Gaza massacres are the price of a Jewish state

As the Israeli army pauses its shelling of neighborhoods, hospitals, and ambulances in Gaza, Ali Abunimah distills the situation to its essence:

Israel cannot exist “as a Jewish state” without violating the rights of all Palestinians to varying degrees... The massacre in Gaza is at the extreme end of the spectrum of abuses necessary to maintain Jewish sectarian rule in Palestine, but it is part of the same policy that requires employment and housing discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel, and outright land theft and ethnic cleansing in the Naqab (Negev) and the occupied West Bank.

If you support Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state” in a country whose indigenous Palestinian people today form half the population, then you ... must come to terms with the inevitability of massacres. If you oppose the horrific, repeated massacres in Gaza, then join the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), a movement that aims to decolonize Palestine and restore to all the people all their legitimate and inalienable rights.

Resources: Abunimah's book The Battle for Justice in Palestine. The U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation holds its annual conference for organizers September 19-21 (wish it were closer than San Diego). The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions. A more recent petition calling for international arms embargo to Israel.

Photo: Shejaiya neighborhood in Gaza 26 July 2014, destroyed this week by Israeli shelling and aerial bombing. Photo via Kate Benyon-Tinker (@katebt3000), Middle East producer for BBC.

Israel's Lies

Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.

I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie.

Israel's Lies, Henry Siegman, January 15, 2009
Siegman is director of the US Middle East Project in New York and a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

h/t Eric Williams at Wampum, who also provides a list of links for relief contributions for Gaza. Eric's Gaza posts have been consistently insightful, starting with one on Christmas day that essentially predicted the events about to unfold.
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