‘The Times’ lets everyone off the hook on Goldstone

by James North and Philip Weiss on October 8, 2009 ·

The New York Times is covering the Goldstone Report. Where is it covering it? Well: the furor over the report among Palestinians. We’re pretty sure this is a good story. Neil MacFarquhar is on it. But it’s really not The Story, it’s just an angle of a hugely-important international story, and the only angle the Times is covering.

Here’s what the Times refuses to cover:

–the furor over the Goldstone report on the part of the Israel lobby in the U.S., and the pressure it’s put on the Obama administration, number one. Even J Street has been quiet about the Goldstone report, while it puts out a statement applauding an Israeli Nobelist.

–and what about the political jockeying over the report, the decision by the Obama administration to bury it and make the Palestinian Authority do the dirty work? Important story. Nothing. Mike Hanna of the Century Foundation said two weeks ago that the report’s troubling findings were going to be very “tricky” diplomatically for the Obama administration. He was right. He knows what’s gone down. Why isn’t the Times calling him for comment?

–the incredible discomfort that Goldstone, a Jewish judge who denounced apartheid, has created among liberal American Jews who know that Gaza was a horror but are afraid to face these facts. Nine dead Israelis, 1400 dead Palestinians: of whom the majority were civiilans. The Israelis destroyed the only remaining flour mill, destroyed chicken farms with bulldozers, and dropped white phosphorus on children. American Jews were never silent about napalm in Vietnam. Here they are tonguetied and helpless, and the Times is helping them to avoid this important question by suppressing the news.

–Nothing in the Times about the many Jews here who have supported Goldstone, including Jews Say No!

–No editorial yet in the Times.

This is about discourse suppression. It is related to the fact that the New Yorker, the leading cranial IV for the Establishment, has said nothing at all about Gaza in 10 months. No: Gaza and the persecution of the Palestinians there is an untidy embarrassment to  the liberal Establishment.

The New Republic has actually been more responsible than the Times and the New Yorker here. By publishing raving maniacs like Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi, it has at least informed its readers where it hurts, that this is ideologically disputed territory. The Times has told its readers, Only Palestinians care about this. More mush from the wimp.

One other point. Mainstream liberals are quick to call for people to speak out on Third World countries and once upon a time in Eastern Europe when human rights are suppressed. It’s easy to condemn the Soviet Writers Union or ministries in Africa for not speaking out against genocide. What’s hard is to report and speak out on issues that cause your own readers to squirm. The true measure of intellectual courage is, you go ahead and do it anyway. The Washington Post, the Times, the New Yorker and others have failed this test.

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There is an old Jewish joke that tells the story of a dying Jewish merchant who calls his son to his sickbed just before he perishes. He tells him, “Listen to me Moisha’le, life is not just about money… you can also do gold and diamonds.”

Monitoring Israeli and Jewish news reveals a devastating fact, it is not ‘just’ about money. It may also be about human organs. A few weeks ago we learned about a ring of American Rabbis who had been arrested in New Jersey upon suspicion of human organs trafficking (amongst many other crimes).  Rabbi Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, we read, enticed “vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $10,000 which he would turn around and sell for $160,000.” Not too bad, I thought to myself then. We are living in hard times, financial melt down, credit crunch, Wall Street is licking its wounds, the car industry is evaporating.  Seemingly, kidney trafficking is still booming.

In fact, the ring of the Rabbi in New Jersey didn’t take me by complete surprise. For years we have been hearing about Palestinians claiming that Israel is “deep into organ trafficking.” We also learned that the family of Alastair Sinclair, a Scottish tourist who hanged himself in an Israeli jail, “was forced to bring suit for his return with missing body parts.”

In 2002 the Tehran Times reported: “The Zionist state has tacitly admitted that doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir had extracted the vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli Army nearly ten days ago. Zionist Minister of Health Nessim Dahhan said in response to a question by Arab member of the Zionist Parliament ‘Knesset’, Ahmed Teibi, on Tuesday that he couldn’t deny that organs of Palestinian youths and children killed by the Israeli forces were taken out for transplants or scientific research.”

But now the news about Israeli trafficking of human organ is spreading to Western mainstream media. Ynet, the biggest Israeli online newspaper, reported today that  “Leading Swedish daily Aftonbladet claimed in one of its articles that IDF soldiers killed Palestinians in order to trade in their organs.”

A few weeks ago we had a debate here on PTT whether Zionism is a colonial apparatus or not. One of the Materialist arguments against the perception of Zionism as a colonial practice was that Palestine has never been too attractive economically; it lacks oil, gold or minerals. However, this may change now. People who specialise in organ theft may find Palestine to be heaven on earth. In the light of the latest vastly spreading accusations, the Jewish national project maybe is colonial after all.

Though the Israeli government denies the accusation, and I myself far from being qualified to know what the truth of the matter is, one cannot deny that we are facing here a shift of consciousness within the Western discourse. At the end of the day, after watching the Israeli army dumping great quantities of white phosphorous on a civilian population in broad daylight, after seeing Israelis gathering gleefully en masse on the hills around Gaza just to watch their military spreading death and physical suffering in a genocidal manner, after reading that 94% of the Israelis supported the IDF military campaign against the elderly, women and children, most of whom were refugees with nowhere to escape and seek further refuge, organ theft seems to be a ‘light crime’.

Whether or not the Swedish paper’s accusations are genuine is yet to be revealed. However, one fact has already been established: after so many years of Western inclination to dance to the relentless crying violin of the Jewish melancholic victim serenade, the Western media is now changing its appetite, it is willing to confront Jewish institutional crime.

Rather than talking about the rise of anti-Semitism, we better discuss the growth of Jewish institutional crime.

NOTE: WE WILL HAVE THE TRANSLATION FROM SWEDISH INTO ENGLISH AVAILABLE LATER IN THE DAY

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab

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Khalid Amayreh

The World Court ruled Israel’s annexation wall in the West Bank illegal in 2004, but with no pressure coming from the international community it has not been dismantled, writes Khaled Amayreh in the occupied Palestinian territories This week marked the passage of five years since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague issued its landmark ruling deeming the gigantic apartheid wall Israel has been building in the West Bank illegal under international law. Though not complete, the bulk of the barrier has already been constructed. In addition to the massive eight-metre high concrete wall now meandering like a snake through the West Bank, the barrier also consists of a vast network of multi-layered fences with vehicle-stopping trenches. The barrier is mostly located inside the West Bank, partly along the former 1949 Armistice line, and is largely built on confiscated Palestinian land. As of April 2006, the length of the barrier as approved by the Israeli government was 703 kilometres (436 miles). On 9 July 2004, the ICJ ruled that the barrier violated international law. While acknowledging Israel’s right to protect its citizens, the World Court said the Jewish state ought to do so within the law and should compensate Palestinians for property lost or damaged by the building of the wall. The ICJ urged the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly to consider further action to end the illegal Israeli activity. Israel completely ignored the ICJ ruling, claiming the international court had no jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories. Some Israeli officials tacitly accused ICJ judges of harbouring “anti-Semitism”. Since then, the Israeli military occupation authorities continued to seize large swathes of mostly private Palestinian land for building the wall and creating “safe zones” around it, especially on the Palestinian side of the barrier. It is widely believed that tens of thousands of acres of fertile Palestinian land have been formally or effectively confiscated as the barrier has been built. Some experts estimate that up to 10- 15 per cent of the West Bank area has been effectively annexed to Israel under the pretext of building the wall. And when Palestinian farmers and peasants protest, even peacefully and non-violently, as in Nilin and Bilin in the central West Bank, the Israeli army routinely resorts to harsh tactics, including opening fire on protesters. Several Palestinians have been killed while demonstrating against the seizure of their lands and olive groves by the Israeli army. A number of foreign peace activists protesting have also been injured by Israeli fire. Facing mounting international criticism over the construction of the barrier, Israeli officials often resorted to prevarication and outright lies, claiming that the barrier was merely a security measure designed to prevent potential Palestinian guerrillas from infiltrating into Israel and that it in no way constituted a political border. However, whenever Palestinian landowners petitioned Israeli courts challenging the legality of the land seizure, the Israeli government representative shamelessly argued that the wall was indeed a de facto border. This deceptive tactic continues to be widely adopted in Israeli courts dealing with the wall and its ramifications, especially relating to Palestinians demanding access to their land on the “Israeli” side of the barrier. More to the point, it has been clear during recent “peace” talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that Israeli leaders treat the barrier as constituting the ultimate western borders of a future Palestinian state. For example, Israel refuses to discuss the removal of any Jewish settlements located west of the annexation wall on the grounds that these colonies would eventually be annexed to the Jewish state. Today, more than 60,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements located east of the apartheid wall and who demand the construction of periphery barriers around their colonies. However, under pressure from the US, Israel has effectively halted work on the so-called “finger enclaves” which extend deep into the Palestinian hinterland in the northern West Bank, especially in the Salfit region where some of the biggest settlements are located. Last week, the UN urged Israel to “dismantle” the barrier and “make reparations for all damage suffered by all persons affected by the wall’s construction”. The call was made by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay and came on the fifth anniversary of the ICJ ruling. Both UN agencies and non-governmental organisations dealing with the Palestinian issue have used the anniversary to bring attention to the massive losses Palestinians have suffered as a result of the barrier. Earlier this month, another UN official reiterated the international organisation’s “non-objection to the wall per se when it sticks to the Green Line,” the erstwhile 1967 armistice line between Israel and the West Bank. The official spoke of the barrier’s “devastating humanitarian impact” on the Palestinian community, saying that up to 85 per cent of the structure was built inside the West Bank. As many as 40,000 Palestinians have found themselves living in “closed areas” that require Israeli permission to travel out of or to have friends or family enter. Another 200,000 Palestinians are surrounded on either three or four sides by the barrier; resulting in what Palestinian spokesman Mustafa Al-Barghouti called “nightmarish claustrophobia”. According to one UN official, the wall constitutes an “interruption of Palestinian life in all aspects”, impacting both economic and social wellbeing. For many Palestinians affected by the barrier it has meant the imposition of a complex permit system to allow them to travel, restricting access to education, medical care and employment opportunities. The wall, they complain, cuts off neighbour from neighbour, children from their schools and kindergartens, patients from hospitals and farmers from their farms and fields. For its part, Israel has been generally nonchalant with regards to the immense suffering and harm inflicted on the Palestinians as a result of the barrier. The Israeli propaganda machine often caricatures the gigantic structure as a mere “fence” between neighbours, ignoring the huge theft of Palestinian land carried out under the rubric of building the barrier. The Palestinians argue forthrightly that the “apartheid wall” is first and foremost an annexation barrier that is meant to steal Palestinian land under the pretext of security considerations. This week, the PA marked the fifth anniversary of the ICJ ruling by calling on the international community, particularly the US and EU, to pressure Israel to dismantle the barrier. “This ugly barrier is devouring our land, disrupting the daily life of our people and making the attainment of the goal of creating a viable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital impossible,” read a PA statement. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A Poem I wrote five years ago….. MY FAMILY IS DIVIDED    Jerusalem, 1 May, 2004 ©  Steve Amsel A wall has been built, I cannot see my neighbor I know not when he needs my help I know not when he is hungry. My brother’s child cannot come for an afternoon snack I cannot bring it to him The wall is in the way Dividing families and loved ones. “They” told us the wall is for protection. From what? Must our children go hungry? Must we be jobless? “They” say we are the enemy. Is going to work a crime? Is going to school a crime? Try to tell a child that hunger is a good thing. If the wall stays up There will be an enemy Uneducation and hunger leads to resentment Resentment will lead to revolt. Learn from your history my friends Learn that walls are not the solution Learn that unity is strength And learn that justice triumphs over evil always.

