Gaza proves Humanity is far more Backward than we Thought
Stuart LittlewoodDecember 23, 2024
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 27: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 27, 2024 in New York City. World leaders convened for the General Assembly as the world continues to experience major wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, along with a threat of a larger conflict in the Middle East. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
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This is for the benefit of all those political piss-artists and ministerial scoundrels in London, Washington, Paris and other Western capitals who wilfully distort the Israel-Palestine narrative and, in particular, the Gaza genocide and would have everyone believe that the problem started with Hamas’s breakout on 7 October, 14 months ago.
And who do this to give their adored friends in Israel a free pass to carry out unspeakable crimes against humanity in order to realise the Zionists’ dream of dominating the entire Holy Land in accordance with their ‘Plan Dalet’ drawn up in 1948 on Ben Gurion’s instructions.
17 years ago I was in Gaza to see for myself what was already a bad situation. That was before the murderous blitzkrieg they called Operation Cast Lead and subsequent massacres, but Israel’s crimes against humanity were already piled high.
When I got home memories of the visit so haunted me that I sat down and wrote an article titled “See Gaza and Weep” describing my impressions in November of 2007.
flattening Gaza to the ground
SEE GAZA AND WEEP
Traffic into Gaza through the smart new border ‘facility’ at Erez is down to a trickle since Israel branded this tiny Palestinian seaside enclave a “hostile entity” and imposed a blockade even harsher than before.
We came to Gaza to visit Fr Manuel Musallam, who ministers to his flock, runs the excellent Catholic school against all odds and is revered as a local hero. If he leaves Gaza the Israelis won’t allow him back, so for 9 years he has stayed put, isolated. When he heard we were coming, said a colleague, he burst into tears.
After a noisy arrival at breakneck speed, with police sirens blaring Palestinian-style, our visit quickly turned into a media circus. An unlikely cavalcade of priests, interpreters, teachers, cameramen and Hamas armed police then took off to inspect the Rafah crossing into Egypt, now closed indefinitely, then followed the iron barrier down to the sea and the coast road back to the city.
I noted the deserted beaches and disused fishing boats… Israel has banned fishing off the Gaza coast, ruined the livelihood of 3000 fishermen and deprived local people of a proper diet. Boats defying the ban are fired on.
The Gaza Strip is sealed off from the outside world with an Israeli fence guarded by watchtowers, snipers, tanks, armoured bulldozers and drones. Israel pretended to withdraw two years ago but still controls Gaza’s airspace, coastal waters and airwaves. It has the place bottled up like a prison and makes frequent incursions.
Much of it is blasted to rubble but many fine buildings survive. So does the defiant community. One can easily imagine Gaza blossoming into a coastal paradise, but right now the strangulated economy is in free-fall and for 1.5 million ordinary folk life is hell. Unemployment stands at 65%, and 80% live below the poverty line.
Fuel is running out, so are basics like washing powder. Shattered infrastructure and food shortages mean serious public health problems. Power cuts disrupt hospitals and vital drugs cannot be kept refrigerated. Thousands look death in the face as medi-care collapses.
A friend emailed: “Today in Gaza we have no cement to build graves for those who die.”
Palestinians pray by the bodies of people killed in the Gaza Strip in front of the morgue in Deir al-Balah. [Adel Hana/AP Photo]
We were also there to show solidarity with the whole population, Muslim and Christian, against the crippling economic sanctions that have led to this crisis. According to the Ministry of Health 450 cancer patients (35% of them children) are forbidden to leave Gaza for treatment or surgery. Many go without medication because cancer drugs are blocked or delayed at the border. There’s no radiotherapy.
400 renal failure patients should be getting dialysis three times a week but 20 of the 69 machines are out of action – no spares – and treatment has been cut to twice a week.
400 cardiac patients suffer unnecessarily owing to shortage of drugs. Spares for therapeutic and diagnostic equipment cannot get through.
Hospitals are completely out of many essential medical and psychiatric drugs, X-ray bags and sterilisation bags. They are dangerously short of dressings, other disposables and cleaning materials. When the 2 weeks’ supply of anaesthetics is finished the operating theatres will close.
Fuel stocks may last 15 days with luck, but there’s no patient food until MAP UK aid arrives.
Physicians for Human Rights (Israel) say they have been trying to bring the critically ill out of Gaza for proper treatment, but are often refused. So they die in agony. A thousand patients – advanced kidney and cancer cases and victims of Israeli air-strikes – need immediate transfer. Channel 4 News screened a shocking report on UK TV about how the sick are blackmailed. If they agree to inform on relatives they are allowed to cross the border. If not they can “stay in Gaza and die”.
