***

Since 1948, the Palestinians live condemned to perpetual humiliation. They cannot even breathe without permission. They have lost their country, their land, their water, their freedom, everything of theirs. They do not even have the right to choose their governments. When they vote for those they should not, they are punished. Gaza is being punished. It turned into a mousetrap without exit since Hamas cleanly won the elections of 2006. Something similar happened in 1932 when the Communist Party triumphed in the elections of El Salvador. Drenched in blood, the Salvadorans atoned for their bad behaviour and since then have lived under military dictatorships. Democracy is a luxury which not everyone deserves.

***

The rockets which the cornered militants of Hamas clumsily aim in Gaza, on land that had been Palestinian and which the Israeli occupation usurped, are the children of impotence. And desperation, on the edge of suicidal madness, is the mother of the threats that deny the right of Israel’s existence: ineffectual cries, while the very efficient war of extermination is denying, for years, the right of Palestine’s existence.

Little remains of Palestine. Step by step, Israel is erasing the map.

The colonialists encroach, and after them the soldiers rush to the border. Bullets sanctify plunder as legitimate defence.

There is no aggressive war that does not say is defensive. Hitler invaded Poland to prevent Poland invading Germany. Bush invaded Iraq to prevent Iraq invading the world. In each of the defensive wars, Israel has swallowed up another piece of Palestine: the luncheon continues. The devouring is justified by the property rights the Bible granted, for the two thousand years of persecution that the Jewish people suffered and for the panic that the Palestinians lying in wait generate.

***

Israel is a country that never complies with either the recommendations or the resolutions of the United Nation, that never obeys the judgments of the international tribunals, that mocks international laws, and is also the only country that has legalised the torture of prisoners.

Who has gifted it the right to deny all the rights? Where does this impunity, with which Israel is carrying out the killings in Gaza, derive from? The Spanish government could not have bombed Basque country with impunity to finish off ETA; neither could the British government have destroyed Ireland to liquidate the IRA. Perhaps the tragedy of the Holocaust entails a policy of everlasting impunity? Or that the green light comes from the bigshot power which has in Israel the most unquestioning of its vassals?

***

The Israeli army, the most modern and sophisticated in the world, knows who it kills. It does not kill by error. It kills by horror. The civilian victims are called collateral damages, according to the dictionary of the other imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten collateral damages are children. And the maimed add up to thousands, victims of human mutilation that the war industry is successfully rehearsing in this operation of ethnic cleansing.

And as always, always the same: in Gaza, a hundred for one. For each hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli.

Dangerous people –warning of another bombardment – in charge of the enormous manipulative media that invite us to think that each Israeli life is worth as much as a hundred Palestinian lives. And those media also invite us to think that the two hundred atom bombs of Israel are humanitarian, and that a nuclear power called Iran was the one that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

***

The so-called international community, Does it exist?

Is it anything more than a club of merchants, bankers and war-makers? Is it anything more than an artistic name that the United States attaches when it engages in theatre?

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the worldwide hypocrisy shows up once again. As ever, the indifference, the vacuous discourses, the empty declarations, the high sounding declamations, the ambiguous postures are a tribute to sacred impunity.

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries wash their hands off. As always. And, as ever, the European countries wring their hands.

Old Europe, so capable of war and malignancy, sheds a tear or so, while secretly celebrating this master move. Because hunting the Jews was always a European custom, but since half a century that historical debt is being paid for by the Palestinians who also are Semites and who never were, nor are, anti-Semites. They are paying, in blood money, the price of others.

(This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends assassinated by the Latin American dictatorships to which Israel acted as consultant)