[Peace-discuss] Galeano on Gaza

[Brussel Morton K.]

Meanwhile, not a scintilla of hope for the Palestinians, or the iraqis  
or Afghans, or…, from the Inaugural speech.  --mkb

Operation Unpunished Lead

January, 19 2009

By Eduardo Galeano

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To justify itself, state terrorism manufactures terrorists: it sows  
hate and harvests alibis. Everything indicates that this  
slaughterhouse of Gaza, which according to its perpetrators is for  
finishing off the terrorists, will achieve boosting them.

***
Since 1948, the Palestinians live condemned to perpetual humiliation.  
They cannot even breathe without permission. They have lost their  
country, their land, their water, their freedom, everything of theirs.  
They do not even have the right to choose their governments. When they  
vote for those they should not, they are punished. Gaza is being  
punished. It turned into a mousetrap without exit since Hamas cleanly  
won the elections of 2006. Something similar happened in 1932 when the  
Communist Party triumphed in the elections of El Salvador. Drenched in  
blood, the Salvadorans atoned for their bad behaviour and since then  
have lived under military dictatorships. Democracy is a luxury which  
not everyone deserves.

***
The rockets which the cornered militants of Hamas clumsily aim in  
Gaza, on land that had been Palestinian and which the Israeli  
occupation usurped, are the children of impotence. And desperation, on  
the edge of suicidal madness, is the mother of the threats that deny  
the right of Israel's existence: ineffectual cries, while the very  
efficient war of extermination is denying, for years, the right of  
Palestine's existence.

Little remains of Palestine. Step by step, Israel is erasing the map.

The colonialists encroach, and after them the soldiers rush to the  
border. Bullets sanctify plunder as legitimate defence.

There is no aggressive war that does not say is defensive. Hitler  
invaded Poland to prevent Poland invading Germany. Bush invaded Iraq  
to prevent Iraq invading the world. In each of the defensive wars,  
Israel has swallowed up another piece of Palestine: the luncheon  
continues. The devouring is justified by the property rights the Bible  
granted, for the two thousand years of persecution that the Jewish  
people suffered and for the panic that the Palestinians lying in wait  
generate.

***
Israel is a country that never complies with either the  
recommendations or the resolutions of the United Nation, that never  
obeys the judgments of the international tribunals, that mocks  
international laws, and is also the only country that has legalised  
the torture of prisoners.

Who has gifted it the right to deny all the rights? Where does this  
impunity, with which Israel is carrying out the killings in Gaza,  
derive from? The Spanish government could not have bombed Basque  
country with impunity to finish off ETA; neither could the British  
government have destroyed Ireland to liquidate the IRA. Perhaps the  
tragedy of the Holocaust entails a policy of everlasting impunity? Or  
that the green light comes from the bigshot power which has in Israel  
the most unquestioning of its vassals?

***
The Israeli army, the most modern and sophisticated in the world,  
knows who it kills. It does not kill by error. It kills by horror. The  
civilian victims are called collateral damages, according to the  
dictionary of the other imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten  
collateral damages are children. And the maimed add up to thousands,  
victims of human mutilation that the war industry is successfully  
rehearsing in this operation of ethnic cleansing.

And as always, always the same: in Gaza, a hundred for one. For each  
hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli.

Dangerous people -warning of another bombardment - in charge of the  
enormous manipulative media that invite us to think that each Israeli  
life is worth as much as a hundred Palestinian lives. And those media  
also invite us to think that the two hundred atom bombs of Israel are  
humanitarian, and that a nuclear power called Iran was the one that  
annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

***
The so-called international community, Does it exist?

Is it anything more than a club of merchants, bankers and war-makers?  
Is it anything more than an artistic name that the United States  
attaches when it engages in theatre?

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the worldwide hypocrisy shows up once  
again. As ever, the indifference, the vacuous discourses, the empty  
declarations, the high sounding declamations, the ambiguous postures  
are a tribute to sacred impunity.

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries wash their hands off.  
As always. And, as ever, the European countries wring their hands.

Old Europe, so capable of war and malignancy, sheds a tear or so,  
while secretly celebrating this master move. Because hunting the Jews  
was always a European custom, but since half a century that historical  
debt is being paid for by the Palestinians who also are Semites and  
who never were, nor are, anti-Semites. They are paying, in blood  
money, the price of others.


(This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends assassinated by the  
Latin American dictatorships to which Israel acted as consultant)

Source: Brecha

[Translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee]
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