- 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 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, bank rolled 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 Orga nisation] by using a competing religious
alter native", 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 Pales tinian 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 kidnap ped 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, includ ing 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.
- http://www.newstatesman.com/200705280029
- John Pilger's latest book, "Freedom Next Time",
is published in paperback by Black Swan (£8.99). His first film for
cinema, "The War on Democracy", is released on 15 June
- Last updated 24/05/2007
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