© Hatem Moussa / APSmoke and fire from the explosion of an Israeli strike rise over Gaza City, Tuesday, July 22.
As a Jewish youngster growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force that sometimes my head would spin: "How was it possible? How could the world have let such horrors happen?"
It was a naïve question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. In Gaza today we find ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a beach.
In Israel-Palestine the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. "They don't care about life," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, abetted by the Obamas and Harpers of this world, "we do." Netanyahu, you who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old, you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their land, their water, their crops, their trees - you care about life?
There is no understanding Gaza out of context - Hamas rockets or unjustifiable terrorist attacks on civilians - and that context is the longest ongoing ethnic cleansing operation in the recent and present centuries, the ongoing attempt to destroy Palestinian nationhood.
Comment: Flights cancelled for one rocket (whose?) near Tel Aviv / no flights cancelled over Gaza. Really? Is the FAA complicit in a high profile international propaganda stunt to influence opinion as to who is the victim in Gaza, knowing the EASA would follow suit? Or is this more false flag to camouflage that the "alleged" Hamas rockets are as absent and ineffective as Hamas claims? Could be both.