Gaza Siege: Time to Break Through the Walls of Indifference

The long-suffering people of Gaza are yet to see one fine day in their wretched lives as Israel’s criminal blockade and economic onslaught continues.

A new report by the United Nations describes the conditions in the besieged city this year as not only heartbreaking but inhumane. It’s no wonder many Palestinians are predicting yet another war of aggression by Israel.

The UN is right to compare Gaza to an open-air prison, because so many Gazans are now homeless, literally left in the open air. They lost their homes and livelihoods during last year’s onslaught in which over 10,000 civilians, mainly women and children, were killed and wounded. The UN did nothing! And the worst part is that aid agencies estimate it would take at least one hundred years to rebuild the enclave’s devastated homes, schools, hospitals, water and electricity plants!

The unjustified suffering here has multiple causes, though: Despite an international ceasefire agreement, Israel and Egypt refuse to lift a siege that amounts to economic warfare on an entire population. Egypt has closed the Rabah border that used to relieve the stranglehold. The international aid money promised to Gaza never came, and the 1.8 million residents are still on their own.

As is, the usurper regime controls 90 percent of the land borders to the city – the northern and eastern borders and 100 percent of the ocean on the west side. Egypt controls the southern border with Gaza. So the only step forward has to be international pressure on both Israel and Egypt to ease the illegal blockade first.

Next, since President Barack Obama has repeatedly claimed that the United States and the United Nations have a closer relationship, and since the clearest examples so far have involved human rights, it is expected that he would honor his promise and force Israel and Egypt to allow international humanitarian aid in.

The previous international aid conference was stillborn. All countries that allege to be advocating human rights, especially the US and Europe, should at least come clean this time by organizing a real international aid conference that is aimed at rebuilding Gaza in actual terms. The participants should name and shame Israel, and condemn its collective punishment too.

They should step forward to explain to the world where the actual Holocaust has been and still is taking place? They should explain why they have never bothered to pay any serious attention to the intolerable situation in Gaza? And they should ask why Israel perpetuates the misery of the Palestinians, and at the same time tightens the blockade noose to further land grabs in the name of security?

Such an outrageous denial reflects a collective nescience among the international community toward the suffering of an occupied and systematically oppressed people. Western media support this state of unknowing by failing to report on the suffering or on the resistance movement that seek to expose and end injustice.

Undoubtedly, in the court of the world public opinion, Palestinians have every right to fight for human dignity and justice. Before it’s too late, the international community should try to break through the walls of indifference, distance themselves from criminal culpability, bear witness to the wretchedness of life in Gaza, and exert a sustained pull upon Tel Aviv to bend toward justice. History is watching us.