Zionists are every bit of how they describe the Nazis. Actually they are worse.
The Greenberg National Institute is complicit in holding the detained dead bodies of killed Palestinians, often dissecting them without the family’s permission.
The Institute admits a history of unauthorized removal of organs, bone and tissue from Palestinians’ bodies.
And similarly, this is not the first time Israel withholds a murder victim to blackmail their families before allowing them to bury their loved ones.
Israel uses the Palestinian dead as ransom. Since the 1960s, Israel has killed and confiscated hundreds of Palestinian bodies and withheld them in clandestine cemeteries within closed military zones, refusing to return them.
In September 2019, the Israeli High Court re-affirmed that the state has the right to withhold Palestinian bodies as a political bargaining chip.
Furthermore, Israel’s practice to withhold the Palestinian dead is in grave violation of international humanitarian law stipulations that uphold the respect for the dead and their burial.
The Geneva Convention Additional Protocol II states that “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” are prohibited.
The Greenberg Institute participates in the humiliation and degradation of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military, further participating in their criminalization after their death.
Hassan Manasrah, a 15-year old Palestinian child who was killed in October 2015 was held in the Greenberg Institute for five months before being returned to his family for burial, at 1:00 AM in March 2016. His body was completely frozen, contorted, and unrecognizable to his family.
Despite the fact that his family had no choice but to acquiesce to the harsh conditions imposed by the state to receive his body – including a guarantee of 20,000 NIS (5,830 USD) to ensure that only 30 people participate in the funeral – they refused to bury him that night due to his physical condition and had to wait for his body to “defrost” to be able to fit him into a grave.
The horrific images of Basem Salah’s contorted corpse after being withheld for a month in the Greenberg Institute’s morgue exemplify the neglect, mistreatment and dehumanization of Palestinians and the complete disregard for the sanctity of the dead at the Institute.
During Israel’s 2014 onslaught against Gaza, Israel said ‘jump,’ and Obama and Biden jumped… to the tune of a quarter of a billion taxpayer dollars
By Alison Weir
President Barack Obama’s Deputy National Security Advisor – and current Biden campaign senior advisor – recently described how Obama and Biden had helped Israel during its 2014 onslaught against Gaza.
Israel had said ‘jump,’ and Obama and Biden had jumped – to the tune of a quarter of a billion dollars. (This is on top of the $10 million per day that Israel was already getting from American taxpayers.)
Here’s the story:
Tony Blinken served as Deputy National Security Advisor under President Barack Obama and currently is a senior advisor to presidential candidate Joe Biden.
He recently participated in the American Jewish Committee’s virtual Global Forum.
During the Forum he debated with Republican former Deputy National Security Advisor K.T. McFarland about which party is more pro-Israel.
In the course of the debate, Blinken boasted of an incident in which Obama and Biden had instantly done Israel’s bidding.
The incident took place during Israel’s 2014 onslaught against Gaza.
Keep in mind that Israeli forces had waged a massive air and land assault on Gaza in July 2014, killing about 2200 Palestinians – of which 1500 were civilians, including 500 children, 16 health care workers, and 9 journalists.
In response, Palestinian resistance fighters had killed 66 Israeli soldiers and 6 Israeli civilians and injured 550 Israelis – 85% of them invading soldiers.
In addition to the deaths, Israeli forces had damaged or destroyed 116,000 Gazan homes, leaving over 100,000 people homeless.
They had also destroyed or damaged 216 Gazan schools and 67 Gazan health care facilities.
Of the 11,000 Gazans injured, 3,300 were children; 1,000 of them are permanently disabled.
More than 1,500 Palestinian children were orphaned. (For more details go here.)
To demonstrate how pro-Israel the Obama administration was, Blinken proudly described to the virtual forum audience Obama and Biden’s role (and his own) in assisting Israel’s pulverization of Gaza.
He began dramatically:
“I got a call late one night from the Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, and he said, ‘Can I come over tonight? It’s something urgent.’
“And I said, of course, come on over.
“This is about 9 o’clock at night at the White House. And he and the military attache from the [Israeli] embassy laid out to me in detail why Israel urgently needed a replenishment of Iron Dome interceptors that were saving lives from missile attacks.”
(Gazan resistance fighters had begun launching rockets in 2001 following Israeli attacks.)
By 2014 the rockets – most of them small, home-made, largely ineffectual projectiles – had killed a total of 23 Israelis.
During the same time period, Israeli air strikes had killed thousands of Gazans.
“The next day,” Blinken continued, “I went to the Oval Office. I sat with President Obama and Vice President Biden.
I laid out what I’d heard from the ambassador and the military attache, and I got three words from both of them in response: ‘Get it done.’
“That was Friday morning. Tuesday, we had a quarter of a billion dollars from Congress to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome supply.
That’s the kind of real action — real deeds — that go to the heart of Israel’s security.”
Israel not ally – Congress to give it $38 billion
While Blinken was trying to claim that Democrats were more pro-Israel than Republicans, the fact is that politicians from both parties have kowtowed to Israel for decades, with only a few exceptions (see this, this, and this).
Today, a bill before Congress will give Israel a minimum of $38 billion over ten years – the largest military aid package in U.S. history.
The bill is co-sponsored equally by Republicans and Democrats. It has already passed the House, and last month the Senate Foreign Relations committee passed it in a unanimous voice vote, paving the way for it to be adopted sometime in the near future. U.S. media have failed to tell Americans about it.
While Americans are often led to believe that Israel is a U.S. ally, the reality is that Israel spies on us, steals our technology, involves us in wars on its behalf, and tried to sink a U.S. Navy ship, killing 34 Americans and injuring over 170.
The pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., the most powerful and pervasive lobby for a foreign country in our nation, is responsible for the massive financial and human capital that our politicians have expended on Israel, one of the world’s smallest nations – and one that was established through a war of ethnic cleansing.
The large majority of Gazans are refugee families violently expelled by Israel, their homes and lands confiscated for the new Jewish state.
Blinken’s 20+ years of senior foreign policy positions – more to come?
Photo from a tweet by Biden in December 2014: “Congrats to my close friend, Tony Blinken, the new Dep. Secretary of State. Admired in every corner of the world. -vp” (Twitter)
A longtime Israel partisan, Blinken has held senior foreign policy positions in two administrations over two decades.
He is close to Biden and is currently a senior advisor to the campaign.
On May 18, 2020 he was featured in a video by the Democratic Majority for Israel, which works to rally liberal and progressives to support Israel, despite its long record of human rights abuses and systemic racism.
“For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim.
It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.” ~ Adolf Hitler
Protestors in Germany call for Palestinian help against Israel. Dozens of protesters marched through the German city of Dortmund , calling for Palestinian support to eradicate Israel. “Palestine help us, Israel still exists” and “Israel no more.”
‘We Look at Them Like Donkeys’: What Israel’s First Ruling Party Thought About Palestinian Citizens
The world after World War II
To Palestine
As state-sponsored anti-Semitism disappeared with the defeat of the Nazis and the horrors of the Nazi holocaust became known, Zionists sought to conceal much of their history of collaboration with anti-Semitic movements and regimes. Yet the disappearance of state anti-Semitism created a dilemma for the Zionist project.
If Zionism considers itself a response to anti-Semitic threats against Jews, with the end of state anti-Semitism Zionism’s raison d’être would be in jeopardy, as Jews would not be convinced of the need to move to the new state of Israel. Moreover, as anti-Semitism came to be rejected by the post-World War II world, so was colonialism.
As the colonial age was ending and a post-colonial world of independent states was emerging, colonialism like anti-Semitism was thoroughly delegitimised in international relations and in European parlance.
Zionism has created ‘rivers of blood’
Now that Zionists began to recode their colonial project as “anti-colonial” while proceeding with colonization, they understood that they could capitalize on the recent hostility to anti-Semitism in European public opinion.
As the Palestinian people mounted their resistance to Jewish colonization year after year, and decade after decade, Zionism began to fight them by labeling them anti-Semites.
Indeed, it was then that any call for the end of Zionist colonization would be confronted with the argument of anti-Semitism. Israel decided then that if state anti-Semitism did not exist, it must be conjured up, if attacks on Jews qua Jews did not exist, they must be engineered, if an anti-Semitic attitude could be discerned, it must be capitalized on, generalized and exaggerated.
For the only defense Israel could mount in the new world that was opposed to both colonialism and anti-Semitism was to use one in defence of the other.
Zionism would begin to rewrite the Palestinian struggle against Jewish colonization not as an anti-colonial struggle but as an anti-Semitic project.
The story of the Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini would become Exhibit A in the Zionist version of Palestinian history.
Despairing from convincing Britain to stop its support of the Zionist colonial project and horrified by the Zionist-Nazi collaboration that strengthened the Zionist theft of Palestine further, the Palestinian elitist and conservative leader Haj Amin al-Husseini (who opposed the Palestinian peasant revolt of 1936 against Zionist colonization) sought relations with the Nazis to convince them to halt their support for Jewish immigration to Palestine, which they had promoted through the Transfer Agreement with the Zionists in 1933.
It was the very same Zionist collaborators with the Nazis who would later vilify al-Husseini, beginning in the 1950s to the present, as a Hitlerite of genocidal proportions, even though his limited role ended up being one of propagandizing on behalf of the Nazis to East European and Soviet Muslims on the radio.
Zionists taking Palestine
Nonetheless, whenever the question of Jewish colonization was raised by the Palestinians, the Zionist response would be to insist invariably that Jewish colonization was the only way to end anti-Semitism and protect Jews, and that any and all opposition to Jewish colonization of Palestine was nothing short of a continuation of anti-Semitism.
Israel began to insist that any talk of colonization of Palestinian land was nothing short of a distraction from anti-Semitism targeting Jews.
In light of the new post-war period that saw the end of state-sponsored anti-Semitism, the Zionists set out to attack Jews in a number of countries and to conjure up the spectre of anti-Semitism in countries that opposed Zionism.
In Iraq, the Israeli Mossad planted bombs in synagogues, libraries and cafes in the early 1950s, which killed and injured Iraqi Jews and spread panic amongst them that Iraqi Muslims and Christians were targeting them.
Collaboration ensued between Israel and the British-sponsored Iraqi regime to bring about the exodus of Iraqi Jews to Israel.
In his book, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews, Giladi discusses the crimes committed by Zionists in their frenzy to import raw Jewish labor.
The Ringworm Scandal: When Israeli Doctors Killed Tens of Thousands of Arab Children
When Egyptian Jews still refused to go to Israel, the Mossad again placed bombs in Egyptian cinemas, train stations and post offices.
When the Egyptian authorities uncovered the terrorist operation, later made famous under the name the “Lavon Affair”, and its Jewish perpetrators were captured and tried, Israel launched a major propaganda campaign claiming that Nasser was “Hitler on the Nile”.
In the post-Stalin Soviet Union, which unlike its Stalinist predecessor, opposed Zionism, and where all Soviet citizens were not allowed to emigrate, a major Cold War Israeli and US propaganda campaign insisted that the Soviets were anti-Semites.
The Americans and the Israelis arranged to grant Soviet Jews special privileges over other Soviet citizens by forcing the Soviet government to grant them emigration visas.
Those Soviet Jews who left did so for economic reasons and as such went (to Israel’s chagrin) to the United States, a situation that forced Israel later to collaborate with the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to reroute them to Israel forcibly.
Indeed, the Israelis would later try to introduce legislation in the US to prevent their emigration to the United States, which indeed would close off its borders to them after the USSR fell.
This would force many Soviet Jews (a majority of whom turned out to be Soviet non-Jews who pretended to be Jewish) to go to Israel as economic refugees in the 1990s.
The post-Soviet world
Israel and Zionism have been in deep mourning over the passing of actual anti-Semitic regimes and of regimes that they could cast in that role, as these regimes had provided them with so much propaganda power to justify their colonial project.
After the fall of the USSR, the Zionists ran out of arguments and of regimes they could label “anti-Semitic”. In this new situation, Israeli propaganda would become outright hysterical. Attempting to cast some of the anti-Zionist pronouncements of the Iranian President Ahmadinejad as genocidal anti-Semitism, Israel is hoping it could cover up its ongoing colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
“Anti-Semitism in Israeli discourse is and has been nothing short of camouflage for the continuation of Jewish colonization of Palestine.”
In case this did not work, the Israeli embassy in Dublin last week summoned the supernatural powers of Jesus Christ to help cover up Zionist colonialism.
In a Christmas Message to the Irish people on its official Facebook page, the embassy announced that the Palestinians would probably “lynch” Jesus and his mother Mary in Bethlehem today had they been alive as “Jews without security”, hence the need for Israel to continue to colonise Palestinian land while ensuring the security of its Jewish colonial settlers.
Indeed Binyamin Netanyahu argued in his UN speech last year that Palestinian resistance to Jewish colonial settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is itself anti-Semitic. He even compared Palestinian Authority laws criminalising collaboration with Jewish colonization as akin to the Nuremberg Laws: “There are laws today in Ramallah that make the selling of land to Jews punishable by death. That’s racism.
And you know which laws this evokes.” Netanyahu seems to have forgotten that it was the Zionists, not the Palestinians, who abetted the Nazis in 1935 when they supported the Nuremberg Laws.
Palestinians understood well these arguments and always insisted and insist that their struggle is against Jewish colonization of their lands and not against Jews qua Jews. When Khaled Meshal arrived in Gaza a couple of weeks ago and made a speech to that effect, he insisted: “We do not fight the Jews because they are Jews. We fight the Zionist occupiers and aggressors. And we will fight anyone who tries to occupy our lands or attacks us.”
The British Observer mistranslated his speech as: “We don’t kill Jews because they are Jews. We kill the Zionists because they are conquerors and we will continue to kill anyone who takes our land and our holy places.” While the Observer would later run a correction after the tireless Ali Abunimah exposed the doctored quotes, its mistranslation was in line with Zionist propaganda.
Herzl’s strategy continues to be the strategy of Zionism and the State of Israel. Whereas state-sponsored anti-Semitism has disappeared, Israel must create it and conjure it up, as this is its major line of defence against any and all international criticisms and censure of its ongoing colonization of Palestine.
While the four permanent members of the UN Security Council censured Israel last week for its plans to expand yet again its colonial settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the US will surely veto a possible UN Security Council resolution condemning these colonial activities.
Should this happen, we will immediately hear the Israeli and pro-Israeli chorus of condemnation of the international body as “anti-Semitic” yet again.
That this strategy has now run its course and no longer intimidates international actors has led to much panic in Zionist and Israeli circles. Israel and Zionism now understand well that when the world, including the United States (excepting Barack Obama), hears “anti-Semitism” as an argument to defend Israel, they understand it as an Israeli diversionary tactic to distract the world from Israeli Jewish colonialism and colonial-settlements on Palestinian land.
Make no mistake about it, anti-Semitism in Israeli discourse is and has been nothing short of camouflage for the continuation of Jewish colonization of Palestine. Only the gullible continue to be fooled.
This book shows us how twisted the Israelis are. It’s a must read.
Andrew and Leslie Cockburns 1991 book on Israels relations with the C.I.A is still a valuable book with regard to the reality of the Israeli States involvement in the world at large.
