EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT
“Three dead and hundreds injured as protests on Gaza border turn violent
Total killed now stands at 41 since unrest started in March”
A ridiculous headline because of its ambiguity.
From the start, Israel's response has been violence, extreme violence.
The protests are noisy and unpleasant, but they have not really "turned violent."
The demonstrators are unarmed, but Israeli snipers keep shooting batches of them, killing, among others, two well-marked journalists and some children. Something in the neighborhood of a thousand have received wounds from guns.
Israel's only real purpose here is not in protecting itself from violence but to make the demonstrators feel the utter futility of their efforts, to demonstrate, yet again, Israel's overwhelming military strength and its readiness to kill on very little provocation and without compunction.
It’s all stuff we knew, but this brutal state never tires of showing us again.
This week-long event is only rightly termed the Passover Massacre.
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Response to a comment, “Israel was established largely to provide a safe haven for oppressed Jewish people”:
Yes, as to why, in part, Israel was re-created, but the great tragedy of it is that it was always something of an unrealistic project, bound to be a moral and ethical failure in the face of millions of Palestinians whose towns and farms were stolen as well as the notion that Israel must have only one kind of people. I know there are a fair number of non-Jewish citizens, but their presence was an accident of 1948, and important Israeli leaders do not regard them as either desirable or permanent. More than a few have advocated their expulsion.
As for the many more Palestinians in the occupied territories, they aren't going anywhere, no matter what horrors Israel inflicts on them. And just where would they go anyway? Who in the region is offering to take millions of refugees? Who anywhere is ready to take millions of refugees? The United States, whose grotesquely unbalanced support of Israel prevents a decent solution, isn’t ready to take even a limited number of refugees from its own bombing campaigns in places like Libya and Syria.
General Dayan, back in the days of the 1967 War, said Israel would have to make the Palestinians miserable enough to want to leave. And that's just what Israel has never stopped working toward, just with highs and lows in the harshness of the effort. But they are not leaving. The ugly sniper killings plus countless other incidents show Israel’s violent frustration with this reality.
In a way, the demonstrations and Israel's extreme brutality towards them hide something far larger and more fundamental and ongoing: conditions in Gaza, home to 1.5 million, are approaching the level of not being able to sustain human life, and that's entirely Israel's doing, its deliberate and immoral doing.
It is stunning that the world can sit back and watch this all happening. Virtually all of our Western press and politicians just shut their eyes. And even the press that does cover it in the smallest degree, often uses euphemisms to describe things.
It is simply the greatest single shame on earth at this time.
The men who lead Israel seem to have learned, from the suffering of their European ancestors under the Nazis, only how to be extremely brutal and vile themselves.
NOTE: While the deaths in Gaza appear to be reasonably consistently
reported, the wounded are not. It is difficult to get a fix on the number,
which, in any case is very high. Looking at different sources, one finds
different numbers. The UN, in its latest rather ineffectual call for an end to
the violence, cited more than 5,500 having been injured by gun shots.
