Gaza Unsilenced

  Where Do We Go from Here?

  About a month ago I wrote: “I have not given up hope. I still believe that there can be a better future for the relationship between Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.” I added that history has proven that “ethnic conflicts far more intransigent and violent than this one have been resolved, while conflicts that seemed mild have declined into bloodshed. All options are on the table.”

  Today the situation is much more ominous. The optimistic scenario is that this period will be seen in retrospect as the extreme right wing’s rear-guard action, its last hoorah before the failure of its campaign against the establishment of a shared and equal society in Israel. Much more horrendous scenarios are possible, of course: the expulsion of the Arab minority from the Israeli economy and society, or harsher discrimination. It is even possible that the Arab sector may revolt against absorbing the blows and resort to a fierce counter-reaction, which, heaven forbid, would trigger a violent battle between Jews and Arabs in Israel. I do not think this scenario is likely, but it can no longer be dismissed as wholly unthinkable.

  The harsh news for all of us who are working to create a shared and equal society is that our past successes—the strengthening of Arab society and the creation of shared spaces—are precisely what encouraged the counter-reaction. Even if, by means of a supreme effort, we are able to prevent deterioration in the coming years and manage to promote Arab participation in the centers of social and economic power in Israel, the radical right will mobilize all its forces to try to halt this process. We will have to continue to build a shared society, but now we will also have to prepare for the reaction. In addition to our investment in building, we will also have to invest in preparing our response to this counterattack.

  If we, Jewish and Arab citizens who seek a better and shared future in this land, choose life, we have no alternative: We must prepare ourselves for a difficult and protracted struggle. It is in our hands. No one else will do it for us.

  +972 Magazine, August 13, 2014, http://bit.ly/1adLoqw

  4

  Gaza Burns, the World Responds: Analysis and Commentary

  Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza elicited a global outpouring of support and solidarity unseen in recent years. People of conscience watched the terror unfold live on their screens and timelines and did what they knew how. In newspapers and on e-zines and in blogs, they deconstructed Israeli actions and doublespeak. Some addressed the “what” of Israel’s assault and drew broad parallels to Israeli actions of the past, while providing much needed context, rightly noting that it should be seen as part of a systemic Israeli attempt to pound the Palestinians into subordination. Other analysts attempted to explain the “why”: why exterminate 2000 some men, women and children, given Israel’s already shaky moral standing in the world? Was Israeli policy borne of desperation, the need to maintain a settler-colonial project begun with violence, or was it simply a sick attempt to keep Gaza in check? Gaza has been in survival mode for over a decade, we are reminded, reeling from a crippling siege aimed at bringing them to their knees with the complicity of neighboring Egypt and American allies in the region, such as Saudi Arabia. Most important, we are reminded that this assault had nothing to do with rockets or tunnels, and everything to do with maintaining control over Palestinian land and lives.

  Something Rotten in the Operations Manual

  Sharif S. Elmusa

  An antecedent of the mass killing and destruction of entire neighborhoods in Gaza—all the while blaming the Palestinians themselves for the carnage and picturing them darkly as terrorists sacrificing their own children—can be found in S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella, Khirbet Khizeh. Its author, who served as an intelligence officer in the Israeli army at the time, describes the siege and expulsion of the population of this fictional Palestinian village by Jewish irregulars in 1948. The novel’s narrator opens with the “operational orders” and instructs the officers in charge that “no violent outbursts or orderly misconduct...would be permitted.” He then explains that this order would be unintelligible without first inspecting the “information” section, which warns the recruits against “infiltrators,” “terrorist cells,” and other such menacing presences.

  The “hope” was that they would expel the inhabitants and blow up or burn their dwellings—as happened in real life in about 500 Palestinian villages—“with such courtesy and restraint, born of true culture, and this would be a sign of a wind of change, of decent upbringing, and, perhaps, even of...the great Jewish soul.” The implicit question posed here is, Can a malevolent purpose be accomplished with courtesy and refined manners?

  Khirbet Khizeh has proven prophetic in foretelling the enduring Israeli “habits” of dealing with the Palestinians. The operation orders have become Israel’s overarching Operations Manual of policy and hasbara, or propaganda, of the practices of violence and dispossession, of racial exclusion, of rendering the Palestinians a state of exception. The Operations Manual gives guidelines for evading moral responsibility for the malevolence, and projecting it instead on the Palestinians themselves. And it is not the Operations Manual of Israel alone; it also circulates in various editions in the corridors of power and mainstream media in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Europe.

  The Operations Manual has been well at work during the Gaza invasion and its aftermath. It instructed officers of the armored brigades, captains of navy ships, and air force pilots to bomb-destroy-target civilians and their houses, schools, shelters, hospitals, and mosques. The “information” section warned of Hamas terrorists and infiltrators, lethal rockets, and sinister tunnels. The “hope,” as in the cleansing of Khirbet Khizeh, must no doubt have been that what is now branded “the most moral army in the world” would leave behind the colossal wreckage of the houses of the poor, thousands of civilians dead and wounded, among them hundreds of children, lasting traumas in every mind and heart—the hope was that it would do it once more, with refinement and restraint, the hallmarks of Israeli culture.

