Ethnic Cleansing By Starvation By Don Nash

Ethnic Cleansing By Starvation

By Don Nash

Al-Jazeerah, April 8, 2006

The United States government adamantly insisted that the Palestinian people hold elections. The U.S. government was so vehemently insistent that Palestinians go to the polls, the U.S. forked up about $50 million American taxpayer dollars and sent that directly to Fatah. Well wonder of wonders, the Palestinian people spoke in that clear and ringing democratic voice and put Hamas firmly in control of Palestinian government. Isn’t democracy in action an amazing process to witness?

The icky fly in the democratic ointment at least for the western “civilized” nations, is that the west can’t tolerate Hamas. The United States, Israel, the European Union, and quite possibly Canada can’t abide or even dance around the notion that Hamas won the Palestinian elections fair and democratically square. Why, that’s just not playing nicely with the Israelis or the U.S.. Democracy only counts as democracy when the results are in accordance with U.S. and Israeli policies. Directly after Hamas captured Palestinian government, Israel suspended the making of payments that are owed to the Palestinian government in lieu of taxes Israel collects from Palestinians.

This money belongs to the Palestinian people and not to Israel. Israel has no legal voice in the withholding of monies that are legally and rightfully Palestinian. But let us not forget, this is Israel and Israel does as they are wont to do. The United States followed the Israeli lead and cut American funding for the Palestinian people and to add an outrageous insult to starving injury, the U.S. demanded the return of monies that had already been given to the Palestinian Authority. Now the European Union has succumbed to the pressure being brought to bear on the E. U. by the U.S. and Israel and suspended monies that were promised the Palestinians and the old global bank is now closed.

That action should spread simply loads of international goodwill all around the West Bank and Gaza. Cowardice is as the money changers withhold payments. It becomes avariciously apparent that ethnic cleansing by starvation proxy is now the policy of the “civilized” west for the Palestinian people. Israel can’t move the Palestinian people from the West Bank and Gaza so, the world’s “civilized” folk will just offer up a little good old fashioned starvation in lieu of payment. Seems almost barbarically noble. It certainly takes on the eerie aura of ‘holocaust’. Just one more injustice in an appalling list of injustices met out to the Palestinian people by Israel, the U.S., and the European Union. George Bush’s “Roadmap to Peace” is a road to nowhere and starvation’s grim death is the last stop.

The world wonders be it however disingenuous, why the Palestinian people would consider “intifada” and mindless violence as any kind of solution. A people starved, driven from their rightful homeland, brutally incarcerated, savagely murdered, and without a seeming friend one in our wholly unjust world has every right to contemplate whatever options present themselves. The United Nations has proven itself to be comprehensively ineffective in dealing with not only Israel, but with the entire Middle East problem and that is more than a little sad. The United States opted out of the new United Nations Human Rights Council and that should come as no surprise to any rationale and thinking person.

To countenance starvation and by simple duplicity, authorize that very starvation is an act of national moral disgrace. Intifada seems wholly equitable and wholly rational in light of Israel and American policies of ethnic cleansing by means of starvation. The European Union is not without blame in the evil that is now afoot in Palestine. Starvation is an horrific manner in which to have to die. The smallest of children will be first and they will be the lucky ones. Our world would be well served by one single day of global intifada. The down and out and all those oppressed by inhumane and brutally harsh governments should raise a collective voice of outrage and disgust.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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