Monday, July 28, 2014

The Gaza prison

"Most of the time Palestinians living in Gaza can go to the corner grocer, buy their kids some milk; they can drive a little ways to their desk job or try to hawk their strawberries and cabbage at the best price in the loudest voice. But whatever they do, they cannot leave Gaza. They can’t get out to Israel or Egypt, or anywhere else. They cannot accept the scholarships to British universities and live out their plans for higher education; they cannot see their aunties in Jordan or New York; they cannot go on business trips or get top-notch chemotherapy or take some vacation days to be Maid of Honor in their best friend’s wedding in Florida. These are humans living in a cage controlled by Israel and ignored by most of the world.  1.8 million live patrolled and contained like this—that’s about the population of Hamburg, or Detroit in its heyday. It is difficult to convey the utter wrongness of this city-sized prison-house to someone who has not experienced or witnessed the daily indignities and frequent atrocities of the occupation.  Only the pinnacle of human creativity could help one imagine it.  It needs a Jim Jarmush film-set, with lighting that’s not quite right, where strange things happen, things are somehow off, and nobody seems to notice. And a melting Dalí clock—to convey the slow creep of time when every day brings more of the same caged existence with no apparent hope for escape. Only Hannah Arendt’s moral clarity and Graham Greene’s sardonic, slicing prose could adequately condemn the banality of this evil, the routinization of the occupation’s violence and the calm general acceptance of the humiliations it inflicts on so many people. Maybe Shakespeare could pierce the fog of obfuscating propaganda and disinformation that spews forth from the governments so intent on justifying this unjustifiable human cage (Israel, the United States, Egypt, for example).

Our lazy swilling of government propaganda, our silence in the face of these wrongs is inexcusable, because the facts are all there for the knowing, all clearly laid out. Human rights organizations, humanitarian workers, the United Nations, journalists, scholars have documented with care and in detail the many dimensions of injustice that shore up the Israeli occupation and holds 1.8 million residents of Gaza hostage. They have been telling us for almost half a century about the ways military occupation crushes Palestinian lives".  I am in no mood for the rest of the last sentence when she says: "and corrupts Israeli society". All arguments that basically dwells on the harm occupation and war crimes cause to the killers is an immoral and racist argument at best.