alternative reader no. 135
The ‘Roadmap’ to Palestinian
Ghettos
By Ghali Hassan
Axis of Logic
Plans to isolate the Palestinian population in ghettos have been under way
since the establishment of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948. Since then,
Israel and its Western allies have embarked on a policy separating the
Palestinian people into designated ghettoes and subjected them to daily
terror. The complete isolation of Gaza and the construction of the illegal
Apartheid Wall in the West Bank and Jerusalem are the foundations of
permanent Palestinian ghettos. How long will the civilised world remain
silent in the face of Israel's crimes and violations of international
humanitarian law?
Immediately after the defeat of German Fascism, Zionism – a clone of
Fascism – began its project of colonising Palestine and establishing a
purely “Jewish State” with a European Christian culture. Jewish terrorist
organisations such as Irgun, Stern Gang, and Haganah (today’s Israeli
Army) were formed – armed and financed by Western powers and wealthy Jews
– to perpetuate a terror campaign of systematic ethnic cleansing and
murdering of the native Palestinian population. By the end of 1948, some
400 Palestinian villages were destroyed, thousands of Palestinians were
murdered and more than 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their
homes to neighbouring countries. This well-orchestrated “ethnic cleansing”
often refers to by Jewish Zionists and their Western supporters as the
“war for independence”. In reality, it was not a war, but one defenceless
nation was wiped off the map, and a Zionist entity of European Jews was
established on its foundation.
According to
the Israeli historian, the Zionist Benny Morris, genocide was planned
against the Palestinians, because “Palestinians are Barbarians”,
consistent with Theodor Herzl’s – the ‘founder’ of Zionism – depiction of
Palestinians as “dirty brigands”. The idea of Palestinians and all Arabs
as “barbarians” is not restricted to few Zionist Jews, but it is part of
Israel’s racist ideology. The recent racist comment by Olmert that, “the
lives and well-being of Sderot's residents [a small Jewish colony outside
Gaza] are more important than those of Gaza residents” is a case in point.
The Nazis used the same racist rhetoric – ‘Deutschland über alles’ or
‘Germany above all’ – to justify their heinous crimes against ethnic
minorities.
The life of one
Jew is worth more than all Palestinians has been Zionism’s racist trade
mark.
Morris regrets
that Ben Gurion (former Israeli PM) didn’t expel all Palestinians. Morris
said: “If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the
whole country – the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River ...
If he had carried out a full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he
would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations ... If the end
of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because
Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948, [and] because he left a
large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and
within Israel itself”. This is like saying: ‘If Adolf Hitler had
exterminated all Jews, the world would be a peaceful place today’.
A recent
opinion poll carried out by the Jaffe Institute for Strategic Studies in
March 2002 revealed that between 46 % and 60 % of Israeli Jews support
mass deportation (expulsion) of the Palestinians for the ‘Final Solution’.
“Even in 1938, these ideas have not had such wholehearted support in Nazi
Germany, as they have now in the Jewish state”, wrote the Israeli writer,
Israel Shamir. Western media – led by the deceptive BBC – have gone long
way to support this racist ideology and continue to depict Palestinian as
“violent militants”, without names and identity.
In an interview
by Ari Shavit (Ha’aretz,
09 January 2004) Morris said; “In the months of April-May 1948, units of
Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they
were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages
themselves”. Morris said that; “Haganah committed 24 massacres, in some
cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70,
80, and 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men
are spotted walking in a field – they are shot. A woman is found in an
abandoned village – she is shot. There are cases such as the village of
Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village
with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.
“The worst
cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250),
Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal
proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were
perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had
been known until now. The same [happened] at Arab al Muwassi, in the
north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in
the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al
Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a[n]
unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or
next to a well in an orderly fashion”.
Morris did compared Palestinian massacres with those condemned by the West
as crime against humanity and affirmed that; “in comparison to the
massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that's peanuts. In comparison
to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at
Stalingrad, that's chicken feed”. The genocide of the Palestinians
continues today with tacit support and complicity of Western governments
and their mass media, was a well-planned campaign of to exterminate the
Palestinians.
