Letter to the Editor

With blood in the streets, filtered coverage in the US leads to a mass of opinion between apathy and indignant support for atrocities. Protesters take to the streets, while governments look away. What is wrong with this picture?

After a week of bombing the trapped and starved population of Gaza with F16s (made in the USA) and Apache helicopters (ditto), Israel has sent in their ground forces of 10s of thousands of soldiers with armored tanks and M16s. The General Assembly of the UN condemned the assault and called for a cease fire, but the Security Council didn’t even try to come up with a resolution. George Bush cheered them on, and a smug Nancy Pelosi gave her blessing to the necessary action by our good friend Israel. The Arab League met, but couldn’t agree on statement, so they didn’t make one. Various EU countries have expressed displeasure, but the current EU President, from Czech Republic, said that they understood Israel’s need to take action. Egypt has sealed the Rafah crossing to make sure no victims escape.

Meanwhile, as Arabs watch daily tv images from Gaza of the death and destruction in horror, American News is purged of the grotesque images of dead babies and their collapsed homes, of hospitals full of wounded, but lacking medicine and tools, of the blood running in the streets. We are blindered like a skittish racehorse, that might bolt if startled. Even so, some of us find ways to be informed, and take to the streets in protest. All over the world, people are in the streets demonstrating their rage and frustration. But nothing changes.

I wrote the following letter to the editor of the New York Times a couple of days after the bombing began. I haven’t heard from them, so it is safe to assume that they are not interested in printing my opinion. So, here it is:

Dear Editor,
A few days ago, I went through your online slideshow of the Israeli attack on Gaza. It struck me that you did not carry a single one of the photos (widely available in the international press) of the dead and wounded children, and the collapsed apartment houses in Gaza.

In today’s paper, you devote an entire article to the question of why Hamas ended the ceasefire with Israel. This is very misleading because Hamas did not end the ceasefire with Israel. The ceasefire had a particular time dimension, and it ended because it was over. A renewal would have been necessary to continue it. To my knowledge, neither Israel or Hamas took an initiative to renew the ceasefire. At the time the ceasefire began, Israel and Hamas were negotiating in Egypt and had a connection. Currently, that connection is broken.

During the course of the ceasefire, Israel killed more than 20 Palestinians in Palestine. Hamas rockets killed 0 Israelis. During this period Israel has besieged Gaza, with the result that people have been going without food, electricity and the basic necessities of life. There is sewage in the streets from the shutdown of electricity to processing plants and hospitals don’t have the medications and equipment necessary to effectively do their jobs. Who knows how many people died without appropriate medical care, and how many of the deaths of babies and the elderly and the chronically ill were caused by the lack of adequate medical resources.

Israel has suggested that the ceasefire be renewed based on certain absolute conditions, but since they had already violated the current ceasefire, and by the end, neither party believed the other was abiding by the ceasefire, Hamas rejected this hypocritical initiative. The only meaningful action would have been an invitation to a new negotiation. Instead, Israel put in to motion a plan that was made before the cease fire began. Prior to the ceasefire, Ehud Barak stated that they would spend the time preparing to attack Gaza, and though he thought Hamas might use the time to muscle up as well, he needed the time to prepare a successful assault. This is exactly the same pattern as led up to the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006. Israel prepared to do battle, then waited for a suitable trigger to justify their incursion. In both cases, the justification is exceedingly slim, given the onslaught it was supposed to justify.

No other country in the world could justify a retaliation rate of 100+ to 1 victims. Meanwhile, for those who think that all this has nothing to do with us, consider the following. In the last 6 months, the US provided Israel with a small fortune in spare parts for the F16 fighter planes they are using to prosecute the current assault (can I call it a massacre) and thousands of gallons of jet fuel (you may remember that gas prices were off the scale for a while) to power those planes.

Over the years, Israel, and their military establishment in particular, have been the single largest recipient of American aid in the world. In the face of world wide condemnation, George Bush and Nancy Pelosi have come out in strong support of Israel’s actions (dare I say atrocities), and even Obama’s spokesman has asserted a measure of approval. No surprise, I suppose, as over the years, the US has vetoed or voted against every single UN resolution in support of Palestinian rights since resolution 242, which followed the 1967 war, a deliberately ambiguous assertion that Israel return the occupied territories to their owners.

We rarely hear the word ‘Zionist’ in this country, because the ‘Zionist’ agenda is antithetical to everything we believe in. We defend the rights of Jews to survive, which seems like a big deal after the European Holocaust. And it is a big deal, but times have changed. Israel is a relatively wealthy country, modernized and armed by donations from all over the world, as well as due to their own industry. Their so-called enemy is a ragtag group of refugees with no where to go, a few smuggled weapons to defend themselves, and home-made rockets that look like over-sized bottle-rockets. Moreover, they are constantly divided by initiatives to co-opt their leadership to the Zionist agenda through various mechanisms. Zionism is antithetical to religious freedom and militantly expansionist. It is a movement based on racial purity.

Zionism is not the same thing as Judaism, or being Jewish, though they would like to convince Jews around the world that it is. Zionism has, in fact, become the mirror image of the Nazism, the dark power that gave birth to it in it’s present form.

It seems to me that we, in the US have become a cold and heartless people. We look on the devastation of innocent, trapped victims, not with glee or satisfaction, but with a cold righteousness and indifference to their suffering. We coldly condemn youthful rock throwers to death, while rallying behind an army with the latest technology as it is turned on innocent civilians repeatedly and with impunity. I don’t like to see Americans this way, but after seeing the reaction to this event, it is unavoidable. I have to ask, what is the limit of loyalty, and what level of deaf dumb and blindness is necessary to maintain it?

Biased press coverage of the event, and unequivocal political support contribute to this attitude. In the US, the people are supposed to direct the government, but in this case, we are being led and misled by our government and the press as well. We hear so much about the holocaust, and we wonder how the Germans could have followed along. Maybe this is the answer.

Sincerely,

Judith