with heart, pain &love for hurted Palestine

24 nov. 2008, The Independent

Four cheers for the feisty Lauren Booth, sister-inlaw of our special Middle East envoy, Tony Blair. But what exactly is he doing? Desperately searching for his legacy I suppose, like the weapons of mass destruction hidden in the sands somewhere, waiting to be unearthed.

Meanwhile Booth is emerging as one of the few voices in the wilderness bringing up the plight of Gaza as Israel efficiently chokes and suffocates the tiny strip of land, the hellish home to Palestinians, of which 60 per cent of its inhabitants are children. This summer Booth joined activists on a ship – including an 80-year-old Catholic nun from the United States and an Israeli peacenik – to take aid to these sick and hungry. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused them of “supporting the regime of a terrorist organisation in Gaza”. This week, Booth has been once again speaking passionately in public about what she witnessed.

It will be a year in January since Israel imposed the blockade, knowing it was against international law and human rights conventions. It is a siege without mercy, locking people into a prison, most of whom have not been convicted of any crime except that of being Palestinian. I am not defending the militants who attack Israel; what they do is extreme provocation. But even that cannot excuse Israel’s actions. Neither United Nations food aid nor European Union medical supplies are allowed through. Fishermen are gunned down, power cuts mean industries have shut down.



Oxfam, Amnesty International and the EU have condemned this as collective punishment. The former US president Jimmy Carter called the siege “a crime, an atrocity and an abomination”. Many conscientious Jewish British men and women feel guilty by association, dreadfully unfair though that is. But where is the outrage in the media? I have scoured the newspapers, and there is nothing. Israel can get away with anything it chooses to do. So low are expectations of this democracy that such a state-made humanitarian disaster is not even news.

Compare the coverage with, say, Zimbabwe where Mugabe goes on annihilating opposition, wrecking the economic future of his country and pushing his people into a famine. This state-made devastation is recorded daily by the Western media, in spite of all the restrictions placed on journalists. So why this blackout on Gaza?

As for propaganda to justify the unjustifiable, there are commentators in this country for whom Israel can do no wrong. One of the most vociferous, Stephen Pollard, now edits the Jewish Chronicle, a newspaper that once expressed a range of views, including those held by liberal British Jews. It is turning hardline. PR onslaughts are launched by the Board of Deputies and British Israeli Communication and Research Centre, whose head, Lorna Fitzsimons (a former Labour MP for Rochdale but not herself Jewish) sends out press releases week after week defending all Israeli actions. In an interview she once said: “We need to think carefully about the consequences of questioning the defensive reactions of a nation-state that is constantly bombarded by an enemy calling for its destruction.” Note the implicit warning in that statement.

It is time to think about not questioning the “defensive” actions of this nuclear nation state. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the brave and moral Nobel Prize alumni, has condemned the “silence and complicity” that allows this to be done. Evil happens when the world says and does nothing. That a Jewish state expects no condemnation of the evil it perpetrates shows that nothing is learnt from history.