'US is responsible for Israel's war crimes'
Ali Kazak
The United States is responsible for Israel's occupation, war crimes and aggression. Without the US's unconditional support, Israel wouldn't dare challenge the international community like it is.
The US is providing Israel with economic and military assistance, as well as political protection. Israel is launching a full-scale war with a heavy US-made military arsenal designed to confront armies and unarmed civilians.
In the last five years, since the second intifada, Israel has killed more than 4500 Palestinians, including 850 children and 455 activists and leaders who were assassinated in cold blood. It has wounded more than 50,000 others and has more than 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners, including 450 children, 1599 students and 205 teachers, all of whom are subjected to torture and possible death.
Since 1967, 181 Palestinian prisoners died under torture in Israeli jails. In this same period, Israel damaged or destroyed 71,470 buildings and houses, including 359 schools and colleges. The Palestinians killed far exceed the number of Americans killed in 9/11.
According to a June 21 report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over three months Israel had dropped 7599 bombs and missiles into the Gaza Strip compared with the Palestinian resistance's 479 missiles in the
in the same period. In one day, Israel dropped more bombs in Lebanon than Hezbollah did since the conflict started.
Israel is using internationally prohibited weapons against civilians, such as cluster, phosphorous, vacuum and depleted-uranium bombs.
Israel accuses Iran and Syria of arming Hezbollah with missiles to defend itself, implying that the US- and Israeli-made missiles are legal, but others are not.
The US claims to be democratic and civilized, but it allowed Israel to place the late democratically-elected Palestinian president Yasser Arafat under siege, bomb his compound and then poison him. It allowed Israel to kidnap 75 elected Palestinian members of parliament, including eight ministers, and the speaker of the parliament who was kidnapped from his home.
The US claims to respect international law and UN resolutions yet it allows Israel to violate these laws and covenants daily.
Olmert, Bush, Blair and Howard claim the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance threatens to destroy Israel, and that Israel is just defending itself. Israel is the fifth largest superpower and the fourth biggest exporter of weapons in the world. Israel possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East - nuclear, chemical and biological - and has the support and protection of the US and Europe.
Israel claims the resistance wants to destroy it. But it has destroyed Palestine and ethnically cleansed more than 70% of the Palestinian people. You do not defend yourself when you are attacking others, occupying their land, ethnically cleansing their people and denying them their most basic human and national rights.
The US and Israel have put themselves in a deep hole, which is getting deeper by the day. It will not be long before the hole swallows them up.
[Ali Kazak is the former Palestinian head of delegation to Australia. Abridged from a speech to a rally outside the US embassy in Canberra on August 12.]