There's a Rally for Gaza outside the Victorian State Library today. 2pm.
xA
On 1/4/09, Max Richards <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Agonizing. I paste below a Fisk piece just sent me, from what source my friend
> did not say. (not that PoetryEtc is where best to agonize, but Fisk does mention
> Edward Said, much missed)
> Max
>
> WHY BOMBING ASHKELON IS THE MOST TRAGIC IRONY
>
> By Robert Fisk
>
> (Robert Fisk is one of the most respected Middle East journalists, has
> a PhD in political science, speaks Arabic, and has lived and travelled
> widely in the region.)
>
> 30 December 2008
>
> How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete
> the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza
> which ? in any other conflict ? journalists would be writing about in
> their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli
> land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
>
> That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in
> Ashkelon and the fields around it ? Askalaan in Arabic ? were
> dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and
> ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They ? or their children and
> grandchildren and great-grandchildren ? are among the one and a half
> million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per
> cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This,
> historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come
> from Gaza.
>
> But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday,
> that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped
> up in the slums of Gaza ? a rubbish dump of destitute people of no
> origin ? and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic
> Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air
> force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had
> grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have
> now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
>
> Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they
> wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see
> why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds
> of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled
> or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years
> ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the
> aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out
> of their property didn't worry the world.
>
> Well, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated
> few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have
> been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in
> hunger and darkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West.
> Gaza was always an insurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel
> Sharon's bloody "pacification", starting in 1971, to be completed, and
> Gaza is not going to be tamed now.
>
> Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice ? I'm
> talking about the late Edward Said, not the corrupt Yassir Arafat (and
> how the Israelis must miss him now) ? is silent and their predicament
> largely unexplained by their deplorable, foolish spokesmen. "It's the
> most terrifying place I've ever been in," Said once said of Gaza.
> "It's a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery
> of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse
> than anything I saw in South Africa."
>
> Of course, it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to
> admit that "sometimes also civilians pay the price," an argument she
> would not make, of course, if the fatality statistics were reversed.
> Indeed, it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American
> Enterprise Institute ? faithfully parroting Israel's arguments ?
> defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was
> "pointless to play the numbers game". Yet if more than 300 Israelis
> had been killed ? against two dead Palestinians ? be sure that the
> "numbers game" and the disproportionate violence would be all too
> relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less
> than Israeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas
> members. But what of the rest? If the UN's conservative figure of 57
> civilian fatalities is correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.
>
> To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli
> onslaught while blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy
> and Israeli policy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is
> following the same dog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his
> predecessor.
>
> As usual, the Arab satraps ? largely paid and armed by the West ? are
> silent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which
> will (if it even takes place), appoint an "action committee" to draw
> up a report which will never be written. For that is the way with the
> Arab world and its corrupt rulers. As for Hamas, they will, of course,
> enjoy the discomfiture of the Arab potentates while cynically waiting
> for Israel to talk to them. Which they will. Indeed, within a few
> months, we'll be hearing that Israel and Hamas have been having
> "secret talks" ? just as we once did about Israel and the even more
> corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and we will be
> facing the next crisis since the last crisis.
>
>
>
> Quoting Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> > In 8 years, the Bush Regime - neocons, and no doubt with Israel's complicity
> > - imagined Iraq's demise would 'reconfigure the Mideast' with democracies up
> > and instantly flourishing in the glow of a successful invasion. Now Israel
> > invades Gaza - with American armor and support - still imagining/dreaming a
> > reconfiguration of the Mideast. If 'slaughter' counts as vision 'they' are
> > clearly winning by the dead in numbers. If this invasion counts as the
> > Israel/American 'vision' in any other sense, 'Eyeless in Gaza' appears to be
> > more accurate than ever. Might as well imagine a tank or Cheney threading a
> > needle's eye.
> >
> > What keeps these people - other than pathology - running this wheel over and
> > over again? One - somewhat helpless at the moment - can only 'hope' that
> > this is Bush & Cheney's "Last Tape" and that Hilary-Obama might (might) pour
> > some water on 'the powder' and work out a vocabulary not built on slaughter.
> >
> >
> > Stephen Vincent
> > http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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