What Americans Don't Know

Americans are told that Muslims hate us because they hate our freedom and democracy, but this is not the case. They hate us because they believe we hate them. The truth is that their hatred is based not on ideology but on reality, the facts on the ground. Currently Gaza is a concentration camp, and the West Bank is even worse.

The book, "Lords of the Land," by two Israeli scholars, was reviewed in "The New York Times Book Review," October 14, 2007, by Adam LeBor. LeBor writes that the West Bank is "a lawless place, where the Jewish settler, rifle in one hand and prayer book in the other, is undisputed king. The settlers have their own roads, guarded by the Israeli army, water, electricity, supplies and ----occasional if well-publicized crackdowns aside---substantial impunity from the law. Much of the land on which their settlements stand, was, as Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar detail in this important book, simply stolen. The settlements are illegal, in contravention of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to occupied territories." LeBor notes that more than a third of the West Bank is "now off limits to Palestinians." The book also documents the minimal sentences handed down to settlers who kill Arabs. These sentences consist of a few months community service or a small amount of time in jail.

Meanwhile the settlers are protected by the Israeli army whose violent behaviour has been described in a recent study by Nufar Yishai-Karin, an Israeli psychologist, as reported by Conal Urquhart in "The Observer," October 21, 2007. Yishai-Karin interviewed soldiers who recounted incidents of brutality and murder. They described shooting innocent Palestinians and leaving them to die, brutally beating little children, breaking their bones for no reason. Urquhart writes that one soldier told of a woman throwing a clog at him, "I kicked her here[pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can't have children. Next time she won't throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spit at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn't have what to spit with anymore."

Of course, Americans know none of this. Jerome Slater's article "Muting the Alarm over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict" ("International Security" Vol. 32, no.2 (Fall 2007), pp84-120) documents the coverage in the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz" versus "The New York Times," and shows that the Israeli media is more balanced in its coverage than is the US media. Americans are kept in the dark.