Wednesday 14 January 2009

Nerves shot in Gaza; nerves raw in Israel

From a brief listen to tonight’s BBC Radio 4 News at Ten, the Israeli preparations for meeting any international investigation of their conduct in Gaza, or a potential war crimes investigation, are already well advanced.

We heard some being trialled tonight: briefly, for example, whether the Israeli response in Gaza was ‘proportionate’ as the UN and international law requires) should depend on the ‘numbers at risk’ (8 million against 1.5 million) as against the number of deaths. (By the time I have posted this, probably 1,000 Gazans, 13 Israelis.)

Alleged ‘war crimes’ by Israeli forces should be investigated by the Israelis. (The ICC is only supposed to intervene if the country responsible fails to carry out an investigation.) But we know that Israeli investigations seldom amount to very much.

The other potential refutations are not worth bothering with, they are predictable by anyone of reasonable intelligence.

And, in a report from Egypt, 400 of those 1000 dead are children; thousands injured. Many of those children now in hospital in Egypt (may of whom will be paralysed, some in a coma forever) bear wounds that neurologists (at least one very highly regarded in Britain, should it be said, as it no doubt will, that Egyptian doctors do not know what they are talking about) say must have been caused by gunshots at close range, often, almost always, to the head.

We will be(and are being) told that Israeli forces do not shoot children, that these are casued by Hamas fighters. Yet, over and over again, Israeli snipers have targeted young teenagers from their watchtowers. And we heard tonight, yet again, that Israeli soldiers encouraged a family to leave their home, the grandmother carrying a white flag, and then shot at the children. The spine of a two-year old is severed; she will not walk again. A young boy’s brain is so damaged he will never wake up from a coma.

It seems as though the Israelis (having realised after the Senate querying of Hillary Clinton that American unconditional, unquestioning, support may not last very much longer, barely one more week even) grasping that they may have finally gone too far even for their greatest ally, are showing signs of, if not fear, a little nervousness, at the potential consequences.

Just a little late.

And who is going to pay for the medical treatment, the frequent surgery, the long-term care, let alone the pyschological treatment, thousands on thousands of young Palestinians are going to need? Who will pay for their rehabilitation? Who rebuild the hospitals, clinics, day centres one day, one year? I can guess who will, but who should is a different matter.

Which country ruthlessly and persistently pursues others, their banks and industries, for reparations for sixty-year-old injuries for people and their families who are in many cases no longer alive? Why should not the time come when it is the turn of the State of Israel not to be owed, but to owe?

(I see that my Al-Jazeera death counter stopped working suddenly. I've checked another blog, and it's gone blank there too. How odd, just when it was within a handful of the emotive 1,000. And the day Jewish organisations have launched a campaign complaining to the press of the 'hacking' of Jewish and Zionist websites . . .)

3 comments:

ed iglehart said...

This is the method to escape charges of war crimes!

Laughable, if it weren't real folk dying.

;-((
ed

Anonymous said...

The counter is still working on the On Palestine blog. Very strange.

cicero said...

I think it froze on the On Palestine one; it had gone blank there at midnight, and on three other blogs of mine I'd placed it on.

The server (it runs this counter, and I think only this, on Red Hat Linux) went down (an Apache service notice). Or was brought down?


It's back now . . .