It is probably rare to see Juan Cole (Informed Comment) this up in arms over Gaza, its aftermath, especially the effect of Israel’s continuing siege on the pain and suffering of Gaza’s wounded children. When Israel told Obama, for sake of a better phrase, to fuck off in response to his January 22 statement that,
As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce,
Israel apparently preferred confrontation. We have yet to hear Obama’s response if one will at all be forthcoming.
Juan Cole recently reviewed the many international efforts to do what the US should be but is not doing to relieve Gaza, as Israel continues its pre-invasion policy of siege allowing only a trickle of food and medical supplies in.
Cole is calling for a Cyberspace Aid Convoy.
Monday, February 16, 2009
The demonstrating crowds have gone home. The blog postings have tapered off. The pundits have moved on. Congress is back to its old tricks, ignoring public opinion in favor of the lobbyists and money men. The US public is worried about losing its job or getting back the one it lost. Gaza here is a dimming memory, a momentary nightmare now past.
But the Palestinian children wounded and charred by Israeli bombings are still screaming, their physicians unable to get hold of enough pain killers to still their yelps of pain. Some 5300 Palestinians, most of them children, women and noncombatants, were wounded in Israel’s savage war on the Gaza population.
In the meantime, Israel imposes new rationales for continuing the siege.
Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has ruled out allowing needed goods into Gaza until Hamas releases captured Israeli soldier Sgt. Gilad Shalit. “Olmert is thereby committing a war crime.”
As Cole rightly notes, “you can’t collectively punish the general Gaza population if you are the occupying authority. It is not allowed to torture that wailing child in the video above by keeping out painkillers, just because some adult somewhere from the same territory captured an Israeli soldier.”
The United Nations Security Council again demanded that Israel let in food, medicine and fuel unimpeded. “Since Israel is still technically the occupying authority in Gaza, insofar as it controls its borders and airspace, for it to engage in collective punishment on the Gazan population is a war crime forbidden by the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, which was enacted to prevent Nazi tactics from being deployed against occupied populations.”
Peace activists and Muslim groups in the UK are attempting to address the continued Israeli blockade of food and medicine by sending an NGO convoy of trucks to Gaza. They will go down through France and Spain, on ferries across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and then across North Africa to Egypt and the Sinai, hoping to cross at Rifah.
MP George Galloway is accompanying the convoy part of the way. He told the Independent,
Anywhere else, there would be a Berlin-style airlift, he says. “Almost every window has been broken but Israel refuses to allow glass across the border. So, in the bitter winter, 61,000 families whose homes have been destroyed are living among the rubble and the rest are freezing because they’ve got no windows. You could solve that problem in a weekend, but because it is the Palestinians it doesn’t happen.
Said Cole, “Galloway is pilloried by the British establishment as an exhibitionist, but he has a knack for speaking uncomfortable truths eloquently.”
Aid for Gazans has also arrived in Jordan from Chile and Pakistan. Israel will not allow direct passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza and has turned away ships bearing aid from Libya, Lebanon, Cypress, and even from Israel itself.
In another humanitarian breakthrough, the government of Scotland has voted to send substantial civilian aid.
In America, peace activists are also organizing for boycotts of and divestment from Israeli companies that support Israel’s siege and military occupation.
A statement from Cole on these boycott and divestment efforts:
Boycotters maintain that some Israeli diamond enterprises selling in the US are morally compromised in two ways– they import diamonds from West Africa (which can be blood diamonds, implicated in violence and human rights abuses), and use profits on selling the cut diamonds to support the illegal colonization by the Zionist far right of the West Bank. (All Israeli colonization of the West Bank is illegal, since it is occupied territory and falls under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the occupier to settle its own people in militarily occupied territory or to substantially alter the lifeways or conditions of the occupied population).
I think organizing an effective For America Peace PAC would be a thousand times more effective in putting pressure on Israel to cease its daily violation of basic Palestinian rights. But I also predict that Israeli Apartheid policies toward the Palestinians will deepen under the new, far-right government now being assembled, and that these policies will increasingly attract economic boycotts from the rest of the world. I think Israel is pretty vulnerable to such boycotts, though I think it will take 20 years for them to build up to the point where they have a practical effect. It is likely the next big thing.
(snip)
So as to avoid negotiating with Hamas, the Olmert government made total war on Gazans, which is to say, on Palestinian children. They need our cyberspace aid convoy to begin healing and recovering. As things now stand, the Israeli blockade remains in place. Children in hospitals are screaming.
Other efforts to break the siege of Gaza have been ongoing since last summer by the Free Gaza Movement as told here:
As a beginning to this Cyberspace Aid Convoy, Cole has posted an appeal by UNICEF’s Gaza Children’s Fund. CLICK HERE to donate if you are able.
