From Ethnic Cleansing to Genocide There Can Be No Solution Until Zionism and the Israeli State are Eradicated From the Face of the Earth
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Let me clear before the Zionist howls become deafening. I want the Israeli state to disappear, just like the Nazi and Apartheid State of South Africa disappeared. The Jewish inhabitants of Israel have every right to stay, but no right to stay in a Jewish Supremacist State.
When I attended Palestine Expo in July 2019 I spoke at a workshop. For some reason the Jewish Chronicle singled out my contribution at this two day event when I said that:
Nazi Germany in a sense built the state of Israel at a crucial time and you can actually say that the state of Israel today is Hitler’s bastard offspring because the ideology that permeates Israel, Jewish racial supremacy, originated in the fascist states of Europe.
The Jewish Chronicle reported that I asked:
“What is Zionism? Zionism is a movement for Jewish racial supremacy. It counterposes the needs of a Jewish racial state to the needs of Jews and that was what Haavara [Agreement] was about.”
Could anyone say today, as we witness the onslaught on Gaza, that Israel has not fully lived up to my description?
Clare Daly speaking in the European Parliament
To paraphrase what Marx wrote, people make history but not of their own time or choosing. It is difficult in any historical period to gauge where we are and where we’re going. The situation in Palestine today is difficult to read but what is clear is that Zionism is reaching the end of the road. Even without the Palestinians the state is doomed.
What does it mean to be a Jewish state – is being Jewish a nationality or a religion? Israelis are hopelessly divided on who they are. According to the Pew survey Israel’s Religiously Divided Society 46% of all Israeli Jews see themselves as Jewish first and only 35% as Israelis first. It is this cleavage which we have been witnessing all year in the massive demonstrations in Israel. Although they have gone away for now, the fault line among the settlers has not gone away. It is a Jewish state in which there is no agreement on what it means to be Jewish.
But for the Palestinians Israel would long ago have witnessed a civil war between its religious and secular components. What adds to this mixture is the rise of the messianic religious right whose deity is the land that god apparently gave them. Their religiosity is secondary to their nationalism, hence the occasional divisions between them and the traditional Haredi Orthodox.
It is hatred of the Palestinians which keeps Israeli Jews together but most Israelis, like all colonists are too stupid to understand that.
Gaza is revealing that Zionism and the Israeli State project has shed the ‘democratic’ façade which it cloaked itself with for 70 years. When you have a Minister, of the Police no less, Itamar ben-Gvir who has chanted ‘Death to the Arabs’ a Kahanist who believes all Israeli Arabs should be expelled, then we are entering new waters.
When I grew up Israel was cited as the only living example of socialism. It was the time of Labour Zionist governments which, if nothing else, excelled at hasbara (propaganda). When I became a socialist and questioned how socialism was compatible with Zionism I was told to go and live on a kibbutz, which was seen as a microcosm of socialism despite being Jewish only and established on the land of destroyed Arab villages.
Today no one hears of kibbutz socialism because the kibbutzim are just another form of Jewish only settlement. Labour Zionism in Israel is all but dead. It survives only in the Jewish diaspora. In Britain it played a major part, via the Jewish Labour Movement, in overthrowing Jeremy Corbyn. Its sole remaining task today is to defame critics of Israel’s openly genocidal Zionism.
A Mad Israeli for whom the Palestinians are substitute Nazis
Exploiting the Holocaust & Jewish Victimhood
The Zionist movement, which did nothing to help save the Jewish victims of the holocaust and which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews by blocking their escape routes and suppressing news of the Holocaust itself, has nonetheless inherited the memory of the six million who died. The Holocaust dead have become part of a western imperialist narrative that justifies any manner of brutality.
Not only has Israel inherited the memory of the Jewish holocaust dead but it has exploited that memory in the most shameless manner possible. Not only Israel but the German state too. The German state, which was so reluctant to prosecute Nazis war criminals post-war has rehabilitated itself by its support for a state that was founded on the very same principles as Nazi Germany – racial exclusivity.
