By Walt Zlotow
Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza is obvious to all with a moral conscious. Killing 70,000 Palestinians under 50,000 tons of US bombs obliterating Gaza’s 139 square miles is easy to process. Denying food, water, medicine causing degradation and death to the remaining 2,200,000 Palestinians reinforces that genocidal reality.
But many remain unaware of Israel’s relentless policy of ethnically cleansing the 3.3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem annexed by Israel in 1967. Israel is positively gleeful about bringing the West Bank entirely into Greater Israel for Israelis only. In July the Israeli Knesset passed a symbolic motion that the West Bank is “an inseparable part of the Land of Israel, the historical, cultural and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people” and that “Israel has the natural, historical and legal right to all of the territories of the Land of Israel.”
Folding the West Bank and East Jerusalem into Greater Israel, with or without (preferably without) those pesky Palestinians, has been the Israeli dream since that illegal 1967 annexation. A decade later Prime Minister Begin initiated an inexorable settlement policy to implement that dream. Jewish settlement rose from just a few thousand in the late 1970s, to over half a million by the October, 2023 Hamas attack in southern Israel.
The now two year Gaza genocide coincided with accelerated settlements, attacks on Palestinians, their homes, villages, harvests making life horrendous for the West Bank and East Jerusalem’s 3,300,000 Palestinians. Israeli settlement now approaches 750,000. With the world fixated on the horror perpetrated in Gaza, West Bank ethnic cleaning proceeds under the radar.
Israel pretends to oppose Israeli settler violence when in fact they both ignore an encourage it. Case in point is Zvi Sukkot, former head of settler terrorist organisation The Revolt who had been marginalised by the Israeli government. Sukkot was arrested in 2010 for possible involvement in a mosque arson in the West Bank but released. By early 2023 he joined the Israeli Knesset. After the Hamas attack Prime Minister Netanyahu appointed him chair of the Knesset Subcommittee for Judea and Samara (Israel’s name for the West Bank). The leap from heading up a terrorist group to heading up a governmental agency tasked with Palestinian removal tells you everything about Israel’s agenda for the West Bank.
Is Israel determined to drive out West Bank Palestinians to fold that Palestinian land into Greater Israel? With America’s unrelenting support you can bank on it.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL
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I thought his name was Begin. Tenses matter.
Thanks, leefe. I have fixed.
In yet another example of the inconsistency of the Nobel Peace Awards, Menachim Begin shared the prize with Anwar Sadat in 1978 for the signing of a peace treaty with Egypt. One wonders whether the people responsible for this award took into account Begin’s past activities. He was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, one of the world’s first terrorist organisations. He attacked British assets in Palestine, including the King David Hotel bombing, as well as a campaign of terror, brutality, murder, against Palestinians… a sustained program designed to drive those people from the lands they had occupied for centuries. This eastern European rabid bigot was a demagogue and a murdering racist of the most vile kind… and yet the Nobel committee saw fit to award him the Peace Prize. As I’ve written previously, it’s beyond time to pack that award away and consign it to the dustbin of history.
So some Israelis (we know who) and Christian Zionists (supported by the IDF) consider Palestinians unworthy of existence. I suggest that in recognition of that attitude we should deny any and all Israeli based enterprises the right to Australian markets. That way we consider them unworthy of existence in our lives.
Israel has run an apartheid regime in the West Bank for decades, and was committing genocide by a thousand cuts before Oct 7th. But you wouldn’t have known anything about it if all you read was the ABC.
The ABC’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza has been biased towards the perpetrator Israel, but it’s coverage of the genocide in the West Bank has been almost non-existent.
There have been virtually daily murders of Palestinians both by settlers and Israeli army personnel in the West Bank, yet none of that gets published by the ABC. There have been constant intimidation, humiliation and racist degradation of the Palestinians in the West Bank, but you wouldn’t know about it if you got your news from the ABC.
But if an Israeli citizen gets murdered by a Palestinian the ABC gives that extensive coverage.
I haven’t looked at the commercial tv networks or their webpages, but from what I’ve read they act as cheerleaders for Israel. Apparently, constantly pushing the false narrative of all Palestinians as terrorists, Israel the victim, and for Israel to give it to them, they deserve it.
The Western mainstream media is complicit in a genocide.
Israel breaks every treaty they ever sign. They have breached this supposed ceasefire on a daily basis killing hundreds of Palestinian with impunity and still denying them promised tents and the level of food supply as per the agreement. The planning for the next stage is nothing more than the grotesque imperialist-colonization of Gaza proposed earlier to turn it in a Riviera.
Again the Western mainstream media simply ignores what is going on.
Meanwhile, the Minns government allows a Nazi protest to take place, fails to use existing laws to stop it, but claims that because of that protest it now needs laws suspiciously like the unconstitional ones it earlier rushed through parliament on the back of a hoax (the caravan) that were clearly aimed at hampering anti-genocide protests.
Famous last words – an hour or so later, I’m watching the ABC and lo and behold there’s an article on the 6.30 news report of the murder of 25 Palestinians by Israel. Doesn’t change the overal coverage.
The coverage has been vile and cowardly.
How did the West allow itself to be dictated too and influenced by a country that has been completely infiltrated and dominated by goose stepping Zionist foot soldiers masqueradingas US patriots?
I just came across a great line.
“Anyone who hasn’t been accused of being an antisemite by a Zionist should be ashamed of themselves.”
Of course, it does not apply here because to my surprise, as far as I know AIMN has not been targeted by the Zionist lobby, so we don’t get the opportunity for a face-to-face. Or a keyboard to keyboard.
But I’m proud to say that I was targeted years ago at The Conversation for a comment so mild it was not even a criticism.
I was attacked by gentlemen with names consistent with a tiny country in The Levant.
When I pointed out the inconsistencies in the attacks, they went harder and I was banned by The Conversation.
I’ve never been back, but to my eternal regret I kept no copy of the email from the Conversation.
But it’s a warning — when they start, they go hard.
S. Davis tells of troubles in commenting (ah), so, let me declare that I fought anti-semitism in a long career in education. Anyone in Australia should be able to state a belief held, a position on religion, but, as religion is baseless superstition and mostly injurious, deceiving, misleading, and historically, murderous and thieving supremacist rot, one must face potential attack. There is no god, and nobody has seen one recently, with no personal appearances, DNA evidence, fingerprints, CIA or KGB files and records, photos, interviews, etc. Thus there is no chosen race or promised land, nothing triumphal or special. “They” all know that all the others are wrong, as they all are. Murder and theft in the name of religion, any, is disgusting, immoral, criminal, hateful.
Onya Steve!
Bugger that!
Sorry, something else.
Sour old Menachim Begin, the man put in after the Yom Kippur war in the early mid seventies.
Metaphoric ancestor and avator to Netanyahu and his supporters. If you want to hear real racism, have a listen to some tapes of him.