Israel's storm trooper tactics—so devastatingly demonstrated in the
invasion of 6/28 and its totalitarian vision of massive ethnic cleansing—leave few
doubts about its ultimate goals and political methods. As John Dugard, UN
Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, pointed out:
Israel is violating in Gaza the most fundamental norms of
humanitarian law and human rights law—its conduct is
indefensible. Over 1,500 rounds of artillery have been showered on
Gaza...Sonic booms terrorize the people. Transport has been
seriously disrupted by the destruction of roads and bridges.
Sanitation is threatened.
In response, with all the cant, hypocrisy and arrogance for which
Israeli politicians are infamously renowned, Israel's Permanent Representative to
the United Nations in Geneva, Itzhak Levanon, blustered that the emergency
meeting was a "planned and premeditated attack on Israel... We find ourselves in
an absurd situation in which the Human Rights Council, convened into
urgent session, ignores the rights of one state and holds a special meeting to
defend the rights of the other side."
Apparently the distinguished diplomat was referring to the Council's
ignoring the "rights" of Israeli fighter and helicopter pilots to bomb Palestinians
civilians into fleeing in terror across the Egyptian border.
1. Israel and Democracy:
In December 2005, in the most democratic election ever organized in
the Arab East, the Hamas Party was elected to power by the majority of
Palestinian voters. Even President Bush, before he was chastened by the
Jewish Lobby, publicly conceded the democratic character of the Palestinian
election process. The Israeli State rejected the outcome and orchestrated a
massive well-financed international campaign through its US and European
Jewish lobbies to isolate and undermine the newly elected government.
Instead of recognizing its democratic mandate, Israel applied the terrorist
label to the new Palestinian government; it ignored Hamas' unilateral ceasefire,
and escalated its murderous military attacks. Above all it succeeded in
establishing an economic blockade, exercising its hegemony over the US
and through the latter, over the European Union. Israeli animus to Palestinian
democracy and its citizens' role in freely electing its representatives clearly
marks Israel as an enemy to an open pluralistic Arab society. Obviously the
same applies to the major Jewish organizations in the US—AIPAC, ADL, the
Conference of Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations, which parroted
Israel's attack on Palestinian democracy, as they have done on every other
policy, no matter how unconscionable, such as the murder of Palestinian
children and families. The Israeli animosity to Arab democracy is widely
transmitted into the US body politic by their Zionist followers in the lobbies,
government, mass media and business.
The week prior to the Israeli
invasion, Hamas and the PLO
agreed to negotiate with Israel,
giving tacit recognition to the
State of Israel.
2. Israel and Peace:
The week prior to the Israeli
invasion, Hamas and the PLO agreed to
negotiate with Israel, giving tacit
recognition to the State of Israel. Most
of the mass media published reports of the accord and the European Union
welcomed the agreement, stating it was the beginning of a process. The Financial Times reported:
The crisis (Israeli invasion of Gaza) has overshadowed a vital
agreement reached by Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian
Authority President, on Tuesday that includes an implicit Hamas
acceptance of a two state solution to the Middle East conflict. A copy
released by Hamas... refers to the Palestinian goal of a state on all
the land occupied in 1967... (Emphas is added)
Since the 1980s, whenever the PLO have
carried out a ceasefire, proposed a two
state solution and explicitly recognized
the State of Israel, it initiated an action
which promptly threw the possibility out
the window.
Israel responded by rejecting negotiations and launching the new
war to destroy the Palestinian State. In fact the Israeli State never at any
point even recognized the elected Hamas government as a negotiating
adversary let alone a partner. As
Noam Chomsky has
documented, at every point
since the 1980's that the PLO
have carried out a ceasefire,
proposed a two state solution
and explicitly recognized the
State of Israel, the Jewish state initiated an action which promptly threw the
possibility out the window: it launched the invasion of Lebanon,
assassinated prominent leaders or launched military assaults, killing activists
and civilians, in order to force the Palestinians to withdraw their offer.
