Addressing The Horrors

The horrors in Gaza - none of us can claim to be unaware of them.  Even harder, despite the efforts of Israel's apologists, is to adhere, with any conviction, to the official line that the carnage and destruction inflicted by the Jewish state is justified in its 'war' on Hamas. As I have said before on this blog, there is only one word to describe the atrocities: genocide.

In an article that will no doubt elicit outrage from those who justify Israel's depredations, Beisan Zubi places the carnage in the context of the Canadian election. 

As a Palestinian Canadian, Gaza feels like the best test I can use to gauge a politician’s actual commitment to human rights. The core principle behind human rights is that they are universal (apply to everyone) and inalienable (cannot be taken away). Over the past 18 months, I have watched Israel violate just about every human right that I learned about in school, while so many Canadian politicians stayed silent. 

 I would argue a politician’s stance on Gaza says volumes about their commitment to a range of domestic issues, and not just Canada’s responsibility to uphold international law.

Zubi draws a compelling test to measure our politicians, asserting if they are for certain things. they have to be for them universally. 

How can I trust a politician will defend women’s rights in Canada if they haven’t said anything about the fact that there are an estimated 48,000 pregnant women in Gaza facing famine? Israel’s ongoing blockade of essential medical supplies means that unmedicated C-sections are no longer the plot of horror movies, miscarriage rates in Gaza are up an estimated 300 per cent...

How can I trust a politician will protect Canada’s health care system if they aren’t outraged that Israel has decimated a health care system serving over two million people, by conducting a reported 136 strikes on at least 27 hospitals, destroying the main IVF clinic in Gaza along with an estimated 4,000 embryos, and killing over a thousand Palestinian health care workers...

How can I trust a politician will fight for disability justice in Canada if they haven’t condemned the mass disabling event still underway in Gaza, where the disabled, elderly, and injured are bombed in tents, forced to flee hospitals under attack in wheelchairs or carried by siblings, the cruel killing of a young man with Down syndrome by an Israeli military dog, that 15,000 deaf Gazans can’t hear evacuation warnings before bombs drop around them, or even that Gaza now has the largest per capita population of child amputees in the world, many of whom are also orphaned.

How can I trust a politician will treat infrastructure and adequate housing as a human right when they haven’t said a thing about the UN reporting that 92 per cent of all homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, or that vital infrastructure like water desalination plants and waste management sites have been forced to shutter, leading to infectious diseases spreading and a looming environmental catastrophe?

Speaking of the environment, how can I believe a politician actually cares about this planet if they don’t speak out about ecocide in Gaza? A Yale School of the Environment report published in February warned us that more than two thirds of Gaza’s farmland has been destroyed, 80 per cent of the tree cover in Gaza is gone, up to 3.5 million cubic feet of raw sewage are leaking into groundwater and the Mediterranean Sea every day...

And of course, how can we believe a politician actually cares about Canada’s territorial integrity amidst threats from Donald Trump to annex our country if they haven’t spoken out about Israel’s ongoing dispossession and theft of Palestinian land in Gaza and the West Bank?

These are all questions that demand real answers. Unfortunately, given that any criticism of Israel is the third rail of politics, I expect none will be forthcoming.