Mustafa Khan: The Zionist Crusade Against Palestinians

2009-03-26

Richard Moore

The Zionist Crusade Against Palestinians

By Mustafa Khan

26 arch, 2009
Countercurrents.org

The original crusades went on for two hundred years spread over several centuries of the Middle Ages. Another such albeit inverted crusade began with the birth of Israel and its unrelenting and merciless drive against the Palestinians in order to grab their land. The Gaza aggression (2008-2009) in which nearly 1400 mostly innocent Palestinians lost their life and thousands were injured was continuation of the same.

There was genocidal instinct behind the so called Operation Cast Lead. Of the only about 10 Israelis killed most of them were victims of friendly fire. One of the tea-shirts in vogue and now worn by Israeli soldiers displays the belly of a pregnant woman marked with a bull’s eye with the caption: I shot, 2killed. Another depicts a mother weeping beside her dead baby and a teddy bear the caption reads “Better Use Durex”. Both are tell-tale symptoms of same instinct to exterminate the Palestinians so that the Jews can have the land for themselves. Neither the mourning mother nor the pregnant woman physically and immediately poses a challenge to the IDF and yet they must have been most wantonly killed in real of which it is a depiction. What was depicted was taken from the real action that went on for 22 days of December and January. According to the statement of the Israeli soldiers the rabbinate had exhorted them to show no mercy to the Muslims because it was against the tenets of their religion. Another depiction is of a bombed out mosque. There is so much of dehumanizing of the Palestinians that in one tea shirt a young woman is shown with bruises which she must have incurred as she had tried to resist the rape by the Israeli soldier and the writing beside it is “Bet you got raped!”

A heart breaking scene of not showing mercy to the Muslims was the Shifa hospital where a Palestinian doctor was working. Dr Izzeldin Abuelash wept uncontrollably before the camera for the death of his three daughters aged 20, 15 and ten and a niece. Though he was not blaming the invading Jewish soldiers but there were many irate Israelis who shouted him down showing their anger that they had lost more and suffered more! Another instance of denying mercy was the killing of the nine year old Ibrahim, son of Kamal Awago. After killing him the Israelis took him by the leg and turned him and put him on a raised part for target practice and shot repeatedly! As these things were taking place, within Israel on a hill the Israeli civilians were enjoying the sight by eating ice cream as they watched from the ice cream stand how the bombers and Apache helicopters were taking off and shooting missiles at their random targets and phosphorus was sprayed causing pain and suffering on the ground some of which they could see with naked eye or through the binoculars. TIME reporter headlined the story: On the Gaza Border: Israelis Cheering on the Attacks. 

The startling revelation by the soldiers of the Israeli army about the Gaza war leaves no doubt it was a part of a resurrected crusade for our time. As one of them identified as Ram has remarked: “the rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles and their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the non-Jews who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war.” Indeed the army rabbinate had tons of books and roomfuls of books which it must have distributed to the IDF soldiers that ignited them to an induced crusade against the gentile Muslims, here the Palestinians of the Gaza strip.

This is pictorially borne out as the soldiers started wearing tea shirts with the motifs of the war written large on them.

Another soldier called Aviv says: On the one hand they (Palestinians) don’t really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they’re (IDF senior officers) telling us they hadn’t fled so it’s their fault ..” Aviv was a squadron commander and others told him “Yeah, any person who’s in Gaza is a terrorist”’ What else is this than the truth that the Israeli army did not discriminate between the civilians and the Hamas militia and this indiscriminate treatment of the civilians constitutes in the words of Richard Falk war crime of the greatest magnitude. Even the Israeli NGO called Physicians for Human Rights has found through its own investigation of what is another proof of war crimes: “attacks on medical personnel; damage to medical facilities and indiscriminate attacks on civilians not involved in the fighting.” It further says: “Israel placed numerous obstacles in the course of the operation that impeded emergency medical evacuation of the sick and wounded and also caused families to be trapped for days without food, water and medications,” the report said. One specific incident cited by it is that of a Palestinian father called Shurrab whose two sons were shot by Israeli forces as they drove toward the southern city of Khan Yunis on Jan. 16.

“One of the sons died immediately, the other bled to death for 12 hours,” the report said. “All that time the Israeli soldiers were within a short distance from the Shurrabs but did not provide any assistance despite the father’s repeated requests.”

What is the cause of merciless repression of the Palestinians of Gaza by the cuss and cruel Israelis? The heart of the matter is the holy land. Jews and Muslims as well as Christians consider Jerusalem and the environs as their holy land. They fought the crusades to get it or retain it. In the past the Jews and Muslims united fought against the Christian crusaders. Today thanks to superiority in arms the Israelis are hell bent in exterminating the Palestinians. The people of Gaza are displaced people, uprooted from the West Bank and Israel. They were forced to migrate because of the terrorism unleashed upon them by the Zionist settlers in the Middle East. Many of the people of Gaza were born and grew up in the West Bank which the Israelis captured in the 1967 seven day war and drove them out. When the Hamas fighters fire rockets called Qassim into Israel they see it as the only way to fight against the injustice they suffer at the hands of the Israelis. It is the Israelis who are responsible for their diasporic existence today and of all their miseries. The Israelis mount their merciless attacks on them in order to break their will power so that the hope to return to their land of birth and their rightful homeland dies in them.