American arms used to kill Palestinians; US complicit in Israeli crimes: Report
An Israeli soldier points his gun at a Palestinian woman in the occupied West Bank city of al-Khalil. (File photo)
Press TV – March 11, 2012
A recent policy paper published by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation brings to light a number of cases in which weapons and ammunition produced by and financed by the United States over the past decade have been used by Israel to kill defenseless Palestinians.
“US military aid to Israel is a policy that is running on autopilot and must be reconsidered,” Josh Ruebner, the national advocacy director of the Washington-based organization and author of the policy paper, said on March 5.
Ruebner added, “US weapons provided to Israel at taxpayer expense make the US complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians living under Israel’s 44-year military occupation of the West Bank, East al-Quds (Jerusalem), and Gaza Strip and defeat US foreign policy objectives of halting Israeli settlement expansion, ending Israeli military occupation, and establishing a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Between the years 2000 and 2009, the United States transferred “more than 670 million weapons, rounds of ammunition, and related equipment,” according to the report.
During the same period, “Israel killed at least 2,696 unarmed Palestinians, including 1,128 children, often with US weapons in violation of the Foreign Assistance Act and Arms Export Control Act.”
The Foreign Assistance Act, signed into law in 1961, stipulates that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violation of internationally recognized human rights.”
This comes as the official inquiries and investigations into US military aid to Israel over recent decades have been met with growing resistance from groups both within and outside of the US government.
Although more expensive weapons systems such as tanks and aircraft make up the bulk of purchasing contracts between Israel and the American manufactures, small arms and ammunition purchases account for the largest number of deaths.
The report adds that Israeli soldiers load some of their guns with high-velocity tear gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets manufactured in the United States – a frequent culprit in death throughout the occupied Palestinian territories.
“From fiscal year 2000 to 2009, the State Department licensed – and US taxpayers funded – the delivery of more than 595,000 tear gas canisters and other ‘riot control’ equipment to the Israeli military, valued at more than 20.5 million dollars,” according to the report.
In a 2007 memorandum of understanding, Washington pledged 30 billion dollars in military assistance to Tel Aviv between 2009 and 2018 – a 25-percent increase in average annual military aid over previous years. Israel will receive roughly 3.1 billion dollars in US military aid for fiscal year 2012.
“With the same amount of money that the United States gives each year to fund weapons for Israel, the federal government could instead fund affordable housing vouchers for 350,000 low-income families, or green jobs training for 500,000 unemployed workers, pr early reading programs for 900,000 at-risk students, or primary health care to 24 million people without insurance,” the report pointed out.
The report comes as eighteen Palestinians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip since last Friday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday the Tel Aviv regime will continue airstrikes against the besieged Gaza Strip “as long as necessary.”
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The Fiction of the Jewish History in Palestine
By Hasan Afif El-Hasan | The Palestine Chronicle | April 8, 2011
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NNC Pierce Morgan on March 18, 2011 that he might agree to a Palestinian state through negotiations. And he added, “We will make territorial concessions although it is very painful to do that in our ancestral land.” Netanyahu was not talking about Poland where his ancestors lived. He was talking about Palestine where generations of its indigenous population ancestors lived, cultivated the land and are buried.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism created a new Jewish identity of blood and soil. To mobilize their followers and supporters and appeal to their emotions, the Zionists created myths. Zionism started as a tribal religion without god, but in order to fulfill its function as a unifying force, Zionism required external religious and race symbols, not inner content. Its leaders regarded metaphysical religious belief and purity of race as having value in itself. They created a divine paradisiacal state of merger with the gods. Despite his non-religious ideology, Herzl’s writings were replete with religious references. The Jews should settle in Palestine because, in his words, “the Temple will be visible from long distance, for it is only our ancient faith that has kept us together”.
The Zionists and their supporters have invested tremendous financial and scholarly resources to work within the Hebrew Bible historical narratives to affirm the links between the intrusive Zionist population and the ancient Israelite past, and by doing so assert the right of that population to the land. The political end-game shaped the investigation and the outcome. Tracing the roots of Israel’s ethnic state in biblical antiquity is effectively to silence the indigenous Palestinian claim to the past and therefore to the land. The Biblical scholarship employs a bewildering array of terms for the region: “the Holy Land”, “the Land of the Bible”, “Eretz Israel”, “the Land of Israel”, or “Judah and Samaria.” To the casual reader these names appear interchangeable, but they all imply connection to ancient Israel.
Biblical narratives or poems that cannot be supported by archeology and common sense are treated by the Zionists and their supporters as historical language. … continue
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