Once again, the Israeli military has turned its guns on Gaza — this time on unarmed protestors, in a series of shootings over the last few weeks. Gaza’s already under-resourced hospitals are straining to care for the 1,600 protesters who have been injured, on top of 40 killed.
According to a group of United Nations experts, “there is no available evidence to suggest that the lives of heavily armed security forces were threatened” by the unarmed demonstrators they fired on.
The violence is getting some coverage in the news. But the conditions in Gaza that have pushed so many to protest remain largely invisible. So do their actual demands.
The Great Return March was organized by grassroots groups in Gaza as a peaceful action with three key demands: respect for refugees’ right to return to their homes, an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
Seventy years ago, Palestinians were expelled from their homes en masse when their land was seized for the state of Israel. Many became refugees, with millions of people grouped into shrinking areas like Gaza. Fifty years ago, the rest of historic Palestine came under Israeli military occupation.
While these refugees’ right of return has been recognized by the international community, no action has been taken to uphold that right. Meanwhile, the occupation has become further and further entrenched.
For over a decade, the people of Gaza have lived under a military-imposed blockade that severely limits travel, trade, and everyday life for its 2 million residents. The blockade effectively bans nearly all exports, limits imports, and severely restricts passage in and out.
In over 20 visits to Gaza over the last 10 years, I’ve watched infrastructure degrade under both the blockade and a series of Israeli bombings.
Beautiful beaches are marred by raw sewage, which flows into the sea in amounts equivalent to 43 Olympic swimming pools every day. Access to water and electricity continually decreases, hospitals close, school hours are limited, and people are left thirsty and in the dark.
These problems can only be fixed by ending the blockade.
As Americans, we bear direct responsibility for the horrific reality in Gaza. Using our tax money, the U.S. continues to fund the Israeli military through $3.8 billion in aid annually.
A group of U.S.-based faith organizations has called out U.S. silence in a statement supporting protesters and condemning the killings: “The United States stood by and allowed Israel to carry out these attacks without any public criticism or challenge,” they said. “Such U.S. complicity is a continuation of the historical policy of active support for Israel’s occupation and U.S. disregard for Palestinian rights.”
The signatories include the American Friends Service Committee, where I work, an organization that started providing humanitarian aid to refugees in Gaza as far back as 1948.
While the U.S. does give money to the United Nations and international aid groups working in Gaza, it’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to our support of the military laying siege to the territory.
As my colleagues in Gaza have made clear, what they need isn’t more aid. That humanitarian aid is needed because of the blockade. What they need is freedom from the conditions that make life unlivable — like the blockade itself — and a long-term political solution.
Ignoring the reasons Gaza is in crisis only hurts our chances to address this manmade humanitarian horror.
Mike Merryman-Lotze has worked with the American Friends Service Committee as the Palestine-Israel Program Director since 2010.
GAZA – Hamas Movement on Friday perceived the statements of Nikki Haley, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, in which she claimed that Hamas uses civilians as human shields in Gaza Strip, as untrue offensive remarks.
The Hamas’s spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said, on Twitter, that Haley’s statements encourage Israeli occupation authorities to commit more crimes against the Palestinian people including the killing of children.
Earlier on Thursday, Haley reiterated her allegations against Hamas Movement before the UN Security Council without even mentioning Israeli ceaseless violations against Palestinians including the killing of the participants of the march of return.
Some 41 Palestinians have been killed and over 5000 others have been injured by Israeli forces since March 30, 2018.
The Palestinian Health Ministry has reported that a journalist, who was shot and seriously injured by Israeli army fire near the eastern border of the Gaza Strip two weeks ago, has died from his wounds.
The Ministry stated that the Journalist, Ahmad Mohammad Abu Hussein, 25, from Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, was shot on April 13, with an expanding bullet in the abdomen before he was rushed to the Indonesian Hospital, in Beit Lahia, also in northern Gaza.
On the same day, the soldiers also shot another journalist, identified as Mohammad al-Hajjar, with a live round in the soldiers.
Abu Hussein was transferred to Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah, in central West Bank, on April 16, before he was moved to Tel HaShomer Israeli Hospital, on April 19, where he succumbed to his serious wounds.
The slain journalist worked for the People’s Voice Radio (Sha’ab Radio), in Gaza.
The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate issued a statement strongly condemning the ongoing Israeli violations against the journalists in Palestine, and urging all international, legal and human rights organizations to perform their duties and provide the needed protection to the Palestinian people.
Mohammad is the second journalist to be killed since the beginning of the Great March of Return nonviolent protests on March 30, which also masks the Palestinian Land Day.
On April 6th, the soldiers killed a Journalist, identified as Yasser Mortaja, 31, with a live round in the abdomen, below his ‘PRESS’ jacket, in the same area where Ahmad was shot.
Gaza –Imad is 34 and has been volunteering as a first responder with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) since 2006. On Monday 9 April 2018, Imad volunteered with PRCS east of al Bureij refugee camp in the Middle Area of the Gaza Strip. Imad was waiting as part of the PRCS team, sitting in the front passenger seat of an ambulance beyond the 300-metre zone.
“Just after 5 o’clock there was suddenly shooting from the barrier and I was hit in my right leg. We got out of the ambulance straight away and went to hide behind it [on the opposite side from the Gaza barrier]. At this point the paramedics who were with me put a bandage on my leg to stem the bleeding and then they got me into the ambulance and moved me to Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah. I was in Al Aqsa Hospital for about 30 minutes to receive first aid and then I was moved to Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City. From there they transferred me to Shifa Hospital after the doctors diagnosed me with compartment syndrome [bleeding into the calf of the leg that then cuts off the blood supply to the leg]. In Shifa I had surgery. Doctors told me that if I hadn’t been able to have this surgery I would have lost my leg.”