It details a diverse range of issues from the arms deals to Iran which continued seamlessly from the Shah to the Ayatolah, Israeli involvement with the right wing dictatorships of Central America, its collaboration with apartheid era South Africa on weapons programmes (nuclear and conventional), its kidnapping and murder operations overseas as well as spying and industrial espionage in the United States.
Even for the most hardened cynic of Israeli actions (based on a study of reality not prejudice) will be astonished at the sheer opportunism and sickening character of Israeli actions including arms sales and training to Columbian drug cartels.
The nature of the Israeli Arms industry is curtly summed up in the statement of an industry executive bemoaning the “threat of peace” and the end of the murderous wars of Central America.
Other issues involve the Israelis contempt for the sovereignty of other nations – witness the ham fisted murder of a Norwegian waiter of Morrocan origins in front of his pregnant girlfriend and the abduction of the courageous Israeli whistle blower Vanunu from Italy.
There is no limit to the opportunism of the Israeli establishment, “Is it good for Israelis?” seems to be the only measure – morals, ethics are just not in the picture.
Even their closest allies in the U.S. are treated with contempt from time to time for instance the Israelis had intelligence relating to the truck bombing of U.S. personnel in Lebanon in 1983 abut didn’t pass it on.
One looks forward to the day the Israelis are put in their place.
Zionism needs to be crushed.
This book should be essential to anyone interested in the real facts about Israels foreign and covert policies, it is well sourced and includes interesting interviews with many of the figures involved, though perhaps not the best read if you are not familiar with modern Middle Eastern history and Israeli relations with the U.S.
Zionist excuses for murdering Palestinians never comes with evidence…just they’re say so. The trigger words are ‘Hamas’ and ‘knife and we go “ooh ok”. Of course they’ve been killing Palestinians long before Hamas ever existed but who thinks of that.
This policy enables the lethal, unlawful and immoral shooting of Palestinians to continue unchecked, as no one is held accountable – whether it is the soldiers, their commanders, those who formulate the directives or the officials who cover up the acts.
On Wednesday morning, 13 May 2020, at around 5:30 A.M., a commercial van bearing Palestinian license plates drove into the Beit Jibrin neighborhood in the eastern section of al-Fawar Refugee Camp, south of Hebron.
About ten soldiers got out, and some of them took up positions on rooftops while others walked through the neighborhood.
On Wednesday morning, 13 May 2020, at around 5:30 A.M., a commercial van bearing Palestinian license plates drove into the Beit Jibrin neighborhood in the eastern section of al-Fawar Refugee Camp, south of Hebron.
About ten soldiers got out, and some of them took up positions on rooftops while others walked through the neighborhood.
Qaysiyah’s uncle, ‘Aziz al-Fayumi (33), went up to the roof shortly before Zeid was shot. In a testimony he gave B’Tselem field researcher Musa Abu Hashhash on 14 May 2020, he described what happened:
I yelled at Zeid not to go near the corner of the roof, but he ignored me and went right up to the edge.
Suddenly, I saw him fall backwards between the water tanks. His head was bleeding. I was confused and didn’t know what do. I ran downstairs to my brother Samir’s apartment.
I woke him up and told him Zeid had been shot in the head. We went up to the roof together. My wife and nieces were still there, screaming.
Some people went up to the roof and a few minutes later, they carried Zeid down to the street, covering his head with a shirt. They drove him to the government hospital in Yatta.
Because of the massive bleeding from the back of his head and all the blood left on the roof, I realized he was probably dead. We followed them to the hospital by car. When we got there, the doctors had already pronounced him dead.
Evidence that came to light after Israel removed its gag order on information regarding the June 12 kidnapping and murder of three Jewish Israeli students suggests that it could have been an Israeli government operation that was intentionally used to punish Hamas and break up the new Palestinian unity government.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had immediately accused Hamas of the kidnapping — without presenting any evidence — and proceeded to “conduct a search” throughout the entirety of the West Bank until the bodies were reportedly found on June 30th.
The “search” entailed arresting and beating up about 600 Hamas members (including legislators) and trashing about 2100 homes; Israeli forces killed at least 7 Palestinians.
Israel also heightened its daily air strikes on the Gaza Strip, which has been under the Israeli blockade since Sept. 2006.
The Gaza government appealed to the UN for relief, which responded by condemning the kidnappings rather than the massive abuse of the Palestinian population. And then urging “all parties” to show restraint.
On July 1, Israel removed a gag order on information about the kidnapping that revealed shocking facts:
The Israeli government had informed members of the press around June 15th that it was aware that the students had been killed (1) but placed a gag order on that information: the government must thus have known where the bodies were.
The brutal “search” was merely cover for punishment of members of Hamas, the democratically-elected party of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. The Israeli media played along with the pretext for the abuse.
Palestinians gather around a destroyed home of the al-Dallu family following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, on November 18, 2012. At least seven members of the same family, including four children, were among nine people killed when an Israeli missile struck a family home in Gaza City, the health ministry said. AFP PHOTO/MAHMUD HAMS (Photo credit should read MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty Images)
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were only called in 8-9 hours after the first call to report the kidnapping. One of the students placed a call to the police emergency hotline 10 minutes after they accepted a hitchhiking ride home, with the message that he was being kidnapped.
The statement was followed by what sounded like several gunshots, groans and silence; the call lasted for 49 seconds. Police ignored the call. The teen’s father called police 5 hours later, at 3:30 am, to report his son missing. “Several hours” after that, after an exchange of 54 phone calls, the IDF and Shin Bet finally became involved. (2)
The founding of Israel marked the culmination of a 50-year-long campaign, waged by political Zionists, to establish a Jewish state.
Despite possession of all of the evidence of the kidnappings and murders, the Israeli government has offered no evidence that indicates responsibility for the acts. Those with any direct connection to the phone calls or the finding of the bodies have remained unidentified.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has used this event for huge political gain:
to create divisions within the new “unity government” of Fatah and Hamas,
to physically punish Hamas members and the cause of Palestinian resistance,
to get legislation passed through the Knesset to block the return of East Jerusalem to Palestinians (1),
to try to foment a third intifada to legitimate further attacks on Palestinians (1) and
to whip up such hatred of Palestinians that it has become dangerous for them to be seen on Israeli streets.
The Israeli government is continuing to harass and attack Palestinians until it supposedly finds the killers. The two young Hebron men named as the accused have been missing since June 12th.
The uncovering of this deception should arouse world condemnation.
Palestine is Arab land. We support the struggle of the Palestinian Arab people to liberate themselves from military occupation and colonial settlement in all of historic Palestine.
We affirm the right of Palestinians to reclaim their land and resources, to maintain their culture, and to free their land from occupation by soldiers and settlers by any means necessary.
We oppose the existence of the colonial-settler state of “Israel.”
We are for an end to all US aid to “Israel” – military, economic, and political.
We oppose all forms of normalization with “Israel.” We support boycotts and other popular actions aimed at isolating “Israel” economically and politically.
We recognize that the struggle of the Palestinian people is part of a regional struggle against US, European, and Zionist imperialism.
We support the regional struggle for indigenous sovereignty over land and resources.
For seventy-two years, Palestine has endured a perpetual war. After several successive waves of immigration, the State of Israel has invented from scratch a “culture” around an imaginary people (including ethnic groups from the Caucasus to Ethiopia), an artificial language (modern Hebrew has little to do with the ancient patois and is written in Aramaic characters) and a fictitious history (despite UNESCO’s objections, the ancient city-state of Jerusalem has been confused with the State of Israel).
Keeping them safe from the world, although since WW2, Zionism has been their only enemy.
