Israeli Strategy: The Relentless Destruction Of Gaza

 

The destruction of Gaza
PHOTO/MAHMUD HAMSMAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty Images

 

Israeli Strategy: The Relentless Destruction Of Gaza

Path to Gaza

Lorena Martin

“This is Eretz Yisrael. This land is your sacred right. Sacred Revenge is our duty.”

Why is everybody so afraid of taking a stance when it comes to Palestine? Have we become so unprincipled, so dehumanized by our fears that it is no longer possible to feel outrage seeing the massacre taking place in Gaza? What will it take for people to realize that the corrupt politicians our dismissal for social justice has nurtured have gone too far? Will a blackout be necessary for us to disconnect from facebook to take a much needed, sobering look at the world around us, and the sorry state it has fallen into because we’re so busy gazing at a small screen, we have forgotten to look at the big picture?

Two thousand Palestinians died in Gaza in one month, the majority of them children, but instead of raising a collective outcry —indeed, instead of saying Enough, what we do is bury our conscience deeper in the vacuous void of social media or altogether obliterate our sense of outrage by clicking “Like” on what should be appalling.

Thanks to our collective disattention, on 1st August 2014, U.S. Congress approved 225 million dollars in emergency funding for Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system —this on top of the 3 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money that Israel gets yearly in support, and the 12-17 billion dollars it gets to arm itself. As far as I know, very few people have asked, To defend itself from what?

That same day, a piece titled “When Genocide is Permissible” was published in The Times of Israel. In it, Yochanan Gordon writes about the desire of Israel’s military to “achieve its goal of sustaining quiet.” Which desire, he proposes, warrants the mass annihilation of an ethnic group because “Hamas has stated forthrightly that it idealizes death as much as Israel celebrates life,” then asks, “What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely?”

He also criticizes CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera for only focusing on the “majority of innocent civilians who have lost their lives … Anyone who lives with rocket launchers installed or terror tunnels burrowed in or around the vicinity of their home cannot be considered an innocent civilian,” then concludes: “If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?”

This way of thinking is not isolated nor is it new. On 9 April 1948, still several weeks before the end of the British Mandate over Palestine, Irgun commandos led by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, attacked Deir Yassin, a village that had approximately 750 Palestinian residents. The village was part of the territories assigned to the Palestinians in the partition plan drafted by the United Nations, but this was of no consequence to Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir, a terrorist who, after extensive lobbying, finally found himself elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1983.

Deir Yassin had a peaceful reputation and was even said by a Jewish newspaper to have driven out Arab militants to support the Jewish refugees arriving to Palestine after the Second War. To its misfortune, Deir Yassin was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, therefore a plan kept secret for years afterwards called for the village to be destroyed and the residents evacuated to make way for an airfield where the airplanes smuggling arms to Israel could land.

Except instead of resettling the villagers, all 750 of them were massacred.

When nobody lifted a finger for the victims, other massacres followed, and thousands of Palestinians were thrown from their homes by Israeli forces, creating an unsolved refugee problem. Whenever the U.N. sent a mediator to try to sort out a problem that was going from bad to worse, the mediators were killed. Nothing but full ownership of the land they abandoned two thousand years before and now had come back to claim, would satisfy the Zionists, who didn’t think twice about murdering other Jews if that helped them achieve their goals faster.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa (the Irgun Zvai Leumi) to train Polish-Jews in terrorist practices, ordered a cell of this terror organization to start blowing up the boats filled to the brim with the youngsters destined to populate Israel when Churchill’s threats about sinking the boats bringing Jews to Haifa turned out to be all bark but no bite. The Zionists did this to win world sympathy, so that when they returned to reclaim the land they had left two millennia before, they encountered no opposition.

Now, what if the Italians got it into their heads to reclaim Great Britain just because they had lived and thrived there during the Roman Empire? How would the English react to it? Or the French or the Swiss if the Italians approached them with the “sacred right” tale?

And yet here Begin and Shamir were, telling the Arabs to pack and leave because now that they wanted Palestine again, they and the whole world had to bend to their wishes. It was crazy and inhuman and Lord Moyne was killed in 1944 for daring to suggest that the Jews be reasonable, then United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte was assassinated in 1948 for more or less saying the same. Murdered just like that, on orders of Yitzhak Shamir, who had taken over as Lehi operations chief following Stern’s death (the Stern Gang was infamous for its terror tactics). After that, the path was open for an Israeli army unit commanded by Ariel Sharon, who ordered the massacre of hundreds of civilians on the West Bank to make room for new settlers in Kibya.

Later, a soldier bragged: “We killed hundreds of Arabs. Women and children … To kill the children, we fractured their heads using the butts of our guns; no need to waste bullets on babies. There were corpses in all the houses. Before we left, we pushed the survivors in the houses, then the saboteurs came to blow them up … You should hear how they squeal for their homes, how they refuse to leave. This is why we kill them there. The fewer the Arabs that remain, the better.”

All I ask of the Arabs, is that they disappear from the face of the Earth

—Ariel Sharon

Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, explained these massacres as “The need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish … with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent.” The ensuing genocide was endorsed by David Ben-Gurion, who was quoted saying, “We must do everything to ensure the Palestinian refugees never do return.” Thus the rightful inhabitants of Palestine became the refugees.

