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By James Petras
Because of the unconditional support of the
entire political class in the US, from the White House to Congress,
including both Parties, incoming and outgoing elected officials and all the
principle print and electronic mass media, the Israeli Government feels no
compunction in publicly proclaiming a detailed and graphic account of its
policy of mass extermination of the population of Gaza.
Introduction
Israel's sustained and comprehensive bombing campaign of every aspect of
governance, civic institutions and society is directed toward destroying
civilized life in Gaza. Israel's totalitarian vision is driven by the practice
of a permanent purge of Arab Palestine informed by Zionism, an ethno-racist
ideology, promulgated by the Jewish state and justified, enforced and pursued by
its organized backers in the United States.
The facts of Israeli extermination have become known: In the first six days of
round the clock terror bombing of major and minor populations centers, the
Jewish State has murdered and seriously maimed over 2,500 people, mostly
dismembered and burned in the open ovens of missile fire. Scores of children and
women have been slaughtered as well as defenseless civilians and officials.
They have sealed off all access to Gaza and declared it a military, free fire
zone, while expanding their target to include the entire population of 1.5
millions semi-starved prisoners. According to the Boston Globe (December
30, 2008): Israeli military officials said their target lists have expanded
to include the vast support network on which the Islamist movement relies
to stay in power "…we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because
everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel
(my emphasis)". A top Israeli in its secret police apparatus is quoted saying, "Hamas'
civilian infrastructure is a very sensitive target" (ibid). What the
Israeli Jewish politicians and military planners designate as "Hamas" is the
entire social service network, the entire government and the vast majority of
economic activity, embracing almost the entire 1.5 million imprisoned residents
of Gaza.
Israel's 'target' list thus involves the 'total population', using the
totality of its non-nuclear weaponry and for an unlimited time period
(until the 'bitter end' according to the Israeli Prime Minister). Israel's
defense ministry spokesman has emphatically reiterated the Jewish's state's
totalitarian war concept emphasizing the targeting of civilians: "Hamas has
used ostensibly civilian operations as a cover for military activities. Anything
affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target."
Like all totalitarians in the
past, the Jewish state boasts of having systematically pre-planned the
extermination campaign – months in advance – up to and including the precise
hour and day of the bombing to coincide with inflicting the maximum murder of
civilians: The rockets and bombs fell as children were leaving school, as
graduating police cadets were receiving their diplomas and as frantic mothers
ran out from their homes to find their sons and daughters.
The mass military extermination campaign was a follow up of its non-stop total
economic embargo and unremitting selective assassination campaign of the
previous two years: Both were designed to purge Palestine of its Arab
population, first via mass hunger, disease, humiliation and violent intimidation
and the proxy power grab by the PLO Quislings under Zionist puppet Abbas. When
they discovered that mass hunger and selective Israeli murder only strengthened
the population's links to its democratically elected government and the resolve
of the Hamas government to resist Israel, the Israeli regimes unleashed its
entire arsenal of weapons, including its new 'American gifts' up-to-date 1000
pound 'bunker buster' bombs and high tech missiles to incinerate large numbers
of human beings within their deadly radius and to obliterate Palestinian
civilization.
Moving directly from its totalitarian vision to its military blueprint to the
savaging of Palestinian population centers, the Jewish state destroyed the
principle university with over 18,000 students (mostly women), mosques,
pharmacies, electrical and water lines, power stations, fishing villages,
fishing boats and the little fishing port that provided a meager supply of fish
for the starving population. They destroyed roads, transport facilities, food
warehouses, science buildings, small factories, shops and apartments. They
destroyed a women's dormitory at the university. In the words of the Israel
leader: "…because everything is connected to everything…" it is necessary
to destroy each and every facet of life, which allows humans to exist with some
dignity and independence.
The Israeli totalitarian leaders knew with confidence that they could act and
they could kill with impunity, locally and before the entire world, because of
the influence of the US Zionist Power Configuration in and over the US White
House and Congress. They knew they had the full backing of all the major Israeli
political parties (Right, Left and Center), trade unions, mass media and
especially public opinion. Israeli state terror is backed by 81% of Jewish
Israelis according to a poll taken by Israel's Channel 10 (Financial Times
December 30, 2008). Israeli totalitarian violence and extermination of
Palestinians is extremely popular among the Jewish electorate, especially in
raising support for the Labor Party candidate Minister Ehud Barak. They knew
they would 'succeed' with virtually no casualties because they bombed, burned
and dismembered a defenseless population totally lacking the minimum means to
defend themselves from F16 bombers, helicopter gun ships and missile assaults.
The vile depravity of the assault on the defenseless population is matched by
the utter cowardice of the Israeli military command and its cheering
bloodthirsty public ensconced behind their aerial monopoly. They suffered no
threats of aerial retaliation, no wounded or dead pilots, helicopter gunners, as
wave after wave swept in and over a defenseless imprisoned population in a
crowded and besieged ghetto.
Hundreds of tanks and armored carriers are prepared to invade once the cities
and towns have been leveled, once the population is too weakened by starvation
to resist, once the leaders and fighters have been murdered and the normal
Palestinian institutions of law and order have been pulverized, making way for
the corrupt thuggish collaborators of the so-called Palestinian Authority…then
and only then, will the Israeli General staff risk the skin of a precious Jewish
'soldier' and risk the anxiety and worry of their kin in Israel and the US.
Overseas Allies: The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO)
From the moment that the Israeli Government decided it would destroy the newly
elected Hamas government and punish the democratic electorate of Gaza with
starvation and murder, the entire Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the US,
including the PMAJO, pulled all stops in implementing the Israeli policy. The
PMAJO encompasses the fifty-two Jewish organizations with the largest
membership, with the greatest financial clout and the most influential backers.
The most prominent lobbyist within the PMAJO is AIPAC, which has over 100,000
members and 150 full-time operatives in Washington actively pressuring the US
Congress, the White House and all administrative agencies whose policies may
relate to the interests of the State of Israel. However Israeli political
extends far beyond its non-governmental agencies. Over two score legislators in
the Congress and over a dozen senators are committed Zionists who automatically
back Israel's policies and push for US funding and armaments for its military
machine. Top officials in key administrative positions, in Treasury, Commerce
and the National Security Council, senior functionaries in the Pentagon and top
advisers on Middle East affairs are also life-long, fanatically committed
Zionists, who consistently and unreservedly back the policies of the State of
Israel.
Equally important, the majority of the largest film, print and electronic media
are owned or deeply influenced by Jewish-Zionist media moguls who are committed
to slanting the 'news' in favor of Israel. The composition and influence of the
ZPC is central to understanding three main characteristics of Israel's power:
(1) Israel can commit what leading United Nations and international human rights
experts have defined as 'crimes against humanity' with total impunity; (2)
Israel can secure an unlimited supply of the most technologically advanced and
destructive weapons and use them without limit on a civilian population in
violation of even US Congressional restrictions and (3) scores of almost
unanimous United Nations condemnations of the construction of genocidal
apartheid barriers against a native population, starvation embargoes and the
current extermination campaign in Gaza are always vetoed by the US
representative.
Many critics of Israel's genocide in Gaza also condemn what they call 'the
complicity' of Washington or 'the United States' without clearly
identifying the actual socio-political forces influencing policy-makers or the
'dual' political loyalties and identities of the 'American' politicians who have
long-standing and deep allegiances to Israel. As a consequence, most critics
fail to counter, protest or even identify the ideology and politics of the
organized power configurations which define US complicity with Israel, who
intimidate potential critics, who write and mouth the pro-Israel editorials in
the mass media and who filter out any criticism, any truth…even when Israel
engages in sustained bloody extermination campaigns.
