After Arrest, Cambridge Reflects on Racial Rift Forum to Explore Deep-Seated Issues

By Krissah Thompson and Cheryl W. Thompson Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, July 26, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The town where a white police officer and a black scholar ignited a national conversation on race and law enforcement has begun to open the dialogue that President Obama invited.

Before summer's end, the mayor, district attorney and police officials will convene a forum to grapple with the controversy over the arrest of Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Sgt. James Crowley -- which exploded into a divisive debate that drew in the president.

Obama, who spoke to both men last week, called it a "teachable moment" for the nation on a "troubling aspect of our society." Gates said in an e-mail statement that he accepts Obama's invitation to begin talking and wants to work with the Cambridge Police Department. Crowley has not publicly responded to the invitation.

Residents of Gates's neighborhood, mostly upper-middle-class whites and a transient but diverse group of students in university housing, have begun pondering the meaning of the incident. Other questions also have emerged: What does it mean to have the nation's first black president involved? Will the discourse have lasting impact on the relationships between police and blacks and Latinos?

"It's disappointing," said Lawrence Neely, a 33-year-old doctoral student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who lives in a university-owned apartment building next-door to Gates's yellow wood-frame house. "We're in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We have an African American mayor. We have an African American governor. We have an African American president, and just looking at the situation strictly at face value -- without getting into who is right and who is wrong -- we are now having a conversation about the question of whether one of the most influential African American scholars in the country has been racially profiled. It all makes it clear that this is still a reality."

Although others have been critical of Obama's role, Neely, who is black, said he was glad that the president weighed in and hopes the conversation on race will not go back underground.

People in the neighborhood are friendly and speak to one another, Neely said, but he added that the horde of reporters and television cameras outside Gates's home in the days after the arrest served as a reminder that the deeper issues of race are still little discussed.

Much is known about Gates's arrest on the charge of disorderly conduct, which was later dropped, but the folks who live here acknowledge that the incident did not happen in a vacuum.

Demographically, Cambridge is a liberal college town of about 100,000 people -- 65 percent white, 11.5 percent black, 12 percent Asian and about 7 percent Hispanic. The divide between the intellectual university affiliates and the rest of the mostly working-class residents is "from time to time quite tense," said Priscilla McMillian, a civic activist and historian who is white.

Merritt Harrison, a 75-year-old white man who lives around the corner from Gates, said that he understands why the police feel defensive, but that he probably would have had the same reaction as Gates if a police officer had showed up at his home and suspected him of being a burglar.

"I'm white, so I probably wouldn't have been arrested," said the part-time Episcopalian pastor, real-estate agent and counselor who has called the community home for 25 years. "I don't know. Was it racial profiling? I don't think anyone will ever know. But plenty of people think it was. The thing to do is to use it as an occasion to look at the issue. People need to talk."

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard who lives next-door to McMillian, said the moment provides an opening to look at "a real paradox persisting in the nation."

"You have a country that has pretty well come to accept blacks in the public domain: in politics, in the media, in sports, in religion," said Patterson, who is black. "But there is still persistent segregation and indeed some areas where there is not much progress, such as integration in the schools. There is a complete mismatch between the world of blacks in the public domain and the world of blacks in their personal relationships."

Patterson, author of "The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's Racial Crisis," is convinced that race and class influenced the interaction between Gates and Crowley.

Not lost on Neely: The irony that all the research on race and socialization gathered in this academic town did not result in greater understanding. "The police officer made a judgment," he said. "Gates made a judgment. The challenge is the subjective assessments of one another."

'Moving From Fear'

In Cambridge this time last year, a young black man was removing a lock from a bike on campus when a Harvard police officer pulled a gun and demanded identification, according to a six-member committee report on the practices of the police department ordered by Harvard President Drew Faust. The youth showed the officer his Boston Public Library card, began crying and said he was a high school student working at the university. (Harvard police were also called to Gates's home.)

Such incidents have prompted Charles Ogletree to convene meetings of police and community members over the years. Ogletree is a Harvard law professor and Gates's attorney, and he is now helping to map out the citywide forum. Gates is going to participate, he said.

"The goal is for people to speak candidly and have the difficult conversation," he said. "The constant factor in all of this fear. Police fear that they are encountering a situation that is dangerous, and suspects fear that police don't care who they are and what they are doing. So, it is moving from fear to a sense of tolerance and a level of acceptance."

