Introduction
For the past forty-five years the state of Israel has
been dispossessing millions of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories,
confiscating their lands, destroying homes, bulldozing orchards and setting-up
‘Jews-only’ colonial settlements serviced by highways, electrical systems
and water works for the exclusive use of the settlers and occupying soldiers.
The process of Israeli territorial expansion throughout the West Bank
and East Jerusalem has greatly accelerated in recent years, converting
Palestinian-held territory into non-viable isolated enclaves like South
Africa’s Bantustans surrounded by the Israeli soldiers who protect violent
settler-vigilantes as they assault and harass Palestinian farmers at work
in their fields, beat Arab children on their way to school , pelt Palestinian
housewives as they hang their laundry and then invade and defecate in
Palestinian mosques and churches.
The Rage and Rape of Gaza and its Apologists
Israel’s
strategic goal is to impose ‘Greater Israel’ on the region: to take over
all of historical Palestine, expell the entire non-Jewish population and
subsidize ‘Jews-only’ settlements (for settler-immigrants, often from
the US and former USSR). While bulldozers and tanks have dispossessed
Palestinians in the West Bank for decades, the launching of thousands
of missiles and bombs have become the ‘weapons of choice’ for uprooting
and eliminating the Palestinians in Gaza. In just eight days, Israel’s
latest blitzkrieg resulted in the killing of 168 Palestinians (42 children
and 100 civilians), the wounding of 1,235, the destruction of over 1,350
buildings and the further traumatizing of over 1.7 million children, women
and men fenced in the world’s largest concentration camp. According
to the Israeli Defense Minister, the Jewish State dropped “a thousand
times more bombs onto Gaza” than the Palestinians fired back into Israel.
The
current Israeli offensive began with the gruesome assassination of a prominent
Hamas leader, Ahmed Jabari, and immediately escalated into an assault
on the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. Secure in the knowledge
that the Palestinians had no capacity to retaliate with similar weaponry,
the Israeli High Command ordered the systematic destruction of civilian
life, workplaces and densely populated neighborhoods. Over 75% of the
casualties have been non-combatants; almost half are children, women and
elders.
The
Israeli propaganda machine and its ‘Fifth Column’ in the US fabricated
and repeated the Big Lie: that the Jewish state was ‘defending itself’…
Right… with only six (mostly military) deaths and 280 wounded (the majority
non-threatening) versus the nearly 200 Palestinians, mostly civilians,
slaughtered. The US Zionist power configuration (ZPC), embedded
in the policy centers of the US Executive, the Congress and both political
parties, parroted this line. All the major US TV networks and print
media reproduced verbatim Israeli Foreign Office press handouts about
Israel’s ‘defensive’ … genocide … while entire Palestinian families were
being buried under the rubble of their bombed apartments.
Death
and destruction, planned and executed with the unanimous support of all
the major Israeli political parties and leaders, enthralled the mass of
its Jewish citizens: Indeed, over 80% of Israeli Jews supported the terror
blitz against Gaza. As the Russian media outlet (RT) reported: “A
new wave of hatred towards Palestinians is sweeping through Israel from
public figures to the man (person) in the street”. The Israeli Interior
Minister declared that “Gaza should be bombed into the Middle Ages”. Israeli
demonstrators in Tel Aviv shouted; “they (the Palestinians) don’t deserve
to live, they must die”, “may your children die” and “now we must go back
there (to Gaza) and kick out all Arabs”. The prominent Israeli Rabbi
Yaakov Yosef, the son of a former chief rabbi, made a speech in the Cave
of the Patriarchs in occupied Hebron where he blessed the Israeli soldiers
and urged them “to slaughter their enemy”.
Even
more to the point, Israel Katz, Israel’s Transport Minister, demanded
“Gaza be bombed so hard the population will have to flee into Egypt (the
Sinai desert)”. Avi Dichter, the Minister of Home Front Defense,
incited the Israeli military to “re-format” Gaza that is to erase its
population with bombs.
Almost
half of Israeli Jews considered Netanyahu’s terror bombing of Gaza insufficient:
According to the independent Israeli Maagar Mohot poll, half of Israelis
opposed the cease fire and demanded the bloody assault against the Palestinian
population of Gaza continue. The same poll reported that almost
a third of Israeli Jews though their government should have sent ground
forces into Gaza, an invasion which would have led to tens of thousands
of Palestinian casualties and total destruction of their vital infrastructural
life-lines. Netanyahu and his allies in power now confront a new,
totalitarian mass opposition that openly embraces a genocidal ‘Final Solution’
to the Palestinian problem.
