One notable example of a prominent American journalist buying Israel’s line hook, line, and sinker was that of Diane Sawyer, who commented to her viewers in early July 2014, that what they were seeing on some shocking video footage showing badly pulverized homes and their distressed residents was “an Israeli family trying to salvage what they can” after “rockets rain[ed] down on Israel today as Israel tried to shoot them out of the sky.” But the footage was not of Israelis or even Israel, but of the aftermath of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, and a Palestinian family gathering belongings in the smoking debris of a missile-hit home.19 She later apologized to viewers for the mistake—but the broader message of “vulnerable, beleaguered Israelis reeling from lethal Palestinian rockets” probably lingered. (During the 51 days of war, the Palestinian factions’ generally primitive rockets caused only very limited damage to Israeli civilian structures—the degree of damage to Israeli military targets was subject to strict Israeli censorship and was never reported in the media. Six civilians died in Israel during the fighting, along with 67 members of the IDF.20)
The Jewish-American scholar-activist Norman Finklestein has written, “What renders Israel’s abuses unique throughout the world is the relentless effort to justify that which cannot be justified.”21 We would add that it is the impunity that Israel enjoys in the West and the receptivity there to its propaganda that render Israel unique—not the fact of its propagandizing alone, since all who commit atrocities anywhere in the world are always at pains to justify them.
The Digital Battlefield
The assault of 2014 was arguably the first large-scale Israeli atrocity to unfold live on our timelines and social media feeds. During Operation Cast Lead of 2008–2009, Israel had at times imposed a complete media and telecommunications blackout of Gaza, but this was not the case during the 2014 attack.
Many have argued that social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook, was an equalizer for Palestinians, accomplishing just that, leveling out the imbalance of power, and turning traditional media hierarchy on its head—or at the very least, that it provided the besieged with alternative tools of creative resistance with which to counter Israel’s bloody and fully funded offensive. On Twitter alone, for example, the hashtag #Gazaunderattack was used more than four million times in the first two weeks of the assault.
Israel, for its part, was funding digital war rooms—recruiting supporters to take to the internet and troll tweets, Facebook posts, and the like, and posting its own cartoonish propaganda graphics. Celebrities ranging from professional basketball player Dwight Howard to actress Selena Gomez and singer Rihanna and even boyband sensation Zayn Malik joined in the sometimes raucous social-media discussions—and were often quickly chastised by Israel, speedily recanting their support for Palestinians or else forced to do damage control by restricting their tweeting to something “less controversial.”22
Within minutes of posting #FreePalestine on his Twitter account, Dwight Howard deleted the post, replacing it instead with one that read: “previous tweet was a mistake. I have never commented on international politics and never will.” (The Nation magazine sports editor Dave Zirin later opined that we should thank Howard for exposing “how Palestinian people are imprisoned not only by walls, barbed wire, and checkpoints but also by Western hypocrisy” and that “acknowledging the humanity of the Palestinian people comes with a price.”23)
And sometimes, as in the case of Palestinian-American professor of native studies Steven Salaita, that price is your job. Salaita’s previous promise of a tenured position at the University of Illinois was rescinded after he posted a series of tweets decrying Israeli actions in Gaza, some of them featured in this book. After Salaita started posting his tweets, a student and former intern with the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) started a petition accusing him of anti-Semitism, hate speech, and “lack of civility.” Salaita countered that his tweets were “pulled out of a much larger history of tweeting and general political commentary that indicates quite strongly and clearly that I’m deeply opposed to all forms of bigotry and racism including anti-Semitism.”24
But with information at the speed of a tweet comes, too, the risk of creating caricatured reductionist representations of Palestinians: victims to be pitied, heroes to be idolized, numbers to be quantified, but never quite real human beings with the entirety of emotions and behaviors that might involve.
This book’s contributions reveal the profundity of both Palestinian culture and Palestinian voices in their insistence on life and defense of their rights to live a decent life. It is an attempt to give faces to those rendered faceless and reduced to mere numbers. It also presents other Palestinian voices or voices inspired by the steadfastness of Palestinians.
Gaza and the Palestinian Condition
There will be those who ask, Why care about Gaza? There are surely more catastrophic conflicts, after all, hungrier tummies, more desperate citizens, higher fatalities, crueler means of extermination, all vying for our divided and beleaguered attentions and increasingly desensitized consciousness—not only in the rest of Palestine but in the entire region. So why is Gaza so special?
The late great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish famously said of Gaza, that it “equals the history of an entire homeland.” If one wants to understand the Palestinian condition, the thinking goes, and Israel’s long-term strategies and visions, then look no further than Gaza.
Israel’s continuous aggression, siege, and violations of all basic human rights as well as its occupation of Palestinian land, sea, and airspace and theft of natural resources continue to be the root cause of all the trouble in occupied Palestine. Israel’s continued presence as an occupying power deprives Palestinians of their freedoms.
