Re: Palestine
Posted: Mon Dec 13, 2021 3:16 pm
The construction of Israel’s Gaza concentration camp is complete
Israel announced the completion of an underground wall and maritime barrier surrounding the besieged Gaza Strip. Not a single mainstream media outlet used the term “concentration camp” to report on it but they should have.
BY HAIDAR EID DECEMBER 10, 2021
ISRAELI SECURITY PERSONNEL GESTURE AT AN OPENING TO THE NEWLY COMPLETED UNDERGROUND BARRIER ALONG ISRAEL’S FRONTIER WITH THE GAZA STRIP IN EREZ, SOUTHERN ISRAEL DECEMBER 7, 2021. PHOTO: (REUTERS/AMMAR AWAD)
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a concentration camp as “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.” And a death camp is “a concentration camp in which large numbers of prisoners are systematically killed!”
The Gaza Strip, occupied and besieged by apartheid Israel, has been transformed into both; the difference is that it is larger than all known concentration and death camps created by the bigoted Western regimes in the 20th Century. Israel’s decision to redeploy its troops around the densely-populated coastal strip in 2005, and then impose an unprecedented, medieval siege in 2006 that has shattered all spheres of life, and then carry out four massive attacks that have killed more than four thousand civilians, including women and children, does not seem to be enough for the ruling Zionist elites of the rogue state.
Two days ago, it announced the completion of a sensor-equipped underground wall around Gaza which includes hundreds of cameras, radar and other sensors, and spans 65km. It was reported that the wall is more than six meters high and its maritime barrier includes electronic devices to detect infiltration by sea and a remote-controlled weapons system. The ministry did not disclose the depth of the underground wall. It took three and a half years to complete.
Not a single mainstream media outlet used the term “concentration camp,” or even apartheid in reference to the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip. The language used by the Israeli Occupation Forces has become the reference – no questions asked. No Gazan/Palestinian voice is permitted to say a word about the impact of this “project” on their lives. What we get to read is the statement made by Israeli war criminal, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, namely that “[t]he barrier, which is an innovative and technologically advanced project, deprives Hamas of one of the capabilities it tried to develop,” and that “[it ]places an ‘iron wall’, sensors and concrete between the terror organization and the residents of Israel’s south.” PERIOD! No questions asked!
ISRAELI SOLDIERS STAND GUARD DURING THE UNVEILING OF A NEWLY COMPLETED UNDERGROUND BARRIER ALONG ISRAEL’S FRONTIER WITH THE GAZA STRIP IN EREZ, SOUTHERN ISRAEL DECEMBER 7, 2021. (PHOTO: REUTERS/AMMAR AWAD)
The two million residents of the Gaza Strip have to be imprisoned inside this concentration camp because they are all “Hamas supporters,” and that gives “us” the right to use a “smart wall” to encircle “them.” That is not a form of “collective punishment” only because “they” are not born to Jewish mothers, and, therefore, they do not have the “right” to be treated as full human beings. Only those with white skin and/or born to Jewish families can have that right.
Apartheid South Africa and the American South under Jim Crow Laws must have been a picnic compared to this.
The two million residents of besieged Gaza, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled and dispossessed from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to four weeks (2009), 2 weeks (2012), 51 days (2014), and 11 days (May, 2021) of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where civilians were taking shelter. This came after years of an ongoing, crippling, deadly medieval Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment. But why are “they” not satisfied with what “we,” supported by the complicit West and “friendly” Arab regimes, are offering them? (Forget about The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by “us”, i.e., Israel, banning collective punishment of a civilian population.)
THE OWNER OF A HOME DESTROYED BY AN ISRAELI AIRSTRIKE IN MAY 2021 STANDS IN THEIR HOME IN BEIT HANOUN IN THE NORTHERN OF GAZA STRIP ON DECEMBER 9, 2021. OWNERS OF HOUSES PARTIALLY OR TOTALLY DESTROYED DURING THE MAY WAR ON GAZA ARE GROWING CONCERNED ABOUT THE DELAYED RECONSTRUCTION. (PHOTO: YOUSSEF ABU WATFA/APA IMAGES)
Never before has a population been denied the basic requirements for survival as a deliberate policy of colonization, occupation and apartheid, but this is what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza, today: two million people live without a secure supply of water, food, electricity, medicines, with almost half of them being children under the age of 15.
