"Walls and Genocides"

Article by Jorge Cadima, member of the International Department

The destruction of the wall along the Gaza-Egypt border had several merits. The first was to temporarily alleviate the suffering of one and a half million Palestinians, who are the victims of an Israeli collective punishment. The second was to break through the news black-out with which the self-proclaimed "free world" is being an accomplice that encourages Israel to continue killing every day, through aerial bombardments, military raids, the denial of health care, power cuts and all kinds of shortages. The images of 700 thousand Palestinians crossing the border, in a tidal wave of struggle for survival, revealed to the whole world that it is not only the Apartheid Wall in the West Bank that is holding the Palestinian people prisoner. And they momentarily broke through the shameless concealment of the slaughter which, with every passing day, materializes a bit more of the slow genocide of the Palestinian people. There may be those who think that it is an exaggeration to speak of genocide. But, to describe something that does not even begin to compare with the suffering to which the Palestinian people have been subjected for many decades, the "Western" governments and media used that word, when speaking about Kosovo. And proclaimed that it was a cause for war.

 

The head of the Israeli secret services informed that 810 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by the Israeli forces in 2006-7 (Haaretz, 14.1.08). The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (www.pchrgaza.org) records 4462 victims (3534 civilians) of Israel aggression, between September 2000 and November 2007. Since then, Israel has killed another 157 Palestinians. They say that Hamas is an obstacle to peace. That is what they used to say about the PLO and Yasser Arafat. It was the current Israeli Prime Minister who threatened to kill Arafat «as one of the means to [...] "remove" him as an obstacle to peace» (http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1042090,00.html, The Guardian, 15.9.03). Several Israeli ministers threatened, a few days ago, to kill Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader (Haaretz, 20.1.08). The only language that Zionism knows is the language of war, terror, death and ethnic cleansing, which always accompanied Israel throughout its 60 years of existance.

 

The permanent complicity of the USA is now being joined by the European Union’s enthusiastic support. Whilst Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, the European Commission’s Vice-President (the former member of the Italian Socialist Party and now Berlusconian member of Forza Italia), Franco Frattini, was in Israel to organize a joint EU-Israel seminar on «fighting terrorism». Israel is already a member of ESRIF (European Security Research and Innovation), an entity that has a 1.4 billion euro budget for the period 2007-13. Speaking at the annual Herzliya Conference, where the leaders of the Zionist State meet their foreign friends to debate strategies and actions, Frattini (in a speech available on the EU’s official site) alligned himself with the Israeli «friends» on all fronts: Palestine, Iran, Syria, Lebanon. He stated that «Israel lives and exists according to the same traditions and values as the European citizens». And that «Europe is better prepared to take real risks itself, to expend political capital and to take on board Israeli concerns and interests in a way that was not on our agenda in the first years of intifada». There are those who want to ensure that, in the next war or ethnic cleansing unleashed by Israel, the EU may have a direct and active participation. It was for this reason too, that the new EU Treaty was adopted.

  • Central
  • Articles and Interviews
  • European Union
  • Israel
  • Lebanon
  • Middle East
  • Palestine
  • Peace
  • Syria
  • USA
  • War