By Kenneth J. Theisen
According to the ICRC press statement when the medical personnel were finally allowed into the neighborhood, “The ICRC/PRCS team found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses. In another house, the ICRC/PRCS rescue team found 15 other survivors of this attack including several wounded. In yet another house, they found an additional three corpses. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do.”
According to Pierre Wettach, the ICRC’s head of delegation for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories “This is a shocking incident. The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded.”
The Israeli army had erected large earth walls preventing access to the neighborhood by ambulance. The children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart. In total, the ICRC/PRCS rescue team evacuated 18 wounded and 12 others who were extremely exhausted.
Because the ICRC was informed that there are more wounded sheltering in other destroyed houses in the neighborhood it demanded that the Israeli military grant it and PRCS ambulances safe passage and access immediately to search for any other wounded. Israeli authorities, as of this writing, have refused to grant access. These wounded will die without aid.
The press release states that, “The ICRC believes that in this instance the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded. It considers the delay in allowing rescue services access unacceptable.”
There are a million reasons one could cite to oppose Israel. I’ll simply say Israel has NO LEGITIMATE RIGHT OF DEFENSE (military or moral), seeing that every time the Zionists invoke that “right” they are in fact talking about the “right” to live on land that was seized at gunpoint and the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinian inhabitants, the “right” to carry out ethnic cleansing, to shoot 500 pound rockets into mosques and schools in the densest area on earth and then have the chutzpah to claim they’re just targeting Hamas (whom I don’t support but nevertheless Israel still has no right to target this ELECTED group—-it was Israel who violated the ceasefire in November by murdering six civilians).
With a staggering $5 billion of US ‘aid’ per year to juice its ultra-modern apartheid existence, ‘tolerant’ Israel ‘tolerates’ (legitimates) its armed religious-nut settlers who populate the West Bank eager to cleanse the desert of Arab ‘lice.’ A state that has boastfully and flagrantly violated TWICE as many UN resolutions as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with no permanently defined borders, a state that produces a culture that justifies running over an unarmed solidarity activist (Rachel Corrie) with a bulldozer—-and then backing over her again. What a profoundly ugly place. A living representation of the imperialist economic and political system against which we struggle.
Israel and its defenders continue to claim this state is a bastion of Western tolerance and democracy in a sea of backward Arab dictatorships.
1) most of these other nations have had their economies and cultures severely distorted by colonialism. At varying times throughout the cold war up to the present day, they have been backed US imperialism to crush revolutionary and independence movements throughout the region (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Jordan, etc.)
2) As for Israel’s allegedly noble beginnings, will take you five minutes of actually looking up major pronouncements from the early proponents of Zionism and Israel’s founders that their intention was ALWAYS to displace the “barbarians” and erect a state founded on ethnic and religious supremacy—-a remarkable evil that rehabilitates the “old” evil of Nazi fascism in content and effect.
If this sounds incredulous to the simple minds of Zionists they should read Ilan Pappe’s “Ethnic Cleansing and the Birth of Israel” as well as Finkelstein’s systematic debunking of Dershowitz’s FRAUD.
Israel is the worst thing to happen to Jews since the holocaust—-and NOT JUST because it is in this supposed fortress of security where Jews are LESS safe than anywhere else on earth. Morally, Zionism breaks with the venerable tradition of liberation and internationalism that many Jews historically took up. It instead aligns itself with the same old chauvanist, narrow-minded, vengeful credos of bourgeois society, now and for the past 100+ years.
Today far too many Jews in Israel as well as elsewhere have become unwitting pawns and playthings of US imperialism, making a deal with the devil. Do we really need to count the dozens of other states who, totally impotent once political winds shifted and US support for them dried up, were left high and dry to suffer the fallout?
Neither revenge against ‘the Jews’ nor conciliation with imperialism (like the ANC adopted in South Africa) are the way to go. A secular, democratic territory for Palestinians and Jews is the only solution. We struggle to free Palestine and for a whole new world.