After the 1967 Israeli war against the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab
countries, Israel forces occupied territories in Syria, Egypt and Gaza,
the West Bank, and Jerusalem in Palestine. The Israeli Occupation was
condemned by the UN and special resolution (Resolution 242) passed
demanding the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from all occupied
Arab territories. In flagrant violations of UN Resolution and
international law, Israel continues to occupy Arab lands.
In addition, since 1967, Israel has violated countless UN resolutions and
embarked on a Zionist ideology of expansion and annexation of Arab lands.
Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes and build illegal Jewish
settlements (colonies) on Palestinian land. Israel continues its policy of
confiscating Palestinian land and expelling Palestinians into designated
ghettos.
Consistent with Israel’s “annexation plan” or “convergence plan” – as is
called today – to isolate the Palestinian into Nazi’s-like ghettos, the
rest of the occupied West Bank will be divided into three big ghettos. The
three big ghettos then divided into nine smaller ghettos separated from
each other by walls, and Jewish-only highways. In addition to total
restrictions on freedom of movement, the ghettos are manned by countless
military checkpoints and razor wires making life unbearable for the
Palestinian population. The aim is to prevent any possibility of
establishing a viable Palestinian state and subject the Palestinians to
servitude, thus the final dispossession of the Palestinian people from
their land.
Jews who lived in and experienced the Nazi’s ghettos have often made the
comparison between Israel’s brutal treatments of the Palestinian people
and the Nazis’ brutal treatments of Jews. In a letter to the Israeli press
more than twenty years ago, Jewish holocaust survivor Shlomo Shmelzman
wrote: “In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when
I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labour camps, to Buchenwald. I
hear too many familiar sounds today, sounds which are being amplified by
the war. I hear about ‘closed areas’ and I remember ghettos and camps. I
hear ‘two-legged beasts’ and I remember ‘Untermenschen’ [subhumans]. I
hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into
submission, and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and
murder…Too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my
childhood”. (Ha’aretz, 11 August 1982). Israel’s terror and crimes
have since increased by many folds.
Unlike the German ghettos, which were provisional, Israel regards the
Palestinian ghettos as permanent measure to control Palestinian lives.
Further, Israel uses the ghettos as investment for the benefit of the
Israeli economy. Israel is moving highly polluting industry and sweatshops
to industrial zones around the ghettos where Palestinians will be used
(forced) as slaves to provide cheap and abundant labour. In addition,
Palestinian ghettos are open-air prisons completely controlled by Israel.
The building of a long, snake-like wall, known as the ‘Apartheid
Wall’,
– condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The
Hague – on stolen Palestinian land annexes 58 per cent of the West Bank.
The ICJ’ ruling was that the Wall and all settlements (Israeli colonies)
in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem are illegal and must be removed. The
ICJ ruling,
like all other world court rulings, requires all other (nations)
signatories to the ICJ Charter to compel Israel’s compliance with the
ruling.
A health review by Dr. Derek Summerfield, of the Institute of Psychiatry
in London found that; “The coherence of the Palestinian health system is
being destroyed. The wall will isolate 97 primary health
clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve.
Qalqilya hospital, which primarily serves refugees, has seen a
40% fall in follow up appointments because patients cannot
enter the city. There have been at least 87 documented cases
(including 30 children) in which denial of access to medical
treatment has led directly to deaths, including those of babies
born while women were held up at checkpoints”. (British
Medical Journal,
2004, 329:924).
The Wall is part of Israel’s ongoing war to fractionate Palestinian
communities and isolate them from each other into disconnected ghettos,
each will be a prison, while virtually all Palestinian agricultural and
water resources land are annexed to Israel. As Israel did in Gaza, the Wes
Bank’s towns of Hebron and Nablus, and the suburbs around Jerusalem will
be transformed into several mini Gaza-like prisons.
After the evacuation of the illegal Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2004,
Israel has literally completed the first Palestinian ghetto. The Gaza
ghetto is the most isolated and densely populated prison on the planet.
