Nr. 30

This is an extraordinary week at the UN thanks to the arrival of President Hassan Rouhani.

Blessed by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei, newly elected reformist President Rouhani is scheduled to address the General Assembly on Tuesday, with a breakthrough message of peaceful conflict resolution and as he terms it, of “heroic leniency”.

Iran must be encouraged under Rouhani’s leadership and Israel must be reigned in under Netanyahu’s misleadership which continues to insist that Iran should be dealt with militarily on the basis of specious and dishonest allegations.

Unlike Israel, Iran does not violate international law by refusing to pull out of invaded and occupied foreign land, and unlike Israel, Iran has not developed an arsenal of nuclear weapons, and as well, unlike Israel, Iran has signed on the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as it is enriching uranium to the 5% and 20% needed for peaceful application in the electrical power generation and in the medical research and therapy field, respectively.

Also, unlike Israel, Iran has not started any war against its neighbors but has been a victim of war started against it with US support, by Iraq under Sadam Hussein.

So, in light of this conjuncture, it is an imperative for the US to rise to the historical occasion and to engage respectfully and constructively with Iran, while also, respectfully and assertively it must demand that Israel be held accountable for its steadfast refusal to stop its violation of international law and of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and furthermore, both the US and Israel must stop pretending that there is any legitimacy to their use of the concept of so-called “exceptionalism” which in Israels’ case is based on a passage in the Hebrew bible, something which cannot be honestly used as a lien on the property of Palestinians.

Said Hewbrew Bilble passage is found in Deuteronomy 6:10-12 and is part of an oration made by Moses to his people while on their way to the so-called “Promised Land” and it says, “Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land he promised your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to you – a land with fine cities you did not build, houses filled with choice things you did not accumulate, hewn out of cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant – and you eat your fill, be careful not to forget the Lord who brought you out of Egypt…”

The “Exceptionalism” characterization is used by extremist Zionist Israeli leaders and their supporters to attempt to evade accountability for their criminal occupation and annexations of Palestinian lands, as well as, for Israel’s covertly developed arsenal of chemical and nuclear weapons, whose weaponization technology, in this latter case, it has for more than a decade secretly been proliferated to the white supremacist Apartheid regime of South Africa (see “The Unspoken Alliance” by Sasha Suransky-Polakow).

Israel refuses to acknowledge its secretive chemical and nuclear weapons arsenal, which now even The Washington Post has acknowledged on September 16, 2013 and international intelligence agencies have known since 1969 when PM Nixon and PM Golda Meyer laid the groundwork for Israel’s acquisition of nuclear WMD.   To this day, Israeli  leaders stick by a policy which is vapidly characterized as “strategic ambiguity” to evade any questions by the media and international authorities on this subject.

It behooves the United States now, more than ever, to distance itself from being associated with a policy of unconditional support of Israel in light of present day realities, since such a policy not only exposes the US to charges of hypocrisy and dishonesty, but isolates it, and most importantly, this policy inflames rather than defuses tensions which are a security threat to the US, to the Middle East, and to Israel itself.

In fact, decent, rationalist, humanist critics of Israel in Israel as well as Jews abroad, and members of Israel’s military and intelligence and security communities have increasingly come out with eloquent and courageous expressions of condemnation of Israel’s behavior.

Incidentally, the writer of this article, who is the writer and editor of this blog,  in case this is relevant to some readers, is of Jewish background and is the son of Holocaust surviving parents, so no anti-Jewish bias can be ascribed to the views expressed in this article.