The Red Cross repeatedly reminds Israel of its obligation under international law and the Geneva Conventions to ensure that humanitarian supplies reach Palestinian civilians.
However, I’m told that drugs purchased from sales of my book ‘Radio Free Palestine’ cannot be delivered in the normal way and will have to be smuggled in somehow.
The European Parliament in October passed a resolution calling on Israel to lift the blockade and guarantee humanitarian aid and essential supplies of electricity and fuel. Israel responded by declaring Gaza a “hostile entity” and announced more sanctions.
As guests in the community we were invited for coffee at the House of Fatah and the residence of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. It was a relief to see that relations between religious and political factions are friendly and good-humoured at such a difficult time.
Taking our leave was double torture… the wrench of saying farewell to a brave people that Western governments are persecuting, and the prospect of once again running the gauntlet of Erez’s high-tech security procedures and questioning, which this time took 3 hours while Qassam rockets flew over and exploded on the Israeli side. They seldom do any damage but indiscriminate targeting of civilians by both sides is deplorable.
Gaza was formerly under British mandate, which is surely reason enough to feel a special responsibility. In better days a kindlier British government might have landed supplies on Gaza’s empty beach and lifted the siege. Indeed, there are many things a kindlier British government might have done to set the Palestinians free.
How different now. The appalling situation, created with Britain’s help, is designed to force democratically elected Hamas into submission and bring a sick and demoralised community meekly back under Abbas’s puppet regime.
Meanwhile the subjugation and dispossession of Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land continues. It remains a mystery to me why our largely Christian (but increasingly Muslim-inclusive) democracy in the UK so slavishly supports the Middle Eastern ethnocracy that’s doing this…
Question: What has changed for the better? Answer: Nothing. And that sums up the achievement of Mahmoud Abbas’s over-long stay as Palestinian president.
Some say Abbas isn’t a bad guy, he just lost his way. Actually there’s a long crime-sheet against him. A founding member of Arafat’s Fatah faction, he ‘won’ the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority in January 2005 in a dodgy contest – let’s not dignify it with the word ‘election’ – in which Israel seriously interfered to obstruct other candidates. He has overstayed his 4-year term by nearly 3 years and is widely regarded as having no legitimacy and no popular mandate. Legitimate or not, he is still propped up by the US, Israel, Britain and those other beacons of democracy.
According to the Constitution the presidency should by now have devolved to the Speaker of the Legislative Council, Aziz Duweik. But that could never be permitted because Duweik, although a professor with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, is also a member of Hamas. So Abbas clings to office like used chewing-gum to the sidewalk.
In 2007 he dissolved the Hamas-led unity government, of which Haniyeh was prime minister, and appointed Salam Fayyad in his place, a move that was almost certainly illegal under Palestinian Basic Law and designed to ensure the disunity and weakness that Israel so badly wanted to see.
Since the Palestinian Legislative Council never approved Fayyad’s appointment, many Palestinians regard Haniyeh as the caretaker PM although his authority, as a result of Abbas’s treachery, is now confined to Gaza. In all probability Fayyad has no more legitimacy than Abbas.
When he took up the post of president, Abbas would have sworn this solemn oath… “I swear to God almighty to be faithful to the Homeland and to its sacred places, and to the people and its national heritage, and to respect the Constitutional system and the law, and to safeguard the interests of the Palestinian people completely, as God is my witness.”
We’ve seen how he respects his country’s Constitutional system. He was further undone by the Wikileaks suggestions that the Israeli government “consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas”.
And only a few days ago Abbas was safeguarding the interests of the Palestinian people by announcing on Israeli TV, of all places: “Palestine now for me is ’67 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever … This is Palestine for me. I am [a] refugee, but I am living in Ramallah. I believe that [the] West Bank and Gaza is Palestine and the other parts [are] Israel.” In other words, he relinquishes the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their lands and homes and even surrenders his own right to return to his birth town Safad, which is now a district in northern Israel.
“We don’t want to use terror,” he says. Agreed. Perish the thought.
“We don’t want to use force. We don’t want to use weapons…” he says. But Palestinians have a perfect legal right to use any means to repel a foreign occupier.
“We want to use diplomacy. We want to use politics. We want to use negotiations…” Has he learned nothing from 64 years of non-stop ethnic cleansing and failed diplomacy?
The Israelis by all accounts are jubilant. Their Top Stooge has scored for them again. But Haniyeh is not amused. “It is not possible for any person, regardless of who he is … to give up a hand’s width of this Palestinian land, or to give up the right of return to our homes from which we were forced out…”
If you visit the Holy Land, Palestinians will urge you to tell their story when you get home. But does Abbas bother to tell it? How many activists, supporters, sympathizers, journalists and writers have had a chance to meet this great leader of the Palestinian underdogs… to be enthused by him… to question him? When he comes to London for “talks” it’s hush-hush. We never hear about it. His good-for-nothing embassy says nothing. His worse-than-useless press office in Ramallah says nothing.
In the struggle for their rights and independence the Palestinians have international law and UN resolutions on their side. But in the seven years Abbas has presided the West Bank has remained sealed, the theft of Palestinian land has continued unabated and the blockade on Gaza has not eased – it’s been tightened. Palestine goes on losing more than it gains.
The bottom line is that in the 21st Century – this new age of enlightenment – Palestinians remain prisoners in their own country. How miserably must a leader fail his people before they kick him out?
And how much longer will Western leaders continue to shirk their responsibilities towards our Christians and Muslims brothers and sisters in the Holy Land?
Fast-forward 12 years and today the loser Abbas is still there, widely regarded as a quisling and achieving nothing for his own country… but still doing Israel many favours.
Who, in 2007, could have believed that for 14 months in 2023/4 the international community would stand by and do nothing to stop the apartheid regime in Israel exterminating Palestinian civilians, women and children in their own homeland in revenge for their having struck back against over 7 decades of Israeli illegal and brutal military occupation, dispossession, theft of their lands, livelihoods and resources, and interference with their lives at every level?
Who, in 2007, would have believed that the US and UK — those champions of democracy, freedom and self-determination — would be supplying Israel with the munitions and other wherewithall to carry out a full-blooded genocide?
Who, in 2007, would have believed that the people of the US and UK could allow their sick-minded politicans to behave in such a despicable way?
And who, in 2007, would have thought Western Christendom would be so spineless as to stand idly by watching their Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters being cruelly slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank — the very wellspring of their faith — and not even raise a whimper never mind mobilise their millions in opposition to such downright evil.
Stuart Littlewood
22 December 2024
After working on jet fighters in the RAF Stuart became an industrial marketing specialist with manufacturing companies and consultancy firms. He also “indulged himself” as a newspaper columnist. In politics, he served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and member of the Police Authority. Now retired he campaigns on various issues and contributes to several online news & opinion sites. An Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, he has produced two photo-documentary books – Paperturn-view.com.
Also, check out Stuart’s book Radio Free Palestine, with Foreword by Jeff Halper, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under brutal occupation.
Stuart’s Very Latest Articles: 2023 – Present
– Archived Articles: 2010-2015 – 2016-2022
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel
$280+ BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation
150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.
ATTENTION READERS
We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.
About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.
https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/12/gaza-proves-humanity-is-far-more-backward-than-we-thought/
Stuart LittlewoodDecember 23, 2024
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 27: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 27, 2024 in New York City. World leaders convened for the General Assembly as the world continues to experience major wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, along with a threat of a larger conflict in the Middle East. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Become a VT Supporting Member Today
Please keep VT Radio and VT Foreign Policy alive! Donate today to make sure VT stays on the internet free and clear of Big Tech control! Donate today:
Please Donate - Click Here
This is for the benefit of all those political piss-artists and ministerial scoundrels in London, Washington, Paris and other Western capitals who wilfully distort the Israel-Palestine narrative and, in particular, the Gaza genocide and would have everyone believe that the problem started with Hamas’s breakout on 7 October, 14 months ago.
And who do this to give their adored friends in Israel a free pass to carry out unspeakable crimes against humanity in order to realise the Zionists’ dream of dominating the entire Holy Land in accordance with their ‘Plan Dalet’ drawn up in 1948 on Ben Gurion’s instructions.
17 years ago I was in Gaza to see for myself what was already a bad situation. That was before the murderous blitzkrieg they called Operation Cast Lead and subsequent massacres, but Israel’s crimes against humanity were already piled high.
When I got home memories of the visit so haunted me that I sat down and wrote an article titled “See Gaza and Weep” describing my impressions in November of 2007.
flattening Gaza to the ground
SEE GAZA AND WEEP
Traffic into Gaza through the smart new border ‘facility’ at Erez is down to a trickle since Israel branded this tiny Palestinian seaside enclave a “hostile entity” and imposed a blockade even harsher than before.
