In July 2014, Israel launched a military assault on the Gaza Strip. Health officials in Gaza say more than 1,800 Palestinians have been killed in the four-week Operation Protective Edge, which has also claimed 67 Israeli lives. You could equally well say that “another war broke out between Israel and Palestine” in December 2008, when Israel last launched a military assault on the Gaza Strip. In the 22-day Operation Cast Lead, about 1,400 Palestinians, mainly civilian women and children, were killed and about 13 Israelis, mainly soldiers, were killed. This is not war. It is massacre. It is “an eye for an eyelash”.
Chomsky was on Democracy Now! on Thursday and he is my favourite commentator. Here he is refuting the HuffPost point that Israel ended the occupation of Gaza in 2005: “First of all, the United Nations, every country in the world, even the United States, regards Israel as the occupying power in Gaza—for a very simple reason: They control everything there. They control the borders, the land, sea, air. They determine what goes into Gaza, what comes out. They determine how many calories Gazan children need to stay alive, but not to flourish. That’s occupation, under international law, and no one questions it, outside of Israel. Even the U.S. agrees, their usual backer. That puts—with that, we end the discussion of whether they’re an occupying power or not.”
When someone asks that we don’t take sides, my response is that “we” – I mean the US and UK states and their allies – have already taken sides. “We” support Israel. I cannot bear to be identified with the states that support Israel, regardless of what is being done by ISIS or any other murderers elsewhere in the world.
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