Worse Than Apartheid
[the Gaza Strip]
by Chris Hedges
www.truthdig.com/, December18,
2006
Israel has spent the last five months
unleashing missiles, attack helicopters and jet fighters over
the densely packed concrete hovels in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli
army has made numerous deadly incursions, and some 500 people,
nearly all civilians, have been killed and 1,600 more wounded.
Israel has rounded up hundreds of Palestinians, destroyed Gaza's
infrastructure, including its electrical power system and key
roads and bridges, carried out huge land confiscations, demolished
homes and plunged families into a crisis that has caused widespread
poverty and malnutrition.
Civil society itself-and this appears
to be part of the Israeli plan-is unraveling. Hamas and Fatah
factions battle in the streets, despite a tenuous cease-fire,
threatening civil war. And the governing Palestinian movement,
Hamas, has said it will boycott early elections called by Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, done with the blessing of the
West in a bid to toss Hamas out of power. (Remember that Hamas,
despite its repugnant politics, was democratically elected.) In
recent days armed groups loyal to Abbas have seized Hamas-run
ministries in what looks like a coup.
The stark reality of Gaza, however, has
failed to penetrate the consciousness of most Americans, who,
when they notice the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, prefer
to debate the merits of the word "apartheid" in former
President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not
Apartheid." It is a sad commentary on the gutlessness of
the U.S. press and the timidity of the Democratic opposition that
most Americans are not aware of the catastrophic humanitarian
crisis they bear so much responsibility in creating. Palestinians
are not only dying, their olive trees uprooted, their farmland
and homes destroyed and their aquifers taken away from them, but
on many days they can't move because of Israeli "closures"
that make basic tasks, like buying food and going to the hospital,
nearly impossible. These Palestinians, after decades of repression,
cannot return to land from which they were expelled. The 140-plus
U.N. votes to censure Israel and two Security Council resolutions-both
vetoed by the United States-are blithly ignored. Is it any wonder
that the Palestinians, gasping for air, rebel as the walls close
in around them, as their children go hungry and as the Israelis
turn up the violence?
Palestinians in Gaza live encased in a
squalid, overcrowded ghetto, surrounded by the Israeli military
and a massive electric fence, unable to leave or enter the strip
and under daily assault. The word "apartheid," given
the wanton violence employed against the Palestinians, is tepid.
This is more than apartheid. The concerted Israeli attempts
to orchestrate a breakdown in law and order, to foster chaos and
rampant deprivation, are on public display in the streets of Gaza
City, where Palestinians walk past the rubble of the Palestinian
Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the
Ministry of National Economy, the office of the Palestinian prime
minister and a number of educational institutions that have been
bombed by Israeli jets. The electricity generation plant, providing
45 percent of the electricity of the Gaza Strip, has been wiped
out, and even the primitive electricity networks and transmitters
that remain have been repeatedly bombed. Six bridges linking
Gaza City with the central Gaza Strip have been blown up and main
arteries cratered into obliteration. And the West Bank is rapidly
descending into a crisis of Gaza proportions. The juxtaposition
of what is happening in Gaza and what is being debated on the
U.S. airwaves about a book that is little more than a basic primer
on the conflict reinforces the impression most outside our gates
have of Americans living in a distorted, bizarre reality of our
own creation.
What do Israel and Washington believe
they will gain by turning Gaza and the West Bank into a miniature
version of Iraq? How do they think people who are desperate,
deprived of hope, dignity and a way to make a living, under attack
from one of the most technologically advanced armies on the planet,
will respond? Do they believe that creating a Hobbesian nightmare
for the Palestinians will blunt terrorism, curb suicide attacks
and foster peace? Do they not see that the rest of the Middle
East watches the slaughter in horror and rage-its angry, disenfranchised
young men and women determined to overcome feelings of impotence
and humiliation, even at the cost of their own lives?
And perhaps they do see and understand
all this. Israel and Washington probably do get the recruiting
value of this repression for Islamic militants. But these Israeli
attacks, despite the rage and violence they breed against Israelis
and against us, also create conditions so intolerable that Palestinians
can no longer reside on their land. More than 160,000 civil servants
have not received full salaries for almost nine months. These
government employees support families that number more than a
million Palestinians. And a United Nations report states that
more than two-thirds of Palestinians are now living below the
poverty line. The unemployment rate is more than 50 percent. The
Palestinian Foreign Ministry says 10,000 Palestinians have emigrated
in the last four months and almost 50,000 others have applied
to leave.
Israel, with no restraints from Washington,
despite the Iraq Study Group report recommendations that the peace
process be resurrected from the dead, has been given the moral
license by the Bush administration to carry out what is euphemistically
in Israel called "transfer" and what in other parts
of the world is called ethnic cleansing. Faced with a demographic
time bomb, knowing that by 2020 Jews will make up only 40 to 46
percent of the overall population of Israel, the architects of
transfer, who once held the equivalent status in Israeli society
of the Ku Klux Klan, have wormed their way into positions of power
in the Israeli government.
Washington and Israel, I suspect, know
the cost of this repression. But it is beginning to appear as
though they accept it-as the price for ridding themselves of the
Palestinians. _Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has installed
in his Cabinet a politician who openly calls for the expulsion
of the some 1.3 million Israeli Arabs who live inside Israel.
Avigdor Lieberman's "Israel Is Our Home" Party, part
of Olmert's governing coalition, proposes involuntary transfer
in a region populated mostly by Arab citizens of Israel, shifting
those people to a future Palestinian state that would include
Gaza, parts of the West Bank and a small slice of northern Israel.
All Israeli Arabs who continued to reside in the territory of
transfer would automatically lose their Israeli citizenship unless
they took a loyalty oath to the state and its Jewish symbols.
The inclusion of Lieberman, the David Duke of Israel, into the
Cabinet is an indication to most Palestinians that the worst is
yet to come.
The debate over Jimmy Carter's book, one
that dishes up a fair number of Israeli myths about itself and
states a reality that is acknowledged even by most Israelis, misses
the point. The question is not whether Israel practices apartheid.
Apartheid is a fond dream for most Palestinians. The awful question
is rather will Israel be able to unleash a policy so draconian
and cruel that it will obliterate a community that has lived on
this land for centuries. There are other, far more loaded words
for what is happening to the Palestinians. One shudders to repeat
them. But unchecked, unstopped, the current wave of violence
and abuse meted out to the Palestinians will echo down the corridors
of history as one of the greatest moral and tactical blunders
of the early part of this century, one that will boomerang on
Israel and on us, bringing to our own doorsteps the evil we have
allowed to be delivered to the narrow alleys and refugee camps
in Gaza. When it was only apartheid, we had some hope.
Chris
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