{news} Oped published: The myth of balance in conflict over Gaza

[Justine McCabe]

(Danbury CT) News-Times
http://www.newstimes.com/opinion/ci_11424163
The myth of balance in conflict over Gaza
Newstimes
Updated: 01/10/2009 05:19:13 PM EST


We hear in response to Israel's ongoing massacre in Gaza that Israel has the right to defend itself from the Hamas government. 
While both sides had previously violated a truce begun in June 2008, Israel's massive attack inside Gaza on Nov. 4 predictably elicited Hamas rockets.

Already blockading Gaza since June 2007, Israel sealed it off completely on Nov. 5, causing life-threatening shortages of basic necessities -- food, fuel and medical supplies.

Under international law, neither Israel killing Palestinian civilians nor Gazans targeting Israeli civilians is justified.

But as Americans we need to understand that the true root of this violence is an illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing.

Until we, Israel's main supporter, stand up for international law by refusing to aid Israel until it complies with international law, we are guilty of aiding genocidal bullying. We are on the wrong side of history.

Our politicians and press divert us from this reality. They lead us to believe that Israelis and Palestinians are equal combatants, that Israel must defend itself from a terrorizing, inherently anti-Semitic enemy.

Israel buries the facts belying this myth as surely as its pilots buried Palestinian children under Gaza's Imad Aqel Mosque.

In fact, Israel is a bully -- nuclear-powered and the fourth largest military in the world -- who plays victim while terrorizing its neighborhood with billions of your tax dollars and mine.

Even before the current Gaza assault, Israel blockaded 1.5 million Gazans. Two-thirds of them are refugees from Israel; 80 percent live on less than $2 a day.


Unemployment hovers at 60 percent. In 2005, there were 3,900 factories; today, there are 195. There is little water, food, electricity, fuel and medicine. Israel denies the delivery of United Nations relief. All of this is collective punishment under the Geneva Conventions, Article 33.

Sound familiar? Think of the Iraq siege in the 1990s before the United States invaded that country on the pretext of an existential threat to Americans.

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, allowing the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed refugees in Sabra and Shatila. It then occupied a huge swath of Lebanon for 18 years.

In 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon again. It killed and injured thousands of civilians, leaving much of southern Lebanon uninhabitable because of unexploded cluster bomblets.

The fundamental source of the conflict is the expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine-Israel because they are not Jews.

In 1948 -- echoing our own national formative acts -- Israel ethnically cleansed 75 percent of the natives of historic Palestine, more than 750,000 Palestinian Christians and Muslims, all documented by Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris.

In further violation of international law and scores of United Nations resolutions, Israel prevents refugees from returning home.

Moreover, Israel maintains an apartheid South Africa-like system for its non-Jewish citizens, particularly the 20 percent who are Palestinian-Israelis.

In 1967, Israel seized the Syrian Golan Heights, Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

Again violating international law, including scores of Security Council resolutions and Geneva Conventions, Israel continues a belligerent occupation with ongoing colonization of Palestinian land by 400,000 Jewish-Israelis, 50 percent of whom settled during the Oslo "peace" process under President George H..W. Bush and President Bill Clinton.

These are offensive actions that only defend racist Israeli policies toward non-Jews.

If this were happening to you, wouldn't you experience an existential threat and resist, as most Palestinians do, by trying to stay on your land?

This conflict is David and Goliath in reverse. Palestinian Kassem rockets -- uncontrollable slingshots -- are little match for American F-16s, Apache attack helicopters and land and sea assaults. Gazans, among the densest populations on earth, have no escape, no bomb shelters like Israelis of Sderot, who can get away from danger.

Just compare Israeli and Palestinian child deaths between the start of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000 and August 2008 -- before Israel tightened its blockade in November, before the current massacre.

While each death is unequivocally tragic, these data reveal that more than 8.5 times as many Palestinian children (1,050) had been killed compared to the number of Israeli children (123).

This child death disparity is another heartbreaking touchstone for the vastly disproportionate power of two peoples inextricably linked by one homeland -- availability of relief services when people are injured, homes destroyed and gross imbalance in vital U.S. support and application of law.

Still, this imbalance points the way out: consistent enforcement of international law.

As anthropologist Talal Asad observes: "In the long perspective of human history, massacres are not new. But there is something special about the fact that the West, having set up international law, then finds reasons why it cannot be followed in particular circumstances."

Israel's assault on Palestinians -- with support from President George W. Bush and silence from President-elect Barack Obama -- is not only deeply disturbing and criminal but profoundly self-defeating.

How can peace come when myths rule, and law and justice are buried along with Palestinian and Israeli bodies?

Justine McCabe lives in New Milford. She is co-chair of the International Committee of the Green Party of the United States.
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