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Sunday, June 10, 2012

The War Against Palestine; What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?, Islam and the West, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and the West
The War Against Palestine; What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?
Exception From Humanity: The War Against Palestine
By GEORGE SALZMAN and MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.
December 29, 2008
The arc for European Jews between the years 400 and 1940 was first to be pressured to convert to Christianity or face employment discrimination, then from the 13th to the 16th century Jews resisting conversion were expelled from many countries, and finally the Nazis devised industrialized extermination. The arc for Palestinians seems to be compressed to a time scale measured in decades rather than centuries. Conversion was never an option, and many forms of exclusion were enforced from the first days of the State of Israel (which, couldn't we see as just the earliest Zionist-occupied section of Palestine?). Wars of territorial conquest since 1967, and the continuing invasion of "unoccupied" territory by "settlers" and their protective cavalry, the IDF -- or land rushes into Indian Reservations, as we knew them in the U.S. -- bend the arc from exclusion to extermination. In the logic of Zionist exceptionalism, there is nowhere within the limits of their territorial vision where Palestinians have "a right to exist." What other kind of mentality could inflict modern aerial bombardment of essentially unarmed, corralled masses of people? Our world remains at Guernica, the Stukas and Heinkels are now F-16s and Lavi jets.

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