The season of peace and goodwill is, as we know, honoured
more in the breach than the observance, by states around the world. The abuse
of human rights continues unabated and the Israeli state is always somewhere
near the top of the list.
News that the Israeli government has been torturing
Palestinian children by keeping them in outdoor cages for months during the
winter won’t surprise many but it is shocking nonetheless.
The human rights organisation Public Committee Against
Torture in Israel (PCATI) has just reported that children
suspected of minor crimes are subjected to “public caging”, threats and acts of
sexual violence and military trials without representation.
Its report – Childhood is a Right – was released on the day
that a committee in the Israeli Knesset was due to hold a hearing on the
treatment of Palestinian youth seized – or, more accurately, kidnapped – by the
Israeli authorities.
According to two other human rights organisations, Defence
of Children International Palestine and Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights,
Israel is the only nation to “automatically and systematically prosecute
children in military courts that lack basic and fundamental fair trial
guarantees”.
The organisations estimate that around 500-700 Palestinian
children, some as young as 12 years old, are arrested, detained and prosecuted
in the Israeli military detention system each year.
And their “crimes”? The majority are charged
with throwing stones, and 74% experience physical violence during arrest,
transfer or interrogation. Of course, they are aiming their stones at the
illegal occupiers of Palestinian territory.
Israeli torture of children is part of the systematic
assault on Palestinians documented in the impassioned pre-Christmas open letter
to the Pope Francis from Dr
Vacy Vlazna, Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters.
In invoking the July Lampedusa Homile, in which the Pope
drew attention to the “globalisation of indifference”, Dr Vlazna’s letter asks
for help to release the people of Gaza from the strangulation of the Israeli
seven-year blockade.
“Today’s Israeli Herods have systematically made Gaza a hell
on earth by imposing a blockade in violation of international law that has made
Gaza an open air concentration camp imprisoning 1.7 million innocent people,
half of whom are children.
“As the world makes merry this festive season, the people of
Gaza have deliberately been deprived of fuel by Israel for two months: they
suffer in freezing temperatures, with no electricity, no light, no heat,
scarcity of food, no essential services, when the waste water treatment plant
stopped functioning sewage flooded the streets - then kicking families while
they are down so low, Israel opened dams east of Gaza drowning hope and
the last vestiges of normal life.”
The repression of children in particular and Palestinians in
general is integral to the fanatical. fundamentalist Zionist vision of a region
ethnically cleansed of a people forcibly deprived of their homeland.
More than that even. In his documentary The Lab, filmmaker
Yotam Feldman, notes: “I think the main product Israelis are selling,
especially in the last decade, is experience… the testing of the products, the
experience is the main thing they [customers] are coming to buy. They want the
missile that was shot in the last operation in Gaza or the rifle that was used
in the last West Bank incursion.”
Inevitably, profits soared in 2009/10 after surgical strikes
by F16s, attack helicopters drones, and phosphorous bombs slaughtered 1,400
Gazans, one third of whom were children and again in November 2012.
Vlazna’s appeal to the Pope is heartfelt but ultimately without
power. The Israelis know that they have the United States at their side,
ignoring the occupation and the torture of children. With Egypt’s military
regime reinforcing the siege of Gaza, we can safely say that the season of
peace and goodwill passed the Palestinians by.
Gerry Gold
No comments:
Post a Comment