Editor,
I’ve been in Gaza for two months teaching engineers about climate change and didn’t expect to find myself in the middle of the current Israeli offensive. When my students and some faculty members asked me if I was going to leave Gaza along with many other foreigners, I said “Of course not.” My reason for staying is simple: I’m in Gaza to witness the occupation, the siege, and now Israel’s military assault against 1.6 million people who cannot escape this “open-air prison.”
President Obama says Israel has a right to defend itself, but professor Noam Chomsky, who happened to visit Gaza in October, has it right when he says “the incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel, it is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in a decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. When Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing. You can’t defend yourself when you’re militarily occupying someone else’s land. That’s not defense. Call it what you like, it’s not defense.”
The mainstream press has skewed the Israel-Palestine occupation so clearly against the Palestinians that I’m not surprised to learn a recent poll shows a majority of Americans support Israel’s military assault. Most Americans are clueless about Gaza and Israel’s five-year siege. The United Nations reported this summer that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. You can’t hear the drones buzzing outside my window now, or feel the house shake when a missile hits nearby or see the blank gazes of the children traumatized the night before by a rocket smashing through their bedroom ceiling. Israel is killing, maiming and traumatizing Palestinian civilians in our name, with our tax dollars, $3 billion per year. It’s about time we stand up and demand some accountability and an end to the occupation.
Lora Lucero
Daily Lobo reader
