Gaza massacre

After every bloody episode of violence perpetrated by Israel, media spin doctors are often deployed with one grand mission: to absolve Israel of any responsibility in their acts of carnage.

It has been one year since the August 14, 2013 Rab’a Square massacre in Egypt, when the Egyptian police and army opened fire on demonstrators opposed to the military’s July 3 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. Using tanks, bulldozers, ground forces, helicopters and snipers, police and army personnel mercilessly attacked the makeshift protest encampment, where demonstrators, including women and children, had been camped out for over 45 days. The result was the worst mass killing in Egypt’s modern history.

Not a month goes by without the West invoking yet another affront to humanity, another crime against humanity, another wave of sanctions, or yet another UN Security Council resolution. This is what North Korea would be like if it is ever armed with social media.

My old family house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza was recently rebuilt by its new owner, into a beautiful three-story building with large windows adorned by red frames. In Israel’s most recent and deadliest war on Gaza, the house sustained significant damage. A large hole caused by Israeli missiles can be seen from afar, in a part of the house where our kitchen once stood.

Washington, August 12, 2014 (IPS) — United Nations officials and human rights organisations have characterised Israeli attacks on civilian targets during the IDF war on Gaza as violations of the laws of war.
During the war, Israeli bombardment leveled whole urban neighbourhoods, leaving more than 10,000 houses destroyed and 30,000 damaged and killing 1,300 civilians, according to U.N. data. Israeli forces also struck six schools providing shelter to refugees under U.N. protection, killing at least 47 refugees and wounding more than 340.

I often don’t write about the things that make me angry. Mostly that’s because I’ve written previously on something similar, and I don’t like repeating myself. Sometimes it’s because it’s very draining to spend time and energy trying to write relatively lucidly and without hysteria on something that almost no one will read and because I know it won’t make any difference what I think and say. So I think why bother?

Friday July 25th was the eighteenth day of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. 1.7 million people, walled in, embargoed, with no place to hide, squeezed now into just 66% of the forty mile long strip of land on orders from the Tel Aviv Reich. Six Palestinians were killed, the death toll in all on the day rose above eight hundred and fifty. The hospital in Beit Hanoun was bombed, part of an ongoing attack until minutes before midnight, injuring a number of people.

The researcher Alice Miller became worldwide known because of her investigations of childhood traumas. A dozen of her books is translated into thirty languages. Miller shows the mechanisms, with which victims can turn to perpetrators, and she shows the ubiquity, even the inevitability of this danger. The big hits the small who in turn will transmit it to their own children if the circle does not get interrupted. Miller (a Jewish victim herself) also examined the Nazi generation in Germany in order to understand how Germany could develop such a genocidal racism.

Today’s Guardian includes an article that appears to be excusing Israel of responsibility for the massive death toll it has inflicted on Palestinian civilians. But, more significantly, it includes a lot of useful – and damning – information about just how “indiscriminate” Israel’s weapons really are.

For a shamefully bloody example of how little single issue identity politics can mean, check out the unity of supporters and opponents of same sex marriage, supporters and opponents of abortion, and supporters and opponents of every other divisive issue clouding the minds of a population kept from acting as a democratic majority, we need look no further than the disgrace of this government’s congress voting to approve and finance the current Israeli slaughter in Gaza.