[News] The Gaza massacre and the struggle for justice

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The Gaza massacre and the struggle for justice
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2010

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11696.shtml

The Gaza massacre, which Israel launched two years ago today, did not 
end on 18 January 2009, but continues. It was not only a massacre of 
human bodies, but of the truth and of justice. Only our actions can 
help bring it to an end.

The UN-commissioned Goldstone Report documented evidence of war 
crimes and crimes against humanity committed in an attack aimed at 
the very "foundations of civilian life in Gaza" -- schools, 
industrial infrastructure, water, sanitation, flour mills, mosques, 
universities, police stations, government ministries, 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11074.shtml>agriculture and 
thousands of homes. Yet like so many other inquiries documenting 
Israeli crimes, the Goldstone Report sits gathering dust as the 
United States, the European Union, the 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10807.shtml>Palestinian 
Authority and certain Arab governments colluded to ensure it would 
not translate into action.

Israel launched the attack, after breaking the ceasefire it had 
negotiated with Hamas the previous June, under the 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10123.shtml>bogus pretext of 
stopping rocket firing from Gaza.

During those horrifying weeks from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 
2009, Israel's merciless bombardment killed 1,417 people according to 
the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza.

They were infants like Farah Ammar al-Helu, one-year-old, killed in 
al-Zaytoun. They were schoolgirls or schoolboys, like Islam Khalil 
Abu Amsha, 12, of Shajaiyeh and Mahmoud Khaled al-Mashharawi, 13, of 
al-Daraj. They were elders like Kamla Ali al-Attar, 82 of Beit Lahiya 
and Madallah Ahmed Abu Rukba, 81, of Jabaliya; They were fathers and 
husbands like 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10138.shtml>Dr. Ehab Jasir 
al-Shaer. They were police officers like Younis Muhammad al-Ghandour, 
aged 24. They were 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11026.shtml>ambulance 
drivers and civil defense workers. They were homemakers, school 
teachers, farmers, sanitation workers and builders. And yes, some of 
them were fighters, battling as any other people would to defend 
their communities with light and primitive weapons against Israel's 
onslaught using the most advanced weaponry the United States and 
European Union could provide.

The names of the dead fill 100 pages, but nothing can fill the void 
they left in their families and communities ("The Dead in the course 
of the Israeli recent military offensive on the Gaza strip between 27 
December 2008 and 18 January 2009," 
[<http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/PressR/English/2008/list.pdf>PDF] 
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 18 March 2009).

These were not the first to die in Israeli massacres and they have 
not been the last. Dozens of people have been killed since the end of 
Israel's "Operation Cast Lead," the latest Salameh Abu Hashish last 
week, a 20-year old shepherd shot by Israeli occupation forces as he 
tended his animals in northern Gaza.

But the tragedy does not end with those who were killed. Along with 
thousands permanently injured, there is the incalculable 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10879.shtml>psychological 
cost of children growing up without parents, of parents burying their 
children, and the mental trauma that Israel's offensive and the 
ongoing siege has done to almost everyone in Gaza. There are the as 
yet unknown consequences of subjecting Gaza's 700,000 children to 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11455.shtml>a toxic water 
supply for years on end.

The siege robs 1.5 million people not just of basic goods, 
reconstruction supplies 
(<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11495.shtml>virtually 
nothing has been rebuilt in Gaza), and access to medical care but of 
their basic rights and freedoms to travel, to study, to be part of 
the world. It robs 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10676.shtml>promising young 
people of their ambitions and futures. It deprives the planet of all 
that they would have been able to 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11385.shtml>create and 
offer. By 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11648.shtml>cutting Gaza off 
from the outside world, Israel hopes to make us forget that the those 
inside are human.

Two years after the crime, Gaza remains a giant prison for a 
population whose unforgivable sin in the eyes of Israel and its 
allies is to be refugees from lands that Israel took by 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11594.shtml>ethnic cleansing.

Israel's violence against Gaza, like its violence against 
Palestinians everywhere, is the logical outcome of the racism that 
forms the inseparable core of Zionist ideology and practice: 
Palestinians are merely a nuisance, like brush or rocks to be cleared 
away in Zionism's relentless conquest of the land. This is what all 
Palestinians are struggling against, as an 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11698.shtml>open letter 
today from dozens of civil society organizations in Gaza reminds us:

"We Palestinians of Gaza want to live at liberty to meet Palestinian 
friends or family from Tulkarem, Jerusalem or Nazareth; we want to 
have the right to travel and move freely. We want to live without 
fear of another bombing campaign that leaves hundreds of our children 
dead and many more injured or with cancers from the contamination of 
Israel's white phosphorous and chemical warfare. We want to live 
without the humiliations at Israeli checkpoints or the indignity of 
not providing for our families because of the unemployment brought 
about by the economic control and the illegal siege. We are calling 
for an end to the racism that underpins all this oppression."

