Every other day, the IDF kills a Palestinian civilian with impunity in the occupied territories. And the Israelis have treated these killings as "combat action," reports B'Tselem in a report on Israeli military killings in the occupied territories, 2006-2009, not including the Gaza war.
From 2006 to 2009, the IDF killed 1,510 Palestinians, not including Palestinians killed in Operation Cast Lead. Of these 1,510 deaths, 617 were of persons who were not taking part in hostilities.
Regarding these 617 fatalities, BʹTselem demanded an MPIU [Military Police Investigation Unit] investigation into the deaths of 288 of them, who were killed in 148 incidents. Ninety‐five of these incidents occurred in the Gaza Strip, accounting for 230 of the deaths. The other 53 incidents took place in the West Bank and resulted in the killing of 58 Palestinians. One hundred and four of the fatalities were minors under age 18, 23 were persons 50 and above, and 52 were women. One hundred of the Palestinians whose deaths B’Tselem demanded to investigate were killed in 2006, 86 in 2007, 93 in 2008, and 9 in 2009.
Stephen Lendman's comment:
Most are witnessed by bystanders whose testimonies are crucial to achieve justice. Yet Israel won't use them, clearly hiding the truth and obstructing justice.
Further, since September 2000, B'Tselem received no response from the Judge Advocate General's Office for " the vast majority" of cases warranting investigation, civilians killed in cold blood, responsible soldiers unpunished.
More from the B'Tselem release:
From the beginning of the first intifada, in December 1987, to the outbreak of the second intifada, in September 2000, the Military Police Investigation Unit (MPIU) investigated almost every case in which Palestinians not taking part in hostilities were killed. At the beginning of the second intifada, the Judge Advocate General’s Office announced that it was defining the situation in the Occupied Territories an “armed conflict,” and that investigations would be opened only in exceptional cases, in which there was a suspicion that a criminal offense had been committed..
B'Tselem protests the sweeping classification of the situation in the Occupied Territories as an “armed conflict,” which effectively grants immunity to soldiers and officers, with the result that soldiers who kill Palestinians not taking part in hostilities are almost never held accountable for their misdeeds. By acting in this way, the army fails to meet its obligation to take all feasible measures to reduce injury to civilians, allows soldiers and officers to violate the law, encourages a trigger-happy attitude, and shows gross disregard for human life.
gosh, if it’s going to be a slow elimination of the Palestinians, you wonder if they have sterilization programs targeting their daily
water supply. What a cynical comment, I know, but the demographic threat must be weighing hard on the fenced-in, Jewish only state.
Not cynical at all – it has already been done using at least one known and obvious method in Gaza.
no link bijou… :(
Israel pushes and pushes (as does a young child seeking a later bed-time) to see what it can get away with. With the USA as witness, prosecutor, judge, jury, etc., etc., it can readily get away with anything.
However, as Israel gets away with more and more, the world’s (or the USA’s MSM’s) standards of permissible behavior relax to accommodate these acts which are known (indeed, which are notorious) but which are accepted. The USA puts its thumb on the scale to prevent other countries and other media from criticizing Israel and, again, the man on the street sees that everything is permitted. To Israel, that is. And to the USA which seems to copy Israel.
But when others cross the old lines that Israel crosses easily, they are condemned (often properly) as terrorists. The problem is not merely one of double loyalties but of double standards.
Yet when 4 Israeli land thieves are killed, you never hear the end of it from the Zionists and their minions in the US Congress.
United States of Israel. No nation can serve two masters.
I wonder, is Hamas investigating the deaths of the 4 settlers killed?
Don’t be a bigger fool than usual, yonira. Try to imagine a carload of Hamas police driving up to Hebron to investigate.
“I wonder, is Hamas investigating the deaths of the 4 settlers killed?”
Why waste the time only to conclude they are all innocent of wrongdoing?
