Israeli police clash with Palestinian worshipers at al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem on Sunday. Mahmoud Illean AP African News Agency Terry Crawford-BrowneJust as apartheid South Africa claimed to be a parliamentary democracy , so apartheid Israel incessantly boasts that it is the “only democracy in the Middle East” .
The reality is that civilian casualties of recurring Israeli bombardments of Gaza are deliberate and disproportionate, and constitute war crimes under international law. Nor should we forget that the Israeli-designed G3 semi-automatic rifles used by the SAPS in 2012 to murder 34 miners at Marikana were manufactured by Denel under licence from Israel. The Brazilian death-squad police that terrorise the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are trained by Israelis - as are many of most notoriously violent and racist American police forces.
The world teeters on the brink of an Israeli-motivated war against Iran, a country which, unlike Israel, abandoned ambitions to develop nuclear weapons as long ago as 2003. "Why, indeed, does the international community tolerate an unnecessary conflict that not only obstructs efforts to bring some stability to the wider Middle East, a pretty important geopolitical region in which the US and Europe are fighting a number of wars, but one that severely disrupts the international system as a whole?”