The Children of Gaza [updated]

The Children of Gaza
& The Profits from their Genocide
The beach in Gaza. Photograph: Hazem Balousha

“The Israeli-Arab conflict is to the wider global war of civilizations what Off Broadway is to Broadway. It is the small laboratory where trends get tested out first, or are perfected, and then go global.”
Thomas Friedman, New York Times, 1 February 2014.

“That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations is as shocking as it is true…” – Thomas Paine

A bearded old man holds a placard:
“You take my water, burn my olive trees,
“Destroy my house, take my job, steal my land,
“Imprison my father, kill my mother,
“Bombard my country, starve us all,
“Humiliate us all, but I am to blame:
“I shot a rocket back.”

A selection of ungodly chants
From the Zionist Book of Psalms
Are used to announce the destruction
Of a country and its inhabitants:

“We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages
“Destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water.”
– Eli Yishai, former Deputy Prime Minister of Israel.
Amen

“There should be no electricity in Gaza,
“No gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing…
“We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods…
“Flatten all of Gaza.”
– Gilad Sharon, son of Ariel Sharon, Jerusalem Post.
Amen

Gaza should be “bombed so hard the population
“Has to flee into Egypt.”
– Israel Katz, Minister of Transportation.
Amen

Gaza should be “wiped clean with bombs.”
– Avi Dichter, Minister of Home Front Defence.
Amen

Israeli soldiers must “learn from the Syrians
“How to slaughter the enemy.”
– Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef.
Amen

Here is Vladimir Jabotinsky, admirer of Mussolini
And godfather of Zionist terrorism,
Justifying the flattening of Arab villages in 1948
And their inhabitants being turned into refugees:
“The world has become accustomed to the idea
“Of mass migrations and has become fond of them.”
“Hitler, as odious as he is to us,” Jabotinsky adds,
“Has given this idea a good name in the world.”
Amen
[Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, New York: Henry Holt, 2001, p. 407]

It’s an irony that Jabotinsky used Hitler
As precedent for the eviction of thousands,
Since forcible expulsion

Was amongst the charges against Adolf Eichmann,
An architect of industrialized mass murder;
Captured in Argentina, tried and hanged in Israel.

Undeterred, the former Chief Rabbi,
Mordechai Elyahu, has urged Israel,
Its army and its government
To employ “the Nazi choice”:
By which he’s meant the carpet bombing of Gaza,
And he urges the “indiscriminate killing of civilians”
On religious grounds.
Amen

The Chabad Lubavitch Rabbi Schneerson,
A self-proclaimed Messiah
Whose followers await his return from the dead
(As if the Rabbi hadn’t preached enough when alive
By his making the claim that his religion
Heralded a new Master Race),
Has a devoted and powerful acolyte, Rabbi Manis Friedman,
Who declares that the “only way to fight a moral war”
Is to “destroy the Arabs’ holy sites”
To “kill men, women and children”, to eliminate anyone
Who stands in the way of a Greater Israel.

With an Old Testament ferocity,
And a religious racism which the atheist,
Christopher Hitchens, has called,
“The root of religious evil”,
The Rabbi acclaims Israel’s relentless colonizing impulse
Whereby the Torah is used
To justify mass killings
And such crimes
Are given a whole country’s blessing.

The Head of the National Defence College,
Professor Arnon Sofer,
Outlines Israel’s strategy:
“If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill.
“All day, every day.”
Amen
Jerusalem Post, 24 May 2004]

Israeli Air Force Colonel Yoav Gal,
Told army radio,
“I believe that Operation Cast Lead
“Should have been even stronger! Dresden! Dresden!
“The extermination of a city!
“Not even a stone will be thrown at us. Because we’re Jews.
“I want the Arabs of Gaza to flee to Egypt.
“This is what I want. I want to destroy the city.”
Amen
[Broadcast during “Operation Cast Lead”, 11 January 2009]
Dresden, 17 April, 1945

Ethnic cleansing is Israel’s origin,
Not peace, or quiet:
The current Prime Minister of Israel,
Benjamin Netanyahu, tells students at Bar Ilan University,
“Israel should have exploited the repression
“Of the demonstrations in China,
“When world attention focused on that country,
“To carry out mass expulsions
“Among the Arabs of the territories.”
[Benyamin Netanyahu, currently Prime Minister of Israel; Hotam, 24 November, 1989]
[“One night at a dinner party in Jerusalem in 1977, I heard a young Israeli [Netanyahu] talking about the Arabs in terms which chilled my blood. “In the next war, we’ve got to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank for good.” Max Hastings, London: The Guardian, 9 May, 2009]
An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot
A 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza
Dismissed a warning from another soldier
That she was merely a child
By saying that he “would have killed her
Even if she was three years old.”
Iman Darweesh al-Hams, 1991-2004

Witnesses described how an unidentified Israeli
Captain R.
Shot Iman al-Hams twice in the head, walked away,
Then turned back and fired a stream of bullets into her body.
Doctors at Rafah hospital said she had been shot at least 17 times.
On his radio, the company commander “clarifies”
Why he killed Iman al-Hams, aged 13.
“This is commander. Anything that’s mobile,
That moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old,
Needs to be killed. Over
[Chris McGreal, ‘Israeli officer: I was right to shoot 13-year-old child: Radio exchange contradicts army version of Gaza killing’, The Guardian, 24 November 2004]
Far from being the world’s most moral army,
As Israeli politicians frequently boast,
Its soldier are on record
As relishing the death of Palestinians.
All Arabs to them are ‘terrorists’.

An Israeli soldier David Dovadia shows himself taking aim
Spread-eagled behind an M44 sniper’s rifle
“I killed 13 childrens [sic] today and ur next
fucking musilms [sic] go to hell bitches.”

Nisim Asis, a 22-year-old soldier from the Beit-El settlement,
Posts racist images on his Instagram page,
Including a picture of himself licking ketchup from a knife
With the caption: “Fuck all Arabs their blood is tasty”.


Mor Ostrovski, an Israeli combat soldier,
Posts an Instagram picture of a Palestinan child
In the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle
[Phoebe Greenwood, Guardian,18 February 2013]
“The Palestinians are like crocodiles,
“The more you give them meat, they want more”
Said Ehud Barak, when Prime Minister of Israel.
[Jerusalem Post, 30 August 2000]
The justly revered Martin Buber
Once despairingly told a New York audience,
“When we followers of the prophetic Judaism
Returned to Palestine… the majority of Jewish people
Preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us
[Jewish Newsletter, 2 June, 1958]
“Death to the Arabs”, Israelis chant,
“A Jew is a brother, an Arab is a bastard” –
Enraged when captive Palestinians have fought back
With ever increasing desperation,
And have tried to regain their ancestral land
Despite overwhelming odds.

During Purim, in front of their Arab neighbours,
Settlers sing the praises of Baruch Goldstein
And of his massacre with automatic weapons
Of 29 Palestinians at prayer during Ramadan:
“Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the world.
“Dr. Goldstein, we all love you… he aimed at terrorists’ heads,
“Squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets,
“And shot, and shot.”

At this settler hero’s funeral, Rabbi Yaacov Perrin
Asserted that one million Arabs
Were “not worth a Jewish fingernail.”

It was Palestinian feelings of impotence
After Goldstein’s mass murder
That provoked suicide bombing–
Some two hundred bombers amongst ten million Palestinians –
That in turn was used to justify Israel’s apartheid wall,
Twice the height of the Berlin wall and five times longer,
Snaking its land-grabbing way through Palestine.
EPA/ALAA BADARNEH

The Israeli state does everything it can
To increase those feelings of impotence:
The Israeli lawmaker, Ayelet Shaked, calls
For the genocide of Palestinians on Facebook;
She advocates “the slaughter of Palestinian mothers
Who give birth to ‘little snakes,’”
“The entire Palestinian people is the enemy,” she says,
Urging their complete destruction,
“Including its elderly and its women.”

The new media are used to demonize the innocent
And to host a sadistic irrationality:
Placing the Hebrew word for “Arabs”, ARAVIM,
Into Twitter reveals young Israelis desiring
That all Arabs die or are tortured to death.
Talya Shilok Edry, tells his thousand followers,
“What an orgasm to see the Israeli Defence Forces bomb buildings
In Gaza with children and families at the same time. Boom boom.”

