![Activists stage a rally condemning the Israeli violence at the Gaza Strip’s eastern border in Brooklyn, New York, United States on 14 May, 2018 [Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency]](https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/20180514_2_30366616_33732740.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=75&strip=all&ssl=1)
Activists stage a rally condemning the Israeli violence at the Gaza Strip’s eastern border in New York, US on 14 May, 2018 [Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency
Posts Tagged ‘Ethnic cleansing’
Demolition spree of Israel of Palestinian Homes this Covid 2020: 500 displaced of the 1,000 are children
Posted on: January 7, 2021
2020 worst for homeless Palestinians in Israel
Tamara Nassar Rights and Accountability 5 January 2021
While people around the world were told to stay home due to the pandemic, Israel made more Palestinians homeless in 2020 than it has in years.
Israel demolished and confiscated more than 850 Palestinian structures throughout the year, displacing 1,000 people. More than half of those displaced were children.
Israel targeted almost any kind of structure Palestinians need for sustainable life, including homes, agricultural buildings, infrastructure and water sanitation facilities.
The number of demolitions last year was also the highest annual total since United Nations monitoring group OCHA began keeping records in 2009 – with the exception of 2016.
These figures do not include some 5,000 Palestinians whose livelihood was affected by demolitions and seizures throughout the year without being displaced.
Israeli forces demolish a Palestinian home east of Yatta, near the West Bank city of Hebron, on 29 December. Mosab Shawer APA images
In 2020, the number of Palestinians who had to demolish their own homes in occupied East Jerusalem under Israeli orders also increased. The irony s that Palestinians are coerced to do this to avoid having to pay for Israeli wrecking crews.
Area C
The vast majority of demolitions and seizures took place in occupied East Jerusalem and Area C, the 60% of the occupied West Bank that remains under complete Israeli military rule.
Most of Area C was supposed to be gradually transferred to Palestinian Authority control following the signing of the Oslo accords in the 1990s. But that never happened.
Israel controls all planning and construction in the area under an openly discriminatory regime.
Palestinians are subjected to Israeli military orders that regulate every aspect of their lives, while Israeli settlers living in Jewish-only colonies built illegally in occupied territory are subject to Israeli civil law.
Israel forbids virtually all Palestinian construction in Area C.
“Palestinians are allowed to build in less than 1% of Area C and in only about 15% of East Jerusalem,” OCHA recently stated.
This forces Palestinians to build on their own land without Israeli permits and live in constant fear that Israeli occupation forces may seize or destroy their property.
“This system works primarily to demolish structures,” Israeli human rights group B’Tselem stated, and is part of Israel’s long-term efforts to change the demographics in the area and ensure a Jewish majority in preparation for annexation.
Palestinians are also denied access to basic infrastructure, such as water and electricity, in those areas. Many rely on donor-funded solar panels for electricity and water storage.
But even donated structures are not safe from Israeli destruction.
In 2020, Israel demolished or confiscated about $350,000 worth of donor-funded structures, many provided by the European Union.
Apart from muted statements and photo opportunities at sites threatened with demolition, the EU has done nothing to hold Israel accountable for destroying tens of millions of dollars of projects funded by European taxpayers over the years.
Largest demolition in years
In November alone, Israeli forces demolished and confiscated more Palestinian structures in a single month on record since 2009, according to OCHA.
November also witnessed the largest single demolition in occupied territory in years, when Israel leveled most of the occupied West Bank community of Khirbet Humsa.
Israeli forces arrived in Khirbet Humsa on 3 November and demolished 76 structures. More than 70 Palestinians were made homeless, including 41 children – totaling 11 families.
Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar called the demolition “a grave crime” at the time and asserted that “the United States of America should not be bankrolling ethnic cleansing.
In the first week of 2021, Israel has already demolished 12 structures and displaced three Palestinians.
Note: The first Palestinian Intifada (civil disobedience/resistance) was done in 1936-39 because the mandated British power refused to hold municipal elections on account that the Jews represented only 20% of the population.
