Jonathan Cook
The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.
Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza.
Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no
law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It
mainly kills your humanity.”
Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t
resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we
had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human
beings.”
Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”
Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out
purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’,
and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight
disturbance.”
No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve
in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are
nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”.
Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war - often
referred to as the Six-Day War - not only confessed that they and others
routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so
under orders from their commanders.
The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.
None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts
are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current,
near three-year destruction of Gaza - levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population - is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct.
Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a
single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” - the plight of Gaza’s
Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4.
Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an
old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling
Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one
of scale and duration.
Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and
space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve
in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern
munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise
what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.
Policy of starvation
The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to
“fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders
now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under
cover of war.
Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing
atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to
Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last
remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured
by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.
This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing
campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew
from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of
Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of
the newly declared Jewish state.
Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria.
But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the
West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - the 22 per cent of their homeland
that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt.
The 1967 war was... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-not-an-aberration-israels-genocide-gaza-was-planned-decades-ago
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