Death in the Eagle's Shadow

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4237
Date Written:  2014-09-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2014
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX20808

Loewenstein details the circumstances surrounding her friend Anwar Za'aneen's death by an Israeli drone in Gaza, to highlight the severity of the dangers that Palestinians must live with in everyday life.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

While Palestine-based human rights groups hammer out facts such as that they found no verifiable incidents of "militants" at or near civilian targets in the most recent Israeli assaults, the exact opposite is declared in the mainstream U.S. media.

These same human rights organizations routinely publish statistics on the dead where, for example, of the approximately 2,030 people killed during "Operation Protective Edge," 85% were civilians, including more than 450 children.

As Israel carries out one barbaric mass murder after another in Gaza -- "Operation Rainbow," "Operation Autumn Clouds," "Operation Cast Lead" or most recently "Operation Protective Edge" -- it carries out, almost unnoticed, the transformation of Palestine into isolated districts such as "Gaza," “Nablus," "Jenin," "Ramallah" and others, including Christian "Bethlehem," with most surrounded by a towering concrete wall that virtually bisects the West Bank into northern and southern sectors and cuts off the villages within these sectors.

Blatant ethnic cleansing is transforming East Jerusalem into disconnected households.

Israel did not invade Gaza to attack Hamas. Shortly before its 2014 summer operation, Palestinian thugs kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers. This act, a gift to Israeli politicians and right-wing extremists, allowed them to launch a major assault -- almost certainly planned well before this attack -- and to label the killers as members of Hamas.

Many people believe Israel's hope is to destroy a recent but shaky agreement between Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party ruling the West Bank and the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip. While this may have been a factor in launching the assault, I believe it was simply another convenient pretext, like the kidnapping and killings of the Israeli boys, for the war on Gaza.

In fact, I believe the only reason Israel even needed a pretext, which it only occasionally does, was because its good relations with Abbas might have been undermined without one.