Een uitstekend artikel van John Pilger (op Information Clearing House – ICH) over de fascistische apartheidsstaat Israël en de steeds onmenselijker manier waarop deze fascisten omgaan met de Palestijnen. De vergelijking met nazi-Duitsland gaat steeds vaker op, een vergelijking die al begin 90er jaren door officieren van het Israëlische leger werd gemaakt…….
De etnische zuivering door Israël van de door deze apartheidsstaat illegaal bezette gebieden, zou tot de belangrijkste inzet van de VN en het Internationale Strafhof moeten behoren.
Als de wereld nog langer zal toezien zonder in te grijpen, is een volgende gigantische massamoord onontkoombaar en zal de etnische zuivering van de door Israël illegaal bezette gebieden voltooid zijn…..
Onder het artikel kan u klikken voor het volledige artikel, daar (op de webpagina van ICH) kan u onder het artikel klikken voor een vertaling.
Palestine
Is Still The Issue
By
John Pilger
“Arabs,”
they said, “nomads.” The words were almost spat out. Israel,
they said, meaning Palestine, had been mostly wasteland and one of
the great feats of the Zionist enterprise was to turn the desert
green.
They
gave as an example their crop of Jaffa oranges, which was exported to
the rest of the world. What a triumph against the odds of nature and
humanity’s neglect.
It
was the first lie. Most of the orange groves and vineyards belonged
to Palestinians who had been tilling the soil and exporting oranges
and grapes to Europe since the eighteenth century. The former
Palestinian town of Jaffa was known by its previous inhabitants as
“the place of sad oranges.”
On
the kibbutz, the word “Palestinian” was never used. Why, I asked.
The answer was a troubled silence.
All
over the colonized world, the true sovereignty of indigenous people
is feared by those who can never quite cover the fact, and the crime,
that they live on stolen land.
Denying
people’s humanity is the next step – as the Jewish people know
only too well. Defiling people’s dignity and culture and pride
follows as logically as violence.
In
Ramallah, following an invasion of the West Bank by the late Ariel
Sharon in 2002, I walked through streets of crushed cars and
demolished houses, to the Palestinian Cultural Centre. Until that
morning, Israeli soldiers had camped there.
I
was met by the centre’s director, the novelist, Liana Badr, whose
original manuscripts lay scattered and torn across the floor. The
hard drive containing her fiction, and a library of plays and poetry
had been taken by Israeli soldiers. Almost everything was smashed,
and defiled.
Not
a single book survived with all its pages; not a single master tape
from one of the best collections of Palestinian cinema.
The
soldiers had urinated and defecated on the floors, on desks, on
embroideries and works of art. They had smeared feces on children’s
paintings and written – in shit – “Born to kill”.
Liana
Badr had tears in her eyes, but she was unbowed. She said, “We will
make it right again.”
A
Dead Infant
Fatima
and Nasser are a couple whose home stood in a village near Jerusalem
designated “Zone A and B,” meaning that the land was declared for
Jews only. Their parents had lived there; their grandparents had
lived there. Today, the bulldozers are laying roads for Jews only,
protected by laws for Jews only.
It
was past midnight when Fatima went into labor with their second
child. The baby was premature; and when they arrived at a checkpoint
with the hospital in view, the young Israeli soldier said they needed
another document.
Fatima
was bleeding badly. The soldier laughed and imitated her moans and
told them, “Go home.” The baby was born there in a truck. It was
blue with cold and soon, without care, died from exposure. The baby’s
name was Sultan.
For
Palestinians, these will be familiar stories. The question is: why
are they not familiar in London and Washington, Brussels and Sydney?
“Palestine,”
said Nelson Mandela, “is the greatest moral issue of our time.”
Why
is this truth suppressed, day after day, month after month, year
after year?
On
Israel – the apartheid state, guilty of a crime against humanity
and of more international law-breaking than any other– the silence
persists among those who know and whose job it is to keep the record
straight.
On
Israel, so much journalism is intimidated and controlled by a
groupthink that demands silence on Palestine while honorable
journalism has become dissidence: a metaphoric underground.
A
single word – “conflict” – enables this silence. “The
Arab-Israeli conflict”,
intone the robots at their tele-prompters. When a veteran BBC
reporter, a man who knows the truth, refers to “two narratives”,
the moral contortion is complete.
There
is no conflict, no two narratives, with their moral fulcrum. There is
a military occupation enforced
by a nuclear-armed power backed by the greatest military power on
earth; and there is an epic injustice.
The
word “occupation” may be banned, deleted from the dictionary. But
the memory of historical truth cannot be banned: of the systemic
expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. “Plan D” the
Israelis called it in 1948.
The
Israeli historian Benny Morris describes how David Ben-Gurion,
Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by one of his generals:
“What shall we do with the Arabs?”
Mandela
put it this way: “We know only too well that our freedom is
incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”
Voor
het volledige uitstekende artikel zie:
Palestine Is Still The Issue