Those of us who live outside Gaza can look to the people there for 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11437.shtml>inspiration and 
strength; even after all this deliberate cruelty, they have not 
surrendered. But we cannot expect them to bear this burden alone or 
ignore the appalling cost Israel's unrelenting persecution has on the 
minds and bodies of people in Gaza or on society itself. We must also 
heed their calls to action.

One year ago, I joined more than a thousand people from dozens of 
countries on the Gaza Freedom March in an attempt to reach Gaza to 
commemorate the first anniversary of the massacre. We found our way 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10972.shtml>blocked by the 
Egyptian government which remains complicit, 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10993.shtml>with US backing, 
in the Israeli siege. And although we did not reach Gaza, other 
convoys before, and after, such as Viva Palestina did, only after 
severe obstruction and limitations by 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11653.shtml>Egypt.

Yesterday, the Mavi Marmara returned to Istanbul where it was met 
dockside by thousands of people. In May the ship was part of the 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11305.shtml>Gaza Freedom 
Flotilla which set out to break the siege by sea, only to be 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11327.shtml>attacked and 
hijacked in international waters by Israeli commandos who killed nine 
people and injured dozens. Even that massacre has not deterred more 
people from seeking to break the siege; the Asian Convoy to Gaza is 
on its way, and several other efforts are being planned.

We may look at all these initiatives and say that despite their 
enormous cost -- including in human lives -- the siege remains 
unbroken, as world governments -- the so-called "international 
community" -- continue to ensure Israeli impunity. Two years later, 
Gaza remains in rubble, and Israel keeps the population always on the 
edge of a deliberately-induced humanitarian catastrophe while 
allowing just enough supplies to appease international opinion. It 
would be easy to be discouraged.

However, we must remember that the Palestinian people in Gaza are not 
objects of an isolated humanitarian cause, but partners in the 
struggle for justice and freedom throughout Palestine. Breaking the 
siege of Gaza would be a milestone on that march.

Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament and a 
passenger on the Mavi Marmara explained last October in an 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11599.shtml>interview with 
The Electronic Intifada that Israeli society and government do not 
view their conflict with the Palestinians as one that must be 
resolved by providing justice and equality to victims, but merely as 
a "security" problem. Zoabi observed that the vast majority of 
Israelis believe Israel has largely "solved" the security problem: in 
the West Bank with the apartheid wall and "security coordination" 
between Israeli occupation forces and the collaborationist 
Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and in Gaza with the siege.

Israeli society, Zoabi concluded, "doesn't feel the need for peace. 
They don't perceive occupation as a problem. They don't perceive the 
siege as a problem. They don't perceive oppressing the Palestinians 
as a problem, and they don't pay the price of occupation or the price 
of [the] siege [of Gaza]."

Thus the convoys and flotillas are an essential part of a larger 
effort to make Israel understand that it does have a problem and it 
can never be treated as a normal state until it ends its oppression 
and occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and 
fully respects the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and 
Palestinian refugees. And even if governments continue to stand by 
and do nothing, global civil society is showing the way with these 
efforts to break the siege, and with the broader Palestinian-led 
campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

Amid all the suffering, Palestinians have not celebrated many 
victories in the two years since the Gaza massacre. But there are 
signs that things are moving in the right direction. Israel begs for 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11686.shtml>US-endorsed 
"peace negotiations" precisely because it knows that while the "peace 
process" provides cover for its ongoing crimes, it will never be 
required to give up anything or grant any rights to Palestinians in 
such a "process."

Yet Israel is mobilizing all its resources to 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11080.shtml>fight the global 
movement for justice, especially BDS, that has 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11683.shtml>gained so much 
momentum since the Gaza massacre. There can be no greater 
confirmation that this movement brings justice within our grasp. Our 
memorial to all the victims must not be just an annual commemoration, 
but the work we do every day to make the ranks of this movement grow.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of 
<http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml>One Country: A 
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and is a 
contributor to 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568586418/theelectronic-20>The 
Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the 
Gaza Conflict (Nation Books).



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