A look at the role of the Israeli military in collective punishment of a group of people.
By Jonathan Ofir | Mondoweiss | Nov 12, 2019
Terrorization has been a consistent means of the Israeli state and army vis-à-vis Palestinians.
After the 2008-9 Israeli onslaught on Gaza that took 1500 lives, a UN fact-finding mission concluded that the three-week campaign was “a deliberately disproportionate attack, designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” Note the word “terrorize.”
But was this an isolated incident? Not at all. Israel has a long and sordid history of state-terrorist activity. There was the pre-state terror, which eventually served as a means of ethnic cleansing, known as the Nakba of 1948. Those Palestinians who tried to return were shot by the thousands, most of them unarmed.
In the early 1950’s, David Ben-Gurion ordered a massive state-terrorist operation in response to the murder of a Jewish family by Palestinian guerillas. Although the suspects were not found, a “retaliatory” attack was conducted across the Jordanian border in Qibya, commanded by Ariel Sharon. Dozens of houses were blown up with their residents inside, about 70 killed. Ben-Gurion cynically tried to attribute the attack to “Jews from the Arab countries or survivors of the Nazi concentration camps”, apparently the lowest stratum he could think of for his cowardly blaming – above Palestinians, that is.
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