I used to know a guy who would throw his hands up in the air when provoked in a certain way and exclaim: “Light up the oven!” This habit deeply puzzled the people that met him for the first time because as you can imagine, they did not understand what he meant. They would ask why he who is a Jew was advocating the cremation of Jews in a manner that was reminiscent of the worst moments of the Holocaust. And he would explain that he was not advocating such a thing but was merely pointing out that the self appointed leaders of the Jews did something dumb. His aim was to warn that this sort of behavior will inevitably lead to the lighting up of the ovens and the holocausting of Jews like it used to happen in the bad old days.
A situation that would have irritated my Jewish acquaintance seriously enough to make him exclaim those words would be the reading of Tom Gross’s article in the December 3, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal. The article was published under the title: “Building Peace Without Obama’s Interference” and the subtitle: “A promising, Independent Palestine is quietly being developed, with Israeli assistance.” Had you been around my friend long enough to pick up his habit, and had you been reading the Tom Gross article, you too would have been provoked enough to throw your hands up in the air and exclaim: “Light up the oven!”
When you read this article you are hit in the face several times by statements that clearly show this man has reached a level of insanity equal only to the insanity of the editors who look for and run this sort of articles. But the hardest of the hits will have come because of an omission that was so glaring you could only despair at the inability of some people to cease doing the things that provoke violent responses from their fellow human beings. Let me explain. Like the title of the article indicates, the discussion is supposed to be about peace. And like the subtitle indicates, it is supposed to be about Palestine. Yet, the glaring thing is that not once in the article is there mention of how the Palestinian people want to see peace achieved. Instead, the article perpetuates the fantasy that the Palestinians feel good under Israeli occupation because they get “Israeli assistance” in one area of their existence or another. Tom Gross then warns, albeit in a subtle manner, that this newly developed relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis may come to an end as a result of Obama’s interference.
Tom Gross begins the article this way: “It is difficult to turn on a TV … without finding some pundit … deploring the … dreadful living conditions of the Palestinians … Very little is changing for the Palestinian people on the ground, I heard [the] BBC … tell listeners three times in a 45 minute period the other evening …I had spent that day in the West Bank's largest city, Nablus … The city is bursting with energy, life and signs of prosperity, in a way I have not previously seen in many years of covering the region.” Further down the article, Tom Gross tells which day that was: “In Gaza too, the shops and markets are crammed with food and goods. But while photos from last Friday's Palestine Today newspaper, for example, depict sumptuous Eid celebrations, these are not the pictures you are ever likely to see on the BBC…”
So here it is, after many years of covering the region during which time he admits seeing what the BBC said the place looked like, Tom Gross now complains that the network has failed to mention that on one special day the Palestinians were determined to forget all their troubles so as to celebrate the festival of Eid, their most important religious holiday. Standing on this shaky ground, he then asserts that peace can come to Palestine if only Obama stopped interfering with a process that has the Israelis assist the Palestinians to plant strawberries. Of course as you would expect, Gross does not mention the fact that without the Palestinian farmer, the Jews of Israel would look like walking skeletons because they would be condemned to live on a mere 1000 calories a day which is all that their farmers manage to produce locally.
This is what the invaders who now call themselves Israelis did to the ancient Palestinian land of Milk and Honey which became the Palestinian portion of the Fertile Crescent which is now the land of Israeli desolation and toxic waste. And only when the Israelis were able to secure food assistance from Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Lebanon (sometimes paid for by the Americans and sometimes by borrowed money guaranteed by America) did they begin to destroy what was left of the farms of Palestine which used to feed them almost free of charge. And to show the world how hideous they can be, they committed their wanton destruction by building an apartheid wall over and around the most fertile of those lands. Now this guy, Tom the grotesque, says that the Israelis are going to help the Palestinians do something that the latter have been doing better than anyone for thousands of years. Who is he kidding? Or must it again be: Light up the oven!
