Crying with Gaza

Crushing Israeli state sponsored violence is meted upon Gaza and is defended as the necessary and proportionate response to extremist Palestinian rocket fire and claims that Israel should not exist as a state at all.

The strange thing is that people like me who are tempted to point a finger have been there before.  I think of Americans wiping out of ‘Red Indian’ warriors.  I think of the English army putting down revolts from Ireland to India.  I think of white South African massacres in black South African townships.

East Jerusalem remains annexed, Gaza remains besieged, and the West Bank remains occupied and gradually settled, all it seems from an apparent conviction that the existing population of those areas has as many rights as people like me felt native Americans, existing Irish and Indian populations and black South Africans had as we moved in around them. 

 

It seems entirely logical.  Gaza is pounded it seems from the same apparent conviction people like me have had that if a native population’s resistance ever overflows into violence then a failure to be systematic and overwhelming in stamping out such terrorism and cowing the whole local population would fatally undermine who we are.

In a hundred years time, will Palestinians be isolated groups living on reservations or natives of an independent state, on partitioned land or in a rainbow nation?   This is the range of results people like me have left behind in America, India, Ireland and South Africa.   And how will the story of the present pounding of Gaza be told by the neighbouring peoples to each other then?