By any mea­sure, lev­els of suf­fer­ing, com­pas­sion and depri­va­tion of human rights ought not be based on nation­al­i­ty, eth­nic­i­ty or eco­nom­ic sta­tus. An attack on a small  U.S. mil­i­tary out­post few even knew exist­ed, and four months of bomb­ing and artillery strikes that have been rained on Gaza flaunt that in real­i­ty, the exact oppo­site is the order of the day.

Sev­er­al of the U.S. ser­vice per­son­al injured in the attack suf­fered what is known as mild trau­mat­ic brain injury (mTBI). Accord­ing to a recent study, mTBI can have “…dev­as­tat­ing neu­ro­log­i­cal con­se­quences…” because “…blast expo­sure affects var­i­ous organ sys­tems, includ­ing ner­vous, pul­monary, gas­troin­testi­nal, car­dio­vas­cu­lar, and endocrine systems…”
The bomb that did the dam­age, as well as killing three sol­diers, appears to have been car­ried by what’s known as a “one-way sui­cide drone”, which makes it the aer­i­al equiv­a­lent of the IEDs (impro­vised explo­sive devices) used by jihadis in Iraq and the Tal­iban in Afghanistan.
Tens of thou­sands of tonnes of unfath­omably more pow­er­ful explo­sives dropped on and fired into Gaza in the space of four months are esti­mat­ed to have killed more than 27,000 peo­ple and injured anoth­er 66,000 – so far.
Has any­one men­tioned, nev­er mind been able to assess how many Pales­tin­ian civil­ians may have mTBI? Or thought about the long-term soci­etal effects it will have?

                    BRAIN DAMAGE IS ONLY PART OF IT

More than 70,000 hous­ing units in Gaza have been destroyed and in excess of 290,000 dam­aged. The esti­mat­ed rebuild­ing cost is at least 15-bil­lion dol­lars. Dev­as­ta­tion on such a scale is prob­a­bly bare­ly, if at all com­pre­hen­si­ble to those whose only view of it is snip­pets of video from Pales­tin­ian jour­nal­ists, whom Israel and its sup­port­ers paint as biased.
In a poignant essay on what he termed “Domi­cide” in Gaza that I urge any­one who has not already done so to read, Dr Bal­akr­ish­nan Rajagopal, the U.N. spe­cial rap­por­teur on the right to ade­quate hous­ing wrote that a home “…is so much more than a struc­ture: It is a repos­i­to­ry of past expe­ri­ence and future dreams, of mem­o­ries of births, deaths, mar­riages and inti­mate moments with our loved ones, amid neigh­bors and a famil­iar land­scape. The idea of home brings com­fort and gives mean­ing to our lives. Its destruc­tion is the denial of a person’s dig­ni­ty and humanity.”

                       TO ADD TO THE SHAME

It’s hard to decide whether cur­tail­ing funds to UNWRA (the UN Works and Relief Agency), which plays the piv­otal role in relief efforts that are the only thing keep­ing Gaza’s civil­ian pop­u­la­tion from falling into the abyss of star­va­tion and dis­ease, is dou­ble stan­dards or ignorance.
The ratio­nale is that a small (maybe 10 per­cent) num­ber UNWRA employ­ees, who have been iden­ti­fied, fired and face poten­tial pros­e­cu­tion, were Hamas sup­port­ers or operatives.
That’s like tar­ring every U.S. sol­dier who was in Iraq with the trav­es­ty of pris­on­ers being humil­i­at­ed and tor­tured in Abu Ghraib prison.
In a sim­i­lar vein, Israel’s fail­ure to think about how it might replace UNRWA was described by a for­mer Israeli gen­er­al as one of sev­er­al gaps in the government’s long-term think­ing about the war and its aftermath.
If that sounds famil­iar, it’s because it mir­rors the will­ful fol­ly of the U.S. occu­pa­tion in Iraq, when it dis­band­ed the Iraqi army and banned mem­bers of the Ba’ath par­ty from work­ing in gov­ern­ment, there­by elim­i­nat­ing the only peo­ple trained to keep the civ­il ser­vice and bureau­cra­cy run­ning for the task of rebuild­ing the coun­try the inva­sion wrecked.
For Wash­ing­ton, sus­pend­ing fund­ing for UNWRA is even less com­pre­hen­si­ble. When Soma­li mili­tias made aid dis­tri­b­u­tion almost impos­si­ble in the mid­dle of a Bib­li­cal scale famine, the U.S. sent in the Marines to restore order and save lives in what was tout­ed as “Oper­a­tion Restore Hope”.
By reg­u­lat­ing the flow of trucks into Gaza, Israel is in effect is doing the same thing as the Soma­li gunsels.

 So the U.S. is send­ing them weapons, even when Israel ignores impre­ca­tions that they
not be used in a way that undu­ly endan­gers civilians.
Maybe if it was labelled “Oper­a­tion Destroy Hope” the Biden admin­is­tra­tion would get the mes­sage that at best, it’s not a good look for the oft-tout­ed “indis­pens­able nation” in world pol­i­tics and Mid­dle East peace-making.
But then, does the by now dev­as­ta­tion-over­loaded pub­lic care all that much?
It seems to me that the greater the social and geo­graph­ic dis­tance from vic­tims in places like Gaza, the more like­ly they are to be pigeon- holed, sub­con­scious­ly or oth­er­wise, as not hav­ing had much any­way, with the result that their epic sto­icism in the face of adver­si­ty gar­ners them far less empa­thy than they deserve.
The same atti­tude should not be true of governments.

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