Gideon Levy of HAARETZ continues to speak as the prophetic conscience for 
an inhumane, Zionist Israel. Today, one day after the Gaza Land Day protests, he writes a lament, a funeral dirge, for the final burial of his nation’s conscience.
I have excerpted his Opinion piece below, but please be sure to read the whole thing. It merits pondering and prayers for our humanity.
He predicts, correctly I believe, only dark days ahead, unfolding predictably from the dark decades past.
The verdict of “heartless persecutor, shameless executioner,” has been passed on the American establishment as well as Israel. America funds Israel’s military, provides their weaponry and then bites its tongue whenever Israel goes on another blood-curdling rampage, leaving shredded, dismembered Palestinian bodies in its wake.
None of us should have any time to waste on the self-righteous debates about “even-handedness,” on the importance of seeing both sides of this “complicated story.” It is meaningless platitude advanced by shallow thinkers that only obscures the truth of history.
I have no more time for David Gregory’s condescending smirks on CNN as he so graciously
allows Diana Buttu a few moments (though he can’t stop from interrupting) to “share her perspective” on the Gazan slaughter.
Thank you CNN. A statement of facts is only a “perspective.”
I have no more time for the arrogance of Thomas Friedman and his ilk (in the White House and beyond) who continue to blame the victims as if they were mindless robots programmed by Hamas master-minds, with no 
personal agency and too bloody impatient to wait for the Utopia that could be Gaza if only the people would stop shitting in their own nest. (Has Friedman never cracked open a book not written by a propagandist for political Zionism?)
The moral insouciance of these self-important talking heads is infuriating.
Remember when Friedman urged the Palestinians to mimic Gandhi and adopt his methods of non-violence? (If you don’t remember, I have written about Friedman’s piece with links to his article here.) From his over-stuffed office chair, Friedman urged Palestinians, young and old, to sacrifice their lives for freedom,
promising a compassionate Israeli 
response.
We have all now seen how Israeli compassion deals with massive non-violent marches.
But even worse is the evangelical/fundamentalist obsession with an embassy in Jerusalem while, on the very same day, more than 60 unarmed people are assassinated, and thousands more maimed for life, by the most immoral army in the world.
The silence of American evangelicalism screams an eternal accusation, “Here we are, a godless people; bloated by comfort; hardened by selfishness; ignorant by choice; disinterested by design…and guilty as hell.”
“When will the moment come in which the mass killing of Palestinians matters anything to the right? When will the moment come in which the massacre of civilians shocks at least the left-center? If 60 people slain don’t do it, perhaps 600? Will 6,000 jolt them?
“When will the moment come in which a pinch of human feeling arises, if only for a moment, toward the Palestinians? Sympathy? At what moment will someone call a halt, and suggest compassion, without being branded an eccentric or an Israel hater?
“When will there be a moment in which someone admits that the slaughterer has, after all, some responsibility for the slaughter, not only the slaughtered, who are of course responsible for their own slaughter?
“Sixty people killed didn’t matter to anyone – perhaps 600 would? How about 6,000? Will Israel find all the excuses and justifications then also? Will the blame be laid on the slain people and their “dispatchers” even then, and not a word of criticism, mea culpa, sorrow, pity or guilt will be heard?…
Media Whitewashes Gaza Massacre.” The entire article is well worth reading. It includes a well known statement by
Remember that this famous fence that Israel guards so fervently is not a border crossing. It is not an internationally recognized territorial, state or national boundary. It is a prison fence.
protesting the way Israeli soldiers regularly arrest, abuse and imprison Palestinian children.
Palestine that was put into effect by Israeli military forces in 1948-49.
May 15th.
been shot. The numbers of people wounded by live ammunition is now in the thousands.
The journalist Glenn Greenwald puts it best (watch the interview 
nonchalantly mimic Israeli press releases. Bernie Sanders is still the only member of Congress to speak out and condemn the mass slaughter now occurring (
A theology of Israeli privilege that overshadows and negates all competing ethical concerns. A theology that baptizes genocide as the approved work of God. A theology – that is really an IDEOLOGY – as effectively racist towards Palestinians as the political Zionism animating the monstrously perverse Middle Eastern beast once known as Israel.
resistance.
the lead. What if 1,000 women sat down peacefully on a road to block access to an illegal Jewish settlement built on Palestinian farmland? What if the women allowed themselves to be tear-gassed, beaten and arrested without a single rock being thrown? Those images would be on televisions around the world – particularly if hundreds more women marched in to replace those hauled away.”
“In Gaza, Israeli army snipers shot unarmed demonstrators as if they were on a shooting range, to a chorus of rejoicing by the media and the masses…This is what the nation wants and this is what it will get. Even if soldiers kill hundreds of demonstrators in Gaza, Israel will not bat an eyelid. The reason: evil and hatred of Arabs. Gaza is never perceived as it really is, a place inhabited by people, an enormous and terrible prison, a huge site of human experimentation. Most Israelis, who — just like their prime minister — have never spoken to a single Gazan, only know that the Gaza Strip is a nest of terrorists. That’s why it’s OK to shoot them. Shocking? Yes, but true.”
violent protests confront the military force of an ethnocracy, rooted in a commitment to purity-of-blood, defending its founding ideology of racial privilege.
Cynics, however, have typically responded to pro-Gandhi idealists by pointing out the humanitarian bent of the British Empire (grossly exaggerated, by the way). They then pose an alternative scenario:
Every victim shot with live ammunition. Bullets fired at unarmed people standing dozens, if not hundreds, of yards away from the soldiers. Unarmed marchers and high-powered rifles separated by a steel fence and a wide no-man’s land imposed from on high.
fumes reminding them of 
hell on earth.
Nor do Palestinian lives matter to America, which once again seeks to block the U.N. resolution condemning the slaughter. America, the lumbering moral Frankenstein, mesmerized by Israeli propaganda, suffers from a cauterized, national conscience seared like a piece of raw meat by a red-hot iron.
now mow down by bravely firing remote-controlled machine guns into the Gazan killing fields – the guns’ operators safely sitting many miles away in the Sinai desert.