Questions still need to be asked

Dear editor: Israeli gunmen have now killed over 58 Palestinians near the Gaza fence, and injured 2,700 more; a dozen are mortally wounded. The Israel Defense Forces spokesman continues to claim that its gunmen were “in danger.”

In 1969 the Ninth Infantry Division of the U.S. army in the Mekong Delta carried out an operation called “Speedy Express.” The U.S. army claimed it killed 10,899 enemy combatants. It suffered only 244 casualties.

Someone studied the statistics and found them strange: the army claimed to have killed 10,899 combatants but captured only 748 weapons: The disparity between the dead and the captured weapons meant most of the people killed in” Speedy Express” were not combatants but civilians.

Speedy Express should be a lesson to all journalists. The questions any journalist talking to the IDF spokesman should be:

1. How many casualties did the IDF suffer in Gaza? If the number is zero, and it is, then the forces were not in danger, and this was not a military action but a massacre.

2. How many weapons did the IDF capture? If the number is zero (and currently it is), then at least some of those shot were not a mortal danger to the IDF.

Why the gun-happy posture of Israelis? Why the dreadful, one-sided attacks against the Gazan Palestinians since 1967?

Could it be that the Gazans remind Israelis of the Nakba (Palestinian Catastrophe) of 1948? By their very existence, are they the ghost which keeps haunting Israelis of the horrors of that year? Are they the phantoms that keep reminding Israelis that their country is built on a massive graveyard; and that they must be silenced, in any way possible?

Meanwhile, at the inauguration in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Netanyahu: “What a glorious day. Remember this moment. This is history.” Frank Martens Summerland