On June 29, 2016 the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, excoriated the Israeli inhumane “collective punishment”  during another visit to  Israeli occupied Palestinian territory.

Initiated by an Israeli started war in 1967,  the invasion and occupation by Israel of Palestine, and of the Syrian Golan Heights,  has been globally condemned and remains to this day a brazen violation of numerous UN Resolutions, a violation of international law, as well as of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.

Ban further added  on June 20, 2016 that “the closure of Gaza suffocates its people, stifles its economy and impedes reconstruction efforts...(and) it’s a collective punishment for which there must be accountability “.

It is beyond disheartening that one of the most important newspapers of the nation as well as the only major newspaper of our nation’s capital city, conspicuously omits this important declaration by this Secretary General of an organization composed of 193 nations.

Readers of The Washington Post are very ill-served by such a omissions at such critical times as these when, it has become an imperative for the best interests of the United States as well as that of the decent, peace and justice demanding Jews in the U.S., in Israel, and world-wide, that our government end its enablement of the Israeli brutally violent oppression of Palestinians who, not only have had their land and properties violently taken from them since 1948 and then, to add insult to injury, when exercising their right to defend themselves have had close to one million of them forced to leave their land, and those who have stayed have become the object of relentless house demolitions, mass killings, and of the systematic denial of the most fundamental human and civil rights.

“Peace talks” have been largely charades, ruses to gain time to occupy and annex more and more Palestinian land, beyond the 75% taken over in 1948.

Netanyahu was captured on video telling illegal residents in the West Bank that he was proud to have scuttled the Oslo Peace talks.   The Argentum Post has reported on this historical reality on numerous occasions and provided said video link.NOW

This writer is the son of parents who survived the Nazi crimes against the humanity of Jews and others and yet is not alone among countless thousands of Jews in Israel, in the U.S., and globally in the demand that Israel be held accountable for its crimes against the humanity  of Palestinians.

Not only must Israel be held accountable now for its crimes against the humanity of Palestinians, but more than ever the U.S. must NOW END its complicitous role by uncritically inundating Israel with financial and military aid which since the mid 80’s has included support for its arsenal of nuclear weapons of mass destruction as a result of a secret agreement between disgraced President Nixon and Israel PM Golda Meir.

Astoundingly, since Israel has refused to sign on the Non Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, it has rendered critical support in the mid 80’s to the white supremacist racist Apartheid regime of South Africa in its quest to weaponize nuclear energy.    Jewish author Sasha Polakow-Suransky amply documented this historical reality, which – again – most of our mainstream media keeps silent on, to the detriment and in violation of, the American people’s right to be honestly and objectively  informed by its said media.

Thanks to finally effective economic sanctions, divestment, and boycotts, the racist dimension of said Apartheid regime collapsed and the African National Congress (ANC) which succeeded it dismantled the Israeli weapons program.

The same regime of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) must and can lead to peacefully force Israel to become an international law-abiding state or non-state member of a Palestinian federation again.

Today, on July 2, 2016, i.e. 3 days after The Washington Post did not report on the UN Secretary General scathing denunciation of Israel, it did report on Israel, but in  an article about a 13 year-old girl who was stabbed to death in a Jewish family home illegally built in occupied Palestinian land.

Obviously her death is a terribly said tragedy, which by not stretch of the imagination can be frivolized, or condoned.

It is however rationally understandable, since such heinous acts as the stabbing of this innocent girl are not natural, are avoidable, and the most important and effective way to begin to end this nightmare is, is for an immediate cessation of the status quo of Kafkaesque provocations by Israel which generate horrible reprisal acts of Palestinians driven to these pathological  states of utter hopelessness and desperation by their submission to systematic violence which is part of what the illustrious scholar, author, and activist Ilan Pappe calls “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”.

This is also the title of a must read book for Americans deprived from the historical facts denied them by the complicity of corrupt politicians in synergy with a corporatized media which is untrustworthy when it comes to the subject of  objectively informing the public of how the Israeli misleadership occupiers humiliates, and submits to literal torture the autochthonous and legitimate owners of the lands it has stolen  and this is done every day, every hour, every minute despite the global opposition to this atrocity.

The tragic deaths of innocent Israelis occurs on an infinitesimally lower scale, something which of course does not detract from the severity of the suffering this causes to their families.

