Palestinians protesting at the Gaza fence posed no threat whatsoever and even if they were trying to cross the border, you don’t use live fire to kill them, says Diana Buttu in this inerview with Dennis J. Bernstein.
By Dennis J. Benstein
Diana Buttu is a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer and former Palestinian negotiator. On 
Monday, she and hundreds of other protesters were roughed up and brutalized by a phalanx of heavily armed Israeli security forces as they tried to raise the Palestinian Flag in front of the new Jerusalem-based US Embassy .
Buttu was outraged as she noted “from video footage we can see that people were shot in the back. Others were shot for carrying tires or for simply walking into these areas. These were individuals who posed no threat whatsoever. Even if they were attempting to cross the border, you don’t use live fire to kill people who are crossing a border.”
Buttu spoke to Dennis Bernstein on Tuesday May 15th, 2018
Dennis Bernstein: Diana Buttu very good to speak with you again. First of all, what is your understanding of the latest statistics? I understand the number of dead is over sixty, the number of wounded is some 2,700, of which 1,300 were hit by gunshots. And please put the latest Israeli slaughter into historical context.
Diana Buttu: We are now at the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the commemoration of the establishment of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Today was a particularly difficult day, both because we had to bury over sixty Palestinians, including eight children and two people who were disabled. In addition to mourning the loss of our country and experiencing the everyday process of ethnic cleansing, we are seeing an effort on the part of the Americans and the Israelis to blame the victim. This is adding insult to injury and we are back at a place now where Israel can justify the unjustifiable.
Bernstein: What are hearing in terms of the ability to treat the wounded?
Buttu: It is important to keep in mind that this is not just a case of overloading at the hospitals, but of the capacity of the hospitals to begin with. These are hospitals that have been running on less than three hours of electricity per day because of the Israeli-imposed blockade on the Gaza Strip. They don’t have the necessary medical supplies because of the blockade. So we are talking about people who are going to die because they are unable to get the necessary treatment. Add to that the kind of weaponry that the Israelis are using. We are hearing of two new types of bullets, one of which is designed to explode inside the body and maim. We are also hearing reports of a different kind of gas which is being used on Palestinians which is akin to a nerve gas. Israeli has a policy of shoot-to-kill.
Bernstein: This notion of the Israeli government that every single person in Gaza is guilty, that there are no innocent people in Gaza. What does that say to you?
Diana Buttu
Buttu: The Israelis have had this policy for quite some time. Avigdor Lieberman has said many times in the past that there are no innocents in Gaza. This is why we see them deliberately targeting children and people in wheelchairs. They can excuse the death of an eight-month-old child who died yesterday from gas inhalation. This process of demonization is what allows them to continue to perpetrate a massacre.
Bernstein: Some people refer to this as a war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But there have been no Israeli casualties, none. How can you consider that a war?
Buttu: It is not only zero casualties, nobody has been even remotely injured. The Israelis are gunning Palestinians down. It is like shooting fish in a barrel. These are people who are nowhere near this electrified fence that the Israelis claim to be defending. [Buttu has been challenged about whether the fence is electrified.] This is a one-sided massacre, with a green light given to it by the Trump administration.
Bernstein: This slaughter is taking place on a day which the Israeli prime minister is calling one of the greatest days in Israel’s history, with the decision of the US government to move its embassy to Jerusalem. Could you talk about the significance of the move in the context of what has been going on in Gaza?
Buttu: Yes, this is a great day for Israel. At its very core, Israel is about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It is ethnic cleansing and land theft that is being recognized and rewarded. Sunday was the 51st anniversary of the occupation by the Hebrew calendar. It is celebrating 51 years of the denial of freedom. The day after is when the US decided to move its embassy. Today is the 70th commemoration of the Nakba. What the United States has done is pour salt into a very open wound. It is sending a very clear message to the Palestinians that Israel will forever be rewarded for violating human rights, for stealing Palestinian land, for expanding settlements, demolishing Palestinian homes. They will never be sanctioned or censored. Instead they will be rewarded.
Bernstein: The Israelis are saying that this is a Hamas terrorist operation at the border. They shot at least 27 terrorists who were trying to plant bombs. But we didn’t see any Hamas or any political flags.
