Noam Chomsky: Nightmare in Gaza

[Purveyor]

Amid all the horrors unfolding in the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza, Israel's goal is simple: quiet-for-quiet, a return to the norm.

For the West Bank, the norm is that Israel continues its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure so that it can integrate into Israel whatever might be of value, meanwhile consigning Palestinians to unviable cantons and subjecting them to repression and violence.

For Gaza, the norm is a miserable existence under a cruel and destructive siege that Israel administers to permit bare survival but nothing more.

The latest Israeli rampage was set off by the brutal murder of three Israeli boys from a settler community in the occupied West Bank. A month before, two Palestinian boys were shot dead in the West Bank city of Ramallah. That elicited little attention, which is understandable, since it is routine.

"The institutionalized disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence," Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, "but also Israel's latest assault on the Gaza Strip."

MORE...

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/25343-noam-chomsky-|-nightmare-in-gaza

[Jefferson23]

1. No one who can is stopping it. K&R

[KG]

2. AutoChomskyDURec

[EEO]

3. This will only be solved when one party forces the other from the region.

And that will follow much death and destruction.

That is what history has taught us.

[Galraedia]

4. Understanding the Israel-Palestine conflict

Around 586 B.C. Jews were forcibly removed from their homes during the diasporas (dispersion) by the Roman empire and Rome renamed the land of Judea to Palestine. Invading Arabs conquered the land from the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantines) in A.D. 638 and attracted Arab settlers. Waves of invasions and changes of control followed, including rule by the non-Arab empires of the Seljuks, Mamelukes and European crusaders, before becoming part of the Ottoman Empire from 1517 until 1918 when Britain took control over Palestine after World War I.


At the turn of the 20th century, a movement called Zionism started that called for the creation of a Jewish nation in Palestine. Before Israel's creation, Palestine willingly accepted some 700,000 Jewish refugees escaping World War I and the Holocaust. After WWII the UN decided to partition Palestine and give 56% of it to the Jews so they could create their own nation. Palestine did not vote for the creation of Israel. Instead Israel's creation was imposed on Palestine by the United Nations. Now imagine that tomorrow the United Nations decided half of your country would go to another nation of people -- while you have no say in the matter. This led to the Palestinian war of 1948 and the deaths of 20,000 Palestinians and several thousand Arab soldiers, while Israel lost around 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians. During this time, Israel expanded their territory into Palestinian territory and began committing massacres against unarmed Palestinian civilians. One such massacre is the Deir Yassin Massacre on April 9, 1948, in which defenceless Palestinian civilians were tortured and bodies mutilated before they were killed. Women and children were raped, babies were butchered and pregnant women were bayoneted. Ethnic cleansing was one of the declared aims of the massacre, and the atrocities committed at Deir Yasin were used to force residents of other Palestinian villages to flee for their lives out of fear of a similar destiny. The majority of the Palestinians fled or were kicked off of their land and forced to become refugees in other middle eastern countries.

[dougolat]

5. Can't qibble with Chomsky's view

and his solution:

"For some years there has been a good basis for public demands
that Washington observe it's own laws and cut off military aid
to Israel. US law requires that 'no security assistance may
be provided to any country the government of which engages
in a consistent pattern of of gross violations of internationally
recognized human rights.' "

Too bad we couldn't manage do that with Indonesia when they were engaged in East Timor, or any number of Latin American nations internally- but since it might hurt the MIC, it seems to be out of the question.

[yurbud]

8. Or Indonesia when they did their anti-Commie cleansing in the 60s.

I watched THE ACT OF KILLING, and though it was similar in some ways to the thugs we supported in Central America and elsewhere, seeing it in a slightly different setting and through the eyes of the death squad "gangsters" themselves--and they called themselves gangsters, made it even more disturbing.

I went to sit in the jacuzzi at my gym after I watched half the movie, and when I saw a bunch of old Asian guys sitting in there, I was more afraid than if it was Sylvio, Paulie Walnuts, and Tony Soprano.

[dougolat]

9. I saw that too, - chilling

It seems like Jimmy Carter is the only President who has even made a move toward withdrawing support for such horrors.

[KoKo]

6. That was well worth the read.....

Thanks for posting.

[yurbud]

7. in sum: would you like your ethnic cleansing with or without slow starvation and mass killing?