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Dehumanizing the Palestinians
by Ali Abunimah
Friday, Sep. 21, 2007 at 5:33 PM
The Electronic Intifada, Sep 21, 2007
The Israeli cabinet has voted to declare the occupied Gaza Strip a "hostile entity," thus in its own eyes permitting itself to cut off the already meagre supplies of food, water, electricity and fuel that it allows the Strip's inmates to receive. The decision was quickly given backing by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Israel is the occupying power in the Gaza Strip, despite having removed its settlers in 2005 and transforming the area, home to 1.5 million mostly refugee Palestinians, into the world's largest open-air prison which it besieges and fires into from the perimeter. Under international law Israel is responsible for the well-being of the people whose lives and land it rules.
There have been barely audible bleats of protest from the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ("Such a step would be contrary to Israel's obligations towards the civilian population under international humanitarian and human rights law") and the European Union ("The [European] Commission hopes that Israel will not find it necessary to implement the measures for which the [cabinet] decisions set the framework yesterday."
What? It hopes that Israel will not find it necessary to cut off water supplies to 1.5 million people of whom half are children?
These statements serve only to underline that Israel operates in a context where the "international community" has become inured to a discourse of extermination of the Palestinian people -- political and physical.
Yossi Alpher, for example, a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and once a special adviser to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, argued coolly this week that Israel should murder the democratically-elected leaders who won the Palestinian legislative election in January 2006 -- calling for "decapitating the Hamas leadership, both military and 'civilian.'" True, he admitted, there would be a possible downside: "Israel would again undoubtedly pay a price in terms of international condemnation, particularly if innocent civilians were killed," and because "Israel would presumably be targeting legally elected Hamas officials who won a fair election." Nevertheless, such condemnation would be quickly forgotten and, he argued, "this is a mode of retaliation and deterrence whose effectiveness has been proven," and thus, this is "an option worth reconsidering."
Alpher incited the murder of democratically-elected politicians not in a fringe, right-wing journal, but in the European Union-funded online newsletter Bitterlemons, which he co-founded along with former Palestinian Authority minister Ghassan Khatib. What journal would publish a call by a Palestinian -- or anyone else -- to murder the Israeli prime minister? Alpher presumably does not worry that he will be denied visas to travel to conferences in the European Union, or will fail to receive invitations to American universities. History tells us that he can feel confident he will suffer no consequences. Indeed, in the current political climate, any attempt to exclude Alpher might even be cast as an attack on academic freedom!
Declarations that reduce Palestinians to bare biological life that can be extinguished without any moral doubt are not isolated exceptions. In May, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, Israel's former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu issued a religious ruling to the prime minister "that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings" (See "Top Israeli rabbis advocate genocide," The Electronic Intifada, 31 May 2007). I could find no statement by any prominent Israeli figure condemning Eliyahu's ruling.
And, in a September 6 blog posting, an advisor to leading US Republican Presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani argued for "shutting off utilities to the Palestinian Authority as well as a host of other measures, such as permitting no transportation in the PA of people or goods beyond basic necessities, implementing the death penalty against murderers, and razing villages from which attacks are launched." This, the advisor stated, would "impress Palestinians with the Israeli will to survive, and so bring closer their eventual acceptance of the Jewish state." (See: "Giuliani Advisor: Raze Palestinian Villages," by Ken Silverstein, Harper's Magazine, 14 September 2007) Giuliani faced no calls from other candidates to dismiss the advisor for advocating ethno-religiously motivated war crimes. Indeed the presence of such a person in his campaign might even be an electoral asset.
The latest Israeli government declaration comes as Palestinians this week marked the 25th anniversary of the massacres in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, in which the Israeli occupation army and political leadership were full participants. We can reflect that Israel's dehumanization of Palestinians and other Arabs, its near daily killing of children, destruction of communities and racist apartheid against millions of people has been so normalized that if those massacres occurred today Israel would not need to go through the elaborate exercise of denying its culpability. Indeed, the "international community" might barely notice.
* * * * *
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of *One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse* (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
electronicintifada.net/v2/article9002.shtml
good one, check it out
by good one, check it out
Friday, Sep. 21, 2007 at 11:13 PM
good one, check it out
One Million Voices for peace
by One voice Mandate
Friday, Oct. 12, 2007 at 7:07 PM
Join the fastest growing peace movement in the World.
OneVoice Mandate
To Our Leaders, our fellow citizens, our neighbors, and the world:
We demand in OneVoice that our elected representatives work to achieve the following demands:
Ensure an immediate end of all violence from both sides in all its forms;
Recognize, respect, and implement all prior international agreements between Israel, the PLO and the PA;
Recognize the right of both peoples to independence, sovereignty, freedom, justice, dignity, respect, national security, personal safety and economic viability;
Implement concrete confidence-building measures that will improve the lives of the Palestinian and Israeli people, including ensuring freedom of movement for ordinary civilians and fostering education against incitement on both sides;
Immediately commence negotiations and reach and implement a Two State Solution to fulfill the consistent will of the overwhelming majority of both populations.
ask me if I care
by yawn
Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2007 at 10:10 PM
They cheered on September the 11th of 2001, so fuck 'em. And how original to post an image of children. Terrorist fellating leftists always use children, (the ones that haven't been aborted, that is), for their evil ends.
ask me if I care
by wake up
Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2007 at 8:07 PM
They fell in line after September the 11th of 2001, so fuck 'em. And how original to post an image of children. Flagsuckers always use children, (the ones that haven't been incarcerated, that is), for their evil ends.
"Flagsuckers"
by just wondering
Friday, Oct. 26, 2007 at 3:49 PM
You mean *this* flag?
![[masthead]](/images/masthead_140.png)