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Written by Free Gaza Movement

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
30 JUNE 2009

“ALL WE WANT IS TO REACH GAZA. WE DO NOT SEEK A CONFRONTATION.”
Activists aboard Gaza justice boat demand they be allowed to visit their friends & family in besieged Gaza, and deliver their cargo of medical supplies, children’s toys, and reconstruction kits. They invite the world to join them.

(At Sea, 60km off the coast of the Gaza Strip) – Human Rights activists aboard the Free Gaza ship, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, today demanded that the Israeli Navy immediately stop threatening them.

“This aid is desperately needed by the people of Gaza,” said Mairead Maguire, winner of the Noble Peace Prize and Pacem in Terris Award for her work in Northern Ireland. “President Obama has called upon the Palestinians to abandon violence but Israel is denying them the right to non-violently resist the siege of Gaza.”

The unarmed justice ship departed Larnaca Port in Cyprus at 7:30am Monday with its crew of 21 human rights activists, humanitarian workers and journalists from 11 different countries, including Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The boat, a converted ferry, hopes to arrive in Gaza Tuesday afternoon, following a grueling 30 hour sea voyage.

At 1:30am, Israeli warships surrounded the small civilian boat and threatened to open fire if they did not turn around. When the activists refused to be intimidated, Israeli Occupation Forces began jamming their instrumentation, blocking their GPS, radar, and navigation systems. This jamming was in direct violation of international maritime law, threatening the welfare and safety of the civilian ship.

Responding to this intimidation, Congresswoman McKinney declared, “I am extremely angry. We demand that the Israeli government call off their attack dogs. We are unarmed civilians aboard an unarmed boat delivering medical and reconstruction aid to other human beings in Gaza. Why in God’s name would Israel want to attack us?”

Huwaida Arraf, Chairperson of the Free Gaza movement and delegation co-coordinator for this voyage, said, “All we want is to reach Gaza. We want to visit our friends and deliver our cargo of medical supplies, children’s toys, and reconstruction materials. Our ship was searched and received security clearance from the Port Authorities in Cyprus before we departed.”

Arraf continued, “We do not seek a confrontation. We have traveled from Cypriot waters to international waters and will enter Gazan waters. We’ve never gone anywhere near Israel. Israel’s closure of Gaza is an act of collective punishment and a blatant violation of international law. We call upon our governments to take action to uphold their obligations under the Fourth Geneva Conventions. If they won’t or until they do, we will act. We will come to Gaza again and again until this brutal siege is broken. We invite the good people of the world to join us.”

Free Gaza boats are the first international ships in 41 years to sail to the Gaza Strip. Since August 2008, the Free Gaza Movement has organized 8 sea missions, successfully arriving to Gaza on 5 separate occasions. One two earlier occasions, Israeli Occupation Forces used violence to stop the ships, physically ramming and almost sinking the DIGNITY boat in December 2008, and threatening to fire on and kill unarmed passengers in January 2008. The fate of this, the eighth mission to Gaza, is still uncertain.
###

For more information, please contact:
Greta Berlin (English/French) or Caoimhe Butterly (English/Arabic/Spanish) at 00357 99 081 767 / friends@freegaza.org This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
www.FreeGaza.org

WHAT YOU CAN DO!

CALL or FAX Major Liebovitz from the Israeli Navy at:
Tel + 972 5 781 86248 or +972 3737 7777 or +972 3737 6242
Fax +972 3737 6123 or +972 3737 7175

CALL Mark Regev in the Prime Minister’s office at:
Tel +972 2670 5354 or +972 5 0620 3264
mark.regev@it.pmo.gov.il This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

CALL Shlomo Dror in the Ministry of Defence at:
Tel +972 3697 5339 or +972 50629 8148
mediasar@mod.gov.il This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
—

Free Gaza Movement
357 99 081 767
www.freegaza.org
www.flickr.com/photos/29205195@N02/

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Image “Copyleft’ by Carlos Latuff

Address by Ronnie Kasrils: CAPE TOWN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE: RE-ENVISIONING ISRAEL/PALESTINE 12 JUNE 2009

May I start by quoting a South African who emphatically stated as far back as 1961 that “The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel like South Africa, is an apartheid state” (Rand Daily Mail, 23 Novemeber 1961). Those were not the words of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu or Ruth First, but were uttered by none other than the architect of apartheid itself, racist Prime Minister, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

He was irked by the criticism of apartheid policy and Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” speech and the growing international outcry following the Sharpeville massacre, in contrast to the West’s unconditional support for Zionist Israel.

To be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel were colonial, settler states created on the basis of the harsh dispossession of the land and birthright of the indigenous people. This is unblushingly documented in Israel’s case from the time of Herzl through Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan to Sharon et al. Both states preached and implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolised rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original indigenous population; the virtual monopoly membership of military and security forces, and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines – even both countries marriage laws are designed to safeguard racial “purity”. The fact that the Palestinian minority within Israel is allowed to vote hardly redresses the injustice in all other matters of basic human rights. In any case those Palestinians allowed to stand for election to the Knesset do so on condition that they dare not question Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

The so-called “non-whites” in apartheid South Africa, indigenous Africans, others of mixed race or of Asiatic origin – like second or third class non-Jews in Israel itself let alone the military occupied areas – were consigned to a non-citizenship status of Kafkaesque existence, subject to all manner of discrimination and prejudice, such as the laws prohibiting their free movement, access to work and trade, dictating where they could reside and so forth.

Verwoerd would have been well aware of Israel’s dispossession of indigenous Palestinian in 1948 – the year his apartheid party similarly came to power – of the unfolding destruction of their villages, the premeditated massacres and the systematic ethnic cleansing.

Within a few short years of coming to power in 1948 South Africa’s apartheid regime was ruthlessly cleansing cities and towns of so-called “black spots” – where the “non-whites” lived, socialised, studied and traded – bulldozing homes, loading families onto military trucks, and forcibly relocating them to distant settlements. Unlike the “native reserves” – soon to be reconstituted as Bantustans – these were not too far away from industrial areas because the economy thrived on a quota of cheap black labour.

Whilst Verwoerd did not live to see the division of Palestinian territory after the l967 Six Day War, and the subsequent creation of miniscule Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza, he would have greatly admired and approved of the machinations that enclosed the Palestinians in their own ghettoised prisons. This after all was the Verwoerdian grand plan, and the reason why Jimmy Carter could so readily identify the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) as being akin to apartheid. In fact the Bantustans consisted of 13% of apartheid South Africa, uncannily comparable to the derisory, ever shrinking pieces of ground Israel consigns to the Palestinians – where it is estimated that well over one-third of the OPT comprises the illegal settlement blocks and security grid system with their bizarre Jewish-only roads. The effect of this is that the 22% of pre-1967 West Bank territory is effectively a mere 12% of historic pre-1948 Palestine.

When former deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad and I visited Yasser Arafat in his demolished headquarters in Ramallah as part of a South African delegation in 2004, he pointed around him and said “See this is nothing but a Bantustan!” No, we responded, pointing out that no Bantustan, in fact not even our townships, had been bombed by warplanes, pulverised by tanks. To a wide-eyed Arafat we pointed out that Pretoria pumped in funds, constructed impressive administration buildings, even allowed for Bantustan airlines to service the Mickey Mouse capitals in order to impress the world that they were serious about so-called “separate development.” The Bantustans were not even fenced-in.

What Verwoerd admired too was the impunity with which Israel exercised state violence and terror to get its way, without hindrance from its Western allies, increasingly key amongst them the USA. What Verwoerd and his ilk came to admire in Israel, and seek to emulate in the southern African region, was the way the Western powers permitted an imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military with impunity in expanding its territory and holding back the rising tide of Arab nationalism in its neighbourhood.

After the Six Day War, Verwoerd’s successor John Vorster, infamously stated: “The Israelis have beaten the Arabs before lunchtime. We will eat the African states for breakfast.” He added the latter warning in the face of the independent African states support for the armed liberation struggles growing in our region.

But it was not only the racial doctrine of Israel that excited apartheid’s leaders, it was the use of the biblical narrative as the ideological rationale to justify its vision, aims and methods.

The early Dutch pioneers, the Afrikaners, had used Bible and gun as colonisers elsewhere, to carve out their exclusive fortress bastion in South Africa’s hinterland. Like the biblical Israelites they claimed to be “God’s chosen people” with a mission to tame and civilise the wilderness; disregarding the productivity and industriousness of people who had tilled the soil and traded for centuries – claiming it was only they who would make the land flow with milk and honey. They invoked a covenant with God to deliver their enemies into their hands and to bless their deeds. Until the advent of South Africa’s democracy, the racial history books generally taught that the white man arrived in South Africa more or less as the so-called “Bantu tribes” from the north were wandering across the Limpopo River – and that they the were pioneer settlers in a land devoid of people.

Such a colonial racist mentality which rationalised the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, in Africa from Namibia to the Congo and elsewhere, most clearly has its echoes in Palestine. What is so shameless about this latter-day colonial sham is that Zionist Israel has been permitted by the West to aspire to such a goal even into the 21st Century.

It is by no means difficult to recognise from afar, as Verwoerd had been able to do, that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. Verwoerd’s successor, Balthazar John Vorster visited Israel after the 1973 October War, when Egypt in a rare victory regained the Suez Canal and later in a peace agreement the Sinai from Israel. After that Israel and South Africa were virtually twinned as military allies for Pretoria helped supply Israel militarily in the immediacy of its 1973 setback and Israel came to support apartheid South Africa at the height of sanctions with weaponry and technology – from naval ships and the conversion of supersonic fighter planes to assistance in building six nuclear bombs and the creation of a thriving arms industry.

For the liberation movements of southern Africa, Israel and apartheid South Africa represented a racist, colonial axis. It was noted that people like Vorster had been nazi sympathisers, interned during World War II – yet feted as heroes in Israel and incidentally never again referred to by South African Zionists as an anti-semite! . This did not surprise those that came to understand the true racist nature and character of Zionist Israel.

It is instructive to add that in its conduct and methods of repression, Israel came to resemble more and more apartheid South Africa at its zenith – even surpassing its brutality, house demolitions, removal of communities, targeted assassinations, massacres, imprisonment and torture of its opponents and the aggression against neighbouring states.

Certainly we South Africans can identify the pathological cause, fuelling the hate, of Israel’s political-military elite and public in general, giving rise to more and more extreme racist postures from its elected representatives – as evidenced by the outcome of its most recent national elections. Neither is it difficult for anyone acquainted with colonial history to understand the way in which deliberately cultivated race hate inculcates a justification for the most atrocious and inhumane actions against even defenceless civilians – women, children, the elderly amongst them as recently witnessed in Gaza. It is from such unbridled racism that genocidal wars and holocausts are fueled.

It can be claimed, without exaggeration, that any South African, whether involved in the freedom struggle, or motivated by basic human decency, who visits the Occupied Palestinian Territories are shocked to the core at the situation they encounter and agree with Archbishop Tutu’s many observations, including his most recent, that such things happen in Israel, “including collective punishment”, that never happened in apartheid South Africa. (London Guardian, 28 May, 2009).

I want to recall here the words of an Israeli Cabinet Minister, Aharon Cizling in 1948, after the savagery of the Deir Yassin massacre of 240 villagers became known. He said: “Now we too have behaved like Nazis and my whole being is shaken.” (Tom Segev – “The First Israelis”)

The veteran British MP, Gerald Kaufman, long time friend of Israel, was reported as remarking that a spokeswoman of the Israeli Defence Force, talked like a Nazi, when she coldly dismissed the deaths of defenceless civilians in Gaza – many women and children amongst them. We dare not allow what is chillingly obvious to be excluded like some elephant in the room from our discourse: the inexorable rise of fascists like Avigdor Lieberman to powerful positions in Israel; the threat of the expulsion of the 1948 Palestinians; the implementation of Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall.” The Knesset has voted by a large majority a law threatening imprisonment for anyone denying that Israel is a Jewish and democratic state; a law prohibiting anyone from advocating a bi-national state is under discussion; so too a bill that seeks to imprison for three years anyone mourning the “nakba.” None other than Tzipi Livni argues in tandem. These have been described as “a factory of racist laws with a distinct fascist odour”, by Uri Avnery (Israeli writer and peace activist).

It needs to be frankly raised that if the crimes of the Holocaust are at the top end of the scale of human barbarity in modern times, where do we place the human cost of what has so recently occurred in Gaza, the numerous bloodstained milestone since 1948 or the crimes in Lebanon in 1983 and 2006?

How do we evaluate the inhumanity of dropping bombs and blazing white phosphorous on civilian populations, burning people alive, roasting and gassing them in a Gaza ghetto under relentless siege with no place to run or hide. For 22 days relentless bombardment whole families vaporised before the horrified eyes of a surviving parent or child.

Guernica, Lidice, the Warsaw Ghetto, Deir Yassin, Mai Lei, Sabra and Shatilla, Sharpeville are high on that scale – and the perpetrators of the slaughter in Gaza are the off-spring of holocaust victims yet again, in Cizling’s words, behaving like Nazis. This must not be allowed to go unpunished and the international community must demand they be tried for crimes of conflict and crimes against humanity. For the lesson is that if the perpetrators are not stopped in their tracks such crimes will get greater and spread not only to engulf the entire Middle East and Iran, but beyond. And of course with Israel a key ally in the USA’s national interests, there will be no end to this bloody saga – with the Palestinians targeted to go the way of the extinct peoples of the former colonial era.

But such a fate must not be allowed to happen. Dare we believe that an America led by Barak Obama will make a difference? Some raise the hope that after 15 years the stalled Road Map might spring back to life and with it the chimera of a Two-State solution. One notes that President Obama only calls for a freeze in settlement construction – and precious little else. Can 12% or a few percent more in horse- trading provide for a viable Palestinian state? One doubts it. We await with interest the results of this conference’s deliberations. May I remind you of Edward Lear’s “Alice in Wonderland”, where a lost Alice asks a caterpillar seated on a toadstool the way. He asks her where does she want to go but the bewildered Alice does not know. “Well”, answers the caterpillar, “”If you do not know where you are going any road will do.”

Are we naïve to believe that academics can help us find our bearings and point out the correct direction. I want to believe that those worth their salt can help. May your deliberations here be productive. Bear in mind the work of Justice Richard Goldstone’s UN investigative team that has been met by Israel’s point-blank refusal to co-operate into the Gaza bloodbath. Dozens of survivors have been interviewed in Gaza, one of whom watched Israeli soldiers shoot his elderly mother and sister dead as they fled their home waving white flags. “The committee was just like all the others who have come,” said Majed Hajjaj. “there are lots of reports written, but there’s nothing more than ink on paper.” Those could be lines straight from Edward Lear.

I began this address by quoting Dr. Verwoerd. I conclude with this quote from Nelson Mandela who famously stated in 1997: “The UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” (Pretoria, December 4, 1997). Just as a united, national movement of a determined people, reinforced by international solidarity

actions embracing the peaceful weapons of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) – including many academic initiatives – won freedom for all South Africans, so too can this be the case in the Holy Land.

Source

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“Where is the ummah; where is this Arab world they tell us about in school.”

Those words will forever remain etched on my brain. They were spoken by a 10 year old girl in a bombed out ruin in Gaza in March. She had lost her almost her entire family in the 22-day Israeli bombardment earlier this year. The second time she spoke, it was to the back of my head. I had to turn away; what answer could you give her?

While Hugo Chavez expelled the Israeli ambassador to Venezuela, the leaders of the Arab League, with a handful of exceptions, spent those murderous weeks in December and January scarcely summoning even the synthetic indignation that has so often attended previous bloody episodes in the Palestinian tragedy.

But that was not so of public opinion, not only in the Muslim world, but mobilized on the streets of Western capitals. In Britain, over 100,000 people took to the streets and night after night we blockaded the Israeli embassy. Above all, the Gaza onslaught produced in the US an unprecedented outpouring. There have, for sure, been protests before, but this has turned out to be more than an ephemeral release of impotent rage. Something is changing.

That has become more and more apparent to me over the last two months as I’ve spoken on Palestine at packed meetings and fundraisers across the US.  The opinion polls in January showed a plurality of Americans against the Israeli onslaught. It may not have been a surprise to those of us who witnessed Ariel Sharon’s leveling of Beirut in the late summer of 1982, but the sight of white phosphorous – which forms a gaseous cloud – being used against civilians in Gaza stunned the senses of millions or people who had up to that point been led to believe that it was somehow the Palestinians who were occupying Israeli land rather than the other way round.

Seasoned activists in the Palestinian cause confirm that there is now a window of opportunity to take this case beyond the ghetto and into the mainstream of political life – in the US and in Britain, which between them bear the heaviest responsibility for the suffering in Palestine: the US as the cashier for Israeli colonization; Britain, as the author of the tragedy in 1917, when a leader of one people, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour (an anti-Semite), gave to the purported leaders of another people, the Zionist movement, the land belonging to a third people, the Palestinians. And all without asking any of the people, which even by the standards of British imperialism is quite a triumph.

How then to bring to the cause of Palestine the kind of political movement that helped shatter apartheid, between the hammer of the ANC resistance and the anvil of international solidarity? This is the question that has led to me flitting backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, between lectures and fundraisers here, and the unfolding of an extraordinary political crisis at home. It was the question we asked ourselves as we marched past the Israeli embassy on those cold days in January.

The demonstrations were important. Anyone who doubts that should listen to those living under siege whose capacity to resist was strengthened every time they saw those protests on Al Jazeera and Press TV. But they were not enough, nor were the speeches, though they too have their place. It is actions that speak louder than words. That’s why on January 10 I announced at the big London demonstration that I would be leading a convoy of humanitarian aid from Britain to Gaza.

We decided to head off just five weeks later and to go through a difficult route – down to Spain, cross to Morocco and then driving across the Maghreb. We hoped to take a dozen or so vehicles. In the end, we left Hyde Park on February14 with 107 vehicles, 255 people and around $2 million of aid. Some 23 days and 5,500 miles later we entered Gaza. And now, we’re doing it all again, this time from the US.

On July 4, the Vietnam vet Ron Kovic, myself and hundreds of US citizens will fly out from JFK to Cairo where we will form up a convoy of hundreds of vehicles carrying medical aid and head into Gaza. We will be in Egypt exactly one month to the day from when President Obama delivered his historic speech offering a new and more egalitarian relationship between the US and the Muslim world. And that speech makes it all the more imperative that anyone and everyone gets on board this convoy.

For Obama’s speech, like his election campaign and presidency, can be looked at two ways. There were the expressions of general support for Israel and continuity in foreign policy which it would be naïve not to expect from any US president. How easy it would be to slump into the cynical and knowing snorting that has been such an unappealing trait of too much of the left for far too long. Because at the same time, his skilful appeal for a more respectful East-West dialogue opens up many roads for friends of Palestine and the Arab cause. If you doubt that, look at the frenzied reaction of the Israeli right who, in their usual understated way, are likening opposition to the settlement program to genocidal murder.

Our case is that Obama is right to identify that if the US wants to drain the swamp of hatred against it, then it needs a radical change in policy. The road he marked out in Cairo points in the right direction. But he stopped short. Literally. The road leads a couple of hundred dusty desert miles further from the Nile Delta, across the Sinai and to the Rafah crossing into Gaza. Hence the convoy, whose aims are manifold.

First, it is to take much-needed aid to a people subsisting under siege. We are a link in the supply chain that others who have sent delegations to Gaza have also helped establish.

Second, it is to take people – lots of American people. No one should underestimate the impact that will have on the Palestinian people. It was emphasized by our hosts in March that the presence of so many Britishers was even more valuable than the aid we brought. It meant hundreds of people going back as ambassadors for Palestine in towns and cities across the country. For the people of the Gaza Strip it was proof positive, in front of their very eyes, that they had not been forgotten.

Third, it is to contribute to the mighty process of changing US public opinion on this issue. And where public opinion changes, public policy follows – even if the mechanism is complex and difficult. The eight dark years of the Bush era saw, in effect, the criminalization of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Whole organization, Muslim and Arab, were closed down, their leaders disappeared and deported or imprisoned, witness the appalling trial and verdict of the Holy Land Foundation organizers. This convoy is about ending that. We want a cross-section of US society, including prominent figures, to take part and demonstrate that this is no longer a no go area; that Palestine is the issue and nobody is going to turn us around.

In Gaza, Ron Kovic will hand over wheelchairs to Palestinian amputees. That’s the image the world’s media will carry. Let the rabid supporters of the Netanyahu-Lieberman regime raise their voices against that. That’s a public relations battle we should relish.

There’s no point passively bewailing what this presidency might be failing to do. If we make an impact in July and beyond, it can help shift the balance, throwing the die-hard defenders of Israeli aggression on the defensive and making it more politically attractive for President Obama to move further down the dusty road.

In a sense George W Bush had an excuse for the mayhem he unleashed: he was a complete and utter imbecile. Barack Obama does not have that excuse. He’s highly intelligent and cultured. He met the sorely missed Edward Said. He doesn’t just know who the President of Pakistan is, he can pronounce the name of the country.

If the new sentiment for Palestine in this country is roused and made politically effective, there will be no excuse for anyone not to do the right thing.

Go to www.vivapalestina-us.org for information on the US to Gaza convoy or phone 773 226 2742

George Galloway is the Respect Party Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow.

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06 June, 2009
Countercurrents.org

It has always been those few who can see through the political correctness and hypocrisy of popular attitudes who are considered dangerous.

“Holocaust denial laws” are now in place in about a dozen countries. Defenders of these laws claim that the expression of unconventional views about the Jewish genocide is “hate speech” and “incitement to violence” and therefore must be suppressed.

But history shows the greatest purveyors of lies, hatred and incitement to violence are those with the power to spread their poison by manipulating popular opinion via the control or complicity of the mass media. Through a purposefully constructed lens of political correctness the despicable becomes normal. It is by this insidious process that tyrants make it normal and acceptable to murder those whom they consider threatening or inferior. We have only to turn on the television to see that process at work.

It is not the unpopular views we should fear but the popular.

When the suppression of free speech serves no purpose other than to silence unconventional opinions we should be alarmed. We should be even more alarmed when to question oppressive laws is to risk vilification, in this case by the smear of “Holocaust denier” and “anti-Semite”.

Appropriation of the term “The Holocaust” to the Nazi extermination of the Jews minimises the significance of other genocides, including those that are happening right now. Should these crimes also be closed to opinions that question the accuracy of the official “truth”?

Stifling open discussion and debate also does an injustice to the other millions of victims of the Nazi concentration camps: the Roma, Blacks, Polish and Russian prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and the mentally and physically disabled. It sidelines the slave labourers starved, beaten and worked to death in German war industries and the horrors suffered by anyone expressing anti-Nazi views.

It is likely that most people regard the real deniers of the Jewish genocide – the ones who say the extermination crimes never happened at all – in the same light as those who espouse any number of other oddball ideas. Do we need laws to protect us from those who make obviously unsupportable claims?

The real threat posed by “deniers” is that others might be influenced to undertake serious study and uncover embarrassing facts that would refute Israel’s “victim” status. This would threaten Israel’s moral legitimacy, underpinned by the world’s collective shame for looking the other way. All it takes to invoke that shame is the term anti-Semite, either stated or implied.

But opinions that question the widely accepted WWII Jewish genocide history are not anti-Semitic any more than opinions that question the accepted history of the Ukraine genocide (1) are anti-Russian. That we are led to label any deviation from the official history as “Holocaust denial” and “Holocaust denial” as anti-Semitism is no accident. It has come about by the same semantic sleight of hand that would have us believe anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are one and the same. They are not.

Many Christians are Zionists while many Jews throughout the world, perhaps even the majority, are anti-Zionist. Anti-Zionism has nothing to do with persecution of the Jews. It is simply anti-racism and anti-colonialism as applied to the occupation of Palestine and the subjugation of its indigenous population. (2)

When anyone goes to great lengths to stifle open inquiry and debate on any subject, alarm bells should ring. Invariably the motivation is suppression of uncomfortable truths. The uncomfortable truth of the Jewish genocide is that millions of lives would certainly have been saved had it been the priority of the Zionist leadership to save them. Their priority instead was establishment of the state of Israel. And then, as now, the suffering of Europe’s Jews and the world’s collective guilt was exploited to that end. (3)

Ironically, when millions of refugees were trying to escape from Europe before the war, and even while the genocide was in progress, prominent leaders of the Zionist movement were “Holocaust deniers”. When the truth could no longer remain hidden, the Zionist leadership opposed attempts to save the European Jews though financial and humanitarian aid and emigration. The exception was migration to Palestine, and even the relative few who were saved were selected not according to their plight but according to their perceived value to the future state of Israel.

One proposal by 270 members of the British Parliament, as a part of diplomatic negotiations with Germany during the height of the killings, was to evacuate 500,000 Jews from Europe and resettle them in British colonies. This offer was rejected by the Zionist leaders with the observation, “Only to Palestine!” (3)

It is clear from the statements and actions of the Zionist leadership that they considered the suffering of the European Jews advantageous in securing future international support for the establishment of the Zionist state.

Shocking? That uncomfortable truth is well documented for those who care or dare to study the subject.

Throughout history Jews, like many other minorities, have indeed been persecuted, but the modern state of Israel never was the victim. Since its inception it has been the coloniser, aggressor, tormentor and oppressor. Exploiting the memory of Hitler’s victims to perpetuate the myth of “victim Israel” is cynical. To do so while attacking its neighbours and inflicting Nazi-style state terrorism, apartheid and genocide on the Palestinians is cynical in the extreme.

While “deniers” are jailed for expressing unacceptable views, the real criminals – those responsible for the agony and death of millions – manipulate popular opinion to make crimes against humanity, war crimes, contempt for international law and indifference to human suffering seem normal and acceptable. And they do so with impunity.

(1) http://www.bigeye.com/111703.htm
(2) http://pilger.carlton.com/page.asp?partid=519
(3) http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/
rabbi_quotes/weissmandl.cfm

Robin Davis lives in Victoria, Australia. He is a freelance writer and graphic designer. He can be contacted at: rbd@knox.hotkey.net.au

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By Armine Amy Kaladzhyan

Students Protest Anti-Defamation League’s Involvement in UCSB Matter

Almost two years ago, a group of outraged students at UC Santa Barbara banded together.  They united, just as  citizens in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had done before them, to get campus and community entities to  disassociate themselves with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and its No Place For Hate (NPFH) program.

The students came together in response to the immoral and callous decision by the ADL to issue a statement that they were against the passage of a resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide and were actively lobbying against it in the halls of Congress. Armenian Americans and humans rights advocates alike believed then and now that the ADL forfeited any moral authority to sponsor NPFH once it took a stance so inconsistent with such a profound human rights issue.

The road to get campus and community groups to disassociate themselves from the ADL’s NPFH program has  encountered many obstacles and bureaucratic hurdles. Berj Parseghian, now a UCSB alumnae, and Garo Manjikian,  former community organizer in Santa Barbara and current ANCA Legislative Affairs Director, began the campaign  with an intense letter writing campaign aimed at encouraging a handful of campus organizations, which the ADL  listed as participants of the NPFH program, to disassociate. Their hard work resulted in two major  organizations, the University Religious Center and Empowerment Works, immediately cutting ties with the ADL.

The leadership of the campaign grew to include Amy Kaladzhyan and Shant Karnikian. These two students  presented the issue at the Sacramento Issues Awareness Caucus of 2008 and gained the support of legislators  such as Assemblymember Pedro Nava and Assemblymember Anthony Portantino, Chair of the Higher Education  Committee. Back in Santa Barbara, Parseghian and Manjikian brought the issue to the attention of Chancellor  Henry Yang of UCSB, who in turn urged them to continue the campaign and raise awareness of the issue among  students because he “expects every community member to adhere to a set of values that include mutual respect,  tolerance and civility.”

Fueled by the thoughtful words of encouragement from the Chancellor, a meeting was arranged between the  leadership of the campaign and the Dean of Students, Assistant Dean, and the Director of Judicial Affairs,  which lists ADL as a resource for students. The students took the opportunity to educate the UCSB  administration about various issues surrounding the Armenian Genocide, as well as the importance of  disassociating the university from an organization which, because of its opposition to the recognition of a  crime against humanity, has no place on a college campus. The Armenian Student Association (ASA) organized a  panel discussion to raise campus awareness about this issue and allow the ADL to present its side of the  story. The panel was comprised of Shant Karnikian on behalf of the ASA, Antranig Kzirian from the Armenian  National Committee-Western Region, and Chris Villavicencio on behalf of STAND: An Anti-Genocide Coalition. The  ADL turned down the invitation to be a part of the panel. Oddly enough, the event was hosted at the Multi- Cultural Center, a campus organization that was formerly associated with the NPFH program. The deliberate and  well-planned efforts of the students at UCSB have been effective. Presently there are no campus entities that  are seeking certification from NPFH.

While the UCSB community has expressed grave concern with the ADL’s hypocritical stance on the Armenian  Genocide, with many departments no longer seeking to renew their membership with the NPFH program, the issue  has become one that is no longer focused on just the Armenian Genocide. In early March, Abraham Foxman, the  national director of the Anti-Defamation League, invited a number of school officials and faculty members to a  meeting to urge university officials to investigate charges of anti-Semitism against Professor William  Robinson, a sociology professor who drew comparisons between Israeli soldiers in Gaza and the Nazi siege of  Warsaw, Poland. The ADL was quick to respond to this incident in an attempt to limit academic freedom and yet  they were nowhere in sight when the Muslim Student Association was victim to a print attack in the school  newspaper, The Daily Nexus, by David Horowitz accusing them of being a part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is important now, more than ever, to fight against the ADL’s involvement in academic or even community  affairs, especially in the Santa Barbara area. The students of UC Santa Barbara will continue to work to keep  the genocide deniers at the ADL off their campus. These students, who are dedicated to human rights, are  determined to set an example for other student groups, Armenian Americans and other minorities alike, to take  action when they are marginalized by a more powerful entity.

Clearly, no one benefits when the sponsor of a community program diminishes a crime against humanity and  denies the historical truth of any genocide. The ADL’s position as deniers of genocide is untenable.  In  southern California, the ADL has learned, the hard way, that they will enjoy no safe haven to practice  genocide denial on the campus of UC Santa Barbara.

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Ami Eden ·

The current issue of Moment magazine dedicates its “Ask the Rabbis” section to the question “How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?” Rabbis from various denominations offered responses, but it’s the final one — from a Chabad rabbi, Manis Friedman of the St. Paul-based Bais Chana Institute of Jewish Studies — that is likely to spark the most reaction: I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral. The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle). The first Israeli prime minister who declares that he will follow the Old Testament will finally bring peace to the Middle East. … Click here to read Friedman’s full answer, as well as the other responses. The editor of New Voices says… We told you so: When we published Jeremy’s piece on Lubavitch rabbis on the radical fringe of the settler movement, we were accused of exaggerating their importance. We were told that they were marginal figures, outside of the influence of Lubavitch HQ in Crown Heights, and that few American Lubavitchers shared their extremism. Rabbi Friedman’s wacky-if-it-weren’t-scary comment in Moment should defuse some of that criticism. Friedman seems to be a fully integrated into the mainstream American Chabad movement. He was the Rebbe’s translator until 1990, he has almost 200 articles and videos up at chabad.org, the movement’s official propaganda arm, and his Minnesota women’s yeshiva is listed in the official online directory of Chabad outposts. His website is fancy and looks well-funded. When I come across this sort of thing, I wonder at Chabad’s popularity among secular Jewish students. These aren’t just bad politics, they’re insane politics. At what point does the Chabad rabbi tell the prospective Ba’al Teshuva that he thinks that Israel should “destroy their holy sites”? Probably not at the first Shabbat dinner, right? Maybe after two Shabbat dinners, a “lunch and learn,” and a Birthright trip through Mayanot? …

:: Article nr. 54809 sent on 03-jun-2009 18:11 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=54809

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Positive Affirmation of What I Already Know About the Hollowco$t

Brandon Dean
WizardofOswald.com
May 28th, 2009

the remains of ethnic German victims of the Polish pogroms before WWII. if you don’t know what that means, LOOK IT UP.

*

One of the people I work with is a kid about 20, who’s grown up living in his German grandparents’ house. His grandparents were alive during WWII, and the old lady who lives in their front house (also German) was an adult during the war.

When he was 15, this kid I work with (let’s call him Adrian) got in a huge fight with the “crazy” old lady in the front house, when she told him Hitler was not the devil, and that there was no holocaust. Adrian screamed at her and called her a nazi in his ignorant fury, and has not spoken to the lady in over five years, though he lives in the house behind her.

Last week, during work, I brought up the hollowco$t, and was explaining to everyone there how it is a big lie, and explaining why it was a big lie. To everyone’s credit, all present–by the end of about a ten minute explanation–were more than open to the idea, and interested in investigating this alleged farce.

Here’s the clincher: almost everyone I work with has Jewish “blood” to some degree, including me. My great grandmother was Jewish. Don’t worry, it’s not a conspiracy–almost everyone who grew up in Los Angeles has some Jewish blood in them it seems. Wait–maybe it is a conspiracy…

Anyhow, by the end of a couple hours of discussion, there were six people who had to know more. I’ve directed them to www.waronyou.com and my site, amongst others.

In any case, the next day Adrian came back to work with a wild-eyed look on his face. He pulled me aside, and in hushed tones, he told me how he couldn’t stop thinking about everything I had said, but that he was very skeptical of it. That night he asked his grandparents their opinion on the holohoax.

His grandmother immediately jumped up with a smile on her face (at the inquisitiveness and honesty of her grandson), and screamed “the holocaust never happened! they have lied to us about our people! Hitler…”

Then her husband, Adrian’s grandfather, interrupted her—”Stop!” he looked at Adrian and said “We don’t know anything about it. Don’t ever bring it up with us again.”

Then his grandfather stormed out of the room. After he left, Adrian’s grandmother leaned close to Adrian and said “Go talk to [the old lady in the front house]. She was there, and she saw what happened to our people.”

I am now waiting to hear the results of his conversation with the old lady in the front house. Understandably, Adrian must approach it delicately, given the fact that he screamed at her the last time he talked to her… And apparently, she’s very old now, and a tad crazy, but we’ll see…

We need to record the testimonies of the people who were there, before all of them are dead, and all we have to look at and listen to is the Jewish press.

FREE ERNST ZUNDL! FREE FREDRICK TOBEN!

FREE THE TRUTH!

copyright Brandon Dean 2009

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Today the Israeli Army Child Killing Unit shot another child. But no need to worry, decent people of the world, after all they are “allowed” to shoot 12 year old children. Why? Because, according to Israel, you are no longer a child when you turn 12 years old. Never mind that the world definition of legal adult age is 18 years old, like everything else, Israel makes it’s own rules to suit it’s purpose of ethnic cleansing as was so graphically depicted in the T-Shirts the IDF soldiers gleefully wore with pregnant women and with children on them as targets. Israel has a long standing Army policy of shooting children since as far back as the year 2000, as I will point out after today’s shooting report below:

Israeli forces apprehended a young Palestinian after injuring him east of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip.

Local sources said Israeli troops seized 12-year-old Ayman Shamiyya after shooting him while he was playing. There was no word about how serious the boy’s injuries were. source

So let’s now take a look at an interview that was given by an IDF sharpshooter in his own words no less. The important thing to notice here (aside from the FACT that they shoot 12 year olds!!!) is that this interview was done, not now, but in 2000,(thanks Owl for pointing the date out) a whopping NINE years ago. Which, points out that this “policy” of murdering Palestinian children is just “part and parcel” of everyday life in the Israeli military.

Don’t shoot till you can see they’re over the age of 12
He doesn’t know how many children have been killed in the violence of the past two months, but he’s sure that the army ’shoots everyone who needs to be shot.’ A day in the life of an IDF sharpshooter.

Q:You haven’t shot children.

A:”All the sharpshooters haven’t shot children.”

Q:But nonetheless there are children who were hit, wounded or killed after they were hit in the head. Unless these were mistakes.

A:”If they were children, they were mistakes.”

Q:Do they talk about this?

A:”They talk to us about this a lot. They forbid us to shoot at children.”

Q:How do they say this?

A:”You don’t shoot a child who is 12 or younger.”

Q:That is, a child of 12 or older is allowed?

A:”Twelve and up is allowed. He’s not a child any more, he’s already after his bar mitzvah. Something like that.”

Thirteen is bar mitzvah age.

“Twelve and up, you’re allowed to shoot. That’s what they tell us.”

Q:Again: Twelve and up you’re allowed to shoot children.

A:”Because this already doesn’t look to me like a child by definition, even though in the United States a child can be 23.”

Q:Under international law, a child is defined as someone up to the age of 18.

A:”Up until 18 is a child?”

Q:So, according to the IDF, it is 12?

A:”According to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don’t know if this is what the IDF says to the media.”

Q:And children are from 12 down. Is there no order that between 12 and 18 you shoot at the legs and not the head?

A:”Of course we try to see to it that he really is over 20.”

Q:In the 10 seconds that you have.

A:”In the 10 seconds that I have, I have to estimate how old he is.”

Q:And in what direction the wind is blowing, and the deviation here and there, and which way he’ll jump the next moment.

A:”Yes, but there are hardly any mistakes by sharpshooters. The mistakes are made by people who aren’t sharpshooters.”

Q:And it turns out that they happen to hit the children’s heads, and all this is just by chance?

A:”If you say you have seen children that have been hit in the head a lot, then it is sharpshooters.”

Q:So what you’re saying is that our definition of children is different.

A:”Your definition is different.”

Q:Because for you it’s someone who is 12.

A:”Yes.”

Q:I want to persist in the matter of the 12-year-olds. Why was this age set?

A:”I have heard that it was important to the IDF to know whether someone was over 12, so therefore I understood that the age of 12 is a border line. They haven’t told us any age, just that we must not shoot at children. The IDF doesn’t specify ages. We take care not to kill, not to have incidents with many dead. Six dead is normal, there could have been a lot more.” link

And, just to hammer home this “policy” of murdering children, yet another interview with another “Israeli Child Killer” soldier who is quite proud of his killing of a beautiful little girl called Iman, who did nothing wrong, except have the misfortune to be born Palestinian and live next to a genocidal rogue state called Israel. Again, this is a report from 2004, so this “policy” is nothing new for Israel as they have been killing children for almost TEN years, since 2000.

Israeli officer: I was right
to shoot 13-year-old child

An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old.

The officer, identified by the army only as Captain R, was charged this week with illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and other relatively minor infractions after emptying all 10 bullets from his gun’s magazine into Iman al-Hams when she walked into a “security area” on the edge of Rafah refugee camp last month.

A tape recording of radio exchanges between soldiers involved in the incident, played on Israeli television, contradicts the army’s account of the events and appears to show that the captain shot the girl in cold blood

Record of a shooting:

Watchtower
‘It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastward’

Operations room ‘Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?’

Watchtower‘A girl of about 10, she’s behind the embankment, scared to death’

Captain R (after killing the girl)‘Anything moving in the zone, even a three-year-old, needs to be killed’

Captain R took the unusual decision to leave the post in pursuit of the girl. He shot her dead and then “confirmed the kill” by emptying his magazine into her body.link

So what we can see from this child killer report above, are two things, firstly, the “watchtower” asks if the girl is over 10 years old, this seems to be in breach of their insane and illegal policy of killing 12 year olds, as they now seem to reduce the age to 10 years old, so which is it Israel? 12 year olds, 10 year olds, or just all Palestinian children that are alive and breathing? Secondly, this “murdering scum soldier” believes in shooting even a 3 year old child as he stated. Makes you wonder how many more are just like this killer, given what we have seen in Gaza recently. And lastly, see what the United Nations had to say about the Israeli Child Murderers three years ago in 2006:

United Nations
October 5, 2006

Ninety-one Palestinian children have already been killed this year in the West Bank and Gaza, almost double the number for the whole of 2005, with youngsters suffering increasing levels of stress from violence and fear in the Israeli-Palestinians conflict, according to the latest United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) update source

So, I think it is clear to say that there has been, and continues to be, an open policy to murder Palestinian children by the Israeli Army. Given that Israel would be well aware of these many incidents and numbers from the last NINE years. And yet, they have done nothing to stop murdering children in all these years. Indeed, after their genocide in Gaza their “soldiers” had T-Shirts printed to celebrate killing pregnant Palestinian women and children.

PHOTOS OF IMAN BEFORE AND AFTER HER ENCOUNTER WITH ISRAELI CHILD KILLING SOLDIERS:
PLEASE REMEMBER ALL THE HUNDREDS OF INNOCENT CHILDREN MURDERED BY ISRAEL.
Americans need to stop funding the killing of children, stop sending Israel BILLIONS of your tax payer dollars when Americans are loosing jobs and their homes.

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‘Racism in Israel is not like racism in other states.’

Racism is common to most and probably all societies. Laws never seem entirely to eliminate it. It was the essential tool in the creation of modern settler states. The United States could not have come into existence without the obliteration of North American Indian cultures and of large numbers of the people themselves. They had to die so the US could be born. In Australia the indigenous people of Tasmania were wiped out to the last man, woman and child, while on the mainland the tribes were massacred, confined, stripped of their ancestral land and eventually turned into fringe dwellers. Until recently Australia had a prime minister who could deny that aboriginal children of mixed ‘blood’ were taken from their parents up to the 1930s and refused to issue any expression of remorse for their mistreatment. More recent targets of racism have been Lebanese and Vietnamese immigrants, while the Howard federal government’s racist treatment of Iraqi and Afghan refugees and asylum seekers remains one of the most shameful chapters of Australia’s history.

In the US the election of a colored president would have been inconceivable until very recently. It was so unbelievable that people wept when Barack Obama won the elections.

Racism comes in many shades. Discrimination against people on the grounds of skin color, ethnicity or religion is a basic human rights issue, a first cousin to discrimination, harassment and denial of opportunity on the basis of gender. President Mahmud Ahmedinejad, in his recent speech at the Durban Review Conference in Geneva, drew attention to Israel as a racist state but Iran has serious issues of its own to deal with. Homosexuality in Iran is treated as a crime. Gays and prostitutes are executed in public. The Bahais have been the victims of discrimination and persecution throughout Iran’s modern history and this remains the case today. They have no legal identity in Iran. On all of these issues, Iran is itself vulnerable to criticism on the grounds of human rights, which does not, of course, detract in any way from his criticism of Israel. The outrage directed against Ahmedinajad obscured the real issue at the heart of what he was saying: is Israel a racist state?

In settler societies such as the United States, Australia and Canada, the crude racism which drove invasion and colonization mostly belongs to the past, when there was an active concept of race, allied with the categories of civilization, barbarism and savagery. The North American Indian was regarded by the white settlers as a savage, perhaps noble, mean or cunning, but a savage ‘redskin’ nevertheless. In Australia the indigenous people were scarcely counted as human beings. It was not until the 1960s that they were even given the vote. The same relegation of ‘Negroes’ to a contingent category of humanity (at best) justified slavery and segregation in the southern states of the United States. The dehumanization of all of these groups was essential to the colonizing process (including the colonization of Algeria after the French invasion of 1830) and the enrichment of white settlers.

All modern ‘western’ colonial settler states share the same characteristics, i.e. the obliteration of indigenous cultures and the displacement of people from their land. This was true of the North American settlers, the Australian colonists and the Boers who eliminated the Herero people of southwest Africa in the early 20th century. Treaties in which the indigenous people were compelled to consent to the invasion and settlement of their land were signed in North America and New Zealand but not in Australia, where the colonists regarded the indigenous people as less than human and could therefore assert that the land was ‘empty’. There are numerous parallels here with Zionism not only on the basis of an ‘empty’ land being settled or of civilization being brought to a ‘primitive’ people but in the double nature of the colonialism. In North America and Palestine, settlement was fostered by a distant government against which the settlers eventually rebelled before declaring their ‘independence’.

Gradually, mostly only in the last half century, laws and attitudes changed. This rolling process met with resistance at every stage from those who justified discrimination on the basis of the Bible or racist genetic theories. Not until the 1960s and 1970s were racially discriminatory laws eliminated from the statute books in modern settler states such as the US and Australia, which does not mean that structural racism has been eliminated. It has not. It can be measured in education, health and welfare statistics, while episodes of racism involving police and the public at large show that attitudes are harder to change than laws.

