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All civilized nations
use air forces in time of war to defend their homelands. But
colonial
and imperial powers
have had no limits in using warplanes to suppress revolutionary
movements of the third
world. For example, the United States leaned heavily on its Air
Force in Vietnam in the
second half of the last century. American military aircrafts were
active in 1960s and
1970s not only in bombarding major Vietnamese cities and harbors
like Hanoi and Hyphong,
but also in spraying chemicals to transform forests into wasteland.
Israel, as Washington’s
strategic ally in the Middle East, has pioneered in capitalizing on
its
air force as an
effective means for mass destruction and implementing horrible
massacres
against Arabs and
Palestinians. Many Egyptian civilian targets were hit by Israeli
warplanes and gross
massacre ensued during the war of attrition in the late years of
1960s. Bahr Al Baqar
School and Abu Za’abal Prison in Upper Egypt have entered history
as two massacres
conducted by the Israel Air Force.
Israel used to dispatch
its American made advanced jets to bomb and rocket Palestinian
refugee camps in
neighboring Arab countries on the pretext that “ terrorist bases”
existed
there. Shortly after the
eruption of the second Intifada two years ago, Ehud Barak, the
former Israeli prime
minister, ordered the bombing of a Palestinian Security Compound
in Nablus by F-16. More
than a dozen of young police officers in their early twenties were
massacred when the F-16
dropped its one ton-bomb at the Palestinian compound.
His Successor, Ariel
Sharon, dispatched the F-16s many times against Palestinian public
and private
institutions. Later on, he enlarged the scope of the F-16’s deadly
missions so
as to in include
residential buildings. 17 Palestinians, including nine children and
mother,
vanished under the
debris of their building in Gaza when Sharon ordered the one-ton
bomb
to be dropped (June 26)
at the heavily populated neighborhood of Al Mawasi
Ben-Gurion was the first
Israeli leader who conceived the idea of “retaliatory” air strikes
against Palestinian
civilians. He ordered in 1953 the air and land attack on the village
of
Kibya. Moshe Sharit,
then the Prime Minister of Israel, wrote in his Diary:
“I told Lavon that
this attack [on Kibya] would be a grave error…Lavon smiled. Ben-
Gurion, he said,
didn’t share my view.”
Ezer Weizman, former
chief of the Israeli Air Force, glorified the massacres implemented
by the Air Force saying:
“The talent of the
nation is to be found in the Israeli Air force…Here, the Jewish
people
stands out more in
its talent, and therefore we are more capable than the enemy.”
On November 20,1967
Israeli war plane bombarded Al Karama refugee camp, near the
Jordan River, killing 14
–some of them were children--and wounding 28 Palestinians.
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