William Bowles: civilians were the intended targets in Lebanon & Gaza

“Gaza fought back, withstood, resisted …. Arabs are now speaking of victory, hailing the resistance, singing the praise of the Palestinians in Gaza…” — Ramzy Baroud

Sixty years ago, in the aftermath of a European war, the Palestinians were made the sacrificial lamb, slaughtered in the abattoir of Capital by their executioners, the Zionists and their imperial paymasters.

Unfortunately for Israel, those damn Palestinians persisted in ‘hanging around’, jammed into refugee camps across the Middle East, ghettoized and relegated to third class people in the land of their birth, Palestine.

The ‘traditional’ view is that expunging an entire nation from the face of the Earth was somehow an atonement for European ‘guilt’ over the Nazi death camps. Looking back, I’m amazed that this idea ever gained any kind of credibility, but it became the rationale for sixty years of misery and death for the Palestinian people as well as a source of destabilization for the entire Middle East.

What it does reveal however, is the deeply rooted racism in Western society, the product of centuries of colonial domination.But I venture to guess that at long last that Israel as ‘victim’ is finally done away with by its own hand and we can get down to looking at Zionism for what it is, messianic, expansionist and racist, in other words, imperialistic, and not coincidentally, an ideology borne at the height of the British Empire’s power.

Utilized as part of a broader strategy of the suppression of Arab nationalist movements, The British ruling class has used the ‘Jewish Question’ as a weapon of war aided by those with wealth and power, whether Jew or Gentile. What unites them is capitalism.

And just as with the Nazi concept of the master race, the ‘uber mensch’, Zionism promulgates the idea of the ‘chosen people’.

And just as the Nazi death camps were the logical outcome of the ideology of Nazism, the genocide of the Gaza Strip is the logical end-product of Zionism, for Zionism is an ideology of denial, starting with the invented history of Israel, ‘people for a land for a land without a people’, a lie that bears a close resemblance to the Nazi extermination programme that sought to expunge all traces of an ‘alien presence’ in ‘Greater Germany’, whether Jew, Gypsy, homosexual or Communist, and not forgetting the ‘feeble-minded’.

Every act since Israel’s foundation in 1948 has been one step on the road to the Gaza Strip Holocaust. (See Norman Finkelstein’s powerful photo-essay ‘The grandchildren of holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany…’)

The problem the Zionists and their US-UK paymasters have is where to from here? Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya suggests in his essay, ‘Israel’s Next War: Today the Gaza Strip, Tomorrow Lebanon?’ that it’s to be the next target. And who knows, these deranged sociopaths are clearly capable of anything including a remarkable and perverse reinvention of the Third Reich and in the name of the Jews no less! What goes around, comes around…

Here’s what the Israelis and their US paymasters’ have to say on the subject:

“Last year several high-ranking Israeli army generals published an outline of their plan of retaliation against Lebanon in the event of an attempt by Hezbollah to attack Israel.

“Dubbed the “Dahiyeh Doctrine,” after the Arabic world for suburb, in reference to Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs, often simply called “Dahiyeh,” the Israeli generals said in the next war with the Lebanese Shiite organization they would “unleash unprecedented destructive power against the terrorists’ host nation of Lebanon.”

“Speaking to the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahronoth, the head of Israel’s Northern Command, Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, announced that his Dahiyeh Doctrine for fighting Hezbollah had gained official approval. “This is not a threat,” he was quoted as saying, “This is policy.”

“Under Eisenkot’s plan, in the event of war the civilian centers from which Hezbollah operates will be viewed exclusively as military installations. If and when the next conflict breaks out, Israel, said a group of senior army generals, would refrain from chasing mobile Hezbollah missile teams around southern Lebanon. Instead, they would “create deterrence” by punishing Lebanon and the individual towns and villages that provide the terror group with its fighting force and cover.

““We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction,” said Eisenkot.

“In so doing, implementation of the Dahiyeh Doctrine would cause massive casualties among the Lebanese civilian population.” — ‘Analysis: Israel’s plans for Lebanon’ by Claude Salhani, Washington (UPI) Jan 19, 2009

Declaring the slaughter over (for now), Olmert has stated that Israel’s objectives have been realized, which clearly they haven’t as Hamas is still in place and still capable of resisting. This brings into question the entire alleged rationale for Israel’s Blitzkrieg, for the destruction of the Gaza Strip is nothing more and nothing less than an attempt to destroy the Palestinian will to resist the occupiers, destroy what remains of Palestinian civil society and, in the process turnevery Palestinian into a member of Hamas, whether they want to be or not.