Facebook reveals soldiers making Rachel Corrie pancakes,
To show their contempt for the American peace-worker
Who was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried
To protect a Palestinian home from demolition.
Nesim Pesarel, holding a gun invites his Facebook followers for an
“Afternoon of ‘rachel corrie’ Pancakes and fun!”

An Israel support group calling themselves The “Citizens of Ashdod”
Post the message, “Waiting for Gaza to be turned into a big blaze!”
Later they publish their suggested words for a protest chant:
“Gaza, Gaza a graveyard! Very soon!”
It receives more than six hundred “likes.”

A Jerusalem city councillor in charge of municipal security, Aryeh King, publicly advocates the murder
And the mutilation of non-Jews:
“I am calling out to all the Pinchases that are here …
Every one of us has a mission …
The Rebbe, who is here with us, expects us to commit acts of Pinchas.”

Pinchas (Phineas in English) in the Torah was so incensed
By interracial (Jewish-Midianite) sex
That he took a sword and plunged it through the bodies
Of a couple in the middle of their making love.

Then, with medieval fervor, the Rabbi Noam Perel
Advocates scalping Arabs
By removing their genitalia –
A blood sacrifice to a mad mind-set
Of mystical thuggery.
[David Sheen, ‘Israeli calls for Palestinian blood ring at fever pitch’, The Electronic Intifada , 15 July 2014]
Two Israeli girls hold up a banner
“Hating Arabs is not racism, it’s values!”

Shortly beforehand, the US House of Representatives
Voted unanimously to reaffirm its full support for Israel.
US donated jets duly make war on Arab children
Whose democratic futures they annihilate.

Streets in Israeli cities
Are routinely named after armed cuckoos –
Murderous Israeli heroes
Who’ve evicted indigenous birds
From the Palestinian nest
And then slaughtered them.

In the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis,
Eight members of the Al Haj family
Are killed, including five children.

Four Arab children, fishermens’ children
And first cousins from the Bakr family,
Aged from nine to eleven years old,
Playing football on the Gaza beach in July, 2014,
Are shot dead by an Israeli gunboat.
A 12-year-old boy loses 18 members of his family in an air raid
From US planes including his father, a schoolteacher.

A photograph of Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh
Shows his shoulders slumped against a car
At the moment that he’s discovered
His father is amongst the dead.

Abdul Rahman Al-Batsh, aged 12, loses 18 members of his own family
Later Abdul Rahman would say,
“They think we are worth nothing. They are killers,
They have no humanity,
And one day I will avenge my father.”

Israel receives more aid from the US
Than the whole of the continent of Africa,

Whilst the US population remains docile
And supinely allows its mainstream media
To beat Israel’s repetitive drum.

A Palestinian child, injured in an Israeli assault, was taken to Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Gaza on Wednesday
The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman,
Says that Israel must “go all the way” in Gaza
And the jubilation of Israeli citizens at its doing so
Is recorded in a vox pop by the newspaper Haaretz.

Someone called Shani Moyal is quoted as saying,
“I couldn’t care less that Arab children were killed.
Too bad it wasn’t more. Good luck to the IDF.”
Stav Sabah says, “Really, these are great pictures.
They make me so happy. I want to look at them
Again and again.” Sharon Avishi says, “Only four.
Too bad. We hoped for more.” Daniel Turgeman says,
“Great. We need to kill all the children.”
Chaya Hatnovich says,“There isn’t a more beautiful picture Than those of dead Arab children.”
Orna Peretz says, “Why only four?”
Rachel Cohen says,
“I’m not for children dying in Gaza.
I’m for everyone burning.” Tami Mashan says,
“As many children as possible should die.”
[Gideon Levy, ‘Images from Gaza should trouble every Israeli’
Haaretz , July. 24, 2014 ]

Israelis sitting on a hilltop outside Sderot watched a smoke plume rise over Gaza on Wednesday following an airstrike.

Comfortably seated on camp chairs and sofas
Some fifty Israelis gather to eat popcorn
And watch from a Sderot hilltop
As bombs rain down from US-supplied F-16s.
They clap and applaud each deadly blast
From 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs
[Robert Mackey, Israelis Watch Bombs Drop on Gaza From Front-Row Seats
New York Times, July 14, 2014]
Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot on Monday to watch the bombardment of Gaza.
ANDREW BURTON / GETTY IMAGES

“We are here to see Israel destroy Hamas,” Eli Chone,
A 22-year-old American tells Allan Sørensen,
Of Kristeligt Dagblad, pointing to a dot of light in the sky.
“It is a fighter who is about to dive. This means that it is about to shoot.”

The conquerors’ fans draw up their chairs
Swigging on beers as they tend their barbecue.
They watch Gaza burn from their vantage-point
In Sderot (once the Palestinian village of Najd).

One says, “this is our entertainment.”
[BBC ‘Broadcasting House’, Radio 4, 20th July, 2014]
Someone jeeringly points out that Hamas,
Rather than its having been elected,
Is instead “a dirty death-cult”
And that Palestinians “enjoy martyrdom”
And so “we’re doing the Arabs a favour.”

A lurid cocktail of triumphalist hatred
Mixed with smoke from burning flesh,
Blinds them to Palestine’s yearning
For self-determination –

To its right in international law;
To its right to be unencumbered by occupation;
To be free from its being Israel’s penal colony;
To be free from its being stateless in a brutal Bantustan –
To its no longer being a colonized people
Who are sneered at and denounced
For their minimal attempts to fight back

Later that night a bomb would land on a Gaza care home
Filled with elderly patients who cannot move
And with children who are already disabled.
Both are bombed in their wheelchairs or in their beds.

Twenty-year-old Palestinian Sally Saqr lies in a hospital bed with burns that have turned her cheeks an angry pink beneath her ventilation tube. Agence France-Presse
The Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva
The world’s largest religious-Zionist youth organization,
Urges on his Facebook page that the IDF,
The Israeli Defence Force, be transformed
Into an army of avengers,
“Which will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins”

And thus incited by a fascistic atavism
Israeli Jews go on the rampage,
Looking to beat any Arab they encounter
To heighten their sense of victory.

On July 2nd, 2014,
A young man in Shuafat, Jerusalem,
Muhammad Abu-Khdeir,
A 16-year old boy with a knowing, elfin smile
Is pulled into a car
And kidnapped in East Jerusalem
While waiting to go into the mosque.

He is tied and beaten.
He has gasoline poured into his mouth
And he is burned alive.

His body is found in the Jerusalem Forest;
Battered in the head
And with soot deposits in the lungs
Suggesting that he was still breathing
When he was set on fire.
Ninety per cent of his body is burned.

Is being financed and uncritically supported
By ‘the good guys’,
By the internationally ‘great and the good’,
By the craven chorus of the compliant
Who ritually pipe up to defend
Israel’s right to defend itself –
To defend the indefensible,
And to supply the money
The weapons, and the excuses
To enable it to do so.

An Israeli chorus glorifies
In its letting loose the dogs of war:
After calling for bloodshed against Palestinians,
Talya Shilok Edry’s Facebook writes gloatingly
Of the kidnapped youth,
Muhammad Abu-Khdeir, burned alive,
“Sweet settlers, next time you kidnap an Arab boy,
Call me and let me torture him!!
Why do you get to have all the fun?”

On Friday July 18, 2014
The Israeli Defence Force
Invades Gaza by land.
An Israeli soldier posts a selfie
Of himself having black camouflage paint
Applied to his face.

He tweets, “From the Field: Our soldiers preparing to enter Gaza.
The whole nation stands behind us”
Another tweets: “We have hit Hamas hard,
And we will continue to hit Hamas hard.”

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Justice Minister,
Says she backs the invasion “wholeheartedly”.
And she expresses “love and confidence
In our soldiers’ strength”.

Israel’s soldiers’ strength is misused
To produce genocide, as well as a scorched policy
Whereby 800,000 olive trees in Occupied Palestine
Are destroyed to drive Palestinian farmers from their land,
And whereby their homes are bombed to smithereens.

King Herod revisits his massacre of the Innocents,
But this time round he has the mainstream media
On his side: his spin doctors have them swallowing
His party line that toddlers are terrorists if they’re Arab,
And King Herod has journalists fired who displease him.

