When I first heard about the Israeli murder of the very innocent 66 year old Omar Qawasmeh, I thought about a remark someone made a few years ago in commenting on Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. They said that the next time any Palestinian military group blows up a bus, they should apologize for the death of the passengers, indicating that the real target was the bus.

On a regular basis, the Israelis wound or kill Palestinian civilians. In almost every case, as in the death of Qawasmeh, the Israeli authorities apologize for the collateral damage and point out that they were actually after another target, usually someone alleged to be part of the military wing of a Palestinian group. In other cases, they simply express their regret that peaceful demonstrators or bystanders were hurt by actions on the part of the Israeli authorities.

There is something else that happens each time there is an atrocity against Palestinians. At best, US authorities express their sorrow and concern regarding the injuries and deaths, but they do not proceed from there to what should be the next logical step: sanctions against the Israelis. Instead, Israeli actions are excused away as an excessive step taken against an allegedly legitimate enemy, so-called Palestinian terrorism.

Israeli atrocities, and US complicity in them, continue because there is no price to be paid. The continuous retreat by the Obama administration in the face of Israeli intransigence in negotiations with the Palestinian National Authority is one major example. Here we sit, two years after the Israeli war against Gaza, an action internationally condemned and documented in the United Nation’s Goldstone Report to have been a massive atrocity, and yet the USA - in this case the Obama administration - has done nothing to alter the continuously illegal activities of the Israeli government.

The murder of Qawasmeh has another side to it, and that side is racial. In the last few years the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as well as within Israel, has been compared with South African apartheid. The analogy is quite appropriate. But there is a side that is regularly deemphasized, that being the racial marginalization of the Palestinian people themselves by the Israelis. To put it another way, the life of a Palestinian simply does not count, certainly in comparison with the life of an Israeli. It actually does not matter what the reason for the death of a Palestinian may be, the individual(s) becomes nothing more than a blur, quickly and easily forgotten. In fact, the entire Gaza has become nothing more than a brown blur to most of us in the USA, irrespective of the misery and suffering of thousands.

After each atrocity, there are many people who express their outrage at the impunity and audacity of the Israeli political establishment. After a few days, a week at the most, the voices of outrage diminish to a murmur, overtaken by other events. This is not due to a lack of concern but rather a lack of direct connection between our outrage and concrete actions that can be taken. For this reason the growing Boycott / Divestment / Sanctions (BDS) movement is precisely the sort of effort necessary to tighten the screws on the Israeli establishment and force them to accept a just and equitable solution to the Israeli / Palestinian conflict, a settlement that guarantees the Palestinian people self-determination, the right to return to lands stolen from them, and freedom from the terror of the Israeli establishment.

[For more information on what you can do, contact the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. See: www.endtheoccupation.org.]

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.