Portion below; whole article here: http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15179
The Palestinian ‘islands’ will remain demilitarized; they will be surrounded by military checkpoints, watchtowers and roadblocks. The Gaza Strip will remain under siege, permanently disconnected from the “West Bank” until the democratically elected Hamas leadership is either wiped out, assassinated to the point of being completely ineffectual, or voluntarily steps down to make room for the Palestinian Authority under Israeli command. Where are Obama’s demands that the racist, colonial-settler state infrastructure be dismantled so that a viable, sovereign Palestinian state with territorial contiguity, national unity and economic viability can succeed?
Reading on in Obama’s speech we find that he (rightly) condemns the resort to violence by Hamas, the party that rules in Gaza whether we recognize it or not. In particularly harsh language he excoriates those who would “shoot rockets at sleeping children, or … blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered. Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build.”
What about what Israel can build –rather than what it can obliterate unopposed? What about the three quarters of a million children of Gaza who were unable to sleep normally during the nightly aerial bombardments of Gaza for three weeks on end; whose trembling bodies were immune to the embraces and desperate attempts at consolation by their parents, themselves terrified as their children asked, “Are they going to kill us?” What about the illegal use of white phosphorous on the densely populated neighborhoods of Gaza City and beyond? The cluster bombs and fleschettes? The rocketing, fire-bombing and bulldozing of entire neighborhoods? Why didn’t Obama excoriate the Israelis for the unspeakable destruction and suffering it wrought on the imprisoned population of the Gaza Strip for three weeks straight this winter, when the scarcity of water, heat and electricity was at its highest? Why didn’t he rail against the IDF for its attack on hospitals, schools, ambulances, UN buildings and shelters, food warehouses, businesses, factories and family homes? Why doesn’t he demand that Israel pay for the rebuilding of Gaza rather than the international donor community – which repeatedly pays for Israel’s successive devastations? Where is Obama’s insistence that Israel comply with the UN fact-finding mission on the commission of war crimes during its relentless assault? Why doesn’t Obama suggest Israel resort to peaceful rather than violent means of settling its disputes? Why doesn’t he mention that while ‘self defense’ against the firing of rockets is understandable, the use of force is illegal and was completely unnecessary? Why was there no condemnation of Israel for breaking the ceasefire and –we now know—of planning Operation “Cast Lead” six months prior to its beginning, or when the ceasefire was still in effect? What other country can unleash the military might of a superpower on a defenseless society, killing 1400 people, 85 per cent of whom were civilians and approximately 400 of whom were children?
Of course, there is one other country whose actions out-do those of its ally: the United States –which would explain why Israel is allowed to pursue the same pattern of destruction and murder with such impunity and, indeed, with the applause of the US Congress, the pro-Israel lobby, and its many friends in the media, academia and elsewhere across the country.
Before moving on to discuss other important topics such as Iran, which has the legal right under the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty to complete the cycle of uranium enrichment that would include developing the capacity to produce nuclear weapons (but not necessarily to do so) and to discuss the importance of democracy in the Middle East (from Cairo, remember), Obama urges the Palestinians “to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.”
Perhaps someone ought to point out to him the irony that his next stop after Cairo is not Gaza City or Beirut where he might help to heal the very recent and very real wartime wounds inflicted on these tortured societies, but Buchenwald, a death camp from the Nazi era, located in the now former East Germany? Certainly Obama ought to be the first to practice what he himself preaches by showing compassion to the recent and innocent victims of an entirely illegal and premeditated slaughter than by rushing off for photo ops at one of the mighty symbols of a depraved Holocaust industry? --one whose finely tuned ideology seeks justification for every act of inhumanity based on the grievance of past inhumanity?
Barack Obama has sent Benjamin Netanyahu the message he most seeks, whether Netanyahu recognizes it or not: continue your colonial-settler project as you have been doing; just change the vocabulary you use to describe it. Then nobody will get upset or notice that the status quo will persists. In the meantime Nasrallah and his followers in Lebanon will be shaking their heads in disbelief at the service Obama has just performed on Hizbullah’s behalf.
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