Indeed it was Germany’s sordid alliance with Israel, supplying it with military technology and financial reparations, which paved the way for the inclusion of West Germany in the NATO cold-war alliance. The reparations went to the military and it is now proposed that the outstanding debt be used to purchase German submarines.
Israel stole the reparations from the holocaust survivors whilst at the same time the holocaust survivors were forced to live in poverty. Today Israel is waiting for the remaining holocaust survivors to die so that they can use the money elsewhere. Whilst holocaust survivors are starved the West Bank settlements are awash with cash.
The ‘guiding principle’ in Israel is that they must remember the Holocaust. But for what? To prevent another holocaust? To combat racism? No. To justify all the terrible crimes that Israel perpetrates against the Palestinians. There can be no greater affront to the memory of the Jewish dead than to use their memory to legitimise the very same racism that caused them to die.
Israel has set up a holocaust memorial museum, Yad Vashem, which is dedicated to doing nothing else but exploiting their memory. Yad Vashem has refrained, throughout its history, from drawing any universal conclusions from the holocaust. Indeed it has fought hard against anyone who might link racism and genocide against other people with the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
Israelis really do believe that a 17 year siege was not a provocation
When UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said that the breakout from the Gaza concentration camp on October 7 and the killing of Israelis ‘didn’t happen in vacuum,’ that it took place in the context of a 17 year siege of Gaza, all hell broke loose.
Victoria Derbyshire: You do have to acknowledge the barbarity of the attack on Israelis.. before this can move forward
The idea that Palestinians living under Israeli bombing and facing pogroms and terror in the West Bank daily might have a grievance is anathema to the distorters of history at the Yad Vashem Propaganda Museum. Its Chair Dani Dayan pontificated that
“The slaughter of Jews by Hamas on October 7th was genocidal in its intents and immeasurably brutal in its form. …
“Those who seek to ‘understand,’ look for a justifying context, do not condemn the perpetrators, and do not call for the unconditional and immediate release of the abducted – fail the test.”
Not once has Yad Vashem condemned Israeli racism or the incarceration of thousands of Palestinians, many without even the charade of a military trial. When Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the ‘wiping out’ of a Palestinian town Huwara Yad Vashem remained silent. Israeli racism gets a free pass from Yad Vashem.
Yad Vashem is situated a few hundred metres from the site of Deir Yassin, a village where a massacre of Palestinians took place in 1948 when over a hundred Palestinian civilians were butchered in cold blood by Zionist terror groups. When a guide, Itamar Shapira, referred to this in a talk to visitors to YV, he was sacked.
How to commit a genocide in the dark in Gaza in four easy steps:
The Holocaust has imbued Israel with the belief not only that it can do no wrong but that it is the perpetual and eternal victim. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said that ‘We Can Never Forgive the Arabs for Making Us Kill Children’. Israel was forced, by those wicked Arabs, to kill them. Even in their death the Arabs are to blame. Golda Meir, a particularly vicious racist from the Israeli Labor Party also said that ‘Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.”
Israel has always been at war with the Palestinians
Meir blamed the Palestinians for forcing Israel’s soldiers to kill their children! She put this down to the fact that they don’t love them like Israeli parents. This is part and parcel of settler colonial racism. The colonised don’t have the same human feelings as the coloniser and therefore what we may consider brutal is acceptable when dealing with them. There is nothing new in this. It was used to justify slavery and all manner of barbarism in the British and colonial empires.
Being less than human the Arabs are quite happy to sacrifice their children for the sake of killing Jews. And this gutter racism is imbibed by the average Israeli with their mother’s milk.
The Holocaust has given Israelis a sense of righteousness, a form of Manifest Destiny, that is impervious to reason or rational thought. This is not new. Even as it was exploiting India mercilessly Rudyard Kipling could write about the Empire as ‘the white man’s burden.’ Every conqueror in history has pillaged and murdered in the name of God. Did not Britain colonise India, not to plunder or exploit, but to eradicate the Hindu practice of Sati (burning the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre).