Shingo
How odd. 1) Hamas admitted it. 2) Some of the perpetrators have been arrested by the PA
“How odd. 1) Hamas admitted it. 2) Some of the perpetrators have been arrested by the PA”
Good point. In the case of Israel, not arrests would have ensued.
BTW. PA/ Fatah carried out an snti Hamas purge. There’s no evidence they captured those responsible.
yeah, the purge started a week before the attack. at one pt i read they’d arrested around 750 hamas ‘affiliates’ which included family members, then released some. i wonder if they’ll try deporting them to gaza. what a mess.
yonira, as someone who very publicly disagreed with the decision to kill those settlers, let me make clear a few things. First, there is no need to investigate that killing; nobody has lied about it. Hamas, or a part of Hamas, claimed responsibility for the operation. When Israel kills, it invariably proffers bogus excuses, if it bothers to comment at all. Israel pretends its killing is in self-defense and/or the unfortunate byproduct of terrorists using human shields, but no unbiased observer with common sense would accept such BS.
Second, there is truly a difference between killing illegal settlers who have embraced outrageous racial/ethnic privileges, and killing those who are denied basic human rights. Yes, I condemn both, but not equally. Israelis kill Palestinians in order to enforce and maintain their morally indefensible position of dominance and superiority. Palestinians kill Israelis in an attempt to win their freedom. The fact that some of this killing is, in my view, absolutely wrong, does not diminish the legitimacy of the cause of Palestinian freedom one iota. None of these deaths would be necessary if Israel were not pursuing unlawful, unethical, unacceptable goals.
Finally, the difference in numbers is shocking. Israel takes the lives of so many more human beings, in an illegitimate effort to subjugate a people based upon ethnicity, than Palestinians do.
Your effort to imply any equivalence, and more importantly, to absolve Israel of the ongoing murder of hundreds, even thousands, is not only lame but morally outrageous.
That Jewish fingernail of yours is acting up again, apparently. You should get your heart checked — nobody can seem to locate it.
No, probably not. Among the many reasons for that lack of investigation is that Israel reportedly murdered the Hamas members responsible for killing the paramilitary settlers. As Ha’aretz reported:
In a joint operation of the IDF, police, and the Shin Bet, troops surrounded the house near Kiryat Arba in which the militants were hiding out in an attempt to arrest the wanted men. A shootout erupted and Israeli troops used bulldozers to coax the militants out of the building.
Two militants, Mamun Natashe and Nasat al-Karmi, were killed during the operation. There were no Israeli casualties. Six additional Hamas men were arrested with a number of weapons in their possession.
You can be sure that Samel and Moor et al were not announcing their duty as moral universalists to condemn those murders. And murders is what they were: when you kill “militants” on their own land after trying to flush them out with a bulldozer without trial or jury, you are murdering them. Honestly, I would not worry so much, Yonira. People are more on your side than you might expect.
Notice that the Israeli media and those who parrot them referred to the assassinated Palestinians as “terrorist.” Not “alleged” terrorists. There was never a trial, never a legal determination of guilt, never a chance for the individuals killed to defend themselves. “Innocent until proven guilty” does not figure in the case of Palestinians.
The Israeli assassination machine is built around a network of informers and collaborators, most of them coerced. This is evidence that would never stand the light of day or be accepted in a court of law – except maybe for an Israeli military court – because of its unreliability. Because people under torture will say whatever the torturers want to hear. So they will name names and the Israelis will take those names and go killing.
Israeli killings have always been about retaliation and “deterrence,” not justice. It doesn’t really matter to them whether they got the right guys. What matters is the exercise of force, the shedding of enemy blood. And slapping the “terrorist” label on the victims excuses everything.
Potsherd,
I have zero expectation of ethics or morality from the Israeli army or under current circumstances from Israeli society. In terms of agitation and such, we need to highlight their actions and systematic immorality, no doubt.
