Open Letter to Stephen Pollard – Words Have Consequences - You Are an Accessory to Murder
Dear Jonathan,
In your determination to avoid the truth about Israel’s refusalto provide a vaccine for the millions of Palestinians living under Occupation, you remind me of a holocaust denier. No matter what the evidence you refuse to accept the truth.
It is an indisputable fact that in the West Bank, Israel is providing vaccines to the 600,000 Jewish settlers residing there. It is also a fact that Israel is not providing a vaccine to the Palestinians whose territory it is and whose land the settlers have stolen. No one disputes those facts.
Jewish settlers and Palestinians inhabit the same territory yet Israel provides vaccines for one group and not for the other. It such a clear example of Apartheid that I cannot imagine why you feel the need to pretend otherwise. B’tselem spoke about Israeli Apartheid last week and this is but a vivid example of that fact.
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| Jonathan Pollard |
At least the White Supremacist supporters of Donald Trump, who you and the Israeli state have fawned over for the past four years, have started to come clean. White supremacists are no longer denying the holocaust. Instead they are complaining that killing 6 million was not enough! Hence their 6MWE tee shirts. It puzzles me why you cannot be equally honest and admit that in a Jewish state Palestinians cannot hope for anything approaching equality. Hasn’t the time come to stop lying?
You commissioned two articles this past week by Seth Frantzman, the Middle East Affairs analyst for the Jerusalem Post. It’s not often that I am left speechless by Zionist dishonesty.
In the first article, after having said that ‘Israel is not responsible for the health care of the residents of the Palestinian Authority’ i.e. those living under the Occupation, Frantzman went on to declare, in his final paragraph that since 139 countries recognise the non-existent state of Palestine, then demanding that Israel fulfills its obligations under Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, to provide health care to those living under occupation would be akin to demanding that Austria vaccinate the population of Slovakia!
In case it has escaped your notice Israel is not one of the 139 countries to recognise a Palestinian state. This is because there is no Palestinian state in existence. There is no Palestinian army, airport, borders etc. The Israeli government is firmly opposed to a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.
I may be wrong but I though the second world war had ended 76 years ago. Austria is not, to the best of my knowledge, occupying the Slovakia. In fact Austria has not had troops in Slovakia since 1945. It is difficult to find a more crass analogy.
It is not even the case that Israel is treating its Arab citizens as equal to its Jewish citizens. Just this week Adalah, the legal centre for Arab rights in Israel, petitioned the High Court over the fact that information about vaccination and Covid-19 was only in Hebrew not Arabic. As a result of the Jewish Nation State Lawwhich you supported, Arabic was removed as a national language equal to Hebrew.
In his second article, a response to B’Tselem’s declaration that Israel was an Apartheid State, Frantzman wrotethat ‘B’Tselem's Israel 'apartheid' accusation masks its own sinister agenda’. What was this sinister agenda? Why B’Tselem ‘wants to force Israelis and Palestinians into the single country that both sides have already rejected’.
It is difficult to deal with such serial dishonesty from someone who has made the Jewish Chronicle into a propaganda rag. B’Tselem, which was a liberal Zionist human rights group when it was founded, was forced into the conclusion that Greater Israel was already a single country because of its own experiences. What is now Greater Israel has a single regime with a system of differential rights for different Palestinians, all of which are inferior to those of Jews.
The Green Line between the West Bank and pre-1967 Israel does not appear on Israeli maps and Israeli civil law operates in all the West Bank settlements. Israel has already de-facto annexed the West Bank. Such serial dishonesty is, unfortunately typical of the man who led the fake ‘anti-Semitism’ campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.
You are the man who went out of his way to defendanti-Semitic politicians in the European Parliament like Michal Kaminski. Your only condition for supporting anti-Semites is that they are also supporters of the Israeli state.
Your attempt to justify Israel’s policy of refusing to vaccinate Palestinians living under occupation isn’t simply a theoretical debate. It has human consequences and those consequences are that Palestinians will die. That will, of course, not trouble you in the slightest. You should be aware that though that your newspaper and your journalism makes you an accessory to murder.
I am sure that that will not cause you to lose a minute of sleep but I thought I should point it out.
Tony Greenstein