Not all people are born equal

I’m sat across the table from my friend from Gaza; he only got back a week ago but somehow home has managed to find its way back on the news. In between bites of SCR chicken he tells me about his friends back home. I ask if they’re OK and he nods. Suddenly he remembers that one of his friend’s sisters has died. He tells me that she left behind a baby, a little girl only 14 months old – another orphan and another dead mother. Of course she was Palestinian, nationless and now dead, her only crime to have been born in Gaza.

Why would she matter anyway? She is only one person, one among more than one hundred and sixty others. She will become nothing more than a statistic, a number, soon to be forgotten and perhaps contributing to a Wikipedia page or a news article. Her child will undoubtedly not forget being brought up without a mother – or maybe she will be killed before the end. I hear they have just announced a ceasefire, so maybe there’s hope for her yet.

Our conversation moves to his nephew, not yet three years old but already taking it upon himself to warn the household when he hears the sound of explosions outside. There are no sirens in Gaza, no warning of the impending destruction of a bomb or a missile. There are no public shelters to flee to or safe rooms to hide in, just the cries of children, it seems, warning their families when they hear loud noises. The children of Gaza may yet sleep in peace tonight, a change from the incessant sound of drones piercing the night, the sound of a million lawnmowers with the occasional bang shaking them awake.

It’s funny that his family ended up in Gaza at all, expelled by the Israelis from a town called Ashdod in the ethnic cleansing of 1948, along with seven hundred thousand others from their homes. His grandparents have never been back and neither has he: Palestinian refugees aren’t allowed to go and see the places they once called home. It’s ironic that Ashdod is also on the news, the destination of many of the rockets fired from Gaza, only a 20 minute drive away, so close to home yet a world away.

The numbers game in Gaza is not important, but no doubt the death toll will be tragic. Needless to say that when one of the world’s most advanced armies in the form of the Israeli Defence Forces decides to punish a people with no army, no navy and no air force, what happens is not war, it is a massacre. That is what was witnessed four year ago in2008/2009 and that is what we saw in the eight days past, a collective punishment for a population that dared to resist. It is also ironic that these operations pop up every few years conveniently just before Israeli elections, as if the price to be paid for political success is the number of Palestinians one can butcher.

The point at which we resign ourselves to apathy and think that one people, in some corner of the world, are dying just because that is how things are, is the point at which we lose our humanity. I pray for peace in the Middle East but I realise that there can never be a lasting peace in the absence of justice, and the blood of guiltless people will continue to be spilt, so long as politicians play games with the lives of innocents in the balance.