Where is the wave of anger by Britain’s mass media to denounce the Israel Defence Force war crime, designated as such by the Geneva conventions that ban attacks on medical workers? Where is sense of shame or apology from politicians, commentators and “friends of Israel” who justify the rising death toll inside the borders of the open-air prison that is Gaza on the zionist state’s “right to defend itself?”
Najjar was unmistakable as a health worker, wearing a white uniform, when she was gunned down on Friday as she treated a man injured by a tear gas canister. The Netanyahu government has, as is now numbingly routine, announced its own inquiry into the circumstances of her killing, but we know the result already. For a military investigator to accurately label this deliberate assassination would call into question Israel’s entire expansionist colonisation project. That won’t happen, but the IDF stands condemned by its own Twitter feed. It tweeted on Saturday: “Yesterday we saw 30,000 people; we arrived prepared and with precise reinforcements. Nothing was carried out uncontrolled; everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.”
The IDF has issued similar brazen statements previously, indicating that it regrets none of the blood it sheds and claiming that the Palestinians’ Great Return March mass protests are riots behind which “terrorists” plan breaches of the border, mass incursions into Israel and attacks on Israeli civilians. Yet Tel Aviv cannot point to a single incident of this taking place since the Great March protests began in March. Nor has a single Israeli soldier been killed or wounded while engaged in sniper practice overlooking the Gaza killing fields. Najjar was not the only Palestinian paramedic shot on Friday — three others were wounded. She is not the first to be killed — Moussa Abu Hassanein succumbed to Israel’s death squads a fortnight ago.
According to the Gazan health ministry, 223 paramedics have been injured during the border protests and 37 ambulances have been targeted. Presumably, according to the twisted logic of those who defend Israel’s willingness to drown angry mass civilian protests in blood and justify relentless colonial expansion and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, these were all engaged as decoys to assist terrorist infiltration. The IDF has often depicted such obviously non-threatening people as being conscious or unwitting “human shields” used by Hamas or Islamic Jihad.
The whole “human shield” logic presupposes that a military power will instruct its forces to avoid civilian casualties, but when has the IDF shown reluctance to kill unarmed men, women or children? Palestinians face a choice. They surrender to Israel’s iron fist occupation, accept that all previous land lost is gone forever and more will go when Israelis demand it, bid farewell to any prospect of an independent Palestinian state and reconcile themselves to future existence in US-style Native American reservations or apartheid bantustans — or they continue to resist.
Even peaceful resistance guarantees bloody repression, but Palestinians reject surrender. They should be able to rely on the international community to honour and assist their resistance, but imperialist powers, including the US, EU and Britain, have switched off their moral compasses, content to see Palestinians treated as less than human. Governments can be defeated by people power, as happened with apartheid South Africa. It can happen too with apartheid Israel.
Source : Mourning Star
Source : Mourning Star
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