“This attack is the final Israeli push to extinguish a Palestinian state and crush or expel the Palestinian people. The images of dead Palestinian children, lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza, are a metaphor for the future. Israel will, from now on, speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. And the language of death is all the Palestinians will be able to speak back. The slaughter—let’s stop pretending this is a war—is empowering an array of radical Islamists inside and outside of Gaza. It is ominously demolishing the shaky foundations of the corrupt secular Arab regimes on Israel’s borders, from Egypt to Jordan to Syria to Lebanon. It is about creating a new Middle East, one ruled by enraged Islamic radicals.”

- Chris Hedges, The Language of Death
 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090112_the_language_of_death/

1) both based on supposed purity of blood.

2) both based on supposedly reuniting some religioethnic diaspora under one expansive state.

3) both attempting to revive some supposedly “glorious ancient kingdom” — a “glorious ancient Teutonic kingdom” for the NAZIs; a “glorious ancient Judaic kingdom” for the Nationalist Zionists.

4) both established a state that was culturally, legally, economically and religiously based to exclusively benefit one ethnic/racial group.

5) both based on violent racist exclusion and a highly intricate complex of racial exclusion laws (like Israel’s racial ‘Nuremberg laws’).

6) both based on creating a founding mythology — like, for Zionist Jews, “a land without a people”

7) both invented their own race: Aryans, by the NAZIs; Jews, constructed as a unique/genetic race, by the Nationalist Zionists.

8) both based on eliminating some other unwanted and supposedly inferior races — ethnic cleansing — and, in the case of Zionism, removing those unwanted people who supposedly didn’t exist.

9) both engaged in collective punishment and widespread torture (even inventing new sadistic torture methods),

10) both engaged in the mass imprisonment — without trials — of unwanted populations/races.

11) both enclosed unwanted races in walled-in ghettos and concentration camps — only the Nationalist Zionists made the walls many times higher and the concentration camps many times larger (like Gaza, in effect the world’s largest open-air prison/concentration camp).

12) both tried out new weapons on civilian populations (and Israel has engaged in the internationally illegal use of anti-personal weapons of mass destruction, like the widespread use of cluster bombs, on civilian populations).

13) both sought to erase existing countries — like the Nazis wanting to wipe Poland off the map and parts of other countries; the Nationialist Zionists wanting to wipe Palestine off the map and parts of other countries.

14) both used pseudo-archeology to claim that it had exclusive right to the land.

15) the Nazis obsessed about “too many Jews” in Germany; Nationalist Zionists/Israel obsesses about “too many Palestinians” and the re-emergence of a Palestinian majority in historic Palestine (once an overhwhelmingly Arab land).

16) both were violently and militarily expansionist.

17) both engaged in blitzkrieg fighter aircraft and tank warfare against civilian populations and civilian targets.

1 8) Nationalist Zionist Israeli Jews even studied the original NAZI methods for urban warfare and clearing Palestinians out of their ghettos. Exclaimed one Israeli commander, “Let’s be Judeo-Nazis!” (Reference: www.seruv.org.il — the website for Israeli Refuniks in the “Occupied Territories”; see “Letter to American Jews”; “The Nazification of Israel” — both online.)

19) both claimed to be based on “God’s will”.

20) and, finally (for Israel’s ‘final solution’), most recently (Feb 29, 2008), Israeli deputy defence minister threatens a “Holocaust” for the Palestinians.

The war on Gaza continues into its seventeenth night. I find myself longing for the day when I don't feel I have an obligation to tell this story anymore. Life seems to have been put on hold; at work, at home, as I eat, as I write, I feel like I am just waiting for this to end, so that maybe I can allow myself to go out again, or just to sleep. It's such a selfish thought to have when in Gaza, they're also waiting for this to end but only so that they can maybe go back to living without the fear of death arriving before the next breath.

But it won't end. Even if this particularly bloody episode finishes sometime soon, it will remain a chapter in the long book of Israeli injustice and oppression that every Palestinian has learned by heart. The number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza prison since this slaughter began has exceeded 900, but very few will remember or care in a few months time, least of all Israelis. It is why they can't fathom the reason Palestinians continue to fight. Israelis are so ingrained in their own historic victimhood that, even as they use the full might of their first world army against the imprisoned, malnourished and impoverished refugee population of Gaza, they cannot accept the defining role their own aggression against the Palestinian people has played in reaching this point.

Palestinian suffering comes into focus whenever Israel goes on a large-scale rampage. But as my cousin reminded me from Gaza last night, the suffering is always there, it has just become accepted by those who do not experience it on a continuous basis. Before this massacre, the people of Gaza were barely living due to the crippling siege that had closed off the land, sea and air, that had blocked the entry of raw materials and supplies, of food and medicines, and that had led 97% of businesses in Gaza to close.

 http://www.kabobfest.com/2009/01/gaza-death-is-more-common-than-sleep.html