Dead women, dead children, dead babies. Limbs missing, brains missing, guts spilled out on the floor. It’s impossible to put a positive spin on those kinds of images, unless you’re Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Two days ago, Bibi sought to explain why, in the space of a few hours, Israeli soldiers, under his orders, massacred 63 people, including 17 children, in the Shuja’iya neighborhood to the east of Gaza City. He said:

“We have to protect ourselves. We try to target the rocketeers, we do. And all civilian casualties are not intended by us but actually intended by Hamas who want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because somebody said they use telegenically dead Palestinians for the cause. They want the more dead the better.”

Think about that for a moment, and while you do so, consider this image of a Palestinian girl in her father’s arms. Half of her head was blown off by Netanyahu’s soldiers in the Shuja’iya neighborhood two days ago.

What Netanyahu is saying is “the Palestinians are MAKING us kill them”. Many parallels could be drawn with this statement. The rapist who accuses his victim of ‘making him do it’ or ‘asking for it’; the psychologically deranged murderer who claims that he killed prostitutes ‘to save them’. When it raises its ugly head in civil society, this kind of twisted psychopathic thinking provokes revulsion and is universally condemned, yet when Netanyahu employs it in relation to the Israeli attack on Gaza, it’s accepted as a reasonable argument that absolves him and his shock troops of the mass murder of civilians.

In spewing such pathological musings on the value of Palestinians life, Netanyahu is merely echoing the equally psychopathic thoughts of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who in the 1960s attempted to justify Israeli murder of Palestinian children by saying essentially the same thing:

“When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us.” – Golda Meir

Staged Palestinian Terror and Rocket Attacks?

Israel’s latest terror attack on Gaza was supposedly provoked by the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers last month. The Israeli government blamed Hamas, but provided no evidence to back up their allegation. By the modern legal standards of any civilized society, the murder of the Israeli teenagers remains an unsolved crime. But Israel isn’t a modern civilized society, it is an apartheid society, and more primitive standards of law and justice apply there.

The murder of the three Israeli teens was used to launch an attack on Gaza, which Hamas allegedly responded to by firing ‘rockets’ into Israel. This, in turn, was used by Israel to expand its bombing and murder campaign in Gaza, including a ground invasion that is still ongoing and has resulted in the massacre of over 600 Palestinian civilians and the wounding of thousands.

The Israeli military has targeted hospitals, mosques and a sports stadium, because the Palestinians ‘made them do it’. There is a serious problem however with Israeli justification for the attack on Gaza.

As I already noted, there is NO evidence that Hamas was to blame. In fact, the Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki suggested that Israel itself may have staged the kidnapping or that it was carried out by “Jewish criminals”. I share his opinion, which is based in common sense. Israel needed a justification to attack Gaza and, as on so many occasions in the past, a justification in the form of an apparent attack on Israelis landed in their lap.

I have already pointed out how the Israeli govt. knew within 24 hrs that the teens were dead, yet they kept up the charade of searching for them for almost 3 weeks and placed a gag order on the press. One week after the kidnapping, leading Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf effectively broke the gag order by stating in a Facebook post that the Israeli government’s goal was to “preserve the local and international legitimacy” for a military policy aimed at Hamas.

Israel had a plan to attack Gaza, it needed justification, so it manufactured it, and then covered up the fact that it did so. It is therefore common sense to conclude that the most likely culprit in the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli boys is someone acting on behalf of the state of Israel itself, because they had both the strongest motive and the best opportunity and have been caught manipulating information in order to justify the Gaza murder spree.

Manipulating information is what Israel does. It’s what Israel HAS to do to justify to the world its existence on, and continued theft of, Palestinian land.

Imagine that someone in your neighborhood falsely claimed ownership of another neighbor’s house, forcibly took physical possession of it, kicked the original residents out into a tent in the street and proceeded to imprison the original residents in said tent. How do you imagine such a person would be able to maintain and justify their illegal occupation if not by the use of force against any attempts to take back what was stolen and the use of regular lies and manipulation of anyone else who dared to try and point out the obvious injustice of the situation? If such a situation persisted long enough, you can imagine that the illegal occupier would be forced to develop all sorts of underhanded strategies and ploys to maintain his ‘right’ to someone else’s property. One example of a useful strategy in this context would be to create the illusion that you are being attacked in order to level the ‘moral’ playing field between you and your victim.

Back in 2008, just after Israel launched ‘Operation Cast Lead’ that resulted in the mass murder of almost 1,500 Palestinian civilians, Robert Siegel, host of NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ interviewed Ahmed Yusuf, the political adviser to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Yusuf complained to Siegel that there was no point in engaging in a ceasefire with Israel because Israel usually reneged on the promises it makes to open border crossings into Gaza:

Mr. YUSUF: You know, actually, we have said we are willing to extend the cease-fire. But the terms that we have agreed upon in Cairo, the Israelis never fulfilled their promises. They’re supposed to have these crossings open for humanitarian aid. Unfortunately, 50 percent of the time, these crossing never opened, and the number of the trucks that’s supposed to come daily to Gaza – there is no cement, no asphalt, no plastic, or everything. Many items of medical supplies not allowed to cross to Gaza.

SIEGEL: But, wasn’t the response of firing rockets into Israel… wasn’t that guaranteed to bring on this retaliation by the Israelis?

