Crushed to the brink
There should be an international outcry over Tel Aviv’s latest assault on the rights of Palestinians. Instead the world looks on in mute collusion.
Eamonn McCann, 28 Nov 2007
It is an indication of how demonised the Palestinian people have become that the latest assault on their human rights has gone almost unnoticed.
Israel has begun cutting off electricity and fuel to Gaza. The territory’s own ability to generate power had already been devastated in June last year when Israeli bombs destroyed its only electrical power plant and main transmitters. The passage of goods and people through border checkpoints, already severely restricted, has been brought almost to a standstill. Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-revenue which Israel has illegally taken control of are not being passed on – that’s to say, stolen. Hospitals and schools have virtually collapsed. Trapped people are festering to death before the eyes of the world.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that the Tel Aviv Government will allow the supply of nothing to the million and a half people crammed into the tiny territory – less than half the size of Carlow, 139 square miles to 316 – “except for whatever Israel considers humanitarian needs.”
Gaza has a recorded history going back more than 3,000 years, to the reign of the Pharaoh Thutmose III, if anybody’s interested. Yet its people could be referred to as “cockroaches” by Golda Meir, Chicago-born leader of the Israeli State created through ethnic cleansing in 1948, and hardly anybody in a position of power in the world shuddered with revulsion.
Another Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, born in Płonsk, Poland, went further, saying of the Palestinian people: “They don’t exist.”
Arms companies which fuel war in pursuit of profit eagerly endorse the racist perception which reduces the Palestinians to nothingness, to beings freely available for slaughter. Four years ago, Adam Cherill, business manager of the notorious US company, Raytheon, declared that, “To qualify for self-determination, a people must show some kind of national identity... What political organisations, social institutions, literature, art, religion, or private correspondence express any ties between the Palestinian people to the Land of Israel?”
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