In March 1988 Yehuda Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and former President and rector of the Central European University in Budapest spoke of:
a profound existential “Angst” fed by a particular interpretation of the lessons of the holocaust … that we are the eternal victim. In this ancient belief… I see the tragic and paradoxical victory of Hitler. Two nations, metaphorically speaking, emerged from the ashes of Auschwitz: a minority who assert, “this must never happen again,” and a frightened and haunted majority who assert, “this must never happen to us again.”
Citing Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that democracy and worship of the past are incompatible, Elkana argued that ‘The very existence of democracy is endangered when the memory of the dead participates actively in the democratic process.’ For Zionism the Holocaust was inexplicable, beyond history. It was a ‘sacred and essentially incomprehensible event.’ (Elie Wiesel)
Gideon Levy on Israeli Victimhood
There is the belief that the Jews are entitled to a state of their own because of the Holocaust. This idea is itself racist, implying that Jews, uniquely, will not do what all other ethno-religious states have done historically, which is turn against their religious/national minorities, often exterminating them as happened with the Armenians in Turkey and Jews in Eastern Europe. It is rooted in imperialist politics.
The idea of Israel as compensation for the Holocaust assumes that creating a state based on the same principles of race as Nazi Germany will be recompense for the losses suffered at the hands of Hitler. It presupposes that Jews will always be the eternal victim of anti-Semitism unless they voluntarily separate themselves off from non-Jews. This very idea of ‘Jewish losses’ in the holocaust assumes that there is such a thing as a Jewish race that must be built up again.
This is why Zionism hates ‘assimilation’ and intermarriage above all. As Donald Niewyk wrote
The Zionist critique of assimilation… rested on a certain conviction that all efforts to blend with non-Jews must lead unswervingly to deformed Jewish lives.
The comparison of assimilation, marrying out or having relationships with non-Jews, to the Holocaust is a common Zionist theme. Avraham Greenbaum of Bar-Ilan University, expressed concern that ‘Jewry’s losses through assimilation were greater than the losses sustained in the Holocaust’. Because the Zionist conception of Jews is as a nation race, the Holocaust – the deliberate extermination of millions of Jews – is compared to the free choice of individuals to take a non-Jewish partner and abandon their religion.
A survivor of October 7 speaks
The Zionist perception of humanity is that human beings are divided into races which retain their distinctive attributes. Zionism is a racial not a religious doctrine. Hence in Israel Jews can be registered as having no religion but they are Jewish as a nationality.
Zionism is based on the myth of Jewish nationhood, a transparent nonsense since Jews live in most countries of the world and speak the native language. Zionism is the mirror image of anti-Semitism since the anti-Semites too believe that Jews are aliens, members of another nation/race.
A ‘Jewish’ state based on an ethno-religious nationalism could not help but be a racist state. That is why the question that has bedevilled Israel throughout its 75 years is ‘Who is a Jew’. This was the same ‘problem’ that German race scientists had to grapple with.
This question is a matter of some importance in a state based on Jewish racial supremacy. If anyone was allowed to convert to Judaism then everyone could join the master race including the Palestinians, the untermenschen. That is why the Israeli Conversion Authority automatically bars Palestinians from converting to Judaism. There is no religious reason for this, it is entirely racial. Nothing in Judaism excludes a whole ethnic group from converting to Judaism but with a state based on race where being Jewish comes with privileges it is a paramount necessity.
To those of us with a universalist outlook the State of Israel proves one thing and one thing only. It is that any group of people, given the right set of circumstances can become genocidal maniacs and racial supremacists. Hitler didn’t invent eugenics or racial supremacy nor did it die with him.
Without the Nazis it is doubtful whether the Zionist project in Palestine would ever have gained that critical mass of Jews necessary in order to found a state. That is why the Zionist movement, alone amongst Jews in the 1930s, welcomed the Nazis to power. When Jews boycotted Nazi Germany the Zionists rushed to agree a trade pact, Ha’avara, with them.
Berl Katznelson, a founder of Mapai and editor of Davar as well as Ben-Gurion’s effective deputy, saw the rise of Hitler as ‘an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have.’ Ben-Gurion was even more optimistic. ‘The Nazis’ victory would become “a fertile force for Zionism.”’
