Israelis lied to justify massacre in Gaza

By granting diplomatic immunity to Israeli government and military officials from being arrested and prosecuted for war crimes in 2009, the British government acted shamefully and should take some of the blame for the appalling Israeli war crimes committed just recently against Palestinians in Gaza. If, for instance, Tzipi Livni had been arrested and prosecuted for war crimes for her key role in the Israeli slaughter of over 300 Palestinian children in 2008-9 in Operation Cast Lead, it is more than likely that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have thought twice before initiating another insane war on the already besieged civilian population of Gaza. Cameron should have been mindful that it was a British judge who said in December 2009 that there was sufficient evidence to justify Livni’s arrest over the three-week Israeli military assault on Gaza.
In fact the war on Gaza is being used as a smokescreen by Netanyahu to sabotage the creation of a viable Palestinian state that may include Gaza and the West Bank. This war was started by Israel on the basis of lies that fooled the US, the international community and the international media.
Before the start of the recent Israeli-Palestinian peace talks sponsored by the US the Israeli prime minister went on record as saying that it would be difficult to have a peace agreement with only one faction of the Palestinians. A responsible reaction to this statement by the Obama Administration would have been to make Palestinian unity between Hamas and Fatah a high priority, a sine qua non for the conduct of any meaningful peaceful negotiations between the Israel and the Palestinians. In fact, President Obama should have invited the leaders of Hamas and Fatah to Washington to jointly renounce the use of violence and to recognize Israel’s right to exist in return for US support in brokering a Palestinian state that included Gaza and West Bank, with contiguity between the two, including the lifting of the siege of Gaza by Israel.
Taking Prime Minister Netanyahu’s statement at face value, US support for Palestinian unity was of paramount importance if John Kerry’s negotiations were to stand any chance of success. However, the reality was that it took the failure of Kerry to gain the co-operation of the Israeli government in peace negotiations with President Abbas before Hamas and Fatah decided that their unity would be better served than their disunity. Prime Minister Netanyahu became so incensed at proposed reconciliation between the two factions that he used it as an excuse to break off the peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
With zero evidence to support the prime minister’s claim that Hamas was to blame for the abduction of the three Israeli settlers, the Israeli propaganda machine was used to whip up public sentiment against the organization. Although the Israeli government was certain the three youths had been killed, a gag order was issued for political purposes and the public was incited against Hamas. Former prisoners who had been released during the Gilad Shalit exchange were rounded up in complete violation of the Egyptian sponsored deal. Specific targets in Gaza were then shelled by Israeli forces, destroying the cease-fire with Hamas and eliciting rocket fire from Gaza.
“The calm from the previous cease-fire was holding when Netanyahu decided to piggyback on a heinous crime against Israeli settlers.” (Al Monitor, July 14, 2014).
The crimes against three Israeli teenagers were deceitfully exploited by the Israeli government to crush a legitimate political movement that had greater democratic credentials than Likud. Clearly the main goal of the Israeli initiated war on Gaza was the destruction of the national unity government because of the fact that according to Prime Minister Netanyahu this would be indispensable for any meaningful peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.
From a political perspective it is highly unlikely that the Hamas leadership would have approved of the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli teenagers, which Netanyahu deceitfully exploited as an opportunity to re-occupy Palestinian areas on the West Bank and to launch a full scale bombing campaign on the densely populated residential areas of Gaza with genocidal results.
Avraham Burg, a former Israeli speaker of the Knesset and founder of Peace Now argued that the kidnapping of the three Israelis should have served as reminder to the Israelis that the occupation is itself an act of kidnapping the whole of Palestinian society, rather than as a pretext to shed innocent blood as was the choice of the Israeli government.
“We are incapable of understanding the suffering of a society, the cry and future of an entire nation that has been kidnapped by us, “Burg wrote in Haaretz. Israel’s own representative at the UN Security Council, Ron Prosor underpinned the shameful response of the US to the reconciliation of the two Palestinian factions: “It’s time for the international community to right the wrong embrace between Hamas and Fatah.”
What he might have more appropriately said, as the representative of a country that is currently in breach of at least 50 UN Security Council resolutions, was that it’s time for the international community to right the wrong of the Israeli Nazi-like siege of Gaza, time to right the wrong of the Israeli Nazi-like illegal military occupation of the West Bank and time to end the Israeli Nazi-like ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and its illegal settlement building there which is designed to make impossible the creation of a viable Palestinian state. (84 percent of the children in East Jerusalem live below the poverty line.)
Maybe Mr. Ron Prosor is unaware that on Nov. 30, 1970, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted Resolution 2649 in respect of Palestine and South Africa, declaring: “The legitimacy of the struggle of peoples under colonial and alien domination as being entitled to the right of self-determination to restore themselves that right by any means at their disposal.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu and the fascists who support him have committed war crimes in Gaza and they must be held accountable for them. You don’t need to kill 2,000 civilians to destroy 30 tunnels. Furthermore, the US having given the Israelis the green light to what has effectively become indiscriminate mass murder of civilians, and having provided them with the weapons to do so, should also be prepared to finance the reconstruction of Gaza and pay compensation for all civilian deaths and injuries. This could appropriately be taken out of the next US $5 billion aid package to Israel. The extrajudicial killing of Palestinian youths by violent Jewish settlers, or by Israeli police or soldiers has become an accepted feature of the Israeli occupation and takes place every week, with at least three victims a month on average on the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Hundreds of Palestinian homes have been destroyed and 2,000 civilians have been killed who have nothing to do with Hamas, and so the memories of the three murdered Israeli teenagers have been dishonored because their murder was used by Israel as a pretext to create mass murder in Gaza and their murderers have yet to be apprehended and put on trial.
Perhaps the moral of all this is that the US sponsorship of Israeli state-terrorism against the Palestinians, which exists in various forms as outlined above, is not compatible with its role as a honest and credible broker for a just settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As long as the US administration, its Congress with all its law-makers and its Senate, make it pay so handsomely for Israel to ignore UN Resolutions and to live in a constant state of war rather than peace with its Arab neighbors, the US will continue to be part of the Middle East problem and will continue to thwart just and peaceful solutions to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.