"WHO STARTED IT" is not the point, genocide is. I don't blame few readers whocondemned the Palestinians for firing rockets into the Israeli territory, giving Tel Aviv a valid reason to level Gaza Strip. They (the readers) don't know history.
So, let me tell them - Malaysians and others - something they should know.
Since 2007, Israel has laid siege to Gaza, controlling its air space, its coast line, its long border with Israel, and via compliant governments in Egypt its tiny border with that country. The fact that these Israeli attacks preceded the firing of primitive rockets from the Gaza Ghetto is both undeniable and irrelevant.
During this time, not a single plane has arrived or departed from Gaza’s bombed out airport. The few ships destined for Gaza’s seaport have been violently seized by Israel’s navy, their crew members arrested if not murdered.
Gazans who stray to close to the fence that Israel built to imprison Gaza’s population are shot dead, including a young boy playing soccer earlier this month, whose death predictably provoked the futile rocket fire that Israel uses as a pretext for its genocidal policies.
At the start of the siege an advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister named Dov Weisglass declared that 'the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger'. An Israeli human rights group, Gisha, forced the government to disclose that the defense ministry calculated the minimum number of truckloads of food needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition - and then allowed only half that number to enter Gaza!
Remember, during most of these six years Hamas has been observing cease fires.
Nothing could better illustrate that Israel’s siege has nothing to do with the rockets, and everything to do with deliberately inflicting on Gazans conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.
This, by the way, fits the definition of genocide set out in Article 2, Section C of theConvention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Israel’s siege does not just limit the total quantity of food that Gaza can import but also many specific staples as well as many non-food necessities.
According to a partial list published by Gisha, fresh meat, jam, dried fruit, many spices, and even chocolate are banned. Items used for producing food, such as livestock like goats, cattle, and chicks are prohibited, as are seeds and nuts, fishing rods, fishing nets, fishing ropes, nylon nets for green houses, hatcheries, spare parts for tractors, planters for saplings, etc.
Materials necessary for rebuilding Gaza’s bombed out housing stock, such as wood, cement, and iron are prohibited. Education materials like notebooks, writing implements, and standard sized writing paper are banned. Musical instruments are banned.
Even children’s toys are not allowed in, according to Gisha. Some of the restrictions may have been relaxed amidst the negative publicity surrounding Israel’s murder of Freedom Flotilla activists, but the basic strangulation nature of the siege remains.
Most Gazans are refugees or are descended from refugees who fled what is now Israel in 1948 during the Nakba, when rampaging Jewish armies forced them to flee from their homes. Those homes were given to Jewish families, and their Palestinian owners were never allowed to return. The return of these people to their homes was once a key Palestinian demand, one rooted in the Geneva Conventions.
However, over the decades, Palestinian leaders have gradually given up on ever returning to their homes. Even Hamas has offered a truce if Israel returns to its pre-1967 borders, leaving the final resolution of the problem to future generations.
Yet, despite all claims that they simply want to live in peace, Israeli leaders have always pushed for more. Not just more Palestinian land, but recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in borders that it has yet to spell out.
Putting aside the fact that the right of a state to exist does not itself exist in international law (ask Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), what this amounts to is asking the Palestinians not just to accept the reality that they will never get their homes back, but insisting that they say that Israel has “a right” to those homes.
It is one thing for people to accept the loss of a stolen item, but it is quite another to expect them to acknowledge that the thief actually had a right to that item. But that is precisely what Israel and its puppets in the White House and State Department have long demanded.
We often hear that the United States and Israel are tied by shared values. Nothing could be further from the truth. The core values of the American state and the Jewish state are diametrically opposed. The United States Declaration of Independence is based on the premise that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'.
The American State, at least in terms of its values, is a state of the people it governs. Israel has never been a state for the people it governs. Its declaration of independence is explicit about it being a state for all the Jewish people, whatever governments they live under. It is not a state for Israeli passport holders of Arab descent, and it certainly is not a state for the millions of Arabs in the lands occupied since 1967.
But it is explicitly a state for Jewish people around the world, who are free to come live in Israel simply based on their racial background, while Arabs are excluded from returning to the homes they were driven out of based on their racial background.
We have now heard some government leaders around the world, Obama and others, reiterate that Israel has a right to self-defense (our Anwar Ibrahim is one of them).
No American official has ever spoken of the right of the people of Gaza to self-defense, and it is safe to assume they feel that Gazans have no such right. And judging by some nations' collaboration with and support for Israel’s genocidal policies, they actually don't feel that the Gazans have a right to food or shelter either.
And while the Americans still have food to eat and a roof over their head, they have lost the right to a government that represents their interest rather than those of a genocidal foreign power. Welcome to Zionist-run America!
So, to those who keep blaming it on the 'attacks over frustration' by the Palestinians, you should at least imagine stepping into their shoe!
So, let me tell them - Malaysians and others - something they should know.
Since 2007, Israel has laid siege to Gaza, controlling its air space, its coast line, its long border with Israel, and via compliant governments in Egypt its tiny border with that country. The fact that these Israeli attacks preceded the firing of primitive rockets from the Gaza Ghetto is both undeniable and irrelevant.
During this time, not a single plane has arrived or departed from Gaza’s bombed out airport. The few ships destined for Gaza’s seaport have been violently seized by Israel’s navy, their crew members arrested if not murdered.
Gazans who stray to close to the fence that Israel built to imprison Gaza’s population are shot dead, including a young boy playing soccer earlier this month, whose death predictably provoked the futile rocket fire that Israel uses as a pretext for its genocidal policies.
At the start of the siege an advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister named Dov Weisglass declared that 'the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger'. An Israeli human rights group, Gisha, forced the government to disclose that the defense ministry calculated the minimum number of truckloads of food needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition - and then allowed only half that number to enter Gaza!
Remember, during most of these six years Hamas has been observing cease fires.
Nothing could better illustrate that Israel’s siege has nothing to do with the rockets, and everything to do with deliberately inflicting on Gazans conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.
This, by the way, fits the definition of genocide set out in Article 2, Section C of theConvention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Israel’s siege does not just limit the total quantity of food that Gaza can import but also many specific staples as well as many non-food necessities.
According to a partial list published by Gisha, fresh meat, jam, dried fruit, many spices, and even chocolate are banned. Items used for producing food, such as livestock like goats, cattle, and chicks are prohibited, as are seeds and nuts, fishing rods, fishing nets, fishing ropes, nylon nets for green houses, hatcheries, spare parts for tractors, planters for saplings, etc.
Materials necessary for rebuilding Gaza’s bombed out housing stock, such as wood, cement, and iron are prohibited. Education materials like notebooks, writing implements, and standard sized writing paper are banned. Musical instruments are banned.
Even children’s toys are not allowed in, according to Gisha. Some of the restrictions may have been relaxed amidst the negative publicity surrounding Israel’s murder of Freedom Flotilla activists, but the basic strangulation nature of the siege remains.
Most Gazans are refugees or are descended from refugees who fled what is now Israel in 1948 during the Nakba, when rampaging Jewish armies forced them to flee from their homes. Those homes were given to Jewish families, and their Palestinian owners were never allowed to return. The return of these people to their homes was once a key Palestinian demand, one rooted in the Geneva Conventions.
However, over the decades, Palestinian leaders have gradually given up on ever returning to their homes. Even Hamas has offered a truce if Israel returns to its pre-1967 borders, leaving the final resolution of the problem to future generations.
Yet, despite all claims that they simply want to live in peace, Israeli leaders have always pushed for more. Not just more Palestinian land, but recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state in borders that it has yet to spell out.
Putting aside the fact that the right of a state to exist does not itself exist in international law (ask Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), what this amounts to is asking the Palestinians not just to accept the reality that they will never get their homes back, but insisting that they say that Israel has “a right” to those homes.
It is one thing for people to accept the loss of a stolen item, but it is quite another to expect them to acknowledge that the thief actually had a right to that item. But that is precisely what Israel and its puppets in the White House and State Department have long demanded.
We often hear that the United States and Israel are tied by shared values. Nothing could be further from the truth. The core values of the American state and the Jewish state are diametrically opposed. The United States Declaration of Independence is based on the premise that 'Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed'.
The American State, at least in terms of its values, is a state of the people it governs. Israel has never been a state for the people it governs. Its declaration of independence is explicit about it being a state for all the Jewish people, whatever governments they live under. It is not a state for Israeli passport holders of Arab descent, and it certainly is not a state for the millions of Arabs in the lands occupied since 1967.
But it is explicitly a state for Jewish people around the world, who are free to come live in Israel simply based on their racial background, while Arabs are excluded from returning to the homes they were driven out of based on their racial background.
We have now heard some government leaders around the world, Obama and others, reiterate that Israel has a right to self-defense (our Anwar Ibrahim is one of them).
No American official has ever spoken of the right of the people of Gaza to self-defense, and it is safe to assume they feel that Gazans have no such right. And judging by some nations' collaboration with and support for Israel’s genocidal policies, they actually don't feel that the Gazans have a right to food or shelter either.
And while the Americans still have food to eat and a roof over their head, they have lost the right to a government that represents their interest rather than those of a genocidal foreign power. Welcome to Zionist-run America!
So, to those who keep blaming it on the 'attacks over frustration' by the Palestinians, you should at least imagine stepping into their shoe!
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