“Days Of Penitence”
Or Days Of Genocide?By Ghali Hassan
23 October,2004
Countercurrents.orgOn 28 September, 2004, hundreds of Israeli tanks, armed bulldozers, Apache helicopters and other Israeli armour, accompanied by thousands of armed soldiers invaded Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza in the occupied Palestine. More than 130 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including 35 school children have been murdered in the invasion. Over 500 civilians, including many children, have been injured by Israeli artillery shells and rockets fired by Israeli warplanes directly on crowded street and homes. More than 200 family houses have been demolished, together with schools, kindergartens, shops and olive groves. Electricity and drinking water have been cut off. A total war exerted on the Palestinian people. The silence in Western capitals raises many moral questions.
One of the many children murdered by the Israeli army is a 13-year-old schoolgirl, Iman Alhams from Rafah in southern Gaza. She was shot twice in the head at close range. After she died, the Israeli soldier sprayed the girl’s body with bullets. The doctors extracted 20 bullets from her body. One of the soldiers who witnessed the crime told the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper: “We saw her from a distance of 70 metres. She was fired at... from the outpost. She fled and was wounded. I understood that she was dead. The Platoon commander walked towards her, he shot two bullets at her before returning to the outpost. Then he returned back to her, put the weapon on the automatic mode, and emptied his entire clip”. The witness continued: “Our hearts ached for her. Just a 13-year-old girl. How do you spray a girl from close range... the commander was hot for a long time to take out Arabs and shot the girl to relieve pressure”. Several claims by the Israeli army on why the schoolgirl was murdered proved to be utter lies. She was murdered carrying her books on her way to school.
What will happen if the Jewish soldier was an Arab and the murdered schoolgirl was French, or American or English? Her murder would trigger a total war against Arabs and Muslims in most major capitals of the “civilised” West, where Israeli soldiers portrayed as heroes and allowed to recuperate on Working-Holiday Visas after their service in the army.
Killing Palestinian children is becoming a competitive sport for the Israeli soldiers. ”Mohammed Aaraj was eating a sandwich in front of his house, the last house before the cemetery of the Balata refugee camp, in Nablus, when a soldier shot him to death at fairly close range. He was six at the time of his death. Kristen Saada was in her parents' car, on the way home from a family visit, when soldiers sprayed the car with bullets. She was 12 at the time of her death. The brothers Jamil and Ahmed Abu Aziz were riding their bicycles in full daylight, on their way to buy sweets, when they sustained a direct hit from a shell fired by an Israeli tank crew. Jamil was 13, Ahmed six, at the time of their deaths”, recounted Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz newspaper.
Since the start of the Intifada in September 2002, the Israeli army has murdered more than 800 Palestinian children, according to the Red Crescent. None of these cases have been investigated, despite prima facia evidence that the children were targeted and murdered at close ranges. Israel’s policy of deliberately killing Palestinians because they are Palestinian is a policy consistent with the definition of genocide. With horrific statistics like this, the question of who is a terrorist should have long since become very clear for every civilised human being.
Adolf Hitler’s plan of genocide was to deliberately exterminate the Jews, not because the Jews had taken arms or joined the resistance movement, but just because they were Jews. The silence of world leaders, particularly those in the West who claimed high “morality”, and the deliberate emission by Western media provide full endorsement for Sharon crimes against the Palestinian people.
Hitler’s pogrom of minorities, including Jews, was opposed by the majority of nations, and Hitler’s allies were only very few. Today, Israel’s pogrom of the Palestinian people is supported by the world superpower and its allies, including the UN of Kofi Annan. The Palestinian people are virtually alone at the mercy of Israeli criminals. The American-controlled mass media, led by Rupert Murdoch, has successfully dehumanised the Palestinian people through deliberate racist and distorted propaganda. The number of Palestinian children murdered by the Israeli army is rising every day because of Western leaders unconditional support to Israel’s policy of genocide. This policy is deliberate and has nothing to do with the old mantra of “criticizing Israel is anti-Semitism”. It is not. Both Jews and Arabs belong to the ancient Semitic tribes of the Middle East either genealogically or metaphorically.
These crimes of genocide “is perpetrated under our eyes every day, making accomplices out of those who do not denounce it”, wrote the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. And to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, may the voice of the people prevent the crime of silence.Since the seizure of Palestine by brute force, and the creation of Israel, the Western world remained silent to Israeli attempts to exterminate the native Palestinian inhabitants. From the massacre of Palestinians of Deir Yasin in 1948, to Qibya in 1953 to Sabre and Shatila in 1982 to Jenin in 2002 and to in Gaza in 2004, Israel had embarked on deliberately exterminating the Palestinian people. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed and hundreds of thousands Palestinians were murdered or deported from their lands. The Israeli army of terror moves with impunity from one refugee camp to the next, unleashing havoc on the Palestinian population.
Israel has rejected all UN resolutions to withdraw from Palestinian lands occupied after its 1967 war. Today, Israel continues to confiscate Palestinian lands and water sources in the West Bank and Gaza by violent inhumane methods reminiscent to the Nazis’ methods. All this was in complete violations of international law, and with the blessing of billions of dollars in US aid, provided by generous American taxpayers. How about spending the money on few schools for American children, Mr. President?
The attacks on Gaza were premeditated acts of terror supported and financed by the US. The objectives were to prevent any peaceful solution to Israel genocidal and illegal Occupation of Palestine. Israel wants Gaza to be the biggest prison in the world, totally at the mercy of Israeli guns and bombs from all directions, without a single window to the free world.
On 08 October 2004, Dov Weinglass, Ariel Sharon's bureau chief, personal lawyer and confidante told the Israeli Ha’aretz newspaper: “The disengagement plan [for Gaza] is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's [Bush’s] formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians”. In other words, no peaceful negotiations are needed with the Palestinians, and that a separate independent Palestine is out of the question. Peace is Israel’s propaganda for public consumption.
It is time for the people of the civilised world to recognise that Israel’s terror against the Palestinian people is in direct conflict with their moral principles and interests. There will be no peace in the Middle East without the end to Israel Occupation of Palestine and US Occupation of Iraq.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He can be reached at e-mail: [email protected]