The difference between Israel and these other settler states is partly one of timing. Israel was founded not at the beginning or the middle of the historical cycle of the settler state phenomenon but right at the end. Israel is a paradox – a settler state arising at the beginning of the post-colonial era. Across Africa, southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, national liberation movements challenged powers unwilling to voluntarily relinquish the territories they had seized in the 19th century. The right of native people to self-determination was expressed in the UN Charter. It was at this precise moment that Israel was established. At a time when universal values were being emphasized Israel headed in the opposite direction.

The Holocaust generated enormous emotional support across the western world for the establishment of Israel. It might not have been the ‘pretext’ for its creation of Israel, as Mahmud Ahmedinejad is reported to have said in Geneva, but it was certainly exploited by the Zionists to make sure that Israel came into existence. Refugees from Europe might have gone elsewhere, but for ideological reasons the only place the Zionist movement wanted them to go was Palestine. The media joined the chorus calling for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine as a solution to the refugee problem and an antidote to anti-semitism. In fact removing the victims from the scene of the crime was no answer to the historical problem of European anti-semitism. Their ‘solution’ allowed European governments to evade responsibility for the consequences of actions in which all of them were in some way complicit. A people who were in no way responsible for the massive crimes which had been committed against Jews were being made to pay for them. Their rights and interests were treated with as much indifference or disdain as anti-semites had traditionally treated the rights and interests of Jews. The export of the ‘Jewish problem’ to Palestine was in its own way anti-semitic.

Within the British government there were objections but only for financial reasons. Britain was broke and could not afford the extra cost of policing Palestine were 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to be admitted as the Zionists and President Truman were demanding in 1946.  Even within the US administrations there were reservations. How, for example, could the principle of self-determination be reconciled with the denial of the right of the majority of the people of Palestine to decide their own future? Would not a ‘socialist’ Jewish state in Palestine further the ambitions of the USSR in the Middle East? And what of America’s interests and its relations with the Arab world? They could only be seriously damaged by support for this project.

Ultimately it was Truman and not the UN who decided that Israel would be created in Palestine. Without his direct intervention the partition vote would never have got across the finishing line at the UN General Assembly. It still has to remembered that the vote was only a recommendation, anyway, swept aside when Ben-Gurion, ignoring the provisions of the partition plan, made a unilateral declaration of ‘independence’ in the name of the state of Israel six months after the plan was passed. In essence it was no different from the declaration of UDI made in the 1960s by the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith. In the name of ‘independence’, both Smith and David Ben-Gurion declared war on the right of an indigenous people to determine their own future on their own land. One got away with it and one did not.

What kind of state Israel would become was predetermined. In Israel today there are individuals and organizations fighting for coexistence with the Palestinians but since the beginning of Zionist settlement such voices have always spoken from the margins. From Herzl’s time onward it was understand within the mainstream that the Palestinians would never give up their land voluntarily and somehow would have to be removed from it. Thus Israel deliberately set itself from the beginning not just against the Palestinians but against the entire population of the Middle East, for whom Palestine (with Jerusalem at its heart) was an inalienable part of the Arab-Islamic heritage. Zionist justification rested on the argument that the ‘Jewish people’ were the true indigenous people of Palestine and that Muslims and Christians were present only as ‘caretakers’ whose role in history had now come to an end. The secondary moral position was that the suffering of Jews throughout history added up to a stronger claim than the rights of the Palestinians, a line of reasoning supported by Arthur James Balfour in 1917. The end justified the means. If it took the deprivation of Palestinian rights for a Jewish state to come into existence, so be it.

In a land in which the vast bulk of the population was not Jewish, a Jewish state could only be constructed by taking one inherently racist measure after another. If the state were to be Jewish so would land ownership and labor. The conditions written into the charter of the Jewish National Fund and other land-purchasing organizations stipulated that land once acquired could never be retained to non-Jewish hands. This ‘extra-territorialisation’ of land as it was described by a British commission of inquiry sent to Palestine fuelled the Palestinian rebellion of 1936-39. Exclusive Jewish access to the land was followed through after 1948 by the destruction of approximately 500 villages and the passage of ‘absent property’ and ‘present absentee’ laws which prevented even Palestinians remaining inside Israel from returning to the property they owned.

Security laws were another means of separating the Palestinians from their land. Consolidation of the Jewish presence on the land has continued through the attempt to erase the Palestinian presence in Jaffa and other cities inside the ‘green line’.

On the other side of the green line the tactics are cruder and more obvious. Open demographic war is being waged against the Palestinians in East Jerusalem while in Hebron the centre of the city has been closed down and residents around the market moved out in the name of ‘security’, i.e. the protection of racist and fanatical Jewish settlers living in the heights above. Across the occupied West Bank it is the armed interlopers who describe the Palestinians as interlopers and ‘infiltrators’ of their own occupied land. All of their vandalism, bullying, harassment of men, women and children, destruction of property and uprooting of olive trees and occasional killing is underwritten by the state, and yet the state is outraged when the charge of racism is raised in Geneva. The colonization of the territories is not incidental or accidental racism but the carefully thought out strategic and ideological racism of a racist state. The fact that it continues every single day is testimony to Israel’s contempt for universal values and international law.

Just as the land would have to be the exclusive possession of the Jewish ‘people’ (as 93 per cent of it is now legally classified), so it could only be worked by Jewish labor. Jewish employers were explicitly prohibited from hiring ‘Arab’ workers in the 1920s and 1930s. Until the 1960s the central Israeli labor organization, the Histadrut, would only admit Jewish members. In practice, labor discrimination has never worked perfectly because of the low cost of ‘Arab’ labor compared to ‘Jewish’ labor and because of the Palestinian need to work, a situation which has led to Palestinian laborers building the settlements being constructed on their own occupied land. When the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir visited Gaza in the 1970s she expressed shock, not at the establishment of Jewish settlements on expropriated land, but at the use of ‘Arab’ labor to work the land for the settlers.

As Israel was the state for Jews wherever they lived and not for all the people who lived within its borders (so to speak, seeing that Israel has never actually declared its borders), the laws would have to be framed accordingly. The Nationality Law automatically conferred Israeli citizenship only on Jews (i.e born of a Jewish mother). The Law of Return granted the ‘right’ of ‘return’ to Jews who had never lived in Palestine while denying the right of return to Palestinians who had lived there for generations. Some families could trace their origins in Palestine back to the Islamic conquest of the 7th century.

The structural discrimination against the Palestinians can be measured in socio-economic statistics dealing with poverty, unemployment, access to government services and education, house construction and funding for municipalities. Taking their cue from the government, and the openly racist statements made by senior political, military and religious figures, describing the Palestinians as ‘two legged animals’, ‘drugged cockroaches’, ‘insects’, ‘snakes’ and ‘a cancer’, large numbers of Israelis polled have said they do not want to live in the same apartment blocks as ‘Arabs’ and in fact would like to see them out of the state altogether. The racism coming out of the mouths of rabbis and religious seminaries, couched in terms of an exclusive Jewish right to ‘Eretz Israel’, with many of the students or graduates of these seminaries living in the most aggressive of the West Bank settlements, is amongst the worst.

Having set out on this path Israel has followed it unswervingly. One flagrant violation of human rights must be followed by another. Without war and without racism in spirit, deed and law there can be no Zionism and no ‘Jewish state’. The Palestinians have been pursued wherever they have gone because by their presence they constitute an existential threat to Israel. Over the years the attitudes of the Israeli mainstream towards the Palestinian ‘enemy’ have grown even harsher. Palestinian armed struggle, suicide bombings and the rocketing of settlements near Gaza are not connected with the policies pursued by Israel against the Palestinians for six decades but with some ex nihilio desire to kill Jews and destroy Israel. This state of mind is deliberately cultivated from the top with the aim of keeping Israel’s Jewish citizens in a state of permanent readiness for the next war. The recent ‘war’ in Gaza was approved by more than 80 per cent of Israel’s Jewish population. The misrepresentation of a massive military onslaught on a largely defenseless civilian population as a ‘war’ allowed the civilian mainstream to justify the crimes that were being committed. Israelis looked on with indifference and even with approval as ‘our boys’ killed hundreds of people in three weeks, most of them civilians and 400 of them children. The media turned into a kingdom of lies. Every specious argument of the political and military establishment was accepted without question and transformed into truth.

The racist t-shirts printed by Israeli ‘soldiers’ engaged in the attack on Gaza were only the surface manifestation of a much deeper psychosis. The t-shirts captured the attention of the outside world in a way that slow, structural, incremental racism never does. Literally every day brings some new or continuing manifestation of Israeli state racism to the surface. After 50 years the beduin are still being driven off their traditional land in the Naqab. Palestinians married to Israelis are prevented from living inside Israel with their spouses and families. The recently declared Jerusalem Regional Master Plan is inherently racist but apparently too complex for the outside media to work out its implications. It embodies the next stage of programmed discrimination that has continued without letup since 1967. The Jerusalem municipality is itself an illegal and racist body whose ‘master plan’ is a template for the further ‘Judaisation’ of Jerusalem whatever the cost to the Palestinians. It must be remembered that until 1948 Palestinian Muslims and Christians owned about 70 per cent of the property in West Jerusalem and all but one or two per cent of the property in the east. They did not forfeit their rights to their houses and land. Their rights have simply been usurped. In normal legal parlance the appropriation of their property is known as theft. For the first time since the Crusaders massacred Jews and Muslims in the 11th century Jerusalem is being transformed into a city for a people of only one religious denomination. Under Arab and Ottoman rule Jerusalem remained a polyglot city. What the Jerusalem municipality and the state of Israel both want is a city cleansed of its non-Jewish population except for tourists and a colorful ethnic remnant hanging around the old city.

Is all of this racist? Of course it is. In fact, those who care to study the UN’s Convention on Genocide, passed in 1948 as Zionist militias were still driving Palestinians off their land and destroying their villages, will see that Israel’s behavior meets some of the criteria of article 2 of the convention which describes genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:

(a) killing members of the group
(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

Israelis involved in the struggle against racism and occupation are fighting an uphill battle. The structural discrimination of the state against its non-Jewish citizens and against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories (as well as the Syrians living on the occupied Golan Heights) is a motor driving Israel and its people from one extreme to another. Thirty years ago it was regarded as unthinkable that Menahim Begin could ever be Israel’s Prime Minister but Begin was followed by Yitzhak Shamir, Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. All of them come out of the same school of Revisionist Zionism. Now revisionism is the mainstream, the labor movement is marginalized and Israel has again elected Netanyahu as its Prime Minister. He in turn has chosen as Foreign Minister the crude, arrogant, provocative and openly racist West Bank settler Avigdor Liebermann.

