COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SPUTNIK
"The abandonment
of 1.8 million men, women, and children to their fate in Gaza by the so-called
international community is one of the most grievous moral outrages of our
time."
I couldn't agree more.
Our Western press and politicians go on about many
relatively small troubles and grievances in our world while ignoring this huge
outrage. The smallest terrorist event or violent demonstration -Charlottesville
or a stabbing in London - is shouted from the rooftops in the West, yet this horror
in Gaza continues, year after year, with almost no notice taken.
These poor people continue to struggle with day-to-day life
in unsanitary and crumbling ruins Israel created in its onslaughts which
murdered about four thousand people, including about a thousand kids. Israel
hasn’t the decency to allow the import of the required building materials.
Now, Israel builds a vast underground wall to prevent the
life-sustaining supplies smuggled in with immense effort through hand-dug
tunnels. It also plans to build a big artificial island off the coast which
would effectively give Israel complete control and keep the people of Gaza from
using any of the resources in the Mediterranean, including the natural gas
fields which are by international standards the property of Gaza but which
Israel is stealing openly and developing.
Gaza’s fishermen cannot even go far from the shore without
being shot by Israeli gunboats. Their concentration camp – for that absolutely
describes what Gaza has become – is lined with fences and towers with automated,
radar-operated machine guns.
Israel even sprays noxious herbicides on portions of their small
land. Some vicious Israelis have dumped raw sewerage on the land. When the few
settlers that used to live there left, they actually poisoned the water wells.
Israel prevents proper supplies of electricity. Israel controls all assistance
that might be sent. Israel won’t even permit most visitors to go to Gaza.
It is a totalitarian nightmare. Israeli politician after
politician has wished the people of Gaza gone and have always treated them
harshly, but in recent years, the treatment has become harsh beyond telling.
All because Gaza voted in democratic elections for a party which represented
their interests. Going back to Moshe Dayan, we have public statements about
making the people of Gaza so miserable, they will leave. And that is just what
is being done.
Many Israelis take comfort in the thought that Israel does
not do what Nazi Germany did with a large group of people it hates. They are
comforted morally by that idea.
But when you keep an entire people living in misery for
generation after generation with no rights, no hope, no ability to better
themselves, no ability to even move around, I see complete moral equivalency
with mass killing
This is a gigantic, on-going crime against humanity, but
because Israel is effectively a colony of the powerful United States, enjoying
intimate high-level connections, most of the Western press and politicians
remain silent.
Repression of the channels of communication is just another
terrible weapon in such a situation. I don’t know how anyone is ever surprised
by the way Nazi Germany got away with its vast crimes because Germany had,
quite simply, one of the early, sophisticated total wars on truth and
communication.
