Palestinians Targeted By Angry Israeli Settlers
Israeli Settlers on the Rampage Assassinating Palestinians on Camera
Dec 8, 2008
Violence has erupted again between extremist Jewish settlers and Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. The hostilities began in the town of Hebron in the West Bank, after the Israeli High Court ordered settlers, on November 16, 2008, to vacate a building they had been occupying since March 2007. Angry settlers went on the rampage, attacking Palestinians and their property. The latest attack was captured on film by an Israeli human rights group, documenting the cold-blooded murder of a Palestinian man by an enraged Jewish settler.
The violence later spread to other Palestinian towns and villages. The West Bank has been closed off by the Israeli army.
Jewish Settlements
Jewish settlements are Jewish-only housing units built on land occupied in 1967. The settlers -most of whom are armed- believe they have a God-given right to the land of Israel. They have openly declared a “price tag” policy under which they respond to any eviction by attacking Palestinians and Israeli security forces.
The United Nations considers Jewish settlements in the West Bank to be illegal. Feeble protestations by the international community for Israel to halt its settlement activity have been ignored. No serious action has been taken by the UN to force Israel to comply with international law. Instead, successive Israeli governments have gone on to build and expand settlements amidst Palestinian towns and villages, while the UN continues to issue resolutions and recommendations urging Israel to stop constructing new and dismantle existing settlements.
8,000 settlers occupy approximately 40 percent of the land in the Gaza Strip, while about 1.3 million Palestinians live on the remaining 60 percent. 600 hardline Jewish settlers live in Hebron under heavy military protection amidst 170,000 Palestinians.
“Scream Bloody Murder”
“Scream Bloody Murder” premiered on CNN December 4, 2008, coinciding with the upcoming 60th anniversary of the UN Convention on Genocide. Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour did a magnificent job to draw attention to the United Nation’s lack of genuine effort to stop genocide since its 1944 convention. She addresses the world’s inaction against Adolf Hitler’s mass murder to exterminate all Jews from Europe, George Bush’s turning a blind eye to Saddam Hussein’s gassing of his own Kurd citizens -in contrast with his immediate action to protect US oil supplies when Hussein invaded Kuwait, and Bill Clinton’s failure to act during the Rwandan Hutu-Tutsi conflict.
But what she fails to address, like all mainstream media, is the alarming international apathy towards the ongoing mass murder and human rights violations against the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Genocide, as defined by the Oxford Canadian Dictionary, is “the mass extermination of human beings, especially of a particular race or nation.” The blockade imposed on Palestinians living in Gaza, the violence of extremist settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, and continued mass punishment policies inflicted on the entire Palestinian population that violate basic human rights (all committed with the sole aim of eradicating the Palestinian nation) cannot but be defined as genocide.
Israel was strongly criticized for its human rights record during the United Nations Human Rights Council review in Geneva on December 4, 2008. Its response was to point “to progress in the rights of disabled people, greater tolerance of sexual diversity and the banning of corporal punishment in schools,” according to alarabiyya.net. No reference was made to the fact it was an occupying army, utilizing brute, occupation- force measures to enforce its hegemony. In response, the UN review recommended -again- that Israel must end the occupation of all Palestinian and Arab Territories occupied since 1967, dismantle the separation wall, end all settlement activities, lift the closure imposed on the Gaza Strip, and fully respect its human rights obligations in the country, including releasing all prisoners in compliance with the Fourth Geneva Conventions.
The 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights falls on December 10, 2008. Six decades later, Palestinians are still screaming “bloody murder.” They are hopeful that their cries will be heard.
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