ISRAEL’S OBSCENITY December 19, 2006
Posted by wmmbb in Israel-Palestine.trackback
Some nations are hardly fit to be members of the world community. Israel is foremost among such nations.
Chris Hedges at Truthdig reports in part:
. . . Palestinians are not only dying, their olive trees uprooted, their farmland and homes destroyed and their aquifers taken away from them, but on many days they can’t move because of Israeli “closures” that make basic tasks, like buying food and going to the hospital, nearly impossible. These Palestinians, after decades of repression, cannot return to land from which they were expelled. The 140-plus U.N. votes to censure Israel and two Security Council resolutions—both vetoed by the United States—are blithly ignored. Is it any wonder that the Palestinians, gasping for air, rebel as the walls close in around them, as their children go hungry and as the Israelis turn up the violence?
Palestinians in Gaza live encased in a squalid, overcrowded ghetto, surrounded by the Israeli military and a massive electric fence, unable to leave or enter the strip and under daily assault. The word “apartheid,” given the wanton violence employed against the Palestinians, is tepid. This is more than apartheid. The concerted Israeli attempts to orchestrate a breakdown in law and order, to foster chaos and rampant deprivation, are on public display in the streets of Gaza City, where Palestinians walk past the rubble of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of National Economy, the office of the Palestinian prime minister and a number of educational institutions that have been bombed by Israeli jets. The electricity generation plant, providing 45 percent of the electricity of the Gaza Strip, has been wiped out, and even the primitive electricity networks and transmitters that remain have been repeatedly bombed. Six bridges linking Gaza City with the central Gaza Strip have been blown up and main arteries cratered into obliteration. And the West Bank is rapidly descending into a crisis of Gaza proportions.
The Palestinian Arabs consistent use of terrorism – suicide bombings, knifings, shootings, Kassam rockets, etc. – going back to 1948-1949 and even before the founding of the State of Israel, is the reason that Israel uses the measures described in this article. Aren’t the Palestinians responsible for any of their actions? The UN’s automatic anti-Israel biased resolutions don’t mean a thing when they are taken in isolation, as institutionally, no Arab or Muslim nation has been censored or similarly criticized, in spite of their long term human rights violations against their own citizens.
Thanks Joelsk for putting the counter-argument.
I accept that suicide bombing is very counterproductive, especially among those Israelis who are sympathetic to the Palestinian case.The question then is, where does that get us?
The Palestinians have been dispossessed over the years, and hence the continuation of war by whatever means available. Had the Palestinian’s rights been recognized, there would be a greater chance of a peaceful outcome with justice. In my opinion, outcomes imposed by force, the up to now assumed military superiority will not work.
The effect of current American policy is I suggest to make things worst. So the question is, who will be an honest broker, or intermediary to provide the framework for reconcilation, other than the United Nations, which is afflicted by American vetoes?
I suppose in the longer term, we have to look to the Americans to set the conditions for peace, but in the immediate future that is not even a possibility.
In that context, all I can do is to be angry.