US Congress support for Israeli terrorism

An Active Complicity in Israel’s Terror
By Ghali Hassan

On June 5, 2007, the pro-Zionist U.S. House of Representatives passed Resolution 152, endorsing Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and Israel’s illegal and violent “reunification of Jerusalem”. The passing of the Resolution was a deliberate refutation of the UN Security Council and in contempt of world peace. While the Resolution is designed to commemorate Israel’s unprovoked and pre-emptive naked aggression against the Arab nation, it is also an attack on Arabs and Muslims in general, and an endorsement of Israel’s Zionist policy of expansion and extermination of the Palestinian people.

In order to divert public attention from the crimes of 1967, the U.S. and Israel are plotting and fanning the flames of violence between Palestinian factions. The current violence in Palestine is a U.S.-Israel engineered violence aimed at covering-up Israel’s sixty years of Israeli violence, the systematic dispossession of 800,000 Palestinians, and the destruction of Palestine.

Meanwhile, a deliberate disinformation and distortion of facts campaign by Western mainstream media is underway to mislead the public to believe that HAMAS – the democratically-elected government – has taken over in Gaza and created what is in effect a miniature “Islamist” state. What is deliberately omitted from the mainstream media coverage are Israel’s forty years of a fascist policy of dispossession and the slow genocide of the Palestinian people. The one-way street anti-Palestinians/Arabs propaganda is designed to demonise the Palestinian people and legitimise U.S.-Europe backing for Israel’s terror and brutal policies.

The reality is that HAMAS has removed (by force) a U.S.-Israel-sponsored coup d’etat against a legitimate Palestinian government at the expense of Palestinian lives. For several months, Israel and the U.S. have been training, arming and financing Palestinian collaborators and militias ¯ led by the thug Mohammad Dahlan ¯ to destabilise the HAMAS-led Palestinian government in contempt of Palestinian lives. It is no secret that the American CIA and Israel have chosen the time in deliberate efforts to destroy the recently formed Palestinian national unity government, fuelling violence and inciting insecurity and civil war. The plan failed miserably.

It is important to note that when Western leaders say they are encouraging the formation of a national unity government in Palestine, they mean exactly the opposite: the disintegration of Palestine. In a recent interview (19 June 2007) with the French daily, Le Figaro, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Isma'il Haniyah said: “Following the signing of the Mecca inter-Palestinian agreements, which permitted the formation of a national unity government, a propaganda war was launched against the HAMAS-led government”. Moreover, in addition to the strangulation and starvation of the Palestinians, the U.S. and its European allies have provided Israel with unconditional military, financial and diplomatic support.

In his recent report, former UN envoy to the Middle East, Alvaro De Soto admitted that the aim of the “Quartet” ¯ U.S., EU, UN and Russia ¯ policy of sanctions and starvation had been to “take all pressure off Israel. With all focus on the failings of HAMAS, the [illegal] Israeli settlement enterprise and barrier [Apartheid Wall] construction [on stolen Palestinian land] has continued unabated”, and in gross violations of International humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions. De Soto added that Israel’s terror “perversely designed to encourage the continued action by Palestinian [resistance]”. The Quartet imposed collective punishments to punish Palestinians for practicing their democratic right, electing a HAMAS-led government and for resisting Israel’s terror. These collective punishments, including blockade and economic sanctions, are devastating and starving the Palestinian population. It is revealed recently that more than “half the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank suffer malnutrition”.

In March 2003, the World Bank’s Director for the West Bank and Gaza, Nigel Roberts, told Peter Cave of the ABC: “Over half of the Palestinian workforce is unemployed, nearly two-thirds of the population is now poor. In towns like Raffa and Khan Yunis, four in five men are unemployed, each wage earner is supporting up to 18 other people, and evidence of severe malnutrition has come to light”. Back in 2000, Roberts lauded the Palestinians for enduring these collective punishments and suggested that any Western society would have collapsed under such inhumane conditions. The objective is that the Palestinians must submit to Israel’s occupation and terror, and recognise Israel as a purely “Jewish state”; an impossible demand that should be rejected by any civilised society.

