ZGram - 9/16/2002 - "Israel's routine terrorism"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

September 16, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

We in America get better news and editorials from Europe, 
particularly Britain, than we can count on from our own beholden 
media.  Here is John Pilger on the hypocrisy of an occupying force:

[START}

PILGER: ISRAEL'S ROUTINE TERRORISM

TONIGHT ITV1 screens John Pilger's powerful documentary, "Palestine 
is still the Issue." In this special report, Pilger reveals the 
tragedy of an epic injustice that is at the root of Bush's and 
Blair's threats of war.

LAST October, in the early hours of the morning, a young expectant 
mother called Fatima Abed-Rabo awoke with intense labour pains; and 
she and her husband Nasser set out in a friend's car for the hospital 
in Bethlehem, in Israeli occupied Palestine.

The couple had been trying for a second child for three years and had 
undergone fertility treatment. "The news of the pregnancy had made us 
so happy," said Nasser, "that we celebrated by replacing the tin 
sheeting on our home with a concrete roof."

The couple were stopped at the Israeli military roadblock just 
outside their village. The soldiers turned them back, even though 
=46atima was now haemorrhaging. They got a taxi, hoping that would be 
allowed through. Again, they were turned back. No explanation was 
given; one soldier mimicked Fatima's moans.

=46atima gave birth to her baby in the taxi. She remembers the soldiers 
hurling her husband's ID into the blood on the floor.

"We cut the umbilical cord with a razor blade," she said. "My husband 
wrapped the tiny boy in his jacket, and eventually one of his 
relatives found a back route."

Barely three pounds in weight, blue and in a critical condition, the 
baby was dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.

We don't know why they did this to us," she told me in my film on ITV 
tonight. "It wasn't personal. This is how they treat all 
Palestinians. I'm sorry to say this, but they would rather help an 
animal than an Arab."

STORIES like Fatima's are rarely news in Britain, yet they are 
typical of the everyday treatment of the Palestinians. Human rights 
groups run by Israelis have recorded hundreds of instances of 
pregnant and seriously ill Palestinians being turned back at Israeli 
checkpoints, including ambulances.

"We don't know how many have died like this," said a spokeswoman for 
the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, "because many people don't 
even bother to set out for hospital, knowing the soldiers will stop 
them. "These people offer no threat to Israel. Those who do, like the 
suicide bombers, of course never go through roadblocks, which exist 
only to control, subjugate and humiliate ordinary people. It is like 
a routine terrorism."

=46atima's remark about being treated worse than an animal is apposite. 
It is always easier to harm or kill people who, in the eyes of the 
powerful, do not matter: be it in Afghanistan or occupied Palestine.

Israeli soldiers enforcing the illegal occupation of Palestinian land 
can cause the death of babies and other innocents, or kill them 
outright, and words such as murder and terrorism are almost never 
used. The same immunity has been enjoyed by those politicians who 
design and permit this "routine terrorism," which is the product of a 
form of colonialism.

Indeed, to understand both the roots and the double standards of 
Bush's "war on terror," whose propaganda the Israeli regime of Ariel 
Sharon has adopted almost word for word, you need to come to 
Palestine, where one of the longest military occupations in modern 
times is now in its 36th year.

When I was passing through Israeli checkpoints last May, there were 
several of these routine murders. A nurse was one of them. 
Nine-tenths of Palestinians killed by the Israelis are civilians; 45 
per cent are teenagers and children. In Gaza, five years ago, an 
amusement park opened beside the sea. It was the only one in a deeply 
impoverished place populated mainly by refugees whose families were 
forced off their land or out of their villages by the Israelis.

"At first, it was very successful," said Walid Al Dirawi, who looks 
after the deserted ruin of rusting rides and dodgem cars. "Then the 
shooting started from across the road. The Israeli settlers and 
soldiers shot it up every weekend, and of course people stayed away." 
Behind the dodgems is a wall pock-marked with bullet holes, like a 
shooting gallery.

THE "settlers" are mostly religious Israelis or immigrants from 
Russia, America and elsewhere, who are subsidised by the government 
to live in what are colonial fortresses in the midst of Palestinian 
communities, guarded by the Israeli army.

They have no right to be there under international law, and the 
United Nations says they should get out. Their justification is 
usually Biblical.

=46or the Israeli state, they serve a practical purpose; they occupy 
and encroach upon more and more Palestinian land, while allowing the 
military to control the Palestinians with more and more roadblocks 
and restrictions. Many Palestinian villages are surrounded by barbed 
wire, and people require a special permit even to travel to the next 
one. Gaza, where 800,000 are trapped, is surrounded by an electrified 
fence.

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu came here recently, he said: "The way 
the Palestinians are treated is the way we were treated in apartheid 
South Africa."

Trapped by checkpoints and arbitrary curfews the Palestinian economy 
is in ruins. According to a US government survey, more than half of 
all Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition, including chronic 
malnutrition defined as stunted growth.

People struggle to live on less than =A31 a day. One of the most moving 
sights I have seen are the kites that reach for the sky every dusk, 
displaying the colours of the Palestinian flag, flown by terribly 
thin children from their open prison in refugee camps.

