The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine

Having sent up numerous trial balloons over the past several weeks, Israel now will work on shutting down the Gaza Strip. Having kept it virtually sealed off from the outside world ever since Hamas beat Fatah for control of it, Israel now plans to use creeping electric power outages to make life in that open-air prison totally intolerable. Since no major power appears to have objected loudly enough to the trial balloons, Israel seems confident it can shut Gaza down without significant political repercussions.

Gaza, indeed Palestine as a whole, now poses a unique case of global insensitivity, and we should ask why. Is it because everybody else considers the Palestinian people less than human? Is it because the Israelis still keep control of the moral high ground after six decades of unremitting ethnic cleansing? Is it because the killing and displacement of Palestinians has become so common a feature of the Middle East human scene that nobody cares? Is it because objections to the usually pointless lobbing of mortar shells across the Israeli boundary are so mind numbing that people stop looking at or listening to what is actually happening to the Palestinian people? More...