Not all Jews bear the burden of guilt, James Petras argues, but most Jews are now rightly perceived as complicit in Israel’s war crimes.
An edited abridgement of this outstanding article by James Petras, with pictures, captions and added endnote by Lasha Darkmoon
KILLING CHILDREN FOR SPORT
(Click to expand)
(Click to expand)
“Some of the greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish.” — Jewish writer Sever Plocker
Gaza and the Ghetto were first set up to be open-air prison camps — temporary measures to mask the real plans. Gaza’s young population had grown to over 1.8 million entrapped human beings by 2014. Obviously, if the Gazans could not travel, farm, fish and trade by normal means, they would dig tunnels for supplies and fight against their relegation to the status of caged animals by the Israeli state.
The next steps after the successful enclosure would be systematic and premeditated: the Zionists launched total war against the inevitable acts of resistance by the oppressed. They sent planes, tanks, missiles, and bombs to level populated areas, especially neighborhoods where young fighters rose up to resist this unendurable cruelty.
In line with this super race mythology, Israel’s killing machine is really most effective at murdering unarmed civilians — invalids who cannot run, doctors who stay to care for the wounded, and mothers and children in their flimsy shelters — and rather pathetic when it confronts face to face determined armed resistance fighters.
As of 6 August 2014, the Israeli Air Force, Navy, and artillery slaughtered 1,594 Palestinian civilians — via long distance high tech warfare — compared to 3 civilians in Israel (one Bedouin, one Thai farm worker and an Israeli Jew), a mind-boggling ratio of over 1,500 Palestinian civilians to one of the ‘Chosen’.
But when it came to ‘ground fighting’, 64 Israeli soldiers were killed compared to 281 Palestinian partisans, a 4.4 to 1 ratio. Despite all the Israeli air cover support and high tech protective gear, the Israelis took heavy military casualties when their invasion came down to a more level fighting field where poorly equipped partisans are willing to die for their homes and liberation.
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Clearly the commanding officers of the Israeli armed forces, the self-styled Israel Defense Forces, who are responsible for the systematic land, aerial, and maritime attacks on civilians, hospitals, schools, refugee sanctuaries are first in line for the war crimes docket.
There is eye-witness testimony and documentation showing middle and lower rank soldiers engaged in wanton shootings of school children, shoppers, and mothers with babies fleeing combat zones. War crimes prosecutions cannot be confined merely to a few dozen senior officers – these crimes were committed at all levels of the IDF.
Political leaders and policymakers, starting with Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and his Cabinet, leading Party and Knesset members, who were the prime movers in launching the blitz against Gaza and justified the massive civilian killings, clearly should be at the center of any International War Crimes Tribunal.
But what about the Israeli public, the great mass of Israeli Jews, who view themselves as morally above world public opinion despite a near-universal revulsion over Israel’s crimes?
More than 90% of Israeli Jews gave unstinting support to the ongoing blood bath, knowing, indeed cheering daily from grandstands erected on hills overlooking Gaza, the criminal consequences of their support – they also are an essential part of this criminal enterprise.
Jews who were deeply shocked by this “anti-Semitic” cartoon showed not the slightest concern at the wanton murder and maiming of Palestinian children — like THIS child, her head half blown off by an Israeli sniper. (LD)
No Israeli can absolve himself by claiming ignorance of the nature of the crimes committed in their name – nor do they want to claim ignorance! The majority of informed Israeli Jews demanded this war from the beginning, many joining racist marches with banners and chants demanding ‘Death to Arabs’! They wear their endorsement of the Gaza holocaust as a badge of honor.
Ninety percent of the Jewish citizens in Israel rejected any humanitarian ceasefire: newspaper columnists and the vast majority of letter writers in the daily press argued openly for extermination! Self-declared war criminals are feted as Israeli heroes by their overseas brethren who hasten to endorse or even join the slaughter.
Any serious researcher, who has looked at American domestic politics, knows that the Presidents of the 52 Major American (sic) Jewish Organizations are complicit in Israel’s terror bombings of Gaza. And polls show that a majority of young Americans sympathize with the rights of the Palestinians.
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We have identified a chain linking Israel’s political elite, military command and the mass of the Israeli public directly to war crimes and genocide with the active material complicity of overseas Zionist organizations. They act as one cohesive force plunging forward into the blood and gore of total war against the Palestinians – the original inhabitants and rightful owners of what is now called ‘Israel’.
The question arises: What unites them in this horrible undertaking? What moral blindness so afflicts them that they ignore the bookshelves cluttered with the writings and humanist teachings of Spinoza, Kant, Babel, or Buber? Are these tribal loyalties derived from Old Testament tales of vengeance and infanticide? Are these expressions of an ethno-religious fanaticism linked to the quest for a regional empire and plunder?
Racist ideology and its virulent expression both from high office and the “Jewish Street” are wide-spread and open. Degrading Palestinians, while claiming to be a superior race above the laws of the rest of the world, serves to justify all crimes against the people of Gaza.
Near and far, this expression of “collective Jewish identity and solidarity”, based on ethnic-religious superiority always threatened by hostile, inferior ‘native’ people, accounts for the unflinching support by top Hollywood moguls, Ivy League professors, French intellectuals, British peers and prominent investment Wall Street bankers.
Ideological affinities and ethno-religious loyalties aside, many Israeli Jews also have a major, material stake in robbing and expelling the people of Palestine.
Seized Palestinian lands result in new cheap subsidized housing, swimming pools for Jews only, developments on lands where olive groves once flourished and extended families had lived and died.
Middle and working class Jews obtain free housing; real estate speculators seize choice ocean front properties for luxury condos and tourist destinations. Building contractors secure lucrative construction contracts from the state.
Pillage forms an important material basis for Israel’s high standard of living, many times higher than that of Palestinians, much higher that that of Israel’s non-Jewish population and higher even than the Americans who have been forced to subsidize the ‘Jewish State’ for almost 50 years.
ARIEL, AN ILLEGAL SETTLEMENT IN THE WEST BANK,
WITH ITS LUXURY SWIMMING POOL
WITH ITS LUXURY SWIMMING POOL
“Pillage forms an important material basis
for Israel’s high standard of living.”
— James Petras
Equally important, Israel’s assault on Gaza serves as a testing ground for its weapons of mass destruction and its anti-missile Dome. In this regard, the slaughter in Gaza serves as a dress rehearsal (and a graphic warning) for new wars across the region in association with the US and its clients.
NSA analyst Edward Snowden’s latest documents reveal that Israel works in tandem with the US throughout North Africa, the Middle East, The Persian Gulf, South Asia and Islamic countries in choosing targets and making war plans.
Greater Israel is no longer the crackpot dream of Jewish visionaries: it is underway and its bloody beginnings in Gaza foreshadow bigger and bloodier wars against humanity in the future.
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Israel’s total war against Gaza has provoked condemnation from millions of people around the world, greater outrage at their crimes against humanity, and calls for an international war crimes tribunal. If such a tribunal were to be convoked, the question arises of how wide the net should be cast – where to draw the line between leaders, soldiers, masses and complicit overseas supporters, all implicated to one degree or another? How many ‘willing accomplices’ to mass murder should be investigated and tried?
The rising horror and indignation has isolated Israel from the greater majority of mankind, including from thousands of Jews — but it has hardened its leaders and aroused its powerful core of influential supporters, especially in the US.
The hardliners openly flaunt their blind support for Israel’s war crimes. These fanatics are convinced that every critic of Israel’s war crimes, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew or atheist, is an anti-Semite, a pervert or terrorist to be censored or crushed.
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Endnote by Lasha Darkmoon
The world is justifiably sickened not only by the disproportionate number of civilians killed in Gaza by “the most moral army in the world”, but also by the huge number of Israeli “atrocity tourists” who flock to view the carnage with binoculars and bloodthirsty jubilation.
“The emerging number of casualties from recent rounds of violence suggests that Israel’s tactics are homicidal,” Gilad Atzmon points out angrily. “They target innocent civilians and on purpose. This shows clearly that the Jewish State is an outlaw among nations.”
Many Israelis cheer and whoop with delight as the bombs fall. Others even boast of being brought to the point of orgasm by the sight of Palestinian children being cruelly butchered — like this Israeli woman, for example:
60 million Christian Zionists give their full support to this Jewish sexual deviant and her kind. The American government meanwhile cannot give these mentally deranged people enough money and lethal weapons with which to conduct their genocidal campaign of sadistic cruelty. Whatever the childkillers want, they get — and more — all at the expense of a justifiably enraged American public. [LD]
Uprooted Palestinian 
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