August 15/16, 2023 -
Information Clearing House
- "Scheerpost"
-- The long nightmare of
oppression of Palestinians is not a
tangential issue. It is a black and white
issue of a settler-colonial state
imposing a military occupation, horrific
violence and apartheid, backed
by billions of U.S. dollars, on the
indigenous population of Palestine. It is
the all powerful against the all powerless.
Israel uses its modern weaponry against a
captive population that has no army, no
navy, no air force, no mechanized military
units, no command and control and no heavy
artillery, while pretending intermittent
acts of wholesale slaughter are wars. The
crude rockets fired at Israel by Hamas and
other Palestinian resistance organizations —
a war crime because they target civilians —
are not remotely comparable to
the 2,000 pound “bunker-buster” Mark-84 bombs
with a “kill radius” of over 32 yards and which “create
a supersonic wave of pressure when they
explode” that have been dropped by Israel on
crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, the thousands of
Palestinian killed and wounded and the
targeted destruction of
basic infrastructure, including electrical
grids and water purification plants.
Palestinians in Gaza live
in an open air prison that
is one of the most densely
populated spots on the planet. They are
denied passports and travel documents.
Malnutrition is endemic in the Occupied
Territories. “High proportions” of the
Palestinian population are “deficient in
vitamins A, D, and E, which play key roles
in vision, bone health, and immune
function,” according to
a 2022 World Bank report. The report also
notes that over 50 percent of those aged six
to 23 in Gaza and over half of its pregnant
women are anemic and “more than a quarter of
pregnant women and more than a quarter of
children aged 6–23 months [in the West Bank
are] anemic.”
Eighty-eight percent of Gaza’s children
suffer from depression, following 15 years
of the Israeli blockade, according to
a 2022 report from Save the Children and over 51
percent of children were diagnosed with PTSD
following the third major war on Gaza in
2014. Only 4.3 percent of the water in Gaza
is considered fit
for human consumption. Palestinians in Gaza
are crammed into unsanitary and overcrowded
hovels. They often lack basic medical
care. Unemployment rates are among the highest in
the world at 46.6 percent.
Zionism’s goal, since before Israel’s
inception, has been to displace Palestinians
from their land and reduce those who remain
to a struggle for basic subsistence, as
Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappe, notes:
10 March 1948, a group of eleven men,
veteran Zionist leaders together with
young military Jewish officers, put the
final touches on a plan for the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine. That same
evening, military orders were dispatched
to units on the ground to prepare for
the systematic expulsion of Palestinians
from vast areas of the country. The
orders came with a detailed description
of the methods to be used to forcibly
evict the people: large-scale
intimidation; laying siege to and
bombarding villages and population
centers; setting fire to homes,
properties, and goods; expelling
residents; demolishing homes; and,
finally, planting mines in the rubble to
prevent the expelled inhabitants from
returning. Each unit was issued its own
list of villages and neighborhoods to
target in keeping with the master plan.
Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew)…
Once the plan was finalized, it took
six months to complete the mission. When
it was over, more than half of
Palestine’s native population, over
750,000 people, had been uprooted, 531
villages had been destroyed, and 11
urban neighborhoods had been emptied of
their inhabitants.
These political and historical facts,
which I reported on as an Arabic speaker for
seven years, four of them as The Middle East
Bureau Chief for The New York Times, are
hard to ignore. Even from a distance.
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I watched Israeli soldiers taunt boys in
Arabic over the loudspeakers of their
armored jeep in the Khan Younis refugee camp
in Gaza. The boys, about 10 years old, then
threw stones at an Israeli vehicle. The
soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding
others. In the Israeli lexicon this becomes children
caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when
F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron
fragmentation bombs on densely packed
neighborhoods. I saw the corpses of the
victims, including children, lined up in
neat rows. This became a surgical strike
on a bomb-making factory. I watched
Israel demolish
homes and apartment blocks to create
buffer zones between the Palestinians and
Israeli troops. I interviewed destitute
families camped in the rubble of their
homes. The destruction becomes the
demolition of the homes of terrorists. I
stood in the bombed remains of schools as
well as medical clinics and mosques. I heard
Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar
fire from the Palestinians caused these and
other deaths, or that the attacked spots
were being used as arms depots or launching
sites. I, along with every other reporter I
know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen
any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as
“human shields.” Ironically, there is evidence of
the Israeli military using Palestinians as
human shields, which Israel’s High Court
deemed illegal in 2005.
There is a perverted logic to Israel’s
use of the Big Lie — Große Lüge.
The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel
seeks to elicit — racism among its
supporters and terror among its victims.
There is a heavy political price to pay
for defying Israel, whose overt
interference in our political process
makes the most tepid protests about Israeli
policy a political death wish. The
Palestinians are poor, forgotten and alone.
