The Crisis in Gaza in contrast to life in London
This evening I met my friend GC for dinner at Locanda Locatelli, which was nominated for the 2008 London Restaurant Awards (Best Italian) and is a place where celebrities and bankers (on company account) like to talk business. We sat next to four bankers and it was obvious they were bankers because no one speaks about macroeconomics, spreads and leverage unless they are and some bankers have a habit of speaking louder than the general population so even if you’re not deliberately eavesdropping you can’t help but hear snatches of the statistics and quotas they’re preoccupied about!
Since GC and I have discussed the US$700 billion bailout, reform of the international regulatory bodies and the Madoff case at some length, we didn’t join the bankers in their pet subjects.
On our table I was busy enjoying these dishes:
* wild pheasant ravioli
* roast rabbit leg;
* Montebianco which I don’t have a photo for but it’s essentially a chocolate brownie with a scoop of slightly alcoholic ice cream on top. This is then covered in whipped cream and chestnut paste.
Our topic of discussion was the crisis in Gaza and I told GC I’ve been providing some input into David Price’s excellent debategraph on the matter over at the Independent online:
* The Crisis in Gaza — debategraph
My approach has been to facilitate the contextualization of three main areas:
(1.) Who are the key players and what they’ve done or are doing to advance / derail the Peace Process?
(2.) What are the historical events which triggered the conflicts between the two parties over the years?
(3.) What is the track record of the previously abandoned peace agreements and what can be learned from each attempt to secure peace?
Whilst suggesting additional sources for me to gain perspectives from both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, GC told me a statistic which I had never heard about previously: 47 percent of the population in Gaza is under the age of 14.
This absolutely shocked me and made the ongoing conflicts even more heartbreaking. With this newly acquired information I later did a Google of “Gaza 47 percent children” and it produced a link to this article from Medical News Today (Aug 2006):
* 98 percent of Gaza’s children witness or experience war trauma
Without any religious, political or any other demographic bias IT IS NOT MORALLY JUSTIFIABLE FOR ISRAELI + PALESTINIAN ADULTS TO SUBJECT THE CHILDREN IN THE GAZA STRIP OR IN ISRAEL TO THIS CONTINUING CONFLICT.
Since I’m not a politician nor do I work for the UN and nor am I a journalist (BBC, Sky, CNN, Xinhua, et al) I’m aware I don’t have a mandate to contribute to the drafting up or sign-off of any Middle East Peace Roadmap. Nor can I ensure the peace is kept. Nor can I get into the countries involved and report from the ground to highlight atrocities on both sides since there seems to be censorship and control of the media in place.
However, I can help populate the debategraph for Crisis in Gaza on the Independent online site and hope that the global online community will stay objectively informed about the issues involved, step up to the plate and say, “Enough! We NEED and would like self-sustainable peace in this region, indefinitely. Here’s how…”
Whilst anti-war street protests and petitions to the government are part of the heritage of democracy I sometimes wonder how effective they are and what their aims and achievements are. Perhaps it would be more progressive if a group of anti-war protestors drafted a comprehensive 10-point action plan of “How to effect peace in the Palestinian-Israeli issue’ and this somehow was integrated in the actual government policy operational strategies of both states as well as the Quartet’s (the US, the EU, Russia and the UK).
In certain ways it would be easy to say, “It’s THEIR problem. The politicians have to deal with it.”
Nevertheless, as President-elect Obama’s election campaigned showed: the people have the power to effect change. Therefore I have a hope the global community will say, “Please change the broken record on the Middle East Peace Process. It’s what the children now and the next generation of Palestinians and Israelis deserve.”
