By Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah
Until a few years ago, most of the Israeli army activities in the occupied territories were aimed primarily at forcing Palestinians to come to terms with their status as perpetual slaves tightly controlled by Jewish masters.
The occupation army would demolish homes, seal college campuses and arrest suspected activists for prolonged periods of time.
The message was clear: Don’t you ever dream of freedom, for whatever you do wouldn’t help you, the world won’t help you because we control America and America controls the world; we are the master race. Now the Israeli army is targeting the Palestinian society as a whole. It is directly targeting educational, social, economic and even medical institutions.
Interestingly, this is taking place under the scandalous rubric of “peace talks” between the Zionist state and the American-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) which is supposed to protect Palestinians and their national interests from Israel’s nefarious conduct.
In doing so, Israel is effectively crossing all erstwhile red lines, violating all conceivable considerations mandated by human decency. It is a no-holds-barred policy intended to impoverish and debilitate the Palestinian community by forcing Palestinians to devote most of their time and energy to hankering after their immediate daily needs.
This week, the Israeli army vandalized and ransacked civil institutions, including a school, a medical center and a commercial department store in the heart of Nablus, the second largest city in the West Bank. The vandalized and ransacked institutions happen to be in an area under the control of the PA, pursuant to the hapless Oslo Accords.
Reporters and ordinary citizens were shocked by the scenes of basic educational materials trashed and crushed by an army that Israelis claim ad nauseam that it is the most moral army in the world.
Well, it is a “moral army” that orders its soldiers to storm orphanages, boarding schools and soup kitchens and crush food about to be served to poor children, many of them have lost their parents to Israeli bullets.
Morality afterall is a relative matter. The Nazis, too, had thought their armies were the most moral of all armies. Apparently, Zionist Jews are walking in the same path and making the same arguments.
A few months ago, the Israeli army carried out a “holocaust”, using the words of a Christian peace activist, against Islamic charitable institutions in the Hebron region. The “army of the Jews” targeted schools, businesses, orphanages and soup kitchens. troops, acting like gangsters and common criminals, went as far as raiding and vandalizing sewing machines and clothes stores. Even children sport shoes and underwear were confiscated and later dumped at sewage streams outside the city. Yes, this happens in a state that claims to be a light upon the nations and the only democracy in the Middle East.
Israel, a country whose very existence is based on murder, mendacity and theft, claims that its “actions” are necessary to combat terror, a reference to Palestinian resistance to Israel’s sinister occupation, including non-violent resistance.
However, it is more than obvious that the targeted institutions have absolutely no connections with any political organization, including Hamas, the mantra whose invocation Israel thinks justifies every conceivable crime against the helpless Palestinians, their dignity and property.
Moreover, one is inescapably compelled to ask how destroying classrooms and trashing educational aids as well as crushing soup kitchens and storming gynecology wards in hospitals contribute to fighting “terror.”?
Does the Israeli army, government and Jews in general think that they endear Palestinian children to peaceful coexistence by destroying their classrooms, by crushing their educational aids, and by tying up Palestinian teachers to power poles and beating them savagely?
In fact, Israel is punishing the Palestinians for their very survival, for their very existence and for refusing to die and disappear, just as the Nazis fought Jews for their very existence, survival and refusal to disappear.
Israel would want the Palestinians to die and vanish from the face of earth without showing resistance and as quietly as possible.
This mental sickness on the part of Israelis explains the utter evilness and insidiousness of their despicable treatment of ordinary Palestinians. The collective mindset of Israel simply expects her Palestinian victims to behave and act like Nazism’s victims, to surrender to their ineluctable fate without making a big noise.
Unfortunately, the world at large seems to be colluding with Israel in crucifying the Palestinian people.
Even the Palestinian Authority (PA) of Ramallah, which claims to be defending and safeguarding Palestinian national interests, is acquiescing to genocidal Israeli terrorism, so much that Israel itself has come to view the PA as a sort of Palestinian Judenrat.
One would have thought that Mahmoud Abbas, the chief of the PA, would take a meaningful stand against Israeli crimes in Nablus and Hebron.
However, his deafening silence in the face of these abominable crimes is confirming and the man’s utter inadequacy for leading the Palestinians.
But, then, what can we realistically expect from an authority that has no authority, an entity whose very existence and survival depends on handouts from foreign powers which themselves happen to be at Israel’s beck and call?
As to the west, the matter is even more scandalous. Western governments, which keep an army of informers, NGO representatives, diplomats, and monitors in the West Bank, know perfectly well the extent of Israeli barbarianism and terror against the helpless Palestinians.
A few weeks ago, a European diplomat intimated to this writer that “we brief our governments on every aspect of Israeli repression of Palestinians.”
However, when asked why the governments don’t act on the information provided, the diplomat, expressing a whiff of embarrassment, said “Well, that is a different matter. Our governments have other considerations. They can’t always do what should be done. They can’t upset certain pressure groups both inside and outside.”
We are talking about mostly morally-bankrupt governments whose leaders, when they come on a visit to occupied Palestine, don’t stop babbling about “human rights, democracy and civil liberties.”
Well, we have heard these stories too much and for too long, so much that most of our people have already lost faith in western democracy, a big lie that only spells hypocrisy and conspiracy.
What else explains the disgraceful western silence toward the Nazi-like Israeli onslaught on the Palestinian people’s very existence.
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