Although Zionists today will deny it their record during the holocaust was shocking. Dr Noah Lucas, a critical Zionist historian wrote:
‘As the European holocaust erupted, Ben-Gurion saw it as a decisive opportunity for Zionism… In conditions of peace,… Zionism could not move the masses of world Jewry. The forces unleashed by Hitler in all their horror must be harnessed to the advantage of Zionism. … By the end of 1942… the struggle for a Jewish state became the primary concern of the movement.’ (Modern History of Israel)
It is also the conclusion of the official biographer of Ben Gurion, Shabtai Teveth. Indeed the Zionist movement opposed rescuing Jews where the destination wasn’t Palestine on the grounds that if they went anywhere else they would simply recreate anti-Semitism.
The Zionist movement sought to create the ‘new Jew’ in Palestine and they treated the diaspora Jew with contempt. Joachim Doron described how:
rather than take up arms against the enemies of the Jews, Zionism attacked the ‘enemy within’, the Diaspora Jew himself and subjected him to a hail of criticism…. Indeed a perusal of Zionist sources reveals criticism so scathing that the generation that witnessed Auschwitz has difficulty comprehending them. (Classic Zionism, JIH No. 8)
It is little wonder that Zionist anti-Semitism morphed into contempt and hatred for non-Jewish Palestinians. This despite the fact that Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben Zvi, Israel’s first Prime Minister and second President respectively, suggested in a 1918 book The Land of Israel in the Past and the Present, that the Palestinian peasants were descended from ancient Jewish and Samaritan farmers,
Hitler’s gift to humanity is a State that ‘mows the lawn’ periodically in Gaza by bombing it. The Palestinians are weeds to be eliminated. The very term ‘mowing the lawn’, Israel’s periodic attacks on Gaza, demonstrates the genocidal intent of the Israeli state. It is a term which could have been penned by Nazi politicians. It reduces Palestinians to a pestilential nuisance.
Israel has serviced the most repressive states in the world. Israel aided the genocide in Guatemala where up to 200,000 Mayan Indians were slaughtered. It supported the death squad regime in El Salvador. Shipped weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras and supported Pinochet in Chile. It armed the neo-Nazi Junta of Argentina between 1976-1983 when it murdered up to 3,000 Jews and it has armed the Myanmar regime as it commits genocide. Israel was also the main arms supplier to the Apartheid regime in South Africa
When Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced the beginning of a genocidal siege of Gaza, no water, food or fuel, he described its inhabitants as human animals. The comparisons between Palestinians and animals did not begin with Gallant. Menachem Begin described Palestinians as beasts on two legs. Chief of Staff Raful Eitan referred to them as drugged cockroaches. Deputy Defence Minister Eli Dahan said that “To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.”
The attack on October 7th, of which we still know very little, was the catalyst not the cause of what is happening now in Gaza. The pent up frustrations of an exterminationist mindset has found expression in the ceaseless and remorseless bombing of Gaza, a tiny strip of land which has no air defences, no Iron Dome or protection.
That Biden, Sunak and Starmer can echo each other in speaking of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ in a situation where there has been a 17 year siege of Gaza and the death of thousands of Palestinians, testifies to two things. Firstly Israel’s rulers haven’t lost their sense of humour even if it is of the morbid kind. Secondly that Orwell was right to say that political language is designed to obfuscate and cloud thinking and ‘are largely the defence of the indefensible.
Iyad Hallak, an autistic man was gunned down by the Border Police because his phone was mistaken for a gun – despite his carer screaming for them to stop – the pig who did it was acquitted by Jerusalem District Court
The German press, which 90 years ago welcomed Hitler to power now welcomes his successors bombardment of Gaza with equal enthusiasm. Where once crowds marched to the chant of ‘Death to the Jews’ or ‘Jews to Palestine’ they now sport blue and white flags instead of the red and black of the swastika. The chant of Death to the Jews has been replaced with ‘Death to the Arabs.’