“Expel the Palestinians, and populate Gaza with Jews”,
Urges the Knesset’s deputy speaker, Moshe Feiglin,
“Israel must attack Gaza even more mercilessly”
To expel the population “with maximum force”.

The deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset,
Promotes war crimes as a state sanctioned tactic:
After “softening” the targets with firepower
He recommends the IDF “conquer the entire Gaza.”
[From an article for the Israeli news website Arutz Sheva, July 2014]
Emboldened by the US’s blank cheques
He urges attacking a defenceless population.
Few of his backers see fit to mention that Israel’s
First victim in its ground invasion of Gaza
Will be a five-month-old baby,
Killed by an Israeli tank in southern Rafah.

On July 17, 2014 a conscience-free King Herod
Returns to rule his zombie state.
A Palestinian baby Abdullah Abu Halib, wounded during an Israeli airstrike, is treated at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis

An Israeli rabbi has obligingly issued a ruling
That allows the killing of innocent civilians
In the besieged Gaza Strip.
The funeral of members of the Abu Jami family, at least 23 of whom were killed when Israel bombed their house in Khan Younis, 21 July 2014, Electronic Intafada

Dov Lior, a rabbi
From the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba
In the occupied West Bank,
Rules that it is “okay” to kill innocent civilians
And to destroy Gaza.

He adds that, as the Israeli army is at war
With the people in the blockaded enclave,
“Any kind of talk about humanism
And consideration are moot.”
[http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/07/23/372448/israeli-rabbi-kill-civilians-in-gaza/]

Rabbis congregate around a field gun
In the desert writing spells
Which they hen attach to artillery shells
Destined for Gaza,
And they dance around them rejoicing
As the shells are loaded into place
By Israel’s “moral army.”

As the invasion proceeds,
The “most moral army in the world”
Reportedly targets women and children
And even animals during its ground invasion –
All of it being done with religious blessings.

A doctor speaking to Al Jazeera says that the Israeli army
“Is shooting at anything moving in Shujaiyah”
And consequently the streets of East Gaza are strewn
With dead bodies and severed limbs.

Two year old Naama Abu Al-Foul, injured in the attack on Gaza
Eyeless, and headless, and heartless in Gaza.
And, despite the ecstatic claims
Of God’s self-appointed spokesmen,
Totally godless in Gaza.

A Norwegian doctor in Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, Mads Gilbert,
Is overwhelmed by the invasion:
By the carloads of those “maimed, torn apart, and bleeding; Shivering, and dying – all sorts of injured Palestinians,
All ages, all civilians, all innocent.”

“The heroes in the ambulances,” he continues,
“And in all of Gaza’s hospitals
Are working 12-24 hour shifts, grey from fatigue
And inhuman workloads – they care, they triage,
And they try to understand the incomprehensible chaos
Of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing,
Not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding humans. HUMANS!”

And with these words Dr Gilbert addresses himself
To the President of the United States directly.
Predictably there’s no response:
No response from the Oval Office,
Nothing from Israel’s greatest ally,
Because, in a word, the American Empire and Israel
Are inextricably and usefully linked.

Instead, at a pro-Israel event in Washington,
Israel’s envoy to the United States, Ron Dermer, declares
That “the Nobel Peace Prize” should be given to Israeli forces
For their “unimaginable restraint” in their offensive
Against the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Israel’s envoy insists that the Israeli soldiers
Do not “target a single Palestinian civilian”
And even claims that, “Our soldiers are dying
So that innocent Palestinians can live,”
He then censures Human Rights Watch
For its criticism of Israeli aggression.

The Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces,
Raphael Eitan, once boasted to the New York Times,
“When we have settled the land,
“All the Arabs will be able to do about it
“Will be to scurry around
“Like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”
[New York Times, 14 April 1983.]

The Palestinians who are bottled up in Gaza
Are the subjects of a mercenary experiment
From which arms-buyers and arms-dealers
And state security forces
All derive the cruellest benefits.

The technology, for example,
Which drives Israel’s laser and satellite guided weapons
Which can destroy buildings in a blinding flash
And with earth-shaking impact
Is Gaza derived.

The technology which drives the Predator drones
Which first hovered overhead in Gaza,
And which carry out the surveillance
That leads to Gaza’s extra-judicial killings,
Was developed to control Gaza’s population,
And now has a vast market value.
[zzh]
And the streets below, cleared by the fear of such drones
Emitting their incessant whirring 24/7,
Are cleared even more quickly by a new Israeli bomb
That’s dropped down from the drones
And packed tight with mini-flechettes:

Showers of tiny arrows designed to subdue,
And developed for the pacification of Gaza,
Are now promoted at Israeli arms fairs
Along with their Gazan provenance:
‘Dissident, problematical population sir? Take it from us.
Such inconvenient problems are speedily nailed.
Tried and tested in Gaza.’

DIME stands for Dense Inert Metal Explosive
And is an experimental weapon with a small blast radius,
Each blast is full of carcinogenic tungsten shards,
Micro-shrapnel for ‘surgical assassination’.

It’s dropped from drones and, on detonation,
In the words of Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian doctor
Working at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza,
It discharges “a metal vapour to tear away the lower body”.

“To lose your legs,” he adds, “means you’ve no future.
“You can’t provide for your family.”
The DIME bomb first surfaced in Gaza’s test kitchen
[Dr. Erik Fosse, Press TV, July 2014
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/op-ed-israel-may-be-testing-weapons-in-gaza/article/391073#ixzz38PuzE370]
Israel is the fourth largest arms exporter in the world,
Ahead of Britain and Germany.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are employed
In its defence industry and therefore
Its Israeli labour force is morally complicit.

Leo Gleser, of International Security and Defense Systems (ISDS)
Whose name is synonymous with techniques of repression,
In Guantanamo, in Abu Ghraib, and in clearing Brazil’s favelas,
Boasts that, “All defence solutions now come from Israel.”

Israeli techniques of satellite surveillance and intercepts,
And its means of riot dispersal;
Its spy systems and its miniaturised lenses;
Its sensors, and its smart fences and its cages
Used for border control by the Yamam –
The Israeli Border Police units who specialize
In “counter-terrorism” and in torture expertise –
Have all been pioneered and road-tested
In the largest prison in the world –
Then are sold on to G4S and to Homeland Security;
And they’re pitched to the military-industrial complex,
Then gulped down by the Pentagon
With its infinite budget,
And sold on once more to military regimes
And to police forces world wide,
To neutralise their dissident poor
Whose resources the wealthy want.

Since its beginning in 1948, the State of Israel
Has imprisoned twenty per cent
Of its total Palestinian population,

Since its beginning in 1948, the State of Israel
Has imprisoned twenty per cent
Of its total Palestinian population,

And forty per cent of its males.
This includes twenty-seven Palestinian Members of Parliament
And three former ministers.

Since 2000 more that 8,000 Palestinian children
Have been detained.

The former deputy chief of Mossad
And head of IDF’s Northern Command,
Addresses a conference of Israeli officers
And of arms manufacturers
On the “importance of punishment as a strategy”.
General Amiram Levin says, with brutish clarity,
“Most of these people were born to die.
We just have to help them.”
[From the film: ‘We make weapons: the Lab Ultime,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn08sgzLN9g&feature=youtu.be, written and directed by Yotar Feldman, produced by Yoar Roeh and Aurit Zamir, Gum Films/Luna Blue Films, 2011]



His words are echoed by the Israeli Major General,
Oren Shachor, who elaborates on their creed,
“If we kill their families that will frighten them.”

Amongst the Israeli military the facetious euphemism,
“Mowing the lawn”, is popular and it means depopulating
The Palestinian population as and when Israel sees fit.

It’s done with an increasingly sophisticated technology
By those specialising in providing “solutions”
For the Palestinian “problem”. Take Lt. Col. Amos Golan,
A former Commander of a unit in the occupied West Bank –

An Israeli soldier, now a multi-millionaire arms dealer,
Who’s adapted the M-16 so that it fires round corners.
It’s called the ‘Cornershot’ and it shoots at right-angles
So that a sniper can remain invisible to his victim.
It’s thought invaluable in the narrow Palestinian streets
And Golan boasts of its product placement in a Hollywood movie:
“It was used by the film star Angelina Jolie
in ‘Wanted’”, and his deadly toy boosts Israel’s exports.

