By James M. Wall
In a 1935 stage production of Billy Rose’s Jumbo, Jimmy Durante is leading an elephant down the street. A policeman stops him and asks, “What are you doing with that elephant?”
Durante responds, “What elephant”? That line became a 1935 nightly show-stopper. Durante repeated the same question in the 1962 film version of Jumbo.
Wikipedia speculates that this line may have contributed to the phrase, “the elephant in the room”, which refers to the denial of something as a reality, when that something is obviously in the room.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres last week became the latest official to deny the obvious presence of the apartheid elephant enforced by the state of Israel.
He joined the parade and said, “What elephant?”, when he instructed Rima Khalaf, Executive Director of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), to withdraw a report written for her agency.
The report concluded that Israel imposes an apartheid regime on Palestinians. She refused to withdraw the report. Then she resigned as ESCWA’s Executive Director.
The Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported that Dr. Khalaf told reporters in Beirut that the report was the “first of its kind” from a UN agency.
She also said the report sheds light on “the crimes that Israel continues to commit against the Palestinian people, which amount to war crimes against humanity.”
The ESCWA, which is comprised of 18 Arab states from western Asia, said in the report that Israel was guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt” of imposing apartheid policies against Palestinians.
Israeli officials were quick to denounce the Report, comparing it to Nazi propaganda and calling for Guterres to publicly reject it. The U.S. quickly f0llowed with its attack on the
Report.
Guterres is new to his post. He was sworn in as the new United Nations secretary general on Monday, December 17, 2016. The 67-year-old former Portuguese prime minister most recently served as head of the UN’s refugee agency.
Rima Khalaf served as Executive Director of ESCWA from 2010 to 2017. A citizen of Jordan, she holds a BA in Economics from the American University of Beirut and a Master’s in Economics and a PhD in System Science from Portland State University in the U.S.
Earlier in her career, Khalaf served her own Jordanian government as
Minister of Industry and Trade (1993–1995); Minister of Planning (1995–1998); Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Planning (1999–2000).
Her resignation for conscience’s sake, came more than a decade after President Jimmy Carter published his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, a study of his years of dealing with Israeli governments.
President Carter was attacked by forces which have frantically sought to hide behind a wall of unreality, a wall that protects Israel’s five-decade long dedication to its illegal oppressive occupation.
The attackers were afraid a book by President Carter with “apartheid” in the title would lead many in the public to wake up to the presence of the apartheid elephant running all over Palestine, locking up children and building more check points.
Israel relies heavily on “Fifth Column” U.S. citizens loyal to Israel, to defend a false narrative which “justifies” the establishment of Israel’s apartheid state for “security reasons”.
That “security” rationale for apartheid is showing additional signs of crumbling, thanks in part to Israeli officials who have seen the apartheid elephant in the line of duty, up close and personal.
Among those officials is former Israeli Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, who has just warned Israelis that they clinging to an unreality.
At a conference at Israel’s Netanya Academic College, Pardo said that Israel’s occupation and its conflict with the Palestinians are “the only existential threat facing Israel”.
“Israel has chosen not to choose, hoping the conflict will resolve itself – perhaps the Arabs will disappear, maybe some cosmic miracle will happen,” Pardo told a conference at the Netanya Academic College.
“One day we will become a binational state because it will be impossible to untie the Gordian knot between the two peoples. That is not the way to decide.”
Pardo stated: “Israel has one existential threat. It is a ticking time bomb. We chose to stick our head in the sand, creating a variety of external threats”.
The American people are discovering the hard way, what it means for its president to live in a self-enclosed understanding of reality.
President Trump is a man who clings to what he thinks is true in spite of overwhelming evidence that it is not true. Like the current leaders of Israel, he surrounds himself with loyalists who support him in his views of reality.
It does seem clear, however, that when Israel and its U.S. loyalists, and Trump, and his Russian-loving pals, cling to their own narrow understanding of reality, we can hear them asking,”What elephant?”
Allison Weir, who has long seen the apartheid elephant, has debunked Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu’s flimsy new law to keep Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) supporters out of Israel by asking in good Joe McCarthy fashion, “Are you now or have you ever been in favor of BDS”?
Weir flattened Bibi by writing “a letter to the Israel government”, which she posted on Dissident Voice.
In her letter she says: “I’m not trying to go to Israel. I want to go to Palestine.”
“I want to go to Bethlehem and Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron, Jenin and Tulkarem. I hope to return to Khan Yunis, Rafah, Gaza City, and numerous other towns and villages in the West Bank and Gaza.
In other words, I want to go to Palestine – a country recognized by 136 countries around the world. But your law, astoundingly, prevents me from visiting that country. You control entry and exit to the places I want to visit, even though they’re not part of your territory, or included in your exclusive democracy.”
Israel’s anti-BDS law is a confession that Israel’s apartheid elephant stands guard in both Palestine and Israel, protecting Israel from opinions.
Border monitors will not change the reality that Palestinians will not have freedom as long as the apartheid elephant exists.
“What elephant?”
– To read more articles by James Wall visit: http://wallwritings.me.
