Netanyahu's familiar farce

Equally inevitably, Palestinian resistance groups resort to rocket fire that has killed three civilians.

Netanyahu is in his electoral element, both threatening the Palestinians that he is ready to escalate the conflict and also tugging the heartstrings by implying that Israel is under existential threat.

This familiar farce is played out every time an Israeli election is pending or international condemnation of zionism's colonisation of the West Bank grows more acute.

Israeli leaders of whatever party have no compunction about treating Palestinian and Israeli lives as pawns in their game of ethnic cleansing to control the entire territory of historical Palestine from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river.

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Cabinet minister Avi Dichter had the temerity to blame victims for their own deaths, saying that the three Israeli citizens would have been alive "if they had just followed instructions."

Israel's cynical and ruthless elite can rely on its allies in Washington and the European Union member states piling in on zionism's side, condemning the Palestinian victim while comforting the Israeli oppressor.

We have had the usual weasel words from "gravely concerned" William Hague who sympathises with the "intolerable situation for Israeli civilians in southern Israel" but omits any mention of Tel Aviv's ongoing colonisation of the West Bank and its armed blockade of Gaza.

Apart from Western politicians, the global media also plays its role by repeating ad nauseam that it was an anti-tank rocket fired at an Israeli military vehicle that sparked the latest conflict.

But there is little mention of Israeli troops shooting dead a young Palestinian with learning difficulties on November 5 or the incursion by Israeli tanks and bulldozers into Gaza three days later, killing a 13-year-old boy.

For Western politicians and media nothing can interfere with the notion of Palestinians provoking the Israeli army until the patience of its commanders snaps and it is "forced" to wade through Palestinian blood.

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Similarly it is reported as fact that Israel does "everything in its power" to avoid civilian casualties - apart from ending the bombardment from air, land and sea.

Israel's brave minority of citizens who reject both the ongoing expansion of the state's borders and constant war as an instrument of government policy are protesting openly in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.

Hadash, the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, and others are demanding an immediate ceasefire and genuine negotiations with the Palestinians to achieve a two-state outcome.

The aim of the zionist leadership is to create facts on the ground - settlements, military camps and Israeli-only roads - that render such an outcome impossible, forcing Palestinians to join the millions of existing refugees or remain in their homeland as a defeated, dispossessed and disenfranchised minority.

That is clearly acceptable to British and EU political leaders no matter how much they chatter about a negotiated end result.

As Ramzy Baroud wrote in our paper this week, the EU pays lip service to a just solution, but its deeds belie its words.

It collaborates consistently with colonisation of the West Bank and rewards Israeli intransigence with a succession of favourable trade agreements.

Supporters of Palestinian national rights should support demonstrations being called throughout Britain and demand a change of direction from elected politicians.