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How many more Israeli myths will be peddled to justify the killing of children?

January 24, 2016 at 12:53 pm

The state of Israel has been built upon myths which distort reality in order to develop some sense of legitimacy within the state and in the international community. Ardent non-Israeli Zionists, such as successive British prime ministers and US presidents, buy into these myths despite overwhelming evidence that they are illogical at best, and outright lies at worst.

Among the myths underpinning Israel is the claim by David Ben-Gurion that “the Bible is our Mandate”; this is at the centre of Zionism and the fact that neither Ben-Gurion himself nor a host of other Zionist founding fathers did not even believe in God is regarded as largely irrelevant. A Zionist myth which is, to put it bluntly, a lie, is the claim that Palestine was, “A land without a people for a people without a land.” A third is the suggestion that Israel faces an existential threat, and so is a “plucky little state” facing “hordes” of Arabs intent on its destruction. Israel, of course, has nuclear weapons.

This week, Israel’s Minister of Defence, Moshe Ya’alon, repeated another old canard when he addressed the World Zionist Organisation in Tel Aviv. “So as long as the Palestinian Arabs continue to incite their children against Israel,” he claimed, “the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs will never be solved.”

The Jerusalem Intifada?

Rising tensions in the Occupied Territories have led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of clashes.
Learn more about the Jerusalem Intifada

Like many Zionists, especially if they happen to be Israeli ministers, Ya’alon simply cannot or will not accept that his country’s brutal military occupation — which has killed 164 Palestinians since last October alone in the occupied West Bank, 31 of them children — provides all the “incitement” that the Palestinians need to resist in any way they can. In this, the Palestinians are well within their legal rights as an occupied people; Israel has no legitimate right to claim “self-defence” with its oppressive measures against the resistance.

When Ya’alon’s security forces kill young Palestinians in cold blood at military checkpoints they are basically executing them without charge or trial. Israeli army and police officers seem to be incapable of apprehending, disarming and arresting Palestinians; they shoot first and maybe ask questions later. More often than not nobody is brought to trial for these killings. They are all carried out in “self-defence”.

Nothing that Palestinian parents could do or say to their children could possibly “incite” them any more than the Israeli occupation which robs them of their land, steals their dignity, abuses and assaults them and eventually kills them with apparent impunity. It is totally unacceptable for Israel and its supporters to insist that the “security” of nuclear Israel, with its modern, fully-equipped army, navy and air force, must take precedence at all costs over the health, well-being and safety of Palestinian children, to the extent that they can be killed at will by a young conscript acting as judge, jury and executioner.

As was reported by MEMO on Saturday, the latest victim of this brutality is a 13-year old Palestinian girl who was executed by an Israeli security guard in occupied East Jerusalem on Saturday. How many more young people have to have their lives cut short in this way before the international community says enough is enough and does something to rein-in the monster that it has created called the State of Israel?

“The propaganda war is very difficult because it is driven by widespread anti-Semitism and delegitimisation of Israel,” said Ya’alon this week, “and so it is hard to fight it.” Only in the warped mind of a Zionist could criticism of a state – supposedly “the only democracy in the Middle East”; another myth – be brushed aside as racist “anti-Semitism”; or that condemnation of Israel’s “right” to kill Palestinians with impunity in the name of “self-defence” somehow “delegitimises” the state. In the real world, Israel’s own very illegal actions do that; it needs no help from the critics or anyone else. Whatever legitimacy the state may have had has been eroded by its blatant disregard for international laws and conventions ever since it was founded on Palestinian land in 1948. Indeed, as a state built upon the terrorism of the Stern Gang, Irgun and Haganah, it is debateable whether there ever was any legitimacy in the first place.

The Jerusalem Intifada?

Rising tensions in the Occupied Territories have led to dozens of deaths and hundreds of clashes.
Learn more about the Jerusalem Intifada

Thankfully, reasonable people the world over can see through the myths and lies peddled by the likes of Moshe Ya’alon and his colleagues, many of whom are suspected of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and those who back them in Western capitals. Killing children is wrong, regardless of who pulls the trigger or drops the bomb. The world is united against murderous thugs in neighbouring Syria and Iraq (even though the waters have been muddied by the Game of Nations); it should also unite against murderous thugs wearing Israeli uniforms. “Purity of Arms”, one of the “values” of the Israel Defence Forces and its “code of ethics”, is another myth.

The children of Palestine have a right to life that is more sacrosanct than any of Israel’s self-inflated “security concerns”. How many more Zionist myths will be peddled to justify the killing of those children? They, and we, have a right to know.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.