But it does help those who are still living to come to greater awareness of the despotism that is around us and in us. As the veils of false consciousness are torn asunder, like bodies rendered, the true nature of social reality is exposed and we have no ethical choice but to strengthen our resolve to be more committed, more receptive, more compassionate, and more engaged.
Despair is chronic; no one can say that this is the world they would have chosen. But art does puncture holes in this pervasive despair and renders things visible that were previously invisible. Art shows us where to look and what to see. We need to see these children. Before and after. We cannot turn away from the Palestinian people and their need to be free from violence, dispossession, and cultural erasure.
It is nearly impossible to know what our ‘responsibilities’ are as artists when we face this kind of ongoing human catastrophe. I would say there is no special responsibility that artists have above and beyond the responsibility that all humans have. The thing that distinguishes artists is that we have made it a regular and formal practice to observe, think, frame, reframe, to try to create work that will do justice to our moment. These activities put us in proximity to ethical questions as a matter of course.
But let’s be reminded that the fishermen’s children were filmed almost by accident and preserved in the public sphere by a young activist who does not identify himself as an artist, but who took the time to see and to act. This shows us the potential of each of us has—to activate our senses and to take a stand on matters of universal concern. There is nothing elite, nor sanctified, nor otherworldly about making art.
Nothing we can do will bring back the children who were killed on the beach on July 16 2014, or the thousands who lost their lives last summer. Nothing will bring back the limbs of the limbless, or repair the skin of those who were permanently disfigured, or close the wounds of those who were left psychologically and emotionally scarred. The personal and collective loss is unfathomable.
The words we write here, the poems we share, the images we capture will not undo the pain and injustice, and we would be naive to think they do. Yet they may help us find solace in community and rediscover joy in a shared liberational vision. These works can give us the strength to keep going—to reach out in solidarity to a people in struggle.
Controversial, Illegal, and Documented: Israeli Military Strategies in Gaza
Sami Kishawi
As Israel rolls deeper into its military offensive against the Gaza Strip, its tactics against the territory’s densely packed civilian population are becoming more and more clear. Over the last 17 days, the death toll has risen to at least 797 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians and nearly two hundred of whom were children. Despite near-global condemnation, Israel has not dialed down the brutality. The following is a list of ten documented Israeli military strategies that are responsible for the disturbingly high casualty count.
1. Israel is one of the best equipped militaries in the world and its weapons industry is responsible for many technological advancements in modern warfare. It should come as no surprise, then, that Israel has the capacity to strike its targets with extreme precision. In the past, Israel has assassinated Hamas members so precisely that others riding with them in their cars or walking alongside them have survived. This has not been the modus operandi for Israel’s last three major offensives against the Gaza Strip, particularly this latest one. Even U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry commented on Israel’s military strategy, sarcastically calling it one “hell of a pinpoint operation.”
2. Israel contends that it warns Gaza residents of imminent air strikes and shelling campaigns and instructs them to flee. However, the crippling siege and total blockade that Israel has imposed on the territory means that Palestinians have no place to go. This allows Israel to kill two birds with one stone, as the saying goes. It can publicly claim that it works to minimize civilian casualties while at the same time killing Palestinians wantonly and with impunity.
3. One of Israel’s methods of warning families in Gaza of an imminent strike is through a “knock on the roof,” a missile that does not contain an explosive warhead. The missile is intended to hit the target and to underline the seriousness of the warning. However, the warning missile strikes its target at about the same forceful velocity as the explosive missile that comes next, collapsing walls and roofs over families attempting to flee. Many Palestinians have been killed by the warning missiles that were allegedly employed to save their lives, including a group of children who were feeding ducks on their roof, CNN reports. In another recorded instance, the explosive missile came only 58 seconds after the “knock,” which is barely enough time for residents to clear the area.
4. Israel strikes buildings that are very clearly sheltering civilians. Palestinians who are able to heed the warnings and flee are not necessarily any safer. On Monday, July 21, Israel launched an air strike against an eight-story building in downtown Gaza City that Israeli military officials had previously urged Palestinians to seek refugee in. Over a dozen were killed. On Sunday, just one day earlier, an Israeli air strike took the lives of Hassan Al-Hallaq’s mother, two children, and wife who happened to be nine months pregnant. Hassan had relocated his family from their apartment outside of Gaza City into the city center, distancing themselves from the border and Israel’s buffer zone and expecting his family’s chances of survival to jump. But an air strike was still ordered against his parents’ home and much of the family was killed.
5. Israel frequently launches air strikes at around sunset when families are most likely to be together, indoors, and breaking their Ramadan fasts.
6. Israel contends that Hamas forcibly puts Palestinian civilians in the line of fire, specifically by keeping them in buildings from which Hamas fighters operate. Although this has never once been supported with conclusive evidence, the Israeli government touts it as the primary reason for the high civilian death toll. But Palestinians rarely have any place to flee, especially when more than a third of the Gaza Strip falls under a military buffer that Israel strikes regularly and without warning. United Nations shelters are at maximum capacity and Israel has no qualms about attacking these buildings either, which is what happened on Thursday, July 24, killing at least 16 and injuring more than 200 in a United Nations school in Beit Hanoun. Palestinians who refuse to leave their homes or surrounding areas do not automatically become legitimate targets. As Mohammed Suliman said under intense shelling in Gaza City, “I look forward to surviving. If I don’t, remember that I wasn’t Hamas or a militant, nor was I used as a human shield. I was at home.”
