73 Years of Apartheid, Occupation, and Ethnic Cleansing No Israel, There Is No Right of Self-Defense from Resistance against Your Continuing Humanitarian Crimes
73 years ago in 1948, approximately 530 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground and 800,000 Palestinians were forced to flee from their land and their homes. It was brutish power, not justice nor Zionist righteousness that was the basis for this forceful removal of Palestinians from their homes. Today 73 years later, the crimes against the Palestinian people continue and even intensify.
Israel: your brutal power exercised by the Israeli government over the Palestinian people is demonstrated by a 10 or 20 to 1 Palestinian to Israeli ratio of deaths.
Displacement, dispossession, home demolitions, destruction of orchards - sources of income and cultural tradition, indefinite detention in an open-air prison with endless checkpoints, Israeli mob attacks, attacks on the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, illegal settlements, racist supremacy and legalized discrimination (The Nation State Law): Israel, these are all forms of your state sanctioned violence directed at Palestinians. These conditions suffered by the Palestinians generate resistance and, under certain conditions, understandable retaliation in true self-defense.
Consequently, Palestine represents the political understanding that the Greek historian Thucydides pointed out to us 2500 years ago, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must.
However, there are alternatives that the nation that, it is said stands for human rights and ‘the free world’, the United States, could do to generate peace in Palestine and end the suffering of the Palestinian people:
1) Insist on an international regime of equal human rights everywhere, including Palestine and Israel, and use your leverage over Israel to require a just settlement for Palestine.
2) End all military funding to Israel.
3) Ensure that the United States itself abides by International law, and does not continue to be an obstacle to a peaceful resolution of the conflict in Palestine.
It is time to lead with international law and justice, and reject the immoral use of raw power.