Imad has been volunteering with PRCS for more than 10 years. He reports that the teams he works with are often exposed to tear gas and he himself has previously sustained some minor injuries. However, Imad remains committed to volunteering with the ambulances and first responders.
“We need humanitarian workers in this difficult situation. Gaza has been exposed to three wars in 6 years. Life here is a constant emergency. Working with PRCS to help the sick and injured, you feel at least that you are able to improve things in some small way.”
Imad graduated in English from Al-Azhar University in Gaza in 2008. He works intermittently as an emergency trainer for the PRCS and other organizations. He is married and has 2 young children.
Now Imad is recovering from this initial operation at Al Quds Hospital in Gaza City. He is due for a second operation to remove the bullet, which is still lodged in his right calf muscle, and to fix a fracture. “After I complete my treatment and get better, I’m aiming to go back to working with the ambulances. For me, it’s a duty that I feel to our patients and to Gaza.”
The Israelis are in a bloody mess. They don’t know how to handle it – Palestinians in their thousands taking a leaf out of Gandhi and protesting non-violently against their colonial masters ignoring their fearsome reputation for brutality. And, to boot, women are at the barricades leading the Great Return March. Bravo!
So far, 37 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli troops and more than 1,500 injured with live ammunition. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government has given advance instructions to the army to shoot to kill. Today, the Israeli troopers shot down two more Palestinians. Today’s has been the fourth weekly protest. The escalating showdown with Israel is to culminate in a mass march on May 15.
The marches are pressing for the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to what is now Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were evicted from their homes and forced to leave their homeland in the 1948 atrocities by the Jewish extremists to pave the way for Israel’s creation. Palestinians mark May 15 (the anniversary Israel celebrates as its founding day) as their “nakba,” or catastrophe.
Ominously, that is also the date President Trump has chosen to shift the American embassy to Jerusalem. What crass insensitivity! But then, Trump needs Jewish money and Jewish media support in his campaign for re-election in 2020. Son-in-law Jared Kushner who is Trump’s point person on the Middle East also happens to be a Jew – some say, a closet rabbi.
Part of the reason for the protests is the crippling Israeli border blockade on Gaza since 2007. Evidently, the mass marches are also fueled by growing desperation among Gaza’s 2 million residents who are trapped in the tiny coastal territory amidst a gutted economy and deepened poverty. The Gaza residents typically get fewer than five hours of electricity per day, while unemployment has soared above 40 percent.
Despite Israel’s media manipulation to change the narrative and divert attention away from the Palestinian issue toward Iran, there is some uneasiness among American Jews as to where all this is heading and what damage all this is causing to Israel’s future in a medium term scenario. (Of course, America’s “exceptionalism” becomes a macabre joke.)
The White House envoy Jason Greenblatt, a member of President Donald Trump’s Mideast team, has admitted on social media that Palestinians in Gaza have a “right to protest their dire humanitarian circumstances.” He added that organizers “should focus on that message, not stoke the potential for more violence with firebombs and flaming kites, and must keep a safe distance from the border… the cost of these demonstrations is too high in loss of life and injuries.” Greenblatt is a devout and observant Jew himself – although he has opted not to wear a kippa while serving the Trump administration.
Another noted figure, actress Natalie Portman – also a Jewess – who is the recipient of an award, which is dubbed the “Jewish Nobel”, has pulled out of the June awards ceremony in Israel because of “extreme distress” over the brutal violence in that country. The Jerusalem-born Oscar winner intimated the Israeli organizers that she “does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel.”
To my mind, the silence of the Indian government on Israel’s premeditated killings is deafening. How hypocrtical that our current leadership keeps chanting “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” (whole-world-is-one-single-family) as its foreign-policy motto! I can only hope that Prime Minister Modi gets to know about all this at some point – and sincerely repents.
I can understand Modi’s lack of erudition. But what I cannot understand why those fellows in his entourage who would have heard somewhere, sometime, someplace about the ideology of Zionism — and Gandhi’s visceral opposition to it — and didn’t alert their prime minister that he was making an appalling error of judgment. Probably, they chickened out.
Read a stirring dispatch from Gaza Strip by Al Jazeera, here, on Friday’s protests that have been labeled as the “Women’s March of Gaza.”
Since the start of the latest massacre in Gaza — the killing with live fire of almost 40 and wounding of almost 3,000 unarmed Palestinian protestors during the March of Return — propaganda in service of Israel has been mobilized to cover up the blatant crime. Three days after the March began, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston issued an unbelievably twisted statement on the attacks. What follows is their statement, with comments inserted in italics:
“We see the events along the Gaza-Israel border this weekend as the continuation of one of the great tragedies of our time.” — This implies that Gaza is a sovereign country bordering Israel, not the prison for Palestinian refugees that Israel established decades ago in the south of Palestine.
“This is a situation where many are at fault, leaving individuals in impossible situations with impossible choices.” — When someone is morally at fault, the situation is always “complicated.” As we shall see, the “many at fault” are always Palestinians, not Israelis.
“It is a tragedy for the people of Gaza that, 12 years after the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip, they live under such difficult conditions.” — “Tragedy” in Greek theater held that events are written by our fate and could not have been otherwise. If Zionism had not chosen Palestine in the late 1800’s and then proceeded to steal land from Palestinians from then on, it could very much have been otherwise. There was an actor here; there was a cause, and an effect. The cause of the “tragedy” was Zionism. Ask the settlers to return to their own countries, and the “tragedy” would end. The sentence also implies that Israel made a noble gesture when it withdrew from Gaza, and that it is the fault of the Palestinians that they did not make the best of this generous gift. In fact, Israel left Gaza because it was more expedient for Israel to administer Gaza as a prison than to occupy it. The “difficult conditions” faced by the people of Gaza are the result of Israeli control over everything and everyone that goes into and out of it. The “difficult conditions” are the result of repeated Israeli bombings of critical infrastructure, and Israel’s clear plan for the complete immiseration of Gaza’s two million people.
