The "Roadmap" To Palestinian Ghettos

By Ghali Hassan

10 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org

Plans to isolate the Palestinian population in ghettos
have been under way since the establishment of Israel
on Palestinian land in 1948. Since then, Israel and
its Western allies have embarked on a policy
separating the Palestinian people into designated
ghettoes and subjected them to daily terror. The
complete isolation of Gaza and the construction of the
illegal Apartheid Wall in the West Bank and Jerusalem
are the foundations of permanent Palestinian ghettos.
How long will the civilised world remain silent in the
face of Israel's crimes and violations of
international humanitarian law?

Immediately after the defeat of German Fascism,
Zionism – a clone of Fascism – began its project of
colonising Palestine and establishing a purely “Jewish
State” with a European Christian culture. Jewish
terrorist organisations such as Irgun, Stern Gang, and
Haganah (today’s Israeli Army) were formed – armed and
financed by Western powers and wealthy Jews – to
perpetuate a terror campaign of systematic ethnic
cleansing and murdering of the native Palestinian
population. By the end of 1948, some 400 Palestinian
villages were destroyed, thousands of Palestinians
were murdered and more than 750,000 Palestinians were
forced to flee their homes to neighbouring countries.
This well-orchestrated “ethnic cleansing” (is) often (refered) to by Jewish Zionists and their Western supporters as the “war for independence”. In reality, it was not a war, but one defenceless nation was wiped off the map, and a Zionist entity of European Jews was established
on its foundation.

According to the Israeli historian, the Zionist Benny
Morris, genocide was planned against the Palestinians,
because “Palestinians are Barbarians”, consistent with
Theodor Herzl’s – the ‘founder’ of Zionism – depiction
of Palestinians as “dirty brigands”. The idea of
Palestinians and all Arabs as “barbarians” is not
restricted to (a) few Zionist Jews, but it is part of
Israel’s racist ideology. The recent racist comment by
Olmert that, “the lives and well-being of Sderot's
residents [a small Jewish colony outside Gaza] are
more important than those of Gaza residents” is a case
in point. The Nazis used the same racist rhetoric –
‘Deutschland über alles’ or ‘Germany above all’ – to
justify their heinous crimes against ethnic
minorities. The life of one Jew is worth more than all
Palestinians has been Zionism’s racist trade mark.

Morris regrets that Ben Gurion (former Israeli PM)
didn’t expel all Palestinians. Morris said: “If
Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and
cleansed the whole country – the whole Land of Israel,
as far as the Jordan River ... If he had carried out a
full expulsion – rather than a partial one – he would
have stabilised the State of Israel for generations
... If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy
one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did
not complete the transfer in 1948, [and] because he
left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the
West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself”. This is
like saying: ‘If Adolf Hitler had exterminated all
Jews, the world would be a peaceful place today’.

A recent opinion poll carried out by the Jaffe
Institute for Strategic Studies in March 2002 revealed
that between 46 % and 60 % of Israeli Jews support
mass deportation (expulsion) of the Palestinians for
the ‘Final Solution’. “Even in 1938, these ideas have
not had such wholehearted support in Nazi Germany, as
they have now in the Jewish state”, wrote the Israeli
writer, Israel Shamir. Western media – led by the
deceptive BBC – have gone (a) long way to support this
racist ideology and continue to depict Palestinian as
“violent militants”, without names and identity.

In an interview by Ari Shavit (Ha’aretz, 09 January
2004) Morris said; “In the months of April-May 1948,
units of Haganah were given operational orders that
stated explicitly that they were to uproot the
villagers, expel them and destroy the villages
themselves”. Morris said that; “Haganah committed 24
massacres, in some cases four or five people were
executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, and 100.
There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two
old men are spotted walking in a field – they are
shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village – she
is shot. There are cases such as the village of
Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column
entered the village with all guns blazing and killed
anything that moved.

“The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir
Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and
perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof
of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes
were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre
about which nothing had been known until now. The same
[happened] at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About
half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation
Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf,
Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad,
Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a[n]
unusually high concentration of executions of people
against a wall or next to a well in an orderly
fashion”.

Morris did compare Palestinian massacres with those
condemned by the West as crimes against humanity and
affirmed that; “in comparison to the massacres that
were perpetrated in Bosnia, that's peanuts. In
comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated
against the Germans at Stalingrad, that's chicken
feed”. The genocide of the Palestinians (which) continues
today with tacit support and complicity of Western
governments and their mass media, was a well-planned
campaign to exterminate the Palestinians.