We came to Gaza to visit Fr Manuel Musallam, who ministers to his flock, runs the excellent Catholic school against all odds and is revered as a local hero. If he leaves Gaza the Israelis won’t allow him back, so for 9 years he has stayed put, isolated. When he heard we were coming, said a colleague, he burst into tears.
After a noisy arrival at breakneck speed, with police sirens blaring Palestinian-style, our visit quickly turned into a media circus. An unlikely cavalcade of priests, interpreters, teachers, cameramen and Hamas armed police then took off to inspect the Rafah crossing into Egypt, now closed indefinitely, then followed the iron barrier down to the sea and the coast road back to the city.
I noted the deserted beaches and disused fishing boats… Israel has banned fishing off the Gaza coast, ruined the livelihood of 3000 fishermen and deprived local people of a proper diet. Boats defying the ban are fired on.
The Gaza Strip is sealed off from the outside world with an Israeli fence guarded by watchtowers, snipers, tanks, armoured bulldozers and drones. Israel pretended to withdraw two years ago but still controls Gaza’s airspace, coastal waters and airwaves. It has the place bottled up like a prison and makes frequent incursions.
Much of it is blasted to rubble but many fine buildings survive. So does the defiant community. One can easily imagine Gaza blossoming into a coastal paradise, but right now the strangulated economy is in free-fall and for 1.5 million ordinary folk life is hell. Unemployment stands at 65%, and 80% live below the poverty line.
Fuel is running out, so are basics like washing powder. Shattered infrastructure and food shortages mean serious public health problems. Power cuts disrupt hospitals and vital drugs cannot be kept refrigerated. Thousands look death in the face as medi-care collapses.
A friend emailed: “Today in Gaza we have no cement to build graves for those who die.”
Palestinians pray by the bodies of people killed in the Gaza Strip in front of the morgue in Deir al-Balah. [Adel Hana/AP Photo]
We were also there to show solidarity with the whole population, Muslim and Christian, against the crippling economic sanctions that have led to this crisis. According to the Ministry of Health 450 cancer patients (35% of them children) are forbidden to leave Gaza for treatment or surgery. Many go without medication because cancer drugs are blocked or delayed at the border. There’s no radiotherapy.
400 renal failure patients should be getting dialysis three times a week but 20 of the 69 machines are out of action – no spares – and treatment has been cut to twice a week.
400 cardiac patients suffer unnecessarily owing to shortage of drugs. Spares for therapeutic and diagnostic equipment cannot get through.
Hospitals are completely out of many essential medical and psychiatric drugs, X-ray bags and sterilisation bags. They are dangerously short of dressings, other disposables and cleaning materials. When the 2 weeks’ supply of anaesthetics is finished the operating theatres will close.
Fuel stocks may last 15 days with luck, but there’s no patient food until MAP UK aid arrives.
Physicians for Human Rights (Israel) say they have been trying to bring the critically ill out of Gaza for proper treatment, but are often refused. So they die in agony. A thousand patients – advanced kidney and cancer cases and victims of Israeli air-strikes – need immediate transfer. Channel 4 News screened a shocking report on UK TV about how the sick are blackmailed. If they agree to inform on relatives they are allowed to cross the border. If not they can “stay in Gaza and die”.
The Red Cross repeatedly reminds Israel of its obligation under international law and the Geneva Conventions to ensure that humanitarian supplies reach Palestinian civilians.
However, I’m told that drugs purchased from sales of my book ‘Radio Free Palestine’ cannot be delivered in the normal way and will have to be smuggled in somehow.
The European Parliament in October passed a resolution calling on Israel to lift the blockade and guarantee humanitarian aid and essential supplies of electricity and fuel. Israel responded by declaring Gaza a “hostile entity” and announced more sanctions.
As guests in the community we were invited for coffee at the House of Fatah and the residence of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. It was a relief to see that relations between religious and political factions are friendly and good-humoured at such a difficult time.
Taking our leave was double torture… the wrench of saying farewell to a brave people that Western governments are persecuting, and the prospect of once again running the gauntlet of Erez’s high-tech security procedures and questioning, which this time took 3 hours while Qassam rockets flew over and exploded on the Israeli side. They seldom do any damage but indiscriminate targeting of civilians by both sides is deplorable.
Gaza was formerly under British mandate, which is surely reason enough to feel a special responsibility. In better days a kindlier British government might have landed supplies on Gaza’s empty beach and lifted the siege. Indeed, there are many things a kindlier British government might have done to set the Palestinians free.
