On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

At 3 a.m. Gaza time, July 9, 2014, in the midst of Israel’s latest exercise in savagery, I received a phone call from a young Palestinian journalist in Gaza. In the background, I could hear his infant child wailing, amid the sounds of explosions and jet planes, targeting any civilian who moves, and homes as well. He just saw a friend of his in a car clearly marked “press” get blown away. And he heard shrieks next door after an explosion but couldn’t go outside or he’d be a likely target. This is a quiet neighborhood, no military targets—except Palestinians who are fair game for Israel’s high-tech US-supplied military machine. He said that 70 percent of the ambulances have been destroyed, and that by then more than seventy had been killed, and of the three hundred or so wounded, about two-thirds were women and children. Few Hamas activists or rocket launching sites have been hit—just the usual victims. It is important to understand what life is like in Gaza when Israel’s behavior is “restrained,” in between the regular manufactured crises like this one. A good sense is given in a report to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) by Mads Gilbert, the courageous and expert Norwegian physician who has worked extensively in Gaza, including throughout the vicious and murderous Cast Lead operation. In every respect, the situation is disastrous. Just keeping to children, Gilbert reports: “Palestinian children in Gaza are suffering immensely. A large proportion are affec...