Are Palestinian Lives Truly Worthless?
I am not saying that I disagree (and I don’t) with David Brooks’ definition of how to find a meaning in each Israeli-Palestinian act of terrorism or war (“The confidence war“, IHT, January 7, 2009). But what is missing from Mr Brooks’ analysis is the fact that the very strategies of successive Israeli Governments, the PLO and now Hamas have been based on the utter disregard of the value of the lives of individual Palestinians.
This has been true especially in the last decade or so, with one side casually bombing crowded residential areas from afar only to release increasingly hypocritical “sorry” press releases afterwards; and the other either sending youths to suicide missions or armed with stones against armored tanks, or proclaiming without a second thought that thousands and thousands of dead women and children are a price worth paying for victory against “the Zionists”.
As shown repeatedly during the last century, it should be the job of international institutions to push hard for the safeguarding of lives, especially when the local Government is clearly unable or unwilling to do so. But I am afraid that until negotiations get centered around politicking rather than the basic rights of individual human beings, Palestinians (and Somalis, and Darfuris, etc etc) can only expect a future made of innumerable deaths.
Maurizio - Omnologos 
does it mean nothing to you that the rockets fired by Hamas only killed 7 Israelis in 2 years, yet the Israelis surge in and kill, wound and maim hundreds of cornered Palestinians – men women and children — and more and more in a land with every exit blocked and where they have cut off water — imagine the horrific suffering of these the indigenous people of that land.
The comparison you leave out completely — of the numbers killed.
Can you not consider this and == care?
?? J
2009/Jan/08 at 02:30:31
The issue is not much if I care…there isn’t much I can personally do to stop anybody doing anything. The (big) issue is that Hamas doesn’t seem to care.
If a man jumps into a polar bear’s pit at the zoo together with all his children, it is true that the bear will show its unforgiving side in killing them all: but the culprit of the massacre is the man. He should have known what would happen (especially since it is clear that no main political party in Israel cares about the life of any Palestinian). And he did know.
So what was the point of firing those rockets, given that they injure almost nobody and destroy pretty much nothing? I am pretty sure if the people in Gaza could decide it democratically and without fear of violence, instead of living imprisoned by their own “defenders”, the rocket launches would stop today.
omnologos
2009/Jan/08 at 07:54:29
[…] headline “When governments fail” (a modified version of yesterday’s blog “Are Palestinian Lives Truly Worthless?“): David Brooks’s analysis (”The confidence war,” Views, Dec. 7) is missing […]
Why Israel Is Not The Palestinian Problem « Maurizio - Omnologos
2009/Jan/08 at 23:54:44
to rephrase the question put by ??J, does it mean nothing to you that Hamas, an organisation born of 61 years of imprisonment in history’s biggest, longest lasting refugee camp, in sending its youth to die for a better future, is acting exactly like every legal government in history? That your man at the zoo has been living with the bear for three generations, has already seen several of his children eaten alive, and one day decides to sacrifice himself and the rest of his children? It’s not western democracy, but what do you expect?
What’s really got me is your comparison on another blog of di Pietro with Robespierre. Maybe you could explain that here, or there. I don’t want to be rude, or complicated. All of us denialists or contrarian thinkers have to think hard about the complex rationales we construct. I think of Orwell who had the courage to say “Churchill good: Hitler bad”. The time has maybe come to say “Hamas good .. ” ..and what the hell’s your problem with di Pietro?
geoff chambers
2009/Jan/09 at 01:44:44
[…] a comment » A chance for some clarification on previous blogs of mine. Let’s start from the Israeli […]
Israel and Gaza Again (1) « Maurizio - Omnologos
2009/Jan/15 at 23:25:34
[…] good about the lives of the Palestinian people they are at least pretending to lead. This makes the life of an inhabitant of Gaza worth more or less nothing, not only in the eyes of the “enemy” (Israel) and of the “bystanders” (USA, […]
Israel and Gaza again (2) « Maurizio - Omnologos
2009/Jan/16 at 07:38:28
This analysis is wrong. People are not polar bears, and when you treat a government, such as Israel, as nature, you give it the privilege of nature to make a holocaust of humanity.
Gazans have the right of self-defense under the Charter of the United Nations, including what you think to be a pointless, doomed self-defense, because human dignity can be more important than physical well-being.
Israel’s constant acts of war (of which blockade is one THAT NEVER STOPS) under international law are being met by nothing more than self-defense.
This is because Israel has no track record of recognizing ANY Arab government formed after World War II, while it has recognized thugs including Pinochet and the Apartheid gang that used to run South Africa.
Israel’s goal is (1) reversing the demographic trend that is in favor of Arabs and Palestinian Christians, and (2) the physical liquidation of all stateless persons in the former mandate of Palestine.
Israel is attempting a slow-motion Holocaust. Somebody pull that shit with me, damned straight I’d fire homemade rockets. Israel has its own dark record vis a vis the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, in which little resistance was mounted outside of the Warsaw ghetto, Jews volunteered for the Jewish police to stave off their liquidation, and, possibly, the Stern gang cooperated with the Nazis, encouraging them in order to create a raison d’etre for a Zionist Israel.
By contrast, the resistance of the Palestinians in straightforward and noble. There’s something old-fashioned and admirable in this which men of the 19th century would applaud, while today’s urban sheeple call it “terrorism”.
spinoza1111
2009/Feb/02 at 07:55:11
The “safeguarding of lives” is about the persecution of ethnic minorities by governments, among other things. It does NOT include the actions of an elected government taken in self-defense.
This morning, the BBC world service quoted Ehud Barack as saying that the new round of Israeli retaliation would be “disproportionate” (his word in the English text as delivered).
This is the announcement of a war crime, because in just war theory as accepted in international law, the response must be “proportionate”.
spinoza1111
2009/Feb/02 at 07:59:09
The worst, most corrupt “politicking”, spelled with or without a “k”, is preferable to “war macking”, “killing children accidentally on purpose from the air”, and “strangling a society by means of a ‘blockade'”. It is called “demockracy”.
spinoza1111
2009/Feb/02 at 08:38:55
[…] good about the lives of the Palestinian people they are at least pretending to lead. This makes the life of an inhabitant of Gaza worth more or less nothing, not only in the eyes of the “enemy” (Israel) and of the “bystanders” (USA, […]
Israel and Gaza again (2) | Omnologos
2012/Mar/22 at 00:18:04