In this sense, writes Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly, scenes of devastation from Israel’s summer assault in Gaza “do not belong to this time or this place alone. They are instances in what is now a century-long confrontation with colonialism. They are part of an archive that is the Palestinian condition. In the immediate present, to live in Gaza is to live in perpetual search for refuge,”25 where there is no refuge to be found.
Gaza has been subject to some form of closure since the implementation of the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s,26 when Israeli authorities cancelled the exit permit that allowed Palestinians in Gaza to travel freely to the rest of occupied Palestine. The siege, in its more current manifestation, is simply the “culmination of a process that began twenty years ago,” according to Sai Bashi, the former director of the Israeli human-rights group GISHA.27
In 2005, Israel unilaterally dismantled its settlements and military infrastructure from within Gaza and relocated them to the occupied West Bank and to the borders of Gaza respectively, in a move described by the advisor to then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon as “formaldehyde” intended to freeze the broader diplomatic process “indefinitely.”28 But it was not a withdrawal, nor was it by any stretch of the imagination (including the legal one) an “end to occupation.” All of Gaza’s effective markers of sovereignty—the benchmarks of a cessation of occupation29—remained under Israeli control: borders, airspace, maritime access, control of the West Bank, which together with Gaza, constitute a single territorial unit, and even the population registry and the taxation system.
Immediately after the Disengagement, Gaza was sealed for months on end, resulting in an unprecedented humanitarian crisis unseen in all of Gaza’s then 38 years of occupation,30 leading then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to observe that many Palestinians were being “deprived of basic human needs.”31
It was the placement of what would become an ever-tightening noose around Gaza, intended to choke it of its livelihood and render it forever dependent on the powers that would continue to control it from afar. The blockade of Gaza intensified even further after the elections of Hamas’s Change and Reform party in 2006 and their subsequent consolidation of power in 2007, after their defeat of CIA-funded Fatah militias led
by strongman Mohammad Dahlan aimed at toppling them.
Regardless, the blockade served no real security purpose, but was rather a very calculated tool of collective punishment. GISHA reports again: “Beginning in September 2007, Israel openly stated that it would restrict the movement of goods into and out of Gaza not in order to protect against security threats stemming from the transfer, but rather as part of a policy to apply ‘pressure’ or ‘sanctions’....”32
The goals of the current and continuing siege on Gaza according to a high-ranking Israeli government official in the Netanyahu government, are “no development, no prosperity, no humanitarian crisis.”33 In other words, to prevent prosperity and development by targeting the bedrock of a self-sufficient and productive economy, while preventing an all-out media outcry. In line with this calculated policy, it should come as no surprise that Israel has systematically targeted Gaza’s productive sector, specifically its institutions, agricultural, and water systems and other infrastructure.34 Twenty percent of the animal population—some 15,000 animals—were killed in the attacks, and half of Gaza’s poultry perished, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.35
And yet, despite all this, we seldom hear of world leaders or media citing the Palestinian need for security or the Palestinian right of self-defense. Who, after all, would tolerate thousands of tons of bombs raining down on them—not once, or twice, but three separate times within five years? Who would tolerate a siege so asphyxiating, so enduring, that it has created a situation, to quote the United Nations, of “fishing without water, farming without land”? Where young people are categorically banned from traveling to purse their higher educations? Where your freedom to live and love and prosper as a family is, too, interrupted?
In the words of Palestinian-American academic Rashid Khalidi, whose “Collective Punishment in Gaza” we include in the concluding chapter of this book:
“The pretexts change: they elected Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and on. But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of ghettos…is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back.”36
Holding Israel Accountable
Today, Gaza is back to the untenable status quo. The challenge of writing this book alone speaks volumes about that status quo: one of us, Laila El-Haddad, is based in the United States, and is unable to return to Gaza, though she possesses a Gaza residency identity card, or hawiya; when she does travel, her husband, a Palestinian with refugee status who is denied his right to return to his own native land by Israel, cannot travel with her. The other, Refaat Alareer, returned to Gaza shortly after the end of “Protective Edge”—but he has been unable to leave Gaza to resume his studies in Malaysia. Thusly, the fragmentation of the Palestinian people continues to be actively enforced by Israel. It took months of coordinating over Skype during three-hour windows of electricity due to rotating power outages there, for us to pull this book together. Between January 1 and June 3, 2015, Gaza’s Rafah Crossing into Egypt has been open only five days, and only a select few of the roughly 60,000 travelers waiting to leave or enter Gaza have been allowed to pass through.
