Ben Heine/ MWC NEWS

What does it mean to say “they blitzed their way through 418 towns and villages”? It means that the Jewish Agency and its military forces used plans drawn up months in advance for the destruction of these towns and villages, divided the armies into predetermined areas, identified the roads and by ways, the homes and the offices of town leaders, mapped out plans to surround the towns on three sides to force the inhabitants out the fourth, forced them from their homes, leaving the dinner still warm on the table, as they rampaged through the streets, and blew up homes burying the inhabitants beneath the rubble. “Women were raped, men tortured, children made to watch and no age or gender was spared from being killed, their mutilated bodies then stuffed down wells or left heaped in mounds of mangled flesh and blood.” (“The Ghosts of Deir Yassin,” Sonja Karkar.)

Curiously, the Zionist Organization had spent months and untold amounts of money gathering in advance a calculated, cold blooded slaughter of the Palestinians without any hint to the Palestinians that they would become victims of the Zionist zeal for their land. I say “curiously” because I find it hard to grapple with a mentality that can earmark a town of several hundred people with whom the Agency had a cooperative agreement and in seclusion construct a plan to eliminate the people and eradicate their town “from the face of the map,” to essentially erase the people and their memory from existence.

What kind of mind can act this way? How does that mind return home at night, open the door to greet his children and wife with hugs and kisses, remove his yarmulke, and sit down to dinner? How does one set aside the blow to the girl’s head that left her helpless as he tore her garments to thrust his savagery into her and then discard her limp body like a useless bale of hay? What mentality lets a people witness the actions of the IDF as they moved from this raw barbarity to the more sophisticated “precision bombing” that allows for a helicopter gunship to hurl a $300,000 dollar US missile down a crowded street to kill a blind, paraplegic in a wheelchair and those friends who pushed him from the Mosque where he had gone to pray? What notion of superior being gives license to this treatment of others? Have we advanced not one step beyond the chained slaves or the discarded dying skeletons that Conrad describes are the victims of Leopold’s “enlightened” imperial army?     

Under Sharon and Olmert, Israel has annexed or confiscated all the land in the West Bank that runs parallel to the eastern border of that area, the Jordan River, and with its wall that slinks through remaining Palestinian land, especially that where aquifers and farm land exist, has commandeered all but 14% of historic Palestine. Into this paltry patch work of their remaining land, the 3.5 million Palestinians must live surrounded by a nuclear armed military power with state of the art ordinance including an air force second only to that of the United States, a tank force of over 4000, and a modern navy including submarines. All of this is paid for by the taxpayers of the United States to protect the Zionist goal of an exclusive National Home for Jews from their proclaimed nemesis the Palestinians that have no military whatsoever.

Perhaps we should stop here to reflect not on Israel’s past atrocities, but on what is happening today, in 2007 during this season of peace as we sing the praises of the Almighty Son of God, the Prince of Peace. Certainly, the people of Israel realize that their country has stolen all but 14% of the land that the Palestinians owned just 60 years ago? Certainly they know that Israel allots these people a fragment of the water they owned but now have to buy from those that confiscated it. Certainly they realize that the foreign squatters that have been given homes paid for by Americans have swimming pools and green, lush landscapes while the indigenous people live in cement bunkers stacked like egg crates on top of each other and scramble for water from trucks when the IDF is kind enough to let the humanitarian groups from the rest of the world enter the prison they have constructed around these people. Certainly they know that Israel as an occupying army has responsibility under International Law to provide for the oppressed, to recognize that they are human and require basic food stables, water, medicine, and schooling. Certainly Israeli citizens know that the “U.N. Refugee World Administration reports that as of “November 2006, 40.3% of Palestinian households lived in ‘deep poverty’ (daily per capita consumption of less than $2.10); in Gaza the figure is 79.8%.” (Counterpunch Nov. 1-15, 2007). And that was a year ago. Today, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency described the situation on November 7 as grim. “Whereas two months ago, there was zero stock of 61 medicines, the figure has now reached 91…  There are no fruits and vegetables to supplement the basic rations that 80% of Gaza’a population receive – flour, oil, sugar, a bit of lentils and powdered milk – either from UNRWA or the UN World Food Program.” (Terry Walz, “Gaza – A Vast Unimproved Refugee Camp.” 11/13/2007).

“The government of Israel has structurally and institutionally dismantled the Palestine economy as well as undermined the fabric of Palestine society and the expression of cultural and political identity.” (“Israel’s Iron Heel”, Counterpunch, Sara Roy, Harvard). Can anyone imagine the outcry that would attend a like decimation of the Jewish culture and economy if, for example, Iran’s government were to create such conditions on the people in Israel? Why do the people of the world hide from such barbarity? Why do our Christian Congressmen support these outrages against human decency, what Jesus proclaimed to be the basis of human interaction and brotherhood, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, not a calculated genocide of a people? Have our representatives, like Faust of legend, sold their souls to the devil?

Certainly, the Israeli citizen asks himself and herself, as I ask myself since as an American these horrors are done in my name and with my taxes, if Jews were treated as the Palestinians are treated wouldn’t the world rise up in anger and stop the barbaric treatment against them? Am I not as a Jew committed by my belief to “Godliness” in all that I do; is not this what the Torah demands? And I, as an American, despite the Satanic sermons of pastor John Hagee, am I not committed to the teaching of Jesus to love my enemy? What has become of my faith that I condone this cold hearted behavior against my brothers and sisters? Have I handed over every ounce of my morals to a government devoid of any? How long can I live in a country that starves children so that vitamin A deficiency in children 12-59 months reached 22%, and 50.5% of West Bank children under 24 months and 71.9% of Gazan children are anemic, statistics that are considered “a severe public health situation”? Have I become immune to the devastation inflicted in my name on these poverty ridden people because that Wall, that hideous Wall dressed out in pretty, painted ballet dancers camouflages the psychological torture we (Americans and Jews together) impose on the women and children buried on the other side? Yes, I include myself in these questions since Bush provides the means to erect this monument to human depravity in my name and to allow the Zionist government in Israel to create the slow torturous journey to death that has become the day to day reality of the Palestinian people.