The Cambridge Police Department is gathering law enforcement and policing experts to study the case as it looks for its own lessons, said Commissioner Robert Haas, though he added that his own review found that race played no role in the arrest.

Law enforcement experts nationwide are watching as the city and the incident become an important, if imperfect, petri dish for discussing racial profiling.

"My suspicion is that this was not about race, this was about power," said Richard Weinblatt, director of the Institute for Public Safety at Central Ohio Technical College. "In the old days, we used to call this 'contempt of cop.' This person was charged with 'contempt of cop' because they kept pushing and pushing. But it has opened up a very powerful national dialogue on race, and it's something that police need to address."

In the 1990s, after high-profile cases such as the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo in New York, departments began requiring officers to document whom they stopped as a way of monitoring their work. Others beefed up cultural diversity training, formed partnerships with the community and, more recently, began using video cameras and other technology to record interactions.

"I'm not saying racial profiling doesn't exist, but I don't think we get as many complaints as we did 10 or 20 years ago," said Atlanta Police Chief Richard Pennington, adding that what happened to Gates was not a case of racial profiling because Crowley received a call of a possible crime in progress. "It's not like he was walking through the neighborhood, saw Gates and demanded to see his identification. That's racial profiling."

Gates wrote in a 1995 New Yorker magazine article: "Blacks -- in particular, black men -- swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories."

Saturday, he said in an e-mail statement: "I have spent my entire career as an academic attempting to bridge differences and promote understanding among all Americans. To that end, I have pledged to do all that I can to help us learn from this unfortunate incident. This could and should be a profound teaching moment in the history of race relations in America. I sincerely hope that the Cambridge police department will choose to work with me toward that goal."

One former chief says it could prompt some self-examination. Another calls it a big mistake.

By Robin Abcarian and Kim Murphy July 24, 2009

Reporting from Los Angeles and Seattle -- To some police officers, President Obama was merely speaking the truth about how a certain department behaved in a difficult situation. To others, he committed the unpardonable sin of sticking his nose where it does not belong.

When Obama accused Cambridge, Mass., police officers Wednesday of acting "stupidly" when they arrested his friend, Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., he reignited smoldering feelings in departments across the country about race, police practices and citizen obligations.

The Henry Gates case Discuss: Was Gates' arrest race-related?Obama eases stance on arrest of black Harvard professor Obama says police acted 'stupidly' in arresting black professor Charges dropped against black Harvard scholar

Gates accused the officer of racism, a charge the officer denied.

Two well-known retired police chiefs -- Norm Stamper of Seattle and Joseph McNamara of San Jose -- agreed that Obama's language was inflammatory. Though Stamper said the president's candid remark could provoke some necessary self-examination by police officers, McNamara took a different view.

"My personal belief is that had Professor Gates been white, the outcome would have been different," Stamper said. Although the incident could have ended in a handshake and "maybe even a couple of chuckles . . . it ended up becoming a huge national issue."

Stamper said Gates was acting as "a true American" -- somebody who has "a healthy skepticism about authority." The officer "lured him outside . . . and cuffed him up."

McNamara said he thought the officer had acted appropriately right up until the moment he decided to arrest Gates, which he thought unnecessary. But Obama, he said, made a big mistake.

"He really hurt the police terribly," said McNamara, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "What bothers me is the tremendous stature that President Obama has with the minority community." Obama's comment, he said, will lead to "a very unfortunate and tremendous setback for police efforts that have been impressive over the 50 years since I became a policeman."

Obama, McNamara said, "spoke with his heart and not with his head, as he should have -- as an attorney and the president of the United States."

But to Atlanta Police Officer Antonio Matos, who is black, even if Gates had berated Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley, as alleged in the police report, "that should have been the end of it. In our profession we're supposed to have thick skin. You can't take things personally."

The incident at Gates' house on July 16 unraveled quickly.

According to an interview Gates gave to the Root, an online magazine about black issues that he edits, he discovered that the front door of his home was jammed when he returned from a trip to China. He asked his limo driver, "a large black man," to help him jimmy open the door. Someone saw the men and called police.

