Webster's defines war as "a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations." It defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group."  While many people have been deliberately misled by the mainstream media to think that there is an ongoing "war" between the state of Israel and "Palestinian terrorists" bent on taking Israel's land away, the truth is that only one side in this "war" has tanks, drones, Apache attack helicopters, F-16s, unconfirmed nuclear weapons, a deadly navy complete with gunboats, an army equipped with sophisticated and offensive weaponry, a sophisticated air force and billions of dollars in military funding. Only one side is even recognized as a state. The other side consists of millions of largely unarmed Palestinian refugees who have been running for their lives for almost 60 years now. They have been running for their lives on their own ancestral lands, which have been violently confiscated from them by the state of Israel.  It is the Palestinians who have had their land taken away. Not Israel.

Israel declared itself a state within Palestine in 1948. It declared itself a state for Jewish people only, and since then has continuously confiscated the ancestral lands of the Palestinians and then renamed each piece of the confiscated property, "Israel."  Most do not realize that Israel is not a contiguous "state," at all. It is a place of strange borders, fences, checkpoints, and apartheid walls snaking through Palestine, sometimes cutting Palestinian farmers off from their backyard farms and orchards, and in some places dotting the countryside with hundreds of Israeli "settlement camps," and "outposts."  This has fragmented Palestine and Palestinian society. Israeli colonization is causing borders to be unclear and constantly shifting, and this is a recipe for endless unrest and disaster.

For the 60 years that Zionist Israel has been taking land that does not belong to it, there has not been one day of peace. The Palestinians, including unarmed women, children, and the elderly, have been repeatedly driven from their homes and made homeless. Many families have experienced this more than once. They have been forced to live in tents or caves, or refugee camps, only to be driven from their land again whenever Israel decides it needs more land to call "Israel."  Israel has also driven Palestinians off their lands when it has decided to build huge walls wherever it pleases, as it did between Palestinian Gaza and the Gaza border of Egypt.  Gaza, with its 1.5 million inhabitants, is now completely cut off from the rest of the world. Israel has made it into the largest prison camp on earth.

Palestinian civilians, including children, are being kidnapped by Israeli military forces. They are being arrested, tortured, maimed and imprisoned without charges or legal representation. They are currently being starved, terrorized, stoned, blown apart by tanks, deprived of their water, and run over by bulldozers and military machinery rampaging through their villages. They have been stripped naked at "checkpoints" and humiliated, tormented by fanatic Zionist "settlers," murdered, run over by hit and run drivers, and generally treated with such barbaric inhumanity that it overwhelms the imagination and defies description. The Palestinians are not permitted to defend themselves or to resist this deplorable treatment. Anyone who dares to "resist" faces imprisonment, or death. Those daring to take part in nonviolent protests are frequently met with violence by the Israeli forces. The Israeli military frequently demands entry into Palestinian homes without search warrants or reasonable cause, sometimes just breaking down the walls with tanks and bulldozers.  Once inside, they take whatever properties they want to take, including life savings. (1) (2) (3) (4)

All of this is clearly illegal and in violation of international laws, but is happening because most of these horrifying events are rarely reported in mainstream news, or if they are reported, we are led to believe that Israel is merely "defending" itself, when in fact, it has been a terrorist aggressor since day one. In addition, the atrocities are now also being hidden from view behind those giant apartheid walls that Israel has been constructing throughout the Palestine.

Unfortunately, and shamefully, a large portion of Israel's offensive terrorist activities which have led to the deaths of many Palestinians, Lebanese and others including Americans, has been funded or made possible by US tax dollars: this is our tax dollar at work. While the current US administration was completely unable to defend the US from the planned 9/11 atrocity, (which we have been asked to believe was slowly carried out by a group of unskilled men armed with box-cutters), while we have yet to see an adequate clean up and rebuilding after hurricane Katrina, while we have just witnessed the collapse of an entire bridge due to its deadly state of well-known disrepair, the White House occupants recently pledged an additional $30 billion of your tax dollars for Israel's already staggering military arsenal. This $30 billion pledge, we are told, is for the "defense" of the state of Israel. (5)

Although the Palestinians have waited for nearly 60 years for international humanitarian groups to come to their aid and help them, very little has been done until recently. As seen in the referenced links below, the Palestinians are now arming themselves with cameras, computers, and video equipment, and bravely positioning themselves near the line of fire, documenting the incursions of Israeli miliary tanks and bulldozers into refugee camps. They have been filming their Palestinian brothers and sisters, their sons and daughters, their mothers and fathers running for their lives.

If the world would not listen or could not hear the Palestinian cries for help during the past 60 years, we can now see for ourselves what is happening. There is no excuse for us to allow it to continue. Sixty years is a long time to wait for help, and perhaps help is finally about to arrive in the form of awareness.  The world seems to be waking up and discovering the other side of Zionism: the surprising anti-Semitic side, in which Zionist Israel has been slaughtering and torturing the Palestinian Semites for 60 years.

Armed only with cameras, the Palestinian journalists have been filming and photographing Israeli atrocities that few outside of the region have known about or even suspected. This, in turn, has made photojournalism one of the most dangerous of all professions in that region, because the Zionists do not want the rest of the world to see what is being filmed, photographed and written about. Israel is now targeting, gunning down, and arresting the unarmed journalists. (6) (7) (8) (9)

Palestinian journalist, Khalid Amayreh, spoke of other problems the journalists also face. Khalid's own family was forced to live in a cave for 22 years after six members of his family were murdered by Israeli soldiers and all of his family's property was confiscated. After eventually receiving a master's degree in journalism, he put the degree to work inPalestine, where lives with his wife and family. In addition to the personal safety issues, Khalid stated some of the other obstacles that journalists face.  "There are serious restrictions facing journalists, including arrest, harassment, and especially being prevented from traveling abroad."

The journalists, however, are determined. They will continue risking their lives in order to reveal to the world what life is like in Zionist-occupied Palestine. There are no horror stories more poignant than those of a people who have lost all of their human rights.  The truth is now in front of us, and it is staring at us. The truth is staring at us and it is awaiting our response.

It is staring at us through the unseeing eyes of lifeless and mangled babies and children. It is staring at us through the tears of old men who do not know why they have been gunned down in their front yards. The truth is staring at us through the tears of the mothers who have lost their children during midnight and dawn Israeli military incursions into sleeping Palestinian refugee camps. It is staring at us through the tears of the fathers who, in shock, have carried their dead children through the streets.  The truth is staring at us through the tears of an entire nation of people who have lost everything, including every human right ever established, expected, or guaranteed since humanity's earliest civilizations first claimed to be civilized.

Israel, which claims to be a "democracy," is not even operating according to the ancient, pre-draconian Code of Hammurabi. There are no rights at all for the Palestinians over whom the Zionists are lording themselves. With no rules or regulations pertaining to human rights or civil liberties, Israel is a military state that is completely out of control.

The Palestinians do not even have the right to live. Nor do they have rights to their own property.  They do not have the right to life, nor do they have the right to eat, to drink their own water, to harvest their own gardens, or to receive aid from the rest of the world. They do not have the right to freely move about in their own land. They cannot pass through their neighborhoods and through other camps and villages unless they have Israeli permission. The permissions are revoked without notice. They must have Israeli permission in order to tend their orchards and farms, and these permissions have also been denied to the farmers who own the land. They have no voice. Some of the orchards have been burned down by Israelis, while others have been uprooted by bulldozers, and the trees carried off and delivered as gifts to the Zionist "settlers." What the Zionists want, the Zionists think they can take.

The justification for this entire nightmare is the Zionist claim that "God gave this land to me." Like everything else that makes no sense whatsoever in this ongoing tragedy, is the fact that a large number of Zionists are atheists. One must at least wonder, therefore, why we should abide by this alleged claim of a divine land grant "by God," which is being claimed by people who are atheists. (10)

The current Zionist US government is supporting this insanity and inhumanity, and recently helped block humanitarian aid into ravaged, hungry, and economically collapsingGaza in what appears to be collective punishment for the 1.5 million Gazans trapped there at the mercy of Israel. The Palestinian "crime" was electing into office a political party that did not meet with Israeli and US approval.

What one finds happening experimentally in Zionist Israel, one soon finds happening in Zionist USA. In mid July, one of the Christian Zionists occupying the White House signed a vaguely worded order that some feel might pose a serious threat to anti "war" activism regarding Iraq.  The order appears to give authority to the Treasury to confiscate all property, including homes, land and money of anyone in the US perceived as "undermining efforts" of the government. One can be judged "guilty" by simply making humanitarian donations to "blocked" persons. What the Zionists want, the Zionists think they can take.  (11)

The Israeli Zionists have taken away all God-given human rights from the Palestinian people, treating them in a similar manner to the way the American Indians were treated in the US. There is another God-given gift, however. It is a gift that no one can take from anyone, and it is called grace. Grace motivates people to be compassionate.

After the Trail of Tears, in which many American Indians were removed from their ancestral homes and forced to march hundreds of miles into a wilderness area, the subtle presence of grace was still alive and well. The Choctaw Indians were the first to walk the Trail of Tears. It was when the Choctaw Indians heard about the potato famine in Irelandwhere people were starving, that grace flowed through them in a powerful way. The tribe took up a collection.  Although homeless and in poverty themselves, the Choctaws raised $710, which they then sent as food money to the Irish people they had never met.

A similar grace can be seen in the cameramen who are now risking their lives in order to help end Palestinian suffering. The risks are very real as you can see in the links below, and some have paid the ultimate price and given their lives for this cause. We, the rest of the world, owe it to them to pay close attention to what they are filming and what they are risking their lives to tell us about.  Armed only with cameras, they have placed themselves on the frontlines of a one-sided "war," that is not a war at all.  It is genocide, and it needs to be stopped, now.

G is not only for genocide. G can also be for grace.

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mary sparrowdancer is an independent journalist and the author of a bestselling book, The Love Song.  The Special Edition is currently being printed and will be available soon.  She can be reached here <http://www.sparrowdancer.com/>www.sparrowdancer.com  She does not read or accept email that is in any way offensive or abusive.

She is of Irish, Italian and Narragansett (American Indian) descent.  She and her two children are among the last of the remaining descendents of the Narragansett Indians.

mary sparrowdancer intends to vote for Ron Paul.

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Cited references:

1.  Video footage of the destruction of Jenin, 2002.  Part 1. 8/5/2007

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2373468531206028191&q=jenin&hl=e

2. Video footage of the destruction of Jenin, 2002.  Part 2. 8/5/2007

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3216988889570484470&q=jenin&hl=e

3. A four-minute slide show set to music of Outlandish. Do you know where your tax money is going? Who is paying for the Palestinian Holocaust that is being carried out by Israel?  Song lyrics by Gihad Ali. 8/5/2007

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKQqItZu4Is

4. Tobias, the full-length homemade documentary. Life in Palestine. 8/5/2007

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2347953151064740545

5. New US $30 billion "defense" package for Israel. 8/5/2007

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070729/wl_mideast_afp/mideastisraelus

6. Graphic video footage of cameraman being repeatedly shot.  He later had both legs amputated. (8/5/2007)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3yN1Qnz3LQ

7. Photograph of young Palestinian photojournalist, Mohammed Al Zanoun, before he was shot by the Israelis.

http://www.currentissues.tv/mohammad-az-zanoun.jpg

8. Photograph of young Palestinian photojournalist, Mohammed Al Zanoun after being shot by the Israelis.

http://www.planetenonviolence.org/photo/406543-499518.jpg

9. What Mohammed Al Zanoun was photographing when the Israeli army gunned him down. (Warning: Very graphic.)

http://electronicintifada.net/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/12/4934

10. Young Zionist, trespassing on Palestinian property and explaining the sacred land grant from God, using very graphic terms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O9W3UsdRyM&NR=1

11. Professor Michel Chossudovsky. July 20, 2007.  Criminalizing the Antiwar Movement.  "Executive Order entitled 'Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq' provides the President with the authority to confiscate the assets of whoever opposes the US led war."

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=6377