No more crocodile tears please

by:Hasan Abu Nimah
Jordan Times

We woke up Sunday to one more day of Israel’s war on the civilian population of this region. It is the same war, the latest phase of which is against Lebanon, the same war that the “international community” has been handling with exceptional skill for more than half a century.

All those Western liberals who now express “shock” over Israel’s “disproportionate” or “excessive” use of force should be less naive, or perhaps more honest. What are they shocked about exactly? Was the butchery of dozens of children in Qana the first massacre committed by Israel? Do they imagine it will be the last?

Do they need to be reminded that the history of Israel is one long series of massacres, ever since the Zionist movement came to Palestine with the intent to remove its indigenous population and found a racist state in their place.

Just to refresh the memory, “terrorism” was introduced to our region decades before Hizbollah and Hamas were founded, by that same Zionist movement. They first used the tactic of bombing marketplaces,government buildings, restaurants, railway stations and hotels — in their war to “liberate” Palestine from its native people.

They spared no means, no matter how cruel, in their campaign to force the British imperial authorities to leave so that a “Jewish state” could be established.

The same Zionist terrorists whose pictures were posted all over the place as “wanted” criminals who bombed and murdered UN officials, British officers and soldiers as well as Arab and Jewish civilians, later put on ties and were called “man of peace” and “prime minister of Israel.”

In the months preceding and following the British departure, the Zionist plan necessitated committing massacres on a massive scale. In 2004 the Israeli historian Benny Morris said: A “Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them.” “There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing,” he added. Who can now possibly express genuine surprise that in a matter of two weeks Israel has expelled 700,000 Lebanese from their homes under the threat of death?

There is also nothing new about Israel’s full-scale assault on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure.

For decades after the expulsion of the Palestinians, refugee camps and infrastructure were constantly bombed in Lebanon and Jordan. Has any Israeli yet stood trial for the massacres of defenceless Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatilla camps in 1982 by Israeli-armed and trained Lebanese militias under the overall authority of Ariel Sharon, or has the world forgotten the deeds carried out by that “statesman”?

Is there really any difference between those deeds and the full-scale assault refugees in Gaza have been subjected to — bombed and murdered from the air 24 hours a day since Israel’s fraudulent “withdrawal”?

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