GUEST BLOG: Lois Griffiths – How to Kill a man
British poet Edwin Brock, who died in 1997, is best known for his poem:
5 Ways to Kill a Man
“There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. ..
Or you can take a length of steel,…
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears….
…, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. …
… Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.”
But it’s the 21th century now. This poem should be updated.
How about describing a 6th Way to Kill a Man? Not just ‘a man’ but men , women and childen too?
What if you lock them up, en masse, in very unsanitary conditions and look the other way when Covid-19 cases arise?
Gaza has been labelled for some time an ‘open air prison’, a misleading word really. Prison, in our understanding , isn’t a place where people are born and remain for the rest of their lives. Prison isn’t a place where affordable water is undrinkable, where clinics , schools, farms, fishing boats are deliberately destroyed, where freedom flotillas bringing badly needed medical aid are denied entry, where children, severely traumatised having seen so much death and destruction, wonder if they will be the next to die.
Covid-19 is in Gaza now.
Gaza is a man-made hellhole.
Israel is to blame for its ghastly medieval siege but the West is guilty too.
Silence is complicity.
New Zealand is highly respected internationally. If New Zealand openly promoted foreign policies based on humanitarian norms, openly demanded that the siege on Gaza be lifted, activists around the world would likely be emboldened to bring pressure on their own governments to follow suit.
WHERE IS HUMANITY?
Lois Griffiths is a human rights activist.
I see that there is a big list of bad behaviour by Gaza-ites that can be retaliated to. At what date will Israel consider it has had its fair amount of retaliation? Perhaps the Palestinians are being the scapegoats for the devilish behaviour to the Jews in World War 2 and before?
Perhaps Israel will always regard any retaliation from Palestine as provocation. Perhaps they lost their hearts and minds in the inhumanity to Jewish people on a vast scale and that will always stain their minds. That anywhere Jews settle can turn them out even after hundreds of years because of some whim, some madman, some bone of contention that can only be answered with Jewish bones, is still in their memory and cannot be forgotten.
Perhaps it is time for the rest of the world to take action to rehouse the Palestinians and stop asking Israel to change. Such a big wrong has been done, it is too hard for the Israelis to change, conquer their fears and trust better relationships with Arab countries, even with the nuclear weapon behind them. Every time Palestinians retaliate it becomes another mark against them, and vice versa, and so it goes. I do not think anything can be done to enable the Palestinians to have a secure and thriving community and there would always be resentment in some way from both sides.
The list of Jewish psychologists is immense and it would be helpful to know their opinions if the wounds inflicted on the Jewish psyche, and on the minds of Israeli Jews. can ever be healed.
There have been studies looking at the two participants in the conflict. Here are some links:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1524838015613774
Psychological Aspects of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict: A Systematic Review
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2005.00444.x
Psychological Correlates of Support for Compromise: A Polling Study of Jewish‐Israeli Attitudes toward Solutions to the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230603110_7
A Psychological Earthquake in the Israeli-Jewish Society: Changing Opinions Following the Camp David Summit and the Al-Aqsa Intifada
Youre kidding surely? The psychological damage suffered by an agressive colonial settler nation agressively invading and settling a weaker nation?? Might just as well ask if white Australia was psychologically damaged by their agressive intrusion against aborigines and whether aborigines ahould now be settled elsewhere!! Platitudes may flow easily and many have. Oh dear what can we do? Oh well just capitulate to the bully. After all we dont want to inflict any psychological damage!
Gabby’s zionist sympathies blinker her logic.
Where does it state in international law that Israel can treat the people in Gaza so inhumanely?