Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea... The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world.
Well, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and darkness... Gaza was always an insurrectionary place... Gaza is not going to be tamed now.
Chris Hedges, at Truthdig: 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 UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, has labeled what Israel is doing in Gaza as '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...
'It is an unfolding catastrophe that each day poses Gazans to an unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to survive,' Falk has said of the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza... 'It is macabre. 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.' ...
The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population is one of the oldest forms of warfare... 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 Israeli 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.