“It is a tragedy for the Palestinians that Gaza was taken over by Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist organization that rules in a brutal dictatorship.” — Hamas was democratically elected by its people because it distinguished itself from the collaborationist leadership of the Palestinian Authority. Israel defines Hamas as terrorist because Hamas is determined to resist the Zionist entity. Israel’s minions in legislative bodies in other countries have been used to create the “designated terrorist” label. “Brutal dictatorship” is a buzzword applied to all political movements asserting independence from imperialist control.
“It is a tragedy that Hamas has chosen to direct its resources to the building of tunnels and rockets, rather than building hospitals, schools, housing, and factories that would create prosperity and opportunity for the Palestinian people.” — Are these the same hospitals, schools, housing and factories that Israel has been bombing since 2006? Are these the same tunnels that Gazans used to bring in vital humanitarian goods not allowed through Israeli checkpoints? Doesn’t Hamas have the right to its primitive rockets when Gazans are being periodically bombarded by Israel and its highly sophisticated fighter jets?
“It is a tragedy that, by squandering the opportunity to build a better future for the Palestinian people, Hamas has forced Israel and Egypt to secure their own borders with a blockade to prevent the further weaponization of Gaza.” — For choosing resistance against the Zionist occupier, the Palestinian people were punished by the Zionist occupier and his servants in Egypt. The blockade is not just against weapons, it’s against any freedom of movement, and any importation of needed goods. Even people in need of urgent medical care are refused. The main purpose of the Israeli blockade is to starve Gaza, to “put them on a diet”, as one Israeli official said. To its everlasting shame, the West-installed political class in Egypt – not the Egyptian people – has chosen to collaborate.
“It is a tragedy that the Palestinian people of Gaza have no recourse against their leaders, living without elections or even the ability to protest those in power openly on pain of death.” — Again, Hamas was democratically elected in 2006. One would think “the only democracy in the Middle East” would appreciate this. Stories of Hamas killing protesters have appeared only in the Israeli press – e.g., the Jerusalem Post, the Times of Israel. However, there are stories every day in the worldwide press of Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian protestors all over the West Bank. Let’s also remember that the March of Return in Gaza is made up of protestors, and that Israel sent snipers there for the explicit purpose of killing and wounding them. This is not to mention the “recourse against” Hamas leaders employed over the years by Israel – namely, open assassination.
“It is a tragedy that they are deceived by their own leaders with the unrealistic promise of a destructive victory over the State of Israel – a victory that will never come. It is a tragedy that their own government chooses to use them as human shields, perpetuating their suffering for nefarious self-interest.” — As the Borg said, “Resistance is futile.” Isn’t the promotion of the idea of an unconquerable Israel the worst kind of war propaganda? The “human shields” argument has been used by Israel as an excuse for intentionally killing hundreds of civilians during its repeated bombing campaigns. What is the “nefarious self-interest” of Gaza’s leadership? — liberation from Israeli torture.
“It is a tragedy that the Israeli people look at Gaza and see the end of a dream; to live in peace with their neighbors.” — The “dream” of the majority of the Israeli people today is to remove Palestinians from all of historic Palestine, and completely erase Palestinian history. Israelis do not “live in peace with their neighbors.” They have repeatedly attacked Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria and they are the main instigators today of conflict and war with Iran.
“It is a tragedy that Israelis living near the border are terrorized by threats coming from tunnels under their homes and rockets over their schools.” –The main tactic of this propaganda piece is to blame the victim. Thus, nothing was done through the agency of the Jewish state and its obvious goals; everything was done as a reaction to injustices committed by Palestinians. It also turns reality on its head. Homes and schools have indeed been destroyed, but by Israel.
“It is a tragedy that when Israelis do what any other nation in the world would do – protect their border from being overrun – that they endure a condemnation that no other nation would receive.” — This is the “why pick on us?” argument. Why? Because Israel has the ugliest, most long-standing system of open colonization and oppression visible in the world today. The vast majority of the people of the world are disgusted. What Israel claims as its “borders” is stolen land.
“It is a tragedy that Israelis experience this singling out as a further example of an isolation, their status as “the Jew amongst the nations,” with only themselves to protect their inalienable rights to live in security.” — This is the “Jew as victim” argument, made possible by unrelenting Holocaust instruction since World War II, which provides a guaranteed pass for any and all crimes committed by Jews. Since 2001, Israel, the poor victim nation, has gotten the United States to attack a long list of countries in the Middle East which Israel feels threatened by, now including Russia because Russia has thrown a wrench into Israeli plans to destroy Syria. Israel also receives massive direct funding and political cover from the United Sates. If Israel resents its status as “the Jew amongst the nations” why does it call itself “the Jewish state”? Why does it display the Star of David on all its national symbols and armaments? This is an identity which Israelis promote – how can they now turn around and blame us for it?
“It is a tragedy because this weekend, young men and women of the Israel Defense Forces stared down the sights of their rifles and learned violence at a time when they should have been at home with their families celebrating freedom at the Passover table.” — The idea that it is the Israeli Occupation Forces who have suffered because they have had to kill and maim defenseless Palestinians is a perfect example of what Zionist supremacy and racism is. It is a form of self-worship and psychopathy in which one is never responsible for committing any wrong — it is always the fault of the other. This sentence is reminiscent of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir saying: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” In other words, the real crime has been committed against Jews, whose purity has been sullied by having to kill innocent people (as they were invading their land and homes). This belief of Jewish superiority above others is at the bottom of everything Palestinians have suffered for the past 70 years.