Gates, who said his home is owned by Harvard, was on the phone with the university to fix the door when police arrived. He answered the door but refused to step onto his porch as the officer requested. "All the hairs stood up on the back of my neck," he said, "and I realized that I was in danger."

He said to prove he was in his own home, he showed his driver's license and Harvard identification to Crowley, and became angry when the officer refused to provide his name and badge number.

Police arrested and handcuffed Gates, director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and charged him with disorderly conduct. According to the police report, Gates "refused to be cooperative" and shouted "this is what happens to black men in America."

Gates spent four hours in jail, but on Tuesday authorities said the charges had been dropped. Cambridge's mayor apologized to Gates, calling the incident "regrettable and unfortunate."

Crowley, who arrested Gates, told a Boston radio station Thursday that he thought Obama went too far.

"I think he was way off base wading into a local issue without knowing all the facts, as he himself stated before he made that comment," he said.

Crowley, who according to the Associated Press teaches a police training course in racial profiling, said he would not apologize, because he thought he had acted appropriately.

Carol Sobel, a Los Angeles civil rights lawyer who used to work for the American Civil Liberties Union and has often represented plaintiffs against police, said she thought Obama made "a fair comment, and one probably born out of his own experience."

But was the incident racial profiling? Sobel said it's more complicated than that.

"It probably involves a degree of racial profiling, but it cuts across race." Officers, she said, "have a badge and a gun, and they are going to exercise their authority."

Verbal insolence is sometimes called "contempt of cop," she said, and offended officers may use the catchall "disorderly conduct" charge to make an arrest. But, she said, "you cannot commit the crime of disorderly conduct in your own home." Nor is it illegal to curse or flip the bird to a police officer.

"The law is clear," McNamara said. "You can't be guilty of disorderly conduct simply because you are saying bad things to a police officer."

When Stamper was an officer in the San Diego Police Department, one training tool was a book called "Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion," by George Thompson.

"He said, 'Any cop can handle nice guys and wimps,' " Stamper said. " 'If you want to be seen as a really good cop, show me what you can do when somebody says no when you tell them to roll down their window and provide their driver's license.' That stuck with me and a whole lot of police officers who now pride themselves on being able to defuse volatile situations."

Gates, for his part, told the Root that he is still stunned by his arrest. "There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. . . . The only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue," he said.

By Richard Fausset and P.J. Huffstutter

July 25, 2009

Reporting from Atlanta and Fort Wayne, Ind. — Like Henry Louis Gates Jr., they are professionals, men of status and achievement who have excelled in a nation that once shunned black men.

And for many of them, their only shock -- upon learning of the celebrated scholar's recent run-in with police -- was the moment of recognition.

They know too well the pivotal moment Gates faced at his Massachusetts home. It was that moment of suspicion when confronted by police, the moment one wonders, in a flash of panic, anger, or confusion -- Maybe I am being treated this way because I'm black.

Next comes the pivotal question -- Do I protest or just take it?

Kwame Dunston says he has made the calculated choice to take it -- repeatedly. The public school administrator says he has been pulled over more than 20 times in the last decade, but has rarely been issued a ticket. What factor other than race, he wondered, would account for all of those stops?

"It's more important for me to make it home than to fight for a cause I'm not going to win," he said.

Dunston, 36, a New York resident who was in Atlanta this week, pointed to the interior of his 2006 Toyota Camry. It was showroom clean. He doesn't want police to think he has something to hide.

"My job," Dunston said, "is to make sure they don't have any question about what's inside the car."

Such anxiety, deeply rooted in the African American experience, has endured into the era of the first black president.

For many black men, the feeling of remaining inherently suspect never goes away, no matter their wealth and status and the efforts by police forces to avoid abuses in profiling.

Lawrence Otis Graham, author of a book on affluent African Americans, said wealthy blacks may, in fact, be subjected to more racial profiling than others.

In upscale white neighborhoods, they sometimes stand out. In fancy restaurants, they're sometimes mistaken for help. "We become almost numbed by the constant presumptions," said Graham.



New attention

Those issues came crashing back into the spotlight with the arrest of Gates, a 58-year-old Harvard University professor, on July 16.

Early that afternoon, Cambridge police showed up at Gates' home, responding to a tip on a possible break-in. Gates was inside the house, after reportedly forcing open a stuck door.

According to his police report, Sgt. James Crowley asked Gates to step outside to talk, and Gates began screaming, accusing Crowley of being a "racist police officer."

