by VIJAY PRASHAD
I’m not Israeli. I’m not Palestinian. Nor Jewish, nor Arab, nor Muslim. I’ve never been to Jerusalem, nor Ramallah. I’m not sure if I’ll ever go there. I have no relatives who live there, no family who ever went there, or came from there. I have a friend who lives there, but I only knew him when we were children in Calcutta more than forty years ago. I don’t remember what he looks like.
It is a fair question: why do you care so much about Israel and the Palestinians? If you care about humanity, why not concentrate on the Great Lakes of Africa, where close to six million people have been killed between 1998 and the present in what is called Africa’s World War? [The six million figure is from the International Rescue Committee. It is contested by the Human Security Project, whose own numbers suggest that the excess mortality in the Congo is less than one million]. Of course I care about this war, which is far greater in scale than what is ongoing in Gaza and the West Bank (the total Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories is less than the maximum estimate for mortality in the Congo, and the lower estimate is twice the population of Gaza). I do not see the Israeli exertions in the Occupied Territories as especially different from the U. S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance.
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