What is a humanitarian crisis?

[note: the following represents the views of the author only, and does not represent the views of other participants on the Seven Blunders of Passive Violence blog]

Over the course of the past few days, I have come to an unhappy conclusion – I no longer understand the meanings of very commonly used words in the English language. For example – victim. Or another – humanitarian. Maybe you can help me out with this one – law.

According to his grandson, Gandhi once identified seven blunders of the world that lead to passive violence – violence that goes largely unnoticed by those that perpetuate its cycle. One of the these blunders, Politics without Principles, is one that resonates with me as I listen to the unending blather about the Freedom Flotilla – that they are responsible for the murder of their own passengers, that they are representative of terror organizations, that Israel was forced into a corner from which they had no escape. I abhor violence in its myriad forms – indiscriminate violence robs the world of souls that were to contribute to humanity in a countless number of ways. However, what I think I feel more deeply is how insidious passive violence is, and how it can be masked and perpetuated by an American society that seems overly obsessed with its own righteousness. How humble are we.

The political rhetoric that has been repeated ad nauseum in the past 24 hours illustrates passive violence at the global scale – a violence that should cause every one of us, as global citizens, to take pause. Countless talking heads have filled my television screen over the past few days, explaining to me, once again, that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and that the 1.5 million people are provisioned with a more than adequate supply of basic resources for survival. I am besieged by the random numbers that are being thrown around by each side. For example, did you know that over 80% of people in Gaza are dependent on humanitarian aid? How about the fact that Israel graciously “lets” 100 trucks per day of aid into the Strip? At what age do you call a child a combatant deserving of death? The mind-numbing list goes on, and we come no closer to an understanding of the humanitarian crisis that sits before each and every one of us.

It is this quibbling that makes clear to me just how much of a crisis this situation has become – that we set numerical boundaries, draw arbitrary lines, and delineate acceptable percentages when we are talking about fellow humans only illustrates how much of our own humanity we have lost. That anyone can openly and proudly proclaim that they provide or slightly exceed minimal standards of human existence is only trumped by our willingness to say “good job.”

We’d like to look at Israel and its relationship with Palestinians as a conflict so rooted in ideology and history that it is unending - but we are lying to ourselves so that we are not forced to look at our own complicity in perpetuating a conflict that, let’s be honest now, most of us could really care less about. We are members of the global political realm, we are one of the leading world economies, we take no shame in dictating terms of living for much of the world, and yet, in the end, we participate in the system without truly standing up for the principle that trumps all others – the value of human life…each life.

We should be outraged – we should be outraged at how Gazans are forced to live in what most international observers call an open-air prison. Come to think of it, we should also be outraged at the seemingly unstoppable cycle of violence that rips through the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We should be outraged at the countless other number of conflicts throughout the world that we contribute to each day – mainly through our silence. What we should be most outraged by, however, is that when we sit silent, we don’t even seem to mind the loss of our own humanity that accompanies such an action. Bit by bit, others suffer so that we can build a case why someone else is to blame.