[I should mention that Khalid's comment which I am forwarding here was originally sent to many others in Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. who share his concern for the welfare of Palestinians today under the Israeli occupation.  I should add here that since I initiated the Israel/Palestine list in hopes of encouraging peace-making between the Israelis and Palestinians -- the majority of whom desire the end to the confrontations and hostilities there -- I have been following the diverse reports from all quarters.  I increasingly share the distress of both Palestinians and Israelis with the failures of the governments there to negotiate peace, the cynical disinclination of American politicians of both major parties to share in that effort.  And I remind those distressed by Khalid's anger that he has had good reasons to be so:

http://www.p4pd.org/lifestories1.html

I admire Khalid  for his steadfast appeal to peace-making in the face of extreme provocations.  Ed Kent]

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Israel’s holocaust-in-the-making against the Palestinians

From Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

10 May, 2007

“I didn’t know that in order to protect a few people, farmland had to be confiscated and crops had to be destroyed; I didn’t know that in order to provide security for a few people, hundreds had to be kept waiting at checkpoints and roadblocks before being allowed to return home exhausted, that is if they are not killed.” Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, March 28, 2002, during a visit to the West Bank.

Not a single day passes without a crime being perpetrated  by the Israeli occupation army and/or  paramilitary Jewish terrorists, otherwise known as settlers,  against innocent and helpless Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.

And in case a murder is not committed,  a home is demolished, a school child is   crippled by a Jewish sniper’s indifferent  bullets, a farm is bulldozed, a grain field is torched, or a new colony is started on stolen Arab land seized at gunpoint from its  lawful proprietors, all in the name of Jewish nationalism.

It is more than the wide wild west here, it is actually  very much like pre-war Germany when the Third Reich effectively encouraged Germans to have a free season on Jews, on their lives, homes and businesses.

Let us have just a few examples of  what the so-called “chosen people” did  in the West Bank in the  past 48 hours:

On Wednesday (9 May),  the heroes of Zionism shot and killed a 7-month-old fetus inside his mother’s womb.  The woman is now fighting for her life in hospital. According to eyewitnesses,  Israeli tanks raiding the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein Beit Alma in Nablus, began firing indiscriminately, hitting the woman  in her underbelly and killing her fetus.  A film showed a fetus image in the hospital after being taken from his mother’s tomb; the fetus is already dead after being shot by a bullet in the head. The treating doctor testified that “the bullets hit the fetus in the head after penetrating the mother’s womb.  The latest crime raised the number of Palestinian children murdered by Jewish terrorists  since 2000  to 853, of whom 124 were killed in 2006.

The Israeli army is still “looking into the incident” just as it is still looking into thousands upon thousands of other murderous crimes committed since Israel’s misbegotten birth  sixty years ago.

The same heroes of Zionism  yesterday torched hundreds of hectares of harvest-ready fields of grains in various parts of the West Bank. The crimes were committed with the knowledge and in full view of  the Israeli army.

In Hebron, crack Israeli soldiers ganged up on peace activists, including Jewish participants,  after the activists sought to remove rocks and dirt blocking a major road linking Hebron with the town of Dahiriya. Several protesters were beaten savagely and   graphic pictures of the “clashes” have been posted on several internet sites.

Around the same time, the Israeli occupation army rounded more than 51 Palestinians (the daily quota is 15-20), sending them to the notorious concentration camp in the Negev desert where they are interned in harsh conditions for months or years, either on concocted charges or without charge or trial.

There are more than 11000 Palestinians languishing in these detention camps. Israel calls them “terrorists or extremists.” However, the truth of the matter is that these people  are doctors, teachers, university professors,  nurses, students,  lawmakers, government clerks, businesspeople  and ordinary people whose only crime is their often peaceful  opposition to the Nazi-like Israeli occupation of their country.

On Thursday,  10 May,  Defense Minister Amir Peretz decided to “outlaw”  the biggest political party in the occupied territories, namely the Reform and Change List, apparently because the Hamas-backed group refuses to give up the Right of Return for millions of Palestinians and their descendants  who were uprooted by ethnic East European gangs in 1948.

Also on Thursday,  Israel decides to keep as many as 530 roadblocks and checkpoints throughout the West Bank, apparently to keep Palestinians thoroughly tormented and humiliated and also to give Jewish youngsters, manning these stations of persecutions,  a true sense of virility and control.

