• 'No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine: PE

    From ltlee1@21:1/5 to All on Sun Oct 13 18:02:39 2024
    https://thewire.in/rights/palestine-israel-apartheid-arundhati-roy-pen-pinter-prize

    "If you read the Pentagon Papers and other documents on US war aims in
    Vietnam, you can enjoy some lively unflinching discussions about how to
    commit genocide – is it better to kill people outright or to starve them slowly? Which would look better? The problem that the compassionate
    mandarins in the Pentagon faced was that, unlike Americans, who,
    according to them, want ‘life, happiness, wealth, power’, Asians ‘stoically accept…the destruction of wealth and the loss of lives’ – and
    force America to carry their ‘strategic logic to its conclusion, which
    is genocide.’ A terrible burden to be borne unflinchingly.

    And here we are, all these years later, more than a year into yet
    another genocide. The US and Israel’s unflinching and ongoing televised genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon in defence of a colonial occupation and
    an Apartheid state. The death toll so far, is officially 42,000, a
    majority of them women and children. This does not include those who
    died screaming under the rubble of buildings, neighbourhoods, whole
    cities, and those whose bodies have not yet been recovered. A recent
    study by Oxfam says that more children have been killed by Israel in
    Gaza than in the equivalent period of any other war in the last twenty
    years.

    To assuage their collective guilt for their early years of indifference
    towards one genocide – the Nazi extermination of millions of European
    Jews – the United States and Europe have prepared the grounds for
    another.

    Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’, Yitzhak Rabin called them ‘grasshoppers’ who ‘could be crushed’ and Golda Meir said ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians’. Winston Churchill, that famous warrior against fascism, said, ‘I do not admit
    that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even
    though he may have lain there for a very long time’ and then went on to declare that a ‘higher race’ had the final right to the manger. Once
    those two-legged beasts, grasshoppers, dogs and non-existent people were murdered, ethnically cleansed, and ghettoised, a new country was born.
    It was celebrated as a ‘land without people for people without a land’.
    The nuclear-armed state of Israel was to serve as a military outpost and gateway to the natural wealth and resources of the Middle East for US
    and Europe. A lovely coincidence of aims and objectives.

    The new state was supported unhesitatingly and unflinchingly, armed and bankrolled, coddled and applauded, no matter what crimes it committed.
    It grew up like a protected child in a wealthy home whose parents smile
    proudly as it commits atrocity upon atrocity. No wonder today it feels
    free to boast openly about committing genocide.

    What can possibly justify what Israel is doing?

    The answer, according to Israel and its allies, as well as the Western
    media, is the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th last year. The
    killing of Israeli civilians and the taking of Israeli hostages.
    According to them, history only began a year ago.

    Israel is not fighting a war of self-defence. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.

    Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth
    can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which
    the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.”

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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