July 5, 2024
Israeli Zionists
have always lusted after Palestine, but loathed its people. Today is no exception.
Ever since the
birth of organized Zionism in 1897, its adherents have been bent on
establishing a Jewish majority on a land not theirs and populated with a
Palestinian Arab majority.
Following the
prison break of the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas, Israel
and the United States have repeatedly declared that they want to eliminate it.
Unless they are willing to destroy an entire population, Hamas—inspired by the
idea of liberation—cannot be destroyed.
If
contextualized correctly, it becomes obvious that the Jewish state has been at
war against the natives of Palestine and its demographics since it declared
itself a state in 1948.
Hence, what we
are currently witnessing in occupied Palestine is not only a war but a
genocide, with children among its many casualties. The young are Palestine’s future. To permanently possess the land, Zionists are
determined to kill the future.
A Palestinian
child is killed or wounded every 10 minutes in the Gaza Strip.
The enclave has
one of the youngest populations in the world, half of whom are under 18. Of the 37,953 reported deaths (as of 3 July
2024), more than half have been children.
Those who survive U.S.-made bombs face a bleak future.
Therefore, it is
lunacy to believe that laying waste to a small, densely populated area the size
of Las Vegas and killing and wounding hundreds of thousands of innocent
civilians, is the way to defeat Hamas.
Israel’s current
policy is a continuation of the Zionist ideology on which the Israeli state was
founded. And its intent is attested to
in the words of the late Israeli general and prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
After proudly
boasting that he had “killed 750 Palestinians in Rafah in 1956,” he went on to
say, “I don’t know something called International Principles. I vow that I’ll burn every Palestinian child
[that] will be born in this area. The
Palestinian woman and child is [are] more dangerous than the man, because the
Palestinian child’s existence infers that generations will go on, but the man
causes limited danger.”
That the
children of Gaza have been the target of Israel’s calibrated destruction has
been affirmed by United Nations officials:
+
“Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” UN Secretary General
– Antonio Guterres, 6 November 2023.
+ “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their
future.”
– Commissioner-General, UN Relief and Works
Agency (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, 15 March 2024.
≠ “We have for many months called this a
war on children”
– James Elder, spokesperson, UN
International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 17 June 2024 .
+ UN “Children and Armed Conflict”
report—Israel added to its “blacklist” of countries that commit grave
violations affecting children in armed conflict, 3 June 2024.
Israel’s total
blockade of Gaza has wreaked havoc on children.
The International Criminal Court’sapplication for arrest warrants
against Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, in May 2024 for war
crimes and crimes against humanity have not stopped the atrocities.
The ethnic
cleansing of Palestine—being live streamed today—has been systematically
executed since the days of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion
(1948-1953). The genesis of the plan to
create a Jewish majority state through force, however, can be traced to Ze’ev
(Vladimir) Jabotinsky (1880-1940)—the ideological leader of the Revisionist
Movement and Revisionist Party; antecedent of the current Likud Party.
Jabotinsky was
among the earliest Zionist advocates of removal and armed force to suppress
Palestinian national resistance, which he understood to be the inevitable
consequence of colonization. He
described his Revisionist beliefs—which gave form to the nascent Zionist
state—in a 1923 essay titled, “The Iron Wall.”
In it, he wrote:
“Every native population in the world resists
colonists….As long as theArabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid
of us, they will refuse to give up this hope in return for kind words or for
bread and butter, because they are not rabble, but a living people. And when a living people yields…it is only
when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us, because they can make no
breach in the iron wall.”
Steeped in
Jabotinsky’s ideology, Israel’s leaders have faithfully carried out the policy
of force he framed in his Iron Wall doctrine; believing as he did that “We are
going in [to] Palestine first, for our national convenience, [second] to sweep
out, thoroughly, all traces of the Oriental soul.”
Finally,
Palestinians in Gaza on 7 October 2023 refused to remain imprisoned behind
Israel’s “iron wall” one more day, as Jabotinsky theorized in 1923. And on that day, a people with a history in
Palestine that spans four millennia, refused to be disappeared.
It is hardly
surprising that the current leaders of Hamas are graduates of Israeli prisons.
Ismael Haniyeh, Chairman of the Political Bureau; Yahya Sinwar, political
bureau leader in Gaza; and Mohammad al-Masri, better known as Mohammad Deif,
leader of the al-Qassam Brigades, military arm of Hamas. As children in Gaza, they grew up and learned
to survive under oppressive Israeli occupation.
Palestinian
children are in the crosshairs of Israeli bombs and bullets daily.
It is essential
to remember Netanyahu’s speech of 28 October 2023, declaring Israel’s genocidal
narrative for the ground invasion of Gaza.