Lieberman: No innocent Gazans. (Al-Manar)
Buttu: Israel wants to paint the picture that everybody is Hamas. If I were to paint the reverse picture and say that every Israeli has blood on their hands, every Israeli is a legitimate target, every single Israeli is voting for the likes of Netanyahu or Lieberman–I would be ridiculed. But this has become so commonplace when it comes to Palestinians. Even if Palestinians were to demand an investigation, Israel would halt such an investigation. You don’t just get a license to shoot people because they are approaching a fence. You are only allowed to protect yourself if you are under threat. Not even a single Israeli has been injured. It is a shoot-to-kill massacre.
Bernstein: From what I understand, many women took on leadership roles. This civil disobedience, this level of commitment, reminds me of when Gandhi went to South Africa.
Buttu: What the Israelis don’t seem to understand is that many Palestinians feel they have nothing left to live for. The Palestinians are coming out en masse and saying, “We’ve lived through fifty-one years of this. Enough! We want to be able to go home.” Others are saying, “We’re tired of the blockade. We just want to live a normal life.” These protests are sustained by the will of a people who want to see a better life. Nobody in this world is going to stay quiet when their freedom is being denied. To expect that somehow the Palestinians are just going to sit and wait for people like Trump to come up with a deal is simply farcical.
Bernstein: I want to come back to the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem. Can you talk more about the historical significance of that? It seems to make it very clear that this is ethnic cleansing and not a step toward negotiation and peace, as the Trump administration would like the world to believe.
Buttu: There is a reason why up until yesterday not a single country in the world
recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Jerusalem was taken by force illegally. One of the basic principles of international law is that you cannot acquire territory by force. Even during the period from 1948 to 1967, before the occupation, the United States refused to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It is on occupied territory and violates international law.
The problem with the recognition of the embassy is that it is not just a blow to the Palestinians, it is a blow to the international system as we know it. Instead of abiding by international law and agreeing that a state cannot take territory by force, they are actually rewarding a country that steals. The message is that might makes right. This affects not just Palestinians but all countries around the world. If we say that force is okay, if we are going to reward countries for using force, the implications are far-reaching.
Rather than Trump focusing on ending this acquisition of territory by force–meaning rolling back settlements–he has instead rewarded the settlers. He has told Israel not to worry, with time you are going to be fully recognized. Yesterday I was at the counter-protest in front of the embassy. The Israeli security establishment was so afraid that they had over 300 guards there. They were pushing people to the ground and kicking them. Many of those brutalized were simply trying to hold up the Palestinian flag. The Trump administration has not only given Israel a green light to commit a massacre in Gaza, but it has also made clear that Israel can do whatever it wants to any dissenters in the country.
Bernstein: I can imagine that the Palestinians who are left in Jerusalem are going to be under even more extreme pressure. There will be more attacks, more demolitions, more accusations. Obviously the Israelis are going to want to clean out the town.
Trump at Western Wall.
Buttu: This is a process which has been going on for 51 years. They have built and expanded Israeli settlements, they have demolished more than 5,000 homes. Any Jew living anywhere in the world can come to Jerusalem and automatically be granted citizenship. Israel is going to use this opportunity now to make more and more Palestinians stateless, to demolish more Palestinian homes. They are going to make life so difficult for Palestinians that they eventually disappear. That’s the plan. This isn’t a plan for peace, it is a plan for subjugation.
Dennis J. Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net. You can get in touch with the author at dbernstein@igc.org.
“The figures are an outrage, a turning away from morality, a disgrace for any army to create.
“And we are supposed to believe that the Israeli army is one of ‘purity of arms”’? And we have to ask another question. If it’s 60 Palestinians dead in a day this week, what if it’s 600 next week? Or 6,000 next month? Israel’s bleak excuses – and America’s crude response – raise this very question. If we can now accept a massacre on this scale, how far can our immune system go in the days and weeks and months to come? […]
“The victims are themselves the culprits. This is exactly what the Palestinians have had to endure for 70 years. Remember how they were to blame for their own exodus seven decades ago, because they followed the instructions of radio stations to leave their homes until the Jews of Israel were ‘driven into the sea’. Only of course, the radio broadcasts never existed. We still must thank Israel’s ‘new historians’ for proving this. The broadcasts were a myth, part of Israel’s foundational national history invented to ensure that the new state – far from being founded on the ruins of others’ homes – was a land without people.
“And it was a marvel to behold the way in which the same old reporting cowardice began to infect the media’s account of what happened in Gaza. CNN called the Israeli killings a ‘crackdown’.
