Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is imprisoning an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza.
The attacks, reported on Britain’s Channel 4 News, were ”targeting key militants of Hamas” and the ”Hamas infrastructure”. The BBC described a ”clash” between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
In one ”clash”, the car of ”militants” was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. In my experience, all Gaza’s people are militant in resisting their jailer and tormentor. And the ”Hamas infrastructure” was the headquarters of the party that won last year’s democratic elections in Palestine.ÂÂ
”Some say,” said the Channel 4 reporter, that ”Hamas has courted this [attack] …” Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, which killed one person. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier’s forces.
The Channel 4 reporter referred to an ”endless war”. There is no war; there is resistance to an enduring, illegal occupation by the world’s fourth largest military power. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, Israeli forces have killed more than 4 000 Palestinians, half of them children.
According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as ”a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative”, in the words of a former CIA official.
Today, Israel and the US openly back Hamas’s rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, another American client. The aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war.
In response, the Palestinians forged a unity government of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks aim to destroy this.
The Israeli plan for Palestine, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is ”a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today . . .”
On May 19 The Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: ”Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show,” he wrote. ”The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is . . . an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation.”
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza’s more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the ”thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment . . . The shadows of human beings roam the ruins . . . They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions.”
Whenever I am in Gaza I am consumed by a melancholia, as if I am a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; marching at the water’s edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, again, when the generators are bombed, again. Murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who ”clashed” with a 200kg American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.
More than 40% of Gaza’s people are children under 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Derek Summerfield wrote that ”two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest — the sniper’s wound”.ÂÂ
Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children’s community health project in Gaza, told me his latest survey revealed that 99,4% of the children studied suffer trauma. More than 99% of their homes were bombarded; 97,5% were exposed to teargas; 96,6% witnessed shootings; 95,8% witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed.
Before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for ”stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises”.
Research by the Glasgow University Media Group shows that only 9% of young people interviewed in the United Kingdom know the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. Broadcasters use words such as ”terrorism” and ”murder” to describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.
No mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, the Israelis wounded eight journalists, including CNN’s Jerusalem bureau chief. The FPA complained in each case. There was no satisfactory reply.
In Western journalism on Israel, especially in the US, Hamas is dismissed as a ”terrorist group sworn to Israel’s destruction”. This suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine’s destruction.
Hamas’s long-standing proposals for a 10-year ceasefire are ignored, along with its recent ideological shift amounting to a historic acceptance of Israeli sovereignty. ”The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran,” said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. ”Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we’re talking now about reality, about political solutions … If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don’t think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution].”