What does Israeli occupation of Palestine really mean?
By Dr. Abdul Ruff
Palestinians feel being chased by Jewish government and its military cum police all the time. Persecution, aggression, oppression of Israel in Palestine where its military and police have a free ride all the time. USA, Europe and their UNSC help Israel terrorize Palestinians all the time.
Israeli occupation of Palestine means annexations, destruction genocides, midnight knocks at house doors, insane torture worse than beheading, military-police chasing of Palestinian youth and children, and fear among Palestinian community living even abroad as Zionist Mossad with CIA backing can murder any Palestinians anywhere in the world. CIA guys make the so-called suspected terrorists remove their cloths and use the worst kind to torture methods on their bodies, worse than even murdering them. Chopping of finders, hands, legs, other body parts have become very ordinary technique of these imperialist capitalists.
Since America and Europeans claim to be democracies they think they have the right to torture any Muslim anywhere in the world. Israel also does it because it a terror allies of NATO/USA. Unlike American occupation forces s in Islamic countries or Hindu/India terror forces in Kashmir, Jewish military keeps expanding the illegal borders by annexing more and more lands each time after its genocides of Palestinians. The Hindu forces in Kashmir keep building houses and offices for military purposes. JK government disallows anybody from purchasing lands in Kashmir which disables Indian desire to make Hindutva inroads by making Hindus settle down in Kashmir. However, Indian regime and its military keep trying all tricks to break the law.
Zionist crimes in Gaza
Let us consider the Jewish attacks most recently on Gaza strip on July 28. Israeli navy attack fishermen in Gaza damaging their boats, meanwhile Israeli troops invade West Bank communities and injure three youth. The Pentagon has already offered its blanket approval of all Zionist crimes inside Palestine as such terror operations reduce Islamic population worldwide – a major goal of US led NATO terror wars in Islamic world.
Israeli navy ships attacked, on Thursday morning, several Palestinian fishing boats in the Sudaniyya Sea area, northwest of Gaza city, kidnapped seven fishermen and confiscated their boats. A fisherman told local news sources that the Israeli military forces first surrounded them all of a sudden giving a deadly shock to them and the navy boats attacked them from several directions, and fired many rounds of live ammunition, causing damage. The navy illegally confiscated the boats before moving them to the Ashdod Port.
On July 27 also the Israeli navy attacked Palestinian fishing boats, close to the Gaza shore, and kidnapped two fishers. Some of the boats were hit with live rounds, before the Jewish terroirsts in uniform (soldiers) assaulted them. Elsewhere, three Palestinian youth were injured; four others kidnapped when Israeli soldiers invaded Deheishe refugee camp in the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem on Thursday at dawn and searched homes there. The Zionist “soldiers” surrounded the refugee camp before invading it and clashed with dozens of local youths, who hurled stones and empty bottles at the military vehicles, while the army fired live rounds, rubber-coated steel bullets and gas bombs. Medical sources said the soldiers shot three Palestinians with live rounds before the medics moved them to hospital suffering moderate-but-stable wounds, while many suffered the effects of teargas inhalation.
Moreover, Dozens of Israeli soldiers invaded, on Thursday at dawn, the northern West Bank city of Nablus, and conducted extensive searches of homes before kidnapping seven Palestinians. In the meantime, Israeli troops invaded late at night and at dawn, several areas in occupied Jerusalem, searched many homes and kidnapped four young Palestinian men. All such terror operations happen without the knowledge of western capitals or their intelligence wings that care for freedoms, democracy, etc. Despite lack of support from USA for the cause of freedom and sovereignty for Palestinians, there has been strong protest against Zionist occupational crimes inside Palestine.
The crude manner in which the Zionist criminals deal with besieged Palestinians has been criticized even by some Jewish leaders themselves. The day after the shooting of Palestinians recently, Tel Aviv’s Mayor Ron Huldai found the courage to state the obvious—that the state violence will persist until the occupation ends. Israel “is perhaps the only country in the world holding another nation under occupation without civil rights,” Huldai said.
Such frankness counts as bravery these days, but even Huldai was understating the truth. It’s not the mere fact of a military occupation, of Israeli troops on Palestinian territory, which provokes such attacks. It can be difficult to comprehend from across the Atlantic, or even from usually tranquil Tel Aviv, but the occupation, as many commentators have observed while reporting from the West Bank since 2011, functions as a massive mechanism for the creation of uncertainty, dispossession and systematic humiliation. It is not just soldiers and guns, but a far-reaching structure that affects all aspects of Palestinian life—a complex web of checkpoints to harass and torture the Palestinians , travel restrictions, permits, walls and fences, courts and prisons, endless constraints on economic possibilities, home demolitions, land appropriations, expropriation of natural resources, and, too often, lethal force.
