[News] Eduardo Galeano On Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

27 July, 2009

http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=4448


<http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=4448>EDUARDO 
GALEANO ON <http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=4448>GAZA

To justify itself, state terrorism manufactures 
terrorists: it sows hate and harvests alibis. 
Everything indicates that this slaughterhouse of 
Gaza, which according to its perpetrators is for 
finishing off the terrorists, will achieve boosting them.

***

Since 1948, the Palestinians live condemned to 
perpetual humiliation. They cannot even breathe 
without permission. They have lost their country, 
their land, their water, their freedom, 
everything of theirs. They do not even have the 
right to choose their governments. When they vote 
for those they should not, they are punished. 
Gaza is being punished. It turned into a 
mousetrap without exit since Hamas cleanly won 
the elections of 2006. Something similar happened 
in 1932 when the Communist Party triumphed in the 
elections of El Salvador. Drenched in blood, the 
Salvadorans atoned for their bad behaviour and 
since then have lived under military 
dictatorships. Democracy is a luxury which not everyone deserves.

***

The rockets which the cornered militants of Hamas 
clumsily aim in Gaza, on land that had been 
Palestinian and which the Israeli occupation 
usurped, are the children of impotence. And 
desperation, on the edge of suicidal madness, is 
the mother of the threats that deny the right of 
Israel’s existence: ineffectual cries, while the 
very efficient war of extermination is denying, 
for years, the right of Palestine’s existence.

Little remains of Palestine. Step by step, Israel is erasing the map.

The colonialists encroach, and after them the 
soldiers rush to the border. Bullets sanctify plunder as legitimate defence.

There is no aggressive war that does not say is 
defensive. Hitler invaded Poland to prevent 
Poland invading Germany. Bush invaded Iraq to 
prevent Iraq invading the world. In each of the 
defensive wars, Israel has swallowed up another 
piece of Palestine: the luncheon continues. The 
devouring is justified by the property rights the 
Bible granted, for the two thousand years of 
persecution that the Jewish people suffered and 
for the panic that the Palestinians lying in wait generate.

***

Israel is a country that never complies with 
either the recommendations or the resolutions of 
the United Nations, that never obeys the 
judgments of the international tribunals, that 
mocks international laws, and is also the only 
country that has legalised the torture of prisoners.

Who has gifted it the right to deny all the 
rights? Where does this impunity, with which 
Israel is carrying out the killings in Gaza, 
derive from? The Spanish government could not 
have bombed Basque country with impunity to 
finish off ETA; neither could the British 
government have destroyed Ireland to liquidate 
the IRA. Perhaps the tragedy of the Holocaust 
entails a policy of everlasting impunity? Or that 
the green light comes from the bigshot power 
which has in Israel the most unquestioning of its vassals?

***

The Israeli army, the most modern and 
sophisticated in the world, knows who it kills. 
It does not kill by error. It kills by horror. 
The civilian victims are called collateral 
damage, according to the dictionary of the other 
imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten 
collateral damages are children. And the maimed 
add up to thousands, victims of human mutilation 
that the war industry is successfully rehearsing 
in this operation of ethnic cleansing.

And as always, always the same: in Gaza, a 
hundred for one. For each hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli.

Dangerous people –warning of another bombardment 
– in charge of the enormous manipulative media 
that invite us to think that each Israeli life is 
worth as much as a hundred Palestinian lives. And 
those media also invite us to think that the two 
hundred atom bombs of Israel are humanitarian, 
and that a nuclear power called Iran was the one 
that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

***

The so-called international community, Does it exist?

Is it anything more than a club of merchants, 
bankers and war-makers? Is it anything more than 
an artistic name that the United States attaches when it engages in theatre?

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the worldwide 
hypocrisy shows up once again. As ever, the 
indifference, the vacuous discourses, the empty 
declarations, the high sounding declamations, the 
ambiguous postures are a tribute to sacred impunity.

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries 
wash their hands off. As always. And, as ever, 
the European countries wring their hands.

Old Europe, so capable of war and malignancy, 
sheds a tear or so, while secretly celebrating 
this master move. Because hunting the Jews was 
always a European custom, but since half a 
century that historical debt is being paid for by 
the Palestinians who also are Semites and who 
never were, nor are, anti-Semites. They are 
paying, in blood money, the price of others.

(This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends 
assassinated by the Latin American dictatorships 
to which Israel acted as consultant)

This is a translation into English of an article 
by Eduardo Galeano on Gaza. Original article in Spanish at:
<http://www.brecha.com.uy/alter/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=585&Itemid=70>http://www.brecha.com.uy/alter/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=585&Itemid=70

Translated by Supriyo Chatterjee for Tlaxcala




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