[News] Israel keeping true to its racist words

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Israel keeping true to its racist words
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9361.shtml

Rami Almeghari, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2008

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Palestinians carry the body of Salsabeel Abu Jalhoumm, a 21-month-old 
girl who was killed early on Sunday when an Israeli air strike hit 
near her home in the northern Gaza Strip, 2 March 2008. (Wissam 
Nassar/<http://maanimages.com>MaanImages)

Following Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai's Friday 
warning that the Gaza Strip faces "a holocaust" if homemade rocket 
fire continues, Vilnai's aides rushed to downplay the remarks, 
claiming the minister did not mean a holocaust exactly.

However, the following day, the Israeli army, through ground forces 
and helicopters in the sky, killed 61 Palestinians in Gaza, at least 
ten of them children. Since Wednesday, 26 March, Israeli occupation 
forces have killed at least 77 Palestinians in Gaza and injured 
approximately 130, including children who won't live to see their 
first birthday.

Vilnai's racist declarations against the Palestinian people are 
certainly not the first from a high-ranking official in the allegedly 
democratic state of Israel.

Last Thursday, 28 February, Israeli cabinet minister Meir Sheetrit 
said that the solution to the rocket fire would be for Israel to "hit 
everything that moves with weapons and ammunition." Earlier in the 
month, during a cabinet session Sheetrit stated that "exactly what I 
think the [Israeli army] should do [is] decide on a neighborhood in 
Gaza and level it."

Genocidal statements calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians 
are not reserved for those in Gaza, however. The extreme rightist 
Yisrael Beitenu party leader and former Deputy Defense Minister 
Avigdor Lieberman, who was born in Moldova and immigrated to Israel 
at the age of 20, advocates for the "transfer" or ethnic cleansing of 
indigenous Palestinian citizens in Israel and has declared that 
Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset who meet with Palestinian 
leaders from the West Bank and Gaza should be executed as traitors.

Before Lieberman was Rehavam Ze'evi, the assassinated Israeli tourism 
minister and founder of the fascist Moledet party which makes the 
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians part of its party platform. 
Regarding the 180,000 Palestinian laborers from the West Bank and 
Gaza working for substandard wages in Israel before the state imposed 
a total closure, Ze'evi described them in a 2001 radio interview as 
"a cancer" and advocated that "[Israel] should get rid of the ones 
who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice."

Dehumanizing the Palestinians has been necessary for Israel to 
justify its actions ever since, and even before, the state was 
declared on destroyed historic Palestine in 1948 and then in 1967 
when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Taken together, they 
indicate the historic effort to destroy Palestinian national 
aspirations and this is what Israel is trying to do in Gaza, which 
Nobel prize winner and late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once 
wished would be swallowed by the sea.

Gaza is no stranger to devastation. In 1956, for example, former 
Israeli prime minister and war criminal Ariel Sharon moved troops 
under his command into the town of Khan Younis where a massacre was 
committed. Since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, Israel 
has been particularly cruel to Gaza, committing crime after crime 
without sanction from the so-called international community. The 
firing of homemade rockets -- no match to Israel's US-supplied and 
funded military arsenal -- came only after decades of violent Israeli 
oppression against Palestinians trying to shake off the military occupation.

Fourteen Israelis have been killed by the crude rockets since 
Palestinian resistance began firing them in 2001, while approximately 
300 Palestinians were killed just in the few months since the renewed 
peace process was declared in Annapolis in November of last year. 
Nearly 5,000 Palestinian men, women and children have been killed 
since 2000, all "terrorists" in the eyes of Israeli intelligence 
chief Yuval Diskin.

Though he may have passed on, the words of deceased Palestinian 
leader Yasser Arafat ring ever true thirty years since he uttered 
them: "Those who call us terrorists wish to prevent world public 
opinion from discovering the truth about us and from seeing the 
justice on our faces. They seek to hide the terrorism and tyranny of 
their acts, and our own posture of self-defense."

Rami Almeghari is currently contributor to several media outlets 
including Palestine Chronicle, IMEMC, The Electronic Intifada and 
Free Speech Radio News. Rami is also a former senior English 
translator at and editor in chief of the international press center 
of the Gaza-based Palestinian Information Service. He can be 
contacted at rami_almeghari at hotmail.com




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