Crime and Punishment
Palestinians, the real owners of Palestine lands, are made now the enemy now whom Israel wants to kill enmasse. With Israeli state backing, the illegal settlers seemed a little crazy, but they are Jews the “boss” of Mideast. Efrati, a Jew who quit Israeli army in protest against Zionist occupational crimes against humanity was earlier a part of the military in Jerusalem at the beginning of a war on Gaza Strip, targeting the children and women as well, that would leave more than 2,000 Palestinians dead. Efrati he spent most of 2006 and 2007 stationed in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, but had long since Gaza attack left the army and become an anti-occupation activist. Efrati was 19 when he arrived there and at the time saw little reason to question the Israeli military’s presence in the city. At his first briefing, he recalled an officer asking the troops what they would do if they saw a Palestinian running at a settler with a knife. “Of course the answer was you shoot him in the center of his body, Palestinians have no right to live ” Efrati said. The officer posed the question in reverse: What if it was the settler with a knife? “And the answer was you cannot do anything. The best you can do is call the police, but you’re not allowed to touch them. From day one the command was, ‘You cannot touch the illegal settlers and other Jews.’” This made sense to him, Efrati said.
A few days later, thousands of illegal settlers, mostly Russian speaking, arrived from all over the West Bank to celebrate a religious holiday. The army imposed a curfew to keep Palestinians off the streets to target the Palestinians. Efrati’s first task as a soldier in Hebron was to throw stun grenades into elementary school of Palestine children to announce the beginning of the curfew. “I just did it, like everyone Jew,” he said, “and within seconds, hundreds of kids ran outside. I was standing at the entrance and a lot of them looked at me in the eyes—that was the first time that it hit me. All of a sudden I understood what I was doing.
Later, Efrati recalled, settlers filled the central city. He was assigned to escort a group of them into the Patriarchs’ Tomb, a site holy to both Islam and Judaism, where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their wives Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah are believed to be buried. The settlers were allowed into the Palestinian side of the site, even into the mosque with their dirty legs and blood stained hands. Israeli children were peeing on the floors and burning the carpets. Their parents were there—the mosque was packed with settlers—but no one was able to stop them. A Israeli criminal soldier grabbed one of the children and took a cigarette lighter from his hand. “He started screaming at us,” Efrati said. “We laughed at him.” Five minutes later, “one of our very, very high-ranking officers came inside the mosque and said, ‘Did you steal something from the kid?’” They tried to explain, but the officer only repeated the question. The officer ordered them to give it back and apologize and Jews have a right to smoke inside mosques . They found the child, apologized and returned the lighter. The boy ran right into the next room, Efrati said, and resumed setting fire to the carpets.
Things got weirder. Efrati was put in charge of a checkpoint separating the area of Hebron inhabited by settlers from the larger Palestinian city. He described it as grueling, mind-numbing work, standing in the cold for as long as 16 hours, usually hungry and always sleep-deprived. Inflicting humiliation was part of the assignment. Schoolteachers would cross dressed in suits and ties. The soldiers would make them strip in front of their students. “Sometimes we would make them wait for hours in their underwear,” Efrati said.
Pure entertainment for the criminal Jews in human suffering…
The pretext was to check them for weapons. “Nobody thought that anything would happen to them,” he said, but the troops were told again and again by their officers that all Palestinians were potential threats, that anyone might stab them if they dropped their guard for a moment. That notion meant to make the Jewish solders more arrogant , Efrati said, “made us very, very aggressive. So you would push them against the wall, undress them, take your weapon and hit them a few times.
That is Zionist democracy, not entirely different from American or NATO’s. “If he’s saying something, hit him.. Just make sure that you’re completely in control.” His conscience began to nag at him. He started bringing bags of Bamba—a popular Israeli snack food, like Cheez Doodles, only peanut flavored and not phosphorescent orange—to the checkpoint and offering them to children.