While Israel has been keeping a half-starved population
Under its thumb for over sixty years,
It has found its experience
With repressive and abusive techniques
To be a saleable commodity.

All the more saleable since the Israeli State
Is not averse to practising torture.

In 1979 its Defense Minister Moshe Dayan
Would state to Israel’s newspaper Maariv
Regarding Arab detainees in Israeli prisons:
“We will make of these detainees parasites
“In their societies, and we will not release them
“Until they become like mummies, empty
“And full of holes from inside like Swiss cheese.”

So now Gaza is housing Israel’s test victims in a lab.,
In a petri dish, in its State torture chamber
In which Palestinians die.

Gaza is where Israel’s tools of control
Can be researched and refined;
Field-tested by a terrorist state
For its so-called ‘war on terror’
By which is simply meant a war on those
From a different background than their own.

And while it subjects it to more and more surveillance,
And while it indulges in more and more killing,
And while it seemingly turns Gaza into a wasteland
It’s secretly making the Gazan desert bloom.

For over a third of Israel’s income
Comes from its exporting its weapons,
And while it cultivates its deadly fruit
In its Gazan hot house at a profit,
It in fact sees no need for peace.

‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2009
Boosted Israeli Arms sales
To a record 6 billion dollars.
It killed 1,471 Palestinians.

‘Operation Pillar of Defense’,
The second large scale operation in Gaza,
Was launched in November 2012
And Israel’s weapons sales that year
Set a new all time record
Of 7,000, 000,000 dollars,
While 169 Palestinians lay dead.

In ‘Operation Protective Edge’
Nearly two thousand would die in July 2014,
And whatever its final body count
The price will have been considered worth it
By a thriving Israeli arms business.

As Israel ruthlessly destroys the besieged Gaza Strip,
Elbit Systems, its largest developer of military technology
And its drone-maker, benefits from the bloodshed.
Since 8 July, 2014, when Israel began its latest offensive,
US-traded shares of Elbit Systems,
Climbed 6.1 percent
According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.
Israel’s three-week long massacre
Of 1,200 Palestinians in Gaza,
Including nearly 300 children,
“Has pushed Elbit’s stock close to the highest level since 2010 while its valuation on a price-to-earnings basis
Is near the most expensive in five years.”
[Gabrielle Coppola and Edith Waringa Kamau, ‘Elbit Gains as Gaza Conflict Seen Fueling Defense Tech’, Bloomberg News, Jul 27, 2014]
Israel, in other words,
Is making bloodshed its business:
Every two years it wages war,
Then every two years it holds a trade fair
To display the weapons which it’s used.

The conflicts they provoke
Are a marketing test-bed
For their Iron Dome intercepts;
For their Tamuz missiles;
For their Windbreaker system;
For the robots that enter houses
To look around inside;
And for their white phosphorus
Incendiary weapons…

After 2012’s Operation Pillar of Cloud
Israeli Aerospace Industries
Raised $132 million in a week
From those in the market for its drones.
The money raised directly correlated
With $132,000 for each Palestinian dead.
So the last thing the Israeli Arms Industry wishes for
Is a ceasefire lasting longer than a few hours.

An Israeli arms manufacturer’s pitch
Would fit neatly upon a postcard:
“Look, what is Gaza? I tell you what it is.
It’s an asset. Why’s it an asset?
Because Gaza is the very epicentre
Of global instability, but guess what?
photo: Ahmed Mansour

We’ve got it totally under control.
So, here’s what we can do for you:
We can sell you the hardware,
And we can sell you the software,
And the follow-up and the accessories
And the bells and the whistles,
So that you and your government can control
Any similar situation. You’ll be safe.
And your security forces will be safe.
How come? Because we tried it for you in Gaza.
And, you gotta believe it, it works.

We’ve got five thousand five hundred insurgents
Locked up in our dungeons at any one time.
You’re talking to those with the know-how.’

Between the rich and the poor,
Governments are now becoming more fearful
Of their disaffected populations:
Of those who can see how they’re being exploited,
By those with hundreds of times their wealth,
By those who have many more opportunities,
By those who live longer and eat better food,
By those whose children are given a head start,
And, understandably, such populations
Judge the prevailing situation to be unfair.

Greater numbers of people are becoming resentful
Of being ruled by those in positions of privilege,
And so economically unbalanced states
Are keen to know how to suppress the underprivileged
And how best to neuter their aspirations.

In July 2014 Israel tells Palestinian families to flee
So it can bomb their homes more freely:
And then it shortly bombs the places
That they’ve just run to for shelter.
By doing this, their will to live is undermined,
Deliberately and systematically
And such techniques are strategically useful.
“There is no place in the prison of Gaza
Safe from Israeli sadism.” Noam Chomsky commented.

Gaza’s power plant is routinely destroyed,
And then Israel starves Gaza through its siege
By callously counting the minimum calories
People need for their bare survival,
And so they supply Gaza’s inhabitants
With no more, and no less.
Pushing Gaza’s food through its bars.

This is called the Dahiya doctrine, devised by Israeli generals,
To punish the Palestinians by using disproportionate measures:
In 2006, putting Palestinians on a diet was thought of as a way
“To force hostile populations back into the Stone Age: Keeping them preoccupied with the essentials of life Rather than demanding, or fighting, for their rights.”
[James Perez, ‘Is Killing Civilians Part of Israel’s plan?’ | Counter Information, WordPress, July 2014]

“Palestine Demonstration in Montreal” (Photo: KMo Foto)
After a brief cease-fire in July 2014,
Palestinians in Gaza City were to return home
For many to find they had nothing.
All they had was the opportunity
To look for their loved ones,
For those who’d been left behind,
And who were buried beneath rubble and dust –
In some cases having been buried alive.

Photo: Ahmed Mansour
A man who’d lost the house
Into which he’d put all his life-savings
Said, “it feels like my heart’s full of knives.”

The Palestinian poet, Remi Kanazi,
Asks pointedly, “If someone comes into your house,
Kills your family, blows up your living room,
And kicks you out, would you call it a conflict?”

The one functioning Hospital, Al-Shifa,
Has lost thirty ambulances
All blown to bits by Israeli rockets.

A small boy stands in the hospital corridor:
And explains: “Our home is destroyed.
My mother was killed. We took her to the hospital
But she died.”

The date of Eid al-Fitr is determined
By the sighting of the new moon

photo: Arab Daily News
Israel would commemorate Eid in Shejaiya
By shelling it continuously for three days.
It left sixty dead and turned it into a moonscape.

By contrast, on the other side of the wall
That incarcerates Gaza,
The price of Israelis living in a stolen country
Has prompted a collective paranoia,
Feeding into a collective psychosis
In an Israeli hive-mind
Where random, racist murder
Is regarded with alarming approval.

Teenage Israelis angered by the sounds of Gaza’s warning sirens
Awakening them on their summer vacation
Take to the social media to express their irritation:
Using the Twitter tag ZionStandUp
They post photographs of themselves
Accompanied by deranged messages:

“Death sentences for leftists & Arabs.”
You are the cancer of this country,”
Says Shalbi Yovel.

“Death to these fucking Arabs” May Levi tweets.
@OrelPery: “I wish a painful death to Arabs”
@OrtaL1ysaScar: “From the bottom of my heart, I wish for Arabs to be torched”
@amit_ezra: “In the end there will be no more Arabs, God willing”
@noypausner: “I spit on you, you stinking Arabs”
@dekelderi9: “We wage war so this will be our land without any Arabs”
@almasulin82: “Hating Arabs isn’t racism it’s a commandment from God”
@shira_agiv: “Arabs may you be paralyzed & die with great suffering!”
@Zohar_siso1: “Stinking Arabs, may you die, Amen”
@yarden_meir: “Kill them already, Arabs are whores”
@stav_madmoni: “Arabs are not human, they’re beasts”
@shirzarfaty: “Death to Arabs you son of a whore”
@aviv_sahar: “Death to all of you Arabs you transfag”
@ashlisade: “Kill Arab children so there won’t be a next generation
[https://storify.com/davidsheen/israeli-army-the-next-generation]

While the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors
Tweet recipes for a revival of the Final Solution,
A small peace march in Tel Aviv,
On the 19th day of Israel’s massacres in Gaza,
Is disrupted by patriots cheering the genocide on,
And mocking the hundreds
Of Palestinian children killed.
They chant a song in Hebrew,
It’s called “Gaza is a graveyard”
And they film themselves doing so.