The Israeli regime absolutely refuses to accept a negotiated prisoner
release and exchange proposed by Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, US
client Hosni Mubarek and most of the European Union. Israel holds at least
9,000 Palestinian political prisoners including 335 children and several hundred
women, most of whom have not been charged, and of whom almost all have
been tortured. The great majority are civilians who were seized in their homes or
in the street. In a word, most Palestinian prisoners are civilian kidnap
victims of the Israeli Defense Forces, not captured combatants as is the
case of the lone Israeli soldier. The Palestinians have repeatedly called on
Israel at least to free the five hundred kidnapped Palestinian children and women
hostages in exchange for their captured soldier. Israel responded by intensifying its
military assaults and widening the net to include all Palestinians. At a
cabinet meeting on July 2, Olmert stated, "I have given instructions to intensify
the strength of action by the army and security services to hunt down these
terrorists, those who sent them.. .and those who harbor them." In other words, the
resistance organizations (dubbed 'terrorists' although they are within their
international legal rights under the Geneva Conventions to combat Israeli military
incursions) include all major Palestinian organizations—those who "send them" includes all the elected political authorities; and those "who harbor them"
includes hundreds of thousands of families, friends, neighbors, community
and civic groups, doctors and nurses—in a word, Palestinian civil society. As
the sentiment now has it in Israel, reflected in a poll published by the (Israeli)
daily Maariv, the majority of Israelis desire the assassination of Hamas
leaders". So this is a totalitarian order to criminalize and target almost the
entire political and civil society of Palestine.
3. Israel and the Possibility of a Two-State Solution:
Israel's re-occupation of Gaza and imposition of martial law is
accompanied by the criminalization of the entire electoral political class:
cabinet ministers, parliamentarians and party activists. Israel's Deputy Prime
Minister Shimon Perez told CNN: "They (Palestinian government officials)
will be put on trial and they will be accused of participating and supporting
terrorist acts against the civilian government [sic]." How to make sense of
such a statement? Which is the civilian government—the one whose duly
elected members are now under Israeli arrest? Or was this a slip of the
tongue, intentional or blundered, which marks the beginning of Israeli reference
to Gaza as within Israel?
To make its point, in the best traditions of Chilean dictator Augusto
Pinochet, the Israelis bombed the executive offices of the Palestinian Prime
Minister, setting the building on fire. As if to demolish even the memory or
thought of a Palestinian government, the Israeli military juggernaut is
destroying the entire Palestinian infrastructural basis for political life: buildings,
leaders, parties, and elections.
Systematically and with bureaucratic efficiency the Jewish State
has proceeded with daily demolitions of every conceivable structure necessary
for civilized life. On July 3, 2006 it bombed the university in Gaza City. On
July 4 it bombed the Ministry of the Interior. On July 5 Israelis invaded
Northern Gaza and the criminal story continues. For those who believed that
this invasion was merely an incursion in search of a prisoner of war, Yuval
Diskin, head of Israel's secret police, Shin Bet, stated that the ".. .operation in
Gaza could last months."15 With monumental cant and hypocrisy, Major
General Amos Yadlin, Israeli Army Chief of Intelligence, having arrested or
driven underground the entire Palestinian leadership, declared that".. .mediation
efforts were stymied because no one knows whom to talk to about Shalit (the
Israeli POW)." Needless to say, no offer to negotiate was put on the table, for
fear that a negotiator might actually appear...
4. Israel and Terror:
While Israel was attempting to destroy the very basis of Palestinian organized collective existence as a people, it was also launching 24 hour
artillery assaults, continual sonic booms by low flying jets, forcing the
dehydration of the entire population in scorching heat by destroying drinking
water supplies, forcing them to live in darkness, deprived of food and confined to
their homes or shelters. An entire people, without an army of their own,
under military siege, is holed up in an ever-shrinking territory! This is State
Terror in its most expressive and malignant form: "Collective Punishment" is
not directed at securing the release of the Israeli POW; it is directed at
making life for the Palestinian people so unbearable, so lacking in the most
basic conditions for survival, that they will either be forced to flee or rise up in a
heroic last stand, to which Israel will apply all its murderous military might.
This, the distinguished academics, journalists, ideologues and Conference of
Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations will describe as: "a vigorous
Israeli response to Palestinian terrorism".
5. The Jewish Lobby: The Central Issue:
While the Israeli assault on Gaza grinds on, so does the propaganda
and activism in its favor by all the major Jewish/Zionist organizations in the
US and Europe. In a review of the Daily Alert (the daily organ prepared for the
Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations in the US) since the
beginning of the invasion of Gaza, one finds automatic and uncritical support for
every single Israeli assault on Gaza: electrical power plants because they have
"dual use"; water supplies and sewage treatment plants are "military targets"
because they are used by the captors; terrorizing children and civilians is to "let
them know what Siderot (an Israeli border community and home of the
Defense Minister) has been going through"; intensified and prolonged Israeli
repression of the Palestinian population occurs because "Hamas and Fatah
are terrorist organizations and they must be treated as terrorists and crushed
by all means necessary".16
There is a Zionist international division of labor: the military assassins
operate in Israel, the verbal assassins operate out of the plush suites of the
head offices of the Conference of Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations.