After a few days, “the first brave kid came up, grabbed a bag of Bamba and ran away.” Efrati was thrilled. Not long after, a Palestinian boy of about eight years old asked him for a treat. This boy didn’t run. He opened the bag, and offered some to Efrati. They sat and ate the chips together. When the boy walked off, Efrati felt ecstatic. He could finally be the man he wanted to be, a soldier who was loved for his kindness and who at the same time, as he put it, “was protecting my country from a second Holocaust.”
When he got back to the base that night, he was ordered to eat quickly and prepare for another shift, not at the checkpoint but on a “mapping” expedition into the section of the city governed by the Palestinian Authority. He was still so high from his success with the Bamba that he didn’t mind the extra work. The routine was simple: “You go into houses in the middle of the night, get everybody outside, take a photo of the family, and start going around the house, destroying things.” The idea was to search for weapons, “but we also needed to send a message,” Efrati said, to make sure the residents never lost “the feeling of being chased.” His job was to draft maps of each house, charting the rooms, the doors and the windows. “If at some point there was a retaliatory attack from that specific house,” the army would be ready.
That night, they searched, trashed and mapped two houses in the neighborhood of Abu Sneineh. It was snowy and cold. When they were done, the sun had not yet risen. They forced the family outside and into the snow and went in and started searching. Efrati opened the door to a child’s room—he remembered seeing a painting of Winnie-the-Pooh on one wall—and had begun sketching when he realized that there was someone in the bed. A young boy leaped out from under the covers. He was naked. Startled, Efrati raised his gun, aiming at the child. It was the kid from the checkpoint that afternoon. “He started peeing himself,” Efrati said, “and we were just shaking, both of us, we were just standing there shaking and we didn’t say a word.”
The boy’s father, coming down the stairs with an officer, saw Efrati pointing a rifle at his son and raced into the room. “But instead of pushing me back,” Efrati said, “he starts slapping his kid on the floor. He’s slapping him in front of me and he’s looking at me saying, ‘Please, please don’t take my child. Whatever he did, we’ll punish him.” In the end, the officer decided that the man’s behavior was suspicious, that “he was hiding something.” He ordered Efrati to arrest him. “So we took the father, blindfolded him, cuffed his hands behind his back and put him in a military jeep.”
They dumped him like that at the entrance to the base. “He stayed there for three days in a very torn-up shirt and boxer shorts. He just sat there in the snow.” Eventually, Efrati summoned the courage to ask his officer what would happen to the boy’s father. “He had totally forgotten about him, didn’t even know what I was talking about,” Efrati said. “He was like, ‘Which father?’” Efrati reminded him. “You can release him,” the officer said. “He learned his lesson.”
After cutting the plastic ties that bound the man’s wrists, untying the blindfold and watching him run off barefoot in his underwear through the streets, Efrati realized that he had never given his commander the maps he had drawn. He hurried back to the officer’s room, apologizing for his negligence. The officer wasn’t angry. “It’s okay,” he said. “You can throw them away.” It is just like that. Efrati was confused. He protested: wasn’t mapping a vital task that might save other soldiers’ lives?
The officer got annoyed. “He says, ‘Come on, Efrati. Stop bitching. Go away.’” But Efrati kept arguing. He didn’t understand. When it became apparent that he wasn’t going anywhere, the officer told him: “We’ve been doing mappings every night, three or four houses a night, for forty years.” He personally had searched and mapped the house in question twice before with other units. Israel is eager to terrorize the civilians everywhere and might knocks terrorize the local population, they pick young persons and never to return them to the families. At times, Palestinians run away through back doors when Israeli military knocks at their doors in the night and the never return homes.
Israeli military and police don’t entrain any complaints from Palestinian parents about their missing sons. If any Palestinian goes to police station or military officers with complaints they are told to go to Tel Aviv and meet the PM Netanyahu and complain to him or report to UN.
Cool guys, Israeli terrorists.
Israeli fascist regime is insane and wants to keep the Palestinians in the terrorization status. Efrati was even more confused. The officer took pity, and explained: “If we go into their houses all the time, if you arrest people all the time, if they feel terrified all the time, they will never attack us. They will only feel chased after.” That, Efrati said, “was the first time I understood that everything I was told was complete bullshit.” From then on, he said, “I didn’t stop doing the things I did, I just stopped thinking.” Of course Efrati’s officer was wrong. If you terrorize people long enough, they eventually lose their fear. They hold onto the anger. This last October, after a year of relative calm, young Palestinians began attacking Israeli soldiers, police and civilians, occasionally with guns or cars but most often with household implements: knives, scissors, screwdrivers. The attacks were uncoordinated and outside the control of the Palestinian leadership or the traditional armed factions.