“References to the tragedy of the Palestinians in many news media referred to their ‘displacement’ 70 years ago – as if they happened to be on holiday at the time of the ‘Nakba’ – the catastrophe, as it’s known – and just couldn’t make it home again. The word to use should have been perfectly clear: dispossession. Because that is what happened to the Palestinians all those years ago and what is still happening in the West Bank – today, as you read this – courtesy of men like Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, a supporter of these wretched and illegal colonies built on Arab lands and appropriated from Arabs who have owned and lived on the land for generations.”
How Long Will We Pretend Palestinians Aren’t People?
By Robert Fisk
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/18/how-long-will-we-pretend-palestinians-arent-people/
While shooting people like fish in a pond, or rather in a bucket, the Zionists cry wolf, claiming the fishes were threatening to leave their bucket and splashing water at them. The Zionists, now being the new Arian race, the decendants of the Holocaust who promised: Never again! Not recognizing that the Holocaust never stopped. It never stopped, and has been happening continously every day for 70 years, or more. Not recognizing that they themselves have become the new Nazies. The oppressor that kills women and children, old and crippled without remourse or guilt.
“Washington’s shameless defense of Israel’s brutal use of lethal force as ‘restrained’ and its subsequent blocking of an independent UN inquiry into the mass shootings only compound Washington’s culpability in the massacre. A massacre which threatens to add further tensions to an already combustible region. […]
“The US is hellbent on keeping the Middle East in turmoil and conflict […] neocon strategy documents, have long prescribed this very policy of creative-destruction, in hoc with Israel, as a formula to consolidate US power, no matter the cost in millions of innocent lives.
“Washington’s callous and criminal disregard for Palestinians is a piece of its strategy for mayhem. The renewed confrontation with Iran is also testimony to this pernicious policy.
“The cynicism of the US is staggering. This week at the UN, the American ambassador Nikki Haley walked out when the Palestinian envoy, Riad Mansour, began his address to the Security Council about the atrocity in Gaza. For months, Haley has been denouncing Syria, Russia and Iran over alleged violations. Yet she had not the conscience to listen to how Israeli troops butchered unarmed Palestinians in cold blood.
“Haley’s rank hypocrisy is closely matched by Western mainstream news media. Their saturated coverage and hysterical distortions over Syria blaming the Assad government and Russia for alleged atrocities was in stark contrast to their muted response to the US-backed cold-blooded murder in Gaza”
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/05/18/us-complicity-in-gaza-massacre.html
USA is the imperial power, but we are simply an attack dog used for advancing the agenda of the powers that rule us. Evidence of one method of control:
https://www.facebook.com/ifamericansknew/videos/10155497150264632/
As Voltaire observed, you can see who is in charge in a society by noting who it is that you are not allowed to criticise.
Diana Buttu has repeatedly made the factually accurate statement that Israeli military murders of Palestinian protesters in Gaza have been in defense of an electrified fence.
Israel’s fence around Gaza is continuously supplied with electricity to power its electronic monitoring sensors and other high-tech “security” features.
The point about Israel’s electrified fence is highly relevant to Palestinians living in Gaza still under Israeli military occupation.
In 2017, a Gaza home had only four to six hours of electricity a day, barely enough to charge their mobile phones and top off the car batteries they use to light a few bulbs at night.
But Israel maintains a 24/7 electrical supply to its 10-foot-high “smart fence”.
Despite the 2005 Israeli “disengagement” from Gaza, Israel still controls Gaza’s air and maritime space, and reserves the right to enter Gaza at will with its military. As the occupying power, Israel is responsible to provide electricity.
In both her interviews with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin (14 May 2018) and Dennis Bernstein (15 May 2018), Butto referred to Israel’s electrified fence.
However. Butto did not in any way claim or suggest that the fence would cause harm to those who touch it.
The context of her remark was entirely clear given widely broadcast video showing Palestinians in physical contact with the fence.
Nevertheless, Butto’s remark on MSNBC was “challenged” by “Camera”, a pro-Israel media pressure group.
In the Introduction to the book Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008), British journalist Jonathan Cook notes the workings of “potent Zionist media lobby groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Camera (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) and Honest Reporting; and behind them stands the muscular pro-Israel political lobby of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).”
Cook observes, “These Zionist watchdogs have created what the late Edward Said called ‘the last taboo in American public life’, moving rapidly to shut down any signs of critical debate about Israeli policies or US support for such policies either in the American media or in Washington’s corridors of power.”
