Enough Outrage Over Gaza? by Scott MacLeod

TIME – MIDDLE EAST BLOG

1/15/09

Enough Outrage Over Gaza?

Scott MacLeod

Is the world reacting with sufficient outrage and urgency to the horrendous humanitarian toll in Gaza? When, in just 20 days, the Palestinian people have lost more than 1,000 dead-- in per capita terms the equivalent of 30,000 American lives, 10 times the number who died on 9/11? That kind of extrapolation, by the way, is a favorite debate tool of former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. He uses it to drive home how a few hundred Israelis killed in terrorist attacks is a national catastrophe for Israel. Few Palestinians are in doubt that they, too, have unjustly fallen victim to a staggering loss of life.

The U.S., other Western governments, pro-Western Arab regimes and Israeli public opinion have been relatively mute about the moral issues like the proportionality of Israel's attacks and Israel's obligation to protect civilians. By and large, they've been eager to show solidarity with the Israeli government's accepted right of self defense against Hamas's rockets, or to cast Hamas as a radical threat to moderate Arab regimes and regional stability.

Yet, stopping there certainly ignores or blames the victims here—the ordinary, long suffering, people of Gaza. Does the relative silence need ignore the fact that a war against Hamas in the densely populated Strip would inevitably be fought with 1.5 million civilians arrayed from one end of the battlefield to the other and therefore caught squarely in the cross fire? Are we so inured to killing in the Middle East that such a huge death toll can be shrugged off in yet another war whose goals are as ambiguous as they are likely to remain elusive?

Actually, there has been an impressively large number of public protests around the world. As far as public officials are concerned, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has notably rushed to the defense of Gaza's defenseless. By coincidence, he was arriving for meetings in Israel with PM Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Thursday, just after Israeli shellfire struck the Gaza headquarters of the United Nations Works and Relief Agency--which has distributed aid to Palestinians since the birth of the refugee problem in 1948.

UNRWA officials said the attack destroyed all of the agency's food and medicine supplies, daily necessities for more than 1 million people who, currently, are under siege. They strongly disputed Israel's contention that Israel had been responding to attacks by Hamas fighters using UNRWA as a protective shelter. "I conveyed my strong protest and outrage to the defense minister and foreign minister and demanded a full explanation," Ban said after meeting Barak and Livni. For his part, Barak acknowledged that the Israeli attack was a "grave mistake." Olmert defended Israeli forces but said "the consequences are very sad and we apologize for it. I don't think it should have happened and I'm very sorry."

One of the strong statements of support for Gazans came from current UN General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, former Sandinista foreign minister in Nicaragua:

We here in United Nations headquarters have remained too passive for too long as the carnage continues.... Every day, we receive messages from Gaza and from around the world asking, indeed pleading, for the UN to stop the violence, protect civilians and attend to the humanitarian needs. Our business here today is urgent.

During this assault, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, one-third of them children. More bodies remain buried under the rubble, out of reach of humanitarian workers because the shelling is too intense – the living would be killed trying to reach the dead. If this onslaught in Gaza is indeed a war, it is a war against a helpless, defenseless, imprisoned population.

As easy as it is for many to turn their eyes from the death toll, you can be certain that Gaza will be added as another source of frustration, hurt and anger experienced by Palestinians and Arabs everywhere—adding more fuel to the fire of political extremism, too. President-elect Obama, arguing there's only one president at a time, has been getting a pass for his own relative silence on Gaza so far. But many in the Middle East will be watching closely after the Inauguration next week, to see if Gaza inspired any sense of outrage or urgency in the new "leader of the free world."