How different now. The appalling situation, created with Britain’s help, is designed to force democratically elected Hamas into submission and bring a sick and demoralised community meekly back under Abbas’s puppet regime.
Meanwhile the subjugation and dispossession of Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land continues. It remains a mystery to me why our largely Christian (but increasingly Muslim-inclusive) democracy in the UK so slavishly supports the Middle Eastern ethnocracy that’s doing this…
Question: What has changed for the better? Answer: Nothing. And that sums up the achievement of Mahmoud Abbas’s over-long stay as Palestinian president.
Some say Abbas isn’t a bad guy, he just lost his way. Actually there’s a long crime-sheet against him. A founding member of Arafat’s Fatah faction, he ‘won’ the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority in January 2005 in a dodgy contest – let’s not dignify it with the word ‘election’ – in which Israel seriously interfered to obstruct other candidates. He has overstayed his 4-year term by nearly 3 years and is widely regarded as having no legitimacy and no popular mandate. Legitimate or not, he is still propped up by the US, Israel, Britain and those other beacons of democracy.
According to the Constitution the presidency should by now have devolved to the Speaker of the Legislative Council, Aziz Duweik. But that could never be permitted because Duweik, although a professor with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, is also a member of Hamas. So Abbas clings to office like used chewing-gum to the sidewalk.
In 2007 he dissolved the Hamas-led unity government, of which Haniyeh was prime minister, and appointed Salam Fayyad in his place, a move that was almost certainly illegal under Palestinian Basic Law and designed to ensure the disunity and weakness that Israel so badly wanted to see.
Since the Palestinian Legislative Council never approved Fayyad’s appointment, many Palestinians regard Haniyeh as the caretaker PM although his authority, as a result of Abbas’s treachery, is now confined to Gaza. In all probability Fayyad has no more legitimacy than Abbas.
When he took up the post of president, Abbas would have sworn this solemn oath… “I swear to God almighty to be faithful to the Homeland and to its sacred places, and to the people and its national heritage, and to respect the Constitutional system and the law, and to safeguard the interests of the Palestinian people completely, as God is my witness.”
We’ve seen how he respects his country’s Constitutional system. He was further undone by the Wikileaks suggestions that the Israeli government “consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas”.
And only a few days ago Abbas was safeguarding the interests of the Palestinian people by announcing on Israeli TV, of all places: “Palestine now for me is ’67 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever … This is Palestine for me. I am [a] refugee, but I am living in Ramallah. I believe that [the] West Bank and Gaza is Palestine and the other parts [are] Israel.” In other words, he relinquishes the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their lands and homes and even surrenders his own right to return to his birth town Safad, which is now a district in northern Israel.
“We don’t want to use terror,” he says. Agreed. Perish the thought.
“We don’t want to use force. We don’t want to use weapons…” he says. But Palestinians have a perfect legal right to use any means to repel a foreign occupier.
“We want to use diplomacy. We want to use politics. We want to use negotiations…” Has he learned nothing from 64 years of non-stop ethnic cleansing and failed diplomacy?
The Israelis by all accounts are jubilant. Their Top Stooge has scored for them again. But Haniyeh is not amused. “It is not possible for any person, regardless of who he is … to give up a hand’s width of this Palestinian land, or to give up the right of return to our homes from which we were forced out…”
If you visit the Holy Land, Palestinians will urge you to tell their story when you get home. But does Abbas bother to tell it? How many activists, supporters, sympathizers, journalists and writers have had a chance to meet this great leader of the Palestinian underdogs… to be enthused by him… to question him? When he comes to London for “talks” it’s hush-hush. We never hear about it. His good-for-nothing embassy says nothing. His worse-than-useless press office in Ramallah says nothing.
In the struggle for their rights and independence the Palestinians have international law and UN resolutions on their side. But in the seven years Abbas has presided the West Bank has remained sealed, the theft of Palestinian land has continued unabated and the blockade on Gaza has not eased – it’s been tightened. Palestine goes on losing more than it gains.
The bottom line is that in the 21st Century – this new age of enlightenment – Palestinians remain prisoners in their own country. How miserably must a leader fail his people before they kick him out?
And how much longer will Western leaders continue to shirk their responsibilities towards our Christians and Muslims brothers and sisters in the Holy Land?
Fast-forward 12 years and today the loser Abbas is still there, widely regarded as a quisling and achieving nothing for his own country… but still doing Israel many favours.
