Two-year-old Palestinian girl Naama Abu al-Foul sleeps after undergoing treatment at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa hospital following Israeli bombing next to her family’s home in the battered city, July 23, 2014.
Finian Cunningham
Thu Jul 24, 2014 3:30AM GMT
US top diplomat John Kerry says a ceasefire deal in Gaza is close but there is still a way to go for one to be implemented.
What's the hold-up? Men, women and children are being slaughtered in their hundreds. Hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, the wounded are being attacked against all norms of international law and morality.
The main Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, says that any truce must be the basis for further talks on the underlying issues of Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip and by extension on other parts of Palestinian territory in the West Bank. That is inarguably reasonable and common sense.
But the Israeli regime doesn't want to engage in discussions about the bigger issues. It says that a ceasefire should be negotiated first and then, at some unspecified later time, talks about underlying issues can be held. Of course, this seemingly two-part deal from the Israeli side is but a cruel, cynical joke. It will never talk to Hamas. Indeed, the Israeli regime will never seriously talk to any Palestinian faction about the wider issues. A ceasefire for them is just a punctuation mark in a long story of ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their historic homeland.
This is where the American government and the European allies are exposed as being on the side of the Israeli aggressor and genocidal regime. Apparent expressions of concern and huffing and puffing about "trying to pursue a ceasefire" are contemptible in the present abominable context.
There is a genocide going on. Simple as that. A genocide. It has been going on for the past 66 years with sporadic gear changes that accelerate and decelerate that genocide. The Western media talk disingenuously about the present Israeli military onslaught in Gaza as being the fourth major operation over the past seven years, when Hamas was elected as the government in that enclave and Tel Aviv began its collective punishment blockade on the 1.8 million civilians there. That blockade is a crime against humanity. Full stop.
The truth is that Israeli military aggression against the people of Palestine has been an ongoing, non-stop campaign since 1948. Palestinian land and sea territories have been gradually whittled away with relentless, punishing oppression - all under the benign watchful eye of Washington, London and other European allies.
The 20-year so-called peace process is just another sick joke whereby the Western-backed genocidal regime in Tel Aviv gets away with more mass murder and other crimes against humanity, while giving nothing back to the Palestinians except heaps more of misery and suffering.
Just days before Operation Protective Edge opened on July 8 under the cynical pretext of three Israeli teenagers being kidnapped and killed by unknown parties, US President Barack Obama announced an extra $430 million in aid to Washington's most indulged foreign regime - in Tel Aviv. This is on top of the $3 billion that Israel receives every year for the past decades from the American government siphon of its taxpayers. Hard-pressed American households are getting their drinking water supplies cut off for unpaid utility bills in Detroit and other US cities, but the benevolence of Washington to Israel is like a wellspring that never runs dry.
This week US Secretary of State John Kerry unveiled $47 million in "humanitarian aid" to Gaza. Are US taxpayers so stupid? They are paying millions of dollars in so-called humanitarian aid for a crisis that billions of their dollars have created and is prolonging.
A fundamental debate on the underlying issues of a peace deal in Palestine is long overdue. Indeed, 66 years overdue. Any end to this conflict and future basis for peace must be based on justice. The oppression of Palestinians cannot be fixed with a sticking plaster of some truce to be discarded in six months or a year. There is a haemorrhage of human life that requires deep intervention.
There must be a full negotiation about how land was dispossessed in the very beginning going back to 1948 and the treachery of Western governments in setting up the present situation; there must be redress for all the land that was usurped over the decades; the millions of people that were forced into refugee exile; the ongoing dispossession of land and illegal settlement building; the ongoing incarceration of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails.
But herein lies the root problem. If such fundamental discussions are allowed to take place, it will very quickly transpire that the Israeli regime is wholly illegitimate and illegal. It has no right to exist under any legal or moral precept. It has no right to continue. Palestine should be one land for all of those people who want to coexist peacefully in that land, as they did before Western imperialist governments started the Zionist occupation. Apartheid division and oppression, including the so-called two-state solution - which is an illusion anyway - is an alien construct that has no historical mandate in Palestine, except for the British self-imposed imperialist one.
America today is the main sponsor of the Israeli regime and all its decades-old crimes against humanity. These crimes are once again on display in the most despicable and barbaric way. American citizens therefore have a heavy responsibility to bear. They must decide which side they are on: that of genocide or human rights.
To clarify the choice that Americans must make, they first of all have to dispel a lot of the propaganda fog that their mainstream media churn out. Their government is not "pursuing peace plans" or "staying up all night working the phones between fractious Middle East parties." American government is a central instigator and perpetrator to the genocide in Palestine. John Kerry, Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton and other American leaders are complicit in one of the great historical genocides of modern times. It couldn't be more simple, or clearer. Israeli genocide is American-sponsored genocide.
Deal with it.
FC/HJL
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, he is now located in East Africa as a freelance journalist, where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring, based on eyewitness experience working in the Persian Gulf as an editor of a business magazine and subsequently as a freelance news correspondent. The author was deported from Bahrain in June 2011 because of his critical journalism in which he highlighted systematic human rights violations by regime forces. He is now a columnist on international politics for Press TV and the Strategic Culture Foundation.More articles by Finian Cunningham
Uprooted Palestinian 
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