At the more macro level, the Israeli media reported, also on Thursday,  the confiscation of thousands of hectares of privately-owned Arab land around East Jerusalem  in order to build three more settlements for ultra-Orthodox Talmudic Jews who believe that non-Jews living under Jewish law ought to be either exterminated, enslaved (wood hewers and water carriers), or, if deemed expedient, expelled.

The huge land  theft is aimed at making it impossible for any future Israeli government to return East Jerusalem to a prospective Palestinian state. In other words,  the purpose is to irreversibly kill any viable prospect for a  peaceful settlement based on the contemplated two-state solution formula.

True,  these crimes don’t yet constitute a  fully-fledged holocaust.

However, the collective accumulative effect of these crimes which have been going on  for nearly sixty years and are continuing unabated will ultimately  have the effect of a holocaust.

Yes, the brutal ugliness of the Israeli occupation,  despite its all its  criminal manifestations, may not be exactly identical to what the Third Reich did more than sixty years ago.

But the Israeli occupation is not a static phenomenon or a one-time episode, but an ongoing process the ultimate purpose of which is to obliterate the Palestinian people, either through  physical genocide, or at least a partial physical genocide, or by making the daily life of ordinary Palestinians unbearable (as a result of the brutal  persecution meted out to them),  so much so that Palestinians would either immigrate or succumb to Israel’s genocidal designs.

Well, genocides and attempted genocides need not be carbon copies of each other. Stalin, the Soviet dictator,  murdered millions during the Gulags (using primarily Communist Jews as  instruments). The Hutus in Rawanda murdered close to a  million human beings using hatchets, swords and Ak-47s. You see, the bottom line here is that a holocaust  against the Palestinians need not be as dramatic as the German holocaust.

I realize that Israel, especially the fascist-minded military establishment, which effectively rules Israel (Israel is an army with a state, not a state with an army), is not after murdering every single Palestinian.

However,  it is abundantly clear that Israel’s undeclared strategy is to uproot every single Palestinian from Palestine in order to fulfill Zionism. And if genocide, or at least a partial genocide, is what it takes to achieve this criminal  goal, there is no doubt whatsoever that Israel  will, when the time allows, resort to the wildest possible scenarios to achieve its goals. After all, genocide is part and parcel of the Zionist ideology which is based on East European fascist traditions.

Last year, Spanish philosopher  Santiago Alba Rico, wrote the following words, warning the world against the evil nature of Israel’s  approach toward the Palestinian people:

“Perhaps Palestinians are not the most punished people on earth, but they are indeed the most openly punished people on earth; perhaps they are not the people who have suffered the most but they are the people whose sufferings are the most uninterruptedly visible.”

I know the shipyard dogs of Zionism will vehemently protest the analogy with Nazism. I also realize, as do many conscientious people around the world, including many honest Jews, such  vociferous protests are in fact aimed less at highlighting the evils of the holocaust and more at attempting to divert attention from Israel’s criminal oppression of Palestinians.

I am saying this because  when one listens to Zionist leaders, such as Elie Wiesel and Benyamin Netanyahu, for example, one will easily get a feeling  that Zionism, which is drifting menacingly to right-wing religious and jingoistic fascism, are effectively asking the world, especially the west, to compensate Jews for the holocaust by allowing them to commit a holocaust against the Palestinians.

Indeed, there are a number of European countries, such as Germany,  that are already effectively consenting to this macabre equation, which explains  European complicity in starving millions of Palestinians by  blocking their access to food and work, and by saying next to  nothing about the unlawful and immoral seizure by Israel of Palestinian tax revenue money.

In conclusion,  I believe that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians should be treated at least as a holocaust-in-the-making, if only  to forestall the possibility of it evolving into a fully-fledged holocaust.

I know and the world knows that the holocaust didn’t begin with Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen and the ovens. It began with the enactment of racist laws against Jews, with a book, a kristlnacht and similar acts, the kind of which Israel and her terrorist  soldiers and Gestapo-like settlers have been doing to the Palestinians.

(end)
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“A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope.” (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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Ed Kent  718-951-5324 (voice mail only) [blind copies]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CollegeConversation

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