Palestinians Speak Israel’s Language
By
Chris Hedges
October 11,
2023
Award Winning Journalist Chris Hedges Says Palestinians Have
Been Fighting To Die Because They Won't Be Allowed To Live.
He Says Palestinians Are Now Speaking In The Same
Language That Israel Uses.
Chris Hedges Whose Article We Reproduce Below Is A Pulitzer
Prize–Winning Journalist Who Was A Foreign Correspondent For 15 Years For The
New York Times, Where He Served As The Middle East Bureau Chief.
Main Points:
1.
Chris Hedges
compares Israeli behaviour of blockading mollions of Palestinians to that of
Nazis and Fascists, giving several examples.
1.
For instance, Israel
has destroyed 530 Palestinian villages.
2.
Israel has seized 78
per cent of Palestine's land.
3.
Israel has killed
750,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949.
4.
Israel has killed
15,000 Palestinians in 70 massacres.
5.
5.Islamic country
Egypt has blockaded the only border opening.
6.
They have been
deprived of food, electricity and medicines.
-------
New Age Islam Staff Writer
14 October 2023
As the seize of Gaza has been launched by Israel's ground
forces, the Palestinians have nowhere to go as they have been confined in an
open prison.
Egypt has also blockaded its border to prevent Palestinians
from entering into Egypt. Israel has cut off water, electricity, food supplies.
Israel and the western world have been blaming Palestinians
for violence and aggression but in reality it is Israel that has been killing
in hundreds and thousands of Palestinians since 1947.
Seventy-five per cent of Palestinians are jobless and they
have been confined to a 46 kilometre stretch. The so called Islamic countries
have not been able to supply food, water and electricity despite being
prosperous and wealthy nations. The Palestinians have been fighting as a last resort
as the world looks on.
The self styled messiah of the Muslim world Erdogan who went
to fight in Azerbaijan is doing only lip service to the Palestinians. The
latest victim of Israel's attacks was Palestinian artist Heba Jagout who was
killed with her three children yesterday. More will be killed either by
Israel's rockets or by starvation while the United Nations, Turkey, Saudi
Arabia and Qatar will look on shamelessly and the US will send more weapons to
further maim Palestinians. More surprisingly, the firebrand ulema who had
supported ISIS in 2014 are also silent.
-----
The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier.
Israel has
spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist
militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530
Palestinian villages and cities and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more
than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between
1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.
Israel’s
response to these armed incursions will be a genocidal assault on Gaza. Israel
will kill dozens of Palestinians for every Israeli killed. Hundreds of
Palestinians have already died in Israel air assaults since the launch of
“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” on Saturday morning, which left 700 Israelis dead.
Prime
Minister Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza on Sunday to “leave now,”
because Israel is going to “turn all Hamas hiding places into rubble.”
But where
are Palestinians in Gaza supposed to go? Israel and Egypt blockade the land
borders. There is no exit by air or sea, which are controlled by Israel.
The
collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial
rulers. We used it against Native Americans and later in the Philippines and
Vietnam.
The Germans
used it against the Herero and Namaqua in Namibia. The British in Kenya and
Malaya. The Nazis used it in the areas they occupied in the Soviet Union, Eastern
and Central Europe.
Israel
follows the same playbook. Death for death. Atrocity for atrocity. But it is
always the occupier who initiates this macabre dance and trades piles of
corpses for higher piles of corpses.
This is not
to defend the war crimes by either side. It is not to rejoice in the attacks. I
have seen enough violence in the Israeli occupied territories, where I covered
the conflict for seven years, to loathe violence. But this is the familiar
denouement to all settler-colonial projects.
Regimes
implanted and maintained by violence engender violence. The Haitian war of
liberation. The Mau Mau in Kenya. The African National Congress in South
Africa. These uprisings do not always succeed, but they follow familiar
patterns. The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have a right to armed
resistance under international law.
Israel
never had any interest in an equitable settlement with the Palestinians. It
built an apartheid state and has steadily absorbed larger and larger tracts of
Palestinian land in a slow motion campaign of ethnic cleansing. It turned Gaza
in 2007 into the world’s largest open air prison.
What does
Israel, or the world community, expect?
How can you
trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the
most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, reduce the lives of
its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level, deprive them
of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft,
artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to
randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response?
Israel is
currently carrying out waves of aerial assaults on Gaza, preparing a ground
invasion and has cut the power to Gaza, which usually only operates two to four
hours per day.
Many of the
resistance fighters who infiltrated into Israel undoubtedly knew they would be
killed. But like resistance fighters in other wars of liberation they decided
that if they could not choose how they would live, they would choose how they
would die.
I was a
close friend of Alina Margolis-Edelman who was part of the armed resistance in
the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in World War II. Her husband, Marek Edelman, was the
deputy commander of the uprising and the only leader to survive the war.
The Nazis
had sealed 400,000 Polish Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto. The trapped Jews died
in the thousands, from starvation, disease and indiscriminate violence. When
the Nazis began to transport the remaining Jews to the extermination camps the
resistance fighters fought back. None expected to survive.
Edelman,
after the war, condemned Zionism as a racist ideology used to justify the theft
of Palestinian land. He sided with the Palestinians, supported their armed
resistance and met frequently with Palestinians leaders. He thundered against
Israel’s appropriation of the Holocaust to justify its repression of the
Palestinian people.
While
Israel dined out on the mythology of the ghetto uprising, it treated the only
surviving leader of the uprising, who refused to leave Poland, as a pariah.
Edelman understood that the lesson of the Holocaust and the ghetto uprising was
not that Jews are morally superior or eternal victims. History, Edelman said,
belongs to everyone. The oppressed, including the Palestinians, had a right to
fight for equality, dignity and liberty.
“To be a
Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors,” Edelman
said.
The Warsaw
uprising has long inspired the Palestinians. Representatives of the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) used to lay a wreath at the annual commemoration
of the uprising in Poland at the Warsaw Ghetto monument.
The more
violence the colonizer expends to subdue the occupied, the more it transforms
itself into a monster. The current government of Israel is populated by Jewish
extremists, fanatic Zionists and religious bigots who are dismantling Israeli
democracy and calling for the wholesale expulsion or murder of Palestinians,
including those who live inside Israel.
The Israeli
philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isiah Berlin called “the conscience of
Israel,” warned that if Israel did not separate church and state it would give
rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult.
“Religious
nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” said
Leibowitz, who died in 1994.
He
understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967
war that captured Egypt’s Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem)
and Syria’s Golan Heights, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate
destruction of Israel, along with any hope of democracy.
“Our
situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant
escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution,” he warned.
He foresaw
that:
“the Arabs
would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors,
officials, and police — mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile
population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a
secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and
democratic institutions.
The
corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the
State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on
the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason
to fear that the Israel Defence Force, which has been until now a people’s
army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation,
degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors,
resemble their colleagues in other nations.”
He saw that
prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would inevitably spawn “concentration
camps.”
“Israel,”
he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve
it.”
The next
stage of this struggle will be a massive campaign of industrial slaughter in
Gaza by Israel, which has already begun. Israel is convinced greater levels of
violence will finally crush Palestinian aspirations.
Israel is
mistaken. The terror Israel inflicts is the terror it will get.
This piece
was first here.
------
Chris
Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent
for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau
chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for
The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host
of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Source: Palestinians
Speak Israel’s Language
URl: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/palestinians-israel-conflict/d/130899
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