“It is a tragedy because Palestinians need some way to express their frustrations – at Israel and at their own government after years of wasted opportunities to build a better life for the people of Gaza. Instead they experienced more manipulation, and more loss.” –No, the ” frustration” Palestinians feel is from being consistently and sadistically blocked from life and liberty by the Israeli prison-keeper. The real manipulators are those who would have us believe the oppressive tactics of Israel are of the Palestinians’ own making, as this sentence implies.
“We see this weekend as the continuation of a tragedy that has not brought the people of Israel and Gaza any closer to a future of peace and hope for all of their children. As the Boston Jewish community continues to celebrate the Passover holiday this week, we are mindful of the lessons learned at our seders, that we do not rejoice over the tragedy of others and we are ever hopeful for peace and stability for all people.” — Again, no recognition that this “tragedy” might be in any way the fault of Israel. Israel is supported, not by “the Boston Jewish community” but by a cynically propagandistic Washington-based lobby for Israel, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which provides the political line for 125 supposedly local Jewish Community Relations Councils in the US. In other words, a political lobby for a country 6,000 miles away says they speak for all Jews in Boston. In 2016 the Jewish Community Relations Council of Boston sponsored a deceptive anti-boycott bill in the Massachusetts legislature. They were successfully opposed by a large number of Jewish activists in the state, and many others. The Council now claims to represent the Jewish community of Boston in mobilizing opposition to a motion in the Cambridge city council to boycott Hewlett-Packard. When was the vote in which “the Boston Jewish community” elected this Council? Who is the real manipulator in this scenario? Doesn’t the Jewish Community Relations Council actually represent a foreign political movement — not Cambridge, not Boston, not Massachusetts? Israel, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t repeatedly murder people in Gaza in broad daylight and then piously claim you’re for “ peace and stability for all people.”
Since Friday 30 March 2018, thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have protested across the Gaza Strip in commemoration of Land Day, demanding an end to the 11-year long closure, and reaffirming their right of return. In response, the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) deployed additional forces and equipment in the area, and issued explicit orders to use live fire against Palestinian protestors. Hundreds of fully armed IOF members, including tens of snipers and military vehicles, spread behind the border area in these locations. The IOF resorted to excessive and lethal force, by shooting live ammunition, rubber bullets, heavy tear gas fired by drones and military vehicles, targeting Palestinian protestors. Since Friday 30 March, 32 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, 25 during the protests, and thousands have been injured, hundreds with live ammunition.
Age-restricted video (based on Community Guidelines)
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday that there were “no innocent people” in the besieged Gaza Strip after days of protests and clashes left 30 Palestinians martyred, including a journalist.
“There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip,” Lieberman told Israel’s public radio.
“Everyone’s connected to Hamas, everyone gets a salary from Hamas, and all the activists trying to challenge us and breach the border are Hamas military wing activists.”
Referring to the journalist Yasser Murtaja, who was martyred during Friday protest, Lieberman claimed: “We know that in many instances Hamas has used journalists and the media and the Red Crescent and ambulances to carry out terror activities.”
“Whoever flies a drone over [Israeli] forces, over our soldiers – we won’t take any chances,” Lieberman said, alleging that Murtaja was using a drone for photos and videos when he was targeted by occupation forces on Gaza border.
Two journalists who were accompanying Murtaja stressed that the 30-year-old journalist was not using a drone during Friday protest.
“He was using a normal video camera all day,” Ashraf Abu Amra, one of the two journalists said.
As of April 7, nearly three thousand unarmed Christian, Muslim and secular Palestinians have been wounded, over three dozen are in critical condition and at least twenty-five unarmed protestors, including children have been assassinated by hundreds of Israeli snipers and heavily armed troops shooting tank shells into crowds of civilians protesting their decades of incarceration by the racist Israeli state.
The Israeli government praised the ‘restraint and morality’ of the IDF, as did the fifty-two Major Jewish American Organizations (MJAO) who largely control the US Congress. These grotesque massacres began during the Christian Holy Week on Good Friday and Easter, coinciding with the Jewish Passover. The self-righteous officials of the MJAO and their relatives and friends broke matzos at joyful Seders as the blood of Palestinians soaked into ground at the fence containing the largest open-air prison camp in history, Gaza.
While tribal loyalties bonded the Israeli and Jewish American leaders, the politicians of the Western oligarchic electoral regimes refrained from criticizing the shocking display of brute force and even defended Israel’s cold blood mass killings of Palestinian civilians in their Gaza prison.
This paper will discuss and analyze the reasons for Israel’s willing Western accomplices and the centrality of its fifth column in the United States.
Israel’s Willing Accomplices
Because of the US veto power, the United Nations Security Council refused to condemn or even discuss Israel’s wanton slaughter in Gaza. The Secretary General of the UN meekly mentioned ‘violence’ and the need for an ‘investigation’ into the killings. The United States Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, prevented any investigation into the ongoing Israeli war crimes. She characterized Israel’s mass murder of unarmed Palestinians as ‘defensive action against terrorists’.
Both major US political parties defended Israel’s crimes against humanity and threatened critics, labeling them as ‘hypocrites’, while deflecting attention away from the state slaughter of Palestinian civilians, pointing to the behavior of the Arab countries.
With the notable exception of Bernie Sanders, both legislative houses and the executive branch expressed unconditional support for Israel’s ongoing slaughter.
The mass media, including all the major television, newspaper and radio outlets echoed the vituperative speeches of Israel’s Ziofascist leaders.
All the major political lobbies in Washington followed the leading arm of the US-Israel lobby, the ‘52 MJAO’.
The key question is what explains the power of Israel to continuously commit crimes against humanity with impunity?