  The destruction of the Shija‘ia district of Gaza City, July 20. A Ma’an News article on the devastation described the area as “a moonscape strewn with bodies.” At least 68 people were killed in that district on that day.1

  Photo by Mohammed Asad

  Nonetheless, the magnitude of the carnage in this 2014 round, broadcast in real time around the globe, and with the United Nations Goldstone Report already charging Israel with war crimes in its 2009 campaign against Gaza, would be too taxing even for Israel—which has been inoculated against accountability by more than 40 U.S. vetoes in the UN Security Council. After all, the Palestinians were getting pummelled, but they were resisting valiantly with means that lag a hundred years behind Israeli materiel, and those who could reach Israel through the tunnels targeted only the military; there were alternative venues to spread the news of the war; and the United States itself was still trying to wiggle out of its debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. People in numerous capitals and cities around the globe, including many Jews, took to the streets and to their computer screens to protest, and to demand a halt to the bloody expedition. And several South American governments—whose countries had for long been fertile grounds for U.S. economic and military exploits—recalled their ambassadors from Tel Aviv.

  To fend off the gathering tide, the Israeli propaganda machine and its affiliates flipped the pages of the information section of the Operations Manual to the “alibi” clauses. The alibi consisted of simple declarative statements, like missiles and advertisement: “Hamas uses children as human shields,” or “Israel has the right to defend itself.” More acrobatic formulations came from the Israeli military: “Some bomb shelters shelter people, some shelter bombs,” the former shelters are clearly Israel’s whereas the second are the tunnels dug by Hamas. Elie Wiesel summoned the sacred for the task. Taking advantage of his status as Noble Peace Laureate and of his parents dying in the Holocaust, he published a full page advertisement on August 4, 2014, in the New York Times w
ith a horror movie photograph of a Hamas sniper, and the heading “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it is Hamas’s turn.”

  It does not take an analytic philosopher to uncover the logic that underlies such assertions: Palestinians do not care about their children and do not value their lives, or that they are so naïve as to believe that the Israelis won’t harm their civilians if their fighters hid behind them, or are cowards who are afraid to engage the Israeli military. Repeated by the White House and by the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany and disseminated by dedicated Israeli media militias in cyberspace, these sound bites became devastatingly effective gospel, a frame with which to perceive and interpret what happens on the ground.

  When it comes to Palestinians valuing their own or their children’s lives, it is first of all axiomatic that both human and nonhuman animals instinctively value the life of their offspring, except perhaps in pathological cases or moments. The instinct is linked to the genetic drive toward self-perpetuation. Humans also acquire it from culture in the broad sense. As children, we watch grown-ups grieve at the loss of their close relations and friends.

  I learned the value of the brother from my mother repeating year after year the story of how her brother Ahmad was killed defending our village al-Abbasiyya, near Lod, in 1948. He was one of the rag-tag volunteers, and was shot after his rifle malfunctioned. The village had been occupied by Jewish forces on May 5, 1948, then retaken by the resistance and held for a month, only to be captured for good. My mother and other relatives remembered him as an exceptionally warm and generous man. He was not religious, and did not perform the ritual daily prayers and did not fast in Ramadan. When family members went to retrieve his body from the police station, he smelled so sweet, my mother stressed, because he was a martyr. And at the moment of the story, she wept every time she told it, as if the words and the tears became his reincarnation.

  Cultures make sense of death each in its own way. In the United States the official mourning rituals refer to the soldiers killed on the battlefield as “fallen,” and remind us that they “did not die in vain.” Instead of the imaginary heavenly rewards for the martyrs, the fallen are “laid to rest,” if their families so wish, in Arlington National Cemetery. For my mother, and in the Palestinian vernacular in general, “martyr” connoted that the person died nobly, for a purpose, defending Palestine. It did not suggest that people sought to be martyrs, only that they would be considered so if they died in the line of duty.

  Israel’s allegation that for Palestinians life is cheap has a long pedigree among Western imperialists. The words of General Westmoreland, quoted in the 1974 film Hearts and Minds about the Vietnam War, always stuck in my mind. Generalizing, the general opined, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.” Westmoreland is a worthy heir to the notorious lights of European empires, the likes of the Britons Cecil Rhodes (South Africa) and Lord Cromer (Egypt), and the French Field Marshal Bugeaud (Algeria). This history of dehumanizing the “Orientals” still lurks below the surface in Western culture, despite the anti-colonial struggles and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States that made it impolitic to voice such unalloyed prejudice publicly. The need for “Orientals,” for barbarians, as a “kind of solution,” persists. Today they are the Arabs and Muslims, and the Israeli information section of the Operations Manual feeds on and into the latent racism.

