With its latest attack on Gaza--on the families it drove from their homes in what is now Israeli territory--Israel is surpassing itself in viciousness. As of today, Israel has killed 212 Gazans, including at least 61 children and 36 women. It is "obliterate[ing] multiple generations of families" in the middle of the night-at least 21 members of the al-Qawlaq family, from 6 months to 90 years old. It is pulverizing residential towers and media offices, and bombing "civic infrastructure, businesses and the main roads leading to the city's al-Shifa hospital." Destroying the roads is an instructive example of Israel's gratuitous, and clever, cruelty: It of course prevents ambulances and medics from moving where they're needed; it also blocks the families who are fleeing to the hospitals for safety from the sudden explosion of their homes. But, We didn't bomb the hospital!
Given all of Israel's precision weapons and careful advance planning, this is not an accident, nor was the killing of at least two key senior medical staff in one night--reminiscent of the one day, during the Great March of Return protest in 2018, when Israeli snipers, who claimed to "know where every bullet landed," just happened to wound and kill 18 paramedics. It's a plan to increase the suffering and chaos.
A powerful state only does these things to people it despises and fears.
I hope that everyone, or at least an increasing number of Americans, can finally acknowledge what they are seeing, what Israel is, and that they will then reject the fables and excuses they are being constantly fed.
Israel is a colonial-settler enterprise. Israel is an ethno-religious (Jewish) supremacist enterprise. Ipso facto, Israel is an apartheid enterprise.
It is that kind of enterprise by virtue of its ongoing conspicuous actions and by virtue of its own self-definition as a "Jewish State."
As British activist Haim Bresheeth-Ã... ½abner says, "From a de facto racist state, Israel has become an Apartheid state de jure." Per Israeli human-rights organization B'Tselem, Israel is "A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid."
Even Human Rights Watch agrees that Israel is guilty of the "crime" of apartheid. It is indisputable, as B'Tselem's executive director. Hagai El-Ad, says, that: "Apartheid is the organizing principle that connects all these forms of colonization and transfer, disenfranchisement and oppression, domination and supremacy... All Palestinians living under Israeli rule are treated as inferior in rights and status to Jews who live in the same area."
As I've said in a previous article, regarding the Zionist colonial, intrinsically apartheid, enterprise: "That's what has to be named and opposed. Every other problem in the context is a derivative of that."
And that is indefensible. Colonialist apartheid is a crime-in terms of both internationally-accepted political ethics and the norms of international law. Colonialism and apartheid are crimes under jus cogens--the preemptory, compelling norms of international "from which no derogation is ever permitted." The perpetrators of such crimes are considered hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind.
A colonial apartheid regime has no "right of self-defense" against the resistance of the people it is attempting to exterminate, expel, or force into submission. Those people the colonial regime is trying to subjugate do have every right to fight for "liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle." Individual people and organized groups--whether kids throwing rocks or Hamas throwing missiles--have every right, with any means necessary, to resist, fight, and defeat the occupying colonial power.
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