The Lessons of Violence

By Chris Hedges

The Gaza Strip is rapidly becoming one of the worst humanitarian
disasters in the world. Israel has cordoned off the entire area, home
to some 1.4 million Palestinians, blocking commercial goods, food,
fuel and even humanitarian aid. At least 36 people have been killed
in Israeli strikes since Tuesday and many more wounded. Hamas,
which took control of Gaza in June, has launched about 200
rockets into southern Israel in the same period in retaliation,
injuring more than 10 people. Israel announced the draconian
closure and collective punishment Thursday in order to halt
the rocket attacks, begun on Tuesday, when 18 Palestinians,
including the son of a Hamas leader, were killed by Israeli forces.

This is not another typical spat between Israelis and Palestinians.
This is the final, collective strangulation of the Palestinians in Gaza.
The decision to block shipments of food by the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency means that two-thirds of the Palestinians
who rely on relief aid will no longer be able to eat when U.N.
stockpiles in Gaza run out. Reports from inside Gaza speak of
gasoline stations out of fuel, hospitals that lack basic medicine
and a shortage of clean water. Whole neighborhoods were
plunged into darkness when Israel cut off its supply of fuel to
Gaza’s only power plant. The level of malnutrition in Gaza is
now equal to that in the poorest sub-Saharan nations.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert uses words like war to
describe the fight to subdue and control Gaza. But it is not
war. The Palestinians have little more than old pipes fashioned
into primitive rocket launchers, AK-47s and human bombs
with which to counter the assault by one of the best-equipped
militaries in the world. Palestinian resistance is largely symbolic.
The rocket attacks are paltry, especially when pitted against
Israeli jet fighters, attack helicopters, unmanned drones and
the mechanized units that make regular incursions into Gaza.
A total of 12 Israelis have been killed over the past six years
in rocket attacks. Suicide bombings, which once rocked
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, have diminished, and the last one
inside Israel that was claimed by Hamas took place in 2005.
Since the current uprising began in September 2000, 1,033
Israelis and 4,437 Palestinians have died in the violence,
according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.
B’Tselem noted in a December 2007 report that the dead
included 119 Israeli children and 971 Palestinian children.

The failure on the part of Israel to grasp that this kind of
brutal force is deeply counterproductive is perhaps
understandable given the demonization of Arabs, and
especially Palestinians, in Israeli society. The failure of
Washington to intervene—especially after
President Bush’s hollow words about peace days
before the new fighting began—is baffling. Collective
abuse is the most potent recruiting tool in the hands of
radicals, as we saw after the indiscriminate Israeli bombing of
Lebanon and the American occupation of Iraq. The death of
innocents and collective humiliation are used to justify callous
acts of indiscriminate violence and revenge. It is how our
own radicals, in the wake of 9/11, lured us into the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Israel has been attempting to isolate and punish Gaza since
June when Hamas took control after days of street fighting
against its political rival Fatah. Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah leader, dissolved
the unity government. His party, ousted from Gaza, has
been displaced to the Israeli-controlled West Bank. The
isolation of Hamas has been accompanied by a delicate
dance between Israel and Fatah. Israel hopes to turn
Fatah into a Vichy-style government to administer the
Palestinian territories on its behalf, a move that has sapped
support for Fatah among Palestinians and across the Arab
world. Hamas’ stature rises with each act of resistance.

I knew the Hamas leader Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who
was assassinated by Israel in April of 2004. Rantissi took
over Hamas after its founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was
assassinated by the Israelis in March of that year. Rantissi
was born in what is now Israel and driven from his home in
1948 during the war that established the Jewish state. He,
along with more than 700,000 other Palestinian refugees,
grew up in squalid camps. As a small boy he watched the
Israeli army enter and occupy the camp of Khan Younis in
1956 when Israel invaded Gaza. The Israeli soldiers lined up
dozens of men and boys, including some of Rantissi’s relatives,
and executed them. The memory of the executions marked
his life. It fed his lifelong refusal to trust Israel and stoked the
rage and collective humiliation that drove him into the arms
of the Muslim Brotherhood and later Hamas. He was not
alone. Several of those who founded the most militant Palestinian
organizations witnessed the executions in Gaza carried out by
Israel in 1956 that left hundreds dead.

Rantissi was a militant. But he was also brilliant. He studied
pediatric medicine and genetics at Egypt’s Alexandria
University and graduated first in his class. He was articulate
and well read and never used in my presence the crude,
racist taunts attributed to him by his Israeli enemies. He reminded
me that Hamas did not target Israeli civilians until Feb. 25,
1994, when Dr. Baruch Goldstein, dressed in his Israeli
army uniform, entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs,
which served as a mosque, and opened fire on Palestinian
worshipers. Goldstein killed 29 unarmed people and
wounded 150. Goldstein was rushed by the survivors
and beaten to death.

“When Israel stops killing Palestinian civilians we will
stop killing Israeli civilians,” he told me. “Look at the
numbers. It is we who suffer most. But it is only by
striking back, by making Israel feel what we feel,
that we will have any hope of protecting our people.”

The drive to remove Hamas from power will not be
accomplished by force. Force and collective punishment
create more Rantissis. They create more outrage, more
generations of embittered young men and women who
will dedicate their lives to avenging the humiliation,
perhaps years later, they endured and witnessed as
children. The assault on Gaza, far from shortening the
clash between the Israelis and Palestinians, ensures
that it will continue for generations. If Israel keeps up
this attempt to physically subdue Gaza we will see Hamas
-directed suicide bombings begin again. This is what
resistance groups that do not have tanks, jets, heavy
artillery and attack helicopters do when they want to
fight back and create maximum terror. Israeli hawks
such as Ephraim Halevy (a former head of Mossad),
Giora Eiland (who was national security adviser to
Ariel Sharon) and Shaul Mofaz (a former defense
minister) are all calling for some form of dialogue
with Hamas. They get it. But without American
pressure Prime Minister Olmert will not bend.

Israel, despite its airstrikes and bloody incursions, has been
unable to halt the rocket fire from Gaza or free Cpl. Gilad Shalit,
an Israeli soldier captured in the summer of 2006. Continued
collective abuse and starvation will not break Hamas, which
was formed, in large part, in response to Israel’s misguided
policies and mounting repression. There will, in fact, never be
Israeli-Palestinian stability or a viable peace accord now
without Hamas’ agreement. And the refusal of the Bush
administration to intercede, to move Israel toward the only
solution that can assure mutual stability, is tragic not only for
the Palestinians but ultimately Israel.

And so it goes on. The cycle of violence that began decades
ago, that turned a young Palestinian refugee with promise and
talent into a militant and finally a martyr, is turning small boys
today into new versions of what went before them. Olmert,
Bush’s vaunted partner for peace, has vowed to strike at
Palestinian militants “without compromise, without concessions
and without mercy,” proof that he and the rest of his
government have learned nothing. It is also proof that we,
as the only country with the power to intervene, have
become accessories to murder.

Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for
The New York Times and author most recently of
“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the
War on America,” can be found every other
Monday on Truthdig.