The biggest story this summer out of Israeli-occupied Palestine is the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Last week, Israel began its scheduled withdrawal of all 8,000 Jewish settlers from the 40 percent of Gaza they have been illegally occupying for 38 years, as well as the soldiers who have been there to protect them
This belated and partial compliance with United Nations resolutions and international law is not going over too well with the settlers. They are enraged and lashing out violently, but the fact is that their presence in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem has absolutely no internationally-recognized legal or moral legitimacy.
Nonetheless, Israel’s racist land and citizenship laws make it perfectly clear that all Jews, no matter where they are born, have a God-given right to all of "the Biblical Land of Israel" simply because they are Jewish, whereas the Palestinian gentiles have little or no legal rights to the land they have lived on continuously for 2,000 years.
These Jews-only settlements reflect the ugliest form of racial supremacism and religious fascism imaginable. They rob the indigenous Palestinians of their land, water, livelihoods and human dignity. They are designed to isolate the Palestinians in detached ghettos, leaving them trapped like "drugged cockroaches in a bottle," to quote Israel’s former Army Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan. "God gave it to us!" has been their clarion call to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its Arab population for decades.
Moreover, the recent acts of extreme violence by Jewish settlers have again exposed the fanaticism and hatred of Israel’s Jewish supremacism. In one incident, a gang of gun-toting fanatics from the Kahane Chai terrorist group viciously assaulted a Palestinian teenager, 16-year-old Hilal Majaida, with bats, bottles and rocks. A picture published in newspapers around the world showed the outrageous scene of a settler pummeling the boy’s head with a rock while an Israeli soldier stood idly by. Then they tried to lynch him, but he was saved by a group of journalists.
On August 3rd, an Israeli soldier, disgruntled over the Gaza withdrawal, opened fire with his machine gun on a bus near Haifa, killing 4 Arabs and wounding 22 more.
In yet another incident of Jewish terrorism, on August 17, in the West bank, a settler machine-gunned 3 Palestinians to death after driving them home in his taxi.
Given the tremendous amount of support among Israelis for the settlements, it’s clear that Jewish fundamentalism is not just isolated to a small handful of settlers, as Israel’s propagandists would have us believe, but is in fact a strong ideological force that is imbued in the Israeli mindset.
That explains why they are not evacuating the 400,000 other settlers in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem areas, in places like Ma’ale Adumim, Neve Yaakov, Gilo and the dozens of other racially segregated settlements built on land stolen from the Arabs. It also explains why the Israeli apartheid wall takes such a serpentine path through Arab towns and villages. The goal is to maximize the theft of land without having to absorb any non-Jews.
In a society touted as the "Middle East’s only democracy," the majority of the population shockingly sees nothing wrong with the fact that 8,000 Jewish settlers occupy 40 percent of Gaza, while 1.3 million Palestinians are piled on top of each other on the rest.
They see nothing wrong with the fact that Palestinians are systematically denied their fundamental human rights, such as the rights to life, liberty, employment, housing, and the ability to possess land and property without the fear of confiscation and dispossession — to say nothing of physical expulsion.
In this "democracy," which we support with 5 billion of our tax dollars annually, 130,000 Arabs in Hebron are routinely placed under curfew for days and weeks at a time to give 450 heavily-armed Jewish settlers (mostly Kahanist terrorists from Brooklyn) free reign to roam the streets and rampage at will.
Our government must regain some badly-needed credibility in the Middle East by immediately ceasing to fund such racist extremism. We pay Israel enormous amounts of money, which they use to sustain a brutal military occupation and build Jews-only settlements, something that is illegal in our own country.
If anyone has ever deluded themselves into thinking that Israeli violence is simply a reaction to Palestinian violence, they are now seeing the truth before their eyes. And the truth is that Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and Jewish religious fundamantalism combined have created a deadly product of Jewish supremacism that has resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and caused unimaginable pain and suffering for Jews as well as Arabs.