Gates was arrested on suspicion of disorderly conduct, a charge later dropped. A number of people -- most prominently, President Obama -- rushed to his defense.

But Lorenzo Wyche, 32, is among those who wonder whether Gates picked the right time to take a stand. Wyche, a black restaurateur and Atlanta resident, said that his generation may not be as quick to ascribe nefarious motives to police as Gates' generation. "I didn't grow up with dogs chasing me down," he said.

And yet Wyche is also gripped at times by the gnawing suspicion that his black skin makes him a target. He was recently driving in midtown Atlanta. In front of him, an attractive white woman walked across the road, catching his eye. Behind him, a white policeman turned on his lights and pulled Wyche over.

But there would be no fireworks. The officer warned Wyche about an expired tag on his Porsche, and drove away.

"So that was my moment," Wyche said, with a laugh. "Did he run my tag just because I stared at this white girl?"

Wyche figures he will never know whether he was profiled. He prefers this mystery to the possible more serious outcomes. At the same time, the difficulty in proving profiling has created problems for police. Last year, members of the Los Angeles Police Department's civilian oversight panel were incredulous when department officials announced that not one of more than 300 racial profiling complaints was found to have merit.

A Times review of department documents later showed that no claims of profiling -- more than 1,200 -- had been upheld in at least six years. (Racial profiling isn't confined to black men; women and other groups can be targeted as well.)

But LAPD Chief William J. Bratton dismissed criticism, saying that profiling allegations hinge on what the officer was thinking, and therefore are nearly impossible to prove. "How," he said, "do you get inside someone's mind?"

For some black men, the solution is to try to avoid the possibility of confrontation altogether. Graham, the author, lives with his family on a large spread in the mostly white suburb of Westchester, N.Y. When the house alarm goes off, his wife goes to the front gate to meet police. He fears that if he goes instead, they will mistake him for an intruder.

Vibert White, a University of Central Florida history professor, recalled driving along an Indiana highway and spotting a line of cars pulled to the side of the road. All of the drivers were black men. So White, too, pulled over, figuring that was expected of black men.

An officer walked up and asked him why he had stopped.

"I told him that I'd seen the line of cars and just reacted," said White, 51. "He told me, 'Sir, you can go on with your business.' I realized how deeply ingrained this lesson had become -- of not causing a ruckus, of just playing the game, of doing what you needed to do in order to live your life."

Years earlier, he said, he had challenged a traffic stop and ended up in handcuffs.

In Detroit, Tony Spearman-Leach, 42, chief communications officer of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, said he gets tailed by police three or four times a year. He gets pulled over, on average, once a year, but has never received a ticket.

He keeps his replies clear, respectful and short. Each time the officer walks up to his black 1991 Volvo S70 sedan, his mind weighs the same questions.

"I know it's because I'm black, and I'm driving the most conservative car you can get your hands on," Spearman-Leach said. "But you have to weigh what to do. If I fight, am I going to escalate the matter? Is this a battle worth fighting?"



Fighting it

Leach's answer has always been no. But before the Gates incident, other black voices had been encouraging people to say yes.

In January, Baratunde Thurston, a contributor to the influential blog Jack & Jill Politics (which bills itself as a voice of the "black bourgeoisie") argued that with a black president entering office, it was important to speak up about such issues, rather than bury the lingering problems of race.

In the past, speaking up has sometimes brought real change. In 1992, Robert L. Wilkins, a Washington, D.C., attorney, refused a Maryland trooper's attempt to search his rental car with a drug dog. His federal lawsuit forced the state to enact a new training regimen for troopers, and to end race-based blanket drug sweeps.

But fighting back does not always yield such results.

In 1997, Aaron Campbell argued with sheriff's deputies in Orange County, Fla., after he was pulled over for a suspected lane-change violation. He was pepper-sprayed and thrown in a police car. Campbell happened to be a major in the Miami-Dade Police Department.

"I think that if I was a white major on the turnpike, and was stopped unlawfully, they would have said, 'Hey, Major, go on about your business,' " Campbell said.

Campbell was found guilty of resisting arrest. The sheriff's deputies said race had nothing to do with it. Campbell's federal civil suit went nowhere.

richard.fausset@latimes.com

p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com

Times staff writers Kate Linthicum and Joel Rubin contributed to this report.