As for reconstruction efforts, only a fraction of the $3.5 billion in aid pledged to “rebuild” Gaza in the fall of 2014 has actually materialized. And what little cement has made it through is unaffordable to the vast majority of the population dependent on aid handouts. Oxfam International, which blamed Israeli restrictions on imports of construction materials into the Gaza Strip, lamented that around 100,000 people are still homeless after the 2014 summer assault. Oxfam has warned that it could take 100 years to rebuild Gaza and that “only an end to the blockade of Gaza will ensure that people can rebuild their lives.” Nearly a year after the Gaza onslaught, the UN reports, “not a single totally destroyed home has been rebuilt.”37
But the question we should all be asking is what good will it do to rebuild the laboratory, the holding pen, the ghetto that has become Gaza, if the overriding cause of its suffering, and the power structures that keep this misery in play, are not put in check? Should we not, then, work together to end injustice, oppression, and occupation in Palestine? Certainly that would contribute to peace throughout the whole Middle East.
By now, it should be clear that this story is not simply the story of a 51-day attack. Nor is it one about 2,200 people killed during the attack. It is not even a story of an Orwellian world where war is peace and victims are villains. It’s a story of what happens when, despite the ability to do so, powerful nations choose to remain silent or, worse, are complicit through financing the crimes being committed in the name of their taxpayers.
Gaza is the example, and continues to be the example, time and again, for what happens when we fail to hold our leaders accountable for their actions and complicity. It is the story of steadfastness and resilience, of decades-long dispossession and an insistence on surviving and existing with dignity despite calculated efforts to rid Palestinians of their humanity and existence. And if we aren’t moved to act in solidarity, or at the very least, speak out, then we have lost everything.
1
Everyone Is a Target:
The Human Toll
Among other unscrupulous objectives, Israel’s 2014 summer onslaught against Gaza intended to sow despair and anguish among Palestinians and to bring them to their knees. Shrill propaganda by Israeli spokes-people and their media supporters was designed to whitewash this catastrophe, but the scale of the devastation made that an impossible task. This chapter gives a selection of personal accounts, reflections, and reports of what actually took place. This was not a war on Hamas, as the conventional discourse would have us believe, and it had little to do with tunnels or rockets. Neither was it related to Israel’s security, which was never threatened by children playing on the beach or on rooftops or in a UN school—all easily identifiable by Israel’s precision-guided munitions. Families crammed in their living rooms in the middle of the night, or huddled around a candle to break their day-long fast, or escaping after a “knock on the roof” chased them from their beds were knowingly and purposefully eviscerated in their entirety by the most heavily armed and highly financed power in the Middle East.
The Story of My Brother, Martyr Mohammed Alareer
Refaat Alareer
My brother Mohammed Alareer, 31, a father of two, was killed by an Israeli airstrike while he was at home. While he was at home.
No one knows yet if he bled for three days or if he died of the shockwaves from the explosion, or the sound, or the debris, or the shrapnel, or the fire or by them all.
But my brother Mohammed is gone.
His two very beautiful children—Raneem, four, and one-year-old Hamza—are without a father forever. And our big house of seven flats is gone.
A house of four floors but thousands of stories is no more. The stories, however, will live to bear witness to the most brutally wild occupation the world has ever known.
Hamada
I am the second of fourteen children. Mohammed is number five after three boys and one girl. Of all my early memories in life, the birth of Mohammed is the most vivid. I was only four then.
When I heard they wanted to name my new brother Mohammed, I started crying and shouting, “I don’t want you to name him Mohammed. I want you to name him Hamada! I want Hamada!”
I used to scream my lungs out every time someone called him Mohammed until no one dared do so. He was then known to all as Hamada (which is a pet name for Mohammed). Everyone called him Hamada except, to my disappointment, my dad, who always used his official name, Mohammed.
Ever since, I felt a very strong connection towards Hamada. It was like he was my son, like I owned him, like I had to take care of him and to make sure his name remained Hamada.
Born in 1983, Hamada was timid but humorous and adventurous. He would be silent most of the time, but when he did speak, he was usually seeking to go beyond the bo
undaries of the given.
The second intifada in the early 2000s gave him his real, life-changing experiences as some of his school friends were killed by Israel and he took leading roles in their funeral processions.
Hamada went to college and finished a two-year degree in public relations, which equipped him with skills to reach out to people. At the beginning of the second intifada, in a matter of two years, people from all over the Gaza Strip started asking me if Hamada was my brother.
Surprised, I would smile and nod. And in my mind I would wonder what made him rise to fame. I realized later that my shy brother had started leading demonstrations and reciting poetic chants to mobilize the masses protesting an Israeli attack on Jerusalem, or he would lead nationalistic chants at the many funerals of martyrs we had in Shuja‘iya (locally, we pronounce it “Shijaiya”) and elsewhere.
Creative
Of all our fourteen brothers and sisters, Hamada was the most distinguished and creative. As he began his twenties, he became a totally different person, with many friends and many connections. As he became more outgoing, he also became even more creative and proactive.
Gaza Unsilenced Page 3