14 Jan 2009 |
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During the past half-year there has been ‘a ceasefire’ in Gaza where Israel has falsely called it’s elected government a terrorist organization, cut off all outside aid into the strip, imposed a crippling economic embargo, imprisoned 1.5 million Gazans in isolation on a Bantustan measuring only 10km by 40km (thus making the strip of land the densest human population in the world!), inflicted devastating human suffering, and stepped up oppression in an all too familiar pattern- repeated incursions, killings, targeted assassinations, mass arrests, incarcerations, torture, and all the rest. In the words of John Ging, the head of operations of the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) who captured the situation that existed very well, Gaza was at this time of the ceasefire a place where its people ‘did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence. We in fact at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food’. But just last month the Israelis carried out a further violation of the ceasefire by firing missiles into Gaza that eventually killed 29 Palestinians on the pretext of pre-emptively striking and destroying tunnels that the resistant groups allegedly were using to smuggle weapons into Gaza.
In response to Israel's attack, Hamas’ military wing- the Qassam Brigades- fired primitive rockets into southern Israel a few of which caused injuries to some settlers there. This ‘retaliation,’ and Hamas’ refusal to renew the ceasefire- on the ground that the initial ceasefire ‘did not benefit the Gazans’ (interestingly the same as in Ging’s words above)- played into the hands of Israel just as intended; Israel had spent the ‘6 months of quiet’ to planned a large-scale offensive (Israel's Defense Minister admits to this when he stated that they had been planning and preparing for months for the military offensive), with Israel as usual portraying itself as the only victim. Israel’s war on Gaza has so far killed more than 950 Palestinians (compared to 13 killed on Israel’s side) - most of who were children and women, and seriously wounding thousands more. Israel claims most of the dead were Hamas ‘terrorists,’ but in fact, the first targets of its campaign were police stations in dense residential areas, and the dead included many police officers and other civilians. Under international law, police officers are civilians, and targeting them is no less a war crime than aiming at ordinary civilians on the street. These first sets of air assaults also came at a time when Palestinian children were leaving the morning school session and the afternoon students were arriving. In occupied Palestine, schools are normally built close to police stations so the police could offer safety and protection to the children to and from school. Israel knew this fact well and yet indiscriminately fired on police stations thereby killing many policemen and school children. Israeli latter shelled three UN run schools where many families were wiped out- head of UN operations in Gaza said after the cowardly attacks that they had supplied the co-ordinates of all UN run schools in Gaza to the Israeli military prior to this campaign and there were neither militants in the schools nor any militant operation around the areas when the schools were targeted. So, these were cold-blooded mass murder and Israel knew exactly what it was doing. After a recent savage Israeli bombardment of a civilian area in Gaza, Palestinian and international medical service providers were forbidden from recovering the dead and injured. When the Red Cross eventually was allowed 4 days later, they found two babies with their mouths suckled to the toes of their dead mothers- they had both starved to death. Because of Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians that had seen whole families wiped out, Palestinian families are now splitting up in a desperate bid to survive Israeli bombardment. Heartbroken parents are scattering their children so as the families are not entirely wiped out by the air strikes. Yet, nowhere is safe! A few days ago, more than 30 civilians were killed when a house where Israeli soldiers themselves had evacuated 110 people was repeatedly shelled 24 hours later. Survivors had to stagger more than a mile down the road in search of help. It was Israeli soldiers that put these people into the house and gave them strict instruction only 24hours earlier not to leave the building under any circumstances- or else they die. The timing during these dying days of the Bush administration may indicate an Israeli effort to take advantage of a moment when there might be more political cover from the lame duck American president. Israel and the supporters of its policies have always falsely referred to Hamas as a terrorist organization to justify its war crimes. Yet Hamas, a registered Palestinian political organization, won a free and fair Palestinian elections in 2006 in the freest election in the whole Arab countries - a clear victory for the whole Palestinian people who used the ballot to reject the grossly corrupt Fattah government, yet Israel, the United States and European Union have insisted that its right to govern cannot be treated as legitimate. More proof, as if any is needed, of the transparent hypocrisy of nations that went to an illegal war partly ‘in order to bring democracy to Iraq’. Israel then immediately rounded up most of the elected parliamentarians who are still languishing in its jails. After mid-June 2007, the western-backed ‘moderate Palestinian’ government of president Mahmoud Abbas, collaboratively and at the behest of Washington and Israel, declared a false "state of emergency"; deposed Prime Minister Ismail Haniya; appointed an "emergency" cabinet; split Palestinian authority between Gaza and the West Bank; incited internal conflict to divide and conquer; and acceded to Israel blockading Gaza. Under the proud eyes of United States military advisors, president Abbas assembled ‘security forces’ to fight the resistance to this killing siege on Israel's behalf. However, none of the humiliating concessions has spared a single Palestinian in the West Bank from Israel's relentless colonization and the brutality of its settlers. Indeed, one of the underlining objectives of the current Israeli merciless military campaign in Gaza might be to reinstate the corrupt government of Mahmoud Abbas in Gaza. But let us be clear what Zionist Israel means by moderate Palestinians and terrorists. The Hamas leadership in recent years has signaled that it is willing to negotiate a two-state settlement according to the June 1967 border and also as long as there will be the resolution of the right of refugees to return. That means that Hamas has signaled to do what the international community has wanted Israel to do over the past 30 years.