Racism in Israel is not like racism in other states, which is usually a matter of changing laws and slowly working on public opinion. In Israel racism is so deeply embedded in Zionist ideology and the structure of the state that without racism Israel cannot remain the state that it has become. Yet there are no signs that the Israeli people or the politicians they are electing as their leaders have any intention of changing direction. When they have a powerful military and when they are under no pressure from the outside world they see no reason to change. In its blockade of Gaza Israel has been supported from the beginning by the US, the EU and the Quartet. None of these venerable authorities could see any reason for Israel to be punished or restrained even after the killing of 1400 Palestinians in Gaza from late December 2008 to mid-January 2009. Their indulgence encourages a dangerous state of mind. The politicians, the generals, the rabbis, the media commentators and the academics know that they are in the right and that everyone else is in the wrong. The outrage at criticism, the arrogance, the self-righteousness, the self-justification, the endless claims of moral superiority and the contempt and hatred of the Palestinians are extremely disturbing. Israel is not a small, weak state in the middle of nowhere. It is a powerful state, armed with nuclear weapons, in the middle of the Middle East. The refusal of the ‘international community’ to restrain states which live outside the law has led to many disasters in the past. The species of animal life known as homo sapiens has a poor record when it comes to averting calamities ahead of time. In the Middle East the creation of Israel brought disaster down on the heads of the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries. The states which created Israel have not yet taken responsibility for the consequences of their actions, but have rather made themselves more complicit in the crimes still being committed. As long as the disaster is someone else’s (and not Israel’s) they do not seem to be concerned. How else can this be understood but as their own racism? Do they have to be pushed to the point where they are directly and unavoidably involved in Israel’s confrontation with the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab world to realize the consequences of what they have done these past six decades?

- Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. If you like this article, please consider making a contribution to the Palestine Chronicle.

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Throughout its history, Israel has willfully and repeatedly committed crimes of war and against humanity, always with impunity. Yet under customary legal standards and norms (including Geneva, Hague, the UN Charter, S.C. and G.A. resolutions), it’s lawless, a serial abuser, a threat to the region and humanity, mostly as an oppressive occupier. Attacking Gaza is the latest episode in its six-decade reign of terror satisfying the definition of genocide against defenseless Palestinian civilians. This article covers more evidence from some disturbing but unsurprising newly published information.

On March 19, in the first of a series of articles, Haaretz headlined: “IDF killed civilians in Gaza under loose rules of engagement.” Military correspondent Amos Harel revealed Israeli soldier and pilot (”dirty secret”) testimonies of being ordered to kill unarmed civilians and destroy their property – accounts at variance with official claims that only military targets were attacked and that “Israeli troops observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation.” Defense Minister Ehud Barak calls the IDF “the most moral army in the world.”

“Moral” examples included an infantry squad leader recounting the shooting of a mother and her two children: “There was a house with a family inside….We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family….The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left,” after which a rooftop sniper “shot them straight away….I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he (followed orders, and, besides, Palestinian lives are) less important” than our own soldiers.

Other incidents included:

– a squad leader telling of a company commander ordering an elderly Palestinian woman to be shot and killed;

– soldiers saying “we should kill everyone (in the center of Gaza); everyone there is a terrorist;”

– soldiers writing “death to the Arabs on walls” and spitting on family pictures;

– a squad leader saying: “At the beginning, the directive was to enter a house with an armored vehicle, break the door down, (and) start shooting inside – I call it murder – to shoot at everyone we identify;” commanders called it OK “because everyone left in the city is culpable because they didn’t run away;”

– soldiers ordered to indiscriminately destroy property and farmland;

– orders given to enter a house, “switch on loudspeakers and tell (occupants) you have five minutes to run away and whoever doesn’t will be killed;”

These and other accounts typify regular incidents in occupied Gaza and the West Bank. When revealed, official denials follow or in response to clear evidence, officers, like military advocate general Avichai Mendelblit, say the incidents will be investigated, after which everything is whitewashed, quietly forgotten, none of the guilty are prosecuted, and security forces keep using disproportionate force against defenseless Palestinian civilians.

In a March 19 analysis, Harel concluded that this “happen(s) in the field most of the time (and) as usual, reality is completely different from the gentler version provided by the military commanders to the public and media during (an) operation and after. The soldiers are not lying, for the simple reason that they have no reason to” and every reason to stay silent. The rule is: “You don’t ask, we won’t tell,” but these soldiers, squad leaders, pilots and commanders did.

Further, there’s a “continuity of testimony from different sectors that reflects a disturbing and depressing picture” of a rogue military willfully committing war crimes because they know they can get away with them. Harel concluded: “The IDF’s ethical problems did not start in 2009.” They go back decades, but according to some, military “deterioration” has been continuous from the 1967 war to Operation Cast Lead. Worse still is that Israeli history reveals six decades of relentless and continuous terror. Attacking Gaza for 22 days is just the latest episode.

On March 21, the London Independent’s Donald Macintyre wrote: “Israelis (were) told to fight a ‘holy war’ in Gaza….a religious war” against Arabs, according to a soldier citing “the martial role of military rabbis during the operation.” In rabbinate literature distributed to the troops, the message was: “We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land, and now we need to fight to expel the Gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

According to the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, IDF head chaplain, Rabbi Avichai Rontzki, a brigadier general, distributed booklet material saying that it was “terribly immoral” to show mercy to a “cruel enemy” and that soldiers were fighting “murderers.” Imagine rabbis claiming to be men of God, yet violating core Jewish dogma by preaching hate, premeditated murder, and lying about innocent civilians they’re vilifying. Another example of the viciousness of a so-called civilized state, acting like barbarians (in the name of God) and calling it just.

There’s more. On March 22 in Haaretz, Amira Hass headlined: “IDF soldiers ordered to shoot at Gaza rescuers” in citing a Hebrew handwritten document, “Rules of Engagement – Open fire also upon rescue.” It confirms numerous reports and testimonies like the above that soldiers shot Palestinian civilians in cold blood, murdered them (and their rescuers), or in cases where they were still alive prevented their evacuation and let them bleed to death.

Hass stated: “The (above-mentioned) document provides written proof that IDF commanders ordered their troops to shoot at rescuers” besides ordering the killing of unarmed civilians and destruction of their property.

On March 22, London Observer writer Peter Beaumont headlined: “Gaza war crime claims gather pace as (still) more troops speak out.” He cited a yet to be published “Breaking the Silence” report containing statements from 15 former soldiers. From their contacts with Operation Cast Lead participants, they corroborate the above claims of random killings and vandalism. According to the group’s Mikhael Manekin:

“We have spoken to a lot of different people who served in different places in Gaza, including officers. We are not talking about some units being more aggressive than others, but underlying policy. So much so that we are talking to soldiers who said that they were having to restrain the orders given.” According to one, Amir Marmor, orders from a Lt. Col. who briefed the troops were: “Shoot and don’t worry about the consequences.”

On March 20, Haaretz reporter Uri Blau disclosed that IDF soldiers ordered T-shirts marking the end of Operation Cast Lead featuring grotesque images of dead babies, mothers weeping at their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosque, and a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s eye depicted on her stomach with the English slogan, “1 shot, 2 kills.”

These aren’t just anecdotes from what Ehud Barak calls “the most moral army in the world.” On March 22, Haaretz correspondent Gideon Levy wrote: “IDF ceased long ago being ‘most moral army in the world.’ ” Moreover, imagining the military will investigate the charges is “propagandistic, ridiculous (and) meant not only to deceive the public, but also to offer shameless lies” as part of a cover-up the way these revelations are always handled.

These practices have gone on for decades. Orders come right from the top – to kill Arabs and commit atrocities and vandalism, and according to one Operation Cast lead soldier: “That’s what is so nice, as it were, about Gaza – You see a person on a road….and you can just shoot him.” This message is ingrained in young recruits, to see Jews as superior, Arabs as sub-humans, so it’s “morally” OK to slaughter them.

Yet on March 22, Haaretz published GOC Home Front Command General Yair Golan’s reply saying: “The reports were exaggerated and any deviations from the IDF’s moral standards will be dealt with.”

Then on March 23, it added IDF Chief Gabi Ashkenazi’s claim that he did not believe Israeli soldiers harmed Palestinian civilians in “cold blood.” He and Golan lied the way top commanders and government officials always do.

Yet Ashkenazi echoed Ehud Barak saying that “the IDF is the most moral army in the world” despite volumes of clear evidence to the contrary. He added that any “incidents” were “isolated,” but Haaretz stated:

“The soldiers’ testimonies run counter to the IDF’s claims throughout the operation that troops observed a high level of moral behavior. A number of officers told Haaretz….that the testimonies did not surprise them, as ‘anyone with eyes in his head knows that these things happened during the fighting in Gaza,’ and they weren’t ‘isolated’ incidents.”

Gaza Civilian Testimonies

Documented by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), they recount Operation Cast Lead’s horror – highlighted by an Israeli soldier’s message on Abu Hajaj’s bedroom wall: “Death will find you….Soon.”

PCHR noted the importance of finding “sanctuary in the comfort of one’s home” at times of trauma, but Gazans lost it for 22 days and still suffer the effects. Briefly some examples:

– the IDF occupied Mos’ab Dardona’s Jabal Al Rayes northeast Gaza home, leaving behind wall drawings of soldiers urinating on toppled mosques and “devouring Palestinians villages;”

– next door in Ibrahim Dardona’s home, instead of using the bathroom, they left behind dozens of bags of feces and crude sexual diagrams on walls;

– the defacing and other actions show a disturbing picture of racial hatred throughout Israeli society, according to PCHR’s democratic development director, Hamdi Shaqqura; PCHR says thousands of Gazans are homeless, displaced, and forced to find shelter with relatives or move back to partially destroyed homes and cope as best they can;

– in the agricultural area of Johr-ad-Dik, the IDF took over homes, displaced half the 2500 population and maliciously destroyed hundreds of olive and citrus trees;

– the IDF ordered local residents near Saleh Abu Hajaj’s home to leave; Saleh’s daughter tied a white scarf to a stick, led out a group of civilians, then along with her mother was shot dead by the military;

– in the Zeytoun district, IDF desecrated walls with messages like: “Die you all..Make war not peace..Arabs need to die,” and on a gravestone “Arabs 1948 – 2009;”

– inside Rashad Helmi Al Samouni’s home, soldiers wrote: “There will be a day when we kill all the Arabs….Bad for the Arabs is good for me….A good Arab is an Arab in the grave (and) Peace now, but between Jews and Jews, not Jews and Arabs.”

PCHR’s conclusion was that whatever war crimes investigations reveal and what, if anything, follows from them, “it will do little to comfort the thousands of civilians whose sense of safety (in their own homes was) so categorically violated,” something they no longer feel and for many never did.

PCHR published the names of 1417 Gazans killed by Israeli forces. It said 926 were civilians, 236 fighters, and 255 others civilian security forces, mostly police. Israel disputes the list claiming most targets “legitimate” despite clear evidence to the contrary, including from its own soldiers. In response, it’s preparing its own list identifying most of the slain as “combatants or legitimate targets” without a shred of evidence for proof and plenty to disprove it.

PCHR also reported that in the week ending March 18:

– IDF forces shot and injured 19 Palestinian civilians, including nine children and a US human rights activist;

– the Israeli air force bombed selected Gaza sites, forcing civilians to abandon their homes and property in the areas;

– Israeli forces conducted 39 incursions into West Bank communities, a practice occurring nearly daily; 39 Palestinian civilians were arrested, including six children for the crime of being Arab under Israeli occupation;

– additional IDF arrests occurred at West Bank checkpoints, and measures to remove East Jerusalem Palestinians continue to make room for new Jewish settlements;

– five West Bank homes were demolished leaving 49 Palestinians homeless; three other families were ordered from their homes in preparation for demolition;

– West Bank settlement construction goes on unabated as part of an ethnic cleansing process;

– settlers regularly attack Palestinians with impunity, and the Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens reported (on March 21) a 1000% rise in 2008 crime rates over 2007 on Israeli Arab citizens; its leader, Jafar Farah, called it a “moral collapse;”
– Gaza remains under siege with no progress made to end it; and

– on March 23, PCHR reported that the IDF violated medical ethics during Operation Cast Lead by preventing Palestinian and ICRC medical teams from reaching the wounded; it also said Israel attacked 34 medical facilities, including eight hospitals, killing 16 medics and wounding 25 others.