Clearly Israel, by itself, lacks the economic, political and media power to influence international organizations. Nor does Israel exercise sufficient ‘soft power’ or cultural influence to neutralize the tens of millions of critics around the world with any persuasive arguments . . . except in the United States.
Where does the power that protects Israel from any consequences for its brutal crimes reside?
The key to Israel’s impunity lies in a chain of command beginning with the local grass roots of hundreds of fanatical, unconditional Zionist-Israel First organizations in the US.
Every major and minor US city has local Zionist-councils who use their influence to intimidate local professional, business, political and media groups into ensuring that critics are censored and Israel’s war crimes are covered up. The tactics range from ‘friendly’ influence within local civic organizations to outright threats, bullying and slander.
Local Zionist organizations are linked to state-wide and national political and economic confederations that influence the nomination and financing of all candidates, the elected officials and the composition of editorial boards of the major media outlets.
Equally important, Zionist activists pressure and recruit leaders of civil society groups through guided propaganda tours to Israel. They enforce obedience and submission to Zionist objectives by blacklisting critics, contacting their places of employment and demanding they be fired. They employ even more repressive tactics against perceived threats to Israel’s interests, including threatening phone calls and unwelcome ‘visits’. At the commanding heights of the Zionist pyramid, hundreds of billionaires and millionaires finance and influence the corporate mass media, the political parties and conservative and liberal religious and educational institutions and demand adherence to Israel’s agenda.
The Zionist power configuration (ZPC) parlays its influence far beyond its dues-paying members, who, in reality, comprises only a very tiny fraction of the US population.
Wider networks extend and magnify the Zionist presence, multiplying power centers up to the highest levels of public policy making. The ideological influence of the Israel Fifth Column is concentrated on a single issue: Defending Israel and its crimes against humanity. They succeed because of their enormous impact on the US role in world politics, including Washington’s trade and military policy in strategic regions, especially in the Middle East.
The members of Israel’s Fifth Column may be liberal or conservative on a broad spectrum of domestic socio-cultural issues, (gay rights, immigration reform, racial and cultural identity, feminism, the environment, etc . . . ) while, at the same time, they provide unconditional support for Israel’s oppression, imprisonment, expulsion and massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
In fact, the Fifth Column’s primary commitment to Israel has guaranteed that the US would wage a sequence of catastrophic wars against Israel’s regional rivals and targeted adversaries – Iraq, Libya and Syria – even at enormous cost in US lives and wasting multi-trillions of dollars of US taxpayers funds. This Zionist-promoted drain on the US treasury to finance disastrous wars has completely undermined any policies to address the domestic needs of US working people (which the progressive Zionists have loudly claimed to support!) The consequences have been tragic to the people of the Middle East and to the increasingly impoverished and desperate American working poor and minorities.
Israel’s power to freely murder unarmed civilians in Gaza is derived from the Fifth Column’s influence in the US. Without it Israel would have no power to block the UN from imposing sanctions, or the International Court of Justice from convening a tribunal for war crimes. Israel would not have nuclear weapons or advanced missiles to threaten its neighbors and destabilize the hundreds of millions of civilians who live in the greater Middle East, were it not for the its US-based Zionist power configuration. The nation of Israel would be ‘confined’ within internationally agreed borders and it would be forced to reverse its policy of ethnic cleansing. Israel would have to become a diverse – society based on laws, instead of a lawless, apartheid ethno-fascist police state dedicated to oppressing half of the people within its declared and occupied territories.
The key to Israel’s power is found in its leaders’ command structure, which dictates policy to its tribal diaspora. Their overseas accomplices command the regional, state and local organizations to relay “the message” and apply various means to enforce it. Dissent by Jews and non-Jews is swiftly and viciously punished, adherence to Zionist dictates is rewarded.
Opponents are ostracized, blacklisted and slandered – without recourse.
Ideological conformity or submission to the Zionist agenda ensures employment, promotions and political and judicial appointments. No Jewish critics of Zionism, no matter how prestigious, have ever received senior political or economic appointments. Even academic careers are systematically derailed. This is well understood by everyone in the US, especially by upwardly mobile ‘silenced critics’.
The so-called ‘uniformity’ of the Zionist-Jewish community is maintained by the stick and carrot. The leading stockbrokers, bankers, casino and media moguls know they can hold liberal or conservative opinions on US domestic issues but must support or remain silent on Israel’s war crimes or else . . . suffer reprisals.
Even critics are careful to temper their dissent by blaming ‘both sides’: They equate the 25 murdered civilians in Gaza with the IDF snipers who complain of fatigue from repeatedly pulling the trigger.
Conclusion
Defending Palestinian rights and finally stopping the massacre(s) in Gaza requires taking on the Israel-Zionist chain of command in the United States. First and foremost, it requires opposing Israel’s corrupt and spineless apologists in the US Congress, who have consistently supported the policies of Israel, taken Israeli-Zionist money, submitted to Zionist blackmail and sent thousands of American troops to their deaths to support Israel’s interests in the Middle East. It requires taking on the local Zionist boosters, including the thugs and blackmailers, as well as the local ‘respectable’ elite.
The prestigious Israel First crowd at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other elite Ivy League universities just celebrated Passover. Meanwhile, the thuggish enforcer of Zionist expansion, a former nightclub bouncer, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman praised the IDF snipers who murdered Gazan school kids, saying they “deserved commendation” (FT, 4/2/18 p. 3).
Not a single US Congressperson raised a critical voice against the grotesque brutality of Lieberman fearing the Fifty-Two Presidents of the Major Jewish American Organizations. The 52 respectable presidents endorsed the wounding of nearly three thousand unarmed Palestinian civilian protesters, who never even crossed from their horrific mass prison into the Zionist state of Israel.
