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Now
When Will Kristoff Go to the Occupied
Territories?
Gaza
and Darfur
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
As a zone of ongoing, large-scale bloodletting
Darfur in the western Sudan has big appeal for US news editors.
Americans are not doing the killing, or paying for others to
do it. So there's no need to minimize the vast slaughter with
the usual drizzle of "allegations." There's no political
risk here in sounding off about genocide in Darfur. The crisis
in Darfur is also very photogenic.
When the RENAMO gangs, backed
by Ronald Reagan and the apartheid regime in South Africa were
butchering Mozambican peasants, the news stories were sparse
and the tone usually tentative in any blame-laying. Not so with
Darfur, where moral outrage on the editorial pages acquires the
robust edge endemic to sermons about inter-ethnic slaughter where
white people, and specifically the US government, aren't obviously
involved.
Since March 1 the New York
Times has run seventy news stories on Darfur (including sixteen
pieces from wire services), fifteen editorials and twenty-one
signed columns, all but one by Nicholas Kristof. Darfur is primarily
a "feel good" subject for people here who want to agonize
publicly about injustices in the world but who don't really want
to do anything about them. After all, it's Arabs who are the
perpetrators and there is ultimately little that people in this
country can do to effect real change in the policy of the government
in Khartoum.
Now, Gaza is an entirely different
story. The American public as well as the US government have
a great deal of control over what is happening there. And it
is Israel, America's prime ally in the Middle East that is, on
a day-to-day basis, with America's full support, inflicting appalling
brutalities on a civilian population. To report in any detail
on what's going on in Gaza means accusing the United States of
active complicity in terrible crimes wrought by Israel, as it
methodically lays waste a society of 1.5 million Palestinians.
Of course the death rate is a fraction of what's alleged about
Darfur, but all the same, we are talking here about a determined
bid by Israel, backed by the U.S. and E.U. to destroy an entire
society.
I wan't at all surprised there
was a sharp swerve in emphasis towards Darfur at about the time
of the Kerem Shalom attack and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit
in Gaza in June of this year. By the time Israel's campaign of
destroying Lebanon got under way this summer (a campaign intricately
linked to the Palestine issue), Darfur was hotter still as a
distracting topic.
Where is Kristof? Couldn't
he trade at least one of his Darfur columns for one on Gaza's
suffering? Maybe he is deferring to Thomas Friedman, who owns
the Middle Eastern turf on the NYT op-ed page the way Kristof
owns chunks of Africa.
Israel's soldiers are not going
to march into Gaza and truck all the inhabitants away. The strategy
is simply to make the place into a garbage dump picked over by
destitute people. The current ceasefire will do nothing to relieve
the siege imposed physically, financially, commercially by Israel,
the U.S. and the E.U. Israel and its accomplices are sentencing
Gaza's occupants to a living death in situ, with actual death
meted out each day to "terrorists" and those unfortunate
enough to be in the line of fire, like the family in Beit Hanoun
or the school teacher by the minibus filled with children (a
near miss).
As Gideon Levy wrote in one
of his many searing reports in Ha'aretz, the Israeli army "has
been rampaging through Gaza-there's no other word to describe
it-killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately".
When my brother Patrick was there in September he reported in
The Independent that "Israeli troops and tanks come and
go at will. In the northern district of Shajhayeh they took over
several houses last week and stayed five days. By the time they
withdrew, 22 Palestinians had been killed, three houses were
destroyed and groves of olive, citrus and almond trees had been
bulldozed. Fuad al-Tuba, the 61-year-old farmer who owned a farm
here, said: 'they even destroyed 22 of my bee-hives and killed
four sheep.' His son Baher al-Tuba described how for five days
Israeli soldiers confined him and his relatives to one room in
his house where they survived by drinking water from a fish pond.
'Snipers took up positions in the windows and shot at anybody
who came near," he said. "They killed one of my neighbors
called Fathi Abu Gumbuz who was 56 years old and just went out
to get water.'"
The sound that Palestinians
most dread, Patrick wrote, "is an unknown voice on their
cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home
before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal."
The Israelis have destroyed 70 percent of the orange groves;
stopped the fishermen from going out in their boats, destroyed
the central power station. More than 50 percent of the population
is out of work, and per capita income is less than $2 a day.
Jennifer Loewenstein, of the
Middle Eastern studies program at the Unversity of Wisconsin
at Madison, has visited Gaza many times and written powerfully
about it on the CounterPunch website. She wrote to me last week,
"If people received genuine information about Gaza they
would also be appalled-and that's of course why they don't get
any real information about it from getting out. In addition,
if the Israeli blockade of virtually all human traffic into Gaza
were to end and more visitors could actually get in, more people-including
freelance journalists-would be outraged, or stunned into disbelief
at what Israel with US and EU backing has done to that miserable
strip of land. Again, that's why the Israeli-imposed human blockade
persists. And while diplomats, UN and international aid workers
and a few others do get in, the fact that most of them utter
not a peep about this ongoing crime against humanity suggests
in the most sinister way that they will continue not to utter
a peep when things get worse.
As Loewenstein concluded: "Servility
to power doesn't get more insidious or malignant than this."
Hitchens
Study Group Probes Policy Options for Bedraggled Warmonger
We hear indirectly that Christopher
Hitchens, as seemingly impervious to reality as his hero George
Bush, is at last beginning to ponder how to extract himself from
the Iraq mess. The usual unreliable sources claim a plaintive
phone call from Hitchens to his friend Martin Amis, brooding
on his dilemma.
Others have already fled the
burning deck of Bush's Mission Iraq. The Neocons are trying to
regroup, amid plaintive squeals that George Bush had not the
intellectual mettle nor moral fiber for the great task they charged
him with. The thousands of liberal intellectuals who either openly
or tacitly backed the venture have long since sidled towards
the exits, albeit without a word of remorse or self criticism.
Hitchens has been a full-bore
supporter of the war, summoned to the White House days before
the invasion to preach the morality and assured success of the
cause. Since those days he has stumbled from one fox hole to
the next. The early howls of triumph and exultant paragraphs
about troops being garlanded with flowers have given way to more
sterterous rationales, before a final stand on Kurdish soil.
His recent book on Tom Paine (which according to a devastating
review in the London
Review of Books (is extensively plagiar ... --er--
indebted to an earlier work by John Keane) is dedicated "by
permission" to the Kurdish president Jalal Talabani). No
more talk from Hitchens of democracy and freedom further south
amidst the Shia and the Sunni.
But defiant wagging of the
Kurdish flag won't suffice for long. A special Hitchens Study
Group is being convened to evolve policy options for the beleagured
scrivener. Among the options on the table:
Hitchens should redeploy immediately
over the horizon to the United Kingdom, be recommended for a
peerage by the expiring Blair and take his seat in the House
of Lords.
Hitchens should publish a vast
essay of plaintive self-justification in Vanity Fair and then
retire for a period of seclusion in the Betty Ford Clinic.
Hitchens should approach Nation
editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, ask for his column back and carry
on.
Note: An earlier version
of first item in this column ran in the print edition of The
Nation that went to press last Wednesday.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
