Operation Unpunished Lead: Eduard Galeano
“To justify itself, state terrorism manufactures terrorists: it sows hate and reaps alibis,” writes Eduardo Galeano, who dedicates the article “to my Jewish friends who were murdered by Latin American dictatorships that Israel supported” (read original Spanish here):
Everything indicates that this Gaza bloodbath, which according to its authors is intended to eliminate the terrorists, will multiply them in the end. Since 1948 the Palestinians have been condemned to perpetual humiliation. They cannot even breathe without permission. They have lost their country, their lands, their water, their liberty, everything. They do not even have the right to elect those who will govern them. They are punished when they vote for whom they are not supposed to vote. Gaza is being punished. It has been turned into a mousetrap without an exit since Hamas cleanly won the elections in 2006. Something similar happened in 1932 when the Communist Party won the elections in El Salvador. Bathed in blood, the Salvadorean people expiated their bad behaviour and lived under military dictatorships since then. Democracy is a luxury that not everyone deserves.
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The homemade rockets that Hamas ineffectually fires at the former Palestinian lands that were usurped by Israel are the sons of impotence.
And the desperation, verging on suicidal madness, is the mother of the bravado that denies Israel’s right to exist, shouts impotently, while for years now the very efficacious war of extermination has been negating Palestine’s right to exist.
Not much of Palestine remains. Step by step, Israel is erasing it from the map.
Settlers invade, and then the soldiers go to rectify the border.
Bullets consecrate the despoilment as legitimate defence.
There is no aggressive war that does not call itself a defensive war. Hitler invaded Poland to prevent Poland from invading Germany. Bush invaded Iraq to prevent Iraq from invading the world. In each one of its defensive wars, Israel has swallowed another piece of Palestine, one meal after another. This process of devouring is justified by the land-deeds conferred by the Bible, by the two thousand years of persecution that the Jewish people suffered, and by the panic generated by the prospect of Palestinians lying in wait.
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Israel is the country that has never fulfilled the recommendations or the resolutions of the United Nations, the country that never complies with the rulings of international tribunals, that mocks international laws, and is also the only country that has legalized the torture of prisoners.
Who gave it the right to negate all rights? From whence the impunity with which Israel executes the massacre in Gaza? The Spanish government could not have bombed the Basque country with such impunity to eliminate ETA; nor could the British government have devastated Ireland to liquidate the IRA. Perhaps the tragedy of the Holocaust implies confers eternal impunity. Or does that green light come from the big boss of which Israel is the most unconditional of vassals?
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The Israeli army, the most modern and sophisticated in the world, knows whom to kill. It does not kill by error; it kills by horror. The civilian victims are called collateral damage, according to the dictionary of other imperial wars. In Gaza, of every ten collateral damages, three are children. And the thousands of mutilated, victims of the technology of human dismemberment the military industry is successfully testing in this operation of ethnic cleansing.
And as always, it is always the same: in Gaza, a hundred to one. For every hundred dead Palestinians, one Israeli.
Dangerous people, warns the next bombardment by the massive media of manipulation, which invite us to believe that one Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives. And those media also invite us to believe that Israel’s two hundred nuclear bombs are humanitarian, and that it was a nuclear power called Iran that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
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The so-called international community, does it exist?
Is it anything other than a club of merchants, bankers and warriors? Is it anything more than the artistic name that the United States gives itself when it stages a show?
Faced with the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries wash their hands. As always. And as always, the European countries rub their hands.
Old Europe, so capable of bellicosity and perversity, sheds a tear or two while secretly celebrating this masterful play. Because Jew-hunting was always a European custom, but for a half century that historical debt has been paid by the Palestinians, who are also Semites and who never were nor are anti-Semites. They are paying somebody else’s debt, in hard cash.
(This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends who were murdered by Latin American dictatorships that Israel supported)
English translation: MM)
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