Second-class citizens
George Bisharat and Nimer Sultany August 15, 2010
Should Israel be encouraged to enact legislation guaranteeing equal rights for all of its citizens as part of any peace agreement with the Palestinians?
Israel's systematic discrimination against Arabs was highlighted recently when Donna Shalala, University of Miami president and former Health and Human Services secretary, was detained for three hours, grilled and subjected to an extended luggage search upon her departure from Israel.
Shalala, of Lebanese Arab descent and a long-time supporter of Israel, had visited the country with other university leaders at the invitation of the American Jewish Congress, but had stayed beyond the planned itinerary for several days. It seems evident that, despite her stature, she was a victim of profiling.
But the indignities that Shalala suffered pale in comparison to those faced by the 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of Israel on a daily basis, and not just at the airport.
Adalah, the Legal Center for Minority Rights in Israel, counts more than 35 Israeli laws explicitly privileging Jews over non-Jews. Other Israeli laws appear neutral, but are applied in discriminatory fashion. For example, laws facilitating government land seizures make no reference to Palestinians, but nonetheless have been used almost exclusively to expropriate their properties for Jewish settlements.
Consider what it would be like if:
• Our Constitution defined the union as a ``white Christian democratic state?''
• Our laws still barred marriage across ethnic-religious lines?
• Our government appointed a Chief Priest, empowered to define membership criteria for the white Christian nation?
• Our government legally enabled immigration by white Christians while barring it for others?
• Our government funded a Center for Demography that worked to increase the birth rates of white Christians to ensure their majority status?
These examples all have parallels in Israeli practices.
While Israel's Palestinian citizens have rights to vote, run for office, form political parties and to speak relatively freely, they remain politically marginalized. No Palestinian party has ever been invited to join a ruling coalition. In recent years, Palestinian politicians and community leaders have been criminally prosecuted or hounded into exile.
Nadim Rouhana, social psychologist and director of Mada al-Carmel (a center studying Palestinian citizens of Israel) reports: ``Our empirical research reveals that many Palestinian citizens are alienated from the Israeli state. At a deep psychological level, the daily message conveyed in Israeli public discourse is: `You are not one of us. You don't belong here. You are permanent outsiders.' Imagine: we, whose families have lived here for centuries, hear this even from recently immigrated Jewish Israeli politicians.''
Palestinian rights are not respected in the Israeli legal system. Israel has no written constitution, only ``Basic Laws'' that were enacted piecemeal over time. None enshrines equality, and efforts by Palestinian lawmakers in Israel's Knesset to add an explicit guarantee of equal rights have been rebuffed.
The 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence promised equal rights to all citizens in a Jewish state, and has occasionally been cited by the Israeli High Court. But a declaration of independence does not play the same legal role as a constitution or basic law. As students of American history know, the U.S. Declaration of Independence held that ``all men are created equal'' but failed to provide legal leverage to dismantle slavery, or to empower women to vote. Equal rights were only installed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and women's suffrage only by the 19th Amendment. Lacking the necessary tools, the Israeli High Court has failed to consistently protect equal rights for Palestinian citizens.
Shalala's treatment in Israel was, no doubt, demeaning. The incident's effect nonetheless will be constructive if it serves to alert more Americans to Israel's discrimination against its Palestinian citizens -- and creates pressure on Israel to adopt equal rights for all. Only then will durable peace prevail in the Middle East.
George Bisharat is a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Nimer Sultany is a civil rights attorney in Israel and doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.
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Sunday, 15 August 2010
Wednesday, 28 October 2009
The Palestinian Authority's state-first
Ahmad Samih Khalidi, The Guardian, Wednesday 28 October 2009
As President Obama seeks to jumpstart the Middle East peace process with increasingly disappointing results, a new approach has begun to emerge from within the upper circles of the Palestinian Authority.
In essence, this approach puts "statehood first" – without waiting for negotiations to resume, or for a full final status agreement with Israel. From this point of view, and in a kind of Zionism in reverse, unilateral actions on the ground can lay the foundations for an independent Palestinian state, irrespective of Israel's demands or strategy.
This approach has recently been formalised in the PA government's two-year plan, which includes an ambitious range of economic and developmental projects and is intended to tally with the growing international consensus on setting a two-year time frame for the two-state vision and a comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli settlement.
"Statehood first" has a superficially attractive ring to it that has begun to gain some traction among decision-makers in Washington and the EU. But it is fundamentally flawed. The first problem is the assumption that unilateral Palestinian state-building is possible when every PA action is determined by the Israeli occupation. Even putting to one side the Fatah-Hamas split, the PA cannot exercise the most elementary of powers; it cannot independently trade on the world market, decide who can enter its soil or deploy the smallest unit of its security services from one village to another; its leaders cannot even move without prior Israeli consent. In short, it cannot freely exercise its authority over its citizens or territory in any meaningful manner.
At the heart of the PA's programme lies a basic contradiction: while it claims to be building a state against the occupation, it is in practice building state-like structures with the occupation. No genuinely sovereign state has been or can be built while still under occupation, and nothing in Israel's current stance on the basic issues of Palestinian sovereignty (territorial extent, control over borders, the right to self defence, and so on) suggests otherwise.
The second problem stems from a total misreading of history. The Zionist movement may indeed have developed its state-building capacity while under the British mandate, but Israel only came into being as a state by using force against British and Palestinians alike. By way of contrast, the only military capability the PA is building under US supervision is directed against those who seek to take up arms against the occupation. The "Zionist" option of military self-reliance and readiness to use force for political-territorial ends is totally absent from the PA's new approach and is inimical to its political outlook.
The state-first approach carries other significant risks: it threatens to transform any final status negotiations into a prolonged state-to-state dispute whereby the fate of Palestinian refugees, the future of Arab Jerusalem and other critical issues will be indefinitely deferred. The urgency of dealing with Palestinians' national grievances as a whole will diminish, and their interests will be gradually pushed to the margins of international and regional concerns on the grounds that they have already fulfilled their major aspiration by being granted statehood.
In present and foreseeable circumstances, the PA's programme will be concentrated on the West Bank alone. This will only aggravate the division of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian hinterland. It will generate new Fatah-Hamas frictions, making it harder for a unified position to emerge. It is also worth remembering that the current PA cabinet is a caretaker government twice over, and has no mandate for any two-year programmes. Moreover, the issue of Palestinian statehood lies outside its legal remit: it is a political decision that rightfully belongs to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, not to the Palestinian Authority. Yet if it proceeds with its programme regardless, the PA will find itself caught in a political trap – success will undermine its claim for more land and greater territorial viability in the final status negotiations; failure will simply demonstrate that the Palestinians are unworthy of statehood.
Palestinian unilateralism will open the door to legitimising Israel's own unilateralism, and both historical precedent and the balance of power suggest that in such a contest Israel will prevail. Rather than lay the foundations for a truly viable and sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, Palestinian "Zionism" as conceived is only likely to produce a partial, ersatz entity; one that differs little from the autonomous self-rule that has long been Israel's remedy for addressing the Palestinian problem.
