Britain ready to back Palestinian statehood at UN
Mahmoud Abbas pledge not to pursue Israel for war crimes and
resumption of peace talks are UK conditions
Ian Black, Middle East editor
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 November 2012
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/27/uk-ready-to-back-palestine-statehood>
Israeli Assault on Gaza is Murder, Not "Defense"
by Mairead Maguire
Published on Tuesday, November 27, 2012 by Common Dreams
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/27-10
--0--
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/israeli-terror-the-final-solution-to-the-palestine-question/5313258>
Israeli Terror: The "Final Solution" to the Palestine Question
By Prof. James Petras
Global Research, November 28, 2012
Introduction
For the past forty-five years the state of Israel has been
dispossessing millions of Palestinians living in the Occupied
Territories, confiscating their lands, destroying homes, bulldozing
orchards and setting-up 'Jews-only' colonial settlements serviced by
highways, electrical systems and water works for the exclusive use of
the settlers and occupying soldiers. The process of Israeli
territorial expansion throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem has
greatly accelerated in recent years, converting Palestinian-held
territory into non-viable isolated enclaves - like South Africa's
Bantustans - surrounded by the Israeli soldiers who protect violent
settler-vigilantes as they assault and harass Palestinian farmers at
work in their fields, beat Arab children on their way to school, pelt
Palestinian housewives as they hang their laundry and then invade and
defecate in Palestinian mosques and churches.
The Rage and Rape of Gaza and its Apologists
Israel's strategic goal is to impose 'Greater Israel' on the region:
to take over all of historical Palestine, expell the entire
non-Jewish population and subsidize 'Jews-only' settlements (for
settler-immigrants, often from the US and former USSR). While
bulldozers and tanks have dispossessed Palestinians in the West Bank
for decades, the launching of thousands of missiles and bombs have
become the 'weapons of choice' for uprooting and eliminating the
Palestinians in Gaza. In just eight days, Israel's latest blitzkrieg
resulted in the killing of 168 Palestinians (42 children and 100
civilians), the wounding of 1,235, the destruction of over 1,350
buildings and the further traumatizing of over 1.7 million children,
women and men fenced in the world's largest concentration camp.
According to the Israeli Defense Minister, the Jewish State dropped
"a thousand times more bombs onto Gaza" than the Palestinians fired
back into Israel.
The current Israeli offensive began with the gruesome assassination
of a prominent Hamas leader, Ahmed Jabari, and immediately escalated
into an assault on the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. Secure
in the knowledge that the Palestinians had no capacity to retaliate
with similar weaponry, the Israeli High Command ordered the
systematic destruction of civilian life, workplaces and densely
populated neighborhoods. Over 75% of the casualties have been
non-combatants; almost half are children, women and elders.
The Israeli propaganda machine and its 'Fifth Column' in the US
fabricated and repeated the Big Lie: that the Jewish state was
'defending itself' Right with only six (mostly military) deaths and
280 wounded (the majority non-threatening) versus the nearly 200
Palestinians, mostly civilians, slaughtered. The US Zionist power
configuration (ZPC), embedded in the policy centers of the US
Executive, the Congress and both political parties, parroted this
line. All the major US TV networks and print media reproduced
verbatim Israeli Foreign Office press handouts about Israel 's
'defensive' genocide while entire Palestinian families were being
buried under the rubble of their bombed apartments.
Death and destruction, planned and executed with the unanimous
support of all the major Israeli political parties and leaders,
enthralled the mass of its Jewish citizens: Indeed, over 80% of
Israeli Jews supported the terror blitz against Gaza. As the Russian
media outlet (RT) reported: "A new wave of hatred towards
Palestinians is sweeping through Israel from public figures to the
man (person) in the street". The Israeli Interior Minister declared
that "Gaza should be bombed into the Middle Ages". Israeli
demonstrators in Tel Aviv shouted; "they (the Palestinians) don't
deserve to live, they must die", "may your children die" and "now we
must go back there (to Gaza) and kick out all Arabs". The prominent
Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, the son of a former chief rabbi, made a
speech in the Cave of the Patriarchs in occupied Hebron where he
blessed the Israeli soldiers and urged them "to slaughter their
enemy".
Even more to the point, Israel Katz, Israel 's Transport Minister,
demanded "Gaza be bombed so hard the population will have to flee
into Egypt (the Sinai desert)". Avi Dichter, the Minister of Home
Front Defense, incited the Israeli military to "re-format" Gaza -
that is to erase its population with bombs.
Almost half of Israeli Jews considered Netanyahu's terror bombing of
Gaza insufficient: According to the independent Israeli Maagar Mohot
poll, half of Israelis opposed the cease fire and demanded the bloody
assault against the Palestinian population of Gaza continue. The
same poll reported that almost a third of Israeli Jews thought their
government should have sent ground forces into Gaza, an invasion
which would have led to tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties
and total destruction of their vital infrastructural life-lines.
Netanyahu and his allies in power now confront a new, totalitarian
mass opposition that openly embraces a genocidal 'Final Solution' to
the Palestinian problem.
Genocide at the Service of Greater Israel
The parallels between the pronouncements and actions of Nazi Germany
and Zionist Israel are overwhelming. The bloodlust in Israel goes
far beyond psychopathic raving of a few deranged rabbis and marginal
politicians: it extends from the top Cabinet members to the average
citizen.
In Israel, almost an entire people - over 80% of Jews - support, with
varying degrees of intensity, the terror bombing and slaughter of
the people of Gaza. Setting aside the profound sociopathic disorders
of the raging and racist multitude in Israel, what is politically
more significant are the totalitarian rants of leading Israeli public
figures, published as editorials, in such newspapers as the
respectable Jerusalem Post: "We need to flatten all of Gaza. There
should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles,
nothing," writes Gilad Sharon and the statements of prominent Knesset
members, like Michael Ben-Ari, "There are no innocents in Gaza mow
them (all) down". These outbursts reveal Israel's strategic goal:
Genocide at the service of Greater Israel - the bloody purge of 5
million Palestinians, the creation of a 100 percent 'pure' Jewish
State. Overseas (mostly US) Zionist-Jewish media moguls, Ivy League
university academics, billionaires, US Congress people and government
officials finance, underwrite, propagandize for and promote with
single-minded perseverance the defense of Israel's most heinous war
crimes, its violations of international law and its ongoing crimes
against humanity.
During the entire period of the recent Israeli blitzkrieg, Israel's
Fifth column, the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish
Organizations, the New York Times and the rest of the major US press
rose to the dirty task of giving unconditional support for Israel's
war crimes. Vocal support from the US White House and by extension
the leaders of the European Union echoed Netanyahu's lies. In order
to grasp the media whitewash of these ongoing crimes against humanity
one could compare the US press reports on Israel's bombing of Gaza to
those which would have appeared in the leading fascist newspapers at
the time of Hitler's 'defensive' attacks on Poland and Belgium and
the bombing blitz of civilians in London.
The true purpose of Israel's terror bombing raids and assassinations
in Gaza and the cutting up of the West Bank is to make these
territories uninhabitable for the Palestinians. The daily humiliation
and destruction of the basic conditions for normal life are designed
to force young, educated, ambitious Palestinians to abandon their
land, homes and families for less grotesquely barbaric sites, where
they might achieve a normal civilized existence, free from
foul-mouthed Jewish settlers, unending military incursions, Israeli
soldiers pistol-whipping their fathers or breaking the legs and arms
of stone-throwing Arab schoolkids.
The Logic of Public Flogging
This obscene Israeli-Jewish behavior is intentionally open and
flagrant: Flaunting Jewish military superiority over the defenseless
Arab is a vital part of the psychological war reinforcing the idea of
Arab inferiority and of Palestinians as aliens in their own country.
Israel's underlying slogan "Arab Raus!" (Arabs Get Out!) echoes the
Nazi screed, "Juden Rauss" (Jews Get Out!). The message is clear:
"If you are not a Jew then you do not exist! Your very alien
presence is an abomination in the eyes of the Zionist God. So if you
won't leave politely we will hasten your departure with a few
thousand bombs, missiles and a rain of white phosphorous." That is
the deeper meaning of Israel's rape of Gaza.
The Impact of Israel's Genocide on US Society
Leading journalists in the politically most influential US
newspapers, academics from the most prestigious universities and
'experts' from the leading research institutes have systematically
defended each and every Israeli war-crime, including the rape of
Gaza, the demolition of Palestinian civil society and the cruel
blockade of 1.7 million Palestinians in the biggest 'open-air
concentration' camp in the world.
