by Stephen Lendman

Israel bears full responsibility for ongoing state terror against an entire Palestinian population - the disturbing truth Western officials and media won’t explain, nor their Israeli counterparts, disgracefully calling Palestinian victims “terrorists,” longstanding Israeli viciousness “self-defense.”

Cold, hard truths are too ugly to reveal. Palestinians are being brutalized, terrorized, murdered, mass arrested and tortured daily. None of this gets mainstream attention.

Jeremy Salt says Israeli ideology is “based on marginalization or discrimination…the ultimate source of” justifiable Palestinian anger against a ruthless occupier, too vicious to tolerate. The entire Israeli/Western narrative about ongoing violence is a Big Lie, including misportraying Palestinians as knife-wielding terrorists - ignoring heavily armed soldiers and militarized police lethally shooting defenseless victims, armed only with stones, their bare hands and will to resist tyranny, a just cause deserving universal support.

Life in Occupied Palestine is deplorable by any standard. Decades of repressive occupation show no signs of ending or easing.

Palestinians have no control over their daily lives, terrorized by Zionist zealots, living in constant fear, not knowing from day to day if they’ll live, die, or be arrested and confined to gulag harshness - for being Arabs, not Jews, for being unwanted in their own country, stolen by Israeli conquest and brutal occupation.

They’re longstanding victims of collective punishment, extreme brutality, isolation, economic strangulation, roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences, separation walls, curfews, displacement, and settlement construction on land stolen from them for exclusive Jewish development.

They’re denied fundamental human rights mandated under international humanitarian laws - victimized by Israeli high crimes of war and against humanity, genocide by any standard.

They’re on their own for justice never gotten - the world community ignoring their longstanding pleas for help, siding with occupation viciousness.

Israel turned Palestine into an isolated prison. Gaza is Exhibit A. Every imaginable indignity and degradation afflicts an entire population - millions viciously oppressed out of sight and mind in the West, terrorized for their faith, ethnicity and presence, their redoubtable spirit their only defense.

The late Edward Said called occupation an “atrocity,” a longstanding crime against humanity. He deplored PA betrayal - comparing it to asking an “executioner if he wouldn’t mind sharpening his axe a little before having another go.”

Before his tragic September 2003 death (after a long, courageous struggle with cancer), he advocated a one-state solution, saying:

“The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle of coexistence.”

“Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable. The question” now isn't separation. It's “to see whether it is possible for (Jews and Palestinians) to live together as fairly and peacefully as possible.”

“What exists now is a disheartening...bloody impasse. There is no way for Israel to get rid of Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away.”

“I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen.”

Doing so in no way diminishes life and aspirations for either side, he added. It affirms equal self-determination for Arabs and Jews - living together in the same land where they once coexisted peacefully.

Neither side deserves “special status at the expense of the other,” Said stressed. For millennia, Palestine was (and still is) “multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious.” No “historical justification for homogeneity” or “notions of national or ethnic and religious purity” exist.

“The alternatives are unpleasantly simple: either the war continues” with its unacceptable costs or an equitable solution is achieved.

There's no in between, not now or ever.

Said denounced the deplorably dishonest media - one-sidedly supporting Israel, suppressing alternative views, ignoring longstanding Palestinian suffering, treating them like non-people, turning a blind eye to Israel’s worst crimes, treating Arabs the way Hitler persecuted Jews, suffocating an entire population.

Joel Kovel said Zionism fosters “imperialist expansion and militarism (with) signs of fascist malignancy.” It turned Israel “into a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses” - led by racist tyrants posing as democrats.

Zionism’s corrosive effects harm Jews and non-Jews alike. It’s ideologically extremist by any standard - defending the indefensible, espousing Jewish supremacy, strength through militarism and intimidation, fostering violence over conciliation, confrontation, not diplomacy, war instead of peace, racist hatred toward Arabs for not being Jews.

The late Michael Mandel called settlements “crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

Section 8, paragraph 2 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) “prohibits "(t)he transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, or the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory.”

Israel isn't party to Rome Statute law. Under Canadian law it's irrelevant, Mandel explained. Grave breaches constitute war crimes. Israel and America are criminally liable.

It doesn’t matter. Terrorizing Palestinians continues unabated. Nations and top UN officials able to intervene responsibly turn a blind eye to their suffering.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III".

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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