“Gaza is a graveyard!
“In Gaza there’s no studying!
“No children are left there!
“There’s no school tomorrow!
There’s no children left in Gaza! Oleh!”
And wearing a fascistic insignia
They attack anti-war protestors.
In “Scenes from School Life” (in Hebrew) by Idan Yaron and Yoram Harpaz.

Dr. Yaron, a sociologist and Dr Harpaz, a professor of education,
Surveyed Israeli school-childrens’ views
Of their fellow beings in Palestine.
A girl in 10th grade from a high school in the central part of the country
Tells them, “For me, personally, Arabs are something
“I can’t look at and can’t stand,”
“I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab.
I live in an area of Arabs, and every day I see these Ishmaelites, I wish them death.”
One student relates that he heard in the synagogue on Shabbat
That “Aravim zeh erev rav” [“Arabs are a rabble,”], and also Amalek,
“And that there is a commandment to kill them all,”
(Amalek being a reference to the prototypical biblical enemy
of the Children of Israel).

The authors found that when the school children
Were invited to suggest remedies for the conflict
Their answer was frequently ‘Kill all Arabs’.
They’d write it on the blackboard.
A glimpse at Yaron’s and Harpaz’ findings is to be a witness
To the unravelling of a psychotic death cult.
[Or Kasht ‘Israeli teenagers: Racist and proud of it: Ethnic hatred has become a basic element in the everyday life of Israeli youth, a forthcoming book finds.’
Haaretz,, August 24, 2014]

When Albert Einstein was invited to become
The first President of Israel he declined
On the grounds of what he considered
To be Israel’s inherent criminality.

He refused the Presidency
Because, as he put it, he knew that he’d have to say things
To the Israeli people,
“Things they would not like to hear.”
[Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 111]

He regarded the Likud party as “fascist”
And declared that it espoused,
“An admixture of ultra-nationalism,
“Religious mysticism and racial superiority.”

The Likud party was the heir, after all,
Of Jabotinsky’s fascistic Zionism
Which spoke of an “iron wall of bayonets”
Required to build Zion in Arab territory.

Shortly after the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948
(In which a hundred and seven Palestinian villagers
Were taken, tied up, photographed and killed),
And after the burning and brutal destruction
Of five hundred Palestinian villages,
The American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel
Approached Einstein for his support,
Only to be sternly rebuffed.

Einstein referred to the Irgun (led by Menachem Begin,
Later a Prime Minister of Israel)
And the Stern Gang (of which Yitzhak Shamir,
Also a future Prime Minister of Israel, was a member)
As “terrorist organizations”.

The Zionist terror bombing
Of the King David hotel
Which the Zionists had just carried out
Killed ninety-one people
(Three times, incidentally, as many innocent people
As all of Hamas’ rockets since 2001 –
Twenty-eight dead).

And with this and with three thousand
Additional Zionist terror bombings
Einstein refused to support
Those whom he regarded
As “misled and criminal people.”
[http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/01/einstein-on-palestine-and-zionism/#footnote_6_13526]

A people by whom was meant
European ethno-centrists:
The Imperialist Ashkenazi,
Who’d been usurping
And displacing the native people
Of Palestine, the Mizrahi Jews,

A people by whom was meant
European ethno-centrists:
The Imperialist Ashkenazi,
Who’d been usurping
And displacing the native people
Of Palestine, the Mizrahi Jews,

And the indigenous Palestinian Arabs – Semites all –
Since the Ashkenazis’ arrival.

Zionism’s inventor, the Austrian atheist Theodore Herzl,
Coined a slogan for his colonialist cult:
“Giving to a people without a country, a country without a people”
And history would be haunted by this fateful falsity.

When informed that there were Arabs in Palestine,
Herzl decided that what was required
Was to get rid of them, and on 12 June 1895
He wrote, “We shall try to spirit the penniless population
Across the border by procuring employment for it
In the transit countries, while denying it any employment
In our own country.” In other words Israel
Had ethnic cleansing in mind from its very conception.

As the Zionists encroached on Palestinian territory,
They would demote everyone there
To the status of second class citizens,
Or else slaughter them with a racist abandon,
And thus Zionists set about founding a state
That’s been institutionally anti-Semitic
For far longer than Nazi Germany
And whose racism is now endemic.

It builds concentration camps
For Africans in the Negev desert,
And denounces them in its Knesset
As disease ridden infiltrators;
It injects them with Depo-Provera
To make sure they don’t conceive.
[Phoebe Greenwood, Ethiopian women in Israel ‘given contraceptive without consent’ Israel’s health ministry is investigating claims that Ethiopian immigrants have unwittingly had Depo-Provera jabs for years, The Guardian, 28 February 2013]
The Israeli parliamentarian Miri Regev
Describes the Sudanese in Israel
As a “cancer” in Israel’s body.
[Mya Guarnieri , The Electronic Intifada
Tel Aviv , 11 June 2012 ]

Israel incorporates demographic engineering
Into its “anti-infiltration” legislation
To reduce African numbers.
Israel incorporates demographic engineering
Into its “anti-infiltration” legislation
To reduce African numbers.

Israelis protest against African migrant workers in south Tel Aviv, May 23, 2012. Photo by Moti Milrod
Shrill and ugly voices are raised in favour of sterilisation
To preserve Israel’s ethnic purity,
[Lisa Hallgarten ‘Forced contraception of Jewish Ethopian women is tip of global iceberg’ A report claims Israel pressured women to reduce its poor black population. Reproductive rights need defending across the world, The Guardian, 30 January 2013]
Safeguarding lebensraum for a white Israel,
While it orders its Arab population to use separate roads
And to live in unviable cantonments,
Vetting all entrances and exits
And talking openly of extermination.

Safeguarding lebensraum for a white Israel,
While it orders its Arab population to use separate roads
And to live in unviable cantonments,
Vetting all entrances and exits
And talking openly of extermination.

http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-video-israeli-racism-new-york-times-didnt-want-you-see

In an unsettling reprise of Darwinian eugenics,
That unkind cult of the survival of the fittest
And of the retrograde territorial imperative,
The official Israel Sperm Bank enlists donors
From combatant units who fought in Gaza.

The Sperm Bank has infertile couples on their books
Who wish to secure “The purest and most supreme
DNA possible for Israel’s prospective children”.
It’s a militaristic neo-Aryanism.
[http://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-soldiers-sperm-in-hot-demand/]

But the world’s guilt over the Nazi genocide
Allowed Israel to commit similar crimes:

Israel has indulged in a Vertreibungskrieg, a war of expulsion,
Enforced by a Reichskristallnacht, with identical sound effects
Of shattered glass and demolished buildings.

It’s staged an Enteignung, an expropriation,
Then thanks to its Drang nach Osten – its urge to expand –
It’s been driven to build ever more settlements.

Anyone daring to resist its Besatzung, its occupation,
Faces Vergeltungsschlaege, or reprisals.

To restore Gesetz und Ordnung – law and order –
Continued defiance leads to a Blitzkrieg with planes and tanks
Directed towards defenceless populations.

Criticism of the Herrenvolk, the master race or ‘chosen people’,
Risks a Vernichtungskrieg, or a war of extermination,
For only they may lord it over the Untermenschen,
The ‘sub-humans’ facing a new Endloesung, or final solution
Designed to destroy the rightful inhabitants of the land.
[Inspired by a Comment by ‘Phil1001’ on Heather Seal’s article, Palin’s ‘The Truth About the War in Israel’, London: The Independent, 30 July 2014]
“We have to kill all the Palestinians, said Chairman Heilbrun
Of the Committee for the Re-election
Of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv,
“We have to kill all the Palestinians
Unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.”
[October 1983]

It’s been overlooked that German Zionists
Congratulated the Nazis on their electing Hitler
And, in the Nazis taking steps to establish a racist state.
It’s overlooked that the Stern Gang in 1940
Volunteered to fight for Nazi Germany.

It’s overlooked that Jabotinsky collected money
For Mussolini and marched in his victory parades,
To celebrate Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia;
It’s overlooked that Netanyahu’s father
Was Jabotinsky’s secretary and that their party,
The Likud, has unsettlingly fascistic roots.
[cf Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Croom Helm, 1983]

Though mercifully such a nightmare has been disowned
By those who regard themselves as True Jews
And to whom Israel is “an abomination before G-d.”