And this is why the defiance of Israel’s
treatment of the Palestinians is the central
issue facing any politician who claims to
speak on behalf of the vulnerable and the
marginalized. To stand up to Israel has a
political cost few, including Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., are willing to pay. But if you
do stand up, it singles you out as someone
who puts principles before expediency, who
is willing to fight for the wretched of the
earth and, if necessary, sacrifice your
political future to retain your integrity.
Kennedy fails this crucial test of political
and moral courage.
Kennedy, instead, regurgitates every lie,
every racist trope, every distortion of
history and every demeaning comment about
the backwardness of the Palestinian people
peddled by the most retrograde and far-right
elements of Israeli society. He peddles the
myth of what Pappe calls “Fantasy
Israel.” This alone discredits him as a
progressive candidate. It calls into
question his judgment and sincerity. It
makes him another Democratic Party hack who
dances to the macabre tune the Israeli
government plays.
Kennedy has vowed to make “the moral case
for Israel,” which is the equivalent of
making the moral case for apartheid South
Africa. He repeats, almost verbatim, talking
points from the Israeli propaganda playbook put
together by the Republican pollster and
political strategist, Frank Luntz. The
112-page study, marked “not for distribution
or publication,” which was leaked to
Newsweek, was commissioned by The Israel
Project. It was written in the aftermath of
Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and
January 2009 — when 1,387 Palestinians and
nine Israelis were killed.
The strategy document is the blueprint
for how Israeli politicians and lobbyists
sell Israel. It exposes the wide gap between
what Israeli politicians say and what they
know to be the truth. It is tailored to tell
the outside world, especially Americans,
what they want to hear. The report is
required reading for anyone attempting to
deal with the Israeli propaganda machine.
The document, for example, suggests
telling the outside world that Israel “has a
right to defensible borders,” but advises
Israelis to refuse to define what the
borders should be. It advises Israeli
politicians to justify the refusal by Israel
to allow 750,000 Palestinians and their
descendants, who were expelled from their
country during the 1948 war, to return home,
although the right of return is guaranteed under
international law, by referring to this
right as a “demand.” It also recommends
arguing that Palestinians are seeking mass
migrations to seize land inside Israel. It
suggests mentioning the hundreds of
thousands of Jewish refugees from Iraq,
Syria and Egypt, who fled anti-Semitism and
violence in the Arab world after the
creation of the Jewish state. The document
recommends saying these refugees also “left
property behind,” in essence justifying the
Israeli pogrom by the pogrom Arab states
carried out after 1948. It recommends
blaming the poverty among Palestinians on
“Arab nations” that have not provided “a
better life for Palestinians.”
What is most cynical about the report is
the tactic of expressing a faux sympathy for
the Palestinians, who are blamed for their
own oppression.
“Show Empathy for BOTH sides!” the
document reads. “The goal of pro-Israel
communications is not simply to make people
who already love Israel feel good about that
decision. The goal is to win new hearts and
minds for Israel without losing the support
Israel already has.” It says that this
tactic will “disarm” audiences.
I doubt Kennedy has read or heard of
Luntz’s report. But he has been spoon-fed
its talking points and naively spits them
back. Israel only wants peace. Israel does
not engage in torture. Israel is not an
apartheid state. Israel gives Israeli Arabs
political and civic rights they do not have
in other parts of the Middle East.
Palestinians are not deliberately targeted
by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Israel
respects civil liberties and gender and
marriage rights. Israel has “the best
judiciary in the world.”
Kennedy makes other claims, such as his
bizarre statement that the Palestinian
Authority pays Palestinians to kill Jews
anywhere in the world along with
falsifications of elemental Middle Eastern
history, which are so absurd I will ignore
them. But I list below examples from the
volumes of evidence that implode the
Luntz-inspired talking points Kennedy
repeats on behalf of the Israel lobby, not
that any evidence can probably puncture his
self-serving attachment to “Fantasy Israel.”
Apartheid
The 2017 U.N. report: “Israeli Practices
towards the Palestinian People and the
Question of Apartheid” concludes that
Israel has established an apartheid regime
that dominates the Palestinian people as a
whole.” Since 1967, Palestinians as a people
have lived in what the report refers to as
four “domains,” in which the fragments of
the Palestinian population are ostensibly
treated differently but share in common the
racial oppression that results from the
apartheid regime.
Those domains are:
1. Civil law, with special
restrictions, governing Palestinians who
live as citizens of Israel;
2. Permanent residency law governing
Palestinians living in the city of
Jerusalem;
3. Military law governing
Palestinians, including those in refugee
camps, living since 1967 under
conditions of belligerent occupation in
the West Bank and Gaza Strip;
4. Policy to preclude the return of
Palestinians, whether refugees or
exiles, living outside territory under
Israel’s control.
