What Does Israeli Occupation Of Palestine Really Mean?
13 July 2016
By Dr. Abdul Ruff
Colachal
Palestinians feel being chased by Jewish government and its military cum
police all the time. Persecution, aggression, oppression of Israel in
Palestine where its military and police have a free ride all the time. USA,
Europe and their UNSC help Israel terrorize Palestinians all the time.
Israeli occupation of Palestine means annexations, destruction genocides,
midnight knocks at house doors, insane torture worse than beheading,
military-police chasing of Palestinian youth and children, and fear among
Palestinian community living even abroad as Zionist Mossad with CIA backing
can murder any Palestinians anywhere in the world. CIA guys make the so-called
suspected terrorists remove their cloths and use the worst kind to torture
methods on their bodies, worse than even murdering them. Chopping of finders,
hands, legs, other body parts have become very ordinary technique of these
imperialist capitalists.
Since America and Europeans claim to be democracies they think they have the
right to torture any Muslim anywhere in the world. Israel also does it because
it a terror allies of NATO/USA.
Unlike American occupation forces s in Islamic countries or Hindu/India terror
forces in Kashmir, Jewish military keeps expanding the illegal borders by
annexing more and more lands each time after its genocides of Palestinians.
The Hindu forces in Kashmir keep building houses and offices for military
purposes. JK government disallows anybody from purchasing lands in Kashmir
which disables Indian desire to make Hindutva inroads by making Hindus settle
down in Kashmir. However, Indian regime and its military keep trying all
tricks to break the law.
Zionist crimes in Gaza
Let us consider the Jewish attacks most recently on Gaza strip on July 28.
Israeli navy attack fishermen in Gaza damaging their boats, meanwhile Israeli
troops invade West Bank communities and injure three youth. The Pentagon has
already offered its blanket approval of all Zionist crimes inside Palestine as
such terror operations reduce Islamic population worldwide – a major goal of
US led NATO terror wars in Islamic world.
Israeli navy ships attacked, on Thursday morning, several Palestinian fishing
boats in the Sudaniyya Sea area, northwest of Gaza city, kidnapped seven
fishermen and confiscated their boats. A fisherman told local news sources
that the Israeli military forces first surrounded them all of a sudden giving
a deadly shock to them and the navy boats attacked them from several
directions, and fired many rounds of live ammunition, causing damage. The navy
illegally confiscated the boats before moving them to the Ashdod Port.
On July 27 also the Israeli navy attacked Palestinian fishing boats, close to
the Gaza shore, and kidnapped two fishers. Some of the boats were hit with
live rounds, before the Jewish terroirsts in uniform (soldiers) assaulted
them. Elsewhere, three Palestinian youth were injured; four others kidnapped
when Israeli soldiers invaded Deheishe refugee camp in the southern West Bank
city of Bethlehem on Thursday at dawn and searched homes there.
The Zionist ''soldiers'' surrounded the refugee camp before invading it and
clashed with dozens of local youths, who hurled stones and empty bottles at
the military vehicles, while the army fired live rounds, rubber-coated steel
bullets and gas bombs. Medical sources said the soldiers shot three
Palestinians with live rounds before the medics moved them to hospital
suffering moderate-but-stable wounds, while many suffered the effects of
teargas inhalation.
Moreover, Dozens of Israeli soldiers invaded, on Thursday at dawn, the
northern West Bank city of Nablus, and conducted extensive searches of homes
before kidnapping seven Palestinians.
In the meantime, Israeli troops invaded late at night and at dawn, several
areas in occupied Jerusalem, searched many homes and kidnapped four young
Palestinian men.
All such terror operations happen without the knowledge of western capitals or
their intelligence wings that care for freedoms, democracy, etc.
Despite lack of support from USA for the cause of freedom and sovereignty for
Palestinians, there has been strong protest against Zionist occupational
crimes inside Palestine.
The crude manner in which the Zionist criminals deal with besieged
Palestinians has been criticized even by some Jewish leaders themselves. The
day after the shooting of Palestinians recently, Tel Aviv's Mayor Ron Huldai
found the courage to state the obvious—that the state violence will persist
until the occupation ends. Israel ''is perhaps the only country in the world
holding another nation under occupation without civil rights,'' Huldai said.
