<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[After Itamar: Exploring the cynical logic that makes everyone a&nbsp;target]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<div class="post-date"><em>On 03.14.11, By Max Blumenthal<br />
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<p>Everyone  is rushing to condemn the gruesome murder of a family in the illegal  Israeli settlement of Itamar. Even President Barack Obama felt compelled  to offer his “unequivocal condemnation” of the murders. For what it’s  worth (very little), I offer my own denunciation of the killings.  Murdering kids can not be justified on any human level. However, even if  the motives of the killer seem obvious to everyone, journalists  covering the incident must be reminded there is no hard evidence that a  Palestinian terrorist committed the crime. No viable armed faction has  taken credit, and Israeli police are even <a href="http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/8469618-itamar-massacrethai-workers-rounded-up-in-itamar">treating</a> Thai workers as suspects.</p>
<p>Itamar is heavily guarded, surrounded by an electrified fence, and  monitored 24/7 by a sophisticated system of video surveillance. Yet  there is no video of the killer. Like it or not, until the identity of  the killer is confirmed, the murder can only be described by journalists  as an “alleged terror attack.” Legitimate outrage is no excuse to flout  the basics of journalism 101.</p>
<p>Given the amount of violence visited upon local Palestinians by the  residents of Itamar and nearby settlements, I will not be surprised if  the killer turns out to be a rogue Palestinian bent on revenge. In one  instance documented in 2007, settlers from Itamar <a href="http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1618">stabbed</a> a 52-year-old shepherd named Mohammad Hamdan Ibrahim Bani Jaber to  death while he tended to his flock. Routine attacks from Itamar have  prompted the near-total <a href="http://www.poica.org/editor/case_studies/view.php?recordID=1069">evacuation</a> of the village Izbat Al Yanoon, while settlers from nearby Jewish colony of Yitzhar have staged <a href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1A1-D91T11303.html">homemade rocket attacks</a> on local Palestinians and <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3835829,00.html">torched their mosques</a>. As I have <a href="http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/08/how-to-kill-goyim-and-influence-people-leading-israeli-rabbis-defend-manual-for-for-killing-non-jews/">reported</a>,  Yitzhar is home to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, author of the notorious  “Torat Hamelech,” which uses rabbinical sources to justify the killing  of non-Jewish civilians, including children, in combat situations.</p>
<div id="attachment_1828" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width:330px;">
<p><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-1828 " title="Ussayed_Qadous_xray" src="https://i0.wp.com/maxblumenthal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Ussayed_Qadous_xray.jpeg" alt="Medical Xray of live ammunition lodge in the skull of Ussayed Qadous, shot at point blank range by Israeli troops near Itamar in 2010" width="320" height="240" /></p>
<p class="wp-caption-text">Medical  x-ray of live ammunition lodged in the skull of Ussayed Qadous, shot at  point blank range by Israeli troops near Itamar in 2010</p>
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<p>A year ago in nearby Palestinian farming villages Awarta and Iraq Burin, Israeli soldiers were <a href="http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?Itemid=74&amp;id=31&amp;jumival=4952&amp;option=com_content&amp;task=view">accused of executing</a> local youths during riots against settlement expansion. As Jesse Rosenfeld <a href="http://www.thenational.ae/news/israel-escalates-its-repression-stoking-the-fires-of-division?pageCount=0">reported</a>,  despite the clear evidence of execution style killings, none of the  soldiers who held the Palestinians in custody at the time they were shot  were convicted of any crimes. And to my knowledge, no official American  response followed. Thus the besieged villages near Itamar have been  left without any recourse or legal means to redress their harassment and  murder.</p>
<p>Israel’s method of occupation and its military rules of engagement —  which are supported by the US in spirit and through acts like the recent  UN settlement resolution <a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/135551/">veto</a> — openly skirt international law, eliminating any outside mechanism for  mediating conflict or redressing the grievances of civilians harmed by  war. Under these terms, where distinctions between civilians and  combatants are deliberately blurred in order to deepen Israel’s control  over land gained through military conquest, horrific attacks like the  kind allegedly witnessed in Itamar become all the more possible.</p>