The new PA approach is not really about building a state by stealth or undoing the occupation by other means. Its focus is apolitical: improving Palestinian living standards and fomenting state-like behaviour but without any of the advantages of a real state. Indeed, this approach dovetails all too neatly with Bibi Netanyahu's notion of "economic peace" – it appears as a pragmatic ambition, to supplement the peace process and path to a viable two-state solution. In reality it is destined to circumvent it altogether – or, at best, to ensure that the outcome is determined by Israeli national interests alone.
The first essential duty of a state is defending its citizens against foreign incursions and threats. This part of the citizen-state contract clearly cannot be fulfilled under the proposed plan. The net result may be to devalue the already unconvincing currency of a two-state solution and leave the Palestinians suspended in yet another twilight zone whose only real dimension is a return to the heady days of "benign" occupation.
As President Obama seeks to jumpstart the Middle East peace process with increasingly disappointing results, a new approach has begun to emerge from within the upper circles of the Palestinian Authority.
In essence, this approach puts "statehood first" – without waiting for negotiations to resume, or for a full final status agreement with Israel. From this point of view, and in a kind of Zionism in reverse, unilateral actions on the ground can lay the foundations for an independent Palestinian state, irrespective of Israel's demands or strategy.
This approach has recently been formalised in the PA government's two-year plan, which includes an ambitious range of economic and developmental projects and is intended to tally with the growing international consensus on setting a two-year time frame for the two-state vision and a comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli settlement.
"Statehood first" has a superficially attractive ring to it that has begun to gain some traction among decision-makers in Washington and the EU. But it is fundamentally flawed. The first problem is the assumption that unilateral Palestinian state-building is possible when every PA action is determined by the Israeli occupation. Even putting to one side the Fatah-Hamas split, the PA cannot exercise the most elementary of powers; it cannot independently trade on the world market, decide who can enter its soil or deploy the smallest unit of its security services from one village to another; its leaders cannot even move without prior Israeli consent. In short, it cannot freely exercise its authority over its citizens or territory in any meaningful manner.
At the heart of the PA's programme lies a basic contradiction: while it claims to be building a state against the occupation, it is in practice building state-like structures with the occupation. No genuinely sovereign state has been or can be built while still under occupation, and nothing in Israel's current stance on the basic issues of Palestinian sovereignty (territorial extent, control over borders, the right to self defence, and so on) suggests otherwise.
The second problem stems from a total misreading of history. The Zionist movement may indeed have developed its state-building capacity while under the British mandate, but Israel only came into being as a state by using force against British and Palestinians alike. By way of contrast, the only military capability the PA is building under US supervision is directed against those who seek to take up arms against the occupation. The "Zionist" option of military self-reliance and readiness to use force for political-territorial ends is totally absent from the PA's new approach and is inimical to its political outlook.
The state-first approach carries other significant risks: it threatens to transform any final status negotiations into a prolonged state-to-state dispute whereby the fate of Palestinian refugees, the future of Arab Jerusalem and other critical issues will be indefinitely deferred. The urgency of dealing with Palestinians' national grievances as a whole will diminish, and their interests will be gradually pushed to the margins of international and regional concerns on the grounds that they have already fulfilled their major aspiration by being granted statehood.
In present and foreseeable circumstances, the PA's programme will be concentrated on the West Bank alone. This will only aggravate the division of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian hinterland. It will generate new Fatah-Hamas frictions, making it harder for a unified position to emerge. It is also worth remembering that the current PA cabinet is a caretaker government twice over, and has no mandate for any two-year programmes. Moreover, the issue of Palestinian statehood lies outside its legal remit: it is a political decision that rightfully belongs to the Palestine Liberation Organisation, not to the Palestinian Authority. Yet if it proceeds with its programme regardless, the PA will find itself caught in a political trap – success will undermine its claim for more land and greater territorial viability in the final status negotiations; failure will simply demonstrate that the Palestinians are unworthy of statehood.
Palestinian unilateralism will open the door to legitimising Israel's own unilateralism, and both historical precedent and the balance of power suggest that in such a contest Israel will prevail. Rather than lay the foundations for a truly viable and sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, Palestinian "Zionism" as conceived is only likely to produce a partial, ersatz entity; one that differs little from the autonomous self-rule that has long been Israel's remedy for addressing the Palestinian problem.
The new PA approach is not really about building a state by stealth or undoing the occupation by other means. Its focus is apolitical: improving Palestinian living standards and fomenting state-like behaviour but without any of the advantages of a real state. Indeed, this approach dovetails all too neatly with Bibi Netanyahu's notion of "economic peace" – it appears as a pragmatic ambition, to supplement the peace process and path to a viable two-state solution. In reality it is destined to circumvent it altogether – or, at best, to ensure that the outcome is determined by Israeli national interests alone.
The first essential duty of a state is defending its citizens against foreign incursions and threats. This part of the citizen-state contract clearly cannot be fulfilled under the proposed plan. The net result may be to devalue the already unconvincing currency of a two-state solution and leave the Palestinians suspended in yet another twilight zone whose only real dimension is a return to the heady days of "benign" occupation.
Last Straw for the Palestinian "Authority"? Sari Makdisi
If there were any lingering doubts concerning the status and integrity of the Palestinian National Authority -- and its so-called President, Mahmoud Abbas ("so-called" because his term of office, such as it was, expired almost a year ago) -- they were surely dispelled once and for all by its decision to drop its support for a UN resolution that would have referred the Goldstone Report on Israel's post-Christmas 2008 attack on Gaza to the UN Security Council.
Saree Makdisi
Professor of English, University of California
The 575-page Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which was led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, confirmed the already densely documented reports published by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International. Those reports had, in turn, systematically confirmed Palestinian claims that Israel had, for example, recklessly and indiscriminately used white phosphorous on the packed residential districts of Gaza; indiscriminately targeted civilian objects including UN schools (as documented by the widely circulated -- other than in the US -- photographs of an Israeli phosphorous strike on a UN school in Gaza); used Palestinian civilians as human shields; and collectively punished the population of Gaza by imposing on them a suffocating siege, cutting off vital supplies of food, medicine, and fuel (not just during the recent assault and on to this day, but, to a greater or lesser extent, since 2005, and even, arguably, since 1991, when the Israelis first methodically sealed off the hapless territory from the outside world).
The Amnesty report, published in July, found that "hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks carried out using high-precision weapons -- air-delivered bombs and missiles, and tank shells. Others, including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers. Aerial bombardments launched from Israeli F-16 combat aircraft targeted and destroyed civilian homes without warning, killing and injuring scores of their inhabitants, often while they slept. Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks."