Such frankness counts as bravery these days, but even Huldai was understating
the truth. It's not the mere fact of a military occupation, of Israeli troops
on Palestinian territory, which provokes such attacks. It can be difficult to
comprehend from across the Atlantic, or even from usually tranquil Tel Aviv,
but the occupation, as many commentators have observed while reporting from
the West Bank since 2011, functions as a massive mechanism for the creation of
uncertainty, dispossession and systematic humiliation.
It is not just soldiers and guns, but a far-reaching structure that affects
all aspects of Palestinian life—a complex web of checkpoints to harass and
torture the Palestinians , travel restrictions, permits, walls and fences,
courts and prisons, endless constraints on economic possibilities, home
demolitions, land appropriations, expropriation of natural resources, and, too
often, lethal force.
Crime and Punishment
Palestinians, the real owners of Palestine lands, are made now the enemy now
whom Israel wants to kill enmasse. With Israeli state backing, the illegal
settlers seemed a little crazy, but they are Jews the ''boss'' of Mideast.
Efrati, a Jew who quit Israeli army in protest against Zionist occupational
crimes against humanity was earlier a part of the military in Jerusalem at the
beginning of a war on Gaza Strip, targeting the children and women as well,
that would leave more than 2,000 Palestinians dead. Efrati he spent most of
2006 and 2007 stationed in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, but had long
since Gaza attack left the army and become an anti-occupation activist. Efrati
was 19 when he arrived there and at the time saw little reason to question the
Israeli military's presence in the city. At his first briefing, he recalled an
officer asking the troops what they would do if they saw a Palestinian running
at a settler with a knife. ''Of course the answer was you shoot him in the
center of his body, Palestinians have no right to live '' Efrati said. The
officer posed the question in reverse: What if it was the settler with a
knife? ''And the answer was you cannot do anything. The best you can do is
call the police, but you're not allowed to touch them. From day one the
command was, 'You cannot touch the illegal settlers and other Jews.''' This
made sense to him, Efrati said.
A few days later, thousands of illegal settlers, mostly Russian speaking,
arrived from all over the West Bank to celebrate a religious holiday. The army
imposed a curfew to keep Palestinians off the streets to target the
Palestinians. Efrati's first task as a soldier in Hebron was to throw stun
grenades into elementary school of Palestine children to announce the
beginning of the curfew. ''I just did it, like everyone Jew,'' he said, ''and
within seconds, hundreds of kids ran outside. I was standing at the entrance
and a lot of them looked at me in the eyes—that was the first time that it hit
me. All of a sudden I understood what I was doing.
Later, Efrati recalled, settlers filled the central city. He was assigned to
escort a group of them into the Patriarchs' Tomb, a site holy to both Islam
and Judaism, where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their wives Sarah, Rebecca,
and Leah are believed to be buried. The settlers were allowed into the
Palestinian side of the site, even into the mosque with their dirty legs and
blood stained hands. Israeli children were peeing on the floors and burning
the carpets. Their parents were there—the mosque was packed with settlers—but
no one was able to stop them. A Israeli criminal soldier grabbed one of the
children and took a cigarette lighter from his hand. ''He started screaming at
us,'' Efrati said. ''We laughed at him.'' Five minutes later, ''one of our
very, very high-ranking officers came inside the mosque and said, 'Did you
steal something from the kid?''' They tried to explain, but the officer only
repeated the question. The officer ordered them to give it back and apologize
and Jews have a right to smoke inside mosques . They found the child,
apologized and returned the lighter. The boy ran right into the next room,
Efrati said, and resumed setting fire to the carpets.
Things got weirder. Efrati was put in charge of a checkpoint separating the
area of Hebron inhabited by settlers from the larger Palestinian city. He
described it as grueling, mind-numbing work, standing in the cold for as long
as 16 hours, usually hungry and always sleep-deprived. Inflicting humiliation
was part of the assignment. Schoolteachers would cross dressed in suits and
ties. The soldiers would make them strip in front of their students.
''Sometimes we would make them wait for hours in their underwear,'' Efrati
said.
Pure entertainment for the criminal Jews in human suffering…
The pretext was to check them for weapons. ''Nobody thought that anything
would happen to them,'' he said, but the troops were told again and again by
their officers that all Palestinians were potential threats, that anyone might
stab them if they dropped their guard for a moment. That notion meant to make
the Jewish solders more arrogant , Efrati said, ''made us very, very
aggressive. So you would push them against the wall, undress them, take your
weapon and hit them a few times.
