Arab Claims of Silence Conspiracy

Wednesday April 17, 2002 01:31

by Megs

Response in Guardian 15 Mar 2002

Khader Shkirat complains of a conspiracy of silence. The following response provides some enlightening facts that are relevant to Irish journalists and readers of Indymedia.

Dear Khader Shkirat,

Does the conspiracy of silence you complain of in the Guardian today include the denial of Arab refusal and rejection of 1947 UN resolution 181?
Arafat's War was started against Barak government attempt to broker a peace? Are EU foreign ministries that naive about the present round of fighting - That international observers achieved nothing but score keeping on the Green Line and the 1967-73 Suez Canal?

If ever there was a breach of UN Charter it is the proclaimed Arab policy to get rid of a UN member; Arab border raiding and kidnapping of Israeli citizens;

Arabs breech Geneva Conventions all the time with Arab seclusion and refusal to allow visits to prisoners; Arab continued politicking to keep Israel out of the International Red Cross or to recognise Israel's Red Shield.

Arabs set out to ethnically cleanse Jews in 1947 - 49 and reaped the whirlwind. You hoped to do likewise on the misinterpretation of the Lebanon withdrawal since Sep 2000 and have only by your own inference raised the doctrine that a Jew free Palestine invites an Arab free Israel.

Where you get 388 000 Arabs displaced in 1967 would also be interesting, when at the time The Guardian never mentioned more than 250 000.

Why should Israel believe the Saudi "peace plan" that can not deliver Syria or Hamas or Iran.

The Arabs never observed the 1949 Armistice clauses to let Israelis access the Western Wall nor to the University site on Mt Scopus.

In March 1957 despite conditions in the withdrawal from Gaza the Egyptians re-militarised it within a week of Israeli withdrawal.

Arab outrage about non aquisition of territory by war is so much Arab hypocrisy given the Syrian refusal to acknowledge the Palestine frontier in favour of the Armistice line that represents a gratuitous and unjustified land grab - small but grabbed all the same. The pre '67 Syrian forts of Tel Fakhr, Bourj Bravil complex are on the Palestine side of the
frontier.

In a very real sense the Arab-Israel conflict is still the War of Israeli Independence because the fundamental question is whether the Arab World will recognise Israel and leave it alone - which it did not in 1948 – 67 when Israel was within the Green Line.

All puts an ironic curl on complaints about Palestine human rights when no Arab government ever allowed Palestine Arabs independence nor free movement to resettle.

Yours sincerely,

Frank Adam