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Tragedy in the Middle East

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Bob Passi
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This is not a war, it a humanitarian debacle in what was once Palestine, in which Israel is being given a free hand to carry out inhuman retribution against an enclosed and defenseless occupied people with no concern for human rights or even humanitarian aid.

Context

Let's look at some context. After WWII, Western Europe decided to soothe its conscience about the centuries-long mistreatment of the Jews that eventually led to the Nazi attempt at a final solution to the "Jewish problem" with its attempt at genocide and ethnic cleansing that devolved into the Holocaust of death squads and concentration camps and finally the ovens.

Even after that, neither the US nor any European nations really wanted to accept the Jewish refugees, so they supported a fictional Zionist narrative that God him/herself was telling the Jews and the world that they had a right, perhaps a religious obligation, to make a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. It was a fiction that the US and western Europe gladly accepted as an answer to their prayers of who should take the Jews after the Holocaust, since they were not being welcomed with open arms by any other nation. So those nations supported that fictional narrative, seeing the Middle East as an area to be manipulated by the West for its own ends. After all, the Arabs were a backward race and were not even Christian. This would probably help them to become modern and enlightened, i.e., Christian. Besides that, there was oil in the Middle East, which was clearly important for not only the growing industrialization of the West but also absolutely necessary for armies. So having a friendly colony in the Middle East would be of great benefit.

The result was that a Jewish state began to emerge with a wink and a nudge from the West that allowed for Jewish terrorism to kill and displace huge chunks of the indigenous Palestinian population in order to claim the land as a new Israel. The US quickly acknowledge the new state in 1948, and the West was quickly in support of the new state with all the support that went with that recognition. The Jews had their homeland, the West had solved its "Jewish problem" and also had established a beachhead in the Middle East with all that that implied.

Eventually Israel became by far the best equipped military in the region, even given the nuclear weapons, while not allowing any other power in the region to have such technology. So, Israel now possessed the trump card.

Palestinians and Resistance

Meanwhile the Palestinians were herded into refugee camps in certain areas of what had been Palestine or pushed into neighboring Arab states. There were wars to consolidate Israeli power and claim more Palestinian land. The Israelis won since they had access to the best of the Western war technology. Within Israel, Palestinians became second-class citizens with many restrictions. In Gaza they became an occupied people, and in the West Bank they were also restricted as they watched helplessly as their land was claimed by new generations of Jewish settlers. And as with the indigenous people world-wide, the world did not seem to care. So, it became clear that only their own resistance fighters could keep them from total domination by the occupier.

No one seems willing to connect the Palestinian resistance to the French resistance to the Nazi occupation in Vichy France. And, if the Nazis had won the war, that resistance movement would have been ruthlessly ferreted out and executed, just as Israel is doing with Hamas. But not even the Nazis would have begun to systematically wipe out all the French in retaliation for the successes of the resistance. We, in the West, now see the French Resistance fighters as noble and heroic yet we are told to have no sympathy for those Palestinians who are tired of being homeless and stateless.

Voices of Indigenous People

But the problem with indigenous peoples is that they are almost always different from the Western norms of race, ethnicity, religion or culture. They seem to stand in the way of "progress" and expansion, sometimes of expansion of some kind of empire, nearly always connected with economics and control.

So now, fighting a Jewish- and Israeli-media dominance, the Palestinians find themselves without a voice in the Western world. In fact, support for the plight of the Palestinians in the Western world is ironically labelled as antisemitic as though all Jewish or Israeli national policies are above reproach. In fact, the US keeps the UN Security Council from action by vetoing any attempts to sanction Israel or to help the Palestinians. (I might also mention in a "I'll scratch your back if you will scratch mine" kind of conspiracy, it is only the US and Israel that are preventing the UN from supporting an end to the embargo of Cuba.).

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

It is also notable that it has been 75 years since, in 1948, the UN accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that was also the year that apartheid began in South Africa and the Jewish population began its pogrom against the Palestinians. Apartheid was forced to end under the scrutiny of world opinion, but Israel has been allowed to continue its slow process of ethnic cleansing under the protection of the US, which has continued to run interference for Israel even in the UN. That process is now being finished in full view of the world while the US continues to fund and send the weapons of mass destruction to Israel, allowing no interference to slow Israel down. In fact, the US is in the area to prevent any other Arab states from interfering in the destruction of the Palestinians. We are using our economic and military clout to bludgeon others into support for the Israeli actions.

Despite how blatant the human rights abuses are and the clear need for humanitarian aid for those trapped in Gaza, the leadership in the US will do nothing to thwart the Israeli intentions. The only solution being allowed by our leadership now is to support moving the remaining Palestinians out of Gaza while allowing the killing to continue and to allow the terrorism in the West Bank to continue until Israel controls all of that area too.

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I have a deep belief in participatory democracy, the value of ordinary people and finding a path to a sustainable future. I also understand the immediacy or the need for significant action to save democracy and our sustainable future on this (more...)
 

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