Israel uses every trick to blame everyone else but themselves
According to Israeli government propaganda, Israeli settlers and soldiers are not killing Palestinians. Palestinians are instead throwing themselves at Israeli settler and soldier bullets, causing their own death. And Israel has a right to demand redress for those actions
By Ray Hanania
On June 14, 2015, Israeli security forces were hunting down in a small village near Ramallah a Palestinian that they wanted for questioning.
The Palestinian, 22 year-old Abdullah Ghneimat, was startled when he saw the heavily armed Israeli forces try to surround him in the Israeli occupied village of Kafr Malik and he started to run.
For most Christians and Muslims living both in Israel and in occupied Palestine, Israeli soldiers and settlers who often work together, will shoot first before asking questions. To Israelis, Christians and Muslims have no legal rights. Shoot first and don’t bother to ask questions later is how Israel handles killings of non-Jews.
Israel never publicly explains why they want any Palestinians or non-Jews. They just arrest them, imprison them in “temporary detention” that can last months and years, and even torture a few all while denying the “suspects” any rights to lawyers or the legal process.
As the chase went on, the Israelis got close, and one of the jeeps hit a large stone and flipped over. The military jeep landed on top of Abdullah Ghneimat, killing him instantly.
Ghneimat’s death might have been the end of it because Israel isn’t required to explain why they wanted him in the first place. But his family decided to file a lawsuit against Israel for wrongful death.
Last week, after making the family jump through hoops in the legal system, hitting roadblock after roadblock, the Israelis decided to try a new strategy, one that only Israel can get away with in this world. They filed a lawsuit against the Ghneimat family seeking tens of thousands of dollars in damages that were caused to the jeep.
In any normal country, the government would have issued a public warrant for Abdullah Ghneimat’s arrest, and all the accused to hire a lawyer to defend himself without fear of being murdered in the Israeli Gulag of prisons and torture chambers. But Israel lives by two rules, one for Jews and one for non-Jews, no matter where they live.
Last year on Sunday, July 23, a young Jordanian worker with a furniture moving company was delivering furniture to a building in Amman, Jordan. Several Israeli security guards assigned to Israel’s embassy in Jordan were living there and had purchased the furniture. For some reason, the Israeli embassy guard and the delivery worker, 16-year-old Jordanian teenager Mohammad Jawawdah, got into a verbal argument. Of course, Israelis all carry weapons whether they are off-duty embassy security guards or 12-year-old Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank. Israelis are taught to kill first and make up a good story, first.
The Israeli guard must have been really angry because he fired a volley of bullets against the unarmed 16-year-old teenager killing him and also the Jordanian landlord of the building where the Israeli security guard lived.
Jordan’s King Abdullah demanded that the Israeli security guard be charged with murder, but Israel refused. King Abdullah then closed the Israeli embassy saying it would not re-open until Israel apologized and conducted a public trial.
Israel would not allow the Jordanians to interrogate the Israeli guard, who asserted that the 16-year-old charged him with a screw-driver during the fight.
That’s Israel’s justice. An Arab pulls out a screw driver and the Israelis blow them away with Israeli Uzis and automatic weapons they carry all the time.
Who is telling the truth? What I have learned over the years is that the side that refuses to allow full disclosure is usually guilty.
The guard was held at the Israeli embassy until the United States intervened and forced Jordan to allow him to flee to Israel where he is free to join a long list of Israeli criminals who have murdered Palestinians, Jordanians and non-Jews without consequence.
The same thing happened in March 2014, when Jordanian Judge Raed Zeiter was shot dead by a heavily armed Israeli border officer as the judge was traveling through a border-crossing checkpoint between the Israeli occupied West Bank and Jordan. Israel refused to conduct an inquiry or to punish the Israeli murderer.
Again, in this case, the judge was shot dead cold by the Israelis and the Israeli asserted that out-of-the-blue, Zeiter tried to kill them. Zeiter is a Palestinian originally from Nablus, and we all know how much Israelis hate Palestinians. Israelis can live with the Jordanians, if just somehow Israel can erase all of th Palestinians who keep getting in the way of their day-to-day occupier lives.
To make matters worse, Israel’s extremist Prime Minier Benjamin Netanyahu refused to offer an apology, expressing a lame, meaningless “regret” to Jordan. A “regret” is not an “apology.” A “regret” is an expression which means that the whole thing is an annoyance and Netanyahu wishes it would just go away.
Of course, when a Palestinian kills and Israeli, it always because a major case and there is no end to the punishment meted out by Israel against the perpetrators.
Remember the case of Elor Azaria, the and the immobile and wounded Palestinian teenager accused of attacking an Israeli soldier? Azaria was a “medic” called to the scene where two Palestinian teenagers had been shot by Israeli soldiers who asserted that they had been attacked by the Palestinians.
As I mentioned, Israelis always assert they were attacked first before they kill a Palestinian. The teenager, Abdul Fatah al-Sharif was lying on the ground bleeding, immobilized by the serious wound on March 24, 2016 when Azaria viciously and without an ounce of humanity put the gun to his head and fired. It was cold blooded murder.
Finally, after months of protests, Azaria was forced to go on trial in January 2017. An Israeli judge sentenced Azaria to 18 months in prison, after he was embraced by Netanyahu for his coldblooded act. The Israeli judge explained Azaria didn’t even express his “regret” for murdering the Palestinian, who was a non-Jew. Had he expressed regret, he might have received an even lighter sentence.
The Israelis reduced Azaria’s sentence by four months, though.
This is Israel’s vicious history. It is a history built on lies and hatred. The Israelis commit egregious crimes and go unpunished, while Palestinians, Jordanians, Arabs and non-Jews are punished to the extreme, usually with their lives in disputed incidents that Israel cloaks.
(Ray Hanania is an award winning Palestinian American columnist and author. He is a former Chicago political news reporter and he covered Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 before becoming a syndicated columnist and Middle East analyst. Hanania’s personal website is TheDailyHookah.com. Email him at rghanania@gmail.com.)
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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