And now we have to deal with the fact that we are literally inmates of the largest concentration camp on earth with no rights whatsoever. President Carter was not exaggerating when he visited Gaza in 2009: “[Palestinians in the Gaza Strip] are being treated more like animals than human beings…[n]ever before in history has a large community like this been savaged by bombs and missiles and then been deprived of the means to repair itself.”
Alas, Carter is no longer the president of the USA, the strategic ally of apartheid Israel. As long as world official bodies and leaders choose to say and do absolutely nothing, Israel will go on killing more Palestinians, building higher walls, tightening the siege, and will claim it is all done in “self defense!”
And yet, we, ungrateful “antisemites,” are being blamed for calling it a “concentration camp!”
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/the-cons ... -complete/
*********************************************
‘Haaretz’ publisher says Israel is ‘an apartheid state’ — as his paper continues to warn against an Israel-Iran war
BY JAMES NORTH DECEMBER 12, 2021
AMOS SCHOCKEN, PHOTO FROM HAARETZ.
Amos Schocken is Israel’s equivalent of the latest Sulzberger to inherit control of the New York Times. Schocken, in his mid-70s, is the third generation of his family to run Haaretz, the most respected newspaper in Israel, and he speaks out regularly in columns and on social media.
Just the other day, Schocken called Israel “an apartheid state.” He was indignantly responding to a right-wing member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. Here’s the full quotation:
The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state, but has instead become an apartheid state, plain and simple.
Haaretz continues to be indispensable to understanding the vital truths about Israel/Palestine, truths the New York Times ignores and covers up. The latest example: yesterday’s Times has an analysis of the differences between the U.S. and Israel over the re-negotiations of the Iran nuclear deal. The article could have been ghost-written by hawks in the Israeli government. Its overall tone is sympathy with Israel, and a sense that American policymakers are naive. The report euphemistically mentions Israeli “covert strikes” and “sabotage operations” against Iran, but doesn’t give more details. Only in the final paragraph (the 23rd), does the Times acknowledge that the American CIA director, William Burns, says the U.S. “continues to believe that Iran has not made a decision to weaponize its nuclear program.”
Let’s turn to Haaretz. Start with its respected national security reporter, Amos Harel. He’s no radical, but he does know how to report and tell the full story, and he obviously has reliable sources within the Israeli military. He starts by raising doubts that Israel is even capable of a successful attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, an angle the Times ignored:
Realistically, an Israeli airstrike on Iran — an inherent topic of fierce professional debate — might have been possible a decade ago. Now, with the Israel Defense Forces only beginning to refresh the operational plans, it will probably take years before that option is given serious consideration.
Harel goes on to warn that an Israel raid would risk dangerous consequences across the Mideast, another angle the Times missed:
[There is a] risk that the attack will unleash a regional war in which the Israeli home front suffers an unprecedented onslaught by Hezbollah [Iran’s ally, the political/military movement in Lebanon]. In other words, the pistol Israel is brandishing has almost no ammunition at the moment.
Harel has the good reporter’s concern for specifics and a healthy disdain for euphemism. What the Times article called “sabotage operations” against Iran turn out to be “assassinations of nuclear scientists, explosions at nuclear sites, cyberattacks, attacks on Iranian ships, extensive airstrikes against pro-Iranian militias in Syria, and a systematic assault on convoys smuggling arms from Iran to Hezbollah. . .”
Haaretz’s truth-telling didn’t stop there. A lead editorial upbraided two top Israeli security officials for “parading a stream of arrogant, boastful threats against Iran in recent days,” and warned that the current discussion should not focus on Israel’s saber-rattling but instead on “an Iran-Israel war that could erupt following such a dangerous attack.”
A decade ago, the New Yorker’s top editor, David Remnick, published an inspiring long report about Haaretz and its publisher, Amos Schocken. Remnick quoted at length from an article Schocken himself wrote back then, which argued that “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, should be changed because “its lyrics are about only Jewish aspirations.” Schocken said:
How can an Arab citizen identify with such an anthem? Hasn’t the time come to recognize that the establishment of Israel is not just the story of the Jewish people, of Zionism, of the heroism of the Israel Defense Forces and of bereavement? That it is also the story of the reflection of Zionism and the heroism of the IDF soldiers in the lives of the Arabs: the Nakba — the Palestinian “Catastrophe” as the Arabs call the events of 1948 — the loss, the families that were split up, the disruption of lives, the property that was taken away, the life under military government and other elements of the history shared by Jews and Arabs, which are presented on Independence Day, and now only on that day, in an entirely one-sided way.
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/haaretz- ... -iran-war/
Israel announced the completion of an underground wall and maritime barrier surrounding the besieged Gaza Strip. Not a single mainstream media outlet used the term “concentration camp” to report on it but they should have.
BY HAIDAR EID DECEMBER 10, 2021
ISRAELI SECURITY PERSONNEL GESTURE AT AN OPENING TO THE NEWLY COMPLETED UNDERGROUND BARRIER ALONG ISRAEL’S FRONTIER WITH THE GAZA STRIP IN EREZ, SOUTHERN ISRAEL DECEMBER 7, 2021. PHOTO: (REUTERS/AMMAR AWAD)
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a concentration camp as “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.” And a death camp is “a concentration camp in which large numbers of prisoners are systematically killed!”
The Gaza Strip, occupied and besieged by apartheid Israel, has been transformed into both; the difference is that it is larger than all known concentration and death camps created by the bigoted Western regimes in the 20th Century. Israel’s decision to redeploy its troops around the densely-populated coastal strip in 2005, and then impose an unprecedented, medieval siege in 2006 that has shattered all spheres of life, and then carry out four massive attacks that have killed more than four thousand civilians, including women and children, does not seem to be enough for the ruling Zionist elites of the rogue state.
Two days ago, it announced the completion of a sensor-equipped underground wall around Gaza which includes hundreds of cameras, radar and other sensors, and spans 65km. It was reported that the wall is more than six meters high and its maritime barrier includes electronic devices to detect infiltration by sea and a remote-controlled weapons system. The ministry did not disclose the depth of the underground wall. It took three and a half years to complete.
Not a single mainstream media outlet used the term “concentration camp,” or even apartheid in reference to the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip. The language used by the Israeli Occupation Forces has become the reference – no questions asked. No Gazan/Palestinian voice is permitted to say a word about the impact of this “project” on their lives. What we get to read is the statement made by Israeli war criminal, Defense Minister Benny Gantz, namely that “[t]he barrier, which is an innovative and technologically advanced project, deprives Hamas of one of the capabilities it tried to develop,” and that “[it ]places an ‘iron wall’, sensors and concrete between the terror organization and the residents of Israel’s south.” PERIOD! No questions asked!
ISRAELI SOLDIERS STAND GUARD DURING THE UNVEILING OF A NEWLY COMPLETED UNDERGROUND BARRIER ALONG ISRAEL’S FRONTIER WITH THE GAZA STRIP IN EREZ, SOUTHERN ISRAEL DECEMBER 7, 2021. (PHOTO: REUTERS/AMMAR AWAD)
The two million residents of the Gaza Strip have to be imprisoned inside this concentration camp because they are all “Hamas supporters,” and that gives “us” the right to use a “smart wall” to encircle “them.” That is not a form of “collective punishment” only because “they” are not born to Jewish mothers, and, therefore, they do not have the “right” to be treated as full human beings. Only those with white skin and/or born to Jewish families can have that right.
Apartheid South Africa and the American South under Jim Crow Laws must have been a picnic compared to this.
The two million residents of besieged Gaza, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled and dispossessed from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to four weeks (2009), 2 weeks (2012), 51 days (2014), and 11 days (May, 2021) of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where civilians were taking shelter. This came after years of an ongoing, crippling, deadly medieval Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment. But why are “they” not satisfied with what “we,” supported by the complicit West and “friendly” Arab regimes, are offering them? (Forget about The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by “us”, i.e., Israel, banning collective punishment of a civilian population.)
THE OWNER OF A HOME DESTROYED BY AN ISRAELI AIRSTRIKE IN MAY 2021 STANDS IN THEIR HOME IN BEIT HANOUN IN THE NORTHERN OF GAZA STRIP ON DECEMBER 9, 2021. OWNERS OF HOUSES PARTIALLY OR TOTALLY DESTROYED DURING THE MAY WAR ON GAZA ARE GROWING CONCERNED ABOUT THE DELAYED RECONSTRUCTION. (PHOTO: YOUSSEF ABU WATFA/APA IMAGES)
Never before has a population been denied the basic requirements for survival as a deliberate policy of colonization, occupation and apartheid, but this is what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza, today: two million people live without a secure supply of water, food, electricity, medicines, with almost half of them being children under the age of 15.
And now we have to deal with the fact that we are literally inmates of the largest concentration camp on earth with no rights whatsoever. President Carter was not exaggerating when he visited Gaza in 2009: “[Palestinians in the Gaza Strip] are being treated more like animals than human beings…[n]ever before in history has a large community like this been savaged by bombs and missiles and then been deprived of the means to repair itself.”
Alas, Carter is no longer the president of the USA, the strategic ally of apartheid Israel. As long as world official bodies and leaders choose to say and do absolutely nothing, Israel will go on killing more Palestinians, building higher walls, tightening the siege, and will claim it is all done in “self defense!”
And yet, we, ungrateful “antisemites,” are being blamed for calling it a “concentration camp!”
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/the-cons ... -complete/
*********************************************
‘Haaretz’ publisher says Israel is ‘an apartheid state’ — as his paper continues to warn against an Israel-Iran war
BY JAMES NORTH DECEMBER 12, 2021
AMOS SCHOCKEN, PHOTO FROM HAARETZ.
Amos Schocken is Israel’s equivalent of the latest Sulzberger to inherit control of the New York Times. Schocken, in his mid-70s, is the third generation of his family to run Haaretz, the most respected newspaper in Israel, and he speaks out regularly in columns and on social media.
Just the other day, Schocken called Israel “an apartheid state.” He was indignantly responding to a right-wing member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. Here’s the full quotation:
The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state, but has instead become an apartheid state, plain and simple.
Haaretz continues to be indispensable to understanding the vital truths about Israel/Palestine, truths the New York Times ignores and covers up. The latest example: yesterday’s Times has an analysis of the differences between the U.S. and Israel over the re-negotiations of the Iran nuclear deal. The article could have been ghost-written by hawks in the Israeli government. Its overall tone is sympathy with Israel, and a sense that American policymakers are naive. The report euphemistically mentions Israeli “covert strikes” and “sabotage operations” against Iran, but doesn’t give more details. Only in the final paragraph (the 23rd), does the Times acknowledge that the American CIA director, William Burns, says the U.S. “continues to believe that Iran has not made a decision to weaponize its nuclear program.”
Let’s turn to Haaretz. Start with its respected national security reporter, Amos Harel. He’s no radical, but he does know how to report and tell the full story, and he obviously has reliable sources within the Israeli military. He starts by raising doubts that Israel is even capable of a successful attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, an angle the Times ignored:
Realistically, an Israeli airstrike on Iran — an inherent topic of fierce professional debate — might have been possible a decade ago. Now, with the Israel Defense Forces only beginning to refresh the operational plans, it will probably take years before that option is given serious consideration.
Harel goes on to warn that an Israel raid would risk dangerous consequences across the Mideast, another angle the Times missed:
[There is a] risk that the attack will unleash a regional war in which the Israeli home front suffers an unprecedented onslaught by Hezbollah [Iran’s ally, the political/military movement in Lebanon]. In other words, the pistol Israel is brandishing has almost no ammunition at the moment.
Harel has the good reporter’s concern for specifics and a healthy disdain for euphemism. What the Times article called “sabotage operations” against Iran turn out to be “assassinations of nuclear scientists, explosions at nuclear sites, cyberattacks, attacks on Iranian ships, extensive airstrikes against pro-Iranian militias in Syria, and a systematic assault on convoys smuggling arms from Iran to Hezbollah. . .”
Haaretz’s truth-telling didn’t stop there. A lead editorial upbraided two top Israeli security officials for “parading a stream of arrogant, boastful threats against Iran in recent days,” and warned that the current discussion should not focus on Israel’s saber-rattling but instead on “an Iran-Israel war that could erupt following such a dangerous attack.”
A decade ago, the New Yorker’s top editor, David Remnick, published an inspiring long report about Haaretz and its publisher, Amos Schocken. Remnick quoted at length from an article Schocken himself wrote back then, which argued that “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, should be changed because “its lyrics are about only Jewish aspirations.” Schocken said:
How can an Arab citizen identify with such an anthem? Hasn’t the time come to recognize that the establishment of Israel is not just the story of the Jewish people, of Zionism, of the heroism of the Israel Defense Forces and of bereavement? That it is also the story of the reflection of Zionism and the heroism of the IDF soldiers in the lives of the Arabs: the Nakba — the Palestinian “Catastrophe” as the Arabs call the events of 1948 — the loss, the families that were split up, the disruption of lives, the property that was taken away, the life under military government and other elements of the history shared by Jews and Arabs, which are presented on Independence Day, and now only on that day, in an entirely one-sided way.
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/12/haaretz- ... -iran-war/