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Gaza under attack again

For the second time in 2 years Israel ferociously attacks Gaza. And for the second time, I’m not there. I follow the news on Twitter. With every tweet, and every explosion, it feels like I am deaf. My heart is there where my family and people are, but physically I am not there. I am not hearing any explosions, not feeling any shockwaves, not physically at risk of being killed by a random bomb Israel drops on my house. But my family and friends are. You sleep not knowing what kind of bad news you are going to wake up to.
The world feels giddy and insignificant.

It’s Gaza again. And it’s bleeding again. And it’s being blamed again, ignored again, and abandoned again, for nothing other than that those who are being killed are Palestinians. Protective Edge is the name of the new Israeli assault. And it’s ongoing and doesn’t seem to be ending soon. Israel hasn’t fulfilled its ravenous appetite for destruction and death. It’s an operation that comes after some settlers burnt a Palestinian boy alive. It’s an operation that comes when Gaza is under unprecedented siege. An operation that comes in the Holy month of Ramadan where Muslims observe fasting. An operation where every 4,5 minutes there’s an explosion. The Palestinians in Gaza are the target, not Hamas. The houses of Palestinians, their institutions, their mosques, their hospitals, their societies are the target. Israel wants to inflect the maximum damage and destruction in order to bring Palestinians to succumb. The world favors the oppressor.

113 Palestinians are now martyrs (and counting), most of whom are innocent civilians, and you still read headlines that say:”Israel is under attack”. There’s no justice for Palestinians in the news. They want to incriminate an entire population, blaming them for their own misery. They want to forge a narrative that there are two equal sides. While there’s one side that’s oppressor and another that’s oppressed.

They want to amplify the effect of a rocket that leaves very little damage, but they want to trivialize the effect of an F-16 bomb dropped on a house in densely populated area. They want to humanize Tel Aviv’s summer vacation, but they want to make entire massacred families some collateral damage, or an error, or Hamas’ fault. But never blame Israel regardless the fact that they’ve some the most sophisticated technologies and regardless of the fact that some these attacks were conducted in broad daylight. The world is blind.

Cast Lead, Pillars of Clouds, and Protective Edge, Israel gets away with it.
Cast Lead, Pillars of Clouds, Protective Edge, people rise up and protest.
Cast Lead, Pillars of Clouds, Protective Edge, nothing is changing.
Cast Lead, Pillars of Clouds, Protective Edge, nothing changes unless there’s an end.
Cast Lead, Pillars of Clouds, Protective Edge, and many more, nothing will change unless there’s an end,
An end to israel’s impunity, an end to israel’s occupation, an end to its apartheid policies, an end to its settler freak mentality, an end to its supremacy.
Cast Lead, Pillars of Clouds, Protective Edge…and many more to come, unless an end to israel’s impunity, an end to israel’s occupation, an end to its apartheid policies, an end to its settler freak mentality, an end to its supremacy.

Until then it’s wrong to think that Palestinians will just turn the other cheek. Resistance, armed and unarmed, is our right, our duty to protect ourselves. Israel only understands the language of force. We don’t have much of it, but we have enough to preserve our dignity. It’s our undeniable right.

Gaza is bleeding. Gaza is mourning. And the bitterness of loss and injustice is colossal. But Gaza has always taught us that it rises up, it resists, it stands up for its people and its people stand up for it.

We should never forget or forgive…Palestinians are not numbers and statistics.

(Originally published on Lina Al-Sharif’s blog Reflections
on motherhood, motherland, and poetry
)

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This is NOT a war about Palestinian rockets – this is a war about illegal settlements, stolen land and 500,000 Israeli settlers

* The BBC has just reported 123 Palestinians killed by the IDF of which more than 75% were civilians. Plus the killing of two patients unable to walk and the serious injuring of four others in a home for the disabled. (12/07 -1321hrs)

The only way now to stop Netanyahu’s horrific killing of innocent men, women and children in Gaza is to stop Israel’s preferential trade with Europe. The EU Parliament should take immediate steps to abrogate the Israel Association Agreement the provisions of which Israel is in gross contempt.

Stop its bilateral trade with the EU and Israel’s territorial expansion plans will be stopped. By removing its preferential rights to trade with Europe, its government will no longer have the money to wage an offensive program of forced land grabs – even with continued military assistance from a lobby-controlled, US congress.

Stop bilateral trade with Europe and Netanyahu becomes impotent overnight and the bully of the Middle East will revert to being just another politician of a small state with F16 bombers (albeit with a secret nuclear weapons arsenal that it cannot use because it would irradiate its own cities).

Then the horrific killing of innocents, by a US-congress-backed IDF, will be an atrocity unlikely to be repeated.

This is NOT a war about Palestinian rockets – this is a war about illegal settlements, stolen land, 500,000 Israeli settlers and the wholesale killing of innocent men, women and children – families just like yours and mine. Palestinians are human beings and bleed just like Christians.

In the face of this continuing atrocity, the world and the UN must act.

I cannot understand how civilised and supposedly “normal” people could carry out atrocities like we have seen over the past few days in Gaza. The people who are ordering these attacks, those who carry them out and those who support them in Israel are all guilty of crimes against humanity. Foreign leaders such as Obama, Cameron etc all share in blame.

The firing of rockets by militants into Israel are militarily completely ineffective. I can understand how Palestinians, having suffered so much oppression, humiliation, death and destruction at the hands of the Israelis, might resort to violence. The have every right to defend their homes and property.

However, it saddens me greatly that they do not stick exclusively to non-violence. Their understandable violence has been used by the Zionist propaganda machine to paint all Palestinians as terrorists when the only real terrorists in Israel/Palestine are the government and armed forces of the Zionists. I cannot understand how little compassion or fellow feeling the people of Israel seem to have. How can they watch innocents being killed daily in their name without crying out for justice !

Here is another good source on Twitter for first hand real time information on what is going on in Gaza. Farah is tweeting as bombs are going off around her house:

https://twitter.com/Farah_Gazan

She is one of several Palestinians who have the presence of mind to report attacks as they happen. It is a little chilling though to not know that if someone I follow isn’t active for a day or two, there is a possibility they may have been killed. It brings the whole thing closer to home.

These are sad, sad, pictures, and it is heart breaking to see these innocent little children feeling the wrath of Israel. They will be forever traumatized by seeing death and destruction, hear their mother’s crying, and see their father’s dead, for no valid reason. The world watches zionist insanity and does nothing. There are no two words about it, the zionists are just as criminally insane as the nazis were.

Anthony, this is simply another brutal step by Israel to decimate Gaza, bomb it to the stone ages (as suggested by Ariel Sharon’s son) and kill a large number of Palestinians. Yes it is about the illegal settlements, and Israel’s plan to rid the Galilee of Arabs.
For Israelis, Palestinians are “animals”, “human animals”, children are “little snakes”, and to justify the brutality, they call them all terrorists. Unfortunately, like extremists give Islam a bad name, these zionists and their brutality, gives Judaism a bad name.
This is more like doing the work of the devil.

Some of the online newspapers are truly abysmal. Headline from the London Evening Standard: “Rabbi stands on top of double-decker bus in west London as part of pro-Palestine protest against ‘Israeli aggression'”

Note the quotation marks around Israeli Aggression.

Meanwhile the Irish Times explains it this way: “Hamas goes to war – for a ceasefire” Here’s the first paragraph: “Writing in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, the Israeli analyst Alex Fishman said Hamas was “like a suicidal individual trying to drag Israel forcibly into armed conflict … believing [it] will be the one to determine the strength of the explosion.”

What planet are these people on?