He did this by referencing the mythical Old Testament story of Amalek in
which the Israelites were ordered to “smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that
they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling,
ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
After nine
dreadful months, the Tel Aviv regime continues to brutalize Palestinian
children physically and psychologically.
Generations of severely traumatized children, they believe, will pose
little threat to their vision of Eretz Israel.
Humanitarian aid
agency, Save the Children , reported on 7 January 2024 that more than ten
children per day have lost one or both legs since Israel began its bombing
blitz. UNICEF has described children who have lost their
hearing due to blasts and others who can no longer speak due to shock and
trauma.
Israel’s
crippling blockade and its current and prior bombardments of Gaza (2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022-23) have
left many of the surviving children devastated with severe PTSD.
Children who
should be in school, playing with friends are now dodging bombs, losing loved
ones, being forced to flee through streets littered with rubble and corpses.
Some Palestinian
children have been literally frightened to death. They have died from heart attacks brought on
by fear from constant bombing, lack of rest and severe malnutrition. An estimated 19,000 of them have been made
orphans. Unaccompanied children are
registered as unknown or under the acronym WCNSF, wounded child no surviving
family.
Israel’s ongoing
genocidal plan to erase Palestinians, Palestinian identity and their spirit is
on full display. The regime in Tel Aviv
believes that if it massacres “sufficient
numbers” of the population, particularly children, it will kill the
resistance. To that aim, its
self-described “moral army” has wiped out entire families as well as families
across generations.
It is the
invincible spirit of Gaza’s children that Israel is determined to extinguish; a
spirit that was evinced during the 16 January 2024 Eid al-Adha—the Muslim
festival of sacrifice. Despite the
devastation surrounding them, the children, led by Palestinian musicians,
sang: “We are steadfast in Gaza, despite
the siege. We are a strong and mighty
people. They hit us with missiles and
made our bodies into pieces. We die in
Gaza with pride.”
In that spirit,
a young Palestinian boy, who had been badly injured, was heard saying to his
caregivers, “ I want to stay alive for my mother.”
Israel has also
been destroying social support systems, like schools. Education has been a central pillar of
Palestinian identity. It is viewed as a
way to lift their communities and as a principal means of non-violent
resistance against the occupation.
Before 7
October, more than 95 percent of children in Gaza, aged six to twelve, attended
school and most graduated from high school.
Despite the severity of blockades, wars and occupation, Gaza and the
West Bank have had internationally high literacy rates.
The United
Nations, in April 2024, expressed grave concern that Israel has been engaging
in “scholasticide” in Gaza; a term that refers to the systematic and
intentional effort to destroy an educational system and its infrastructure.
The UN High
Commissioner on Human Rights noted that more than 80 percent of the schools
have been destroyed or severely damaged.
Additionally, all 12 universities and colleges in Gaza have been
demolished; considered a war crime, by the 1998 Rome Statute, the founding
treaty of the International Criminal Court.
Palestinian
educators, however, are trying to teach Gaza’s children anyway they can—in
makeshift tents or from a mobile classroom.
To destroy the
cultural fabric of life in Palestine, Israel has bombed libraries, museums,
archives, heritage sites, monuments, mosques, churches and even graveyards.
Israel has used
its public school system to further the ideology and propaganda of
Zionism. They have raised their young
to see Palestinians as problems, sub-human and existential threats to national
security. The educational system has
groomed its children to be willing soldiers in its country’s campaign of terror
and genocide in occupied Palestine.
Israeli
indoctrination was clearly visible after the attack of 7 October. On November
2023, for example, an Israeli state-owned TV channel aired a three-minute video
of Israeli children singing “patriotically” about the annihilation of Gaza and
everyone living there. With scenes of
Gaza’s destruction as background, they sang:
“Autumn night falls over Gaza, planes are bombing
destruction, destruction.
Look the IDF is crossing the line to annihilate the
swastika bearers.
In another year there will be nothing there…. Within
a year we will
annihilate everyone and then we will return to plow
our fields….
We will show the world how we destroy our enemy.
We will remember the pretty and the pure [Israeli
soldiers]….”
That Israeli
soldiers have assimilated the racist values taught them has been visible in
their numerous social media posts from Gaza in which they celebrate and cheer
as they destroy homes and buildings, loot, and mock Palestinians.
It is important
to note, that while the focus has been on Israel’s genocidal campaign to annex
Gaza, its leaders have been actively working to do the same in the occupied
West Bank.
Prior to the
October prison break, Israel knew that it would face strong criticism if it
proceeded with unilateral annexation of the West Bank. Since the United States has, however,
essentially green lighted Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, the
Netanyahu regime has felt unrestrained in acting similarly in the West Bank and
East Jerusalem.