Well-funded Conventional Hasbara (pro-Israel propaganda) pressure groups like “Camera” aim to distract, divert and disrupt discussion of Israeli government and military actions, particularly Israel’s illegal 50-year military occupation of the Palestinian territory it seized in the 1967 war.
Conventional Hasbara propaganda outlets and fake fact-checkers like “Camera” follow scripted propaganda narratives, downplaying or ignoring factual inaccuracies by Israeli officials and media “friends” of Israel, and (as is the case with Buttos’s remark) leaping forward to “correct” critics of Israel.
For example, the “Israel Project” propaganda manual, written by Republican pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz in 2009, was labeled “Not for distribution or publication” and titled “Global Language Dictionary”
The “Israel Project” manual is a treasure trove of scripted Conventional Hasbara propaganda canards.
https://www.transcend.org/tms/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/sf-israel-projects-2009-global-language-dictionary.pdf
Page 96 of the “Israel Project” manual recommends: “‘Defensive’ and ‘preventative’ are the words that best describe Israeli military action.”
This is precisely the kind of propaganda verbiage employed by the Israeli and U.S. governments and mainstream media when Israel attacks the Palestinian population under its continuing oppressive military occupation, wages war on neighboring countries like Lebanon and Syria, or threatens to attack Iran.
In Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008), journalist Jonathan Cook examines the enduring themes of Zionist colonisation of Palestine, arguing that Israel has developed and refined policies to disperse, imprison and impoverish the Palestinian people in a relentless effort to destroy them as a nation.
The West Bank and Gaza have been transformed into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative “defense” industry by pioneering technologies for surveillance, collective punishment and urban warfare.
Israel’s violent ethnic cleansing operations and the “Judaizing” of Palestinian land are examined in this extract from Chapter 1 of Disappearing Palestine:
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/docs/disappearing-extract-1.pdf
The IDF perpetrated ABSOLUTE TERRORISM upon unarmed protesting Palestinians.
One cannot call their actions anything but ACTUALIZED METHODICAL TERROR.
The so-called “Evangelical Christians” in America are the clones of Anthony Beavis,
Primary character in Huxley’s novel, “Eyeless In Gaza”/emotionally blinded by ‘religion’.
The IDF acts as the Blinded biblical character Samson, reigning destruction upon the
Philistines who’re at war with the Hebrews. David Ben-Gurian was/is the New Samson.
Benjamin Netanyahu is in a line of successive Dictatorial Zionists Terrorists that deem
The Palestinians as “grasshoppers” and inconvenient interlopers fit for extermination.
The Proof is in the very words of the procession of Israeli leaders (to follow).
— And if you didn’t know, now you’ll be Without the Excuse of Ignorance.
In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” That set the trend for the Israeli State’s attitude towards the Palestinians. In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “Palestinians do not exist.” Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eschol said, “What are Palestinians? When I came here (to Palestine), there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was a desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing.” Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians “two-legged beasts.” Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them “grasshoppers” who could be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of ordinary people.
In 1947, the U.N. formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 per cent of Palestine’s land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76 per cent. On the 14th of May 1948 the State of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza strip came under Egyptian military control, and formally Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees. In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
Over the decades there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Tens of thousands have lost their lives. Accords and treaties have been signed. Cease-fires declared and violated. But the bloodshed doesn’t end. Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions, in virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, twenty-four hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. And when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity. With not much hope in sight. They have no control over their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their water supply. So when accords are signed, and words like “autonomy” and even “statehood” bandied about, it’s always worth asking: What sort of autonomy? What sort of State? What sort of rights will its citizens have?
Young Palestinians who cannot control their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel’s streets and public places, blowing themselves up, killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hard- ening both societies’ suspicion and mutual hatred of each other. Each bombing invites merciless reprisal and even more hardship on Palestinian people. But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic. Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government’s daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse for old-fashioned, nineteenth-century colonialism, dressed up as a new fashioned, twenty-first century “war”.
?
Israel’s staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the U.S. The U.S. government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every U.N. resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States—taxpayers’ money.
What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves—more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history—to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a victory? When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for or, the rights to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone regardless of their ethnicity or religion?
In 1947, the U.N. formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 per cent of Palestine’s land to the Zionists.
Within a year, they had captured 76 per cent.
On the 14th of May 1948 the State of Israel was declared.
Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel.
The West Bank was annexed by Jordan.