The ZPC and the Israeli War of Extermination in Gaza
The ZPC played a major role in all stages of Israel's extermination campaign
against Gaza including a sustained propaganda effort. The ZPC orchestrated a
massive successful campaign through the extensive network of American mass
media, which it controls and influences. It fabricated an image of the Hamas
administration in Gaza as a terrorist organization, which allegedly seized power
through violence – totally denying its rise to power through internationally
supervised, democratic elections and its defense of its electoral mandate
against a US-Israeli backed PLO military takeover. The entire Zionist Jewish
leadership backed Israel's land grabs, its ghetto wall around Palestinians, the
hundreds of road blocks, the Jewish settlers violently taking over Palestinian
homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the criminal, genocidal Israeli
economic embargo on Gaza designed to systematically starve the Palestinians into
submission. Throughout the two years of this Israeli extermination campaign,
American Zionists played a major role in leading the servile US government at
home and abroad in backing each totalitarian measure: The vast majority of local
synagogues became bully-pulpits defending the starvation and degradation of 1.5
million Palestinian refugees in Gaza caged on all sides by deadly force and the
'walling off' into economically and socially devastating cantons of the 4.5
million West Bank Palestinian population under foreign occupation. The US
Congress shamelessly followed the Zionist lead, backing every single criminal
measure taken by the State of Israel and approving dozens of resolutions, which
in most cases were entirely written by AIPAC lobbyists acting as unregistered
agents of the Israeli government (contrary to US federal statute, which requires
foreign agents and lobbyists to be registered as such). Israel's demands for the
most up-to-date US warplanes, including F-16s, Apache helicopter gun ships, and
1,000 pound bombs were secured by dint of effort of the AIPAC lobbyists and
their clients in the US Congress. In other words, the American ZPC created the
ideological cover and military instruments for Israel's 'total
war' against the defenseless Palestinian population. Equally important,
prominent Zionist leaders in the US Congress and members of the foreign policy
establishment blocked or vetoed any international criticism of Israel – securing
its impunity and immunity from any of the Congressional sanctions usually
enacted against criminal states. In other words, Israeli policy makers operated
with the knowledge that there would be no negative economic, diplomatic and
military repercussions to their launching the planned Gaza extermination
campaign because they knew, in advance, that 'their people' were in total
control of US Middle East policy to the extent of actually repeating verbatim
each and every propaganda lie in defense of Israel's total war against the
entire population of Gaza.
In Defense of Israel's War of Extermination
The Zionist-controlled US print media, in particular the New York Times
and the Washington Post, systematically fabricated an account that fit
perfectly with Israel's official line defending its massive assault on Gaza:
Omitting any historical account of the hundreds of Israeli armed incursions and
'targeted' assassinations of Palestinian leaders and officials (even in their
own homes) which repeatedly violated the 'cease fire' agreed by Hamas and
provoked its retaliation in self-defense of its people; omitting the years of an
Israeli enforced starvation embargo of food and essentials that threatened the
lives of 1.5 million Palestinians and led to the desperate efforts of the
elected Hamas leadership to secure supplies for the people's survival via
tunnels across the Egyptian border and through missile attacks against Israel to
pressure the Jewish state to negotiate an end of the criminal blockade.
The Conference of President of the Major American Jewish Organizations, and the
vast majority of Jewish communal groups and congregations, gave enthusiastic and
unanimous support to Israel's total war, its extermination campaign against the
captive Palestinian population of Gaza. Even as images and reports of the
massive destruction, killing and wounding of over 2,500 defenseless Palestinians
filtered in the mass media, not a single major Jewish organization broke ranks;
only individuals and small groups protested. All the 'Majors' persisted in the
politics of the Big Lie: the destruction of hospitals, mosques,
universities, roads, apartments, pharmacies and fishing ports were all labeled
'Hamas targets'. The systematic all-out assault by uncontested helicopter
gunships against 1.5 millions civilians was erased by tendentious accounts of
Hamas' homemade missiles falling ineffectively near Israeli towns.
A close reading of the most important propaganda organ of the PMAJO, The
Daily Alert (TDA), during the first 5 days of Israel's assault, reveals the
propaganda tack taken by the leadership of the pro-Israel power configuration.
TDA systematically worked to achieve the following:
1.Exaggerate the threats to Israel by the
Palestinian missiles from Gaza, citing 4 Israeli deaths, while omitting any
mention of the 2,500 Palestinian dead and wounded and the total destruction
of their economy and living conditions (without safe water, electricity,
food, cooking fuel, medicine and heat in the winter).
2.Promote Israel's military assault as 'defensive', directed at eliminating
Hamas rocket attacks while omitting mention of Israel's clearly stated
purpose of destroying all civil organizations, social welfare agencies,
educational facilities, medical clinics and public security institutions
connected in any way with the elected Hamas government and any auxiliary
agencies.
3.Cite select statement from Israel's allies and clients (Washington, the US
media, Germany and the UK) blaming Hamas for the conflict without mentioning
the vast majority of countries in the United Nations General Assembly
condemning Israel's brutality.
4.Reproduce Israeli slanders against any and all international human rights
leaders and organizations that condemn the Jewish state's policy of genocide
against the native Palestinians. In this regard, TDA is the foremost
'genocide denier' in the United States and, perhaps outside of Israel, in
the world.
