Starting a revolution.

• Author: Hedges, Chris
• Position: Political reform - Viewpoint essay

I would like to begin by speaking about the people of Gaza. Their suffering is not an abstraction to me. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I spent seven years in the region. I speak Arabic. And for much of the time I was in Gaza, including when Israeli fighter jets and soldiers were attacking it.

I have stood over the bodies, including the bodies of children, left behind by Israeli airstrikes and assaults. I have watched mothers and fathers cradle their dead and bloodied boys and girls in their arms, convulsed by an indescribable grief, shrieking in pitiful cries to an indifferent universe.

And in this charnel house, this open-air prison where 1.8 million people, nearly half of them children, live trapped in an Israeli ghetto, I have witnessed the crimes of occupation: the food shortage, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear, and the despair.

And as I have witnessed this mass of human suffering, I have heard from the power elites in Jerusalem and Washington the lies told to justify state terror.

An impoverished, captive people that lacks an army, a navy, an air force, mechanized units, drones, artillery, and any semblance of command and control does not pose a threat to Israel. And Israel's indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill hundreds of innocents, wound thousands more, and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war. It is state-sponsored terror and state-sponsored murder.

The abject failure by our political class to acknowledge this fact (a fact that to most of the rest of the world is obvious) exposes the awful banality of our political system, the cynical abandonment of the most vulnerable of the Earth for campaign contributions. Money, after all, has replaced the vote.

The refusal to speak out for the people of Gaza is not tangential to our political life. The pathetic, Stalinist-like plebiscite in the Senate--where all too Senators are trotted out like AIPAC windup dolls to cheer on the Israeli bombing of homes, apartment blocks, schools (where hundreds of terrified families were taking shelter), water treatment plants, power stations, hospitals, and, of course, boys playing soccer on a beach--exposes the surrender of our political class to cash-rich lobbying groups and corporate power.

The people of Gaza are expendable. They are poor. They are powerless. And they have no money.

Just like the poor people...