Genocide
In Gaza
By Ilan Pappe
04 September 2006
The
Electronic Intifada
A genocide is taking place in
Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were
killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning
reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An average
of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip.
Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.
The Israeli leadership is
at lost of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has vague ideas about
the West Bank. The current government assumes that the West Bank, unlike
the Strip, in an open space, at least on its eastern side. Hence if
Israel, under the ingathering program of the government, annexes the
parts it covets ? half of the West Bank ? and cleanse it from its native
population, the other half would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least
for a while and would not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless
it won the enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such
an arrangement can not work in the Gaza enclave ? Egypt unlike Jordan
has succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the
Gaza Strip for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt.
So a million and half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel ? although
geographically the Strip is located on the margins of the state, psychologically
it lies in its midst.
The inhuman living conditions
in the most dense area in the world, and one of the poorest human spaces
in the northern hemisphere, disables the people who live it to reconcile
with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967. They
were relative better period where movement to the West Bank and into
Israel for work was allowed, but these better times are gone. Harsher
realities are in place ever since 1987. Some access to the outside world
was allowed as long as there were Jewish settlers in the Strip, but
once they were removed the Strip was hermetically closed. Ironically,
most Israelis, according to recent polls, look at Gaza as an independent
Palestinian state that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge. The
leadership, and particularly the army, see it as a prison with the most
dangerous community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one way or
another.
The conventional Israeli
policies of ethnic cleansing employed successfully in 1948 against half
of Palestine?s population, and against hundred of thousand of Palestinians
in the West Bank are not useful here. You can slowly transfer Palestinians
out of the West Bank, and particular out of the Greater Jerusalem area,
but you can not do it in the Gaza Strip - once you sealed it as a maximum-security
prison camp.
As with the ethnic cleansing
operations, the genocidal policy is not formulated in a vacuum. Ever
since 1948, the Israeli army and government needed a pretext to commence
such policies. The takeover of Palestine in 1948 produced the inevitable
local resistance that in turn allowed the implementation of an ethnic
cleansing policy, preplanned already in the 1930. Twenty years of Israeli
occupation of the West Bank produced eventually some sort of Palestinian
resistance. This belated anti-occupation struggle unleashed a new cleansing
policy that still is implemented today in the West Bank. The Gaza imprisonment
in the summer of 2005, which was paraded as an Israeli generous withdrawal,
produced the Hamas and Islamic Jiahd missile attack and one abduction
case. Even before the abduction of Giald Shalit, the Israeli army bombarded
indiscriminately the Strip. Ever since the abduction, the massive killing
increased and became systematic. A daily business of slaying Palestinians,
mainly children is now reported in the internal pages of the local press,
quite often in microscopic fonts.
The chief culprits are the
Israeli pilots who have a field day now that one of them is the General
Chief of Staff. In the 1982 Lebanon war, the Israeli airforce issued
orders to its pilots to abort mission if within 500 square meters of
their target they spotted innocent civilians. Not that these orders
were kept, but the pretense for internal moral consumption was there.
It is called in the Israeli airforce, the ?Lebanon Procedure? [Nohal
Levanon]. When the pilots asked a year ago if the ?Lebanon procedure?
is in tact for Gaza, the answer was no. The same answer was given to
the pilots in the second Lebanon war.
The Lebanon war provided
the fog for a while, covering the war crimes in the Gaza Strip. But
the policies rage on even after the conclusion of the cease-fire up
in the north. It seems that the frustrated and defeated Israeli army
is even more determined to enlarge the killing fields in the Gaza Strip.
There are no politicians who are able or willing to stop the generals.
A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave few thousands
dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a million
people in one campaign ? the only inhibition Israel is willing to undertake
in the name of the Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing you
raise the number to horrific proportions and more importantly you may
force a mass eviction in the end of the day outside the Strip ? either
in the name of human aid, international intervention or the people?s
own desire to escape the inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness
is going to be the response, and there no reason to doubt that this
will the Gazan reaction then the massive killing would continue and
increase.
Much depends on the international
reaction. When Israel was absolved from any responsibility or accountably
for the ethnic cleansing in 1948, it turned this policy into a legitimate
tool for its national security agenda. If the present escalation and
adaptation of genocidal policies would be tolerated by the world, it
would expand and used even more drastically.
Nothing apart from pressure
in the from of sanctions, boycott and divestment will stop the murdering
of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip. There is nothing we here in
Israel can do against it. Brave pilots refused to partake in the operations,
two journalists ? out of 150 ? do not cease to write about it, but this
is it. In the name of the holocaust memory let us hope the world would
not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue.
Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of
Haifa Department of political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute
for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. His books include among others The
Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992), The
Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A History of Modern
Palestine (Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East (London and New York
2005) and forthcoming, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)