“I hear the voices and I am aware of them. We have a feeling that our residents are not being protected and this situation has been going on for five and a half years. Over 3,000 rockets have landed,” said the mayor of Sderot, Eli Moyal, speaking this week to a group of protestors in front of the home of Defense Minister Amir Peretz.
Voices deemed less newsworthy include activists from the Middle East Children’s Alliance, who organised a protest this week to denounce the pounding of Gaza, as the IOF “have fired over 7,000 shells on the people of Gaza so far this year.”
Sderot protestors, quoted in the press, must not know that Gaza remains an open-air prison, as one after another claimed it’d been returned to the Palestinians. They neither mentioned, nor were they prompted to discuss, the psychological effects of the occupation on Palestinian children, information available in reports such as Surviving the Present: Facing the Future: An Analysis of Human Rights Violations Against Palestinian Children in 2004 (.pdf) describing an epidemic of “bedwetting, nightmares, increased aggressiveness, anxiety and poor school achievements, in addition to symptoms of depression.” Sderot protestors did not call for an end to mutual suffering, only their own, and more than one said the extermination of their neighbours was the only solution.
Israel expressed “regret” for killing three more children on Tuesday but not for the air strike which missed its stated target, and they ultimately blamed the Palestinians “for failing to stop the rocket salvoes.” The “accident” was so regrettable, they “killed a 35 year old pregnant woman, Fatmeh Ahmad, and her brother Zachariya Ahmad, 48, and injured 11 others, among them 6 children,” the next day.
*The BBC reported yesterday that “three botched Israeli missile strikes in Gaza” have killed 13 Palestinian civilians in the last 10 days. Patrick O’Connor counts 14 killed in the same period. This does not include 8 victims of the 9 June Gaza beach shelling that claimed the lives of, “Ali Issa Ghalia, his wife Raissa and their five children – a one-year-old son and four daughters aged two, four, 15 and 17.” *paragraph updated @ 1600
*”A Palestinian baby girl whose mother was wounded in a botched Israel Air Force strike was stillborn on Friday, two days after the strike that killed two other civilians and wounded 14 in the Gaza Strip, medics said.” That brings the total deaths, excluding the Gaza beach victims, to 15. *added @ 1825
“Since the onset of the Intifada, 123 civilian passersby have been killed in the course of targeted killings. (this in addition to the 235 Palestinians who were the targets of these killings),” according to B’T selem. The assassinations are a violation of international law, even when they hit the preferred target. (.pdf – pp. 14-15)
Israel’s policy of targeted assassinations violates a number of fundamental rights such as the right to a fair trial outlined in international human rights instruments to which Israel is a state party. Even if Israel was not a state party to these instruments, fundamental rights such as the right to life, and the prohibition on cruel, inhuman and or degrading treatment or punishment constitute customary international law. According to international human rights instruments, such as the ICCPR, the prohibition on the arbitrary deprivation of life cannot be derogated from, even “in time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation” [emphasis added]. Therefore Israel may not justify its targeted assassination policy in the name of security or counter-terrorism measures. In addition, wilful
killing of this nature is a war crime, and constitutes a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention,
which mandates universal jurisdiction.55
Israel launched a missile into Jabalya refugee camp, “one of the most densely populated places on earth“, to kill a “suspected terrorist.” Israel could be picking names out a hat for these hits and who would know the difference.
Israel, while ending its artillery shelling of ‘Qassam rocket launch zones’ in Gaza, continues to target terrorist suspects there with air force ‘pinpoint prevention’ tactics. But the air force appears to be in a slump. In the last few weeks has killed far more innocent civilians than suspected terrorists — and considering no Israelis have been killed by Qassams since last August’s withdrawal from Gaza, the Israeli retaliations and ‘pinpoint preventions’ that kill passersby appear ever more disproportionate.
“Israel does not separate between children and adults,” the officer told Samer. “All Palestinians are terrorists!” The officer was defending the arrest and incarceration of a 5-year-old child for allegedly throwing stones, but the sentiment applies across the board. The offence is being born Palestinian. How long the world will turn a blind eye to the obvious is the question.
“An accident! He was not meant to be the target!” [24:00], exclaimed NPR’s Neal Conan, just before asking his guest, David Rubin, how he felt about the news that a 5-year-old Palestinian had been killed. (Later reports updated Tuesday’s death toll to three children.)
