Alzheimers in Gaza

        Only a new Rosetta Stone can exegete this week's Gaza horror. All the historical facts, all the political expediencies, all the killing and brutalities have been well know and documented for years but like Shelly's "Ozimandias" seem lost in a dessert, unremembered.  Way back in 2006, all of twelve years ago Henry Siegman, a former National Director of the American Jewish Congress told a truth few in the U. S. want to hear today:

"the problem is that....there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state, primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never had the intention of allowing such a state to come into being."

         Why such historical Altzheimers? Shelly's poem aimed at a fearful British government that had suspended Habeus Corpus and could point today as well to our American civilization become dessert-like and without memory, making do in advance of murder with a foreplay of self-interests, religious escapism, and a media fog claiming everything has two sides.

          Israeli PM Netanyahu today never contests that Israel has deliberately moved 800,000 Israeli citizens into settlements all over the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem; proclaiming without apology what Siegman had described in 2006:

"No government serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued, without letup, the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands, which even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible."

       Ahud Barak was on PBS last week explaining, just in case everyone didn't know about Hamas and the Palestinians,"they're the bad guys." While PBS subsequently pulled the interview with the former Israeli Prime Minister from its replays website, it was a declaration ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent (the old Ivory soap ad) of Americans are sure is true.   On the contrary Siegman reported that the then Hamas leader Mohammed Ghazahad rejected the tenets of Islamic religious extremism. "The Koran is not Hamas' charter.... 

"we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions....I don't think there will be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis."It is a sentiment echoed by Hasan Yousif, the Hamas leader in the West Bank [from] an Israeli jail: "We have accepted the principle of accepting a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders."

        In 2005 when Prime Minister Arial Sharon withdrew Israeli settlements from Gaza as cover for his creation of large settler towns in the West Bank like Har Homa and Kiryat Arba, World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, himself a Jew, spent 11 months in Gaza as the Middle East envoy of the Quartet (United States, Russia, European Union and the United Nations). 

 In a 2017 reflection with Haartez he remembered a more hopeful moment of seeing the Gaza greenhouses with the Palestinian chairman Mahmoud Abbas

.

"and looking at the fruits and everything, and there was a joyous atmosphere: 'Boy, we're about to get this going and we're going to have hotels by the beaches and we're going to have tourism and it's going to be fantastic...' and the Palestinians really know how to be hosts."

       The euphoria lasted only nine months. The Israelis blocked all the border crossings out of Gaza demanding lengthy terror-proofing:

"Everything was rotting because you couldn't get the fruit [to market]. And if you went to the border, as I did many times, and saw tomatoes and fruit just being dumped on the side of the road...."

       In this 2017 reflection Wolfensohn told another truth to Haaretz, that powerful forces in the U.S. administration were working behind his back.

"They [the U. S.] did not believe in the border terminals agreement that would have brought Gaza's abundance to market and wanted to undermine his status as the Quartet's emissary...."

         He shared with Haaretz that the official behind this policy was Elliot Abrams, the neoconservative who was appointed deputy national security adviser in charge of disseminating democracy in the Middle East but "every aspect of that agreement was abrogated" said Wolfenson.   Abrahms today is a close advisor to the Trump White House from his post as senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. 

       Caught in a dessert of lies and lost truths the American nation and many others need a Rosetta Stone that can inform democratic discernment. Jim Wall, former editor of "The Christian Century" magazine underlines in his blog "Wallwritings" the tepid attitude of U. S. media to protect itself by reporting both sides.  In a month of slaughter with more than 2,000 Gazans killed and wounded and zero Israeli casualties there are not two sides; only the fact of the killing with more probably on the way. Gaza is a terrible outdoor prison kept in situ by U. S. foreign policy, taxpayer dollars and Israel's intention to take over all of what is left of the Palestinian West Bank.