Oppose Divestment From Israel

WHEREAS, in the summer of 2000, in compliance with the Oslo accords, the Israeli government offered the Palestinians national independence on almost all of the territories captured in the Six-Day War (June 5-11, 1967), including the unprecedented concession of sharing Jerusalem with the people who had desecrated every Jewish site when they controlled it until 1967, and after 2000;

WHEREAS the Palestinian leadership responded with a suicidal war in which they forced entry into neutral Palestinian residences to shoot at Israeli homes across the green line from the homes of unwilling Palestinians (often Christian), targeted Israeli civilians everywhere, used ambulances to transport weapons, explosives, and terrorists, place their children in harms way so as to multiply their own casualties, incite Palestinian violence, and curry sympathy in the West;

WHEREAS the Palestinian people are the greatest victims of their leaders decision to go to war rather than begin to develop a civil society that took care of its own people;

WHEREAS Palestinian media (run by the PA) regularly run virulent accusations about the Israelis and Jews, including medieval and modern blood libels and paranoid fantasies like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, repeatedly televise calls from Imams to exterminate the Jews all over the world, and videos exalting martyr mass murder and encouraging children to sacrifice their lives in order to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible;

WHEREAS the Israeli military has responded with unparalleled restraint given the nature of the provocation, and sacrificed its own soldiers in order to keep Palestinian civilian casualties to a minimum (for example, in Jenin);

WHEREAS the Palestinians have despaired of destroying Israel by themselves and therefore look to enlisting Westerners of good will to unwittingly participate in their effort by making Israel a pariah state;

WHEREAS their effort to paint Israel as an apartheid state is particularly odious and a moral travesty of liberal values since by the very definition of apartheid the systematic legal inferiority of subject populations apartheid laws and treatments of non-Muslims characterizes the behavior of most Arab Muslim states;

WHEREAS among the political leaders of the Arab world, Palestinian leadership has shown some of the greatest religious intolerance, oppressing and massacring both Jewish and Christian minorities when they held political power (e.g., Southern Lebanon (1970-82) and the Palestinian Authority Territories (1993-present));

WHEREAS the first victims of Palestinian terror are the Palestinian people themselves, and, in the words of the courageous Muslim Irshad Manji, anti-Zionism is a weapon of mass distraction whereby a ruthless and oppressive Arab leadership blames the Israelis for the very damage they inflict on their own people;

WHEREAS the people who have put forward the petition before the Somerville city council send those who visit their website to the websites of the very groups who support and incite to total war against Israel, demonizing the Israelis, and endorsing the targeting of civilians [Resistance is not terrorism! ISM, All Israelis serve in the army, therefore none are considered civilians];

WHEREAS the petitioners for divestment have abused the language of decency and human rights to give aid and comfort to some of the worst abusers of human rights in the world today, and show no concern to denounce the horrors committed by the Palestinians religious and ethnic brethren in Sudan and elsewhere;

WHEREAS the petition they have put before the council is riddled with misleading, false, and dishonest claims whereby they hope to sway the good will of the council;

WHEREAS the said petition cannot in any serious manner encourage peace and compromise, but rather further demonize people who have done much for peace, and encourage people who have done their best to make peace impossible;

We, the concerned citizens of Somerville (MA), call on our City Council and Board of Aldermen to vote against the proposed divestment measure that unfairly demonizes a democracy for simply defending itself in a fight for its life against terrorism.