FUNDS, GUNS, SETTLERS COME FROM U.S.
Israel pounds Arab homes in renewed land grab
By Richard Becker
May 14 was a day of unprecedented Israeli violence against
the Palestinian people in the illegally occupied West Bank and
Gaza.
Elements of the U.S.-armed Israeli Army, Navy and Air Force
launched heavy assaults on residential areas and Palestinian
Authority facilities in several areas. At least seven
Palestinians were killed. Many more were seriously wounded.
Densely populated Gaza was rocketed from Navy gunboats, Air
Force helicopters and by surface-to-surface Army missiles.
The heaviest death toll was in the West Bank town of
Beitunia. There the Israeli Army, in a surprise attack,
massacred five Palestinian security officers inside and outside
their small checkpoint post.
Two of the Palestinian officers were reportedly sleeping and
two others preparing food when the daytime attack took place. A
sixth officer was seriously wounded.
PA President Yasir Arafat denounced the Israeli attack as
"assassinations." He said, "Israel must know that it will be
harshly judged over this crime."
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell refused to comment on
the massacre of the Palestinians. Instead, Powell brazenly
attacked Arafat, saying, "That kind of language I don't think
is very helpful, especially during the time Israel is
celebrating its anniversary."
May 15 was the 53rd anniversary of Israel's declaration of
"independence." But the Palestinians commemorate the date as
Al-Nakba, or "the Catastrophe," for when they were dispossessed
and driven from their homeland.
Massive actions were expected to take place in the West
Bank, Gaza, in Palestinian areas within the 1948 borders of the
Israeli state and elsewhere.
Thousands marched in the Ain al-Hilweh, Saadnayel and other
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon on May 13. Mass
demonstrations in Jordan were repressed by the pro-U.S.
government on May 11, with more than 50 people arrested.
Israel escalates war against Palestinians
Israeli attacks on Palestinian areas have been escalating
for weeks, especially in the days leading up to May 15.
On May 7, Israeli tank fire killed a 4-month-old Palestinian
girl and severely wounded several members of her family in
their home in Khan Younis, Gaza.
On May 11, Israeli forces bulldozed at least five homes in
the Deir El-Balah refugee camp in southern Gaza, leaving one
dead, two wounded and more than 30 people homeless.
Altogether, Israel destroyed 60 houses and hundreds of acres
of orchards, groves and farmland in Palestinian areas in the
previous week.
The death toll since the beginning of the second Intifada,or
Uprising, now stands at more than 440 Palestinians and 77
Israelis.
More than 13,000 Palestinians--over 95 percent of the
injured--have been wounded. At least 1,000 of the wounded
Palestinians will suffer lifelong disability, many of them
paralyzed or missing eyes.
A May 1 article in the Guardian of London reported: "The
Nobel prize-winning U.S. group Physicians for Human Rights
blames the widespread use of the M-16 automatic rifle for the
high rate of crippling Palestinian injuries." The U.S.-designed
weapon is standard issue for Israeli troops.
Yet most U.S. media attention--and condemnation--was
reserved for the killing of two Israeli settler teenagers near
Tekoa settlement in the West Bank.
Seth Mandel, the father of one of the boys, brought his
family to Tekoa from College Park, Md., less than five years
ago. According to Menachem Froman, the Tekoa rabbi, Mandel
aspired to be a "spearhead" among the settlers. "They are
pioneers of pioneers,"Froman said of the Mandel family.
In other words, Mandel was among the most aggressive and
extreme of the 200,000 settlers, many recently arrived from the
United States. These "spearheads" of the settler movement,
armed with automatic weapons and backed by the Israeli
military, are determined to drive the Palestinians out of the
West Bank and all of Palestine.
Resistance intensifies
The Israeli government headed by notorious war criminal
Ariel Sharon has vowed to keep building new settlements and
expanding the existing ones. The settlements' purpose is to
establish "facts on the ground"--Israeli possession of wide
swaths of the West Bank and Gaza.
These "facts" are intended to create a situation where, the
Israeli leaders hope, it will be practicably impossible for a
real Palestinian state to come into existence.
It is not just the right-wing Likud governments that have
pursued this end, but the Labor party regimes as well. Since
1993, when the Oslo "peace process" began, the population of
the settlements has increased by 72 percent. The biggest
percentage increase came under the Labor government of Ehud
Barak.
Sharon has rejected any limit to Israeli settlements in the
West Bank and Gaza. This is despite the undeniable fact that
they blatantly violate international law that prohibits
annexing and settling militarily occupied lands.
Sharon has begun denying that the West Bank and Gaza are
occupied at all. He referred to them in recent pronouncements
as "disputed areas." Two weeks ago, the government allocated an
additional $375 million to settlement expansion.
Contrary to the image deliberately created by U.S. officials
and their official media, nearly all the fighting and dying
goes on inside the tiny fraction of Palestine that is under
tenuous Palestinian control. The relentless Israeli aggression
is relentlessly termed "retaliation" by the corporate
media.
Although it faces overwhelming fire power and what appear to
be insurmountable odds, the Palestinian resistance is
intensifying and deepening. After all, the Palestinians have
long confronted what appear to be impossible obstacles.
While they lack helicopters, gunboats, tanks, missiles and
machine guns, the Palestinians are fighting back heroically
with everything at their disposal. Tens of thousands reportedly
marched militantly through Ramallah at the funeral of the five
Palestinian security officers.
What the Palestinian people need in this critical hour is
intensified international solidarity.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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