The Gaza strip came under Egyptian military control,
and formally Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees. —– {Refugees In/On Their Own Centuries Old Land !!!!!!!!}
In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza strip.
The Gaza Strip is now AN OPEN AIR PRISON for these People, these HUMAN BEINGS. That are considered Grasshoppers and or Sheep For The Slaughter.
What “god” do these “evangelical christians” worship… ? !!
The poster presented a lengthy quote without attribution from the acclaimed 2002 Lannan Foundation lecture by Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy.
Roy’s talk was a critical examination of the effects of U.S.-led corporate globalization, the “war on terrorism” and the history of U.S. intervention in Chile, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and in Iraq.
Text
https://lannan.org/images/cf/arundhati-roy-020918-trans-read.pdf
Video
Watch the YouTube link below.
Arundhati Roy, “Come September”
a talk at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Santa Fe, NM
September 29, 2002
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET7I9jvP4Ic
[Video minute 18:20-26:10]
@Mild…
“The so-called “Evangelical Christians” in America are the clones of Anthony Beavis, Primary character in Huxley’s novel, “Eyeless In Gaza”/emotionally blinded by ‘religion’.”
What do you want from America, where “Beavis and Butthead” type of movies are very popular. Next to all of the Seal Team re-enactment, where the hero soldiers overcome the enemy of the week against all odds.
/s
Go play some Candy Crush like anyone else…
“Nowhere Man”
The Beatles, from their album Rubber Soul.
The song was written by John Lennon (credited to Lennon – McCartney)….
Lyrics:
He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Doesn’t have a point of view
Knows not where he’s going to
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere man please listen
You don’t know what you’re missing
Nowhere man, The world is at your command
He’s as blind as he can be
Just sees what he wants to see
Nowhere man, can you see me at all
Nowhere man don’t worry
Take your time, don’t hurry
Leave it all till somebody else
Lends you a hand
Ah, la, la, la, la
Doesn’t have a point of view
Knows not where he’s going to
Isn’t he a bit like you and me?
Nowhere man please listen
You don’t know what you’re missing
Nowhere man, The world is at your command
Ah, la, la, la, la
He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody
“Making all his nowhere plans for nobody”
… ridged inflexibility
is the highway
into invalidity,
(a heart prognosis)
an open invitation
into Politically
appointed, and
approved, genocide.
Why did you insert a lengthy irrelevant quotation of a song?
The wealthy and powerful aristocrats who have taken over our world are responsible for this nightmare of hatred and violence, which is only for the sake of their profits, and their plan of total domination turning everyone except themselves into slaves of their empire.
In a nutshell, Mike.
This is the problem with borders and fences in general. Luckily the United States can’t shoot people at are border… yet. :(
The zionist pretense that fences are the problem; for only fences cause the massacre of innocents.
Two “other” trolls used the same pretense today here, no?
Strngr-Tgthr is a Soros- type globalist. No borders, no nations, just one world government run by our corporate overlords. Hillary spouted the same dream in one of her speeches that was leaked by wikileaks in the Podesta batch. I am also curious as to his/her continued use of “are” for “our”, and have seen other signs of him/her not being of English-speaking origin.
WHO WANTS TO WIPE OUT WHOM? Examples of the desire for peace by Israelis:
“Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”–Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.
“We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not…You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world.”–Chaim Weizmann, Published in “Judische Rundschau,” No. 4, 1920
“The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war.”–Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha’aretz, March 19, 1972
“It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”–Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of July 14,1972.
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”–Israel Koenig, “The Koenig Memorandum,” April 1976
“We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.”–David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!'”–Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, October 23, 1979.
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel… Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”–Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, New York Times April 14, 1983
“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”–Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, April 14, 1983
“We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.”–Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983
“The Palestinians” would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.”–Isreali Prime Minister (at the time, in a speech to Jewish settlers) New York Times, April 1, 1988
“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”–Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2013/1105-GreaterIsrael.html
@Enver…
““Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”–Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001,”
And still, the US politicians and people stay obedient; calling the US a vassal state is not an understatement by any means…
The “ethnic cleansing” of Palestine started the very next morning after the partition resolution of 29 November 1947 when the 75,000 Arab citizens of Haifa were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly by the terrorist group, the Irgun, under Menachem Begin, and the Haganah, the regular militia under David Ben Gurion. The Jewish settlers who had arrived during the previous decade had built their homes higher up the mountain and thus occupied a higher topographical space. From the superior height, they could snipe at the villagers at will. They began doing this while the Jewish troops rolled barrels of burning oil down their roads and then ignited them. When the terrified residents came out to try to extinguish the rivers of fire, they were sprayed with machine gun fire.”
https://dissidentvoice.org/2015/12/zionism-and-th…
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” ~ David Ben-Gurion, chief architect of the state of Israel and revered as Father of the Nation
In the US, social services are under attack, private home and property ownership is much harder due to an economic policy built on financial myths and the police force has become more brutal. Are Americans being driven out of America?