<p>To establish an ethical basis for military operations aimed at  consolidating the occupation, the Israeli army has turned to Zionist  academics like Tel Aviv University philosophy professor <a href="http://pulsemedia.org/2010/02/23/the-second-battle-of-gaza-israel%E2%80%99s-undermining-of-international-law/">Asa Kasher</a>.  In the service of the army, Kasher churned out elaborate manifestoes  justifying Israel’s tactics during Lebanon II and Operation Cast Lead.  Kasher’s concepts of warfare are best defined by his explicit  justifications for killing unarmed civilians in any instance when an  Israeli soldier believed that they were in danger. Kasher strained his  logic to the point that he <a href="http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&amp;TMID=111&amp;LNGID=1&amp;FID=378&amp;PID=0&amp;IID=3345">highlighted</a> the 2004 US invasion of Fallujah in Iraq, when American troops fired  white phosphorous shells into the city center and demolished hundreds of  homes, to justify Israeli actions in Gaza. “If it’s between the soldier  and the terrorist’s neighbor, the priority is the soldier,” Kasher <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/the-philosopher-who-gave-the-idf-moral-justification-in-gaza-1.269527">said</a>. “Any country would do the same.”</p>
<p>Another academic with close ties to the Israeli military-intelligence  apparatus, Professor Arnon “the Arab Counter” Soffer of Haifa  University, urged the army to massacre Palestinian civilians after the  withdrawal from the illegal settlement of Gush Katif in Gaza. Soffer,  who devised the separation wall policy in order to confine the  Palestinians of the West Bank to what he called “three sausages,”  reasoned that mass murder was the only way to maintain the security of  the Southern Israeli perimeter communities while avoiding political  concessions to the Palestinians of Gaza.</p>
<div id="attachment_1829" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width:310px;">
<p><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-1829" title="ShowImage" src="https://i1.wp.com/maxblumenthal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/ShowImage.jpeg" alt="Prof. Arnon Soffer: &quot;Kill, kill, kill.&quot;" width="300" height="194" /></p>
<p class="wp-caption-text">Prof. Arnon Soffer: &#8220;Kill, kill, kill.&#8221;</p>
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<p>“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe,” Soffer <a href="http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2006/05/arnon_the_arabs.html">argued</a>.  “Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with  the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border  will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain  alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” And  that is exactly what Israel did when it followed Soffer’s logic in  Operation Cast Lead. (Note the use of the word “animal” in Soffer’s  language and in the <a href="http://972mag.com/unbelievable-racism-hate-talk-from-prime-minister-sharons-son/">language of Israelis responding</a> to the murders in Itamar; the word is essentially a signal to kill Palestinians indiscriminately).</p>
<p>While Soffer and Kasher have both served as outside consultants for  Israeli governments and the army, another advocate for slaughtering  Palestinian civilians, Yaakov Amidror, has been <a href="http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2011/03/04/bibi-set-to-name-amidror-national-security-advisor/">appointed</a> to serve as Benjamin Netanyahu’s National Security Advisor. “That’s a  totally illegal order,” Amidror once snapped at Israeli news anchor Haim  Yavin, who had said that Israeli soldiers were instructed to avoid  civilian casualties in Lebanon. “What should be said is ‘kill more of  the bastards on the other side, so that we’ll win.’ Period.” Amidror has  criticized Kasher for formalizing the army’s ethical code — “<span style="font-weight:normal;font-size:1em;margin:0;padding:0;">I said this should remain unwritten, so there wouldn’t be anything written, as [then] it would become technical</span>,”  he declared — and even called for the on-site execution of Israeli  soldiers who refused to advance in battle. (Amidror also happens to be a  religious settler who lives in the West Bank.)</p>
