Signs of Regression: The NDP and Palestine
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- Published on Saturday, 29 August 2015 22:00
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1157 .... August 30, 2015
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Signs of Regression:
The NDP and Palestine
Dan Freeman-Maloy
A friend recently expressed his confusion about the outrage over the death of Ali Dawabsheh, the 18-month-old Palestinian toddler who was killed last month when Jewish settlers firebombed his home in the occupied West Bank. (The child's father was also badly burned in the attack, and eight days later died from his injuries.) An attack that kills a sleeping toddler is surely horrific. But Israeli violence against Palestinian children is an aspect of the Palestine conflict almost as central as the perpetuation of historical lies through the force of repetition. What is it then, in the Israeli and Western public arena, that makes the assault on Palestinian life sometimes seem outrageous, and at other times acceptable?
Of the approximately 1.9 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, nearly half are eighteen years old or younger. Nearly forty-three per cent are fourteen years old or younger. Not that the targeting of adults is less than horrific! But the siege on Gaza, in its entirety, is part of a war on Palestinian life. It was in February 2008, several months after the ongoing siege of Gaza was imposed, that Israel's deputy defence minister threatened the Palestinians of Gaza with a ‘Shoah’ – the Hebrew word usually reserved exclusively to refer to the Nazi holocaust. Public relations aside, Israeli policy has incrementally moved in this direction. Several weeks after Vilnai made his threat, 50,000 infant vaccines were spoiled in Gaza as even the general storage unit of Gaza's health ministry was starved of fuel. At year's end came Operation Cast Lead. T-shirts circulated among Israeli soldiers featuring a veiled, pregnant woman, her belly targeted in the crosshairs of a rifle, alongside the slogan “One Shot, Two Kills.” So it was, and so it has remained; last summer, more than five hundred Palestinian children were among the more than two thousand Palestinians in Gaza killed by Israel's armed forces.