Gaza kids need water not Sesame Street.

28 October 2009

The news of a project to beam the children's television series 'Sesame Street' into the Gaza Strip sounds like good news. On the surface of it, the deprived kids of the blockaded and tormented hell hole that is Gaza need some entertainment relief from the daily life of constant conflict and political turmoil.

The aim sounds laudable - 'Sesame Street' will enhance the kids' 'self esteem' and balance out the 'incitement' of local television.

But wait a minute. What exactly is the aim of this 'enhanced self esteem'? If it is to make the Palestinian youth of Gaza forget their circumstances then 'Sesame Street' hovers in a zone somewhere between deceit and naivety.

The problems of Gaza are not of Palestinian making. It is not self esteem they need, but justice. Three quarters of the Palestinians of Gaza were forced to live there because Israel booted most Palestinians out of the rest of Palestine in 1948. What they can see over their Israeli created border are their homes being occupied by people recently arrived from other parts of the world, qualified to take over simply because they are Jewish. Those are the rules Israel sets and demands the world accepts.

The Gaza Strip is a giant refugee camp of nearly 1.5 million people, crowded into scarcely more space then the island nation of Niue, but with a thousand times the population.

The 'incitement' that 'Sesame Street' is meant to replace, and which Israel and the US is so critical of, is mostly an education of the lawful rights of Palestinian nationhood and the history of betrayal of those rights. Palestinian youth however need no 'incitement' on television to learn what Israel means to them. Israeli armed forces bomb and invade their refugee homes and neighbourhoods, kill or take away their family members, deprive them of food, building materials, medicine and fuel. The so called incitement is nothing more than an explanation of the Israeli motives. They can already clearly see the Israeli actions.

Amnesty International has just reported that the Gaza aquifer is nearly totally polluted by seawater and sewerage infiltration. Israel has first access to the aquifer flow, thus allowing seawater to flow in, and Israel denies Gaza the imported machinery to repair the sewerage infrastructure it destroyed earlier this year when it invaded.

The official Israeli response to the report is the same response Israel gave to the recent UN Goldstone report on the invasion. Officials called both reports 'biased' and claimed that the huge degree of international criticism only indicated the degree of prejudice against Israel.

Meanwhile Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has stated that he does not believe there will be a peace settlement to the decades long conflict. This is quite simply an honest expression of the Israeli leadership's intent to never cede justice or nationhood to the Palestinians, but rather continue to deal with Palestinians as merely incipient terrorists for evermore.

So, for Mr Lieberman, 'Sesame Street' might be a ray of hope. The next generation of Palestinians may ignore their hunger, Israeli attacks and their justice denied, if they can instead get a good laugh in front of the box.