ANALYSIS – Since October 1, 77 Palestinians have been killed in a wave of slaughter that has it’s immediate roots in the actions of the Israeli military and settlers, but whose greviance stretches back all the way to 1948. Then, Palestinians were driven away from their homes by the terror of Irgun, Haganah and the Stern gang. Then they were expected to accept their fate. When Israel’s military achieved a lightning win in 1967, those who were driven away were joined in occupation as Tel Aviv seized west Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. Israel had proved itself to its superpower patron and Washington would now back the Zionist state no matter how appalling its behaviour towards the Palestinians and its weaker neighbour Lebanon. In 1982 Israel plumbed new depths and in doing so set a murderous precedent whose ramifications are being felt to this day. When the ‘world’ said nothing to the government of Menachem Begin and his defence minister Ariel Sharon after it perpetrated the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, Israel took this as a green light to behave as she liked against the people it regarded as inferior. From now onwards an army backed by a navy, airforce and atom bomb would successfully claim it was under attack from terrorism no matter how murderous it’s actions. The first intifada was an unarmed struggle that was met by live gunfire which struck stone throwing children in the throat and chest. The second intifada which was inspired by Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, brought suicide bombers and bloodshed to the streets of Israel but far more suffering and murder to the Palestinians. Even then Israel refused to accept the root cause of the conflict – the rights of the Palestinians to live in a homeland that had been theirs for more than two thousand years. Ariel Sharon simply built a wall and set in place the current state of affairs – by welcoming Russian immigrants into the Zionist state, he ensured settlers now had a harder edge. Today those settlers and their children have fought in Israel’s three murderous campaigns against the imprisoned people of Gaza, and walk in the occupied territories of west Bank and east Jerusalem openly brandishing rifles and knives attacking ordinary Palestinians at will. To this day, no one has been held to account for the burning alive of Ali Dawabshah and his mother and father by Zionist settlers. No one too is held responsible as Zionist settlers and the Israeli army conduct arbitrary ‘justice’ on the streets of Hebron and against the Palestinians trapped in Gaza  – one million of whom are children. More than a thousand children were killed in the three wars that were conducted in the full glare of the media spotlight since Israel’s ‘withdrawal’ from Gaza in 2005 – 551 alone in last year’s war which was cheered on by Israelis who were sat on a mountain watching the unfolding horror as if there were at a boxing match.  If the current unrest is indeed the third intifada one thing is certain, that the Palestinians will continue to die and that the ‘world’ will do nothing because Washington has decided that this is Israel defending itself, that this is Israel fighting a war against terror.