[WCUSP] Fwd: Worse than Apartheid

[yvonne simmons]

--- Regina Birchem <regbirchem at earthlink.net> wrote:

> To: yvonne simmons <roweenayvonne at yahoo.com>
> CC: Regina Birchem <regbirchem at earthlink.net>
> Subject: Worse than Apartheid
> From: Regina Birchem <regbirchem at earthlink.net>
> Date: Tue, 26 Dec 2006 06:51:39 -0500
> 
>
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15960.htm
> Worse Than Apartheid
> 
> By Chris Hedges
> 
> 12/20/06 "TruthDig" --- - 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 orchestra te 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 impr ession 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 w ith 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 Ara bs 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 ec ho 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 Hedges is former Middle East bureau chief for
> The New York  
> Times and author of the bestseller “War Is a Force
> That Gives Us  
> Meaning ” reports on Bush’s plan for Iran,
> and how a callous  
> war, conceived by zealots, will lead to a disaster
> of biblical  
> proportions.
> 
> 
> --
> "Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
> Expediency asks the  
> question - is it politic? Vanity asks the question -
> is it popular?  
> But conscience asks the question - is it right? And
> there comes a  
> time when one must take a position that is neither
> safe, nor politic,  
> nor popular; but one must take it because it is
> right." ~Martin  
> Luther King, Jr.
> 
> "I rebel, therefore we exist." ~ Albert Camus
> 
> "We must not forget that this country owes its birth
> to disobedience  
> to law." ~ Matilda Joslyn Gage
> 
> "My aim is to agitate & disturb people. I'm not
> selling bread, I'm  
> selling yeast." ~ Unamuno, wall graffiti from Paris,
> May 1968
> 
> "To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and
> to anger others;  
> and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are
> wasting the time you  
> spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards to deep
> thought is the hot  
> glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger
> is taboo, thought  
> will starve to death. " ~ Jules Henry
> 
> "Walk gently, breathe peacefully, laugh
> hysterically." ~ Nelson Mandela


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com