By Khalid Amayreh

Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, have been complaining about the increasing "de-legitimization" of the Zionist state across the world. Netanyahu, who is a skilled media operator, said that Israel "needs to de-legitimize the de-legitimizers".

However, a fleeting glance at recent Israeli actions shows that Israel is a nefarious, lawless and murderous entity whose representatives commit murder and terrorism knowingly and deliberately against innocent people. In doing so, it is they who "de-legitimize" the state of Israel.

Murder, even when "mistaken", is Israel's modus operandi when dealing with its real or imaginary foes, whoever and wherever they happen to be. Some of the murder victims are apolitical figures, innocent people whose killing has no possible justification other than the "need" to make the other party suffer psychologically.

On 9 January, trigger-happy Israeli soldiers manning a military watchtower near the northern Gaza Strip shot and killed 65-year-old Sha'aban al-Garmoot, a poor farmer, as he was working on his own land, which happens to be within the "security zone" declared unilaterally by the Israelis inside Gaza. Sounding totally apathetic about the loss of a non-Jewish life, an Israeli military spokesperson said he had no knowledge of the shooting. Israeli spokespersons, men and women alike, are generally dismissive when talking about non-Jewish lives so this person is not unusual. This may have to do with the racist indoctrination of Israelis that non-Jews are sub-human; indeed, at least one rabbi has called Arabs animals.

Relatives of the victim and eyewitnesses dismiss Israeli claims that the murder of the elderly farmer was a mistake. "A mistake is something done once, perhaps twice or even three times," said Ahmed al-Qarmoot, a relative of the latest victim. "However, here we are talking about almost daily shootings of innocent people at the hands of Israeli soldiers; when ‘mistakes’ happen on a daily basis, it means they are official policy."
Israeli soldiers occasionally indulge in so-called "sport shooting" whereby they "knock down" Palestinian farmers with their bullets. Numerous Palestinians have been murdered by soldiers in this way.

Following last week’s murder of another man in his sixties in Hebron, the wife and relatives of Omar Qawasmi described the shooting as "cold-blooded murder".

"It was like a movie," said Muhammad Qawasmi. "They crashed the door open and fired a hail of bullets, killing him while he was asleep in his bed." This close relative of the victim was at a loss about how to describe the people responsible. "Shall I call them barbarians, savages, Nazis? Did they learn all of this evil from the Nazis? Are Zionist Jews the Nazis of our time?" he asked.

As on previous occasions, the real nature of this murder was covered-up by the Israeli military. It was, said a spokesman, "a case of mistaken identity". So that’s all right then; if the "right man" had been in that bed, he would have been killed in a hail of bullets. Each successive murder, sorry, "mistake", requires a fresh lie to cover it up and offer a justification.

Jawaher Abu Rahma died after Israeli soldiers shot tear gas at a peaceful rally protesting against the Israeli annexation wall near Bil'in in the central West Bank. Her brother Bassem was also killed during a similar peaceful protest on April 17th, 2010. Again, the Israeli occupation army was desperate to invent another lie to distance itself from the killing. An Israeli military spokesman said that the lethal gas fired towards the 35-year-woman may not have been "completely responsible" for her death. There was no sense of remorse in his statement, just hair-splitting, prevarication and verbal gymnastics in order to exonerate the killers.

If the ever-increasing list of Israel’s crimes doesn't qualify the Zionist entity as a rogue, murderous state, what would? Must an evil state create gas chambers and concentration camps before it is regarded as truly evil? How about raining down white phosphorus on civilian neighbourhoods? Or dropping 1-ton bombs on civilian homes to exterminate entire families as a deterrent? Or dropping two to three million cluster bomblets which will kill and maim as many children as possible?

I am not claiming that every member of the Israeli armed forces is evil, but there is no doubt that the Israel Defence Force, which calls itself the most moral army in the world, is a criminal organisation which has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. So-called "Purity of Arms" is a sick joke. Conscientious Jews in whose name the IDF acts have to come to terms with this reality. In the final analysis, you can't expect to be respected while you are infatuated with child-killers and murderous hoodlums.

Israeli criminality is not, of course, confined to the Palestinian theatre of operations. Israel's Mossad spy agency murders people as a matter of routine, including, it is alleged, nuclear scientists, intellectuals and others who are critical of Israel's policies and therefore regarded as enemies. It is almost certain that Mossad was behind the assassination of a number of Iranian nuclear scientists recently. What sort of morality condones Israel’s murder of scientists who never committed any crime against Israel or Jews? The same question applies to the murder of writers, poets and academics whom the princes of darkness in Israel have had silenced because they dared to call a spade a spade.

With such criminal leaders and policies, Israel will continue to be a destabilizing factor affecting not only the Middle East but also the rest of the world. Israel's state terror will continue to affect the lives of millions of people around the globe. It is, therefore, the moral and political duty of those in power across the world to rein in Israel before matters get really out of hand and the cancer of Zionist terror spreads even further than it already has.

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By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine