Last week the Associated Press reported:
Israeli authorities blockading the Gaza Strip in 2008 went so far as to calculate how many calories would be needed to avert a humanitarian disaster in the impoverished Palestinian territory, according to a newly declassified military document… [Critics said] the document was new evidence that Israel used food as a pressure tactic to try to force Gaza’s Hamas rulers from power…
What bothers me are the number of parallels to this right here, throughout US history. We’ve used chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare against our alleged enemies, have had concentration camps for far more people than the Japanese; starved our enemies with “sanctions” while denying them medical care at the same time; and much worse -back well into the First World War and the Civil War. But people don’t like to remember these things, whether they’re about Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, or Japan or against the enemies in our midst, like the Red Man – and god only knows how many others. Starving people through sanctions or sieges is, as Allen says, just a primitive form of biological warfare.
In its early years, our beloved, exceptional Republic, used germ warfare by deliberately giving small-pox infected blankets to groups of Native Americans, often wiping out entire tribes – and then grabbing their land. The concentration camps we devised for them still exist in places like the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, the Tohono O’odham desert outside Ajo, Arizona, or the dustlands of Oklahoma. Go back to the Crusades for examples of enforced starvation and creative torture such as the art of burning living people at the stake in the name of religion.
As for chemical weapons, how many people know that US forces used “Mark 77,” a new and improved form of Napalm, in Iraq? Or that we’ve permanently poisoned the environments of Basra and Fallujah through the metals used in our weapons? The nuclear cases are well-known, as is the example of depleted uranium and white phosphorus. Reports out three years ago detailed the astonishing rise in birth defects in infants, metals in their systems, and spontaneous abortions by women who’d had no difficulty conceiving prior to our little adventure.
The point isn’t to generate a list, it’s to say that for every barbaric act committed by the Israelis there are parallels that came first in the United States (and before that, in Europe) – one reason our government sits silently by when Israel uses newfangled weapons like DIMEs, with strange chemical components such as tungsten in them, on human beings in Gaza to cause unspeakable amputation wounds.
Personally, I’m surprised by the article – as if it wasn’t common knowledge during Cast Lead and before it that government officials were calculating the number of calories each Gazan could live on per day under the blockade. This was talked about openly in Israel as Tzipi Livni self-righteously exclaimed, “there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza”. (The Arab media played her saying this over and over while showing war footage in the background that, to my knowledge, has never been seen in this country, as I’m sure you know.)
This was true – and written about – a long time ago when Dov Weisglass spoke openly of putting Gaza on a “starvation diet” (just enough food to live on but to stay hungry) or when the blockade authorities would authorize, week by week, which food stuffs not to let in (hence the reason why, at one point, spaghetti and macaroni were prohibited, and at another point, citrus fruits, or certain vegetables would not be allowed in, etc. It made perfect sense to those cheering on the IDF that one of the first factories bombed in Dec. 2008 was the last remaining flour mill in Gaza. So much for making bread. The Gazans must be made completely dependent on outside aid organizations, often the same ones paying for the US/Israel’s occupation, or the sum total of the damages inflicted on peoples’ homes, businesses, and factories.
Way back in the 1990s and before, curfews and closures left thousands of people ‘food insecure’ or malnourished. It just wasn’t framed the same way as ‘counting calories for a blockade,’ though in essence it was the same tactic. Probably started in 1948. I believe most of us have yet to view Israeli and US history with our eyes wide open. If we could see it that clearly we’d have to renounce our citizenship to live with ourselves. Just as an aside, it is now well known that before 1500 (or 1492, to be exact) somewhere between 10 and 17 million Native Americans (a conservative estimate) lived on this land. By 1900 that number was 250,000. What American history textbook teaches that?
Jennifer, you forgot to list Martin Kramer and the infamous Gaza starvation plan he proposed at the Herzliya gathering in 2010.
So you can go back as far as you want and dig as deep as you want into what those awful Americans or, indeed, Gentiles in general got up to but if you dare…
RE: “What bothers me are the number of parallels to this right here, throughout US history. We’ve . . . had concentration camps for far more people than the Japanese . . .” ~ Jennifer Loewenstein
MY COMMENT: The (so-called) “war on drugs”, in conjunction with the biases inherent to our system of (so-called) “justice”, has virtually turned our prisons into concentration camps for black males!
So what? This is 2012.
I would say that what Israel is doing does not fit the framework of genocide. If Martin Kramer proposed a “starvation plan” (he was kind of musing in a moronic vein rather than planning), it indicates a certain frame of mind that is accepted enough that he can speak loudly without being dis-invited from the next conference, but this is not genocide.
In my view, what we see is a level of hostility that overrides any rational impulses. In the same time, Israel is acutely aware that it can be in deep, deep trouble would it resort to genocide etc. Additionally, even internally, actually planning genocide is a taboo (although not to the point of tarring and feathering Martin Kramer). The essence of the project of “Gaza on diet” was to create as many hardships for Gazans as Israel can get away with, rationalized as being “anti-terrorist policy” or something like that. The mental process as I see it is to create an image of “demonic enemy” and any hardship that this enemy suffers is a source of joy and satisfaction.
Thus investigations on the caloric needs of inhabitants of Gaza. Within humane parameters of “sufficient diet” the goal was to make it as unpalatable as possible. Similarly, while there were many deaths in 2008, the top objective was to destroy as many buildings as possible, preferably without killings, to make the life of the survivors as hard as possible. Of course, with that mindset, supplying materials for reconstruction was out of the question. Any goals attached to such policies were simply rationalizations. Mind you, in Israeli politics it works like a well tuned violin. Some more extreme people kwetch that the government is coddling terrorists, some self-hating treacherous leftist show sympathy to the monsters on the other side of the fence, but for 90% such policies seem to be just fine.
Now let us read Martin Kramer. He noticed with considerable trepidation that the rate of population increase in Gaza is extremely high. As this is undesired (forget for a while why, there are good reasons too) he muses about solutions. How about decreases in food?
Would the presumably well paid think tanker pause to think, he could check that some African countries with starvation problems also have a very high birth rate. Short of genocidal starvation, decreasing food supplies actually has the opposite effect. On the other hand, there are reports what decreases birth rates most: increasing the education and employment of women and men. When bulk of men cannot be employed anyway, economic achievement ceases to be a condition for an acceptable marriage partner, which eliminates the motivation to avoid teen marriages etc. If you were a demonic anti-natalist you should make Gaza a region with export oriented sweatshops with clear ways of spending the family savings (building houses and furnishing them better than neighbors etc., making it prestigiously necessary for children to have this or that). I mean, if you were a devilishly clever anti-natalist.
But this is totally unthinkable! Improving life in Gaza? For those monsters? Perish the thought!