Covid

MASKING SAVES LIVES

Sunday, January 11, 2009

"When One People's "National Liberation Movement" Is Another People's Genocide" - Lawrence of Cyberia

"Palestinian people living free, equal and in peace in their own homes and on their own land is not a desirable or acceptable outcome for Zionism, it is instead an impediment that needs to be disposed of. And the Palestinians have been progressively disposed of through escalating violence in various forms over the last 100 years. It is not some unfortunate and regrettable accident that more and more of those people who have the misfortune to be non-Jewish inhabitants of a land that Zionism claims for itself end up dead, dispersed or disenfranchised. These are simply the measures you have to take to establish and maintain a “Jewish and democratic” state in a place where most people aren’t Jewish. If you want to realize Zionism in Palestine, it’s not a question of getting rid of Palestinian “terrorists”, but of getting rid of the Palestinians: men, women, children. You can do this in lots of ways. You can expel them en masse, as in 1948. You can massacre them, like at Safsaf and Deir Yassin and Kfar Kasem (and Gaza). You can enable others to massacre them, as at Sabra and Shatila. You can let millions remain in Palestine as disenfranchised and intimidated non-citizens, confined to smaller and smaller ghettos until, cut off from the necessities of everyday survival, they are forced into emigration (as Moshe Dayan [3] and Ariel Sharon [4] boasted they would do). The one thing you cannot do is subscribe to a project that can be fulfilled only through the deliberate extinction of the non-Jewish people and culture of Palestine, and then insist in all seriousness: “Violence? How terrible. Of course we never meant for anything like that to happen....'."

Portion below; whole thing [some graphic pictures] here: http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2009/01/poor-misunderstood-israel.html

Israel has always claimed that its soldiers adhere to a doctrine of "purity of arms" in dealing with the Palestinian civilian population. In the first intifada, Ehud Barak was the IDF’s Deputy Chief of Staff, and proclaimed: "We do not want children to be shot under any circumstances … When you see a child you don’t shoot." But that was untrue:

The Swedish “Save the Children” organization estimated that “23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the [first] intifida,” with nearly one‐third sustaining broken bones. Nearly one‐third of the beaten children were aged ten and under. It also states that 6,500 to 8,000 children were wounded by gunfire during the first two years of the Intifada. Researchers investigated 66 of the 106 recorded cases of “child gunshot deaths.” They concluded that: almost all of them “were hit by directed ‐‐ not random or ricochet ‐‐ gunfire”; nearly twenty percent suffered multiple gunshot wounds; twelve percent were shot from behind; fifteen percent of the children were ten years of age or younger; “most children were not participating in a stone‐throwing demonstration when shot dead”; and “nearly one‐fifth of the children were shot dead while at home or within ten meters of their homes.”

- cited in The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (chapter 2, end note 49); by Mearsheimer and Walt.

That's how the IDF killed Palestinian civilians - children - during the first intifada. Not through a careless use of missiles or the occasional errant tank shell, but by individual Israeli soldiers pointing their guns at children in the Occupied Territories - even children under ten, even children who had turned their backs and were running away - and shooting them dead.

And the IDF's record in the second intifada is much worse. First, because the IDF has relaxed its policy on how to handle the deaths of civilians killed by Israeli soldiers. Instead of automatically referring civilian deaths to the Military Police for investigation as it did during the first intifada, the IDF announced that individual Israeli officers in the field would now effectively decide whether an investigation was necessary, or whether the killing should simply be declared an "unfortunate incident of death", which required no formal investigation. This policy had the following, entirely predictable, result:

The IDF effectively grants immunity to soldiers who open fire illegally. Since the beginning of the intifada, the IDF has ceased to automatically open an investigation into every case in which a Palestinian is killed by IDF fire. The decision as to whether to open a Military Police investigation into each incident is now made by the Judge Advocate General's office, based on the results of the field de-briefings, which are also carried out by the army itself. In one case that was exposed by B'Tselem, it was clear that an eleven-year-old child had died as a result of the violation of procedures and illegal shooting. Despite this, the Judge Advocate General's office decided not to request a Military Police investigation. In addition, the investigations that are opened are generally protracted and based primarily on soldiers' testimonies, while completely ignoring the Palestinian eyewitnesses.

This policy has unavoidably resulted in a situation in which shooting at innocent Palestinians has practically become a routine. (B'Tselem)

And second, because the IDF dispensed with its previous practice of issuing written instructions to its soldiers about when they might open fire, in favor of oral instructions passed down to its troops through local commanders. The Israeli High Command insisted that the reason why the open fire regulations were no longer published was that it was "not efficient" to put them in booklet form. However, to IDF soldiers who received - and carried out - the verbal open-fire regulations, it was apparent that the real reason they were not written down was that nobody was willing to publicly take responsibility for the new open-fire instructions put into place during the second intifada [Footnote 1] . Instructions like this, for example:

Sniper: “They forbid us to shoot at children”.
Journalist: “How do they say this?”
Sniper: “You don’t shoot a child who is 12 or younger”.
Journalist: “That is, a child of 12 or older is allowed?”
Sniper: “Twelve and up is allowed. He’s not a child anymore, he’s already after his bar mitzvah. Something like that”.
Journalist: “Thirteen is bar mitzvah age”.
Sniper: “Twelve and up, you’re allowed to shoot. That’s what they tell us”.
Journalist: “Under international law, a child is defined as someone up to the age of 18.”
Sniper: “Up until 18 is a child?”
Journalist: “So, according to the IDF, it is 12?”
Sniper: “According to what the IDF says to its soldiers. I don’t know if this is what the IDF says to the media.”

-- Amira Hass' interview with an IDF sharpshooter, explaining why so many Palestinian children were killed in the first weeks of the intifada, when the IDF was largely confronted by stonethrowers. Published in Ha'aretz, Don’t shoot till you can see they’re over the age of 12, 20 November 2000.

So, if you start off with an Israeli society that is generally convinced of its own perpetual victimhood and righteousness and of its enemies' intrinsic wickedness, then draft young people from that society into the IDF, where you arm them, give them open fire regulations that allow them to shoot even at children, and assure them that as a matter of policy they will not be investigated for killing civilians... how surprising is it that the outcome during the second intifada has been this:

Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest – the sniper's wound".

These Palestinian children were not killed by errant tank shells or because they stood too close to some militant when a helicopter fired a missile at him, they were shot by Israeli soldiers. And the soldiers who shot them were not just "a few bad apples", but were acting within the norms of an Israeli army that fosters at every level in the chain of command the belief that it is perfectly natural for an Israeli soldier to kill a Palestinian civilian without fear of repercussions. You can see this culture of impunity at work in some real life examples. [story continues on]

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