LAST Friday saw the opening moves by the Palestinian Authority to bring the state of Israel before the international courts to answer for its murderous attacks on Palestinian children. In an open letter to the UN Security Council the Palestinian Ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, wrote:
‘Every single day and in countless ways, Palestinian children are victims of Israeli human rights violations, with no child considered too young to be spared the oppression being meted out by the Israeli occupying forces and extremist settlers.’
He added: ‘These crimes committed against our children are intolerable and unacceptable’, and noted that they were in violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. Mansour highlighted a whole series of attacks against children and young people carried out by the Zionists in just the last two weeks.
These include the case of 18-year-old Muhammad Murad Yahiya who was shot dead by Israeli forces in Jenin last week, 14-year-old Fadi Abu Mandil who remains in critical condition after he was hit by an Israeli bullet while studying in his room in the Gaza Strip, and 200 Palestinian students who suffered tear gas inhalation after Israeli forces raided their school in Nablus last week.
The Zionist war against Palestinians and the particular targeting of Palestinian children and young people are well documented. At the end of March, there were 182 Palestinian children, including 26 under the age of 15, held in Israeli jails.
The group Defence for Children in Palestine found that over 75% of children detained in 2014 were subjected to some form of physical violence during their incarceration.
The PLO reported that during 2014 Israel had detained 1,266 Palestinian children under 15 in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and that over 10,000 had been detained since 2000.
When not detaining Palestinian children, the Israelis are hell-bent on killing them.
The 50 days of murderous, indiscriminate attacks by the Israeli military on Gaza last year, resulted in the killing of 547 Palestinian children with nearly 68% of the children killed 12 years or younger.
A graphic demonstration that the Zionist state is even-handed in its racism, occurred at the weekend when an anti-racist demonstration in Tel Aviv was attacked by Israeli police.
The 10,000 strong demonstration last Sunday was in protest at police racism and brutality and was sparked by a video clip that emerged last week of police attacking a black Ethiopian wearing the uniform of an Israeli soldier.
Riot police used stun grenades and water cannon on the ethnic Ethiopian Jewish citizens in order to drive them off the streets.
Tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews affected by famine were airlifted to Israel in the 1980s and 1990s after a rabbinical ruling that they were direct descendants of the biblical Jewish Dan tribe.
In Israel, they have been subject to massive discrimination by a state that claims to be a Jewish homeland for every Jew on the planet – but not if you are black!
In 2013, Israel admitted to forcibly administering birth control injections to Ethiopian Jewish women without their consent or knowledge.
Ethiopian Jews – who now number around 135,500 – were allowed in solely to provide a cheap source of labour for the Israelis, they occupy only the lowest paid jobs with more than half living in abject poverty. Not even an army uniform, supposedly a badge of honour in Israeli society, can protect them from the inherent racism of a society that was founded on the racist cleansing of Palestinians in order to create the Zionist state in 1948.
The Zionist state of Israel was founded not as a Jewish homeland but as an armed encampment of imperialism in the Middle East.
As more and more Jewish workers become conscious that Zionism is nothing but a trap for the Jewish people, the conditions are rapidly developing for them to join with the Palestinian people to organise a revolutionary struggle to bring down the state of Israel and replace it with a secular and socialist Palestine as part of the struggle for the victory of the world socialist revolution.
