I feel like I've been hit in the solar plexus, simultaneously kicked in the back. I've completely lost my breath. And we're into the merciless bombing of Prison Gaza about, what is it now? Six Days? Why do I feel physically ill?
At first, personal issues disabled me from writing a diary. Or even going online. Later, I found these incredible diaries. Chilean Jew, Daisy Cutter, Assaf, Meteor Blades and many others on the Rec list. Each is well-worth reading and restored my faith in humanity. In fact, many of the commenters on these and other diaries did the same.
But why, then, am I sick to my stomach? I can't get over this. It's just too unbelievably horrific.
But many believe that nobody gives a shit about Palestine. Nobody with power, anyway. Obama's silence is deafening. He's caught between the time-hallowed Rock of Solid Israeli Support by U.S. Regardless of What They Do and the devastating hell of the Hard Place: bringing down on himself and his presidency the wrath of the United States he presides over and who all believe that it is our God-ordained Duty to Stand By Your Israel.
The Arabs are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The Arab world is NOT Palestine, and only gives it lip service. Even though they feel it like a punch in the stomach to their pride. But they have no power. They have conceded power to the despots: to rapist-by-proxy and murderer-by-hire Hosny Mubarak, to the brutal, heartless Saudi Mafia, to Syria's secret cultist Ruling Family who just happened to put a hapless optometrist in the empty seat of his mass murderer-father, to the God-only-knows-where-he-stands King of Jordan, to the Oil Oligarchy lining the Persian Gulf, to the non-despotic but forever-embroiled forever-struggling Israeli-bomb-decimated democracy of Lebanon... Israel has nothing to fear here. Oh, I forgot to mention Iraq. Bush took care of that.
First, the clearcut. Then the slaughter. U.S.-Israeli policy is clear.
So where's the conscience?
Obviously, there's some Machiavelli-think at play here. People are but pawns, or should I say, bowling pins, in this great Power Play of People Who Count. Even Newsweek's cover was about The New Elite. There are people who count, and people who don't count. You can kill people who count, but you can't kill people who don't count without facing consequences.
The civilian population of Burma doesn't count - for much. The genocide victims of Darfur are beginning to count - but just a little. In fact, millions of people in Africa are trying hard to count - and they do - like a blip on a radar screen, fading out and fading in. Obama's election restored faith that the American people count - even if they believe their leaders are criminals. In all this, Palestinians, as far as the U.S. and Israel are concerned, MUST NOT COUNT - EVER. Palestinians are dealt with, en masse, as terrorists. That makes it easier. It dehumanizes them. And they are in the way, badly. In the way for Israel to reach its "goals", which apparently, do not include peaceful coexistence.
So the solution is to emprison them, starve them, deprive them of a means to make a living, assassinate their leaders, kill their children and families, bulldoze their homes, make them ask permission to do anything, to cross the street, to drink water. And the consensus is, they don't count. So nobody will do anything for them - neither for Gazans nor people in the West Bank. Nobody can. To that end, they - the US & Israel - are testing the waters of world conscience. They are trying to see just how far they can go with impunity. Does anyone give a damn about the children being bombed from the air?
Our much-loved former Clinton SOS Madeline Albright said about "millions" of Iraqi children being killed in the double-whammy of sanctions and war in Iraq - during Clinton's presidency, not Bush's! - "it was worth it." Idealogy trumps compassion every time. Especially when the people getting killed don't "count".
But what the problem here is, that it seems to everyone who is in the Arab world, or the Muslim world, looking out from their viewpoint (note: I'm speaking now as if one of them for this paragraph), that Jews, generally speaking, DO count. Not that this is bad, or wrong. Every human being should count. But they ask, why do THEY count and NOT US? Why does Israel get subsidized even though they're relatively well-off, and not us? Why does the death of an Israeli get revenge, but when we try to do a little "balancing" (not that this is right, mind you, it's perception I'm trying to portray) we get our families, infrastructure, and everything we can think of wiped off the face of the earth. If 2 Israeli soldiers are kidnapped, the Beirut airport is fair game, hence decimated. But if 400 starving people in Gaza get killed, including women and children, it's justifiable "self-defense".
Now, there's all this fine sensitivity work we have to attend to. If I say "Israelis" maybe - or maybe not - it's OK. But if I say "Jews", it's antiSemitic. But Israel is defined as a "Jewish Homeland". You don't see, say, Tibetan Buddhists or Pakistani emigres knocking on Tel Aviv's door, let alone getting in. And for my whole life, that was perfectly OK. I used to stay up late at night reading "Exodus" in high school, my walls covered with posters blaring "Never Again Auschwitz" - and I'm not even Jewish. I felt like I was, in spirit anyway. My best friend had a crush on Moshe Dayan (this dates me, OK), and applied to go to a kibbutz but was turned down. Guess 'cause she was Irish Catholic. But there was this sense of cameraderie.
So if you look at it out of Palestinian eyes for a moment, pretending not to refer to them by the nefarious slur "terrorist" - just for the sake of argument, of course! - then it appears that the world - The World being the U.S. and Europe, and Asia following in drag - counts and responds to Jews and of course Americans, but doesn't count or respond to what happens to, say, Gazans. Or Palestinians generally. And this seems to be true for almost 60 years. Generations of people who feel they don't count. Who feel demonized. Who are demonized, in fact. Whose every waking moment is circumscribed by so-called democracies. Why is democracy free in the "West" (is not Israel part of the West?) but imposed by force in Iraq, and not even an option, except to Jimmy Carter, in Palestine? They have one option for a "homeland": Gulag Archipelago, overseen by Israel.
Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. There are lots of examples of Jews and Muslims, Jews and Arabs getting along just fine. Some say they used to in Israel before the U.N. interfered. Lebanon has many examples, at least years ago when I was there. But politics got in the way. There is, for another example, the Jewish School in England where half the students are Muslims. Intermarriage, social interaction is the rule, not the exception.
King David is a strictly Jewish school. Judaism is the only religion taught. There's a synagogue on site. The children learn modern Hebrew - Ivrit - the language of Israel. And they celebrate Israeli independence day.
But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school's catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.
The Muslim parents, mostly devout and many of the women wearing the hijab, say they love the ethos of the school, and even the kosher school lunches, which are suitable because halal and kosher dietary rules are virtually identical. The school is also respectful to Islam, setting aside a prayer room for the children and supplying Muslim teachers during Ramadan. At Eid, the Muslim children are wished Eid Mubarak in assembly, and all year round, if they wish, can wear a kufi (hat). Amazingly, dozens of the Muslim children choose instead to wear the Jewish kipah.
What does this say? It says that peace is more than possible. It says that the "ethos" of Palestinians and Israelis, of Jews and non-Jews and Muslims and those of any other religion, is somehow the same. It says that the people want peaceful coexistence, and it's the governments that do not. What governments? Let's first look at the governments in power, who set the tone. Both Israel and the U.S. set the tone of violence and hatred, of killing and fear and terrorism. If one has power, it's self-defense to kill babies. And it's an accident. If one has no power, it's terrorism to lash out, fight back, fight for what feels for all the world like survival.
But if people took their own power, their voice, like they did in the recent U.S. elections, into their hands, could they not transform the situation, or set it on a path of recovery, peace, transformation?
I may be sick to my stomach, reading what I must read every day of slaughter, of what are the actions of people without a conscience. It's been eight years of lots of physical sickness, psychological distress. It's time to get out of that, and be a voice for all the people who don't count. Right now, we should stand beside the people of Gaza. Hamas will capitulate in a heartbeat to a power that takes the higher ground. I'm sure of it.