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 | | Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS |
How difficult can it be to drop 500 pound bombs on apartment tenements in refugee camps? How difficult can it be to prevent ambulances from taking injured people to hospitals? How difficult can it be to deal with children that throw stones at tanks and use them as target practice? How difficult can it be to prevent fishermen from catching a few fish off Gaza when the Israeli Navy controls the shore with state of the art ships? How difficult can it be to control the lives of all Palestinians when the state can field 700 checkpoints throughout the West Bank and Gaza, surround the entire area with a cement and steel and electric wall that literally imprisons the entire people, imposes identification systems that control movement throughout the occupied territory with IDs and colored license plates, and controls all legal matters of recourse to justice by courts totally controlled by the Israeli state? This is justice? This is the American way? This is the best use of our 3 to 5 billion dollars every year to ensure peace in Palestine? What hypocrisy. What mockery of our purported democratic system. What a way to ensure that America is hated around the world. Yet this is what our legislators have bought for the American people by fawning before their benefactors at AIPAC.
You have heard of the injustice done to Israel by the “kidnapping” of three soldiers, the ostensible cause of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon? Strange that word “kidnapping.” Israel has over 11,000 Palestinians, hundreds of them children, incarcerated without charge. They have not been kidnapped. They are potential terrorists. Yet according to Geneva Conventions, occupied people can legally fight against their occupiers. “Kidnapping” becomes “capturing” an enemy soldier. States negotiate the exchange of prisoners, they do not attack an innocent nation. You have heard that individual Palestinians attack Israelis, even commit suicide to destroy innocent people, yet we never hear that Israel daily commits crimes against humanity as declared in the Geneva Conventions and in the UN Charter against masses of Palestinians by collective punishment, house demolition in the thousands, confiscation of homes and land, stealing of natural resources to supply the settlements, torture of prisoners, extrajudicial executions, all illegal, all done with the complicity of our Congress, in our name. These are the representatives that are devoted to America’s security, its standing before the international community, and human rights. They like the first lady last month (USA Today, October 10, 2007) proclaim their intense desire to ensure that human rights are protected – in Burma, in Darfur, in Pakistan, in all the hot spots on the globe, but not in Palestine. The only human rights we protect in Palestine are those of the occupiers. We overlook how the occupiers train their teenage troops to act against the people they oppress. Dalia Karpel reported in Haaretz’ Hebrew Weekend Supplement September 21, 2007 the nature of that training based on interviews with former IDF soldiers. Needless to say it was not reported in the American press. This report describes the research of Psychologist Nofer Ishai-Karen and Psychology Professor Joel Elizur of the Hebrew University. “We Israeli Soldiers – were put there to punish the Palestinians, says Ilan Vilenda, an Israeli soldier who served in Rafah during the first Intifada.” “The soldiers enjoyed the ‘intoxication of power’, and had pleasure from using violence,” according to the researchers. “What is great is that you don’t have to follow any law or rule. You feel that YOU ARE THE LAW; you decide. Once you go into the Occupied Territories YOU ARE GOD.” “We drove through Rafah. A man of 25 walked nearby. He didn’t hurl a stone at us or anything. Then without any reason “X” shot him in the stomach. We left him lying on the sidewalk.” “He captured a kid and broke his elbow. Broke the kid’s elbow! Damn me if I’m not telling the truth! Then the NCO treaded on the kid’s stomach three times, before he moved on. We couldn’t believe our eyes … But the next day we went on patrol with that guy and the soldiers started to imitate him.” “A woman threw a stone at me. I kicked her with my foot at her crotch. I broke her. She can’t have children any longer. Next time she won’t throw sandals at me … and when another woman spat at me she got the butt of my gun in her face. She can’t spit now.” “He was real big, some 30 years old. He refused detention. We hit him but couldn’t force him down. … We beat him and told him to lie down. Till he finally did. We drove to the base with him. By that time he had lost consciousness. He died some days later.” These are the compassionate humanitarians that oversee the International laws that govern the responsibilities of the occupying forces. These are the soldiers we support. This is the way we protect America. And so our legislators, fearing their own potential loss of their House or Senate seat, continue to support the desires of the Neo-cons and AIPAC and its fellows despite the condemnation of the world’s communities that see nothing but hypocrisy in their behavior. What the world sees is simple enough if Americans were given the truth by its main stream media: “700 checkpoints that strangle the Palestinians’ freedom of movement, 68 women forced to give birth at checkpoints since the year 2000, half of the babies died and four of the women, 18,000 houses have been demolished by Israel since 1967, often over the heads of their inhabitants … In the old city of Hebron, 400 fanatical settlers – protected by Israeli Defense Force soldiers – hold 30,000 Palestinians to ransom. They stone and kick the inhabitants, while the Israeli army forbids Palestinians to drive – in some areas, even to walk – on the streets. I saw for myself the concrete blocks, rubbish and human excrement thrown down onto passing Palestinians by the illegal settlers occupying the flats above Arab shops.. The racist graffiti is shocking …” (“Go and See the Truth for Yourself, I Did,” Asad Khan, Special Registrar, Respiratory Medicine Wythenshawe Hospital, Manchester, UK, British Medical Journal, October 7, 2007). So while our legislators dress appropriately in their double breasted suits, with their American flag lapel pins glowing in the ballroom lights at the AIPAC gala, as they grovel before the keypad denizens of the posh offices that turn out the legislation they will vote on in the following weeks, the people of Palestine suffer the humiliation, the suffering, the agony of the occupation, the illegal occupation, that our friends on K street impose on people they do not know or could care less about. Yet there are those in the Jewish community who suffer a like humiliation as they watch their compatriots commit their non-Jewish atrocities to further their rapid Zionist ends, and they, like us, must endure the corrosive rot of our constitution and Bill of Rights as the cowards in our Congress convince themselves that they are obedient to the word of their Christ and uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights even as they lift their cocktail glass in celebration of the latest resolution they’ve passed for their masters.
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