The Goldstone report (though it remarkably reserves its strongest language for Palestinian rocket attacks that killed 3 Israeli civilians, compared to the 1,400 Palestinians killed in Gaza, the vast majority civilians, and a third of them children) reiterates many of the same conclusions, and reports on case after case where Israeli forces launched "intentional attacks against the civilian population and civilian objects," including "the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the [latter] attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status." These incidents -- all of which constitute war crimes -- indicate, according to the Goldstone report, "that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population."
Indeed, among its other findings, the Goldstone report corroborates the well-documented reports (all of them summarily dismissed by the Israeli army, which considers itself "the most moral army in the world") that Israeli soldiers themselves admitted to the brutality of the bombardment of Gaza, and left behind them -- as unmistakable evidence of their officially-encouraged attitude towards Palestinians -- both racist slogans (e.g., "We came to annihilate you; Death to the Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate") and human feces smeared on the walls of the Palestinian homes they looted and vandalized. "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them," one Israeli soldier confessed of the prevailing Israeli army attitude toward the Palestinians of Gaza, which was fueled in part by the proclamations of the army's rabbinical corps, which compared Palestinians to the biblical Philistines and urged that Israeli soldiers "show no mercy."
None of the conclusions of all these reports ought to come as a surprise. The Israeli army itself had openly proclaimed, months before the bombing even started, that its strategy in both Lebanon and Palestine has been premised since 2006 on the sweeping and indiscriminate use of massive firepower: the so-called "Dahiyeh Doctrine," referring to the Dahiyeh, or southern suburb of Beirut, which the Israelis razed to the ground in their 2006 war on Lebanon, as they also did to many villages in the south of that country. "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction," one Israeli general (Gadi Eisenkot) announced -- with contemptuous disregard for the law of war. "From our perspective, these are military bases," he added. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized."
Other than planning for -- and attempting (to its own satisfaction at least) to legitimate -- the massive and necessarily indiscriminate use of force, the Israeli military legal establishment had specifically authorized premeditated attacks, such as the one that killed dozens of unarmed Gaza policemen parading in their graduation ceremony, with which Israel kicked off its bombardment on 27 December 2008, that inherently involved manifest violations of the principles of proportionality and discrimination that are the pillars of international humanitarian law.
Moreover, not only the Amnesty and Goldstone reports but Israeli commanders themselves openly said that overwhelming and indiscriminate force was used -- deliberately, and in a premeditated fashion -- again, in total disregard for the principles of proportionality and discrimination. "At the start of the ground offensive, senior command decided to avoid endangering the lives of soldiers, even at the price of seriously harming the civilian population," one Israeli media report revealed. "This is why the IDF [Israeli army] made use of massive force during its advance in the Strip. As a Golani brigade commander explained, if there is any concern that a house is booby-trapped, even if it is filled with civilians, it should be targeted and hit, to ensure that it is not mined -- only then should it be approached. Without going into the moral aspects, such fighting tactics explain why there were no instances in which there was a need to assault homes where Hamas fighters were holed up."
Ultimately, all that these inquiries, including Goldstone's, have done is merely to confirm Israel's own (repeatedly flaunted) contempt for international humanitarian law.
Needless to say, from the beginning, Israel utterly refused to cooperate with the Goldstone inquiry, dismissing it -- as it has dismissed all previous attempts to investigate its conduct or to hold it accountable to the principles of international humanitarian law -- as "unfair" and "unbalanced" (as though there were anything "balanced" about the conflict between the sheer force of an occupying power and an essentially defenseless occupied people). Among the many previous investigative commissions which Israel has either summarily dismissed or refused to cooperate with are the investigation led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu into the Israeli killing of 19 members of a Palestinian family in Gaza in 2008; the commission appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2002 to investigate the indiscriminate destruction of civilian areas in the Israeli assault on Jenin refugee camp that spring (the actions of which a separate investigation, by Amnesty International, found amounted "to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes"); and the UN investigation of the Israeli artillery massacre of over a hundred Lebanese civilians huddling in a shelter at a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon in 1995, which found that "it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors," as the Israeli army said at the time -- as, indeed, it always says is the case when its soldiers kill dozens of civilians: not once has Israel actually held any of its officers or soldiers accountable for such crimes. In all previous cases, Israel's adamant refusal to be held accountable to the law has been upheld by the US, and the Obama administration proved that it had no intention of breaking that particular tradition this time either.
Nevertheless, as Professor Richard Falk (the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) points out, the Goldstone report could have provided a basis for referring Israel's conduct durng the war in Gaza to the International Criminal Court or other international courts, or to the establishment of a war crimes tribunal along the lines of those established after the catastrophes of Bosnia and Rwanda. That would have been the best way to finally hold Israel accountable for its grave breaches of international humanitarian law, its war crimes, and its crimes against humanity (not least the sealing off an entire civilian population from the outside world, denying it the ability to flee to safety, and then subjecting that same, defenseless, shelterless population -- most of it composed of children -- to an indiscriminate round-the-clock bombardment).
The process of referral depended, however, on obtaining a vote within the UN to have the Goldstone report referred to the Security Council for further deliberation, the creation of a war crimes tribunal, and so on. And all of that depended in turn on the support of Palestinian diplomats appointed by and accountable to Mahmoud Abbas.
But it is now clear that the Palestinian team representing Mahmoud Abbas at the UN (for they certainly do not represent the Palestinian people) has, on his instructions, dropped its support for the resolution that might have set the legal machinery of the international judicial system in motion. Other states can hardly be expected to stand up to US pressure and support a resolution on behalf of Palestinian rights that the Palestinian delegation itself is unwilling to support -- why should Venezuela or Nigeria or Pakistan be more Palestinian than the Palestinians?
Reports have been circulating in the Arab, Israeli and European media that Abbas and his associates may have been prompted to take this extraordinary action because Israel had been threatening, had they continued with their support of the UN resolution, to withhold its release of a share of the radio spectrum that would have allowed the creation of a new Palestinian mobile phone company, Wataniyya: the product of a joint venture between Qatari investors and the Palestine Investment Fund, to which Abbas himself and one of his wealthy sons have personal connections. Palestinians have suggested that simple corruption and cronyism may have motivated Abbas's decision. The PA and the circle of officials attached to it have certainly had their share of corruption charges -- most shockingly, perhaps, when Ahmed Qureia, then the so-called Prime Minister of the PA (again, "so-called" because Prime Ministers usually have countries to govern, and the PA is anything but a country), was accused of selling cement to the Israelis to build their wall in the West Bank. The corruption of the PA and the narrow circle of Fateh party officials running it, clinging to it, and benefiting from it, is one of the main reasons why Fateh was swept from office in the 2006 Palestinian elections in favor of Hamas: most people then were voting against Fateh and its corruption and general hopelessness, rather than for Hamas (which had, and has, little to offer other than simply not being Fateh: a credit which goes only so far).
It's possible, of course, that corruption and cronyism were not the motivating factors for Abbas's decision to withdraw Palestinian support for the Goldstone report. There are two other possibilities.
