Matt McCarten: West stands by while a whole population is illegally jailed

Matt McCarten

After this week, does anyone doubt that Israel is a
terrorist state? Our televisions couldn't hide the truth
last week that 1 1/2 million civilians are imprisoned
behind walls Israel has built around them.
The entire Gaza population is cut off from the world,
with no one permitted to leave or enter their compound.
All goods, including oil, have been cut.
The entire population is starving and without electricity.

This imprisonment follows a decision by Israel to
collectively punish Palestinian civilians.
The reason is that members of the Gaza resistance
- mainly Hamas militants - have been causing a nuisance
by lobbing home-made missiles over the prison wall into
Israel. Damage is minimal but the Israeli Government and
its military are embarrassed by these acts of public defiance.

What Israel doesn't admit is that its military constantly
carries out air raids and "surgical strikes" that kill and maim
hundreds of Palestinian civilians, with the blessing of the US
administration. The world takes the word of the Israeli
Government when it claims it is targeting militants.
When innocent victims, including children, are killed and
maimed that is accepted as collateral damage.

Television shots last week showing tens of
thousands of Palestinians civilians streaming into
Egypt through holes blown through the wall that
encircles Gaza shows Israel's huge crime against
the Palestinian people.

One of the chilling crimes committed by the Nazis when
occupying Poland was walling off a large part of the city
of Warsaw, forcing all Jews into it.

Inside these walls there was a Jewish resistance
that ran attacks against its jailers. The Nazi occupiers
took retaliation by carrying out collective punishment
against the civilian population, which included shelling,
assassinating their leaders and cutting off supplies.

What's the next move for Israeli leaders? They could
have to follow the example of the Nazis who in the end
massacred everyone inside the compound.

Last year former British Prime Minister Tony Blair
was appointed by President Bush to bring peace to the
Palestinians. There has been a defining silence from Blair
and Bush on Israel's atrocities.

Every time damage is inflicted by Palestinian bombs
tossed over the wall, there are stern pronouncements
from the rest of the world that the elected Hamas
leaders must stop their population carrying out this
mischief. However, these same people are silent when
the Israeli military bombs and maims Palestinians in
retaliation. Then we wonder why the Palestinians
hate us for our hypocrisy.

The only thing we have heard about Blair since his
appointment as peace envoy is that he has converted
to Catholicism. I wonder if he considers the irony of
him joining the Church that led crusader invasions
of Palestine, which caused a lot of the antagonism
between Muslims and Christians.

His last diplomatic act in the area was supporting
Israel's invasion of Lebanon after a soldier was
kidnapped. The Hizbollah still has its hostage
and peace is even more elusive than it was then.
What the captors want is to swap their handful
of Israeli prisoners for people who have been illegally
kidnapped and wallow in Israeli prisons. Israel holds
more than 6000 people who have been kidnapped
or detained without being charged, let alone convicted,
of any crime. Some of them are publicly elected officials
and representatives.

Israel often sends in assassins to murder its opponents -
the world is silent when these executions and murders
are carried out. When was the last time Hamas murdered
an Israeli politician? Never.

In the final days of Bush's presidency he is desperate
to do something right. During his recent visit to the
Middle East he said he was there to help win a peaceful
outcome for Israel and Palestine. It's a lie of course.
His rhetoric was all about rarking up the leaders of
the Western client states to try to get their support
for bombing Iran into oblivion.

He released a tape of the Iranian Navy threatening
US warships on the eve of his visit, but within days it
was proved to be a hoax. That didn't stop Bush claiming
Iran was now the real evil that had to be destroyed. It's
not lost on anyone that the only threat to Israel for hegemony
in the region is Iran.

While all these games go on a whole people are walled in by
a military state. Unless the world tells the truth about the
terror against the Palestinian people, peace in the Middle
East will never happen.

The truth is Israel is a terrorist state and is able to
wage crimes on an innocent people because it is funded
and abetted by the world's only superpower. Watching
the television images of the Palestinians breaking through
to freedom surely must make everyone in the world realise
we are being sold a great lie about Israel wanting to negotiate peace.

The last place to have a wall that imprisoned a people was Berlin.
The then US President Ronald Reagan created a defining moment
in world history when he called for the wall to come down.

What we have now is a US president helping fund the Gaza wall.
It's an atrocity.