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Bill Van Auken Correspondent
The Israeli military slaughtered dozens of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators and wounded thousands more in Gaza on Monday. As this atrocity was being carried out, a grotesque ceremony was unfolding barely 80km away to mark the formal opening of a US embassy in the divided and occupied city of Jerusalem.

The two events – occurring on the 70th anniversary of Israel’s declaration of independence – were juxtaposed by the media, broadcast simultaneously on split screens by television networks.

What could not be concealed was the fact that the opening of the American embassy was entirely in line with and, indeed, a statement of political support for the massacre taking place at the security fence separating the impoverished occupied territory from Israel.

The number of unarmed Palestinian protesters shot dead by Israel Defence Forces (IDF) snipers on the eastern border of Gaza rose to at least 58 on Monday, with over 2 700 others wounded, many suffering grievous injuries from live ammunition that will almost certainly drive up the death toll.

Many of the injured who survive will lose one or more limbs as a result of Israeli sniper fire. Palestinian ambulance teams were reportedly unable to collect some of the bodies of protesters who were cut down as they reached the heavily fortified fence.

Among the dead were at least eight children under the age of 16, including a 12-year-old and one young girl. The wounded included 78 women and 203 children, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reported.

This deliberate mass killing of refugees demanding the right to return to the homes and villages from which their families were violently expelled 70 years ago with the founding of the state of Israel is a monstrous criminal act.

The lethal violence unleashed by the Israeli military included air strikes, tank shelling and the dropping of flammable material on tent encampments where Palestinian families had gathered.

This unbridled state violence is motivated not by any lethal threat from the tens of thousands of unarmed demonstrators. The IDF, while killing well over 100 Palestinians, has suffered not a single casualty since the “Great March of Return” protests began in Gaza on March 30.

Rather, the elementary right demanded by the youth marching into gunfire poses an existential threat to the entire Zionist project of carving out a Jewish state based upon racial and religious exclusivity through the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

All those involved in this mass killing, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, their enablers in Washington, down to the snipers firing the bullets, are collectively and personally responsible for war crimes. As the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals established, soldiers are able and obliged to refuse an illegal order to wantonly kill civilians. Only an army saturated with racist and fascistic ideology can be counted on to commit such crimes.

The carnage on the Gaza border was matched by the atmosphere of criminality and reaction at the US embassy ceremony, which was staged before an audience of right-wing Israeli and American politicians, army commanders and leading rabbis.

Present for the occasion was Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino mogul, whose millions have gone to fund Zionist settlements in the occupied West Bank as well as Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Also present was Joseph Lieberman, the former Democratic senator and vice-presidential candidate, who drafted the 1995 US legislation – supported overwhelmingly by both parties – that called for transferring the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Further underscoring the bipartisan support for Israel’s criminal policy, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York hailed the opening of the Jerusalem embassy as “long overdue,” adding, “I applaud President Trump for doing it”.

Providing an opening invocation was Robert Jeffress, the right-wing Dallas Baptist preacher who has declared that “all Jews will go to hell” and that Islam is “a heresy from the pit of hell.” He spoke alongside an Israeli rabbi who has described blacks as “monkeys. Also present was another prominent “Christian Zionist,” John Hagee, who has declared that Hitler was “a hunter” sent by God to fulfil biblical prophesy by chasing the Jews into Israel. Such are the friends of the Israeli state.

While Trump appeared via video, the main speech was given by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who told the audience, “We stand with Israel because we both believe in human rights, democracy worth defending, and believe that we know that it is the right thing to do.” – WSWS.