For rather than the land being given to just one ethnic group
(As nationalists insist with their shibboleth ‘God gave us the land’),
The Bible makes it clear that possession of the land of Israel
Was conditional on the inhabitants’ good behaviour:
“The land” says God in Leviticus “must not be sold permanently,
“Because the land is mine and you reside in my land
As foreigners and strangers.”
[Leviticus, 25:23]

Israel’s propagandists ignore the inconvenient fact
That the Divine Realtor
Was to spell out in the Torah all the conditions
That had to be complied with before he’d grant tenancy.
These divine conditions required aspiring tenants to:
‘Visit those imprisoned; act mercifully to the widow and the orphan;
Welcome the stranger in your midst; tend the sick; do justice and love mercy
And then you will be my people and this land will be your land.’
Thus Israel’s in breach of its much-vaunted covenant with God on most counts
And its conduct renders any contract with the Almighty null and void.

Orwell described nationalism
As “power-hunger tempered by self-deception.
“Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty,
“But he is also unshakably certain of being in the right.
“Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.”

The Israeli Prime Minister, Netanyahu,
Accuses Hamas of cynically wanting
To “pile up as many civilian dead as they can”
Just to make Israel look bad.
“They use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause.
“They want the more dead, the better.”
[Ben Lynfield, The Independent, 20 July 2014]

Given the nationalist’s tunnel vision
It doesn’t occur to Netanyahu
That a way for him to stem the world’s sympathy
For “telegenically dead Palestinians”
Would be to refrain from killing them.

For him to refrain from bombing a playground in Gaza City Filled with children celebrating the end of Ramadan
With their first meal of the day, the feast of Eid al-Fitr.

[Palestinian Journalists Network (English)]
The Prime Minister of Israel’s pitiless phrase,
“Telegenically dead”, implies they staged their own death
To elicit sympathy. He thus dehumanizes them
By suggesting that they so devalued their own lives
He can kill them with a guiltless impunity
Since, after all, they’ve chosen to be victims.

Albert Einstein was wise to spurn Israel’s offer
Since he’d long regarded the proposed Israeli state
From its conception as an absurd anachronism,
And he’d have certainly disassociated himself
From the present settler state of Israel
Where, on average, a Palestinian child, a Semitic child,
Is sacrificed daily to Israel’s racism.

A child in Gaza holds a sign,
“Both my brothers
And my friend are dead.
My turn is coming soon.”

In a leading article the Jerusalem Post urges ethnic cleansing:
“The only durable solution requires dismantling Gaza
And extension of Israeli sovereignty over the region.”
[Martin Sherman, ‘Into the fray: Why Gaza must go’, Jerusalem Post, 24 July, 2014]
But, of course, there’s a sub-text to such psychopathy –
There being precious gas and oil fields off Palestine’s coast,
And the last people whom Israel would wish to defer to
While satisfying their energy needs would be Palestinians –
An added reason for Israel’s mass and social media,
its politicians, and its army – its hive mind –
To bang the drum for Palestinian elimination.

On 29th July a ferocious assault on Gaza is launched
And it’s broadcast on livestream in real time,
The sounds transmitted echo the thundering sounds from Baghdad
When Baghdad was being subjected to all-out war.

No child should ever have to suffer such sounds
Or their consequences:
Seven entire families are instantly wiped out;
A hundred people die in one day.

According to the prophet Isaiah
Israel’s vision of itself was once
As a “light unto the nations”.

Instead Israel now lights up the night sky
With poisonous phosphorus flares,
The better to see what lies below,
And the better to strike it with mortar shells
And for the world to witness Israel’s victories.

Once the land prided itself on its being illuminated
By the ancient wisdom of its prophets,
Such as Hosea,
Who was keen to discern that of the divine
In every living thing,
Although Hosea would also chastise his followers:
“You have ploughed wickedness,
You have reaped iniquity.
You have eaten the fruit of lies.”
[Hosea 10:13]
The prophet might recognise the toxic hatred
That fuels Israel’s bombs and bullets,
Dropped by a country in moral free-fall,
And extinguishing the light that could enable it
To see the stranger as a friend.

The central message of Torah
Is that the world is ruled
By a force that makes possible
The transformation from “that which is”
To “that which can and should be”

Nonetheless a headline in The Times of Israel
Degradingly reads ‘When Genocide is Permissible,’

And the author, Yochanan Gordon, writes,
“What other way is there
To deal with an enemy
Of this nature
Other than obliterate them completely?”
[The Times of Israel, August 1, 2014]
In the same paper Gilad Sharon urges his fellow-countrymen:
“We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza.
The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima
The Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough,
So they hit Nagasaki, too.”
[Gilad Sharon, ‘A decisive conclusion is necessary’, Jerusalem Post, 18 November, 2012]

In his novel ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, Dostoievski
Has Ivan Karamazov saying to his brother Alyosha,
On hearing of a five-year-old girl’s suffering at the hands of her parents,
‘…the entire universe of knowledge is not worth the tears of that little child”.
Likewise all of Israel’s land, all its profitable weapons
And all of its cunning technology,
Is not worth a single tear, let alone the life of a child.

At a demonstration in London a man displays a placard,
“Phony evil Israelis. Money can’t buy you love.”

“Phony evil Israelis.”
The genocidal destruction of Gaza:
A Palestinian boy writes on a shrapnel riddled backboard at the heavily damaged Sobhi Abu Karsh in Gaza City’s al-Shujaeya neighborhood.
Mohammed Abed/AFP

Of its schools, of its houses,
Its universities, and shelters –
Twenty thousand houses flattened
And sixty-five thousand homeless –
The destruction of its hospitals, of its water supplies;
Of its drainage, inducing disease;
Of its farms inducing starvation;
Of its only power station,
Of a hundred and fifty mosques;
Of its trees, its birth-right – eight-hundred-thousand
Olive trees destroyed since Israel’s Occupation –

Of its factories, one hundred and seventy factories bombed,
And the destruction of its men, and its women and of its children;
One thousand eight hundred and eighty six lives destroyed;
Four hundred children;
Between sixty to sixty-five families wiped out completely;
Nine thousand people injured.

Bones broken and irreplaceable organs shredded.
Children slaughtered while they were sleeping.
Absolutely nothing at all being off-limits.
Five billion dollars worth of damage in Gaza.
Fishermen killed. Fishing boats trashed.
Grain-mills put out of action.
Its people left with nothing
After three massacres in six years…
[Gaza: Indiscriminate Israeli War Crimes against Civilians From July 7 to August 12, 2014: Number of Gazans killed by Israel: 1,943 (with 80 percent civilian casualties including 437 children and 243 women); Number of Gazans wounded by Israel: 9,886 Number of Houses Destroyed: 5,622; Damaged: at least 36,700 Number of Mosques Destroyed: 64; Damaged: 152 Number of Churches Damaged: 2; Number of Schools or Educational Facilities Destroyed or Damaged: 189; Number of Hospitals or Medical Facilities Destroyed or Damaged: 24 Number of Structures Destroyed including the only Electric Power Plant: More than 1500; Statistics compiled by Esam al-Amin, for Counterpunch:]

On a visit to Khuza’a in Gaza
A visiting doctor, Mona el-Farra
Reports that “whole villages have been wiped off the map.”
[Dr. Mona El-Farra, Director of Gaza Projects, Counterpunch,]

When Israel’s fuel stocks for its armed forces in Gaza
Were running low, President Obama rushed a tanker to Israel
To enable stocks to be replenished
So its campaign of mass murder could continue.
[Robin Beste, ‘A tale of two sieges: Iraq and Gaza. Why the different response to humanitarian crisis?’ Stop the war Coalition, 15 August 2014.
Cf also http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/stop-us-shipment-fuel-israels-armed-forces-evidence-gaza-war-crimes-mounts-2014-08-04]

He then stood in front of the White House to announce
The resupply of ammunition to Israel and that it would receive
An added $220 million for an expanded Iron Dome,
And he voted against any investigation
“Of possible violations of human rights.”
[Noam Chomsky: Israel’s Actions in Palestine are “Much Worse Than Apartheid” in South Africa’ Democracy Now, August 08, 2014]
The British Prime Minister endorsed the President’s stance,
There was no convincing word of sympathy
From either for the Palestinians’ plight.

