ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT REACHES SOUTH TEXAS

By Juan Montoya
Who would have thought that the recurring clashes between Arabs and Jews in the Palestine would reach out and touch residents of South Texas?
The most recent bloody encounter has gone on for the last two weeks and more than  604 Palestinians and some 27 Israelis are dead, one of them a civilian and on a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen. Reports indicate that more than 70 percent of the Palestinian dead are civilians and that tens of thousands Palestinians in Gaza have been left homeless . Some 80 Palestinian victims were children.
The Israeli Consulate in Houston confirmed that 21-year-old Sgt. Nissim Sean Carmeli, who lived in South Padre Island, was among 13 Israeli soldiers and 65 Palestinians killed Sunday when the Israeli Army marched into the Gaza strip. Carmeli had moved to Israel about four years ago.
Many of us who have been watching this tragedy unfold are so far removed from the scene that – listening to the media blitz in the Sunday news talk shows – it would appear that the Jewish state was fighting for its life against "terrorists" and Hamas, the elected government of Gaza which Israel calls a "terrorist" organization.
In fact, the spiral of violence that has led to all-out war was started by isolated incidents by zealots on both sides that led to the conflagration.
This didn't start with the three Jewish teenagers killed and buried by unknown assailants, or by the four vigilantes who sought out Arab teens to kidnap and burn alive in retaliation for the murder of the three teens.
And despite what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netayahu claims are the attempts of the Israeli military to minimize civilian casualties, the truth of the matter is that Israel is facing an overwhelmingly inferior fighting force which uses rockets without any semblance of  guidance systems which are no match for the Jewish state's U.S-provided sophisticated armaments to lead the assault against the Palestinians.
Israel has courted the evangelical Christian element in the U.S. to buttress its claim that the entire Palestine formed Greater Israel of the Old Testament and therefore is entitled to reclaim it because of its people's antecedents to the land.
But if that was the measure, how about the the Chicanos and Mexican-Americans claims to Aztlan, their mythological homeland, now the U.S. Southwest?
No, this dispute goes much further back.
Following WW II, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman recognized the new nation on the same day. The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 ultimately led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs.
Even before that, Jewish irregulars had been advocating the establishment of a Jewish state despite the fact that Palestine was populated by predominantly Arab countries.With the establishment of the partition of Palestine and the displacement of the Arab population there, it was a recipe for the disaster we're facing now.
Netanyahu and the spokesmen for the State of Israel can wring their hands and whine about the "terrorists" on the Sunday morning talk shows (and they did) all they want. But they know that the tens of thousands of newly-displaced refugees from Gaza are the direct result of the decades-long policies by Israel to marginalize the Arab majority.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and President Barack Obama have shown that they are not honest brokers. They – along with conservative Republican hawk Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.), have given the Israeli Army the green light to enter and destroy the Palestinian state under the justification that everyone there is a  "terrorist."
Funny, the images on television showing the blown up bodies of children and women "terrorists" don't appear to show them carrying weapons or firing rockets at the Israeli soldiers of civilians. Netanyahu said the army had tried through telephone calls, text messages and leaflets to warn civilians and get them to leave the area.
And where are they supposed to go? UN refugee centers are overwhelmed. Entire families are fleeing through the streets as Israeli tanks fire at them in the distance. There is no light at the end of that tunnel. In fact, there is no tunnel at all.
At the heart of the dispute is the fact that the last thing Israel wants is a Palestinian state and labels adherents to the idea "terrorists."
It wasn't that long ago that a small band of "freedom fighters" (or was it terrorists?) under the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin called the Irgun, carried out indiscriminate murders of innocent Arabs and even British soldiers in their quest for an independent state of Israel.
Wikipedia states that "During the 1936-39 Arab revolt in Palestine against the Mandatory Palestine, the militant Zionist group Irgun carried out 60 attacks against Palestinian Arabs and British soldiers. Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by The New York Times, the Anglo-American Court of Inquiry, and prominent world figures such as Winston Churchill, and Jewish figures such as Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and many others. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the other hand,  describes it as "an underground organization. (Isn't today's Palestinian Hamas the equivalent of the Irgun?)" 
The New York Times at the time cited sources in an investigative piece which linked the Haganah
paramilitary group to the Irgun terrorist attacks such as the King David Hotel bombing. Irgun launched a series of attacks which lasted until the beginning of World War II. All told, Irgun attacks against Arab targets resulted in at least 250 Arab deaths during this period."
We can only hope some sort of agreement will put the current troubles to an end. Right now Netanyahu and his U.S. allies in the mainstream media own the airwaves. But until the Arabs are given what Israel got through force of arms and their own brand of "benign terrorism," don't expect this tragedy to stop no matter how it's sugar coated.