Gaza & Race

Dear Friends,

When Truthout's Marc Ash calls for Hamas to stop firing rockets as a credible prelude to a truce, I lose all patience with the Left. So please let me share my thoughts on both-sides-are-responsible thinking regarding Gaza.

THE CRIME OF DISPROPORTION
First, it is insulting since Israel's magnitude of reaction to Hamas provocation constitutes a universally condemned form of criminality so barbaric it cannot be rationalized by or equated to acts of the enemy. A Norwegian doctor reported on CBS Morning News that only one of the scores of casualties that he has treated was connected to the Hamas military. He also pointed out that the average age of the population in Gaza is 18 years old and that 80% of the population live below the poverty line as defined by the UN. Last, they are trapped with no where to flee unlike other populations at the mercy of invaders and occupiers. Is it any wonder that at least half the dead are women and children? See

Doctor Decries Israeli Attacks:
(Mads Gilbert)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev6ojm62qwA

DISCUSSING PALESTINE IN A FRAMEWORK OF HISTORIC REALITY
WE HAVE TO FRAME THE OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE IN A WAY THAT DOES JUSTICE TO THE REALITY OF THIS SITUATION AND DECRIES THE BEHAVIOR OF THE GOVERNMENT WHICH HAS CREATED AND MAINTAINED THE DESOLATE NORMS OF LIFE IN THAT VAST BARRIO.

HAMAS AND GANGLAND GOVERNANCE: LIVING BY THE LIGHT OF LIGHTNING
If you think for a moment about the nature of Palestinian society, you realize that Hamas is what you get when you don't permit a country you have occupied for 40 years and two generations to become little more than a vast barrio for an Arab (both Muslim and Christian) underclass. Gaza is in many places a tent city with its refugee camps. These are inhuman homelands for the homeless.

Seen in this light, rocket fire isn't rage made intelligent; it is rage made intelligible, manifest. It isn't an expression of anger mobilized, but anger immobilized. It is neither strategy or tactic. It is random and pathetic--dangerous but feeble outcries of misery, impotence, isolation, fury and humiliation.

ISRAEL'S HISTORY OF BAD FAITH BARGAINING
But even if Hamas were more civil, it would do no good. Israel has never for an instant proved it genuinely wants two sovereign states. Even the Oslo Accords left Palestine a vassal-state. So when the Palestinians refuse to play the role of hosts to and henchmen with their occupiers from inside their vast barbed-wire, concrete-wall enclosed Sowetos or Warsaws, one errs to see their intransigence as a justification for elephantine, implacable and sadistic Israeli militancy.

ISRAEL'S BLACKS & AMERICA's
It doesn't take much contemplation to see that Israel, as slum landlord of Palestine, cares even less for the vast slumlands of Palestine that it has created than my state and local government do for the vast slumlands of North Philadelphia.

Which brings me to the subject of RACE. Only five miles away from me, North Philadelphia's blacks are not my neighbors in any Christian or even contiguous sense, but demonized poor who frighten civilized suburbia with anger and the meager right of gun ownership. Gaza is looked upon and characterized by Israelis the same way my neighborhood looks upon and characterizes the nearby inner city inhabitants who live in squalor, poverty, hopelessness and despair.

"THEY ARE NOT LIKE US"
The tragedy of inequality and otherness is compounded by the fact that we project an inherent lack of purpose and drive on inner city folk. By dint of racism that doesn't even recognize itself as such, we assume all inner city inhabitants (whether in North Philadelphia or Gaza) are born into non-congeniality with suburbia's dreams and ambitions. This "projection," of course, is just de facto ineligibility for a life based on those dreams and ambitions. When you deprive a people for generations of the means to realize ends that are cherished by and accessible to the more fortunate, the oppressors add insult to injury by concluding their victims never wanted to pursue those ends in the first place. THIS IS RACISM.

Gaza is, at heart, a race war conducted against Arabs in methods shockingly similar to race wars conducted against Jews. This twisted parallelism is a chronic koan that dominates the minds of most conscientious Jews I know, including myself, and inflicts endless torment since I was brought up to think of being Jewish as the essence of my life (a victory, I now realize, for anti-Semites everywhere).

PALESTINE AND THE CONFEDERACY
Every time I see an Israeli flag, and try to imagine how it is perceived by a Palestinian, I see it much as an African-American might see a Confederate flag. It is an icon of injustice--just as Communist and Nazi flags are. Icons of oppression like flags are spiritually radioactive and carry enormous archetypal half-lives from the time when they flew with impunity. That's why the Red, White & Blue is so hated in many places. If we could see Gaza as a place whose welfare was placed in our hands decades ago by dint of our sustaining alliance with Israel, the cruelty we tolerate there would end in a matter of weeks as we succored its occupants and condemned its occupiers.

In any case, once we see the recent attacks on Gaza as part of an escalating race war for which we are responsible and in whose outcome we have a stake, it must become, through our subsidization of that war, an extension of American History and Life--a long, sordid history of and life filled with race wars, including the Civil War as well as 19th and 20th century American imperiums in South America. To me, the Palestinians are Israel's African-Americans. This is the real anti-semitism at work here.

Israel has done everything in its considerable power to delegitimize Palestine's moral right to statehood as well as dehumanize and deprive its occupants of their moral and cultural rights to citizenry. Indeed, I would say that as apartheid occupiers they have systematically tried to prevent or stunt any aptitude for citizenship as they or we know it. How? By allowing Palestinians no infrastructure above that of a penal colony. Gaza is an open-air prison camp. Of course, aspirations to and assumptions of the normalcies of citizenship (what Jefferson called "the pursuit of happiness) are enshrined in American and Israeli law.

Amazingly, Hamas was elected by a democratic election process more strictly monitored than our own presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. We must never forget that Israel immediately stopped the flow of funds to the victors and began its draconian collective punishment of the Palestinian people for exercising their vote in large part as a protest against occupation.

ZIONISM AND COLONIALISM
To me, the Jewish State has become a solitary lethal relic of Western colonialism. As such, Israel is and maybe has always been in an existential dilemma that comes with creation of what is essentially a squatter's state. Either Israel sanctifies its contentious, debatable existence with kindness to its neighbors or perishes from the cruelty inflicted on them to sustain its own delusional racist notions of a separate people and impermeable polis. Is Jewish nationalism as practiced toward others any different from Nazi era nationalism practiced toward Jews? Why must Israelis in power act like the children of abuse, the children of alcoholic parents perpetuating instead of ending their suffering?

For me, Gaza demands immediate intervention. And I'm not talking truckfuls of milk and medicine. For me, Israel must be barred from any further presence in Palestine. Complete withdrawal is the only acceptable reparation at this late stage in Israel's 42-year inhuman slumlord governance of Palestine.

Pray without ceasing. Pray for a rising tide of aghastness that forces Israel to remember and act upon its humanity.