The West’s parallel media war on Palestine

The BBC, as the mouthpiece of the British state has made it abundantly clear where they stand on the slaughter of women and children: bring it on! But perhaps in the longer term this has a positive side for it reveals the BBC for what it is, a wholy owned subsidiary of the British ruling class (and paid for by us).

Without the public’s support, or at least acquiescence to our government’s cold-blooded support of the Zionists utilizing the direct complicity of entities like the BBC, selling Israel’s slaughter would have been well nigh impossible.

In a BBC report ‘Rocket salvo tests Gaza ceasefire’, we read,

“BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen says the question now is whether Hamas decides to lick its wounds and regroup – or whether it gambles on dragging Israel into a war of attrition.”

The implication, no, a blatant lie is that it’s Hamas who is “dragging Israel into a war of attrition”. What an outrageous statement! Buried in this statement is the endlessly repeated mantra; it’s Hamas’s unguided missile attacks on a ‘civilian’ population, that it’s a Hamas ‘provocation’ that is the cause of the ‘war’ (even here, using the word war is entirely misleading. Wars assume at least two armed protagonists slogging it out, but trashing Gaza has been an entirely one-sided operation, Grad rockets don’t shoot down F-16s or Apache helicopter gunships.

Missing from Mr. Bowen’s ‘analysis’ is the simple fact that almost every Israeli (except the Arab ones) are in the military. There are half-a-million reservists, one sixth of the total Jewish population. Israel is a totally militarized society, from top to bottom. It thrives on it. 3 million Jews wield the world’s fourth largest army, and one armed by the United States not only with F-16s and helicopter gunships but with an estimated 250 nuclear weapons. Imagine almost half the population of London with that kind of firepower! The mind boggles.

No, what we get from Mr. Bowen is the endless peddling of the myth that it’s Islamic ‘terrorists’ who broke the cease-fire thus bringing the wrath of Abraham and other assorted prophets down on their heads. But it’s an established fact that it was Israelis who broke the cease-fire not only killing Palestinians in an ‘incursion’, but by not sticking to the terms of the cease-fire agreement in the first place. The entire piece referred to above is about Hamas breaking cease-fires, not the Israelis and as such it directly serves the interests of Israeli/US imperialism.

Of course you won’t find a reference to this in anything the BBC publishes. As with anything that contradicts the carefully constructed mythology of Israel as ‘victim’, the BBC airbrushes these out.

The entire process, extending back over the decades consists of a series endlessly repeated lies not only about Hamas, but Fatah, the PLO, Hezbollah, in fact anything vaguely ‘Islamic’ but definately Arab, is the subject of a series of lies about the real history of the conflict and where the blame really lies.

But if there’s one thing the Israeli Blitzkrieg on the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip reveals it’s just how important the media/propaganda component of waging wars is in a world of instant communications. Events and their causes are constantly manipulated, from hour to hour, even minute to minute in order to maintain the Big Lie.

Destroy the victim

“Therefore, Israeli officials say, an offensive that caused average people to suffer put pressure on Hamas in real and specific ways.” — ‘Parsing Gains of Gaza War’, NYT, 19 January, 2009

It couldn’t be made plainer than this even if “real and specific ways” is the way the NYTobscures the slaughter of the innocents. The destruction of the Gaza Strip is then, by Israel’s own admission, an unabashed act of terror, directed not at Hamas but at the 1.5 million refugees in the Gaza Strip.

“As Livni herself announced several times, the attack on Gaza, which is a massacre, a genocide, is not being done in order to topple Hamas or to stop the firing of the rockets: they are attacking Gaza to destroy any group or any Palestinian movement that sees resistance as the main way to face the Israeli occupation.” — Nassar Ibrahim: “Resistance Should be our Strategic Choice”

And, as with the myth of who broke the ceasefire, Israel’s own admission of targeting civilians in order to break their will to resist is also missing from the BBC’s ‘analysis’.

Instead, we read in the BBC’s latest puff piece for Israel,

“The Israeli Social Welfare Minister, Isaac Herzog, told the BBC the problem was how to rebuild Gaza without facilitating further attacks on Israel by militants.

“There was a risk during reconstruction that buildings would be turned into missile launch sites, he said.” — ‘Gaza rebuild ‘to cost billions’, BBC News Website, 20 January, 2009

The fact that the BBC chose to use this ludicrous and utterly irrational statement illustrates just how deeply in bed the BBC and most of the Western media is with Israel and how oblivious it is to its own deceptions.

This essay is archived at: http://www.creative-i.info/?p=4124

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