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From the military of the only democracy in the Middle East: “If
our fighters deep in Lebanese territory are left without food our water, I believe
they can break into local Lebanese stores to solve that problem,” Brigadier
General Avi Mizrahi, the head of the Israel Occupation Forces logistics branch,
informs Haaretz.
“If what they need to do is take water from the stores, they can take.”
Of course, this is nothing new, as the Israelis have stolen from Arabs
for decades, regardless of what was supposedly inscribed on the stone tablets
Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. Obviously, the Israelis no longer consult
Exodus 20:1-17.
Israelis have rarely expressed moral qualms over looting Arab property. During
the 1948 “war” that drove more than 700,000 Palestinians off their
land, thanks to a number of strategic massacres, such as Dair Yasin, David Ben-Gurion
commented: “The only thing that surprised me, and surprised me bitterly,
was the discovery of such moral failings among us, which I had never suspected.
I mean the mass robbery in which all parts of the population participated.”
According to an article posted on the Palestine
Remembered website, Israeli looters in Ramlah and Lydda took possession
of “a total of 45,000 homes and apartments, about 7,000 shops and other
places of business, some 500 workshops and industrial plants, and more than
1,000 warehouses,” massive thievery by any count. “The urge to grab
has seized everyone,” noted writer Moshe Smilansky. “Individuals,
groups and communities, men, women and children, all fell on the spoils. Doors,
windows, lintels, bricks, roof-tiles, floor-tiles, junk and machine parts.”
According to Amin Jarjouria, MK of the (Arabic) Nazareth Democratic List, marauding
Israeli soldiers didn’t take kindly to complaining victims:
“Two days after the seizure of Jish, in the Safed district, the army
surrounded the village and carried out searches. In the course of the search
soldiers robbed several of the houses and stole 605 pounds, jewelry and other
valuables. When the people who were robbed insisted on being given receipts
for their property, they were taken to a remote place and shot dead. The villagers
protested to the local commander, Manu Friedmann, who had the bodies brought
back to the village. The finger of one of the dead had been cut off to remove
a ring…”
In fact, the ill-gotten gains were collected and stored by the Israeli government
under “the Custodian of Abandoned Property, as required by law.”
After a while the Custodian … began to distribute the I confiscated
property. To begin with, [Dov Shafrir, a “Custodian”] later reported,
goods, materials and equipment were turned over to the army, directly from
the stores in the occupied towns. Merchandise which the army did not require
was put up for sale. The sale was conducted by special departments instituted
for the purpose, staffed, as much as war conditions allowed, by personnel
trained in the principal branches of commerce. Other merchandise was sold
through negotiation with merchants or industrialists, depending on the type
of materials. “The army had the first choice of any goods and materials
it might require,” Shafrir said. “Next were the government offices,
the war disabled, the Jewish Agency, the local authorities and public bodies,
such as Hadassah.” The army also needed most of the workshop equipment
such as cabinet-making shops, locksmiths-works, turneries, iron-works, tin-works
and the like. Industrial plants which could be operated on their existing
sites were leased out by contract, “whenever possible,” according
to Shafrir. Plants which no one wanted to lease were sold to the highest bidder.
During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis stole everything not nailed
down, including antiquities. “Lebanese minister of higher education and
culture Mahmoud Youssef Beidoun said that Lebanon has prepared a file to demand
Israel for returning back antiquities its forces had stolen from Lebanon during
the past years,” reported the Arabic
News on January 1, 2000.
In addition to antiquities, the Israelis went so far as to “steal fertile
Lebanese soil and transport it to settlements in northern Israel,” a brazen
act investigated by UNIFIL’s leadership. “Israel has admitted the
removing of Lebanese fertile soil from some areas inside the occupied border
strip of South Lebanon to settlements in the occupied Galilee,” the Arabic
News reported on November 11, 1998. “In its occupation of south Lebanon
and destruction of many towns and efforts to loot Lebanese water resources,
Israel has something new to steal, rich Lebanese top soil, and the Lebanese
government has finally brought this issue to light,” the newspaper
reported a few days later.
In the Marjyoun area of Lebanon during Israel’s occupation, the Zionists
siphoned off spring water. “Lebanese Prime Minister Salim al-Hoss on Monday
discussed with Lebanese Parliament member Nazih Mansour, who is also a member
of the al-Wafa bloc for resistance, Israel’s theft of Lebanese waters
in order to irrigate its settlements Following the meeting with al-Hoss, Mansour
said Israel has started stealing al-Hammad spring’s water in the Marjyoun
area. He added that pipelines between the spring and northern Israel were erected
at a length of seven kilometers and a depth of one and a half meters,”
the Arabic News reported on June 22, 1999.
In addition, the Israelis installed pumps to steal water from the al-Wazzani
and Hasbani rivers. According to research conducted by David
Paul, in “1982 one of the first acts of the Israeli invaders upon
reaching Lake Qir’awn in Lebanon was to seize all the hydrographic data
on the dam and the river and ship a complete set to Israel.”
Of course, the Israelis have long planned to steal land and water. In 1919,
Chaim Weizman wrote David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister, stating
the “minimum requirements essential to the realization of the Jewish National
Home” required massive theft:
“The whole economic future of Palestine is dependent upon its water
supply for irrigation and for electric power, and the water supply must mainly
be derived from the slopes of Mount Hermon, from the headwaters of the Jordan
and from the Litany [sic] river [of Lebanon]… [We] consider it essential
that the Northern Frontier of Palestine should include the Valley of the Litany,
for a distance of 25 miles above the bend, and the Western and Southern slopes
of Mount Hermon…”
It should come as no surprise the IOF, supposedly agreeing to a “ceasefire,”
would steal Lebanese food. It should also come as no surprise this story was
not covered by the corporate media in this country, as a Google News search
returns results from Haaretz (linked above), the Jerusalem Post, and Stratfor
(known as the “shadow CIA”), period.
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