A Blog from David Crump
Israel is one of the most militarized societies in the world.
Military service is compulsory for all graduating high school seniors. Everyone remains a member of the military reserves and is eligible for a call back into active service well into middle-age.
Israeli dissident, Miko Peled, son of a famous Israeli general and former soldier himself, explains how this militarization of civil society affects Israel’s culture and indoctrinates its people.
This week was marked by the opening of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.
Many international experts in the field of genocide studies agree — Israel is committing both genocide and ethnic cleansing against the 2.3 million Palestinian people living in Gaza.
Whereas many US news outlets covered Israel’s defense against South Africa’s charges, very few offered coverage of South Africa’s case for the prosecution. Another example of western bias when discussing Israel.
Consequently, I offer here only a portion of the case made against Israel earlier this week. It is chilling and damning.
Israel deserves to be convicted, shunned and sanctioned by the international community until it not only stops the current war, but dismantles its oppressive apartheid state.
Watch and hear some of the abundant evidence presented for yourself:
What happens to a society where the vast majority endorse their government’s policy of committing genocide against a subject people?
Unsurprisingly, it will demonstrate increased levels of hard-heartedness and moral corruption.
Gideon Levy is an award-winning Israeli journalist who provides a chilling description of how Israeli society-at-large now illustrates such corruption as the people of Gaza are exterminated.
Watch and shudder.
Israeli Jews have always viewed the native Palestinian population as a dangerous “demographic threat” to the maintenence of a Jewish majority in the Jewish state.
Investigative journalist Anthony Lowenstein discusses the long history of Israel’s attempts to rid the country of Palestinians, by hook or by crook.
More than 9,000 children in Gaza have undergone amputation, in many cases without anesthesia: In the Gaza Strip, the life of any child could turn into a
nightmare in the blink of an eye. Families try to keep their children safe, but this becomes harder and harder with the intense bombardments. Many houses have been destroyed, and many children ended up under the rubble. More than 9,000 children have been injured in the Gaza Strip, leaving them grappling with the loss of an arm or a leg.
Read the story of 4-year-old Ghazala, who lost a leg, here.
This harrowing story is taken from the Israel-Palestine News site at If Americans Knew (IAK). It is an excellent source for daily updates on the situation in Palestine-Israel, bringing facts and figures to Western readers that you will never see on the mainstream, corporate media.
“No one but Jews can inhabit this land (of Gaza)”:
“Every baby in Gaza is an enemy”
Common Dreams has published an article by investigative journalist, Brett Wilkins laying out the many accusations against Israeli soldiers charging them with mass executions of Palestinian civilians, men, women and children.
The article is titled,
Euro-Med Monitor documented nine separate cases in which Israeli troops executed Palestinians—including numerous women and children—during the ongoing invasion of Gaza.
A prominent European human rights group on Monday submitted a report to the International Criminal Court and United Nations special rapporteurs documenting “dozens of cases of field executions carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip.”
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based nonprofit, requested the ICC and U.N. immediately investigate “the widespread killing operations carried out by Israeli forces targeting Palestinian civilians, especially the field executions and physical liquidations in the Gaza Strip.”
In addition to ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, Euro-Med Monitor sent copies of its preliminary findings to Maurice Tydball Benz, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial or arbitrary executions; Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; and Navanethem Pillay, head of the Investigative Committee on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
“Nearly 10 days after the Israeli army began its ground attack in the Gaza Strip on October 27, the Israeli army carried out dozens of executions and direct physical liquidations against civilians as part of its all-out military campaign that started on October 7 in retaliation for the armed attack that Palestinian factions carried out in Israeli settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip,” Euro-Med Monitor said in a statement.
The group’s report lists nine separate instances in which it says Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops executed Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Victims include multiple elderly couples shot and left to bleed to death after being forced from their homes in Gaza City last week; a mentally ill man shot in his home in the Jabalia refugee camp; six members of the al-Khaldi family shot dead during an Israeli raid on their home; and nine forcibly displaced civilians including women and children who were massacred while seeking shelter in the Shadia Abu Ghazala School near Jabalia on December 13.
“The Israeli soldiers came in and opened fire,” one unidentified witness said of the school attack. “They took all men, then entered classrooms and opened fire on a woman and all the children with her,” including “newborn children.”
“The Israeli soldiers executed those innocent families point-blank,” she added.
You can read the rest of the article here.
Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac is a professor at Bethlehem Bible College as well as the pastor at the bethlehem Lutheran Christmas church. Terry and I often worship at this church whenever we are in the West Bank.
Pastor Isaac understands that now is the time for a prophetic word addressed to the western church. He declares hard truths powerfully.
He is a Christian leader speaking to his fellow believers in the western Church — a Church that largely approves of Israel’s current campaign of destruction against his people. How can this be?
Our only proper response is repentance.
I am privileged to count both the Rev. Drs. Mitri Raheb and Munther Isaac among my friends. You will meet them in this video from Democracy Now.
Together with the other Christian leaders of Bethlehem, they are speaking prophetically to the rest of the world as public celebrations have been cancelled in Bethlehem this Christmas.
Oh, they are not neglecting the wonder of Jesus’ birth. But they are grappling with the contexual realities of remembering Jesus’ birth while also suffering brutal Israeli attacks in both Gaza and the West Bank.
Thus, they haver turned to the Old Testament tradition of lament, that is crying out to God in protest against both worldly injustice and his apparent absence.
The western Christian church has become immune to the biblical concept of collective, corporate lament. Even when we try to construct a lament service, we don’t really know how to be comfortable with it.
In part, this awkwardness is due to American isolationism, ignorance, and lack of empathy for others.
We fail to identify with our Palestinian brothers and sisters in Christ because many don’t realize that Palestinian Christians exist.
We ignore the news of literal genocide occurring in Gaza because we are generally disinterested in the rest of the world.
And when we go to visit Israel, we are more feverish about visiting Zionist synagogue services than we are about worshiping with Palestinian brothers and sisters.
The Palestinian church is showing us once again what biblical lament means as they endure a multitude of the cruelest war time injustices.
Never before has the Jewish settlement movement held as much power as they do today. Several of their leaders are members of the Israeli cabinet. They now call the shots in the West Bank, accelerating Jewish attacks against Palestinians, stealing their homes, destroying their crops and killing them with impunity.
The following video compilation offers a glimpse into this world of daily threats and violence: