Posted on 01/23/2008 4:16:56 PM PST by SJackson
www.lennybendavid.com
Ms. Rice Visited Israel, Not Birmingham, Alabama
Two months ago in Annapolis Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice compared the plight of Palestinians to the experience of African-Americans some 40 years ago in the segregated South. "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are Palestinian," she said. "I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness." The reporter continued, "As a black child [pictured with her mother] in the South, [she remembers] being told she could not use certain water fountains or eat in certain restaurants."
Well, Ms. Rice, I recently returned from the South - southern Israel - and I saw a far different scene from the Jim Crow measures you experienced in the land of the Confederacy. My wife and I drove some 200 miles south from Jerusalem to Eilat, Israel's "little Riviera," for a week's vacation. It coincided with the Muslim holiday of Id al Adha, and we shared Eilat with thousands of Israeli citizens of Muslim faith and Palestinian national identity.
I recall the de facto segregation in the Takoma swimming pool in northwest Washington DC where I grew up. In our Eilat hotel, on the other hand, it was impossible to differentiate between the Israeli Jewish and Muslim kids splashing in the pool. In the 1960s, ten years after Rosa Parks, seating on D.C. Transit buses and at the Peoples Drug Store soda counter reflected a habitual racial separation. There was nothing similar in the Eilat hotel dining room on Friday night which was filled with Jewish families saying Kiddush at their traditional Shabbat meal alongside Arab families partaking of the Ashkenazi gefilte fish and the Sephardi couscous. The Israeli Arabs' 4x4 monster SUVs cast shadows over our modest sedan at the famous 101 roadside rest stop in the Negev desert where all Israelis - Muslim and Jewish - shared the restaurant, kids' rides and washrooms.
Anyone suggesting that Jim Crow is present in Israel should be eating crow (except for the fact that it's not kosher). That includes the Washington Post correspondent Scott Wilson who recently filed a story, "For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion."
Israeli Arabs or Palestinian Israelis
Standing in line at an Eilat supermarket check-out we stood behind an Israeli Arab woman who spoke no Hebrew or English, only Arabic. She was a Palestinian from the West Bank who was married to an Israeli Muslim citizen, one of many West Bankers who have found a surreptitious way to accomplish the Palestinian goal of a "right of return" to the area of pre-1967 Israel.
Instead of traveling a route past the Dead Sea and parallel to the Jordanian border, our drive went straight south along Route 60 from Jerusalem. The first 30 miles were through the southern half of the West Bank, known for centuries as "Judea." That took us past Hebron (Al Khalil on map), Arab villages and Jewish villages and towns -- misnamed for years as "settlements." The term connotes temporary, military-style encampments. They're nothing of the sort, with many stylish residences housing second and third generations of Israeli Jews.
Hundreds of Palestinian cars, trucks, and the distinctive yellow Palestinian taxis shared the road with us. My wife and I, in one of the few cars with the yellow and black Israeli license plates, kept looking for the supposedly omnipresent Israeli Army roadblocks and checkpoints. Frankly, we were a little anxious, and we were a lot curious about Ms. Rice's complaint that Palestinians "can't go on a road." Along the whole route of this major thoroughfare - some 30 - 40 miles we did not see one roadblock or checkpoint! Only at the "crossing points" between the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel did we see checkpoints, established to prevent suicide bombers and terrorist groups from attacking Israeli targets. One such checkpoint recently discovered 6.5 tons of the bomb-making chemical, potassium nitrate, hidden in bags of sugar sent by the European Union as humanitarian aid.
Yes, there are checkpoints - and choke points - around some Palestinian towns, and travel to areas adjacent to Jerusalem and other major Israeli cities is often made difficult as the Israeli army attempts to thwart terrorists going into Israel and Palestinian car thieves fleeing Israel with their loot. But we travelled the length of a large, contiguous Palestinian region where Palestinian school children, merchants, truckers and commuters experienced no interference whatsoever as they traveled.
Ms. Rice, thank God Almighty that the U.S. civil rights movement was led by the likes of Reverends Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. Imagine how the U.S. government would have reacted if the movement were led by the militant Black Panther's Booby Seale or Huey Newton, or a terrorist group such as the Symbionese Liberation Army led by Donald "Field Marshal Cinque" DeFreeze. Government agencies probably would have set up roadblocks and checkpoints around every American urban center. Ms. Rice, if a non-violent Palestinian national movement were ever to emerge and really purge the terrorists, then your comparisons would be worthy of consideration.
Lenny Ben-David I*Consult Business and Government Relations U.S. phone: 202.256.8155 Israel phone: (972.2) 993.4423 Israel cell (972.54) 216.8155 New Address: 3233 M Street NW, Fourth floor Washington, D.C. 20007 e-mail: BenDavid@i-consult.org Blog: www.lennybendavid.com www.i-consult.org If you are Israel Feb. 19-20 plan to attend the www.jerusalemconference.com
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Did the Blacks in Birmingham engage in suicide bombing, launch Kassam rockets at white neighborhoods, threaten to drive all white people into the sea? Any comparison is incomplete without these annoying little factoids.
They must have, the media just covered it up.
I think our public schools are catching up to us as a society. It’s crept into our thinking even if we were lucky enough to get out of them before the damage was done and even if we had educations afterwards.
In a related note, I saw NBC nightly news, and they did a story about Jews in Russia or somewhere and the holocaust and a woman was saddened and wanted to let the world know that war is terrible.
NBC news is virulently anti-IRAQ war, so they let this slide.
In reality, not only would more Jews have died in Europe in the absence of war, they may well have been completely exterminated!
The old woman hates war, but she’s uneducated and unaware that had Hitler never been confronted by war, she may well not have ever told her story at all!
Meanwhile doing it the U.N. way in Congo...some 45,000 are dying what is it per week? per DAY?
Not a peep from Brian Williams from that angle.
Can’t be bothered with the facts in this regard.
I wonder if the State Dept. career libs have ruined Condy!
Excellent article - the author absolutely nails it with a great big hammer! Amen and right on ping!
You’ve got that right.
Her FRIENDS were killed in that bombing.
Couldn’t they have just gotten another blue dress?
No doubt soon she’ll be off to emeritus at some university and she can help spread this poison to the impressionables.
Yep, or join some law firm whose clients are Fraudi Arabian princes. She’ll be quite at home with James Baker.
...the U.S. civil rights movement was led by the likes of Reverends Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy. Imagine how the U.S. government would have reacted if the movement were led by the militant Black Panther's Bobby Seale or Huey Newton, or a terrorist group such as the Symbionese Liberation Army led by Donald "Field Marshal Cinque" DeFreeze.The leadership was all of the above; and along the lines of the Hegelian dialectic, the synthesis led to Jesse Jackson. Thanks C from E.
The author is wasting his time preaching to Rice hoping for a conversion. It won’t be coming. Condoleeza Rice simply hates Jews. She is nothing but a Saudi stooge. Her mentor, Brent Scowcroft has earned millions in “consulting” fees from the Saudi family over the past 15 years, and she wants the same paychecks coming her way once she leaves office on January 20, 2009 (Lord, please make it sooner).
My hat is off to Ms. Rice. At least she has the courage to try and make the world a better place in the present, rather than to keep drudging up the past. Personally I have never met any of my ancestors that owned slaves. The Rosa Parks incident is over a quarter of a century old and does anyone know where Jesse and Al were?
LMAO, hey that’s pretty funny, putting the name ‘Ms Rice’ and the word ‘courage’ in the same sentence like that!
Check out the next ‘open mic nite’ at your local comedy club, ‘cuz YOU got *TALENT* !!!
it’s a good bet
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