One of these is simple incompetence: that Abbas and his associates are so lacking in intelligence, imagination and political skill that they just bungled the whole affair. This is certainly not out of the question: Abbas himself is an extraordinarily unprepossessing and profoundly compromised man, and his circle of associates -- including men like Mohammad Dahlan and Saeb Ereikat -- hardly inspire any more confidence than Abbas himself. Quite apart from their sheer disregard for Palestinian suffering in Gaza (seeking redress for which ought to be their main priority), it ought to be clear that a party to a negotiation that wantonly throws a rarely-held card out of the window while attempting (or at least claiming) to negotiate is, to put it mildly, not qualified to negotiate in the first place, let alone to claim to "lead" a defiant and unvanquished people like the Palestinians. If the Ramallah leadership is really as hopelessly incompetent as this scenario would have it, that's reason enough for their removal from office, if not the dissolution of the PA itself. (It's difficult, though, to "dismiss from office" someone like Abbas who is not actually in office in the first place -- he is there because the Israelis and the Americans want him to be there, because the election for his successor after his term expired has been deferred at the behest of Washington and Tel Aviv, and not because he holds any legitimate mandate from the Palestinian people themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom have no faith in him whatsoever, as opinion polls have regularly found).
Another -- and I think more likely -- possibility is that Abbas, the PA and the essentially defunct PLO are not (and never were, at least since the time of Yasser Arafat's death) interested in serious negotiations with Israel that could have led to the creation of a genuine Palestinian state in the occupied territories. After all, one of the main criticisms of the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 which created the PA, is that, far from ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, they merely served to shift the day-to-day burden and cost of administering the occupation to the newly-established PA, while allowing Israel to go on demolishing Palestinian homes, expropriating Palestinian land, and building Jewish colonies in the occupied territories in contravention of international law. Oslo formally separated the three main chunks of Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967 (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem) from each other and the outside world, and, additionally, broke the West Bank itself into Areas A, B and C. It was only in Area A (about 18 percent of the total) that the PA had any kind of practical presence on the ground, and in Area C (60 percent of the West Bank), the PA had no role or presence at all -- and that's where Israel was (and still is) busy demolishing, expropriating and building. Oslo and the PA, in other words, far from ending the occupation and laying the basis for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, actually allowed Israel to consolidate the occupation and further cement its grip on Palestinian land. Which is exactly why the population of Jewish colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem doubled during the period of Oslo and has been increasing ever since -- and today numbers almost half a million.
As this latest episode so amply demonstrates, the PA serves Israel by facilitating the occupation -- which is why Israel invented it in the first place, just as, historically speaking, colonial powers have always attempted to create or coerce local elites into helping them deal with the population at large: an approach perhaps most gracefully summarized in Macaulay's Minute on Indian Educationhttp://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html of 1835 ("We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect"). Why would the PA want to bring to an end an arrangement from which it benefits? As the French scholar Regis Debray points out, the status quo provides the PA elites in Ramallah "with a living, status, dignity and a raison d'être," and probably (e.g., if the mobile phone contract rumors prove to be true) much more in the way of emoluments besides that.
Even if one were to grant the PA and Abbas and his associates the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really have their people's best interests at heart, it still remains the case that the PA, even under the best-case scenario, can claim to represent only a minority of the Palestinian people, since only a minority of Palestinians live in the occupied territories: the majority live either in the exile imposed on them by force during the creation of Israel in 1948, or (in the case of those Palestinians who survived that year's ethnic cleansing and remained in their homes) as second-class, non-Jewish citizens of the would-be Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them simply because they are not Jewish.
These, then, are the possibilities before us: not only does the PA not represent the Palestinian people, it is also, on top of that, either corrupt to an almost unimaginable level; or it is profoundly incompetent and guilty of squandering the rights and hopes of a people that it is unentitled to claim to lead; or it is interested not in its people's rights and hopes but rather in perpetuating its own status as the day-to-day caretaker of a permanent Israeli occupation -- in which case it is no less collaborationist than the Vichy "government" of Nazi-occupied France in the 1940s. Corruption; incompetence; collaboration: ah, the agony of choice.
In the unlikely event that Abbas and his associates were to declare the "independence" of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, as has been suggested by the current so-called Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad (another man whose claim to office has no legitimacy, since his arbitrary appointment, by Abbas, to replace the legitimately elected Hamas leadership -- whatever one thinks of it -- was never confirmed by the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, many of the members of which are in Israeli jails), it ought to be clearer than ever that such a "state" would offer Palestinians only more of the same choices (corruption, compromise, collaboration), while continuing to serve Israel's interests, if not actually to take direct orders from Washington and Tel Aviv.
In any case, the Palestinian cause is a struggle for freedom and justice, not for the creation of a statelet in the occupied territories that would, as I said -- even in the best circumstances -- only address the interests of that minority of the Palestinian people who live there.
What, then, are we to conclude from all this?
Above all, that no Palestinian ought to look to the official leadership as a source of guidance and direction: it has betrayed the people and proved itself totally unworthy of their trust -- indeed, many Palestinians, including Abdelbari Atwan, editor of the newspaper al-quds al-arabi, are demanding that those behind this recent decision be apprehended and put on trial. And of course with a leadership this corrupt, inept or collaborationist, Palestinians can hardly expect better treatment from Washington and Tel Aviv than they are getting from Ramallah. And the Hamas opposition and its alternative leadership has little more to offer in the long run other than resistance for the sake of resistance, which is not, in itself, a blueprint for freedom and justice, and in any case has nothing to offer to Christian or secular Palestinians (and hardly much more than that to offer Muslim ones either, for that matter).
The second immediate conclusion to be drawn from this experience is that, as more and more Palestinians are demanding, the PA ought to be dissolved once and for all -- the sooner, the better. This latest action really ought to be the last in a long and dismal record proving that the PA has not only not served the interests of the Palestinian people, but that, on the contrary, it fundamentally serves the needs and requirements of Israel.
Bereft of any credible or legitimate leadership, the Palestinian people will have to look to themselves to continue their struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Indeed, their struggle has been at its best, for example, during the first intifada of the 1980s, when the official leadership -- at the time in exile in Tunis -- was actually least involved in it. No wonder, then, that the Israeli response to the grassroots autonomy of the first intifada was to usher the official leadership back into Palestine; the first intifada then stalled, and things have gone downhill ever since.
In looking for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then, we should once and for all stop looking to governments and officials (elected or otherwise), in the US, Israel, or among the Palestinians themselves. As the Obama administration has already demonstrated, the US government, in the present political conjuncture, will never put peace and justice in Palestine ahead of internal domestic pressures and politics; the Israeli government will not for one moment back down from its continually expanding colonization plan in the West Bank and East Jerusalem until it is compelled by outside pressure to do otherwise; and the Palestinian government -- well, there is no such thing. There is a people living partly under military occupation; partly in enforced exile; and partly as a racialized and discriminated-against minority inside Israel. What they need is to refocus their struggle in ways that they can all identify with, collectively and equally, and, moreover, in ways that people of good will around the world -- who have repeatedly demonstrated in their tens of thousands in support of justice for Palestine.
Indeed, the Palestinians are not alone: they have the support of people around the entire world. And it is to that reserve of good will and good faith among ordinary people around the world that the Palestinians must also look, then. As the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, governments not only can, but do, act, when ordinary people of good will make them act. In fact, even as governments have dithered, a vibrant global campaign to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel in order to bring it into compliance with international law and in order to realize the rights of the Palestinian people (all of it) has been recording one success after another, reminding us all that boycotts really do work.
This is the direction in which all Palestinians, bereft of leadership, must now throw themselves. And their demand must be something that addresses and unifies the rights of all segments of the Palestinian people, not just those suffering under occupation, as well as addressing and recognizing the rights of Jewish Israelis -- something that most decent people in the world can readily identify with: justice, equality, one-person-one-vote: in other words, the creation of one democratic and secular state in which Palestinians and Israelis can live equally in a just and lasting peace. For without justice there will be no peace.Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saree-makdisi/last-straw-for-the-palest_b_309585.html
Saree Makdisi
Professor of English, University of California
The 575-page Report of the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which was led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, confirmed the already densely documented reports published by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International. Those reports had, in turn, systematically confirmed Palestinian claims that Israel had, for example, recklessly and indiscriminately used white phosphorous on the packed residential districts of Gaza; indiscriminately targeted civilian objects including UN schools (as documented by the widely circulated -- other than in the US -- photographs of an Israeli phosphorous strike on a UN school in Gaza); used Palestinian civilians as human shields; and collectively punished the population of Gaza by imposing on them a suffocating siege, cutting off vital supplies of food, medicine, and fuel (not just during the recent assault and on to this day, but, to a greater or lesser extent, since 2005, and even, arguably, since 1991, when the Israelis first methodically sealed off the hapless territory from the outside world).
The Amnesty report, published in July, found that "hundreds of civilians were killed in attacks carried out using high-precision weapons -- air-delivered bombs and missiles, and tank shells. Others, including women and children, were shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of the Israeli soldiers. Aerial bombardments launched from Israeli F-16 combat aircraft targeted and destroyed civilian homes without warning, killing and injuring scores of their inhabitants, often while they slept. Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business, as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by Hellfire and other highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, and by precision projectiles fired from tanks."
The Goldstone report (though it remarkably reserves its strongest language for Palestinian rocket attacks that killed 3 Israeli civilians, compared to the 1,400 Palestinians killed in Gaza, the vast majority civilians, and a third of them children) reiterates many of the same conclusions, and reports on case after case where Israeli forces launched "intentional attacks against the civilian population and civilian objects," including "the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the [latter] attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status." These incidents -- all of which constitute war crimes -- indicate, according to the Goldstone report, "that the instructions given to the Israeli forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population."
Indeed, among its other findings, the Goldstone report corroborates the well-documented reports (all of them summarily dismissed by the Israeli army, which considers itself "the most moral army in the world") that Israeli soldiers themselves admitted to the brutality of the bombardment of Gaza, and left behind them -- as unmistakable evidence of their officially-encouraged attitude towards Palestinians -- both racist slogans (e.g., "We came to annihilate you; Death to the Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate") and human feces smeared on the walls of the Palestinian homes they looted and vandalized. "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them," one Israeli soldier confessed of the prevailing Israeli army attitude toward the Palestinians of Gaza, which was fueled in part by the proclamations of the army's rabbinical corps, which compared Palestinians to the biblical Philistines and urged that Israeli soldiers "show no mercy."
None of the conclusions of all these reports ought to come as a surprise. The Israeli army itself had openly proclaimed, months before the bombing even started, that its strategy in both Lebanon and Palestine has been premised since 2006 on the sweeping and indiscriminate use of massive firepower: the so-called "Dahiyeh Doctrine," referring to the Dahiyeh, or southern suburb of Beirut, which the Israelis razed to the ground in their 2006 war on Lebanon, as they also did to many villages in the south of that country. "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction," one Israeli general (Gadi Eisenkot) announced -- with contemptuous disregard for the law of war. "From our perspective, these are military bases," he added. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized."
Other than planning for -- and attempting (to its own satisfaction at least) to legitimate -- the massive and necessarily indiscriminate use of force, the Israeli military legal establishment had specifically authorized premeditated attacks, such as the one that killed dozens of unarmed Gaza policemen parading in their graduation ceremony, with which Israel kicked off its bombardment on 27 December 2008, that inherently involved manifest violations of the principles of proportionality and discrimination that are the pillars of international humanitarian law.
Moreover, not only the Amnesty and Goldstone reports but Israeli commanders themselves openly said that overwhelming and indiscriminate force was used -- deliberately, and in a premeditated fashion -- again, in total disregard for the principles of proportionality and discrimination. "At the start of the ground offensive, senior command decided to avoid endangering the lives of soldiers, even at the price of seriously harming the civilian population," one Israeli media report revealed. "This is why the IDF [Israeli army] made use of massive force during its advance in the Strip. As a Golani brigade commander explained, if there is any concern that a house is booby-trapped, even if it is filled with civilians, it should be targeted and hit, to ensure that it is not mined -- only then should it be approached. Without going into the moral aspects, such fighting tactics explain why there were no instances in which there was a need to assault homes where Hamas fighters were holed up."
Ultimately, all that these inquiries, including Goldstone's, have done is merely to confirm Israel's own (repeatedly flaunted) contempt for international humanitarian law.
Needless to say, from the beginning, Israel utterly refused to cooperate with the Goldstone inquiry, dismissing it -- as it has dismissed all previous attempts to investigate its conduct or to hold it accountable to the principles of international humanitarian law -- as "unfair" and "unbalanced" (as though there were anything "balanced" about the conflict between the sheer force of an occupying power and an essentially defenseless occupied people). Among the many previous investigative commissions which Israel has either summarily dismissed or refused to cooperate with are the investigation led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu into the Israeli killing of 19 members of a Palestinian family in Gaza in 2008; the commission appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2002 to investigate the indiscriminate destruction of civilian areas in the Israeli assault on Jenin refugee camp that spring (the actions of which a separate investigation, by Amnesty International, found amounted "to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes"); and the UN investigation of the Israeli artillery massacre of over a hundred Lebanese civilians huddling in a shelter at a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon in 1995, which found that "it is unlikely that the shelling of the United Nations compound was the result of gross technical and/or procedural errors," as the Israeli army said at the time -- as, indeed, it always says is the case when its soldiers kill dozens of civilians: not once has Israel actually held any of its officers or soldiers accountable for such crimes. In all previous cases, Israel's adamant refusal to be held accountable to the law has been upheld by the US, and the Obama administration proved that it had no intention of breaking that particular tradition this time either.
