Israel has stepped over the red line demarcating the humane from the brutish and bloodthirsty in its attack on Gaza. I will not take up the argument of the Hamas rocket fire and the tunnels. You have heard all that. Let me concentrate on the part of the story you do not hear or read about. Sadly, the events in Gaza reminds me of the 1943 brutal massacre of innocent Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. The world mostly sat back and let that tragedy happen, unable or unwilling to help. More than 7,000 Jews were killed and the rest deported to concentration camps where many or most died. As I write this today, wondering as I write, how and why we as a people either forget our history or simply are unaware of it, and thus keep repeating past mistakes and atrocities. As of today I read that more than one-thousand Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. And as in the Warsaw uprising, the world's nations just sit by doing nothing.
The Israeli Army--considered perhaps one of the top-five best-equipped and run militaries in the world--was unleashed by Mr. Netanyahu two weeks ago against the poor, urbanized, densely populated enclave of Gaza --a 141 square mile sea-side Mediterranean ghetto (about six miles wide and twenty-five miles long) located between Israel and Egypt. Like the Warsaw ghetto the Israelis have sealed up the borders. The Israeli forces plowed through the chain link fencing and barbed wire of the 300 meter wide no-mans land at the Gaza-Israeli boundary with tanks, heavy artillery, and armored troop carriers. Israeli navy ships used heavy guns to bombard the Gaza shore. Its Air Force made devastating bombing runs over densely populated areas collapsing high rise apartments and burying residents in rubble. Even "off target" humanitarian UN schools and facilities were bombed, more than once, causing heavy fatalities.
The Netanyahu-assigned kill-zone where the Israeli "Defense" Force ( IDF) is now operating is an outdoor, urbanized prison where 1.8 million Palestinians live cheek by jowl in an area the size of six Manhattan Islands. Even on Manhattan island-- one can readily leave by roads, bridges, and ferries, but in Gaza the Israeli barbed wire and machine gun nests have sealed off the enclave tightly since 2007. Its inhabitants have no possibility of escape. The IDF has been literally assigned by its political leaders to shoot "fish in a barrel". As the dead pile up in the streets, one wonders how the proud IDF...professional soldiers all--can stomach being ordered to target buildings and structures they know are filled with unarmed children, women and old people. The body count is now ( July 30) well over 1000 dead...largely women and children, and as as many seven thousands wounded of all ages. The Palestinian body count belies the Israeli propaganda machine which claims "pin point" strikes and "restrained" action on Hamas tunnels. Sadly these exaggerations and untruths are routinely parroted by US media. It makes one gasp with incredulity upon hearing these statements, first put forth (perhaps understandably) by professional defenders and representatives of the Israeli government, but then repeated verbatim by so-called US "journalists". As the propaganda is repeated in the American press and on air, one can sit there and view other pictures and commentators on the internet which tell a completely different story. That story is one of the illegal and disproportionate use of force by one heavily armed and militarized people brutishly visited on another group trapped and almost wholly unarmed populace. One wonders do these Israelis remember their own heroic history of resistance to the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943? Can they no longer empathize with suffering that they or their grandparents may have experienced. There is an embarrassing and disturbing parallel here.
The world rightly erupted in agonized and angry resentment at the outbreak of the Israeli attack against Gaza..and Israel's disproportionate and inhumane attack on essentially unprotected, unarmed civilians being punished as a community only because they are Palestinians and who as children are innocent of any wrong doing--- and can not escape. Massive, demonstrations against Israel's actions took place in the UK, France, Australia, Canada, Germany and many other nations. But here at home in the US, there was little anger or resentment....only bland statements by President Obama offering Mr. Netanyahu cover for his brutal actions by claiming Israel had the "right to protect itself". Left unsaid by the American media were the underlying facts of the illegal occupation, the unending expansionism of settlements, the daily humiliations, beatings, killings and attacks on Palestinians. Most importantly, what has been ignored here in the US were the provocations by Mr. Netanyahu, who, Bush-Cheney-like used the abductions and brutal murder of three Israeli boys as a pretext for war. Mr. Netanyahu was quick to blame Hamas for the abductions (without any proof or evidence to support his claim) and used this causus belli to run rough shod over Palestinian communities in the West Bank, breaking into homes, killing and brutalizing innocents in his quest to "find and return the boys to their parents". Though he well-knew at the time that the abducted youths were already dead. The three were killed almost immediately as one of the teenagers tried fruitlessly to make a covert call to the police. Mr. Netanyahu hid this fact and continued to claim, without proof, that Hamas was to blame for the abductions, and to stir up his nation to acts of hatred, violence, and support for war. His obvious goal in all this brutality was to undermine Hamas, and somehow abrogate the recent unpalatable agreement between Hamas and Fatah to form a joint government. Unsaid also was that Hamas had kept to its 2012 agreement with Israel regarding restraining rocket fire, but during that same period Israel had not modified its policy of keeping Gaza's borders sealed and limiting inflow of goods and supplies into the Gaza ghetto. So here at home, the citizenry of the nation which claims to lead the free world and prides itself on its penchant for protecting the downtrodden, and righting injustice remains ignorant of the whole story. Our government, its hands tied by a complacent and /or ignorant populace looks on and either ignores this unprecedented act of perfidy and brutality and/or encourages the perpetrators and instigators of violence. The US news reports in our papers and on the air focus on other stories--like the Ukraine-- and the streets here--unlike in the rest of the world--were essentially quiet.
The oft claimed myth that American Jews control the US press and other media might be offered as an explanation for the paltry (and where it occurred, misleading) coverage. But in this I agree with Abe Foxman of the AIPAC. The Jews who support Israel do not control the media. The US media actually police themselves. Out of habit or fear of reprisal they simply conform to the story-line handed to them by the Israeli propaganda machine.There are very few examples of journalists in the US media who step out of line. For US journalists there is no "positive" outcome in writing stories which criticize Israel. The result is, with few exceptions...they simply avoid the topic. This leaves the American public with only one view--a biased and inaccurate one. Why expose oneself to the calumny of an angry and powerful minority, and be unfairly branded as "anti-Semites" or as Jews, as facilitators of anti-Semites, in the process?
Better to focus on writing about the Russians and the Ukraine.
But perhaps when these journalists do write about the Ukraine, they might ask themselves this question--just so they can continue to call themselves "journalistssts". If Mr. Putin is "responsible" (as our government spokespersons repeat over and over again) for the acts of the
Think of that....or at least just THINK.
rjk
