Role Play

Apart from the dead, 5,300 Palestinians were wounded during the Israeli campaign. Many of the 1.5 million people in the Gaza Strip have seen their homes and other property blown to pieces.

“We want a solution that would guarantee Israeli tanks will not return to kill us,” said Yehya Aziz, 28. “They said a ceasefire for a week. I don’t feel good, I doubt it is over.”

Israeli soldiers have been withdrawing from Gaza, leaving scenes of devastation and what Palestinians see as desecration.

Graffiti scrawled inside a mosque in the battered Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City read “Hamas whores” in Hebrew and “Hamas is dead” in English. Discarded military rations littered the floor. A shell hole gaped in one wall. (Source)

Suppose Israel were a small coastal strip approximately 4-5 miles long. Suppose a radical Arab nationalist state called Palestine whose area was approximately 21,000 square kilometers bordered it on three sides. Suppose this fictitious Palestine tightly controlled the border of Israel. Suppose they decided that the population of Israel had voted for the incorrect party in a demonstrably free, fair, and open election; suppose that because of this Palestine decided to disallow humanitarian aid to Israel. Suppose Palestine refused to allow Israeli’s to leave their tiny strip of land.

Suppose the Israeli’s felt this situation was inadequate, and foolishly decided to use what meager capabilities they had to fire explosives at their oppressive radical nationalist foes. Suppose Palestine viewed this disobedience as intolerable and decided that such actions were grounds for the use of mass violence.

Suppose Palestine used massive air bombardment to destroy thousands of Israeli buildings, in the process killing around 300 Israeli children. Suppose Palestine justified the violence against the innocent on grounds that Israeli militants were hiding amongst the children. Suppose the Palestine Air Force (PAF) completely obliterated around 20 synagogues, again, recycling the cowardly justification that Jewish militants were hiding in them or attempting to store weapons in them (suppose the Jews often used rocks as weapons, due to the fact that Palestine totally controlled their borders and refused to allow weapons into Israel).

Suppose the Palestine Defense Forces (PDF) invaded the tiny but densely populated Jewish enclave after most of the Jews’ defense capabilities had been destroyed by the PAF, who flew over the undefended Jewish air-space and dropped load after load of bombs onto whatever random buildings and human beings happened to be underneath. Suppose that PDF ground troops had written Arabic graffiti on the inside of half-decimated synagogues that read, Jewish whores and Zionism is dead in English.

Suppose this were the sequence of events over the past three weeks. Would the international response be different? Suppose the United States were merely a small regional power and that Iran were the dominant economic and military power of the world, and that Iran uncompromisingly gave the actions of this fictitious Palestine not only their verbal blessing, but suppose they provided them with massive quantities of bombs, war-planes, and diplomatic support.

Suppose the events were the way I just described.

Now realize that they were exactly as such, with a few proper nouns simply replacing eachother to change the meaning of the violence.

Shame on Israel. Shame on the United States government for supporting this.

Where is the change we can believe in?

Barack Obama is too busy fancifully riding around in trains, talking about how to get the most privileged people on the planet, Wall Street, back on their footing again. He hasn’t said but a word about the slaughter of the innocent in Gaza.

Will he continue to allow Israel to do whatever it wants and kill as many children as it sees fit in the name of security? If so, I think a lot of people are going to want their votes back.

It is as though the United States elects a new Queen once every four years. The Queen’s duties include political pageantry such as staged speeches, train rides, and other photo opportunities that contribute to favorable, however empty, imagery. The Queen is to read the government policies and programs that the public relations specialists have decided on aloud in front of the cameras of the mass media, which are owned by those Wall Street folk I mentioned earlier. Ronald Reagan was ideal for this role, given his background as an actor.

Now we have Obama, the man of a thousand public-relations-approved speeches, the man who makes people feel good about themselves because of the color of his skin, and also the man who was elected to bring about change but will likely pursue the exact same policies that have been pursued by U.S. planners since the second World War; hegemony, full-spectrum dominance, ethnocentric conceptions regarding resource control, and of course peculiar attention to the needs of Wall Street, who, make no mistake about it, are the chief decision-makers on all things both domestic and international.

If this is what democracy looks like, tell me, who needs democracy promotion?