5.Repeatedly cite Israeli political and military leaders' claims of acting
'with restraint', 'safeguarding civilians', and 'targeting military
objectives', even in the face of reports and images of mass civilian
destruction and loss of life documented in the vast majority of (non-US)
Western media.
6.Defend every Israeli bombing mission, every day, every hour, of every
building, every home, and every economic, religious and educational
institution in Gaza as 'defensive' or a 'reprisal', all the while quoting
some of the most notorious, unconditional, perennial apologists of Israeli
violence as if they were unbiased intellectuals, including Benny 'Nuke
Tehran' Morris, Marty Peretz and Amos Oz.
7.The Daily Alert quotes US writers, journalists and editors who
praise and defend Israel's 'total war' without identifying their
long-standing affiliation and identification with Zionist organizations,
giving the false image of a wide spectrum of opinion behind the assault.
Never has even the most moderate Jewish or Gentile critic of Israel's
massive extermination campaign appeared in any issues of The Daily Alert.
The principle American Jewish organizations have bombarded the US Congress,
influencing, intimidating and purchasing the craven so-called 'representatives'
of the American people, the media and public notables with lies in defense of
Israel's total war to exterminate a people. Their public, brazen, open
complicity in genocide can be considered crime against humanity: The willful
promotion of acts of a state designed to destroy an entire people.
And yet these willing accomplices, these 'willing executioners' of state mass
murder go uncontested within the US political class. One of their leading
mouthpieces in the incoming Obama Administration, Chief Presidential Adviser
David Axelrod, even cites an Obama campaign speech defending Israeli assaults on
the people of Gaza.
Israel arrogantly repudiates all calls to end this mass murder, because Israel
knows that 'its people' are still in control of US policy toward the Middle East
and will use their power in the new president's administration to block any
condemnation of this crime.
To date the entire human rights and anti-war movements have failed to even
mention, let along challenge, the most powerful propaganda and political
organizations, which influence US policy and manipulate the mass media in favor
of Israel's extermination campaign. They will play no restraining role on
Israel's totalitarian policies as long as its principle US backers are free to
lie, manipulate and defend each and every crime.
There is little hope for an independent US Congressional policy as long as
Israel's war of extermination in Gaza can be defended by the Chairman of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee (and Zionist zealot) Congressman Howard Berman
in the following terms: "Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself
in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past
week. No government in world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected
to this kind of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a
terribly tragedy and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas." Thus
Congressman Berman cynically omits the 2 years of Israel's embargo, the daily
'targeted' assassinations of Palestinians, the 'targeted' missile attacks
against civilians, the land, sea and air blockades and the blatant 'targeted'
destruction of the infrastructure of Gaza. No government, indeed a
democratically elected Islamist government, can stand by while its people are
starved and murdered into submission. But according to the respected Congressmen
Bermans of the world, only the lives of Jews matter, not the growing thousands
of murdered, dismembered and mutilated citizens of Gaza – they do not count as
people!
What is to be Done
Israel's crimes against humanity demand a public response: social action, which
will force it to cease and desist from its campaign to exterminate the people of
Gaza. Because the Jewish state has assaulted a vast array of Palestinian social
institutions, which resonate with those in our own society, we can and should
mobilize them to condemn and boycott their counterparts in Israel:
1.We should urge the entire academic community
to denounce Israel's bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza and the
total destruction of all of its science facilities. An organized boycott of
Israeli universities and all academic exchanges, especially scientific,
should become university policy throughout the country. Special attention
should be paid to the 450 US university presidents, who in the recent past,
denounced a call by British academics for a boycott and who remain silent
and complicit in the face of Israel's total physical annihilation of all ten
faculties for 20,000 Palestinian university students.
2.All American health workers, doctors, nurses, technicians, should organize
and denounce Israel's medical embargo against the 1.5 million Palestinians
crowded into the Gaza Strip. They must condemn Israel's bombardment of
Gaza's Children's Hospital, the neighborhood pharmacies and the attacks on
any transport of those critically wounded Palestinian victims of its aerial
and missile attacks. Medical personnel should raise the fundamental ethical
issues regarding the collaboration of US medical personnel and programs with
the Jewish State's 'total war' policies of extermination.