  What is a human shield anyway, this alloy of the human and the technological? True, we are all cyborgs these days, with one prostheses or another; in the “human shield,” however, the human is grafted onto the metal, which makes it a strange coinage that works only metaphorically; human flesh is poor armor. Deploying children as shields therefore assumes that the Palestinians believe that the Israeli army is indeed a moral army that would be ever so conscientious in its choice of targets, cognizant of the children’s presence and their vulnerability, and fire its missiles and shells with utter refinement as to spare the children, and by extension the fighters.

  In fact, more than 60 percent of Gazans are refugees from numerous Khirbet Khizehs. Since 1948, they have been through small and big “wars” waged by Israel, through two uprisings, and two previous major invasions in 2009 and 2012. The Palestinians know only too well the long history of abuse of children and adults by Israeli army and security, which has been documented by first-hand accounts, journalists, and reports by human rights organizations. Here is how Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz on 24 August put it, “We must admit the truth: Palestinian children in Israel are considered like insects. This is a horrific statement, but there is no other way to describe the mood in Israel in the summer of 2014.” Did this piece of information come to the attention of Elie Wiesel before he wrote his eloquent advertisement, or did he prefer the bliss of denial?

  Still, why did the Israeli army finish off the life of more than 2,100 people, more than three quarters of them civilians, when its casualties were less than 80? Why kill 500 children and introduce to the vocabulary of war the “unknown child,” unknown because the members of his or her family were all gone? Why wipe out entire families? Why did one soldier publicize on the Internet that he knocked out 13 children? Why did the navy willfully gun down kids playing on the seashore? Why did the air force destroy the sole electric power station and the greenhouses that farmers used to plant flowers for export to Europe? Why did Israel feel it must inflict this immeasurable misery on Gaza? Why did it do all this despite steady protests and appeals from so many people and from the United Nations and the Red Cross and numerous world bodies? What did the Operations Manual tell the officers to do? What types of “information” did it supply them with? Who are the barbarians?

  French Field Marshall Bugeaud once exhorted his men in Algeria during the 1838 expedition to Constantine, “you must show yourselves strong everywhere at once to influence the Arab mind. It is useless to try treating [sic] with the Arabs, unless we are victorious; they would laugh in our faces. The Arabs respect and honour no one but the victorious enemy.”

  Are these the kinds of thought that went on the mind of Israeli leaders like Moshe Yaalon, the defense minister during the Gaza campaign? In the light of Algeria’s history, it is hard to resist laughing in the face of the dead general. And, it would be truly sweet to “laugh our joy” in the faces of a few Israeli generals--for a moment.

  In the denouement of Khirbet Khizeh, the narrator sums up:

  “We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile.” What for? So, as to have “Our very own Khirbet Khizeh,” with problems of absorption, a cooperative, a school, political parties, and maybe even a synagogue.

  In other words, multiplied a few thousand times, the terrible deeds were committed so that Israel could be established. Could it be that the maintenance of a project begun with violence and disregard for the natives of the land requires like means?

  Institutionalised Disregard for Palestinian Life

  Mouin Rabbani

  One either rejects the killing of non-combatants on principle or takes a more tribal approach to such matters. In the case of Israel and the Palestinians, the global outpouring of grief and condemnation over the killing of three Israeli youths in the occupied West Bank is the moral equivalent of Rolf Harris denouncing Jimmy Savile.

  Over the past 14 years, Israel has killed Palestinian children at a rate of more than two a week. There seems to be no Israeli child in harm’s way that Barack Obama will not compare to his own daughters, but their Palestinian counterparts are brushed aside with mantras about Israel’s right to self-defense. The institutionalized disregard for Palestinian life in the West helps explain not only why Palestinians resort to violence, but also Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip.

  The current round of escalation is generally dated from the moment three Israeli youths went missing on June 12. Two Palestinian boys were shot dead in Ra
mallah on May 15, but that—like any number of incidents in the intervening month when Israel exercised its right to colonize and dispossess—is considered insignificant.

  Binyamin Netanyahu immediately blamed Hamas for the three Israeli teenagers’ disappearance. The White House almost as quickly confirmed Hamas’s guilt, which has since been treated as established fact by the media. Yet the culprits remain at large and their institutional affiliation unclear. For its part Hamas, which like other Palestinian organizations never hesitates to claim responsibility for its actions and is prone to exaggerate its activities, has this time denied involvement.

  What we do know is that a distress call made by one of the Israeli youths on June 12 included the sound of gunfire, which led the Israeli security establishment to conclude they had been killed. Netanyahu suppressed the information, and used the pretext of a hostage rescue operation to launch an organized military rampage throughout the West Bank. His demagoguery, even by his standards, plumbed new depths of vulgarity. To blame the subsequent burning alive of a 16-year-old Palestinian on a few errant Israeli fanatics (after attempts to portray it as the murder of a gay boy by his own family had failed) is to pretend such barbarism exists independently of the colonial and political contexts that produce it.