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Dehumanizing the Palestinians - by Ali Abunimah | |
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VIEWPOINT
"Exploring The Powerful Issues & Emotions of The Middle East"
Reaching out to 51,228 Viewpoint readers around the globe
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Editor's Note:
One of the most articulate voices concerning the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict can be heard from Ali
Abunimah. We are pleased to offer this article from
his pen.
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Video Clip Of The Week
Israeli Soldiers Break Palestinians Youth's Elbow With Rock
The camera is unyielding as we witness three Israeli
soldiers break a young boys' arm utilizing a rock. These
incidents are being caught on camera more and more yet US
television does not show them.
Click to View:
Israeli Soldiers Break Palestinians Youth's Elbow With Rock
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Dehumanizing the Palestinians - by Ali Abunimah
The Israeli cabinet has voted to declare the occupied Gaza
Strip a "hostile entity," thus in its own eyes permitting
itself to cut off the already meager supplies of food,
water, electricity and fuel that it allows the Strip's
inmates to receive. The decision was quickly given backing
by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Israel is the occupying power in the Gaza Strip, despite
having removed its settlers in 2005 and transforming the
area, home to 1.5 million mostly refugee Palestinians,
into the world's largest open-air prison which it besieges
and fires into from the perimeter. Under international law
Israel is responsible for the well-being of the people
whose lives and land it rules.
There have been barely audible bleats of protest from the
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ("Such a step would be
contrary to Israel's obligations towards the civilian
population under international humanitarian and human
rights law") and the European Union ("The [European]
Commission hopes that Israel will not find it necessary
to implement the measures for which the [cabinet] decisions
set the framework yesterday."
What? It hopes that Israel will not find it necessary to
cut off water supplies to 1.5 million people of whom half
are children?
These statements serve only to underline that Israel
operates in a context where the "international community"
has become inured to a discourse of extermination of the
Palestinian people -- political and physical.
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Yossi Alpher, for example, a former director of the Jaffee
Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and
once a special adviser to former Israeli prime minister
Ehud Barak, argued coolly this week that Israel should
murder the democratically-elected leaders who won the
Palestinian legislative election in January 2006 -- calling
for "decapitating the Hamas leadership, both military and
'civilian.'" True, he admitted, there would be a possible
downside: "Israel would again undoubtedly pay a price in
terms of international condemnation, particularly if
innocent civilians were killed," and because "Israel would
presumably be targeting legally elected Hamas officials
who won a fair election." Nevertheless, such condemnation
would be quickly forgotten and, he argued, "this is a mode
of retaliation and deterrence whose effectiveness has been
proven," and thus, this is "an option worth reconsidering."
Alpher incited the murder of democratically-elected
politicians not in a fringe, right-wing journal, but in
the European Union-funded online newsletter Bitterlemons,
which he co-founded along with former Palestinian Authority
minister Ghassan Khatib. What journal would publish a call
by a Palestinian -- or anyone else -- to murder the Israeli
prime minister? Alpher presumably does not worry that he
will be denied visas to travel to conferences in the
European Union, or will fail to receive invitations to
American universities. History tells us that he can feel
confident he will suffer no consequences. Indeed, in the
current political climate, any attempt to exclude Alpher
might even be cast as an attack on academic freedom!
Declarations that reduce Palestinians to bare biological
life that can be extinguished without any moral doubt
are not isolated exceptions. In May, as reported by The
Jerusalem Post, Israel's former Sephardic Chief Rabbi
Mordechai Eliyahu issued a religious ruling to the prime
minister "that there was absolutely no moral prohibition
against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a
potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at
stopping the rocket launchings" (See "Top Israeli rabbis
advocate genocide," The Electronic Intifada, 31 May 2007).
I could find no statement by any prominent Israeli figure
condemning Eliyahu's ruling.
And, in a September 6 blog posting, an advisor to leading
US Republican Presidential hopeful Rudolph Giuliani argued
for "shutting off utilities to the Palestinian Authority
as well as a host of other measures, such as permitting no
transportation in the PA of people or goods beyond basic
necessities, implementing the death penalty against
murderers, and razing villages from which attacks are
launched." This, the advisor stated, would "impress
Palestinians with the Israeli will to survive, and so bring
closer their eventual acceptance of the Jewish state."
(See: "Giuliani Advisor: Raze Palestinian Villages," by Ken
Silverstein, Harper's Magazine, 14 September 2007) Giuliani
faced no calls from other candidates to dismiss the advisor
for advocating ethno-religiously motivated war crimes.
Indeed the presence of such a person in his campaign might
even be an electoral asset.
The latest Israeli government declaration comes as
Palestinians this week marked the 25th anniversary of the
massacres in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, in
which the Israeli occupation army and political leadership
were full participants. We can reflect that Israel's
dehumanization of Palestinians and other Arabs, its near
daily killing of children, destruction of communities and
racist apartheid against millions of people has been so
normalized that if those massacres occurred today Israel
would not need to go through the elaborate exercise of
denying its culpability. Indeed, the "international
community" might barely notice.
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Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-
Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
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