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CounterPunch
February
28, 2003
Don't Turn Off the War
Bound
By Terror: the Iraq-Palestine Link
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
I've said it myself many times. I need a break
from this awful business I can't watch any more news about Iraq
or Palestine. I'm dreading this bloody war and want an escape.
Spare me the euphemisms and lies, the blasé manner with
which our leaders and their collective media mouthpieces talk
about killing and death, the intellectualizing over war costs
and causes by people who have never seen or heard an F-16 drop
a bomb on a civilian building. There are people --with families,
lives, histories, hopes and dreams for the future-- in that building.
Get me out of here. I want to forget. Please, turn off the war.
An email message from a good friend in
Madison read, "I need to distance myself from the news lately,
I find, because it makes me crazy." How many of us have
echoed this sentiment? But then, there I was on the telephone
to a friend in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, ranting on about US
foreign policy in the Middle East and how I couldn't stand it
any more. He listened to me quietly, sympathetically --and answered
in a voice full of fatigue, "I wish I could switch it off,
too."
But if you live in Iraq or Palestine,
if you live anywhere in the Middle East today, you can't switch
it off. You can't escape. Our war-mongering, rapacious actions
have turned a chaotic, suffering region into an even greater
hell. Normal, every-day living involves the anticipation of bombings
and mass killing, of wondering if your children are safe, of
wondering if you'll make it to work that day past the checkpoints,
of wondering if there will be any water or electricity, of wondering
what targets the U.S. will strike in Iraq (some people think
the war hasn't yet started) and of how many more civilians will
die or which homes the Israelis will bulldoze and whose lives
they will turn upside down this time.
There are many links between what is
going on in Iraq and what is going on in Palestine-- despite
what our media and politicians insist. We can blot out, ignore,
or re-write realities over here if we want, but Iraqis and Palestinians
are bound together by the rule of US-Israeli terror in the region.
There is no running away. No changing the channel. You can't
resist. If you do, you're as good as dead. You are the enemy.
The news out of Iraq and Palestine barely
reaches the United States. How many people here could tell you,
for example, that just since the beginning of the year 2003,
there have been 20 US bombing raids in Iraq and that a number
of civilians have been wounded and killed in these raids. How
many know that US and British warplanes have bombed more than
80 targets in southern Iraq over the past five months, "conducting
an escalating air war even as UN weapons inspectors proceed and
diplomats look for ways to head off a full-scale war"? (Irish
Times; 1/16/03)
How many people here know that in some
of these bombing raids, which have over the years destroyed much
of the civilian infrastructure of Iraq (a war crime, according
to international law), US pilots have dropped millions of leaflets
in the southern "no-fly zone" (also illegal under international
law) warning Iraqis not to repair damaged facilities? (Matt Kelley,
Associated Press; 2/11/03, among others).
How many are aware that childhood cancers,
especially Leukemia, have skyrocketed in Iraq as the result of
US-made depleted uranium shells dropped over southern Iraq in
1991? How many understand what it is like to live in an environment
polluted and poisoned beyond repair? How many know that seven
out of 10 infant deaths in Iraq result from diarrhea or acute
respiratory infections linked to polluted water and malnutrition?
How many people here understand what
it means to live under the constant threat of war, not knowing
if you will be alive tomorrow, if your family is safe, your friends
still alive? How many know that Iraqis are facing a humanitarian
disaster? That more than half the Iraqi population is dependent
on food aid from the outside? That Iraq has suffered the greatest
increase of child mortality in the world as a result of US-sponsored
sanctions, the destruction of sewage and electricity plants,
and resulting malnutrition? (Oxfam Briefing Note; www.oxfam.org.uk/policy/papers/iraq)
Is this not a form of chemical and biological warfare?
How many know that when the "official"
war begins, estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths are as high as
250,000 under the planned aerial bombardment of Baghdad because
the more people we kill, the lower US and British casualties
are likely to be? How many care that Iraq had nothing to do with
the September 11 attacks against the US? That the average Iraqi
had nothing to do with the rise of Saddam Hussein, whose ascent
to power was openly supported, even financed, by the United States?
How many of us even begin to understand the real meaning of terror?
How many people here know that the Israeli
occupation forces are bulldozing family homes, farms, and businesses
every day in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to make way for
a massive wall not just separating Palestinians and Israelis,
but forcing Palestinians into smaller and more overcrowded ghettos?
Why have there been no news reports of the destruction of fresh-water
wells, hospitals, schools and childcare centers? Why have we
not seen the faces of the nearly 2000 Palestinian men, women,
and children dead since the outbreak of the new Intifada?
Why do people look doubtful or indignant
when you tell them that ethnic cleansing and apartheid are a
central feature of Israeli political policies and that people
in the United States are the principal financial and military
subsidizers? That the war against Iraq could well facilitate
the now-mainstream policy of "Transfer" or mass expulsion
of the Palestinians out of what is left of their land?
Iraqis and Palestinians can't turn off
their televisions sets or ignore the daily news in order to make
it go away. We have made war, destruction, and military threats
an inescapable, brutal reality of their lives, haunting them
day and night. We have united Iraqis and Palestinians under an
umbrella of US-sponsored terrorism. To turn off the war here
is to betray the people on whose behalf we must struggle now.
It is up to us to stop our racist, sadistic, and murderous regime
before it proceeds one step further. It is up to us to put hope
in place of terror. Don't turn off the war now. The struggle
has barely begun.
Jennifer Loewenstein lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She spent a good
part of the last three years in Palestinian refugee camps in
the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon. She is a member of
the Palestine/Israel Peace & Justice Alliance (PIPAJA) and
a founder of the Rafah-Madison Sister City Project. She can be
reached at: jsarin@facstaff.wisc.edu
To get involved or for more information,
call (608) 215-9157 or subscribe to the PIPAJA listserve at:
PIPAJA-subscribe@yahoooogroups.com.
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February 22
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