As Israel continues its unspeakable brutality, violating not only international law but basic human decency by targeting children, hospitals, mosques and private residences, its many outrages are being widely publicized, thanks to social media. One can access YouTube and see Israeli soldiers using Palestinian children as human shields. Facebook is awash with pictures of bloody, dismembered, dead children, victims of ‘the most moral army in the world’. Twitter is filled with links, all showing not only the horrors that Israel is inflicting, but the many worldwide demonstrations supporting Palestine. Numerous large such demonstrations have been held in Israel itself.
Yet Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu carries on, maintaining a straight face while he says that all he wants is peace, and the current genocidal acts are simply to protect poor, vulnerable Israel from mighty Palestine.
Would that it were true! Yet Mr. Netanyahu has stated publicly that he will never allow a sovereign Palestine, and his actions show that he will not tolerate the existence of Palestine at all. In the West Bank, in violation of numerous international laws, he continues to build settlements. He continues to harass the Palestinian people there with countless checkpoints, arbitrarily closed, preventing Palestinians in the West Bank from moving about freely, and often from getting life-saving medical attention in a timely manner, if at all.
And in the Gaza Strip, the best of times are those when there are no bombs falling. Construction materials are forbidden by Israel from entering, again in violation of international law. Israel has compiled a lengthy and bizarre list of things that it prevents from being imported into the Gaza Strip. Such dangerous supplies as crayons and musical instruments must not be made available to Palestinians. Their children might possibly be allowed to use their creativity to color pictures, and any of them might sing a protest song, which Israelis would find, this writer is sure, most offensive, and worthy of another few weeks of carpet-bombing.
Mr. Netanyahu, his predecessors and current cohorts have divided, shrunken, bombed, blockaded, and isolated Palestine. They and their IDF (Israel Defense Forces) terrorists do all they can to humiliate Palestinians, prevent them from earning a living, and do all they can to keep them just ahead of starvation. And this has been ongoing for over sixty years.
Yet even against Israel’s advanced weaponry and technology , provided by the racist, murderous and unjust United States, the Palestinians have not given up. Their houses are bombed, and they rebuild. Their children are murdered, and they give birth to more. Their schools are destroyed, and they search the ruins for books. They are prevented from harvesting their crops before they spoil, and they plant again the next year. They perform acts of civil disobedience and are arrested, and, upon release, continue their defiance. They are forced to live in poverty, by an occupying force that prevents them from getting to work or school, or from exporting their goods, but they celebrate religious holidays, weddings and other events with joy.
More and more, this is what the world is seeing. More and more, people are not associating the traditional Palestinian kufeyah with terrorism, an association that the U.S. and Israel were desperate to establish, but with an oppressed people who refuse to give up. Less and less are they buying into the fairy tale of a vulnerable Israel, and seeing the reality of a cruel, barbaric, powerful apartheid regime.
Today (July 28, 2014) it was reported that the U.S. has actually said something critical of Israel! This is in response to Israel’s criticism of the ineffectual, dishonest and clown-like Secretary of State, John Kerry, by Israel. But the reason is unimportant; for years, Israel could spit in the face of the U.S., and the U.S. would thank it, and give it more money. One example is telling: in 1988, after Israel flatly refused a U.S.-brokered peace plan, the U.S. accelerated the delivery to Israel of seventy-five F-16 fighter jets. This prompted an Israeli journalist to comment that, “One may say no to America and still get a bonus”. And thus it has been ever since.
What may have caused this seismic shift? Why did the U.S., which seems to be a puppet whose strings are pulled by Israel, dare to criticize Israel, however timidly? Does AIPAC not still own Congress and the President?
Perhaps, just perhaps, the countless emails and telephone calls to the White House and Congress, and to the media, are having an impact. Perhaps the coast-to-coast demonstrations supporting Palestine and condemning Israeli genocide are sufficient to clear away a little of the fog that Israel-lobby money seems to cause to generally enshroud Congress. One must not take this as an indication that the U.S. Congress listens to its constituents, and governs accordingly. Believing that would be naïve indeed! However, if enough people say they will vote on this issue, and that they are on the side of justice and not Israel, Congress members may be sufficiently frightened about the possibility of losing their jobs to pretend to take the moral high ground, and decide that, yes, bombing innocent children probably isn’t a good thing for Israel to do.
The resiliency of the Palestinians is beyond remarkable. Despite the meager international support they received for generations, they refused to surrender. And now, perhaps, they are to be rewarded. This writer is not sufficiently naïve or optimistic to say that Israel will now withdraw and abide by international law, but it does appear that significant new pressure is being brought to bear; in the twenty-first century, some powerful governments may countenance genocide, but it appears that their citizens will not. And like ending apartheid in South Africa, or forcing a conclusion to the Vietnam War, it will not be the will of the so-called leaders that will prevail. In both of those cases, powerful people’s movements eventually grew, and world leaders eventually gave in to the inevitable. This same phenomenon cannot happen soon enough for Palestine.