Anyone that has studied the modes of operation used by the Jewish leaders in Israel and in America will see right away that the Tom Gross article is but a continuation of the way that the Jewish organizations have been doing things for many decades now. Their aim is to get as much as they can from America so as to continue the occupation of Palestine, to ethnically cleanse the territory and to eventually annex it to Israel. In the meantime, they do everything they can to quash the possibility that what they receive may come with strings attached. Indeed, they want unlimited amounts of money, weapons, diplomatic backing and the exercise of the American veto in the Security Council to cover up the crimes they commit against humanity but they do not want the checks and balances that would temper their misuse of American largess.
Look how Gross ends the article: “Israelis and Palestinians may never agree on borders ... Not all Germans and French agree who should control Alsace Lorraine. Poles and Russians, Slovenes and Croats, Britons and Irish, and peoples all over the world, have border disputes. But that doesn't keep them from coexisting with one another...” Thus, when you read the entire article and you see this ending, you ask: How is it that the man reaches these conclusions? You then remember that he already answered the question so you back up a few paragraphs and reread this passage: “And perhaps most importantly of all, we had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints …There was one border post on the return leg of the journey, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but the young female guard just waved me and the two Palestinians I was traveling with, through.”
What he is saying here is that because on the day of the Eid festival the Israelis had relaxed the afflictions of the occupation, we must now believe that the Palestinians can be made to accept that their relationship with the Israelis is comparable to that which exists between the Germans and the French, the Britons and the Irish, and so on. It is clear from this that what Gross and those like him are incapable of grasping – perhaps because they are endowed with an inferior IQ -- is that such relationships exist between sovereign peoples where both sides accept the relationship because each side gets to be treated as the equal of the other. In drawing the moral equivalence between this relationship and the sort that exists between an occupying power and an occupied people such as it exists between Israel and Palestine, Tom Gross is saying something profoundly ugly. He is saying the thing that would make you throw your hands up in the air and exclaim: Light up the oven!
Indeed, on behalf of Israel and the Jewish organizations, Tom Gross and the Journal are saying that the Palestinians must accept the Israeli occupation as something normal because all that they can aspire to be is second class human beings. The border post on the outskirts of Jerusalem which was mentioned in the article was only manned at the Israeli side and not at both sides which would be the case if the two peoples were treated equally. But this is how Gross and the grotesque Journal that purports to cater to Wall Street want to keep things. Then, they turn around and urge the world to embrace this ugly reality and feel good about it because they claim that the Palestinians have so miraculously come to accept it. Did Obama’s interference cause this miracle? They don’t say so. And when you add to their sick delusion the empirical observation that when they begin something, it is always the first step on a slippery slope that ends with the oven being lit up to take in the Jews, you realize that a holocaust is quietly being fashioned that will consume not only the Jews but many others around the world.
What do Gross, Israel, the Jewish organizations and the Wall Street Journal recommend in the final analysis? In fact, they do more than recommend something; they assert the recommendation forcefully like this: “The truth is that an independent Palestine is now quietly being built, with Israeli assistance. So long as the Obama administration and European politicians don't clumsily meddle as they have in the past and make unrealistic demands for the process to be completed more quickly than it can be, I am confident the outcome will be a positive one.”
You can be certain that neither Tom Gross nor anyone believes a word of this. The history of the region and that of the world negate a positive outcome to a situation where one people occupy another. And no one, however challenged he or she may be, are ignorant of this fact. But this deception is designed to achieve the criminal outcome of ethnically cleansing Palestine and handing it to anyone who converts to what they fraudulently call the Jewish religion. Achieving their dream may be a positive outcome in the eyes of those who cannot live without provoking a holocaust but it is an ugly crime in the eyes of a world that is trying desperately to prevent the eruption of one. Please, do not provoke the lighting of the oven again; the human race cannot stomach another one of these episodes.
Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone. See you next year.