No boundaries for Israel's state-terrorism

First of all, the best first hand updated information about Israel's attack on Lebanon at http://electronicLebanon.net

As I follow the news about the new Israeli horror campaign in Lebanon I keep sinking in rage, frustration, sadness and more rage.

Kosovar TV is reporting it extensively. My friends here translate from Albanian for me, even though the images speak for themselves and I already have all the details by reading the dozens of articles and reports that pour into my email everyday from conscious organizations and friends around the world.

Frustration and rage. I can’t listen any more or read the comments of the racist amoral members of the Israeli government or the shameful UN representatives. It just makes me sick. At this point, I don’t feel like quoting the dozens of International regulations Israel is permanently breaking any more, because at the end is not about law, it’s about justice, but the real human justice, the one that doesn’t hold hands with the rotten ambitions of the colonizers and the powerful, and which exists despite the set of rules and institutions they manipulatively use on the name of International law and Justice to back up their ill, amoral, behavior. That justice.

This article from counterpunch website reflects some of the thoughts I have been immerse in all day:



"The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel"
Atrocities in the Promised Land. By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON

18 July 2006 http://www.counterpunch.org/

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified -- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in theU.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.

But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into amonster, and it has come time for all of us -- all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, allAmericans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies -- to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as anexistential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its ownexistence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The statelashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.

The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel. "This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral," wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis ofIsraeli Society. Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel's arrogance.

We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized. But a military establishment that drops a500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.

A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza fourdays ago, is not the military of a moral country.

A society that can brush off as unimportant an armyofficer's brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began -- is not a society with a conscience.

A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is nota government with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)

Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel isself-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in "moral collapse." Michel Warschawski writes of an "Israeli madness" and "insane brutality," a "putrefaction" of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a "gang of hoodlums," he says, a state "that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive."

As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries -- if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is theauthor of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.


Some examples of actions being done around the world to oppose the Israeli brutal attack:

On Friday July 14th, 100 Stockholm-based activists blocked the entrance to the Foreign Ministry building in the Swedish capital. They formed a human chain at the front gate for 2 hours, and delivered a letter of protest to a representative of the Ministry. Police tried to break them up by means of violent pushes, pepper spray and dogs.

On Sunday July 16, 600 people joined together in Tel-Aviv to protest the war in Lebanon. The demonstration included veterans, young people, refuseniks, and various Israeli and international peace groups. The demonstrators marched through the streets of Tel-Aviv until they were stopped by riot police.

On Monday July 17, over 200 Palestinians and internationals marched through the center of Ramallah to protest Israel's actions in Lebanon and Gaza.

Also on Monday, English protesters blockaded EDO MBM Technologies Ltd, a Brighton-based company that produces electrical components for Israeli weapons. The action was designed to prevent the production of Israeli weapons for use in Lebanon and Gaza. Early Monday morning, protesters erected two roadblocks outside each gate of EDO MBM Technology, preventing vehicle access to the factory. Activists locked themselves to barrels filled with cement in front of the gates to create immoveable human obstructions.


Several Human Rights and activist groups are planning more actions for the next days.

If you are in the US, check out http://www.endtheoccupation.org/ to see what can you do in your area. Other interesting links:
http://electronicintifada.org
http://www.democracynow.org

For those in Catalonia, get in touch with XEP (Palestine Linkage Net) at info@xarxapalestina.org to learn about the new actions being planned. Also:
http://barcelona.indymedia.org/
http://www.vilaweb.cat/