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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
Worse Than Apartheid
Chris Hedges, Truthdig
f4926329156.jpg
December 18, 2006
Israel has spent the last five months unleashing missiles, attack
helicopters and jet fighters over the densely packed concrete hovels in
the Gaza Strip. The Israeli army has made numerous deadly incursions,
and some 500 people, nearly all civilians, have been killed and 1,600
more wounded. Israel has rounded up hundreds of Palestinians, destroyed
Gaza’s infrastructure, including its electrical power system and key
roads and bridges, carried out huge land confiscations, demolished homes
and plunged families into a crisis that has caused widespread poverty
and malnutrition.
Civil society itself—and this appears to be part of the Israeli plan—is
unraveling. Hamas and Fatah factions battle in the streets, despite a
tenuous cease-fire, threatening civil war. And the governing Palestinian
movement, Hamas, has said it will boycott early elections called by
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, done with the blessing of
the West in a bid to toss Hamas out of power. (Remember that Hamas,
despite its repugnant politics, was democratically elected.) In recent
days armed groups loyal to Abbas have seized Hamas-run ministries in
what looks like a coup.
The stark reality of Gaza, however, has failed to penetrate the
consciousness of most Americans, who, when they notice the Israeli and
Palestinian conflict, prefer to debate the merits of the word
"apartheid" in former President Jimmy Carter’s new book, "Palestine:
Peace Not Apartheid." It is a sad commentary on the gutlessness of the
U.S. press and the timidity of the Democratic opposition that most
Americans are not aware of the catastrophic humanitarian crisis they
bear so much responsibility in creating. 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 juxtaposition of what is happening in Gaza and what is
being debated on the U.S. airwaves about a book that is little more than
a basic primer on the conflict reinforces the impression most outside
our gates have of Americans living in a distorted, bizarre reality of
our own creation.
What do Israel and Washington believe they will gain by turning Gaza and
the West Bank into a miniature version of Iraq? How do they think people
who are desperate, deprived of hope, dignity and a way to make a living,
under attack from one of the most technologically advanced armies on the
planet, will respond? Do they believe that creating a Hobbesian
nightmare for the Palestinians will blunt terrorism, curb suicide
attacks and foster peace? Do they not see that the rest of the Middle
East watches the slaughter in horror and rage—its angry, disenfranchised
young men and women determined to overcome feelings of impotence and
humiliation, even at the cost of their own lives?
And perhaps they do see and understand all this. Israel and Washington
probably do get the recruiting value of this repression for Islamic
militants. But these Israeli attacks, despite the rage and violence they
breed against Israelis and against us, also create conditions so
intolerable that Palestinians can no longer reside on their land. More
than 160,000 civil servants have not received full salaries for almost
nine months. These government employees support families that number
more than a million Palestinians. And a United Nations report states
that more than two-thirds of Palestinians are now living below the
poverty line. The unemployment rate is more than 50 percent. The
Palestinian Foreign Ministry says 10,000 Palestinians have emigrated in
the last four months and almost 50,000 others have applied to leave.
Israel, with no restraints from Washington, despite the Iraq Study Group
report recommendations that the peace process be resurrected from the
dead, has been given the moral license by the Bush administration to
carry out what is euphemistically in Israel called "transfer" and what
in other parts of the world is called ethnic cleansing. Faced with a
demographic time bomb, knowing that by 2020 Jews will make up only 40 to
46 percent of the overall population of Israel, the architects of
transfer, who once held the equivalent status in Israeli society of the
Ku Klux Klan, have wormed their way into positions of power in the
Israeli government.
Washington and Israel, I suspect, know the cost of this repression. But
it is beginning to appear as though they accept it—as the price for
ridding themselves of the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has installed in his Cabinet a
politician who openly calls for the expulsion of the some 1.3 million
Israeli Arabs who live inside Israel. Avigdor Lieberman’s "Israel Is Our
Home" Party, part of Olmert’s governing coalition, proposes involuntary
transfer in a region populated mostly by Arab citizens of Israel,
shifting those people to a future Palestinian state that would include
Gaza, parts of the West Bank and a small slice of northern Israel. All
Israeli Arabs who continued to reside in the territory of transfer would
automatically lose their Israeli citizenship unless they took a loyalty
oath to the state and its Jewish symbols. The inclusion of Lieberman,
the David Duke of Israel, into the Cabinet is an indication to most
Palestinians that the worst is yet to come.
The debate over Jimmy Carter’s book, one that dishes up a fair number of
Israeli myths about itself and states a reality that is acknowledged
even by most Israelis, misses the point. The question is not whether
Israel practices apartheid. Apartheid is a fond dream for most
Palestinians. The awful question is rather will Israel be able to
unleash a policy so draconian and cruel that it will obliterate a
community that has lived on this land for centuries. There are other,
far more loaded words for what is happening to the Palestinians. One
shudders to repeat them. But unchecked, unstopped, the current wave of
violence and abuse meted out to the Palestinians will echo down the
corridors of history as one of the greatest moral and tactical blunders
of the early part of this century, one that will boomerang on Israel and
on us, bringing to our own doorsteps the evil we have allowed to be
delivered to the narrow alleys and refugee camps in Gaza. When it was
only apartheid, we had some hope.
source:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20061218_worse_than_apartheid/
===
-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
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