Image by SJ Objio.
U.S. laws require healthcare practitioners and anyone else to report to “the state” their suspicion of abuse of any child they’ve encountered. But the state abuses too.
The Lancet medical journal, published in Great Britain and read throughout the world, recently condemned the Israeli state and the “ongoing Israeli military assault on Gaza” for causing “an unprecedented rise in maternal deaths, miscarriages, and stillbirths.”
Lancet asserts that the “violence is not just a consequence of the military assault—it is a deliberate outcome of policies that restrict access to health care.” And a “blockade, now in its second decade, and ever-tightened over the last few months, has compounded the suffering, with dire implications for future generations.”
Lancet’s report refers to “humanitarian catastrophe … the onset of famine … deterioration of maternal health services … [and the] near-total collapse of the health-care infrastructure.” It points to “a tragic surge in preventable maternal and neonatal deaths.”
Lancet adds that:
“Prenatal care is virtually non-existent in Gaza. The rise in premature labor is staggering, often triggered by the chronic stress of displacement, malnutrition, and the trauma of witnessing air strikes. As hospitals struggle to keep up with mass casualties, maternity wards are becoming non-functional. In some cases, women have had to deliver babies outside, in unsanitary conditions, without the assistance of midwives or doctors.”
The “targeting of maternity hospitals and the blockade that limits essential medical supplies … from entering Gaza have turned pregnancy into a life-threatening condition for thousands of women.”
Women “are forced to carry pregnancies through conditions unfathomable to the human conscience.” The report cites malnutrition … a profound moral failure of the international community … [and] violation of international law.” “Humanitarian principles dictate that civilians, particularly children and pregnant women, must be protected,” the report states. Moreover, “The world cannot remain silent any longer. The time for action is now—to restore access to health care, to protect women and children, and to uphold the sanctity of life.”
The enabling role of Israel’s partner in crime receives no mention. The United States supplies the tools for killing – the bombs, guns, ammunition, and planes.
Citing mothers, nurses and physicians, Gaza journalist Taghreed Ali points out that expectant mothers are experiencing more miscarriages, premature deliveries, and stillborn births than before. He notes an increased incidence of newborns born with congenital abnormalities.
These include deformed or absent limbs; neurologic malformations, especially hydrocephalus; cardiac defects; and digestive problems. Possible causes, according to experts whom he consulted, include:
malnutrition of mothers; no pre-natal care; stress provoked by the bombings, shooting, and forced moves to new localities; gases produced by explosions; self-administration of inappropriate medicines necessitated by the absence of care; and inhalation of dust from explosions and collapsed buildings. Ali tells of expectant mothers buried in rubble for hours and later giving birth to babies who died or were malformed.
In this war and earlier Gaza wars, Israel’s military violates international humanitarian law by using artillery shells containing white prosperous. A pregnant woman exposed to this incendiary agent risks delivering a baby with congenital abnormalities, according to Lancet.
Aggravating the lack of care for sick or malformed babies has been the denial of access to specialty services outside of Gaza. Israel continues with its lockdown of Gaza’s borders.
The Israeli state’s trashing of healthcare in Gaza parallels the sorry state of healthcare fostered by governments in power in the United States. Israeli and U.S. political leaders share an easy tolerance of preventable dying.
In his recent comprehensive analysis, reporter Peter Dolack asserts that U.S. healthcare “is by far the world’s most expensive while providing the worst results among the world’s advanced capitalist countries.” The system is “designed to extract maximum profits rather than deliver health care.” U.S. residents “live the shortest lives and have the most avoidable deaths … More than 26,000 die in the United States yearly because of a lack of health insurance.”
Powerbrokers in both countries are dismissive, it seems, of healthcare for the poor, marginalized, and forgotten, and of their health. Such evident cruelty betokens an oppression that is widespread in both situations. Meanwhile, both leadership classes shore up power and privileges. This is one area of struggle.
Another is the decades-long striving of Palestinians to restore land and liberty. Any headway with struggle along such lines promises to fire up oppressed peoples throughout the Middle East – and not so much minders of the region’s status quo. According to academician Jason Hickel, “A liberated Middle East means capitalism in the core really faces a crisis, and they will not let that happen, and they’re unleashing the full violence of their extraordinary power to ensure it doesn’t.”
Under these circumstances, Israeli and U.S. strategists are looking ahead and seeking to waylay progressive change, while tuning into their counter-revolutionary instincts. They apparently have latched onto a notion of power put forth earlier by one of their ideological enemies. According to Lenin (State and Revolution), “The state is a special organization of force; it is the organization of violence for the suppression of some class”.
It’s a frame of mind that, reasonably enough, would have the victims of oppression in both the Middle East and United States casting about for ways for their own class to achieve political power.
Meanwhile, the Communist Parties of Palestine and Israel, and their allies, meeting virtually on October 7, agreed that, “Only by establishing a sovereign Palestinian state will there be peace and stability in the region.” Beyond self-determination, they also called for cessation of the siege on Gaza and the relief of suffering.
