What have you got against Gaza, Mr Brown?

Stuart Littlewood asks British Prime Minister Gordon Brown,
the son of a Christian preacher, how he could reconcile
his Christian principles with his uncritical support for
Israel, a state that practices apartheid and murder,
and is a wholesale thief, plunderer and wrecker
of Palestinian lands.

James Gordon Brown, you are a “son of the manse”,
which means you were raised in the household of a
church minister. You'll be quite big on
Christian principles, then.

So how do you explain your uncritical support of a foreign
government that practices apartheid and is a wholesale
thief, plunderer and wrecker of other people's lands ...
carelessly slaughters children and inflicts slow genocide
on defenceless civilians ... sends snatch squads to break
your door down in the middle of the night and manhandles
your family, demolishes your home and imprisons you
indefinitely without charge or trial ... deals with its
“enemies” by torture and assassination, and ceaselessly
breaches the rules of civilized conduct?

As if that weren’t enough, Israel terrorises the
Holy Land’s Christian communities along with their
Muslim neighbours, and uses pernicious administrative
controls to disrupt the life and work of the Church.

In a speech to Labour Friends of Israel you said:

"Many of you know my interest in Israel and in the Jewish community has been long-standing... My father was the chairman of the Church of Scotland's Israel Committee. Not only... did he make visits on almost two occasions a year for 20 years to Israel – but because of that, although Fife, where I grew up, was a long way from Israel with no TV pictures to link us together – I had a very clear view from household slides and projectors about the history of Israel, about the trials and tribulations of the Jewish people, about the enormous suffering and loss during the Holocaust, as well as the extraordinary struggle that he described to me of people to create this magnificent homeland."

In reality the “extraordinary struggle” has been a
60-year crime spree – a violent exercise in seizing the
Palestinians’ homeland and forcing them to flee.

It is a puzzle why true Christians would wish to embrace
Zionism. Don’t they understand the nature of the project
and the injustice to others? Since 1948 it has become
abundantly clear that the 57 per cent of the territory
generously handed out by the UN wasn’t enough, they
want it all... and there’ll be no peace until they have
created as many irreversible “facts on the ground”
as necessary to make sure Israel’s occupation of Palestine
is permanent, especially where it encompasses prime
lands and key water resources.

“Put the Palestinians on a diet...”

Dov Weisglass, adviser to your friend Olmert, said of
Israel’s siege of Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians
on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” The
hunger pangs are supposed to turn the Palestinians against
Hamas, leaving Israel and the Quartet with only the
corrupt and compliant Fatah faction to browbeat into
submission. But the severity of the blockade has done
much more. It has devastated Gaza's already weak
economy and destroyed most of its businesses.
Eighty-five per cent now live below the poverty line.
A hundred chronically sick people have died in agony
for want of drugs and hospital equipment spares held
up at the border by the Israelis. Hundreds more face
the same fate. Energy restrictions are causing grave
public health problems. Children do their homework by
candlelight and if the 3000 licensed fishermen put to sea
their boats are fired on.

Who is going to pick up the tab for the wreckage to lives
and infrastructure? EU taxpayers, of course. If the
Palestinians had been left alone in peace these last 60 years,
with their territories intact, there would be no need for aid.
Our cash in effect subsidizes Israel’s criminal greed. It is
one of the prices we pay for your government’s failure to
intervene.

Two-thirds of the 1.5 million Gazans are refugee families
dispossessed and driven from their towns and villages. The
Gaza siege is a story of courageous resistance by already
impoverished and devastated people against a brutal invader
and conniving Western powers. Their crime? They take
exception to being under unlawful and murderous occupation,
they want freedom from oppression and the return of their
lands, and they democratically elected a government that
doesn’t happen to suit the ambitions of Israel and the US.

As one of those connivers, Mr Brown, can you explain what
exactly you have against Gaza? Is it a threat to our national
security? Are Gazan’s children of a lesser God in your eyes?
What of the Christian community that is also made to suffer?

What is it that justifies such evil meddling and
cowardly collective punishment?

The latest Muslim News weekly report on Israeli
human rights violations says:

During the reporting period, IOF [Israeli Occupation Forces] killed 10 Palestinians, including three brothers and a school teacher, and an eleventh one died from a previous wound in the Gaza Strip. IOF also wounded 40 Palestinians, mostly civilians, in the Gaza Strip, and two civilians in the West Bank. Forty Palestinians, mostly civilians, including nine women and eight children, were wounded by the IOF gunfire in the Gaza Strip and two others in the West Bank. IOF conducted 31 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and six into the Gaza Strip.

As I write, Israeli F-16s have just bombed a Gaza refugee
camp killing eight and wounding 60, 10 of them critically.
If this sort of thing happened on Israeli territory there
would be hysterical uproar.

Forced to live like dogs

In the recent Parliamentary debate on Gaza your ministers
dismissed democratically-elected Hamas as "a rejectionist
Palestinian group” and tried to equate Gaza's feeble home-
made rocket launchings with Israel’s high-tech military
onslaughts and crippling blockade. They voiced no outright
condemnation of the siege.

Your foreign secretary, David Miliband, now speaks of a
“moral impulse” to promote and foster democracy, especially
in the Middle East. But faced with a perfectly good
Palestinian democracy you and your friends couldn’t
wait to tear it down.

You won’t talk to Hamas because warmongers in the
White House branded them “terrorists”. What does
that make Israel? The state of Israel was founded by
terror groups like the one that blew up the King David
Hotel killing 90 in a vicious attack on the British mandate
government. As Norman Finkelstein remarked, “It is
more than a rogue state. It is a lunatic state... The
whole world is yearning for peace, and Israel is
constantly yearning for war.”

The Israeli government itself is aptly described by
one of your own MPs as a “gang of amoral thugs”.

Mr Brown, I leave you to mull over the words of
another Christian – Gaza’s priest, Father Manuel
Musallam. He told my journalist friend
Mohammed Omer:

Palestinian Christians are not a religious community set apart in some corner. We are part of the Palestinian people. Our relationship with Hamas is as people of one nation. Hamas doesn’t fight religious groups. Its fight is against the Israeli occupation.

When asked about Western media reports that
Islamic oppression was forcing Gaza’s Christians to consider
emigrating, Father Manuel said that if Christians emigrate
it’s because of the Israeli siege, not the Muslims.
“We seek a life of freedom—a life different from the life
of dogs we are currently forced to live.”

*Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine
about the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. See details on http://www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk.