Plumbing the depths

Much like its eager satirisation of Bush's gaffes, reporting the facile ramblings of figures such as Joe the Plumber is an ideal exercise for our liberal media outlets, providing a form of contextualised light relief - which is always welcome in times of Western-sponsored atrocity and wholesale murder.

But back to the issue at hand. To read the unspeakable Joe trotting out the de rigeur Israeli refrain - "What would you do if unprovoked rockets were coming through your innocent window?" - jarred an opaque, unresolved corner of my memory.

When I worked in Israel in 2001 - surrounded by friends and colleagues I consider to be the most upright, generous people I have ever met - a deathly, labyrinthine incongruence would, on rare occasions, rear its head:

"The only good Arab is a dead Arab."

The quip, and permutations thereof, appeared infrequently, but its impact will stay with me. Somehow, educated, moral and welcoming Israeli adults were able to blithely dismiss an entire people.

At a visceral level, my response was to realise that I simply could not know nor judge the cumulative effects of living in fear of a rocket/bomb attack. (For my part, I experienced at least some of this fear on various trips to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: flinching at the sight of charred buses; hearing radio reports of bombs going off in nearby malls.)

Nor could I hope to understand the cultural impact of the events of 1967, or indeed the entire breathtaking journey of these stoic, resourceful, beautiful people.

One night-time outing to Tel Aviv, aborted at the last minute by our happy young party simply for lack of car space, is printed indelibly on my mind because of what occurred there that night.

There are less than seven million people in Israel. It can feel awfully close.

And so, I wasn't about to tell my hosts otherwise. Theirs was an ingrained, unfathomable impulse. Some of my immediate Israeli peers were, like me, bookish 18-year-olds. The difference was that while I was soon trotting off home to study DH Lawrence, they were reeling at the thought of 3-5 years' national service.

My conclusion in the ensuing years, however, was that many of the people with whom I discussed the issues of the day, teens and seniors alike, had a simple absence of either knowledge or care about the obviously skewed playing-field just down the road.

Israel has been turning the screw for decades. What we are witnessing is nothing less than an administrative attempt at ethnic cleansing; an abhorrent siege; a structured evisceration.

Let us be clear: you can wage war on a people without firing a shot. The current rockets issuing from Gaza are but a beleaguered, near-spent fox bearing its teeth at a thousand riders and hounds who surround its hole dawn to dusk.

Talk of ceasefires, then, in this egregiously imbalanced scenario, is almost tautological.

These facts were - as they are now - the malignant elephant in the room.

Today, incredibly, just as the Israeli news reports I viewed throughout my stay in 2001 comprehensively ignored this overwhelming disproportion, our own domestic media vehicles in the UK remain just as monocular. Why?

"The basic principle, rarely violated, is that what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist."

- Chomsky, 1992