Non-Violence to Gaza: Light to Darkness

The following are excerpts from very reputable journalists on the situation in Gaza. Chris Hedges, former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and author of War A Force That Gives Us Meaning and Uri Averny, long-time Israeli peace advocate and long-time editor of Gush Shalom.

► Chris Hedges
www.Truthdig.com
December 31, 2008

Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on Gaza—the buildings blown to rubble, the children killed on their way to school, the long rows of mutilated corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the crowds of terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, the hospitals so overburdened and out of supplies they cannot treat the wounded, and our studied callous indifference to the widespread human suffering—wonder why we are hated.

Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should time and fate and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love. “Expose thyself to what wretches feel,” King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, “and show the heavens more just.” 

Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods.

► Uri Averny
How Many Divisions?
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1231625457

In this war, as in any modem war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army—with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks—and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government —the state must defend its citizens from the Qassam rockets—has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassam rockets are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

War—every war is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one’s country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor. . . . So it went with other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a “symbol of Hamas rule.” Thus, the Israeli army retained its purity as the “most moral army in the world.”

The Truth is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak—A man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called “moral insanity,” a sociopathic disorder.

The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming election) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the imagination of the planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a foreign country. The reality is, of course, entirely different. . . . The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the eminently democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. It won because the Palestinians had come to the conclusion that Fatah’s approach had gained precisely nothing from Israel—neither a freeze of the settlements, nor release of the prisoners, nor any significant steps toward ending the occupation and creating a Palestinian state. Hamas is deeply rooted in the population—not only as a resistant movement fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the Stern Group in the past—but also as a political and religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.

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