17 dead. 773 wounded, or is it 1,400? How many more victims will there be this week, or in the weeks ahead as Palestinians continue their Land Day protests?
Every victim shot with live ammunition. Bullets fired at unarmed people standing dozens, if not hundreds, of yards away from the soldiers. Unarmed marchers and high-powered rifles separated by a steel fence and a wide no-man’s land imposed from on high.
Over 100 snipers staring through high powered scopes.
Deadly shots fired into crowds kneeling in prayer, marching in protest. Smoke and tear gas wafting through the air, encircling their heads, burning eyes, nose and throat like Hades’ own sulpherous 
fumes reminding them of 
hell on earth.
The army is proud, boasting that they know precisely where every bullet landed (a tweet since removed from Twitter). Each death a deliberate murder. Every injury an intentional maiming. Every wound a purposeful assault on the image of God.
The largest, most technically advanced military in the Middle East tries to convince us that young men with rocks, slingshots and burning tires pose an “existential threat” (as they say) to nuclear armed Israel.
Perhaps Israeli soldiers now fear deadly smoke inhalation from 100 yards away, as Palestinians cover their faces, sputter and gag against the hundreds of tear gas canisters raining down on their heads.
We are reminded that Palestinian lives don’t matter, not to Israel.
Nor do Palestinian lives matter to America, which once again seeks to block the U.N. resolution condemning the slaughter. America, the lumbering moral Frankenstein, mesmerized by Israeli propaganda, suffers from a cauterized, national conscience seared like a piece of raw meat by a red-hot iron.
No. Palestinian lives don’t matter to the United States, where Israeli lobbyists write US foreign policy in the Middle East. Palestinians are inconvenient human fodder in need of bulldozing by Zionist racism and international neglect.
It is impossible for these Palestinian to make contact with the Israeli soldiers aiming at them from the opposite side of the fence. Yet, these soldiers posture heroically while discussing the Palestinian “threat” they 
now mow down by bravely firing remote-controlled machine guns into the Gazan killing fields – the guns’ operators safely sitting many miles away in the Sinai desert.
It is like shooting fish in a barrel, except that these fish are human beings and the barrel is the Gaza Strip, a place that many observers have described as “the world’s largest open-air prison.”
Glenn Greenwald (one of the most important investigative journalists working today) asks a most revealing question, “Imagine if an Arab-majority country were imprisoning 1.8 million Jews in an open-air cage, preventing them from leaving, controlling all aspects of their deprived civic lives, then picking them off with snipers in the back when they protested. Might the reaction be different?”
What would the United States be saying to the United Nations then?
No, Palestinian lives don’t seem to matter, except to their Creator.
The Christian church knows that the Lord God Almighty cares deeply for the Palestinian people, as he does every human being. And the Lord keeps score. He will not forget their suffering, come judgment day.
- Please take a few minutes to watch Max Blumenthal – an investigative journalist who has spent a considerable amount of time in Gaza – describe what is happening now.
- Also, read Gideon Levy’s article containing this lead: “The shooting on the Gaza border shows once again that the killing of Palestinian’s is accepted in Israel more lightly than the killing of mosquitoes.”