History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing
By Victoria Buch
Counterpunch
Wednesday, Jun 24, 2009

I arrived in Israel 40 years ago. It took me many years to understand that the very existence of my country, as it is today, is based on an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The project started many years ago. Its seed can be traced to the basic fallacy of the Zionist movement, which set out to establish a Jewish-national state in a location already inhabited by another nation. Under these conditions, one has, at most, a moral right to strive for a bi-national state; establishing a national state implies, more or less by definition, ethnic cleansing of the previous inhabitants.

Albert Einstein grasped this fallacy a long time ago. A short time after WWI ..Einstein complained that the Zionists were not doing enough to reach agreement with the Palestinian Arabs…He favored a binational solution in Palestine and warned Chaim Weizmann against ..Prussian style.. nationalism..[1]

But such warnings passed un-heeded by the Zionist movement. So here we are, nearly a century later, with a Jewish national state dominated by militaristic and militant nationalists, who diligently pursue colonization and ..judaization.. of the land under Israeli control, on both sides of the Green Line (1967 border). The project has been pursued continuously and relentlessly under the different Israeli governments, recently under the cover of bogus ..negotiations.. with President Abbas. Most of the Israeli institutions participate in it. Young Israelis, generation after generation, join the army to provide the military cover. The young folks have been brain-washed to honestly believe that the army pursues Israel..s ..fight for existence... However it seems evident to the author of this article, as to many others, that the survival of the Jewish community in this country depends on establishing viable mechanisms of coexistence with the Palestinians. Thus, under the slogan of ..fight for existence.., the State of Israel is pursuing an essentially suicidal project.

This long-standing outlook of the Israeli governing classes was summarized succinctly in a recent book ..Palestine Inside Out.. by Saree Makdisi, an American academic. His book ..suggests that occupation is merely a feature of an ongoing Israeli policy of slow transfer of the native Palestinian population from their lands. This policy predates the founding of the state, and all of the various practices of the occupier: illegal settlement, land confiscation, home demolition and so on, serve this ultimate purpose...[2]

If you do not believe the above assessment, consider several statements by David Ben Gurion himself, from the time before the establishment of the State of Israel (Ben Gurion was the leader of the Zionist movement before 1948 and the first Israeli Prime Minister after 1948):

..The compulsory transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second Temples…We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government and sovereignty, this is national consolidation in a free homeland... [3]

..With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]…I support compulsory transfer. I don..t see anything immoral in it...[3]

During the 1948 war, about two-thirds of the Palestinians who would become refugees were in fact expelled from their homes by the nascent Israeli army, and one-third became refugees while escaping the dangers of war. All these people, 0.75-1 million of them, were prevented from returning to Israel after the armistice agreement, while their homes and property were demolished or appropriated by the State of Israel.

Among the common mantras provided to the Israelis to justify the above is the following: ..Israel accepted the UN partition plan, and Arabs did not, so what happened afterwards is their own fault... What is conveniently overlooked is that Palestinian Arabs constituted between one third and one half of the population of that designated Jewish homeland (according to various UN reports). Why should these people, whose ancestors lived there for generations, accept living in somebody else..s designated homeland? Imagine, for example, the reaction of French Belgians if their country were designated as a ..Flemish homeland.. by the UN.

But the main mantra drummed into the conscience of an Israeli citizen from kindergarten, is that in 1948 ..it was either them or us.., ..Arabs would have thrown us into the sea if we did not establish a Jewish majority state with a strong army.., etc. I have my doubts about that line, too, but let us suppose for the moment that in fact, it was so. And then came the year 1967, and the Six Day War. Another chapter in the Israeli ..fight for existence.. against recalcitrant Arabs who just keep trying to throw us into the sea. On the face of it, that is how it seemed. I together with most of my compatriots believed for years that 1967 was in fact a moment of existential danger for Israel. Until I stumbled upon some telling quotes, uttered by our very own leaders [4]:

..(a) The New York Times quoted Prime Minister Menachem Begin..s (1977 - 83) August, 1982 speech saying: ..In June, 1967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that (President Gamal Abdel) Nasser (1956 - 70) was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him...
(b) Two-time Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1974 - 77 and 1992 - 95) told French newspaper Le Monde in February, 1968: ..I do not believe Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it...
(c) General Mordechai Hod, Commander of the Israeli Air Force during the Six-Day War said in 1978: ..Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we perfected it...
(d) General Haim Barlev, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief told Ma..ariv in April 1972: ..We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.....

