The Calamity in Gaza and West Bank
Few had not anticipated that the discovery that the kidnapped Israeli youth had been killed inside Palestinian territories would lead a terrible collective punishment of Palestinian civilians. The death of the two kidnapped young people is a sad and frightening reality of the injustice of a war forced upon the people of Israel and Palestine to serve but one objective; the continued illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
While we acknowledge that many Israeli families have lost lives, it has however become a pattern that the state of Israel reacts with all its crude force against 1.5 million Palestinians caged in ever shrinking territories to even the smallest incident. Since 2000, thousands of Palestinians have perished as a result and many more have been traumatised and displaced.
When the Israeli airforce bombarded the besieged Gaza Strip for the first time in the nights of 8-9 July 2014, 27 civilians including children, women and the elderly perished and over 200 were injured. When the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council finally started issuing statements of concern about the atrocities being visited on Palestinians, the body count had increased fast to exceed 70. The question is what has led to this level of barbarism, what is being done and what should peace-loving peoples of the world do?
The bombing of the Gaza Strip and West Bank is not an isolated and inexplicable explosion of madness, but it is very much part of a culture of hate and paranoia that the occupation has engendered. The recent turn of events are shaped by Israeli interests threatened by the recent consolidation of Palestinian unity. What are Israel's interests? Besides the well-known interest in creating a Jewish state and annexing the Palestinian land for that, we have come to know now that the deadly Israeli ground incursion on Gaza in 2000 was actually a war of conquest driven by the intention on the party of the ruling elite in Israel to access and control Gaza's offshore gas fields.
Israel's own media uncovered in 2006-7 a plot to have Palestinian gas transmitted to Israel via undersea pipelines and thus transfer control over the sale of Palestinian gas to Israel. When this exposé happened elements in the Israeli political class justified this clandestine plan as a way to ensure that proceeds from gas did not land in the hands of "terrorists", meaning the Hamas organisation whose election into government Israel sought to rubbish.