Displaying items by tag: Gaza

You and I are human beings, with family, perhaps children and grandchildren, certainly with friends and neighbors. We are of different nationalities, ethnicities, beliefs. We have all seen extreme poverty, and witnessed wars and the killing and the dying, whether firsthand or through the news.

We have similar sentiments. Empathy is a part of us, in our DNA. Unless one can completely block out this aspect of all human beings, it is impossible to view what has happened in the last weeks the people of Gaza without being heartbroken, angry, and feeling helpless.

The country inflicting such disproportionate war on the inhabitants of Gaza is the one that was carved out of ancient Palestine following one of the worst, and one of the most heartbreaking man-made human calamities, the Jewish Holocaust.

As the smoke clears, and as both parties finish their “victory celebrations,” it is on all of us to ask ourselves what we can do.

A mostly barren region of the world, the Israeli and Palestinian land is the holy birthplace of the prophets of the three primary monotheist religions of the world. One would think that with the wisdom of these powerful religions, it would be a heaven of harmony. Instead, we find a hell on Earth, a ground soaked in the blood and tears of far too many innocent victims.

No conflict has consumed so much thought, wisdom and mediation by so many sages. It has produced more “peace plans” and “road maps” than any other conflict of the last century, the writers and planners at times rewarded prematurely with the Nobel Peace Prize, creating false optimism followed by disillusion, more frustration and anger. The hopes of Palestinians have been betrayed by their own leaders, by the rulers of their fellow Arab nations, and by the US.

We have just witnessed a new round of horrors, unleashed by an Israeli state that is apparently without moral constraints, one that believes it somehow has God’s exclusive mandate to be the unchallenged regional power, and one that believes itself entitled to nuclear arsenal that is denied to others in the region. Hamas rockets are easily overwhelmed by the unmatched air force and infantry army of Israel, the world’s 4th world military power.

Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.

AS of 2020, the United States had provided Israel $146 billion (current, or noninflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. In 2021, the Trump Administration requested and additional $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing for Israel and $500 million in missile defense aid. Israel receives the second largest foreign aid allocation in the US budget, second only to Afghanistan, including ultra-modern lethal weapons, advanced missile shield technology and the most advanced jet fighters. 

Rhetoric and fist-waving aside, Israel has no discernible external threats to its survival. Iran is as close as it comes to a plausible enemy – but with no nuclear weapons against Israel’s 200 nuclear warheads it is difficult to call this credible. The rockets fired by Hamas, most of them destroyed by Israel’s “Iron Dome,” are comparable to a child throwing rocks at an army of tanks in proportion to Israeli might. Yet the Israeli army has continued to wage wars against the Palestinian people, as it has done since the Arab-Israel war of half a century ago.

 The recent conflict, ignited by the invasion by Israeli security forces of the most sacred of Muslim sites, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, resulting in hundreds wounded, is only the latest move in a long campaign. It is made even more absurd today by the fact that 44% of the population of Gaza is under 14 years old, a demographic often seen in populations that have been subjected to campaigns of annihilation.

The US is an irreplaceable partner in the region and is critical to is resolution. The Biden Administration is inheriting a legacy of extraordinary blunders by the Trump administration that were received by Netanyahu as a green light and license for a scorched earth war against the Palestinians. It will demand courage and wisdom, and strong international support, to undo.

A path to the resolution must begin with all parties being held to the recognized international standards for crimes against humanity. No alliance with the powerful should shield any state or party from accountability for the violation of these standards. International Standards of crimes against one’s fellow human beings, when applied to Slobodan Milošević or Omar Al-Bashir but not to Benjamin Netanyahu become pointless.

Every conflict in this ongoing theater of insanity, including the “eviction” by armed forces from one’s home, to missiles landing in one’s bedroom in Gaza to a 10-year-old Israeli girl cowering in fear in a shelter, should reaffirm the validity and urgent need for the two-state solution based on the 1967 borders. The only other option is a unified state composed of Israelis and Palestinians, with the recognition that Palestinians would be the majority. There are no other options.

The  next steps on this vital road must  now include unimpeded access to Gaza for international humanitarian agencies, and international support for the reconstruction and compensation for the destruction of infrastructures and human lives needlessly lost and wounded. Our common empathy and humanity demand it.

(Article by Professor Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and José Ramos-Horta, 1996 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)

Source : https://www.muhammadyunus.org/news/2221/the-war-on-gaza-there-is-only-one-road-out

A TRUCE to last some 72 hours has started in Gaza and the Israeli army is being pulled back to the borders. Brokered by Egypt, the ceasefire should allow some breathing space for Gazans to bury their dead — if they can find space for them — salvage whatever they can and stock up on supplies in case talks break down and they are back to square one. According to the latest reports, Gazans remain nervous; fearing the worst. However, after declaring that they have achieved their objective of destroying the tunnels, Zionist Israel has begun pulling back their army, but not before perpetrating a long list of war crimes, including the latest attack on the United Nations (UN) school-cum-shelter, which drew condemnation even from their allies, especially the French.

 

After four weeks of ceaselessly pounding Gaza and killing more than 1,800 Palestinians, mainly civilians, the world leaders have suddenly woken up to the grizzly reality of Tel Aviv’s “defensive” action against the defenceless. Not that the Israeli-friendly governments and the UN have stopped blaming Hamas, firstly, for triggering this latest assault by the occupying power and, secondly, for raining rockets on an Iron Dome-protected Israel. Against such blatant bias, how can there be a lasting peace? Instead, if the statement of the French foreign minister is anything to go by, the intransigence of both parties has become an excuse for calls for the international community to impose peace. There are even suggestions that it revert to some form of mandated territory administered by the UN, which is not the solution desired by Palestinians surely, who expect self-determination in a sovereign Palestine.

 

Not too many days ago, Malaysia’s deputy prime minister called for supranational organisations, including the UN Security Council and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, to act or lose their legitimacy. The Security Council has voiced its support for an immediate halt on attacks that have taken a high civilian toll, especially on Gaza’s children. This, however, did not take the form of binding resolutions. The UN General Assembly will also be convening to figure out a solution. Meanwhile in Teheran, the foreign ministers of the Non-Aligned Movement’s Palestinian Committee are meeting. The committee, consisting of Algeria, Bangladesh, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, India, Senegal, South Africa, Palestine, Zimbabwe, Indonesia and Malaysia, has been urged by the Iranian president to focus on working out practical ways of helping the people of Gaza whom he says are “caught in a web of colonial plots”.

 

In short, while the world has awoken to the need to pressure Israel to stop the bloodbath, the voice is not homogenous. Rather, the agendas being pursued may not match the aspirations of the Palestinians, in both Gaza and the West Bank. Israel, however, has managed to exact its extreme and indiscriminate punishment on Palestine with impunity once again.

Every morning when I listen to the news update about Gaza I stop breathing. I couldn’t breathe last Wednesday when I read that four Palestinian children were killed while playing soccer on the beach; I couldn’t breathe two days later when I heard that three Palestinian children were killed while feeding their ducks on the roof; and I couldn’t breathe yesterday when a strike hit the building of the Abu Jameh family killing 26 people—19 of them children ages 4 months to 14 years—while they were gathered for breaking the Ramadan fast. I often weep and wonder how fellow Palestinians living under the most brutal military occupation imaginable can endure these horrors over and over and over again. Do Palestinians have a right to life?......................Click here to Read More