10 years ago this month, Israel withdrew from its brutal and oppressive occupation of the Gaza Strip, replacing it with an even more oppressive embargo and even worse military chokehold with more deaths and more violence. And yet Israelis continue to lie about how they left Gaza and the Palestinians never used the gesture for “peace.”
By Ray Hanania
covering Chicago
City Hall
(1976-1992)
The Israelis are the masters of the Big Lie, used by the Germans during World War II. They believe that they can simply say anything that suits them and that especially casts all the blame on their enemies to explain why peace has been replaced by violent bloodshed — with most of the blood Palestinian.
And yet still, the Israelis insist that they are the victims in the face of overwhelming facts that show that they are in fact the oppressors and that the violence is the direct result of their violent policies and I think an anger that pushes their military to greater heights of war crimes.
Israel had enough of occupying the Gaza Strip in August 2005 in a large part because the constant and daily battles their soldiers were fighting to protect a dozen illegal Jewish-only settlements was becoming too costly.
They were actually losing soldiers at a higher rate and the Palestinians were improving their resistance. Weekly tolls showed a high price for Israel to continue to occupy the Gaza Strip and Ariel Sharon, one of the worst but not the worst war criminals to serve as an Israeli Prime Minister, decided to use the Gaza as a Public Relations stunt.
Smoke rises as Palestinians stand atop the rubble of a house, which witnesses said was destroyed in an Israeli air strike, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip August 20, 2014. Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip fired rockets at Israel for a second day on Wednesday after fighting resumed with the collapse of truce talks and an Israeli air strike that killed three people in Gaza. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu MustafaSharon withdrew his oppressive Israel Defense Forces which were targeting and killing Palestinian civilians at an alarming rate but that were being hit and killed almost as fast by Palestinian fighters. And he was tired of the high price that Israel was paying to protect the 8,000 extremist Jewish only settlers who were armed to the teeth and were protected by Israeli soldiers as they provoked, rampage and brutalized nearby Palestinian civilians from lands taken from Palestinians.
And yet news media like the Washington Post constantly refer to the Israeli settler terrorists who lived in the Gaza Strip as Jewish families who hoped to build their lives in “their homes.”
Israel has stepped up the violence against the Palestinians int he Gaza Strip, increasing the number of Palestinians that are murdered by theIDF and Settler fanatics who join in with Israeli soldiers in constant raiding parties into the Gaza Strip. The Israelis target any Palestinian who dares to criticize Israel’s policies. The settlers run rampant and unrestrained crossing over into Gaza all the time attacking Palestinians and shooting from the borders whenever they see a Palestinian, regardless of whether the Palestinian is a militant, which is rare, or a child, which is most frequent.
The embargo is oppressive and every time Palestinians have tried to bring food and supplies into Gaza, Israel has attacked the boats, killed the non-violent activists and used their PR machine to portray the activists as “terrorists.”
Israel has launched three wars against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the death toll has been a holocaust of injustice. It is outrageous and beyond anything humanity can accept. In the last war, Israel lost about 70 soldiers and a few civilians while the Israelis murdered, intentionally and with malice, more than 2,200 Palestinians including more than 1,500 civilians that included more than 500 victims that were under the age of 18.
The intentional targeting of Palestinian children has helped Israeli soldiers mollify the anger they harbor against Palestinians. Israelis are taught to hate the Palestinians in their training and in their Jewish-only schools. Their textbooks reek of hatred and vicious libel against the Palestinians, who are Christian and Muslim. They promote stereotypes of the Palestinians and it is so intensive that most of the Israelis who serve in the military have no hesitation to engage in war crimes and murder innocent civilians during their many and repeated military excursions into the Gaza Strip.
It’s not the Palestinians who are attacking Israel. It is Israel that continues to enter Gaza with tanks, war planes and missiles, killing Palestinians and destroying civilian homes and property.
It’s the “price” Israeli fanatics — an oxymoron these days — believe Palestinians must pay because Israel fled the Gaza Strip in cowardice and in the face of the constant brutality and violations of the Fourth Geneva Conventions in Gaza that Israel doesn’t even recognize.
Israelis believe Palestinians must be punished as the price for having left Gaza. The 8,000 Israeli settlers have been given money, land and homes. They are angry because it is not enough, but that’s all Israel can afford from the $5 billion that American taxpayers are forced to give to Israel every year.
Children killed by Israeli missiles and soldiers during the July-August 2014 Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip. Copyright (c) Mohammed Asad 2015. All Rights Reserved, Photo may be reproduced with full citation to Mohammed Asad and the Arab Daily News.The Israeli settlers have taken lands elsewhere, from Palestinian civilians in the West Bank where the extremist and violent Jewish-only settler movement continues to expand against the cries for peace.
If Israel wanted peace, they would start acting like human beings with morality. But many Israelis are driven by religious entitlement. They believe that Christians and Muslims are infidels who are not human and therefore can be slaughtered without consequence to their own selfish beliefs of a spiritual afterlife. They don’t mind murdering children believing that killing the Palestinian children inflicts the most vicious pain on the Palestinians, the price Palestinians must pay for challenging Israel’s lies, it’s violent occupation and its occupation which steals Palestinian lands.
Gaza is a reminder not that Palestinians do not want war, but that Israel is willing to commit any atrocities to prevent peace and solidify their Jewish-only control of the Holy Land.
After all, they know the Muslim World cowers in fear in the face of Israeli brutality and violence, and that the Christian world lives under their propaganda thumb!
These are facts the Israelis don’t want you to read:
- (Click here for a factual overview of the conflicts Israel started that provoked Hamas rocket attacks, intentionally so Israel could use the conflicts to achieve their settler land goals.)
- (And if you want to know the truth about Hamas and how Israel helped get the organization on its feet int he 1970s as a strategy to fight the PLO, please read this article, too.)
Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.
Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).
Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.
His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.
Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.
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