Meanwhile on March 19, Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, said: “If the (IDF) cannot (distinguish between civilians and military targets), its attack becomes unlawful and constitutes a war crime of the greatest magnitude under international law.” He added that the UN (and human rights groups like Amnesty International) has clear evidence to support this conclusion and called for a formal investigation of IDF shelling of schools, mosques, ambulances, educational facilities, and homes as well as use of illegal weapons like white phosphorus.

Whatever follows, Gaza remains under siege. Allowed in humanitarian aid falls way short of supplying 1.5 million people with the barest subsistence they need. Through March 2, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that Israeli violence continues and “authorities (still) limit the amount and range of goods allowed into Gaza….A range of essential goods, including supplies and equipment needed for rebuilding, are not being allowed into the territory.” They’re still kept out.

Basic items like medical equipment, veterinary supplies, macaroni, chickpeas, and lentils were suspended or delayed, and border crossings remain closed, except for brief periods. Like before, everything is in short supply or not available, including essential medical care, food and fuel. Earlier Amnesty International said “Gaza (was) reduced to bare survival.” Today, it’s no better under a continuing Israeli siege, illegal and brutal in the extreme, yet not denounced by world leaders to give Israel cover to maintain it.

The Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel’s Position Paper on Israeli Civilian Killings in Gaza

Adalah (meaning justice in Arabic) is a 1996-established independent, non-profit, human rights organization serving Arab Israeli citizens’ rights on issues of land, civil, political, cultural, social, religious, and economic matters among others. In February 2009, it examined the legality of Israel’s 22 day Gaza attack, specifically the killing of civilian police and bombing of government buildings and Hamas institutions.

In citing the laws of war, it identified four central principles:

– military necessity – that only those targets intended to “weaken or overcome the enemy or bring the battle to an end may be attacked;”

– distinction – that must be drawn between combatants and military targets on the one hand, and civilians and non-military objects on the other; international law prohibits attacking the latter; doing so is a war crime; non-combatant civilians are protected by law under all circumstances; also, targets must clearly be military ones and nearby civilians must be warned in advance so they may leave;

– proportionality – that prohibits disproportionate force likely to cause damage to or loss of human lives or objects; in other words, disproportionate to an intended military objective or that in any way is indiscriminate; and

– the prevention of unnecessary suffering, especially for non-combatant civilians.

Beginning December 27 and continuing for 22 days, the IDF attacked uniformed police cadets and officers killing them and other civilians. During the period of fighting, non-combatant civilian Hamas members were also struck, including from its government.

International law prohibits attacking non-combatant civilian security forces, especially police whose role is to maintain law enforcement and public order.

Further, and despite using “rocket attacks” as a pretext, Israel attacked preemptively and aggressively, not in response to Hamas-initiated hostilities, and most initial targets were civilian ones. The IDF erroneously claimed that attacking uniformed police was legitimate because their role for 22 days changed from enforcers to combatants. By this logic, all civilians are legitimate targets because under attack they may defend themselves. That, in fact, is what Israel claims.

Under international law, civilians may only be harmed accidently or inadvertently as a result of attacks on legitimate military targets but never for reasons of military necessity, even when large numbers of combatants are present.

Adalah concluded:

“Members of a civilian police should benefit from the protection which is conferred upon them as civilians under customary international law. Given that the conditions for the exception to this rule – i.e., taking a direct part in hostilities at the time of the attack – were not met, the attack ran counter to customary international humanitarian law” and was illegal.

The same holds for attacking government buildings and institutions – a total of 68 buildings plus 31 offices belonging to NGOs, completely destroyed or damaged during the conflict. According to Major Avital Leibovitz, Head of International Communications Section in the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Office: “Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target,” meaning all 1.5 million Gazans, the vast majority being non-combatant civilians, including women, children, and infants.

International law refutes Israeli policy, including under the principles of military necessity and distinction. These principles demand that military targets be differentiated from civilians and civilian objects (including government ones) to prevent deliberate attacks on them.

The only allowed exceptions relate to narrowly defined “vital and immediate military need” to defeat the enemy and end the battle, matters to which Israel didn’t comply. Also, Israel ignored the requirement “to take all feasible precautions in attack, in particular the obligation to verify that objects (and individuals) to be attacked are military objectives,” legitimate targets under international law.

Again Adalah: “Thus it is apparent that the attack on government buildings and institutions (as well as non-combatant civilians) on the basis of the claim that they formed part of the Hamas regime is illegal” under international law.

“Attacks that fail to distinguish between combatants and military targets and civilians and civilian objects constitute grave breaches of customary international law and are considered as war crimes. Attacks perpetrated against a civilian population may also be considered crimes against humanity if they are committed ‘as part of a wide or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack.’ ”

Planned months in advance, Israel’s attack was premeditated, and under Article 8(2)(a)(1) and Article 8(2)(b)(1) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) constitutes a war crime. It’s also a crime against humanity under the statute’s Article 7(1) relating to the deliberate killing of civilians or deliberately attacking non-combatant ones.

Further, attacking government buildings and institutions is also a war crime under Article 8(2)(a)(1), Article 8(2)(b)(8), and Article 8(2)(b)(13) of the Rome Statute that prohibits the destruction of property and civilian objects for non-military necessity reasons.

Even though Israel is not party to the Statute, its Articles 7 and 8, relating to crimes of war and against humanity, reflect customary international law under which Israel, its officials, and military commanders at all levels may and should be held accountable.

Under international law, responsibility relates to perpetration, planning, inciting, and/or ordering a crime to be committed as well as “vicarious” (indirect) responsibility of civilian leaders and commanders for crimes committed by their subordinates. These conditions apply in the case of the 22 day Gaza attack – planned well in advance by high-level government and military officials and launched with overwhelming force against multiple targets on December 27.

Again, the evidence is clear, unequivocal, overwhelming, and conclusive that high-level Israeli government and military officials planned and willfully committed systematic crimes of war and against humanity of such gravity that justice demands they be held to account in an international court of law – either the ICC in the Hague or a special International Criminal Tribunal for Israel (ICTI).

Doing so will warn future Israeli governments and all others that no one is exempt from the law and they, too, will be prosecuted if evidence provides justification. The rule of law is sacrosanct, especially for wanton killing that when ongoing for sustained periods satisfies the definition of genocide. Israel long ago passed that threshold. No longer can its lawlessness go unpunished.

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Israeli soldiers have confessed to wanton killing of Palestinian civilians and behaving immorally during the Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

The soldiers who fought in the Gaza war told a post-operation conference that they had killed Palestinian civilians and intentionally destroyed their property under permissive rules of engagement.

“When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up story by story… I call that murder. Each story, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself – how is this reasonable?”, an Israeli soldier said.

The testimonies includes killing of a Palestinian mother and her two children by an Israeli sharpshooter and the case of an elderly Palestinian woman who was killed as she was walking 100 meters (yards) from her home.

“We had taken over the house” and the family was released and told to go right. A mother and two children got confused and went left. “The sniper on the roof wasn’t told that this was okay and that he shouldn’t shoot”, a soldier said.

“I don’t know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don’t know her story. . . I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out” It was cold-blooded murder.”

Their testimony contradicts the Israel Defense Forces’ claims that its troops had “observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation”.

Tel Aviv launched Operation Cast Lead on the Gaza Strip on December 27. Three weeks of ensuing airstrikes and a ground incursion killed around 1,350 Palestinians and injured nearly 5,450 people – mostly civilians.

The carnage also inflicted more than $1.6 billion in damages on the Gazan economy.

HE/MMN

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Rather that reiterate what so many others have already written about the Genocide in Gaza, I would like to look at the bizarre support of this slaughter, coming mainly from the United States, without which none of this could be happening. I believe that this latest slaughter signals the final death throes of America. This failed nation no longer has an excuse to exist.

For the purpose of this article, I will look at the way the American public is responding to the information as it is presented by the media, and the moral judgment calls they are making based on this information, rather than condemning them for being altogether too stupid to figure out what is actually happening.

The American public has supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are now supporting the slaughter in Palestine.

Though comparable, the genocide presently taking place in Gaza is different than that in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least in it’s presentation. Iraq and Afghanistan are presented as wars. Though a million plus Muslims have died, compared to a few thousand Americans, there is at least the impression that these people have the capability to defend themselves. In Gaza, on the other hand, the situation cannot be construed as anything other than what it is: the wholesale mass murder of a civilian population. There is also the fact that no one is even claiming that Gaza has anything to do with the United States, as they do with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Following this, I would argue that in supporting the genocide in Gaza, Americans have crossed into a completely new realm of evil. There is no going back. It is our tax dollars that have paid for the Israeli Genocide Machine, and our consent which has allowed it to press forward, and thus the blood is on our hands.

The main reason given, by the people I have talked to, for supporting this mass slaughter, is that 9 people have been killed by Hamas rockets in the last 4 years and that Israel “had to do something about that”. Though the facts about the concentration camp conditions in Gaza are being reported by the Mainstream Media, this is tossed aside. These people are driven now not by reason, but by an unholy bloodlust, that I myself see all around me, but am yet to fully comprehend.

Much of this support comes from the “Christian Right”, who believe that if they can kill enough Muslims to start a Third World War, Jesus will come down and “rapture” them up to Heaven, where they will live forever in perfect health. Slaughter in the name of God is the highest of evils, and these people all have a special place waiting for them in the Ninth Circle. Many atheists side with Israel, as they see her as a force of Natural Selection, wiping the earth clean of a lesser evolved species. The others supporting the genocide don’t seem to have any reason at all, other than that they hate Muslims, and think the world would be better off without them. This idea that Muslims are a problem needing solved has been drilled into their heads by mass media and mass entertainment for so many years that it has become an unquestioned part of their manufactured reality. They are too weak minded to question even the most basic aspects of their indoctrination that effect their everyday lives, so we can’t expect them to be able to question the stated logic behind events taking place halfway around the world.

A once proud people have become a nation of monsters, crying out for the blood of children. The American conscience is dead. We have buried it like a cheap hooker in a shallow grave in a desert somewhere. Our fate is sealed.

This is why America deserves the hell that awaits it. She is beyond redemption. She has become the most powerful force for evil that the world has ever seen.

So yes, the economy is going to collapse. Martial law will be declared. Plagues will be released. Foreign troops will be brought in to usher us onto trains bound for containment camps. People will eat their own children. And it will be sad. I will cry. But it will be justice, long awaited. A people cannot condemn innocents to death forever without it coming back on them. God and the Universe demand a balance. Blood for blood.

Realize this when it all comes down. Realize that it is simple cause and effect. And know that if you have remained vigilant, and stood against this beast, than fate will be much kinder to you than to those who have bathed in the blood of innocents.

Stay Free
–Andre

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