Party to Murder

TruthDig.com editor's note: In light of the recent
fighting in Gaza, Truthdig asked Chris Hedges, who covered the Mideast
for The New York Times for seven years, to update a previous column on Gaza.

Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on Gaza-the
buildings blown to rubble, the children killed on their way to school,
the long rows of mutilated corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the
crowds of terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, the
hospitals so overburdened and out of supplies they cannot treat the
wounded, and our studied, callous indifference to this widespread human
suffering-wonder why we are hated?

Our self-righteous celebration of
ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We
have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are
a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We
forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection
of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate and time and
geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget
that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the
capacity to fear and hate and love. "Expose thyself to what wretches
feel," King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom,
"and show the heavens more just."

Privilege and power, especially military
power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the
brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods.
Over 350 Palestinians have been killed,
many of them civilians, and over 1,000 have been wounded since the air
attacks began on Saturday. Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, said
Israel is engaged in a "war to the bitter end" against Hamas in Gaza. A
war? Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb
densely crowded refugee camps and slums, to attack a population that
has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no
artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army,
and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder.

The U.N. special rapporteur
for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former
Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, has labeled what
Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza "a crime
against humanity." Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective
punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as "a flagrant and massive
violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33
of the Fourth Geneva Convention." He has asked for "the International
Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the
Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the
Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of
international criminal law."

Falk's unflinching honesty has enraged
Israel. He was banned from entering the country on Dec. 14 during his
attempt to visit Gaza and the West Bank.

"After being denied entry I was put in a
holding room with about 20 others experiencing entry problems," he
said. "At this point I was treated not as a U.N. representative, but as
some sort of security threat, subjected to an inch-by-inch body search,
and the most meticulous luggage inspection I have ever witnessed. I was
separated from my two U.N. companions, who were allowed to enter
Israel. At this point I was taken to the airport detention facility a
mile or so away, required to put all my bags and cell phone in a room,
taken to a locked, tiny room that had five other detainees, smelled of
urine and filth, and was an unwelcome invitation to claustrophobia. I
spent the next 15 hours so confined, which amounted to a cram course on
the miseries of prison life, including dirty sheets, inedible food, and
either lights that were too bright or darkness controlled from the
guard office."

The foreign press has been, like Falk, barred by Israel from entering Gaza to report on the destruction.

Israel's stated aim of halting homemade
rockets fired from Gaza into Israel remains unfulfilled. Gaza militants
have fired more than 100 rockets and mortars into Israel, killing four
people and wounding nearly two dozen more, since Israel unleashed its
air assault. Israel has threatened to launch a ground assault and has
called up 6,500 army reservists. It has massed tanks on the Gaza border
and declared the area a closed military zone.

The rocket attacks by Hamas are, as Falk
points out, also criminal violations of international law. But as Falk
notes, "... such Palestinian behavior does not legalize Israel's
imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and health-threatening
character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract the U.N. or
international society from discharging their fundamental moral and
legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people."

"It is an unfolding humanitarian
catastrophe that each day poses the entire 1.5 million Gazans to an
unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to survive in terms of their health,"
Falk has said of the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza. "This is an
increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports that 46
percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are
reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have
caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children
need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a
number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There
are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without
the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12
have been found to have no will to live."

Before the air assaults, Gaza spent 12
hours a day without power, which can be a death sentence to the
severely ill in hospitals. Most of Gaza is now without power. There are
few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer or cystic fibrosis
medication. Hospitals have generators but often lack fuel. Medical
equipment, including one of Gaza's three CT scanners, has been
destroyed by power surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot
control the temperature of incubators for newborns. And Israel has
revoked most exit visas, meaning some of those who need specialized
care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis,
have died. Of the 230 Gazans estimated to have died last year because
they were denied proper medical care, several spent their final hours
at Israeli crossing points where they were refused entry into Israel.
The statistics gathered on children-half of Gaza's population is under
the age of 17-are increasingly grim. About 45 percent of children in
Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit and vegetables, and 18
percent have stunted growth.

"It is macabre," Falk said of the
blockade. "I don't know of anything that exactly fits this situation.
People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog
in modern times."

"There is no structure of an occupation
that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive
circumstances," the rapporteur added. "The magnitude, the
deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the
impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions
warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This
occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian
authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable."

The point of the Israeli attack,
ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was
elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term
truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During
the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in
July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the
blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel.

"This is a crime of survival," Falk said of the rocket attacks by
Palestinians. "Israel has put the Gazans in a set of circumstances
where they either have to accept whatever is imposed on them or resist
in any way available to them. That is a horrible dilemma to impose upon
a people. This does not alleviate the Palestinians, and Gazans in
particular, for accountability for doing these acts involving rocket
fire, but it also imposes some responsibility on Israel for creating
these circumstances."

Israel seeks to break the will of the
Palestinians to resist. The Israeli government has demonstrated little
interest in diplomacy or a peaceful solution. The rapid expansion of
Jewish settlements on the West Bank is an effort to thwart the
possibility of a two-state solution by gobbling up vast tracts of
Palestinian real estate. Israel also appears to want to thrust the
impoverished Gaza Strip onto Egypt. Dozens of tunnels had been the
principal means for food and goods, connecting Gaza to Egypt. Israel
had permitted the tunnels to operate, most likely as part of an effort
to further cut Gaza off from Israel. This ended, however, on Sunday
when Israeli fighter jets bombed over 40 tunnels along Gaza's border
with Egypt. The Israeli military said that the tunnels, on the Gaza
side of the border, were used for smuggling weapons, explosives and
fugitives. Egypt has sealed its border and refused to let distraught
Palestinians enter its territory.

"Israel, all along, has not been prepared to enter into diplomatic
process that gives the Palestinians a viable state," Falk said. "They
[the Israelis] feel time is on their side. They feel they can create
enough facts on the ground so people will come to the conclusion a
viable state cannot emerge."

The use of terror and hunger to break a
hostile population is one of the oldest forms of warfare. I watched the
Bosnian Serbs employ the same tactic in Sarajevo. Those who orchestrate
such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage born of long humiliation,
indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father or a mother whose child
dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not
forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an Israel
checkpoint does not forget. A family that loses a child in an airstrike
does not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of
family members do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those
who, eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that
71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said
they wanted to be a "martyr"?

The Israelis in Gaza, like the American
forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are foolishly breeding the next
generation of militants and Islamic radicals. Jihadists, enraged by the
injustices done by Israel and the United States, seek to carry out
reciprocal acts of savagery, even at the cost of their own lives. The
violence unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the
violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza.
This is the tragedy of Israel.