[Marxism] "The traiuma etched on every face"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://socialistworker.org/2009/01/26/the-trauma-on-every-face

The trauma etched on every face in Gaza
January 26, 2009

Israel declared a unilateral "cease-fire" after pounding the Palestinians of
Gaza with air strikes and a ground invasion for more than three weeks. The
war plunged Gaza even deeper into suffering already inflicted by an iron
blockade imposed by Israel and the U.S. after the Islamist Hamas party won a
victory in January 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Assembly.
Haidar Eid, a professor of English, political commentator, activist and
resident of Gaza City, has told the story of this war like few others can.
He provided eyewitness reports throughout Israel's bombing campaign, the
ground invasion and now the "cease-fire."
Haidar spoke with Eric Ruder about the political and military consequences
of the war--and the urgent need for activists around the world to take up
the struggle against Israel's apartheid.

A Palestinian man walks past the rubble of a building destroyed in an
Israeli air strike on Rafah in southern Gaza (Said Khatib | AFP)
DO YOU think the cease-fire will hold?

THE CEASE-FIRE is holding because Israel wants it to. Israel didn't want to
spoil the Obama inauguration party. Israel wanted to join the party.

Israel unilaterally declared a cease-fire, and then 12 hours later, the
Palestinian resistance movement also declared a one-week cease-fire, as long
as Israel withdraws all of its troops from Gaza.

But I think the proper word to describe what is going on is not withdrawal,
but redeployment. Israel wants to redeploy its troops around Gaza, and again
transform Gaza into the concentration camp it had been before December 27,
when they began their criminal war.

We still have 24-hour surveillance by Israeli drones flying overhead, we
still hear the F-16's and Apache helicopters, and I can see the gunship in
the Mediterranean from where I now sit. I don't know whether to call that a
"commitment to the cease-fire" or what.



WHAT ELSE TO READ

To tell you the truth, people are extremely sad. For the last three days,
I've been visiting people, moving around and seeing lots of destroyed
houses, and looking at my neighborhood, which was attacked last week.

The day before yesterday, I went to a farm near the Jabaliya refugee camp in
the eastern part of Gaza. Some 75 to 80 percent of the houses were
demolished by Israeli Caterpillar bulldozers.

I also visited the house of a friend who was shot dead, and then his family
had to keep him in their home for 11 days because no medics could pick up
the body for fear of being attacked by the Israelis. I went to the funeral
and gave my condolences to his father. I talked to families whose houses
were demolished.

There's just extreme...I don't know what the right words are. Sadness,
anger, frustration. But also resilience and steadfastness. I really felt all
of this.

Then yesterday, I went to the house of a friend who is an academic--who
works at Al Azra University. His house was also attacked, and he lost
everything. Everything. I took some pictures. All the rooms are completely
destroyed--three bedrooms, the bathroom, the kitchen. He can't bring his
family back.

Then I went to the Zeitoun area, where the Samouni family lives. Israel
forced all the members of the family into a single building, and then they
shelled the building. So far, 37 family members are confirmed dead, and they
believe there are still relatives under the rubble.

If death has a smell, it was there. The stench was horrible. That is Gaza
under cease-fire.

The grandfather of the Samouni family was looking at his grandson, and I'll
remember what he said for the rest of my life. He said, "Where can I bring
him a father from? Where can I bring him a mother from?" Because his
grandson's parents and all of his brothers and sisters have been killed. He
was desperate. He was crying.

Then it struck me that this was a microcosm of a macrocosm--that is, the
Palestinian people as a whole. We have been left alone to die. We have been
orphaned as Palestinians.

Our Arab brothers have failed us. Our Muslim brothers and sisters have
failed us. And the international community at large failed us. We were left
alone to face the fourth-strongest army in the world, and the official Arab
governments failed, for 19 days, to even hold a summit.

I also spoke with Amira Qirm, a 14-year-old girl, whose father, brother and
sister were killed by exposure to white phosphorous bombs. She was also
wounded and crawled on her knees for half a kilometer, and then she managed
to get into an empty house. She laid on a mattress on the floor from
Wednesday to Saturday, surviving on water alone. I visited her because she
was found in my cousin's house.

