To truly understand what is happening and how great the hypocrisy of the world is, it is not enough to just read the news and books written on the subject; one simply needs to go to Israel and Palestine. The author of these lines had the journalistic privilege of reporting from that area.
Written by: Krešimir Raguž
If in the wars fought last century the ratio of casualties on the two opposing sides reached one to one hundred, the civilized world would have declared without much doubt that it was genocide. If among those hundred victims half were children and women, the usual terms such as ‘crime’ or ‘atrocity’ would have been added to the aforementioned term. However, judging by the war that has been ongoing for the third week in the Gaza Strip, the world is either no longer civilized or has fundamentally changed.
The Israeli military expedition to Gaza, in which approximately a thousand lives have been lost on the Palestinian side and 13 on the other (most soldiers killed by ‘friendly fire’ from their colleagues), is therefore a shameful stain on the face of civilized humanity. And to avoid any misunderstanding, this does not only refer to the hundreds of tons of bombs that the Israeli army drops on Gaza, nor to the 20 rockets a day that Hamas fires at the southern cities of the Jewish state. Along with the listed casualties and destruction, they are merely a consequence of much more complex relations that have governed this unfortunate corner of the Middle East for 60 years.
For a true understanding of this issue, in addition to the interest and information that arises from listening to the news and reading books written on the subject, one simply needs to go to Israel and Palestine. The author of these lines had the journalistic privilege of reporting from that area. Dust in the nose and under the nails, the screams of victims and blood everywhere are memories of Gaza that leave no one indifferent. And those memories forever change a person, memories of the largest prison in the world where life is worth less than any bullet that can fly around the first corner. Perhaps precisely because of that, but also due to a number of friends left on both sides of this conflict, the news, especially the superficial analyses we have been inundated with in recent days, let no one be offended, often seem ridiculous to me. Reading between the lines rarely offers any real explanations.
Divide and Rule
Among the latest news received before writing this text was that the UN Security Council has supported the Secretary-General of the same organization, Ban Ki-moon, for his seven-day tour of the Middle East. It is presented as a great novelty that even the USA, which was against the resolution to cease the war just last week, has provided support. Full support? While people die every day, the UN, for who knows how many times, proves its incompetence with superficial and weak reactions. We also remember the example of Rwanda, where nearly a million people were killed in genocide in just one hundred days in 1994, also remembered for the UN’s support for the peace initiative. Certainly not for action.
Interestingly, Ban Ki-moon will discuss with the leaders of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank during his tour. There he will be welcomed by Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fatah, which opposes Hamas, and the president of the Palestinian Authority whose mandate expired on January 9, yet he continues to govern without hindrance. The best confirmation of how he governs is that in the first days of the war in Gaza, he banned demonstrations in support of his attacked compatriots in the West Bank. Ban Ki-moon has excluded Gaza and a visit to that area from his program. There, in fact, Hamas rules, which won the elections in 2006, and a year later took power in an armed conflict, expelling Abbas in the process. Hamas is also on the list of terrorist organizations of the USA and the EU, although it has never operated in those areas in its history.
