[News] All Points Alert: Killer State at Large - Israel

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/all-points-alert-killer-state-at-large/


  All Points Alert: Killer State at Large

*By Jeremy Salt - September 20, 2019
<http://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/jeremy-salt>*

The most important news coming out of occupied Palestine last week was 
not the blow delivered to Benyamin Netanyahu.Netanyahu or Gantz, it will 
be business as usual, now that the elections are over: more attacks on 
Gaza, possibly a large-scale war on Gaza, possibly a war on Lebanon, or 
Iran, who would know, as Israel always has a profusion of targets.

No, the most important news was not the elections but the killing of a 
Palestinian woman in the West Bank, only a few days after a 10-year-old 
boy, Abd al Rahman Yasir Shtewi, had been shot in the head by a soldier 
near the northern West Bank village of Kafr Qaddum during a 
demonstration over the closure of an access road. He was taken to 
hospital in critical condition.

The woman, Alaa Wahdan, was shot with an assault rifle as she walked 
towards a checkpoint near the Qalandiya refugee camp, built for refugees 
after the massacres and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Lydda and 
Ramle in 1948.

She was walking on the road, having missed the pedestrian lane allotted 
to the Palestinians. That was the crime for which she had to die. She 
was told to stop. According to the five heavily armed men who blocked 
her way, she pulled out a knife, a small yellow-handled thing 
photographed lying on the road. Alaa was five to seven meters away and 
the knife could have been knocked away with the butt of a gun but one of 
the armed men shot her instead, the bullet apparently severing an artery 
in her leg.

Alaa fell to the road and was left there unattended for half an hour, 
bleeding to death. The Palestinian Red Crescent said it was prevented 
from attending to her. The soldiers watched her drag herself along the 
roadside on her front, the blood pouring out of her body, leaving a 
long, wide red stain behind her.Not one of them made any attempt to 
comfort her or staunch the wound. They watched her bleed to death. They 
let her die, in line with unstated state policy.

Who Alaa was precisely, a mother, a sister, a daughter or an aunt, was 
of no interest to the occupiers. She was a down-page story in the media, 
not even worthy of being given a name, no more than the African 
‘terrorists’ of the 1940s or 50s were worthy of being given a name by 
the British or French occupiers of their land who tortured and murdered 
them. In the words of Mickey Rosenfeld, the police gauleiter of occupied 
Jerusalem, she was no more than a “female terrorist” who was “injured 
moderately.” If this is so, Mr Rosenfeld, why did she die?

In the background, while Alaa crawled along the road, her lifeblood 
draining away, the spivs, the thieves and the war criminals quarreled 
over who should be next to take over the occupation of Palestine. The 
choice was between Netanyahu and Gantz, the outcome of the elections so 
close that the ‘kingmaker’ will be Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan 
immigrant who arrived in Palestine when he was 20 and lives with his 
wife and children on Palestinian land in the settlement of Nokdim.

Like Menahim Begin in the 1970s, Lieberman was once regarded as a thug 
and fanatic who would never make it into the mainstream of Zionist 
politics but as the mainstream has shifted further right year by year it 
finally reached him.He once advocated the bombing of the Aswan dam as a 
means of shutting up the Egyptians. He thinks the ‘Arab’ members of the 
Zionist ‘parliament’ are the allies of terrorists.

He wants Muslim and Christian Palestinians to be required to swear an 
oath of loyalty to a state which has declared itself to be a Jewish, 
which has practically stripped them bare of all they possess and which 
plans to keep going until nothing is left.

His philosophy can be summed up in his own words: “Whoever is against us 
there’s nothing to do …. We have to lift up an axe and remove his head … 
otherwise we won’t be here.” The option of handing back part of what has 
been stolen as a means of making peace is not even within his realm of 
thinking.

As for Netanyahu, his campaigning was nakedly racist. He warned against 
an ‘Arab’ party ending up in government and his Likud party stationed 
cameras outside polling booths to intimidate Palestinians and prevent 
them from voting.It didn’t work. They turned out in higher numbers than 
ever.It is the measure of this individual’s vile nature that he wanted 
to attack Gaza either to win or postpone the elections, riding to 
eventual victory over the bodies of more dead Palestinian men, women and 
children.

Gantz got in his way, but only for the same electoral reason, because he 
also is a killer of Palestinians, and currently the subject of 
prosecution in the Netherlands for the bombing of an apartment building 
in Gaza in 2014 which killed six members of the same family.

As the Palestinians well know, it makes no difference which of the 
parties is in power because their policies – more war, more killing, 
more settlements, with annexation now only a few steps away – are all 
the same.

The pathology of the Zionists puts them beyond reason. They do not 
connect up with any laws or values except their own and trying to reason 
with them on the basis of international law and universal values is a 
waste of time, pebbles thrown against the side of a tank.

