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The 'Beacon That Is Israel'  :      Information Clearing House: ICH

The 'Beacon That Is Israel'  :      Information Clearing House: ICHMarch 14, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- A beacon is a signal fire, a warning light to guide one out of darkness. As the former Israeli minister of foreign affairs Tzipi Livni noted in late February, "these are days of momentous change in the Middle East..." Courageous thousands are demanding their rights as human beings, she intoned, and there is an inner hunger for freedom abroad in the land.

But those courageous thousands have lit a fire that is also a beacon for Israel, if it heeds it, a warning that it alone of all the states in the Middle East could be left defying the peoples' demands for human rights and freedoms. Yet Livni, and US politician Edward Koch last week, went to the media not to announce that Israel would alter its treatment of the Palestinians, but simply to ignore the existence of the Palestinians. In the words of Koch, "these uprisings clearly demonstrate that it is not the issue of Israel that is rocking the Arab world, but the presence of arbitrary and repressive regimes."

How convenient. Israel alone stands immune from the repression and arbitrary policies of the abusive regimes that face the multitudes in the streets. Indeed, Livni charitably intoned that "the values and experiences of the Jewish people demand that we embrace the promise of real democratic change, not merely express concern about uncertainties associated with it."

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