[News] America’s Apple Pie and Gaza’s Ice Cream Freezers

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  America’s Apple Pie and Gaza’s Ice Cream Freezers

August 08, 2014

http://www.turkeyagenda.com/americas-apple-pie-and-gazas-ice-cream-freezers-986.html

by Dr. HATEM BAZIAN <http://www.turkeyagenda.com/author/dr-hatem-bazian/>

A haunting photo coming from Gaza showing the body of a dead child 
placed in an ice cream refrigerator as hospital morgues were overwhelmed 
with bodies and ran out of space due to the murderous campaign unleashed 
by Israel on the Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip. The stark 
contrast is so powerful yet symbolic of Israel’s gallantry and military 
prowess directed at children, women and the old in Gaza. It must be so 
difficult for Israel’s military to kill children: around 400 of them in 
this campaign!

Children in every corner are delighted to run after ice cream trucks and 
reach into freezers in neighborhood stores but in Gaza they became the 
frozen lifeless inhabitants of a refrigerator intended to provide much 
happiness at summer time. Yet, the ice cream freezers were not the only 
ones to be used as another disturbing image showed a vegetable 
refrigerator in a store likewise being filled to capacity as the numbers 
of civilian dead continued to mount and all existing hospital facilities 
were running beyond capacity.

One can see and examine these images from a variety of point of views 
but the contradiction that I would like to direct our attention is the 
one that must be made between America’s continued and unconditional 
support to Israel and the death and destruction permitted and encouraged 
by the US to be visited upon the Palestinians. Indeed, if the lifeless 
image of children in ice cream display is to be understood correctly and 
it should then it must be set as a contrast between America’s limitless 
apple pie support for Israel worth more than $3 billion dollar a year 
and the cold freezer intended for the Palestinians, at present in Gaza 
but also in the West Bank. America’s financial apple pie is what makes 
it possible for Israel to be the bully that it is and to punish the 
Palestinians time and time again.

In this current slaughter, President Obama, 100 Senators, and 418 
Congressmen/women expressed in no uncertain terms America’s apple pie 
support for Netanyahu and Israel’s murderous campaign against the 
Occupied Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The expressions of support is 
so one sided that Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims should ask the 
question on whether the US and America’s political elites comprehend the 
impacts of such policies on the Palestinians and the long term standing 
of America across the region.

The congressional votes included an expression of support worth an 
additional $225 millions emergency funding for the Iron Dome, 
replacement equipment and access to America’s pre-positioned armament 
that will allow Israel to continue its assault on a captive population. 
Indeed, America’s military ice cream and apple pie sent free to Israel 
to rain death, destruction and a freezer space for lifeless Palestinian 
children. The moral and ethical are frozen and America’s complicity is 
visible to each and every Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and conscious people 
around the world. Indeed, the weapons causing Palestinians pain and 
suffering are provided free of charge by Uncle Sam to the Israelis: 
every bullet, missile, plane, tank and the Iron dome all come from 
America. What have the Palestinians done to America to receive these 
death gifts!

Indeed, the aggression on Gaza has already surpassed all levels of 
brutality and cruelty with the Israeli army unleashing a violent 
campaign that has so far resulted in more than 1900 deaths (including 
more than 400 children, 300 women and dozens of elderly people), and 
more than 9,000 wounded (over 1500 children).  In this campaign, no 
building, however sacred, was spared: more than 8,500 
homes, 76 mosques, 2 churches 
<http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/gazas-christians-and-muslims-grow-closer-defiance-israeli-attacks-372261379>, 
and 25 hospitals and health clinics were destroyed. Ambulances, doctors, 
nurses and paramedics, schools 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-presses-attack-16-killed-at-un-school/2014/07/30/4a643588-17a5-11e4-85b6-c1451e622637_story.html>, 
universities, UN buildings 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/world/middleeast/israel-gaza.html?_r=0>, libraries, 
shelters 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/israel-presses-attack-16-killed-at-un-school/2014/07/30/4a643588-17a5-11e4-85b6-c1451e622637_story.html>, food 
markets, playgrounds, graveyards were also bombed, in addition to 152 
educational facilities.

According to Israeli authorities 95 percent of the sixty 
declared Israeli fatalities are military, while according to the UN 
about three-quarters of Palestinian casualties are civilians 
<http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=48330>. Consequently, top 
UN officials and human rights groups have conducted investigation 
<http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/07/15/israelpalestine-unlawful-israeli-airstrikes-kill-civilians%20/t%20_blank>s 
and accused Israel of “war crimes 
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2702485/Israel-investigated-war-crimes-Gaza-UN-says.html>,” 
and even called for the UN to impose an arms embargo 
<http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/news-item/israelgaza-un-must-impose-arms-embargo-and-mandate-an-international-investigation-as-civilian-death> against 
Israel.