It was not until the Dreyfus affair in France that Theodor Hertzl committed himself to converting the Jewish diaspora to Anglo-US Zionism.
He conceived a colonial system on the model of the one put into practice by Cecil Rhodes in Africa and gradually managed to rally many atheist Jewish intellectuals.
When the British and American governments were occupied by Puritans (David Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson) during World War I, an agreement was reached between the two countries to create Israel.
The principle of a “Jewish national home” was made public by a letter from Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild, and President Wilson officially established the creation of Israel as one of the 14 American war aims. At the peace conference, Emir Faisal endorsed the Zionist project and pledged his support.
Jews began to colonize Mandate Palestine with the help of the local bourgeoisie, but at the expense of the common people, and then to emancipate themselves from London.
In 1948, an atheist Jew, Ben Gurion, this time five years ahead of the Rhodesian model, proclaimed Israel’s independence before the United Nations had defined its borders. Only then did the rabbis massively support the colonial project.
For seventy-two years, Palestine has endured a perpetual war. After several successive waves of immigration, the State of Israel has invented from scratch a “culture” around an imaginary people (including ethnic groups from the Caucasus to Ethiopia), an artificial language (modern Hebrew has little to do with the ancient patois and is written in Aramaic characters) and a fictitious history (despite UNESCO’s objections, the ancient city-state of Jerusalem has been confused with the State of Israel).
The assimilation of this intellectual creation to the Puritan colonial project was solidified around a sacralized interpretation of certain Nazi crimes, described as “holocaust” by the Puritans and “shoah” by the Jews.
Nothing in this fake construction resists analysis. Everything is done there to increase the continuity of a People and a State, even though it is only an Anglo-Saxon colony.
However, all the colonial states have disappeared today with the exception of Israel and, with time, the majority of today’s Israelis were born in Israel. Two conceptions of this state now coexist:
– on the one hand the supporters of Anglo-Saxon colonialism who claim sovereignty of the lands from the Nile to the Euphrates. They think they are an island of pirates, sheltering criminals from all over the world and refusing any extradition agreement.
They claim to be a “chosen people”, superior to other men, and consider Israel to be “The Jewish State”.
– The other is people who want to live in peace with their neighbours, regardless of their religion or lack of religion and regardless of their ethnicity.
They want nothing to do with the colonial fantasies of past centuries, but do not intend to give up anything they inherited from their fathers, even if they have stolen it. They would like to see the bewildering social problems of their homeland solved.
These are two irreconcilable visions embodied by two Prime Ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu and his “deputy” General Benny Gantz.
This tandem will never be able to resolve any conflict with the Arab peoples. At most, it will at last be able to consider the terrible injustices of the country. For example, nearly 50,000 citizens who passed through the Nazi death camps are today surviving in the country as best they can, without help from the State, which ignores them but has cashed in the compensation intended for them, claiming to save them.
By the simple pressure of Time and Demography, after three successive and useless legislative elections, the decolonization of Israel has begun.
“After vandalizing my house and terrorizing my children, who were asleep at the time, they started stealing every single shekel and the Eidiyyahs that my children were saving.”
June 3, 2020
Occupied Jerusalem (QNN)– Israeli forces on Wednesday broke into the house of the former prisoner Majed Jo’beh in occupied Jerusalem and stole every single Shekel from the house, even his children’s piggy banks.
Jo’beh posted on his Facebook account that Israeli Shin Bet and border police officers broke into his house in the occupied city.
“They showed me a discriminatory order by the Israeli minister of war, Naftali Bennett, to confiscate all the money in my house under the pretext that I get money from the Palestinian Authority”, he wrote.
Occupation terrorists night raids
He noted that he is not getting any money from the PA although he had spent over six years in Israeli jails.
“After vandalizing my house and terrorizing my children, who were asleep at the time, they started stealing every single shekel and the Eidiyyahs that my children were saving.”
He added that they also stole his family’s household expenses, stealing a total of 8400 NIS (nearly $2500).
The Mavi Marmara Gaza flotilla massacre: laptops, cameras and memory cards belonging to passengers or the İHH were missing. Passengers in June also complained that Israeli officers had used their seized credit cards.
IDF soldiers burst into a Palestinian house, wreak havoc, and disappear with money and the gold.
At the scene of a drive-by shooting where Zionist terrorists shot several Arab bystanders after raiding the Jaffa Ottoman Bank, a Palestinian policeman with gun drawn, crosses the street to confer with a British soldier. Jerusalem, September 13th, 1946. Title derived from Yankee Nomad, p. 227, and the Sept. 30th, 1946, issue of Life.
The place: the West Bank village of Kalil. The time: 1:30 a.m., around the beginning of June 2015. Athmad Aziz Shakhada Mansour, a social activist and a member of the village council, wakes up from a noise she she has become accustomed to: violent slamming on the front door of the house.
She instructs her husband to secure the money and gold the family holds for the wedding of their son M., who is supposed to marry in two days time.
The slams continue. Mansour goes to open the door. A large group of soldiers, all hooded, burst into the house. Somehow, the strange custom of IDF soldiers to hide their faces, as if they were not in charge of law enforcement but rather breaking it—as if they were thieves in the night—has become a fixture over the past few years, while the public remains silent.
The soldiers, as usual, gather the residents of the house into one room and forbid them to leave it. When they enter the bedroom, they find Mansour’s husband trying to pack up the money and gold. The husband tells them loudly that he wants to protect the gold; some of the soldiers answer, in what Mansour would later remember as fluent Arabic, that soldiers are not thieves.
The soldiers conduct a search of the house; they are probably looking for arms. They detain Mansour’s husband and her son S. while shouting: “Tell us where the weapons are. You have weapons, surrender them and we’ll release the detainees.
You have a wedding in two days, you wouldn’t want the father and one of the brothers to be held custody.”
Finally, the soldiers despair and leave, taking the son S. with them but releasing the father. They didn’t find any weapons. A week later S. is released without charge.
Once the family leaves the room where they were held, they find the usual trail of destruction — a hallmark of a visit by the IDF: the chicken feed has been spilled on the floor, all of the dishware was thrown from the cupboards, and the contents of the drawers have been thrown on the ground.
Among the missing objects is 30,000 NIS ($7,950) in cash, as well as 22 gold coins, purchased for M.’s wedding.
The soldiers, as we understand it, likely had a legitimate reason to break into the house at night. They may well have had a legitimate reason to detain S., as well, but we have no idea what that reason is. The disappearance of the money and gold after the search, however, indicates a case of looting.
Again, IDF soldiers are allowed to confiscate property that may be suspected of being used, or possibly being used, in the committing of a crime. They must, however, supply the owners with a written confirmation of the confiscation. In the absence of a receipt, the assumption should be that we are dealing with looting.
Mansour heard from her daughter-in-law, S.’s wife, that 8,000 NIS ($2,120) were also stolen from his house (on the lower floor of the building) during the very same search. However, we do not have a direct testimony regarding that claim.
Looting is a war crime. Although Israeli military law does not call it that by name, it nevertheless carries a punishment of 10 years in prison. This isn’t the first case of looting on part of the IDF that we know of.
We documented one case in February 2013, in which soldiers vandalized a home and looted money from it. In September 2013 we documented a case in which soldiers burst into a house (the wrong one, as it turned out) and vanished with a woman’s life savings.
The very violent Operation Brother’s Keeper in the West Bank in 2014 included several cases of looting. One of them, a year ago, looks like a direct copy of Mansour’s story. Soldiers burst into a house to look for weapons, didn’t find them, and made off with gold.
In yet another case, the soldiers came to a house, took the money – which turned out to be tax money paid by the townspeople – and told the owner he would receive a receipt from the police; the latter didn’t know what he was talking about.
