U.S. Administration Must Rein In Israel

By VICTOR LAMA

As anyone who follows events in the Middle East knows, Israel is contemplating a re-invasion of the Palestinian Territories. Last week in Jenin, 70 Israeli tanks accompanied by several bulldozers and a half dozen Apache helicopter gunships launched a midnight blitzkrieg attack, destroying several buildings and homes and murdering 2 civilians. As reported by the BBC, the next day, Israeli tanks surrounded Bethlehem and its suburbs, Beit Jalla and Beit Sahour, and began pounding homes and apartment buildings with tank shells and American-made Hellfire missiles launched from Apache gunships, inflicting mass destruction and terror on the civilian populations. These are predominantly Christian towns, which proves that "militant Islam" is not the real enemy, but any Palestinian who resists Israeli military occupation.

The Israeli war machine is escalating the conflict each day, using more bellicose means to subdue 3.2 million Palestinians and destroy their will to resist. These include home demolitions; mass arrests; curfews; road closures, which prevent Palestinians from attending school, going to work or reaching the hospital; state-sanctioned assassinations; and flat-out murder and torture of men, women and children. At Israeli army roadblocks, Palestinians are regularly beaten, shot at and tortured.

On August 19, at the Surrah Israeli military checkpoint, a 7-month-old Palestinian baby girl, Nour Odeh, was shot 3 times in the abdomen while her mother and sister cowered in a taxi waiting for Israeli soldiers to allow them entry into their town near Nablus. "The soldiers opened fire without provocation and they could clearly see the passengers inside my taxi," added the taxi driver Jaber Ishtaya, who was standing next to his taxi and could clearly see three of the soldiers involved in the shooting. The bullets penetrated the car. Seven-month-old Nour, who was in her mother's lap in the backseat of the taxi, was shot repeatedly. According to Ishtaya "Sometimes soldiers let us pass, sometimes they fire tear gas or sound bombs to terrorize us. This time they used live ammunition and it is certainly a miracle that the bullets which wounded the baby were not fatal."

Miraculously, notwithstanding all the anti-Palestinian incitement by Israeli rabbis like Ovadia Yosef, who called for the extermination of all Arabs on April 9, Israeli soldiers are increasingly troubled with their government's policies. An Israeli female conscript, whose job is to search and frisk Arab women and children who come to visit their detained relatives in Israeli jails, told the Israeli paper Yedeot Ahranot on August 10th that "I often feel we (Israelis) are Nazis."

"My job is to search and frisk some 500 Arab women and their children. I search their personal belongings, their garments, shoes, and sensitive parts of the body. I notice their sullen hostility toward us. I see how tormented, how exhausted, how humiliated they are, but I'm supposed to make no regret or remorse about it. I guess I sometimes feel we are Nazis." The Israeli paper further quoted the soldier, identified as Helna Goldotsky, as saying that "I felt that I was behaving like an animal toward those Arabs; they are oppressed."

With the American media promulgating the notion that Ariel Sharon is showing "restraint" by not "declaring war" on the Palestinian Authority, they are affording him the chance to employ the most vile means of oppression while escalating their intensity daily. Many journalists and human aid workers have argued that Israel has already declared war in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

In the meantime, the U.S. State Department, as usual, is playing into his hands by repeating their much worn out mantra, admonishing Arafat to rein in "terrorists and arrest them", while imploring Israel to "show restraint". Of course, this advances the distorted, even perverted, view that Israeli Occupation Forces are defending themselves and the Palestinians are the aggressors. The glaring reality that this Intifada is another Palestinian rejection of 34 years of a brutal military occupation goes completely unmentioned and dismissed.

What we hear from Secretary Colin Powell are the same tired old "condemnations" of Israel's policies of state-sanctioned assassinations (which have killed 20 innocent civilians, including 8 children) and home demolitions as "provocative", but with absolutely no resolve to end Israeli aggression. Bulldozing 1,100 Palestinian homes and destroying another 3,500 with tank and missile fire, leaving 10,000 civilians living in tents is "provocative"? War crimes are more like it! To simply call for "an end to violence" is absurd if one does not address the underlying cause: the violent Israeli military occupation of what remains of historic Palestine.

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