Who Rules the World? (American Empire Project)

by Noam Chomsky

For the West Bank, the norm has been that Israel carries forward its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure, so that whatever might be of value can be integrated into Israel, while the Palestinians are consigned to unviable cantons and subjected to intense repression and violence. For the past fourteen years, the norm has been that Israel kills more than two Palestinian children a week. One such recent Israeli rampage was set off on June 12, 2014, by the brutal murder of three Israeli boys from a settler community in the occupied West Bank. A month before, two Palestinian boys had been shot dead in the West Bank city of Ramallah. That elicited no attention, which is understandable, since it is routine. “The institutionalised disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence,” the respected Middle East analyst Mouin Rabbani reports, “but also Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip.”