Nothing captures the power of the Jewish Lobby as much as the
Euro-American response to Israel's full-scale assault on Gaza. Bush supports
Israeli action even when it grossly violates Washington's own 'rules' for the
IDF offense: it destroyed a US-financed power plant, it blew up bridges,
roads and water lines contrary to Bush's admonition to "avoid damaging
infrastructure and harming civilians". Israel can stick its fingers in both of
Bush's eyes and have his backing because it knows that the Jewish Lobby
will mobilize a near unanimous Congressional endorsement, a favorable media
focus on the Israeli 'hostage' and a virtual blackout on massive Palestinian
suffering. Thanks to the Jewish Lobby, Israel's totalitarian terror directed toward a 'Final Solution' only elicits laughable proposals from the United
Nations to negotiate a peaceful resolution, when the only legitimate elected
negotiators are in jail or hiding and threatened with assassination.
On July 5 the European Union (EU) castigated Israel's "disproportionate
measures" but not Israel's invasion and violation of the United Nations
Charter on the rights of nations to self-determination. This meek, shameful
betrayal of the EU's own principles is exacerbated by its equating Israel's
invasion with the Palestinian capture of an active military combatant.17 The
difference between Lobby-dominated US backing of Israel's invasion and that of
the EU boils down to the "appropriate amount of force" which Israel should
apply in invading Gaza.
What accounts for US support for Israeli ethnic cleansing, despite its
impudently and blatantly repudiating the US "moderate" guidelines on
destroying Palestinian democracy? No one in their right mind can claim that
the Israeli assault on Gaza advances US policies, interests or US imperial
power. The entire campaign from the beginning to end to destroy the
democratically elected Hamas government was made and packaged in Israel
and executed with the willing complicity of the executives among the
Conference of Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations in America—
including but not confined to AIPAC. The daily assaults and assassinations in
Gaza and the West Bank were carried out under the direction of Israeli
generals, Shin Bet and Mossad, and approved by the Israeli Defense Minister
and Prime Minister without their consulting or even feigning to publicly advise
Washington in advance. The political campaign to isolate and destroy Hamas
was overwhelmingly organized by the Jewish Lobby; it succeeded in securing a
near unanimous endorsement in the US Congress and complete backing in
Washington. It successfully got the Bush Administration to pressure the
European Union to boycott the Hamas government.
There is no evidence that Israel
was acting on behalf of US
strategists. There is a wealth of
reports, documents, statements
and actions taken by the Israeli
regime and its US transmission
belts indicating that they
imposed US complicity
There is no evidence that implicates Big Oil in the Israeli drive to
'cleanse' Palestine of Arabs. There is no
evidence that Israel was acting on behalf
of US strategists. There is a wealth of
reports, documents, statements and
actions taken by the Israeli regime and its
US transmission belts indicating that they
imposed US complicity, engineered the
entire operation in accord with their own
totalitarian methods at the service of their
own designed strategy to secure the 'Final Solution': Jewish rule over the
entire Palestinian territory.
The Jewish Lobby has dutifully followed every twist and turn in the
Israeli propaganda line on its devious road toward a purely Jewish-populated former Palestine.
For example, Israel claimed it couldn't negotiate with the Palestinians
because they refused to recognize Israel despite the fact that even Arafat
publicly and categorically proclaimed he favored a Two State solution in the
1980's. The Lobby ignored Arafat's pledge, then labeled his proposal as
unreliable, then turned around and endorsed his role as a legitimate interlocutor at
the Oslo meeting after Israel passed the line that he was a statesman and not a
terrorist.... With Sharon finally scuttling the tarnished agreement, the Lobby
switched to re-labeling Arafat a terrorist and blamed the PLO for failing to accept
the creation of separate Palestinian Bantustans.
The Jewish State claimed that it couldn't deal with an illegitimate
undemocratic regime. The Lobby parroted the line, calling Israel the "only
democracy in the Middle East", even as it occupied and exercised colonial
rule over 3.5 million Palestinians. Subsequent to the free elections which
were won by Hamas, the Israeli State rejected the democratic outcome; the
Lobby "forgot" about its democratic rhetoric and again parroted the line of its
Israeli masters—democratically elected authorities who are not approved by
Tel Aviv are not acceptable.
When Israel launched a series of measures to destroy the Palestinian
economy and blockade trade and financial life, the Lobby automatically
endorsed it, promoted US complicity, and supported the collective punishment of
the Palestinian people for having been so irresponsible as to support a
nationalist government inclined to eliminate corruption.