The current Israel-U.S. policy is to punish Palestinians in Gaza for they dared to democratically elected HAMAS movement, while rewarding Palestinians in the Wes Bank who are ruled by unelected Western-oriented clique of corrupt bourgeoisie ¯ led by the moron Mahmoud Abbas ¯ serving Israel-U.S. interests and pliant to Israel-U.S. dictates. Israel and the U.S. are banking on the suffering and sorrow of brutalised civilians, hopping that the more the Palestinians suffer the less likely to resist and the more likely reject the HAMAS-led government. The elected HAMAS leaders are illegally imprisoned and possibly tortured in Israeli prisons.

It must be acknowledge that the HAMAS leadership has accepted all conditions imposed on them by Israel and the U.S., including a long truce with Israel and “recognition” of Israel within the 1967 borders. Countless peace proposals have been rejected and each time Israel and the U.S. imposed new conditions and creating new pretexts in order to continue the violence and bloodshed.

Furthermore, in November 2006, Khalid Meshaal, the political leader of HAMAS Movement told the German daily Junge Welt: “I think the Western world has understood by now that HAMAS will never recognise Israel Occupation. How can I recognise the one who occupies my land? It is illogical that it is demanded of HAMAS to recognise Israel. I am the victim. I am the man who is not free. I am the man living in the Diaspora away from my land. Israel has got a kind of a nation that was imposed as a fait accompli by the United Nations. We don’t have a nation. More than half of the Palestinian people are living in the Diaspora, mostly in [refugee] camps and they can’t go home. Because of Israel they can’t go home and we should recognise Israel? Who is actually in the wrong, Israel or us?”

While a media campaign of disinformation is in place to enforce the myth that Israel has withdrawn its Army from Gaza; Israel has only removed few thousands illegal settlers from Gaza to the West Bank. Gaza remains a besieged Concentration Camp. It is largest Concentration Camp on the planet. The 1.5 million inhabitants are mostly refugees from other parts of Palestine ethnically cleansed by Israeli terror gangs in 1948 Nakba.

In addition to the imposed blockade, the Israeli Army continues its daily and nightly invasions across the Camp, bombing civilian neighbourhoods, destroying homes and killing Palestinians indiscriminately. On Wednesday (June 20, 2007) Israel bombed Gaza with missiles and sent tanks, killing at least four innocent civilians.

According to the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly, Palestinian medical sources reported that in October 2006, at least 23 Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians, were killed in the Gaza within 48 hours (an average of one Palestinian every two hours). Most of the killings occurred as a result of air strikes by F-16 fighter jets that bomb unprotected and undefended targets, particularly residential homes where innocent civilians are asleep. No Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in this period.

The peer-reviewed Journal of Palestinian Studies counted Israel’s atrocities from 26 November 2006 up until 3 April 2007:

Israeli forces in the West Bank killed 51 Palestinians, and three more Palestinians died from lack of care while stopped at checkpoints. Israeli forces wounded 154 Palestinians, and Israeli settlers wounded another eight. During their incursions, which included 314 arrest raids and 312 house searches, Israeli forces demolished 92 homes (other buildings were also partly or completely destroyed).

Israeli forces in Gaza killed at least 13 Palestinians, wounded 56, and arrested 22 in land and sea attacks.

Palestinian attacks, including rocket fire, killed 3 Israelis and injured 13.

Since June 2006, Israel’s “heroic” Army has murdered more than 600 Palestinian, mostly women and children. No more than six Israelis died in the same period of time. A report on June 04, 2007 by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) revealed that 3,235 Palestinian have been killed since the start of Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000. The Report noted that: “141 women, 25 medics, 10 journalists, 6 of whom were foreigners, and 764 children, have been killed. It is important to mention that the murder of Palestinian children has become the Israeli soldiers’ trademark of cowardice.

The Report added that; “11,030 Palestinians were injured in the Gaza Strip and 13,100 in the West Bank. 11,000 Palestinians [including women and children] have been taken prisoners”. They are tortured on a daily basis by Israel’s Internal Security Service or Shabak. The Report revealed that: “The lands razed by the Israeli forces amount to 36,200 dunams (36,200,000m²) in the Gaza Strip and 58% of Palestinian land in the West Bank has been seized for the construction of the separation wall. 2,914 houses were completely and 2,838 partially demolished in the Gaza Strip. Palestinians are living in the worst conditions ever with regards to internal chaos, in which 160 Palestinians were killed and 835 injured in the first four months of 2007”. In addition, Israel’s Gestapo death squads are murdering Palestinian activists and politicians in daylight. However, Western leaders are happy to shift the blame on the Palestinians in order to absolve Europe of the atrocity that was committed in Europe by Europeans, and inflaming the anti-Muslims propaganda campaign.

