2023-10-12 19:24:55
No medicine, no water, no electricity, no fuel. Hunger and despair as a political weapon. “We are fighting animals and we act accordingly,” said Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, recently when announcing the total siege against the Gaza Strip.
There is a thread of steel that unites the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli commander with the architects of the United States blockade against Cuba. Lester Mallory, undersecretary of the State Department, made similar arguments in 1962, as did Joseph Goebbels after visiting the Lodz ghetto in 1939: “These are no longer men, they are animals. That is why it is not a humanitarian task, but a surgical one. “Incisions must be made here and entirely radical,” the Nazi Propaganda Minister wrote in his diary.
Gallant’s threat is serious.
Euro-Med Monitor, an organization based in Geneva, recorded the deaths of 880 Palestinians in the first four days of declared war, of which 59 percent were civilians, including 185 children and 120 women. Around five thousand more people have been injured and hundreds remain trapped under rubble along the border areas. Israel claims to focus on military targets, but hits residential buildings, hospitals and mosques, where there is no shelter or way to protect themselves from the unannounced bombings that have already killed entire families.
The new escalation began this time with the Hamas attack, but the revanchism and spirit of revenge that now reigns in the media and networks, and that naturalizes the conception of the Palestinians as animals worthy of being slaughtered, completely forgets that Israel has The fire in the pressure cooker increased for years and it finally burst last Saturday. He Foreign Policy in Focus He has compared the current situation in Gaza to the prison riot in Attica, New York, in 1971, which ended in a bloodbath: “If you put prisoners in a cage and torture them, they will rebel.”
The deafening noise in favor of Israel in this war has buried, along with the Palestinian victims, the history of that people, the tragedy they have lived through for decades and the grotesque irony that the original and legal owners of the Israeli land today live in Loop. The only explanation that the strip exists is because the Palestinians were dispossessed of their lands in 1948, when Israel was created. They — or their children and grandchildren — are among the two million Palestinian refugees crammed into the most densely populated territory on the planet, where 80 percent of its inhabitants come from families that lived in what is now Israel. Most people in Gaza are not from there. They are refugees who have been victims of dehumanization for too long now.
“It is the most terrifying place I have ever seen,” wrote the intellectual Edward Said, after one of the countless bombings against Gaza, in 2001. “It is a horribly sad place because of the desperation and misery in which the people live. . “I was not prepared to see the refugee camps, which are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.” It was not a left-wing intellectual, by the way, but Amnesty International, who declared a few months ago that “the scheme of domination of the Palestinians by Israel constitutes a system of apartheid”, and that it is “a crime against humanity.”
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, issued a statement this Tuesday reiterating that “the imposition of sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited by international law.” humanitarian”.
It should only be added that the blockade does not appear now as a result of this war. It takes decades. It is the long prologue of the punishment and forced dehumanization of a people to create the perfect alibi that leads to their annihilation. We Cubans know it very well. In this specific case, there are layers upon layers of pain from the kidnapping of thousands of Palestinians who were taken away by Israeli soldiers without leaving a trace, from the desolation and helplessness of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who have tried to survive. among ruins, by the electricity and water cuts, by the endless curfews, by the shortage of food and medicine, by the wounded bleeding to death, by the systematic attacks against ambulances and humanitarian personnel, by the adolescents attacked with dogs from the Tel Aviv army, for the murdered boys and girls…
The truth by name. It is genocide and it comes from afar.
(Image taken from Le Monde Diplomatique. Text: La Jornada)
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