Both nations partner in each other's high crimes - raging on Monday in besieged Gaza. As of 4:00 PM local time, 44 Palestinians were murdered in cold blood by Israeli snipers, another 1,700 injured, many seriously - the death and injury toll sure to rise.
Trump and other administration Ziofascists are ruthlessly contemptuous of Palestinian rights. They deplore peace and stability, instigating and supporting endless violence and chaos.
In a recorded message from Washington during the ceremonial opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, Trump disgraced himself more than already, saying:
"The United States remains fully committed to facilitating a lasting peace agreement. The United States will always be a great friend of Israel and a partner in the cause of freedom and peace."As his message was aired, Palestinians were being gunned down in cold blood - Trump, other administration officials, congressional Republicans and undemocratic Dems, along with the world community remaining indifferent to the suffering of a long-beleaguered people.
According to Palestinian media, Monday Palestinian casualties include about 800 shot with live rounds (including internally exploding dum dum bullets), around 90 seriously wounded - 65 of them shot in the head and/or neck, about 50 in the chest or back, most others in the legs.
Journalists, medical personnel and an ambulance were targeted. Gaza's Health Ministry called on Egypt to send urgently needed surgeons, intensive care physicians, anesthesiologists, other medical personnel and supplies to deal with the overwhelming casualty toll Gaza can't handle on its own.
Palestinian Center for Human Rights' fieldworkers in the Strip reported "continuously fired live and rubber bullets, tear gas canisters and artillery shells at the whole area, and not only at Gazans" within a few hundred meters of the border fence or closer.
Earlier in the day, the PCHR said eight journalists and 11 medical workers were wounded, including one of its fieldworkers.
Thousands of Gazans demonstrated peacefully, it stressed, many women, children, and entire families involved.
"Ambulances, medical staff, and field clinics were deliberately and directly targeted and prevented from approaching those wounded in addition to causing injuries among them" - journalists targeted the same way.
The death toll from Monday alone is certain to rise. Israeli viciousness flagrantly violates international law - nothing ever done to hold its culpable officials accountable for their high crimes.
Bloody Tuesday, Nakba Day, is likely to follow bloody Monday. While Israeli and US officials celebrate the opening of Washington's Jerusalem embassy, along with invited guests, Palestinians are being gunned down in cold blood.
An entire population is suffering under oppressive Israeli militarized occupations - besieged Gazans most of all.
Stephen Lendman was born in 1934 in Boston, MA. In 1956, he received a BA from Harvard University. Two years of US Army service followed, then an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. After working seven years as a marketing research analyst, he joined the Lendman Group family business in 1967. He remained there until retiring at year end 1999. Writing on major world and national issues began in summer 2005. In early 2007, radio hosting followed. Lendman now hosts the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network three times weekly.
His newest book as editor and contributor is titled Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.
What makes this distinct self-perpetuating leniency all the more extraordinary is that even the original designation of the Palestinians as refugees ran counter to both the standard definition of this status and the international treatment of similar, if not worse, contemporary humanitarian predicaments. In contrast, the Palestinians and the Arab states have never been penalized for their “war of extermination and momentous massacre,” to use the words of Arab League secretary-general Abdul Rahman Azzam, against the nascent state of Israel. Quite the reverse, in fact. Despite U.N. secretary-general Trygve Lie’s admonition that “the United Nations could not permit that aggression to succeed and at the same time survive as an influential force for peaceful settlement, collective security, and meaningful international law,” the Palestinians and the Arab states were generously rewarded for that very aggression. The former have become the most privileged refugee group ever; the latter have been generously remunerated for hosting the displaced persons whose dispersal they caused in the first place. This unprovoked war of aggression should have ipso facto precluded the Palestinians from refugee status, should have obliged them to compensate their Jewish and Israeli victims, and should have made their rehabilitation incumbent upon their leaders and the Arab regimes as with post-World War II Germany and collaborating parties. However, it did not. In addition, their designation as refugees also failed to satisfy the internationally accepted definition of this status in several other key respects. Apart from recognizing the Palestinians as refugees despite their failure to meet the basic criteria for this status and assigning a distinct agency to tend to their affairs, the U.N. blindly registered countless false claimants as refugees despite its keen awareness of the pervasiveness of this fraud, then let their falsely obtained status be passed on to future generations. Yet rather than seek to dispel this misguided sense of victimized entitlement and steer the refugees toward rehabilitation as stipulated by its mandate, UNRWA began edging in the opposite direction. One can only hope, therefore, that as UNRWA nears its seventieth anniversary, the agency’s main donors, first and foremost the United States and the European Union, which bankroll nearly half of its budget, will find the necessary courage and integrity to acknowledge the urgency of deep reform and condition future contributions on UNRWA’s reversion to the original mandate: that is, its gradual transfer of responsibility for the Palestinian “refugees” to the Palestinian Authority and the host Arab governments, thus ending their eternal “refugeedom” and facilitating their integration in their respective societies as equal and productive citizens. This will be seventy years later than originally conceived, but better late than never. EFRAIM KARSH
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