The Media Don't Tell the Real Reason Israel Kills People in Gaza
by John Spritzler
November 26, 2012
The reason Israel periodically kills men, women and children in Gaza is not because Hamas fires rockets. Nor is the
purpose of the killing to weaken the power and influence of Hamas (every reporter regardless of political orientation
notes that the effect is always the opposite, to strengthen Hamas, as Israeli leaders know all too well.)
The actual purpose of the killing is to strengthen the power of the Israeli Zionist leadership class of generals and
billionaires and politicians, specifically to strengthen their control of the Israeli population of ordinary Jews. The
strategy for securing this control over the Jewish population is simple: keep them so fearful of an external
enemy--"Arabs"/Palestinians--and so convinced that Zionist leaders are their protectors against this enemy, that no
matter how bad they think their Zionist leaders are otherwise, no matter how angry they are at being impoverished by
this Jewish upper class, they will never seriously challenge the power and authority of the Zionist ruling elite. Thus
in August of 2011 hundreds of thousands of Israelis, starting with people who set up tents on Rochschild Boulevard in
Tel Aviv and spreading across the whole country, demonstrated against the Israeli rulers demanding relief from the
economic hardships that had become so bad that ordinary Jews couldn't afford to rent an apartment. The demonstrations
were the largest in Israeli history. But all Prime Minister Netanyahu had to do to neutralize them was to provoke an
incident to focus attention on the "threat from the real enemy--Hamas in Gaza" and, forced to choose between being
"patriotic" and supporting the government in a "crisis" or continuing the struggle against the government and the upper
class that controls it, the Israelis chose the former.
What would people like Netanyahu do if it were not for Hamas and their earlier suicide bombings and current rocket
firings at non-combatant Israeli Jewish civilians? Without a credible frightening boogieman enemy, Zionist leaders would
lack their most effective means of social control. To produce such an enemy is precisely the strategy of Zionist leaders. It is why Zionist leaders periodically massacre
people in Gaza.
More fundamentally, this is why Zionist leaders carry out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the name of the Jewish
people: to produce a credible "enemy of the Jews." It is why all Zionist leaders of Israel, from David Ben Gurion in
1948 to Netanyahu today, insist that the most important thing in the world is to do whatever it takes to ensure that the
population of Israel remains forever at least 80%* Jewish. It is why Israeli leaders violently drove out 750,000 people, 80% of the non-Jews then living in what is now
Israel in 1947-48. It is why they carried out further ethnic cleansing in 1967, extending Israel's borders into the
occupied territories. It is why the previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, could declare that he wanted to end
discrimination against non-Jews inside Israel but would absolutely never allow the Palestinian refugees to return to
their homes and villages inside Israel--never!
Most people living in Gaza are refugees from this ethnic cleansing. Israel refuses to let them return to their homes.
Palestinians oppose Israel not because of anti-Semitism but outrage at being driven out of their homes and villages by
Israel. The Zionist strategy of social control is to provoke Palestinian anger and then to make sure that Israeli Jews
(and the whole world, for that matter) wrongly believe that the anger is hateful irrational anti-Semitism, that the
Palestinians want to "drive the Jews into the sea" or "wipe them off the face of the map" or kill every last one of
them.
The truth is that most Palestinians who voted for Hamas did so in order to reject the only other choice, the Fatah
leaders who are notoriously corrupt and who collude shamelessly with the Israeli government. Most Palestinians do not
agree with Hamas leaders who say the goal is to make Islam sovereign in all of Palestine from the Jordan River to the
Mediterranean Sea. On the contrary, most Palestinians say their main concern is a) to have the right to return to the
homes and villages inside of Israel where they (or their parents or grandparents) lived until they were driven out by
the Zionists, b) to have the property that the Zionists stole from them (land, homes, and other things) be returned or
to be fairly compensated for it, and c) to live as the equals of Jews under the law in all of Palestine from the River
to the Sea.
If Israel would give to the Palestinians these basic rights, which they fully deserve, then the conflict would end
immediately. If the conflict were ended this way, then Hamas would no longer have any support whatsoever from
Palestinians for continuing to fire rockets aimed at Jewish non-combatants. Israeli leaders claim to have done
everything possible to achieve peace before slaughtering innocent people in Gaza, but they don't do the most obvious
thing they could do: let the Palestinians return to their homes. The establishment media reveal none of these facts.
The mass media virtually never inform people about the ethnic cleansing that is the very basis of the Jewish state of
Israel. Instead they make people believe that the conflict is about where a border should be drawn separating Jews and
Arabs who can never live together peacefully. They tell people that the conflict is about whether Israel should continue
to occupy the West Bank and control Gaza (as an outdoor prison). Israel insists that it needs to maintain the occupation
and control over Gaza because otherwise Palestinians will be able to use these areas as a base from which to launch
military attacks on Israel, motivated by their anti-Semitic hatred and wish to destroy Israel. Never mentioned is the
fact that Israel, being a state based on ethnic cleansing, has no right to exist in the first place, and everything it
does to defend its right to exist is therefore morally wrong. The mass media never explain that even if Israel were to
end its occupation of the West Bank and its control of Gaza, the Palestinian anger at being victims of ethnic cleansing,
and their opposition to a state based entirely on that ethnic cleansing, would remain, and it would be entirely morally
justifiable anger.
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*Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, page 48 of the hardcover edition, provides the
following quotation from a speech by David Ben-Gurion (later Israel's first prime minister) given on December 3, 1947 in
front of senior members of his Mapai party (the Eretz Israel Workers Party), in which he said (referring to the UN
partition resolution):
There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish
state. And we have to face this new reality with all of its severity and distinctness. Such a demographic balance
questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty...Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state.
ENDS