The omens have been there for some time. In 2018 Israel entrenched into its constitution Jewish racial supremacy. What had previously been an unwritten code was now formalised into law. That the Jewish Nation State Law is accepted by all wings of Zionism is proven by the fact that the ‘change’ government of Israel under Bennett and Lapid did nothing to alter this piece of racist legislation.
The mass demonstrations against Netanyahu this year were designed to defend Jewish democracy, under threat as it is from a far-right settler/Jewish Orthodox coalition.
What had previously been seen as beyond the pale, open Jewish Supremacy, has been legalised and sanitised in less than 5 years. When Rabbi Meir Kahane of Kach won a seat in the Knesset in 1984 all Zionist parties, including Likud, boycotted Kahane with his views that Arabs must be expelled from Israel. When Kahane spoke in the Knesset the other members walked out.
Kach was openly called a Nazi party and outlawed. Kahane was banned from running again for the Knesset, although opinion polls at the time had him getting up to 9 seats if he had stood. Slowly but surely in the past decade the Jewish far-right has gained in strength as the messianic nationalists in the West Bank, in tandem with an openly corrupt religious orthodoxy (led by Aryeh Derri – gaoled for corruption) has gained a political stranglehold on Israeli politics.
It was Netanyahu who brought open Jewish supremacists into his coalition. Even 5 years ago it was unimaginable that someone convicted for racial incitement (in Israel it is unheard of for a Jew to be convicted of racism) could become Police and Security Minister.
What was unthinkable has become acceptable. Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) is the largest part of the Religious Zionism bloc, the third largest party in the Knesset. Meretz (formerly Ratz/Mapam) has disappeared and the Israeli Labor Party is set to follow it.
Ben Gvir put a picture of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 worshippers in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron, on his living room wall. Gvir has defended Jewish murderers of Arabs as a career. Now he is the Police Minister.
Israel’s Quisling Collaborator on the West Bank Shoots Protestors Against Israeli Genocide
Some indication of what Israeli politics is now like is the fact that when settlers invaded the Palestinian village of Burqa in August and shot one man dead, who had confronted them, unarmed, Gvir praised the killer and demanded that he be freed. This is the ‘democratic’ Israeli state today which the Western leaders and media fawn over.
The fact that Western politicians repeat clichés about Israeli democracy and ignore the growing neo-Nazi racism that is coursing through the veins of Israeli politics like an overdose of heroin, testifies to the corruption of the Western media who refuse even mention the fact that those committed to mass murder of Palestinians are now in the Israeli government in key positions.
As far as the prostitute press in the West is concerned, the Palestinian fighters who attacked Israel and the settlements near Gaza on October 7th did so without provocation. It came out of the blue. It had no causes and therefore Israeli democracy has every right to exterminate the population of Gaza.
You may think that I am exaggerating when I use the term ‘exterminate’, which is usually associated with Hitler and the Jews but I’m not. What is happening in Gaza today is extermination and the Western states nod their heads in approval.
Extermination is in the air. Adam Keller, a veteran Israeli peace activist wrote about how genocide is now an appropriate term to use about Israel’s actions. Keller describes how the word ‘extermination’ with all its resonance of Auschwitz has now entered the language of Israeli politics in the so-called liberal oasis of Tel Aviv.
This week Roy Sharon, a “respectable” radio and TV commentator on the main Israeli broadcasting corporation, spoke very explicitly of his desire to see “a million dead bodies in Gaza”.
And the streets of Tel Aviv are flooded with red stickers reading “Exterminate Gaza!”. Not “Destroy!”, not “Flatten!” – but clearly and explicitly “Exterminate Gaza!”. “Le-Ha-Sh-Mid!” – “Exterminate!” Every Jewish Israeli knows from a young age exactly what this word means. ….
An invasion in which the army would invade and crush Gaza with all its might would most likely lead to the killing of the Israeli abductees, among all the many others who would be killed. This was expressed with characteristic bluntness and ruthlessness by the extreme right Minister Smotritz: “We need to be cruel, not to think too much of the captives”. Negotiating with Hamas for a prisoner exchange deal is not compatible with a total war whose goal is to completely destroy Hamas. This was explicitly stated by Tzachi Hanegbi, head of Israel’s National Security Council. The State of Israel has a choice between two courses that in practice rule out each other – either an effort to bring back the captives and abductees from Gaza, or a ground invasion that will multiply the killing and destruction already caused in the week of bombings.
