Gaza Unsilenced

  If it was known that there were no hostages to be rescued, what was Israel trying to achieve? A key objective was reversing the tentative steps taken by Fatah and Hamas towards national reconciliation. Israel prefers a divided Palestinian polity partially ruled by militant Islamists to a unified one led by the pliant Mahmoud Abbas, who remains committed to negotiations and publicly proclaims security collaboration with Israel to be “sacred.” Concerned that a reconciliation at a time of growing Palestinian unrest could lead to another uprising, Israel sought to pre-empt it. In doing so, it rearrested a number of Palestinians released in the 2011 prisoner exchange with Hamas. In the context of the latest collapse of American-sponsored diplomacy, and a growing global consensus that Israel, its appetite for Palestinian land and failure to fulfil its commitments regarding prisoner releases were to blame, Netanyahu leaped at the chance to change the narrative from colonialism and its consequences to terrorism.

  Israel’s actions have produced major unrest in the West Bank and among the Palestinian community in Israel, as well as a new confrontation with the Gaza Strip. It’s all still a long way from a third intifada, however, primarily because the organizational infrastructure that produced and sustained the first two is degraded, no longer exists, or is controlled by leaders who prefer the perks and privileges of office to struggle and sacrifice.

  Hamas, too, would rather avoid a large-scale confrontation with Israel. But, in contrast to recent months, it is now meeting violence with violence rather than enforcing calm. It has less to lose than at any point since it took power in Gaza in 2007. Its main objectives in the recent reconciliation agreement—payment of salaries for its civil servants, reopening the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border, reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, and enhanced regional and international legitimacy—have failed to materialize. The new Palestinian Authority government, though formed with Hamas’s endorsement, acts as if Gaza does not exist, and continues to co-operate with Israel against Hamas in the West Bank. The unremitting hostility of Egypt’s new rulers to Gaza and Hamas means there isn’t a credible mediator, unless Turkey or Qatar steps into the breach.

  Taken together, these developments could make for a confrontation between Israel and Hamas longer and more intense than either party bargained for.

  London Review of Books (blog), July 9, 2014, http://bit.ly/VK2hl8

  International Solidarity with Palestine Grows with Israeli Assault

  Beth Staton

  Three weeks ago, a coalition of organizations published a heartfelt and urgent call for action. “We Palestinians trapped inside the bloodied and besieged Gaza Strip call on conscientious people all over the world to act,” it said. “Protest and intensify the boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel until it ends this murderous attack on our people and is held to account.”

  The plea, from groups including trade unions, women’s organizations and press representatives, was issued four days into the Gaza onslaught. It wondered, grimly, if the number killed in the new fighting would reach the 1,400 of Operation Cast Lead in 2008. Now, the death toll stands at 1,865. It isn’t likely to remain at that figure for long: the carnage, which razed entire neighborhoods, left Gaza with wounds from which it’s difficult to imagine a recovery.

  Such a bleak picture suggests the coalition’s call went unanswered. And indeed, throughout the weeks of Operation Protective Edge, governments have maintained trade and military aid to Israel, with rarely more than muted censure of civilian casualties.

  But the call was recognized in other ways. For the past month, the streets from Sana‘a to Washington, D.C., have been flooded with demonstrators demanding an end to the carnage and the Israeli occupation. Online appeals for peace have attracted tens of thousands of signatures. The campaign to boycott Israel—already steadily gaining momentum—has achieved major victories and adopted new tactics.

  “Even with public opinion in the United States, recent polls have shown that the only demographic really supporting Israel is old, white Republican men,” said Josh Ruebner, Policy Director at the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation. “There’s a clear indication that support for Israel is becoming a more marginalized phenomenon.”

  In the July air of Kensington, a wealthy West London neighborhood overlooking Hyde Park, that sense of a changing mood was tangible. In a last-minute demonstration just a few days after the operation began, several thousand people, with a powerful showing from the city’s many Muslim communities, brought “Free Palestine” chants to the Israeli Embassy, shutting down traffic through the upscale High Street and commandeering a red London bus. Two weeks later, 45,000 demonstrators marched from Downing Street to the embassy. London was just one among scores of global cities whose streets were transformed by fury following atrocities in Gaza.

  “Now, international activists are showing their own government how the Palestinians are suffering,” said Mousa Abu Maria, an activist with the Palestine Solidarity Project in the West Bank. “They show that people stand with us, behind Gaza, and that we are not alone.”

  But although mass protests are photogenic, do they achieve anything? It’s a pertinent question for activists in Palestine and around the world, and one that’s closely tied to deeper conundrums about the role that international campaigning should play in the Palestinian struggle. Mezna Qato and Kareem Rabie argue that global activism can mistakenly focus exclusively on discrete issues—violations of international law or bloody onslaughts such as the current attack on Gaza or the occupation itself—missing the broader fight for Palestinians self-determination. That’s amplified by superficial, fleeting involvement, a tendency to victimize and speaking on Palestinians’ behalf. By disregarding Palestinian action and “believing the road to liberation lies elsewhere,” Palestinian activist Maryam Barghouti explains, “you are not expressing solidarity; you are expressing a white savior mentality.” If the Palestinian struggle is against colonialism and for national liberation, when Western activists attempt to shape its terms they just perpetuate the imperialism behind the oppression they are trying to fight.

