Gaza Scorecard

“Editors around the world are requesting their journalists to be ever softer, ever more mealy-mouthed in their reporting of any incident which might upset Israel.” Robert Fisk, The Independent, August 2001

The New York Times keeps a running scorecard of the latest Israeli-Palestinian madness in Gaza. According to the Times, Israel has struck 3,209 targets in Gaza, and Hamas has fired 2,233 rockets into Israel. It’s interesting that these numbers are reported side-by-side, as if to show there is some equality between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas. But it’s one thing to attack a target in a densely populated territory with sophisticated weaponry, and another to launch a rocket indiscriminately in the hope it will find a target.

The death count is the true indicator of the one-sided nature of this latest round of conflict: 856 Palestinians, many of them children, 40 Israelis, most of them soldiers. It’s also telling that the Times chose not to report the number of wounded on either side, or the number of people displaced from their homes – those numbers fall overwhelmingly, and almost exclusively, in the Palestinian column of a grim ledger.

I look at photographs of destruction on Aljazeera and wonder how the people of Gaza will ever rebuild their homes, businesses, schools, and neighborhoods, not to mention the water and sewage system and electrical grid. For the third time in six years, the infrastructure of Gaza has been smashed. How are Palestinians supposed to rebuild in the face of Israel’s blockade? Where will the enormous quantities of steel, cement and other building materials come from? Not from the sea – the Israeli navy won’t allow it; not from the air -- Israel controls the airspace; not by land from Egypt because the Egyptian dictatorship despises Hamas almost as much as Israel’s political leaders do.

Israel has a right to exist. Israel has a right to defend its territory and population. But Israel doesn’t have the right to occupy land taken from the Palestinians by armed force, or to evict Palestinians so Israel can build more settlements, or to indefinitely imprison Palestinians, and on and on. 

What most irks me about the constant turmoil in the Middle East is the role played by the United States. For decades we’ve blindly backed Israel, allowed Israel to call our diplomatic tune, and provided buckets of military aid and diplomatic support so that Israel can maintain a stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank. Along with unconditional support of Israel, the US supports the junta in Egypt and the despotic rulers of Saudi Arabia. We sure know how to pick our friends. And lest it be forgotten, we once considered Saddam Hussein a stand-up guy.