When former President George W. Bush departed for his final trip home, that very moment represented an end of a long and unbearable nightmare, one that Bush epitomized until his last day in office.
Americans may decry what we can finally dub as the 'Bush legacy', for it brought economic ruin, but also pushed the country into avoidable, if not completely preventable wars, disgracing the collective history of a nation that for long imposed its sense of moral authority on the world.
RAFAH - Traffic on Sea Street, a major thoroughfare alongside Gaza's coastline, includes horses, donkeys pulling carts, cyclists, pedestrians, trucks and cars, mostly older models. Overhead, in stark contrast to the street below, Israel's ultra modern unmanned surveillance planes criss-cross the skies. F16s and helicopters can also be heard. Remnants of their deliveries, the casings of missiles, bombs and shells used during the past three weeks of Israeli attacks, are scattered on the ground.
Dr. Atallah, a physician in Gaza, invited us to meet him in his home in Gaza City, just a few blocks away from the Shifaa Hospital.
Early this morning, he and his family returned to their home after having fled five days earlier when the bombing attacks on Gaza City had become so fierce that they feared for their lives. "Believe me, when I would drive from the hospital to the place where my family was staying, I prayed all the way," said Dr. Atallah, "because the Israelis would shoot anyone on the roads at night."
The scale of Israel's attack on the
Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last
three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and
sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government's long-planned and
comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell.
As American Jews, we grew up learning to revere Israel, the "Jewish state" -- the refuge of the persecuted. We had come to expect that Israel would have a highly developed moral consciousness and a collective awareness of what it means to have another group want to annihilate you. So it is shocking for those of us who grew up with these romantic myths to witness the state of Israel assuming the role of oppressor, of murderer of innocents, of desensitized military annihilator.
Israel stands accused of perpetrating a series of war crimes during a sustained 12-hour assault on a village in southern Gaza last week in which 14 people died.
In
testimony collected from residents of the village of Khuza'a by the
Observer, it is claimed that Israeli soldiers entering the village:
In the wake of Israel's invasion of Gaza, Israel's Defense Minister
Ehud Barak made this analogy: "Think about what would happen if for
seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico."
The morgues of Gaza's hospitals are over-flowing. The bodies in their blood-soaked white shrouds cover the entire floor space of the Shifa hospital morgue. Some are intact, most horribly deformed, limbs twisted into unnatural positions, chest cavities exposed, heads blown off, skulls crushed in. Family members wait outside to identify and claim a brother, husband, father, mother, wife, child. Many of those who wait their turn have lost numerous family members and loved ones.
My two children went to the United Nations school in New York. Maybe that's why the news of the 40 people killed at the United Nations school in Gaza hit me so hard. I'm as blasé as the next person about pictures of children's bodies lined up on the ground. We've probably all thought, "Those could be my kids." This time the idea was a little more vivid than usual.
The crowd that gathered outside New York's City Hall on Jan. 7 included a lot of Jews like me. We were there to protest Mayor Michael Bloomberg's enthusiastic support for what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza.
Tom Friedman, one of the nation's leading propagandists for the Iraq
War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel's wars, has a column today in The New York Times
explaining and praising the Israeli attack on Gaza.
