http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=715046&contrassID=2
Let their people go
By Bradley Burston
In all of the Holy Land,
there is no more beautiful
area than the Gaza Strip.
And none more accursed.
It is the Riviera of the damned.
The cruel Club Med of
the eternally passed over,
the pitied, the left to drown.
This week,
a number of schoolchildren were
caught in the crossfire of a gun
battle in which Hamas and Fatah
vied for the upper hand.
The children lost.
Eight were wounded in the exchange of fire.
Later that day,
an official of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City
noted that at least four people suffering
from kidney diseases had died in the Strip
in April,
after the cash-starved Palestinian
Authority Health Ministry cut Shifa
Hospital's budget for dialysis treatments.
"There are 650 people suffering
from kidney diseases in the
Gaza Strip, and 300 of them
are treated at Shifa Hospital,"
said Dr. Guma'a Al-Saka.
"However,
since the end of March, [the hospital]
was forced to reduce their treatments
from three per week to two,
and at least four people
did not survive the reduction."
Some cancer patients have
stopped receiving chemotherapy,
the hospital has a dwindling
two-week supply of medicines,
and cannot afford to repair
medical machines when they break.
If that were not enough, the next day,
Gazans were told that fuel could run
out soon,
after the Israeli company that
supplies petroleum products to
the Strip,
citing a succession of unpaid bills,
threatened to stop supplying it.
Should we care?
We should,
and not only because we live
on the slopes of Vesuvius,
and there's thick black smoke
issuing from its summit.
Not only out of fearful self-interest,
that is, not just because today's misery
can be tomorrow's murderous desperation.
We should care because there are
people living next door to us whose
normal daily life is built of the
kind of hardships one sees after
a natural disaster.
No work,
no money,
little food,
open sewage,
disease,
depression,
hope too scant,
shelter too primitive,
services too meager,
death too soon,
the horizon too empty,
the future worse
than no relief for an
unbearable present.
We should care because we will
travel to the ends of the earth
to help people suffering tragic loss,
large-scale traumatic injury,
destruction of their homes,
their livelihoods,
but as far as Gaza's concerned,
a few meters from our doorstep,
good riddance.
We have left it to the wolves.
We were right to have left it.
But we were wrong to have
done it the way we did.
We hurt and abandoned our
people who lived there and
whom we expelled.
We hurt and exploited and ultimately
abandoned the Gazans themselves,
who lived in a colony we called
part of the Land of Israel because
we were unwilling and unable to run
it as what it was, a colony.
And now we are hurting and
abandoning them as what they have become,
what we have, in fact, made them, our neighbors.
"Stop right there, you've got it wrong,"
we console ourselves.
"These people want to kill us.
These people want to throw
us into the sea.
They won't even let us help them.
Besides,
we can't even manage
to feed our own people,
you want to take care of them, too?
And just when we've finally
washed our hands of them,
after all these years?"
"They brought it upon themselves," we tell ourselves.
"Let them stew in their own juice.
They elected murderers to lead them.
Let them go hungry,
let their electricity
be cut off, their water."
"Why should we help them," we ask ourselves,
"when their own brothers screw them,
and have done so systematically for
decades -
the Egyptians,
the Lebanese,
the Jordanians,
the Syrians,
the Kuwaitis -
the Arab world as a
whole has let them rot
- forced them to rot -
evolved and adhered to an
entire ideology explaining
why the Gazans must be kept
as a symbol of Zionist induced
suffering.
For their own sake."
"Why should we feel
responsible when the Saudis,
the Emirates,
could have used a sliver of a
fraction of their stratospheric
oil revenues to solve Gaza's problems,
when the expenses of one week of the fruitless,
decision-less 10-year Iran-Iraq war
could have helped turn Gaza around.
Their own brothers won't lift a finger, why should we?"
Forget,
for the moment, what the right says.
Consider the limousine left.
There are a number of reasons
why the disengagement from Gaza
was and remains so popular in
the svelte sections of Tel Aviv,
Herzliya, and, for that matter,
the Upper West Side.
One of them is surely this:
We don't want to think
about those people anymore,
and now we think we no longer
have to.
"Mah li u'lezeh?"
What does this have to do with me?
The most unpleasant answer is this:
Because we are still occupying them.
There is more than one way to occupy a people.
We, having evolved, have chosen remote control.
Our drones occupy the Gazans,
morning and night,
directing the artillery
that occupies them,
shell after shell
after hour and hour,
directing helicopter gunships
that fire missiles at cars and
hit terrorists and also kill
innocent bystanders.
Our lifestyle occupies them,
and the fact that,
not only are they unable
to work on our side anymore,
they can't even work in the
factories in Gaza that once
shipped goods to us for sale.
We occupy them because we
don't like the government
they elected,
and we believe that we can
quarantine them into choosing
another.
We occupy them, fundamentally,
by deciding for them who should
rule over them, and by deciding that
we have the right to set them straight.
This is, of course,
the cue for the right-wing
chorus from abroad to dismiss
this as the usual leftist drivel,
and to point out the obvious:
Really, though what are they to us?
Well, here's the worst of it,
especially for those of us who
believe in the Bible:
They are our family.
They are the relatives we cannot stomach,
the cousins we have disowned,
the kin we pretend are unrelated,
the blood relations we act as if
never existed.
They are certainly as ornery as we,
as unforgiving, just as likely to think
that we are all their enemies,
as we are to think the same of them.
But they are also human beings,
children of Abraham,
trying to raise children
and keep them from being shot -
either by us or their own -
keep them fed, perhaps even,
one day, have an actual childhood.
It's about time we saw this price
that we've paid for weathering the
Intifada:
Hamas has hardened our hearts.
Islamic Jihad suicide bombers
have robbed us of much of our
compassion.
Every Fatah Al Aqsa gunman killing
innocents has blinded us to the
Palestinians who aren't wearing masks,
the vast majority.
Over the past six years,
we made a conscious decision
to stand up to their bombings,
not to buckle under to the maiming
and murder of our children,
not to change our lives just to suit them,
not to let the Palestinian fanatics win.
But this has cost us something
very profound in the national soul.
Suddenly,
even leftists welcome the
idea that you can't make peace
with these people.
Even leftists now embrace unilateralism,
which, at its root,
gives a whole new meaning
to the tired adage of the right,
that There Are No Palestinians.
We have to realize that our hearts
have been hardened, and do the
right thing:
Let these people go.
Even if they're still being used
as pawns by their own leaders,
their own brothers.
Even if their own people
won't let them go,
it's time we did.
We have to stop occupying them,
find entirely new ways to start
helping them,
involve the international community
as a presence for large-scale relief,
start seeing them as what they actually
are, human beings, trying to get by in
one of the worst places on earth.
We must, as well, swallow our fears
of international intervention and
find a way to involve the international
community in helping to stop attacks
against us.
We are no less deserving of life,
nor of protection from killers.
The challenge of being a Jew in Israel today,
is to stand up and say,
I'm willing to stay here,
defend myself, and still find a
way to help those in distress
just over the fence -
even if I find their leaders
horrendous and the fanatic
fringe among them abhorrent.
It's a challenge that moral
people in the world face as well,
the same international community
for whom talk of concern for the
Palestinians is so seldom matched
by action.
Gaza, by rights,
should be paradise,
not hell on earth.
These people are right next door.
They are in our blood.
Their future,
whether we like it or not, is ours as well.
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