Open Letter to Stephen Pollard – Words Have Consequences - You Are an Accessory to Murder
Dear
Stephen,
In
your determination to avoid the truth about Israel’s refusal
to provide a vaccine for the millions of Palestinians living under Occupation,
you remind me of a holocaust denier. No matter what the evidence you refuse to
accept the truth.
It
is an indisputable fact that in the West Bank, Israel is providing vaccines to
the 600,000 Jewish settlers residing there.
It is also a fact that Israel is not providing a vaccine to the Palestinians
whose territory it is and whose land the settlers have stolen. No one disputes
those facts.
Jewish
settlers and Palestinians inhabit the same territory yet Israel provides
vaccines for one group and not for the other. It such a clear example of Apartheid
that I cannot imagine why you feel the need to pretend otherwise. B’tselem
spoke about Israeli Apartheid last week and this is but a vivid example of that
fact.
Stephen Pollard |
At
least the White Supremacist supporters of Donald Trump, who you and the Israeli
state have fawned over for the past four years, have started to come clean.
White supremacists are no longer denying the holocaust. Instead they are
complaining that killing 6 million was not enough! Hence their 6MWE
tee shirts. It puzzles me why you
cannot be equally honest and admit that in a Jewish state Palestinians cannot
hope for anything approaching equality. Hasn’t the time come to stop lying?
You
commissioned two articles this past week by Seth Frantzman, the Middle East Affairs
analyst for the Jerusalem Post. It’s not often that I am left speechless by Zionist
dishonesty.
In the first
article, after having said that ‘Israel
is not responsible for the health care of the residents of the Palestinian
Authority’ i.e. those living under the Occupation, Frantzman went on to
declare, in his final paragraph that since 139 countries recognise the
non-existent state of Palestine, then demanding that Israel fulfills its
obligations under Article
56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to provide health care to those living
under occupation would be akin to demanding that Austria vaccinate the
population of Slovakia!
In
case it has escaped your notice Israel is not one of the 139 countries to
recognise a Palestinian state. This is because there is no Palestinian state in
existence. There is no Palestinian army, airport, borders etc. The Israeli government
is firmly opposed to a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan.
I
may be wrong but I though the second world war had ended 76 years ago. Austria
is not, to the best of my knowledge, occupying the Slovakia. In fact Austria
has not had troops in Slovakia since 1945.
It is difficult to find a more crass analogy.
It
is not even the case that Israel is treating its Arab citizens as equal to its Jewish
citizens. Just this week Adalah, the legal centre for Arab rights in Israel, petitioned the High
Court over the fact that information about vaccination and Covid-19 was only in
Hebrew not Arabic. As a result of the Jewish Nation State Law
which you supported, Arabic was removed as a national language equal to Hebrew.
In
his second article, a response to B’Tselem’s declaration that Israel was an
Apartheid State, Frantzman wrote
that ‘B’Tselem's Israel 'apartheid'
accusation masks its own sinister agenda’. What was this sinister agenda? Why
B’Tselem ‘wants to force Israelis and Palestinians into the single
country that both sides have already rejected’.
It
is difficult to deal with such serial dishonesty from someone who has made the Jewish
Chronicle into a propaganda rag. B’Tselem, which was a liberal Zionist human
rights group when it was founded, was forced into the conclusion that Greater Israel
was already a single country because
of its own experiences. What is now Greater Israel has a single regime with a
system of differential rights for different Palestinians, all of which are inferior
to those of Jews.
The
Green Line between the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel does not appear on Israeli
maps and Israeli civil law operates in all the West Bank settlements. Israel has
already de-facto annexed the West Bank.
Such serial dishonesty is, unfortunately typical of the man who led the
fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.
You
are the man who went out of his way to defend
anti-Semitic politicians in the European Parliament like Michal Kaminski. Your
only condition for supporting anti-Semites is that they are also supporters of
the Israeli state.
Your
attempt to justify Israel’s policy of refusing to vaccinate Palestinians living
under occupation isn’t simply a theoretical debate. It has human consequences
and those consequences are that Palestinians will die. That will, of course,
not trouble you in the slightest. You should be aware that though that your
newspaper and your journalism makes you an accessory to murder.
I
am sure that that will not cause you to lose a minute of sleep but I thought I
should point it out.
Tony
Greenstein
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