By Kathleen Kern

At the end of January, Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery wrote a column about Gazans breaching the wall between the Palestinian and Egyptian sections of Rafah, comparing it to the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

He described events preceding it — Israel preventing food, medicines and fuel from entering Gaza in reprisal for Palestinian militants firing Qassam rockets into Israel.

Earlier he had written a satirical article describing the situation in Gaza as a “scientific experiment” designed to find out how long one could impose hellish measures on a civilian population before they surrendered.

He wrote: “It has been said before that it is dangerous to write satire in our country — too often the satire becomes reality.”

Avnery’s article got me thinking. What if the citizens of Dallas, which has a population roughly similar to that of the Gaza Strip, voted the Republic of Texas — a group that wants Texas to secede from the United States — into city office?

This is what I imagined:

Because of the group’s violent history, the U.S. Federal government built a fence around Dallas and regulated the flow of goods in and out. Militant groups affiliated with the Republic of Texas began firing crude, inaccurate missiles into the Dallas suburbs and the surrounding countryside.

In the space of two years, a dozen Texans died from these missile attacks, and many traumatized residents fled the region, unable to live with the uncertainty of when the next missiles might fall.

In reprisal, the U.S. bombed and strafed neighborhoods in Dallas from which the militants were launching missiles, killing 650 citizens of Dallas, more than half of whom were civilians and 126 of whom were children.

The mayor and city council offered to negotiate with the militants to stop the attacks in exchange for ending the siege, but U.S. officials said they would not negotiate with the democratically elected city government.

Soon, the United States made the blockade absolute. Without fuel, hospitals could no longer run incubators for premature infants or dialysis machines. People could no longer cook their meager rations donated by the Red Cross.

One day, the hungry civilians in Dallas blew up a retaining wall, cut through barbed wire surrounding the city and poured into the suburbs to find food. Although the U.S. military warned the suburban police to stop the outflow, most suburbanites, who had watched with horror what was happening to fellow Texans in Dallas, eagerly sold or gave supplies to the people who had fled their quarantine.

I often wonder whether people in the United States would feel more outrage if they saw English-speaking men and women dressed in jeans and T-shirts suffering the calamities that Arabic-speaking people dressed in robes and headscarves do.

If gunmen were shooting at police from my neighborhood, the police would never bomb or strafe all the nearby houses.

If such an event occurred, most Americans would condemn such tactics. Brighton, the suburb of Rochester, N.Y., where I live, would for decades be remembered for the civilian deaths in my neighborhood, the way Kent State is associated with the deaths of four college students.

Perhaps considering this possibility will help us see what the Arabic-speaking world sees when it watches the forced starvation and bombings of people in Gaza.