  For the last month, Friends of Al-Aqsa has set its sights firmly on Gaza, in the context of ending the siege and occupation, and from a broader human rights perspective. “I think the central and most important factor for us is to work for justice and for equality, to say that all people should be treated equally before the law,” said Ismail Patel, chair of the organization. “Most people can agree on that. We must have some kind of standard globally, and highlight the hypocrisy that takes place by allowing some people to get away with certain things and not others.”

  Friends of Al-Aqsa has drawn on diverse tactics in its work. It’s been instrumental in organizing marches across the United Kingdom—and is increasing its efforts to lobby political representatives and recruit volunteers—with a hope to turn those involved into active advocates who can rally further support in their communities and media. And central to its strategy is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, campaign called for by Palestinian civil society in 2005 and perhaps the most clearly defined framework that international Palestine activists are organizing around.

  Reiterated in the July 12 call to action and pushed hard since Operation Protective Edge, BDS has been building momentum for years. “We work very closely with the Palestinian BDS National Committee responding to Palestinian civil society campaigns,” said Josh Ruebner. “This is what Palestinians are asking for from civil society.” And it’s crucial that the BDS strategy doesn’t just look to end the occupation, but calls on equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and the right of return. “We agree that any just peace needs to address these components as well,” he explained.

  The U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation expects an uptick in BDS campus actions in the fall, spurred, in part, by horror at the terrible images and rising death toll in Gaza. And recent weeks have witnessed dramatic developments in the campaign both large and small: Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador and Peru recall
ed their ambassadors from Israel; George Soros, Tesco and John Lewis all distanced themselves from settlement profits; and on August 4, the U.K. National Union of Students voted to endorse BDS.

  “We have the beginning of a global movement now,” said Patel. “Our role is to translate that into political action. Now opinion needs to shift to such a level that the narrative changes, that people support the Palestinians.”

  In the West Bank, Abu Maria knows international action has to be carefully coordinated with the goals and strategy of Palestinian civil society. “To make real work with Palestinians directly is very important,” he said. “Now the Palestinians have seen how internationals are important to our community, and since 2003 the international solidarity is growing day by day.”

  “I am from Beit Ommar,” he continued. “The Friday before they killed three people, and shot maybe 60 people. Why? Just because they demonstrated for people in Gaza. That’s why international solidarity is so important now.”

  Waging Nonviolence, August 8, 2014, http://bit.ly/1FaQxaB

  Gaza Traces

  Kim Jensen

  A shorter version of this essay will be published in Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (New York: OR Books, Fall 2015) edited by Ru Freeman.

  We have been asked where we stand, as writers and artists, in relation to the systematic human rights violations against the Palestinian people. In order to approach this question, I want to draw closer to this mesmerizing image of three children on a beach in the Gaza strip that was widely shared on social media during the Israeli assault this past summer. Studying the photograph and the story of its origins may shed light on what it means to bear witness to a human catastrophe.

  During the military siege on Gaza in the summer of 2014, many international journalists were staying at Al-Deira Hotel, overlooking the Mediterranean. Reporters and cameramen often watched the children of fishermen playing on the beach in front of the hotel, and sometimes went down to play with them.

  At 4 pm on July 16, a day of heavy bombardments, the Israeli navy targeted a ramshackle hut where fishermen stored their nets. No Palestinian resistance fighters were present, as numerous eyewitnesses testified, but a group of children was playing nearby. After the first explosion, the survivors ran for safety. A few seconds later, the Israelis let loose a second attack directly aiming at the fleeing children. Four of them—Ismael Muhammad Bakr, ZakariaAhedBakr, AhedAtifBakr, and Muhammad RamizBakr—were killed. Journalists who witnessed and filmed the incident later reported that it was abundantly clear, even from a distance, that the running figures on the beach were unarmed children.

  The Bakr boys running on the beach, as filmed by a journalist for the French television network TF1.

  Screen capture by Trevor Hogan.

  This haunting photograph was captured and tweeted by the Irish rugby player and Palestine solidarity activist Trevor Hogan. On the evening of the beach massacre, he was sitting in his living room in Dublin watching the news coverage, and happened to notice a fleeting image of running children. Rewinding and fast-forwarding—Trevor finally managed to isolate the frame. He snapped an iPhone picture and posted it online, creating one of the most indelible images from Israel’s summer offensive.

  I choose to reflect on this image and not the images of the aftermath: the children’s bent, dismembered bodies in the sand. The disturbing pictures of their corpses—the unthinkable outcome of modern warfare—are revolting and obscene. To demand an extended gaze upon them is a different project, equally legitimate. It is important for people, especially those of us whose governments perpetrate such war crimes, to see and to know exactly what bombs, mortar shells, and missiles do to living bodies—and to confront our own complicity.