Genocide at the Service of Greater Israel
The
parallels between the pronouncements and actions of Nazi Germany and Zionist
Israel are overwhelming. The bloodlust in Israel goes far beyond
psychopathic raving of a few deranged rabbis and marginal politicians:
it extends from the top Cabinet members to the average citizen.
In
Israel, almost an entire people over 80% of Jews - support, with varying
degrees of intensity, the terror bombing and slaughter of the people
of Gaza. Setting aside the profound sociopathic disorders of the
raging and racist multitude in Israel, what is politically more significant
are the totalitarian rants of leading Israeli public figures, published
as editorials, in such newspapers as the respectable Jerusalem Post: “We
need to flatten all of Gaza. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no
gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing,” writes Gilad Sharon and the statements
of prominent Knesset members, like Michael Ben-Ari , “There are no innocents
in Gaza … mow them (all) down”. These outbursts reveal Israel’s
strategic goal: Genocide at the service of Greater Israel the
bloody purge of 5 million Palestinians, the creation of a 100 percent
‘pure’ Jewish State. Overseas (mostly US) Zionist-Jewish media moguls,
Ivy League university academics, billionaires, US Congress people and
government officials finance, underwrite, propagandize for and promote
with single-minded perseverance the defense of Israel’s most heinous war
crimes, its violations of international law and its ongoing crimes against
humanity.
During
the entire period of the recent Israeli blitzkrieg, Israel’s Fifth column,
the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish Organizations, the New
York Times and the rest of the major US press rose to the dirty task of
giving unconditional support for Israel’s war crimes. Vocal support
from the US White House and by extension the leaders of the European Union
echoed Netanyahu’s lies. In order to grasp the media white wash
of these ongoing crimes against humanity one could compare the US press
reports on Israel’s bombing of Gaza to those which would have appeared
in the leading fascist newspapers at the time of Hitler’s ‘defensive’
attacks on Poland and Belgium and the bombing blitz of civilians in London.
The
true purpose of Israel’s terror bombing raids and assassinations in Gaza
and the cutting up of the West Bank is to make these territories uninhabitable
for the Palestinians. The daily humiliation and destruction of the basic
conditions for normal life are designed to force young, educated, ambitious
Palestinians to abandon their land, homes and families for less grotesquely
barbaric sites, where they might achieve a normal civilized existence,
free from foul-mouthed Jewish settlers, unending military incursions,
Israeli soldiers pistol-whipping their fathers or breaking the legs and
arms of stone-throwing Arab schoolkids.
The Logic of Public Flogging
This
obscene Israeli-Jewish behavior is intentionally open and flagrant:
Flaunting Jewish military superiority over the defenseless Arab is vital
part of the psychological war reinforcing the idea of Arab inferiority
and of Palestinians as aliens in their own country. Israel’s underlying
slogan “Arab Raus!” (Arabs Get Out!) echoes the Nazi screed, “Juden Rau!s”
(Jews Get Out!). The message is clear: “If you are not a Jew then
you do not exist! Your very alien presence is an abomination in
the eyes of the Zionist God. So if you won’t leave politely we will hasten
your departure with a few thousand bombs, missiles and a rain of white
phosphorous.” That is the deeper meaning of Israel’s rape of Gaza.
The Impact of Israel’s Genocide on US Society
Leading
journalists in the politically most influential US newspapers, academics
from the most prestigious universities and ‘experts’ from the leading
research institutes have systematically defended each and every Israeli
war-crime, including the rape of Gaza, the demolition of Palestinian civil
society and the cruel blockade of 1.7 million Palestinians in the biggest
‘open air concentration’ camp in the world.
As
usual, the Uber-Zionist Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz and his
acolytes provide a legal gloss on the savage bombing of essential public
services and private communication and media centers. Not to be
outdone by the loudmouths in Harvard Square, Yale and Princeton professors,
with tribal loyalties to the Jewish state, describe the Israeli killing
machine as a righteous citizen army defending its eternally victimized
people. “Experts” at the Brookings Institute, Hudson Institute and
dozens of other ‘research’ (read propaganda) centers provide ‘scientific’
explanations regarding Israel’s unique right to dispossess millions of
Palestinians. The experts’ justifications of Israeli war crimes permeate
the mass media, penetrate the homes of millions of Americans and fill
the heads of elected officials. Meanwhile they ‘convince’ and/or
browbeat thousands of non-tribal school teachers and educators into complicity
or silence, thus perverting and hollowing out what residual humane and
democratic values remain embedded in the citizenry. It is precisely
the much-vaunted ‘high achievements’ of so many Israel-Firsters that has
led to their rise to the most influential positions in US society and
state and makes their support of terror bombings, ethnic cleansing and
genocide so deeply destructive to the US political culture. In spite
of this, some of the same expert-academic apologists for Israel’s terror
against the Arab civilians are the most vociferous defenders of human
rights everywhere else in the world - including the US (piously condemning
US war crimes whenever and wherever they are not explicitly aligned with
the interest of the Jewish State). These ‘experts’ have perverted
the concept of universal human rights in the minds of the US public.
As
the US mass audience and political class watches the smoke, debris and
wreckage of Gaza and even catch glimpses of a child’s dismembered small
body they are told by the tribal loyalists that this destruction is
morally justified, that the target is really “Hamas” even over the piercing
cries of Palestinian mothers for their slaughtered children. US
citizens are told that Israel’s aggressive aerial bombing and mass shelling
from warships off-shore is really a “defensive” maneuver against a “terrorist”
regime one which just happens to lack a single airplane, warship, tank
or missile capable of hitting a single major Israeli military or civilian
installation.
The Zionist Academic Journalist Propaganda Complex
The
Israeli academic-journalist propaganda complex in the US has pushed the
entire US political narrative even further to the fascist right.
It has perverted our political vocabulary, equating mass slaughter with
national defense; equating the ‘anxiety’ of Israeli Jewish civilians with
the homeless, jobless and traumatized widows and children emerging from
their devastated densely-populated urban neighborhoods.
The
tribal scholars and mass media pundits excel in transforming executioners
into victims and victims into executioners. The Liberal-Zionists,
peace-time critics of Israel, remove their peace buttons and pick up scripts
defending ‘just wars’, as soon as Israel starts bombing another Arab population
or adversary. For the liberal (human-rights-spouting) Zionists,
bombing civilians is always illegal - except when it is Israel launching
the missiles. Propaganda zealots for Israel saturate the media attacking
any human rights activist critical of Israel with charges of “anti-Semitism”.
They smear, threaten and blackmail each and every dissenting voice daring
to oppose their narrative.
The entire mass media and the most prestigious universities censor any
mention of Israeli crimes against humanity. As bombs rained on Gaza
not one single Congressional voice denounced the odious American President
Obama when he defended Israel’s eight-day “Guernica” against a defenseless
population. Unlike the citizens in Nazi Germany, we, in the US and
Western Europe, cannot claim that we did not know about Israeli war crimes
as they were happening. On the other hand, how can the mass of semi-literate
TV viewers in the US really ‘know’ what is going on when Israel-Firsters
have so thoroughly ‘framed the context’ claiming it’s all defensive,
that only Hamas “terrorists” are targeted …despite the images of children
being frantically pulled from the wreckage of their homes. However,
the educated classes in the US do know about Israel’s tradition and practice
of mass civilian bombings; they do remember Lebanon 2006 as well as Gaza
2008-2009 (and countless Israeli massacres in the late 20th century).
At the same time, they also “remember” the vicious reprisals and vitriolic
attacks the Zionist ideological attack-dogs launched against the critics.
Having ‘learned their lessons’ from the Zionist ‘thought-cops’ they conveniently
remember … to forget and walk away… from the whole ‘Middle East mess’.
Worse still, they sanctimoniously blame the Palestinians for their efforts
to retaliate in the face of Israel’s blatant murders of their most prestigious
leaders as well as their stubborn refusal to surrender.
There are a few Left-Zionists who actually praise the ‘resilience’ of
the Palestinians and their refusal to surrender to the dictates of Israel
and its occupying army. They note how the Gazans ‘celebrate’ their ‘victory’
amidst the rubble after having secured a very tenuous cease fire.
Any reasonable observer could reply to this sentimental nonsense:
Is survival in an open air concentration camp for another day, the daily
prospect of Israeli drone flights overhead and a brutal land and sea blockade
any “victory”? There is no cause for celebration: Transforming
Israeli war crimes into Palestinian virtues is a cheap liberal Zionist
sideshow. An eight-day Israeli assault, which had successfully destroyed
every major and minor public office responsible for providing the people
of Gaza with essential services, and the savaging of the water and
sewage system, power and electrical grids and media offices (not to mention
perishable food and medicine) is nothing to celebrate. In fact the
underlying strategic goal of the Jewish state to make the remains of
historical Palestine uninhabitable (a modern ‘howling wilderness’) for
its people - has been advanced by leaps and bounds. Surviving another
day in order to bury loved ones and scrounging among the burnt ruins of
a home for a birth certificate or photograph is hardly the noble “Hamas
victory” proclaimed by Norman Finkelstein and Uri Avneri.