Rubin immigrated from Brooklyn, New York to the illegal settlement of Shilo in 1992, “after seeing a brochure advertising the community as the ancient capital of Israel.” (It was “founded by eight families in 1978.”) Since he and his then 3-year-old son suffered gunshot injuries four years ago when the car they were travelling in was fired upon, both have fully recovered, unlike 7-year-old Akaber Adbelrahman Zaid, who was murdered by Israeli Border Police on 17 March 2006 as her uncle was attempting to drive her to the clinic to have stitches removed from her chin. And unlike Akaber’s father, Rubin’s become a sort of go-to-guy whenever these accidents occur in Israel. He likes to introduce himself by saying, “I come from the heart of Samaria, which the media mistakenly calls the West Bank.” This is his response to the news that a child had died.
“Every country has as its primary responsibility to protect the lives of its citizens. And when you’re in a war, obviously there are civilians who are going to be killed. Nobody was complaining during WW II when the United States was bombing Dresden and bombing Berlin and civilians were killed because there was a war. There was a war against an enemy that was out to destroy the free world. And we have a similar war today. And I know President Bush spoke about it sometime after 9/11 but since then he’s been a little bit unfortunately too quiet about it. The war is against Islamic extremism and, and, and, there is, the force of Islam is the force that is more threatening than the Nazis were and than Communism was and I say that based on the facts, based on what we see. And I think that’s important to stand up to that, to stand up against it.”
Rubin welcomes news of dead Palestinian children. He and his ilk intend to rid the promised land of Palestinians.
A Neo-Zionist Answer to Post-Zionist Appeasement
Mr. Rubin was a history teacher before he accepted Israel’s messianic quest and generous settler compensation, subsidised by the American taxpayer, even as their fellow citizens are bulldozed out of New Orleans for being poor heathens.
Now he gives lessons to the press on his G-D given right to a Greater Israel, in a neoconservative narrative that warns of the imminent dangers of radical fundamentalism, that Islamic terrorists are keeping him from his destiny. His mission is enabled by a record number of MKs representing the settler movement in Knesset. As Labour MK Shalom Simhon, a former agriculture minister tells it, “Their presence in parliament has had a strong impact on the national agenda. Politically, they can credit themselves with incredible achievements. Over the years they have built mechanisms into the government’s budget that enable them to pump out amazingly huge quantities of money. All those who have ever held a portfolio in the cabinet knew that their budget items included an entire system dedicated to transferring funds to the West Bank and the Katif Bloc. There are some people who, even after they have stopped serving as cabinet ministers, still do not understand how that mechanism works.”
Whether one convergence at a time, or take it all by force now, the objective is the same, a Jewish state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. The settlers are impatient and they have brochures to prove it.
The pamphlet distributed at the gathering lays bare the planned extreme right-wing response to “Olmert’s destruction plan”, in which tens of thousands of Jews are liable to be evacuated from most of the occupied West Bank.
Olmert’s bargain that in exchange the largest settlements on Palestinian territory, home to most of the quarter of a million Jewish settlers, will be forever Israeli sways no extremist as to the merits of the sacrifice.
First off, swarms of militant Jews will puncture the tyres of jeeps and army trucks, torch military supplies and dump toxic products into water supplies to cut the soldiers’ advance in its tracks.
In a second wave of protest, young people will flock en masse to settlements threatened with eviction orders and try to succeed where they failed last year in Gaza: to stop soldiers and police from carrying out their mission.
In parallel, the plan calls for assaults on Palestinian villages and fields, and for water and electricity supplies to be sabotaged in order to provoke a “third intifada”, divert military attention and delay evacuation.
“This is a war that knows no bounds,” vow the authors of the brochure which encourages readers to deface mosques with anti-Muslim graffiti.
They have a head start on assaulting Palestinian villages and fields. The IOF is working on the third intifada.
Rubin has the peace plan covered.
“I believe in peace for peace. Relationships between families, relationships between friends. Everyone knows that if you want to have peace it has to be mutual, it has to be reciprocal. I don’t believe in peace for our heartland. I don’t believe in peace for a piece of paper. I believe in real peace. And if they’re ready for real peace, without getting tangible assets from us in return, then I’m all for it. We’ve always been in favour of peace. There’s nobody in Israel who doesn’t want a real peace.”
Take the blue pill. Take the red pill. Has Neal Conan seen this film?