Who, in 2007, could have believed that for 14 months in 2023/4 the international community would stand by and do nothing to stop the apartheid regime in Israel exterminating Palestinian civilians, women and children in their own homeland in revenge for their having struck back against over 7 decades of Israeli illegal and brutal military occupation, dispossession, theft of their lands, livelihoods and resources, and interference with their lives at every level?
Who, in 2007, would have believed that the US and UK — those champions of democracy, freedom and self-determination — would be supplying Israel with the munitions and other wherewithall to carry out a full-blooded genocide?
Who, in 2007, would have believed that the people of the US and UK could allow their sick-minded politicans to behave in such a despicable way?
And who, in 2007, would have thought Western Christendom would be so spineless as to stand idly by watching their Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters being cruelly slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank — the very wellspring of their faith — and not even raise a whimper never mind mobilise their millions in opposition to such downright evil.
Stuart Littlewood
22 December 2024
After working on jet fighters in the RAF Stuart became an industrial marketing specialist with manufacturing companies and consultancy firms. He also “indulged himself” as a newspaper columnist. In politics, he served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and member of the Police Authority. Now retired he campaigns on various issues and contributes to several online news & opinion sites. An Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, he has produced two photo-documentary books – Paperturn-view.com.
Also, check out Stuart’s book Radio Free Palestine, with Foreword by Jeff Halper, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under brutal occupation.
Stuart’s Very Latest Articles: 2023 – Present
– Archived Articles: 2010-2015 – 2016-2022
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel
$280+ BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation
150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.
ATTENTION READERS
We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.
About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.
https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/12/gaza-proves-humanity-is-far-more-backward-than-we-thought/
Gaza proves Humanity is far more Backward than we Thought
Stuart LittlewoodDecember 23, 2024
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 27: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on September 27, 2024 in New York City. World leaders convened for the General Assembly as the world continues to experience major wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, along with a threat of a larger conflict in the Middle East. (Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)
Become a VT Supporting Member Today
Please keep VT Radio and VT Foreign Policy alive! Donate today to make sure VT stays on the internet free and clear of Big Tech control! Donate today:
Please Donate - Click Here
This is for the benefit of all those political piss-artists and ministerial scoundrels in London, Washington, Paris and other Western capitals who wilfully distort the Israel-Palestine narrative and, in particular, the Gaza genocide and would have everyone believe that the problem started with Hamas’s breakout on 7 October, 14 months ago.
And who do this to give their adored friends in Israel a free pass to carry out unspeakable crimes against humanity in order to realise the Zionists’ dream of dominating the entire Holy Land in accordance with their ‘Plan Dalet’ drawn up in 1948 on Ben Gurion’s instructions.
17 years ago I was in Gaza to see for myself what was already a bad situation. That was before the murderous blitzkrieg they called Operation Cast Lead and subsequent massacres, but Israel’s crimes against humanity were already piled high.
When I got home memories of the visit so haunted me that I sat down and wrote an article titled “See Gaza and Weep” describing my impressions in November of 2007.
flattening Gaza to the ground
SEE GAZA AND WEEP
Traffic into Gaza through the smart new border ‘facility’ at Erez is down to a trickle since Israel branded this tiny Palestinian seaside enclave a “hostile entity” and imposed a blockade even harsher than before.
We came to Gaza to visit Fr Manuel Musallam, who ministers to his flock, runs the excellent Catholic school against all odds and is revered as a local hero. If he leaves Gaza the Israelis won’t allow him back, so for 9 years he has stayed put, isolated. When he heard we were coming, said a colleague, he burst into tears.
After a noisy arrival at breakneck speed, with police sirens blaring Palestinian-style, our visit quickly turned into a media circus. An unlikely cavalcade of priests, interpreters, teachers, cameramen and Hamas armed police then took off to inspect the Rafah crossing into Egypt, now closed indefinitely, then followed the iron barrier down to the sea and the coast road back to the city.
I noted the deserted beaches and disused fishing boats… Israel has banned fishing off the Gaza coast, ruined the livelihood of 3000 fishermen and deprived local people of a proper diet. Boats defying the ban are fired on.
The Gaza Strip is sealed off from the outside world with an Israeli fence guarded by watchtowers, snipers, tanks, armoured bulldozers and drones. Israel pretended to withdraw two years ago but still controls Gaza’s airspace, coastal waters and airwaves. It has the place bottled up like a prison and makes frequent incursions.
Much of it is blasted to rubble but many fine buildings survive. So does the defiant community. One can easily imagine Gaza blossoming into a coastal paradise, but right now the strangulated economy is in free-fall and for 1.5 million ordinary folk life is hell. Unemployment stands at 65%, and 80% live below the poverty line.
