Crushed to the brink

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?”
The fact that they’ve lived there for thousands of years might, in most people’s eyes, have established “ties”. But just as the savages who exterminated the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia first had to declare the continents “empty territory”, so Zionism has to erase all history of the people it has targeted for annihilation.
Agreements, treaties, pledges, United Nations resolutions and international law are routinely ignored by the Israelis, safe in the knowledge that the United States will veto any attempt to condemn them at the UN Security Council or in any other world forum.
When Iran or Syria breaches inter-State agreements or UN resolutions (or is merely accused of breaches) the cry goes up for the “international community” to impose sanctions. But when Israel makes rubbish of international law and human decency, there’s only the roaring sound of dour silence.
The UN’s chief representative in Gaza, Karen Koning-Abu Zayd, has denounced the siege of Gaza explicitly as “a violation of international law.” The Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has called on the EU to suspend commercial ties with Israel until it ends the food blockade. But there’s no response from the EU Commission or from the Council of Ministers.
The chances of Security Council paying heed to its own representatives are, likewise, zero. Far from reflecting the views of his senior officials on the ground, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, parrots the US line, denouncing Hamas’s “indiscriminate rocket fire” and emphasising that he “understands Israel’s security concerns in this matter.” His statement includes not a single reference to Israel’s daily attacks on and killing of Palestinians or to the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Apologists for Israel maintain a barrage of propaganda to the effect that Israel is merely retaliating and defending itself against the rocket attacks mentioned by Ban Ki-Moon. But the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths is currently running at 30 to one. One death is too many. But who, on balance, is the major aggressor here, and who the hapless victim of aggression?
The economic offensive against Gaza is not retaliation for attack but part of a twin-track strategy with military assault to crush the Palestinian people until they accept the status of the black majority in South Africa in the worst days of apartheid. Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky and former US president Jimmy Carter are among those who have endorsed the parallel between apartheid and the Israeli oppression of Palestine.

Meanwhile, on the West Bank, the other patch of land on which the people of Palestine are allowed the appearance of a say over their own affairs, the Apartheid Wall is strengthened, widened and heightened day by day in blatant breach of international law and clear UN resolutions. Yet, the same people who threaten war on Iran if it doesn’t comply with questionable UN demands in relation to the country’s nuclear power programme, continue to set their faces like flint against any attempt to hold Israel to account.
Seamus Milne wrote in the Guardian recently: “Israeli demolitions, land seizures, settlement expansion, assassinations, armed incursions, segregated road-building and construction of the land-grabbing separation wall continue apace.”
Note the reference to segregated roads. The best roads in the West Bank are reserved for Israelis only. Palestinians who presume to use roads through their own country are turned back at checkpoints or arrested by soldiers from Israel... Ask yourself: if that were happening anywhere else on earth, would the outcry not be deafening?
But in relation to Palestine, it seems, only the Palestinians themselves and those commonly described as the “hard Left” make any consistent effort to voice a protest.
At the last count, there were 563 Israeli checkpoints controlling the movement of Palestinians in the 2,270 square miles – the size of Derry and Tyrone combined – of the West Bank.
This is colonial occupation and oppression on a scale and of an intensity equalling anything perpetrated by European powers in Africa in the hey-day of imperialism. It’s devised and implemented by the Zionist thugs who run Israel, who have subsumed into themselves the vile attitudes of their 19th century predecessors. Gordon of Sudan and Leopold of the Congo would recognise them as blood-brothers.
I am reminded of the attitude of some members of the British ruling class to the Bogside during the Free Derry period in the early 1970s. One document I have to hand records, in his own handwriting, the strategy favoured by Adrian Thorpe, a senior official in the Foreign Office: “I have always been in favour of encouraging the no-go areas to rot from within; there is no reason why we should not encourage the breakdown of essential services and the spread of disease etc.”
The difference is that the British retained a modicum of civility and balked at any such measure, whereas the Israelis are implementing the strategy in spades.
Is it any wonder that some young Palestinians, and other Arabs and Muslims who feel at one with them, might come to the conclusion that the only way to make the world listen and look at what’s happening to them is to strap on an explosives belt and head for the designated target? It’s amazing there’s not more of it.