I learned a new word this week. Dystopia:
Dystopia, noun: an imaginary place where
people are unhappy and usually afraid because they are not treated fairly; an
unpleasant future where people are often dehumanized; a nightmare world characterized
by human misery, squalor, oppression, disease and overcrowding… Dystopian societies
give us glimpses into distorted societies where justice and freedom are
suppressed; where deprivation is a way of life; and lives are dispensable. They
ask us to imagine a society where people are pushed to the limits of what they
can endure – and often killed if they can’t.[1]
Well, we don’t have to imagine. Just think of Israel’s Gaza.
The biggest strain on Israel’s legacy, image and conscience
is Gaza. More than two million people now live in Gaza, that little sliver of
land squeezed between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea, barely 25 miles long
and no more than seven miles across at its widest point. According to the
United Nations, the territory could be unlivable by 2020 and Israel totally
controls Gaza, as 70 percent of Gazans subsist on less than a dollar a day and
60 percent have no daily access to water.[2]
Decades of siege and three major bombardments in six years
has left Gaza in a state of perpetual crisis. “We aren’t human. Our life is
hell. We are living like animals,” says 54 year old Maeen Neim Maqbel, whose
home was destroyed by Israel, twice.[3] Add to that; leaking sewage systems, and
electricity for barely half the day and totally dependent upon charity handouts
from the United Nations to keep his family alive and you have a glimpse of
dystopia in Gaza.
Unemployment in Gaza stands at 40
percent, however for those between 15 and 29 years of age, the unemployment
rate is 60 percent. Poverty has increased with almost 80 percent of Gazans dependent
on humanitarian aid to survive… In 2000 the U.N. was feeding 80,000 people in
Gaza; today it feed over 830,000 people.[4]
The most painful part of this whole scenario for me is not the
almost total indifference of most
Americans to this suffering and the eagerness of my government to support it,
but the unwillingness of my church to address it.
Thomas Are
October 19, 2016
[1]
Huffington Post, Gaza: The Makings of a
Modern Day Dystopia, September 22, 2014.
[2]
Rochelle Marshall: Has Obama Made a
Devil’s Bargain with Israel.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 2009.
[3]
Mondoweiss, Living in the Aftermath:
Palestinians in Gaza Struggle under the Siege to Rebuild, December 3, 2014
[4]
Sara Roy, Deprivation in Gaza. July
19, 2014. Sara Roy is a senior research
scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University.
The warmongers of the world, mostly the same one percent have unfortunately turned to whole world of ours to a dystopia, where dark rules and the sun come out every morning so shamefully, looking at man and weeps.
ReplyDeleteGaza is, of course, a Palestinian strip of land that Israel turned into the largest open-air concentration camp in the world in defiance of several UN resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention. The defenceless captive population there is subjected to some of the most horrendous crime perpetrated by Israel in the knowledge that the world community is complicit by silence. Israel occasionally creates provocations to use as excuses for inflicting greater suffering on the people of Gaza, using its air, land and naval armed forces as well some banned weaponry. We have been accustomed to the reaction of western leaders to Israel’s war crimes - the words “Israel has the right to defend itself” come to mind.
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