7. Israel uses flechette shells, banned DIME weapons, and U.S.-manufactured M107 shells in the Gaza Strip. Flechette shells, typically fired from a tank, explode above their targets and release thousands of miniature metal darts that piercingly cover a wide range. DIME weapons, which produce small and compact explosions, are densely packed with tungsten powder which acts like shrapnel but dissolves in human tissue, making it very difficult for physicians and investigators to determine the cause of the injuries. M107 shells explode into nearly two thousand metal fragments that rain on the areas surrounding their immediate targets. Not only has Israel chosen against striking its targets with careful precision, it also employs the use of weapons that cause maximal damage to anyone within the blast radius.
8. Many of the homes that have been targeted belonged to former Hamas fighters who had retired and transitioned back into civilian life—upon encouragement from the international community, no less—as government security guards charged with maintaining order on the streets or guarding important government structures, such as passport offices and ministry buildings. Israel still considers these former fighters as legitimate targets and has repeatedly launched strikes against them and their families. The logic that former Hamas fighters are legitimate targets suggests that former Israeli soldiers could also be legitimate targets. The logic that members of a government security force are legitimate targe
ts suggests that Israeli reservists could also be legitimate targets. Israel disagrees and instead maintains a double standard that ultimately punishes the people of Gaza.
9. Israel has launched a rather bizarre public relations campaign to justify its offensive against Gaza. Social media accounts linked to the Israeli military frequently upload and circulate cartoons that allegedly explain Israel’s motive for the assault. One of the more notable ones was published during the latter period of Israel’s intense shelling of the Shuja‘iya neighborhood in east Gaza City which killed an estimated 72 Palestinians within the first twenty-four hours. The cartoon, which depicts Hamas fighters placing weapons in tunnels underneath civilian homes, gave Israel the legitimacy it felt it needed to continue striking the neighborhood. At least 17 children were among the victims.
10. Israel frequently launches follow-up strikes against targets it just hit. Commonly referred to as “double tap” strikes, the general purpose of the tactic is to kill other fighters who return to the scene to retrieve the remains of their partners. But the use of this tactic has drawn ire from the international community especially because the victims tend to be rescue workers and other civilians who rush to the scene. In Israel’s case, the “double tap” is much more discreet. The follow-up strikes typically hit locations in the close vicinity of the previous strike. On July 16, Israel fired a shell at a Gaza City beach where a group of boys had just been playing football. The boys ran away from the initial blast but a second shell struck them moments later. Witnesses to the tragic scene said that it seemed as though the Israeli military was chasing the boys with shells. Four children were killed and a fifth was critically wounded.
The United Nations Human Rights Council has launched an independent investigation into various allegations of war crimes committed by Israel in the occupied Gaza Strip. The Council agreed to investigate by a vote of 29 countries in favor, 17 abstaining, and one—the United States—voting against the measure.
Sixteen Minutes to Palestine (blog), July 24, 2014, http://bit.ly/1CsxBFD
Why Gaza Fought Back
Ramzy Baroud
My old family house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza was recently rebuilt by its new owner, into a beautiful three-story building with large windows adorned by red frames. In Israel’s most recent and deadliest war on Gaza, the house sustained significant damage. A large hole caused by Israeli missiles can be seen from afar, in a part of the house where our kitchen once stood.
It seems that the original target was not my house, however, but that of our kindly neighbor, who had spent his entire working-life toiling between manual jobs in Israel, and later in life as a janitor for UN-operated schools in Gaza. The man’s whole lifesavings were invested in his house where several families lived. After “warning” rockets blew up part of his house, several missiles pulverized the rest.
My entire neighborhood was also destroyed. I saw photos of the wreckage-filled neighborhood by accident on Facebook. The clearance where we played football as little kids was filled with holes left by missiles and shrapnel. The shop where I used my allowance to buy candy was blown up. Even the graveyard where our dead were meant to “rest in peace” was anything but peaceful. Signs of war and destruction were everywhere.
My last visit there was about two years ago. I caught up with my neighbors on the latest politics and the news of who was dead and who was still alive underneath the shady wall of my old house. One complained about his latest ailments, telling me that his son Mahmoud had been killed as he had been a freedom fighter with a Palestinian resistance movement.
I couldn’t fathom the idea that Mahmoud, the child I remembered as running around half-naked with a runny nose, had become a fierce fighter with an automatic rifle ready to take on the Israeli army. But that he was, and he was killed on duty.
Time changes everything. Time has changed Gaza. But the strip was never a passive place of people subsisting on hand-outs or a pervasive sense of victimhood. Being a freedom fighter preceded any rational thinking about life and the many choices it had to offer growing up in a refugee camp, and all the little kids of my generation wanted to join the fedayeen.