This is just a partial list of cases of looting, which also took place during Operation Protective Edge (for which the MAG ordered several indictments), and the looting of the Mavi Marmara detainees in 2010 (Hebrew). Earlier examples can be seen here.
Therefore when the soldiers of the most moral army in the world claim that they are not thieves, we cannot take them at their word.
Looting cannot be excused; and what we cannot excuse, we suppress. When we suppress, we become silent partners to a war crime.
So here it is, in full view. Do with it as you will; you can no longer say, however, that you did not know.
Our attorney, Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, sent a complaint in late June to the Operational Affairs Attorney, Lt. Col. Adoram Riegler, demanding an urgent investigation both of the soldiers and of their commanders (who have command responsibility, which MP-CID often ignores.) We will keep you posted on developments, although history cautions us not to expect too much from the military justice system.
“israeli” occupation forces yesterday announced the destruction of ten wells in the town of Az-Zawiya, west of Salfit in the north of the West Bank.
The Palestinian News Agency (Wafa) quoted local sources as saying that occupation forces handed over demolition notices to owners of the water wells in the western region of the town.
The sources pointed out that the wells belong to Maher Qadous, Munir Shamlawi, Rebhi Abu Nabaa, Adnan Ali Hamdan, Nizam Hammouda, Harun Muqadi, Jamal Mosleh, Raji Shakur and Shehadeh Dahbour.
“israel” continues to steal water from the occupied West Bank by curbing Palestinian access to it, while increasing the control illegal Jewish only settlements have over water resources in the area.
The Zionists are the bad guys in every scenario. What kind of people root for them?
In November 1967, Israeli authorities issued Military Order 158, which stated that Palestinians could not construct any new water installation without first obtaining a permit from the Israeli army.
These are nearly impossible to obtain, Amnesty reports. “Palestinians living under Israel’s military occupation continue to suffer the devastating consequences of this order until today.
They are unable to drill new water wells, install pumps or deepen existing wells, in addition to being denied access to the Jordan River and fresh water springs,” the rights group explains.
Adding: “While restricting Palestinian access to water, Israel has effectively developed its own water infrastructure and water network in the West Bank for the use of its own citizens in Israel and in the settlements – that are illegal under international law.”
israeli occupation forces yesterday announced the destruction of ten wells in the town of Az-Zawiya, west of Salfit in the north of the West Bank.
The Palestinian News Agency (Wafa) quoted local sources as saying that occupation forces handed over demolition notices to owners of the water wells in the western region of the town.
The sources pointed out that the wells belong to Maher Qadous, Munir Shamlawi, Rebhi Abu Nabaa, Adnan Ali Hamdan, Nizam Hammouda, Harun Muqadi, Jamal Mosleh, Raji Shakur and Shehadeh Dahbour.
Israel continues to steal water from the occupied West Bank by curbing Palestinian access to it, while increasing the control illegal Jewish only settlements have over water resources in the area.
In November 1967, Israeli authorities issued Military Order 158, which stated that Palestinians could not construct any new water installation without first obtaining a permit from the Israeli army. These are nearly impossible to obtain, Amnesty reports.
“Palestinians living under Israel’s military occupation continue to suffer the devastating consequences of this order until today. They are unable to drill new water wells, install pumps or deepen existing wells, in addition to being denied access to the Jordan River and fresh water springs,” the rights group explains.
Adding: “While restricting Palestinian access to water, Israel has effectively developed its own water infrastructure and water network in the West Bank for the use of its own citizens in Israel and in the settlements – that are illegal under international law.”
Israeli occupation forces yesterday announced the destruction of ten wells in the town of Az-Zawiya, west of Salfit in the north of the West Bank.
The Palestinian News Agency (Wafa) quoted local sources as saying that occupation forces handed over demolition notices to owners of the water wells in the western region of the town.
The sources pointed out that the wells belong to Maher Qadous, Munir Shamlawi, Rebhi Abu Nabaa, Adnan Ali Hamdan, Nizam Hammouda, Harun Muqadi, Jamal Mosleh, Raji Shakur and Shehadeh Dahbour.
Israel continues to steal water from the occupied West Bank by curbing Palestinian access to it, while increasing the control illegal Jewish only settlements have over water resources in the area.
In November 1967, Israeli authorities issued Military Order 158, which stated that Palestinians could not construct any new water installation without first obtaining a permit from the Israeli army.
These are nearly impossible to obtain, Amnesty reports.
“Palestinians living under Israel’s military occupation continue to suffer the devastating consequences of this order until today.
They are unable to drill new water wells, install pumps or deepen existing wells, in addition to being denied access to the Jordan River and fresh water springs,” the rights group explains.
Adding: “While restricting Palestinian access to water, Israel has effectively developed its own water infrastructure and water network in the West Bank for the use of its own citizens in Israel and in the settlements – that are illegal under international law.”
Before running for president, he provoked suspicion among Israelis and some US Jewish groups when he expressed sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. But after winning the Democratic nomination earlier this year he veered in the other direction, voicing strong support for Israel in a speech in Washington to the Israeli lobby group Aipac.
‘No nation should accept rockets fired into its borders,’ Obama says of Israel’s ground push
It is not self-defense…It is a vengeful military aggression intentionally planned and perpetrated by the occupying power on the civilian population under its occupation.
I was one of the idiots with Obama fever during the 2008 election. I was stunned and horrified when “israel” attacked the Gaza people immediately and Obama declared on TV that “israel” had a right to defend itself. Hard to imagine I was so naive. Now I realize that if one does not pledge fealty to “israel” one cannot, and will not become president of the United States. Besides, it’s written in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And I willl never forget the lesson Obama taught me.
All the land bordering Palestine is internationally recognized Palestine land. The rockets that have fallen around them over the past 12 years come from the very place where now live the families that lived on this land. Thus does Sderot have an intimate connection with a date that President Obama may have forgotten about when he came visiting: 1948, the year that will never go away.
On December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a massive, 22-day military assault on the Gaza Strip. The ferocity of the attack was unprecedented in the more than 70 year old war on Palestinians, killing some 1,400 Palestinians, most of them civilians.
According to investigations by independent Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, between 1,385 and 1,419 Palestinians were killed during Cast Lead, a majority of them civilians, including at least 308 minors under the age of 18. More than 5000 more were wounded. Thirteen Israelis were also killed, including 3 civilians. (See below for a more detailed breakdown of casualties)
According to the UN, 3,540 housing units were completely destroyed, with another 2,870 sustaining severe damage.
More than 20,000 people – many of them already refugees, some two or three times over – were made homeless.
268 private businesses were destroyed, and another 432 damaged, at an estimated cost of more than $139 million, according to an assessment by the Private Sector Coordination Council, a Palestinian economic group. A separate report found that 324 factories and workshops were damaged during the war.
According to the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides services to Palestinian refugees, the offensive damaged almost 20,000 meters (approx. 12 miles) of water pipes, four water reservoirs, 11 wells, and sewage networks and pumping stations. Israeli shelling also damaged 107 UNRWA installations.
Eighteen schools, including 8 kindergartens, were destroyed, and at least 262 others damaged. Numerous Palestinian government buildings, including police stations, the headquarters of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and part of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ compound, were also destroyed.
After an investigation of the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli military of violating the international ban on “wanton destruction” found in the Fourth Geneva Convention.
BACKGROUND
“israel” terrorists free to come and go into Gaza, armed to the teeth, and the people in Gaza can’t come out nor are they allowed to have weapons.
Six months before Cast Lead, Israel negotiated a ceasefire with Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Gaza. Under the agreement, which went into effect on June 19, 2008, both sides agreed to stop hostilities across the Green Line, the de facto border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
Despite a number of violations by both sides, the truce was largely successful.