Why NATO Washington Support Israel’s Genocidal War
Unlike
in the past, where some international organizations and European states
raised tepid objections to Israel’s military assaults against Palestine
or Lebanon, this time around nothing took place. The White House
immediately embraced Israel’s terror bombing as did the governments of
Western Europe. Meanwhile, Turkey, the Gulf States, the Arab League
and the pan-Islamic organizations did nothing concrete, offering no arms,
no boycotts, no oil embargos - only shallow symbolic gestures.
Netanyahu timed his assault to take advantage of the western imperial
offensive against independent countries and leaders who had historically
supported the Palestinian liberation struggle for decades. Since
NATO states had invaded and bombed the sovereign nation of Libya back
into the Stone Age, Netanyahu’s Cabinet Ministers must have reasoned,
“Why can’t we send the Gazans back to the Middle Ages with our bombs”?
When NATO and the Gulf States now arm, finance and support a prolonged
terrorist-led assault against the secular regime, people and infrastructure
of Syria, Netanyahu reasons, “Why don’t we do the same to the Palestinians”?
With
the EU, Washington and the Gulf States engaged in covert and overt wars
against all of Palestine’s staunchest allies (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya
Syria, Iran and the Sudan) and against the people’s movements in Yemen,
Bahrain and Pakistan, Netanyahu’s plan to ethnically purge Palestine has
advanced with total impunity indeed with overt Western approval and
without concern for any international ‘humanitarian’ sanctions or even
protest.
Netanyahu’s murderous war on Gaza, with full US complicity, has unmasked
the collaborationist-nature of Egypt’s Islamist President Morsi.
Morsi, together with US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, secured a cease
fire only after Netanyahu had accomplished his immediate goal of destroying
the public institutions of civil society and undermining the vital public
functions of the Hamas government.
Against
the protests of the blood-thirsty Israeli public, who wanted their bombers
and army to ‘finish the job’, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu negotiated
and signed an agreement overseen by Morsi on a cease fire where Israel
will pay no indemnity to the devastated civilians of Gaza while confirming
the Mubarak-era Israeli Egyptian treaty and starvation blockade of Gaza.
Right after the ‘cease-fire’, President Morsi assumed dictatorial powers
over the Egyptian state. With the shameful terms of the cease fire
and Morsi’s assumption of dictatorial powers the ‘Arab Spring’ has come
to a tragic end.
Conclusion
The
people of the Middle East, especially the Palestinians, are in their worst
position ever. Palestinians have lost the political, financial and
military support of the independent, secular regimes of Libya, Syria and
Iraq. And Iran, the principle source of arms for the Palestinians,
faces a US Naval armada off its coast. Israel is accelerating its
naked land grabs in the West Bank. The PLO continues to be Israel’s
frontline ‘cop on the block’ jailing resistance fighters and dissidents
by the hundreds. Israel’s Fifth Column in the US ensures unconditional
support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing of its non-Jewish population. Above
all, as the terror bombing of Gaza reveals, Israel, as a state and as
a people, is free to bomb and destroy Gaza in order to force a mass exodus
of the Palestinians so that they may establish a ‘pure’ and unadulterated
Jewish state on historical Palestine.
Epilogue
Less
than 24 hours after the so-called “cease fire” Israeli soldiers murdered
an unarmed Palestinian protestor and wounded dozens with live ammunition
on the Gazan side of the border. Israel storm troopers raided West
Bank homes and arrested 55 Palestinians accused of supporting Hamas.
Scores more Palestinians in the Beit Lahia area of the West Bank were
summarily arrested and jailed as suspected Hamas members. Jewish
vigilante settlers near occupied Hebron uprooted 400 olive trees belonging
to Palestinian farmers from the village of Hawara. As the missile
murderers take their break, the bull dozers rev up their engines:
Israel’s leaders pursue their strategic objective of a “pure” Jewish state
with their inexorable and destructive juggernaut. The ‘cease fire’
merely changed the methods and the terrain of dispossession for the time
being.
Israel’s assault on Gaza has totally demolished its vibrant recovery and
growth since the previous war of destruction. In 2011 the economy
of Gaza grew by 20%; after the recent Israeli attack who would dare consider
Gaza as a place to live and invest? |