Imprisoning a Whole Nation
[Palestine]
by John Pilger
http://www.antiwar.com/, May 24,
2007
Israel is being allowed to destroy the
very notion of a state of Palestine and is imprisoning an entire
nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering
has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of
the Middle East and beyond. These 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.
Consider one such clash. The militants'
car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who
were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza
are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor.
As for the "Hamas infrastructure," this was the headquarters
of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine.
To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest
that the people in the car and all the others over the years,
the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with
fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would
suggest the truth.
"Some say," said the Channel
4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack] ..."
Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within
the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law
an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's
forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred
to an "endless war," suggesting equivalents. There is
no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable
people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by
the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass
destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices,
bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote
the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli forces have killed
more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children."
Consider how this power works. 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 [Palestine Liberation
Organization] by using a competing religious alternative,"
in the words of a former CIA official.
Today, Israel and the US have reversed
this ploy and 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, where they had been trained
by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis'
aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite
a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians
forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah.
The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.
With Gaza secured in chaos and the West
Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, 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 19 May, 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. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined
role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director ... 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."
The remarkable 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 have been in Gaza, I have been
consumed by this melancholia, as if I were 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; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at
the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power
are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again.
Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead,
such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed"
with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of
flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.
More than 40 percent of the population
of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year
field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal,
Dr. 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."
A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children
of the dust." Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness
and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.
I met Dr. Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist
who heads one of several children's community health projects
in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic
I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4
percent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look
at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 percent
of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 percent were exposed
to tear gas; 96.6 percent witnessed shootings; 95.8 percent witnessed
bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members
injured or killed."
He said children as young as three faced
the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions.
They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken
by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation
of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an
attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer
football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs"
and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest
and have Apache gunships."
Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly
reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive
role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the
response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the
terrible suffering from which it arises." Just as the invasion
of Iraq was a "war by media," so the same can be said
of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine.
As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows,
television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims
of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories"
is seldom explained. Only 9 percent of young people interviewed
in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the
illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian.
The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining
this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism,"
"murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing"
describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.
There are honorable exceptions. The kidnapped
BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche
of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands
of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see
their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem,
the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation
of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period,
as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem,
were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each
case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory
reply.
A censorship by omission runs deep in
western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed
as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction"
and one that "refuses to recognize Israel and wants to fight
not talk." This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is
bent on Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing
proposals for a ten-year cease-fire are ignored, along with a
recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts
to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. "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]."
When I last saw Gaza, driving towards
the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with
a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled
compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They
make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will
climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They
do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can
tell the world.
John
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