John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY KATHY KELLY IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“The Ongoing Dread in Gaza: So Many Names, So Many Lives
“Activists in Chicago this month evoked the deadly trauma of Israeli aerial attacks”
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Response to a comment which said “The cause of all of the Palestinian problems is cultivated hate. Obviously that gets the Palestinian people nowhere. When will they wake up?”
Hard to believe anyone accepts that.
The rockets - rare and very ineffective - represent the desperation of a people kept locked up in a squalid prison for a lifetime. Surrounded by fences and radar-activated machine-gun towers. Fishermen given harsh limits on how far they can go without being shot by Israel patrol boats, as they are sometimes.
Gaza actually resembles a giant prison camp, a concentration camp, if you will. It started as a refugee camp with tens of thousands of Palestinians running from the genuine Zionist terrors of 1948, but Israel’s policies and practices have since turned it into a prison camp, a nasty one.
“Cultivated hate’? My God, what else motivates Israel's behavior towards these people, mostly just the most ordinary people trying to get on with their lives?
You know, some Israelis like to brag about the fact that something much worse hasn't happened to them, and that’s some brag isn’t it?
But I question whether there can be anything much worse.
An entire lifetime of no freedom of movement, no rights, no hope, constant abuse, treatment almost like cattle at check-points daily, no opportunities for development, and even no secure ownership of homes? What American, the people whose taxes are sent to support that, would tolerate living that way for a single day?
Not permitting even the materials for repairs to be imported? Repairs needed after Israel’s several heavy bombardments of civilians. Jets and missiles and tanks used on civilians. A number of times.
Bombardments in which more than a thousand children died plus several thousand adults, including women and old people. I saw photos of people rushing along a narrow street, trying to avoid the stream of blood running down the central gutter, resembling something from a slaughterhouse.
In the original illegal blockade, Israel had actually calculated the minimum number of calories that would just keep the population alive, and that's what was allowed to be imported. That's why there were no chocolate bars in Gaza for a time.
It was such an appalling measure, Israel finally relented somewhat to all kinds of private diplomatic pressure from aboard. But still the Palestinians can’t even repair the mess Israel made, and they live in unsanitary squalor, imposed on them by the inability to get basic materials and supplies.
You know, when General Dayan won the Six Day War (which had been deliberately provoked by Israel to grab the territory of the much dreamed of “Greater Israel”), he was widely quoted as saying it would be necessary to make the Palestinians feel miserable, so they would all want to leave.
That, in a nutshell, has been Israel's policy for half a century. Make the Palestinians so miserable, they’ll all want to leave. But, apart from the injustice of being driven from their homes, where are they all supposed to go?
You can just feel the love, can't you?
