Friday, November 23, 2012

For my regular readers

Hello, you lot, you dear faithful readers.  Now that an Israeli/Gaza ceasefire has been announced, I am hoping NOT to be blogging about Gaza and the oppressed Palestinian people for a while (apart from my Christmas appeal.)

cristina ruiz cortina gaza kids

I try to leave politics off my blog, but this is one issue I feel too strongly about to ignore. A blog reader once asked me why. The answer is this:

I care deeply about social justice, and the way the Israeli state treats Palestinians day by day is not just. Outside Gaza, they oppress them, steal their land and resources, destroy their houses and their olive groves, treat them inhumanely, deny them freedom of movement, and treat them as second class citizens. Meanwhile, the people of Gaza live under siege conditions, with no freedom of movement, and they are denied access to all kinds of basic resources such as medicines and building materials to rebuild the houses destroyed by Israeli missiles. Past bombing by Israel has destroyed their infra-structure and their economy. The Israelis break international laws and yet the rest of the world supports them in the oppression of the Palestinians, by sending them aid and arms. The Israelis are treated as a special case, presumably because of collective world guilt for the Holocaust. You would think that people who had survived the Holocaust would behave more humanely towards other people.

The other reason I cannot remain quiet on the subject is because the mainstream media generally reports the issues from the point of view of the Israelis without challenging their spokespeople, ignoring the Palestinian case, and the BBC is the worst offender in this.

If you want to read more, read this.

OK. That’s it. Normal service resumed…

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