On 19 July 2018, the Israeli Knesset
voted “to approve the Jewish
Nation-State Basic Law, constitutionally
enshrining Jewish supremacy and the identity
of the State of Israel as the nation-state
of the Jewish people,” the Haifa-based civil
liberties group Adalah explained.
It is the supreme
law in Israel “capable of overriding any
ordinary legislation.”
In 2021 Israeli human rights group
B’Tselem published its report “A
regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan
River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is
apartheid.” The report reads:
In the entire area between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River,
the Israeli regime implements laws,
practices and state violence designed to
cement the supremacy of one group — Jews
— over another — Palestinians. A key
method in pursuing this goal is
engineering space differently for each
group.
Jewish citizens live as though the
entire area were a single space
(excluding the Gaza Strip). The Green
Line means next to nothing for them:
whether they live west of it, within
Israel’s sovereign territory, or east of
it, in settlements not formally annexed
to Israel, is irrelevant to their rights
or status.
Where Palestinians live, on the other
hand, is crucial. The Israeli regime has
divided the area into several units that
it defines and governs differently,
according Palestinians different rights
in each. This division is relevant to
Palestinians only…Israel accords
Palestinians a different package of
rights in every one of these units — all
of which are inferior compared to the
rights afforded to Jewish citizens.
“Since 1948,” the reports continues,
“Israel has taken over 90% of land within
its sovereign territory and built hundreds
of Jewish communities, yet not one for
Palestinians (with the exception of several
communities built to concentrate the Bedouin
population, after dispossessing them of
most of their property rights),” the report
reads.
“Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this
policy in the Occupied Territories, dispossessing Palestinians
of more than 2,000 km2 on various pretexts.
In violation of international law, it has
built over 280 settlements in
the West Bank (including East
Jerusalem) for more than 600,000 Jewish
citizens. It has devised a separate planning
system for Palestinians, designated
primarily to prevent construction and
development, and has not established a
single new Palestinian community.”
Targeting Civilians
Contrary to Kennedy’s claims that “the
policy of the Israeli military is to always
only attack military targets,” the deliberatetargeting of
civilians and civilian infrastructure by the
Israeli military, and other branches of the
Israeli security apparatus, has been
extensively documented by Israeli and
international organizations.
The 2010 Goldstone report, which is over
500 pages, investigated Israel’s 22-day air
and ground assault on Gaza that took place
from Dec. 27, 2008, to Jan. 18, 2009. The United
Nations Human Rights Council and the European
Parliament endorsed the report.
The Israeli attack killed 1,434 people,
including 960 civilians, according to the
Palestinian Center for Human Rights. More
than 6,000 homes were destroyed or damaged,
leaving behind some $3 billion in
destruction in one of the poorest areas on
Earth. Three Israeli civilians were killed
by rockets fired into Israel during the
assault.
The report’s key findings include that:
• Numerous instances of Israeli
lethal attacks on civilians and civilian
objects were intentional, including with
the aim of spreading terror, that
Israeli forces used Palestinian
civilians as human shields and that such
tactics had no justifiable military
objective.
• Israeli forces engaged in the
deliberate killing, torture and other
inhuman treatment of civilians and
deliberately caused extensive
destruction of property, outside any
military necessity, carried out wantonly
and unlawfully.
• Israel violated its duty to respect
the right of Gaza’s population to an
adequate standard of living, including
access to adequate food, water and
housing.
On 14 June of this year, B’Tselem reported that
“Top Israeli officials” are “criminally
liable for knowingly” ordering airstrikes
which were “expected to harm civilians,
including children, in the Gaza Strip.”
Contrary to the myth propagated by
Kennedy, reports and investigations, both by
the U.N. as well as by rights groups,
domestic and international, routinely cover
suspected or known violations by Palestinian
militants when they investigate alleged war
crimes. As B’Tselem noted in
the same 2019 report, in total, four
Israelis were killed and 123 wounded.
Last month, the U.N.’s expert on the
situation of human rights in the Palestinian
territories occupied since 1967, Italian
international lawyer and academic Francesca
Albanese, presented her
report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. It
makes for very grim reading.
Deprivation of liberty has been a
central element of Israel’s occupation
since its inception. Between 1967-2006
Israel has incarcerated over 800,000
Palestinians in the occupied territory.
Although spiking during Palestinian
uprisings, incarceration has become a
quotidian reality. Over 100,000
Palestinians were detained during the
First Intifada (1987-1993), 70,000
during the Second Intifada (2000-2006),
and over 6,000 during the ‘Unity
Intifada’ (2021). Approximately 7,000
Palestinians, including 882 children,
were arrested in 2022. Currently, almost
5,000 Palestinians, including 155
children, are detained by Israel, 1,014
of them without charge or trial.