To support a meaningful protest one must shame and name the Zionist 5th column close at hand, because they are politically responsible for making sure that US political leaders submit to Israel’s agenda and guarantee total impunity and indeed praise for all the brutal ‘Liebermans’.
Zionist tribal organizations and leaders, their networks and organizers who ‘commend’ the IDF killers need to be named, exposed and confronted.
The US enablers, who protect, promote and defend Israeli war criminals are Zionist psychologists, lawyers, journalists and experts who can talk at great lengths about ‘Jewish ethics’ but who have never shown a shred of decent human compassion and solidarity for the victims in Gaza.
The issue of Zionist crimes resonates across the social spectrum.
Prominent progressive working-class leaders, like Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the British Labor Party, are routinely slandered as anti-Semites for speaking publicly about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Leading Zionist spokespeople have launched a vindictive media campaign to destroy Corbyn and prevent a courageous politician from leading tens of millions of British workers in their struggle for social justice.
In the United States, Zionists organize to slander any and all popular leaders engaged in the struggle for social justice, labor and minority rights if they dare to speak against Israel’s injustice against their counterparts – workers and oppressed minorities in Palestine.
The struggle for Palestinian self-determination has a profound significance for the United States as its youth and minorities confront increasing desperation and injustice in their communities. American youth and minorities see their own struggles for justice against an increasingly oligarchic police state mirrored in the protests of Palestinian youth. Their defense of free speech (including the freedom to criticize and confront Israel’s war crimes), freedom of assembly (including the freedom to organize boycotts of Israeli products) and self-determination, mean that American working class youth must confront the oligarchy run by and for the plutocrats at home and in Israel.
A Palestinian video journalist and photographer who had just been contracted to work with MEMO has been hospitalised after being shot by Israeli sniper fire today while covering The Great March of Return near Gaza’s eastern border.
Though wearing a vest marked ‘PRESS’, Yaser Murtaja, co-founder of Ain Media production company, was shot in the abdomen by Israeli snipers perched on a hilltop on Gaza’s border.
Israeli sniper shoots journalist on #Gaza border and now he is in the operation room in hospital. pic.twitter.com/m3Pw21SWRK
Ain Media, which is made up of a dozen Palestinian media professionals, has been covering the events taking place near Gaza’s border with Israel since Friday. In the past, the team have produced work for Al JazeeraDocumentaries, BBC Arabic, VICE, Alaraby TV, UNICEF, UNRWA and Oxfam amongst others.
In an interview with MEMO earlier this month, Yaser said that his passion for filming and photography was born out of his desire to document the events taking place in the besieged Gaza Strip and to do what he could to help shed light on the reality of life in Gaza and the plight of fellow countrymen under occupation and blockade.
At least 23 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza and more than 1,500 others wounded during the Great March of Return, a six-week demonstration and sit-in which started last Friday to mark Palestine Land Day and is calling for the implementation of the Right of Return.
Palestinians come together near Gaza’s eastern border for ‘The Great March of Return’
Demonstrators are demanding that Palestinian refugees be granted their right to return to their towns and villages in historical Palestine, from which they were driven in 1948 to make way for the state of Israel.
In the run-up to the mass demonstrations last week Israel deployed thousands of troops on the border, threatening to use live ammunition against anyone who threatened Israel’s “security infrastructure”.
During peaceful protests on March 30 in eastern Gaza, an unarmed Palestinian man walked on farmland towards the fence built by his occupiers. Within minutes, he was shot by one of the 100 Israeli special forces snipers deployed along the fence precisely to quash dissent—by any means necessary—under the old pretext of “self-defense.”
On the same day, a Palestinian woman, armed solely with a flag, walked towards the fence which has imprisoned her for so many years. She, too, was targeted by one of the snipers.
Among the 17 killed that day was a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old farmer, the latter killed by Israeli tank fire.
Even the BBC, which is not generally known to report fairly on Palestine, noted: “The first to die was Omar Samour, 27 – a Palestinian farmer killed in Israeli shelling as he worked his land near Khan Younis early on Friday, before the protests began.”
Yet, according to Israel, this farmer was a “terrorist infiltrator,” the lexicon which Israel uses to whitewash its extrajudicial assassinations.
Sputnik reports that the Israeli Army spokesperson proudly tweeted they knew “where every bullet landed,” but later deleted the tweet, likely because it was clear these bullets landed in the bodies of unarmed protesters.
In my three years living in Gaza, I frequently accompanied such demonstrations, and also did so in countless demonstrations when I stayed as an activist for eight months in the West Bank. Having experienced these first hand, I’m acutely aware that Israel has zero moral authority on conduct.
In the tens of demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza which I accompanied, “violence” always began with the Israelis shooting live ammunition, lead bullets covered with a thin rubber layer, and suffocating tear gas at unarmed Palestinians. That Palestinian youths chose to respond with slingshot-spun rocks is entirely within their rights. But in my experiences, it was always Israel which began, shooting to maim and kill, kidnapping and imprisoning unarmed protesters.
On Land Day in March 2010, I joined one of six demonstrations that were held in the Gaza Strip. It was in Khoza’a village, east of Khan Younis. The four young Palestinian men targeted by Israeli snipers all reported being shot with live ammunition without any prior warnings, including one man shot in his head.
And as with the March 2018 Land Day demonstrations, Israel deemed the 2010 assault acceptable: “an investigation showed ‘soldiers operated in accordance with accepted dispersal procedures,’ in regards to the IDF violence against unarmed protestors.”
The “accepted dispersal procedures” of Israel occur on a daily basis throughout occupied Palestine, whether against unarmed protesters in Bil’in village near Ramallah, or against unarmed farmers—from children to elderly—in Gaza.
These procedures include firing on Palestinian civilians from remotely-controlled Israeli gun towers stationed along the fence enclosing Gaza. Israel also targets other civilians working in border regions, including children and youths collecting rubble and scrap metal for use in construction.
Western media is reporting that the 2018 attacks on Palestinian protesters was the single bloodiest day in Gaza since the 2014 “clashes.” The lexicon of “clashes” – used to refer to Israel’s brutal summer 2014 bombardment of Gaza, and also the recent Israeli assassinations of civilians in protests – is corporate media’s typical distortion of reality and of the balance of power. When unarmed protesters calling for human rights are literally gunned down, these are not “clashes,” these are assassinations.
Further, this negates the near-daily Israeli targeting of Palestinian farmers, fishers, and people working in the border regions. This including sniping at and shelling women, elderly, and children.
In the farmer accompaniment work I did in Gaza, many Israeli soldiers fired live ammunition at and around myself and other volunteers, at close proximity, in an effort to aggress and frighten farmers off of their land. Israel’s policy of attacking Palestinian farmers and fishers is a part of their larger policy of rendering Palestinians utterly dependent on inadequate food aid and utterly, needlessly, impoverished.
In 2011, I wrote about the Israeli destruction of Palestinian agriculture in Gaza, noting:
“Around a decade ago, Palestinian farmers could still access land up to 50 metres from the border. The Israeli-deemed ‘no-go zone’ expanded over the years to 150 metres, then 300 metres, cutting Palestinian farmers from their orchards, crops and grazing land.
“A decade later, those orchards bulldozed by Israeli bulldozers, farmers now struggle to access land in some areas up to two kilometres along the 300 metre buffer zone violently rendered off-limits by the Israeli soldiers.
“Over 30 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land is not worked on because of the buffer zone. This is Gaza’s more fertile land, where olive, fruit, citrus and nut trees once flourished, along with wheat, barley, rye and other crops, providing much of Gaza’s needs.”
Two brutal Israeli bombardments of Gaza later, the percentage of workable agricultural land will have decreased still further.
Turkey and Israel compete for moral supremacy
Following Israel’s attacks on Palestinian protesters, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan bashed Israel, stating:
“I do not need to tell the world how cruel the Israeli Army is. We can see what this terror state is doing by looking at the situation in Gaza and Jerusalem. Israel has carried out a massacre in Gaza and Netanyahu is a terrorist.”
While I happen to agree with this statement, it is particularly ironic that it comes from the leader of a state that is warring on Syria, has given safe passage, and weapons, to terrorists to enter Syria, and has in recent months killed hundreds of civilians in northwestern Syria.
Since late January, Turkey has been bombing Afrin, northwestern Syria. The latest casualty count I have found was 222 civilians murdered and 700 injured as of March 10, 2018. A later report states, “more than 1000 civilians martyred and injured,” thousands displaced, by the Turkish bombings.
Then, of course, there is Israel’s direct support to terrorists in Syria, including treating terrorists from the FSA to Al-Qaeda in Israeli hospitals.
Thus, both Israel and Turkey have civilians’ blood on their hands, and neither has been held accountable.
No justice has ever come to those civilians maimed, murdered, imprisoned by Israel. Nor has any international body truly pushed for justice. Weak words, quickly forgotten, are not the pursuit of justice and accountability of the perpetrators of crimes.
Predictably weak UN reaction
Following Israel’s assassination of Palestinian protesters, the United Nations issued weak statements of concern, but no actual condemnation of Israel’s brutality.
Absent the outrage which UN bodies and representatives reserve almost exclusively for war propaganda and whitewashing terrorists in Syria, UN Secretary-General António Guterres blandly offered his “thoughts” to the families of those murdered by Israel. He called for “an independent and transparent investigation into these incidents.” Just who would do such an investigation? Israel? The UN?
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, known for his rabid anti-Palestinian statements, vetoed the call, stating, “There will be no commission of inquiry. We shall not cooperate with any commission of inquiry.”
The UN assistant secretary-general, Tayé-Brook Zerihoun, described the day of slaughter as having “devolved into violence at several locations across Gaza.” Seventeen unarmed Palestinians murdered by elite Israeli snipers is not “devolving into violence,” it is slaughter. Premeditated slaughter, at that.
We can expect precisely zero action or justice via the UN, when such a massacre is downplayed, and when prior Israeli massacres of Palestinians have never been held accountable by the UN or by the state which the UN routinely requests look into its own murdering.
At that same UNSC meeting, America’s UN delegate, Walter Miller, had the gall to put the blame on Palestinians. Miller described Palestinian civilians as: “Bad actors who use protests as a cover to incite violence [and] endanger innocent lives.”
America is fine with “rebels” like Al-Qaeda “protesting” in Syria, but when genuinely unarmed protesters in Palestine exercise their right under international law to protest the occupiers who violently expelled them from their homes and land, they are “inciting violence.” The hypocrisy of America and the UN never ends, and as a result, the violence of Israel will never end.
While Turkey cries crocodile tears for Palestinians, Israel pretends to be the most moral army in the world, and the UN turns endless blind eyes to Israel’s war crimes and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and Palestinians continue to bravely protest the crimes of Israel.
As Gareth Porter tweeted, “many 1000s of Gazans are ready to die as martyrs rather than submit to Israel’s policy of slow death; Israeli snipers will continue 2 kill Palestinian demonstrators in cold blood; US gov’t & news media have given Israel a green light.”
Indeed, the UN, corporate media and world leadership may, and do, ignore or vilify them, but Palestinians keep standing up to the most immoral military and government in the region.
Eva Bartlett is a freelance journalist and rights activist with extensive experience in the Gaza Strip and Syria. Her writings can be found on her blog, In Gaza.
