Congress supports illegal Israeli regime that defies US laws: Academic

The US Congress continues to support the illegal Israeli regime that defies American laws, according to an American academic and political commentator.

William A. Cook, a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction, said the US is “supporting an apartheid state that pours untold billions of American tax payers money that goes into the hands of foreigners, called settlers.”

Professor Cook made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Thursday while commenting on the recent developments in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Since last week, the Israeli regime has been conducting military strikes against Gaza. That started after resistance groups based in the enclave started launching hundreds of rockets into the occupied territories in response to Israeli violence against fellow Palestinians in the occupied lands.

So far, as many as 219 Palestinians, including 63 children and 36 women, have lost their lives in the Israeli strikes on Gaza, according to the Gazan Health Ministry.

Israel has waged three all-out wars against the territory so far, killing thousands of Palestinians each time.

Gaza to face dire food, medicine shortages without ceasefire: UN official

A top official at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) says Palestinians are facing growing shortages of vital commodities, including food, fuel, and medicine, in the Gaza Strip.

“Gazans and Palestinians are the victims of enemies that have no natural rights to be in Palestine. The historical facts are clear, from the aborted inception of the illegal creation of the state of Israel on Nakba Day, May 15, 1922, when the League of Nations, (confirmed by the United Nations in 1948) awarded the Mandate to Britain to fulfill its responsibility to create a Palestinian state in 10 years, guided by the British government, the very existence of the state of Israel was and remains illegal under international law,” Professor Cook told Press TV.

“After 73 years of open occupation by a supposed ally of the US, I ask, where is the US Congress that continues to support an illegal regime that defies our own laws, and where is Israel that defies its own people’s desires to end the occupation. Why are we supporting an apartheid state that pours untold billions of American tax payers money that goes into the hands of foreigners, called settlers, to defy the people of the world assembled this very day, to bring Israel before the ICC charged with theft of the Palestinian’s land, and genocide of its people?” he said.

Why the US refuses to condemn Israeli atrocity

When asked why the US and other Western states refuse to condemn Israel’s brutal bombardment of the Gaza strip, Professor Cook said, “A simplified answer is money, follow the economics. You can read all about it in my edited text The Plight of the Palestinians. Read Chapter 24 by Dr. James Petras where he covers Israeli and Zionist intervention in the US presidential elections and economic policy, followed by the theory and practice of genocide, and deliberate state genocide in the service of colonial aggrandizement. The rogue state of Israel has bought and paid for the major governments of the western world.”

In 2013, I wrote an article for the Palestine Chronicle, ‘Universalism and Individualism versus Tribalism.’ I opened that piece with a quote from Uri Avnery: ‘As it looks now more than half the members of the 19th Knesset will belong to the extreme right and beyond, at least a dozen of them honest to goodness fascists.’ Ironically, Barack Obama was inaugurated for a second term and called upon all Americans to respond to the words of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream speech.’ He used the words of the Declaration of Independence. He pointed to the appeal of the moral star that governs our nation, ‘a nation dedicated to universalism and individualism,’” the academic said.

“But, nothing in Obama’s address focused on the state of Israel, yet every word he spoke addressed the inequity that has attended the fulfillment of America’s promise to recognize the inherent rights of the oppressed, the occupied in Palestine. Why should they be included? Because this country has chosen to support the increasingly undemocratic state of Israel, the ever increasing tribalism that is pushing that state into a theocracy that denies the universalism of all human kind and imposes a set of beliefs that threatens to destroy the very concept of individual rights. America invests untold billions of dollars into this state ostensibly because it is democratic, a democratic friend in the mid-east, and it adheres to America’s core values. Nothing could be further from the truth,” he noted.

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