[News] A 14-Year-Old Girl Forced Alone and at Night Into the Gaza Cage. Another Routine Mishap for Israel’s Occupation

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/06/a-14-year-old-girl-forced-alone-and-at-night-into-the-gaza-cage-another-routine-mishap-for-israels-occupation/ 



  A 14-Year-Old Girl Forced Alone and at Night Into the Gaza Cage.
  Another Routine Mishap for Israel’s Occupation

by Jonathan Cook <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/> - 
February 2, 2018
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How did a 14-year-old Palestinian girl who has never set foot in the 
open-air prison of Gaza find herself being dumped there by Israeli 
officials – alone, at night and without her parents being informed?

The terrifying ordeal – a child realising she had not been taken home 
but discarded in a place where she knew no one – is hard to contemplate 
for any parent.

And yet for Israel’s gargantuan bureaucratic structure that has ruled 
over Palestinians for five decades, this was just another routine error. 
One mishap among many that day.

A single, abstract noun – “occupation” – obscures a multitude of crimes.

What crushes Palestinian spirits is not just the calculated malevolence 
of Israel’s occupation authorities, as they kill and imprison 
Palestinians, seal them into ghettoes, steal lands and demolish homes. 
It is also the system’s casual indifference to their fate.

This is a bureaucracy – of respectable men and women – that controls the 
smallest details of Palestinians’ lives. With the flick of a pen, 
everything can be turned upside down. Palestinians are viewed as numbers 
and bodies rather than human beings.

The story of Ghada – as she has been identified – illustrates many 
features of this system of control.

She was arrested last month as an “illegal alien” in her own homeland 
for visiting her aunt. The two live a short distance apart, but while 
Israel considers Ghada a resident of the West Bank, her aunt is 
classified as a resident of Jerusalem. They might as well be on 
different planets.

Ghada, we should note, suffers from epilepsy. After two days in 
detention, and over opposition from Israeli police, a judge ordered her 
released on bail. All this happened without her parents present.

Israel controls the Palestinian population register too, and had 
recorded Ghada wrongly as a Gaza resident, even though she was born and 
raised far away in the West Bank. She is separated from Gaza by Israel, 
which she cannot enter.

Presumably, no Israeli official wanted to harm Ghada. It was just that 
none cared enough to notice that she was a frightened child – afraid of 
being alone, of the dark, of fences and watch-towers. And a child who 
needs regular medical care.

Instead she was viewed simply as a package, to be delivered to whatever 
location was on the docket. Despite her anguished protests, she was 
forced through the electronic fence into the cage of Gaza.

She was finally released by Israel and returned to her parents last 
Thursday, two weeks after her ordeal began.

Was this not precisely what Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher of 
totalitarianism, meant when she identified the “banality of evil” while 
watching the trial of the Holocaust’s architect, Adolph Eichmann, in 
Jerusalem in 1962?

Arendt wrote that totalitarian systems were designed to turn men into 
“functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery”, to 
“dehumanize them”.

Even the worst bureaucracies contain few monsters. Its officials have 
simply forgotten what it means to be human, losing the capacity for 
compassion and independent thought.

After five decades of ruling over Palestinians, with no limits or 
accountability, many Israelis have become cogs.

Most of the Palestinian victims of this “system” remain hidden from view 
– like the small children of Abu Nawar who awoke this week to find their 
village school had been levelled because Israel wants their land for the 
neighbouring illegal settlement of Maale Adumim.

But a Ghada occasionally throws a troubling light on the depths to which 
Israel has sunk.

Another example is Ahed Tamimi, who spent her 17^th  birthday in prison 
last week, charged with slapping a heavily armed soldier during an 
invasion of her home. Moments earlier his unit had shot her 15-year-old 
cousin in the face, nearly killing him. She now risks a 10-year jail 
sentence for her justified anger.

Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington and now a 
government minister, was so unwilling to believe Ahed could be 
blonde-haired and blue-eyed – like him – that he ordered a secret 
investigation to try to prove her family were actors.

Most Israelis cannot believe that a Palestinian child might fight for 
her home, and for her family’s right to live freely. Palestinians are 
expected to be passive recipients of Israel’s “civilising”, bureaucratic 
violence.

Soldiers helping settlers to steal her community’s farmland have 
scrawled death threats against her on the walls in her village, Nabi Saleh.

Oren Hazan, a parliament member from the ruling Likud party, told the 
BBC 
<http://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-42884885/ahed-tamimi-was-palestinian-teenager-s-slap-terrorism?ocid=global_bbccom_email_01022018_top+news+stories> last 
week that Ahed was not a child, but a “terrorist”. Had he been slapped, 
he said, “She would finish in the hospital for sure … I would kick, kick 
her face.”

This dehumanising logic is directed at any non-Jew with a foothold in 
the enlarged fortress state Israel is creating.

But belatedly a few Israelis are drawing a line. A backlash has begun as 
Israel this week starts expelling 40,000 asylum seekers who fled wars in 
Sudan and Eritrea. In violation of international treaties, Israel wants 
these refugees returned to Africa, where they risk persecution or death.

Unlike Palestinians, these refugees tug at some liberal Israelis’ 
heartstrings, reminding them of European Jews who once needed shelter 
from genocide.

Nonetheless, Israel has incentivised its citizens to become 
bounty-hunters, offering them $9,000 bonuses for hunting down Africans. 
Progressive rabbis and social activists have called for Israelis to hide 
the refugees in attics and cellars, just as Europeans once protected 
Jews from their persecutors.

It is a battle for Israel’s soul. Can Israelis begin to see non-Jews – 
whether Palestinians like Ghada ot Africans – as fellow human beings, as 
equally deserving of compassion? Or will Israelis sink further into the 
darkness of a banal evil that threatens to engulf them?

/A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi./

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