“The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow” ― Philip Gourevitch, American author and journalist
It does seem that if you’re Muslim and live in the middle-east, your life is only as good as the amount of oil that flows under your feet? Palestine an agricultural people that has existed circa 3000 BCE, and a people who have fought and been invaded by the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians and later even the Persians. It was the Romans who first employed the geographic denomination Palestine, which stuck to this day. Arguably, no other region on the planet over the millennia has been as hotly contested by different tribes, nations and ethnic groups as Palestine, thus it should have been called the “Middle-Earth”, not the Middle-East.
From ancient times, Jews Gentiles and Muslims lived together, side-by-side as neighbours within this maelstrom of conquest and defeat, in order for the cycle to be repeated a few years later once another young empire rose and wished to prove its testosterone. But things would change on the 29th of November 1947 when the UN General Assembly adopts a resolution to subdivide Palestine into an independent Arab and Jewish state. Amid the steady influx of Jews from Europe, the Jewish leadership announced the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. This was to change everything for the people of Palestine who were involved in more than a dozen wars with Israel amid losing huge tracts of land and properties. Come the year 2018, the much-oppressed people of Gaza, a 72km square piece of land, surrounded by artificial “no man’s land, an Israeli state fiction, decided to embark on a serious of non-violent protests every Friday.
Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison system, an average of 10 000 unarmed protestors took to the so-called, “border” to protest the return of their land, the lifting of the blockade and the discontinuation of the systematic brutalisation. Since the first demonstration on the 30th March, the death toll now stands at about 600 massacred, with many of the victims being women and children, and about 10 000 injured. The Israeli armed forces favourite methods of death and destruction are the prolific use of banned explosive rounds, chemical agents and live sniper fire.
Imagine an administration, involved with an embargo of goods and services so thorough in their application that they count the calories of the foodstuffs entering Palestine to ensure that each person’s nutritional needs are barely met? Imagine that they have almost completely destroyed the infrastructure like desalination plants, electricity supply and water facilities, and rendering 98% of the water undrinkable? Imagine deliberately targeting aide and medical workers and the press, then claiming that Hamas is using them as “human shields?” Now imagine that the Israelis, with the help of the Americans, operate one of the largest propaganda campaigns, known as “Hasbara” meant to influence an international audience and discredit a people that have already been stripped of everything?
Imagine no more and welcome to Apartheid 2.0, the updated version of the original Apartheid program of “slow-motion” genocide and destruction of just over 5-million people, whose only wish is to exist in peace and harmony, as they’ve always done. Remember, it was the 4th Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir who said, “We can never forgive the Arabs for forcing us to kill their children”
“The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out “stop!” When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.”
― Bertolt Brecht, German theatre practitioner, playwright and poet