But I am interested more in what the (lack of) reaction to this, or to the attempted assassination of PFLP freedom fighters last week, says about us. There was endless kvetching and kvelling and hand-wringing on this blog when Hamas killed the Hebron settlers. But whatever you have to say about those killings, there’s little question that the settlers, by their very existence in Hebron, were complicit in perpetrating a violation of the Geneva Conventions. Compare that to resistance fighters in Hebron or Gaza, who are fighting that occupation on their own land, and the silence about them being murdered. That says a lot about us: about institutional racism, about hypocrisy, about a real unwillingness to think about what it means to be in solidarity with a people under occupation; in some sectors, probably not here, about Islamophobia; about a total refusal to apply moral codes to ourselves before applying them to others. It is the constancy of occupation and murder and massacre that made the collective reaction to the Hamas killings so inappropriate–and the total lack of response that makes it very, very clear that the collective condemnation was either posturing, racism, or thoughtlessness.
That frankly concerns me a lot more than the fact that a people under occupation take measures that some of us consider extreme.
Max, I think the title of this thread explains it: outrage fatigue. Just about every day, Seham has been posted a long list of Israeli atrocities against the occupied population. Every day there are killings, arrests, evictions. And the sense of impotence it creates, that we can do nothing to stop it.
Reminds me of this log of news stories, merely from Haaretz, at the (sadly) now-defunct Moon of Alabama blog. Familiar to some here, I’m sure.
Moon of Alabama and Whiskey Bar were probably the most outstanding blogs ever in my mind. They caused me to have a cataclysmic awakening. I have a CD of the archives which is one of my most treasured possessions. I just wanted to pipe up and give those blogs the massive appreciation they deserve and acknowledge how much they contributed to my education, just in case those who are reading this had anything to do with them. Thank you.
Looks to me like Moon of Alabama is undefunked. link to moonofalabama.org
I think it came back a couple months ago.
It has posts from today. Or is that not what you meant.
Linda, this is an old post from October of last year. Luckily MOA has resurrected itself since then.
their quake thread is chilling. for west coasters don’t miss scams#13 post or debs@17. pray for easterly winds.
quite familiar. i see bernhard has cleaned up the archives. the search function on the front page works wonders. i still reference it frequently, this morning actually.
Oops, meant to post it thus:
The Daily Palestinian, courtesy of Bernhard
>> Every other day, the IDF kills a Palestinian civilian with impunity in the occupied territories.
Until ethnic cleansing stops being “currently not necessary”, what choice does Israel really have? Sure, it could withdraw to within internationally recognized borders and halt all oppression, theft and colonization, but that flies in the face of all that is considered by “humanists” to be “justice”.
It’s a tough gig being an oppressor-victim. All one can do it never forget to “Remember the Holocaust!”
Thanks, Philip. Really important to see past the Israeli official narrative that always frames with a security framing. Whereas once you turn that around – even just for the heck of it or intellectual curiosity and search for truth – and see it as via Occupation and its policies (such as the IDF almost daily killings innocent civilians), then a whole bunch of stuff becomes more accessible and focused. Settlers are not out there for security reasons, half a million of them. 24,000 homes have not been demolished since 1967 because of illegal building. Half the Bedouin in the Negev aren’t illegally on their own land. It’s all about displacement, landgrab, colonialism, discrimination, racism and all those other isms and ations. And the world is beginning to get it, as Israel slides down its self-willed slippery slope of assisted suicidal fascism. What comes next? Probably more violence until Obama or the international community begin to do more than pay lip service to 67 borders. Until then, almost daily deaths, forced displacement, and insecurity for all. But hey, that way we can still cling together as a nation of victims with carte blanche. Seeking: Visionary leadership for a nation gone wrong, not yet over various major traumas… Apply to The God.
@max ajl “A shootout erupted and Israeli troops used bulldozers to coax the militants out of the building.”
Strange definition of coaxing. It’s like saying the Tienanmen Sq protester was caressed by a tank.