None of this is broadcast by the BBC and Sky. They are happy to buy into Israel’s lies, the BBC especially, because they are funded by the British government through the TV license.
Avichai Buaron who called for death camps for Palestinians
Amongst the new Likud MKs this year is Avichai Buaron. A decade ago Buaron penned an editorial (original story reported by Udi Aloni in Ynet) in his newsletter, Ma’ayney HaYeshuah [“Wells of Salvation”], in which he criticised rabbis who refused to involve themselves in secular politics. The article is accessible on page 4 of the newsletter pdf via the Wayback Machine).
Buaron, editor of Ma’ayney HaYeshua
Buaron wrote that if the rabbis refrained from entering politics, it would be impossible to create “extermination camps” for “Amalekites.” ‘Amalekites’ is a code for “Palestinians,” referring to the ancient tribe of the Biblical era which, according to the Bible God commanded the Israelites to wipe out completely. See New Israeli MK Advocated Death Camps for Palestinians
Tzipi Hotoveli looks forward to 600,000 dead Palestinians
Earlier this week Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotoveli openly compared Britain’s killing of 600,000 German civilians in Dresden and Hamburg with Israel’s operations in Gaza. Was it worth it to defeat the Nazis she asked and answering her own question she said ‘yes’. Not once did Piers Morgan intervene to point out that if anyone bore a resemblance to the Nazis it was the Israelis.
The Nazis let it not be forgotten were the foremost military and industrial power in Europe. The Jews were powerless as are the Palestinians. Never could there be a more sick comparison between Palestinians and Nazis but to the Zionists Palestinian opposition to Israel is not on account of what they have suffered and are suffering but merely because their persecutors happen to be Jewish.
Seymour Hersh in THE MYSTERIES OF OCTOBER 7 asks the questions that our own fake media avoids. Information indicates that when the Israeli military reached Kibbutz Be’eri they shot the civilian hostages rather than allow them to be captured. See Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says
Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says (Full with subtitles)
Israel has become a vicious police state, not only for Israeli Palestinians but even for dissident Israelis. Orthodox Jewish journalist Israel Frey was attacked by a mob outside his house because he expressed solidarity with Gaza. The police refused to protect him.
Israel Frey
The Disinformation War
Former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid has just gone on record as saying that “If the international media is objective, it serves Hamas.” He is admitting that the truth hurts Israel! Not that our media would notice as lying comes second nature to the prostitute press–from the Sun to the Guardian. Which is why Israelis have been in uproar about the press conference that Yocheved Lifshitz gave which praised the humane treatment that she had received from Hamas. Israeli hospitals are refusing to treat Hamas attackers thus revealing Israeli doctors no better than SS doctors.
‘Lifshitz press conference panned as disastrous for Israel, PR win for Hamas’ screamed the headline in the Times of Israel. “There’s no doubt that Lifshitz’s statement could have been managed better,” tweeted Channel 12 reporter Daphna Liel. Dana Weiss calls the press conference a “disaster,” noting the lack of state intervention in managing her appearances. These so-called journalists are admitting that Israeli PR is just one long lie. Instead of being the demons that Israeli hasbara makes them out to be Hamas operatives are human beings. A blow admittedly to the Israeli psyche.
Israel’s bombing of Al Ahli hospital should have been an open and shut case. Think of it. Israel has openly declared it wants northern Gaza to be a free fire zone. It has told Palestinians to leave for the South and conducted an unremitting bombing campaign to ‘encourage’ them. Israel has bombed at least 19 medical and health facilities as well as UNWRA schools, churches and mosques.
So when an Israeli missile caused 500+ deaths at a hospital it should have been an obvious example of mass murder by the Zionists. Yet because of the backlash Israel had to lie. First they said it was a failed rocket that fell to earth but it was obvious from the video that this was a subsonic rocket that only Israel possesses. Then Israel faked a conversation between 2 Hamas operatives that has been found by Forensic Architecture to be digitally knitted together. Israel has repeatedly faked and tamped with evidence.
