INDEPENDENT REPORT EXPOSED ISRAELI LIES

After months of meticulous investigations, the Israeli rights group, B’Tselem has confirmed that the Israeli military killed 773 non-combatants during the invasion of Gaza, which began on December 27, 2008 and ended on January 18, 2009. Among the 773 were 320 minors and 109 women over the age of 18.
Figures show that within the overall Palestinian death toll of 1,387, there were 248 Palestinian police officers killed in aerial bombardment of their police stations. In contrast, nine Israelis lost their lives, three of them civilians. The new statistics, like others provided by human rights groups, expose as lies claims by the Israeli military leadership that only 1,166 Palestinians died and that 60% of them were Hamas fighters.
B’Tselem, which got no help from the Israeli Defense Forces when conducting its inquiry, says the discrepancies between its findings and the military’s claims are “intolerable.” One of those discrepancies is the fact that 320 minors were killed yet the military says the figure should be 69. However, unlike the IDF, B’Tselem staffers visited Palestinian homes and assembled photos of 252 children under age sixteen who were among the dead. It stresses that behind the dry statistics are “shocking individual stories” with whole families killed.
“Parents saw their children shot before their very eyes and relatives watched their loved ones bleed to death. Entire neighborhoods were obliterated,” says the report.
From B’Tselem’s perspective, the “extremely heavy civilian casualties and massive property damage” require introspection on the part of Israeli society. In calling for “an independent and credible investigation,” the group says military briefings are no substitute for transparency. It has sent its report to Israel’s Judge Advocate General, along with what it calls 20 illustrative cases of the killing of 90 Palestinian civilians that it feels should also be investigated.
There is unlikely to be any positive response by the Israeli government to a report on the slaughter of innocent Palestinians. That same government is only focused on bringing pressure to bear on the Obama administration to support its case for bombing Iran. It has even ignored Washington’s demands for a halt to settlement building and instead has expanded settlement construction.
The dirty little secret of the awful plight of Palestinians is one Israel would like the rest of the world to ignore. Essentially, Palestinians have no rights and they are constantly reminded of that fact by extreme policies restricting their freedom of movement, their rights to land, access to medical facilities, university education and open economic development.
A stark example of how Israeli law favors illegal settlers and not poor Palestinians occurred on the early morning of August 10, 2009 when two male settlers beat an elderly female Palestinian shepherd. They also tried to steal her sheep by leading them towards a settlement. Fortunately, some of her neighbors ran out and began filming the assault. The culprits were well known and the matter was brought to the attention of the local police and military. While that was being done, one of the culprits was observed mingling with soldiers and calling for military reinforcements on a two-way radio. A complaint was later lodged by the victim but is unlikely any action will be taken against her assailants. Such assaults are common though they are not always committed by settlers. Elements of the Israeli military and its intelligence apparatus use far more excessive measures, which often breach international law.
For example, Palestinians, who have complained about the construction of separation barriers hampering their movement, have found themselves visited in the middle of the night by the IDF. They have been dragged from their beds, blindfolded, taken to interrogation centers and accused of crimes. Often they have been beaten and released 48 hours later with no recourse to justice.
When reports surface about separation barriers, they fail to describe Israel’s massive use of road closings, as well as barriers both temporary and permanent. Temporary barriers are put in place making it impossible for the elderly or the sick to negotiate them. They can be huge mounds of earth that are never removed. A major road through Hebron has been shut since 2001 because a settler was shot on it. That road once served 45,000 Palestinians but now it is used only by settlers. In fact many roads have been closed so they can be available to illegal settlements. In one instance, a road closure forced Palestinian children to walk three miles each morning over rugged terrain to get to school. Before the road closure, the journey took two minutes.
The distinguished Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, who was in Jerusalem in February to accept a literary prize, has called Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian “unjust. In February, he was heavily criticized for visiting Israel but later defended his decision on the basis that he had hoped to use the trip to highlight the plight of the Palestinians but never got the opportunity to do so. Recently, he gave interviews in which he pulled no punches regarding his views on Israel. He recalled that he found Israel a traumatic place. It was, he felt, a racist, militant and aggressive society and he attributed much of that to schooling and how children were taught the state’s official history, followed later in life by mandated military service. Israelis, he argued, had failed to understand their policy towards the Palestinians was wrong. They forced Palestinians to undergo through security checks when they wished to go anywhere and would not let them build homes where and when they wanted. Ultimately, they had no sovereignty over their land.
He also commented that the State of Israel was suffering from “some sort of trauma.”
“The brain tells them that excessive self defense is not good but their body spontaneously responds to the slightest of provocations.”
He recalled being in a taxi and seeing, an Israeli soldier take an entire family out of their car at a junction in Jerusalem and beat up the father in front of his children. When he asked another taxi driver what was the purpose of the security wall that ran along the highway, the driver replied that it was there to keep the animals from crossing the border.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry dismissed Murakami’s comments as unhelpful, saying they contained “inaccurate generalizations.”
Murakami was not the first writer to take Israel to task for his militaristic mindset and he will not be the last.