But options for Gazans are becoming much more limited than ever before, even for my generation.
Since Israel besieged Gaza with Egypt’s help and coordination, life for Gazans has become largely about mere survival. The strip has been turned into a massive ground for an Israeli experiment concerned with population control. Gazans were not allowed to venture out, fish, or farm, and those who got even close to some arbitrary “buffer zone,” determined by the Israeli army within Gaza’s own borders, were shot and often killed.
With time the population of the strip knew that they were alone. The short stint that brought Mohammed Morsi to power in Egypt offered Gaza some hope and a respite, but it soon ended. The siege, after the overthrow of Morsi, became tighter than ever before.
The Palestinian leadership in Ramallah did very little to help Gaza. To ensure the demise of Hamas, Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority carried on with its “security coordination” with Israel, as Gaza suffered a Draconian siege. There was no question, that after all the failed attempts at breaking the siege and the growing isolation of Gaza, Gazans had to find their own way out of the blockade.
When Israel began its bombardment campaign of Gaza on July 6, and a day later with the official launch of the so-called Operation Protective Edge, followed by a ground invasion, it may have seemed that Gaza was ready to surrender.
Political analysts have been advising that Hamas has been at its weakest following the downturn of the Arab Spring, the loss of its Egyptian allies, and the dramatic shift of its fortunes in Syria and, naturally Iran. The “Hamas is ready to fold” theory was advanced by the logic surrounding the unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah; and unity was seen largely as a concession by Hamas to Abbas’ Fatah movement, which continued to enjoy Western political backing and monetary support.
The killing of three Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank in late June was the opportunity for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to test the misleading theory on Hamas’ weakened position. He launched his war that eventually mounted into a genocide, hoping that Hamas and other resistance groups would be forced to disarm or be completely eradicated—as promised by various Israeli officials.
But it didn’t. From the very first days of the war it became clear the resistance could not be defeated, at least not as easily as Netanyahu had expected. The more troops he invested in the war on Gaza, the more Israeli army casualties increased. Netanyahu’s response was to increase the price of Palestinian resistance by inflicting as much harm on Palestinian civilians as possible: He killed over 1,900, wounded nearly 10,000, a vast majority of whom were civilians, and destroyed numerous schools, mosques, hospitals, and thousands of homes, thus sending hundreds of thousands of people on the run. But where does one run when there is nowhere to go?
Israel’s usual cautious political discourse was crumbling before Gaza’s steadfastness. Israeli officials and media began to openly call for genocide. Middle East commentator Jeremy Salt explained. “The more extreme of the extreme amongst the Zionists say out loud that the Palestinians have to be wiped out or at the very least driven into Sinai,” he wrote, citing Moshe Feiglin, the deputy of the Israeli Knesset, who called for “full military conquest of the Gaza strip and the expulsion of its inhabitants. They would be held in tent encampments along the Sinai border while their final destination was decided. Those who continued to resist would be exterminated.”
From Israeli commentator Yochanan Gordon, who flirted with genocide in “when genocide is permissible,” to Ayelet Shaked, who advocated the killing of the mothers of those who resist and are killed by Israel. “They should follow their sons. Nothing would be more just. They should go as should the physical houses in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise more little snakes are raised,” he wrote on Facebook.
References to genocide an
d extermination and other devastatingly violent language are no longer “claims” levied by Israeli critics, but a loud and daily self-indictment made by the Israelis themselves.
The Israelis are losing control of their decades-long hasbara, a propaganda scheme so carefully knitted and implemented, many the world over were fooled by it. Palestinians, those in Gaza in particular, were never blind to Israel’s genocidal intentions. They assembled their resistance with the full knowledge that a fight for their very survival awaited.
Israel’s so-called Protective Edge is the final proof of Israel’s unabashed face, that of genocide. It carried it out, this time paying little attention to the fact that the whole world was watching. Trending Twitter hashtags which began with #GazaUnderAttack, then #GazaResists, quickly morphed to #GazaHolocaust. The latter was used by many that never thought they would dare make such comparisons.
Gaza managed to keep Israel at bay in a battle of historic proportions. Once its children are buried, it will once again rebuild its defenses for the next battle. For Palestinians in Gaza, this is not about mere resistance strategies, but their very survival.
Counterpunch, August 13, 2014, http://bit.ly/1OUuhK9
Blaming the Victims
Diana Buttu
Israel’s crimes—whether the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, the military occupation and colonization of Palestinian (and other) territory, or periodic massacres—are invariably accompanied by a media discourse designed to explain, justify, and obfuscate the facts. After more than sixty-six years, and despite abundant factual evidence and extensive academic scholarship giving them the lie, tired, old Israeli mantras that demonize Palestinians and deny their existence as a people continue to live on. The massive attack on the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014 was no exception, with Israel now using both the media and its own discourse to legitimate the Dahiya doctrine—a policy deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure to induce such suffering among the population that it creates deterrence.
Gaza Unsilenced Page 19