Debunking Two Israeli Myths

Found this on a link my brother sent me today. Great site dealing with Palestine and the Israelie occupation. THe site also has lots of facts that you may not know such as the fact that palestinians have to have seperate license plates, they cannot buy or lease land and that yearly U.S. Aid to Israel a developed country exceeds all aid given to the entire african continent. Anyways heres the two that I found and thought rang true.

Heres the site if you want to take a gander. FREE PALESTINE

1. No moral equivalence

"There is no moral equivalence between suicide bombings on the one hand, and Israel's killing of Palestinians on the other because while suicide bombings deliberately target civilians, Israeli forces do not.

Suicide bombing is a reprehensible and unacceptable tactic. These attacks should stop immediately. What needs to be added, and what is almost always missing in American media commentary is a similar condemnation of Israel's deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians.

Since the Palestinian uprising started in late September 2000, more than 1,500 Palestinians, and 400 Israelis have been killed (as of April 12, 2002), the vast majority on both sides being unarmed civilians. Most of the deadly violence against innocent civilians, therefore, has been committed by Israeli forces and has been directed at Palestinians.

Israel and its supporters claim that while Palestinian suicide bombers deliberately target Israeli civilians, Israel tries to avoid harming Palestinian civilians and that those who have died are "collateral damage." Hence, they argue, there is no moral equivalence between the killing of civilians by Israel and Palestinians. This defies both common sense and all the available evidence.

On the one hand, Israel wants us to believe that 400 of its own civilians were deliberately targeted, while more than three times as many dead Palestinians all somehow just got in the way of what Israel claims is its humane and disciplined army. It is, in essence, an argument that 1,500 people all died by accident.

Every human rights group that has examined Israel's practices has documented systematic and deliberate use of violence targeted at unarmed Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces. Physicians for Human Rights USA which investigated the high number of Palestinian deaths and injuries in the first months of the Intifada, concluded that:

"the pattern of injuries seen in many victims did not reflect IDF [Israel Defense Forces] use of firearms in life-threatening situations but rather indicated targeting solely for the purpose of wounding or killing."

[Source: PHR USA, 22 November 2000]

This finding was based on "the totality of the evidence" the investigators collected about:

"the high number of gunshots to the head; the volume of serious, disabling thigh injuries; the inappropriate firing of rubber bullets and rubber-coated steel bullets at close range; and the high proportion of Palestinian injuries and deaths."

The findings of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch confirm this pattern. Israeli human rights group B'Tselem has documented and condemned the targeted use of violence against Palestinian civilians and has found evidence of systematic torture of thousands of Palestinian detainees, including children.

What has been confirmed by human rights groups has also been observed directly by journalists.

In October 2001, Harper's magazine published the "Gaza Diary" of journalist Chris Hedges. Hedges' entry for June 17, 2001 provides even more shocking evidence of the wanton and deliberate killing of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers at Gaza's Khan Yunis refugee camp.

Hedges writes:

"I sit in the shade of a palm-roofed hut on the edge of the dunes, momentarily defeated by the heat, the grit, the jostling crowds, the stench of the open sewers and rotting garbage. A friend of Azmi's brings me, on a tray, a cold glass of tart, red carcade juice."

"Barefoot boys, clutching kites made out of scraps of paper and ragged soccer balls, squat a few feet away under scrub trees. Men in flowing white or gray galabias -- homespun robes -- smoke cigarettes in the shade of slim eaves. Two emaciated donkeys, their ribs protruding, are tethered to wooden carts with rubber wheels."

"It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker."

""Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!""

"I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's cunt!""

"The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come."

"A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos."

"Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered -- death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo -- but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."

There can be no doubt that Israeli troops have been targeting innocent Palestinian civilians for death from the beginning of the uprising. This understanding was also reflected in UN Security Council Resolution 1322, passed on October 7, 2000, which

"Condemns acts of violence, especially the excessive use of force against Palestinians, resulting in injury and loss of human life."

In making the moral superiority claim, Israel's apologists are either shamelessly denying the irrefutable evidence cited above and are simply lying, or they are asserting that some forms of murder are morally superior to other forms of murder.

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2. Self-defense

"Israel's invasion of Palestinian cities and refugee camps is self-defense against suicide bombings. No country can tolerate its citizens being blown up in streets and cafes and Israel has to act."

The Israeli claim that its attacks on the Palestinians constitute "self defense" ignores the fact that its posture in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip is, by definition, not defensive. Since 1967, Israel has maintained tens of thousands of heavily armed troops outside its borders for the purposes of stealing land from the Palestinians and forcing them to live as non-citizens under a foreign military dictatorship.

Seized Palestinian land has been used to build Jewish-only settlements linked by a network of Jewish-only roads, in flagrant violation of UN Security Council Resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention. This colonization is, and can only be, carried out by the violent suppression of any and all Palestinian resistance to the occupation.

Throughout the years of the "peace process" during the 1990s, Israel continued to construct settlements, doubling the number of settlers in the West Bank from about 100,000 to 200,000 according to the Israeli group "Peace Now." At least 34 new settlements have been built since Sharon took office.

The settlement colonization policy is, and can only be carried out by the violent suppression of any and all Palestinian resistance to the occupation. Throughout the years of the "peace process" Israel continued to construct settlements, doubling the number of settlers according to the Israeli group "Peace Now."

The entire international community has recognized that Israel's military occupation must end, and that its continuation, along with the settlement policy, and the massive repression they entail is a guarantee of continued bloodshed. Israel's brutal actions in the occupied territories are designed to consolidate and entrench the occupation and expand Israeli colonization, and are therefore, by definition, not defensive in nature.