Israelis gather on hillsides to watch and cheer as military drops bombs on Gaza "People drink, snack and pose for selfies against a background of explosions as Palestinian death toll mounts in ongoing offensive As the sun begins to sink over the Mediterranean, groups of Israelis gather each evening on hilltops close to the Gaza border to cheer, whoop and whistle as bombs rain down on people in a warzone hell a few miles away. Old sofas, garden chairs, battered car seats and upturned crates provide seating for the spectators. On one hilltop, a swing has been attached to the branches of a pine tree, allowing its occupant to sway gently in the breeze. Some bring bottles of beer or soft drinks and snacks."
How
do I feel about this display of callous disregard for human lives? Numb.
I
sometimes wonder what the powers-that-were were thinking when they
created the state of Israel after WW2... but it can't have been to give
the Jewish people a peaceful place to set up their homes, could it?
Rather, it seems the Allies seemed to have been looking for a convenient place to just dump a mass of people who'd become something of a knotty problem for the nations who not only hadn't gone to war over anti-Semitism, but were now caught up in dealing with the aftermath of those who'd done what many of them secretly were also not innocent of either.
After all, how many Western and European nations had turned away Jewish refugees from as far back as the 1930s? "Give me your huddled masses, your poor..." Hah! Platitudes on display... window-dressing - but even the USA closed their doors to people facing death under the Nazi jackboot, and was itself rife with anti-Semitism. To think that I grew up being spoon-fed the bullshit story that the USA went to war with Germany over the way they'd treated the Jews? The whole idea makes me sick to the stomach.
In order to give an alien nation - a nation with no
current claim to a geographic area, someone on that land - people who
have settled there thousands of years since it was last a Jewish state,
had to be moved aside first... to give them control of the land, someone had to be dispossessed of it first. and as we know all too well in South Africa, the rest as
they say, is history.
For decades we have heard about the many wars in which Israel has become embroiled... the 6 Day War for one, not to mention the constant trickle of news about all the internal terrorist attacks: car-bombings, suicide bombers, airline hijackings and the like, the constantly shifting (usually expanding) borders of Israel, and the aggressive expansion of Jewish settlements into Palestinian settlements - and the constant, annoying, brain-numbing political rhetoric cluttering the TV and print media since I can remember.
According to the USA, Israel can never do any wrong - and I'm not talking about ordinary Jewish people here, I'm talking about the radical, aggressive, violent and ideologically fascist nature of Zionism, which is firmly entrenched in Israeli government and has been since the late 1940s.
Always it was 'poor Israel' this, 'poor Israel' that... never a sympathetic ear for the Palestinians who are treated like prisoners in their own native homeland, no time to hear the other side of the story, no objective reporting in the media or in foreign policy, no humanitarian sympathy for the people who inhabited that land for centuries before a bunch of Zionists came along to push and shove them aside without their being consulted, or even involved in how their own lives would be affected by it.
It always seemed to me, being a child of the 1980's in South Africa, that the "Christian society" we lived in felt that, being Muslims, the Palestinians somehow deserved the violence and the suffering and whatever Israel did, no matter how inhuman or violent, they were always "in the right" and above criticism. Of course, Israel was a firm supporter of the Apartheid government - in fact, during the arms embargoes of the 1970s, Israel was at one time the only country willing to supply arms to prop up the NP government - as a matter of interest, the R4 and R5 assault rifles still in use by the armed forces of South Africa today were of Israeli origin, the Galil.
As a child though I must admit I didn't really know enough about the world to question any of what was going on. Recently in South Africa and abroad, there has been a sudden emergence of concern for the people of Gaza as well - perhaps as a result of the gradual awareness being raised because of the emergence and reach of the internet and social media. Stories of what is really going on in Palestinian experiences are finally starting to leak out beyond Israel's ability to smother them.
To me though, this sudden concern with the welfare of the "other side" is, in my humble opinion, too little, if not a bit too late. But it's also better late than never.
This ongoing human rights disaster is not a new thing - it's been developing over the past six decades - and if Israel's government can't stop in its tracks and recognize that something has to change, the course it's on will result in Israel being equated to the very sort of crimes against humanity that resulted in the Holocaust. But will they? Or will they continue to foster the sort of mindset that results in people treating a nearby bombardment of neighboring civilians, including children, like a soccer match on TV with pizza and a couple of brewskis, and as something to cheer (and jeer) about?
People capable of doing that are, to my mind, irretrievably broken - and this too translates pretty damningly to the society they form part of.
In my view, any government whose state is perpetually at war, continues down a path that inflames more war and more strife for its citizens, persecutes people along racial or cultural lines - and remains so for as long as has Israel, is incompetent and unfit - and should resign.
Frankly, I think it's already long past tine for Israel's government to face charges of crimes against humanity at the Hague. Now isn't that ironic?
______________________________________________________________
If you would like to know more about Christina Engela and her writing, please feel free to browse her
website.
If you’d like to send Christina Engela a question about her life as a writer or transactivist, please send an email to
christinaengela@gmail.com or use the
Contact form.
All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2019.
________________________________________
