Michael Oren who was born to Jewish American parents, used
to be Israel's ambassador to the United States of America because his parents
migrated to occupied Palestine where he learned to become a Jewish kind of
historian that is now telling America it is time to have a final solution for
the Palestinian people. Of course, he did not come right out and said so
anymore than the Nazis said it out loud about the Jews. But he said it
metaphorically which is a style everyone knows how to translate into plain
English. You'll find all that in his article titled: “Israel must be
permitted to crush Hamas,” published on July 25, 2014 in the Washington Post.
This is how he put it in the text: “Israel must be
permitted to crush Hamas in the Gaza Strip.” But everyone knows that Israel will not do in the Gaza Strip what it
will not take to the West Bank eventually and
seek to exterminate the Palestinians there too. For this to happen, he is
asking what he calls the senior statesmen of the world to be “most helpful now
by doing nothing.” Of course, when he says nothing, he means let Israel
slaughter the Palestinian civilians by the logic that women and children must
die so as to kill the freedom fighters that protect them. He says do nothing
that will save the lives of these people at the same time that he is asking America to do all that is necessary to keep Israel afloat
economically, militarily and diplomatically. It is a one-direction nothing
because you are not permitted to equate the Jews with anyone.
However, nothing in what he said up to this point was so new
to me that I wanted to write about. But then I hit this passage: “Israel
responded … fighting against a deeply dug-in enemy.” Because I knew he was
referring to the Palestinian resistance movement that is operating in tunnels
underground, my memory went back 60 years to a time when, as a child, I learned
something about the human condition as well as the mysterious ways by which
history unfolds.
Sixty years ago, the parents of Michael Oren sat in New York wondering if
they should try having a baby now or wait a little longer. At the same time, my
parents had taken me and my siblings to a place called Djibouti (then
a French colony) situated at the Horn of Africa where my father worked for the
railway company. Two years or so after we got there, something happened that
would be etched in my memory like a message chiseled in rocks.
What happened was that a French colleague of my father's
used to come to our house every evening for several weeks, and would sit with
my father beside the radio listening to Arabic news coming on short wave both
from Cairo and from London . And every time the announcer
pronounced the name Dien Bien Phu , I could see
the Frenchman react facially and bodily as if a dagger had just pierced his
heart. The man did not speak Arabic but he knew what Dien
Bien Phu meant. That was the place in Vietnam where the French were
taking a beating in a ferocious battle where his brother was sent to fight, and
had not been heard from for some time. The Frenchman in our house did not trust
the news agencies of his country telling him the truth of what was going on in
that far away place, and this is why he asked my father to tell him what Cairo
and London were saying about the ongoing battle.
I took interest in that war as I did ten years later when America got involved in Vietnam , and I was in Canada following the events not in
Arabic or French but in English. This is when I learned where the word
underground had come from. It came from the fact that a resistance movement
always digs tunnels under the ground where it operates in relative safety away
from the eyes of a superior military force. At first I thought that the
Vietnamese had pioneered this method but then learned it was an old idea
employed even by the French when they were fighting the Nazi occupation of France . If only
I had known this bit of truth when tall Charles de Gaulle came to our school in
Djibouti ,
and we lined up as he shook our tiny hands one by one. I would never have
thought that a man as tall as him could fit into an underground tunnel.
And here we are in the year 2014, a man named Michael Oren,
who wasn't born yet when all those things were happening, telling the senior
statesmen of the world: “By letting Israel
regain its security with regard to Gaza , the United States
and its allies will be safeguarding their own.” Yes Michael, we heard this
argument before when they spoke of the Domino Theory that never materialized,
and Vietnam – after defeating
America – became a good
friend of America
... not the enemy that would bring about the end of civilization as we know it.