358 Mike Carlton and Israel
Here is an article in the SMH by Mike Carlton
on Israel's atrocious handling of the current Gaza crisis, the ongoing Gaza
crisis and the abominable mistreatment of Palestinians. I've often tried
to express my outrage at what’s happening in Palestine (tricky for a German, born in 1947, the year Israel was given legitimacy by the UN ... I have an essay on the HOLOCAUST in my book with three definitions for the term en.light.en.ment for a title), but Carlton takes the words right out of my mouth.
(For the record: Carlton & FitzSimons are my first reads on Saturdays & Sundays.)
Does
Israel have the right to defend itself? Absolutely. Must they use
appropriate means to do so? Absolutely. Are they totally out of control when
dealing with stone-throwing teenagers and rockets fired at them ... out of utter
desperation? Absolutely. Is Israel to blame for the dis-enfranchisement of an entire
people? Absolutely.
Carlton calls a spade a spade. I hope I have his permission when I quote his article verbatim (I’ll ask):
The
images from Gaza are searing, a gallery of death and horror. A dishevelled
Palestinian man cries out in agony, his blood-soaked little brother dead in his
arms. On a filthy hospital bed a boy of perhaps five or six screams for his
father, his head and body lacerated by shrapnel. A teenage girl lies on a torn
stretcher, her limbs awry, her face and torso blackened like a burnt steak.
Mourners weep over a family of 18 men, women and children laid side by side in
bloodied shrouds. Four boys of a fishing family named Bakr, all less than 12
years old, are killed on a beach by rockets from Israeli aircraft.
As I
write, after just over a week of this invasion, the death toll of Palestinians
is climbing towards 1000. Most are civilians, many are children. Assaulting
Gaza by land, air and sea, Israel has destroyed homes and reduced entire city
blocks to rubble. It has attacked schools, mosques and hospitals. Tens of
thousands of people have fled, although there is nowhere safe for them to go in
this wretched strip of land just 40 kilometres long and about 10
kilometres wide. There are desperate shortages of food and water, of
medical and surgical supplies.
In an
open letter to US President Barack Obama, Dr Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian surgeon
working at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital, writes of "the incomprehensible chaos
of bodies, sizes, limbs, walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing,
bleeding, not bleeding humans. Humans!
"Ashy
grey faces – Oh no! Not one more load of tens of maimed and bleeding. We still
have lakes of blood on the floor in the emergency room, piles of dripping,
blood-soaked bandages to clear out ... the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly
shovelling the blood and discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the
leftovers from death – all taken away... to be prepared again, to be repeated
all over."
The
onslaught is indiscriminate and unrelenting, with but one possible conclusion:
Israel is not fighting the terrorists of Hamas. In defiance of the laws of war
and the norms of civilised behaviour, it is waging its own war of terror on the
entire Gaza population of about 1.7 million people. Call it genocide, call
it ethnic cleansing: the aim is to kill Arabs.
As none
other than Malcolm Fraser tweeted this week: "If any other country went to
war killing as many civilians, women and children, it would be named a war
crime." But it is not, although the UN is asking the question of both
sides.
Yes,
Hamas is also trying to kill Israeli civilians, with a barrage of rockets and
guerilla border attacks. It, too, is guilty of terror and grave war crimes. But
Israeli citizens and their homes and towns have been effectively shielded by
the nation's Iron Dome defence system, and so far only three of its civilians
have died in this latest conflict. The Israeli response has been out of all
proportion, a monstrous distortion of the much-vaunted right of self defence.
It is a
breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be committed by a people with a
proud liberal tradition of scholarship and culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto
and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory.
But this is a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hardline, right-wing Likud
Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. As one observer
puts it: "All the seeds of the incitement of the past few years, all the
nationalistic, racist legislation and the incendiary propaganda, the scare
campaigns and the subversion of democracy by the right-wing camp – all these
have borne fruit, and that fruit is rank and rotten. The nationalist right has
now sunk to a new level, with almost the whole country following in its wake.
The word 'fascism', which I try to use as little as possible, finally has its
deserved place in the Israeli political discourse."
Fascism
in Israel? At this point the Australian Likudniks, as Bob Carr calls them, will
be lunging for their keyboards. There will be the customary torrent of abusive
emails calling me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, an
ignoramus. As usual they will demand my resignation, my sacking. As it's
been before, some of this will be pornographic or threatening violence.
In fact,
that paragraph within the quotation marks was written by an Israeli. Gideon
Levy is a columnist and editorial board member of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz.
Born in Tel Aviv to parents who fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in
1939, he despairs of what his country has become and the catastrophe its armed
forces are visiting upon Gaza. After a recent column calling on Israeli pilots
to stop bombing and rocketing civilians, his life was threatened and he now has
a bodyguard day and night. It has come to that. In the worst insult of all, Levy
is branded "a self-hating Jew".
Israeli
propaganda is subtle and skillfully put. "If Israel were to lay down its
arms tomorrow, she would be destroyed; but if Hamas were to lay down their
arms, there would be peace," goes the line, parroted endlessly.
But in
all these long and agonising decades, Israel has never offered the Palestinians
a just and equitable peace. They would have only a splintered, vassal state,
their polity and economy and even their borders and freedom of travel and trade
managed and determined by Israel. The occupation of Palestinian lands would
remain with the relentless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on the West
Bank of the Jordan and the Dead Sea.
As the
Palestine Liberation Organisation official Hanan Ashrawi put it this week in a
television interview with the Australian journalist Hamish Macdonald: "No
nation can accept being imprisoned, being besieged by land, by air, by sea and
deprived of the most basic requirements of a decent life: freedom of movement,
clean water. For seven years they have been under a brutal and lethal Israeli
siege ... You shell them and you bomb them; you destroy homes, you destroy
whole neighbourhoods. You obliterate, annihilate, whole families, and then you
come and say that this is self defence?"
That is
why the killing and the dying goes on. Ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And the rest
of the world, not caring, looks away.