That is Zionist democracy, not entirely different from American or NATO's.
''If he's saying something, hit him.. Just make sure that you're completely in
control.'' His conscience began to nag at him. He started bringing bags of
Bamba—a popular Israeli snack food, like Cheez Doodles, only peanut flavored
and not phosphorescent orange—to the checkpoint and offering them to children.
After a few days, ''the first brave kid came up, grabbed a bag of Bamba and
ran away.'' Efrati was thrilled. Not long after, a Palestinian boy of about
eight years old asked him for a treat. This boy didn't run. He opened the bag,
and offered some to Efrati. They sat and ate the chips together. When the boy
walked off, Efrati felt ecstatic. He could finally be the man he wanted to be,
a soldier who was loved for his kindness and who at the same time, as he put
it, ''was protecting my country from a second Holocaust.''
When he got back to the base that night, he was ordered to eat quickly and
prepare for another shift, not at the checkpoint but on a ''mapping''
expedition into the section of the city governed by the Palestinian Authority.
He was still so high from his success with the Bamba that he didn't mind the
extra work. The routine was simple: ''You go into houses in the middle of the
night, get everybody outside, take a photo of the family, and start going
around the house, destroying things.'' The idea was to search for weapons,
''but we also needed to send a message,'' Efrati said, to make sure the
residents never lost ''the feeling of being chased.'' His job was to draft
maps of each house, charting the rooms, the doors and the windows. ''If at
some point there was a retaliatory attack from that specific house,'' the army
would be ready.
That night, they searched, trashed and mapped two houses in the neighborhood
of Abu Sneineh. It was snowy and cold. When they were done, the sun had not
yet risen. They forced the family outside and into the snow and went in and
started searching. Efrati opened the door to a child's room—he remembered
seeing a painting of Winnie-the-Pooh on one wall—and had begun sketching when
he realized that there was someone in the bed. A young boy leaped out from
under the covers. He was naked. Startled, Efrati raised his gun, aiming at the
child. It was the kid from the checkpoint that afternoon. ''He started peeing
himself,'' Efrati said, ''and we were just shaking, both of us, we were just
standing there shaking and we didn't say a word.''
The boy's father, coming down the stairs with an officer, saw Efrati pointing
a rifle at his son and raced into the room. ''But instead of pushing me
back,'' Efrati said, ''he starts slapping his kid on the floor. He's slapping
him in front of me and he's looking at me saying, 'Please, please don't take
my child. Whatever he did, we'll punish him.'' In the end, the officer decided
that the man's behavior was suspicious, that ''he was hiding something.'' He
ordered Efrati to arrest him. ''So we took the father, blindfolded him, cuffed
his hands behind his back and put him in a military jeep.''
They dumped him like that at the entrance to the base. ''He stayed there for
three days in a very torn-up shirt and boxer shorts. He just sat there in the
snow.'' Eventually, Efrati summoned the courage to ask his officer what would
happen to the boy's father. ''He had totally forgotten about him, didn't even
know what I was talking about,'' Efrati said. ''He was like, 'Which father?'''
Efrati reminded him. ''You can release him,'' the officer said. ''He learned
his lesson.''
After cutting the plastic ties that bound the man's wrists, untying the
blindfold and watching him run off barefoot in his underwear through the
streets, Efrati realized that he had never given his commander the maps he had
drawn. He hurried back to the officer's room, apologizing for his negligence.
The officer wasn't angry. ''It's okay,'' he said. ''You can throw them away.''
It is just like that. Efrati was confused. He protested: wasn't mapping a
vital task that might save other soldiers' lives?
The officer got annoyed. ''He says, 'Come on, Efrati. Stop bitching. Go
away.''' But Efrati kept arguing. He didn't understand. When it became
apparent that he wasn't going anywhere, the officer told him: ''We've been
doing mappings every night, three or four houses a night, for forty years.''
He personally had searched and mapped the house in question twice before with
other units. Israel is eager to terrorize the civilians everywhere and might
knocks terrorize the local population, they pick young persons and never to
return them to the families. At times, Palestinians run away through back
doors when Israeli military knocks at their doors in the night and the never
return homes.
Israeli military and police don't entrain any complaints from Palestinian
parents about their missing sons. If any Palestinian goes to police station or
military officers with complaints they are told to go to Tel Aviv and meet the
PM Netanyahu and complain to him or report to UN.