Many such reactions from Palestinians occurred in or near Hebron, often at checkpoints or other sites of friction between Palestinian civilians and the Israeli military, but also on buses and trains in Jerusalem, in supermarkets and in the streets. Israeli military and police ransack Palestine territories with perpetual terrorization of peole on permanent basis.
World powers do not make any genuine steps to teach a bloody lesson to fanatically fascist Israel which also advices those countries like India purchasing terror goods from Tel Aviv depots to follow the terror footsteps of Israeli military in Palestine territories. Terrorization of people by midnight knocks.
Why do Palestine youth attack powerful Israeli army?
Will any one, individual or nation, fight against powerful nations? Certainly not, unless out of mere insanity. But Palestinians are facing dirtiest attacks from Israel, made powerful by USA and NATO, and also fighting the one of the dirtiest militaries in third world whose terror goods are being brought across the globe including India. .
Israel possesses not only illegal nukes but also strongest military terror equipment with regular updates from the world’s most powerful military called the Pentagon. Any nation, including Russia, is scared of the pentagon and CIA. Every power in West Asia fears Israeli military might. But the powerless and defenseless Palestinians are not afraid of it and fights against its illegal occupation of Palestine lands and its expansionist-murder strategy by sacrificing their own valuable lives.
Continued occupation crimes of Israeli military forces against the besieged Palestinians force the Palestinians to retaliate to Zionist attacks with small scale attacks. In November, Major General Herzl Halev, Israel’s highest ranking military intelligence officer, explained to PM B. Netanyahu’s cabinet that the Palestinian attacks were not primarily ideological. They were motivated by rage and frustration and carried out by youth—mainly teenagers—who “felt they had nothing to lose.” In fact, they had a great deal to lose, as much as anyone, their whole lives ahead of them. But the fact that so many were willing to throw it away, and to take others with them, testifies to the depths of the despair bred by Israel’s occupation.
Until Wednesday’s shootings, only Palestinians got killed and no Israelis had been killed by Palestinians since February 18. In the same period, Israeli security forces killed 34 Palestinians, including a six-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother who died when an air strike hit their family’s home in the Gaza Strip. Their names were Israa and Yasin Abu Khussa. Such Israeli murders rarely make headlines here, but Palestinians are well aware of them. So long as they continue, and the occupation drags on, world can expect many more opportunities to grieve. That is exactly what Netanyahu and his government continued to do.
Fifty years into Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Israel’s government is continuing its “preemptive and predetermined” territorial changes and a policy of clandestine ethnic cleansing in what the Oslo Accords designated as Area C, which constitutes over 60 percent of the West Bank. As for the USA, the mischievous mediator for peace talks, it continues to pretend it believes Netanyahu’s claim that he is seeking a two-state solution, and continues to assure Israel that it will not allow “any daylight”—and any Security Council resolutions—to come between the USA and Israel.
American regime shields the Zionist crimes by misusing its veto on UNSC.
If in fact world no longer believes Netanyahu’s lies, his two state theory, then its tendency of “balancing” even the mildest reproaches of Israel’s never-ending occupation with condemnations of Palestinian incitement is particularly reprehensible. Whatever the Palestinian Authority may be guilty of by delaying to file cases against Israeli crimes, it pales into insignificance when compared to the incitement that is Israel’s half-century long fascist occupation. Zionist fascism in Palestine functions as a massive mechanism for the creation of uncertainty, dispossession and systematic humiliation. It is not just soldiers and guns, but a far-reaching structure that affects all aspects of Palestinian life—a complex web of check points, travel restrictions, permits, walls and fences, courts and prisons, endless constraints on economic possibilities, home demolitions, land appropriations, expropriations of natural resources, and, too often lethal force.
Neither the USA nor the UNSC nor the Quartet’s diplomacy has the slightest prospect of changing the status quo that Netanyahu has so successfully entrenched if they cannot screw up the courage to state straightforwardly the truth—that Israel’s half-century long occupation and genocides not only incites to violence but itself constitutes violence incarnate on a massive scale. The injection of such truthfulness might perhaps help flush the diplomatic channels that have for so long been clogged by pretense and dishonesty, indirectly supporting Zionist fascism.
Unfortunately, shamefully!
