KM, Tzipi Livni, Jerusalem -- Wednesday, October 21, 2009

To Mr. Jeremy Ben-Ami, Executive Director, J Street

'I would like to congratulate you on your inaugural national conference. I believe most American Jews support Israel and want to see it thrive as a Jewish and democratic state.'

However, in the eyes of many, the reality is that Israel is arguably neither Jewish nor democratic.

The state of Israel was established in 1948 by the UN as a Jewish homeland, in the aftermath of the Holocaust in which the majority of European Jews were liquidated by the Nazis in industrial style murder factories.

In the beginning, it served its true purpose and welcomed all those who had suffered from persecution around the world and who were born of a Jewish mother.  But in the years that followed, the vision blurred and Herzl's dream of a Jewish agrarian co-operative, set within a Muslim Middle East and living in harmony with its indigenous neighbours, soon turned into a nightmare.

The indigenous Arabs voted, en bloc, against the UN resolution of 1947 that proposed to divide their land to accommodate a Jewish state in Palestine, and when their voices were ignored they attacked the fledgling state immediately upon its birth, which they saw as illegitimate. But the Arab armies, lost, and with that loss the new Israeli state gained an arrogant maturity. If a small Jewish army could defeat the combined armies of the Arabs, then surely God was with them and they could impose their rule at will.

In fact, they succeeded in imposing their will only with the covert, but subsequent overt, help of the United States - or rather, the American Zionist lobby, later to adopt the more benign name of AIPAC, the American Israel Jewish Affairs Committee, that now exerts such a powerful influence on US foreign policy through its control on the voting behaviour of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Throughout the post-war years, as America's power increased worldwide, the tiny Israeli state hung onto its coat-tails, fed and sustained with billions of tax dollars from unknowing Americans.  And so, the state of Israel grew exceedingly arrogant and with that arrogance, came brutality.  For the grandchildren of the survivors of the Holocaust grew to forget the horrors of war-time Europe that had so decimated their grandparents in Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Holland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Like an abused child, who in turn abuses his or her own children - Israelis began to oppress and humiliate their neighbours. Then came the killings, which, it was claimed, were in self-defense. But too often it was women and children who died at the hands of the Israeli army. Too often, unarmed civilians.

But the IDF was increasingly composed of young soldiers of Russian or Ethiopian origin, whose parents may, or may not, have been born Jewish.

Israel consistently claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East, but her actions are anything but democratic. She kills, imprisons and tortures many thousands - even up to today. Without trial and without any semblance of justice but with every semblance of inequality.

That the state of Israel is carried on the back of the American tax-payer is common knowledge but it is open to debate whether that small country is entirely Jewish or democratic.  Certainly, as a Jewish Democrat, originally from a very old, east European Jewish family, I am exceedingly doubtful.