More and more decent, peace and justice for Palestinians aspiring, humanist Jews in Israel and globally now deal with the wounds of such losses not by inciting more hate and fear and vengeance against Palestinians, but contrariwise, by joining such Israeli dissidents movements such a Peace Now, Breaking the Silence, the human rights organization Bet’selem and others, and demanding an end to the U.S. supported ultra right-wing obscurantist, fundamentalist, regime of Benjamin Netanyahu and his neocon/neolib supporters in the U.S. congress who take their marching orders from the toxic AIPAC lobby which is to the Palestinian and Israeli victims of lethal violence as the toxic NRA lobby is to the American public’s victims of mass killings.

One most distinguished case of a gentleman who lost his Israeli niece to a suicide killing in Israel is the illustrious Miko Peled.

Mike Peled, very laudably dealt with his and his family’s tragic loss by becoming a dissident activist and by reaching out to Palestinians who have had analogous tragic losses on a monumentally larger scale and since 1948, but most particularly since the 1967 war provoked by Israel and not the other way around.

Mike Peled is the son of an Israeli Major General, namely Major General Matti Peled, who was a man of a heightened sense of social awareness.

Mike Peled describes the atrocious and unjust abusive by Israel of the Palestinians in a fascinating book titled ” The General’s Son :  Journey of An Israeli In Palestine “.

One of the saddest realities of our upcoming election is that of the two apparent nominees, one, namely Donald Trump is an automatic non-choice for any rational and humane American, and the other Hillary Clinton, is a forced choice in order for them to cast an anti Trump vote.

Otherwise however,  particularly but not exclusively , when it comes to our decadent Israel policy she is actually a threat to our nation’s best interests and the best interest of Israel and the world,  in the context of her bizarrely blind deference to AIPAC and the present Israeli misleadership of Netanyahu who has been soundly condemned  by his own Secretary of Defense, Moshe Yaalon, and who just resigned in protest  subsequently.

This is the same nominee who as Secretary of State to President Obama, succeeded, also bizarrely, in convincing the President in 2009 that when then democratically elected President Zelaya was abducted in the middle of the night by a group of thighs led by Porfirio Lobo in a violent coup, that said coup somehow was not to be called a coup since that would have the ramifications of calling for and end to U.S. military aid to Honduras.

It turned out later that the same gang of coup empowered thugs were responsible for systematic assassinations of labor leaders and more recently were implicated in the assassination of the legendary human rights worker and environmental activist  Berta Caceres.

On June 30, 2016, it was reported – not in The Washington Post – but by independent media, including the prestigious Democracy Now program hosted by Amy Goodman and co-hosted by Juan Gonzales, that the son of the Honduran coup  leader, Porfirio Lobo, was involved in a Honduran drug heroin trafficking ring into the United States.   It probably is no coincidence that the U.S. has a military  base (the Palmerola base) in Honduras.

So, the alternative to  Trump candidate, in effect supports the violent suppression of democracy in Honduras, and not so remarkably, this has been her record when it comes to the violent suppression of “Arab Spring” democracy activism in Bahrain, where the U.S. has its 5th Naval Fleet base, and where democracy activists were killed by the Baharaini dictatorship which was assisted by a military  incursion of Saudi Arabian bombers.

Of course one must keep in mind that Hillary Clinton actively endorsed the Cheney/Bush war on Iraq which was launched on the basis a rote repetitive mantra of outright manipulative and false claims.

So, bottom line, not to be too cynical, one can plausibly state that, given that Hillary Clinton proclaims herself as a “friend” of the Netanyahu misleadearship, and of their AIPAC lobby, that  (as illustrious Israeli journalist Gideon Levy commented in this book “Punishing Gaza”), “…with friends such as Hillary Clinton, Israel does not need any enemies…” to which this writer adds dryly and sadly that  “with presidential nominees such as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we do not need any election, since we hardly have a rational choice…”

So, save some miraculous last-minute unpredictable event, we appear to be headed backwards toward the future, at this point of our nations history when we should have instead arrived at the milestone of the dawn of a progressive era characterized by the extinction of the failed neoconservative and neoliberal models of pseudo and elite managed democracy which indeed is rigged leaving  the “we the people” of our constitution out of the picture.