After the 1967 Israeli war against the Palestinians
and neighbouring Arab countries, Israeli forces
occupied territories in Syria, Egypt and Gaza, the
West Bank, and Jerusalem in Palestine. The Israeli
Occupation was condemned by the UN and a special
resolution (Resolution 242) passed demanding the
immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from all
occupied Arab territories. In flagrant violation of
UN Resolution and international law, Israel continues
to occupy Arab lands.

In addition, since 1967, Israel has violated countless
UN resolutions and embarked on a Zionist ideology of
expansion and annexation of Arab lands. Israel
continues to demolish Palestinian homes and build
illegal Jewish settlements (colonies) on Palestinian
land. Israel continues its policy of confiscating
Palestinian land and expelling Palestinians into
designated ghettos.

Consistent with Israel’s “annexation plan” or
“convergence plan” – as it's called today – to isolate
the Palestinians into Nazi-like ghettos, the rest of
the occupied West Bank will be divided into three big
ghettos. The three big ghettos then divided into nine
smaller ghettos separated from each other by walls,
and Jewish-only highways. In addition to total
restrictions on freedom of movement, the ghettos are
manned by countless military checkpoints and razor
wires making life unbearable for the Palestinian
population. The aim is to prevent any possibility of
establishing a viable Palestinian state and subject
the Palestinians to servitude, thus the final
dispossession of the Palestinian people from their
land.

Jews who lived in and experienced the Nazi’s ghettos
have often made the comparison between Israel’s brutal
treatments of the Palestinian people and the Nazis’
brutal treatment of Jews. In a letter to the Israeli
press more than twenty years ago, Jewish holocaust
survivor Shlomo Shmelzman wrote: “In my childhood I
have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I
passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labour camps,
to Buchenwald. I hear too many familiar sounds today,
sounds which are being amplified by the war. I hear
about ‘closed areas’ and I remember ghettos and camps.
I hear ‘two-legged beasts’ and I remember
‘Untermenschen’ [subhumans]. I hear about tightening
the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into
submission, and I remember suffering, destruction,
death, blood and murder...Too many things in Israel
remind me of too many things from my childhood”.
(Ha’aretz, 11 August 1982). Israel’s terror and crimes
have since increased...manyfold.

Unlike the German ghettos, which were provisional,
Israel regards the Palestinian ghettos as (a) permanent
measure to control Palestinian lives. Further, Israel
uses the ghettos as investment for the benefit of the
Israeli economy. Israel is moving highly polluting
industry and sweatshops to industrial zones around the
ghettos where Palestinians will be used (forced) as
slaves to provide cheap and abundant labour. In
addition, Palestinian ghettos are open-air prisons
completely controlled by Israel.

The building of a long, snake-like wall, known as the
‘Apartheid Wall’, – condemned as illegal by the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague – on
stolen Palestinian land annexes 58 per cent of the
West Bank. The ICJ ruling was that the Wall and all
settlements (Israeli colonies) in the West Bank, Gaza
and Jerusalem are illegal and must be removed. The ICJ
ruling, like all other world court rulings, requires
all other (nations) signatories to the ICJ Charter to
compel Israel’s compliance with the ruling.

A health review by Dr. Derek Summerfield, of the
Institute of Psychiatry in London found that; “The
coherence of the Palestinian health system is being
destroyed. The wall will isolate 97 primary health
clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they
serve. Qalqilya hospital, which primarily serves
refugees, has seen a 40% fall in follow up
appointments because patients cannot enter the city.
There have been at least 87 documented cases
(including 30 children) in which denial of access to
medical treatment has led directly to deaths,
including those of babies born while women were held
up at checkpoints”. (British Medical Journal, 2004,
329:924).

The Wall is part of Israel’s ongoing war to
fractionate Palestinian communities and isolate them
from each other into disconnected ghettos, each will
be a prison, while virtually all Palestinian
agricultural and water resources (and) land are annexed to
Israel. As Israel did in Gaza, the West Bank’s towns of
Hebron and Nablus, and the suburbs around Jerusalem
will be transformed into several mini Gaza-like
prisons.