Israel immediately started its ethnic cleansing planned in 1935: After the UN unfair partitioned land of Palestine in 1947
Posted on December 3, 2015
Israel immediately started its ethnic cleansing planned in 1935:
After the UN unfair partitioned land of Palestine in 1947
U.N. voted to partition Palestine 68 years ago
In an unfair plan made even worse by Israel’s ethnic cleansing
Palestinians were 2/3rds of the population but were offered only 43% of land.
Then, Israel ethnically cleansed it and kept occupying more of the land
Ben Norton , Nov 30, 2015
Enlarge (Credit: United Nations)
68 years ago yesterday, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, with General Assembly Resolution 181.
The front page of the November 29, 1947 edition of the New York Times read “[General] Assembly Votes Palestine Partition;
Margin Is 33 to 13; Arabs Walk Out; Aranha Hails Work as Session Ends.”
(Do Not confuse with UN resolution to recognize Israel in 1948, by a single vote majority when most States were colonies and Not independent at the time)
(Credit: New York Times)
Why were the Palestinians angry?
Because, for the indigenous Palestinians, the deal was a thoroughly bad one. Palestinians comprised approximately two-thirds of the population, yet were offered just 43% of their land in the deal.
Osvaldo Aranha, a Brazilian diplomat was president of the U.N. General Assembly. Aranha lobbied strongly on behalf of the Zionist movement (a settler colonialist Jewish nationalist political movement that called for the creation of the state of Israel).
He delayed the vote on resolution 181 by two days in order to give the U.S. and other pro-Israel countries more time to pressure U.N. member states to vote for the plan.
Scholar Fred Khouri writes that, in these two days:
“The United States and Zionists led the lobbying efforts of the pro-partition forces. The delegates, as well as the home governments, of Haiti, Liberia, Ethiopia, China, the Philippines, and Greece were swamped with telegrams, telephone calls, letters, and visitations from many sources, including the White House, congressmen, business corporations, and other fields of endeavor.
As a result of these tremendous official and nonofficial pressures, Haiti, Liberia, and the Philippines finally agreed to vote for partition.”
These last-minute changes ensured that resolution 181 would have the two-thirds majority vote needed to pass.
The following is the U.N.’s map of the proposed partition.
The blue areas comprising roughly 57 percent of the land were to be allotted to Jews; orange areas were to be allotted to Palestinians.
Jerusalem was to be left under the governance of the international community, because of its historical and religious importance for numerous religions and cultures.
religious importance for numerous religions and cultures.
(Credit: United Nations)
The Partition Plan was never implemented, however. The very next day after it was voted on, the 1947-1948 war broke out.
In this war, Zionist militias systematically ethnically cleansed large portions of historic Palestine, sacking hundreds of Palestinian villages and expelling more than 750,000 people — around two-thirds of the indigenous Arab population.
Prominent Israeli historian Ilan Pappé notes that, in Israel’s Plan Dalet (also known simply as Plan D), “veteran Zionist leaders” created “a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” They dispatched military orders in March 1948, Pappé explains:
“The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition
Aand, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.”
Plan D “spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go,” writes Pappé.
“The aim of the plan was in fact the destruction of both the rural and urban areas of Palestine and contain[ed] a repertoire of cleansing methods that one by one fit the means the U.N. describes in its definition of ethnic cleansing.”
Jews in Israel agree on ethnic cleansing. Statistics might be higher for Jews Not living in Israel?
Posted on: March 11, 2020
Jews in Israel agree on ethnic cleansing. Statistics might be higher for Jews Not living in Israel?
Note: re-edit of the article of 2016 “Nearly half of Israeli Jews believe in ethnic cleansing, survey finds”
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called the findings a ‘wake-up call for Israeli society’
Almost half of Jewish Israelis believe Arabs should be “expelled or transferred” from Israel, a survey has found. (Is that why Israel built Walls of Shame around its borders that its constitution never delimited?)
A study carried out by the Pew Research Centre found that around one in five adults questioned “strongly agreed” with the controversial statement, which amounts to ethnic cleansing under some definitions.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes the act as “attempting to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas through the deportation or forcible displacement of persons belonging to particular ethnic group”, while a United Nations report in 1993 additionally specified the use of “force or intimidation”.
