Target Practice

“More death and destruction will undoubtedly follow as Israeli forces prepare for a land invasion, children will die, the tragic numbers in Israel will be dwarfed by the magnitude of horrifying death in Gaza. Mothers and fathers will weep and young men will vow vengeance. We know this story.” Alice Rothchild, Counterpunch 

Gaza is being bombed, again. 2008. 2012. 2014. How many times can one 350 square mile sliver of land be pounded by advanced weaponry, and how much longer will the State of Israel be allowed to kill Palestinians with impunity? If my memory serves, the UN issued a report in 2014 that concluded that Gaza might be uninhabitable by 2020. As always, the United States pledges its support for Israel’s right to “defend itself.” No mention made of the right of the Palestinian people to simply live. Do the majority of the Israeli people support what their government is doing in their name? Aren’t the Jews doing to the Palestinians what was done to Jews in Russia, Poland, and Germany for generations? Ethnic cleansing. Wholesale theft of land, water, homes. 

The conflict is always depicted in the American media as one waged between equals, which is laughable. The US doesn’t gift the Palestinians millions of dollars worth of military hardware every year, nor does it promote the Palestinian cause in the United Nations at every opportunity as it does Israel. The leader of the Palestianian Authority isn’t invited to address a joint session of Congress as Bibi Netanyahu was a few years ago. 

Why do I care? What does it have to do with me and the price of bread or cheese? What has it to do with the work my wife and I need to do on our new digs? Maybe nothing, but as a citizen of the US, it pisses me off to no end that my government consistently and unquestioningly backs Israel. The journalist Chris Hedges wrote this week, “I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage. “ Children are being killed. In the West Bank news reports say mobs of angry Jews roam the avenues looking for Arab targets. Do they want to murder them all? This conflict began years before I was born. I was 8-years-old during the 1967 war that saw Israel take control and occupy Palestinian land in violation of international law. When public health lockdowns went into effect across the US in 2020, many Americans reacted as if all their civil liberties had been permanently stripped away. Well, imagine living under siege and the threat of bombardment the way the people of Gaza do every day. Imagine being forcibly evicted from the house your family has lived in for half a century. Imagine watching Jewish settlers set fire to your olive trees. In this long conflict there have been casualties on both sides, though disproportionately on the Palestinian side. They seem to stand all alone, invisible to the world. A good number of countries are critical of Israel, but as long as Israel is backed by US economic and military power, nothing changes. The State of Israel has been emboldened to take more, and more, expanding ever further. 

What did Martin Luther King Jr. say about injustice? The exact quote slips my memory but the gist of it was that people should push back against injustice wherever they encounter it, because sooner or later injustice comes calling. Wherever one human life is devalued compared to another, deemed less important, less worthy of dignified treatment. Collective punishment of a civilian population is illegal under international law, but of course Israel isn’t deterred by that. By providing cover for Israel to do whatever it pleases my government is complicit in these crimes.