Israel is exercising its right of self-defence in precisely the same sense that Hitler was exercising the right of self-defence in Normandy in 1944

The Palestinian Genocide Continues

Strangely, even the sight on 

television of the body of a

 small boy, the same age as

 Cameron, being dug by 

hand from the bomb rubble, is  not what has stayed with 

me strongest from the latest  attack on the Palestinians.

 Instead, I recall most vividly a radio broadcast on the 

BBC World Service two days before the attack on Gaza 

began. 

It was a banal, everyday story of Palestinian villagers 

being evicted from their land in the occupied West Bank, 

to make way for an Israeli "military zone". These 

pastoralists had lost a thousand hectares to the Israelis

 in the last few years, and now these ancient villages 

were being finally, forcibly, evacuated in a vicious act of 

ethnic cleansing. The shepherds claimed that what this 

was really about, was the precious springs that watered 

their livestock. Work was already starting to divert their 

water to nearby, and illegal, burgeoning Israeli 

settlements. 

The BBC World Service TV has this minute, at 9.00am 

GMT, started its news broadcast as usual from Ashkelon 

in Israel, highlighting rocket attacks on Israel. There is 

no mention on the BBC - there has never been any 

mention on the BBC, or anywhere in the Western 

mainstream media - that for at least 4,000 years Ashkelon

 was an Arab town, until in 1948 the entire, Arab 

population of 12,000 was driven out by armed force, 

many being massacred. Doubtless some older 

inhabitants of Gaza are refugees whose home is 

Ashkelon. 

Israel is exercising its right of self-defence in precisely

 the same sense that Hitler was exercising the right of 

self-defence in Normandy in 1944 - ie not at all. Why the

 world puts up with this blatant ethnic cleansing and 

prolonged, agonizing genocide of the Palestinain 

people, I have no idea. It is not just about bombs and 

rockets and deaths now. It is about the shepherds being

 pushed out of their village in 2012 as part of the same 

process of the massacre of Ashkelon in 1948, all a 

process of genocide of the Palestinians in which Obama,

 Clinton, Cameron and Hague, as two wholw generations 

of western politicians before them, are actively 

complicit.