[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Gaza Special Full Show @http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin180518.mp3″]
This week on CounterSpin: The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza says Israeli soldiers killed at least 60 Palestinians and wounded as many as 2,700 in an eight-hour period pm May 14. Palestinians protesting both the horrific living conditions in Gaza and their inability—despite international law—to leave it, to return to the homes from which they were expelled, along with hundreds of thousands of people, in the 1940s. At the same time—and for many US TV viewers, on a sickening split-screen—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, celebrating the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, declared it a “great day for peace.”
Media could hardly avoid revealing the disjunction, even as many worked hard to tell you you weren’t seeing what you thought you were seeing—that the overwhelmingly unarmed people were a violent mob, that the snipers picking them off from a distance were defending their lives.
That sort of dissonance has marked elite US media coverage of Gaza for many years. This week we revisit conversations with just three of the people that CounterSpin has heard from who are working to expand and deepen US audiences’ understanding of Gaza—the conflict, the context and the possible ways forward. We’ll hear from James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute; from Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights; and from the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis.
Transcript: ‘There’s an Asymmetry Not Only in Power, but in Compassion’
No one would have been displaced & no land would have been lost if Palestinians had not tried to exterminate the Jews.
The day after the UN Partition Resolution in November 1947, racist, xenophobic Palestinians started a genocidal war to exterminate the Jews. Haj Amin el-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem – “I declare a holy war, my Muslim brothers! Murder the Jews! Murder them all!”
The war started with Palestinians attacking a Jewish bus driving on the Coastal Plain near Kfar Sirkin killing five and wounding others. Half an hour later they ambushed a second bus from Hadera, killing two more. Arab snipers attacked Jewish buses in Jerusalem and Haifa.
Wars create refugees!
That is very interesting. Palestinians must be the worst genocidal maniacs that ever lived, given that they seem to die in far greater numbers than their ostensible victims.
Typically, to succeed in genocide you must first have in place a political power apparatus and infrastructure that delivers exclusive power to you so that you have the power of life and death over your victims. Given that Israel has busted up Palestine into bantustans and forces them to live in them in squalor because the Israelis control the borders between and around them (and thus denies them an economy proper) that they build settlements on Palestinian land outside of Israel proper and force them into homelessness, that they have no state, that Israel has tanks, planes, ships, nukes, and gets much financial and political support from the most powerful nations on Earth, one would get the impression that the Palestinians may not understand how to do genocide. History is full of examples of how this most horrific crime is committed (indeed, the United States exists because of genocide) but for some reason the Palestinians, given their conditions, seem to have learned nothing from it.
If what you say is true, please explain where the Palestinians, in their genocidal mania which should have resulted in a shiny new Middle Eastern Superpower decades ago, went wrong?
Not to mention, that fighting that took place in 1947 was not the Palestinians beginning an extermination project. Even Zionist groups’ intelligence at the time acknowledge the Palestinians had no intentions of fighting.
netenyahoo(sp?) and drumpf, both sociopaths need to be removed from office by whatever means.
The American military industrial complex would remain.
Present-day Warsaw Ghetto. Too many parallels to count.
We ignored it then, and we ignore it now.