The mind-set of the Israeli State had a continuing appeal
Even though Israel had just killed 249 children in 249 war crimes,
But this was overlooked since Israel was their pet attack dog,
Safeguarding the oil supplies of the Western powers.

By contrast those with a conscience still intact
Spurned the State that Zionism has spawned:

Henk Zanoli, who helped to save a Jewish child
From deportation to Nazi concentration camps,
Returned his ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ medal to the Israeli Government
Upon learning that six of his relatives were killed in Gaza.
The ninety-one-year-old Dutchman
Said that holding on to the medal would be an ‘insult to the family.’

225 Jewish survivors and descendants of survivors
Of Nazi genocide signed a letter condemning the Gaza massacre
And called for an end to the genocide of the Palestinian people.

“We are alarmed” they said, “by the extreme, racist dehumanization
Of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch.
In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post
Have called openly for genocide of Palestinians
And right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia.”
[International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network http://ijsn.net/gaza/survivors_and_descendents-letter/]
Ahmad Kathrada who spent 26 years in prison
Alongside Nelson Mandela as his closest comrade, Visited Gaza and the West Bank,
And said it felt all too familiar.

“What worries me is the sheer impunity
With which Israel acts.
It reminds me of the many years
That apartheid was allowed to flourish in South Africa With little constructive action
On the part of the major powers.”

Then Kathrada asked, “Has apartheid Israel so quickly Forgotten the millions of Jews, communists and gypsies
Who were exterminated by the Nazis,
That they now commit the same crimes?”

All of which prompts a look in the other direction,
At what’s on the other side of the ‘separation wall’
And begs a question about the legitimacy of a State,
Victimizing Gaza with such psychotic intensity.

By what right?

Despite Israel’s President Golda Meir claiming,
“This country exists as the fulfilment of a promise
Made by God Himself.” And despite her arrogantly adding,
“It would be ridiculous to ask it to account for its legitimacy”
[Golda Meir, Le Monde, 15 October 1971]
It’s tempting to subject Israel’s claim
To godliness to a little scrutiny
And also to wonder if the destruction of Gaza
Won’t sow dragons’ teeth,
Turning traumatised children into warriors.

[Location of places hit in Gaza, July 2014]
A map of Gaza in July 2014 shows no space
Between the areas targeted. Each marker
Indicates crushed bodies and crushed buildings
And a criminal bloodletting,
Signalling countless stolen futures.

Some carrying out such dreadful damage
Must have asked themselves
In the dark watches of the night,
“I have wronged my own soul.”
They must have asked themselves:
By what right?

And the answer, of course, is
That it’s by no right at all:
David Ben-Gurion knew
That what they were doing was wrong:
“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves,”
He said, “Politically we are the aggressors
And they defend themselves…
The country is theirs, because they inhabit it,
Whereas we want to come here
And settle down, and in their view
We want to take away from them their country.”
[David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech, also quoted by Nahum Goldmann, in The Jewish Paradox : A Personal Memoir of Historic Encounters that Shaped the Drama of Modern Jewry (1978)]

The destruction of Palestine’s Gaza strip
Prompts a scrutinising, and dismantling glance
At Israel’s self-mythologizing.

European colonists found it politic
To adopt Hebrew-sounding names
In order to convince themselves and others
Of an ancestral title to another’s tribal land
And to justify usurping, if not killing,
The land’s continuous occupants:
The Palestinian Arabs and the Palestinian Jews.

Thus the European David Green became David Ben-Gurion;
And Ariel Scheinemann became Ariel Sharon;
Shimon Persky became Shimon Peres;
Golda Mabovitz became Golda Meir;
Yizhak Jazernicki became Yizhak Shamir;
Levi Shkolnik became Levi Eshkol,
And Shneor Rubashov became Zalman Shazar,
The third President of the State of Israel.
Mark Freiberg, Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesman,
Became the more Hebraic Mark Regev
And Benjamin Milikowsky became Benjamin Netanyahu…
[zzzzo]
All of them Europeans coming uninvited to another’s land –
All of them becoming Presidents and Prime Ministers
Of a contrived and imaginary state;
All abusing native hospitality to live out a cruel charade
By turning Palestine into a kind of Germany-on-Sea;
While concocting a language to add authenticity
To what was little more than a criminal fraud.

Hebrew was extinct save for its liturgical usage,
But it was artificially revived to serve the Israeli state
Whilst Yiddish, the Jews’ poetic, resonant language, was decried
As the language of the left and the Ghetto and was banned;
Likewise Arabic. whose ancient street signs and place names
Were replaced by Hebraic neologisms
From an apartheid language as cooked up as Klingon, or Esperanto –
A fascistic ethnocracy’s guttural NewSpeak
Spoken by Europeans pretending to be ancient Hebrews –
But by what right would this all climax in a fake country running amok,
And by what right does it commit mass murder in Palestine –
Serial mass murder –
In another country that it insists,
With Orwellian logic, has never existed,
Doesn’t exist and shouldn’t ever have come into being?
[There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.”– Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969; “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.”– Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.]

The script for Israel’s apocalyptic and bloodthirsty farce
Was written for it by its former Defence Minister, Moshe Dayan,
Who said that “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
[Comment, The Observer, Sunday 21 September 2003,’The War Game’ citing David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch: the Roots of Violence in the Middle East, 2003]
And Dayan boasted of his state’s ethnic cleansing
And of his liquidating memory of Palestine’s past:
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages.
You do not even know the names of these Arab villages,
And I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist.
Not only do the books not exist,
The Arab villages are not there either.
Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul;
Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta;
Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis;
and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman.
There is not a single place built in this country
That did not have a former Arab population.”
[Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.]

In 1919 after Dr. Chaim Weizmann,
The leader of the Zionist Organization,
Had been granted a settlement in Palestine,
The Emir Faisal put his arm around his shoulder
And said graciously, “Welcome home.”

Faisal couldn’t have known
That his hospitality would lead to Arab lands
Being expropriated; nor to half a million Palestinians
Being forced to flee by Zionist terrorists;
Nor to Palestinian civilians being lined up
And shot as a deliberate policy
By the Stern Gang, The Irgun and the Haganah –
Under orders from David Ben Gurion –
Who said in 1937, “We must expel Arabs and take their places.”
[David Ben Gurion, future Prime Minister of Israel, 1937, quoted in, ‘Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs’, Oxford University Press, 1985:]

And who also warned in 1948 : “We must do everything to insure
They (the Palestinians) never do return.”
[David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157. He assured his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. “The old will die and the young will forget.”]

Nor could Faisal with his generous welcome
Have foreseen that Palestinians
Would be condemned by violent zealots
To live in refugee camps for the rest of their lives
And only the keys of former homes for comfort.

[Symbolic: Palestinian children hold ginat keys to represent their homes their families lost]
King Faisal couldn’t know
That his ‘Welcome home’ message meant
That his fellow-Arabs would be condemned to be hated
By those determined to do them wrong,
Nor that he was his signing their death warrants.

Neither would Faisal know
Of the Zionists’ unusual bedfellows,
Notably Adolf Eichmann who was to visit Palestine
At the invitation of the Zionist, Feivel Polkes,
To be entertained by the Zionists’ military wing, the Haganah.

Eichmann was struck by the Zionists’ enterprise:
“In 1937, when I had been struggling with Hebrew
“For two and a half years,
“I had a chance to take a trip to Palestine…
“I did see enough to be very impressed
With what the Jewish colonists
“Were building upon their land.
“Had I been a Jew I would have been a fanatical Zionist.
“I could not imagine being anything else; in fact I would have been
“The most ardent Zionist imaginable.”
[Harry Mulisch, ‘Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann: An Eyewitness Account’, University of Pennysylvania Press, 2002, p.22; also cited in “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” Life Magazine, 28 November 1960, p. 22).]
Here was a man with a name most associated
With technological mass slaughter
Singing the Zionists’ praises –
Zionists whose attitude to Faisal’s fellow Arabs
Would be every bit as racist and as eliminationist
As Eichmann’s attitude to the Jews –
Both of them sharing an exclusive sense of “ein volk” –
A monocultural, colonising entity.
The Zionists’ National Military Organisation(NMO),
As the Stern gang called themselves,
Were equally eager to treat with Nazi officials
And to discuss, in the NMO’s words:
“Cooperation between the new Germany
And a renewed volkish-national Hebrium”.

