Apparently the big news of the week has been the Netanyahu government’s major diss of visiting Vice President Joe Biden and Washington’s unusual public critique of this “insult.” While it’s good to see even this minor pushback to the continuing Israeli theft of Palestinian lands in East Jerusalem, it’s hard to believe this verbal rebuke with be taken very seriously by Bibi and his associates. It is not hard, however, to guess that Palestinians are not overly impressed.
After all we saw last year of the Israeli assault on Gaza and the persistent expansion of illegal Israeli settlements with nary a peep from DC, how impressive is a little tough talk.
While this “mistake” as Bibi called it may have been a step too far in public for the administration, the continuing suffering of the people of Gaza goes unmentioned.
On Saturday,Gazans marked the 1,000th day of the Israeli blockade of their territory, an anniversary made even more problematic by the devastation of the Israeli attacks last year.
The blockade continues to cause power outages with the resulting threats to health, as reported by Oxfam, but now Gazans face the added burden of trying to treat the wounded from Operation Cast Lead and face a situation the UN’s “top humanitarian official” described “de-developing.”
In the West Bank, Israel has not only continued its attacks on residents and journalists but has now placed the territory on a complete lockdown in an attempt to block Palestinians from reacting to both the new settlement news and the recent Israeli attempts to block worship by any men under the age of 50 at the Al Aqsa Mosque after protests of Israel’s attempts to claim Palestinian holy sites as part of it’s own historic district.
Just one example from the last week puts it all into perspective:
Amir al-Mohtaseb smiled tenderly when I asked him to tell me his favorite color. Sitting in his family’s living room last Thursday afternoon, 4 March, in the Old City of Hebron, the ten-year-old boy with freckles and long eyelashes softly replied, “green.” He then went on to describe in painful detail his arrest and detention — and the jailing of his 12-year-old brother Hasan by Israeli occupation soldiers on Sunday, 28 February.
Hours after our interview, at 2am, Israeli soldiers would break into the house, snatch Amir from his bed, threaten his parents with death by gunfire if they tried to protect him, and take him downstairs under the stairwell. They would beat him so badly that he would bleed internally into his abdomen, necessitating overnight hospitalization. In complete shock and distress, Amir would not open his mouth to speak for another day and a half….
At the end of our interview last Thursday, Amir sent a message to American children. “We are kids, just like you. We have the right to play, to move freely. I want to tell the world that there are so many kids inside the Israeli jails. We just want to have freedom of movement, the freedom to play.” Amir said that he wants to be a heart surgeon when he grows up.
It must be very hard for Palestinians to take seriously the wounded pride of Washington.