Weapons expert debunks Israel’s denial of Gaza hospital strike
Has the BBC seriously investigated yet another Israeli lie? Have they pointed to the Israeli Army’s history of lies from the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh last year to the 4 children murdered playing hide and seek on Gaza’s beach in 2014. Not a bit of it. So I want to quote from Norman Finkelstein’s article quoting Noam Chomsky’s FATEFUL TRIANGLE on Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
Israel has a history of bombing hospitals and clinics. Israel is a terrorist state backed by Western leaders who approve of such terrorism as long as it is their allies who are doing it. Bombing medical facilities for Israel is the equivalent of Mother and Apple Pie for Americans.
Repeatedly, Israel blocked international relief efforts and prevented food and medical supplies from reaching victims. Israeli military forces also appear to have gone out of their way to destroy medical facilities—at least, if one wants to believe Israeli government claims about “pinpoint accuracy” in bombardment. “International agencies agree that the civilian death toll would have been considerably higher had it not been for the medical facilities that the Palestine Liberation Organization provides for its own people”—and, in fact, for many poor Lebanese—so it is not surprising that these were a particular target of attack.
In the first bombing in June, a children’s hospital in the Sabra refugee camp was hit, Lebanese television reported, and a cameraman said he saw “many children” lying dead inside the Bourj al Barajneh camp in Beirut, while “fires were burning out of control at dozens of apartment buildings” and the Gaza Hospital near the camps was reported hit… On June 12, four bombs fell on a hospital in Aley, severely damaging it. “There is nothing unusual” in the story told by an operating room assistant who had lost two hands in the attack; “That the target of the air strike was a hospital, whether by design or accident, is not unique either,” William Branigan reports, noting that other hospitals were even more badly damaged. Fragments of cluster bombs were found on the grounds of an Armenian sanitarium south of Beirut that was also “heavily damaged during the Israeli drive.” A neurosurgeon at the Gaza hospital in Beirut “insists that Israeli gunners deliberately shelled his hospital,” it was reported at the same time. A few days later, Richard Ben Cramer reported that the Acre Hospital in Beirut was hit by Israeli shells, and that the hospitals in the camps had again been hit. “Israeli guns never seem to stop here,” he reported from the Sabra camp, later to be the scene of a major massacre: “After two weeks of this random thunder, Sabra is only a place to run through.”…
The Red Cross reported that by August 6, “there were 130 beds available in west Beirut out of a total of about 1,400.” The American University Hospital was admitting only “those who look salvageable” on bad days, the staff reported. The Berbir hospital was “just an underground dormitory with generators churning away to give the few patients air.” At the Hotel Bristol, hit by an Israeli phosphorus shell, the Red Cross had set up an underground hospital. “The majority of the doctors and nurses working in the city have fled.” “Even the Red Cross delegation has been shelled twice. …
Palestinian academic Shahd Abusalama, who the Zionists attacked as ‘antisemitic’ at Sheffield Hallam University has had her whole family wiped out by Starmer’s Zionist friends
An American nurse working in Beirut, who was appalled by the “watered-down descriptions in American newspapers,” reported that Israel “dropped bombs on everything, including hospitals, orphanages and, in one case, a school bus carrying 35 young schoolgirls who were traveling on an open road”; she cared for the survivors. The U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander in charge of removing unexploded ordnance in Beirut reports that “we found five bombs in an orphanage with about 45 cluster bombs in the front yard. We were called there after five children were injured and four killed.” About 3-5% of the shells and bombs failed to go off and are considered highly dangerous, he said. This particular orphanage, then, must have been heavily bombed.
Not only hospitals, but also medical personnel seemed to evoke particular fury. One eyewitness saw a Palestinian doctor, unconscious, “his hands and neck tied to a post, his face bloodied and covered with flies.” Palestinian hospitals were closed down, their staffs arrested, removed to prison camps, and brutalized.