Nevertheless, as Professor Richard Falk (the UN's Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) points out, the Goldstone report could have provided a basis for referring Israel's conduct durng the war in Gaza to the International Criminal Court or other international courts, or to the establishment of a war crimes tribunal along the lines of those established after the catastrophes of Bosnia and Rwanda. That would have been the best way to finally hold Israel accountable for its grave breaches of international humanitarian law, its war crimes, and its crimes against humanity (not least the sealing off an entire civilian population from the outside world, denying it the ability to flee to safety, and then subjecting that same, defenseless, shelterless population -- most of it composed of children -- to an indiscriminate round-the-clock bombardment).
The process of referral depended, however, on obtaining a vote within the UN to have the Goldstone report referred to the Security Council for further deliberation, the creation of a war crimes tribunal, and so on. And all of that depended in turn on the support of Palestinian diplomats appointed by and accountable to Mahmoud Abbas.
But it is now clear that the Palestinian team representing Mahmoud Abbas at the UN (for they certainly do not represent the Palestinian people) has, on his instructions, dropped its support for the resolution that might have set the legal machinery of the international judicial system in motion. Other states can hardly be expected to stand up to US pressure and support a resolution on behalf of Palestinian rights that the Palestinian delegation itself is unwilling to support -- why should Venezuela or Nigeria or Pakistan be more Palestinian than the Palestinians?
Reports have been circulating in the Arab, Israeli and European media that Abbas and his associates may have been prompted to take this extraordinary action because Israel had been threatening, had they continued with their support of the UN resolution, to withhold its release of a share of the radio spectrum that would have allowed the creation of a new Palestinian mobile phone company, Wataniyya: the product of a joint venture between Qatari investors and the Palestine Investment Fund, to which Abbas himself and one of his wealthy sons have personal connections. Palestinians have suggested that simple corruption and cronyism may have motivated Abbas's decision. The PA and the circle of officials attached to it have certainly had their share of corruption charges -- most shockingly, perhaps, when Ahmed Qureia, then the so-called Prime Minister of the PA (again, "so-called" because Prime Ministers usually have countries to govern, and the PA is anything but a country), was accused of selling cement to the Israelis to build their wall in the West Bank. The corruption of the PA and the narrow circle of Fateh party officials running it, clinging to it, and benefiting from it, is one of the main reasons why Fateh was swept from office in the 2006 Palestinian elections in favor of Hamas: most people then were voting against Fateh and its corruption and general hopelessness, rather than for Hamas (which had, and has, little to offer other than simply not being Fateh: a credit which goes only so far).
It's possible, of course, that corruption and cronyism were not the motivating factors for Abbas's decision to withdraw Palestinian support for the Goldstone report. There are two other possibilities.
One of these is simple incompetence: that Abbas and his associates are so lacking in intelligence, imagination and political skill that they just bungled the whole affair. This is certainly not out of the question: Abbas himself is an extraordinarily unprepossessing and profoundly compromised man, and his circle of associates -- including men like Mohammad Dahlan and Saeb Ereikat -- hardly inspire any more confidence than Abbas himself. Quite apart from their sheer disregard for Palestinian suffering in Gaza (seeking redress for which ought to be their main priority), it ought to be clear that a party to a negotiation that wantonly throws a rarely-held card out of the window while attempting (or at least claiming) to negotiate is, to put it mildly, not qualified to negotiate in the first place, let alone to claim to "lead" a defiant and unvanquished people like the Palestinians. If the Ramallah leadership is really as hopelessly incompetent as this scenario would have it, that's reason enough for their removal from office, if not the dissolution of the PA itself. (It's difficult, though, to "dismiss from office" someone like Abbas who is not actually in office in the first place -- he is there because the Israelis and the Americans want him to be there, because the election for his successor after his term expired has been deferred at the behest of Washington and Tel Aviv, and not because he holds any legitimate mandate from the Palestinian people themselves, the overwhelming majority of whom have no faith in him whatsoever, as opinion polls have regularly found).
Another -- and I think more likely -- possibility is that Abbas, the PA and the essentially defunct PLO are not (and never were, at least since the time of Yasser Arafat's death) interested in serious negotiations with Israel that could have led to the creation of a genuine Palestinian state in the occupied territories. After all, one of the main criticisms of the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 which created the PA, is that, far from ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, they merely served to shift the day-to-day burden and cost of administering the occupation to the newly-established PA, while allowing Israel to go on demolishing Palestinian homes, expropriating Palestinian land, and building Jewish colonies in the occupied territories in contravention of international law. Oslo formally separated the three main chunks of Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967 (Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem) from each other and the outside world, and, additionally, broke the West Bank itself into Areas A, B and C. It was only in Area A (about 18 percent of the total) that the PA had any kind of practical presence on the ground, and in Area C (60 percent of the West Bank), the PA had no role or presence at all -- and that's where Israel was (and still is) busy demolishing, expropriating and building. Oslo and the PA, in other words, far from ending the occupation and laying the basis for the creation of an independent Palestinian state, actually allowed Israel to consolidate the occupation and further cement its grip on Palestinian land. Which is exactly why the population of Jewish colonists in the West Bank and East Jerusalem doubled during the period of Oslo and has been increasing ever since -- and today numbers almost half a million.
As this latest episode so amply demonstrates, the PA serves Israel by facilitating the occupation -- which is why Israel invented it in the first place, just as, historically speaking, colonial powers have always attempted to create or coerce local elites into helping them deal with the population at large: an approach perhaps most gracefully summarized in Macaulay's Minute on Indian Educationhttp://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/macaulay.html of 1835 ("We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect"). Why would the PA want to bring to an end an arrangement from which it benefits? As the French scholar Regis Debray points out, the status quo provides the PA elites in Ramallah "with a living, status, dignity and a raison d'être," and probably (e.g., if the mobile phone contract rumors prove to be true) much more in the way of emoluments besides that.
Even if one were to grant the PA and Abbas and his associates the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really have their people's best interests at heart, it still remains the case that the PA, even under the best-case scenario, can claim to represent only a minority of the Palestinian people, since only a minority of Palestinians live in the occupied territories: the majority live either in the exile imposed on them by force during the creation of Israel in 1948, or (in the case of those Palestinians who survived that year's ethnic cleansing and remained in their homes) as second-class, non-Jewish citizens of the would-be Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them simply because they are not Jewish.
These, then, are the possibilities before us: not only does the PA not represent the Palestinian people, it is also, on top of that, either corrupt to an almost unimaginable level; or it is profoundly incompetent and guilty of squandering the rights and hopes of a people that it is unentitled to claim to lead; or it is interested not in its people's rights and hopes but rather in perpetuating its own status as the day-to-day caretaker of a permanent Israeli occupation -- in which case it is no less collaborationist than the Vichy "government" of Nazi-occupied France in the 1940s. Corruption; incompetence; collaboration: ah, the agony of choice.
In the unlikely event that Abbas and his associates were to declare the "independence" of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, as has been suggested by the current so-called Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad (another man whose claim to office has no legitimacy, since his arbitrary appointment, by Abbas, to replace the legitimately elected Hamas leadership -- whatever one thinks of it -- was never confirmed by the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, many of the members of which are in Israeli jails), it ought to be clearer than ever that such a "state" would offer Palestinians only more of the same choices (corruption, compromise, collaboration), while continuing to serve Israel's interests, if not actually to take direct orders from Washington and Tel Aviv.
In any case, the Palestinian cause is a struggle for freedom and justice, not for the creation of a statelet in the occupied territories that would, as I said -- even in the best circumstances -- only address the interests of that minority of the Palestinian people who live there.
What, then, are we to conclude from all this?
Above all, that no Palestinian ought to look to the official leadership as a source of guidance and direction: it has betrayed the people and proved itself totally unworthy of their trust -- indeed, many Palestinians, including Abdelbari Atwan, editor of the newspaper al-quds al-arabi, are demanding that those behind this recent decision be apprehended and put on trial. And of course with a leadership this corrupt, inept or collaborationist, Palestinians can hardly expect better treatment from Washington and Tel Aviv than they are getting from Ramallah. And the Hamas opposition and its alternative leadership has little more to offer in the long run other than resistance for the sake of resistance, which is not, in itself, a blueprint for freedom and justice, and in any case has nothing to offer to Christian or secular Palestinians (and hardly much more than that to offer Muslim ones either, for that matter).
The second immediate conclusion to be drawn from this experience is that, as more and more Palestinians are demanding, the PA ought to be dissolved once and for all -- the sooner, the better. This latest action really ought to be the last in a long and dismal record proving that the PA has not only not served the interests of the Palestinian people, but that, on the contrary, it fundamentally serves the needs and requirements of Israel.
Bereft of any credible or legitimate leadership, the Palestinian people will have to look to themselves to continue their struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Indeed, their struggle has been at its best, for example, during the first intifada of the 1980s, when the official leadership -- at the time in exile in Tunis -- was actually least involved in it. No wonder, then, that the Israeli response to the grassroots autonomy of the first intifada was to usher the official leadership back into Palestine; the first intifada then stalled, and things have gone downhill ever since.
In looking for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then, we should once and for all stop looking to governments and officials (elected or otherwise), in the US, Israel, or among the Palestinians themselves. As the Obama administration has already demonstrated, the US government, in the present political conjuncture, will never put peace and justice in Palestine ahead of internal domestic pressures and politics; the Israeli government will not for one moment back down from its continually expanding colonization plan in the West Bank and East Jerusalem until it is compelled by outside pressure to do otherwise; and the Palestinian government -- well, there is no such thing. There is a people living partly under military occupation; partly in enforced exile; and partly as a racialized and discriminated-against minority inside Israel. What they need is to refocus their struggle in ways that they can all identify with, collectively and equally, and, moreover, in ways that people of good will around the world -- who have repeatedly demonstrated in their tens of thousands in support of justice for Palestine.
Indeed, the Palestinians are not alone: they have the support of people around the entire world. And it is to that reserve of good will and good faith among ordinary people around the world that the Palestinians must also look, then. As the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa demonstrated, governments not only can, but do, act, when ordinary people of good will make them act. In fact, even as governments have dithered, a vibrant global campaign to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel in order to bring it into compliance with international law and in order to realize the rights of the Palestinian people (all of it) has been recording one success after another, reminding us all that boycotts really do work.
This is the direction in which all Palestinians, bereft of leadership, must now throw themselves. And their demand must be something that addresses and unifies the rights of all segments of the Palestinian people, not just those suffering under occupation, as well as addressing and recognizing the rights of Jewish Israelis -- something that most decent people in the world can readily identify with: justice, equality, one-person-one-vote: in other words, the creation of one democratic and secular state in which Palestinians and Israelis can live equally in a just and lasting peace. For without justice there will be no peace.Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saree-makdisi/last-straw-for-the-palest_b_309585.html
Monday, 13 April 2009
Friday, 23 January 2009
Friday, 16 January 2009
I got mad
I got mad yesterday. I could not reach my sister, Samia, who lives in Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza city. Her apartment is very close to UNRWA headquarters which was hit by Israeli occupation forces phosphorous shells when they pushed deeper into Gaza City. I tried in vain to reach her by phone. I tried all her numbers, the landline, the mobile, her husband mobile, her neighbor land line etc but there was no answer. What would be the reasons? What happened to them? Are they still alive? Or what? Did they evacuate the house and run for their life looking for a safer place? But there is no safe place in Gaza anymore. So what could be the reason?
She is due in ten days. Her family already suffers from acute shortage of water and food supplies. There have no electricity but only an hour today, no cooking gas and no candles. The batteries of the radio are getting so weak. They have almost nothing but their will, dignity and steadfastness. Last time when I called her she told me many stories.
Among these stories was about Her children who are getting so scared from the bombardment. It reached the stage that her daughter, Noor, aged14, locked the flat door and hid the key so that her dad doesn’t go to the mosque for Friday prayer. The girl thinks that if he goes he won’t return. She is right. Tens of people were killed in mosques, many in market. Others were killed in schools and some in hospitals. The United Nations centers have been shelled. All the places that suppose to be safe places are shelled. Then where is she?
After several attempts, I reached my family in Khan Younis. Like me they were too worried about Samia. But when they released the state that I am at My mother started to calm me down saying that it is communication problem. And while realizing that this justification is accurate particularly after the Israeli shelled all the power units and all stations that strengthen the reception, I remained worried.
Nasser my husband called me. Before uttering any word, I asked him what happened. He said bad news. I said what? He said his cousin Shihda in Rafah was killed. Shihda, A bright engineer aged 28 was the third son to be killed to the family during this Intifada. How would be the situation of his mother now? I was with her when her son Karam, aged 13 killed in 2000. How will she cope? What shall I tell her when I call her? What words? What prayers? What and then what? May Allah be with her.
Al-jazeera broadcasted a scream of woman saying that a pregnant lady has been killed in their building. With the woman there were 3 children. Could she be my sister? She is pregnant and she has 3 children. I got mad again.I had another telephone call. It was Our neighbor, Ashraf, in Zahra town that is very close to what used to be Netazarim colony or settlement. Asraf, flat was bombed and he ask if he can live in our flat. Of course i said. You should not call me for such thing. Consider it your home. Then he said can Saeb family stay as well. I said of course. Then the call ended as the battery was too weak.
Then another call. I was so scared to take it. I was afraid to get mote terrible news. I was hesitant and so scared to take the call and therefore I missed it. Then I collapsed crying. Then I had a text message. It was from my sister Lubna in Khan younis. She wrote 5 words “don’t worry, Samia is safe.” With these words my tears fall like a river. Thank god. Thank God.
