From: Biniam Haile \(SWE\) (eritrea.lave@comhem.se)
Date: Sun Jul 31 2005 - 18:46:20 EDT
Letter to President George W. Bush on the Gaza Crisis
by Ralph Nader
¨
Global Research, January 3, 2009
Dear George W. Bush,
Congressman Barney Frank said recently that Barack Obama's declaration
that "there is only one president at a time" over-estimated the number.
He was referring to the economic crisis. But where are you on the Gaza
crisis where the civilian population of Gaza, its civil servants and
public facilities are being massacred and destroyed respectively by U.S
built F-16s and U.S. built helicopter gunships.
The deliberate suspension of your power to stop this terrorizing of 1.5
million people, mostly refugees, blockaded for months by air, sea and
land in their tiny slice of land, is in cowardly contrast to the
position taken by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. That year he
single handedly stopped the British, French and Israeli aircraft attack
against Egypt during the Suez Canal dispute.
Fatalities in Gaza are already over 400 and injuries close to 2000 so
far as is known. Total Palestinian civilian casualties are 400 times
greater then the casualties incurred by Israelis. But why should anyone
be surprised at your blanket support for Israel's attack given what you
have done to a far greater number of civilians in Iraq and now in
Afghanistan?
Confirmed visual reports show that Israeli warplanes and warships have
destroyed or severely damaged police stations, homes, hospitals,
pharmacies, mosques, fishing boats, and a range of public facilities
providing electricity and other necessities.
Why should this trouble you at all? It violates international law,
including the Geneva Conventions and the UN Charter. You too have
repeatedly violated international law and committed serious
constitutional transgressions.
Then there is the matter of the Israeli government blocking imports of
critical medicines, equipment such as dialysis machines, fuel, food,
water, spare parts and electricity at varying intensities for almost two
years. The depleted UN aid mission there has called this illegal
blockade a humanitarian crisis especially devastating to children, the
aged and the infirm. Chronic malnutrition among children is rising
rapidly. UN rations support eighty percent of this impoverished
population.
How do these incontrovertible facts affect you? Do you have any empathy
or what you have called Christian charity?
What would a vastly shrunken Texas turned in an encircled Gulag do up
against the 4th most powerful military in the world? Would these
embattled Texans be spending their time chopping wood?
Gideon Levy, the veteran Israeli columnist for Ha'aretz, called the
Israeli attack a "brutal and violent operation" far beyond what was
needed for protecting the people in its south. He added: "The diplomatic
efforts were just in the beginning, and I believe we could have got to a
new truce without this bloodshed.....to send dozens of jets to bomb a
total helpless civilian society with hundreds of bombs-just today, they
were burying five sisters. I mean, this is unheard of. This cannot go on
like this. And this has nothing to do with self-defense or with
retaliation even. It went out of proportion, exactly like two-and-a-half
years ago in Lebanon."
Apparently, thousands of Israelis, including some army reservists, who
have demonstrated against this destruction of Gaza agree with Mr. Levy.
However, their courageous stands have not reached the mass media in the
U.S. whose own reporters cannot even get into Gaza due to Israeli
prohibitions on the international press.
Your spokespeople are making much ado about the breaking of the six
month truce. Who is the occupier? Who is the most powerful military
force? Who controls and blocks the necessities of life? Who has sent
raiding missions across the border most often? Who has sent artillery
shells and missiles at close range into populated areas? Who has refused
the repeated comprehensive peace offerings of the Arab countries issued
in 2002 if Israel would agree to return to the 1967 borders and agree to
the creation of a small independent Palestinian state possessing just
twenty two percent of the original Palestine?
The "wildly inaccurate rockets", as reporters describe them, coming from
Hamas and other groups cannot compare with the modern precision
armaments and human damage generated from the Israeli side.
There are no rockets coming from the West Bank into Israel. Yet the
Israeli government is still sending raiders into that essentially
occupied territory, still further entrenching its colonial outposts,
still taking water and land and increasing the checkpoints This is going
on despite a most amenable West Bank leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whom you
have met with at the White House and praised repeatedly. Is it all vague
words and no real initiatives with you and your emissary Condoleezza
Rice?
Peace was possible, but you provided no leadership, preferring instead
to comply with all wishes and demands by the Israeli government-even
resupplying it with the still active cluster bombs in south Lebanon
during the invasion of that country in 2006.
The arguments about who started the latest hostilities go on and on with
Israel always blaming the Palestinians to justify all kinds of violence
and harsh treatment against innocent civilians.
From the Palestinian standpoint, you would do well to remember the
origins of this conflict which was the dispossession of their lands. To
afford you some empathy, recall the oft-quoted comment by the founder of
Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who told the Zionist leader, Nahum Goldmann:
"There has been anti-Semitism the Nazis Hitler Auschwitz but was that
their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have come
here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"
Alfred North Whitehead once said: "Duty arises out of the power to alter
the course of events." By that standard, you have shirked mightily your
duty over the past eight years to bring peace to both Palestinians and
Israelis and more security to a good part of the world.
The least you can do in your remaining days at the White House is adopt
a modest profile in courage, and vigorously demand and secure a
ceasefire and a solidly based truce. Then your successor,
President-elect Obama can inherit something more than the usual
self-censoring Washington puppet show that eschews a proper focus on the
national interests of the United States.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader is a frequent contributor to Global Research.