KURTENBACH: Harper's address to the Israeli Knesset
February 8, 2014
To the Editor,
On January 22nd. 2014, our Prime Minister Stephen Harper addressed the Israeli Knesset. I listened intently to his every word - and was quite flabbergasted.
Harper was effusive in his support of Israel and its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
But there was not one word about the plight of the Palestinian people. They have been, and are being, displaced by the ongoing building of Israeli settlements on Palestinian land which, according to the United Nations (UN), is illegal. The Palestinian people feel powerless in the face of the Israeli military which is the 10th largest on Earth and holds nuclear weapons in its arsenal.
Harper more or less intimated that anyone who criticized Israel's political policies was an anti-Semitic.
Does it follow then that a person who criticizes Harper's political policies is anti-Canadian?
Palestine was a colony of Britain in 1947. In 1948, Britain ceded Palestine to a group of Jewish Zionists and Palestine was renamed Israel. This was probably done to find a safe place for Jewish people who had suffered the horrors and death of the Holocaust under Hitler's Germany during WW2.
The Zionists immediately displaced 700,000 to 800,000 Palestinian people; most were Muslim but some were Christians. Many of them ended up in refugee camps in Jordon, Lebanon and Syria.
During his speech to the Knesset, Harper assured Netanyahu "through fire and water, Canada will stand with you."
Is it possible that Harper was not aware of Netanyahu's long term plans for Israel?
In 1989, Netanyahu was a junior minister in the Israeli coalition government of P.M. Yitzhak Shamir. Speaking to an audience at Bar Ilan University, Netanyahu made the following statement: "Israel should have taken advantage of the suppression of the demonstrations (at China's Tiananmen Square) when the world's attention was focused on what was happening in that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the Territories. However, to my regret, they did not support that policy that I proposed, and which I still propose, should be implemented." -PIWP quotation number 2378 [ http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPS ... aid=134874 ]
It is quite obvious that the wisdom of Martin Luther King applies to the Palestinian/Israeli crisis: "Violence begets violence."
Leo Kurtenbach
Saskatoon, SK
Phone: 306-652-5129