[Media-watch] My Country Is At War With Palestine

[Kev Kiernan]

ZNet Commentary
My Country Is At War With Palestine October 20, 2003
By Richard Hugus

Most US citizens, if asked, would be surprised to learn that their country 
is at war with the
country of Palestine. They wouldn't be aware that Palestine is a country. 
They've heard of the
West Bank and Gaza, not as parts of Palestine, but as territories where 
Palestinians live, which
Israel occupies. They assume the territories were never part of any country 
and that it is
natural for Israel to occupy them.

US citizens haven't heard of US soldiers being sent to Palestine. How, then 
could there be a
war? They are ignorant of the massive support being given to Israel, with 
their taxes. They are
unaware that the US has such power that it can attack another country simply 
by creating and
supporting a compliant power within that country, and let that power do its 
bidding.

When a country is erased from history, absurdities abound. War cannot be 
declared against a
country which doesn't exist. When people flee such a country and become 
refugees, how does one
account for them; how does one name them? What does one do with the map, the 
homes, the culture
of the people who lived there before and continue to live there?  Palestine 
is such a country.

Since Zionism began its patently insane program of eradicating the 
indigenous people of
Palestine -- beginning officially with the founding of Israel in 1948 -- 
some 5 million refugees
have been forced from Palestine into the rest of the world. The US is very 
much involved in the
issue of Palestinian refugees because its sponsorship of Israel in large 
part created them.

But because the US war against Palestine is covert, the US must come up with 
false pretexts for
its persecution of Palestinian refugees who have brought the struggle to 
liberate Palestine  to
the source -- the United States itself. Through the FBI and the Immigration 
and Naturalization
Service, and now with the Department of Homeland Security, the US has used 
alleged violations of
immigration regulations as a pretext for harassing, jailing, and deporting 
numerous Palestinian
activists, particularly since the Bush Administration's two year-old 
declaration of racism
against Arab, Muslim, and South Asian peoples.

Among the Palestinian activists singled out by the US government the 
following are notable:

o Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide of the LA 8, originally arrested in 
California in 1987,  now
facing renewed threats of deportation.

o Mazin Al-Najjar, arrested in Florida in May 1997,  again in September 
2001. Deported in 2002.

o Sami Al-Arian, under surveillance since 1995, arrested in Florida in 
February 2003, currently
in jail awaiting a trial date scheduled for July 2005.

o Farouk Abdel-Muhti, arrested in New York in April 2002.

o Ahmed Bensouda, arrested in Illinois in May 2002.

o Jaoudat Abouazza, arrested in Massachusetts in May 2002.

o Amer Jubran, arrested in Massachusetts in June 2001, and in Rhode Island 
in    November 2002.


The story of the last two has not been widely told.

Jaoudat Abouazza's treatment in the hands of the federal authorities was 
unusual in its
brutality. In the spring of 2002, orders from the Bush Administration were 
coming down full
force. All the activists above were subjected to imprisonment and solitary 
confinement after
their phony arrests. Violation of Constitutional rights was standard. But 
Abouazza, following
his arrest in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was actually strapped into a 
dentist's chair in a county
jail and physically tortured by means of forced extraction, without 
anaesthesia, of several
teeth. He was beaten, stripped,  repeatedly interrogated, and finally 
allowed to return to
Canada where the FBI and RCMP continued to harass him. His crime? Possession 
of leaflets for an
upcoming protest against  an "Israel Independence Day" celebration in 
Boston.

The case of Amer Jubran is better known. Jubran has told New England 
audiences who have come to
hear him that they have no idea what it is like not to have a country. He 
has patiently educated
thousands about the reality of the theft of Palestine. So close is Israel to 
the US
establishment that for many this education is a process - one lie after 
another must be peeled
back and exposed, like the layers of an onion. Jubran has taken many through 
the process. He is
eloquent, likeable, and politically sophisticated. For these reasons, the US 
government has
taken special trouble to bring charges against him, and to try to deport 
him. It is doing so by
means of the usual accusations of violating immigration rules.

Amer Jubran's immediate family is from a small village near Al-Khalil in 
Palestine. They now
live in exile in Jordan. Were Jubran to be deported, it would only mean 
sending him from one
place of exile to another. The evidence of how fully the US is haunted by 
what it has done,
through Israel, to Palestine, is that with all its power and money it must 
go to extraordinary
lengths to persecute those from Palestine who whisper the truth to people in 
the US.

In other cases, the establishment is content to rely on its bought media to 
overwhelm dissent.
That is, it will allow dissent, knowing that it has provided a thousand 
effective distractions
to drown it out. But not in the case of Palestine, particularly since the 
Endless War for oil
was declared in September 2001. Palestine, though it lacks oil, sets a bad 
example in Uncle
Sam's eyes for other nearby countries that do have oil. That example is its 
longstanding
resistance to fascism.

The INS, FBI,  and the new Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement 
-appropriately named
"ICE" --  are working overtime to silence Palestinians. In the case of 
Abouazza, their methods
are reminiscent of the the Nazis, who were pioneers in medical torture. In 
Jubran's case, the
authorities have been more circumspect. Their strategy has been to keep him 
continually
entangled in the court system on one trumped up charge after another. The 
circus that began with
Jubran's second political arrest has now gone on for a year.

In July,  2003, his trial was intentionally delayed by the prosecutor, 
Richard Neville, who
wasted an entire afternoon in irrelevant questioning of a witness, and then 
claimed he had to
leave early because his wife had the flu. The presiding judge, the Honorable 
Leonard Shapiro,
obviously had no choice -- allowing the trial to continue would amount to a 
declaration that a
woman with the flu had no right to have her husband at home. In September, 
the prosecutor
delayed the new trial date by claiming that he had travel plans.

The clincher was that he had "pre-paid tickets" for these travel plans - a 
fact of such
importance that the shrewd judge once again had no choice. On September 25, 
the day he claimed
he would be travelling, Neville was in his office. Jubran's new trial date 
is now set for
November 6, 2003. On November 6, Prosecutor Neville is expected to announce, 
"the dog ate my
homework," and be fully rewarded by the judge.

Though it has come at some cost to Jubran personally, the two causes of 
immigrant rights and the
liberation of Palestine have been greatly advanced by this Justice 
Department attack against
him. He and others who are dedicated to telling the truth about the United 
States' sordid
involvement in his country could not have asked for a better venue.

If only we had been able to hear such eloquent spokesmen from the native 
people during the
Indian Wars, the Africans during slavery, anti-imperialists during WWI and 
II, the Koreans
during the Korean War, the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, from Nicaragua 
and El Salvador and
Honduras during the covert wars in Central America, from Panamanians during 
"Operation Just
Cause", from Iraqis during the last 13 years of US genocide there, from 
Afghanis as their
country became a US battleground for 20 years,  from Somalia, from 
Yugoslavia, from practically
the entire world, as it has been attacked the US.

If only the Justice Department had been lunatic enough then, as it is 
today,  to publicly target
those who dared to tell the story, we might have  learned much sooner of 
these continent-sized
crimes. Today the Bush Administration has committed the fatal mistake of 
obviousness. They have
made it nearly impossible not to see the enormity of US imperialism.

The question for US citizens now is, once you have been delivered of your 
ignorance, what will
you do?  Will you defend those whom your country has harmed who have come to 
tell you the tale?


(The Amer Jubran Defense Committee can be reached at 
www.amerjubrandefense.org. A campaign is
underway to amass support at his November 6, 2003 trial at the JFK Federal 
Building in Boston.)

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