"Where did we get the gall to decide the fate of another people?"

Gideon Levy, an op-ed writer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has been a strident critic of Israel's policies in relation to the Palestinians, the West Bank and Gaza. MPS would describe him as almost being Israel's conscience! Be that as it may, in his latest piece "Only gall and nothing more" he raises a very critical question...."where did we get the gall to decide the fate of another people?"

As he writes:

"About an hour's drive from us, the unbelievably cruel reality continues. Everything is done there in the name of us all, supposedly, and in the name of security, supposedly. And here among us there is either distorted discourse or non-discourse.

Nothing will change as long as this state of affairs continues. A recent report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs draws a shocking picture of what is happening in Gaza. For example, 75 percent of its inhabitants, more than 1 million people, are suffering from nutritional deficiencies, 90 percent must live through power blackouts for four to eight hours every day, 40 percent of those who apply to leave for medical treatment are refused by Israel and 140,000 inhabitants are unemployed.

All these figures reflect a situation that has degenerated badly over the past year, and all of them stem from the siege in its third year. How many of us know this? How many of us does this touch at all, between the bar and the gym?"

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