We Have No Words Left

"I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is
doing." Those chilling words were spoken on al-Jazeera on Saturday by
Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area
adjacent to the Gaza Strip. For days Israeli planes have bombed Gaza.
Almost 300 Palestinians have been killed and a thousand injured, the
majority civilians, including women and children. Israel claims most of
the dead were Hamas "terrorists". In fact, the targets were police
stations in dense residential areas, and the dead included many police
officers and other civilians. Under international law, police officers
are civilians, and targeting them is no less a war crime than aiming at
other civilians.

Palestinians are at a loss to describe this new
catastrophe. Is it our 9/11, or is it a taste of the "bigger shoah"
Matan Vilnai, the deputy defense minister, threatened in February,
after the last round of mass killings?

Israel says it is acting
in "retaliation" for rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since
a six-month truce expired on 19 December. But the bombs dropped on Gaza
are only a variation in Israel's method of killing Palestinians. In
recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick
especially, deprived of food, cancer treatments and other medicines by
an Israeli blockade that targeted 1.5 million people - mostly refugees
and children - caged into the Gaza Strip. The orders of Ehud Barak, the
Israeli defense minister, to hold back medicine were just as lethal and
illegal as those to send in the warplanes.

Ehud Olmert, Israel's
prime minister, pleaded that Israel wanted "quiet" - a continuation of
the truce - while Hamas chose "terror", forcing him to act. But what is
Israel's idea of a truce? It is very simple: Palestinians have the
right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and
continues to violently colonize their land.

As John Ging, the
head of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees, said in November: "The people of Gaza did not
benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence ...
at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the
ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and
precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food."

That
is an Israeli truce. Any act of resistance including the peaceful
protests against the apartheid wall in the West Bank is always met by
Israeli bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from
the West Bank, and yet Israel's extrajudicial killings, land theft,
settler pogroms and kidnappings never stopped for a day during the
truce. The western-backed Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has
acceded to all Israel's demands. Under the proud eye of United States
military advisers, Abbas has assembled "security forces" to fight the
resistance on Israel's behalf. None of that has spared a single
Palestinian in the West Bank from Israel's relentless colonization.

The
Israeli media report that the attack on Gaza was long planned. If so,
the timing in the final days of the Bush administration may indicate an
Israeli effort to take advantage of a moment when there might be even
less criticism than usual.

Israel is no doubt emboldened by the
complicity of the European Union, which this month voted again to
upgrade its ties with Israel despite condemnation from its own
officials and those of the UN for the "collective punishment" being
visited on Gaza. Tacit Arab regime support, and the fact that predicted
uprisings in the Arab street never materialized, were also factors.

But
there is a qualitative shift with the latest horror: as much as Arab
anger has been directed at Israel, it has also focused intensely on
Arab regimes - especially Egypt's - seen as colluding with the Israeli
attack. Contempt for these regimes and their leaders is being expressed
more openly than ever. Yet these are the illegitimate regimes western
politicians continue to insist are their "moderate" allies.

Diplomatic
fronts, such as the US-dominated Quartet, continue to treat occupier
and occupied, colonizer and colonized, first-world high-tech army and
near-starving refugee population, as if they are on the same footing.
Hope is fading that the incoming administration of Barack Obama is
going to make any fundamental change to US policies that are hopelessly
biased towards Israel.

In Europe and the Middle East, the gap
between leaders and led could not be greater when it comes to Israel.
Official complicity and support for Israel contrast with popular
outrage at war crimes carried out against occupied people and refugees
with impunity.

With governments and international institutions
failing to do their jobs, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions National Committee - representing hundreds of organizations -
has renewed its call on international civil society to intensify its
support for the sanctions campaign modeled on the successful
anti-apartheid movement.

Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term effort to make sure we do not wake up to "another Gaza" ever again.