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<font size="1"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/better-launch-balloons-die-silence/31056">https://electronicintifada.net/content/better-launch-balloons-die-silence/31056</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Better to launch balloons than die in silence</h1>
<p class="gmail-node__submitted">
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-author"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ahmed-abu-artema">Ahmed Abu Artema</a></span> <span class="gmail-field gmail-field-publisher">-</span>
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-publication-date"><span class="gmail-date-display-single">25 August 2020</span></span> </p>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<img src="https://electronicintifada.net/sites/default/files/styles/original_800w/public/2020-08/200820_ash_00_42.jpg?itok=Nls2ClRO×tamp=1598381728" alt="" title="" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="447" height="298"><p>Incendiary balloons bear no resemblance to the deadly weapons in Israel’s arsenal. </p><small>
<span>APA images</span></small><p>In recent weeks,
the tension between Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s forces of
occupation has increased. Israel has used the launching of incendiary
balloons by Palestinian youths as a pretext to <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israels-crimes-must-be-met-arms-embargo">bomb</a> Gaza once again.</p>
<p>The release of the balloons is a gesture of protest against how the Israeli occupation has procrastinated in abiding by its <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/hamas-did-not-reject-ceasefire-israel-did">previous agreements</a> with the Palestinian resistance. Under those agreements, Israel had committed to easing the siege on Gaza.</p>
<p>This procrastination has caused the continued deterioration of Gaza’s
health and public services and its economy. Meanwhile, the Israeli
government continues to control the movement of goods and people in and
out of Gaza.</p>
<p>The Israeli military has responded to the incendiary balloons by
carrying out dozens of raids on sites used by Palestinian resistance
fighters with US-made F-16 jets. The Israeli naval forces, which besiege
Gaza from the sea, have prevented fishers from doing their work and <a href="https://www.pchrgaza.org/en/?p=14941">fired</a> at their boats.</p>
<p>The Israeli government has also <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-cuts-fuel-gaza-goes-dark">closed</a>
the only crossing through which commercial goods enter Gaza. This
closure led to the shutting down of the only power plant in the
territory, which, in turn, means households in Gaza receive only four
hours of electricity per day.</p>
<p>Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-claims-israel-responding-to-gaza-fire-balloons-as-it-does-to-rockets/">stated</a>
frankly that Israel would respond to the incendiary balloons in the
same way as it responds to rockets fired from Gaza. Israel, it seems,
wishes to keep on responding with deadly force to largely symbolic acts
of resistance that make use of very basic materials.</p>
<p>Israel has put this statement into practice by dropping highly
destructive missiles from F-16s onto densely populated Gaza for 13
consecutive nights.</p>
<p>The incendiary balloons bear no resemblance to Israel’s sophisticated
and modern weapons. Youths have simply attached burning wicks to
balloons and released them toward Israel.</p>
<p>The balloons have been carried into Israel by the wind. They have
caused some fires on farm land and, as a result, incurred a small amount
of damage to Israel’s economy.</p>
<p>Yet nobody has been killed or injured by them.</p>
<h2>Compelled to act</h2>
<p>Israel and pro-Israeli media exaggerate the effects of this form of
resistance while completely ignoring the reasons motivating it.</p>
<p>If one wishes to understand why incendiary balloons have been
launched from Gaza, it is crucial to go back to the circumstances under
which Palestinian youths feel compelled to act.</p>
<p>I have been asked repeatedly by many Western journalists if the youth
who launch incendiary balloons are contradicting the principles of the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/great-march-return">Great March of Return</a>, unarmed protests which began in 2018.</p>
<p>I have replied by asking the journalists to imagine a person locked
in a room without access to food or medicine while they are dying slowly
and silently. The person decides to bang on the door of the room with
all their strength and anger and shouts for their freedom and their need
to escape from death.</p>
<p>Then their jailer comes from outside to give a moral sermon and tell
people: Look at this prisoner’s barbarism. They are not behaving
properly because they are not knocking on the door calmly and not
presenting their demands to us in a respectful way.</p>
<p>It is unfair to blame the victim, to be preoccupied with assessing
their behavior. By neglecting to address the root of the problem, we are
distracted from the real criminal, the one who placed a prisoner in
those life-threatening and inhuman conditions.</p>
<p>Whatever a prisoner who feels death approaching them does, their
behavior will be in harmony with the principles of freedom and justice,
even if they break the door of the prison cell.</p>
<p>This analogy captures Israel’s behavior toward Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel has exaggerated the significance of the simple incendiary
balloons launched by groups of Palestinian youths.</p>
<p>Israel has tried to portray these balloons as akin to a military threat. By doing so, it has tried to devise new “rules.”</p>
<p>Under those “rules,” Israel thinks it may respond to crude balloons with missiles launched from F-16 warplanes.</p>
<h2>Banging on the tank’s walls</h2>
<p>Israel says nothing about the political and economic environment in
which the young people who release those balloons are growing up.</p>
<p>These young people are victims of Israeli aggression many times over.</p>
<p>Their problems began before they were born. In 1948, their families were expelled from their villages by Zionist forces.</p>
<p>Two-thirds of Gaza’s population are refugees hailing from towns and villages in what is now called Israel.</p>
<p>Many young Palestinians can see their families’ original villages
beyond the fence separating Gaza and Israel. But they cannot reach them.</p>
<p>That offers some explanation as to the motives of people releasing
balloons. The balloons are crossing the boundary and reaching towns and
villages that have been stolen from Palestinians.</p>
<p>They are being flown as a protest against the theft of our homeland.</p>
<p>After the expulsions of 1948, Israel committed countless other
crimes. Those include occupation, massacres, the mass detention and
torture of Palestinians.</p>
<p>They have included, too, a <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/gaza-siege">siege</a>
that has deprived Palestinians in Gaza of basic rights and necessities.
The siege has undermined our economy, destroyed the labor market and
shattered the dreams of Palestinian youth for a decent life.</p>
<p>Gaza’s youth banged against the prison walls during the Great March of Return. Israel <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israel-slaughters-palestinians-marching-return">responded</a> by firing live bullets against them, causing death and permanent disabilities.</p>
<p>These youths, crushed by the Israeli occupation and deprived of their
fundamental rights, still feel the urge to scream at their jailers.
They want to make noise so that they do not die in silence.</p>
<p>In his novel <em>Men in the Sun</em>, <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/ghassan-kanafani">Ghassan Kanafani</a>
tells a story of three Palestinians undertaking a perilous journey
hidden in a water tank. After the men are found dead by their driver,
Kanafani asks why they didn’t bang on the water tank wall.</p>
<p>Banging on the walls of a tank is better than suffocating.</p>
<p>Launching handmade incendiary balloons from the besieged Gaza Strip
is like banging on the walls of a water tank and refusing to die in
silence.</p>
<p><em>Ahmed Abu Artema is a writer who lives in Gaza and a researcher
at the Center for Political and Development Studies. He is one of the
organizers of the Great March of Return.</em></p><br>
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