golden sheaves
spread in school yard
salt coast grown,
resistant stems
of native centuries
warned from homes
to wretched refuge
without respite
no shafts to freedom
where none are safe
threat of grass
and budding seed
shields real estate
coveted by
lawnmower men
with tunnel vision
of western pretexts,
colonial deterrents
to permanence,
not never again,
but again and again
unseen drone buzz
no fertilising bee
searing scythe
explodes from thirsty sky
row on row ripped
before flower blown
monstrous harvest
in Gaza charnel house
beneath earth strewn
with blood and bone
olive tree kernels awaken
August 2014
Names of Palestinians Killed in the War on Gaza since 8 July
AUGUST 1 UPDATE: Child death toll in Gaza approaches 200 and rising
Related Links
The IDF prepares to attempt to cover its tracks, but thousands of photos of disproportionate death and destruction don’t lie. Israel has been engaged in a deliberate, planned act of genocide, with accompanying war crimes. Its attack on the Occupied people of Gaza breaches the Geneva Conventions in the first place. Israel to the Hague!
Another vile story calls for genocide of Gazans in the Israeli media, this time in JPost and phrased as ‘humanitarian relocation of the non-belligerent Arab population’
The author of this scurrilous piece of incitement, Dr. Martin Sherman of the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies, has the gall to quote Einstein in support of his solution for the Palestinian question “No, periodically mowing the lawn is not a policy that can endure for long – it simply will not cut it. The grass needs to be uprooted – once and for all.”
How do these drooling fascists live with themselves?
More zionist genocidalists – Prof. Efraim Inbar is director and Dr.Eitan Shamir a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
“Against an implacable, well-entrenched, non-state enemy like the Hamas, Israel simply needs to “mow the grass” once in a while to degrade the enemy’s capabilities.”
Another genocidal Israeli lawnmower man: David M. Weinberg is Director of Public Affairs at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies
Racism is the Foundation of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge Joel Beinin:
The viciousness of Mordechai Kedar, lecturer in Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, was even more creative than Shaked and Elitzur’s merely genocidal proposal. “The only thing that can deter terrorists like those who kidnapped the children and killed them,” he said, “is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” As a university-based “expert,” Kedar’s heinous suggestion is based on his “understanding” of Arab culture. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,” he explained, hastening to add, “I’m not talking about what we should or shouldn’t do. I’m talking about the facts.”
Racism has become a legitimate, indeed an integral, component of Israeli public culture, making assertions like these seem “normal.”
…
Israeli security officials sardonically call these operations “mowing the lawn” because well-informed observers know that Hamas cannot be uprooted and is capable of rebuilding its military capacity. There is no long-term strategy, except, as Gideon Levy put it, to kill Palestinians. Major General (res.) Oren Shachor elaborated, “If we kill their families, that will frighten them.” And what might deter Israel?
Times of Israel publishes a zionist’s defence of genocide – the article was withdrawn but is archived.
Behind the Lying Eyes of Mark Regev
Behind the lying eyes of Mark Regev from One Democratic State Group on Vimeo.
Discrimination against Arab families:
‘In an attempt to lure the small ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism into his new government, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has agreed to pay extra child allowance to religious Jewish families with many children in a way that guarantees the extra payments do not also go to large Arab families.
This is the latest in a long line of manoeuvres by successive Israeli governments to ensure that Jewish and Arab citizens receive differential child allowances so that higher birth rates among Jewish families can be encouraged without also encouraging increased fertility among Arab families.
Such schemes are widely seen as being part of government initiatives to counter the perceived “demographic threat” posed by high Arab birth rates and maintaining Israel’s Jewish majority. Child allowance was only equalised for Jews and Arabs in the mid-1990s.’
Olmert and the ‘demographic threat’:
‘The time is fast approaching when Arabs will constitute a majority in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. Then, Olmert said, Palestinians will abandon their calls for an independent state and instead will demand a one-man-one-vote system in a binational state that they will control.
“The day we come to that, we will lose everything” Olmert said. “Even when they carry out terror, it’s hard for us to convince the world of the justice of our cause.”
“How much the more so,” he continued, “when all they ask for is one man, one vote? I shudder to think that the same liberal Jews who led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will be at the forefront of the struggle against us.”’
More Olmert:
‘Mr Olmert said it was not the first time he had articulated his fears about the demographic threat to Israel as a Jewish state from a faster growing Palestinian population.
He made similar comments in 2003 when justifying the failed strategy of unilateral withdrawals from Israeli-occupied land which holds large Palestinian populations.
“If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,”
Rape of Palestinian women:
‘If the Or Yehuda banner only hinted at rape and the WhatsApp image played coyly with it, a leading Israeli academic blatantly floated the idea of using rape against the Palestinians at the very start of the current round of hostilities.
On July 1, just after the bodies of three Israeli teens who had gone missing in the West Bank were found, Bar Ilan University lecturer Dr. Mordechai Kedar spoke on Israeli radio about raping Palestinian women in order to deter “terrorism,” saying that only the knowledge that Israel could dispatch agents to rape a Palestinian militant’s mother or sister, as retribution for his crimes, could deter him from carrying out those actions.’
Here’s Netayahoo in 2003 bemoaning the ‘demographic threat’ of Palestinian wombs in Israel:
Israel’s growing demographic problem is not because of Palestinians, but of Israeli Arabs, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday.
Speaking at the Herzliya Conference on security, Netanyahu said Israel had already freed itself from control of almost all Palestinian Arabs. He said he could not foresee a future in which “any sane Israeli” could try to make Palestinians either Israeli citizens or “enslaved subjects.” The Palestinians would under all circumstances rule themselves and administer their own affairs, he said.
“If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens,” he said. The Declaration of Independence said Israel should be a Jewish and democratic state, but to ensure the Jewish character was not engulfed by demography, it was necessary to ensure a Jewish majority, he said.
Joseph Massad – “Are Palestinian Children Less Worthy”
Who could forget these IDF T-shirts?
Deliberately killing children:
“Monica Awad, the spokeswoman of the UNICEF, condemned Israel’s targeting of women and children in its ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.”
In an interview with Al-Jazeera on 31 July, Awad said “Israeli forces had deliberately killed 264 children in Gaza, which is equal to 11 children per day, and injured more than 2,000.”
“Where’s the international community’s reactions to the slaughtering of children in Gaza? Where are the international human rights covenants?”
IDF Sniper Admits On Instagram To Murdering 13 Gaza Children
I am shocked and dismayed that you would end the employment of the honourable Associate Professor of American Indian Studies, Steven Salaita, due to pressure from those who place the indefensible – the genocidal actions of settler colonial Israel toward Palestinians whom it occupies, oppresses and sieges in Gaza – before academic freedom and ethical educative values.
