The Israeli state was founded with the use of anti-Arab terror by Jews and the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from their ancestral lands. Apparently because of the holocaust and the idea among Christian fundamentalists that the Jews are God's "choosen" people the crimes of terror committed by the Israelis (or by Jews in the Middle East prior to the establishment of the state of Israel) are conveniently ignored and all the focus placed on the Arab terrorists in the popular media in the US.
Israeli Terrorism doesn't make News
Cause of The Conflict Ignoredby Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
SNIP
The question is: Who is really, in Sharon’s words, “under terror”? It is an unfortunate but well-documented fact that Israel’s bloody record of terrorism against Palestinians far outweighs the scale of the tragic atrocity that occurred on Saturday. From the inception of the Zionist State to the present day, terrorism has been built into the foundations of policy of Israel’s military institutions. We should start, naturally, at the beginning. One authoritative source for understanding the genocidal essence of Israeli military policy comes from within Israel itself - the Israeli military historian Aryeh Yitzakhi, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Eretz Yisrael Studies at Bar Ilan University (Tel Aviv) and Senior Lecturer in Military History in Israeli Defence Force (IDF) courses for army officers. Yitzahki is particularly qualified in this area due to his in-depth acquaintance with IDF archives, on which his conclusions are based. In the 1960s, Yitzakhi served as director of the IDF archives within the framework of his IDF service in his capacity as historian. “The time has come,” he observes, “to face the ocean of lies in which we were brought up. In almost every conquered village in the War of Independence, acts were committed, which are defined as war crimes, such as indiscriminate killings, massacres and rapes…
“For many Israelis it was easier to find consolation in the lie, that the Arabs left the country under orders from their leaders. This is an absolute fabrication. The fundamental cause of their flight was their fear from Israeli retribution and this fear was not at all imaginary. From almost each report in the IDF archives concerning the conquest of Arab villages between May and July 1948 - when clashes with Arab villagers were the fiercest - a smell of massacre emanates. Sometimes the report tells about blatant massacres which were committed after the battle, sometimes the massacres are committed in the heat of battle and while the villages are ‘cleansed’. Some of my colleagues, such as Me’ir Pa’il, don’t consider such acts as massacres. In my opinion there is no other term for such acts than massacres. This was at the time the rule of the game… In the first phase a village was usually subjected to heavy artillery from distance. Then soldiers would assault the village. After giving up resistance, the Arab fighters would withdraw while attempting to snipe at the advancing forces. Some would not flee and would remain in the village, mainly women and old people. In the course of cleansing we used to hit them. One was ‘tailing the fugitives’, as it used to be called (‘mezanvim baborchim’)… In a typical battle report about the conquest of a village we find: ‘We cleansed a village, shot in any direction where resistance was noticed. After the resistance ended, we also had to shoot people so that they would leave or who looked dangerous’.” <1>
SNIP
Terror comes in many forms. Couple an ongoing illegal military occupation with brutal measures of repression suited to the worst military dictatorships, and terrorism not only takes the form of physical warfare, but also expands into unbearable social, psychological, and economic forms of comprehensive strangulation. Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb who serves on the board of the Jewish Peace Fellowship and who visited Israel in 1998 as part of an interfaith delegation to the West Bank and Gaza, describes the comprehensive military repression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, a state of affairs highly unbefitting of a regime purporting to be democratic:
“Israel continues to use torture, collective punishment, annexation and destruction of occupied territory, denial of food and medical supplies, arbitrary arrest, detention and imprisonment, execution without fair legal process, forced exile and the daily humiliation of security checks to manage Palestinians living under Israeli military rule. Between 1,000 and 1,500 Palestinians are arrested every month and as many as 80 percent of those arrested undergo this form of interrogation, which falls under the category of ‘torture’ by all international definitions. The use of torture is officially permitted by the Israeli Supreme Court and has been documented by the US State Department, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, the International Committee of the Red Cross and numerous Israeli and Palestinian human-rights groups.
http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq22.htmlIf there is no excuse for violence and terrorism, I assume there is no excuse also when it is practiced by Israel.
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