Chris Hedges: The Silence of the Damned – ScheerPost

The Sword of Damocles Mr Fish

IS REALITY

There is no effective health care system left in Gaza. Infants are dying. Children are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Thousands of cancer patients and those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia. Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.” Clinics, along with ambulances – 79 in Gaza and over 212 in the West Bank – have been destroyed. Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016. Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers. 

The dehumanization of Palestinians is lifted from the playbook of all settler colonial projects, including our own. This racism, where people of color are branded as “human animals,” is coded within the DNA of our institutions. It infects those chosen to lead these institutions. It lies at the core of our national identity. It is why the two ruling parties and the institutions that sustain them side with Israel. It feeds the perverted logic of funneling weapons and billions of dollars in support to sustain Israel’s occupation and genocide.

History will not judge us kindly. But it will revere those who, under siege, found the courage to say no.

Source: Chris Hedges: The Silence of the Damned – ScheerPost

One thought on “Chris Hedges: The Silence of the Damned – ScheerPost”

  1. Who’s plausibly going to stop them, especially with their state-of-the-art mostly-American weaponry?

    There have been tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian non-combatants killed by Israeli assaults, largely the result of the decades-long Israeli occupation. This time, however, there not only were casualties in Israel but a significant number, even though they’re still far fewer than the Palestinian death toll.

    Normally, there are rockets fired from Palestinian territory, intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defenses, and Israel retaliates in their usual many-fold-measures way with smart bombs [etcetera] supplied by U.S. taxpayers, typically killing civilians or school children. The IDF’s frequent ‘defense’ is a claimed belief that their targets were using Palestinian non-combatants basically as human shields.

    It’s Israel’s, and too much of the West’s, business-as-usual perception thus inevitable non-intervention.

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