Sunday, April 16, 2006

Official Policy: Starve the Palestinians.

No-one can say they didn't see it coming. Indeed, it is the desired effect of the recent US and EU governments decision to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority until Hamas officially recognise the state of Israel.

Palestinians are now surviving on little money and, with the Israeli decision to close the Karni crossing, even less food.

The rationale to all this was explained by Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, earlier this year. 'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.'

In other words, to starve them - but not to kill them. Oh, the nobility of such a stance. How honourable we must seem that we stop short of actual starvation.

And what was the Palestinian crime that justifies this outrage? That they dared to elect as their democratic representatives a regime that Israel and the US disapprove of.

So much for our much vaunted "love of democracy."

Nor has the Hamas government they elected been engaged in any hostilities towards Israel in recent times.

Hamas have been operating a ceasefire for some sixteen months now, a fact that the US press always seem to eliminate from their one sided reporting of events in the Middle East. Furthermore, Hamas have offered Israel a deal of quiet for quiet which Israel responded to by shelling the northern Gaza Strip and killing six Palestinians.

But, according to the US/Israeli songsheet, all of the above is irrelevant, and the people of Palestine must be starved until Hamas submits and recognises Israel's "right to exist". A right that no other country in history has ever demanded.

One also notes that, in this US inspired - highly selective- reading of history, the fact that the Israelis are in the middle of a 39 year occupation of Palestinian territory - indeed, the longest occupation in modern history - has been conveniently erased from the American narrative. Or, at the very least, placed to one side as an irrelevance.

The notion that the act of occupation is, of itself, an act of violence is dismissed.

What we are asked to look at and condemn is the reaction to the occupation rather than to condemn the occupation itself. An occupation that is illegal under international a law.

Resolution 242 requires that Israel withdraw from all the territories occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem. The United Nation's General Assembly has repeatedly condemned Israel's occupation of the territories as illegal (see UN resolutions 338, 1397, and 1402, among others).

Again, we are asked to ignore unpractical notions such as justice or adherence to international law, and instead we are asked to watch silently as the Palestinians are starved into submission.

Whatever one thinks of the Hamas regime, it is cruel in the extreme to subject Palestinian citizens to this ordeal.

Indeed, terrorising a civilian population with the aim of changing a governments course of actions is the very definition of terrorism.

The Palestinian people have suffered enough. There is no need for those of us here, in the affluent West, to inflict further unnecessary pain upon them.

What is being done here, in our name, I regard as little less than shameful.

Click title for Guardian report on the story.

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