WHAT ABOUT the flow of food and humanitarian and medical supplies into Gaza?

PRIOR TO the war, we were under this medieval siege for two-and-a-half
years. Then they started this war, but now we are back under siege. In other
words, we experienced slow-motion genocide, as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe
has described it.

I don't know what to call what happened during the war. Gaza already has
been transformed into the Auschwitz of the Middle East, as a famous
Palestinian journalist said.

The right description for Westerners is probably the scenes from the German
city of Dresden after the Second World War. But it is even worse than that,
judging from the pictures I've seen of Dresden. There are more than 40,000
houses and institutions completely destroyed by the Israeli war machine.

That includes the houses I've been telling you about, that includes part of
the Islamic University, legislative council buildings, police stations,
schools, UN schools for refugees, 18 mosques, and on and on.

We need something like $1.5 billion to $2 billion to start "standing up," as
we say in Arabic. And the prevailing view amongst Gazans is that the
cease-fire is only temporary. What guarantees that Israel will not come
back?

If you remember, in March 2008, Israel gave us a rehearsal of what would
happen by attacking the Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya area. I remember at that
time that Natan Vilnai, the deputy minister of war (who they call deputy
minister of defense) threatened us with a bigger "shoah"--the Hebrew word
for holocaust.

That didn't provoke the necessary outcry from the international community,
which should express alarm when someone talks about carrying out a
holocaust. So Israel got the message--that the international community
wouldn't do anything if the Israelis carried out a bigger shoah. That's why
they came back on December 27.

So if you talk to people, they say the Israelis might come back tomorrow.
What is there to stop them? Nothing. The Arab summit produced nothing but
empty rhetoric. The UN Security Council Resolution 1860 means absolutely
nothing. Israel never committed itself to that resolution.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon visited Gaza yesterday. He was spineless.
He came in a convoy of cars, then drove from the border wearing a
bulletproof vest, as if someone was going to shoot him from the Eretz
checkpoint to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency headquarters.

Never visited Jabaliya, never visited the Zeitoun area. And then he talked
about the shocking scenes. But he didn't see anything.

That's why, as I said during our last interview, we have lost faith in the
official bodies of the international community--the European Union, UN
Security Council, Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference and so
on.

I think the popular sense that we've been left alone is correct. Not a
single Arab country intervened. The best example of solidarity was from
Bolivia and Venezuela [which severed diplomatic ties with Israel to protest
the war on Gaza]. So the joke here in the streets of Gaza goes, "Long live,
Venezuela! The leading Arab country."

We can't go to the south--to Rafah, to Khan Younis--but we can go to the
middle camps, such as Nusayrat and Burayj. We've been able to move around
some. But no food and still shortages of medicine. As I speak to you right
now, I have no electricity. No land line. No Internet connection in my flat.
That's the situation.

How long will it take us to heal? On a personal level, I talk about myself
as Haidar before the Gaza war, and Haidar after the Gaza war. I am conscious
of the trauma--both the personal trauma and the collective trauma. It's on
every face on the streets of Gaza.

And the question is why? Why did Israel have to target children? They killed
438 children. And then there are the 120 women, 95 old people, 16 medics,
four journalists, five foreigners. And 85 to 90 percent of those who were
killed were civilians.

If this offensive has done something, it has succeeded in radicalizing
people and strengthening the will to resist the occupation. People have now
understood that this is the end of the so-called negotiations with Israel.
It's clear that negotiations with Israel within the current imbalance of
power are not going to lead us anywhere, but surrender.

This is what the official leadership of the Palestinian Authority has been
doing. It has surrendered to the Zionist leadership of Israel. And
coexistence with Zionism, people here feel now, is impossible--exactly like
coexistence with apartheid was impossible for the Black indigenous
population of South Africa.

Therefore, as I see it, Israel must be transformed into a secular democratic
state--from a state for Jews only to a state for all its citizens.

YOU ARE coughing a lot. Are you okay?

