On Aliens, Israel, and Immigration

*Warning - This may be a long rambling post with much incoherency.  But if it's any comfort you're not the crazy one, it's me. It all makes sense in my head!*

I have been ruminating and germinating this post for a long time in my head - and by long time, I mean at least a week.  Every so often the thoughts start pouring in, but I haven't gotten a chance to put them all together until today.

In the past few weeks several significant international and domestic events have occurred that have caught my attention.  I also had the opportunity to view the movie District 9.  And in only a way that my brain would do, all three things have connected themselves in my brain.

First comes Israel and all of this state's happenings in recent days.  I could not contain my absolute abhorrence when I learned about the raid on the peaceful, pro-Palestinian flotilla that was seeking to bring aid to the Gaza strip - an area that has been walled off and ostracized from the rest of the world for the past three years.  Nothing goes in or out of there and meanwhile, the innocent Palestinian civilians are left to starve and claw their way to survival.  And how did the state of Israel react to this gesture of humanitarian aid?  By shooting live bullets into the ships, killing at least 9 people and wounding dozens of others.  Worldwide condemnation followed this act, but it stopped there.  Even as a second flotilla tried to deliver aid and they were captured and turned back, nothing other than a promise for Israel to conduct it's own "inquiry" resulted from all this worldwide condemnation.  No, protected by the powerful Israeli lobby in the United States, nothing of any significance that would result in the alleviation of the terrible plight of these Gaza Palestinians, has happened.  In fact, the United States refused (REFUSED) to condemn Israel's actions.  And the United Nations - the farcical organization that it is - stayed up all night in negotiations over the "wording" of a resolution that expressed condemnation over the raid.

This is WRONG!  The injustice of treating people in this way because of their political or religious affiliation is wrong.  Of any people in the entire world, Americans should be the ones most up in arms over this injustice!  And yet our words remain handicapped because anything that is said against Israel or calls out its military injustices and policies against the Palestinian people is seen as traitorous or anti-Semitic.  Helen Thomas, the 89-year old White House correspondent who has been a fixture of the White House Press Corps for over 5 decades, had her career end in flames last week after making remarks against Israel and its right to exist as a state.  But if you examine the context of where Thomas's remarks come from - a woman who covered the White House and sitting presidents before an Israel existed and who extensively understands how it came into being, mainly through it's own use of terrorism, the guilt of the West over the Holocaust, and the ambivalence of the British to maintain any kind of continued presence in the Middle East - you understand that there may be an element of truth in her remarks.  But I'm not here to debate whether or not Israel should exist as a state, for the reality is that it does and it is not going away. 

What I am most upset about is the rampant racism and apartheid that the Israeli state formally practices against the Gaza strip, especially since Hamas came into power.  But the worldwide uproar over the raid on the peaceful flotilla should give Israel pause and if they are smart, they will begin to change their policies of hatred.  After all, shouldn't Israel, of all nation-states, extend understanding and humanitarian aid to their neighbors?  As a people who suffered through the hatred and unthinkable atrocities of the Holocaust genocide, shouldn't they recognize and work towards policies that seek to build up another nation, instead of oppressing it to the point that they continuously create militants (and I'll call them militants here, not terrorists) who want the destruction of their state?

I've been in such a turmoil over this - so much so, that I stayed up to watch Charlie Rose's interview with Mahmoud Abbas, the current leader of the Fatah faction in Palestine who had visited the White House to talk about the current situation in Israel and Palestine.  It was a fascinating interview, creating the opportunity to hear from the "other" side, so to speak, on what they want for peace to exist.  Too bad that this interview was shown on the local WETA PBS station at 1:00am in the morning.  So much for spreading dialogue.  On the other hand, thank God for a station like WETA that would put such programming on the air.  Otherwise we would only have programming like the "No-Spin Zone" likes of Bill O'Reilly or the liberal crap of Keith Olbermann.  Can you tell that I have no respect for the media and the way that they report international events?

But you know what else? This practice of systematic hatred isn't just regulated to the land and policies of Israel.  It is propagated in our own country.  Don't believe me?  How else do you characterize the passage of the new Arizona immigration laws and the other laws that they seek to pass?  And how they want to jail illegal immigrants in "tent cities"?