They sought “a treaty with the German Reich.”
And they even made an offer in 1940,
“To actively take part in the war on Germany’s side”
So much did they find that they had in common.
[http://www.inminds.co.uk/jews-against-zionism.html; cf also Lenni Brenner,]

If this beggars belief the physical evidence
Survives, for a medal was struck to memorialise
The Nazis and the Zionists’ interaction,
And the Nazi taint endures
In the nature of the Israeli State:
In Israel’s Gazan reprise of the Warsaw Ghetto;
In its camps and in its extra-judicial killings;
In its enforced sterilisations
Of those it judges to be untermensch;
And in its corrosive racial stereotyping.

Lastly Faisal couldn’t have known of massacres
Of his fellow Muslims that were destined to target
Those as yet unborn:
In Operation Cast Lead T-shirts were produced
For the soldiers of IDF,
That showed a pregnant Palestinian woman
Caught in a rifle’s cross-hairs

It was captioned ‘1 shot 2 kills’.
Another design showed a Palestinian mother weeping
Next to her dead baby’s grave,
She was also in the crosshairs of a rifle.
With the T-shirt suggesting it would have been better
If the child had never been born,
By its carrying the slogan, “Better use Durex”.

Another popular design in Hebrew
Reads ‘Can’t chill l till I confirm a kill.’

On 20 July, 2014, during Operation Protective Edge
Three pregnant mothers were killed
When Israeli forces attacked a house near Khan Younis.
It was as if those shooting them were so affronted
By the visible fruits of Palestinian love
That they couldn’t bear to think of them
Coming to fruition and preferred to pick them off
And to destroy them for their own pleasure.

On August 9, 2014 in al-Khalil, Gaza, four IDF snipers
Lie spread-eagled on a roof
Aiming at children in an apartment opposite.
Footage shows them slapping each other on the back
Then gleefully exclaiming when one hits a child.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUibXSgILv0

Further triumphalism prompts the IDF
To post a video of its jet pilots targeting the Gaza Strip

With a mash-up clip of video footage as if it’s making merry over war.
Sounds of pilot communications are given a rhythmical backing
Punctuated with percussive explosions set to a catchy beat –
As if bombing civilians is something that you can dance to.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-rapped-for-gaza-strike-mashup-clip/
To ensure Israel receives its 58 million dollars
Per day from a biddable US Congress,
Each Israeli President routinely makes much
Of ‘Israel’s desire for peace’,
Yet whenever Israel’s Presidents are asked
Whether Palestine will ever be a sovereign state,
They discreetly whisper, ‘Never.’
[Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank, he told reporters last week in remarks that largely have been overlooked. ‘
July 27, 2014 Ryan Grim & Paul Blumenthal – Huffington Post ]

And instead of speaking to Gaza’s leaders
On equal terms, Israel urges their “decapitation.”
Leader after leader, their wives and their families
Fall victim to Israel’s targeted assassinations.

Accompanied by a dehumanising rhetoric,
The Deputy Speaker of the Knesset,
Danny Danon of the Likud Party,
Urges that Hamas’ “head of the snake” be cut off.

It’s more than a figure of speech.
‘Decapitate Hamas’ ‘Decapitate Hamas’
Is a constant bloodthirsty refrain:
The Shas party leader, Aryeh Deri,
Tweets on 9 July 2014,
“…We must cut off the head of the snake”
And in August 2014, after 60 missile attacks
On an Hamas-affiliated TV station,
An attempted assassination of Mohammed Deif
Hamas’s military leader,
Succeeds in killing his wife and child.
[Harriet Sharwood, ‘Hamas leader’s wife and child reported killed as Gaza war resumes’ Guardian, 20 August 2014]
Hamas responds by saying that Israel
had opened a “gateway to hell”.

The same day three Hamas leaders are killed in Rafah.
[Ibrahim Barzak, Israeli Airstrike Kills 3 Senior Hamas Leaders,’ Associated Press, Aug 21, 2014]

“The Ummah”, said the Prophet Mohammed
(Meaning the family of Islam), “The Ummah is like one body,
“If one part is hurt then the whole body suffers.”

Not unsurprisingly, the dehumanising rhetoric
That so very often urges the decapitation
Of indigenous Muslims by Israelis

Bears fruit and, shortly afterwards,
Just as every action
Has an equal and opposite reaction
A kidnapped US hostage, James Foley,
Whose ransom’s not been paid,
Despite pleas to the US government,
Is taken out into the desert dressed only in a shift –
An orange Guantanamo-style shift –
And, judged to be a creature
Of Israel’s oil-hungry sponsor
Which so extensively finances the Zionist project,
James Foley is scapegoated and decapitated.

With a knife in his hand,
The masked executioner
Advances on the camera
And addresses the US President:
Your strikes,” he says pointedly,
“Have caused casualties among Muslims”.

The US can afford to pay billions to Israel
For its genocidal version of Groundhog Day

Yet it’s too mean to find a few million
To ransom James Foley – its own citizen –
Despite US defence budgets routinely being
The very largest in human history.

To support Israel in its present state
Is to buy into the idea that Palestinian lives
Are worth less than those of Israelis –

The lives of both Americans and Israelis
Are consequently downgraded by many.

“Money can’t buy you love” ran the second part
Of the London demonstrator’s placard,
Yet love is a neglected weapon
Which may still be used to undermine the Israeli state.

Despite Israel’s army culture
And its refusal to countenance conscientious objection,
There are those who refuse to serve in its military
And who are happy to be sent to its jails.

Udi Segal, a 19-year-old Israeli from Kibbutz Tuval,
Is imprisoned for refusing to enlist.
“The government,” he says, “try to silence any voices
“That depart from the belligerent mainstream.

“There are a lot of people who need to understand
“The occupation doesn’t only hurt Palestinians
“It hurts Israelis as well.

“My desire to refuse was not well received.
“A lot of people stopped talking to me
“But to refuse is a tool in the struggle
“To end the occupation.”

The “moral” governments of the world
May stand by as tank shells land in schools
And they may give carte blanche
To the Palestinians’ extermination,

[photo BBC, A tank shell landing in the UN school at Jabaliya.]

And Israel may call up 59,000 reservists
To further indulge its death-wish,
But nonetheless there are Jews and Arabs
Who are all refusing to be enemies.

And some who courageously parade with placards
That read, ‘Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies’
At peace demonstrations in Tel Aviv.

Jews and Arabs, Arabs and Jews…
Whose mutual affection,
And whose intimate relations,
Are more subtly successful
Than any war can ever be
In bringing people together in life,
Instead of together in death.

Arabs and Jews, Jews and Arabs
Secretly breeding
Their hidebound divisions
Out of existence –
And quietly manufacturing
A unified state within a state.

For a racist existence is unviable:
Despite its lumbering about armed to the teeth,
It’s a redundant, demographic dinosaur
Since Nature’s imperatives will always kick in.

Heartbeats will always be a step ahead
In finding a chink in man’s armour –
A soft chink in this case
whereby the physical offspring
Of those Arabs and Jews
Who cast aside archaic traditions
To produce living ‘facts on the ground’
Breaking taboos instead of breaking bones,
Making love instead of murdering,
Tiring of re-fighting the Trojan War
And of destroying Carthage over and again.

However many dragons guard the bride,
Human nature inevitably comes to mean
That all sectarian superstitions
Come to be ignored, to be shrugged off
And then to be laughed at,
Only to dissolve in the mists of time.

Palestine can’t be stolen from the Palestinians
For however much Palestine is resented,
However much its body politic is savaged
By retrograde forces of armed hatred,
It’s present in Israel’s very fabric.
[Shujaiya, Gaza, July, 2014; Photo: Max Blumenthal]

The threads are woven from a similar cloth
And despite a bullying Goliath deluding himself
That his God favours only one side
And allows an armed giant to crush Gaza,
A David can still defeat him with weapons of the spirit.

Heathcote Williams

With grateful acknowledgements to Esam al-Amin, Farah Baker, Robin Beste, Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, Elleanne Green, Karim Lahham, Dave Lawton, Phil1001, Jonangus Mackay, Mike Lesser, Claire Palmer, Terry Stewart and Martin Wilkinson.