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<font size=3>"By choice they made themselves immune" <br>
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10128.shtml" eudora="autourl">
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10128.shtml<br><br>
</a>Saree Makdisi, <i>The Electronic Intifada,</i> 6 January 2009
<br><br>
Israel has killed and injured almost 4,000 men, women and children so far
in its assault on Gaza; it has entombed whole families together in the
ruins of their homes. As I write, news is breaking that Israeli bombs
have killed at least 40 civilians huddling in a UN school which they
mistakenly thought would be safer than the homes from which Israel's
relentless barrage -- and its deliberately terrorizing
"warning" leaflets and prerecorded phone calls -- had already
driven them. (I still have one of the leaflets the Israelis dropped on
besieged Beirut in 1982 and the language is exactly the same --
"flee, flee for your lives!"). Mosques, schools, houses,
apartment buildings, have all been brought down on the heads of those
inside.<br><br>
All this death and destruction comes supposedly in retaliation for rocket
attacks that had not inflicted a single fatality inside Israel in over a
year. What happened to "an eye for an eye?"<br><br>
As horrific as the toll of dead and injured already is, the scale of
Israel's bombing, and its targeting of ambulances and medical and rescue
crews -- several doctors and paramedics have been killed or wounded so
far -- means that the true totals are actually unknown. Countless numbers
of victims have bled to death in the streets or in the ruins of their
smashed homes. Calls for help aren't getting through Gaza's phone
networks, battered to pieces along with the rest of the civilian
infrastructure -- its water, sewage, electricity systems, all already
crumbling as a result of the years of siege. The victims that are
evacuated -- as often, these days, in civilian cars as in the remaining
ambulances -- make it to hospitals that are overwhelmed; many will die
that might have otherwise been saved.<br><br>
Any hospital would be overwhelmed under the circumstances: how then for a
hospital that has already been cut off by the 19-month-old Israeli
blockade of Gaza from urgently needed supplies, medicines, drugs,
anesthetics, spare parts, fuel for generators? In fact, the true story of
what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza is to be seen in the besieged
territory's hospitals: the smashed, burned, dusty bodies of children
being carried in on makeshift blankets (there aren't enough stretchers to
go around); the morgue drawers full of bodies; the emergency rooms with
badly hurt, crying people scattered on stretchers, on beds, on the
blood-washed floors, as the doctors run from one to another trying to
figure out who can be saved and who must be attended to first -- the boy
with his feet blown off? The old woman with the huge gash in her head?
The young man with his guts hanging out of his stomach? The anguished
little girl thrashing about in pain, in fear, in agony and begging for
her mother who vanished in some monstrous explosion? And outside, on the
crowded sidewalks, the other side of the human suffering that Israel has
chosen to inflict on an entire population: the wailing mothers, fathers
and children; the weeping young men; the panicked people rushing around
trying to find loved ones after each new Israeli bombing.<br><br>
All this to make Israelis feel secure? What security is this kind of
barbarism ever likely to gain them?<br><br>
These are the scenes that every Palestinian and every Arab around the
world sees every single day on the uncensored, unedited, unfiltered and
relentlessly, brutally honest coverage broadcast on the Arabic Al-Jazeera
channel. Unlike the US and UK networks, Al-Jazeera has correspondents and
camera crews all over Gaza; they are Arabs, some of them are
Palestinians, and they all live among the people whose suffering they
record for the whole world to see; they can communicate with them in
their own language and in the language of the audience as well. The
coverage is continuous 24 hours a day.<br><br>
Ordinary people around the rest of the world are seeing the version of
events that gets filtered through the editing suites, the cutting rooms,
the editorializing of foreign media, and that, in the case of the US,
finally makes it to their living room largely (if not entirely)
sanitized, and packaged to them in two-minute sound bites by
correspondents posted safely outside of Gaza and inside Israel. The
coverage broadcast from Israel is heavily monitored, controlled and
censored. The Israeli army found in 2006 that its panicked soldiers in
Lebanon were using cell phones to call home for help; this time it made
sure to inspect all of its soldiers to make sure that none takes a phone
with him into Gaza. The army imposes a smothering control over the flow
of information; nothing that is reported from or datelined Israel can be
read at face value or taken for granted.<br><br>
If you get your news from an American television network, no matter how
horrible you think what's happening in Gaza is, the reality that you are
not seeing is much, much, much worse. (Perhaps that's why the
English-language Al-Jazeera channel, widely followed in the rest of the
world, is unofficially banned in the US -- not a single cable or
satellite provider carries it).<br><br>
And yet even with this imperfect coverage it must be said that people all
over the world, including in the US, are protesting what they are seeing.
Huge, million-person demonstrations have been held, from Melbourne to
Jakarta, from Calcutta to Istanbul, and from Vienna to London, not to
mention the huge popular protests in Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Amman,
across the length and breadth of the West Bank, and in some of the
largest protests ever held in Palestinian communities inside Israel.
Across the US, too, people have been protesting, holding vigils, writing
letters to the editors of the newspapers demanding more balance to the
warped coverage of the events that we see here, especially in papers like
<i>The New York Times</i>. And the internet has been a major source of
information for all those millions who have figured out that they will
never learn what they need to learn from <i>The New York Times</i> or the
<i>Washington Post</i> or ABC or CNN. Sites like Counterpunch, Electronic
Intifada, Alternet, Truthdig, Huffington Post, Salon and many others
besides have carried extraordinarily intelligent and detailed pieces by a
range of commentators whose sense of what is happening far exceeds what
is made available by professional journalists in the mainstream press --
including many superb pieces by Jewish Americans who give the lie, once
and for all, to the absurd notion that their community is solidly behind
Israel's violence.<br><br>
Indeed, it seems clear that the writing now being posted on alternative
media outlets is also starting to outweigh the clumsy efforts still being
churned out by America's army of paid and unpaid cheerleaders for Israel,
who have forsaken what little remained of their own humanity and blinded
themselves to suffering that ought to move any rational, caring, sentient
human being to tears -- the Dershowitzes and Foxmans, the Orens and
Boots, the Krauthammers and Peretzes, the Bards and Goldfarbs, the
cynical apparatchiks of CAMERA and AIPAC and the mindless busybodies and
shuffling zombies of Stand With Us, the Israel Project and the Israel on
Campus Coalition -- who persist with their stubborn, craven defense of
the indefensible. About these misanthropes there is much to be said, most
of it too unpleasant to print, so I'll shift the burden here to those
memorable closing lines of Wilfred Owen's war poem
"Insensibility:"<br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,<br>
<dd>That they should be as stones.<br>
<dd>Wretched are they, and mean<br>
<dd>With paucity that never was simplicity.<br>
<dd>By choice they made themselves immune<br>
<dd>To pity and whatever mourns in man<br>
<dd>Before the last sea and the hapless stars;<br>
<dd>Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;<br>
<dd>Whatever shares<br>
<dd>The eternal reciprocity of tears.<br><br>
</dl>As for Israel itself: once again it has revealed its true nature to
the world. It was only after the first reports came in of their own
serious fatalities -- soldiers caught in an ambush, though the censored
news reports from Israel claim that it was all friendly fire -- that the
Israeli media suddenly started carrying reports wondering whether things
have gone too far. "The Price of Stubbornness over Gaza Exit is Dead
Soldiers," write Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in Haaretz.</i>
"For the first time, Israeli TV broadcasts raised the question of
whether it was worthwhile for the operation to continue."<br><br>
Until this point, the Israeli media -- and most of the country's liberal
intelligentsia, never mind the militant right wing -- had been
moralistically defending the bombing, and sometimes actually cheering it
on. Starting the attacks on a Saturday was a "stroke of
brilliance," the Guardian's</i> Seamus Milne quotes the country's
biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot</i> as saying; "the element of
surprise increased the number of people who were killed." The daily
Maariv</i> agreed: "We left them in shock and awe." The
rational and genuinely ethical voices of Amira Hass and Gideon Levy have
never seemed more isolated.<br><br>
The brute fact of the matter is that, as long as their air force is
killing an entirely defenseless people, the Israeli public and media do
cheer them on. As soon as they start paying any kind of price -- no
matter how grotesquely out of proportion to the level of damage their
soldiers are inflicting on unarmed and innocent people -- their bloodlust
quickly cools. In Gaza, the Israeli infantry won't take a single step
forward unless the ground in front of them -- and everything and everyone
in it, armed, unarmed, whoever and whatever they are -- has been safely
cleared away for them by the air or by artillery. <br><br>
These are "Georgia rules," which are not so far from the
methods Russia used in its conflict last summer," write Harel and
Issacharoff in Haaretz</i>. "The result is the killing of dozens of
non-combatant Palestinians. The Gaza medical teams might not have reached
all of them yet. When an Israeli force gets into an entanglement, as in
Sajaiyeh last night [where three Israeli soldiers were killed], massive
fire into built-up areas is initiated to cover the extraction. In other
cases, a chain of explosions is initiated from a distance to set off
Hamas booby-traps. It is a method that leaves a swath of destruction
taking in entire streets, and does not distinguish military targets from
the homes of civilians."<br><br>
I'm not sure where the "Georgia" reference comes from: the
Israelis used the very same tactics in Jenin and Nablus in 2002, and in
southern Lebanon in 2006 and 1982. And it would be an act of futility to
point out -- for the millionth time -- that the Israeli method of warfare
takes place in sweeping disregard for the principles of international
humanitarian law, not to mention total contempt for innocent human life.
This is not to mention that most of the casualties pouring into Gaza's
morgues and hospitals are the victims of the sheer indiscriminate
unleashing on densely populated civilian areas of high explosive ordnance
from land, sea and air that has been characteristic of Israel's military
style since at least the 1970s.<br><br>
Israel's disregard for innocent human life is not motivated only by a
desire to forestall the political consequences -- especially during an
electoral campaign -- of Israeli military casualties. It is also a clear
indicator of the contempt that Israel has for Palestinian life in
general. The cold, hungry, tired, desperate, and terrified men, women and
children that Israel is now sweeping away by the dozen in balls of fire
and showers of shrapnel are the very same people that it had already
reduced to what one UN official months ago warned was "a subhuman
existence," the deliberate product of the siege that Israel has
imposed on Gaza for over three years, beginning in 2005, before the
election of Hamas. They are the same people whose political and human
rights Israel has been stifling since the occupation of 1967 -- 20 years
before the creation of Hamas. They are the same people who were
ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948 because, as non-Jews, they
were inconveniently cluttering up the land that European Zionists wanted
to turn into a Jewish state, no matter what the land's actual population
had to say about it.<br><br>
Israel's disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza today is, in short, a
direct extension of its disregard for Palestinian life since 1948, and
what is happening in Gaza today is the continuation of what happened six
decades ago. Eighty percent of the people crammed into Gaza's hovels and
shanties are refugees or the descendants of refugees that armed Zionist
gangs, which eventually coalesced into the infant Israeli army,
terrorized from their homes elsewhere in southwestern Palestine in 1948.
They have been herded, penned, and slaughtered by a remorseless power
that clearly regards them as subhuman.<br><br>
If you think I'm stretching the point, I'm not. Listen to the words of
Professor Arnon Sofer, the government consultant who did so much to help
plan the isolation and imprisonment of Gaza, in a interview with the
Jerusalem Post</i> in 2004: "When 2.5 million people live in a
closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe," Sofer
predicted. "Those people will become even bigger animals than they
are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure
on the border is going to be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So,
if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All
day, every day." Sofer admitted only one worry with all the killing,
which will, he says, be the necessary outcome of a policy that he himself
helped to invent. "The only thing that concerns me," he says,
"is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do
the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal
human beings."<br><br>
Meticulously and clinically thought through even before the first rocket
from Gaza claimed a life inside Israel, the slaughter in Gaza today has
nothing to do with rockets or with Hamas. As Sofer himself explains, it
is the purest and most distilled expression of Zionist ideology.
"Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee 'peace,'" Sofer says
in that same interview; "it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with
an overwhelming majority of Jews."<br><br>
And that -- taken right from the horse's mouth -- is what the slaughter
of innocents in Gaza is fundamentally about: the people being killed
today are the ones for whom there is no room in the Zionist vision of the
state. They are regarded as an excess population. Not even Malthus
thought that a redundant population should just be lined up and shot, or
bombed into the ground. But, clearly, times have changed since
1798.<br><br>
This inhuman madness will end only with the end of the violent ideology
that spawned it -- when those who are committed to the project of
creating and maintaining a religiously and ethnically exclusivist state
in what has always been a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land
finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed.<br><br>
Saree Makdisi is professor of English literature at the University of
California, Los Angeles and author of
"<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9889.shtml">
Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation</a>."</i> <br><br>
<br>
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