By Vacy Vlazna
Every time Israel bans Palestinians from leaving Israel’s West Bank-Gaza Prison, and every time a well-meaning foreigner is refused entry to give humanitarian assistance to Palestinians, Israel is consolidating its reputation as a global pariah, now, according to the BBC poll, on par with North Korea for having the highest negative influence on the global stage.
Like Pavlov’s dog, Israel rabidly salivates and attacks in response to any association with human rights and human decency. All compassionate attempts by the flotillas to bring aid to alleviate the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza were confronted with Israeli violence, piracy, looting, and imprisonment peaking in the shocking Mavi Marmara massacre through which Israel recruited the whole of Turkey to the pro-Palestinian cause.
Ordinary Greeks were focused on their nation’s economic woes until Israel alerted them to Palestine’s and their own loss of sovereignty when Israel closed Greek ports to deter the 2011 Gaza flotilla.
Speaking of loss of sovereignty, average Europeans are now on the alert after Israel’s tentacles clamped on airports and airlines to obstruct goodhearted people from simply and honestly entering Palestine via Ben Gurion airport. For every Fly-tilla aid worker turned away at their home airport or detained, humiliated and deported from Ben Gurion, and even removed from a plane for not being Jewish, Israel educated hundreds of thousands of their compatriots about its subversive bullying of once sovereign and once decent EU governments.
This month, while Israel deprived Australians of the honor of meeting the highly respected human rights advocate, Shawan Jabarin, Director-General of AlHaq, who was to be the guest of The NSW Parliamentary Friends of Palestine, Israel provided a valued consolation gift – the welcome bullet of stupidity that Israel shot into its own foot-in-mouth adding another notch to the BBC poll as the news of Israel’s latest faux pas circulates in Australia and beyond.
Israel equal to North Korea! Israel’s Ministry of Hasbara must be in a right flap utterly bewildered how its promotion of Israel as the only so-called ‘democratic’ and so-called ‘civilized’ nation in the Middle East has failed.
With the hubris of a fascist, Israel is blind to the facts on the ground- that it is deliberately assassinating its own character with war crimes and crimes against humanity. And every hasbaric utterance of a Regev, a Liebovitz, a Lieberman, a Netanyahu is suicidal repute.
North Korea is a world joke and in that lies the difference between people’s perception of North Korea and Israel. To 4.17 million Palestinians under occupation and the 4.5 million diasporan Palestinians denied their right of return, Israel is not a joke.
Unlike Israel, North Korea hasn’t illegally occupied another people, it hasn’t rounded up another people into concentration camps ringed by 500 checkpoints, it hasn’t stolen land and demolished homes of another people, it hasn’t committed crimes against humanity and war crimes against another people.
The international community only vaguely knows of North Korea through the occasional saber-rattling of the US, but the world has woken up to Israel’s atrocities and human and civil rights abuses.
We all know of Israel’s wars on the trapped citizens of Gaza to test its high-tech armaments, we know of the Mavi Marmara massacre, we know of the illegal Annexation Wall, we know of Israel’s murder of children, we know of the 2500 hunger striking prisoners, its arbitrary arrests, its administrative detention, its extrajudicial executions. We know of the cancer of fanatical colonialism that ravages Palestinian lands, livelihoods and lives. We know how Israel dishonors the tragedy of the Holocaust by shrieking anti-Semitism when criticized, we know about Israel’s insolent disregard of hundreds of UN resolutions and daily violations of international human rights laws…
… as well as its months of screeching to plunge all of us into an unjust war with Iran.
At this rate, Israel’s abysmal lack of humanity will see it rightfully top the BBC chart as the worst country in the world.
– Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
