Category: Media

I audibly gasped when Andrew Podger referred to Israel’s response in Gaza as a “lack of care” in a recent P&I article. Hardly a balanced use of words.

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With impudence, Israel and its lobby always accuse us Palestinians of what they do against us. They play the role of the victim, making the criminal a victim and the victim a criminal even as they commit one of the most heinous war crimes and genocide against humanity, with unprecedented hatred and sadistic brutality.

Turning tens of thousands of homes into gas ovens with their firebombs, burning people alive and destroying everything: residential buildings, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, cemeteries, museums, cultural centres, bakeries, banks, streets, parks and even the zoo. And yet they claim to be “civilised”, “the only democracy in the Middle East”, and have “the most moral army in the world”!

They accused Hamas fighters of committing the crime of raping, killing, burning children, and removing fetuses from their mother’s wombs on 7 October 2023, without providing any evidence, while they are the ones who precisely committed these atrocities against the Palestinians which are documented with their confessions. Below are some quotes.

Quotes

“Haleem Eid, then thirty years old, said she saw “a man shoot a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher’s knife. She said that another woman witnessing the same scene, Aiesch Radwas, was killed when she tried to remove the unborn infant from the dead mother’s womb. Many survivors [Deir Yassin Massacre: 9 April 1948] described the savagery of killing, rape and looting. In addition, Irgun and Lehi fighters dynamited many houses.Survivors of the massacre were paraded, hands forced above their heads, through the streets of Jewish-held Jerusalem, said Eliyahu Arieli, the commander of the Hagannah force which moved into Deir Yassin following the massacre.

Meir Pail, the Hagannah ‘observer’ recounted that after parading a group of 25 men, Irgun and Lehi members ‘put them in a line in some kind of quarry and shot them.’ According to Arieli ‘All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women and children […] the dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands.’ After the massacre, Zionist forces took the bodies of the victims to Deir Yassin’s rock quarry, poured gasoline on them and set them alight.”

Nathan Krystall, ‘The De-Arabisation of West Jerusalem 1947-50”, Journal of Palestine Studies, Volume 27, Nu. 2, Winter 1998, pp. 5-22. See also Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre book “O Jerusalem”, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972, Pages 288, 289 ….

“…In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the centre of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.”

Benny Morris, an Israeli historian in an interview with Ari Shavit, “survival of the fittest”, Haaretz, 8.1.2004.

An investigative report by Haaretz and the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research revealed acts of murder and massacres perpetrated by Jewish terrorists against Palestinians – targeting unarmed women, children and men during the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. The report disclosed testimonials from members of the underground Irgun terrorists: “A. They annihilated with a machine gun 35 Arabs who had surrendered to that company with a white flag in their hands. B. They took as captives peaceful residents, among them women and children, ordered them to dig a pit, pushed them into it with long French bayonets and shot the unfortunates until they were all murdered. There was even a woman with an infant in her arms. C. Arab children of about 13-14 who were playing with grenades were all shot. D. A girl of about 19-20 was raped by men from Altalena [an Irgun unit]; afterward she was stabbed with a bayonet and a wooden stick was thrust into her body.” And some acts were “being carried out for the purpose of robbery.” The victims’ families said that those murdered had been carrying hundreds of Palestinian pounds, a very substantial amount at the time.

Adam Raz, “Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in ’48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew”, Haaretz, 9 December 2021.

“When you sum up the systematic mass executions, the many gang-rape cases (which have been slow to be uncovered, because they involve shame on both fronts), the crushing of children’s skulls with sticks, the ripping out of fetuses from their mothers’ wombs – all, and many more, perpetrated by “us”, the “good guys”, the “cultured elite” – often in situations which presented no danger, just out of pure gratuitous sadism and hate for the “Arabs” – then you may begin to realise, that Israel is not in a war of survival, a war of an elite and advanced culture in a “bad neighbourhood” of backwards Arab sub-culture.Let me put it out there, clearly and directly: We have been acting like animals, with barbarism of a degree which indeed could be, and should be, and has been, compared to those whom we love to hate – the Nazis – whose cruelty is supposed to exonerate ours. As Golda Meir told MK Shulamit Aloni: “After the Holocaust, Jews are allowed to do anything.” NO. Damn well not. We’ve used this excuse, with those words or others, together with a systematic cover-up of our own cruelties, since the start. And because we have largely succumbed to our own propaganda in this, we have failed to perceive the historical trace, which, if followed honestly, will show us that we are essentially AT THE SAME PLACE as before – still subjugating, still massacring, still torturing.

This is not a chain of events forced upon us as an inevitable consequence of trying to “survive”. This is nonetheless a predictable outcome of our inherent state-religion – which is not Judaism, as many mistakenly think – but rather Zionism.”

Jonathan Ofir, “To my fellow Israelis: We can stop this”, Mondoweiss, 8.2.2016.