Since then, the
Israeli army and Zionist squatters have, for example, killed at least 553
Palestinians, including 133 children, in the West Bank. And in addition, as of 10 June 2024, over
5,200 Palestinians have been injured, including 800 children; more than a third
by live ammunition.
To weaken
Palestinian resolve, since 2000, more than 10,000 children in the West Bank and
East Jerusalem had been detained by the Israeli army, typically without charge
or trial. Most often, they were arrested
for stone-throwing. Since October,
Israel has detained 640 minors; at least 250 remain in prison, where they are
subject to atrocities such as torture, mental abuse, solitary confinement,
strip searches and physical injuries.
Israel’s cruel
and immoral behavior in Gaza and the West Bank have been well practiced over
generations. The country has lived by
force and intimidation that was charted by Jabotinsky a century ago.
Preservation and expansion of the Jewish state, without Palestinians, has been
its sine qua non and motivating force.
Predictably,
Israel arrogantly believes that once it has established complete control and
sovereignty over all of historic Palestine through genocide that it will be
able to conduct business as usual in the world.
It cannot. The Gaza genocide has
awakened much of the world to its fraudulent history and invented “deed” to the
land based on mythical bible stories.
Edward
Carver
Former
Biden administration officials this week sharply criticized its Gaza policy,
arguing that the continued supply of weapons to Israel is not only “morally
reprehensible” but also a violation of U.S. and international law.
In
a joint statement, 12 officials who’ve resigned in protest in the last nine
months set forth a list of recommendations and urged their former colleagues in
the administration to use American leverage to help bring an end to the assault
on Gaza.
“The
administration’s policy in Gaza is a failure and a threat to U.S. national
security,” the statement says. “America’s diplomatic cover for, and continuous
flow of arms to, Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings
and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza.”
The
12 signatories included former officials from a wide range of posts and
backgrounds.
One
was the the administration’s latest defector: 24-year-old Interior Department
special assistant Maryam Hassanein, who resigned on Tuesday, telling HuffPost
that “serving in the administration in any capacity does essentially make you
complicit in the genocide of the Palestinians.”
Hassanein
was the first Muslim American administration appointee to resign, according to
the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which applauded the resignation on
social media. She said the administration was engaging in the “dehumanization
of Arabs and Muslims.”
Another
signatory was Harrison Mann, the most senior military official to have left in
protest of the Gaza war. Mann had been a major at the Defense Intelligence
Agency. He made the news this week when he told The Guardian that Israel was
seeking out a war with Lebanon for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
political gain.
Stacy
Gilbert, a 20-year-old State Department veteran who resigned in May over a key
report, dealing in part with whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to
Gazans, that she says contained “patently false” findings, was also among the
statement’s signatories, as was Lily Greenberg Call, a former Interior
Department official who was the first Jewish American appointee to resign in
protest of the administration’s war policy.
The
joint statement, timed to come on the week of Independence Day, warns that the
U.S. government is risking its international credibility and the safety of its
own citizens by putting a “target on America’s back.”
The
authors argued that the administration was “willfully violating multiple U.S.
laws and attempting to deny or distort facts, use loopholes, or manipulate
processes to ensure a continuous flow of lethal weapons to Israel.” They cited
the Leahy Laws that forbid providing military support to forces engaged in
human rights violations.
The
U.S. provides Israel with billions of dollars per year in military aid and has
significantly increased its support during the war. In April, President Joe
Biden signed a bill providing at least $15 billion in military funds for
Israel.
The
former officials called for an end not just to the U.S. supply of weapons for
the war but also the “diplomatic cover” the U.S. provides for Israeli military
occupation and settlements in Palestinian territory. The administration should
announce that U.S. policy is “to support self-determination for the Palestinian
people,” they wrote.
The
12 ex-officials also called for an “immediate expansion” of humanitarian aid to
Gaza and funding to help rebuild the territory.
Their
statement comes as Israel continues to pummel Gaza with strikes that kill
Palestinian civilians. Nearly 38,000 Gazans have been killed in the last nine
months, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Several strikes that killed
Palestinian civilians, including a massacre in Rafah in late May that killed at
least 45, have been undertaken with U.S.-made weapons, forensic analyses have
showed.
The
conditions for those who have survived the Israeli bombardment are dire, with
Gazans forced to live amid sewage and debris.
“Civilians
in Gaza are clinging to their dignity under the most inhumane conditions,”
Sigrid Kaag, United Nations senior humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator,
said in a statement on Tuesday.
“The
war has not merely created a humanitarian crisis, it has unleashed a maelstrom
of human misery,” she said.
No comments:
Post a Comment