By Jennifer Loewenstein
Around 10:30pm on the night of
February 28th, M and his wife
spoke in low tones in a dark
room dimly lit by a battery-
operated lamp. They were
trying to decide if it was still
safe to send their children to school and decided in favor
because the elementary school building is in a safer part
of the city near a number of international offices. The
electricity in the building had been out 10 hours by
then and the couple pulled blankets around them to
keep warm in the damp winter air. They live on the
6th floor of Shifa Tower, an 11-story apartment building
housing more than a hundred families.
When the blast occurred that took out the Interior Ministry
building across the street, there was no time to think about
what to do. M flew into his children’s bedroom and threw
himself over the sleeping body of his son, Basel , to shield
the young boy’s body from the glass shattering in the
windows beside his bed. Then after a matter of seconds
the three young children, two girls and the boy, were
taken to the windowless kitchen, all of them now fully
awake and crying out in terror. M threw blankets and
pillows around them where they huddled for the night
in restless sleep and dreams of horror, their mother
sobbing silently over them as she caressed their faces.
M returned to the children’s room in time for the second
deafening blast that made him put up his arms instinctively.
When he let them down and looked out into the night sky,
it was all brown, the earth from underneath the destroyed
buildings was swirling around outside the bedroom
windows and he could see nothing but flying debris,
smoke and a wall of dirt. For some time he could not
hear well.
In the morning, no one went outside. “This is a black day
in Gaza,” M wrote; “a holocaust” as (Israeli deputy
defense minister Matan) Vilnai put it. There is an attack
every five or ten minutes. It keeps our nerves on edge
and our senses strained. There is so much rage at what is
happening; especially the scenes of murdered children and
babies. I am so busy I don’t know how to describe my
feelings. I work to avoid feeling because right now that’s
too unbearable.
Watch as A, a Hamas soldier, runs for his life into his house.
His pursuers miss shooting him so they launch three rockets
into the house on the edge of Jabalya camp killing everyone
inside (four family members). They are angry now so every
house in the way gets the same treatment and without the
‘militant’ to guide their next moves: rockets fired into the
interiors of homes with no knowledge of who is inside.
Eye-witnesses report this and worse: a six month old baby
girl becomes tiny body parts with her mother and brother.
A small child is cut apart by shrapnel and screams that she
doesn’t want to die just before leaving this world. The mothers
and fathers cannot protect them so they weep and scream at
the funerals that this side of the world never views, especially
during basketball season.
Who really cares about these children? Every Palestinian is a
militant because everyone (sooner or later) wants Israel off
their land, out of their lives, and forgotten like a horrible
dream. It is for this reason that they are all equal targets:
none of them is intelligent enough to understand that their
land isn’t their land, their lives are not their lives, and their
horrible dream is their present and future. Have no pity on
those who don’t get it.
The night strikes from F-16s and helicopter missiles
continued throughout the day on Friday the 29th and into
the first weekend in March, unceasing in their ferocity and
indiscriminate killing revenge for the death early last week
of an Israeli student at Sapir College outside Sderot. For
every one Israeli life, scores of Palestinians must die. God
help us now that two Israeli soldiers have been killed
fighting on occupied land, against unwilling slaves;
killing innocent people to maintain a 60-year-old injustice.
Brace yourself, Gaza. You will pay dearly for the
continuation of this crime.
Let us not reflect too much on what all this means.
How, for example, would the 47-year-old Sapir College
student like to know that his death has been far more
useful to his State than his life? For in death he provided
another pretext to carry out mass murder of the Arab
Untermenschen blocking the otherwise pleasant view
to the sea in the southeastern Promised Land. His death
challenged the Israeli rules of combat: the ‘We kill and
You Die’ warfare, the only type allowed by the Zionist
masters and their allies in the United States who have
no intention of making a just peace with the lower forms
of life in their midst. The sanctimonious demand that
the Qassams must be stopped is a deliberate lie intended
to make you forget that the Qassams provide a near
fool-proof pretext for grabbing more of Gaza and setting more
of it to ruin; and that the Qassams are the result of systematic
national torture and evisceration, borne themselves of occupation,
caused by it, improved upon by periods of siege, sadism and mass killing.
Peace would require relinquishing regional hegemony.
Peace would demand sharing the land and the resources
equally. Peace might, heaven forbid, require democratic
decision making in a region where the Israelis are not better,
more entitled, more deserving of Their Way than everyone
else in the neighborhood. Well, sorry, but these are not on
Israel’s agenda. The leaders of the hapless Sderot student’s
racially pure dreamland are grateful for his dying: Now the
angry flames of intolerance can burn on feverishly. Into those
flames the bodies of each dead Gazan man, woman or child
should be flung, like books, to consecrate the ritual, the burnt
offering, of those who owe the latter-day Israelites their
Modern Day Zion. In Holy Victimhood shall We Reign Supreme.
Surely this would satisfy Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit who
bellowed that if it were up to him, Israeli soldiers going into
Gaza should shoot ‘everything that moves’ like babies and
toddlers, grandfathers and mothers, orange trees and
wasted-away donkeys pulling cartloads of rotten vegetables;
like flowers and seabirds, chickens and goats, rats and
cockroaches. A scorched-earth policy will suffice. They’ll create
their apocalyptic wilderness and will call it peace.
No one needed Sheetrit to legitimize the strategy of creating
oblivion from hell. Untermenschen who can be denied food,
water, fuel, electricity, medical supplies, the right to leave
and return home, the right to not to die in an ambulance
that without the proper permits, the right to their own
land and their own nationhood precisely because they
are lesser human beings can also be picked off one by
one or in groups or in families or because they are
‘militant’ or all of the above, who deserve no fair hearing,
due process, photographs, names, headlines, stories,
grief or televised tear-jerker funerals to commemorate
their sacrifices. In such a world contexts are an insult to
the intelligence of the policy-makers.
Plea after plea from human rights organizations, legal
organizations, religious charities and leaders, children’s
welfare organizations, medical aid projects, refugee relief
societies, international humanitarian agencies, celebrities,
parliamentarians, foreign policy analysts and countless
others go not only unheeded but unread, unheard, a waste
of one’s time. Is there a reason why the carnage in Gaza is
continuing before our very eyes and no State or Non-state
actor strong enough to make a difference is bothering to step in?
The shame is ours, for Israel and its US Master have long since
resided in the lowest circle of Hell for betraying the
name of humanity.
-Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the
Middle East Studies Program at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, a freelance journalist and
human rights activist.
She can be reached at amadea311@earthlink.net
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