Fuel is running out, so are basics like washing powder. Shattered infrastructure and food shortages mean serious public health problems. Power cuts disrupt hospitals and vital drugs cannot be kept refrigerated. Thousands look death in the face as medi-care collapses.
A friend emailed: “Today in Gaza we have no cement to build graves for those who die.”
Palestinians pray by the bodies of people killed in the Gaza Strip in front of the morgue in Deir al-Balah. [Adel Hana/AP Photo]
We were also there to show solidarity with the whole population, Muslim and Christian, against the crippling economic sanctions that have led to this crisis. According to the Ministry of Health 450 cancer patients (35% of them children) are forbidden to leave Gaza for treatment or surgery. Many go without medication because cancer drugs are blocked or delayed at the border. There’s no radiotherapy.
400 renal failure patients should be getting dialysis three times a week but 20 of the 69 machines are out of action – no spares – and treatment has been cut to twice a week.
400 cardiac patients suffer unnecessarily owing to shortage of drugs. Spares for therapeutic and diagnostic equipment cannot get through.
Hospitals are completely out of many essential medical and psychiatric drugs, X-ray bags and sterilisation bags. They are dangerously short of dressings, other disposables and cleaning materials. When the 2 weeks’ supply of anaesthetics is finished the operating theatres will close.
Fuel stocks may last 15 days with luck, but there’s no patient food until MAP UK aid arrives.
Physicians for Human Rights (Israel) say they have been trying to bring the critically ill out of Gaza for proper treatment, but are often refused. So they die in agony. A thousand patients – advanced kidney and cancer cases and victims of Israeli air-strikes – need immediate transfer. Channel 4 News screened a shocking report on UK TV about how the sick are blackmailed. If they agree to inform on relatives they are allowed to cross the border. If not they can “stay in Gaza and die”.
The Red Cross repeatedly reminds Israel of its obligation under international law and the Geneva Conventions to ensure that humanitarian supplies reach Palestinian civilians.
However, I’m told that drugs purchased from sales of my book ‘Radio Free Palestine’ cannot be delivered in the normal way and will have to be smuggled in somehow.
The European Parliament in October passed a resolution calling on Israel to lift the blockade and guarantee humanitarian aid and essential supplies of electricity and fuel. Israel responded by declaring Gaza a “hostile entity” and announced more sanctions.
As guests in the community we were invited for coffee at the House of Fatah and the residence of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. It was a relief to see that relations between religious and political factions are friendly and good-humoured at such a difficult time.
Taking our leave was double torture… the wrench of saying farewell to a brave people that Western governments are persecuting, and the prospect of once again running the gauntlet of Erez’s high-tech security procedures and questioning, which this time took 3 hours while Qassam rockets flew over and exploded on the Israeli side. They seldom do any damage but indiscriminate targeting of civilians by both sides is deplorable.
Gaza was formerly under British mandate, which is surely reason enough to feel a special responsibility. In better days a kindlier British government might have landed supplies on Gaza’s empty beach and lifted the siege. Indeed, there are many things a kindlier British government might have done to set the Palestinians free.
How different now. The appalling situation, created with Britain’s help, is designed to force democratically elected Hamas into submission and bring a sick and demoralised community meekly back under Abbas’s puppet regime.
Meanwhile the subjugation and dispossession of Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land continues. It remains a mystery to me why our largely Christian (but increasingly Muslim-inclusive) democracy in the UK so slavishly supports the Middle Eastern ethnocracy that’s doing this…
Question: What has changed for the better? Answer: Nothing. And that sums up the achievement of Mahmoud Abbas’s over-long stay as Palestinian president.
Some say Abbas isn’t a bad guy, he just lost his way. Actually there’s a long crime-sheet against him. A founding member of Arafat’s Fatah faction, he ‘won’ the presidency of the Palestinian National Authority in January 2005 in a dodgy contest – let’s not dignify it with the word ‘election’ – in which Israel seriously interfered to obstruct other candidates. He has overstayed his 4-year term by nearly 3 years and is widely regarded as having no legitimacy and no popular mandate. Legitimate or not, he is still propped up by the US, Israel, Britain and those other beacons of democracy.
According to the Constitution the presidency should by now have devolved to the Speaker of the Legislative Council, Aziz Duweik. But that could never be permitted because Duweik, although a professor with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, is also a member of Hamas. So Abbas clings to office like used chewing-gum to the sidewalk.
