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LETTER: Israel still operating without boundaries

July 14th, 2018 5:00 PM

By Southern Star Team

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SIR – Frank Adam has joined Joshua Rowe in bringing us a selective Zionist view from Manchester on the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict.

SIR – Frank Adam has joined Joshua Rowe in bringing us a selective Zionist view from Manchester on the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict.

Frank has given up on the Rowe argument that the land was empty and instead suggests that much of Israeli land was the subject of just a routine commercial transaction from Arab to Jew. An extraordinary statement considering that, in less than six months alone, from December 1947 to mid-May 1948, Zionist armed groups expelled some 440,000 Palestinians from 220 villages. 

A devious Israeli law was brought in, designed so that a Palestinian landowner who was absent from his property for more than a day could have his land purchased by a Jew. Perhaps such transactions were in Frank’s mind in offering his new explanation on the state of Israel.

The new state of Israel, in reality, was built on the ruins of a dispossessed Palestinians’ homeland (both Muslim and Christian) to solve the problem of a Jewish exit from Europe where anti-Semitism endured the war, and a colonial power unable to enforce its occupation mandate. 

As a result, most Palestinians were turned into refugees, and denied by Israel the right to return to their homes ever since. This despite Palestinians having nothing to do with the Holocaust, but due to their land being gifted for settlement by a departing colonial power.

Frank dismisses the disproportionate killings by Israel of Gazans living in abysmal and unsustainable conditions as due to poor Palestinian leadership. That Israel authorises the shooting of unarmed protesters, press, media and children (146 killed and thousands gravely injured in one week) is thus dismissed as of no consequence or significance under international law. 

How strange it is that the once oppressed have so easily become the oppressors, while the justice of Gazans’ demand for the return to their dispossessed homes is ignored by Zionist apologists for ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, the illegal military occupation, blockade and apartheid laws continue unchallenged despite the outrage expressed over extra-judicial killings, the inauguration of the US Embassy in the divided city of Jerusalem and human rights violations such as child detentions.

Israel has no defined borders and continues with its a major plan to build an ever ‘Greater Israel,’ as made public by former Israeli PMs Ben-Gurion and Yitzak Shamir. To ensure that there was to be no suggestion of equality, the Zionists self-styled Israel as ‘the Jewish State of Israel.’

Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the thousands of Gazans taking part in the March of Return were not pawns of Hamas nor ‘infiltrators’ trying to breach a sovereign state. They were, in effect, displaced and disenfranchised ‘citizens’ breaking out of a state-built ghetto. The Israeli army was not holding off ‘foreign invaders,’ but killing and suppressing those for whose lives it has assumed responsibility.

The Zionist regime is intent on perpetuating the status quo so that it continues to grab Palestinian land for still more illegal Jewish settlements populated with incentivised recruits from Europe and the rest of the world. Israel is unique due to its 50+ years of illegal occupation with thus no recognised international borders to restrict its disregard for the rights to self-determination of Palestinians. 

As a nuclear power with weapons of mass destruction, and with the US an ever more willing aid-giver under Trump, Israel feels secure in operating without physical or behavioural boundaries.

Bob Storey, 

Skibbereen.   

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