Gaza is completely fences-off by electronic and electric fences, and
controlled by Israel’s occupation forces (IOF) from all sides. The
population of 1.5 million Palestinians are lockdown for good part of the
year. No Palestinian can leave or come into Gaza unless they have an
Israeli-issued Palestinian ID card, which is impossible to obtain. The aim
is to completely cut Gaza off from the West Bank and the rest of the
world, and the second is to encourage starvation and epidemics among the
population.
Israel continues to destroy Palestinian infrastructure and kill innocent
Palestinians, with impunity. In the first four months of this year 90
Palestinians, including more than 20 children, were killed by Israeli
forces meanwhile 17 Israelis, including one child, were killed by
Palestinian armed groups (AI
Wire,
Vol. 36, No. 5, June 2006).
Murdering
Palestinian children in cold blood has always been the Israeli
soldiers’ way of training. In many
cases Israeli soldiers were known to provoke children to throw stones and
then murdering them. The last two months (May-June) Israel has fired more
than 6,000 shells into the Gaza killing more than 30 innocent
Palestinians.
According to Dr. Summerfield, the IOF has “killed more Palestinian
civilians than the number of people who died on September 11, 2001. In
conducting 238 extrajudicial executions the army has also killed
186 bystanders (including 26 women and 39 children). Two thirds
of the 621 children (two thirds under 15 years) killed at
checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their
homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of
cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper's wound.
Clearly, soldiers are routinely authorised to shoot to kill
children in situations of minimal or no threat”. As a result of
Israel daily terror, most Palestinian children suffer trauma and
psychological sickness.
The month of June was the deadliest so far.
Using the
(football) World Cup event as a cover, on
Friday 09 June 2005, Israeli gunboats deliberately and indiscriminately
shelled northern Gaza beach and murdered eight Palestinians (the entire
Ghalia’s family) – including three children while they were picnicking. As
usual, the Israeli Government and its crimes complicit, the BBC, tried to
cover up the massacre. However, evidence provided by eyewitness on the
ground, member of the US-based Human Rights watch (HRW) and hospital
records refuted the Israel’s propaganda campaign as distortion of facts.
“The army’s case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist
assumptions that now prevail as Western ‘thought’ about Arabs and
Muslims”, wrote author and journalist Jonathan Cook. Two days later Jewish
soldiers murdered another nine Palestinians including children in cold
blood in northern Gaza.
On 21 June
Israeli war planes attacked a group of civilians murdering a pregnant
woman, Fatima Ahmed and her brother
Zachariah, and seriously injuring seven more people, including
another pregnant women and three small children two pf them a 5-years-old
boy and his 4-years-old cousins. There were no harmless (Qassam) rockets
strikes before the crimes. Murdering Palestinian children in cold blood
has become the Israeli soldiers’ way
of training. Nearly one-quarter of the victims are children aged 16 years
and younger. As always, “[s]ome of the children were playing football in
the street in full sight of the soldier who pulled the trigger, others
were sitting at their desks in school when a stray bullet from an army
post crashed into the classroom” reported Chris McGreal of the London
Guardian. “About half of those children were shot in the Gaza strip,
the bulk in two refugee camps in the south – Rafah and Khan Yunis. The
killings were only part of it. Israel bulldozed the homes of thousands of
Palestinians along the Egyptian border and around the settlements. It
drove out many others with the daily, and more often nightly, barrage of
fire into Rafah and Khan Yunis. Nowhere suffered more at the hands of
occupation” added McGreal. The “moral” West (led by the U.S.) not only
remains silent but also condoning Israel’s crimes as “self-defence”, not
terrorism.
Billions of U.S. taxpayers' money is spent annually to arm Israel and to
implement gross abuses of human rights against the Palestinian people.
Gaza (and other towns in the West Bank) is often invaded by Israeli tanks
backed by troops, helicopter gunships and F-16s aircraft leaving behind
trails of civilian massacres and wanton destruction. Again, the crimes
depicted in the West and the mass media as “incursion” and Israel depicted
as a “civilised” society, not one that addicted to violence and terrorism.
