Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Israel Deliberately Targeting Civilians to Ensure Quiet Occupation

Around 40 people were killed, overwhelmingly civilian, in an Israeli attack on the UNRWA-run Al-Fakhora school in Jabaliya, Gaza on January 6. See here. As of now, there have been 660 Palestinians killed and close to 3000 injured. The majority of casualties are civilians. Around 50% are civilian women and children. See here.

According to Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor currently in Gaza, he has only seen a single fighter treated at the hospital but has witnessed hundreds of civilians. See here and check out his statement on CBS below. To paraphrase Gilbert, "This is a war on the civilian population of Gaza, not Hamas".



In my opinion, the goal of the state was always to dispel Palestinians from Palestine, and for those that remained, to keep them an occupied, docile, chaotic, illiterate, subjugated mass devoid of emancipatory sentiments that take the form of a genuine liberation movement. See in general the work of Nur Masalha, Ilan Pappe.

And it has been mostly successful - in having the PLO essentially work together with them in designing policy and life (of a subjugated people) for Palestinians, in signing agreements with Egypt and Jordan to neutralise emancipatory threats from outside their borders, and in having most international governments agree to the designation of unliquidated Palestinian liberation movements as terrorist organisations.

Unfortunately for Israel, Hamas is not playing the same game. It could very well play the same game if weakened enough, but it seems a genuinely emancipatory liberation and resistance movement.

In my opinion, Israel is deliberately targeting civilians to drive popular sentiment in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere against Hamas. In other words, Israel is targeting civilians in the Gaza Strip to deflect and neutralise sentiment, support and action for a genuine liberation of Palestinians from subjugation and occupation.

Enough is enough! The international community needs to act immediately to stop the aggression and to push for the State of Israel's leaders - Barak, Olmert, Livni and others - to be tried for war crimes for the (deliberate or not) targeting of civilians; I maintain that such attacks are reflective of a historical trend towards Palestinian emancipation and are evidenced by numbers, making such civilian attacks seem a deliberate policy.

For more on the colonial manoeuvrings to crush genuine Palestinian liberation movements see
Azmi Bishara on al-Jazeera.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Palastinian people chose terrorists to lead them and they are reaping the consequences.

Anonymous said...

We forget that Israel is backed by the U.S. We should condemn the U.S. also. Shame also on the Arab countries that take American money to shut up and look the other way while Jews are killing their brothers. Money can buy anything. The Arab league is good for nothing. It's a broken union just like the European Union and it's exactly what the U.S. wants so that U.S. control them more easily. They are all prostitutes.