08-02-2014, 04:25 AM
a jewish friend of mine just wrote and send me this essay,I thought I share
Yesterday, 1 August, was the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising by the people of Warsaw (resistance fighters and ordinary citizens) against the Nazi regime, which had conquered and occupied their city. Some German soldiers were killed, but the number of Polish resistance fighters and civilians who died in the fighting and in the brutal Nazi retaliation that followed was enormous, dwarfing by many fold the number of casualties on the occupiers’ side. The Uprising is remembered today with pride as a demonstration of a people’s courage, dedication and integrity.
Historical parallels are misleading and even dangerous to draw. The times, places, people, historical circumstances, geopolitical context—all were utterly different from and incomparable with the current Israeli onslaught in Gaza. But one thing was the same: the number of Gazan resisters and civilians killed (over 1600, as I write this) and wounded—a large proportion of them children, women, and other noncombatants—is way disproportionate to the number of soldiers and civilians killed on the occupiers’ side.
That fact—the overwhelming disproportion in the number of casualties on the Gazan and Israeli sides—sticks in my moral craw, raising an irreducible moral revulsion. Obviously, this is not much of a fight.
Remember, Gaza, one of the most densely populated human agglomerations on earth, is entirely surrounded along its land borders by an Israeli-built and -manned impenetrable wall, and is heavily blockaded along its coast to such a degree that even fishing from small boats in its coastal waters is prohibited. In other words, the people of Gaza are trapped in what has been called the world’s largest prison. They have nowhere to go, nowhere to run to when they are attacked.
Hamas’s firecrackers, which the media calls missiles, the main weapon of its resistance to the illegal nearly half-century long Israeli occupation of its territory, have inflicted no significant material harm on Israel thus far, in part because they are so inaccurate and impotent, and in part because of Israel’s American funded defense system. In short, for Israel, the operation against Gaza is like shooting fish in a barrel with impunity.
So why don’t the Gazans end their fruitless and hopeless provocations? But then what are they supposed to do? Meekly accept their status as an illegally occupied territory? Meekly accept the fact that their lives are dependent on Israel’s largesse or otherwise with regard to their supply of food, medicines, construction material, etc.? Meekly accept the fact that movement in their own homeland is at the absolute discretion of a foreign power whose agents can and do stop and frisk and as often as not humiliate them?
All this is old news. But what truly disturbs, nay, even frightens me this time is the diametrical opposition between Western governments’ reaction to the Warsaw Uprising against that city’s Nazi occupation, and their reaction to the Gazans’ resistance against their occupation by Israel. The unanimity with which Western governments support Israel’s attacks on and invasion of Gaza, most starkly illustrated by the US Senate’s unanimously adopted resolution, which “reaffirms support for Israel’s right to defend its citizens and ensure the survival of the State of Israel [and] call[ing] on Hamas to immediately cease all rocket and other attacks against Israel” and which doesn’t call on Israel to do anything at all other than it is doing, bespeaks a moral bankruptcy on the part of Western governments and much of the mainstream media—which also uncritically support Israel’s actions—as well.
Have Western governments entirely lost their common-sense moral compasses, as they watch and yet still approve of and affirm the Israeli military machine’s virtually unopposed killing of innocents by the dozen every day? That’s what’s happening, happening right in our faces, in our living rooms, live on TV!
Yes, the action on the ground is hedged about with all sorts of geopolitical, economic, ethnic, religious, national-interest considerations. And these are the criteria Western governments employ to decide on what courses of action they will follow.
But what seems to me to be the one overriding criterion that should be exclusively in the spotlight, and to which all other considerations should take a back seat, is stopping the slaughter of innocents! And that surely would be the case if the numbers were reversed and it was dozens of innocent Israelis who were being killed every day. But the blood and guts and bricks and mortar spilling onto the streets of Gaza have become the backdrop for the apparently much more important considerations of Western leaders and governments. The people of Gaza do truly seem to be, as one Palestinian spokesman put it in a BBC interview the other day, “children of a lesser God.”