(Actually, the Palestinians are Not different ethnically, and yet they have got to be transferred for economic reasons in order to acquire free lands and resources)
(Most of the Jews in Israel are from various ethnic background, so how this definition can stand if Not believing in religious myths and acquired privileges?)
In Pew’s survey, 48 per cent of Jewish respondents said Arabs (Israel and Western colonial powers that established Israel try Not to say Palestinians in order Not to give them an particular identity) should be removed from Israel, while a similar share disagreed with the statement.
While 54 to 71% of Jews who defined themselves as ultra-Orthodox, religious or “traditional” supported such a step, only about 36% of the secular community did (They have vested interests in cheap labor?).
“While religious identity influences Israeli Jews’ views on the expulsion of Arabs, the survey finds that even after taking this and other demographic factors into account, Jews’ views on the expulsion of Arabs are most strongly correlated with their political ideology,” the Pew Research Centre report noted.
“The further to the left on the political spectrum, the more Jews are likely to oppose the expulsion of Arabs from Israel, just rhetorically.”
Those supporting the cleansing tended to be Russian-speaking, rather than Hebrew or Yiddish, male, and with a Jewish education to secondary level or below.
(Racist behavior emanating from internal feeling of Not being to the level)
Reuven Rivlin, the President of Israel, called the findings a “wake-up call for Israeli society”.
“It pains me to see the gap that exists in the public’s consciousness – religious and secular – between the notion of Israel as a Jewish state and as a democratic state,” he added. (This President would have liked that 99% of the Jews agree on the transfer of the Palestinians?)
“A further problem is the attitude towards Israel’s Palestinian citizens.”
Israeli Arab is the Israeli government’s definition of non-Jewish citizens and many members of the minority, who are predominantly Muslim, identify as Palestinian.
In the same survey, almost 80% of Jewish Israelis said Jews deserved preferential treatment in Israel, while a similar proportion of Israeli Arabs claimed they had seen discrimination against Muslims (and Christians).
The research appeared to show that all religious and ethnic groups had lost hope for a two-state solution, with half of Palestinians saying co-existence was possible compared to 40 per cent of Jewish Israelis.
The most recent round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014, just before a 7-week war in Gaza, and tensions have worsened in recent months with a resurgence of violence that has seen an estimated 28 Israelis and 172 Palestinians – mostly attackers – killed.
Pew conducted through face-to-face interviews in Hebrew, Arabic and Russian with more than 5,600 Israeli adults from October 2014 to May 2015 for the research.
The survey used the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics’ definition of the Israeli population, which includes settlers living in the West Bank as well as Arab residents of East Jerusalem.
Note: Another urgent survey is needed, after the Trump pronouncement on Jerusalem and the realization of the Israelis that No effective preemptive wars are feasible anymore
Tidbits and notes. Part 412
Posted on: October 27, 2019
Tidbits and notes. Part 412
Apparently, the Muslim wives have an effective resolution to their retired husband troubles: They marry him with a tad younger second wife. Now, the first wife can travel at leisure to visit with her sons and daughters, dispersed around the world.
China has banned the export of black clothes, often worn by protesters, to Hong Kong. And how Iran will get its black clothes?
Depuis des annees “il flotte comme un parfun de genocide” au Myanmar? What’s that crappy piece of poetry? No doubt of ethnic cleansing. And the UN is still debating whether there was a genocide since 2017?
And why this Buddhist racist State of Myanmar decided to commit genocide? The Rowinga “ethnic Muslims” were procreating like crazy? Another proof that all religions are racist by nature and inciting on violent acts.
Is Boris as big a liar as Trump? A Brexit deal has been struck, says the UK prime minister. As the deadline for Britain’s departure from the EU approaches, Boris Johnson announced, “we’ve got a great new deal that takes back control.”
Le plus grand cannibal est toujours l’Europe colonial, mais l’Amerique l’a surpasse’ depuis 1945.
How would you list the hardest hit States/nations by climate calamities (Storms, earthquakes, flooding, fires) according to their economic/financial potentials to recover from devastation?
