Israelis Plan to Steal Lebanese Food
Monday August 14th 2006, 5:48 pm
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.
