We have the power
Why we must act to help the people of Gaza, urges JEREMY CORBYN.
SIX HUNDRED dead and 2,500 injured is the current price of Israel’s 11-day onslaught on Gaza. Its blood-stained assault is the culmination of the abject failure of Western strategy in the Middle East since 2005.
That was the year in which the first democratic elections in Palestine for the presidency and assembly were supposed to mark a step on the road towards the recognition of Palestine as an an independent state, with the complete withdrawal by Israel from Gaza and a partial withdrawal in the West Bank.
But the result didn’t go to plan.
While Palestinians elected Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas as president, they handed Hamas a parliamentary majority.
Israel’s response was swift. It rounded up 74 parliamentarians and threw them in jail. Today, 40 remain in custody without charge or any prospect of a trial.
The US and EU, meanwhile, promoted economic and political support for the West Bank while allowing Israel to continue its blockade of Gaza unhindered. It joined Tel Aviv in ritual condemnation of the Hamas leadership.
A ceasefire agreed between Hamas and Israel was respected by the Islamist movement until Israel carried out a major offensive in the West Bank. When Tel Aviv failed to end its siege of Gaza as agreed, the ceasefire was again broken by Hamas.
Normally 450 lorries a day enter the strip bearing essential supplies to sustain Gaza’s 1.5 million population. Under the Israeli blockade, this fell to fewer than 80 lorries a day, helping to create the humanitarian disaster now unfolding in the strip.
Much has been made of attacks using home-made rockets upon Israel and their military impact has been greatly exaggerated. Obviously, it is wrong that they should be fired and that any casualties should be caused. But these attacks are no excuse for 600 air raids and an orgy of killing.
Israel has flouted every UN resolution ever passed concerning the rights of Palestinian people. It has constructed a wall that has been declared illegal by the World Court and it has forced collective punishment on the people of Gaza by controlling all travel and by denying access to the basic necessities of life.
The Israelis are led by President Shimon Peres, a man addicted to office irrespective of the policies of the administration in which he is serving, and the squabbling twins of Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni. They are engaged in a macabre competition to see who can be the most brutal towards the Palestinian people. Theirs is a crude electoral game played with an eye on elections for prime minister next month.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu is waiting in the wings. He has a proven record of killing far more people than this and is ready to do battle.
The EU has called for a ceasefire and issued various statements suggesting that Israel ought to halt the bombardment of Gaza as it is wholly disproportionate to the alleged cause for their actions.
However, at no stage has the EU even suggested that there could be any political or diplomatic reaction to Israel’s behaviour. The current bilateral trade agreement between Israel and the EU is due to be upgraded. If Israel is granted associated status, in the past a step on the road towards full EU membership, it will gain even greater access to EU trade and aid.
If any other country anywhere else in the world had behaved in the way that Israel has in the past 11 days, never mind the past 60 years, it would be roundly condemned by every government.
But there is an unspoken bottom line that Israel need fear no retribution for its actions. The US administration has not even called for a ceasefire. George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice have fallen neatly in line with Israel’s depiction that this is a war of equals. Yet this supposed war of equals is being waged by a nuclear-armed power against a largely unarmed Gazan population.
The US, with the support of the British government, has ensured through its security council veto that there has been no ceasefire call from the UN.
Another security council meeting takes place today in New York. The very least that it could do is condemn Israel for the huge loss of civilian life, including the bombing of a UN school in Gaza yesterday, which has reportedly killed at least 40 people.
Next Monday, Foreign Secretary David Miliband will report to the House of Commons on the British government’s participation in the various EU efforts to bring about a ceasefire.
But will he recognise that ordinary public opinion in Britain has been steadily moving in favour of the rights of Palestinian people?
There has been an avalanche of support for the victims of Israel’s behaviour. Support for Jews for Justice for Palestinians has increased, as has the participation of people in demonstrations such as the massive march through London last Sunday and the daily demonstrations at the US embassy.
Ordinary people have been emailing, phoning and faxing their MPs to demand action as they are bombarded with daily images of the carnage in Gaza. Support for Israel in Parliament has been steadily reducing and is now much more limited than in the past.
Not only is the continued oppression of Palestinians appalling for the individuals concerned but it can only lay the foundations for greater conflict in the future.
The time is long past for the rest of the world to unreservedly condemn Israel’s behaviour.
The increasingly militant hardline leadership in Israel must be isolated.
This time, the plight of the Palestinian people will not wait as they are dying in their hundreds and starving in their thousands.
The neighbouring governments that have so far failed to open the crossing points or effectively condemn Israel will soon be feeling the wrath of popular opinion in their own communities.
We often feel a sense of helplessness in these situations. But we can apply force to the political process in Britain and join in the massive numbers of protests and street demonstrations that are being held every day.
For the people of Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank, it means more than we can know.
There is a national demonstration in London this Saturday January 10. Assemble 12.30pm at Hyde Park Corner. Visit www.palestinecampaign.org for more information on this and other actions.
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Peace and Justice Post 
Allowing the Destruction of Palestine, We Die Hungry Too
January 7, 2009Published on Tuesday, January 6, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
by Ru Freeman
Today’s New York Times highlights the plight of the Samouni family in Gaza who lost eleven of their members despite their calls to the Red Cross to help them evacuate from Gaza, and after the order from the Israeli military forces, who occupied their home, to relocate to another building. Masouda al-Samouni lost her husband, mother in law and her 10 month old son for whom she had been preparing food. “He died hungry,” she said.
Let us set aside the business of occupation and military aggression for a moment and reflect on the words of Major Avital Leibovich, a spokesman for the Israeli Defence Forces who repeats the oft repeated: Hamas has built its network among civilians and therefore civilians are collateral damage. The entire Gaza strip is 360 square km. That is just about 50 sq. km. larger than New York City. Should the rest of the neighboring states here decide to surround the city of New York, cut off access to it or departure from it, ignore its elected leaders, withold its legally earned revenue, set up refugee camps and periodically bulldoze them as well as adjoining neighborhoods, starve the people, cut off their water and their electricity and prevent the supply of humanitarian aid, where would the city’s resistance reside? I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be congregating en masse down 5th Avenue.
In the occupied territories of Palestine – and I call them that because we are all intelligent enough to know that occupation does not have to mean physical presence, it is the power to deny human freedoms and to prevent the right to the conduct of normal life – there are no families left who have not suffered a loss at the hands of the IDF. That makes every Gazan a victim. That makes every Gazan have anger toward the IDF. That does not make every Gazan deserving of murder.
Collateral damage is an easy term to toss around. The term collateral comes from the Latin and its meaning is not only “parallel,” it is also “additional but subordinate.” The United States military defines it as being damage that “is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the military advantage anticipated by the attack.” Since when is the premeditated murder of an innocent human being, “subordinate” to anything? How, exactly, do we define “excess?” Would we have mourned less if nobody had gone to work on 9/11 and only a few janitors and an over-zealous upper manager or two were killed? Is there a certain number after which we begin to pay attention? When our basic human instinct to feel for one another, to mourn the death of another like us, kicks in?
In 1994, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire watched as his troops, sent for peace-keeping, were withdrawn over the death of ten Belgian soldiers. He went on to write a book, Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, in which he poses the question, why did the deaths of ten Belgians matter so greatly, and the death of eight hundred thousand Rwandans matter so little?
The question for us today is the same. We have the UN inside Palestine, along with numerous other organizations including the Red Cross. Apparently, we care enough to maintain an international presence that can help eleviate the suffering of the people of Palestine. But we don’t care enough to stop the continuing massacre of those people. We don’t care enough to set aside our polite requests by international governments, not specific leaders, and our little European delgations flying hither and yon asking for a bit of mercy on behalf of those people, to put our feet down in the soil inside Palestine and say no.
In 2003, a 23 year old American activist, Rachel Corrie, had the guts to do what we refuse to do. She stood before a caterpillar bulldozer being driven by the IDF, to ask that they not destroy the home of a Palestinian family. Despite the attemts of her fellow activists to contact the American embassy, and the knowledge of the IDF about the presence of Rachel and other International Solidarity Movement volunteers in Rafah, Rachel was killed as her friends watched.
This country came together, not so long ago, to bring about a transformation that the world never expected of it. During those twenty months, and right up to the day of the presidential elections, we were all Rachel Corries, we were simply doing her work inside America. So long as we consider that to be sufficient contribution to the progress we desire, to the peace we seek, and to the change we want, we will all die hungry.
Ru Freeman is an author and activist. Her political journalism and cultural criticism has appeared internationally. Her novel, A Disobedient Girl, will be published in English and in translation in July, 2009.
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Tags:every Gazan a victim, false charges against Hamas, IDF, Israeli military aggression, Major Avital Leibovich, New York Times, Ru Freeman
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