Aussie Columnist Fired for Blasphemy (Offending Zionists)

As I write, after just over a week of this
invasion, the death toll of Palestinians is climbing towards 1900. Most
are civilians, many are children. Assaulting Gaza by land, air and sea,
Israel has destroyed homes and reduced entire city blocks to rubble. It
has attacked schools, mosques and hospitals. Tens of thousands of people
have fled, although there is nowhere safe for them to go in this
wretched strip of land just 40 kilometres long and about 10 kilometres
wide. There are desperate shortages of food and water, of medical and
surgical supplies.

In an open letter to US President Barack
Obama, Dr Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian surgeon working at Gaza’s al-Shifa
hospital, writes of “the incomprehensible chaos of bodies, sizes, limbs,
walking, not walking, breathing, not breathing, bleeding, not bleeding
humans. Humans!

“Ashy grey faces – Oh no! Not one more load of
tens of maimed and bleeding. We still have lakes of blood on the floor
in the emergency room, piles of dripping, blood-soaked bandages to clear
out … the cleaners, everywhere, swiftly shoveling the blood and
discarded tissues, hair, clothes, cannulas – the leftovers from death –
all taken away… to be prepared again, to be repeated all over.”

 As one observer puts it: “All the seeds of the incitement of the past few years, all the nationalistic, racist legislation and the incendiary propaganda, the scare campaigns and the subversion of democracy by the right-wing camp – all these have borne fruit, and that fruit is rank and rotten. The nationalist right has now sunk to a new level, with almost the whole country following in its wake. The word ‘fascism’, which I try to use as little as possible, finally has its deserved place in the Israeli political discourse.”

Fascism in Israel? At this point the Australian Likudniks, as Bob Carr calls them, will be lunging for their keyboards. There will be the customary torrent of abusive emails calling me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, an ignoramus.  As usual they will demand my resignation, my sacking. As it’s been before, some of this will be pornographic or threatening violence.

In fact, that paragraph within the quotation marks was written by an Israeli. Gideon Levy is a columnist and editorial board member of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Born in Tel Aviv to parents who fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he despairs of what his country has become and the catastrophe its armed forces are visiting upon Gaza. After a recent column calling on Israeli pilots to stop bombing and rocketing civilians, his life was threatened and he now has a bodyguard day and night. It has come to that. In the worst insult of all, Levy is branded “a self-hating Jew”.

Israeli propaganda is subtle and skillfully put. “If Israel were to lay down its arms tomorrow, she would be destroyed; but if Hamas were to lay down their arms, there would be peace,” goes the line, parroted endlessly.

But in all these long and agonising decades, Israel has never offered the Palestinians a just and equitable peace. They would have only a splintered, vassal state, their polity and economy and even their borders and freedom of travel and trade managed and determined by Israel. The occupation of Palestinian lands would remain with the relentless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the Jordan and the Dead Sea.

As the Palestine Liberation Organization official Hanan Ashrawi put it this week in a television interview with the Australian journalist Hamish Macdonald: “No nation can accept being imprisoned, being besieged by land, by air, by sea and deprived of the most basic requirements of a decent life: freedom of movement, clean water. For seven years they have been under a brutal and lethal Israeli siege … You shell them and you bomb them; you destroy homes, you destroy whole neighborhoods. You obliterate, annihilate, whole families, and then you come and say that this is self defence?”

That is why the killing and the dying goes on. Ad nauseam, ad infinitum. And the rest of the world, not caring, looks away.