By Ellen Cantarow
By Ellen Cantarow
“Not a word, not a thought, not a sign of grief for the hundreds of people killed, women, children, the elderly and Hamas militants, who are also persons. Homes, entire buildings, ministries, schools, pharmacies, and police stations gutted. Where has our humanity gone? … How can you be silent about or defend the Israeli policy of aggression?....
The people of Gaza and the West Bank, all Palestinians, pay the price of the failure of the international community to oblige Israel to respect international law, and to halt its politics of colonialism. Certainly, by launching rockets, Hamas generates fear and is a threat against the Israeli civilian population, unlawful actions that are to be condemned. They must by stopped.
But enough with the impunity of Israel and the blackmailing by its leaders.” From an open letter by Luisa Morgantini, Vice President of the European Parliament, to European Leaders – And Not Only to Them. 3 January, 2009)
Gaza, on the Mediterranean coast along Israel’s south, is an immense concentration camp – 1.5 million people squeezed into 440 square miles hemmed in on all sides but the sea by 25-foot-high walls separated by a vast expanse of bulldozed earth. Gaza’s air and sea space are controlled by Israel; its entries and exits are prison-like mazes electronically controlled and under constant surveillance. Few enter or leave, never without the greatest difficulty in obtaining Israel’s permission. Bombing it from air and sea and shelling it on land is like shooting animals in a pen. There can be no “pinpoint” accuracy. As Israel’s reporter Gideon Levy wrote in Israel’s Ha Aretz, “Someone who throws burning matches into a forest cannot claim he didn’t intend to set it on fire.”
Levy was commenting on Israel’s 2006 “Summer Rain” incursion. There have been eight military assaults on Gaza since 2004. The one Americans are now glimpsing is the “holocaust” promised by Israel’s Deputy-Defense Minister Matan Vilnai last spring when he said Israel would create a shoa if Qassems kept dropping on Israeli towns like Sderot. Shoa, Hebrew for “Holocaust,” is a serious word denoting the extermination of an entire people. Vilnai embarrassed the Israeli government, and no official has used the term since.
But actions speak louder than words. As I write I can’t keep up with Gaza’s death and injury tolls, recounted in the reports reaching my e-mail. According to the UN, in the first ten days Israel killed 540 people of whom 30% were civilians. Over 2750 people have been injured including more than 1000 children. As of yesterday the dead included a family of seven from Shati refugee camp killed by an Israeli navy shelling. Three siblings from one family, as well as a girl and her grandfather, died in Gaza’s Zeitoun neighborhood. In Jabalya Israeli shells hit the al-Awda hospital. Twelve mosques have been destroyed. Since Israel’s war began a week and a half ago, rocket fire from Gaza has killed five Israelis including one soldier. The New York Times’ Taghreed El-Khodary, reporting from Gaza, describes more such today, January 6.
“I don’t know what kind of weapons Israel is using. There is so much amputation,” a nurse in a Gaza hospital told El-Khodary. Medics have been killed, ambulances assaulted. London’s Times reports that Israel is launching white phosphorous from the air onto Gaza. International law prohibits using white phosphorous as an anti-personnel weapon but permits it as a smoke screen. Israel used it in Lebanon; the US in Iraq and Vietnam – always with a toll on humanity. Phosphorous burns are almost always second or third-degree (the particles don’t stop burning on contact with skin till they have finally disappeared: it isn’t unknown for them to reach the bone.
War against civilians violates the Fourth Geneva Accords. International law prohibits the use of disproportional force. Qassem rockets are frightening for those Israelis whose towns are hit by them, but they are crude compared to the arsenal of the world’s fourth greatest military power, which our tax dollars underwrite at$5 billion a day. Rockets from Gaza have killed between fourteen and twenty Israelis in eight years. Israel’s military arsenal has killed 4228 Palestinians between 2000 and 2007. During the same period 1024 Israelis died. (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.). The ratio is 25:1, and Palestinians’ higher death toll is widening that ratio as I write. According to the website, “Remember These Children,” from September 29, 2000 to January, 2008, 1,050 Palestinian and 123 Israeli children were killed.
