Stephen Lendman

Throughout its history, Israel has been a regional menace, intimidating and preemptively attacking Palestinians and regional neighbors for any reason or none at all. Each time, it has self-righteously claimed it was acting in "self-defense" ― that's what scoundrels always say.

Until his death, Edward Said passionately defended Palestinian rights. He accused Israel of turning Palestine into an isolated prison, suffocating an entire population, impoverishing and slaughtering them, blaming them for its own state terror, and creating a wasteland of destruction and human misery.

Moreover, he said Israeli regimes sanctioned torture, targeted assassinations, and mass killing as official policy, besides committing every imaginable human indignity and degradation against people for their faith, ethnicity and presence.

As a result, Israel perpetuates a never ending cycle of violence and destruction, planning to end "the Palestinian problem," calling courage and resistance "terrorism," offering nothing in return for outrageous demands, and pursuing dominating pacification disguised as "peace." Journalist Henry Siegman once called it "the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history."

Gideon Levy calls it "an unborn baby," saying there's "never been an Israeli peace camp." How can there be when decades of Israeli leaders called peace process negotiations a useful fiction.

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Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

Intolerance in the Occupied West Bank: A Palestinian mother is
kicked by a Jewish boy while a Jewish woman rips off her Islamic
headscarf.

In a New Statesman article, law professor John Dugard ,who was a Judge on The International Court of Justice as well as being Special Raporteur for United Nations Commission on Human Rights, summarises the Goldstone apology saga :

‘there are no new facts that could possibly have led Richard Goldstone to change his mind about the UN-backed investigation into Israel and the conflict in Gaza.’

While Goldstone claimed that the Israeli investigations produced some results also recognised by a follow-up UN committee report chaired by Judge Mary McGowan Davis, Dugard stresses that the McGowan Davis report was actually very critical of the Israeli investigations, finding them to be “lacking in impartiality, promptness and transparency.”

According to the McGowan Davis report, the Israeli ‘probe’ has resulted in “two convictions; one for theft of a credit card, resulting in a sentence of seven months' imprisonment, and another for using a Palestinian child as a human shield, which resulted in a suspended sentence of three months.”

Dugard is clearly bewildered by Goldstone’s latest zigzag: “Richard Goldstone is a former judge and he knows fully well that a fact-finding report by four persons cannot be changed by the subsequent reflections of a single member of the committee.” What made Goldstone change his mind “remains a closely guarded secret,” says Dugard.

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