Hamas negotiators claim that Israel agreed to end its closure of Gaza’s border crossings as part of the ceasefire agreement, however Israeli officials dispute this. While Israel did resume operations at one border crossing, the overall policy of closure did not change. Two months after the truce began, the UN reported that the number of goods allowed into Gaza actually decreased.
Nevertheless, overall, a situation of relative quiet prevailed in and around Gaza until November 4, when Israeli soldiers staged a raid into the Strip, killing six members of Hamas. The attack, which took place on the eve of the US presidential elections, ended the ceasefire and led to an escalation of hostilities culminating in Cast Lead the following month.
“Israel” says they’re after the Hamas elected government, which is a lie, but how do we explain all the massacres of Palestinians before Hamas existed?
THE ASSAULT
Cast Lead proceeded in two phases: a week of intense aerial bombing followed by two weeks of a joint air and land assault and invasion. The surprise attack began at 11:30 a.m. on December 27, 2008, with Israeli F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and unmanned drones striking more than 100 locations across the tiny, crowded Gaza Strip within a matter of minutes.
Among the targets were four Palestinian police stations, including the central police headquarters in Gaza City, where a graduation ceremony for new officers was underway. Ninety-nine police personnel and 9 members of the public were killed in the first minutes of the attack. By the end of the first day at least 230 Palestinians had been killed.
The massive bombardment continued until January 3, 2009, when the Israeli army invaded the Strip from the north and east. Israel’s navy also shelled Gaza from offshore.
On January 18, 2009, under enormous international pressure and just two days before Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States, Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew its forces from Gaza. Palestinian armed groups followed with a separate unilateral ceasefire.
CASUALTIES
Reports of the exact number of Palestinians killed vary, but casualty figures supplied by credible independent nongovernmental organizations are generally consistent.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reported that the offensive left 1,419 Palestinians dead, including 1,167 civilians. The Centre also reported more than 5,000 Palestinians wounded, as did the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported 1,385 Palestinians killed, including 762 noncombatants, and 318 minors under the age of 18.
Officially, local authorities in Gaza put the total Palestinian fatalities at 1,444. For its part, the Israeli government claimed that 1,166 Palestinians were killed, including 709 combatants.
According to Israeli authorities, three Israeli civilians and one soldier were killed by rockets fired from Gaza during Cast Lead. Nine Israeli soldiers also died in combat in Gaza, including four killed by friendly fire. According to the UN, 518 Israelis were wounded.
EVIDENCE OF WAR CRIMES
In April 2009, following international outrage at the carnage caused by Cast Lead, the UN Human Rights Council established a Fact Finding Mission to investigate possible violations of international law committed during the conflict. Leading the mission was Justice Richard Goldstone, a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and war crimes prosecutor for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
The four members of the mission visited Gaza in late May and early June 2009, holding hearings there and in Geneva. They conducted 188 interviews and reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents, more than 30 videos, and 1,200 photographs.
Israel refused to cooperate with the inquiry, denying the mission the opportunity to meet with Israeli officials or visit the West Bank.
As a result of its investigation, the mission issued the so-called “Goldstone Report,” a 575-page document detailing alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli military. The report also accused Palestinian armed groups of war crimes as a result of indiscriminate rockets attacks on Israeli civilians living near Gaza.
The Goldstone Report documented 36 specific cases and incidents where Israeli forces allegedly violated international laws during the Gaza offensive. These include:
Samouni family massacre: In perhaps the most infamous incident of the war, Israeli soldiers ordered around 100 members of the Samouni family into a single building in the Zaytoun area of Gaza City. Soldiers held the family in the building for 24 hours before shelling the building on January 4, 2009. Twenty-one members of the family, all civilians, were killed.
Al-Daya family massacre: On January 6, an Israeli F-16 jet fired a missile at the home of the Al-Daya family, also in the Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City, killing 22 family members, most of them women and children.
White flag killings: The UN mission and human rights groups also documented several cases in which witnesses saw Israeli soldiers kill Palestinians who were fleeing while carrying makeshift white flags to indicate their status as civilians. In one case, a soldier shot and killed two women, Majda and Rayya Hajjaj (aged 37 and 65 respectively) who were fleeing with their families while carrying a white flag in the town of Johr Ad-Dik. In August 2012, in a plea deal with prosecutors, a solider was sentenced to just 45 days in prison for their deaths. To date he’s the only person to face serious charges stemming from Cast Lead.
Use of white phosphorus in populated areas: Rights groups, journalists, and the UN mission in Gaza also documented numerous instances of the use of white phosphorus, an incendiary substance that is illegal when used in populated areas. Israeli forces used white phosphorus in attacks on at least two hospitals (Al-Quds Hospital and Al-Wafa Hospital), as well as the central UN compound in Gaza City. Numerous civilian casualties were caused by white phosphorus in the small, densely populated Strip.
In addition to the Goldstone Report, human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports of their own documenting numerous allegations of war crimes being committed by Israeli forces.
The Zionist entity called Israel is a spurious state planted on the soil of Palestine by the British in 1948 through the illegal settlement between the two world wars of hundreds of thousands of East European Khazar Jews, who had no connection, whatsoever, to the ancient Israelite tribes.
“Monopoly Capitalism, Zionism, Communism, Nazism & Fascism: ALL came out of the Rothschild Offices in Frankfurt, Germany.” ― Eustace Clarence Mullins
The claim that “israel” has a ‘right to exist’ is a contrived myth. In fact, apartheid states are crimes against humanity and must be dismantled. The pertinent question, addressed by this paper, is what are the future prospects for a democratic Palestine?
The paper begins by reviewing the foundations of the Israeli state, including its racial ideology, the character of the Palestinian resistance, the ‘moral equivalence’ and false reformist arguments of ‘left Zionism’; and then the prospects for a democratic Palestine.
The analysis identifies the key challenges of zionist military occupation, powerful western allies, a fanatical zionist mission and disunity amongst Palestinian factions and their allies.
On the other hand the strengths are ongoing Palestinian resistance, the growing legitimacy of Palestine, the commitment of regional allies and the vulnerability of Israel’s allies to exposure of zionist crimes. In sum the future of Palestine is clouded with divisions, paid and sacrifice but remains far from hopeless.’
The phrase “right to exist” entered my consciousness in the 1990s just as the concept of the two-state solution became part of our collective lexicon. In any debate at university, when a Zionist was out of arguments, those three magic words were invoked to shut down the conversation with an outraged, “are you saying Israel doesn’t have the right to exist??”
Of course you couldn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist – that was like saying you were negating a fundamental Jewish right to have…rights, with all manner of Holocaust guilt thrown in for effect.
Except of course the Holocaust is not my fault – or that of Palestinians. The cold-blooded program of ethnically cleansing Europe of its Jewish population has been so callously and opportunistically utilized to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab nation, that it leaves me utterly unmoved.
I have even caught myself – shock – rolling my eyes when I hear Holocaust and Israel in the same sentence.
What moves me instead in this post-two-state era, is the sheer audacity of Israel even existing.
What a fantastical idea, this notion that a bunch of rank outsiders from another continent could appropriate an existing, populated nation for themselves – and convince the “global community” that it was the moral thing to do. I’d laugh at the chutzpah if this wasn’t so serious.
Even more brazen is the mass ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population by persecuted Jews, newly arrived from their own experience of being ethnically cleansed.
But what is truly frightening is the psychological manipulation of the masses into believing that Palestinians are somehow dangerous – “terrorists” intent on “driving Jews into the sea.”
As someone who makes a living through words, I find the use of language in creating perceptions to be intriguing. This practice – often termed “public diplomacy” has become an essential tool in the world of geopolitics. Words, after all, are the building blocks of our psychology.
