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href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/18/in-words-and-deeds-the-genesis-of-israeli-violence/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/18/in-words-and-deeds-the-genesis-of-israeli-violence/</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">In Words and Deeds: The Genesis of Israeli
Violence</h1>
<p class="post_meta"> <span class="post_author_intro">by</span>
<span class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/cet6s/"
rel="nofollow">Ramzy Baroud</a></span> - January 18, 2018<br>
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<p>Not a day passes without a prominent Israeli politician
or intellectual making an outrageous statement against
Palestinians. Many of these statements tend to garner
little attention or evoke rightly deserved outrage.</p>
<p>Just recently, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, Uri
Ariel, called for more death and injuries on
Palestinians in Gaza.</p>
<p>“What is this special weapon we have that we fire and
see pillars of smoke and fire, but nobody gets hurt? It
is time for there to be injuries and deaths as well,” he
said.</p>
<p>Ariel’s calling for the killing of more Palestinians
came on the heels of other repugnant statements
concerning a 16-year-old teenager girl, Ahed Tamimi.
Ahed was arrested in a violent Israeli army raid at her
home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh.</p>
<p>A video recording showed her slapping an Israeli
soldier a day after the Israeli army shot her cousin in
the head, placing him in a coma.</p>
<p>Israeli Education Minister, Naftali Bennett, known for
his extremist political views, demanded that Ahed and
other Palestinian girls should “spend the rest of their
days in prison”.</p>
<p>A prominent Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit, sought yet
more punishment. He suggested that Ahed and girls like
her should be raped in jail.</p>
<p>“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at
some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses
and cameras”, he wrote in Hebrew.</p>
<p>This violent and revolting mindset, however, is not
new. It is an extension of an old, entrenched belief
system that is predicated on a long history of violence.</p>
<p>Undeniably, the views of Ariel, Bennett and Caspit are
not angry statements uttered in a moment of rage. They
are all reflections of real policies that have been
carried out for over 70 years. Indeed, killing, raping
and imprisoning for life are features that have
accompanied the state of Israel since the very
beginning.</p>
<p>This violent legacy continues to define Israel to this
day, through the use of what Israeli historian Ilan
Pappe describes as ‘incremental genocide.’</p>
<p>Throughout this long legacy, little has changed except
for names and titles. The Zionist militias that
orchestrated the genocide of the Palestinians prior to
the establishment of Israel in 1948 merged together to
form the Israeli army; and the leaders of these groups
became Israel’s leaders.</p>
<p>Israel’s violent birth in 1947- 48 was the culmination
of the violent discourse that preceded it for many
years. It was the time when Zionist teachings of prior
years were put into practice and the outcome was simply
horrifying.</p>
<p>“The tactic of isolating and attacking a certain
village or town and executing its population in a
horrible, indiscriminate massacre was a strategy
employed, time and again, by Zionist bands to compel the
population of surrounding villages and towns to flee,”
Ahmad Al-Haaj told me when I asked him to reflect on
Israel’s past and present.</p>
<p>Al-Haaj is a Palestinian historian and an expert on the
Nakba, the ‘Catastrophe’ that had befallen Palestinians
in 1948.</p>
<p>The 85-year-old intellectual’s proficiency in the
subject began 70 years ago, when, as a 15-year-old, he
witnessed the massacre of Beit Daras at the hands of
Jewish Haganah militia.</p>
<p>The destruction of the southern Palestinian village and
the killing of dozens of its inhabitants resulted in the
depopulation of many adjacent villages, including
al-Sawafir, Al-Haaj’s home village.</p>
<p>“The notorious Deir Yasin massacre was the first
example of such wanton killing, a model that was
duplicated in other parts of Palestine,” Al-Haaj said.</p>
<p>The ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the time was
orchestrated by several Zionist militias. The mainstream
Jewish militia was the Haganah which belonged to the
Jewish Agency.</p>
<p>The latter functioned as a semi-government, under the
auspices of the British Mandate Government, while the
Haganah served as its army.</p>
<p>However, other breakaway groups also operated according
to their own agenda. Two leading bands amongst them were
the Irgun (National Military Organization) and Lehi
(also known as the Stern Gang). These groups carried out
numerous terrorist attacks, including bus bombings and
targeted assassinations.</p>
<p>Russian-born Menachem Begin was the leader of the Irgun
which, along with the Stern Gang and other Jewish
militants, massacred hundreds of civilians in Deir
Yassin.</p>
<p>‘Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel
with your attack and your conquest. Continue this until
victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will
attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us
for conquest,” Begin wrote at the time. He described the
massacre as a “splendid act of conquest.”</p>
<p>The intrinsic link between words and actions remain
unchanged.</p>
<p>Nearly 30 years later, a once wanted terrorist, Begin
became Prime Minister of Israel. He accelerated land
theft of the newly-occupied West Bank and East
Jerusalem, launched a war on Lebanon, annexed Occupied
Jerusalem to Israel and carried out the massacre of
Sabra and Shatilla in 1982.</p>
<p>Some of the other terrorists-turned-politicians and top
army brass include Begin, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin,
Ariel Sharon, Rafael Eitan and Yitzhak Shamir. Each one
of these leaders has a record dotted with violence.</p>
<p>Shamir served as the Prime Minister of Israel from 1986
– 1992. In 1941, Shamir was imprisoned by the British
for his role in the Stern Gang. Later, as Prime
Minister, he ordered a violent crackdown against a
mostly non-violent Palestinian uprising in 1987,
purposely breaking the limbs of kids accused of throwing
rocks at Israeli soldiers.</p>
<p>So, when government ministers like Ariel and Bennett
call for wanton violence against Palestinians, they are
simply carrying on with a bloody legacy that has defined
every single Israeli leader in the past. It is the
violent mindset that continues to control the Israeli
government and its relationship with Palestinians; in
fact, with all of its neighbors.</p>
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<p class="author_description"> <em><strong>Dr. Ramzy Baroud</strong>
has been writing about the Middle East for over 20
years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a
media consultant, an author of several books and the
founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My
Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story (Pluto
Press, London). His website is: ramzybaroud.net</em> </p>
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