Israeli Prime Minister at the United Nations
Netanyahu: "Hamas Made Us Massacre Innocent Children"
October 13, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's September 29 speech at the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly was full of lies and distortions of reality that went off the charts.
Unpacking and dissecting ALL the genocidal logic and lies of Netanyahu's speech is beyond the scope of this article. Right now, let's fact-check one central aspect of his speech: Netanyahu's defense of the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians during the onslaught against Gaza in July and August: "...Hamas cynically used Palestinian civilians as human shields. It used schools, not just schools—UN schools, private homes, mosques, even hospitals to store and fire rockets at Israel.... Israel was doing everything to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties. Hamas was doing everything to maximize Israeli civilian casualties and Palestinian civilian casualties.... Israel dropped flyers, made phone calls, sent text messages, broadcast warnings in Arabic on Palestinian television, always to enable Palestinian civilians to evacuate targeted areas.... As their families were being rocketed by Hamas, Israel's citizen army—the brave soldiers of the IDF, our young boys and girls—they upheld the highest moral values of any army in the world...."
Basically, Netanyahu declared that "Hamas made us kill all those innocent civilians including children."
Reality check: Israel fired missiles from U.S.-made jets and drones and shelled Gaza from tanks. According to the United Nations Human Rights Council report of September 22, "Some 1,479 of a total of 2,158 Palestinian fatalities were civilians, of them 506 were children. On the Israeli side, 66 soldiers and five civilians were killed. More than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza were left without a habitable home to return to, and 497,000 people had been internally displaced."
And almost all of the Israelis killed were soldiers who invaded Gaza and were carrying out these war crimes.
Because this UN report exposed some of Israel's war crimes, Netanyahu denounced the UN human rights group as a "'terrorist rights council."
Netanyahu's charge that "Hamas used civilians as human shields" is a sick perversion. In densely populated Gaza, every neighborhood has some kind of government facility, from schools to health and welfare offices. Israel did deliberately target "schools, private homes, mosques, even hospitals." And the purpose was not so much to wipe out Hamas, but to terrorize the whole population.
Netanyahu's claim that Hamas stored weapons in United Nations schools is another big lie that has been endlessly repeated by the rulers and media in the U.S. In the three cases where weapons were discovered in a UN school, these facilities had been closed and were vacant for months. No Palestinian civilians were present there. But many Palestinians lived near these three schools, and inside other UN schools or Palestinian hospitals that were supposed to be safe shelters but were deliberately hit with Israeli missiles on the pretext of targeting Hamas leaders or fighters who were allegedly nearby. One horrific example was the Israeli attack on the UN-run school in Beit Hanoun in Gaza. It was packed with hundreds of Palestinian evacuees seeking shelter under UN protection. The UN had repeatedly certified the school was not being used by combatants or to store Palestinian weapons. On July 24, word spread among those huddled in the school that they were to be evacuated to a safer place. People gathered up their meager possessions and lined up in the courtyard. That was when the rockets hit. Sixteen people were killed on the spot, a hundred more wounded, including women, children and infants. (See "Massacre of Palestinians at a UN School: Stop Israel's Assault on Gaza Now!" July 28, 2014. It includes a link to a video of the massacre.)
As for the Israeli "warnings" of imminent attack, where could people go to be safe? People fled from one neighborhood to another, from one refugee camp to another, to UN schools and to hospitals, only to be hit by Israeli missiles and shells over and over again. Result? More than 68 percent of the over 2,000 Palestinian deaths in Gaza were civilians. And, typically, when Israel did issue "warnings" it was only one to 15 minutes before Israel's death machine struck from the sky.
It is important here to remind readers of some key facts about the desperate conditions of everyday life for the people in Gaza today that have been created and enforced by Israel:
- Over half the Palestinians in Gaza have refugee status, having fled, or being children of victims of Israel's expansionist wars in 1948 and 1967 that grabbed most of Palestine and set up a "Jewish state."
- After Hamas came to power in 2006 in an internationally-monitored election, Israel sealed the border with Gaza and it tightly controls the two border crossings, while the U.S.-backed military regime in Egypt keeps a lid on the third crossing at Rafah.
- In 2007, in an act of collective punishment against the whole population, Israel and the U.S. imposed strict and genocidal sanctions that systematically restrict most of the basic necessities of life in Gaza. Fishermen have even been banned from fishing in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza. Israeli leaders have boasted of "putting Gaza on a diet."
- Consecutive Israeli assaults in 2008-09 and this year have deliberately targeted the physical infrastructure including power plants and water and sewage facilities. As a result, more than 90 percent of the groundwater in Gaza is contaminated by sea water and sewage, making the people dependent for water on what Israel allows in.
All this is a continuation and escalation of the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the state of Israel.
One last point. Netanyahu stated: "It's not just our values that are under attack. It's your interests and your values."
There is some truth to Netanyahu's claim about the "values" shared among Israel and the representatives of the oppressors and exploiters—big and small—at the UN, especially the United States.
These "values" are a manifesto of commitment to keeping the world as it is today, starting with maintaining U.S. imperialism's stranglehold on the Middle East, including the subjugation of the Palestinian people. For the U.S. and Israeli rulers, this is a key to maintaining U.S. global dominance—and its accompanying wars, degradation and enslavement of women, grinding poverty for billions of people, destruction of the environment, and the reduction of every human and every thing into a commodity valued only by the amount of profit that can be squeezed out. Every U.S. president and every Israeli leader invokes these "shared values."
It seems that part of what framed Netanyahu's speech is contention between Israel and the U.S., including over moves by the rulers of the U.S. to explore bringing the reactionary Islamic Republic of Iran more into their orbit. But an even more defining reality is that the state of Israel has historically played and continues to play a unique and crucial role in maintaining the status of the U.S. as the world's sole superpower that sits atop and violently enforces a world of exploitation and oppression. And so whatever spats there are between the U.S. and Israel, the U.S. backed Israel's war crimes against the people of Gaza all the way, even sending over munitions to restock the Israel military while they massacred hundreds of children in Gaza. (For an in-depth look at the nature and role of the state of Israel, see the Revolution/revcom.us special issue "The Case of Israel: Bastion of Enlightenment or Enforcer for Imperialism.")
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