For over a year and a half before Israel began bombing Gaza it conducted a savage siege to punish 1.5 million people for having elected a Hamas majority displeasing to the US and Israel. The ceasefire agreement called on Hamas to stop firing rockets, but it also required a relaxation of the siege: Israel didn’t comply. By December, 2008, Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories for the UN, Richard Falk, reported an overall Gaza malnutrition rate of 75%, and a childhood anemia rate of 46%. (See Huffingtonpost.com, Richard Falk’s”Understanding the Gaza Catastrophe.”)
Americans are finally getting a glimpse of Israel’s savagery. The carnage is being beamed 24/7 to the Arab and Muslim worlds. This is one of the great war crimes of our era. Where are American voices? Why does Obama refuse to comment? To him and to our Senators and Representatives who obediently parrot the Israeli government line, excusing the occupier and blaming the occupied, I’d address European Parliament Luisa Morgantini’s closing words in her open letter to European leaders:
“Israel has a right to exist as a normal State, a state for its citizens, along the 1967 borders, much wider than those of the partition plan passed by the United Nations in 1947. But I would have liked to hear your outrage and your humanity, and to hear you shouting for the pain of so many deaths and so much destruction, for such arrogance, for so much inhumanity, for so many violations of international and humanitarian law. I would have liked to hear you tell the Israeli government: cease your fire, end the siege on Gaza, stop the construction of settlements in the West Bank, end the military occupation, respect and implement the United Nations resolutions. This is the way to remove any room for fundamentalism and threats against Israel. And listen to the thousands of Israelis in Tel Aviv, they are saying: we refuse to be enemies, stop the occupation, stop the massacre. My God, what a terrible world we live in!”
Four of many alternative Internet news sources for Gaza: Electronic Intifada. B’tselem (Israeli human rights group); Physicians for Human Rights, Israel (click on “English” to exit the Hebrew page accessed at this site); Today in Palestine.
SIDEBAR: BACKGROUND HISTORY
The parents and grandparents of the youngest Gazans don’t come from Gaza but, ironically, from the very places shelled by the Qassems, places like Ashkelon (its Arab name, Askalaan, replaced by Hebrew as all others were.) Gaza’s original 200,000 refugees were a quarter of the 750,000 Arabs ethnically cleansed from Palestine by the pre-Israel Jewish Army. (See Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, based on Israeli government and army archives, Ben Gurion’s and other leaders’ diaries.) After Israel replaced Egypt as Gaza’s occupier in 1967 it inflicted over 40 years of oppression, forbidding the tiny region any independent economic development; displacing its refugees even further (in 1977 Sharon’s Southern Command destroyed over 2000 Palestinian homes, displaced 16,000 people and expelled 600 families into Israeli-controlled Sinai); and after the 1993 Oslo Accords, instituting a policy of “closure,” which shut off practically all in-Israel employment to Gazans. Since 2000 and Sharon’s ascendancy to Premiership, Gaza has suffered even more, as indicated in my article. Israel has always wanted to get rid of Gaza (before signing the Oslo accords Yitzhak Said he wished Gaza “would just sink into the sea.” After Sharon’s famed Gaza “disengagement,” pulling Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Strip, Sharon’s Chief of Staff, the lawyer Dov Weisglass, chortled that the pull-out was meant to “embalm” any peace process “in formaldehyde forever.” Of Israel’s post-2006 siege, which reduced the region to a 75% malnutrition rate, with 46% rate of childhood anemia, he chortled that Israel was “putting [Gazans] on a diet.” The rise of Hamas was funded by Israel in the 1980s, since Israel hated the secular PLO, the “no-one-to-talk-to” of that time, and tried to crush it in its air war against Lebanon in 1982.
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