She is due in ten days. Her family already suffers from acute shortage of water and food supplies. There have no electricity but only an hour today, no cooking gas and no candles. The batteries of the radio are getting so weak. They have almost nothing but their will, dignity and steadfastness. Last time when I called her she told me many stories.
Among these stories was about Her children who are getting so scared from the bombardment. It reached the stage that her daughter, Noor, aged14, locked the flat door and hid the key so that her dad doesn’t go to the mosque for Friday prayer. The girl thinks that if he goes he won’t return. She is right. Tens of people were killed in mosques, many in market. Others were killed in schools and some in hospitals. The United Nations centers have been shelled. All the places that suppose to be safe places are shelled. Then where is she?
After several attempts, I reached my family in Khan Younis. Like me they were too worried about Samia. But when they released the state that I am at My mother started to calm me down saying that it is communication problem. And while realizing that this justification is accurate particularly after the Israeli shelled all the power units and all stations that strengthen the reception, I remained worried.
Nasser my husband called me. Before uttering any word, I asked him what happened. He said bad news. I said what? He said his cousin Shihda in Rafah was killed. Shihda, A bright engineer aged 28 was the third son to be killed to the family during this Intifada. How would be the situation of his mother now? I was with her when her son Karam, aged 13 killed in 2000. How will she cope? What shall I tell her when I call her? What words? What prayers? What and then what? May Allah be with her.
Al-jazeera broadcasted a scream of woman saying that a pregnant lady has been killed in their building. With the woman there were 3 children. Could she be my sister? She is pregnant and she has 3 children. I got mad again.I had another telephone call. It was Our neighbor, Ashraf, in Zahra town that is very close to what used to be Netazarim colony or settlement. Asraf, flat was bombed and he ask if he can live in our flat. Of course i said. You should not call me for such thing. Consider it your home. Then he said can Saeb family stay as well. I said of course. Then the call ended as the battery was too weak.
Then another call. I was so scared to take it. I was afraid to get mote terrible news. I was hesitant and so scared to take the call and therefore I missed it. Then I collapsed crying. Then I had a text message. It was from my sister Lubna in Khan younis. She wrote 5 words “don’t worry, Samia is safe.” With these words my tears fall like a river. Thank god. Thank God.
Monday, 12 January 2009
There is no safe place in gaza
Yesterday, a close and old friend sent me an e-mail from Paris asking about me and my family. At the beginning I got puzzled of what to write to her. The situation back home is horrible. There in no accurate words to describe it. Some people call it massacre, annihilation, war crimes and I feel that none of these words describe what is going on.
Israel succeeded to dehumanize Palestinians to the extent that the world is now accepting their slaughter with no comment. They are nothing but mere terrorists who aim to destroy the Western civilization. More than that Israel succeeded to terrorize the world governments and to large extent their civic institutions with its two main issues the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Anyone who dares to open his or her mouth to protest against Israelis polices in Occupied Palestine is usually hit by one of those accusations.
We called my husband’s sister, Majdiya, aged 62 years who lives in beach camp. She is usually a strong woman. However, today being a grandmother and mother with too many mouths to feed and too many youth to fear to loose and too little food remained and no security or safety of what so ever to protect her family, she kept silent for a while. Then she asked me:
“What does the Israeli government want from us”? What do they mean by killing our kids, shelling our schools, mosques, universities, water wells, fields, homes, orphanage? Isn’t it enough what they took in 1948 and killed in 1956 and reoccupied in 67? Wasn’t it enough the horror of first intifada and second intifada, the blockade of Gaza, the shortage of fuel, food, water and electricity? Gaza is already hell. What do they want from us more than the hell and the prison that they put us in. In previous wars when there was shelling we used to escape for our life. But now we cannot. We are trapped in a big prison. Getting out of home means putting ourselves a target to planes, drones, or artillery shells.
More silence then the same question was repeated by Majdiya. What do they want from us? Nothing left to give them. They took everything: land, orchids, and places that used to be called home. They destroyed our future, freedom and dignity. Only the air that remains for us to breathe and if I am sure if they succeed to find away to deprive us from it they will do.There were no answers from my side. And my answer in fact doesn’t change the situation and after all my call is to make sure that she and family are OK and not to make statements.
I am sick and I am so frustrated and after every call with family and friends I cry. Then I charge my batteries and call the next family and try to find words and justifications and ask for patience and more patience. I try to give hope while in my heart i know there is no hope. I try to find words but there are no words that can explain the loss from our side and the crimes of the other side. The number of death toll keeps going up. And with every victim there is a story. And behind every story there is a crime. And behind every crime there is a free criminal that threatens not only Palestinians but also the world peace and more importantly the entire humanity.
Israel succeeded to dehumanize Palestinians to the extent that the world is now accepting their slaughter with no comment. They are nothing but mere terrorists who aim to destroy the Western civilization. More than that Israel succeeded to terrorize the world governments and to large extent their civic institutions with its two main issues the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Anyone who dares to open his or her mouth to protest against Israelis polices in Occupied Palestine is usually hit by one of those accusations.
We called my husband’s sister, Majdiya, aged 62 years who lives in beach camp. She is usually a strong woman. However, today being a grandmother and mother with too many mouths to feed and too many youth to fear to loose and too little food remained and no security or safety of what so ever to protect her family, she kept silent for a while. Then she asked me:
“What does the Israeli government want from us”? What do they mean by killing our kids, shelling our schools, mosques, universities, water wells, fields, homes, orphanage? Isn’t it enough what they took in 1948 and killed in 1956 and reoccupied in 67? Wasn’t it enough the horror of first intifada and second intifada, the blockade of Gaza, the shortage of fuel, food, water and electricity? Gaza is already hell. What do they want from us more than the hell and the prison that they put us in. In previous wars when there was shelling we used to escape for our life. But now we cannot. We are trapped in a big prison. Getting out of home means putting ourselves a target to planes, drones, or artillery shells.
More silence then the same question was repeated by Majdiya. What do they want from us? Nothing left to give them. They took everything: land, orchids, and places that used to be called home. They destroyed our future, freedom and dignity. Only the air that remains for us to breathe and if I am sure if they succeed to find away to deprive us from it they will do.There were no answers from my side. And my answer in fact doesn’t change the situation and after all my call is to make sure that she and family are OK and not to make statements.
I am sick and I am so frustrated and after every call with family and friends I cry. Then I charge my batteries and call the next family and try to find words and justifications and ask for patience and more patience. I try to give hope while in my heart i know there is no hope. I try to find words but there are no words that can explain the loss from our side and the crimes of the other side. The number of death toll keeps going up. And with every victim there is a story. And behind every story there is a crime. And behind every crime there is a free criminal that threatens not only Palestinians but also the world peace and more importantly the entire humanity.
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Palestinian refugees sit at Khan Younis refugee camp
