Posted on 10/22/2003 1:48:56 PM PDT by Alouette
AMMAN, 22 October 2003 — It matters little whether the mastermind behind the killing of three Americans in Gaza last week was a Palestinian group or Israeli intelligence. What’s of relevance, however, is that the Palestinian people will wholly bear the brunt of the incident.
Censuring the weakest party is a habit that has infected the ongoing Middle East conflict for decades. To illustrate: Palestinian parents are still being customarily accused of recruiting their own children for “martyrdom” for the sake of some funneled dollars provided by Arab governments or for the sake of merely blemishing Israel’s image. With the inimitable trickery of the charismatic — mostly the US media — such accusations rapidly transform themselves to serve as a satisfying rationalization offered, even championed, by top officials on Capital Hill.
With that in mind, the proclamation of Palestinian factions disavowing the killing of the diplomats in Gaza will gain no empathy.
Nevertheless, Palestinians could very likely have been the perpetrators. They are angry, and anger often stipulates vengeance. To comprehend this, we must see this equation not from an American newspaper’s point of a view but from the tatters of a tent pitched by a Palestinian refugee in Rafah, who has been made homeless once again, purely for being a Palestinian next to an illegal Israeli settlement.
In “a wave of destruction”, as Amnesty International called it, from Oct. 9 to 12, and again a few days later, 1,240 Palestinians lost their homes. Amnesty, recalling similar practices in the last three years, branded the destruction unlawful and said it constituted a war crime.
Relief teams affiliated with the UN agency UNRWA counted 114 “refugee shelters” that were completely erased by Israeli Army bulldozers, and 117 sustaining varying degrees of damage. UNRWA also disclosed that in Rafah alone, a small town under every definition, 7,532 individuals were made homeless as a result of similar Israeli raids in the past three years.
While destruction of buildings can be reversed, the destruction of human life cannot. Fifteen Palestinians, including several children, were killed and scores more were wounded in the Israeli “incursions”.
“This is part of defending themselves,” an anonymous senior official from the State Department told the Israeli daily Haaretz. Earlier in the day, Richard Boucher, the department spokesman, echoed the same sentiment, with the ominous addition of comparing the refugees to terrorists.
Lacking shelter, food and water, the Rafah refugees don’t lack good judgment. They are well informed, like most Palestinians, about those supplying Israel with its vast assortment of weaponry, the bulldozers that routinely demolish their homes, down to the bulletproof vests that soldiers wear during their barbaric nightly raids on the weary civilians. The several billion dollars of annual US military aid to Israel have systemically targeted the civilian infrastructure: Factories, homes, schools, mosques and churches.
Palestinians are growing tired of such duplicity. They can no longer justify or tolerate the bizarre use of American vetoes at the UN Security Council, the last on Oct. 14, hours before the car explosion in Gaza. It was John Negroponte who thwarted an endeavor to bar Israel from completing its apartheid wall, which has already ingested much of the West Bank. Just recently, the US vetoed another draft resolution calling on Israel not to physically harm Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. What is now being referenced as the “Negroponte Doctrine” an automatic US veto of any “anti-Israeli” resolution at the council is a blank check for Ariel Sharon’s government to proceed with its anti-peace policy, with its boundless territorial objectives, fences, walls, illegal settlements and remorseless assassinations.
Yet the objectives of the right-wing government of Israel entail more. There remains Gaza, although sliced up, riddled with settlements, military compounds and checkpoints, and degraded with untold poverty, still provides a somewhat safe haven for resistance factions that managed to adapt to the harshness of the bloody “incursions” of Israel.
Without forcing Gaza into submission, Israel remains partly ineffectual in obliging its detested peace “vision” on the Palestinians. A large-scale invasion of Gaza however is apt to produce thousands of casualties, if not trigger a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe. To invade Gaza, Israel is in need of even a greater American commitment, a mandate, boundless enough that would provide a political shield for Sharon and his henchmen to overlay any damaging international outcry.
Because of this, and because of the Israeli attempt to instigate direct US involvement on the ground, the Israeli intelligence very much could have been the perpetrators of the killing of the three Americans in Gaza. While the style of Palestinian bombings are all but a mystery, death by remote control is the Israeli intelligence’s most ideal assassination method, used with profusion and precision during the current Al-Aqsa Intifada.
Palestinian factions rarely if ever deny responsibility for their bombings, no matter how tactless they may appear. On several occasions, more than one faction claimed credit for the same attack, purportedly to perplex the Israeli Army and defuse its responses.
The utter denial of any connection with the attack on the US diplomats in Gaza — which was made by all major Palestinian resistance groups with unambiguous wording — is an indication that the Palestinian resistance might in fact be innocent of masterminding the deadly blast. The patent, albeit perpetual, Israeli plot to get Palestinians in direct military strife with the United States — one can hardly forget how Israeli intelligence leaked information alleging that the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) was the group behind the Sept. 11 attack — is all too clear, even to the most radical elements in the Palestinian resistance. Palestinian groups have proved cunning enough not to lend Israel a helping hand.
The real culprits may never be caught, even if a few Palestinian youngsters with bruised faces “confess” to carrying out the attack. Alas, it matters little who the real architect of the bombing was. Israel and the US government’s verdicts are already out, and the PA, to distance itself from any blame, is “hunting” for “terrorists” among the refugees in Gaza, who, according to Arafat, “not only committed a criminal act,” but have also “betrayed the cause of their own people.”
In times like these, evidence, motives, truth and due process are purely ornamental vocabulary, and sadly, the least relevant of all.
— Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American journalist and editor in chief of The Palestine Chronicle online newspaper.
The writer is STUPID and not tech savvy.
True, a wire was found. It was a wire [picture below]
of the type used by Paleostinians, not the Mossad.
and the wire went to a booth. It was not R/C.
========= Beit Hanoun =========
BREAKING: The Terrorist Wire
In Beit Hanoun, the actual wire leaving from the scene of the attack
to a small concrete room at the side of the road.
Palestinian attack on Americans
In Beit Hanoun, Gaza, where the Palestinian terrorists have full control,
the latest Palestinian attack on Americans
Israelis help Americans
Wounded Americans taken by helicoper and ambulance to hospitals.
CRIME SCENE TAMPERING
In Beit Hanoun, Palestinians were first on the scene to remove evidence
of their bombing that murdered at least three Americans.
In Beit Hanoun, at the wreckage after contamination by the Palestinian terrorists,
enter the Palestinian "police".
If Abdul will pray, to a smoking crater.
If this were true, then they would be able to provide examples of a person made homeless who went on to become a suicide murder bomber.
But the fact is, most of the murderers have been city dwellers with homes, and I don't know of one who was homeless.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.