------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the May 24, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- FUNDS, GUNS, SETTLERS COMES FORM U.S.: ISRAEL POUNDS ARAB HOMES IN RENEWED LAND GRAB By Richard Becker May 14 was a day of unprecedented Israeli violence against the Palestinian people in the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza. Elements of the U.S.-armed Israeli Army, Navy and Air Force launched heavy assaults on residential areas and Palestinian Authority facilities in several areas. At least seven Palestinians were killed. Many more were seriously wounded. Densely populated Gaza was rocketed from Navy gunboats, Air Force helicopters and by surface-to-surface Army missiles. The heaviest death toll was in the West Bank town of Beitunia. There the Israeli Army, in a surprise attack, massacred five Palestinian security officers inside and outside their small checkpoint post. Two of the Palestinian officers were reportedly sleeping and two others preparing food when the daytime attack took place. A sixth officer was seriously wounded. PA President Yasir Arafat denounced the Israeli attack as "assassinations." He said, "Israel must know that it will be harshly judged over this crime." U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to comment on the massacre of the Palestinians. Instead, Powell brazenly attacked Arafat, saying, "That kind of language I don't think is very helpful, especially during the time Israel is celebrating its anniversary." May 15 was the 53rd anniversary of Israel's declaration of "independence." But the Palestinians commemorate the date as Al-Nakba, or "the Catastrophe," for when they were dispossessed and driven from their homeland. Massive actions were expected to take place in the West Bank, Gaza, in Palestinian areas within the 1948 borders of the Israeli state and elsewhere. Thousands marched in the Ain al-Hilweh, Saadnayel and other Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon on May 13. Mass demonstrations in Jordan were repressed by the pro-U.S. government on May 11, with more than 50 people arrested. ISRAEL ESCALATES WAR AGAINST PALESTINIANS Israeli attacks on Palestinian areas have been escalating for weeks, especially in the days leading up to May 15. On May 7, Israeli tank fire killed a 4-month-old Palestinian girl and severely wounded several members of her family in their home in Khan Younis, Gaza. On May 11, Israeli forces bulldozed at least five homes in the Deir El-Balah refugee camp in southern Gaza, leaving one dead, two wounded and more than 30 people homeless. Altogether, Israel destroyed 60 houses and hundreds of acres of orchards, groves and farmland in Palestinian areas in the previous week. The death toll since the beginning of the second Intifada,or Uprising, now stands at more than 440 Palestinians and 77 Israelis. More than 13,000 Palestinians--over 95 percent of the injured--have been wounded. At least 1,000 of the wounded Palestinians will suffer lifelong disability, many of them paralyzed or missing eyes. A May 1 article in the Guardian of London reported: "The Nobel prize-winning U.S. group Physicians for Human Rights blames the widespread use of the M-16 automatic rifle for the high rate of crippling Palestinian injuries." The U.S.- designed weapon is standard issue for Israeli troops. Yet most U.S. media attention--and condemnation--was reserved for the killing of two Israeli settler teenagers near Tekoa settlement in the West Bank. Seth Mandel, the father of one of the boys, brought his family to Tekoa from College Park, Md., less than five years ago. According to Menachem Froman, the Tekoa rabbi, Mandel aspired to be a "spearhead" among the settlers. "They are pioneers of pioneers,"Froman said of the Mandel family. In other words, Mandel was among the most aggressive and extreme of the 200,000 settlers, many recently arrived from the United States. These "spearheads" of the settler movement, armed with automatic weapons and backed by the Israeli military, are determined to drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank and all of Palestine. RESISTANCE INTENSIFIES The Israeli government headed by notorious war criminal Ariel Sharon has vowed to keep building new settlements and expanding the existing ones. The settlements' purpose is to establish "facts on the ground"--Israeli possession of wide swaths of the West Bank and Gaza. These "facts" are intended to create a situation where, the Israeli leaders hope, it will be practicably impossible for a real Palestinian state to come into existence. It is not just the right-wing Likud governments that have pursued this end, but the Labor party regimes as well. Since 1993, when the Oslo "peace process" began, the population of the settlements has increased by 72 percent. The biggest percentage increase came under the Labor government of Ehud Barak. Sharon has rejected any limit to Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. This is despite the undeniable fact that they blatantly violate international law that prohibits annexing and settling militarily occupied lands. Sharon has begun denying that the West Bank and Gaza are occupied at all. He referred to them in recent pronouncements as "disputed areas." Two weeks ago, the government allocated an additional $375 million to settlement expansion. Contrary to the image deliberately created by U.S. officials and their official media, nearly all the fighting and dying goes on inside the tiny fraction of Palestine that is under tenuous Palestinian control. The relentless Israeli aggression is relentlessly termed "retaliation" by the corporate media. Although it faces overwhelming fire power and what appear to be insurmountable odds, the Palestinian resistance is intensifying and deepening. After all, the Palestinians have long confronted what appear to be impossible obstacles. While they lack helicopters, gunboats, tanks, missiles and machine guns, the Palestinians are fighting back heroically with everything at their disposal. Tens of thousands reportedly marched militantly through Ramallah at the funeral of the five Palestinian security officers. What the Palestinian people need in this critical hour is intensified international solidarity. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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