As usual, the Uber-Zionist Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz and
his acolytes provide a legal gloss on the savage bombing of essential
public services and private communication and media centers. Not to
be outdone by the loudmouths in Harvard Square, Yale and Princeton
professors, with tribal loyalties to the Jewish state, describe the
Israeli killing machine as a righteous citizen army defending its
eternally victimized people. "Experts" at the Brookings Institute,
Hudson Institute and dozens of other 'research' (read propaganda)
centers provide 'scientific' explanations regarding Israel's unique
right to dispossess millions of Palestinians. The experts'
justifications of Israeli war crimes permeate the mass media,
penetrate the homes of millions of Americans and fill the heads of
elected officials. Meanwhile they 'convince' and/or browbeat
thousands of non-tribal school teachers and educators into complicity
or silence, thus perverting and hollowing out what residual humane
and democratic values remain embedded in the citizenry. It is
precisely the much-vaunted 'high achievements' of so many
Israel-Firsters that has led to their rise to the most influential
positions in US society and state and makes their support of terror
bombings, ethnic cleansing and genocide so deeply destructive to the
US political culture. In spite of this, some of the same
expert-academic apologists for Israel's terror against the Arab
civilians are the most vociferous defenders of human rights
everywhere else in the world - including the US (piously condemning
US war crimes whenever and wherever they are not explicitly aligned
with the interest of the Jewish State). These 'experts' have
perverted the concept of universal human rights in the minds of the
US public.
As the US mass audience and political class watches the smoke, debris
and wreckage of Gaza - and even catch glimpses of a child's
dismembered small body - they are told by the tribal loyalists that
this destruction is morally justified, that the target is really
"Hamas" - even over the piercing cries of Palestinian mothers for
their slaughtered children. US citizens are told that Israel's
aggressive aerial bombing and mass shelling from warships off-shore
is really a "defensive" maneuver against a "terrorist" regime - one
which just happens to lack a single airplane, warship, tank or
missile capable of hitting a single major Israeli military or
civilian installation.
The Zionist Academic -Journalist Propaganda Complex
The Israeli academic-journalist propaganda complex in the US has
pushed the entire US political narrative even further to the fascist
right. It has perverted our political vocabulary, equating mass
slaughter with national defense; equating the 'anxiety' of Israeli
Jewish civilians with the homeless, jobless and traumatized widows
and children emerging from their devastated densely-populated urban
neighborhoods.
The tribal scholars and mass media pundits excel in transforming
executioners into victims and victims into executioners. The
Liberal-Zionists, peace-time critics of Israel, remove their peace
buttons and pick up scripts defending 'just wars', as soon as Israel
starts bombing another Arab population or adversary. For the liberal
(human-rights-spouting) Zionists, bombing civilians is always illegal
- except when it is Israel launching the missiles. Propaganda
zealots for Israel saturate the media attacking any human rights
activist critical of Israel with charges of "anti-Semitism". They
smear, threaten and blackmail each and every dissenting voice daring
to oppose their narrative.
The entire mass media and the most prestigious universities censor
any mention of Israeli crimes against humanity. As bombs rained on
Gaza not one single Congressional voice denounced the odious American
President Obama when he defended Israel's eight-day "Guernica"
against a defenseless population. Unlike the citizens in Nazi
Germany, we, in the US and Western Europe, cannot claim that we did
not know about Israeli war crimes as they were happening. On the
other hand, how can the mass of semi-literate TV viewers in the US
really 'know' what is going on when Israel-Firsters have so
thoroughly 'framed the context' - claiming it's all defensive, that
only Hamas "terrorists" are targeted despite the images of children
being frantically pulled from the wreckage of their homes. However,
the educated classes in the US do know about Israel's tradition and
practice of mass civilian bombings; they do remember Lebanon 2006 as
well as Gaza 2008-2009 (and countless Israeli massacres in the late
20th century). At the same time, they also "remember" the vicious
reprisals and vitriolic attacks the Zionist ideological attack-dogs
launched against the critics. Having 'learned their lessons' from
the Zionist 'thought-cops' they conveniently remember to forget and
walk away from the whole 'Middle East mess'. Worse still, they
sanctimoniously blame the Palestinians for their efforts to retaliate
in the face of Israel's blatant murders of their most prestigious
leaders as well as their stubborn refusal to surrender.
There are a few Left-Zionists who actually praise the 'resilience' of
the Palestinians and their refusal to surrender to the dictates of
Israel and its occupying army. They note how the Gazans 'celebrate'
their 'victory' amidst the rubble after having secured a very tenuous
cease fire. Any reasonable observer could reply to this sentimental
nonsense: Is survival in an open air concentration camp for another
day, the daily prospect of Israeli drone flights overhead and a
brutal land and sea blockade any "victory"? There is no cause for
celebration: Transforming Israeli war crimes into Palestinian
virtues is a cheap liberal Zionist sideshow. An eight-day Israeli
assault, which had successfully destroyed every major and minor
public office responsible for providing the people of Gaza with
essential services, and the savaging of the water and sewage system,
power and electrical grids and media offices (not to mention
perishable food and medicine) is nothing to celebrate. In fact the
underlying strategic goal of the Jewish state - to make the remains
of historical Palestine uninhabitable (a modern 'howling wilderness')
for its people - has been advanced by leaps and bounds. Surviving
another day in order to bury loved ones and scrounging among the
burnt ruins of a home for a birth certificate or photograph is hardly
the noble "Hamas victory" proclaimed by Norman Finkelstein and Uri
Avneri.
