Sunday, March 22, 2009

A tale of two farces

It is really a farce that the Israeli Military Advocate General has for the first time called for criminal inquiries into the conduct of Israeli troops in Gaza.(1) On a day that we also hear that Ehud Barak has issued an order against demolishing Israeli homes built on Palestinian land in the West Bank settlement of Ofra.(2) Unadultared theft continues apace and IDF soldiers report on how innocent men, women and children were intentionally slaughtered. Now, we are informed that the Israeli Military Advocate General is about to demonstrate how Israel is a democracy and does what democracies do, namely, investigate crimes and while it might be the first time the military itself has called for an investigation we have had investigations in the past. There will be a whitewash and a few minor heads may roll and the reality remains that one of those responsible for those crimes, Ehud Barak, stopped the demolishing of Israeli homes on Palestinian land saying that there must be an investigation before such action is taken and with B'Tselem providing evidence that shows that 58 percent of land of the veteran West Bank settlement was built on private land belonging to Palestinians and furnishing documents to prove their case, we might well ask, what is it that Barak wants to investigate? Of course, we might also ask what is it the Israeli military want to investigate and it will certainly not be its dirty, illegal little war and what do both investigations have in common? Well, both refer to two different "incidents" in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that has been going on uninterrupted since 1948.
1 http://www.democracynow.org/
2 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072968.html

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