<p>Kasher, Soffer, and Amidror’s arguments relating to the killing of  civilians are eerily similar to those advanced in a halakhic context by  religious nationalist rabbis. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira of Yitzar, a  settlement that neighbors Itamar, has written in his book <a href="http://maxblumenthal.com/2010/08/how-to-kill-goyim-and-influence-people-leading-israeli-rabbis-defend-manual-for-for-killing-non-jews/">“Torat Hamelech”</a> that non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and should be killed in  order to “curb their evil inclinations.” A guide for anyone pondering  when killing goyim is permissible, the book has been described by Rabbi  Dov Lior of the settlement Kiryat Arba as “very relevant, especially in  this time.” Lior, who has <a href="http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4006385,00.html">said that</a> “gentile sperm leads to barbaric offspring,” is also a firm advocate of  slaughtering Palestinian civilians. In 2008, when the IDF’s chief  rabbi, Brigadier General Avichai Ronski, brought a group of military  intelligence officers to Hebron for a special tour, <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/rabbinate-without-borders-1.260132">he concluded the day with a private meeting</a> with Lior, who reveled the officers with his views on modern warfare:  “no such thing as civilians in wartime.” (For his part, Ronski has <a href="http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2009/01/27/idf-chief-rabbi-teaches-torah-to-terrorists-advises-soldiers-to-show-palestinian-civilians-no-mercy/">urged</a> Israeli troops to show Palestinian civilians “no mercy.”)</p>
<div id="attachment_1830" class="wp-caption alignleft" style="width:181px;">
<p><img loading="lazy" class="size-full wp-image-1830" title="18306" src="https://i0.wp.com/maxblumenthal.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/18306.jpeg" alt="National Security Advisor appointee Yaakov Amidror: kill civilian &quot;bastards&quot; and shoot non-compliant soldiers on the spot" width="171" height="179" /></p>
<p class="wp-caption-text">National Security Advisor appointee Yaakov Amidror: kill civilian &#8220;bastards&#8221; and shoot non-compliant soldiers on the spot</p>
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<p>So what is the difference between rabbis like Lior and Shapira and  secular academics like Kasher and Soffer? I put this question to a  20-something settler (he is the last guy I interviewed in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t_LxpCY2G8">this video</a>)  during a rally in defense of the publication of “Torat Hamelech.”  “Well, the difference is that someone like Kasher is speaking from his <em>kishkes </em>[guts],”  the settler told me. “But Yitzhak Shapira is speaking from Torah; he’s  speaking from Hashem.” In other words, the philosopher and the rabbi  share a philosophy that justifies killing non-Jewish civilians, but the  ethicist uses rational arguments rooted in secular Enlightenment  thought, while the rabbi claims to be translating for God from ancient  documents. In the end, both are working to cultivate an environment in  which legal and moral protections for civilians are discarded in order  to advance the maximalist goals of Jewish nationalism.</p>
<p>During his <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/23319530/Dore-Gold-on-the-Goldstone-Reporthttp://www.scribd.com/doc/23319530/Dore-Gold-on-the-Goldstone-Report">opening statement</a> in his debate against Judge Richard Goldstone at Brandeis University on  November 5, 2009, former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold claimed that the  Goldstone Report was in fact an attack on Israeli society. In a section  entitled “Maligning Israeli Society,” Gold and Lt. Col. Jonathan Dahoah  Halevi wrote: “The language used by the UN Gaza report — and the gravity  of its allegations about “deliberate” Israeli attacks on civilians —  maligns Israeli society as a whole, for the Israel Defense Forces is a  citizen’s army, an army which is made up of the people of Israel.”</p>
<p>In Gold’s own words, there is no difference between Israeli civilians and soldiers — the army <em>is</em> society. Without knowing it, Gold deployed the very same argument  Palestinian militant factions have used to justify suicide attacks  inside Israel and the murder of the children of settlers in the West  Bank. Thus Gold revealed the extent to which the process of  comprehensively militarizing Jewish Israeli society — a central goal of  Zionism since the days of <a href="http://blog.eteacherhebrew.com/israel-history/never-mind-it-is-good-to-die-for-our-country/">Joseph Trumpeldor</a> — had obliterated the distinction between civilian and combatant, transforming every human being into a possible target.</p>
<p>In such an environment, horrific violence against the innocent is not  only possible, but inevitable. Of course, most of the violence will be  meted out against the Palestinians, who live under a seemingly permanent  occupation with negligible deterrent capacity and no political rights.  But Israelis must also live in this moral wasteland and face the  depressing consequences. Having to someday accept that they were  responsible for its creation might be the cruelest fate of all.</p>
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<p><a href="http://maxblumenthal.com/2011/03/after-itamar-exploring-the-logic-that-makes-everyone-a-target/"><br />
Source</a></p>
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