Seriously America?  Are Americans truly going to let a new-age apartheid system spring up on our own shores?  The shores that we have fought for in blood - the blood of immigrants nonetheless - so that freedom can be experienced by all people?  Why should we limit the rights of a person to become a naturalized citizen of our country that was born on the shoulders of immigrants from all walks of life?  All great innovations, all privileges that we take for granted today came to us because our grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great grandparents traveled from some place overseas to start a new life - to have a chance to earn a living and experience a quality of life that no one else in the world gets to experience - true and utter freedom to do whatever the heck we want, whether it be waste our life or make it into something.  Why are we now going to deny others the capability to earn a living?  To have a chance to NOT live in third-world poverty - to earn a living?  And if we do indeed deny others this chance, what are we going to do to help these individuals?  Are we going to try to propagate some kind of backwards isolationism thinking and do nothing to help others of the world - like other "first world" nations, Austria and Australia (my own sister, a college graduate cannot obtain a job as a library aid because of the racism rampant in Australia)?  Doesn't that completely fly in the face of our global and interconnected economy? Isn't that what partially led to 9-11 in the first place?  And hasn't any isolationist policy we as a nation have ever practiced backfired on us?  Or are we just going to become a nation of a bunch of Gangs of New York?

And while we deal with how to treat legal and illegal aliens in our country, perhaps we can use a movie about aliens, apartheid, and xenophobia, District 9, to illuminate our way.  I don't want to spoil too much of the movie for those who haven't seen it, but it is a phenomenal film in the way that it dissects these issues in the context of the fantasy-realm of an alien population stranded on Earth.  Tent cities are erected and aliens are forced to live in a shanty town in the middle of Johannesburg, based upon Soweto and its history within South Africa.  And in spine-chilling way, the film examines what life looks like when the shoe is on the other foot, so to speak.  It may seem kind of random to mention such a film in the same post as my rants on Israel and immigration policy, but the way it speaks to the issues of xenophobia, apartheid, and basic humanitarianism and how they are extremely relevant in the context of those two issues, prompt me to recommend it unequivocally.

What I hope for most of all is that common human decency and justice will prevail in the end.  I hope that someday Israelis and Palestinians will be able to experience the peace that South Africa found through its Truth and Reconciliation Committee.  I hope that everyday Americans will take a step back from their anger over funding health care and education for illegal immigrants and see that these are human beings like ourselves, like our ancestors, who just want the opportunity to experience a life like we have.  And that those same Americans who want to send these illegal immigrants back to their own countries, will step up and take the jobs that we gladly let them procure.  And that the opportunity and freedom that we have fought so long and hard for will be experienced by all people, regardless of their race or religion.

It's Complicated...

As Monthy Python would say, "And now for something completely different".  No book reviews or random thoughts today.  No, today I am still digesting a program I watched on WETA PBS last night called "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands". 

First, this is a subject that is near to my heart.  The conflict between Israel and Palestine and Israel and the Arab world at large is something that has interested me since high school, so much so that it drove me to be a foreign affairs major at UVA.  Seeking to understand the root causes of a decades old conflict that still dramatically affects the shape of our foreign policy to this day has always been vastly interesting to me.  And yet while it is vastly interesting, it also is vastly depressing and disheartening - which is why I work at a local cabinet company instead of a think tank in Washington DC.  So when I read about this program airing, I was very keen to watch and learn more about Jewish and Arab relations.

It was fascinating to say the least.  Whenever the Holocaust is discussed, it mainly focuses on the fate of European Jews and the atrocities that were uncovered at the concentration camps in Europe.  But the fate of Jews living in North Africa during World War II is hardly ever discussed or mentioned.  Truly, unless you take a university history class on World War II, most discourse is focused on the battles that occurred in Europe or the in the Pacific, but hardly ever talk about the campaigns in North Africa, which was where the tide of the war truly started turning.  But did you know that there were more concentration camps across North Africa than there were in Europe?  That Jewish people who had cohabited with their Arab friends peacefully before the war were suddenly singled out by European invaders and forced to either go to one of these concentration camps or wear yellow Stars of David signifying their ethnicity?