After the evacuation of the illegal Jewish settlers
from Gaza in 2004, Israel has literally completed the
first Palestinian ghetto. The Gaza ghetto is the most
isolated and densely populated prison on the planet.
Gaza is completely fenced-off by electronic and
electric fences, and controlled by Israel’s occupation
forces (IOF) from all sides. The population of 1.5
million Palestinians are locked down for (a) good part of the year. No Palestinian can leave or come into Gaza unless they have an Israeli-issued Palestinian ID card, which is impossible to obtain. The aim is to completely cut Gaza off from the West Bank and the rest of the world, and the second is to encourage starvation and epidemics among the population.

Israel continues to destroy Palestinian infrastructure
and kill innocent Palestinians, with impunity. In the
first four months of this year 90 Palestinians,
including more than 20 children, were killed by
Israeli forces meanwhile 17 Israelis, including one
child, were killed by Palestinian armed groups (AI
Wire, Vol. 36, No. 5, June 2006). Murdering
Palestinian children in cold blood has always been the
Israeli soldiers’ way of training. In many cases
Israeli soldiers were known to provoke children to
throw stones and then murder them. The last two
months (May-June) Israel has fired more than 6,000
shells into the Gaza killing more than 30 innocent
Palestinians.

According to Dr. Summerfield, the IOF has “killed more
Palestinian civilians than the number of people who
died on September 11, 2001. In conducting 238
extrajudicial executions the army has also killed 186
bystanders (including 26 women and 39 children). Two
thirds of the 621 children (two thirds under 15 years)
killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to
school, in their homes, died from small arms fire,
directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and
chest – the sniper's wound. Clearly, soldiers are
routinely authorised to shoot to kill children in
situations of minimal or no threat”. As a result of
Israel daily terror, most Palestinian children suffer
trauma and psychological sickness.

The month of June was the deadliest so far. Using the
(soccer) World Cup event as a cover, on Friday 09
June 2005, Israeli gunboats deliberately and
indiscriminately shelled northern Gaza beach and
murdered eight Palestinians (the entire Ghalia
family) – including three children while they were
picnicking. As usual, the Israeli Government and its
crimes complicit, the BBC, tried to cover up the
massacre. However, evidence provided by (an) eyewitness on
the ground, member of the US-based Human Rights Watch
(HRW) and hospital records refuted Israel’s
propaganda campaign as distortion of facts. “The
army’s case could be dismissed outright were it not
for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western
‘thought’ about Arabs and Muslims”, wrote author and
journalist Jonathan Cook. Two days later Jewish
soldiers murdered another nine Palestinians including
children in cold blood in northern Gaza.

On 21 June Israeli war planes attacked a group of
civilians murdering a pregnant woman, Fatima Ahmed and
her brother Zachariah, and seriously injuring seven
more people, including another pregnant women and
three small children,...a 5-year-old boy and
his 4-years-old cousin. There were no harmless
(Qassam) rocket strikes before the crimes. Murdering
Palestinian children in cold blood has become the
Israeli soldiers’ way of training. Nearly one-quarter
of the victims are children aged 16 years and younger.
As always, “[s]ome of the children were playing
football in the street in full sight of the soldier
who pulled the trigger, others were sitting at their
desks in school when a stray bullet from an army post
crashed into the classroom” reported Chris McGreal of
the London Guardian. “About half of those children
were shot in the Gaza strip, the bulk in two refugee
camps in the south – Rafah and Khan Yunis. The
killings were only part of it. Israel bulldozed the
homes of thousands of Palestinians along the Egyptian
border and around the settlements. It drove out many
others with the daily, and more often nightly, barrage
of fire into Rafah and Khan Yunis. Nowhere suffered
more at the hands of occupation” added McGreal. The
“moral” West (led by the U.S.) not only remains silent
but also (condones) Israel’s crimes as “self-defence”,
not terrorism.

Billions of U.S. taxpayers' money is spent annually to
arm Israel and to implement gross abuses of human
rights against the Palestinian people. Gaza (and other
towns in the West Bank) is often invaded by Israeli
tanks backed by troops, helicopter gunships and F-16
aircraft leaving behind trails of civilian massacres
and wanton destruction. Again, the crimes (are) depicted in
the West and the mass media as “incursion” and Israel
depicted as a “civilised” society, not one that (is)
addicted to violence and terrorism.