The cobra effect is a specific kind of unintended consequence that happens when the proposed solution ends up worsening the problem it was intended to solve. It’s not simply a surprise negative result, it’s the opposite of what was intended. The cobra effect highlights the limitations of linear thinking, and what happens when we underestimate the complexity of a system—or of human motivations
When you introduce an incentive scheme, you have to just admit to yourself that no matter how clever you think you are, there’s a pretty good chance that someone far more clever than yourself will figure out a way to beat the incentive scheme.
The classic example of a fix that fails is relieving road congestion by building bigger roads. Traffic eases at first, but then, because driving is more pleasant when roads are less congested, more people drive, and the cycle starts again.
French-occupied Hanoi attempts to reduce the rat population in its newly-built sewer system with a bounty on tails. Enterprising locals cut the tails from rats and set them free to breed and create more tails. Some also breed their own rats. When the bounty ends, those rats are released, further increasing the rodent population in Hanoi.
The Streisand effect is when the act of trying to make something private calls more attention to it.
Rania avait vite eu de quoi s’ inquieter: Le pretendant etait un vertueux, ne buvait pas d’alcool, pas d’ aventures, un precheur venue de la campagne, intransigeant et “honnete”. La marieuse dit: “Tous les chameaux ont une bosse: j’en trouverais une”. Beware of the “puritan” people.
The Times of London reported that Turkey could have used banned white phosphorus against Kurdish civilians in Rass el Ayn town
US Administrations Not famous for saying the truth to its citizens
Plausible conjecture: Nations are unwilling to treat the capitalist fundamental of retaining 20% of the population always slaves to “Capital”. Thus, a newer influx of refugees toward the developed nations.
A lost chapter of the world’s first novel was unearthed? Parts of the 11th-century epic tale, The Tale of Genji, were discovered in a Tokyo family home.
Debt collection is an $11 billion industry in the US, and medical debt makes up nearly half of what’s collected each year. Debt collectors, working with judges who often have no law degree, decide who gets thrown behind bars and who’s shown mercy.
About 60% of Qatar electricity is used for cooling, the hottest place on earth.
Scammers, running hard-to-cancel “subscription traps,” use free trials to trick customers into paying for products they don’t want
Caring is a case by case endeavor: listening intently on the individual case. Generalization is the perfect concept for Control, over a large swap of people and phenomena.
Speech for London Rally in Support of Palestinians’ Rights to Exist: Shahd Abusalama
Posted on: September 20, 2019
My Speech
Of Shahd Abusalama for London Rally in Support of Palestinians’ Rights to Exist, Resist and Return
During a #StopArmingIsrael protest during a week of action against DSEI arms fair in September 2017. Photo by David Dinis Photography
My name is Shahd Abusalama and I’m a 3rd generation Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp, northern Gaza.
I’m standing here with so many Palestinians, born in Palestine and in exile, to tell the “founding Zionists” of Israel who assumed that the old will die and the young will forget, that we will not forget Palestine, and we will never surrender our fundamental rights to exist, resist and return.
We stand representative of many indigenous communities who faced various forms of oppression across the history of European colonialism and imperialism, to remind the world that settler colonialism is not a culture of the past, but a current reality that we have lived and defied from America, Australia and Ireland to Palestine.
My grandmother described a peaceful childhood in green fields of citrus and olive trees in our village Beit-Jirja. This life, the tastes, the sounds and the smells remained fixated only in her memories as Beit Jirja was dismantled alongside other 530 villages and towns that were depopulated and destroyed by Zionist thugs in 1948.
For Palestinians, the Nakba was never a one-off event that happened in 1948. Israeli colonial oppression has never stopped and many Palestinian communities within Israel, including the people of Khan Al-Ahmar, are still fighting against their ethnic cleansing as we stand here.
My grandparents are present today more than ever as we mark the 71st anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, for what happened then is why I was born in Jabalia with a gun pointed at my head.
During my mother’s labour, Israeli soldiers disrupted her way to Jabalia UNRWA Clinic as they forced a curfew that indoctrinated to shoot any moving being. Shooting to kill was common in the 1st Intifada when I came to life, and is a common practice now.
We saw it in the shooting and maiming of Gaza’s Great Return March protesters who stood with their bare chests against Israeli snipers to claim their humanity and to bring their right of return, an issue that Israel firmly rejected across the past 7 decades on racist grounds, to the centre of political debate.
Their cries for justice come amidst US-Israeli attempts to push the right of return and Jerusalem “off the table”. It is time that we call those world leaders what they are: racist trolls. It is time to stand firm in our support of the Palestinian right of return, as without justice, there will be no meaningful peace.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip just survived another a 3-day deadly Israeli attack last weekend, which claimed 25 lives, including two pregnant women, two toddlers and a 12 year old child.
While world news was quick to move on after the truce was announced, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip returned to a daily struggle for survival while more deadly violence is expected at any moment. That’s how my family welcomed Ramadan. Following the truce, I heard my parents calling relatives and friends and saying, “glad you survived” before continuing “Ramadan Kareem”.
Imagine living in an open-air prison where there is constant presence of death, and fear of walls falling inwards. This fear of being uncertain about anything, including your own life, even while in your home, is terrifying. This is what 2 million people faced last weekend as they are besieged by Israeli weaponry from air, land and sea, turning Gaza into a laboratory for its lethal arms, which Israel markets as ‘battle-tested’ in notorious arms fairs around the world, such as DSEI which London is hosting again this year.
It is not a coincidence that Gaza comes under attack during Israeli elections over and over again. Those elections are led by criminals using Palestinian children’s blood to win popular support.
Meanwhile, the world is about to celebrate Eurovision in Israeli Apartheid on top of an ethnically-cleansed Palestinian land, a show whose whole purpose is to expose Israel’s ‘prettier face’ while deflecting global attention from its daily crimes against the Palestinians. Shame on all contestant countries, all the participants and audiences if they still support Eurovision in Israel while our victims’ blood haven’t dried.
This is nothing new. This is our decades-long lived experience that is normalized by a dominant media discourse that finds it comfortable to avoid addressing the power imbalance between the occupier and the occupied, to remove the context of settler colonialism and reduce it to conflict, effectively demonizing Palestinians and their legitimate struggle against their systematic dehumanization.
Our injustice is also normalized by tax payers whose money is paid as military ‘aid’ for Israel, by politicians who suddenly fall short on words of condemnation once the perpetrator is Israel, by international institutions doing business with Israel or corporations that enable Israeli crimes, by Muslims of the world who normalize relations with Israel and buy Israeli dates merged with our pains of loss and dispossession, by Zionist Jews and Christians who support the uninterrupted process of ethnic cleansing against the native people of the ‘promised land’ in the name of God.
The best response to such brutality and normalisation is active solidarity!
We have a beautiful demonstration of solidarity today with thousands uniting from different races, religions, genders, professions and cities, to say: we’re not turning our back to the Palestinian people. We know too well that whether Palestine on news headlines or not, Israel is perpetrating violence uninterruptedly.
Every minute, innocent souls are buried, and building that took a lifetime to build are flattened. It is urgent that people of conscience all over the world join in solidarity and resist the collusion of their governments and institutions in this long-standing crime against humanity.
Israel occupation mindset: Endless lust to kill Palestinians. This genocide incremental strategy
Posted on: December 26, 2018
Israel’s occupation mindset and lust to kill has to be ended
The history of the Palestinian cause since the 1948 Nakba has been linked to a lengthy list of legal and moral violations against innocent people; a lot of their blood has been spilt.
This has produced the greatest level of human suffering of modern times, to which the international powers have contributed by harnessing the law in favour of rogue terrorist gangs.
Having such powers behind them, those gangs were able to establish a country upon the remnants of a peaceful population of an ancient civilisation reflected in their land, identity and culture.
The rest of the indigenous people (Palestinians) were driven off the land at gunpoint, in a stark example of what we now call ethnic cleansing.
This is the first time in modern politics that we have ever witnessed such a “surrogate” state, which uprooted the existing population and has sought ever since to eradicate their existence and history.
Israel has lived up to its stated intent to be an “outpost of [Western] civilisation against barbarism” having been planted in a region which shares the faiths, language and general culture of the Palestinians.
In order to accomplish the international conspiracy and criminal intent of this “surrogate” state, the process has been carried out regardless of the history and culture of the land in which it was established, against the wishes of the indigenous population it must be said. Since taking over 78 per cent of historic Palestine, the occupation state has shredded the remaining land, “in a way that prevents the achievement of its unity, and the construction of its independent political entity.”
READ: Reporters Without Borders asks ICC to investigate Israel war crimes against journalists
Israel was built upon the terrorism of Zionist militias who held no red lines as sacred and proceeded to kill, displace and plunder the people and their resources.
For the past 70 years, Israeli governments have continued in the same vein, preventing — by force when deemed necessary — the Palestinians from leading a peaceful and dignified life in their own land.
In doing so, the occupation authorities have trampled on international laws and conventions, claiming an unprecedented degree of exceptionalism that allows Israel to act with impunity. Its war crimes and crimes against humanity continue to go unpunished; in this, its international backers in Washington, London and other Western capitals are complicit.
The 70th anniversary of the Nakba – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]
The establishment of the State of Israel was accompanied by systematic massacres in order to empty the land of its existing inhabitants.
The massacre of Balad Al-Shaykh in 1948, for example, saw 600 Palestinians killed, most of them women and children; their corpses were found in their homes.
The well-known massacre of Deir Yassin, also in 1948, reflected the extent to which the sanctity of human life was disregarded by the Zionist terrorists, and demonstrated their criminality and inherent hatred for the local people.
Estimates differ of the number of casualties, but the International Red Cross reported that 150 corpses were found in one cistern alone, apart from the bodies on the streets, some of which had been badly mutilated.
As was the case across Palestine, when the people were killed or driven out of their homes, whole villages were then demolished and wiped off the map.
Massacres by Israeli troops continued throughout 1948 and beyond. The village of Abu Shusha was “depopulated” the day before Israel was created, while Tantura was attacked by the nascent Israel Defence Forces (IDF) 10 days later, with dozens of the local people killed and hundreds more forced out of their homes. Similar attacks on Palestinians took place in Qabiya in 1953, and Qalqilya, Kafr Qasim and Khan Yunus in 1956, to name but a few.
The whole history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine is filled with massacres of the Palestinian people. In part, this is because the state ideology, Zionism, requires as much of the land to be taken as possible, with as few Arabs on it as possible, so that Jewish settlers can be moved in to colonise the occupied territories.
Those Palestinians who stayed behind and refused to move off their land have faced systematic attacks over the decades, by the forces of the state as well as illegal settlers.
In 1990, a Jewish group calling itself the Temple Mount Faithful went to lay a cornerstone in the Noble Sanctuary of Al-Aqsa, where the group hopes one day to build a temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock Mosque. Protected — as such incursions continue to be — by Israeli security forces, the settlers were met by Palestinian worshippers, 20 of whom were killed in the confrontation, with 150 more wounded.
The Ibrahimi Mosque was attacked by a lone gunman wearing his IDF uniform in February 1994; settler Baruch Goldstein shot and killed 29 Palestinians as they prayed in the mosque and injured dozens more. In 2002, the IDF surrounded the Jenin Refugee Camp before attacking the inhabitants. More than 50 Palestinians were killed, along with a number of Israel soldiers. Early claims put the number of those killed in the hundreds.
These massacres are well known, but are not the only Israeli crimes. What has been called “Jewish terrorism” was killing Palestinians (and British Mandate personnel, by the way) in the decade before the establishment of the state of Israel. Terrorist groups such as the Irgun and Stern Gang are infamous for their crimes. An estimated 7,000 Palestinians are believed to have been killed by such gangs.
Explained: The Nakba 70 years on
Furthermore, Israel has not been content with attacking and killing Palestinians in the occupied territories alone. Its armed forces and agents have killed Palestinian individuals around the world, and facilitated the massacre of civilians in the Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camps in Beirut in 1982.
