Eugene Bird is President of Council for the National Interest (CNI) and is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the organization. He is the former Counselor of Embassy in Saudi Arabia and has served in Jerusalem and in several other Middle East posts. He has followed the peace process from Washington and in the field since 1993. He was at the Camp David talks as a reporter, and at the Wye River talks between Israel, the Palestinian leadership and President Clinton. He is knowledgeable about the politics and leadership of Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, where he is well known as a journalist and the leader of CNI.

Emphasis added by Editor, not the author.

July, 2005

Dear Citizens of Somerville,

I must congratulate you on taking up a subject that has been largely hidden in American politics: the question of Israeli treatment of three and a half million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. There continue to be severe violations of not only the Geneva Convention regarding treatment of people in occupied territories, but there have been violations of Israeli law, aided by the military assistance from American taxpayers.

We have provided about one third of the military spending of Israel for the past twenty years and the result has been an egregious invasion of Lebanon that killed thousands of civilians, perhaps as many as 25,000. The Israelis remain in clear violation of a US sponsored UN resolution calling for their return to the international boundary without further negotiation or concessions from the government of Lebanon. Similarly, there have now been thousands of Palestinians, including 700 children, killed by the Israel Defense Forces, using American tanks, aircraft, missiles and other weaponry.

The Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy thousands of Palestinian homes, another direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, mean that the United States has participated and continues to participate in an attempt to remove the Palestine population from their own lands and substitute exclusive Jewish colonies. When the Geneva Conventions were written in 1949, the key portions of it were drafted at the insistence of worldwide Jewish organizations. It was of course aimed at preventing another Holocaust and transfer of population. To find 50 years later the Jewish-Arab state of Israel engaging in direct violations of a convention that they had helped draft is Orwellian.

Three former chiefs of their FBI, Shin Bet, have described Israel as on a self-destructive course. On behalf of the majority of Israelis who believe the occupation must end, and a Palestinian state created, we need to have a mass movement not only here in the United States, but in other countries to simply refuse in every way possible to let our munitions and our bulldozers be used to violate international laws. We're proving every day in Iraq that there are better ways to create lasting friendships and alliances with key foreign countries than using military, no matter how benevolent we may claim it to be.

Apartheid in South Africa was considered just as an intractable problem, as is peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. But with the help of divestment as the entering wedge and danger signal to those Israelis who believe they can impose an Israeli governance over three and a half million Palestinians, we may bring Israel to her senses and immensely help US credibility in the Middle East and through out the world.

Will Somerville join in the campaign to divest from a few key companies as their contribution to creating a non-military and common sense solution to the Israel-Palestine question? I certainly hope so.

Sincerely,

Eugene Bird