Israel rejects such a two-state settlement because it wants to continue and advance its dream of the Greater Israel project- a project predicated on the racist and evil ideology of Zionism. So for Israel a moderate Palestinian means a Palestinian who is willing to do whatever Israel wants: is a Palestinian who is willing to follow Israeli orders: a Palestinian organization that will be subservient to Israel in the premeditated land "purification" goals and methods. When the Palestinian Authority refused to do this under Arafat, it branded Chairman Arafat a terrorist and repeatedly complained it had ‘no partner for peace’ to work with, when Hamas refuses to be subservient, it brands it a "terrorist organization". However, an interesting feature of Israel’s aggressions in the Middle East is that whenever it goes to war, so do the dominant media- in the lead are FOX, CNN, Sky, BBC and New York Times- and other ‘Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month ceasefire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory’ media cult whose Middle East affairs desks have been partially converted to Israel’s war propaganda offices to twist facts into a fabric of misinformation and agitprop, to viciously vilify Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. So, when next you see dapper, Western-accented apologists for mass-murder appearing on any of those channels acting as spokespersons for Israel, remember that a well-oiled propaganda machine is at work! As we have seen in other Israeli aggressions against its neighbours in the recent past, a veteran cheering squad always suits up to support the home team as soon as the first Israeli missile strikes. This section of the media never report Palestinian violence to be the effect— only the cause. Following in the trend set by the immoral and one-sided Middle East foreign policy of White House itself which always sees President George Bush and his war-on-terror pimp, Condoleezza Rice, blame Hamas for every violence, insisting that (only) Israel has a right to exist and defend itself. The so-called mainstream media report nothing about Hamas’ democratic election, the unlawful arrest and continued illegal detention of elected parliamentarians, its seeking peace and rapprochement, its unilateral ceasefires, its support by the great majority of Gazans, and the efforts it makes to ease living under the overwhelming challenges of Israeli relentless siege. They are quick to justify Israel's every violent attacks in a manner that de-contextualizes Palestinian militancy, thereby depriving the latter of any semblance of legitimacy. The inhuman practices adopted by Israel in treating the Palestinians are in clear violation of virtually every article of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and are considered, by international law, as war crimes. Yet you do not find the media and State Department mentioning this at all. It is amazing that while these media organizations are busy helping to sell Israel’s war to the world public, more and more people from the mainstream of Israeli politics are voicing alarm. In the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg compared the situation in Israel today to Germany on the eve of the Nazis’ rise to power. And writing for The Huffington Post, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy likened Israel to a drunk and the U.S. to a "friend" who gives the already-drunk a bottle of vodka and keys to the car. Israel is a lawless country and it is no doubt emboldened to continue promoting Zionism and colonization at gunpoint by the complicity of its principal backer and financier- the US government, the European Union and the Arab leaders’ pathetic silence. Of course the Israeli government could never have pursued its oppressive and violent policies in the occupied territories without the money, weapons, and diplomatic cover provided by the United States, especially the Congress which has been hopelessly corrupted by the Israeli lobbies in Washington. They are, almost all of them, fully complicit in Israeli government crimes, including its war crimes. The gradual process of ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian territories is being accelerated through the current campaign in Gaza, and with it so is the moral culpability of Israel’s political backers. Israel knows and is emboldened by this fact. Despite popular outrage, pro-forma criticism and anger on Arab streets, corrupt and oppressive Arab kings and presidents in the region's capitals offered little or no supports for Gazans for fear of antagonizing their protecting friends in Washington and their powerful Israeli neighbour- whom they fear given its military might of nuclear arsenal and close ties to America. The silence and tacit support of these Arab regimes are also factors in the collective abandonment of Gaza by the international community while Israel continues to commit war crimes carried out with brutal impunity against the occupied people, most of whom are refugees in their homeland. The 41-year-old war of attrition on the Palestinians is an unjust and immoral war that is paid for in American dollars and American political capital. The Amnesty International, the Red Cross and many other humanitarian and human rights organizations, now have rightly condemned the way and manner the Gazans are being attacked. During the 6-month period of the so-called ‘ceasefire’, more Gazans surely died of hunger, torture and targeted killings than this current Israeli aggression which to many Gazans is same death by other means. Palestinians and their supporters worldwide will never be silenced or defeated, and the Palestinian martyrs, even as the number grows unbearably by the day, are dying honorable deaths that highlight their cause and signpost a very dark chapter in human history. Their cause is to resist oppression, colonization, and to pursue and win freedom even unto the very bitter end.
Disu Kamor Director of Media & Communications Muslim Public Affairs Centre, MPAC, Nigeria e-mail: kamor.disu@mpac-ng.org website: www.mpac-ng.org
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