Israel is not exercising “the
right to defend itself” in the
occupied Palestinian territories. It
is carrying out mass murder, aided
and abetted by the U.S.
May 14, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - - "
ScheerPost"
- Nearly all the words and phrases used
by the Democrats, Republicans and the talking heads
on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel
and the heaviest Israeli assault against the
Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on Gaza, which
lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200
Palestinians, including 551 children, are a lie.
Israel, by employing its military machine
against an occupied population that does not have
mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles,
heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to
mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion
defense aid package for Israel over the next decade,
is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” It
is carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Israel has made it clear it is ready to destroy
and kill as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israel’s
defense minister
Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during
the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014, has vowed
that if Hamas “does not stop the violence, the
strike of 2021 will be harder and more painful than
that of 2014.” The current attacks have already
targeted several residential high rises including
buildings that housed over a dozen local and
international press agencies, government buildings,
roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two
schools and a mosque.
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a
correspondent, four of them as The New York Times
Middle East Bureau Chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I
lived for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world’s
largest open-air prison where over two million
Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation,
struggle to find clean water and endure constant
Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when it was
pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I
have watched mothers and fathers, wailing in grief,
cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and
daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation—the
food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the
stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the
lack of health services, the near constant
electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of
power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic
unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have
witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies
emanating from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel’s
indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to
kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more
and make tens of thousands of families homeless is
not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while
I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by
Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide
bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am
acutely aware of a huge disparity between the
industrial violence carried out by Israel against
innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of
violence capable of being waged by groups such as
Hamas.
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The false equivalency between Israeli and
Palestinian violence was echoed during the war I
covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the besieged city
of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of
heavy shells and rockets from the surrounding Serbs.
We were targeted by sniper fire. The city suffered a
few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government
forces inside the city fired back with light mortars
and small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized
on any casualties caused by Bosnian government
forces to play the same dirty game, although well
over 90 percent of the killings in Bosnia were the
fault of the Serbs, as is also true regarding
Israel.
The second and perhaps most important parallel is
that the Serbs, like the Israelis, were the
principal violators of international law. Israel is
in breach of more than 30 U.N. Security Council
resolutions. It is in breach of Article 33 of the
Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective
punishment of a civilian population as a war crime.
It is in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention for settling over half a million
Jewish Israelis on occupied Palestinian land and for
the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000
Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and
another 300,000 after Gaza, East Jerusalem and the
West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its
annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan
Heights violates international law, as does its
building of a security barrier in the West Bank that
annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in
violation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194
that states that Palestinian “refugees wishing to
return to their homes and live at peace with their
neighbors should be permitted to do so at the
earliest practicable date.”
This is the truth. Any other starting point for
the discussion of what is taking place between
Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.
Israel’s once vibrant peace movement and
political left, which condemned and protested
against the Israeli occupation when I lived in
Jerusalem, is moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu
government, despite its rhetoric about fighting
terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive
regime in Saudi Arabia, which also views Iran as an
enemy. Saudi Arabia, a country that produced 15 of
the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is
reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of
international
Islamist terrorism, allegedly supporting
Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaeda, and groups
such as the Afghanistan
Taliban,
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the
Al-Nusra Front.
Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together
to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by
General Adbul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a
democratically elected government. He has imprisoned
tens of thousands of government critics, including
journalists and human rights defenders, on
politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime
collaborates with Israel by keeping its common
border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping
them in the Gaza strip, one of the most densely
populated places on earth. Israel’s cynicism and
hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the
mantle of protecting democracy and fighting
terrorism, is of epic proportions.
Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either
second class citizens or live under brutal military
occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the
exclusive homeland of the Jewish people. From the 7th
century until 1948, when Jewish colonial settlers
used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the
state of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly
Muslim. It was never empty land. The Jews in
Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The
United States is not an honest broker for peace but
has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes
against the Palestinian people. Israel is not
defending the rule of law. Israel is not a
democracy. It is an apartheid state.
That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced
by the ruling elites–there is no daylight between
statements in defense of Israeli war crimes by Nancy
Pelosi and Ted Cruz–and used as a foundation for any
discussion of Israel is a testament to the
corrupting power of money, in this case that of the
Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political
system of legalized bribery that has surrendered its
autonomy and its principles to its major donors. It
is also a stunning example of how colonial settler
projects, and this is true in the United States,
always carry out cultural genocide so they can exist
in a suspended state of myth and historical amnesia
to legitimize themselves.
The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense
political clout to demand that Americans take de
facto loyalty oaths to Israel. The passage by 35
state legislatures of
Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their
workers and contractors, under threat of dismissal,
to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support
the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a
mockery of our Constitutional right of free speech.
Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to
redefine anti-Semitism under a three-point test
known as the Three Ds: the making of statements that
“demonize” Israel; statements that apply “double
standards” for Israel; statements that
“delegitimize” the state of Israel. This definition
of anti-Semitism is being pushed by the Israel lobby
in state legislatures and on college campuses. The
Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at
the direction of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic
Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of
Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and
blacklists defenders of Palestinian rights–including
the Jewish historian
Norman Finkelstein; U.N. Special Rapporteur for
the Occupied Territories, Richard Falk, also Jewish;
and university students, many of them Jewish, in
organizations such as Students for Justice in
Palestine.
The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions
of dollars to manipulate U.S. elections, far beyond
anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia,
China or any other country. The heavy-handed
interference by Israel in the American political
system, which includes operatives and donors
bundling together hundreds of thousands of dollars
in campaign contributions in every U.S.
congressional district to bankroll compliant
candidates, is documented in the Al-Jazeera
four-part series “The Lobby.” Israel
managed to block “The Lobby” from being
broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy that is
available on the website Electronic Intifada,
the leaders of the Israel lobby are repeatedly
captured on a reporter’s hidden camera explaining
how they, backed by the intelligence services within
Israel, attack and silence American critics and use
massive cash donations to buy politicians. Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured the
unconstitutional invitation by then-House
Speaker John Boehner to address Congress in 2015 to
denounce President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear
agreement. Netanyahu’s open defiance of Obama and
alliance with the Republican Party, however, did not
stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year $38
billion military aid package to Israel, a sad
commentary on how captive American politics is to
Israeli interests.
The investment by Israel and is backers is worth
it, especially when you consider that the U.S. has
also spent over $ 6 trillion during the last 20
years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby
pushed for in the Middle East. These wars are the
greatest strategic debacle in American history,
accelerating the decline of the American empire,
bankrupting the nation at a time of economic
stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge
parts of the globe against us. They serve Israel’s
interests, not ours.
The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is
embraced, the more empowered become the racists,
bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate
groups inside and outside Israel. This steady shift
to the far right in Israel has fostered an alliance
between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom
are anti-Semites. The more Israel and the Israel
lobby level the charge of anti-Semitism against
those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they
did against British Labour Party leader
Jeremy Corbyn, the more they embolden the real
anti-Semites.
Racism, including anti-Semitism, is dangerous.
It is not only bad for the Jews. It is bad for
everyone. It empowers the dark forces of ethnic and
religious hatred on the extremes. Netanyahu’s
racist government has built alliances with far-right
leaders in Hungary, India, and Brazil, and was
closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic
chauvinists, as I saw in the wars in the former
Yugoslavia, feed off of each other. They divide
societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that
only speak in the language of violence. The radical
jihadists need Israel to justify their violence,
just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to
justify its violence. These extremists are
ideological twins.
This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized
society. It permits the ruling elites in Israel, as
in the United States, to dismantle civil liberties
in the name of national security. Israel runs
training programs for militarized police, including
from the United States. It is a global player in
the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing
against China and the United States.
It oversees hundreds of cybersurveillance
startups whose espionage innovations, according to
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been
utilized abroad “to locate and detain human rights
activists, persecute members of the LGBT community,
silence citizens critical of their governments, and
even fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in
Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal
relations with Israel.”
Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned
by the psychosis of permanent war. One million
Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened
and educated, have left the country. Its most
courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals
and journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—endure
constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests
and vicious government-run smear campaigns. Mobs and
vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth
groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault
dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and African
immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish
extremists have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh
Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their expulsion. They
are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups
including the Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological
descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the Lehava
movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel
and the occupied territories to be expelled to
surrounding Arab states, and La Familia, far-right
soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means “flame” and
is the acronym for “Prevention of Assimilation in
the Holy Land.” Mobs of these Jewish fanatics parade
through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in
occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli
police, shouting to the Palestinians who live there
“Death to the Arabs,” which is also a popular chant
at Israeli soccer matches.
Israel has pushed through a series of
discriminatory laws against non-Jews that echo the
racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in
Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law, for
example, permits “small, exclusively Jewish towns
planted across Israel’s Galilee region to formally
reject applicants for residency on the grounds of
‘suitability to the community’s fundamental
outlook.” Israel’s educational system, starting in
primary school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews
as eternal victims. This victimhood is an
indoctrination machine used to justify racism,
Islamophobia, religious chauvinism and the
deification of the Israeli military.
There are many parallels between the deformities
that grip Israel and the deformities that grip the
United States. The two countries are moving at warp
speed towards a 21rst century fascism, cloaked in
religious language, which will revoke what remains
of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic
democracies. The failure of the United States to
stand up for the rule of law, to demand that the
Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the
Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors
the abandonment of the vulnerable within our own
society. We are headed, I fear, down the road
Israel is heading down. It will be devastating for
the Palestinians. It will be devastating for us.
And all resistance, as the Palestinians courageously
show us, will only come from the street.
[Chris Hedges writes
a regular original column for ScheerPost.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning
journalist who was a foreign correspondent for
fifteen years for The New York Times, where
he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan
Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked
overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The
Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is
the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America
show On Contact.
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