Don’t most of us back terrorists?

The Israeli guys were showing off for one another, for two young American Jewish women visiting and perhaps for me, an Associated Press journalist covering the last Passover in Gaza before Israel "withdrew" from the small coastal slip months later. The Israeli guys with army guns and training took turns acting out an attack on the threesome down the shore. For more than half an hour, the targets of this charade stood facing them without moving. The Israelis’ anger toward their Palestinian neighbors darkened when a couple of teenage Jewish settler girls waded into the cold choppy waves between them. Alone on this assignment, I was staying across the street from the gun-toting youths. I watched and waited at a distance, horrified and saying nothing.

For two weeks the following September, I was based in Gaza again as settlers were pulled kicking and screaming from their neat streets of spacious homes and improbable vegetation. Thousands refused to pack up, prepare their children or plan ahead. One couple was doing their press act from their kitchen when their toddler made her way to the street, amid a crush of riot police and television crews. Gripping a ring of keys, she was trying to get into the family car.

Images of young people often reveal the truth. The lifeless bodies of so many Palestinian children in Gaza this month tell of a people with nowhere to run. And of a ruthless occupier that has never really left Ğ or grown up.

’Why don’t you care?’

While attending the ’Call for Peace in Gaza’ meeting of first wives from Middle Eastern countries last week in Istanbul, a colleague from Yeni Safak newspaper asked me: "Why don’t Americans care about this? The press, the public, politiciansÉ?" It’s true that Americans see little carnage and even less of the dead children in mainstream media. It’s true that there is a powerful pro-Israel lobby. But this massacre, as in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982 and others perpetrated by Israel and the U.S., come down to citizens who let them do it. On the U.S. side, most Americans don’t care about Palestinians. My parents’ generation came of age believing that Israelis were entitled and just and that Palestinians were terrorists.

Today, my generation faces a tougher challenge: ignorance and apathy. A lack of perspective is harder to confront than any conspiracy. But it can be done.

On behalf of a selfish few

Is America’s role complicated? Not really. Israel has always demanded more than it needs. U.S. foreign policy has always been reckless and selfish on behalf of a select wealthy group. It supports Israel near unconditionally to ensure footholds in oil, the Christian electorate and regional hegemony.

As a taxpaying American with a vote, I’m complicit in this slaughter in Gaza. The U.S. Congress sends Israel more than $2.3 billion each year. In 2005 I interviewed Bill Frist, then Senate majority leader, at the Israeli Prime Ministry. He confirmed that figure.

As I write, Israel is killing families and children with American rockets and bombs falling from $200 million worth of spare F-16 fighter jets and missiles supplied by U.S. taxpayers from 200l to 2006. As of Friday, half of the more than 1,150 people dead were women and children. Israel Defense Forces spokesman Capt. Benjamin Rutland told Fox TV last week that Israel reserved the right to target anyone they believed to be supportive of terror or Hamas. By this logic, Gazans are well within their rights to target regular Israelis and American families like mine.

Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, condemned Israel for its "severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law" and impugned the U.S. for being "complicit ... and knowingly providing the military equipment including warplanes and missiles used in these illegal attacks."

If this isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is. There on the beach I watched and waited at a distance, horrified and saying nothing. I don’t have that privilege now. None of us do.


To contact U.S. president Barack Obama: (202) 456-1414 president@whitehouse.gov and other elected officials: www.congress.org. To donate money to the people of Gaza: www.un.org/unrwa/emergency/donation