YES, IT'S just cold here, and I don't have windows [they were all broken by
shock waves from Israeli missiles]. At night, it gets pretty cold--sometimes
3, sometimes 2, sometimes 5 degrees Celsius [just above freezing]. But I'm
okay.

IS YOUR point about the "end of negotiations" that the last remaining hope
has been extinguished among Palestinians that the Oslo Accords would
accomplish a two-state solution?

ABSOLUTELY. WHEN Israel started this war, it killed the two-state solution.
People were mostly already convinced that such a solution was
impossible--with the construction of the apartheid wall, with the increase
of the number of settlers to more than half a million, the expansion of the
settlement bloc around Greater Jerusalem, and so on.

This is what we, as one-state activists, have also been arguing. But now, I
think, people on the street have come to realize that Israel is not sincere
about the two-state solution, and by launching the latest war against Gaza,
it has shot the two-state solution in the head.

That's why I strongly believe--and I have been arguing this lately on
television and radio and in an article I've written--that there is a golden
opportunity for activists to start reformulating the Palestinian national
program.

The previous Palestinian national program represented the interest of the
bourgeois within Palestinian society, in the form of the Fatah movement
headed by Yassir Arafat in the 1980s and 1990s. That led to the 1993 signing
of the Oslo Accord.

But from 1993 until now, Israel has taken every possible step to squash the
two-state solution--by the measures I outlined: increasing the number of
settlers, annexing Jerusalem, the apartheid wall and so on.

The last bullet was when Israel launched the war on Gaza, but during the
last three years, Israel has transformed Gaza, with the complicity of the
international community, into the largest concentration camp in the
world--larger than the Warsaw Ghetto and even Auschwitz. And the West Bank
has been transformed into three large Bantustans--one in the north with
Jenin and Kalkilya, one in the middle with Ramallah, and one in the south
with Beit Lahoun and Hebron.

In other words, the two-state solution has become a façade, a fiction. I
think people understand this now.

But having said that, it doesn't mean that people understand what the
one-democratic-state solution is. And this is the role for civil society
organizations and for us as activists--to start the discussion. There aren't
many groups calling for a one-state solution at this time, but we have the
support of many intellectuals--such as Ilan Pappe, Ali Abunimah, Ramzy
Baroud, Omar Barghouti, and so on.

WHEN ISRAELI Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced the end of Israeli
operations, he said that Israel had accomplished all of its goals--that
Hamas and its armed wing of 15,000 fighters had been hit hard, and that
Israel had perhaps achieved even more than it had expected. But there are
also Israeli observers who are skeptical about this. So what do you think of
the political and military consequences, both for Israel and for Hamas?

THE PROBLEM I have with this kind of question when it comes from the
mainstream media is that the war has been misrepresented as a war between
Israel and Hamas. But I know that you don't ask the question in this way.

This has been a criminal war, a genocidal war, committed by the state of
Israel against the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. We need to understand that
Israel is a colonial-settler state--an apartheid state, based on deep-rooted
racism and a fundamentalist interpretation of Judaism.

Israel is defined as a Jewish-only state, and therefore, there shouldn't be
anyone who is not Jewish on this land, according to this logic. So the war
on Gaza is a continuation of the genocidal war that Israel has waged since
1948.

In 1948, Israel kicked more than two-thirds of the Palestinian people out of
their homes, and there was no Hamas. There were no Qassem rockets launched
against the Jewish settlements in Palestine before 1948. In 1967, Israel
occupied Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Desert, and
killed thousands of Palestinians without Hamas launching rockets against
Israel.

Now, Israel is arresting and killing Palestinians in the West Bank, although
we know that there are no rockets launched from the West Bank against
Israeli settlements inside the West Bank--though according to international
law, we as occupied people have the right to resist Israeli occupation.

I think to judge the outcome, you need to look at the objectives of the war
and what Israel has achieved so far. At the beginning, Israel made very
clear its objectives: 1) to destroy the infrastructure of the "terrorist
organization," 2) to put an end to the launching of rockets from the Gaza
Strip into Israel proper, and 3) to create a new security situation in the
Gaza Strip.