Not to miss a beat, Israel Koenig extolled Israeli settlers to “use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” To justify the unspeakable, he cited Theodor Herzl’s instructions: “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

When Herzl wrote this in 1895, he did so in reference to the dispossessed Jews of the Pale, the ones nobody wanted in Europe nor Russia, much less the Zionists. Many of these wretches ended up in the United States at the turn of the century, after the wave of pogroms unleashed by the Zionists against their brethren because powerful interests had already set their sights on Palestine. This is why the First and Second Wars were manufactured; this is why Hitler was fully supported by the Zionists, who collaborated with him to achieve their goals. Without Hitler, they couldn’t have had Palestine.

How many people besides Israel’s founders know the tragedy of this legacy? How many have taken the time to read the unadulterated history or educate themselves about the motives behind corrupt individuals? Indeed, how many have seen the hordes of Israeli youth sent to Poland every year in a pilgrimage of hatred? Ignoring everything else that the country has to offer, they flock to the concentration camps, where they make a beeline to the ovens. There, they dutifully fill their hearts with hate before returning to Israel to join the army (in Israel, military service is compulsory). How many of them, besides Israeli soldier Gal Katz—along with fifty other soldiers—are not willing to take part in the brutal occupation that’s been going on for more that fifty years or condone it with their silence?

Unlike many other people, Gal Katz opened his mouth to defy a system founded on tyranny. He has put his career at risk, and perhaps even his life, to make people think about their participation in the intolerable policy of oppression to which the Palestinians have been subjected, if not directly, at least through a complicity of silence; he wants us to be aware that if it weren’t for the support of many people in the United States, this travesty wouldn’t be happening, that in regards to Israel’s injustice, Americans have been conditioned to remain silent. Like Katz, we should be baffled by this complicity and ashamed of our silence. Like him, we should be aware that even if the aim of stopping Hamas rockets is justified, the mass murder of innocents to retaliate, is unjustified.

As put by David Bromwich of The World Post, “The killing of women and children on such a scale does not happen by accident. It happens when soldiers who are angry at the loss of comrades have been shown, by unwritten orders or by a leeway that amounts to permission, that they are free to decide “in the heat” whom they want to kill, and that those whom they target need not be armed or anywhere close to anyone armed … Perhaps even more than it aims to destroy Hamas, the Netanyahu government hopes by this offensive to crush the will to resist and the desire for independence among Palestinians. But political resistance is the greatest enemy.

Terrorist resistance is less unwelcome —it feeds Israeli militarism, supplies new reasons-of-state to support emergency action, and gives plausibility to successive appeals for American planes, helicopters, drones, and missiles.” Bromwich continues, “The nature of the offensive makes sense in this light and no other. Reduce them to an abject condition, by the irresistible force of the attack, so that they realize anything is better than what they have to suffer now. The long-term aim was suggested in words as well as deeds by Netanyahu when, in July, he altered his stance on the acceptability of a Palestinian state. He now concedes nothing but the right of the

Palestinians to be endowed with separate spaces within a larger geographical entity supervised by Israel; but, according to the new iteration, there will never be such a thing as a sovereign Palestine. This change was reported with relief by one of his admirers, in an article entitled ‘Netanyahu Finally Speaks his Mind.’ The offensive of July and August is the action properly suited to accompany that state of mind.”

Then he adds, “Netanyahu’s fearlessness, on this point, is the plainest sign we have had that the present campaign means to mark the resoluteness of Israel’s blockade of Gaza by land, sea, and air, and the endlessness of its occupation of the West Bank. His confidence has become so swollen that his words at last do correspond to his actions.

Two other signs have been his defiance of the US president and state department—a defiance expressed in language that is barely diplomatic—and his open contempt for the United Nations.” For more than fifty years, Palestinians have lived imprisoned by the invaders who took their land through subterfuge and a bogus claim, which makes it hard not to wonder, how many other countries would put up with this kind of occupation if foreign settlers landed in their territories? At the very moment when the United States is effecting the largest deportation of illegal immigrants, shouldn’t it support Palestine’s deportation of these extremely violent and antagonistic occupiers as well?

As Katz says in his interview, the military has a lot to do with inequality and segregation in Israeli society, and he wants to convince Israel that this cannot continue. He also wants to call attention in the United States by explaining that Israel couldn’t have gone on with its policies of apartheid if not for the support of many Americans. Expressing this does not mean people are antisemitic or pro-Palestine. To view the issue under those premises, not only polarizes the argument, it is simplistic to the point of insult to those who have a moral conscience.

Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the

truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct or for

being years ahead of your time. If you’re right, and you know it, speak your

mind. Even if you are in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.

Mahatma Gandhi

To see Gal Katz’s interview, click the link below:

http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/highlight/more-than-50-israeli-reservists-pen-washpoop-ed-voicing-refusal-to-fight/53d14342fe3444e6bf0002a1?cn=tbla

To read David Bromwich’s article at The World Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/actions-and-intentions-ingaza_b_5644766.html

To read more about Israel’s Sacred Terrorism:

http://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/essays/rokach.html

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http://www.tijuanabanana.com/path-togaza/