The Israel we know

Palestinians under military occupation have been watching with helpless anguish the gruesome images of Israel's campaign of murder and horror in Lebanon. For a people who have just buried an additional 100, victim to Israeli state terrorism which also targets schools, bridges and power stations, the merciless killing of Lebanese civilians and wanton destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure, clarion testimony to Israeli criminal savagery, are scenes all too familiar.

Equally familiar for the Palestinians has been the brazen approval by the Bush administration of Israel's murderous aggression, as well as the impotent silence and betrayal by brotherly Arab states and segments of the international community as a whole.

"What is happening in Lebanon doesn't surprise us at all. We ourselves have been -- and continue to be -- slaughtered by Israel on a daily basis while the Arabs are watching passively as if this was happening on another planet. The West is merely pleading with Israel to exercise a modicum of discretion while killing us," said a Hebron physician while watching dead Lebanese children and women being retrieved from under the rubble of a Tyre building bombed by Israeli warplanes.

Palestinian identification with Hizbullah has assumed several manifestations. Portraits of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, now available everywhere, are pasted prominently throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This is significant given that Palestinians are Sunni Muslims and that Nasrallah is a Shia leader who, unlike predominantly Sunni Arab states in the region, has made the Palestinian cause a central theme, if not the raison d'être, of Hizbullah.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/804/re111.htm