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By Gilad Atzmon
28 March 2007 Gilad Atzmon contrasts US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s vacuous utterances in Jerusalem with a local disaster in the Gaza Strip as an illustration of Western indifference to the plight of the Palestinian people.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced yesterday, 27 March, that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas would meet regularly under US auspices. This is indeed “great news for the Palestinians and the Israelis”.
At about the same time, at least five Palestinians drowned in a “sewage tsunami” when a water treatment reservoir burst, flooding Umm Naser, a village in the northern Gaza Strip.
On the one hand, at a peaceful news conference in Jerusalem Rice was once again saying “NO” to the democratically-elected Hamas government and referring to the PNA chairman as a “partner for peace”, while on the other hand a Bedouin village in Gaza was submerged in sewage.
This devastating picture of total, surreal detachment between the two events, between a meaningless political intercourse and a devastating destruction on the ground, is the true reality of the Palestinian disaster. It demonstrates the Western political leadership’s zero commitment to humanist and ethical thinking. It shows our abandonment of the Palestinian people. It is a reminder of our general negligence towards a people which, for six decades, has been dispossessed without mercy. It underlines our blindness towards what seems to be suffering without end and without limit.
Rice called on regional Arab states to “participate actively in the peace process”. She also welcomed the Saudi peace plan as “an example of such new thinking”.
I ask myself when was the last time that Rice or the Saudi royal family have been submerged in sewage? Rice probably fails to realize that people who are flooded by “treated water” want something slightly more significant than a mere “peace process”. I ask Rice: Shouldn’t we better start with food? In case you didn’t realize, your embargo on the Hamas government has led to unprecedented starvation in Gaza. Some 80 per cent of Gaza’s population relies on aid from the World Food Programme and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
By the time the US secretary of state finished saying that the Israeli prime minister and the PNA chairman would discuss a “political horizon,” it was clear that dozens of residents of Umm Naser were still unaccounted for.
By late afternoon, receding flood waters had left a foul-smelling muck. Village children clung to wooden doors that were floating on the putrid waters. Rescuers were paddling through the village in search of victims. Frightened goats and cows were seen swimming in the mud searching for safe ground.
By the time Rice left the region it was revealed that the “negotiations” between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas will not include the three core issues: Jerusalem, refugees and borders. What a surprise!
Instead of going from Jerusalem to Riyadh, Rice went back to Washington. She realized that she had nothing to offer the Arab summit. She has nothing to offer - almost as much as the people of Umm Naser have nothing to lose.
*Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born musician and writer, and a proponent of a secular and democratic one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the two peoples live in one state as citizens with equal rights and responsibilities.
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