As Israelis and Palestinians count the cost of the recent 11-day conflict following the Egypt-negotiated ceasefire, an outraged world is left with graphic images and horrors of the humanitarian carnage resulting from it.
The death toll numbered close to 300, most of them on the Palestinian side. Many of the dead and wounded were children and women. Hospitals, schools, homes and other critical infrastructure in the Gaza Strip were destroyed by relentless bombardment from the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), rendering thousands of people homeless.
The immediate cause of the conflict was the eviction of six Palestinian families from their houses in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers. This was followed by altercation between Palestinian worshippers and Israeli police who denied them access to the grounds of Al Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
There are no two ways about it; responsibility for the remote as well as immediate cause of the conflict must be laid squarely on the doorsteps of Israel and its leaders, who have repeatedly scuttled all meaningful efforts over many decades to find lasting solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Backed to the hilt by the United States in its intransigent and illegal Occupation of Palestinian lands, Israel has continued to defy and reject efforts towards the creation of a Palestinian State as demanded by successive United Nations resolutions since 1975.
From the storm of worldwide condemnation that greeted its latest aggression in Gaza, including from among prominent Israeli citizens and leading figures of world Jewry, a clear message has been sent to Israeli leaders that world public opinion does not agree that a nuclear power and one of the most powerful armies in the world that Israel has, is acting in self-defence against a people with no state to call their own and who have been under Israeli occupation, subjugation, siege and blockade for decades.
Having shown such robust resolve against the Israelis this time around despite the backing of its powerful Western allies to control the narrative in its favour, the world must step up actions like worldwide boycott of Israeli goods and services, sporting contacts, mass information and enlightenment campaigns to pressure the Israeli government to stop its intransigence on the issue of granting the Palestinians the right to self-determination that they deserve.
Occupation is illegal, inhuman and anachronistic. Israel’s claim of “self defence” against people it subjugates and whose lands it regularly seizes to illegally resettle its migrants is a big lie. It is hypocritical and shameful that a people whose parents survived Hitler’s Holocaust are dishing out the same treatment to others. The world must speak up against this greatest of 21st Century injustices. United States, which hypocritically speaks up and rushes to impose sanctions over Crimea and other lesser outrages, must end its unconscionable backing of this outrage in Palestine.