Yesterday, 1 August, was the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Uprising by the people of Warsaw (resistance fighters and ordinary citizens) against the Nazi regime, which had conquered and occupied their city. Some German soldiers were killed, but the number of Polish resistance fighters and civilians who died in the fighting and in the brutal Nazi retaliation that followed was enormous, dwarfing by many fold the number of casualties on the occupiers’ side. The Uprising is remembered today with pride as a demonstration of a people’s courage, dedication and integrity.
Historical parallels are misleading and even dangerous to draw. The times, places, people, historical circumstances, geopolitical context—all were utterly different from and incomparable with the current Israeli onslaught in Gaza. But one thing was the same: the number of Gazan resisters and civilians killed (over 1600, as I write this) and wounded—a large proportion of them children, women, and other noncombatants—is way disproportionate to the number of soldiers and civilians killed on the occupiers’ side.
That fact—the overwhelming disproportion in the number of casualties on the Gazan and Israeli sides—sticks in my moral craw, raising an irreducible moral revulsion. Obviously, this is not much of a fight.
Remember, Gaza, one of the most densely populated human agglomerations on earth, is entirely surrounded along its land borders by an Israeli-built and -manned impenetrable wall, and is heavily blockaded along its coast to such a degree that even fishing from small boats in its coastal waters is prohibited. In other words, the people of Gaza are trapped in what has been called the world’s largest prison. They have nowhere to go, nowhere to run to when they are attacked.
Hamas’s firecrackers, which the media calls missiles, the main weapon of its resistance to the illegal nearly half-century long Israeli occupation of its territory, have inflicted no significant material harm on Israel thus far, in part because they are so inaccurate and impotent, and in part because of Israel’s American funded defense system. In short, for Israel, the operation against Gaza is like shooting fish in a barrel with impunity.
So why don’t the Gazans end their fruitless and hopeless provocations? But then what are they supposed to do? Meekly accept their status as an illegally occupied territory? Meekly accept the fact that their lives are dependent on Israel’s largesse or otherwise with regard to their supply of food, medicines, construction material, etc.? Meekly accept the fact that movement in their own homeland is at the absolute discretion of a foreign power whose agents can and do stop and frisk and as often as not humiliate them?
All this is old news. But what truly disturbs, nay, even frightens me this time is the diametrical opposition between Western governments’ reaction to the Warsaw Uprising against that city’s Nazi occupation, and their reaction to the Gazans’ resistance against their occupation by Israel. The unanimity with which Western governments support Israel’s attacks on and invasion of Gaza, most starkly illustrated by the US Senate’s unanimously adopted resolution, which “reaffirms support for Israel’s right to defend its citizens and ensure the survival of the State of Israel [and] call[ing] on Hamas to immediately cease all rocket and other attacks against Israel” and which doesn’t call on Israel to do anything at all other than it is doing, bespeaks a moral bankruptcy on the part of Western governments and much of the mainstream media—which also uncritically support Israel’s actions—as well.
Have Western governments entirely lost their common-sense moral compasses, as they watch and yet still approve of and affirm the Israeli military machine’s virtually unopposed killing of innocents by the dozen every day? That’s what’s happening, happening right in our faces, in our living rooms, live on TV!
Yes, the action on the ground is hedged about with all sorts of geopolitical, economic, ethnic, religious, national-interest considerations. And these are the criteria Western governments employ to decide on what courses of action they will follow.
But what seems to me to be the one overriding criterion that should be exclusively in the spotlight, and to which all other considerations should take a back seat, is stopping the slaughter of innocents! And that surely would be the case if the numbers were reversed and it was dozens of innocent Israelis who were being killed every day. But the blood and guts and bricks and mortar spilling onto the streets of Gaza have become the backdrop for the apparently much more important considerations of Western leaders and governments. The people of Gaza do truly seem to be, as one Palestinian spokesman put it in a BBC interview the other day, “children of a lesser God.”
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