by Khalid Amayreh, Occupied East Jerusalem - Oct 30, 2007While the world is looking on passively, Israel is perfecting its strangulation of the Gaza Strip’s 1.4 million civilians.
On Sunday, Oct. 28, the Israeli army reduced by more than 20% fuel supplies to the Strip. More cuts are slated to take place in the next few days and weeks, according to Israeli officials.
Last week, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered a gradual cutoff of fuel and electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip, ostensibly in preparation for a deep blitz into the occupied coastal territory. Given past experience, hundreds of mostly innocent Palestinians can be expected be murdered and maimed in such a blitz.
Barak, a certified war criminal for his role, as Prime Minister, in the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians , including children, in 2000 and 2001, is using the recurrent firing of homemade projectiles from Gaza onto nearby Jewish colonies, as a pretext for his long-anticipated campaign of murder and terror against the impoverished territory.
Barak also want to use another wave of bloodshed and terror in Gaza in order enhance his own popularity and public standing ahead of possible general elections in Israel.
Needless to say, killing and tormenting Palestinians has always been the most effective tactic to win elections in Israel where the Jewish public has been for years drifting toward right-wing jingoism.
The Qassam argument, often made to justify Israel’s Nazi-like approach toward the people of Gaza and Palestinians in general, is disingenuous and unacceptable.
In fact, one could argue that Israel has done everything possible to push Palestinian resistance fighters to resort to this desperate act to deter Israeli aggression.
Israel, which has been lying to the international community by claiming that it no longer occupies Gaza, has effectively turned that most densely populated spot on earth into a huge detention camp, very much like the Ghetto Warsaw.
In this huge open-air prison, 1.4 million Palestinians are confined to 300 square kilometers, with very little food, little water, rampant unemployment, and a huge reservoir of despair, indignation and poverty.
And at the top of all of this, the Israeli army, with its state-of-the-art technology of death, continues to murder and maim Palestinians, including civilians, on a daily basis.
More to the point, Israel doesn’t allow Gazans to travel abroad for work or medical care, causing numerous Gazans to succumb to their illnesses.
Last week, a Gaza middle-aged man died at the Eretz border terminal while awaiting indifferent Israeli occupation soldiers to allow him to enter Israel or travel to the West Bank for medical care.
Similarly, numerous other Palestinians, with chronic health problems, had to succumb to their illnesses because the “apple of God’s eye” wouldn’t give them mercy nor allow God’s mercy to reach them.
Israel’s callousness and criminality are also manifested in preventing Palestinians who had left Gaza from returning home.
There are really no objective justifications for this hateful policy toward a people thoroughly tormented by 40 years of a Nazi-like occupation.
Israeli leaders and apologetics routinely invoke the issue of terror. However, one is always prompted to ask what terror and what criminality is greater than keeping an entire people in a state of indescribable oppression for all these years?
Besides, what would any people on the face of earth do when faced with these hellish conditions?
Indeed, are Palestinians supposed to be denied access to food, work and basic necessities of life, and be killed and maimed and hounded and blockaded, and then remain silent?
The Palestinians authorities in Gaza have repeatedly proposed a total ceasefire with Israel whereby both sides would refrain from attacking the other. However, an characteristically insolent and bellicose Israel has always said “No” on the ground that Israel, the chosen, can’t be treated on equal footing with “terrorists.”!!!
The Israeli posture is very telling and needs no further explanation. Israel, like any other fascist-minded state is not after peace or coexistence with the Palestinian people, its enduring victims.
Instead, Israel simply wants to kill Palestinians, starve and torment them until they surrender to Zionist designs of ethnic cleansing, lebensraum and territorial aggrandizement.
But this the Palestinians won’t accept even if the entire Palestinian people at home and in the Diaspora were to perish.
Today the survival of the Palestinian people is the ultimate litmus test of human conscience everywhere because if Palestinians were to be let down by a world that is increasingly overwhelmed by spin and lies and ferocious capitalism, then this would be an absolute indicator that the world is on a sure course of moral demise and self-destruction.
On the other way, a brave stand against the powers of darkness and hegemony and darkness, e.g. Israel, its guardian-ally, the United States, and their allies, would be a soul-saver for humanity.
There is no doubt that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Likewise, resisting oppression and fascism will help the cause of freedom and justice everywhere in the world.
This is why all honest people on earth, people who will not cower before brute force, people who are willing to call the spade a spade, are called upon to rise up and take to the streets in order to send an unmistakable message to the Nazis of our time in Tel Aviv, who are now committing a slow-motion genocide in Gaza.
Don’t say “we didn’t know.”
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