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<font size=3 color="#191919">Israel keeping true to its racist words
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<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9361.shtml" eudora="autourl">
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9361.shtml<br><br>
</a>Rami Almeghari, <i>The Electronic Intifada,</i> 2 March 2008
<br><br>
<img src="http://electronicintifada.net/artman2/uploads/2/080302-rami-gaza.jpg" width=483 height=330 alt="[]">
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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/<a href="http://maanimages.com">MaanImages</a>) <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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." <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
<i>Rami Almeghari is currently contributor to several media outlets
including </i>Palestine Chronicle<i>, IMEMC, </i>The Electronic
Intifada<i> and </i>Free Speech Radio News<i>. 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</i> <br><br>
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