Israel began selling arms to Guatemala in the early 1970s but took up the training and arming of Guatemalan forces in earnest when the U.S. Congress cut off aid to Guatemala in 1977 in protest of its gross human rights abuses…
Ben-Menashe emphasized that the Israelis were unaware of the genocidal nature of the Guatemalan military’s campaign against the Ixil. The Israelis did recognize, however, that they “were assisting in mass murders of dark-skinned Guatemalans; the distinction being that the Israelis did not identify the slaughters as genocide against a specific racial or ethnic group.” Ben-Menashe told Perry, “As we saw it, they [Guatemalan military authorities] were targeting all non-white villagers who were sitting on fertile lands that the white Guatemalans wanted….”
Officially, the massacres in Guatemala were not about land; they were a matter of military necessity…
The Israeli army’s aim in Gaza could have been terror, or collective punishment, rather than extermination. But when terror and collective punishment are effected by killing civilians, genocide is a persistent danger.
Continue reading at http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/10/07/we-called-it-genocide-guatemala-why-not-gaza-too