Why NATO - Washington Support Israel 's Genocidal War
Unlike in the past, where some international organizations and
European states raised tepid objections to Israel's military assaults
against Palestine or Lebanon, this time around nothing took place.
The White House immediately embraced Israel's terror bombing as did
the governments of Western Europe. Meanwhile, Turkey, the Gulf
States, the Arab League and the pan-Islamic organizations did nothing
concrete, offering no arms, no boycotts, no oil embargos - only
shallow symbolic gestures.
Netanyahu timed his assault to take advantage of the western imperial
offensive against independent countries and leaders who had
historically supported the Palestinian liberation struggle for
decades. Since NATO states had invaded and bombed the sovereign
nation of Libya back into the Stone Age, Netanyahu's Cabinet
Ministers must have reasoned, "Why can't we send the Gazans back to
the Middle Ages with our bombs"? When NATO and the Gulf States now
arm, finance and support a prolonged terrorist-led assault against
the secular regime, people and infrastructure of Syria, Netanyahu
reasons, "Why don't we do the same to the Palestinians"?
With the EU, Washington and the Gulf States engaged in covert and
overt wars against all of Palestine's staunchest allies (Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iran and the Sudan) and against the
people's movements in Yemen, Bahrain and Pakistan, Netanyahu's plan
to ethnically purge Palestine has advanced with total impunity -
indeed with overt Western approval and without concern for any
international 'humanitarian' sanctions or even protest.
Netanyahu's murderous war on Gaza , with full US complicity, has
unmasked the collaborationist-nature of Egypt's Islamist President
Morsi. Morsi, together with US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton,
secured a cease fire only after Netanyahu had accomplished his
immediate goal of destroying the public institutions of civil society
and undermining the vital public functions of the Hamas government.
Against the protests of the blood-thirsty Israeli public, who wanted
their bombers and army to 'finish the job', Israeli Prime Minister
Netanyahu negotiated and signed an agreement overseen by Morsi on a
cease fire where Israel will pay no indemnity to the devastated
civilians of Gaza while confirming the Mubarak-era Israeli- Egyptian
treaty and starvation blockade of Gaza. Right after the
'cease-fire', President Morsi assumed dictatorial powers over the
Egyptian state. With the shameful terms of the cease fire and
Morsi's assumption of dictatorial powers the 'Arab Spring' has come
to a tragic end.
Conclusion
The people of the Middle East, especially the Palestinians, are in
their worst position ever. Palestinians have lost the political,
financial and military support of the independent, secular regimes of
Libya, Syria and Iraq. And Iran, the principle source of arms for
the Palestinians, faces a US Naval armada off its coast. Israel is
accelerating its naked land grabs in the West Bank. The PLO
continues to be Israel's frontline 'cop on the block' - jailing
resistance fighters and dissidents by the hundreds. Israel's Fifth
Column in the US ensures unconditional support for Israel's ethnic
cleansing of its non-Jewish population. Above all, as the terror
bombing of Gaza reveals, Israel, as a state and as a people, is free
to bomb and destroy Gaza in order to force a mass exodus of the
Palestinians so that they may establish a 'pure' and unadulterated
Jewish state on historical Palestine.
Epilogue
Less than 24 hours after the so-called "cease fire" Israeli soldiers
murdered an unarmed Palestinian protestor and wounded dozens with
live ammunition on the Gazan side of the border. Israel storm
troopers raided West Bank homes and arrested 55 Palestinians accused
of supporting Hamas. Scores more Palestinians in the Beit Lahia area
of the West Bank were summarily arrested and jailed as suspected
Hamas members. Jewish vigilante settlers near occupied Hebron
uprooted 400 olive trees belonging to Palestinian farmers from the
village of Hawara. As the missile murderers take their break, the
bulldozers rev up their engines: Israel's leaders pursue their
strategic objective of a "pure" Jewish state with their inexorable
and destructive juggernaut. The 'cease fire' merely changed the
methods and the terrain of dispossession for the time being.
Israel's assault on Gaza has totally demolished its vibrant recovery
and growth since the previous war of destruction. In 2011 the
economy of Gaza grew by 20%; after the recent Israeli attack who
would dare consider Gaza as a place to live and invest?
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