When Israel built the segregation wall and the World Court condemned it,
the Lobby defended it, repeating the Israeli State line: It's a 'Security
Fence'.
The evidence of the Lobby acting as a transmission belt for Israeli
state policy under all conditions is overwhelming. In the face of all rational
considerations, the Lobby automatically gives unquestioned support to Israel's
violations of peace, democracy, human rights, international court rulings,
United Nations resolutions. This is especially true even when the Israeli State
blatantly ignores US policy. There is no question that the Lobby's primary
political loyalties lie with the State of Israel.
The Jewish Lobby's wholehearted backing of Israel's assault on Gaza
illustrates once again that there is no crime, no matter how terrible and
perverse, that Israel commits, which will not be supported by the respectable
professors, investment bankers, journalists, surgeons, policy advisers, real
estate moguls, lawyers, school teachers and other ordinary folk who make
up the activist base of the Major Organizations.
6 Israel and Prisoner Exchanges: The Record
The Israeli government and all its principle spokespeople have repeatedly rejected negotiations directed toward a prisoner exchange, calling
the demand "outrageous", "extortion" and likely to "encourage terrorism". The
Jewish State's line was predictably echoed and amplified by its representatives in
the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations (CPMJO)
repeatedly throughout the Israeli invasion in their propaganda sheet, Daily
Alert. The editorial pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times and
the Los Angeles Times were full of opinion pieces supporting the Israeli line
opposing prisoner exchanges written by members or supporters of the (pro-
Israel) Jewish Lobby.
The historical record provides a totally different account of Israel's
policy on prisoner exchange and extortion. Israel has on numerous occasions
negotiated with so-called 'Palestinian terrorists' the exchange of prisoners,
and consummated the deals. As Esther Wachsman, the mother of an Israeli
soldier who died in an operation to release him, emphatically stated (and as
everyone in Israel knows), "All this talk about not speaking to the terrorists is
nonsense, in the end they released Palestinian prisoners with blood on their
hands for three dead soldiers and they released Sheikh Ahmed Yassin for
two Mossad agents."18
Equally the indignation of Israeli officials and the officials of the Jewish
Lobby against "extortiori' is laughable, were it not so tragic. Israel systematically
holds family members, relatives and entire neighborhoods of suspected
Palestinian activists hostage. Some are even imprisoned and tortured in order to
extort information or force the suspects to turn themselves in.
The practice of accusing the victims of the crimes that the
executioners themselves are about to commit, as Albert Camus once noted, is
the hallmark of totalitarian regimes.
The refusal to negotiate is a
coldly calculated move to
increase the stranglehold on
the Gaza economy in order
to accelerate the "voluntary"
departure of the Palestinians
and Palestinian businesses.
Beyond the Jewish State and Lobby's hypocrisy, cant and outright
lies accompanying the refusal to negotiate a prisoner exchange is an equally
important question: Why has the Israeli regime, contrary to its past practices,
refused to negotiate? The explanation for Israeli intransigence is that it
does not want its soldier released, at least
not until it has devastated and re-occupied
Gaza. The refusal to negotiate this time is
a coldly calculated and cynical move to
prolong the invasion and increase their
stranglehold on the Gaza economy in
order to accelerate the "voluntary"
departure of the Palestinians and Palestinian businesses. The lowly
corporal is being sacrificed to the Greater Good of Greater Israel; for all the
sentimental photos of the lad published in the Lobby-influenced mass
media, there is no accompanying concern at the cynical refusal of the
Jewish State to negotiate his release.
The danger is that Israeli fundamentalism is implicating not only the US mass media and state, it's infusing US civil society, which already is
suffering from police state regulation by our own rulers in the White House.
Beyond the terrible plight and injustices of the Palestinians in Gaza, and US
complicity, lies the larger question of a new air war against Iran. If Israel,
through its Jewish lobby and backers in the government, can induce a US
invasion of Iraq, if it can secure US and EU complicity in destroying a
democratically elected government in Palestine in the course of ethnic
cleansing and invading and destroying Lebanon, could the same power
configuration lead to a full-scale attack on Iran? The precedents have been
established. The political machinery is in place. Is it a question of timing or
pretext? Can some as yet unforeseen or unpredictable event or political
force intervene to forestall the Zionist juggernaut? The first step is to explain
the problem: to name the pro-Israel power bloc at work, to expose the issue of
dual loyalties, to face down the vicious slander campaigns emanating from the
agents of the Israeli state, and to begin a nationwide educational and
political campaign to end Israeli crimes against humanity and its Lobby's
shameful apologetics for the 'Final Solution'.From: The Power of Israel In the united states (2006) By James Petras
