Background Facts about Gaza
By Rick Sterling | Dissident Voice | October 27, 2023
Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” The Israeli Ambassador responded that Guterres’ comments were “shocking”, “unfathomable” and “disconnected from reality”. He called for the Secretary General’s resignation. Below are some facts about Gaza to evaluate whether Guterres was accurate or not.
Gaza is a tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean coast with the 5,000 year old Gaza City in the north. The entire strip is only 5 miles wide by 25 miles in length with 2.3 million Palestinians locked in this territory by Israel. It is the size of a small US city.
In 1996 Israeli journalist Amira Haas published the book Drinking the Sea at Gaza. After living and researching in Gaza, she described the history, conditions, religion and politics. The subtitle was “Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege”. Gaza has been under siege for decades.
About 80% of the people in Gaza are descendants of refugees who were expelled from their villages in what is now southern Israel in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). Most Gazans have never been able to set foot outside the territory. They are born, live their lives and die in this concentration camp.
At least 50% of Gaza’s work force is unemployed. Israel restricts nearly all aspects of their economy. For example, Gaza’s fishermen are prevented from going into deeper waters to fish. If they try, they are fired on by Israeli naval boats. Farmers and shepherds are also fired on as they try to eke out a living.
From December 1998 to February 2001, there was an airport in Gaza until Israel bombed the control tower and destroyed the runways to make it unusable.
Gaza has a port but foreign boats are prevented from landing. In 2010, six civilian ships including the Turkish Mavi Marmara tried to bring humanitarian relief to Gaza. Israeli paratroopers attacked the ships, killing 9 passengers including one American.
Israel routinely demolishes the homes of Palestinians. In 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the destruction of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Gaza.
Israel routinely denies exit permits to outstanding youth who have received scholarships to study abroad.
In 2014 Israel bombed Gaza’s water reservoir and sanitation treatment facilities, escalating the shortage of drinking water while sewage ran in the streets. Since then, as documented by Oxfam, Israel has prevented the importation of equipment necessary to rebuild sanitation and water treatment.
In spring 2018 Gazans demonstrated against their imprisonment. They called it the Great March of Return. The two year report documents that 217 Palestinians were killed and over 19,000 injured by Israeli soldiers.
In 2020 the UN issued a report saying that Gaza is not liveable. “The primary cause of this ‘unliveable environment is a highly restrictive Israeli blockade … which has reduced Gaza to the point of ‘systematic collapse.’”
Conclusion
Clearly, the Secretary General was accurate in his statement that Palestinians have endured decades of “suffocating occupation”. It is a measure of the Israeli Ambassador’s sense of impunity that he attacks the top UN official who dares to mention this.
The diplomatic conflict will increase in the coming days and weeks as Israel’s genocidal campaign continues.
The facts about Gaza and Palestine are clear: Israel is violating international law and Western states that support this are complicit. It is up to the people all over the world to speak out.
Rick Sterling can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com
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October 28, 2023 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine
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Film Review
Israeli film paints sympathetic picture of Jewish terrorists who tried to kill millions
By Eric Striker | National Justice | September 8, 2021
An upcoming Israeli film that sympathetically portrays a group of Jewish terrorists who attempted to murder millions of German civilians by poisoning their water supply is enjoying uncritical publicity in Zionist media.
The film, “Plan A,” is based on a true story that director Yoav Paz extensively researched through recently unveiled testimony as well as the book Li Nakam Veshilem (Vengeance and Retribution are Mine) by historian Dina Porat.
Following the end of the second world war, a group of approximately 50 Jews led by communist partisan and Israeli national poet Abba Kovner formed a group called “Nakam,” or “the avengers.”
The group concocted a scheme to infiltrate post-war Europe and kill millions of German citizens by adding arsenic to their drinking water — a plot they called “Plan A.” Were that to fail, they had a “Plan B” where they would poison German soldiers held in Allied prisoner of war camps. According to Kovner’s testimony, the future first president of Israel Chaim Weizmann aided his organization in the operation.
“Plan A” failed when British security forces intercepted members of Nakam and they were forced to throw their supply of poison overboard of their ships. Individuals in the Zionist movement also believed that a terrorist attack of such a magnitude would’ve caused diplomatic problems for the soon to be founded Zionist state and may have tipped the British off.
Eventually they succeeded in partially achieving “Plan B.” … continue
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The Great Game Continues. Israel was created by the British Empire with the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War, announcing the Empire’s support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The ensuing three decades saw Jews pitted against indigenous Arabs. This conflict has continued up to this moment, and has continued to be a “cockpit for war” when the British felt it needed to rearrange the pieces on the geostrategic Chess Board. Emergence of the BRICS, China’s Belt and Road, and the support of the Global Majority, has panicked the Anglo-American financial oligarchy into blowing up the Middle East to overturn the Chess Board.
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