Take, for example, the way we have come to view the Palestinian-Israeli “dispute” and any resolution of this enduring conflict. And here I borrow liberally from a previous article of mine…
The United States and Israel have created the global discourse on this issue, setting stringent parameters that grow increasingly narrow regarding the content and direction of this debate. Anything discussed outside the set parameters has, until recently, widely been viewed as unrealistic, unproductive and even subversive.
Participation in the debate is limited only to those who prescribe to its main tenets: the acceptance of Israel, its regional hegemony and its qualitative military edge; acceptance of the shaky logic upon which the Jewish state’s claim to Palestine is based; and acceptance of the inclusion and exclusion of certain regional parties, movements and governments in any solution to the conflict.
Words like dove, hawk, militant, extremist, moderates, terrorists, Islamo-fascists, rejectionists, existential threat, holocaust-denier, mad mullah determine the participation of solution partners — and are capable of instantly excluding others.
Then there is the language that preserves “Israel’s Right To Exist” unquestioningly: anything that invokes the Holocaust, anti-Semitism and the myths about historic Jewish rights to the land bequeathed to them by the Almighty – as though God was in the real-estate business. This language seeks not only to ensure that a Jewish connection to Palestine remains unquestioned, but importantly, seeks to punish and marginalize those who tackle the legitimacy of this modern colonial-settler experiment.
Coming from Europe
But this group-think has led us nowhere. It has obfuscated, distracted, deflected, ducked, and diminished, and we are no closer to a satisfactory conclusion…because the premise is wrong.
There is no fixing this problem. This is the kind of crisis in which you cut your losses, realize the error of your ways and reverse course. Israel is the problem. It is the last modern-day colonial-settler experiment, conducted at a time when these projects were being unraveled globally.
There is no “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” – that suggests some sort of equality in power, suffering, and negotiable tangibles, and there is no symmetry whatsoever in this equation. Israel is the Occupier and Oppressor; Palestinians are the Occupied and Oppressed. What is there to negotiate? Israel holds all the chips.
They can give back some land, property, rights, but even that is an absurdity – what about everything else? What about ALL the land, property and rights? Why do they get to keep anything – how is the appropriation of land and property prior to 1948 fundamentally different from the appropriation of land and property on this arbitrary 1967 date?
Why are the colonial-settlers prior to 1948 any different from those who colonized and settled after 1967?
Let me correct myself. Palestinians do hold one chip that Israel salivates over – the one big demand at the negotiating table that seems to hold up everything else. Israel craves recognition of its “right to exist.”
But you do exist – don’t you, Israel?
Rothschild Imperialism
Israel fears “delegitimization” more than anything else. Behind the velvet curtain lies a state built on myths and narratives, protected only by a military behemoth, billions of dollars in US assistance and a lone UN Security Council veto. Nothing else stands between the state and its dismantlement. Without these three things, Israelis would not live in an entity that has come to be known as the “least safe place for Jews in the world.”
Strip away the spin and the gloss, and you quickly realize that Israel doesn’t even have the basics of a normal state. After 64 years, it doesn’t have borders. After six decades, it has never been more isolated. Over half a century later, and it needs a gargantuan military just to stop Palestinians from walking home.
Israel is a failed experiment. It is on life-support – pull those three plugs and it is a cadaver, living only in the minds of some seriously deluded foreigners who thought they could pull off the heist of the century.
The most important thing we can do as we hover on the horizon of One State is to shed the old language rapidly. None of it was real anyway – it was just the parlance of that particular “game.” Grow a new vocabulary of possibilities – the new state will be the dawn of humanity’s great reconciliation. Muslims, Christians and Jews living together in Palestine as they once did.
Naysayers can take a hike. Our patience is wearing thinner than the walls of the hovels that Palestinian refugees have called “home” for three generations in their purgatory camps.
These universally exploited refugees are entitled to the nice apartments – the ones that have pools downstairs and a grove of palm trees outside the lobby. Because the kind of compensation owed for this failed western experiment will never be enough.
When Golda Meir visited #Haifa a few days after the ethnic cleansing, she felt frightened when she entered the houses. The cooked food was still on the tables, the games and books left by the children were still on the ground, as if life had frozen in one moment. #Nakba72pic.twitter.com/LWFOCIW25h
And no, nobody hates Jews. That is the fallback argument screeched in our ears – the one “firewall” remaining to protect this Israeli Frankenstein. I don’t even care enough to insert the caveats that are supposed to prove I don’t hate Jews. It is not a provable point, and frankly, it is a straw man of an argument. If Jews who didn’t live through the Holocaust still feel the pain of it, then take that up with the Germans. Demand a sizeable plot of land in Germany – and good luck to you.
For anti-Semites salivating over an article that slams Israel, ply your trade elsewhere – you are part of the reason this problem exists.
Israelis who don’t want to share Palestine as equal citizens with the indigenous Palestinian population – the ones who don’t want to relinquish that which they demanded Palestinians relinquish 64 years ago – can take their second passports and go back home. Those remaining had better find a positive attitude – Palestinians have shown themselves to be a forgiving lot. The amount of carnage they have experienced at the hands of their oppressors – without proportional response – shows remarkable restraint and faith.
This is less the death of a Jewish state than it is the demise of the last remnants of modern-day colonialism. It is a rite of passage – we will get through it just fine. At this particular precipice in the 21st century, we are all, universally, Palestinian – undoing this wrong is a test of our collective humanity, and nobody has the right to sit this one out.
Israel has no right to exist. Break that mental barrier and just say it: “Israel has no right to exist.” Roll it around your tongue, tweet it, post it as your Facebook status update – do it before you think twice. Delegitimization is here – have no fear. Palestine will be less painful than Israel ever was.
“If the Israelis are confusing unarmed children with terrorists, I suppose it’s just fine to confuse All Jews with Zionist terrorists.” ― Dmitry Dyatlov
A painstaking reconstruction of a series of Israeli airstrikes that killed two Palestinian boys on the roof of a building in Gaza City this summer suggests that Israel’s military tampered with its own surveillance footage of the attack, possibly to conceal evidence that the children were visible to the drone pilots who carried out what were supposed to be nonlethal “warning strikes.”
The visual investigation of the July 14 killing of Luai Kahil and Amir al-Nimra, both 14, was carried out by Forensic Architecture, a research group based in London that works with communities affected by state violence (and has previously partnered with The Intercept), and B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that documents Israel’s abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories it has controlled since 1967. [There were plenty more massacres before 1967]
Forensic Architecture created a detailed visual timeline of the incident, which offers compelling evidence that a video report shared on Twitter by the Israel Defense Forces in the immediate aftermath of the attack distorted the sequence of strikes to give the false impression that the roof was unoccupied when the missile that killed the boys was fired.
Using open-source visual evidence — including a rooftop selfie taken by the boys shortly before the airstrike that killed them, timestamped security camera footage of the sequence of Israeli strikes, witness video of the mangled bodies of the two boys after they had been torn apart by shrapnel from what Israel described as the first in a series of four “warning strikes,” and a YouTube cooking video recorded by three children in a nearby kitchen during the attack — Forensic Architecture concluded that the Israeli army had misleadingly substituted footage of the third missile strike for what it described as the first impact, which had killed the boys.
According to the investigators — who also relied on witness testimony, local news footage, and an architectural model of the destroyed building in Gaza City’s al-Katiba Square — by the time the third strike hit the building, nine minutes after the first missile, the bodies of the boys had already been evacuated from the roof.
Eyal Weizman, the Israeli architect who founded Forensic Architecture and was the principal investigator of the strike that killed the two boys, argues that Israel’s own video of the incident proves that the army’s entire concept of warning strikes is flawed.
