Imprisoning
A Whole Nation
By John Pilger
06 June, 2007
Zmag
Israel
is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed
to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks
on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed
on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported
on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas"
and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash"
between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
Consider one such clash.
The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber.
Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are
militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the
"Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party
that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that
would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in
the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly
who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims
of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.
"Some say," said
the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack] .
. ." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from
within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law
an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's
forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred
to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war.
There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth
to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest
military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster
bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the
past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé, "Israeli
forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".
Consider how this power works.
According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis
once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute
support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation]
by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a
former CIA official. Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy
and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars.
Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza
from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client,
the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected
Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded.
In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity,
of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying
this.
With Gaza secured in chaos
and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian
academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society:
truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate
militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into
ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look
to the Iraq of today . . ." On 19 May, the Guardian received this
letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land,
water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance
system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In
this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli]
army behaves as a director . . . The Gaza strip needs to be shown as
what it is . . . an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community
where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and
perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation."
The remarkable Israeli journalist
Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a
million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded,
disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment .
. . The shadows of human beings roam the ruins . . . They only know
the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for
them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction
in monstrous proportions".
Whenever I have been in Gaza,
I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser
in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang
over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here.
Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated
of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the
water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off,
yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals
on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family
of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli
bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they
were militants.
More than 40 per cent of
the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on
a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical
Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621
children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school,
in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of
cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound". A friend
of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust".
Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm,
belie their nightmare.
I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a
psychiatrist who heads one of several children's community health projects
in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally
find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children
we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to
trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes were bombarded;
97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings;
95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw
family members injured or killed."
He said children as young
as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions.
They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken
by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide
bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis.
For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion
of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because
Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".
Shortly before he died, Edward
Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their
destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence,
the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible
suffering from which it arises". Just as the invasion of Iraq was
a "war by media", so the same can be said of the grotesquely
one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work
of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are
rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military
occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained.
Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the
Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish;
many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by
broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance.
Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage,
cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never
Palestinians.
There are honourable exceptions.
The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst
the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the
thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not
see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem,
the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation
of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many
journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded
by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained.
In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.
A censorship by omission
runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas
is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction"
and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not
talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on
Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for
a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological
shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the
sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran,"
said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we
believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now
about reality, about political solutions . . . If Israel reached a stage
where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem
of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]."
When I last saw Gaza, driving
towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with
a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds.
Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles
out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and
hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners
around and they believe they can tell the world.
John Pilger's latest book,
"Freedom Next Time", is published in the US by Nation Books.
His film, "The War on Democracy", is released in the UK on
15 June
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