“The Israeli massacre of Palestinians is a prelude to a dystopian, neocolonial world where global elites, hoarding wealth and controlling the mechanisms of power, increasingly resort to widespread bloodshed to keep the oppressed at bay.
What Israel is doing to Palestinians—impoverished and trapped without adequate food, water and medicine in the open-air prison that is Gaza, a strip of land subject to repeated murderous assaults by the Israeli war machine—will be done to desperate climate refugees and citizens who rise up to protest the pillage by global oligarchs.
Those who resist will be as dehumanized as Muslims. They too will be branded as terrorists. The global elites have a plan for the future. It is visible in the killing fields of Gaza.”
– Chris Hedges
The first time I saw Diana Buttu on TV my impression: she is articulate, committed, brilliant and beautiful. Because of information suppression prevalent in our society, few get to see her and what she has to say.
First article I’ve read, and I read everyday, that is a pile of slanted crap.
As opposed to CNN and the rest of the MSM who report only the facts, and present all sides of the issue fairly. But don’t worry, their “Mighty Wurlitzer” drowns out the voices here at Consortium News, along with the screams of the victims.
I recall the “Winston” zio troll now, from some time ago.
All of us goys are so easily fooled, Winston, that you may as well just be irrational.
Americans have become so hardened over the past decades to all the killing their own troops, their surrogates like Isis and Daesh, and their allies like Britain and Israel have done around the world that they don’t notice it any longer and really don’t care if they perchance do. Contrast that with the attitude during the Jimmy Carter years following the Vietnam meat grinder. In spite of the Iranian hostage provocation, I think most Americans were grateful that no one was killed on Carter’s watch–Americans or foreigners. At any rate, that is how the media portrayed it, until the hostages were released on Inauguration Day. That was sold as the consequences of waving the big stick, even though a secret deal was illegally made during the election campaign. When America got back into the killing business under its following presidents, Bushdaddy made the first slaughter in Iraq seem like a catharsis of sorts when he spoke of “kicking the Vietnam syndrome.”
Nowadays, American presidents seem not to be accepted as our legitimate leader until they get their hands bloody from their first military actions, for which they no longer even request the consent of Congress irrespective of what it says in the Constitution. Case in point, Trump’s two missile attacks on Syria, both on false pretenses, but the only occasions on which he received public accolades. It certainly says something quite critical of our society, if not human nature itself, when the most peaceful presidency within the lifetimes of most reading this blog is generally considered the worst in history–at least in the popular press. The man not only never ordered the troops into battle, he somehow even negotiated a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt.
Maybe Americans really thrive on the excitement of killing and war, as long as their own kids are not drafted to fight it and the bills are put on the tab for future generations to pay. The routine butchery and ethnic cleansing by Israel may just be part of the show, kind of like the lineup of B-rated gladiatorial contests Roman citizens might first watch before the main event of Christians versus Lions. There is something seriously wrong with human minds that condone this stuff rather than taking immediate and drastic action to stop it.
@Sam F…
“We must have amendments to restrict funding of mass media and elections to limited donations, to end this control of the human mind by money power. But those are the very tools of democracy needed to effect the cure.”
That would require proposing such amendments, passing in the house and signed by the POTUS. With the oligarchy/Zionists having a stranglehold of the house and POTUS, with MSM/SCOTUS backing them all the way, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. If ever…
Yes, I mention desired ends only to avoid the choice of a fatalistic conclusion, or presenting reform schemes such as my proposed internet College of Policy Debate to augment Congress and media.
