Israeli Violence: Horrific Smoke Screen for a Political Agenda

http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=20020801165800131

On the internet, as well as in other international news media, one can see and
read the horrors of war, the details of lives destroyed, many of them young and
innocent, about the gruesome details of what happens when explosive power
tears apart human bodies that are no different from our own.

No one can deny the horror it instills in our minds, the disgust we feel when the
reading of these awful stories force us to imagine how we would feel if this horror
were to strike our own beloved families and friends.

While I do agree that it is essential to put this human suffering into the focus of
our attention, if only to prove that we value the precious lives that were lost in
these gruesome acts of violence, I still believe that these accounts of human
tragedy should not divert our attention from other aspects of Middle East
politics. What I am mainly talking about, are the aspects of the conflict that
inflict a more constant, more widespread injury upon entire communities, and
that may have far-reaching ramifications that are likely to perpetuate the
occurrence of these gruesome acts of violence.

While violence-loving people like the elected Israeli Prime Minister Sharon are
basking in satisfaction at watching the carnage unfold, his government is granted
a free hand in creating facts on the ground that form the main objective of
Israeli colonization strategies. News media all over the world, due to the nature
of their business, are far more interested in covering detailed stories of direct
and bloody violence, than in focusing on the confiscation of lands, or on choking
curfews inflicted upon hundreds of thousands of ordinary civilians living under
military oppression.

Unfortunately, with the balance of financial and political influence on these media
in their favor, Israeli casualties are granted significantly more attention than the
Palestinian ones, and perhaps it is only due to the fact that the number of
Palestinian victims is threefold that of the Israeli ones, that people all over the
world have some degree of realization concerning the bloody toll that military
occupation has been taking on Palestinian society.

There is, however, one important difference: while bloodshed has turned into a
two-way street, with casualties on both sides, the systematic policy of
oppression, dispossession, arrests, the siege of entire communities, and land
confiscation all remain the monopoly of the Israeli war machine.

The human suffering that is striking each and every Palestinian living in the
occupied territories on a daily, if not hourly basis, is something that many people
in the world are largely unaware of. At various times in the past few months and
for a continuous period of several weeks now, the Palestinian population has
been living under curfew, in the urban as well as the rural areas, feeling the
weight of this overpowering military occupation on their shoulders practically
every minute of the day. Food and water supplies are running low, and are even
absent among the poorer families, who have come to depend on the charity of
others within their community in order to be able to survive.

Medical care varies from totally absent to extremely difficult to obtain, depending
on where the patient is located, which has led to hundreds of unnecessary
deaths. Vivid examples are deaths from acute medical conditions due to the
blocking of ambulances at roadblocks, gunshot victims bleeding to death from
relatively minor wounds, and pregnant women that are not allowed to reach the
hospital, and are forced to deliver their babies at the roadside, jeopardizing their
own lives as well as that of their unborn child.

At the various “checkpoints” that have been erected on roads linking villages and
cities to one another, the harassment of Palestinian civilians is practically
routine, including severe beatings, unprovoked shootings at unarmed people
wanting to cross the checkpoints, humiliations like being forced to undress in
front of others, and the denying of passage even for urgent medical reasons.
The majority of those Palestinians living in rural areas have not had access to
their lands in weeks, and are thereby deprived of their only source of income, as
have been tens of thousands who used to work within Israel as laborers.

All of these abovementioned crimes against humanity, of which these were only a
few general examples, are inflicted upon an entire people by a military occupation
force that falsely claims to represent a stronghold of democracy and civilization
in the human rights wasteland of the Middle East.

I would be extremely surprised if the tremendous number of accounts of these
practices would not stir the emotions of those who gain access to them.
Actually, I would question the sincerity of people who would read these
accounts, and still defend these practices as “unfortunate but necessary
measures” in order to curb “terrorism”.

Some aspects of the Israeli occupation, however, go even more unnoticed,
perhaps only because no direct bodily harm is inflicted upon people in these
practices. The “Buffer Zone”, that is already being built, starting at various
locations alongside the “Green Line”, has caused the dispossession of hundreds
of farmers, who see their lands being simply confiscated by the Israeli army in
order to be incorporated into the “Buffer Zone”, without their consent, and
definitely without compensation. This is taking place on a daily basis, and is
robbing people from their legal property, their source of income, their human
rights, and their future. The creation of this zone should be on the front pages of
all major news sources, as an example of how the process of continued Israeli
colonization is alive and kicking, and how thousands of people living alongside
this zone are under a very real threat of losing everything they have been living
from, and living for.

Only a few weeks ago, hundreds of acres of land were confiscated from the
village of Faroon near Tulkarm, and annexed into the so-called “Buffer Zone”,
leading to the dispossession of hundreds of people. Thousands of other people
await this same fate, and barely a voice of protest is heard against this illegal
form of land acquisition and colonization. In the same way, thousands of acres of
Palestinian land have been illegally confiscated by the Zionist entity throughout
its history, without any significant restraint. In fact, politically speaking, the
“Buffer Zone” should be somewhere at the top of the agenda, since it violates
international law in more than one way, and constitutes no unfortunate incident
but a premeditated policy of annexation.

While we watch pictures of carnage with disgust, and hear the voices in our
minds and hearts calling for an end to the violence, Sharon can only be smiling in
satisfaction. There could be no better smoke-screen for his real political agenda,
namely the annexation of as much Palestinian land as he can take hold of, and
he will continue to rake up the violence until the Israeli colonization program has
been fully completed to the liking of his cabinet of warmongers.

http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=20020801165800131