Aug. 8, 2014 (TSR) – With the 72-hour humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza now ended, and apartheid Israel once more raining down U.S.-provided bombs on an oppressed people with no army, navy or air force that has already seen near 2,000 people, including hundreds of children, die, it might be worthwhile to look beyond Israel’s lies and see reality.
First, Israel is not bombing Gaza back to the Dark Ages to protect itself and its citizens. This is patently absurd. The Israeli military, financed by the U.S., is considered the fourth most powerful in the world. People in Gaza are able to cobble together rockets from what few items Israel allows to be imported, and what can be smuggled in. Palestine presents no threat to the existence of Israel.
The idea that Israel is in great danger from Palestine, because Hamas’s charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and Palestine does not recognize Israel, would be laughable if the consequences for Palestine were not so dire. Israel does not recognized Palestine’s right to exist. If it did, it wouldn’t constantly steal Palestinian land in the West Bank, or blockade Gaza, and continually expand the ‘green line’, reducing the already-limited land the overcrowded Palestinians in Gaza have to live on.
Second, this is all business as usual for Israel. Israeli officials have stated that, every couple of years, they have to ‘mow the lawn’ in Gaza, so an occasional, ineffective rocket fired into Israel is sufficient to bring a response of indiscriminate carpet-bombing.
Third, the lie that the killing of three settlers living illegally in the West Bank was done by Hamas has been disproved. That may have been given as one of the reasons for the current, brutal attack on Gaza, but it has no basis in reality.
Fourth, the ultimate goal of the current genocide against the Palestinians, the unraveling of the new unity government that combined Fatah and Hamas, does not seem to be happening. The weak, spineless, corrupt Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has not said anything about revoking the agreement that reunited the rival factions.
Fifth, Israel has now dropped all pretense, and is publically endorsing genocide. Articles in mainstream Israeli publications and websites discuss this openly, justifying genocide, ‘in this case’.
Future generations will look back at this time as our generation looks at photos of police and National Guardsmen spraying African-Americans in the United States’ south with high-powered hoses. As we cannot comprehend how whites in the U.S. south saw ‘blacks’, negroes as they were then called, at least in polite company, as somehow inferior, our children and grandchildren will question why Israeli’s saw Palestinians as inferior. Further, they will ask why we allowed it. Why, they will wonder, did anyone vote for a candidate that supplied Israel with billions of dollars to kill Palestinians? Why did the killing of an Israeli child spark international outrage, while the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians by Israeli bombs was somehow blamed on the Palestinians?
Additional, they will ask why any of us supported an administration that vetoed all criticism of Israeli war crimes. They will ask how it was ever possible for anyone to justify ‘defense’ against an occupied nation, a concept that, in theory and jurisprudence, makes no sense.
Israelis have forgotten significant events from their own recent history. They no longer remember what it was like to be considered second-class citizens in society, where they were forbidden from using the same roads as other people, where they were arrested and killed with impunity. Today, the occupied West Bank has ‘Israeli only’ roads, and Palestinians in the West Bank – men, women and children – are arbitrarily arrested, held without charge for months, and killed with impunity. Israelis forget that their nation was born on the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians, driven from their homes with no redress or compensation, and certainly no voice in the decision to remove them. They forget that at least 10,000 Palestinians were killed to make room for them.
They also seem to forget that, while they live in a prosperous, invented nation, and Palestinians live in poverty, they rely heavily on U.S. dollars to achieve and maintain that prosperity. One can only surmise that if Palestine were given $3 billion annually by the U.S., as Israeli is, then Palestine too would be a prosperous nation, a world power with glittering cities, world-class universities and all the advantages and benefits that U.S. largesse to Israel brings.
The power of the Israel lobbies in the U.S. can only be described as amazing. As the U.S. administration decries, however timidly, the Israeli bombing of United Nations schools that are being utilized as refugee centers for Palestinians driven from their homes by the current bombing, the U.S. actually sends more weapons for Israel to bomb more U.N. schools. While Detroit, Michigan is scrambling to cobble together $1 billion to survive for the current year, it receives no federal funding, while Israel gets three times that amount. Apparently, Detroit needs a well-funded lobby so it can purchase Representatives and Senators, the way the Israeli lobby does.
How the current massacre of the Palestinians will end is anybody’s guess. Palestine is only asking for an end to the blockade of Gaza, or at least a blockade controlled by an entity other than Israel, in exchange for a permanent cease-fire. This is entirely reasonable. Israel, however, has no desire to surrender any of its complete control over Palestinian life in Gaza, all part of its intended and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
The United States could, of course, force Israel to comply. All it need do is withhold the $3 billion dollars that Israel relies on to supply its murderous military, and support its IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) terrorists. If the U.S. were to turn off the money tap, the world would see how quickly the blockade of Gaza, and the occupation of the West Bank, would end.
But as mentioned above, the U.S. government is owned by Israeli lobbies, so such a thing will not happen. Monies will continue to flow to the election campaigns of U.S. officials whose only wish is to keep easy, high-paying, prestigious jobs. The fact that that money is soaked in the blood of Palestinian children is not in the least a concern; Palestine is without a powerful lobby in the U.S., so the human rights of the Palestinians, in addition to international law and basic human decency, cannot be considered.
Yet eventually, governments must heed the will of the people. With social media bringing the carnage into homes the way the mainstream media refuses to, there is hope for the Palestinians. And relief cannot come soon enough.
