As I write this safe and sound in my nice little suburban home, having just signed another online petition calling for an end to the horror in Gaza, I begin to question what I have accomplished in over 40 years of calling for peace and understanding among the peoples of the world. Who besides me wants it? Surely not anyone in power as they continue to ignore, mouthing pre written sanctimonious statements about the value of human life and DO nothing.
Five girls from one family were killed over the weekend when a mosque near their home was targeted. They were sleeping together in one room. How many Canadian families do you know that talk about five children sleeping in one room as normal? There were actually seven but two survived, but for how long with an acute shortage of medical supplies. The other aspect of the story that seems to be taken for granted is the fact that a mosque was a target of an Israeli air strike. Now I know the rational Israel is using here. They will argue that radical Imams are calling upon their followers to rise up in Jihad. Mosques are not just religious centers but centers of resistance and terrorism. Interesting enough the Germans used similar rationalizations for their destruction of synagogues. The Israeli government learned a lot of lessons from the Nazis. There I have done it. I have stepped over the line. Now comes the onslaught. I am an anti-Semite. I hate Jews. But is that what I said just now? No. I said the Israeli government, not Jews, had learned lessons in repression, not only of Palestinian Arabs but of any Israeli Jew that disagrees with them. Ask activists with B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group about the harassment they experience because they protest the human rights violations of their government. They are attacked by official sources as self-hating Jews.
Israel is not Judaism and Judaism is not Israel. Judaism is a religion, Israel is a state. Until that concept is clearly rooted in the international psyche nothing will be done to end the bloodshed until Israel has succeeded in wiping every Palestinian from the face of the earth. Actually you might say they already have. One argument advanced by the Israeli government is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian. Palestine is not a nation. Arabs in the West Bank are Jordanians. The Nazis used this tack with certain Slavic groups to justify their murder. Better yet the late Golda Meir, former prime minister of Israel claimed that when the Jews arrived in Palestine there were not people on the land at all. It was unoccupied. So if these non-existent people were to disappear no one would notice. The path to genocide begins first with an attack on identity.
The international community sits back and refuses to act perhaps out of some misplaced sense of collective guilt, perhaps from self-interested agendas and perhaps partly out of fear. Remember that Israel is the sixth largest nuclear power. Israel continues to officially deny possessing nuclear weapons but their existence is the worst kept secret in the world. Regardless of the reason, how long can we sit back and allow this atrocity to continue before our eyes. The mainstream news media is never more biased than with reporting on middle eastern issues. If one relies on the major American networks or the BBC for information it would be understandable to see Israel as the victim in this. Again a tactic used by the Nazis against Jews. Nazi propogandists repeatedly drummed the mantra into the German people that the Jews were controlling the economy and conspiring with foreign powers to destroy Germany. The justification for Kristallnacht was the assassination of the German ambassador in Paris by a Jew. Goebbels disseminated the idea that this was part of a greater conspiracy to bring down the German government and cause a war rather than the act of a frustrated individual. Anyone who blindly believes the press is courting disaster. Media is ALWAYS controlled by the politically powerful in a society and serves whatever agenda they pursue.
The facts:
- In the last seven years only 17 Israelis have been killed by rocket fire. In the first day of this new pogrom in Gaza approximately 200 Palestinians died. The number is now around 375 mostly civilians contrary to the CNN report I watched tonight which claims that most of the dead are Hamas fighters. So five little girls sleeping in their own home are a threat to Israel, I guess.
- The initial attacks on Saturday, December 27th were timed to coincidence with schools letting out. The streets were full of children and the police stations and training facilities that were prime targets were close to schools. This can only be interpreted as an attempt to kill children. Again this is reminiscent of the Nazi behaviour. The Nazis paid special attention to Jewish children in the Holocaust. The best method to annihilate an entire race or class of people is to destroy their future.
- Israel was first to break the ceasefire. Ehud Barack stating publicly that Israel is no longer interested in a ceasefire leaves me incredulous as the evidence shows they never have been interested in one. Wanton, unjustified intrusions into Gaza occurred repeatedly without Hamas responding in defense until the murder of six Hamas leaders and the attack on a tunnel complex supplying Gaza. Israel wanted Hamas to respond for fear if they continued to unilaterally hold to the ceasefire they would achieve a moral victory. This would further undermine the position of Israel’s puppet, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas and his government are equivalent to the Jewish Councils in the Ghettos.
- Police stations and training facilities, water wells, mosques and public officials were the prime targets of the Israeli invasion. Interestingly the Israelis do not seem interested in rocket sites. But this invasion was never about rockets attacking Israel. There are many possible reasons for the attack at this time. One that came immediately to my mind was the Israeli elections. Kadima, lagging in the polls behind Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, hopes to undermine Likud’s chief criticism that Kadima is soft on the Palestinian issue.
- Gaza has been subjected to an inhuman siege which have reduced it to the world’s largest concentration camp. Everything is in short supply; food, fuel, water, medical supplies. Those shortages now contribute to the suffering caused by this latest attack. How many of the wounded will be able to survive is questionable and the death toll will only rise.
Candidate Obama, now President-Elect Obama, said in his visit to Israel earlier this year:
“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing,”
Well what would he do if his daughters were lying in the morgue instead of those five Palestinian girls? Would he be so quick to condemn Hamas and blame them for the problem? Hamas acted lawfully in defending the people of Gaza against an aggressor. The international condemnation of Israel is muted by American support. But the international community is a paper tiger. It does not want to confront Israel. If the United Nations stood for something the following should happen:
- Israel’s membership in the UN should be immediately suspended as they have flagrantly violated the UN Charter, are currently in violation of some 80 odd Security Council resolutions (for perspective Saddam Hussein was maybe in violation of six or seven before his country was invaded and he was hanged for crimes against humanity), and also in violation of their commitments under the Geneva Conventions.
- All trade and foreign aid coming into Israel should be immediately halted. Israel’s assets abroad should be seized and frozen. Israeli government officials found outside of Israel should be arrested and held for investigation by the International Criminal Court.
- Humanitarian aid should be injected into Gaza as quickly as possible, even if this means a military confrontation with Israel. Along with this an international force should enter Gaza to protect civilians from genocide.
- All of this will require the courage of the other powers of the world to stand up to the United States.
If this all sounds extreme it is. But we are facing a moral choice. If we do not act, as we did not in Germany, as we did not in Rwanda, and as we are not in Congo currently, then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is meaningless. The Nuremburg and Tokyo trials were a waste of time. The tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda should be stopped. The choice is to do something or to do nothing. So whether I have accomplished anything in my life or not, I will probably never know but since I continue, I must continue to try.
