Looking
From The Side,
From Belsen To Gaza
By John Pilger
26 January, 2006
Johnpilger.com
A genocide is engulfing the people
of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. "Some 1.4 million
people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated
regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and
no space to hide," wrote the senior UN relief official, Jan Egeland,
and Jan Eliasson, then Swedish foreign minister, in Le Figaro. They
described people "living in a cage", cut off by land, sea
and air, with no reliable power and little water and tortured by hunger
and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.
Egeland and Eliasson wrote
this four months ago as an attempt to break the silence in Europe whose
obedient alliance with the United States and Israel has sought to reverse
the democratic result that brought Hamas to power in last year's Palestinian
elections. The horror in Gaza has since been compounded; a family of
18 has died beneath a 500-pound American/Israeli bomb; unarmed women
have been mown down at point-blank range. Dr David Halpin, one of the
few Britons to break what he calls "this medieval siege",
reported the killing of 57 children by artillery, rockets and small
arms and was shown evidence that civilians are Israel's true targets,
as in Lebanon last summer. A friend in Gaza, Dr Mona El-Farra, emailed:
"I see the effects of the relentless sonic booms [a collective
punishment by the Israeli air force] and artillery on my 13-year-old
daughter. At night, she shivers with fear. Then both of us end up crouching
on the floor. I try to make her feel safe, but when the bombs sound
I flinch and scream …"
When I was last in Gaza,
Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist, showed me the results of a remarkable
survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said,
"is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma.
Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma you see why: 99.2 per
cent of their homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear
gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment
and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed."
Dr Dahlan invited me to sit in on one of his clinics. There were 30
children, all of them traumatized. He gave each pencil and paper and
asked them to draw. They drew pictures of grotesque acts of terror and
of women streaming tears.
The excuse for the latest
Israeli terror was the capture last June of an Israeli soldier, a member
of an illegal occupation, by the Palestinian resistance. This was news.
The kidnapping a few days earlier by Israel of two Palestinians - two
of thousands taken over the years - was not news. An historian and two
foreign journalists have reported the truth about Gaza. All three are
Israelis. They are frequently called traitors. The historian Ilan Pappe
has documented that "the genocidal policy [in Gaza] is not formulated
in a vacuum" but part of Zionism's deliberate, historic ethnic
cleansing. Gideon Levy and Amira Hass are reporters on the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz. In November, Levy described how the people of Gaza were beginning
to starve to death … "there are thousands of wounded, disabled
and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment … the
shadows of human beings roam the ruins … they only know the [Israeli
army] will return and what this will mean for them: more imprisonment
in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions."
Amira Hass, who has lived
in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls
how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle-train to the
Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer's day in 1944."
[She] saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking,"
she wrote. "This image became very formative in my upbringing,
this despicable 'looking from the side'."
"Looking from the side"
is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being
called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many western
Jews do, while those Jews who honour the humane traditions of Judaism
and say, "Not in our name!" are abused as "self-despising".
Looking from the side is what almost the entire US Congress does, in
thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist "lobby'. Looking
from the side is what "even-handed" journalists do as they
excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities and
supress the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the
implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out
for better.
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