Ran HaCohen making sense, as always

Ran HaCohen writes about the dismissive responses of Israelis to a UN report on worsening levels of malnutrition and food insecurity among Palestinians (due almost entirely, as he observes, to "Israeli-imposed closures, and the international and Israeli boycott of the PA" [Palestinian Authority]):

Palestinian suffering is not perceived as a human catastrophe, but as a political argument. It's as if the Israeli propaganda machine managed to turn off the most basic human solidarity within the Israelis, replacing it by cynical sophistry devoid of any humanity. Hungry Palestinians are merely an attack on Israel's  righteousness, and they are confronted as such.

One of the arguments he cites that Israelis use to justify this callousness toward Palestinian suffering (which applies in this case but much more broadly as well):

Always use the magic word "Terror" to turn the Israelis  into victims and the Palestinians into "terrorists." "Terrorists" are unworthy of human compassion, not even when they are starving; moreover, their suffering is always their own fault. [...]

Palestinian "terror" is conceived of as an eternal, inherent, never changing, and unmotivated national trait ("No wonder, after 120 years of terrorism," one reader explains), in which all Palestinians equally partake – doctors and nurses, merchants and students, the elderly and children – and for which they all deserve the punishment of starvation, inflicted upon them by an invisible, unnamed, but ultimately just hand.

The entire article is just as dead on as these excerpts.  This kind of clarity and insight is exactly why I make a point of reading everything he writes.

You can see the full UN report here, BTW.

Comments

[RD]

As I've said many times before, it makes me sick to think that a people whose history includes such miseries has decided to inflict great pain on others based on thier race and religion. If history teaches anything it should teach the previously oppressed to reach out with open arms those less fortunate who are suffering. I know it's a much more complicated issue that got us all here, but where's the humanity?