Torture
Around 1,200 complaints “alleging
violence in Shin
Bet [The Israeli Security Agency]
interrogations” were filed between 2001 and
2019, according
to the Public Committee Against Torture
in Israel.
“Zero indictments have been brought,” the
committee reports. “This is yet another
illustration of the complete systemic
impunity enjoyed by the Shin Bet’s
interrogators.”
Coercive methods include sexual
harassment and humiliation, beatings, stress
positions imposed for hours and
interrogations that lasted as long as 19
hours as well as threats of violence against
family members.
“They said they would kill my wife and
children. They said they would cancel my
mother’s and sister’s permits for medical
treatments,” one survivor said in
2016. “I couldn’t sleep because even when I
was in my cell, they would wake me up every
15 minutes… I couldn’t tell the difference
between day and night… I still scream in my
sleep,” another said in 2017.
The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture,
Nils Melzer, expressed “his
utmost concern” after a December 2017 ruling
by Israel’s Supreme Court exempting security
agents from criminal investigation despite
their undisputed use of coercive “pressure
techniques” against a Palestinian detainee,
Assad Abu Gosh. He called the ruling a
“license to torture.”
Abu Gosh “was reportedly subjected to
ill-treatment including beatings, being
slammed against walls, having his body and
fingers bent and tied into painful stress
positions and sleep deprivation, as well as
threats, verbal abuse, and humiliation.
Medical examinations confirm that Mr. Abu
Gosh suffers from various neurologic
injuries resulting from the torture he
suffered.”
Civil
Liberties
In the November 2022 elections in Israel,
a far-right theocratic, nationalist and
openly racist coalition took power. Itamar
Ben-Gvir, from the ultra-nationalist Otzma
Yehudit, “Jewish Power,” party, is the
Minister of National Security. Otzma Yehudit
is populated with former members of Rabbi Meir
Kahane’s Kach party, which was banned
from running for the Knesset in 1988 for espousing a
“Nazi-like ideology” that included
advocating the ethnic cleansing of all
Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as
all Palestinians living under Israeli
military occupation. His appointment, along
with that of other far-right ideologues, including Bezalel
Smotrich, the Minister of Finance,
effectively jettisons the old tropes liberal
Zionists used to defend Israel — that it is
the only democracy in the Middle East, that
it seeks a peaceful settlement with the
Palestinians in a two-state solution, that
extremism and racism have no place in
Israeli society and that Israel must impose
draconian forms of control on the
Palestinians to prevent terrorism.
The new coalition government is reportedly
preparing legislation that would be used
to disqualify almost all Palestinian/Arab
Knesset members from serving in the Israeli
parliament, as well as ban their parties
from standing in elections. The recent
judicial “reforms” gut
the independence and oversight of the
Israeli courts. The government has also proposed shutting
down Kan, the public broadcasting network,
although that has been amended to fixing its
“flaws”. Smotrich, who opposes LGBTQ rights
and refers
to himself as a “fascist homophobe,”
said on Tuesday he would freeze all
funds to Israel’s Palestinian communities
and East Jerusalem.
Israel has promulgated a series of laws
to curtail public
freedoms, brand all forms of Palestinian
resistance as terrorism, and label
supporters of Palestinian rights, even if
they are Jewish, as anti-Semites. The
amendment of one of Israel’s principle
apartheid laws, the 2010 “Village
Committees Law,” grants neighborhoods
with up to 700 households the right to
reject people from moving in to “preserve
the fabric” of the community. Israel has
over 65 laws that are used to discriminate directly
or indirectly against Palestinian citizens
of Israel and those in the Occupied
Territories.
Israel’s Citizenship and Entry into
Israel Law prevents Palestinian
citizens of Israel from marrying
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Interreligious marriage in Israel is also prohibited.
As explained by
Jacob N. Simon, who served as the President
of the Jewish Legal Society at the Michigan
State University College of Law:
The combination of the blood line
related requirements to be considered
Jewish by the Orthodox Rabbinical Court
and the restriction of marriage
requiring religious ceremonies shows an
intent to maintain race purity. At its
core, this is no different than the
desire for pure blooded Aryans in Nazi
Germany or pure blooded whites in the
Jim Crow Southern United States.
Those who support these discriminatory
laws and embrace Israeli apartheid are
blinded by willful ignorance, racism or
cynicism. Their goal is to dehumanize
Palestinians, champion an intolerant Jewish
chauvinism and entice the naïve and the
gullible into justifying the unjustifiable.
Kennedy, bereft of a moral compass and a
belief system rooted in verifiable fact, has
not only failed the Palestinians, he has
failed us.
