ATILIO BORON / Gaza: the infinite barbarity

By Atilio Boron

Source: contrainjerencia

What is happening in Gaza? The Israeli government, a state that imposes an unfair, cruel and inhuman blockade against a tine Palestine territory on the Mediterranean, decided to apply an exemplary lesson for the murder of three young Jewish colonists allegedly perpetrated by Hamas.

Without the least convincing proof and amidst a suspicious police operation, Jerusalem accused this organization so as to – as recognized by the Israeli apologist in the U.S. Zbigniew Brzezinski - of “stirring up public opinion in Israel to justify its attacks of Gaza”. And that is what happened: children, elderly people, women and men fall under the fire of its shrapnel. For Netanyahu and his gang all in Gaza are terrorists, far beyond their appearance. One of the leaders of the genocide dictatorship in Argentina, Ibérico Saint Jean, said, “first we are going to kill all the subversives, later their collaborators; finally the indifferent and lastly the timid”.

The Israeli government inverted that sequence and began with the civilian population whose only crime is that they live in Gaza and committed the crime of applying a collective punishment for a crime committed by some individuals. After this brutal and harsh lesson they invaded Gaza to annihilate the terrorists and their collaborators. Israel knows of the rudimentary and scarce weapons of Hamas that could not pose any harm of significance.

Their threat to destroy the Israeli State is a show of bravado that doesn’t correspond, in the least, to effective fire power. But they aver very useful for the psychological war: they serve to terrorize the Israeli population and therefore obtain the consent for the genocide and occupation of the Palestinian territories; and also for the United States and European countries to supply all kinds of weapons and politically support the regime. 

Just these days Israel requested Washington of 225 million dollars additionally to finance the production of their anti missile shield, known as the “Cupola of Iron”. U.S, Defense secretary delivered messages to the Senate and House of Representatives urging a rapid approval of the Israeli request for U.S. aid approved financial aid would reach, only in 2014, 500 million dollars. Military aid that Hamas receives from any source is zero. The disproportion of forces is so fragrant that to talk of a “war” is a macabre joke. Marco Aurelio, special advisor to President Dilma Rousseff: “What we are seeing in the Middle East, for the love of God, is a genocide, a massacre. 

And it is that because Gaza has no army, it has not been allowed. Israel has one of the best in the world, supplied with the most sophisticated war technology received from Washington and the old European powers Also; Gaza does not have an aviation to survey its air space or a fleet to guard its sea and beaches. The Israeli drones and helicopter fly over Gaza with no fear and shoots its missiles without worrying over enemy fire because there is no enemy fire.

The new war technologies have allowed “improving” what Hitler did in Guernica. Its murdering fury has bombed homes, schools, hospitals, UN premises. Its powerful allies (accomplices of their crimes) validate any atrocity. They did it before and not only Israel and will do it whenever they want. Their poor conscience favors this genocide plan: they were shamefully quiet during the Shoá perpetrated by Hitler before the sight and patience of the world, from Pope Pius XII to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. They were also silent in face of the genocide methodically and periodically consummated in Gaza because killing Palestinians point blank and that is: a genocide. The Rome Statute of the International Penal Court established in1998 that “genocide” is defined by any attempt to totally or partially destroy any national, ethnic, racial or religious group: a) killing members of a group; b) serious lesions to the physical and mental integrity of the members of that group; c) intentional submission of the group to conditions of existence that implies their physical, total or partial destruction”. 

The Israeli government committed three of these parts of the definition. The problem for the Israeli government, at least at the moment, is that rarely genocide has been the road to victory. Hitler killed six million Jews in crematoriums and ended up crushed by its enemies. What makes us think that this genocide will have a different result? Is that why Brzezinski in his interview affirmed that with his policies Netanyahu “is isolating Israel and endangering it future in the long run”? 

Fortunately, inside Israel there are sectors that criticize in harsh teems the conduct followed in Gaza: a group named “Jews against genocide”, the Communist Party together with the Democratic Front for peace and (Hadash) have condemned the crimes perpetrated in Gaza and also claim the legitimacy of any form of resistance in any occupied territory. But there are others such as Ayelet Shaked, the parliamentary deputy who demanded the killing of all Palestinian mothers because they engender terrorist snakes.

And inside the Israeli government work is done to dehumanize the “other” Arab. The large mass media and schools teach Israeli children to hate their undesirable neighbors, reduced to the condition of a despicable race. To involve them in the war effort they are invited to write messages of death in the missiles launched by their armed forces. Other children will be killed by these missiles lovingly dedicated by their Israeli counterparts.

The behavior is a spit on the great humanism of the Jewish people that begins with the biblical prophets, continues with Moses, Abraham, Jesus Christ and goes by Avicena, Maimónides, Baruch Spinoza, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Martin Buber until it reaches Erich Fromm, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky. Or with the extraordinary Jews who enriched the culture heritage of Argentina such as León Rozitchner, Juan Gelman, Alberto Szpunberg and Daniel Barenboim, among so many more that it would be too long the name here.

Betrayal of the great ideals of Judaism contributed to mankind will not be free. With their criminal cowardice, their crimes of genocide, the own practices of “State terrorism”, with the violation of international law (ignoring resolution 242 of November 1967, of the UN Security Council that unanimously demanded Israel to withdraw from occupied territories during the Six Day War of 1967, Israeli authorities are inflicting a harsh blow to the long term sustainability of the Israeli state. Its isolation in the UN General Assembly is pathetic, exemplified by its systematic and solitary accompaniment of the United States in votes on, the blockade imposed against Cuba; even their unconditional friends like Mario Vargas Llosa do not limit criticisms: after visiting Gaza in 2005. He wrote in the Spanish newspaper, El País: No one has told me, I am not a victim of any prejudice against Israel, and a country I always defended…I saw it with my own eyes. I was sickened and outraged by the atrocious misery, indescribable where they settle, without work, without future, nor vital space, in narrow and filthy caves and covered by garbage overrun by rats and patience of the passersby, these Palestinian families condemned only to vegetate, to await death, to end there existence without hope, of absolute inhumanity that is theirs. They are the poor wretches, children, old and young people deprived of all that makes life human, condemned to an agony so unjust so larval like the Jews on the ghettos of Nazi Europe, those that are being massacred by Israeli bombers and tanks that does not lessen a millimeter to the long awaited peace”.

It seems improbable that the infernal Israeli war machine will stop and reflect on the importance of this betrayal of the ideals of Jewish humanism. A sick racism has gotten control of the dominant circles of Israeli society that inhibits reacting against the monstrosities perpetrated, uncontrolled, against the Palestinian in Gaza confronting the construction of an infamous wall in the West Bank or against the perpetuation of the policy of usurpation and colonial plunder. The horrors suffered under Nazism seem sufficient to justify the unjustifiable or unforgiveable. Is it that way? But if so, the question is: for how long? A pertinent question recalling the dictum by John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States when he said that the U.S. has no permanent friends but permanent interests”. This is a phrase repeated as nauseam by another war criminal, Henry Kissinger. It would be worthwhile for the Israeli authorities who count on the indefinite support of Washington of their policies to meditate on this issue.

A Cuba-Network in Defense of Humanity translation
http://cuba-networkdefenseofhumanity.blogspot.com/2014/08/atilio-boron-gaza-infinte-barbarity.html

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