Cutting a swathe through this poverty and despair are the Israeli 
"settlements": surreal, middle class suburbs that are armed 
fortresses with watchtowers. From here, the "settlers" shot up the 
amusement park. I visited one of these fortresses. What struck me was 
the lushness: the constant sound of running water: sprinklers 
nourishing hothouse crops and manicured gardens. On the other side of 
what looks like the Berlin Wall, in impoverished Gaza, standpipes 
trickle and often run dry.

These illegal, provocative enclaves, and their surrounding security 
areas, control almost 42 per cent of occupied Palestine - a fact 
that, on its own, makes mockery of the popular myth that two years 
ago the Israelis made a "generous" offer to return 90 per cent of the 
occupied territories, which the Palestinian Authority rejected.

The truth is very different. Following peace negotiations in America 
in 2000, President Clinton's National Security Adviser Robert Malley, 
who was there with Clinton, revealed that, although the Palestinians 
rejected certain Israeli proposals, "it could also be said that 
Israel rejected the unprecedented two-state solution put to them by 
the Palestinians, including the following provisions: a state of 
Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very 
large majority of its settlers; the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the 
city's history (and) security guaranteed by a US-led international 
presence."

Shortly after it was founded in 1948, Israel controlled, mostly as a 
result of a United Nations partition and partly by force, a total of 
78 per cent of historic Palestine. The Palestinians, who were the 
majority, fled in an orchestrated campaign of fear and terror, or 
they were expelled. These days, this would be known as "ethnic 
cleansing".

When he retired, General Moshe Dayan, Israel's military hero, said: 
"Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages. There is not 
one single place in the country that did not have a former Arab 
population."

DURING the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis occupied the remaining 
22 per cent of Palestine. Today, the Palestinians, seeking to form 
their own independent state, want only that 22 per cent back.

Little of this background is known or understood widely in Britain, 
even though the region is constantly in the news. Last May, the 
Glasgow University Media Group, famous for its pioneering media 
analysis, published a study that found TV viewers in particular were 
rarely told that Palestinians were the victims of an illegal and 
brutal military occupation. Only nine per cent of those interviewed 
were aware that the Israelis were the occupiers. For years, 
representing the Israelis as oppressors has been a taboo with always 
the threat of slurs of anti-Semitism (a bleak irony, as Palestinians 
are Semites, too).

This has been manipulated by the Israeli government and its foreign 
lobbies, especially in the United States where the lobby commands 
most of the Congress and the White House.

Many Israelis, like many Jews in Britain and other counties, condemn 
this intimidation, just as they condemn the occupation and are 
fearful of its deeply corrupting effect on Israeli society. Recently, 
the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, said he had long believed 
that Israel should give back the Occupied Territories. When I was in 
Israel in May, some 50,000 Israelis crowded central Tel Aviv, 
demanding that the government of Ariel Sharon made peace.

They are still a minority. The Palestinian suicide bombers and their 
mass murder of innocents have hardened Israeli public opinion, but 
what is seldom reported is that they are a relatively recent 
phenomenon.

=46or much of their resistance, the Palestinians have fought back 
courageously with slingshots - against a modern army, equipped with 
tanks, fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships.

Britain has a historic responsibility towards the Palestinians. The 
1917 "Balfour Declaration" promised Jews a homeland provided it would 
not prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities. The British 
famously reneged on this. Britain administered the League of Nations" 
Mandate for Palestine until the partition that created Israel in 
1948, which the Palestinians call al-Nakba, "the catastrophe."

AS a permanent member of the UN Security Council, successive British 
governments have pledged to support the resolutions that have called 
upon Israel to end its occupation.

In the General Assembly, there have been an estimated 450 resolutions 
calling, in one form or another, for justice for the Palestinians. 
This is a world record. No country has incurred the opprobrium of the 
world community as often as Israel and no country has been excused 
its "rogue" behaviour so consistently, thanks to its backer, America.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was ordered to withdraw by the 
United Nations Security Council. When the Iraqis failed to comply, 
they were attacked with such force that tens of thousands were 
slaughtered. When Israel seized the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, 
it was ordered to withdraw by the same UN Security council. That was 
35 years ago, and the occupation goes on.

On the contrary, Israel has since been rewarded with billions of 
dollars worth of aid and armaments, principally by the United States, 
which has helped it develop nuclear weapons and other so-called 
weapons of mass destruction.

Britain has nurtured the hypocrisy that reached its apogee in the 
United Nations General Assembly last week when George Bush, speaking 
and postulating like a Mafia don, and with the full support of Tony 
Blair, threatened the very existence of the UN unless it provided him 
with a figleaf from behind which he could attack Iraq.

But it was Israel's flouting of UN resolutions on Palestine that was 
the spectre in the General Assembly. Every delegate knew it, 
especially the British who are fully aware of the enduring 
destabilising effect of the illegal occupation.

They also know that it is being intensified by Ariel Sharon, a man 
whom a commission of his own parliament found indirectly but 
"personally responsible" for the massacre of more than 800 
Palestinians in 1982 and who once boasted: "They (the Arabs) have the 
numbers. We have the matches."

With Bush and Blair about to ignite another war in the Middle East, 
justice for the Palestinians remains key to peace.

[END]

*	John Pilger's documentary, "Palestine is still the Issue" is 
on ITV1 tonight at 11.05 p.m.

(Source: 
=1Fhttp://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=3D12202728&method=
=3Dfull&siteid=3D50143)