Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
16 November
US GREENLIGHTS ISRAELI BARBARISM
On this day in 2012, Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai specified Israel’s aims in its ongoing military attack on Gaza: “We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water.” A few minutes earlier a US spokesman "wouldn’t comment on specific targeting choices by the Israelis other than to say that we of course always underscore the importance of avoiding civilian casualties. But the Israelis again will make judgments about their military operations."
الولايات المتحدة تعطي الضوء الأخضر للبربرية الإسرائيلية
16 نوفمبر
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 2012 ، حدد وزير الداخلية الإسرائيلي أهداف إسرائيل في هجومها العسكري المستمر على غزة: "يجب علينا إعادة غزة إلى العصور الوسطى ، وتدمير جميع البنى التحتية بما في ذلك الطرق والمياه. " قبل دقائق قليلة ، لم يعلق المتحدث الأمريكي" على خيارات الاستهداف المحددة من قبل الإسرائيليين سوى القول إننا بالطبع نؤكد دائمًا على أهمية تجنب وقوع إصابات في صفوف المدنيين. لكن الاسرائيليين سيصدرون احكام مرة اخرى بشأن عملياتهم العسكرية.
Following israel's murderous Operation Cast Lead in New Year 2009, the Israeli financial press reported the impact of mounting calls to boycott goods from the Jewish state. Writing in the daily finance paper, The Marker, economics journalist Nehemia Stressler berated then- trade and industry minister Eli Yishai for telling the Israeli army to "destroy one hundred homes" in Gaza for every rocket fired into Israel
After moving to the Ministry of the Interior in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition government in June 2012, Yishai, the ex-leader of the religious Shas Party, made his racist views clear: “Muslims that arrive here do not even believe that this country belongs to us, to the white man."
Yishai's language was a genocidal threat, but it barely raised an eyebrow in Israel where such language is common. Four years earlier, in 2008, Israel's deputy defence minister warned his country was close to launching a huge military operation in Gaza and said Palestinians would bring on themselves a "bigger shoah," using the Hebrew word usually reserved for the Holocaust. The choice of vocabulary from Matan Vilnai, an often outspoken former army general, was unusually grave - the word is not normally used for anything other than the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews.
Ten months later, Israel massacred more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza over the Christmas and New Year period
Final note on the then-Israeli Interior Minister, Yishai, reported in Haaretz, May 31, 2012
Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Thursday that many Israeli women have been raped by migrant workers “but do not complain out of fear of being stigmatized as having contracted AIDS." Yishai stated that the solution to the current problem is “more prisons and migrant detention camps," and that Israel must “prepare more military bases where we can jail all of them without exception.”
Yishai further stated that the “infiltrators [refugees], along with the Palestinians, will bring a quick end to the Zionist dream,” adding that “there is not another country that is as sensitive as Israel is to the rights of foreigners. We have enough worries with issues of health and welfare in this country, and we don’t need to import more worries from Africa,” Yishai said. Yishai also told the Maariv daily that “south Tel Aviv has turned into the garbage can of the country” and implored all those who speak out against him to “take the infiltrators and put them in their neighborhoods so that they see them every day, so that their children will try and play in the same pre-schools.”
24-minute Video: Empire Files on the extreme racism of Israeli aociety and political leaders. Google makes it awkward to access this video.