Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

No one is enthusiastic about the latest escalation of violence in the Gaza Strip, except perhaps the warmongers in Tel Aviv and the American-backed Arab and Palestinian traitors who would do anything and go to any extent to please their masters in Washington, D.C.

In Israel, the Gaza Strip is becoming the central election issue in a country deeply menaced by political and religious extremism.

Israeli political leaders from right and left are already promising the Jewish public that they will destroy Gaza and murder untold thousands of poor Gazans if only they are elected in the 10 February polls.

Tzipi Livni, leader of the Kadima party, was quoted as saying on Sunday, 21 December, that if she becomes Israel’s next Prime Minister, she will destroy Hamas’s government in Gaza, using military, economic and diplomatic means.

Similar remarks have been voiced by other Israeli leaders, which really underscores the cannibalistic instincts and jingoistic trends permeating through the bulk of the Israeli Jewish society.

After all, experience shows that the more racist, more criminal and more vitriolic a given Israeli politician is perceived, the greater the likelihood he will be elected.

In contrast, an Israeli politician who advocates a humane approach toward the Palestinians, like, for example, calling for lifting the Nazi-like siege imposed on the 1.5 million innocent Gaza inhabitants, will be committing a political suicide. Such a politician would instantly be called “Self-hating Jew,” “Hamas lover,” or even “a Nazi.”

This background is essential for understanding the present situation in Gaza as the huge Israeli propaganda machine would have us believe that Israel is the victim of aggression and that the Palestinians are the aggressors.

Israel claims ad nauseam that its Nazi-like blockade of Gaza, which is a brazen violation of international law, is in response to the firing by Gaza guerillas of generally ineffective home-made projectiles known as Qassams.

This is simply a big lie. The Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip began immediately after Hamas won the legislative election in January 2006, and the main driving goal was to punish, as much as internationally acceptable, the people of Gaza and Palestinians in general for electing a government that Israel didn’t like.

Indeed, some Israeli leaders admitted then that Israel wanted to put the Palestinian on a diet, a euphemistic expression connoting the subsequent and continuing Israeli policy of starving and killing and savaging the people of Gaza very much like the Nazis did to Jews at Ghetto Warsaw in 1942-43.

Determined to survive, in spite of a malicious cruel world that preaches human rights while crushing human lives, Gazans appealed to everyone and anyone willing to listen all over the globe, but to no avail.

It was only after it became clear that Israel was hell bent on destroying Gaza and its inhabitants through a slow process of extermination that Gazans began firing these largely psychological weapons which inflict little damage and rarely cause human casualties among Israelis.

In June, Hamas agreed to stop all “belligerent acts and hostilities” against Israel in return for Israeli reciprocity and the lifting of the hermetic siege on the Strip which obliterated Gaza economy and caused the death of hundreds of innocent people.

However, instead of dealing in good will with the Egyptian-mediated understanding, Israel never lifted the siege nor allowed the reopening of the border crossings.

Using the words of a Gaza journalist, Israel resorted to the policy of “strangling Gaza to near death,” by preventing the delivery to Gaza of most consumer goods and products from vital medical material to food products.

More to the point, Israel did violate the ceasefire understanding several times, killing as many as 49 Palestinians from June-19 when the truce began to December-19 when it ended.

During that period, not a single Israeli civilian was killed by Palestinian factions in the Gaza strip.

Hence, one is always prompted to ask what the Palestinian Authorities in Gaza are supposed to do when Israel is effectively telling them that they have only two choices awaiting them, to die a slow agonizing death as a result of this criminal siege, or be killed and decimated by the Israeli occupation army.

A few months ago, this writer challenged a rabbi from the West Bank to ask his government to end the siege in Gaza and allow normal economic activities between Gaza and the outside world.

I assured him that if Israel were to carry out such a step, there would be a total stoppage of all attacks and hostile activities against Israeli settlements bordering the coastal territory.

Predictably, the Israeli government dismissed the proposal, telling the rabbi rather tersely that they respected his efforts.

Unfortunately, Israel is allowed to keep up starving and killing Gazans thanks to a hypocritical world whose leaders keep telling Israel that “it has the right to defend itself,” while utterly ignoring the fact that the Palestinians, too, have at least an equal right to life and human dignity.

How many western leaders have had the moral courage to visit the Gaza Strip and see the slow-motion holocaust on the ground?

How many western leaders have dared utter the politically innocuous but balanced view that Israel should lift the siege on Gaza and Palestinians ought to stop their nearly innocuous attacks on Israel?

Why is Tony Blair telling Israel that it has the right to bomb Gaza? Is he completely oblivious of the existence of 1.5 million human beings who have been forced into a situation that doesn’t really differ much form that faced by much of the European Jewry several decades ago?

How about Sarkozy, who claims to represent western enlightenment? How about the leaders of EU states? Do they all enjoy watching the people of Gaza getting savaged and killed by the crime against humanity, otherwise known as Israel.

Have all they succumbed to moral blindness and callousness in the face of an evil state that claims to be a light upon the nations while thinking, behaving and acting very much like the Third Reich?

Well, shame on you all. History won’t be kind to you.

-###-

By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem