There’s a lot being written about the current crisis in Palestine–after Israel blocked commercial goods, food, fuel and even humanitarian aid to Gaza earlier this week. But the best analysis I’ve read comes from the ever-passionate Chris Hedges (former NY Times Middle East bureau chief):

This is not another typical spat between Israelis and Palestinians. This is the final, collective strangulation of the Palestinians in Gaza.

He also includes some important facts:

Since the current uprising began in September 2000, 1,033 Israelis and 4,437 Palestinians have died in the violence, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. B’Tselem noted in a December 2007 report that the dead included 119 Israeli children and 971 Palestinian children.

This is clearly not a war of equal aggression. By having one of the strongest militaries in the world and the support of American politicians seeking a Western-minded presence in the Middle East, Israel holds all the cards. Isreal’s leaders must also be fully aware that by using force and collective punishment they–to quote Hedges–”create more outrage, more generations of embittered young men and women who will dedicate their lives to avenging the humiliation.”

Why then does Israel keep at it? Aside from the yearly $3 billion in American aide, the reason could be as grim as genocide. Princeton International Law scholar Richard Falk has described the siege of Gaza as “a prelude to genocide.” But that was before this week’s events. Palestinian journalist Omar Barghouti believes the situation can now be considered full-blown:

According to Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the term is defined as:

“[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; …”

Clearly, Israel’s hermetic siege of Gaza, designed to kill, cause serious bodily and mental harm, and deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about partial and gradual physical destruction, qualifies as an act of genocide, if not all-out genocide yet.

Gaza is not the only area where Palestinians are subjected to ethnically-charged oppression. In the West Bank a 450-mile long concrete wall is being built on Palestinian land. The United Nations and the International Court of Justice have called for its demolition. Even the respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz has referred to it as the “Apartheid Wall.”

With this information it becomes increasingly harder to look at the conflict as just an unending complicated mess where both sides are equally complicit. Noam Chomsky–the preeminent scholar on foreign policy–explained the solution as rather simple and within grasp in the following 2004 Q&A with ZNet:

There are some people who argue that while a two-state solution may have been possible in the past, factors including the settlements and economic and demographic changes over the last 37 years have so intertwined Israeli Jews and Palestinians that a two-state solution today could not realistically provide for two viable states. How do you assess this argument?

To clarify, the question is whether the two communities are so intertwined in the occupied territories that no division is possible: they have always been intertwined within Israel. I think the argument is incorrect — as, incidentally, do the former heads of the Israeli Shin Bet (General Security Services, GSS), who recently discussed the matter publicly (Nov. 14, 2003). They were in general agreement that Israel could and should leave the Gaza Strip completely, and that in the West Bank, 85-90% of the settlers would leave “with a simple economic plan” while there are perhaps 10% “with whom we will have to clash” to remove them, not a very serious problem in their view. The Geneva Accords and Ayalon-Nusseibah plans are based on similar assumptions, which appear realistic.

As Americans this is something we should be pushing our government to support and enforce before acts of genocide and apartheid escalate ever further.