In 2013 Mehdi Hassan interviewed Dani Dayon as the centerpiece of an 
Oxford Union debate. Until recently Dayon was the head of the Yesha 
settler council.Sitting in the front row, Ghada Karmi, born in Al Quds 
to a family that owns land on the West Bank taken over by foreign 
settlers like Dayon, had to endure the lies and delusions that flowed 
from this man’s mouth. Cutting through the arrogance and his smiling, 
self-assured attempts to deceive the audience, she told him what he 
actually was in her eyes and the eyes of the world –a common thief.

There is no mystery about what has ‘happened’ in Palestine.There is no 
‘conflict of rights,’ ‘contested narratives’ or ‘disputed’ ownership. 
These are all propaganda phrases designed to conceal the indisputable 
reality.From the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, Palestine has been 
stolen by people whose moral right to stay there can only be conferred 
on them by the people whose land they have stolen.Had they ever accepted 
this principle, had they ever apologized for their crimes, had they 
agreed to share instead of wanting to take the lot, using all the brutal 
means at their disposal, this moral right could have been secured but 
they forfeited this possibility long ago, preferring endless war to the 
possibility of peace. There is no ‘two state’ solution in sight.Add it 
to the list of myths still being purveyed. There is no solution in sight 
at all, at least not one based on rational discussion and the 
application of international.

There is no statute of limitations here. The land was stolen and will 
remain stolen no matter how long the Zionists hold it.There is no ‘land 
of Israel’.There is no ‘Temple Mount’ and no ‘tomb of the patriarchs’ in 
Hebron.These are all deceptions sitting atop a mountain of lies intended 
to bury the truth.There is Palestine, there is the Haram al Sharif, the 
Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron, where the settler state pogrom against the 
Palestinians continues without pause, and countless other sites on the 
map, all of them occupied and renamed.Not a drop of water in the sea or 
a speck of sand on the beach belongs to the Zionists.It has all been stolen.

As soon as the elections were over, ‘kingmaker’ Lieberman, leading the 
party of Russian ‘immigrants’ to an illegally occupied land, started 
stitching together a ‘national unity’ government. As excited or as 
preoccupied with the process as the Zionist population of Palestine 
might be, there is no prospect of change for the Palestinians except 
change for the worse.

Gantz is as much a warmonger as Netanyahu or Lieberman and as the 
Palestinians will continue to resist occupation of their land where and 
when they can, as is their natural right and their right under 
international law, more large-scale violence is only a matter of time. 
In their arrogance the Zionists are ignoring all the warning signs, the 
cries of ‘death to Israel’ from the Houthis, the tens of thousands of 
missiles in Hizbullah’s armory and the determination of Iran to defend 
itself and its allies. The Zionists can kick the Palestinians around, 
but not these powerful enemies, who have behind them the support for 
Palestine of Muslims everywhere, not to speak of the numerous defenders 
of Palestine and Palestinian rights in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia 
and many other countries.

The Zionists came to the Middle East as a ‘rampart’ of ‘western 
civilisation’ and that is where they have remained, on the ramparts, 
behind the palisades, the fences and the wall, fencing others out and 
fencing themselves in. They wanted to be in the Middle East but not of 
the Middle East. It was beneath them. They hijacked those aspects of its 
culture that suited them but looked down with contempt on the rest and 
they still do.

In any case, western domination was the accurate phrase, not western 
civilization.The ‘west’ has never been civilized, not in the Middle East 
or in any other lands against which it went to war and occupied. Rather, 
it has been utterly barbaric, as the word is generally understood, and 
Zionism has been part of that barbarism.

Not wanting to be part of the Middle East except on its own unacceptable 
terms, Zionism has to rely on powerful outside backers, a role currently 
filled by one of them, the United States.However, will it always be 
there to give the Zionist state the support it demands, will it always 
be capable of giving it the support it demands, will it ultimately be 
willing to put its own life on the line for a small state far away that 
is held in contempt by much of the world, not for bad reasons but for 
perfectly understandable ones, and one that is held in contempt as well 
by an increasing number of Americans?

Only arrogance could be the reason for the willingness of the Zionists 
to stake their future on such uncertainties, when for a small price, 
except in their own greedy eyes, they could have secured their place in 
the Middle East long ago. There is one other reason for their 
confidence, though, and that is their possession of nuclear weapons.At 
the worst, backs finally against the wall, they can take everyone down 
with them.

Take a serial killer out of the psychiatric ward, hand him a machine-gun 
and wait to see what happens.That is the prospect ahead of the Middle 
East as long as the Zionist state remains a killer at large.

/– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus 
University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, 
specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent 
publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A 
History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California 
Press). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle./

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 https://freedomarchives.org/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20190923/e4169202/attachment.htm>