November 23, 2006 According to veteran Middle East reporter Patrick Seale, Israel has killed 2,300 Gazans since 2000, including 300 in the four months since Cpl. Gilad Shalit was captured in a cross-border raid by Palestinian resistance fighters near Rafah on June 25. The number of wounded since this time number in the tens of thousands. Most of the casualties are civilians, many of them children. The Jews who perpetrate these atrocities do not kill out of any perceived military threat to Israel; they kill because they are steeped in a toxic culture of Jewish supremacy and anti-Arab hatred. They torture and massacre Arabs, starve them, toy with them, punish them for their birth, and they do so voluntarily, even eagerly, with unsurpassable malice and cruelty. Like the Nazis, these are men and women who, faithful to their credo of racial superiority, consider the slaughter to be just. From at least the early 20th century, they have been possessed by “eliminationist” anti-Arabism, which was best expressed by David ben-Gurion in May 1948: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”* Beginning with the April 1947 Deir Yassin massacre, Israel has put its eliminationist credo into practice more than 50 times, which leads me to this observation by Seale: “The killing continues on a daily basis—by tank and sniper fire, by air and sea bombardment, and by undercover teams in civilian clothes sent into Arab territory to ambush and murder, an Israeli specialty perfected over the past several decades. How long will the ‘international community’ allow the slaughter to continue? …Some form of intervention is urgently required, perhaps in the form of an international force on the border between Israel and Gaza, to protect each side from the other, to allow some air into the moribund Gaza economy, and to bring relief to a humanitarian catastrophe.” Seale was eerily prescient. Less than a week after this article was published in Lebanon’s Daily Star on Oct. 27, Israel began the massacre of Beit Hanoun. In six days, more than 80 Palestinian men women and children were killed and hundreds wounded, including 19 members of the extended Al Athamna family. Not satisfied with terrorizing and killing people, the Israeli Occupation Force also uprooted more than 42,000 olive, citrus and date trees. In all it razed 4,405 acres of orchards, vineyards and vegetable fields. Five factories, 21 houses and 19 wells were also destroyed—all this, because of a few erratic Qassam rocket attacks. As usual, the world expressed disgust and outrage. Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, even visited the ruined al-Athamna home: “The violation of human rights I think in this territory is massive,” she said. “The call for protection has to be answered. We cannot continue to see civilians, who are not the authors of their own misfortune, suffer to the extent of what I see.” But so what else is new? The massacre of Beit Hanoun is no different from the scores of massacres that preceded it, and in those cases the world did nothing to punish Israel or force it to compensate its victims, which highlights the importance of Seale’s rhetorical question:“How long will the ‘international community’ allow the slaughter to continue?”
The operative word here is “allow,” because at any time during the last 60 years, the international community could have stopped the carnage. Unfortunately, this notion is purely theoretical because virtuous, democratic countries like Canada, the U.S. and the U.K., as well as the UN, allowed Jewish supremacism to gain a foothold in Palestine.† A case could be made that the international community bears greater responsibility for the plight of Arabs than does Israel, in the sense that the creator of a monster is ultimately responsible for the monster’s behaviour, since the monster can only act according to its nature. To take but one historical analogy, had zionist Jews not helped the Nazis break the worldwide anti-German boycott, and sabotage reports of anti-Jewish persecution, Hitler’s economically vulnerable Reich would likely not have lasted more than a few years. From this perspective, one might reasonably conclude that zionists bear at least as much responsibility for the persecution of (non-zionist) European Jewry, and the outbreak of war as did the Nazis. Therefore, Seale’s anguish at the inaction of world governments, although thoroughly justified, is also sadly futile. Here is the Nov. 8 boilerplate response of Canada’s Foreign Minister Peter MacKay regarding the massacre: “The Palestinian Authority must take concrete measures to eliminate attacks against Israel. The statement by a leading Hamas official encouraging attacks against Israel is disturbing, and once again demonstrates the incompatibility of terrorism and democratic principles. We also understand and recognize Israel’s right to protect its citizens. However, Israel must assume its responsibility to exercise the utmost caution to prevent civilian casualties. We welcome Israel’s decision to investigate the shelling.” How does bombing non-combatants and destroying their livelihood equal self-defence?! As you ponder this question, here is MacKay’s statement two days later regarding the shelling of civilians in a camp for internally displaced persons near the town of Vakarai in eastern Sri Lanka: “ ‘This incident demonstrates once again the heavy price paid by civilians caught in this long-standing conflict,’ said Minister MacKay. ‘Canada urges both sides to immediately cease hostilities and return to negotiations.’ The Government of Canada continues to believe that there can be no military solution to this lengthy conflict. The targeting of non-combatants is never acceptable and is a clear violation of international humanitarian law. Canada calls on all parties to the conflict in Sri Lanka to strictly adhere to their obligations under international humanitarian law, including the protection of civilians and the facilitation of safe and unhindered access for humanitarian agencies to reach civilians in need.” (my emphasis) On the one hand, Canada believes that Sri Lankan non-combatants are deemed to be victims of terrorism and worthy of the full protection of international law, yet it charges that non-combatant Palestinians have only themselves to blame for being massacred, and dismisses their deaths as merely “tragic accidents.” Meanwhile, Israel has admitted that it indiscriminately dropped cluster bombs on civilian targets during the massacre of Lebanon, which proves that they are guilty of war crimes and treat Arabs as sub-human. In the Beit Hanoun massacre, for example, a triumphalist battalion commander praised his soldiers for killing 12 Palestinians with the words: “We have won by 12:0!” Cabinet Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a Moldovan who is denounced as fascist and racist even by Jewish politicians, has openly called for the assassination of Palestine’s Hamas-led government, and the mass murder of all Palestinians: “They ... have to disappear, to go to paradise, all of them, and there can’t be any compromise.” What is this, if not the voice of ben Gurion and “eliminationist” anti-Arabism? Yet, all Canada and the rest of the world can do is blindly regurgitate hoary propaganda about Israel’s right to self-defence as if Palestine’s right to self-defence didn’t exist. How long will the international community allow the slaughter to continue? For as long as Canada and other civilized nations deny Arabs their humanity, and refuse to acknowledge their responsibility for unleashing the zionist monster upon the world. Notes: |