So: instead of ..thwarting an existential danger.., in 1967 the State of Israel carried out an effective military operation to acquire some real estate. There is nothing new about that ..existential danger.. propaganda. Acquisition of real estate by conquest has been already called pleasing names by various other conquerors and occupiers, throughout the old and new history: such as ..manifest destiny.., ..white man..s burden.., ..spreading true religion / culture / democracy.., whatnot.

The reader may like to know that the 1967 real estate acquisition by the State of Israel was anticipated some twenty years earlier by Ben-Gurion, at the time of the partition plan (which was supposedly accepted by the Zionist leadership). See the following quotes of Ben-Gurion, which can be found in the book by an Israeli historian[5]:

..Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do not see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question. Those who reject partition are right in their claim that this country cannot be partitioned because it constitutes one unit, not only from a historical point of view but also from that of nature and economy...
..After the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of the Palestine...

I wonder if at any point in history there was any association of people who acquired goodies by brute force, and who viewed themselves candidly as such. Times and again, conquerors considered themselves unwilling victims of circumstances, and the barbarians (their own victims!) against whom they have to regretfully protect their rights. Consider the following pronouncements of Benny Morris, a historian who documented the 1948 ethnic cleansing. In a 2004 interview with Morris which was published in Haaretz one reads[6]:

Q: The title of the book you are now publishing in Hebrew is ..Victims... In the end, then, your argument is that of the two victims of this conflict, we [Israelis] are the bigger one.
Morris: ..Yes. Exactly. We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here. We are a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us.

The above opinion is representative of the Israeli mainstream. It has been raised to the status of axiom over the years, and no reasonable peace offers (such as the latest Saudi one) are likely to put a dent in it. Israelis are using this slogan to exempt themselves from normal human decency towards Palestinians. Most Israeli Jews have convinced themselves that they have a moral right to expropriate and expel Palestinians because Palestinians are such barbarians, who did not respond to Israel..s..generous peace offers.. and ..only wanted to throw us to the sea... Because we are a nation of Holocaust survivors. My compatriots imagined themselves starring in a modern version of Tolkien..s ..Lord of the Rings.. - starring as beautiful elves, of course, who were forced by sad fate to fight ugly goblins the Palestinians (goblins = ..terrorists..). Human mercy does not apply to ..terrorists... You do not make territorial compromises or peace agreements with ..terrorists...

The above explains the mass participation of otherwise normal and more-or-less decent Israelis in the ongoing ethnic-cleansing projects. How else can you account for a dying elderly man and his wife being dragged out of their east Jerusalem apartment to make space for Jewish settlers. Building the Jerusalem ..Museum of Tolerance.. on the site of an ancient Muslim graveyard. Onslaught on West Bank orphanages supported by Islamic charities. State-subsidized Jewish settler-thugs conducting pogroms against Palestinians in Hebron and elsewhere in the Occupied Territories. Widespread sadism practiced by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian detainees. Trashing of Palestinian homes during nightly military incursions in Palestinian towns and villages. Demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem under the brazen pretext of ..illegal construction... Extensive land grab for settlers. And much more.[7]

The Gaza Strip is the place where the self-righteous Israeli sadism has reached new heights. The Strip is densely populated, mostly by descendants of Palestinians expelled in 1948. Well before the Second Intifada, choice Gazan real estate along the beach (about ¼ of the Strip land) was confiscated for a few thousand Jewish settlers. Still, a million and a half Gazan Palestinians had a sort of normal life (under the Israeli occupation) – growing fruits and vegetables, making construction materials and other products for Israeli markets, and working as laborers within the Green Line. Before the second Intifada, very little terror was coming from there to Israel.

However, since the beginning of the Intifada (a year and a half before the first Palestinian rocket landing across the border) the Israeli army embarked on the systematic destruction of the Strip. Incursions were carried out every few weeks and included the destruction of factories and workshops, roads, agricultural land, homes, and whatnot. Access to the Israeli economy was closed. Eventually, desperate Palestinians resorted to shooting Qassam rockets which rarely caused casualties or real damage but served as an excellent pretext for Israeli military ..action...

