Viewpoint

Editor’s Note:

Chris Hedges is an award winning journalist and author.
He covered the Middle East for many years. This is a
very good article. Please pass it along.

Thank you,
Editor

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Video Clip Of The Week

Israel Creates Humanitarian Crisis In Gaza

Israel has cut off fuel to Gaza and has illegally
instituted collective punishment on 1.5 million
Palestinians. Raw sewage runs in the streets, hospitals
have no power and the world stands silent and MSM does
not cover the story.

Click to View: Israel Creates Humanitarian Crisis In Gaza

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Party to Murder
By Chris Hedges

Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on
Gaza—the buildings blown to rubble, the children killed
on their way to school, the long rows of mutilated
corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the crowds of
terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, the
hospitals so overburdened and out of supplies they cannot
treat the wounded, and our studied, callous indifference
to this widespread human suffering—wonder why we are
hated?

Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our
supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have
become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and
savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant
war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents
who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves,
of how we might have been should fate and time and
geography have made the circumstances of our birth
different.

We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures.
We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love.
“Expose thyself to what wretches feel,” King Lear said,
entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, “and show
the heavens more just.” Privilege and power, especially
military power, is a dangerous narcotic.

Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force,
but also those who try to use it to become gods. Over
350 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians,
and over 1,000 have been wounded since the air attacks
began on Saturday. Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister,
said Israel is engaged in a “war to the bitter end”
against Hamas in Gaza. A war? Israel uses sophisticated
attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded
refugee camps and slums, to attack a population that has
no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons,
no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and
control, no army, and calls it a war.

It is not a war. It is murder.

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the
occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University
law professor Richard Falk, has labeled what Israel is
doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime
against humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the
collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a
flagrant and massive violation of international
humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth
Geneva Convention.”

He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to
investigate the situation, and determine whether the
Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders
responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and
prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.”

Falk’s unflinching honesty has enraged Israel. He was
banned from entering the country on Dec. 14 during his
attempt to visit Gaza and the West Bank. “After being
denied entry I was put in a holding room with about 20
others experiencing entry problems,” he said.

“At this point I was treated not as a U.N. representative,
but as some sort of security threat, subjected to an inch-
by-inch body search, and the most meticulous luggage
inspection I have ever witnessed. I was separated from my
two U.N. companions, who were allowed to enter Israel.

At this point I was taken to the airport detention
facility a mile or so away, required to put all my bags
and cell phone in a room, taken to a locked, tiny room
that had five other detainees, smelled of urine and filth,
and was an unwelcome invitation to claustrophobia. I spent
the next 15 hours so confined, which amounted to a cram
course on the miseries of prison life, including dirty
sheets, inedible food, and either lights that were too
bright or darkness controlled from the guard office.”

The foreign press has been, like Falk, barred by Israel
from entering Gaza to report on the destruction. Israel’s
stated aim of halting homemade rockets fired from Gaza
into Israel remains unfulfilled.

Gaza militants have fired more than 100 rockets and mortars
into Israel, killing four people and wounding nearly two
dozen more, since Israel unleashed its air assault. Israel
has threatened to launch a ground assault and has called
up 6,500 army reservists. It has massed tanks on the Gaza
border and declared the area a closed military zone.

The rocket attacks by Hamas are, as Falk points out, also
criminal violations of international law. But as Falk
notes, “… such Palestinian behavior does not legalize
Israel’s imposition of a collective punishment of a life-
and health-threatening character on the people of Gaza,
and should not distract the U.N. or international society
from discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty
to render protection to the Palestinian people.”

“It is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that each
day poses the entire 1.5 million Gazans to an unspeakable
ordeal, to a struggle to survive in terms of their health,”
Falk has said of the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza.
“This is an increasingly precarious condition.

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A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan
children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that
the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have
caused widespread deafness, especially among children.
Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition
is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and
affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental
disorders, especially among young people without the will
to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age
of 12 have been found to have no will to live.”

Before the air assaults, Gaza spent 12 hours a day without
power, which can be a death sentence to the severely ill
in hospitals. Most of Gaza is now without power. There are
few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer or
cystic fibrosis medication. Hospitals have generators but
often lack fuel. Medical equipment, including one of Gaza’s
three CT scanners, has been destroyed by power surges and
fluctuations.

Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators
for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit visas,
meaning some of those who need specialized care, including
cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, have
died. Of the 230 Gazans estimated to have died last year
because they were denied proper medical care, several spent
their final hours at Israeli crossing points where they
were refused entry into Israel.

The statistics gathered on children—half of Gaza’s
population is under the age of 17—are increasingly grim.
About 45 percent of children in Gaza have iron deficiency
from a lack of fruit and vegetables, and 18 percent have
stunted growth.

“It is macabre,” Falk said of the blockade. “I don’t know
of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have
been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog
in modern times.”

“There is no structure of an occupation that endured
for decades and involved this kind of oppressive
circumstances,” the rapporteur added. “The magnitude,
the deliberateness, the violations of international
humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and
survival and the overall conditions warrant the
characterization of a crime against humanity. This
occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military
and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should
be held accountable.”

The point of the Israeli attack, ostensibly, is to break
Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power
in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces
with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce.
During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian
intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although
Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that,
on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the
truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that
Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel.

“This is a crime of survival,” Falk said of the rocket
attacks by Palestinians. “Israel has put the Gazans in
a set of circumstances where they either have to accept
whatever is imposed on them or resist in any way available
to them. That is a horrible dilemma to impose upon a
people. This does not alleviate the Palestinians, and
Gazans in particular, for accountability for doing these
acts involving rocket fire, but it also imposes some
responsibility on Israel for creating these circumstances.”

Israel seeks to break the will of the Palestinians to
resist. The Israeli government has demonstrated little
interest in diplomacy or a peaceful solution. The rapid
expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank is an
effort to thwart the possibility of a two-state solution
by gobbling up vast tracts of Palestinian real estate.
Israel also appears to want to thrust the impoverished
Gaza Strip onto Egypt. Dozens of tunnels had been the
principal means for food and goods, connecting Gaza to
Egypt. Israel had permitted the tunnels to operate, most
likely as part of an effort to further cut Gaza off from
Israel.

This ended, however, on Sunday when Israeli fighter jets
bombed over 40 tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt.
The Israeli military said that the tunnels, on the Gaza
side of the border, were used for smuggling weapons,
explosives and fugitives. Egypt has sealed its border
and refused to let distraught Palestinians enter its
territory.

“Israel, all along, has not been prepared to enter into
diplomatic process that gives the Palestinians a viable
state,” Falk said. “They [the Israelis] feel time is on
their side. They feel they can create enough facts on
the ground so people will come to the conclusion a viable
state cannot emerge.”

The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population
is one of the oldest forms of warfare. I watched the
Bosnian Serbs employ the same tactic in Sarajevo. Those
who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible
rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence
and abuse.

A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack
of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy
whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an Israel
checkpoint does not forget. A family that loses a child
in an airstrike does not forget. All who endure
humiliation, abuse and the murder of family members do
not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who,
eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any
wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a
school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a
“martyr”?

The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan, are foolishly breeding the next
generation of militants and Islamic radicals. Jihadists,
enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the United
States, seek to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery,
even at the cost of their own lives. The violence
unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the
violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the
tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel.

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Chris Hedges, who covered the Mideast for The New York
Times for seven years
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