“Please show the reality” say Lebanon’s affected
Report, Christian Aid, 28 July 2006
Volunteers and staff from a Christian Aid-supported organisation working to help those displaced by the conflict in Lebanon say the world needs to understand the depths of the humanitarian crisis unfolding there.
“The news isn’t showing the reality of what is happening here,” said Pascale Kolakez, a psychologist speaking from a Beirut school that Christian Aid partner Mouvement Social (MS) has converted into a shelter for displaced people.
“Please show the reality. People have lost everything, even the future of their children. What’s happening in Lebanon is a crime against humanity.”
Israel’s secret war: the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Palestine
By Anne Penketh in Gaza City
07/29/06 “The Independent” — — A 12-year-old boy dead on a stretcher. A mother in shock and disbelief after her son was shot dead for standing on their roof. A phone rings and a voice in broken Arabic orders residents to abandon their home on pain of death.
Those are snapshots of a day in Gaza where Israel is waging a hidden war, as the world looks the other way, focusing on Lebanon.
It is a war of containment and control that has turned the besieged Strip into a prison with no way in or out, and no protection from an fearsome battery of drones, precision missiles, tank shells and artillery rounds.
As of last night, 29 people had been killed in the most concentrated 48 hours of violence since an Israeli soldier was abducted by Palestinian militants just more than a month ago.
The operation is codenamed “Samson’s Pillars”, a collective punishment of the 1.4 million Gazans, subjecting them to a Lebanese-style offensive that has targeted the civilian infrastructure by destroying water mains, the main power station and bridges.
If it’s possible for the Israeli government to shield its citizens from the horrors it is inflicting upon the Lebanese and Gazan people, it’s less difficult to understand how Americans, thousands more miles removed, could be coaxed into complicity by their media and government. Yet, since neither government could accomplish this Orwellian task without a citizenry willing to accept unquestionably that there are people in this world who deserve such treatment, who is to blame, the government, the media, or these citizens? In conversations that I’ve had with some workmates this week, I’ve rarely been shocked by the inaccuracy of their “facts,” but I cannot fathom the intensity of their conviction that all Arabs deserve to die. Is there a genetic predisposition to dehumanise and destroy that explains their eager willingness to engage in mass murder, even when the facts pierce their bubbles, and they stammer and sputter to a stop, in a final burst of hot air?
Six Israeli Refuseniks from the group, Courage to Refuse, are interviewed in a documentary film by Shiri Tsur, On the Objection Front, aired by LinkTV last week. The racist, “triumphal militarism” that infiltrates every aspect of Israeli life, as described by Jonathan Cook in, “The Lies Israel Tells Itself (and We Tell on Its Behalf),” is on full display in this remarkable film. It can be witnessed when Dr. Itai Berger reveals that he cannot say whether his children should serve, despite his own experiences in the Occupied Territories that caused him to become a refusenik. Does he actually believe there are benefits that somehow outweigh the damages, both to Palestinians and to his children’s souls, or is he containing the backlash his children would face if it became known they were refuseniks in the making? Dr. Berger heals himself by going into the OT and giving free medical care to Palestinian children and their families. If someone so compassionate is really on the fence about his own children, what is the reason, is there any excuse?
Major Tomer, a former F-16 pilot, no longer lives in Israel. He misses the adoration and respect that he received as an Israeli pilot, and he resents the anonymity that comes with being a common labourer. As it becomes obvious that he draws comfort from an adopted country that considers his decision to become a refusenik an heroic one, the interviewer asks him if he didn’t run away. It’s a brutal question, and rightly so. As Tomer clings to the vestiges of heroism, Palestinians continue to be tortured and murdered. But for the moment, it’s the best he can muster against his life long and most formidable opponent, the “triumphal militarism” that defined his existence and formed his ego.
But this film was released in 2005, so what excuse do humanitarian agencies of the world have for witnessing the testimony of David Zonshein, a lieutenant in a Special Paratrooper Unit of the Reserve Army, and doing nothing? He speaks about raids he witnessed and routine interrogations of Palestinians, torture of inconceivable cruelty that is abominable in its own right, executed on young and old alike, and carried out for no reason other than the sickness that infects the perpetrators. That this “democratic” country has devolved into little more than a breeding ground for the most twisted of psychopaths has nothing to do with DNA and everything to do with moral decay, a refusal of the agencies with the means to expose these crimes to do so, in complicity with the powers that be that keep the reality of this failed experiment from its citizenry.
The world must stop now and witness what is being done in Lebanon and Palestine or finally declare that humanity is a failed experiment that can never be resurrected.