NATION OF COWARDS
John Chuckman
What else can you fairly call a people who attack a
population of refugees confined to a small space surrounded on every side by
fences and machine-gun towers, a population with nowhere to run? No, that is
not put strongly enough. Not just attack, but use the latest and most ferocious
weapons from the American arsenal to slaughter more than 2100 people, including
more than 500 children, destroying along the way a major portion of the housing,
businesses, and institutions of a poor people.
The definition of a coward
is not the traditional military one of a soldier who won’t fight. No, that’s
far too simplistic and self-serving. The genuine meaning of the word, the
meaning that warrants our full sense of revulsion and contempt, is someone who
attacks someone far weaker than themselves. A large man who beats a woman or a
child with his fists or a policeman who clubs a handcuffed prisoner – that is
the accurate and meaningful definition of the word. And the people of Israel responsible
for Operation Protective Edge are as sadly perfect examples of genuine cowards as
you can find in the world.
What remarkable courage it takes – outfitted as the IDF is
with Kevlar armor, the latest intelligence gadgets, satellites, radios, support
of every imaginable kind, and immensely powerful weapons (they even get hot
pizzas delivered as they pause in their gruesome work) - to shoot people who
cannot run away, are often poorly fed and clothed, and who mostly have no
weapons. And the courage of the Israeli pilots who make bombing runs over
homes, schools, apartments, and stores from the safety of their supersonic
fighters is surely remarkable. They remind me of the American pilots who shot
and incinerated countless retreating Iraqi soldiers in the (engineered) First
Gulf War while the television broadcasts caught their gleeful shouts of “Wow,
it’s just like shooting fish in a barrel!”
Yes, Americans are the only comparable example of Israel’s
cowardice, the Americans who literally enable Israel’s savagery but also themselves
have given the world the best part of half a century of savagery abroad, the
deaths of literally millions of civilians in half a dozen countries – deaths by
carpet bombing, napalm, missiles, white phosphorus, various poisons, and the
razor-like shards of cluster bombs.
The United States, like Israel, is never called to account
for the worst record on the planet of mass killing and destruction. You simply cannot
name a contemporary criminal enterprise or a so-called terrorist organization
which has a record so steeped in horrors as those two.
Wholesale death inflicted with utter disregard for
international law and custom has become standard policy for both countries. Yes,
there are always excuses for mass murder, the weasel words such as communists or terrorists or dictators and
weapons of mass destruction (Americans
ironically being the only people on earth who actually used them, twice, on
civilians) – all of them having no more real meaning than Stalin’s chilling wreckers, a word he used to signal his
creatures that it was time for a new bloody purge. In some cases those purged
were simply people Stalin did not like or of whom he felt jealous, but in most
cases of the millions smashed or consigned to hell on earth, the only motive
was to terrify a population into submission, and that is exactly what Israel’s
motive is for its periodic massacres of Palestinians and Lebanese.
Anyone of moderate intelligence who reads and thinks must
know Israel is in no danger from anyone, least of all the Palestinians who have
no organized army, no navy, and no air force, not to mention very little of
anything else. Israel is armed to the teeth with conventional and
non-conventional weapons, it leans back arrogantly into the arms of super-power
America and plays the victim in a land it victimizes, and it functions as a
garrison state whose major purpose is to hold down and make miserable millions
of people who happen not to be Jewish, all the while hoping they will one day pick
up and leave. It is absurd to say Israel’s security is endangered by anyone, and
especially by the hopeless, lifetime prisoners of Palestine.
Turning a blind eye to the Holocaust three-quarters of a
century ago was an unforgivable thing, but in at least one very real sense, it
is now even more culpable the way the West turns a blind eye to Israel’s
horrors. The Holocaust was perpetrated in great secrecy, and there was no
Internet or international media equipped with satellites to tell the world what
was happening. There was no United Nations or other international organizations
watching. Today, what Israel does is everywhere to be seen. People in America
eat their suppers watching Israeli jets bombing homes. Without much effort you
can find images of Palestinian children with portions of their heads missing. And
we all saw the Israelis from Sderot sit in lawn chairs on a bluff in the
evening breeze laughing and applauding as women and children writhed in agony
far below much like ants being stepped on.
