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Killing of 6th Palestinian child in 2020 was ‘grave violation of international law.’

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  • Killing of 6th Palestinian child in 2020 was ‘grave violation of international law.’

    But liberal Zionists want U.S. to keep funding Israeli soldiers
    Israeli soldiers have killed 155 children in West Bank in recent years with impunity-- a process "unworthy of a country that proclaims it lives by rule of law."
    BY PHILIP WEISS DECEMBER 20, 2020

    ALI ABU ALIYA, FROM TWITTER.
    We have tried to keep the focus here on the murder by Israeli soldiers of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy on December 4 when all Ali Abu Aliah was doing was protesting the illegal seizure of his occupied village’s lands by Jewish settlers. It is a heinous crime that ought to be motivating American leaders to take action against Israeli soldiers– by refusing to continue to give Israel $4 billion a year in military aid.

    Sadly the murder has gotten little attention in the United States. The New York Times has not covered the case, though the United Nations issued a statement on it three days ago calling it a “grave violation of human rights,” and saying Ali Abu Aliah was the sixth Palestinians child killing by Israel this year, and Israeli soldiers act with complete impunity.

    From the High Commissioner on Human Rights:

    UN human rights experts today called for an impartial and independent investigation into the killing of a 15-year-old boy by Israeli security forces at a West Bank protest this month, saying they were deeply troubled by the overall lack of accountability for the killings of Palestinian children in recent years.

    “The killing of Ali Ayman Abu Aliya by the Israeli Defense Forces – in circumstances where there was no threat of death or serious injury to the Israeli Security Forces – is a grave violation of international law,” said the experts. “Intentional lethal force is justified only when the security personnel are facing an immediate threat of deadly force or serious harm.”

    Some of the grotesque facts. An American gun was used.

    Abu Aliya was hit in the abdomen with a bullet from a 0.22 Ruger Precision Rifle, fired by an Israeli soldier from an estimated 100-150 metres….The human rights experts are unaware of any claims that the Israeli security forces were in danger at any point of death or serious injury.

    More than a thousand children have been injured by Israeli security forces in the occupied West Bank this year, the U.N. reports, and six killed. That’s on top of hundreds of children killed in Gaza in recent years.

    Israel is investigating Ali Abu Aliah’s killing but the UN experts have no faith in that process. It’s “unworthy of a country that proclaims that it lives by the rule of law.”

    Civil society organisations have documented the deaths of 155 Palestinian children by Israeli Security Forces using live ammunition or crowd-control weapons since 2013. Only three indictments on criminal charges have been issued for offences directly tied to those killings. In one case, the charges were subsequently dropped. In the second case, the responsible soldier reached a plea deal and was sentenced to nine months jail for death by negligence. In the third case, a soldier was convicted of not obeying orders and sentenced to one month in military prison.

    “This low level of legal accountability for the killings of so many children by Israeli security forces is unworthy of a country which proclaims that it lives by the rule of law,” the experts said.

    Again, I say the scandal here is that liberal Zionist organizations, which have the ear of the Democratic Party, have had almost nothing to say about the murder of Abu Aliah or the five other children Israel killed this year.

    None of the liberal Zionist organizations has tweeted out this U.N. report. And it’s no wonder. They are focused on the Israeli government policy of endless settlement expansion and the threat to the so-called two-state solution that is dead as a doornail. The atrocities committed by the Israeli army are neverending, but just too troubling– and built-in to U.S. aid– to make an issue of.

    J Street has repeatedly said that U.S. aid to Israel should not be conditioned, even though the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is fully in favor of such accountability. “Israel faces real security threats,” J Street says, “and US commitment to its security is rooted in America’s own national interests.”

    So 15 year old boys will be killed with impunity, so Israel can maintain “qualitative military edge” over its enemies.

    As Youssef Munayyer told the Intercept:

    “In recent years, J Street has increasingly played a role of working to prevent a critical mass for accountability from forming among liberals and progressives, which only ends up carrying water for AIPAC, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.”

    J Street’s Dylan Williams has approvingly cited a new report by the International Crisis Group and US Middle East Project on next steps for Joe Biden in the conflict that is happily lacking in two-state hokum; and that report includes the idea of accountability:

    Ensure greater transparency, end-use monitoring and accountability regarding security assistance to Israel, so that Israel can be held to standard U.S. human rights and other benchmarks for aid recipients.

    Exactly. Leaders should be doing as Rep. Betty McCollum is doing, and hammering on the murder of Ali Abu Aliah to demand that U.S. money is not going to the state-sponsored murder of Palestinian children. Only progressive pressure, and the BDS campaign, is going to put an end to these atrocities. Liberal Zionists are, not surprisingly, thrusting their heads in the sand, and insuring that Israeli soldiers will continue to have impunity as they fire their American rifles at boy protesters.

    H/t Scott Roth, James North and Adam Horowitz.
    The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.” Winston Churchill
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