Up to 3,500 Palestinian women, children and elderly people were slaughtered by a Lebanese Christian militia let into the camps by the IDF. Israeli soldiers actually lit the scene with flares and stood by while the massacre ensued. The victims lay in the streets for several days because the killers closed the entrances of the camps until they finished their crime. As on other occasions, bodies were mutilated and personal belongings were stolen.
The Israeli mindset appears to be one of territorial conquest and bloodlust. The IDF shows no mercy, even when the Palestinians protest against their virtual imprisonment by the occupation.
In 1987, when the First Intifada (Uprising) erupted, stone-throwing youths were met with live ammunition and rubber-coated steel bullets; if caught, they often had their arms and legs broken by the Israeli troops. When the Second Intifada broke out in 2000 in response to Israel’s assassination of key Palestinian individuals and other violations, the occupation security forces shed the blood of more than 4,000 people; a further 38,000 were wounded.
The Third Intifada began as a wave of protests by Palestinian youths in response to the criminal acts of the occupation authorities and extremist settler groups, the most notorious of which was the 2015 Duma arson attack against the house of the Dawabsheh family in Nablus. Most of the family were burnt alive, including an 18-month-old baby, Ali. A year earlier, in July 2014, 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir was burnt alive by Jewish settlers in Jerusalem.
![11-year-old Gazaian Abdurrahman Nevfel (R), who lost his leg after Israeli soldiers opened fire on "Great March of Returns" demonstrations at Gaza Strip, is seen with his crutch in Gaza City, Gaza on 12 May, 2018 [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency]](https://i1.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/20180516_2_30407636_33801423.jpg?resize=262%2C333&quality=75&strip=all&ssl=1)
11-year-old Gazaian Abdurrahman Nevfel (R), who lost his leg after Israeli soldiers opened fire on “Great March of Returns” demonstrations at Gaza Strip, is seen with his crutch in Gaza City, Gaza on 12 May, 2018 [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency]
CCTV and the cameras of human rights groups have recorded the cold-blooded killing of young Palestinians on the pretext that they were trying to stab soldiers and police officers. The evidence in many of the cases, though, suggests that these claims were false and the victims were actually unarmed. In one case, the victim was already seriously wounded and motionless on the ground when a soldier approached and shot
him in the head, killing him instantly. The soldier in question served just nine months in prison for manslaughter.
Since 2008, Israel has launched three major military offensives on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, killing thousands in the process, including hundreds of children. Military incursions occur on a regular basis, often for no reason other than that the IDF can do what it wants to do, when it wants to do it. Israel has also imposed an immoral and illegal siege on Gaza for 12 years, an act of collective punishment that is a crime against humanity.
Human rights organisations agree that these are acts of genocide, with whole families wiped out and buried in the rubble of their homes.
Gaza’s infrastructure was already weakened by the siege when the Israeli offensives destroyed much of it altogether. The IDF killing machine did not distinguish between combatants and civilians. The statistics collated by international organisations confirm that the majority of the victims in Israel’s 2008/9, 2012 and 2014 offensives were civilians including elderly people, children and women.
READ: Gaza death toll rises to 61
Israel’s contempt for international law and human life has been witnessed again this week, with snipers shooting dead more than 60 Palestinians demonstrating for their legitimate right to return to their land within Israel. Since the Great March of Return protest started last month, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed by the Israelis — many of them shot in the back, hundreds of metres from the border fence and posing no risk to anyone — while thousands more have been wounded, often in life-changing ways.
This lust for killing is appalling, and has been condemned by the international community, although to their shame the US and others have sought to shift the blame onto the Palestinians themselves. The sight of Israeli soldiers and civilians celebrating and cheering whenever another Palestinian fell to the ground mortally wounded is sickening. Such behaviour can only be fuelled by their racism and hatred of all things Palestinian, Arab, Islamic and Christian.
Such is the demonic nature of the Zionist mindset, which rejects the Other, especially when that Other is a Palestinian standing up for his or her rights. The tyranny of the Israeli occupation of Palestine is unacceptable in the 21st Century and should be both condemned and ended by right-minded people the world over.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Adonis Diaries 