And then Sharon carried out his brilliant propaganda move of ..disengagement.. from Gaza. The whole operation was marketed as a demonstration of Israeli good will. The Israeli settlements in Gaza were in fact removed, but the army was redeployed around the Strip, and the Strip was converted to a large scale prison. The economic strangulation of Gaza was tightened to a draconian extent, especially after the Hamas government suppressed the Israel-cum-USA sponsored Fatah putsch. (I am no fan of Hamas but their government was democratically elected by the Palestinians) Hamas offered several times to conduct negotiations with Israel, based on 1967 borders, but the offers were under-reported and ignored. It is likely that such negotiations would have stopped the Qassams, but Israeli leaders appeared interested in continuation of the violence. The Qassams created a great opportunity for more ..poor little us.. propaganda, and a great pretext to wiggle out of legitimate international requests to stop the massive colonization of the West Bank.

Finally, a truce with Hamas was negotiated. Since the beginning of the truce defense minister Barak commenced preparations for a massive attack on Gaza[8]. On November 14th the working truce with Hamas was deliberately broken on Barak..s orders, by killing several Hamas fighters. A totally predictable Palestinian response ensued - cancellation of the truce and a barrage of rockets. The barrage was used by Barak as a pretext for that large-scale operation, including the slaughter of hundreds of people in Gaza with missiles deployed from airplanes. This muscle-flexing is an obvious part of Barak..s and Livni..s forthcoming election campaign, at the price of hundreds of Palestinian casualties, and several Israeli ones (as meanwhile Palestinians have improved their aim). In a forthcoming ground operation Israeli soldiers are also likely to pay with their lives for this form of electioneering.

Do you know what mainstream Israelis make of the above? ..We, Israelis, in an act of self-sacrifice, removed poor Jewish settlers from their ..homes.. in the Gaza Strip and gave Palestinians a chance for free and happy existence. But the Palestinians spurned our peace efforts and preferred instead to pursue their addiction to ..throwing Jews to the sea... Gaza could have become a new Singapore, but the Gazans chose instead to shoot rockets at Israelis...

The disengagement was thus an act of brilliance on part of that evil genius, Sharon. He provided mainstream Israelis with a sweeping moral absolution. Palestinians ..disappointed.. them. Now the Israeli leaders can do anything they wish to Palestinians. Do not expect a squeak of public protest from the Israeli Jewish public, except for a tiny minority of ..self hating Jews.. like yours truly.

Believe me, these Jewish-Israeli mainstreamers are not natural-born monsters. They just do not know any better. Alas, I used to be one of them. Then one day I stumbled, more or less by chance, into the West Bank with a group of activists. I acquired some Palestinian friends and finally understood the criminality of the treatment of the Palestinians by my country. And I learned to ignore the daily portion of preposterous propaganda which is provided to my compatriots by the media in lieu of ..news... But how to convince my compatriots not to listen to this propaganda? I do not know.

Then again, it does not have to be so. In addition to four million or so stateless Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, there are about a million Palestinians living within the Green Line and carrying Israeli citizenship. Despite the very considerable internal racism, many of these Palestinian citizens are deeply involved in Israeli society. You meet Arab doctors and nurses in Israeli hospitals, Arab students in Israeli universities etc. There is quite an element of coexistence and cooperation between Jews and Arabs there. But a mainstream Jewish-Israeli colleague who might treat his or her Arab co-worker perfectly decently would still be proud of a soldier son who is ..serving the country.. in the Occupied Territories. He or she would still repeat racist propaganda about the ..demographic danger.. to the State of Israel from its Arab citizens, and believe the bloodthirsty speeches of generals and ex-generals on the TV. And vote for any of the three major Zionist parties, Likud, Kadima and Labour, whose leaders have been dedicated ethnic cleansers over the years.

For the sake of both nations living in this country, this outrage must be stopped. It must be stopped by pressure from outside, because at present within Israel there are no significant political forces to oppose it. Please do something, my friends, and do it urgently. And kindly ignore the endless ..negotiations.. between our government and the powerless Palestinian Authority, they are just a cover for more ethnic cleansing. If you do not believe me, come and see the massive settlement construction in East Jerusalem and West Bank. And the walls of the Palestinian ghettos.