Mr. YUSUF: No. No. This has nothing to do with firing rockets because there is no rockets fired. There are collaborators, sometimes they fire based on the Israeli asking them maybe to fire some of these home-made projectiles. They know that Hamas did their best to protect the border and not to let anybody firing rockets.

SIEGEL: But you’re saying that when rockets have been fired out of Gaza, you’re saying that those are being fired by Israeli collaborators whom the Israelis are arranging for them to do that…

Mr. YUSUF: Actually, we all – let me try me to check if there is anybody actually – we check with those political and militant group who are really showing their commitment. And when we check, well, they – all them denied any of them been firing rockets. So, who been firing these rockets? We don’t have an explanation except from those Israeli collaborators.

This was not the first time that a Palestinian politician claimed that alleged attacks on Israelis were in fact the work of Israeli agents. On manyoccasions, the Palestinian leadership has pointed the finger at Israel as the real ‘rocketeer’. Once in a while, the Israeli military at least admitsthat rockets were not fired by Hamas. At other times, it admits that it deliberately lied about Palestinian rocket attacks to justify ‘reprisal’ missile strikes. The first recorded claim of Israeli manufacturing of Palestinian terrorism came from the venerable Yasser Arafat in 1995 when heclaimed that a suicide bombing attributed to Palestinians was the work of Israelis.

“Soon after the Beit Lid massacre, in which 21 Israeli soldiers were killed by two Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, Palestinian Authority chief Yasser Arafat told a group of visiting dignitaries that right-wing Israelis had collaborated with the killers. Otherwise, he said, the killers could not have passed through several army check posts without being stopped.”

In a 2001 interview with several leading Italian publications, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat went into some detail regarding the genesis and operation of Hamas. To Corriere della Sera on Dec. 11, he said:

“We are doing everything possible to stop the violence. But Hamas is a creature of Israel which, at the time of Prime Minister [Yitzhak] Shamir [the late 1980s, when Hamas arose], gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques. Even [former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin ended up admitting it, when I charged him with it, in the presence of [Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak.”

In an interview with L’Espresso on Dec. 19, Arafat said:

“Hamas was constituted with the support of Israel. The aim was to create an organization antagonistic to the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]. They [Hamas] received financing and training from Israel. They have continued to benefit from permits and authorizations, while we have been limited, even [for permits] to build a tomato factory. Rabin himself defined it as a fatal error. Some collaborationists of Israel are involved in these [terrorist] attacks. We have the proof, and we are placing it at the disposal of the Italian government.”

Recently, an Israeli Defense Prize winner and aerospace engineering expert Dr. Moti Shefer, called into question the reality of Israel’s lauded ‘Iron Dome’ missile defense system that supposedly “shoots down Hamas rockets“:

“There is no missile in the world today able to intercept missiles or rockets. Iron Dome is a sound and light show that is intercepting only Israeli public opinion, and itself, of course. Actually, all the explosions you see in the sky are self explosions. No Iron Dome missile has ever collided with a single rocket. […] The rockets announced as intercepted by Iron Dome either never reach the ground, or are virtual rockets invented and destroyed on the Iron Dom control computer. To this day, no one has ever seen an intercepted rocket fall to the ground.”

“What lands here is what’s launched. The parts we see on the ground are from Iron Dome itself. We’re shooting at ourselves, mainly virtually.

According to Dr. Shefer, Iron Dome is a part of a broad conspiracy, in which two interested parties afraid of peace are participating: the defense industries and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

The Problem With Israel

The problem with Israel isn’t merely that it is an Apartheid state where Palestinians (both in Israel and in the occupied territories) are treated as second class citizens, at best; there have been (and are) many nations around the world that brutally treat a section of their populations. The real problem with Israel is the image it presents of itself as a little slice of the ‘West’ in the Middle East surrounded by hoards of atavistic Arabs baying for Jewish blood and against whom Israel is fighting, on behalf of the people of Western nations, in the supposed ‘clash of civilizations’.

The problem is not only that this image is entirely false, but in manipulating Western citizens into accepting this false image as true, the state of Israel makes Western citizens accomplices in the slaughter of innocent civilians, children included. This is the real problem of Israel for the people of the world and in particular the people of Western nations who are very much the primary target of this attempt to, essentially, subvert their souls, or at least their humanity (or what is left of it).

Israel’s ongoing attack on the people of Gaza represents a choice (albeit a weighted one) for the people of this planet. A gun is being held (figuratively and literally) to the head of a small child, and the question being put to the ‘civilized’ West is:

‘Is there ANY situation under which it is appropriate to pull the trigger?’

Too many people are allowing themselves to be manipulated by the despicable lies and manipulations of psychopaths in positions of power to answer ‘yes’. In doing so, they are pushing us all, as a global society, closer to the brink (and perhaps over the edge) of complete moral bankruptcy. The history of human civilizations is littered with, not only the stories, but the actual ruins of civilizations that provoked devastating catastrophes because they lost their connection to their own humanity.

I started this essay with a truly psychopathic statement from Netanyahu that amounted to accusing the 600 slaughtered Palestinians of making Israel slaughter them (‘look what you made me do!’) I’ll finish with a slightly less egregious, but equally schizophrenic, statement made by US Sec. of State John Kerry who, in referring to the situation in Gaza, appeared to be experiencing the obvious problem of trying to project a humanitarian face to the world while ensuring that that same face remained firmly planted between the butt cheeks of the murderous Israeli regime.

“I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of Israel’s appropriate and legitimate effort to defend itself.”