Questioning Our Country's Support of Israel

'Time to start asking questions'

By Mazin B. Qumsiyeh
Jordan Times
Thursday, December 12, 2002

UNLIKE THE rest of the world, US media coverage of the
Middle East conflict has focused mainly on political
issues and also on the Israeli victims of violence.
Americans are thus shielded from the horrendous
Palestinian medical and humanitarian catastrophe and
our government's role in it. The following
observations are based on information from
nongovernmental organisations.

In the two years since the start of the Palestinian
uprising, Israeli occupation forces and settlers
killed 1995 Palestinians and injured 32,000 others.
Dozens more Palestinian deaths are directly attributed
to Israeli medieval style siege and closure of
Palestinian towns and villages (including several
deliveries with subsequent deaths of babies at
checkpoints). The closure also prevents medical
personnel from getting to
the scenes of injury and many more of those who died
bled to death while waiting for evacuation. Israeli
forces attacked ambulances on 215 occasions causing
damage to 106 ambulances, killing 3 medical personnel
and injuring 184. Over 100 Palestinians were
assassinated (extra-judicial killings are considered a
war crime by international law) with 75 bystanders
also killed during these illegal actions.

Such medical disasters are wreaked in a context of
economic devastation. Confiscation and colonisation so
far has taken half of the Palestinian land occupied in
1967 (itself a mere 22 per cent of historic Palestine
that was usurped to make space for the Jewish state).
Israeli forces destroyed 12,000 buildings including
mosques, churches, schools, and hundreds of houses
demolished (some 20,000 made homeless). They even
attacked food storage facilities (both UN and FAO),
water wells, hospitals, clinics and sewage treatment
facilities.

Tens of thousands of trees were uprooted and over
30,000 acres of agricultural land were bulldozed or
confiscated. According to the World Bank and
international agencies, the siege and relentless
attack on Palestinians and the infrastructure in the
past two years resulted in massive poverty and
economic hardships that more than halved the already
feeble economy which was weak from 35 years of
occupation. Now a majority of Palestinians live below
the poverty line of $2 per day and 45 per cent of
children are malnourished according to UN studies.

Yet, the impact of a two-year-old siege and warfare on
Palestine is reduced to mere ciphers (two killed here,
five there, eight elsewhere). Americans consequently
have no idea of the true magnitude of war-inflicted
suffering that would constitute an unprecedented
national emergency where it to take place on a similar
scale in our country. If we consider that 2.9 million
people live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, this
would be equivalent to having over two million
Americans injured, over 170,000 killed, and 500,000
houses destroyed.

Many Americans are misled by media reports and think
more Israelis are killed than Palestinians or that
Israeli killing of Palestinian civilians is done ?by
mistake?. With literally thousands of such ?mistakes?,
UN and Human Rights Organisations clearly do not buy
this whitewashing of Israeli war crimes and crimes
against humanity. Every single human rights
organisation investigating the situation concluded
that war crimes were being committed. Furthermore, of
the 1995 Palestinians killed, 20 per cent were under
the age of 18 and many of those were killed in the
first month of the uprising well before any attacks on
Israelis.

Psychology enters into the latter phenomenon and bodes
poorly for the future. A majority of Palestinian
children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders.
Psychological research also shows that the main factor
motivating those engaged in suicide bombing (so far
some 200 people of the population of 2.9 million) is a
personal history of suffering (occupation forces
causing suffering to bomber or to a close family
member). The unprecedented suffering of dispossession
by the refugees for 55 years, massive oppression,
ghettoisation and lack of hope lead to predictable
reactions.

Our government supplies the money, the weapons, and
the tools (bulldozers, veto power at the UN) which
allow Israel to carry out these crimes against a
largely defenceless and captive population. Congress
has funnelled more money to Israel than we gave to the
whole continent of Africa. Now Israel is asking the US
for an additional $14 billion in grants and loan
guarantees, in addition to the already massive
taxpayer subsidy of this apartheid regime. It is time
to start asking questions about our complicity in
creating and sustaining this tragedy and to understand
why a
majority of world public opinion is arrayed against US
foreign policy.

The writer, an Associate Professor of Genetics at Yale
University School of Medicine, is co-founder of
AcademicsForJustice.org and the Palestine Right to
Return Coalition. He contributed this article to The
Jordan Times