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Reflections on the demonstrations in Gaza, June 2018

History will remember

In this latest Palestinian protest, the Israelis are murdering mostly non-violent civilian protesters by the score and maiming them by the thousands. They intentionally target the arms and legs of protesters so as to maim rather than kill. Maiming doesn’t receive as much public attention as killing. Maiming thousands of people significantly adds to the already overwhelming load on the pretty much non-existent Palestinian resources. The Israelis use explosive bullets that will rip off arms and legs and/or can blast a fist-sized hole through your torso or your head — and in a new development, their snipers now target aid workers.

Your tax dollars at work

ALL of these acts violate a large number and wide variety of international laws — but the United States invariably (and usually unilaterally) blocks any UN resolutions to try to do anything about it. So these outrages not only continue with impunity, but they are largely paid for with your tax dollars. Israel is the largest single recipient of American foreign ‘aid’ of any country in the world.

Targeting with lethal precision

If you take the Israelis at their own word — and specifically, if you take seriously the Israeli claim that they know exactly where each and every Israeli bullet fired goes and who it hits — then the Israelis began targeting aide workers [the first week in June]. Up until then not a single aide worker had been killed. Now 16 of them have been killed. They almost immediately f%#ked up, though, by shooting and seriously injuring an aide worker who was also a photogenic Canadian citizen. The same day they also shot four of his colleagues, and one of those colleagues was the Palestinian aid worker who had himself rescued the Canadian aid worker — only to be himself shot and killed just an hour later.

That incident caused outrage and further attempts at the UN to hold Israel responsible — all to no avail. Thanks to the United States, Israel has a blank check.

Now, the Israelis have killed an attractive 20-year old female aid worker named Razan al-Najjar by shooting her in the chest. She had previously conducted numerous interviews on camera due to the fact that she was a telegenic, charming, selfless, dedicated, brave, inspiring, and beautiful young example of humanity’s finest. (See link below.)

An international law exception for Israel

These clips are now playing all over the world and — again — there is universal outrage all over the planet (everywhere except in the United States, anyway). United States — again — unilaterally blocked yet another UN resolution. This time it was a resolution to simply ‘protect Palestinian civilians’. The America’s UN representative Nikki Haley said she vetoed the resolution because it was too ‘one sided’.

Hundreds of Palestinian shot dead; thousands injured

I must agree with Ms. Haley. This is indeed a ‘one sided’ situation. Israel has one of the largest and most advanced militaries on the planet along with world-class cutting-edge technologies to suppress civilian populations — while the Palestinians have rocks, Molotov cocktails suspended from balloons and kites, and a few crappy rockets that can’t hit anything. In every confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians, the casualty figures invariably turn out to be hundreds-to-one—including the casualty rates amongst children. In this latest protest there have been hundreds of Palestinian deaths and thousands of injuries—with many of those injuries being disfiguring, disabling, and/or life-transforming. Not a single Israeli soldier has suffered so much as a nick or a cut that anyone knows of. Israeli snipers sit behind fortified barricades that are behind a fortified wall where they train their high-powered sniper scopes on unarmed teenage civilian aid workers. Their Propaganda Machine is simultaneously insisting that the Palestinians are the ‘aggressors’ in this situation. (Evidently their theory is that the Palestinians are the ‘aggressors’ because they are all so ‘aggressively’ dying?)

Their Propaganda Machine claims that Palestinians defending their homeland from a foreign occupying army serves as further evidence that the Palestinians are ‘murderers’ and ‘terrorists’ which justifies murdering civilians and negating any claim to even the most basic civil liberties and thus proving the Palestinians unworthy of even the right to food, medicine, clean water, electricity, or shelter.

Funded, defended, and abetted by the US government

Due to the Israeli blockade and restrictions on imports, hospitals in Gaza were already underfunded, understaffed, and under-supplied to the point of crisis even before the Israelis began blowing off thousands of Palestinian arms and legs. Now, according to reports on the ground, those hospitals are simply nightmarish charnel houses.

What is happening in Palestine represents nothing less than a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Period. What is happening in Palestine represents ethnic cleansing and genocidal slaughter no matter what their constant barrage of propaganda says — and the Israelis could not get away with this crap for a single minute if the government of the United States did not always unconditionally have their back. Even if Americans continue to ignore it — I can guarantee you that history will remember.

Dana Walker writes and comments at The Thunderbolt. This piece appeared in the June 14, 2018 issue. http://www.democracynow.org/2018/6/4/a_source_of_positivity_all_the

 

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