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dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a id="reader-domain" class="domain"
href="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/">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></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">A 14-Year-Old Girl Forced Alone and at
Night Into the Gaza Cage. Another Routine Mishap for Israel’s
Occupation</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/"
rel="nofollow">Jonathan Cook</a> - February 2, 2018<br>
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<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>A single, abstract noun – “occupation” – obscures a
multitude of crimes.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The story of Ghada – as she has been identified –
illustrates many features of this system of control.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>She was finally released by Israel and returned to her
parents last Thursday, two weeks after her ordeal began.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Arendt wrote that totalitarian systems were designed to
turn men into “functionaries and mere cogs in the
administrative machinery”, to “dehumanize them”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>After five decades of ruling over Palestinians, with no
limits or accountability, many Israelis have become
cogs.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>But a Ghada occasionally throws a troubling light on
the depths to which Israel has sunk.</p>
<p>Another example is Ahed Tamimi, who spent her 17<sup>th</sup> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Soldiers helping settlers to steal her community’s
farmland have scrawled death threats against her on the
walls in her village, Nabi Saleh.</p>
<p>Oren Hazan, a parliament member from the ruling Likud
party, <a
href="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">told
the BBC</a> 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.”</p>
<p>This dehumanising logic is directed at any non-Jew with
a foothold in the enlarged fortress state Israel is
creating.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Unlike Palestinians, these refugees tug at some liberal
Israelis’ heartstrings, reminding them of European Jews
who once needed shelter from genocide.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><em>A version of this article first appeared in the
National, Abu Dhabi.</em></p>
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