In 2007 he dissolved the Hamas-led unity government, of which Haniyeh was prime minister, and appointed Salam Fayyad in his place, a move that was almost certainly illegal under Palestinian Basic Law and designed to ensure the disunity and weakness that Israel so badly wanted to see.
Since the Palestinian Legislative Council never approved Fayyad’s appointment, many Palestinians regard Haniyeh as the caretaker PM although his authority, as a result of Abbas’s treachery, is now confined to Gaza. In all probability Fayyad has no more legitimacy than Abbas.
When he took up the post of president, Abbas would have sworn this solemn oath… “I swear to God almighty to be faithful to the Homeland and to its sacred places, and to the people and its national heritage, and to respect the Constitutional system and the law, and to safeguard the interests of the Palestinian people completely, as God is my witness.”
We’ve seen how he respects his country’s Constitutional system. He was further undone by the Wikileaks suggestions that the Israeli government “consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas”.
And only a few days ago Abbas was safeguarding the interests of the Palestinian people by announcing on Israeli TV, of all places: “Palestine now for me is ’67 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever … This is Palestine for me. I am [a] refugee, but I am living in Ramallah. I believe that [the] West Bank and Gaza is Palestine and the other parts [are] Israel.” In other words, he relinquishes the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their lands and homes and even surrenders his own right to return to his birth town Safad, which is now a district in northern Israel.
“We don’t want to use terror,” he says. Agreed. Perish the thought.
“We don’t want to use force. We don’t want to use weapons…” he says. But Palestinians have a perfect legal right to use any means to repel a foreign occupier.
“We want to use diplomacy. We want to use politics. We want to use negotiations…” Has he learned nothing from 64 years of non-stop ethnic cleansing and failed diplomacy?
The Israelis by all accounts are jubilant. Their Top Stooge has scored for them again. But Haniyeh is not amused. “It is not possible for any person, regardless of who he is … to give up a hand’s width of this Palestinian land, or to give up the right of return to our homes from which we were forced out…”
If you visit the Holy Land, Palestinians will urge you to tell their story when you get home. But does Abbas bother to tell it? How many activists, supporters, sympathizers, journalists and writers have had a chance to meet this great leader of the Palestinian underdogs… to be enthused by him… to question him? When he comes to London for “talks” it’s hush-hush. We never hear about it. His good-for-nothing embassy says nothing. His worse-than-useless press office in Ramallah says nothing.
In the struggle for their rights and independence the Palestinians have international law and UN resolutions on their side. But in the seven years Abbas has presided the West Bank has remained sealed, the theft of Palestinian land has continued unabated and the blockade on Gaza has not eased – it’s been tightened. Palestine goes on losing more than it gains.
The bottom line is that in the 21st Century – this new age of enlightenment – Palestinians remain prisoners in their own country. How miserably must a leader fail his people before they kick him out?
And how much longer will Western leaders continue to shirk their responsibilities towards our Christians and Muslims brothers and sisters in the Holy Land?
Fast-forward 12 years and today the loser Abbas is still there, widely regarded as a quisling and achieving nothing for his own country… but still doing Israel many favours.
Who, in 2007, could have believed that for 14 months in 2023/4 the international community would stand by and do nothing to stop the apartheid regime in Israel exterminating Palestinian civilians, women and children in their own homeland in revenge for their having struck back against over 7 decades of Israeli illegal and brutal military occupation, dispossession, theft of their lands, livelihoods and resources, and interference with their lives at every level?
Who, in 2007, would have believed that the US and UK — those champions of democracy, freedom and self-determination — would be supplying Israel with the munitions and other wherewithall to carry out a full-blooded genocide?
Who, in 2007, would have believed that the people of the US and UK could allow their sick-minded politicans to behave in such a despicable way?
And who, in 2007, would have thought Western Christendom would be so spineless as to stand idly by watching their Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters being cruelly slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank — the very wellspring of their faith — and not even raise a whimper never mind mobilise their millions in opposition to such downright evil.
Stuart Littlewood
22 December 2024
After working on jet fighters in the RAF Stuart became an industrial marketing specialist with manufacturing companies and consultancy firms. He also “indulged himself” as a newspaper columnist. In politics, he served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and member of the Police Authority. Now retired he campaigns on various issues and contributes to several online news & opinion sites. An Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, he has produced two photo-documentary books – Paperturn-view.com.
Also, check out Stuart’s book Radio Free Palestine, with Foreword by Jeff Halper, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under brutal occupation.
Stuart’s Very Latest Articles: 2023 – Present
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VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel
$280+ BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation
150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.
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