  But I want to return to the spirit in which Trevor Hogan created this image. Overwhelmed by feelings of horror, disgust, and helplessness, he worked with a clear intention: to create something that would “allow people who don’t wish to view a graphic image of war crimes to connect with the gravity of what had happened while highlighting the split second in time before their lives were taken.” His objective was to move people to action.

  How to read this photograph without context? At first glance and to the uninitiated, it might read simply as a blurry snapshot of some appealing children in the distance. Upon further study, we might think of it as a representation of childhood itself, wistful, hazy in detail—a frozen moment of transient, ephemeral innocence. Even if we knew of the tragic war surrounding the children, we might believe that this was the boys’ last moments of play on the beach.

  But this is not an image of joy; it’s an image of terror. These children weren’t playing; they were fleeing for their lives.

  They have now become traces on our screens, traces left behind from the persistent carnage inflicted on the people of Palestine. Like raindrops streaking a windowpane, the image lifts this moment into permanence. It resurrects other stories. In a cascade of associations, it reawakens the memory of Huda Ghaliya who watched her family slaughtered before her eyes on a beach in Beit Lahia. It resuscitates twelve-year old Muhammad al-Durra dying in his father’s arms during the Second Intifada, and the powerful requiem that Mahmoud Darwish wrote for him: “Muhammad/is a poor angel, trapped at close range/by a cold-blooded hunter/in the eye of a camera that captures each movement/of a child becoming one with his shadow.”

  For me the photograph also conjures the sad, luminous spirit that inhabits the writings of American poet and novelist Fanny Howe who has spoken of her work as an attempt to “describe a preserved radiance—and to show that there is an invisible “elseness” to everything.” She writes: “You go on because of it, but it’s the thing you can’t quite see.”

  This image from Gaza, something of the magic and sorrow in it, provides a visual corollary of that preserved radiance and that “elseness” that Howe describes. The enigmatic combination of beauty and grief.The glow of the yellow sand, a kind of halo for the fleeing children.

  The fact that we have this image at all is a matter of chance and craft. It was chance that Western journalists were on hand to film to the casual, deliberate slaughter of innocent Palestinian civilians that has been ongoing for over sixty years. It was also chance that this committed activist happened to be watching the news and realized he had seen something important.

  Chance is at play in the symbolic elements of the composition. The children’s clothing—the green, red, and white shirts when combined with the looming shadow on the foreground form the colors of the Palestinian flag—lifting this fleeting moment to the level of mythos and national iconography. Fate is already printed here, maktoob, written, as if martyrdom was already stamped on this moment.

  The children’s faces are darkened, anonymous—like most of the nameless victims of war and violence. Their facelessness makes them all the more universal. In their impersonal presence they become emblematic of all children—we recognize that these could be any children, could be our children, your children, our neighbor’s children.

  They hover in shadow in that tenuous space just before they become bodies. The photograph neither memorializes them as the boys that they were with their individual personalities and traits nor does it reduce them to inanimate flesh.

  These are some of the elements of chance, but craft is also at work.

  Trevor intentionally captured the perfectly matching strides of the children, apprehended midflight like sea birds, the joy of innocence, the tenuous connection to the earth at that instant. The graininess of the photograph is part of its quiet splendor. The children’s vertical figures are the only rupture in a study of horizontal lines. They disrupt and animate the composition. Bewildering, fragmented, and anachronistic—the forms come to us as if through a filter of sadness.

  “Beauty,” Fanny Howe says, “is the presence of something else wanting to be born. It’s like a figure that we are rushing for, both to touch and to save. It flies ahead—and we rush after it. We reach for it.” This
eternally frozen moment embodies that beauty we seek and rush toward. It has the quality of a prayer or a sacred text in that it has the potent ability to reach the deepest recesses of human trauma.

  This low-quality, third-hand image that I now call “Gaza Traces” is, in its way, a work of art. It has elements of fiction—the artifice of the frozen moment, which is an impossible, imaginary figment. The artifice manages to save these children, protecting them for eternity from inevitable violence.

  Despite the preserved nature of the image, we do see fate arriving. The children are already silhouettes, thin limbed, almost disappearing. The composition already suggests their vulnerability. The shadow before them and the indifference of the ocean behind them seem to want to swallow them.

  Once we read “Gaza Traces” this way, and we make the decision to face the gravity of the situation, we are also faced with an inevitable question: Do we have the right to extract a private meaning from the unthinkable grief of others?

  As a poet and writer, I find Herbert Marcuse’s defense of the revolutionary nature of art helpful in answering this question. Marcuse argues that by virtue of its aesthetic transformation, authentic art estranges the viewer from oppressive social conditions, and indicts the established reality. “Art,” he says, “alienates individuals from their functional existence and performance in society—it is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination and reason…” Authentic art does not exploit pain, it helps us to see and feel our way through it and past it.

  A critic may argue that this moment of aesthetic transformation cannot help these children in a besieged place that has become nothing more and nothing less than the first concentration camp of the twenty-first century. This is correct. It does not.