3.All citizens should demand the end of all US military aid to Israel,
especially F-16 fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, missiles, 1000
pound 'bunker buster' bombs used by the Israeli armed forces on the civilian
infrastructure of Gaza and the murder and maiming of over 2,500
Palestinians, civilians, civil servants, police and national militia. In
pursuit of a cutoff of US military aid to Israel, every effort should be
made to target and denounce the most forceful, aggressive and successful
Zionist advocates and lobbyists who influence the elected members of the US
Congress and White House on foreign military aid budgets. No progress in
ending US military aid for Israel's ethnic cleansing will succeed unless the
peace movement and others appalled by Israel's mass murder tackles the
Zionist lobby head on. This includes boycotts, rebuttals and demonstrations
against the AIPAC, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the other 50
leading American Jewish organizations, which initiate and secure US
governmental endorsement of Israel's extermination policies.
4.US religious institutions should forcefully denounce Israel's crimes
against humanity, including its demolition of 5 mosques, uniting all faiths
(Christian, Moslem, Buddhist) and especially reaching out to the tiny
minority of rabbis and observant Jews willing to forthrightly denounce the
totalitarian practices of the Israeli state.
5.Port and long shore workers, sailors and other maritime workers and
officials should boycott the handling of all trade with Israel and denounce
its Navy's violent illegal assault, in international waters, of civilian
fishing boats and vessels carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. No ships
carrying Israeli products should be loaded or unloaded as long as Israel
maintains its criminal military blockade of the port facilities of Gaza.
6.Tens of millions of US citizens subject to the one-sided pro-Israel bias
of the electronic and print media, the lop-sided presentations of Zionist
'op-ed' writers, 'news' reports and the self-styled Middle East experts,
should demand equal time, coverage and reportage for non-Zionist
specialists, analysts and commentators. We should demand the end of
euphemisms and fabrications, which convert victims into aggressors and
exterminators into victims.
7.We should wage a battle of ideas everywhere (in every public forum)
against the efforts by the Zionist Power Configuration to monopolize
discussion over the Israeli policy of genocide, to censor, intimidate and
slander critics of Israeli apartheid – as UN General Assembly President
Manuel d'Escoto so aptly calls Israel's Ghetto Wall surrounding Palestinian
villages. The outpouring of public protest over Israel's war of
extermination is an enormous step forward in countering the Zionist monopoly
of the mass media and encouraging the tens of millions of Americans who
clearly recognize and privately despise Israel's crimes against humanity and
resent the local Zionist elite's thuggery against those who speak out. Mass
pressure on elected representative may sway some to reconsider their abject
servility to their Zionist 'contributors' and their 'Israel First'
Congressional colleagues.
8.A patriotic nationwide campaign should demand that the Israel lobby,
especially AIPAC, come clean and register as a foreign agent of the State of
Israel. This might undermine the Lobby's appeal to American Jews, reduce its
influence over Congress and open up judicial processes and investigations
over its abuse of tax-exemptions, money-laundering and lead to revelations
over its treasonous procurement of confidential US state documents for a
foreign power. There is a powerful political and legal basis for such a
denial of the 'Lobby's' tax-exempt status and legality, apart from the
transparent and overwhelming evidence that all Zionist organizations act as
transmission belts for Israeli state policies: In the early 1950's up to
1963, the forerunner of AIPAC was obligated to register as a foreign agent
of the State of Israel. More recently, an Israeli prosecutor presented
evidence that the Israeli-Jewish Agency and its US counterparts were
laundering billions of dollars especially for the funding of Israeli
colonial settlements on occupied Palestinian land, condemned as illegal
under international law. Congressional hearings, law suits and further
published research would reveal the role of the Lobby as a Fifth Column for
the State of Israel against the interest of the people of the United States.
Until we neutralize the pervasive power of the Zionist Power Configuration in
all of its manifestations – in American public and civic life – and its deep
penetration of American legislative and executive offices, we will fall short of
preventing Israel from receiving the arms, funding and political backing to
sustain its wars of ethnic extermination.
When told that the great majority of the world's people are sickened and
incensed by Israel's mass murder of the citizens of Gaza, we can easily imagine
the contemptuous dismissal by Israel's top leaders, paraphrasing Joseph Stalin:
How many bombers, missiles, fighter planes and powerful lobbies do they (the
outraged people of the world) have?
... Payvand News - 01/06/09 ...
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