What Robert Satloff, the executive director for the Washington Institute of Near East policy uncovers though are tales and stories (that are authenticated and verified through meticulous research and first person interviews) of Arabs who help their Jewish neighbors escape from the fate of concentration camps - much like there were Europeans who helped their Jewish neighbors escape the nightmares of concentration camps.  Satloff sought to show that though these two ethnicities proclaim hatred for each other now, there were some Arabs that saw only their common humanity and were unwilling to be complicit in the suffering of fellow human beings.

What is remarkable, or rather actually sad, about this is how much this history is suppressed by the descendants of these individuals today.  There are some Arabs, because of their political views on Israel, that would rather not acknowledge the heroism of their grandparents during the Holocaust in North Africa.  The view of a common humanity has been replaced with a simmering hatred of Israel and the atrocities that Israel commits against the Palestinians today.  In fact, the documentary showcases a meeting in which Satloff is presenting his findings and a participant becomes so upset that the Holocaust of the Jews is only being discussed and that no mention of the persecution of Palestinians is made, that he storms out of the meeting, shouting and slamming the door on his way out.  It is a reflection of how deep this hurt and hatred runs, that the man could not sit through a presentation about fellow Arabs who helped save their Jewish neighbors from atrocities unimaginable.

The Holocaust served as the catalyst for the creation of a political state based on an ethnicity and religion, and as such its repercussions are as much a part of our present foreign political state as it was in our past.  Without the Holocaust, it is doubtful that Zionists would have been able to make a successful case for the creation of their own political state to the world.  But guilt, coupled with a powerful lobbying force in the United States and the diminished power of the British, helped bring about the state of Israel and the problems of the modern Middle East.  While it might be a stretch to say that if there was no Israel there would have been no September 11th or War on Terror, the justification for those attacks by the terrorists would have been based on other reasons.  And yet, if there had been no Anti-Semitism brought to light by such events like the Dreyfus Affair or pogroms in Russia or most evidently, by the Holocaust, there would have been no need for a Jewish political state.

This is a long tangled history that can fill more than this meager blog post, but "Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust in Arab Lands" has added an interesting layer to these relations that is relevant and almost hopeful, for it shows that when we transcend our ethnic and religious beliefs at times, we find that we are all made of the same cloth.  Hopefully, instead of using religious beliefs to divide, perhaps there will come a time in which we can use them to see what we have in common more than what we don't.

The futility of the United Nations

In my opinion, the time of the United Nations is over. Today it is nothing more than a bureaucratic nightmare of an organization that has done little in years past to do anything, except help corrupt people profit off crippled nation-states (The Iraqi Food for Oil program anyone?). The final death knell of the United Nations came in 2003 when the United States unilaterally invaded Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein. Though, I would argue that its futility existed long before that, when the Rwandan genocide was allowed to occur in 1994.

I woke up this morning to the radio saying that last night, the UN Security Council had agreed to a resolution calling for a cease-fire in the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And both sides brushed off the resolution like it was nothing more than a nuisance (read a report about the conflict here). And I can't really blame them, because my first thought when I heard that a resolution had been agreed to was in essence, "Big whoop". What is a resolution going to do about this decades old conflict that seems to perpetuate no matter how many peace talks or cease-fires occur? The way that the Israelis are approaching this, it seems like they are not going to be satisfied until Hamas is blown into oblivion. I don't believe that when Hamas started firing rockets into Israel after the cease-fire brokered by Egypt expired, they expected this kind of response. But I think Israel is out to show (and right before their election, nonetheless) that they have had enough and are not going to stop shelling Gaza until...who knows when?

Also, as much as I respect Condi Rice for her intelligence and education background, I found her statement about the US's abstainment from voting on the resolution laughable and a complete political cop-out for an outgoing administration - "We're going to let Egypt take the lead on this and see if they can broker another cease-fire". Let the corruptest Egyptian politician, Mubarak, broker a cease-fire between these two nations? Right, like that will really work. We'll see how that goes.

So, United Nations, I say your time has come and it's over. You have turned into another League of Nations. Unless you can bring nation-states truly together to do things of significance, instead of passing meaningless resolutions calling for cease-fires, what are you even here for?