As I am writing these lines, Israeli tanks backed by troops and helicopter
gunships are invading and reoccupying Gaza, destroying civilian
infrastructures, including bridges and electricity grids, in violations of
the Geneva Conventions and international law. Much of Gaza has been left
without electricity, making life unbearable and rending the health care
system unusable. Israeli actions are war crimes and crimes against
humanity, with the Bush Administration blessing. The advertised pretext
for this deliberate wanton destruction and collective punishment on
defenceless population is to free one Israeli soldier, which is completely
fraudulent. The soldier was taken prisoner during a legitimate resistant
operation by Palestinian fighters and in retaliation to Israel’s ongoing
acts of terrorism and crimes against Palestinian children. Hence, the real
aim of the “Jewish State” is to topple a democratically elected government
and install a subservient one ready to accept Israeli rules.
While the world is focussing on the one Israeli soldier, there are more
than 9,400 Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons. These
include hundreds of women, children and infants as young as 3 months old
separated from their mothers and under brutal conditions. Many of the
prisoners are imprisoned without charge as “Administrative Detainees”.
They were kidnapped from their homes at midnight, imprisoned and subjected
to torture, sexual abuses and denied their rights to fair trial.
A permanent state of violence has served the “Jewish State” very well,
allowing it to avoid any peaceful settlement and to continue its Zionist
policy of expansion. As Professor Ur Shlonsky of Geneva University in
Switzerland wrote; Israel’s aim is to “terrorise the civilian population,
assuring maximal destruction of property and cultural resources”. At the
same time, “the daily life of the Palestinians must be rendered
unbearable: They should be locked up in ghettos and refugee camps,
prevented from exercising normal economic life, cut off from workplaces,
schools and hospitals, This will encourage emigration and weaken the
resistance to future expulsions”.
After the success of HAMAS movement in the Palestinian Legislative
Council, the U.S. and the European Union (EU) imposed economic sanctions,
as a collective punishment against the Palestinians for practicing their
democratic rights and for electing the “wrong” people. In order to
increase the suffering of Palestinians, on 23 May 2006, the U.S. House of
Representatives voted to approve by 361-37 to impose sanction against the
Palestinian people and starve their children. Encouraged by Western
powers, Israel followed with its own brutality by illegally withholding
millions of dollars ($55 million per month) in tax revenues from the
Palestinians. As a result, more than 170,000 government employees have not
been paid their salaries for three months affecting the lives of more than
a million Palestinians.
Furthermore, unemployment and poverty among Palestinians are as high as 60
% in Gaza and 50 % in the West Bank (Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA]). This deliberate economic siege “is like an
appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but
they won't starve to death”, said Dov Weissglas, the Israeli Government’s
senior political advisor. The same crimes were known to have been
perpetuated by the Nazis on defenceless population. By refusing to return
Palestinian tax revenues and deliberately imposing harsh living
conditions, Israel is forcing the Palestinians to pay for their own (and
their children) malnutrition and starvation.
Yet, despite nearly sixty years of Zionism, including forty-years of
brutal military occupation and barbarism enforced by the “Jewish State” –
the world’s fourth largest army – and its Western allies, the Palestinian
ghettos and refugee camps continue to be vibrant grounds for Palestinian
resistance and civil societies. Zionism and Israeli oppression have failed
to break the desire and national struggle of the Palestinians for freedom
and self-determination. Palestinians have built and organised various
institutions and organizations not only to resist the Israeli Occupation
but also to care for their society. In addition to the armed struggle,
Palestinian institutions and organizations are providing daily health care
services, education and aid to the Palestinian population.
Israel’s terror is dependent on the supports provided by Western
governments, and U.S. taxpayers’ money. Like Fascist Germany and Apartheid
South Africa, Israel can be forced – even under moderate economic
sanctions – to change its brutal policies and seek a peaceful resolution.
An independent Palestine and the rights of return for all Palestinian
refugees to their land is the only just and peaceful resolution.
Just as the civilised world stood together against Fascism and Apartheid,
so it today must join to condemn Israel and call on it to stop committing
crimes against the Palestinian people.
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.
July
4,
2006
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