The Israeli army’s trigger-finger against Palestinian protesters close to the fence surrounding Gaza at the weekend, killing at least 18 and injuring hundreds more, has an explanation rooted in more than normal conceptions of security.
Even before Israel’s creation, its leaders were obsessed with demography and winning a zero-sum numerical war of attrition with the Palestinians. The consequences are still playing out to this day.
Last week, ahead of the Gaza protests, the Israeli army made an unexpected admission. It told parliamentarians that for the first time Jews are outnumbered by Palestinians living under Israeli rule, both inside Israel as citizens and in the territories under occupation.
It was a moment whose significance was not lost on Israeli legislators. Many were appalled, refusing to accept the army’s assessment that there are now half a million more Palestinians than Jews between the Mediterranean Sea and the river Jordan.
Avi Dichter, a right wing legislator and a former head of Israel’s secret police agency the Shin Bet, called the data “disconcerting”.
In 1948, when the Zionist movement saw a chance to seize control of as much of Palestine as possible, it understood that this goal could be achieved only through the ethnic cleansing of most of the native population. It was Zionism’s moment to create the “empty land” mythologised in its early slogans.
Today, the demographic successes of 1948 have been largely reversed. The Six-Day War of 1967 was over too quickly for Israel to expel more than a small proportion of the Palestinians living in the rest of the historic Palestine it had just conquered.
Higher Palestinian birth rates have been eroding the Jewish majority ever since while various schemes to force or pay Palestinians to leave have mostly failed.
Israeli officials’ ultimate fear in this demographic war is that the world will judge a minority of Israelis ruling over a majority of Palestinians as a new form of apartheid.
Seven decades on from its creation, Israel has won every battle, bar this one. The Palestinians are crushed. Washington now does little more than cheerleading for the settlers. Parts of the Middle East are in disarray. The Europeans have lost interest.
But in terms of the most pressing of all Israel’s struggles – for numerical dominance over Palestinians – Israel appears to be losing its seven-decade fight.
In a sign of growing levels of desperation, the Diaspora Affairs Ministry, headed by settler leader Naftali Bennett, announced a plan last week to track down those around the globe with an “affinity” to Israel or Judaism. In the ministry’s view, 90 million people may qualify.
According to an editorial in the Israeli daily Haaretz, officials regard this group as “demographic treasure … potential candidates to join the Jewish people and immigrate to Israel”.
But Israel is not only trying to bolster its Jewish population. It has been devising tangible ways to reduce the Palestinian population too.
Since 2003, Israel has effectively banned family reunifications for Palestinians in Israel who marry Palestinians in the occupied territories. Such families are under pressure to move abroad so they can live together.
More significantly, two years later Israel pulled its few thousand settlers out of Gaza, in part so it could claim it was no longer occupying the coastal enclave, even as it blockaded it from land, air and sea. It has argued unconvincingly – as the weekend’s events prove – that about two million Palestinians there, who constitute the fastest-growing Palestinian population, have been removed from the demographic equation.
Withdrawing from the rest of the territories has proven even harder. There is almost no support among Israeli Jews for giving up East Jerusalem and its holy sites, even though it is home to 300,000 Palestinians.
And a rapidly shrinking Israeli centre-left has lost the campaign to withdraw from the parts of the West Bank where large numbers of Palestinians live.
The right is committed to seizing all of the West Bank. The question now is how to annex it without the Palestinians becoming the majority population. Palestinian legislator Ahmed Tibi warned his Jewish colleagues last week that they were bringing closer their nightmare scenario of a Greater Israel ruled by an “Arab prime minister”. But no one, including Mr Tibi, believes that will be allowed to happen.
Instead two varieties of annexationists have emerged.
The first are those who want to intensify the campaign to force Palestinians out of most of the West Bank, gradually herding them into a handful of cities, in preparation for a series of ever-expanding annexations.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem issued a warning last week that dozens of Palestinian farming communities were facing imminent expulsion from Area C, which forms two-thirds of the West Bank.
Israel has stepped up home demolitions, torn up roads, denied Palestinians electricity and water, encouraged settler violence and conducted military and live fire training on Palestinian land. The aim, said B’Tselem, is to avoid international censure as Israel makes “life unbearable to force them to leave, as if by free choice”.
These are the “moderates” in the government. The other camp, exemplified by deputy defence minister Eli Ben Dahan, believes all the West Bank can be annexed, with the Palestinians viewed more like trees than human beings.
Last week he told Arutz Sheva, a settler news agency, that the army’s warning of a Palestinian majority should not “scare us”. Palestinians would simply be denied voting rights for the foreseeable future.
“They are far from [a] meaningful democracy as we know it,” he said, adding that Palestinians might eventually earn citizenship in a Greater Israel if they submitted absolutely. “There are many examples of citizenship that are given gradually,” he added.
Seventy years on, as the massacre in Gaza has underscored, Israeli leaders are faced with the same dilemma as its founders: should they again use violence to drive Palestinians from their homeland or establish an unapologetic and brutal apartheid state ruling over them?
By GARETH PORTER | CounterPunch | February 27, 2013
“Going to Tehran” arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony. … continue
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GAZA – Hamas Movement on Friday perceived the statements of Nikki Haley, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, in which she claimed that Hamas uses civilians as human shields in Gaza Strip, as untrue offensive remarks.
The slain journalist worked for the People’s Voice Radio (Sha’ab Radio), in Gaza.
Gaza –Imad is 34 and has been volunteering as a first responder with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) since 2006. On Monday 9 April 2018, Imad volunteered with PRCS east of al Bureij refugee camp in the Middle Area of the Gaza Strip. Imad was waiting as part of the PRCS team, sitting in the front passenger seat of an ambulance beyond the 300-metre zone.
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