In Sidon, the Israeli army closed down the Palestinian Red Crescent Hospital. A Dutch nurse working there told a reporter: “I was in Holland during World War II. I know what fascists are like. It’s terrible that all these women and children are being killed. Tell that to the world.” On the same day, the New York Times reported a Jerusalem news conference in which Imri Ron, a Mapam Knesset member (from Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek) and paratroop major, “spoke from a combination of political and military authority” about the “clean fight” the Israeli army had fought, “taking extraordinary precautions to save civilians.” …
A Belgian doctor at the closed Sidon hospital, who “struggled to cope with wounded men, women and children” (victims of this “clean fight”), stated that “We had a good operation here. We were doing surgery and everything” before almost the entire staff was arrested by the Israeli army. Shipler reported the same events in the New York Times. He quotes the Israeli Major who is military governor of Sidon and who closed the hospital because, he said, “It’s obvious it’s not a good hospital.” Therefore, “At 11A.M. today I had all the patients moved out to a good private hospital, the Labib Medical Center,” not tainted by a Palestinian connection. … A Canadian and Norwegian doctor, along with Palestinian doctors, will be taken to Israel for interrogation and possible imprisonment, the Major added. Shipler visited the “good private hospital,” where no one seemed “pressed for time” and the director angrily refused to take patients from the closed hospital, explaining to his guests that “The first case I got from there, she had gangrene all over her body.” He will take only “good cases.” Meanwhile one Belgian doctor remained in the closed Palestinian hospital to take care of 58 patients, some badly wounded, amidst “a stench of filth and rotting flesh.” The director of the “good private hospital” is, incidentally, the son of a millionaire orange grove owner, who was quite pleased to be liberated by the Israeli army.
[…]
In his congressional testimony, [the Canadian surgeon Chris] Giannou reported that he was “a witness to four prisoners who were beaten to death” (reduced to two by the Times)…. He saw “the entire male staff’ of the hospitals being taken into custody, leaving patients unattended, and “savage and indiscriminate beatings” of prisoners with fists, sticks, ropes with nuts and bolts tied to them. He saw a Palestinian doctor hung by his hands from a tree and beaten and an Iraqi surgeon “beaten by several guards viciously, and left to lie in the sun with his face buried in the sand,” all in the presence of an Israeli Colonel who did nothing about it. He watched prisoners “being rehearsed by an Israeli officer to shout ‘Long Live Begin’,” others sitting bound in “stifling heat” with “food and water in short supply.” He was forced to evacuate his hospital and bring the patients down to the seafront. The Norwegians confirmed his story and said that they had seen at least 10 people beaten to death, including an old man who was crazed by the lack of water and intense heat as the prisoners were forced to sit for hours in the sun; he was beaten by four or five soldiers who then tied him with his wrists to his ankles and let him lie in the sun until he died.
[…]
The Norwegian doctor and social worker told the story of their captivity in a report issued by the Norwegian Department of Foreign Affairs. Under Israeli captivity, they were forced to sit, hands tied, for 36 hours without permission to move, while they heard “screams of pain” from nearby. In an Israeli prison, they were forced to lie for 48 hours, blindfolded and handcuffed, on the interrogation ground….. One of the most sadistic Israeli guards told them he was from a kibbutz where an Austrian girl had been killed by rocket fire. Prisoners were tied with tight plastic straps with sharp edges, “causing pain.” The Norwegians were given “preferential treatment.” Arab prisoners were subjected to constant brutality and degradation.
Dr. Shafiqul-Islam from Bangladesh, who was on the staff of the Palestinian hospital in Sidon, reports that he was arrested by the IDF while operating on a 12-year-old Palestinian boy with severe internal shrapnel injuries. He was not permitted to complete the operation, but was arrested, beaten mercilessly, forbidden to ask for food or water for 4 days, denied drugs or dressings for other prisoners on the grounds that they were “all terrorists,” and so on.
This is the context to Israel’s bombing of Al Ahli hospital and the lies that Israel tells which western ‘experts’ are happy to back up.
Tony Greenstein