“The best-known attack was by the Irgun and Lehi operating under the orders of (and in conjunction with) the Haganah, on the Palestinian village of Deir Yasin on April 9. Women were raped, most of the villagers including children were killed and bodies were defiled. Already before the attack, Yosef Sepir, a member of the supervising committee, warned his colleagues that the non-Jewish world might see such action as an echo of the German destruction of the little Czech village of Lidice on June 10, 1942 in retaliation for the murder of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. At Lidice, all the adult males and most of women were murdered and the site was plowed under to be ‘forever blotted from memory.’ The comparison of the two may be odious, but as Mr. Sepir had warned, it is hard to avoid.”

William R. Polk, “Where we came from, what we have been doing, where we are going and what’s next”, June 2018

“IF A gang of neo-Nazis had kidnapped a 16-year old boy in a London Jewish neighbourhood in the dark of the night, driven him to Hyde Park, beaten him up, poured gasoline into his mouth, doused him all over and set him on fire – what would have happened?

Wouldn’t the UK have exploded in a storm of anger and disgust?

Wouldn’t the Queen have expressed her outrage?

Wouldn’t the Prime Minister have rushed to the home of the bereaved family to apologise on behalf of the entire nation?

Wouldn’t the leadership of the neo-Nazis, their active supporters and brain-washers be indicted and condemned?

Perhaps in the UK. Perhaps in Germany.

Not here.

This abominal atrocity took place in Jerusalem. A Palestinian boy was abducted and burned alive. No racist crime in Israel ever came close to it.

Burning people alive is an abomination everywhere. In a state that claims to be “Jewish”, it is even worse.”

Uri Avnery, An Israeli columnist a former member of the Israeli Knesset and the head of the Israeli leftist peace bloc, “Gush Shalom”, “The Atrocity”, AMIN, 12.7.2014,

“When Palestinians attack Israeli soldiers serving in the West Bank, it’s “terror,” but when Jews attack innocent Palestinians, it’s “politically motivated crime,” “price-tag action” or “hilltop youth violence.” The refusal to call Jewish terror by name and the use of euphemisms allow the self-righteous among us to wash their hands of the matter and ignore the serious implications of Jewish terror, which challenges the institutions of government and threatens the future of the state. Nevertheless, quite a few Knesset members and cabinet ministers ignore the danger, seeing it as marginal, even justified behaviour in the face of Palestinian violence.

It must be clearly stated: There is Jewish terror! Terror is what led to Rabin’s assassination and the firebombing of the home of the Dawabsheh family, killing a toddler and his parents. It is terror that led to the burning alive of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, and terror that led to the murder and serious injury of additional innocent Palestinians by Jews. The destruction of Palestinian property, such as olive trees, water sources and fields of crops, and the vandalism of homes and vehicles, are also criminal acts of terror.”

Omer Bar-LevMoti Milrod, Interior Minister, “Bar-Lev Is Right: Jewish Terror Exists”, Haaretz, 30.12.2021.

“We have to face reality. We are witnessing the flourishing of a Jewish Ku Klux Klan movement. Like its American counterpart, the Jewish version also drinks from the polluted springs of religious fanaticism and separatism, only replacing the Christian iconography with its Jewish equivalent. Like white racism’s modus operandi, this Jewish racism is also based on fear mongering and violence against its equivalent of Blacks — the Palestinians.

Like the members of the KKK, the Jewish rioters throw stones, shoot, and set fire to homes, and in one instance, even burned down a house with its residents inside. And like the American Klan at its height, the Jewish Klan also enjoys law enforcement authorities who turn a blind eye.”

Michael Sfard, a lawyer specialising in human rights and is legal adviser of Yesh Din Volunteers for Human Rights, “The Flourishing of the Jewish KKK”, Haaretz, 25.12.2018.

“Because so many of the people who live in Israel lived through 1948, this is not a distant memory. It is not the genocide of the Native Americans in the United States. People know exactly what they did, and they know what others did. Yet they still succeed in erasing it totally from their own memory while struggling rigorously against anyone trying to present the other, unpleasant, story of 1948, in and outside Israel. If you look at Israeli textbooks, curricula, media and political discourse you see how this chapter in Jewish history – the chapter of expulsion, colonisation, massacres, rape and the burning of villages – is totally absent. It is not there. It is replaced by a chapter of heroism, glorious campaigns and amazing stories of moral courage and superiority unheard of in any other histories of people’s liberation in the 20th century.”

Ilan Pappe, Professor of History at Haifa University, “The ‘48 Nakba and the Zionist Quest for its completion’, Between the Lines, October 2002, Vol. II, #18

“In 1947 America delayed the Palestine partition vote at the UN, bullying client states to vote for a resolution that violated the terms of the fledgling UN’s own charter. In 1948 America recognised Israel minutes after it declared independence, and while Zionist terrorists were committing massacres, rapes and military forced mass expulsions.”

Rich Siegel, “Rich Siegel’s Statement on Anti-BDS Bill”, Deir Yassin Remembered, 27.7.2017

Despite the horrendous massacres, rapes, war crimes and ethnic-cleansing, not only were none of the perpetrators of these crimes ever brought to justice, but they were appointed to senior positions in the government, army and security, and the leaders who had given the orders became prime ministers of Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon.

Ilan Pappe wrote in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, “From 9 July [1948] … in less than two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been expelled from their villages, towns and cities. The UN ‘peace’ plan had resulted in people being intimidated and terrorised by psychological warfare, heavy shelling of civilian populations, expulsions, seeing relatives being executed, and wives and daughters abused, robbed and in several cases, raped. By July, most of their houses had gone, dynamited by Israeli sappers. There was no international intervention the Palestinians could hope for in 1948, nor could they count on outside concern about the atrocious reality evolving in Palestine. Neither did help come from the UN observers, scores of whom roamed the country at close hand ‘observing the barbarization and killing, but were unwilling, or unable, to do anything about them.”

Pappe wrote on the village of Deir Yassin massacre on the outskirt of Jerusalem saying; as the Irgun and Stern Gang Jewish terrorists burst into the village they “sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many inhabitants [245 men, women and children]. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed.

Ilan Pappe, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”, Oneworld Publications Ltd., Oxford, 2006, p.156.

“There were cases of rape in Ramla. I can forgive rape, but I will not forgive other acts which seem to me much worse. When they enter a town and forcibly remove rings from the fingers and jewellery from someone’s neck, that’s a very grave matter. … Many are guilty of it.”

Aharon Cizling, A Zionist leader who became agriculture minister, made the remarks during a provisional government meeting, “State Archive Error Shows Israeli Censorship Guided by Concerns Over National Image”, Haaretz, 5.1.2022. see also Mondoweiss, “State archive glitch reaffirms Israel’s genocidal intent” & (1949, The First Israelis, p. 71-72).

“When you are looking for a needle in a haystack, and you can not find the needle – you must burn the whole haystack”.

Ezer Weizmann, the president of Israel (he is the father of the current Israeli president), Quoted in ‘News From Within’, an Israeli publication, expressing his support of the harsh and collective punishment of the Palestinians, Vol XII, No. 3, March 1996.

“In December 2015 Roi Sharon, a journalist at the time on Channel 10, aired a film clip from a wedding of members of the (“extremist”) right, who were seen dancing to the song [A song that extols a murderous revenge, a mass slaughter, death, suicide]. Some were carrying weapons. As part of the dance, one of the attendees stabbed a picture of the toddler Ali Dawabsheh, who was burned to death in the Jewish terror attack in Duma after an incendiary device was tossed on his house. In other words, part of the joy of the wedding included an impassioned dance to the strains of a song that celebrates a murderous revenge, and stabbing the picture of an Arab baby who was burned to death by Jews only because he was born an Arab.

Think about the cascades of empathy among the Israeli public for Itzik Saidian, who tried to immolate himself. Death by burning is a particularly cruel method of execution, which causes unimaginable suffering to the victim. The toddler Ali Dawabsheh was not only murdered, he was also cruelly tortured until he died. And this inhuman barbarism celebrated at a wedding, in dance and song.”

Rogel Alpher, “Murderous Violence Against Palestinians Is in the Blood of Israeli Settlers”, Haaretz, 27.12.2021.

“Well before the Hitler era, Zionists came thousands of miles to dispossess people who had never done them the slightest harm, and whose very existence they contrived to ignore. Zionist atrocities were not part of the initial plan. They emerged as the racist obliviousness of a persecuted people blossomed into the racial supremacist ideology of a persecuting one. That is why the commanders who directed the rapes, mutilations and child-killings of Deir Yassin went on to become prime ministers of Israel. But these murders were not enough. Today, when Israel could have peace for the taking, it conducts another round of dispossession, slowly, deliberately making Palestine unliveable for Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. Its purpose is not defence or public order, but the extinction of a people. True Israel has enough PR-savvy to eliminate them with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a kinder, gentler genocide that portrays its perpetrators as victims.‘Israel is building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most fervent believer in Judaism, but are not. Palestinians are being squeezed and killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan, to perish in a civil war….They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not the bloody mistake of a blundering superpower but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious ethnic nationalism…”

Michael Neumann, professor of philosophy at Trent University, Ontario, Canada, Excerpts from his article “What is Antisemitism?”, MIFTAH, 7.6.2002.

Western media never tire of citing the atrocities of Hamas while diminishing and justifying the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, even when the majority of them are women and children. But how accurate is this portrayal of events? (more…)