It happens all the time, so there is no good reason that I should have been surprised today when I opened up my Google page to see the link for an article titled, "Hamas-Israel: A Tiny Ray of Hope" in the British Times Online (3/11/2008).  The point of the article, written by David Byers, was that Israel is somehow offering that "ray of hope" by allowing an eight-day-old baby to be taken across the border between Israel and Gaza to be the taken to Tel Aviv for treatment for debilitating and life-threatening infections and other problems.  It quotes an Israeli hospital official as saying that "Nobody talks about it, people only ever talk about the violence.  But this is an established procedure and people from the hospitals [in Gaza] and Hamas know about it…We are neighbours and it happens that we don’t like each other very much. But when it comes to emergencies that save human lives, this is beyond political disputes.”

Sure, that’s a nice sound bite.  And it may be true for the individuals involved in this particular story, but when it comes to state policies, it’s a blatant lie.

To give Byers credit, he does talk briefly about the fact that Israel routinely denies Palestinians access to better equipped and supplied hospitals in Israel, and that this has sometimes had deadly consequences (e.g. for 23 year old Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim, denied emergency medical treatment by Israel five times on "security grounds").  But Byers does not mention the fact that this is part of Israel‘s general policy of genocide by attrition against Arab Palestinians in the occupied territories.  He does not mention that Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinians to move freely through the occupied territories is tantamount to murder.

He doesn’t mention the capture and detention of innocent Palestinian civilians or the demolition of Palestinian homes, the torture of suspected militants or the targeted assassinations.  He doesn’t bring up the fact that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been punished by Israel and the United States for bringing Hamas to power, or that the US and its client state have purposely halted financial and material aid to Palestine and stolen resources (namely water) as retribution for having elected a movement that dared to resist Israel’s brutality. He discusses the Hamas rockets that fly into Israel, but doesn’t bring up the fact that Israel’s actions constitute internationally recognized war crimes (aggression, terrorism).

This is all intentional, mind you – we’re not supposed to know the facts.  At least not the important ones.  This is not to say, of course, that the spiriting of the Palestinians newborn to Tel Aviv for medical treatment is not important – to that child and its family, it is everything, and surely is to be commended.  But it distracts the reader from the overarching policies that have made that child and so many like him have to struggle for every breath in the first place. 

 

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