« QUAND la vérité est remplacée par silence, » le Yevgeny dissident soviétique Yevtushenko a indiqué, « le silence est un mensonge. »

Il peut être évident que le silence sur Gaza est cassé. Les petits cocons d'enfants assassinés, enveloppés en vert, ainsi que des boîtes contenant leurs parents démembrés, et les cris de la peine et de la fureur de chacun dans ce camp de la mort par la mer peuvent être étés témoin sur Al-Jazeera et YouTube, même aperçus sur la BBC.

Mais le poèt incorrigible de la Russie ne se référait pas aux éphémères que nous appelons des nouvelles. Il demandait pourquoi ceux qui ont su le pourquoi ne l'a jamais parlé et ainsi l'ont nié.

Parmi l'intelligentsia Anglo-USA, ceci frappe particulièrement. C'est eux qui tiennent les clefs sur les grands entrepôts de la connaissance - les historiographies et les archives qui nous mènent à le pourquoi.

Ils savent que l'horreur pleuvant maintenant sur Gaza a peu à faire avec Hamas ou, absurdement, le « juste de l'Israel à existent. »

Ils savent que vis-à-vis soyez vrai que le juste de la Palestine à existent a été décommandé il y a 61 ans et que l'expulsion et, au besoin, l'extinction du peuple autochtone ont été projetées et exécutées par les fondateurs de l'Israel.

Ils connaissent, par exemple, que le « plan infâme D » de 1947-8 a eu comme conséquence la dépopulation meurtrière de 369 villes et villages palestiniens par le Haganah (armée israélienne) et que massacre sur le massacre des civils palestiniens dans des endroits tels que Deir Yassin, Al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle et Lydda désigné dans les actes officiels sous le nom « du nettoyage ethnique. »

Arrivant à une scène de ce carnage, un général, Yigal Allon a demandé David Ben Gurion, le premier premier ministre de l'Israel : « Ce qui nous suffirons avec les Arabes ? » Ben Gurion, rapporté le Benny israélien Morris d'historien, « a fait un renvoyé, le geste énergique avec sa main et a indiqué : Le `les expulsent'. »

L'ordre pour expulser une population entière « sans attention à l'âge » a été signé par Yitzhak Rabin, un futur premier ministre promu par la propagande la plus efficace du monde en tant que conciliateur.

L'ironie terrible de ceci a été adressée seulement dans le dépassement, comme quand le Co-chef Meir Ya' ari de partie de Mapam a noté « comment facilement » le rai des chefs de l'Israel de la façon dont il était « possible et permis de prendre les femmes, les enfants et les vieux hommes et de remplir route de eux parce que tel est l'impératif de la stratégie. And this we say … who remember who used this means against our people during the (second world) war … I am appalled.”

Every subsequent “war” that Israel has waged has had the same objective - the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first against Israel.

Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Papp? and Norman Finkelstein have undermined this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism.

“It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Papp? on January 2, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology - in its most consensual and simplistic variety - allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them.

“The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern (of genocide).”

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, fall within the international standard of the Genocide Convention.

“Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

In describing a “holocaust-in-the making,” Falk was alluding to the nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland.

For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews, led by Mordechaj Anielewicz, fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew.

Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project.

The F-16 jet fighters, the 250lb “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza having been approved by a congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making “aid,” give Washington de facto control.

It beggars belief that president-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken about Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama has maintained a silence on Palestine that marks his approval, which is to be expected given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of zionists as his secretary of state and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings Think, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on January 20, I trust that someone with the brave heart of Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now Operation Cast Lead, which is the unfinished Operation Justified Vengeance.

This was launched by prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with George W Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time.

In that same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of new Labour’s enduring complicity in Palestine’s agony.

However, the Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries (because) the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial.” This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians.”

What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, then Israeli chief of staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks.

On November 23 2001, Israeli agents assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud and got their “trigger.” The suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on November 4 last year when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people.

Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger,” a ceasefire sustained by the Hamas government, which had imprisoned its violators, was shattered as a result of the Israeli attacks and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be called Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed.”

On December 23, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Behind this sordid game is the Dagan Plan, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon during his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Now head of the Israeli intelligence organisation Mossad, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has brought about the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, now effectively a concentration camp.

The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mahmoud Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through mostly supine, if intimidated Western media, notably in the US, which says that Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and is to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, since long before its creation.

“We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.”

In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor.

This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the Western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power.”

Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic.

Neither is its proposal of a 10-year truce reported as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition - that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders.

As every annual vote in the UN general assembly demonstrates, most states agree. On January 4, the president of the general assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity.”

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” - the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority, followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and, perhaps, finally into Jordan.

This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote British-based Palestinian exile Karma Nabulsi, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed … Look to the Iraq of today: that is what (Sharon) had in store for us and he has nearly achieved it.”

Dr Dahlia Wasfi is a US writer on Iraq and Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-semitic,” she wrote on December 31.

“But I’m not talking about the World War II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years … Since Arabs are semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-semitic than this.”

She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young US citizen who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer.

“I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.”

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility.”

Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform.

With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable, invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-semitism.

The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plead for help?

Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries?”

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third American Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure that the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 2,500 jammed the auditorium.

Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete. The literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance. False symbolism is all.

As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised people. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants war criminals impunity and immunity through our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or it gives us the power to speak out.

For the moment, I prefer my own memory of Gaza - of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity,” as Nabulsi put it.

On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No-one had told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and a few of them climbed onto a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, in the belief that the world will not forget them.

This article appeared in the New Statesman.