al-Nakba: the Palestinian "Catastrophe"

Ironic, how quickly innocent victims can become ruthless victimizers

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Ignoring the Fourth Geneva Convention and other international laws, Israel has routinely conducted targeted assassinations, collective punishments, and massacres such as those in the Sabra, Shatila, Jenin and Nablus refugee camps. Israel arrests and imprisons many thousands of Palestinians at any given time (from 7,500-11,000) for resisting the occupation, most without charges or due process protections as either questionable "security threats" under military jurisdiction or "administrative detention" if no credible charges can be claimed.

Even when a Palestinian is charged and tried under the Israeli military court system, trials last an average of 13½ minutes and result in a 99.7% conviction rate.  Detainees usually include several hundred children isolated from their families for months at a time and often subjected to torture.  Under Israeli law, administrative detainees can be imprisoned without formal charges for 6 months, but these 6-month terms can be repeatedly extended often stretching out for many years. Ex-prisoners include some 40% of the male Palestinian population, who report that torture is routinely inflicted.

When Israeli forces intrude upon Palestinian lands and properties to seize and imprison Palestinians, these are called "arrests." They do this with regularity. On the very rare occasions when Palestinians are able to seize an Israeli soldier such as Gilad Shalit, it is called a "kidnapping" even though the captive was taken in Palestinian land. It is ludicrous to compare the occasional capture of an invading or occupying Israeli soldier with the illegal arrests and detentions of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom were lawfully protesting or resisting the occupation of their land. And of course only the Israeli victim is reported in the U.S. press.

A comprehensive description of Palestinian prisoners and their treatment can be found on the website of Addameer, the
Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. For a comprehensive list of responsibilities and limitations of an occupying power under international law that Israel has regularly and flagrantly violated, see the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Prime Minister Sharon was consistently accused of inflicting or permitting such human rights violations. He commanded the "101" unit in 1953 that committed the Qibya massacre, was close to Israeli massacres in the Sinai as a commander in the 1956 and 1967 wars without stopping or censuring them, and as Defense Minister in 1982 was held responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

Extrajudicial assassinations of Palestinian resistance workers by death squads, attack helicopters, and F-16 and drone-launched missiles has occurred routinely as a method of eliminating potentially effective and therefore troublesome Palestinian leadership.  Israeli soldiers continuously murder and maim Palestinian protestors pursuing Gandhian methods of non-violent resistance.  

An outstanding Israeli human rights organization, B'Tselem, has recorded the deaths of 1,467 Palestinian children from the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000 through 2010, most by gunshot and often gunshot to the head which clearly suggests deliberate targeting by Israeli snipers
.  These crimes are almost always committed with complete impunity.

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