As I am writing these lines, Israeli tanks backed by
troops and helicopter gunships are invading and
reoccupying Gaza, destroying civilian infrastructures,
including bridges and electricity grids, in violations
of the Geneva Conventions and international law. Much
of Gaza has been left without electricity, making life
unbearable and (rendering) the health care system
unusable. Israeli actions are war crimes and crimes
against humanity, with the Bush Administration's
blessing. The advertised pretext for this deliberate
wanton destruction and collective punishment on (a)
defenceless population is to free one Israeli soldier,
which is completely fraudulent. The soldier was taken
prisoner during a legitimate resistance operation by
Palestinian fighters and in retaliation (for) Israel’s
ongoing acts of terrorism and crimes against
Palestinian children. Hence, the real aim of the
“Jewish State” is to topple a democratically elected
government and install a subservient one ready to
accept Israeli rules.

While the world is focussing on the one Israeli
soldier, there are more than 9,400 Palestinian
prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons. These
include hundreds of women, children and infants as
young as 3 months old separated from their mothers and
under brutal conditions. Many of the prisoners are
imprisoned without charge as “Administrative
Detainees”. They were kidnapped from their homes at
midnight, imprisoned and subjected to torture, sexual
abuses and denied their rights to (a) fair trial.

A permanent state of violence has served the “Jewish
State” very well, allowing it to avoid any peaceful
settlement and to continue its Zionist policy of
expansion. As Professor Ur Shlonsky of Geneva
University in Switzerland wrote; Israel’s aim is to
“terrorise the civilian population, assuring maximal
destruction of property and cultural resources”. At
the same time, “the daily life of the Palestinians
must be rendered unbearable: They should be locked up
in ghettos and refugee camps, prevented from
exercising normal economic life, cut off from
workplaces, schools and hospitals, This will encourage
emigration and weaken the resistance to future
expulsions”.

After the success of (the) HAMAS movement in the Palestinian
Legislative Council, the U.S. and the European Union
(EU) imposed economic sanctions, as a collective
punishment against the Palestinians for practicing
their democratic rights and for electing the “wrong”
people. In order to increase the suffering of
Palestinians, on 23 May 2006, the U.S. House of
Representatives voted to approve by 361-37 to impose
sanctions against the Palestinian people and starve
their children. Encouraged by Western powers, Israel
followed with its own brutality by illegally
withholding millions of dollars ($55 million per
month) in tax revenues from the Palestinians. As a
result, more than 170,000 government employees have
not been paid their salaries for three months
affecting the lives of more than a million
Palestinians.

Furthermore, unemployment and poverty among
Palestinians are as high as 60 % in Gaza and 50 % in
the West Bank (Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA]). This deliberate economic
siege “is like an appointment with a dietician. The
Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but they won't
starve to death”, said Dov Weissglas, the Israeli
Government’s senior political advisor. The same crimes
were known to have been perpetuated by the Nazis on
defenceless populations. By refusing to return
Palestinian tax revenues and deliberately imposing
harsh living conditions, Israel is forcing the
Palestinians to pay for their own (and their children's)
malnutrition and starvation.

Yet, despite nearly sixty years of Zionism in
Palestine, including forty-years of brutal military
occupation and barbarism enforced by the “Jewish
State” – the world’s fourth largest army – and its
Western allies, the Palestinian ghettos and refugee
camps continue to be vibrant grounds for Palestinian
resistance and civil societies. Zionism and Israeli
oppression have failed to break the desire and
national struggle of the Palestinians for freedom and
self-determination. Palestinians have built and
organised various institutions and organizations not
only to resist the Israeli Occupation but also to care
for their society. In addition to the armed struggle,
Palestinian institutions and organizations are
providing daily health care services, education and
aid to the Palestinian population.

Israel’s terror is dependent on the support provided
by Western governments, and U.S. taxpayers’ money.
Like Fascist Germany and Apartheid South Africa,
Israel can be forced – even under moderate economic
sanctions – to change its brutal policies and seek a
peaceful resolution. An independent Palestine and the
rights of return for all Palestinian refugees to their
land is the only just and peaceful resolution.

Just as the civilised world stood together against
Fascism and Apartheid, so it today must join to
condemn Israel and call on it to stop committing
crimes against the Palestinian people.

Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia.