De Israelische Terreur 70

Electronic Intifada bericht: 'Israel's experiment in human despairJonathan Cook.

One needed only to watch the interview on British television this week with Israel's ambassador to the UK to realise that the Israeli army's tightening of the siege on Gaza, its invasion of the northern parts of the Strip today, and the looming humanitarian crisis across the territory, have nothing to do with the recent capture of an Israeli soldier -- or even the feeble home-made Qassam rockets fired, usually ineffectually, into Israel by Palestinian militants.Under questioning from presenter Jon Snow of Channel Four news on the reasons behind Israel's bombing of Gaza's only power station -- thereby cutting off electricity to more than half of the Strip's 1.3 million inhabitants for many months ahead, as well as threatening the water supply -- Zvi Ravner denied this action amounted to collective punishment of the civilian population.Rather, he claimed, the electricity station had to be disabled to prevent the soldier's captors from having the light needed to smuggle him out of Gaza at night. It was left to a bemused Jon Snow to point out that smugglers usually prefer to do their work in the dark and that Israel's actions were more likely to assist his captors than disadvantage them.The Alice Through the Looking Glass quality of Israeli disinformation over the combined siege and invasion of Gaza -- and its widespread and credulous repetition by the Western media -- is successfully distracting attention from Israel's real goals in this one-sided war of attrition.The current destruction of Gaza's civilian and administrative infrastructure is reminiscent of the Israeli army's cruel rampages through the streets of West Bank cities in the repeated invasions of 2002 and 2003, and the Jewish settlers' malicious attacks on Palestinian farmers trying to collect their olive harvests.The relative absence of these horror stories today is simply a reflection of the terrible success of the wall Israel has built across Palestinian farmland and around Palestinian population centres in the West Bank. Settlers no longer need to plunder the olive harvest when the fruit is being left to rot on the trees because farmers can no longer reach their groves.In the case of the West Bank invasions, Israeli tanks rolled easily into Palestinian cities that had already been isolated and crippled by the stranglehold of checkpoints and roadblocks all over the territority. Israeli heavy armour knocked down electricity pylons as though they were playing a game of ten-pin bowling, snipers shot up the water tanks on people's roofs, soldiers defecated into office photocopiers and the army sought out Palestinian ministries so that their confidential records and documents could be destroyed or stolen.' Lees verder:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4915.shtml