” Never again! Never again!” How often have we read that declaration, heard it spoken, yelled. The heart-rending cry of those who survived the Holocaust, that what had happened during the years of the Third Reich was never to be repeated anywhere again… at least not to Jews. I grew up during WWII and truly felt, believed that my father, my cousins and my uncles were fighting for a truly just cause. Like many boys my age at the time, I might even have had a fear that the war would end before I had a chance to do my part, to fight the good cause against evil, On my 12th birthday the people of Paris were rising up and reclaiming their city from the Nazis. Those were pretty heady times for a kid..it was pretty easy to buy into the “Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori” mindset and it was also very easy to buy into the Zionist propaganda which would be forthcoming soon thereafter, After 1948, overlooking the odd bits of news as to how Israelis were already taking advantage of America’s compassion and friendship, we began to see a barrage of pro-Zionist propaganda. Leon Uris’ “Exodus” comes to mind as a great example and when Hollywood gave us the Movie Version in stunning color with none other than Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint starring in the main roles, Zionism managed to hook a great many Americans to believe in the cause of a down-trodden, much abused people simply trying to establish a homeland, a place where they might be safe to live normal lives.
Not long after that I began to read of ow some of the Arab villages were being terrorized by Israelis who needed or thought that they needed the same lands. A Jewish friend whom I had known to be a thoughtful and compassionate man began to take on a totally different set of ideas concerning the Palestinians after he had married a “Sabra”. a woman who had been born in Israel. His wife , when speaking of Arabs, spoke of them as a hopelessly barbaric people. unworthy of any consideration whatsoever. Listening to her was like re-reading Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race”, a book totally given over to Race Science and racial superiority.. I had known some Lebanese people in my childhood and had found them to be a remarkably compassionate and accepting people . My wife and I soon learned that a discussion at dinner where even the subject of Palestine might present itself was out of the question. I found this to be somewhat reminiscent of conversations of earlier years, when people whom I had come to regard as thinking Germans would be discussing Jews.. It doesn’t take much. All that we have to do is to convince ourselves that another people are “sub-human” in some way and we can treat them as a people unworthy of basic and decent considerations.
It must have been about thirty years ago now, that I was seated across the table in New York from a small, fair-haired, blue eyed Polish-Jew who had survived one of the death camps. She really had quite a story to tell! She had narrowly escaped death on two occasions and on the third near end to her life she had escaped by being laid in a wagon with three other girls, covered with straw, over which the bodies of some Catholics had been laid that they might be interred in a nearby Catholic cemetery. She said that a priest had helped them to escape through the back of his church, after his having given them a small bag of food and had instructed them to keep running into the forest. She told me: ” These Zionists wont let me speak publicly, for we must not mention any help from non-Jews! I found out later that the same priest had been finally caught and executed by the SS. Wasn’t his death a part of the Holocaust?” I felt a great compassion for her at the time and a great respect also.
I have come to see the State of Israel to be a monumental hoax: A “Jewish” state that has very little to do with Judaism or even a Semitic people. Israelis do not even trust truly Semitic Jews. Israel is a nation based n late 19th century neo-Marxist ideals, brought into being by people who are Jews in name only. Israel will no doubt self-destruct, but I very much fear that much of Western Civilization or what is left of Western Civilization, will go down with her. What can we say? Perhaps a stronger people might have survived
Thanks for your well worded description of the reality of Israel’s Zions government and the destruction they are perpetrating on other people around the world, including the Palestinian people. What is going on now is criminal beyond belief; and, it is time the American (US) people, along with any Jews who are also horrified of the “Netenyahoo” gov’t’s horrendous acts put a stop to it and drag that s.o.b to the Hague to stand trial at the same dock that tried and hung Hitler’s monsters.
Certainly the zionist propaganda in the US is entirely a hoax.
Tyrants everywhere must have a “sub-human” opponent to rob for “defending” their supporters.
Amusing that zionist “neo-Marxist ideals” depend upon Capitalist abuse of US mass media and elections.
Thank you very much for your open heartfelt contribution.
I tried to answer but when I got closer to the propaganda used in WWII the usual happened: censored (called moderation, basically squashed). We are nowhere near free speech in Western societies about WWII. The root cause of Israel’s ability to continue with impunity will not be removed for another generation, who can face reality, but not as long as an older generation is in charge.
I so much agree with you and wanted to share similar experiences form my Dutch background and family. I’ll stay with people in Europe for that to share as the US and its “free speech” is not ready for some aspects of reality about WWII.
Maybe even saying this will be censored.
The Holocaust victims of Nazism serving as martyrs for Zionism.
all mainstream media portraying the killings as justified. disgusting.
thank you diana buttu and dennis bernstein.
dennis, i consider you one of the last real journalists in this country.
again, thanks to both of you.