Stephane Hessel: My indignation regarding Palestine outrages by Israel [Indignez-vous!] Today, my main indignation concerns Palestine, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank of Jordan. This conflict is outrageous. It is absolutely essential to read the report by Richard Goldstone, of September 2009, on Gaza, in which this South African, Jewish judge, who claims even to be a Zionist, accuses the Israeli army of having committed acts comparable to war crimes and perhaps, in certain circumstances, crimes against humanity during its Operation Cast Lead, which lasted three weeks. (www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/12session/A-HRC-12-48.pdf) I went back to Gaza in 2009 myself, when I was able to enter with my wife thanks to our diplomatic passports, to study first-hand what this report said. People who accompanied us were not authorized to enter the Gaza Strip. There and in the West Bank of Jordan. We also visited the Palestinian refugee camps set up from 1948 by the United Nations agency UNRWA, where more than three million Palestinians expelled off their lands by Israel wait even yet for a more and more problematical return. As for Gaza, it is a roofless prison for one and a half million Palestinians. A prison where people get organized just to survive. Despite material destruction such as that of the Red Crescent hospital by Operation Cast Lead, it is the behavior of the Gazans, their patriotism, their love of the sea and beaches, their constant preoccupation for the welfare of their children,who are innumerable and cheerful, that haunt our memory. We were impressed by how ingeniously they face up to all the scarcities that are imposed on them. We saw them making bricks, for lack of cement, to rebuild the thousands of houses destroyed by tanks. They confirmed to us that there had been 1400 deaths — including women, children, and oldsters in the Palestinian camp — during this Operation Cast Lead led by the Israeli army, compared to only 50 injured men on the Israeli side. I share conclusions of the South African judge. That Jews can, themselves, perpetrate war crimes is unbearable. Alas, history does not give enough examples of people who draw lessons from their own history. [The author, Stéphane Hessel, had a Jewish father.] Stephane Hessel was born in Berlin in 1927. When he was 8 he moved with his family to France. He joined the resistance against the Nazis and the collaborationist Vichy government in France and escaped to London, where he met Charles de Gaulle. He returned to France to complete a mission for the resistance but was captured by the Gestapo, which tortured him. Hessel was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he narrowly escaped execution by switching identities with a French soldier who died of typhoid fever. He escaped from Buchenwald, but was recaptured and made to do slave labor at Dora, the giant underground plant. Hessel escaped again from a train bound for Belsen. After the war Hessel returned to France, helped draft the Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and became an honorary Ambassador of France.
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 22:51:50 +0000
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