[News] Who is killing whom in Israel/Palestine?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Who is killing whom in Israel/Palestine?

By <http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/sonja>Sonja Karkar
http://www.zcommunications.org/who-is-killing-whom-in-israel-palestine-by-sonja-karkar

Friday, March 26, 2010

One man dead in Israel and the whole world knows. 
He actually was not Israeli, but an unfortunate 
immigrant worker from Thailand. We have been told 
who killed him too: not by name, but by some 
shadowy nom de guerre, used by jihadist groups 
some claim to be loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda 
in Iraq and elsewhere. The unknown group in Gaza, 
Ansar al-Sunna, claimed responsibility for the 
rocket fired into Israel that caused the man’s death by shrapnel.

The Hamas government has had its own problems 
with such groups, which have challenged its rule 
in Gaza. But, that is neither here nor there for Israel.

Israel has already said that its response will be 
strong. And sure enough, Israeli bombers have 
pounded the southern-most part of Gaza, so far 
killing and wounding some fourteen Palestinian 
civilians including children, three of them critically.

The proportionality of the response is totally 
unbalanced, but more outrageous is that Israel 
should resort to such measures at all. Israel’s 
recent provocations have been like a red rag to a 
bleeding bull and these cannot be discounted in 
understanding the cycle of violence.

The targeted assassination of a Palestinian Hamas 
leader in a foreign country by agents using 
stolen identities and forged passports turned the 
spotlight on Israel, which neither denied nor 
admitted to the crime, while all the evidence 
clearly incriminated it. Briefly, the world was 
shocked, not so much that a state would sanction 
a killing in the first place, but that the 
killers would violate the sovereignty and 
security of other countries to carry out such a plan.

That modus operandi is common practice for Israel 
whether it perpetrated this particular killing or 
not. Of course, its victims are always 
“terrorists” as the Palestinians know only too 
well. Even their children are fair game.

In Nablus two sixteen-year-old cousins were shot 
in the heart and the head for throwing stones. 
One is dead, the other critically injured. 
Similar incidents occur without any international 
outcries throughout the West Bank where protests 
by Palestinians against Israeli oppression, 
discrimination and expansionism continue with a 
courageous steadfastness. No people would 
willingly give up their birthright and land.

As the bulldozers move in to tear down houses and 
rip up olive groves, stones against these 
military machines are the only weapons these 
angry youths have to defend their family homes 
and livelihoods. However, the consequences for 
stone-throwers and their families alike are 
devastating with death, injury, imprisonment, 
torture and expulsion just some of the punishments meted out.

In Hebron, repeated settler violence has led to 
the shooting and beating of Palestinian civilians 
in the Old City and nearby neighborhoods. 
Protests against these continual violations to 
their lives have only invited more attacks on the 
Palestinians from Israeli soldiers claiming to 
quell the protests. Tear gas and rubber-coated 
bullets have recently injured some 47 residents, 
in response, says Israel’s military, to stones 
thrown, although there is no way of knowing who 
fired the first shot or threw the first stone.

In East Jerusalem, the Israeli government 
announces almost every other day new plans to 
construct Jewish-only housing units on land 
illegally seized from the Palestinians. Families 
have been evicted from homes they have lived in 
for decades while Jewish settlers are indecently 
moved in before their very eyes. Palestinian 
houses are demolished in Palestinian 
neighborhoods to make way for encroaching Jewish 
ones or to replace them with Jewish 
neighborhoods. The latest are the 1,600 illegal 
units announced while the US vice-president Joe 
Biden was in Israel seeking to re-start peace 
negotiations on the understanding that settlement building would cease.

Not only is Palestinian land being stolen and 
lives destroyed, but Palestinian religious sites 
of centuries are being desecrated. Christians and 
Muslims alike are struggling to stop Israel’s 
Judaization of their cities, and Jerusalem 
particularly, has always been part of this 
creeping takeover, but never as intensely as now.

Israeli excavations in and around Islam’s third 
most holy site in Jerusalem, the Haram al Sharif 
compound which houses two famous mosques, are 
seriously threatening its integrity and are in 
breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention which 
prohibits the destruction of a World Heritage 
site. Just 50 meters away, a Jewish synagogue is 
being built in the Muslim quarter while one of 
the city’s oldest Muslim cemeteries is the site 
selected for Israel’s Museum of Tolerance. Not 
only that, Israel has periodically set up 
military checkpoints to prevent Palestinian men 
from attending the Al Aqsa mosque for Friday 
prayers, a prelude no doubt to barring 
Palestinians from entering the city at all.

The whole Arab and Muslim world knows that Israel 
wants to turn Jerusalem into an exclusively 
Jewish city and expand its territory from the 
Mediterranean to the Jordan River, if not 
further. Up till now, that did not seem to bother 
the US government, but after Israel insulted 
Vice-President Biden, this administration might 
just be realizing that its indulged acolyte can 
no longer be controlled and threatens its own interests in the region.

Netanyahu’s conciliatory message to US Secretary 
of State Hillary Clinton offered the removal of 
some of the 500 plus military checkpoints that 
have caught Palestinian civilians in an 
impossible grid of shuffle-through turnstiles and 
lockdowns inside the West Bank. It is not the 
first time that checkpoints have been dismantled 
only to have new ones erected elsewhere. He also 
suggested the possibility of transferring more 
land to the control of the Palestinian Authority. 
That is a sham we have seen repeated all too 
often - talking peace and making a few paltry 
concessions while creating facts on the ground, 
which make any viable state impossible.  But it 
is the Palestinians we should be worried about.

Aside from the walls and laws that imprison the 
Palestinians already, Israeli leaders, academics 
and military experts, and backed by Zionist 
supporters, have spoken of transfer, curbing 
Palestinian births and putting them on a “diet”. 
The most chilling proposal was put by a former 
chief rabbi in May 2007 when he advocated carpet 
bombing Gaza. His son who is also a chief rabbi 
elaborated: "If they don't stop after we kill 
100, then we must kill a thousand, and if they do 
not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If 
they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even 
a 1,000,000. Whatever it takes to make them stop."

Such remarks and actions by a state drunk on its 
own ill-gotten power are plainly genocidal and no 
peace talks are going to stop Israel in its 
tracks.  There is, however, one sure remedy – the 
enforcement of international law by whatever 
legal means necessary, even if that requires 
UN-backed sanctions or the cutting of billions of 
US aid to Israel to force Israel to comply. 
Anything less will soon answer the question of 
who is killing whom for those too blind to see 
the truth already being played out in full view of the whole world.

  Sonja Karkar is the founder of Women for 
Palestine and one of the founders and co-convener 
of Australians for Palestine in Melbourne, 
Australia. She is also the editor of 
<http://www.australiansforpalestine.com/>www.australiansforpalestine.com 
and contributes articles on Palestine regularly 
to various publications. She can be contacted at 
<http://www.zcommunications.org/javascripts/fckeditor/editor/sonjakarkar@womenforpalestine.org>sonjakarkar at womenforpalestine.org




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