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<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"
dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/25/the-defiance-that-launched-gazas-flaming-kites-cannot-be-extinguished/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/25/the-defiance-that-launched-gazas-flaming-kites-cannot-be-extinguished/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Defiance that Launched Gaza’s
Flaming Kites Cannot be Extinguished</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/jonathan-cook/"
rel="nofollow">Jonathan Cook</a> - June 25, 2018</span></div>
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<p><em><br>
Nazareth.</em></p>
<p>First Israel built a sophisticated missile interception
system named Iron Dome to neutralise the threat of
homemade rockets fired out of Gaza.</p>
<p>Next it created technology that could detect and
destroy tunnels Palestinians had cut through the parched
earth deep under the fences Israel erected to imprison
Gaza on all sides.</p>
<p>Israel’s priority was to keep Gaza locked down with a
blockade and its two million inhabitants invisible.</p>
<p>Now Israel is facing a new and apparently even tougher
challenge: how to stop Palestinian resistance from Gaza
using flaming kites, which have set fire to lands close
by in Israel. F-16 fighter jets are equipped to take on
many foes but not the humble kite.</p>
<p>These various innovations by Palestinians are widely
seen by Israelis as part of the same relentless campaign
by Hamas to destroy their country.</p>
<p>But from inside Gaza, things look very different. These
initiatives are driven by a mix of recognisably human
emotions: a refusal to bow before crushing oppression; a
fear of becoming complicit through silence and inaction
in being erased and forgotten; and a compelling need to
take back control of one’s life.</p>
<p>Palestinians encaged in Gaza, denied entry and exit by
Israel via land, sea and air for more than a decade,
know that life there is rapidly becoming unsustainable.
Most young people are unemployed, much of the
infrastructure and housing are irreparably damaged, and
polluted water sources are near-unpotable.</p>
<p>After waves of military attacks, Gaza’s children are
traumatised with mental scars that may never heal.</p>
<p>This catastrophe was carefully engineered by Israel,
which renews and enforces it daily.</p>
<p>The kites have long served as a potent symbol of
freedom in Gaza. Children have flown them from the few
spots in the tiny, congested enclave where people can
still breathe – from rooftops or on Gaza’s beaches.</p>
<p>Five years ago, the film “Flying Paper” documented the
successful efforts of Gaza’s children to set a new world
record for mass kite-flying. The children defied
Israel’s blockade, which prevents entry of most goods,
by making kites from sticks, newspapers and scraps of
plastic.</p>
<p>The children’s ambition was – if only briefly – to
retake Gaza’s skies, which Israel dominates with its
unseen, death-dealing drones that buzz interminably
overhead and with missiles that can flatten a building
in seconds.</p>
<p>A young girl observed of the kite’s lure: “When we fly
the kite, we know that freedom exists.” A message
scrawled on one read: “I have the right to pride,
education, justice, equality and life.”</p>
<p>But the world record attempt was not only about the
children’s dreams and their defiance. It was intended to
highlight Gaza’s confinement and to issue a reminder
that Palestinians too are human.</p>
<p>That same generation of children have grown into the
youths being picked off weekly by Israeli snipers at
unarmed protests at the perimeter fence – the most
visible feature of Israel’s infrastructure of
imprisonment.</p>
<p>A few have taken up kite-flying again. If they have
refused to put away childish things, this time they have
discarded their childish idealism. Their world record
did not win them freedom, nor even much notice.</p>
<p>After the snipers began maiming thousands of the
demonstrators, including children, medics and
journalists, for the impudence of imagining they had a
right to liberty, the enclave’s youths reinvented the
kite’s role.</p>
<p>If it failed to serve as a reminder of Palestinians’
humanity, it could at least remind Israel and the
outside world of their presence, of the cost of leaving
two million human beings to rot.</p>
<p>So the kites were set on fire, flaming emissaries that
brought a new kind of reckoning for Israel when they
landed on the other side of the fence.</p>
<p>Gaza’s inhabitants can still see the lands from which
many of them were expelled during the mass dispossession
of the Palestinian people in 1948 – under western
colonial sponsorship – to create a Jewish state.</p>
<p>Not only were those lands taken from them, but the
Jewish farming communities that replaced them now
irrigate their crops using water Palestinians are
deprived of, including water seized from aquifers under
the West Bank.</p>
<p>The kites have rained fire down on this idyll created
by Israel at the expense of Gaza’s inhabitants. No one
has been hurt but Israel claims extinguishing the fires
has already cost some $2 million and 7,000 acres of
farmland have been damaged.</p>
<p>Sadly, given the profound sense of entitlement that
afflicts many Israelis, a small dent in their material
wellbeing has not pricked consciences about the
incomparably greater suffering only a few kilometres
away in Gaza.</p>
<p>Instead, Israel’s public security minister Gilad Erdan
called last week for anyone flying a kite, even young
children, to be shot. He and other ministers have argued
that another large-scale military assault on Gaza is
necessary to create what Erdan has termed “durable
deterrence”.</p>
<p>That moment seems to be moving inexorably closer. The
last few days have seen Israel launch punitive air
strikes to stop the kites and Palestinian factions
retaliate by firing significant numbers of rockets out
of Gaza for the first time in years.</p>
<p>The Trump administration is no longer pretending to
mediate. It has publicly thrown in its hand with Israel.
It withdrew last week from the United Nations Human
Rights Council, accusing it of being a “cesspool of
political bias” after the council criticised Israel for
executing Gaza’s unarmed demonstrators.</p>
<p>On a visit to the region last week, Jared Kushner,
Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, urged ordinary
Palestinians to rebel against their leaders’ refusal to
accept a long-awaited US peace plan that all evidence
suggests will further undermine Palestinian hopes of a
viable state.</p>
<p>Kushner is apparently unaware that the Palestinian
public is expressing its will, for liberation, by
protesting at the Gaza fence – and risking execution by
Israel for doing so.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Prince William is due in Israel on Monday,
the first British royal to make an official visit since
the mandate ended 70 years ago. While Kensington Palace
has stressed that the trip is non-political, William
will meet both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in an itinerary
that has already been claimed by both sides as a
victory.</p>
<p>From the vantage point of the Mount of Olives, from
which he will view Jerusalem’s Old City, the prince may
not quite manage to see the kite battles in Gaza’s skies
that underscore who is Goliath and who is David. But he
should see enough in the West Bank and occupied East
Jerusalem to understand that western leaders have
decisively chosen the side of Goliath.</p>
<p><em>A version of this article first appeared in the
National, Abu Dhabi.</em></p>
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