At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital in the Gaza Strip.
His name was Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob, and he was suffering from a
lung infection which was treatable.
Denied basic equipment, the doctors in Gaza could do nothing. For
weeks, the child’s parents had sought a permit from the Israelis to
allow them to take him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where he would have
been saved. Like many desperately sick people who apply for these
permits, the parents were told they had never applied. Even if they
had arrived at the Erez Crossing with an Israeli document in their
hands, the odds are that they would have been turned back for refusing
the demands of officials to spy or collaborate in some way. “Is it an
irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations
special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian
territories and emeritus professor of international law at Princeton
At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital in the Gaza Strip.
His name was Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob, and he was suffering from a
lung infection which was treatable.
Denied basic equipment, the doctors in Gaza could do nothing. For
weeks, the child’s parents had sought a permit from the Israelis to
allow them to take him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where he would have
been saved. Like many desperately sick people who apply for these
permits, the parents were told they had never applied. Even if they
had arrived at the Erez Crossing with an Israeli document in their
hands, the odds are that they would have been turned back for refusing
the demands of officials to spy or collaborate in some way. “Is it an
irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations
special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian
territories and emeritus professor of international law at Princeton
University, who is Jewish, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians
with [the] criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think
not.”
Falk was describing Israel’s massacre in December and January of
hundreds of helpless civilians in Gaza, many of them children.
Reporters called this a “war”. Since then, normality has returned to
Gaza. Most children are malnourished and sick, and almost all exhibit
the symptoms of psychiatric disturbance, such as horrific nightmares,
depression and incontinence. There is a long list of items that Israel
bans from Gaza. This includes equipment to clean up the toxic detritus
of Israel’s US munitions, which is the suspected cause of rising
cancer rates. Toys and playground equipment, such as slides and
swings, are also banned. I saw the ruins of a fun fair, riddled with
bullet holes, which Israeli “settlers” had used as a sniping target.
The day after Baby Zu’rob died in Gaza, President Barack Obama made
his “historic” speech in Cairo, “reaching out to the Muslim world”,
reported the BBC. “Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the
continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Obama, “does not serve
Israel’s security.” That was all. The killing of 1,300 people in what
is now a concentration camp merited 17 words, cast as concern for the
“security” of the killers. This was understandable. During the January
massacre, Seymour Hersh reported that “the Obama team let it be known
that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and
other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” for use in
Gaza.
Obama’s one criticism of Israel was that “the United States does not
accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements . . . It is
time for these settlements to stop.” These fortresses on Palestinian
land, manned by religious fanatics from America and elsewhere, have
been outlawed by the UN Security Council and the International Court
of Justice. Pointedly, Obama made no mention of the settlements that
already honeycomb the occupied territories and make an independent
Palestinian state impossible, which is their purpose.
Obama demanded that the “cycle of suspicion and discord must end”.
Every year, for more than a generation, the UN has called on Israel to
end its illegal and violent occupation of post-1967 Palestine and has
voted for “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.
Every year, those voting against these resolutions have been the
governments of Israel and the United States and one or two of
America’s Pacific dependencies; last year Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe
joined them.
Such is the true “cycle” in the Middle East, which is rarely reported
as the relentless rejection of the rule of law by Israel and the
United States: a law in whose name the wrath of Washington came down
on Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait, a law which, if upheld and
honoured, would bring peace and security to both Palestine and
Israel.
Instead, Obama spoke in Cairo as if his and previous White House
administrations were neutral, almost divine brokers of peace, instead
of rapacious backers and suppliers of the invader (along with
Britain). This Orwellian illogic remains the standard for what western
journalists call the “Israel-Palestine conflict”, which is almost
never reported in terms of the law, of right and wrong, of justice and
injustice – Darfur, yes, Zimbabwe, yes, but never Palestine. Orwell’s
ghost again stirred when Obama denounced “violent extremists in
Afghanistan and now Pakistan [who are] determined to kill as many
Americans as they possibly can”. America’s invasion and slaughter in
these countries went unmentioned. It, too, is divine.
Naturally, unlike George W Bush, Obama did not say that “you’re either
with us or against us”. He smiled the smile and uttered “many eloquent
mood-music paragraphs and a smattering of quotations from the Holy
Quran”, noted the American international lawyer John Whitbeck. Beyond
this, Obama offered no change, no plan, only a “tired, morally
bankrupt American mantra [which] essentially argues that only the
rich, the strong, the oppressors and the enforcers of injustice
(notably the Americans and Israelis) have the right to use violence,
while the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the victims of oppression
must . . . submit to their fate and accept whatever crumbs their
betters may magnanimously deign suitable to let fall from their
table”. And he offered not the slightest recognition that the world’s
most numerous victims of terrorism are people of Muslim faith – a
terrorism of western origin that dares not speak its name.
In his “reaching out” in Cairo, as in his “anti-nuclear” speech in
Berlin, as in the “hope” he spun at his inauguration, this clever
young politician is playing the part for which he was drafted and
promoted. This is to present a benign, seductive, even celebrity face
to American power, which can then proceed towards its strategic goal
of dominance, regardless of the wishes of the rest of humanity and the
rights and lives of our children.
www.johnpilger.com
June 11, 2009