Which of these objectives has been achieved? None. One, Hamas is still
functioning. It is still in control of the security situation in the Gaza
Strip. Today, they issued a very powerful press release in the Jabaliya
refugee camp, which was the first refugee camp to be attacked during this
war.

Two, after Israel unilaterally declared a cease-fire, the Palestinian
resistance movement--not Hamas--shot seven rockets against Sderot and other
Israeli cities to say, "We are still here."

Three, the new security situation that Israel was talking about was to
weaken the Islamic resistance movement of Hamas in order to pave the way for
the return of the pro-Oslo forces. But that has not happened.

So in other words, none of the three objectives declared at the beginning of
the war have been achieved, and therefore Israel has lost the war.

If killing 438 children, if killing more than 120 women, if demolishing more
than 40,000 houses, religious and government buildings and so forth--if that
is how winning is defined, then Israel has won the war.

According to a press conference by the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of
Hamas, Hamas lost 48 fighters. Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic
Jihad, lost 37 fighters. The National Brigades, the armed wing of the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, lost 12, I think. I don't
know how many the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine lost.

That's a tiny proportion of the number of people Israel killed during the
war. So my conclusion is that Israel, with the fourth-strongest army in the
world, with 120 nuclear warheads, F-16s, Apache helicopters and Merkava
tanks, up against starving people, against stones and crude homemade
rockets--still, Israel was not able to reoccupy the Gaza Strip.

They were able to move around in empty areas--in the Netzarim settlements
and north of Gaza, but they were not able to enter the Jabaliya refugee
camp, Gaza City or the Rafah crossing.

And I have more bad news for them. They said they attacked the
Palestinian-Egyptian border in order to destroy the tunnels. And I can tell
you that today, we started getting things through the tunnels.

That means that they have achieved nothing--except terrorizing the people of
Gaza and creating a situation where there is only fear and, unfortunately,
hatred. That does not lead us to peace with justice. That is what we are
fighting for. We want true peace with justice, comprehensive peace with
justice. Israel, unfortunately, has delayed that for us.

ON THE eve of the cease-fire, there was a meeting in Sharm el Sheik in
Egypt, between Israel, the European Union countries, UN Secretary General
Ban Ki Moon and Egypt. I was struck by the announcement that the chief point
of agreement was to collaborate in order to insure that Hamas was unable to
re-arm during the "peace." They didn't utter a word about Israel's
atrocities, or discuss how to stop Israel from using U.S. weaponry to carry
out another massacre.

ABSOLUTELY. WHY allow Israel to be armed to the teeth? This is the policy of
blaming the victim. And within Arab countries, official politics is nothing
more than a cocktail of the politics of cowardice and hypocrisy when it
comes to the Palestinian situation. That also applies, unfortunately, to
European politics, when it comes to the question of Palestine.

We Palestinians are paying a heavy price for a guilt-complex that Europe has
been suffering from--as a result of the terrible holocaust in which more
than 6 million Jews were killed. But we did not kill these Jews--it was
Europe. Anti-Semitism is a European phenomenon.

So today, instead of supporting the victim, Europe supports the victimizer,
the oppressor. The EU has decided to upgrade its ties with Israel. It is
rewarding the oppressor and punishing the oppressed.

So again, I ask you, is there really any hope of a new direction from
Western governments? I don't think so. And that is why our only hope is
among civil society organizations and political parties such as
yours--people on the left, people who understand the conflict, people who
know who the victimizer is and who the victim is.
***

Haidar Eid has written an article titled"Sharpeville 1960, Gaza 2009" that
recounts his experiences during Israel's war and adds his voice to call for
an international movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, modeled on
the anti-apartheid movement.

The One Democratic State Group has issued "A Call from Gaza" that asks
activists and organizations to demand that their governments sever ties with
Israel, and calls for Israel's war criminals be brought to justice. The same
day this call was issued, Israel bombed the headquarters of the University
Teachers Association, one of the prominent signatories of the call.



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