“In a city like Gaza, subject to so many attacks, of so many different types, it is unreasonable to expect civilians to become munitions experts, and to understand that a small missile is a message rather than the normal attempt to kill and destroy,” Weizman wrote in an email to The Intercept on Wednesday.
“We can see in this case a demonstration of this misunderstanding. When the first responders ran to the roof to evacuate the teens after the first strike, it was likely because they did not understand that this was a warning, as they wouldn’t run onto the roof of a building about to be demolished.”
Four cousins were killed in two separate drone strikes after they were “mistaken for Hamas fighters.” That’s the explanation.
Hagai El-Ad, executive director of B’Tselem, told The Intercept that the video posted on Twitter by the Israeli army, along with the boast that the attack demonstrated “the IDF’s intelligence and operational capabilities, which will become deeper and stronger as necessary,” aroused suspicions from the start, since it seemed to include surveillance footage of all four initial strikes but showed no trace of the two teenage boys killed by the first blast.
“We knew from the outset, from our field research, from testimonies we collected, as well as from social media, that Amir and Luai were on the roof of the building when they were killed. They were in plain sight, in broad daylight, on a large, empty roof — in principle, as exposed to aerial surveillance as one could be.
Yet in the video footage released by the Israeli army, they are not seen. This was very difficult to reconcile, so it was important for us to try and not leave this unanswered,” El-Ad explained in an email.
“Through the expertise of Forensic Architecture,” he added, “it was possible, step by step, to understand what happened on July 14, including how the Israeli army omitted the first ‘warning’ strike — the lethal one which killed the two teens — from the video it released, replacing it with footage of the third strike, shot from a different camera.”
Since actual footage of the first strike seems to have been concealed by the Israeli army, Amit Gilutz, a B’Tselem spokesperson, said in a statement that “we don’t know if the boys were visible to the military before the first strike.”
As The Intercept reported earlier this year, however, Israel’s military has repeatedly claimed that its surveillance drones give remote operators the ability to call off airstrikes when they detect the presence of civilians near targets intended for destruction.
In this case, since other figures — the bystanders who rushed to the roof to try to save the boys — were clearly visible in surveillance video of the second strike, the Forensic Architecture investigators are convinced that the two boys should have been visible in the unreleased footage.
After the Israeli military said in a statement on Tuesday that the Forensic Architecture video report was the first visual evidence it had seen of the two boys’ presence on the roof, the researchers responded by daring the army to produce the surveillance footage of the first strike.
The investigators tweeted at the Israeli military: “share with us the footage of the first warning strike to hit the Katibah building on 14 July 2018, and we’ll show you Luai and Amir.”
The Forensic Architecture timeline also suggests that an Israeli military spokesperson, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, lied to the New York Times on the day of the attack, when he claimed that the first four smaller-scale strikes, intended to warn civilians to evacuate the area, were fired more than an hour before the building was blown up.
According to the security camera footage obtained by Forensic Architecture, a high-intensity missile was fired at the building at 6:02 p.m. that day, less than 17 minutes after the first warning strike that killed the boys.
Nonetheless, the perception that Israel takes extraordinary measures to warn Palestinian civilians to evacuate before dangerous bombing begins in Gaza is widespread among Israelis.
Just hours after the boys were killed on July 14, an Israeli civilian in the nearby town of Sderot, Refael Yifrah, complained in a radio interview that she had been warned by the local civil defense authorities to take cover just seconds before an incoming missile fired from Gaza exploded at around 6:15 p.m.
“It’s better to be in Gaza where they get warning that they’re going to be fired upon in one neighborhood or another and they evacuate,” Yifrah said. “Here, there’s an alert, no one knows where it’s going to land.”
Eyal Weizman has long contested Israel’s claim that firing warning shots to encourage civilians to evacuate is permissible under international humanitarian law.
“Israel has been using warning tactics for many years,” Weizman wrote during Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza in 2014. “They started as phoned-through messages, informing people that they had minutes to collect their belongings and vacate the building before it was bombed.
Finding that they couldn’t always get through, however, the Israeli Army began to use so-called ‘roof knock’ strikes. These involve the firing of a low- or non-explosive missile — usually from a drone — at the roof of a building that is to be destroyed. A bomb that devastates the building follows the missile a short time later.”
“Israeli military lawyers argue that if residents are warned, and do not evacuate, then they can be considered legitimate collateral damage,” he added. “Under this interpretation of the law, the civilian victims become human shields. This is a gross misuse of international law.
It is illegal to fire at civilians, even if the intention is to warn them. It is ridiculous to ask them to understand, in the commotion and chaos of war, that being shot at is a warning — and it is outrageous to claim that this is undertaken to save their lives.”
Weizman’s team noted in its report on the killing of the Palestinian boys this summer that video recorded by witnesses who rushed to evacuate Luai and Amir after the first strike showed a fragmentation pattern on the roof identified by weapons experts as “consistent with the explosion of a munition loaded with shrapnel — specifically designed as a lethal weapon.”
“The fact that they shoot munitions of enhanced lethality” in the guise of warning shots “is outrageous,” Weizman said in a recent interview with The Intercept in London. “It’s not even just like a kind of standard explosive,” he added.
“They say that a warning strike should be noisy only … like a firework, but the design of that is to tear through flesh. If you look at the catalogues, the way they describe those fragmentation shrapnel sleeves is exactly to increase the lethality of those strikes.”
His team’s reconstruction of what happened in Gaza was “very much a way of honoring two lives that have been lost,” Weizman added, but also a way to draw attention to Israel’s policy on warning strikes. “It’s so important because the issue of warning shots is exactly exemplifying the entire paradox of Israel’s self-perception as a humanitarian party or the most moral army in the world,” Weizman said.
2015 – A children’s playground in Bethlehem, Palestine, is tear gassed for fun from a nearby occupation force base by “israeli” troops .
Understanding what happened in al-Katiba Square last summer was not just about “showing the IDF is being dishonest about the way they present it,” he said, “it’s also allowing us to ask much larger questions about the use of warning, and whether it’s legal or illegal.”
Those questions, for Weizman, “go right to the heart of the humanitarian paradox that underlines Israel’s attitude toward Gaza — that is, Israel saying, ‘We abide by the law.’ We show how a certain interpretation of international law effectively could proliferate violence rather than contain it.
It’s kind of the paradox of the lesser evil that is within that approach, i.e. ‘If we warn, we can bomb civilian targets, hence we will warn and proliferate and this will allow us to use that tool much more widely.’”
El-Ad, the B’Tselem director, also stressed that his organization has no faith whatsoever in Israel’s Military Advocate General to investigate the killing of the boys or the apparent faking of video evidence by the army spokesperson’s office. “To be clear: We did not publish what happened on July 14 because we wanted the MAG to ‘examine’ or ‘investigate.’
Based on hundreds of case files B’Tselem worked on throughout the years, we know that an announcement by the army that they will investigate in nothing more than the beginning of an orchestrated whitewash, eventually leading to the closing of yet another file with impunity. We have no illusions in this regard,” El-Ad told The Intercept on Tuesday.
“We published the facts of the July 14 killing of Amir al-Nimra and Luai Kahil because their families deserve to know how they died, and because we at B’Tselem still hold that facts do matter.
It is true that just knowing the facts does not suffice in order to bring about accountability or end injustice, but they are the foundation for any such outcome,” he added.
“As human beings we should be morally outraged by what happened on July 14, because it is simply that: morally outrageous,” El-Ad continued. “Our hope is that the public, in Israel and around the world, will be able to see reality through the smokescreen of Israeli propaganda and demand a different future — and that the international community will finally stand up to its obligations in order to bring that future about.”