The destruction will have a far reaching impact on the lives of Gaza’s 
population for years to come as the already tattered infrastructure have 
reached the point of collapse. Yet, what is missing from all the ink 
spent on Gaza is a clear linkage between President Obama’s failure in 
the peace process and Netanyahu’s march toward war crimes and Israeli 
death fields by design. While Gaza is smoldering as a result of Israel’s 
unrelenting bombardment; the real power behind Netanyahu must be located 
in America and the “audacity of hope” transformed into death and 
destruction by US made weapons and a single voice uniformed support from 
Washington political establishment and media acting as a cheer leading 
squad for war criminals. The army is Israel’s but the policy and the 
power making it happen belongs to America with both political parties 
united in supporting the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza with 
Western media obfuscating the causes and the impacts.

President Obama arrived at the White House in 2009 and began a shift in 
policy on the failed war in Iraq and Afghanistan and into articulating 
America’s soft power in the then celebrated speech in Cairo, Egypt. The 
speech in more than one way created an audacity of hope for the 
Palestinians with the President calling for an end to settlement 
activities and the re-energizing the dormant peace process. Significant 
as it maybe, the President and his foreign policy team were unable 
(assuming they had the intention to do so) to bring about any change on 
the ground.

Following the Cairo speech, the President’s domestic agenda took center 
stage and most if not all of the political capital coming form his 2008 
elections were spent on winning the healthcare reform. After the 
healthcare battle, the democrats were running for cover and tea party 
activists with strong pro-Israel leaning as well as heavy dose of 
Islamophobia managed to set the terms of the debate and Palestine was no 
longer on the President’s agenda. Furthermore, Israel’s Prime Minister 
Netanyahu and AIPAC managed to mobilize their congressional and senate 
power base and maneuver around the President on the settlement issue and 
the peace process itself. This was most evident when Netanyahu addressed 
a joint session of Congress and demolished in the process President 
Obama’s agenda on the peace process resulting in the White House and 
State Department complete abandonment of any effort in this regard.

The current campaign on Gaza has to be understood in the broader failure 
of US policy and the emboldened Israeli extreme right running the show 
on the ground in Gaza and through surrogates in Washington D.C. For all 
intensive purposes the Two State solution is dead, since the Peace 
Process was allowed to be an occupation by means of negotiations and in 
the process permitting Israel to swallow the West Bank one settlement at 
a time and one security zone and bypass road to protect it. The Peace 
Process made it possible for Israel to take the West Bank one piece at a 
time. In addition, the Palestinian Authority became the security agency 
tasked with protecting the settlement and settlers with US funding and 
training to this effect; thus transforming a national project into an 
classical colonial structure.

On the Middle East regional levels, the US and Europe supported the 
reemergence of the despotic, authoritarian and undemocratic regimes 
rather than standing for democracy, freedom and dignity of Arabs and 
Muslims. The outcome was disasters in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Yemen and the 
on-going fragmentation of Syria as well as fanning the flames of 
sectarian Sunni-Shia conflict across the region. For some in the US, 
Israel and Arab capitals this is a much celebrated containment strategy 
and the needed pain to “transform” and bring the Middle East into the 
modern world; a modern colonial Arab and Muslim world.

The Israeli attack on Gaza made it clear that the new order to be born 
in the region is the old one but with new faces managing the same 
post-colonial structures. Certainly, the Palestinians in Gaza were able 
to resist Israeli attacks and withstood a massive military assault but 
as the days counted it became clear that this was more than just Israel 
settling accounts with Hamas. In reality, this was a regional and global 
alliance against the Palestinian resistance with the hoped for plan to 
end their defiance and move toward a new alignment centered on further 
fomentation of Shia-Sunni confrontation with Israel becoming a key ally 
in this phase. Removing Palestine as a point of tension would facilitate 
a smoother transition into a new and improved post-colonial regional 
conflict pitting Sunni and Shia against one another for the next 50 
years. Killing each other, selling oil to fund their wars and buying 
Western made weapons to do it: the business of war is business and 
keeping the wheels of the military industrial complex running at a high 
speed.

Palestine has always served as a unifying force with the ability of 
disrupting such regional plans and it is this capacity that sets at the 
heart of the current assault supported by all the major regional and 
global powers. The ice cream refrigerator for the children in Gaza is 
symbolic of the attempts directed at freezing the future prospects of 
the Arab and Muslim world and with it the continued support for despotic 
regimes and the Israeli colonial structure. America’s apple pie is set 
at the wrong side of history and all the resources used to prop-up 
Israel’s death machine will only delay the inevitable: freedom, liberty, 
dignity for the Palestinians and an end to the despotic post-colonial 
structures in the region. The shift is already underway and the time to 
join the Palestinian freedom train is today.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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