While Israel’s illegal Apartheid Wall walls off the Palestinians, they are bombed and killed at will. “Israel has reached an unprecedented degree of arrogance when its army announced that they killed only three Palestinian civilians in the raid on Gaza on Sunday. This implies that three innocent civilians are not important, but this is by itself a recognition by the Israeli army that they have committed the crime of killing the Palestinians", said Palestinian information minister, Dr Mustafa Barghouthi (May 20, 2007) after the Israeli Army went on a rampage killing Palestinians while Israeli Western backers praising its crimes.

Many Western journalists, pundits and NGOs have unashamedly compared Palestinians living condition in Gaza and the West Bank to a “human laboratory” and Palestinians to “guinea pigs”. Isn’t time to ‘call a spade a spade’ and compare the West bank and Gaza to Auschwitz and Treblinka? Isn’t it time to stop this Judeofascism? Israel’s criminal and racist policies endured by the Palestinian people since 1948 are worse than those endured by people under Nazism. It is the longest and most criminal occupation in the history of Western imperialism.

Pro-Israel Zionists and Jews (with a few exceptions) around the world have consistently supported Israel’s brutal and criminal policies against the Palestinians. Influential Jewish leaders are consistently using and exploiting the Holocaust (and “anti-Semitism”) to block any criticism of Israel and allow it to get away with state terrorism and war crimes. Zionists around the world are enforcing the Zionist myth that Israel can do no wrong and that Palestinians can do no right.

The Holocaust and “anti-Semitism” provided Israel with excuse to kill and immunity from condemnation. According to the late Israeli academic Tanya Reinhart, the Holocaust and “anti-Semitism” have been transformed into an instrument for intimidating and blackmailing any criticism of Israel’ terror.

Further, for telling the world part of the truth about Israel’s terror against the Palestinian people, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is viciously attacked and accused of “anti-Semitism” by pro-Israel Zionists and U.S. Jews. Carter’s critiques allege that Jews suffering under European fascism justify Israel’s Apartheid system and Israel’s terror against the Palestinians.

As John Dugard, the UN’s Special Rapporteur, a South African law professor in the Netherlands, rightly noted that, while “Israel’s laws and practices certainly resembles aspects of Apartheid … Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the Apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, levelling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in Apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites”. He added: “It is difficult to resist the conclusion that many of Israel’s laws and practices violate the 1966 Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination”. Indeed, according to the Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions as well as the Statute of the International Criminal Court considered the “practices of apartheid” constitute war crimes.

In Hollow Land, Israel's Architecture of Occupation (2007), the Israeli author Eyal Weitzman quoted the Israeli Army Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz, that the Israeli army considers the war on the Palestinians as “irresolvable and permanent”. The Army has “geared itself to operate within an environment saturated with conflict and within a future of permanent violence”. It acts “just under the threshold of international sanctions ... keeping the conflict on a flame low enough for Israeli society to be able to live and prosper within it”. Indeed, Zionism was found on violence, and violence is Israel’s way of life. Israel thrives on violence and war. After all, Israel is the most militarised, racist and violent society today.

Since the 1967 Israel’s unprovoked aggression against Arab nation, Israel continues a mentality of aggression and a state of terror aimed at extermination of the Palestinian people. Since 1967, Arab leaders have failed to build a military deterrence capable of defeating Israel’s aggression. Unless the Arab nation builds a military capability, Israel will continue with its expansionist Zionist ideology in the Middle East.

Congratulating Israel for its unprovoked naked aggression, ongoing war crimes and violations of International Law is admitting an active complicity in Israel’s war crimes and Israel’s Zionist policies against the Palestinians. The complicity of the U.S. and in Israel’s crimes exposed the myth of U.S. “neutrality” as “honest broker”. The U.S. and its European allies should condemn Israel and work to advance world peace and security.

Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.