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It’s harder every day to read about Gaza. I go to the sports page, do the crossword puzzle, even check out the celebrity gossip. It’s so bad that I read about the economic cataclysm we’re facing in order to avoid confronting the daily atrocities from Palestine. But avoidance only works for so long, and I finally decide to find out what horrors Israel has committed over the previous 24 hours. That this attack has continued and the U.S. media reports on it so casually is an obscenity. And, while I won’t go into a discourse on “weapons of the weak” or the relative merits of Hamas vis-a-vis the “state terror” of Tel Aviv, I do believe, firmly and potently, that the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza are worse than Hamas, worse than al-Qaeda, worse than the various anti-U.S. groups operating in Iraq.
Israel is a sovereign state with an awesome military arsenal, much of it courtesy of you and me and the rest of tax-paying Americans. It has a level of legitimacy and is considered a “democracy” by a media full more of myrmidons than reporters. It has controlled Gaza-which was essentially populated in 1948 by Arabs driven out of other villages by Israel-for over a half century, and has occupied it since 1967. Israel has regularly attacked, shelled, invaded, bulldozed, starved, and kept medicine away from the people of Gaza. Unlike a spontaneous terror attack plotted by a non-state agent, like al-Qaeda on 9/11/01, governments in Tel Aviv have for years, with deliberation and calculation, murdered many times more Palestinians that were Americans killed on 9/11. Their actions, to repeat, are worse than terrorism.
Gaza is about 140 square miles, or less than a quarter of Houston, Texas, where I live. I’ve lately taken to asking people around me how they’d feel about a foreign nation invading Houston with over 10,000 troops, armor and support Apache helicopters and F-16 Fighter Jets. That’s not a “conflict” or a “war” or whatever the American media calls it. It’s a carnage, an act of state terror that in as unimaginable to me as it is unconscionable. It’s like Ali in his prime getting in the ring with a Golden Gloves fighter; like the Yankees, with Roger Clemens on steroids on the mound, playing a Little League team; like the Dream Team against Angola in 1992. All the usual caveats about Hamas and how terrible their own actions are ring hollow. The obligatory denunciations of Arab terrorism are shallow and unnecessary in light of what Tel Aviv is doing. Israel is a modern military state with the will to destroy. Gazans, no matter how bad Hamas is, are simply being annihilated.
Not only is Israel physically killing and crushing Gaza, it controls access into and out of the area, for people and goods. In contravention of the Geneva Convention, it is destroying the welfare of the people, allowing a small trickle of food, water and medicine in-less than ten percent of the minimum needed according to UN officials on the ground. Fuel and electricity are in short supply and increasingly absent. It would be Orwellian to even call the situation “dire.” It is much worse than that-it’s a humanitarian crisis and a war crime.
Just a few of the recent “highlights” of the Israeli terror [all reports are based on stories from various mainstream media]:
On 5 January Israeli troops commandeered high rise buildings in Gaza, expelled the residents and started shooting at what they deemed Hamas fighters in the streets below. An unknown number of Palestinians, including at least a dozen children were killed, and fuel and water was cut off to hundreds of thousands.
Amid this carnage, the Grey Lady did let us know that a Hamas rocket hit an empty school in Ashdod, Israel and littered the floor with dolls and shrapnel, surely a commensurate level of violence.
On 6 January, Israel, for the second day in a row, struck a U.N. school and killed at least 12. The school was being used as a shelter for people displaced by earlier Israel attacks which destroyed their homes.
At the same time, the Israeli ground offensive deepened into Gaza, pushing further southward toward Khan Yunis, its second largest city. Israel struck another school and killed three U.N. workers. Four Israelis were killed by friendly fire.
On 9 January, Israel shelled a family compound in Gaza and killed 30 members of an extended family. Relief workers could not reach the site for days as Israel denied access to U.N. officials in the aftermath of the attack. Navanethem Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for an investigation because such incidents “display elements of what could constitute war crimes.”
Obviously Tel Aviv had little concern that it would in fact be investigated for on 10 January it warned Gazans to expect more and more intense attacks, based on its argument that the general popular was harboring Hamas and therefore was fair game. An Israeli tank shell that day also killed 8 Palestinians, raising the death toll to over 800, compared to about a dozen Israelis [and if friendly-fire KIAs are excluded, the number killed by Hamas is in the single digits]. Of course, it is no surprise that any U.N. warnings about war crimes would not affect Israel. No nation has ignored, dismissed or violated more United Nations resolutions than Israel, and it can do so with the safe assurance that Washington-whether led by Democrats or Republicans-will handle Tel Aviv’s affairs in much the way a mafia don takes care of his caporegimes.
Today, 11 January, Gazan doctors are reporting that Israel is using white phosphorous, which sears the flesh, and have treated at least 10 patients, including children, who have skin peeling off their faces and bodies. Again, the U.N. is being prevented from investigating these allegations.
Perhaps, like the Israeli invasion of Lebanan in 2006, this terror will expose the shortcomings of Israel’s warmaking capabilities, but the price being paid by Gazans is hard to comprehend. Israel’s standing in the world is plummeting and the so-called Arab Street is increasingly demanding that their often-collaborationist governments take a stand in defense of the Palestinians. The Middle East, a miasma already, is becoming more incendiary daily. Perhaps that is Tel Aviv’s goal-to maintain a political system of constant chaos and horror to divert attention from its own actions.
In the long-term, though, Israel cannot succeed. For a half-century it has been America’s “cop on the beat” in the region, and in some ways, the American aid sent to Tel Aviv was money well spent. But Israel is playing with too much fire at a time when there are too many potential powderkegs.
Even if he hasn’t been inaugurated yet, Barack Obama’s silence is eroding his moral standing. No one could expect the Bush administration to do anything but support Israel’s terror, but Obama, even if he did go beggaring before pro-Israel groups during the campaign, did engage in the rhetoric of diplomacy.
Right now, none of that matters in Gaza so long as Israel continues to strike, to attack, to shell, to invade, to kill civilians and U.N. officials, to engage in terrorism backed by state sovereignty and high-tech weaponry.
At key moments in the past-Spain in 1936, the Holocaust, Munich in 1972, for instance-the world stopped and saw the horror that was unfolding, and pled for help, pled to put a stop to it.
Today, more than at any time since the World War II generation, the world has to stand up and put a stop to Israel’s terror in Gaza.
As professors, writers, scholars, concerned citizens, the least we can do is take a stand-not stand aside in the interests of “balance” or “objectivity” and not accept the apologetics for Israel that dominate the media.
At times like this I often think of Noam Chomsky’s thoughts on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” and try to tell others about his words: “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies… it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective… The question, ‘what have I done?’ is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam – as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.”
Bob Buzzanco
Professor, Department of History, University of Houston; Ph.D. from The Ohio State University; Author and editor of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy; recipient of Bernath Book Prize [1996] and Bernath Lecture Prize [1999]. buzz@uh.edu; http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/buzzanco.htm