Sunday, May 20, 2018

Collective Guilt

 Israel says it is forced to control access to Gaza for security reasons, although the UN sees the blockade as collective punishment.

A poll conducted this month found 83% of Jewish Israelis believed the army’s open-fire policy was justified. Defence Minister Avigdor Liberman called Hamas a “bunch of cannibals”.

 Israel has killed more than 110 people and thousands of others have been shot, mostly in the legs, according to health officials.

Yehuda Shaul, one of the founders of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation Israeli human rights group run by military veterans, said most of Israeli Jewish society had “sadly enough, bought into the talking points of the government. It was really devastating to see the response of mainstream Israel, so to speak, on this,” he said. Voices of outrage have been largely muted and sidelined. Small protests across the country condemning the army’s use of live fire have barely reached the low hundreds. “There was a voice of dissent. It’s a minority, but it’s there,” Shaul said. “There is a voice and we are proud of it, but we are a minority.”

1 comment:

Tim Hart said...

The slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli military at the behest of its Fascistic government, under the lunatic terrorist extremists of the likes of Lieberman and Natanyahu, is despicable and, of course, a war crime; although the grumbling in the UN to that effect will soon peter out, as it always does. Each individual killed or injured is a personal tragedy and an indictment of the political and moral bankruptcy of the so called ‘International Community,’ the most reprehensible of which being the UK and US governments who have provided the lethal weapons and political cover for the latest murderous Israeli onslaught. In the scheme of things the killing in Palestine, in terms of numbers, is small compared to many other conflicts and needless deaths by other causes around world - disease, famine etc. But I feel that what justifies the elevation of the Palestine issue to something greater than its scale is that it contains all the ingredients of what is wrong with the world, of which there are too many to list here. But two of the most destructive ones are the endless wars by competing nation states over territory and resources, further fuelled by competing religious ideologies. Of course, if there were no nation states and no religions then wars would be extremely difficult to perpetrate; the latter being two of the fundamental planks of socialism and are all but impossible to achieve under the current system of capitalism. On the contrary perpetual war between nation states is an endemic characteristic of the capitalist system.