The Final Solution to the Palestinian Question
James Petras, Nov 28 2012

For the past 45 years, the state of Israel has been dispossessing millions of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, confiscating their lands, destroying homes, bulldozing orchards and setting-up ‘Jews-only’ colonial settlements serviced by highways, electrical systems and water works for the exclusive use of the settlers and occupying soldiers. The process of Israeli territorial expansion throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem has greatly accelerated in recent years, converting Palestinian-held territory into non-viable isolated enclaves, like South Africa’s Bantustans, surrounded by the Israeli soldiers who protect violent settler-vigilantes as they assault and harass Palestinian farmers at work in their fields, beat Arab children on their way to school, pelt Palestinian housewives as they hang their laundry, and then invade and defecate in Palestinian mosques and churches. Israel’s strategic goal is to impose ‘Greater Israel’ on the region: to take over all of historical Palestine, expel the entire non-Jewish population, and subsidize ‘Jews-only’ settlements for settler-immigrants, often from the US and former USSR. While bulldozers and tanks have dispossessed Palestinians in the West Bank for decades, missiles and bombs have become the ‘weapons of choice’ for uprooting and eliminating the Palestinians in Gaza. In just 8 days, Israel’s latest blitzkrieg resulted in the killing of 168 Palestinians, including 42 children and 100 civilians, the wounding of 1,235, the destruction of over 1,350 buildings, and the further traumatizing of over 1.7 million children, women and men fenced in the world’s largest concentration camp. According to the Israeli Defense Minister, the Jewish State dropped “1,000 times more bombs onto Gaza” than the Palestinians fired back into Israel.

The current Israeli offensive began with the gruesome assassination of a prominent Hamas leader, Ahmed Jabari, and immediately escalated into an assault on the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. Secure in the knowledge that the Palestinians had no capacity to retaliate with similar weaponry, the Israeli High Command ordered the systematic destruction of civilian life, workplaces and densely populated neighborhoods. Over 75% of the casualties have been non-combatants; almost half are children, women and the elderly. The Israeli propaganda machine and its fifth column in the US fabricated and repeated the Big Lie that the Jewish state was ‘defending itself.’ Right. With only six (mostly military) deaths and 280 wounded (the majority non-threatening) versus the nearly 200 Palestinians, mostly civilians, slaughtered. The US Zionist Power Configuration embedded in the policy centers of the US executive, the Congress and both political parties, parroted this line. All the major US TV networks and print media reproduced verbatim Israeli Foreign Office press handouts about Israel’s ‘defensive’ genocide, while entire Palestinian families were being buried under the rubble of their bombed apartments. Death and destruction, planned and executed with the unanimous support of all the major Israeli political parties and leaders, enthralled the mass of its Jewish citizens. Indeed, over 80% of Israeli Jews supported the terror blitz against Gaza. Russia Today reported:

A new wave of hatred towards Palestinians is sweeping through Israel, from public figures to the man in the street.

The Israeli Interior Minister declared:

Gaza should be bombed into the Middle Ages.

Israeli demonstrators in Tel Aviv shouted:

They don’t deserve to live, they must die! May your children die! Now we must go back there and kick out all Arabs!

Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, the son of a former chief rabbi, made a speech in the Cave of the Patriarchs in occupied Hebron where he blessed the Israeli soldiers and urged them “to slaughter their enemy.” Even more to the point, Israel Katz, Israel’s Transport Minister, said:

Gaza must be bombed so hard that the population will have to flee into Egypt.

Avi Dichter, the Minister of Home Front Defense, incited the Israeli military to “re-format” Gaza, that is to erase its population with bombs. Almost half of Israeli Jews considered Netanyahu’s terror bombing of Gaza insufficient, opposed the ceasefire and demanded the bloody assault against the Palestinian population of Gaza continue. Almost a third thought their government should have sent ground forces into Gaza, an invasion which would have led to tens of thousands of Palestinian casualties and total destruction of their vital infrastructural lifelines. Netanyahu and his allies in power now confront a new, totalitarian mass opposition that openly embraces a genocidal ‘Final Solution’ to the Palestinian problem. The parallels between the pronouncements and actions of Nazi Germany and Zionist Israel are overwhelming. The bloodlust in Israel goes far beyond psychopathic raving of a few deranged rabbis and marginal politicians. It extends from the top Cabinet members to the average citizen. In Israel, almost an entire people, over 80% of Jews, support the terror bombing and slaughter of the people of Gaza with varying degrees of intensity. Setting aside the profound sociopathic disorders of the raging and racist multitude in Israel, what is politically more significant are the totalitarian rants of leading Israeli public figures, published as editorials in such newspapers as the JPost, where Gilad Sharon wrote:

We need to flatten all of Gaza. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.

MK Michael Ben-Ari wrote:

There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down.

These outbursts reveal Israel’s strategic goal: genocide at the service of Greater Israel, the bloody purge of 5 million Palestinians, the creation of a 100% ‘pure’ Jewish State. Overseas (mostly US) Zionist-Jewish media moguls, Ivy-League university academics, billionaires, US Congress people and government officials finance, underwrite, propagandize for and promote with single-minded perseverance the defense of Israel’s most heinous war crimes, its violations of international law and its ongoing crimes against humanity. During the entire period of the recent Israeli blitzkrieg, Israel’s fifth column, the CPMAJO, the NYT and the rest of the major US press rose to the dirty task of giving unconditional support for Israel’s war crimes. Vocal support from the White House and by extension the leaders of the EU echoed Netanyahu’s lies. In order to grasp the media whitewash of these ongoing crimes against humanity, one could compare the US press reports on Israel’s bombing of Gaza to those which would have appeared in the leading fascist newspapers at the time of Hitler’s ‘defensive’ attacks on Poland and Belgium and the bombing blitz of civilians in London.

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