Press "Enter" to skip to content

Mowing the Grass

"Mowing the grass". This is the expression used by the Israelis to refer to their periodic annihilation of anything of value in the vast swaths of Palestinian land which they dominate to an increasing degree every year.

The most recent paroxysm of senseless mass murder by Israel is understood by most who are familiar with the situation, to have mainly been ginned up by long time war criminal (as well as other types of criminality presently being adjudicated by Israeli courts) Benjamin Netanyahu, to divert attention from the decades of crimes for which he is, at long last, actually in danger of being held accountable.

Bibi, as he is known, is as aware as anyone just how well the death and destruction of non-Jews living anywhere within striking distance, sells in this country that has gone mad with US subsidies for whatever Geneva Convention violations it chooses to engage in. All they've got to do is recall the Holocaust and say Never Again! And the most racist country in the world will rally around whatever lies and deceit their ‘Dear leader’ has in mind. Clearly the aim this time is to distract attention from Bibi's criminal problems, which could end up with him being housed where he should have been many years ago; prison.

Anyone who has followed this story over the last few decades is aware that Israel has moved during this time steadily to the right; that with the ongoing paid-for propaganda of some very wealthy 'Israel firsters’ from all around the world, Israel has become more hardened and intransigent; that the once numerous faction of Israeli people for peace and freedom for Palestinians has largely been driven out of the country out of the exhaustion of beating their heads against a brick wall. As these good guys have left or been driven out of Israel, they have been replaced by the most retrograde racist Zionist chauvinists, whether from Moldova or Queens. These religious zealots will cite ancient texts to justify their stealing the land of Palestinians who have lived on it for generations. They guarantee an ongoing motivation for bloody conflict between people who should just be able to treat each other fairly and just get along.

It is apparent to any objective observer of the conflict over the last half-century, that had the United States not been extending virtually unlimited funding for Israel’s ‘security’, that Israel and its Palestinian neighbors would have long ago worked out some kind of political arrangement in which they all had some voice. But with Uncle Sam’s enormous thumb on the Israeli side of the scales, why should the Israelis give an inch? Instead, it has been rapaciously seizing Palestinian land, uprooting ancient olive trees as punishment for the most trivial offenses, building their garish new ‘settlements’ all over this ancient land, while blowing up the beautiful old hand made stone homes of the people who actually live there.

This most recent massacre of the godforsaken denizens of Gaza, known worldwide as the world’s largest open air prison, stands out in its brazen extended middle finger to the whole rest of the world. It’s virtually unanimous will having been clearly expressed in the United Nations, even though they all know about the inevitable veto of anything critical of Israel that the US guarantees in perpetuity, such expressions of rage and disgust by the rest of the world have become an exercise in futility. 

Anyone with any kind of basic human compassion can see that the uncritical support of whatever slaughter the Israelis do can only be harmful to everyone involved; the Palestinian second class citizens of Israel, the occupied people whose daily lives have become endless hours of waiting in the sun at checkpoints waiting for humiliation by merciless Israeli child soldiers, empowered to put them down without consequence at the slightest infraction of their arbitrary rules, and the Israelis themselves! who have been warped mentally by their power over the arabs.

Have I, in recent years, ever experience something as infuriating as hearing an NPR interviewer talking blandly about the ‘conflict’ in Gaza, where, with the lame justification of rocket fire into Israel from Gaza (basically glorified fireworks with no guidance, which may do damage to some Israelis or their assets 1% of the time), the Israelis have unleashed the full panoply of US donated high-tech weaponry which always hits their targets. I wanted to barf when I heard about how they were targeting ‘terror tunnels’ which were conveniently located mostly often under high rise apartment buildings; hey, two birds with one stone! Destroy the ‘Terror Tunnels’, AP, Al Jazeera, etc. news offices and hundreds of the homes of otherwise uninvolved civilians simply trying to exist. If these terror tunnels were so terrible, providing opportunity for murder of say, Israelis, I think we would have heard about it, since the US media seldom passes on an opportunity to bring such deaths to our attention, even while scores or hundreds of Palestinians, many of them women and children, can be massacred with barely a mention in the American press.

I’ve been a fan of much of Joe Biden’s actions since assuming the presidency, which is why I found it so disgusting to hear him say as a reaction to Israel’s most recent horrifying orgy of bloodletting with the decades-long US public officeholder shibboleth of “Israel has a right to defend itself”. So do the Palestinians!

Be First to Comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

-