Gaza continued

Dec 29, 2008, 11:30pm in Palestine

The death toll in Gaza has reahed 350. 1650 injured. I wonder how the injured are counted. Are these people who reach the hospital? How many others must there be? We watch the footage on the news of children screaming, men and women wailing, fathers with tears streaming down their faces as they kiss the heads of their dead
infants. We see the destroyed buildings. A university, a pharmacy, a police station, a house...

I just sent a text message to my friend in Gaza (the same one I wrote about the other day, the university student), asking how she was. Her response: "We're out of home now because it's ruined. Dad and brothers injured." I tried to call and she didn't answer. She then wrote, "Please!! I can't say a word now but we're fine. Take care." I wrote and said I am so sorry, that I will continue to write to people in the US and to protest. I asked her if there's anything else she can think of that I can do, knowing there probably isn't. I offered to get her a phone card if she needs credit. "What can a phone card do," she wrote back, "with my dad's leg! It needs operation. I don't want more than safety. I want you to know I appreciate you."

I was supposed to go to a friend's house this afternoon in the northern West Bank. She was going to cook me lunch for my birthday. When I got to the area she was unable to cook or think or do much of anything. She grew up in Gaza and most of her family is there. Last night when she talked to her brother in the middle of the night, a bomb had just exploded nearby and the children were all screaming. They are in Rafah, very close to the border with Egypt. Today she has been unable to reach him.

Please, please, stop what you're doing and go out on the streets in protest. Write to your newspapers. Especially those of you in the US. Today everyone I talked to told me the US streets are silent. That there are protests all over the world (people talk about a huge protest in London that got a lot of media attention here), but that the US is doing nothing. I tell them about the many e-mails I've gotten in the past day of protests scheduled in New York, Boston, DC, San Francisco, etc. And yet, it is not enough. Nothing is enough.

But please, do not continue as usual. 1.5 million people who have been under siege in the largest prison in the world for months, even years now, are now being bombed indiscriminately. We have ignored Gaza for too long. Every day, every hour, every minute counts.

I will pray that the rain and clouds continue through the night. Yes, the people fleeing their homes who are now outside may be cold and wet, but the Israeli army is also having difficulty, apparently, bombing in this weather.

This is insane.

(For anyone who still thinks this attack is a response to Hamas rocket attacks of the past few days, read this Israeli article about how the attacks have been planned for months: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050448.html)

For US folks who don't know where to look for actions: endtheoccupation.org

Gaza

Today, 271 men, women, and children who were alive yesterday are now dead in Gaza. More than 900 are injured, including 180 critically. The death toll is rising as more people are dug out from under the rubble, and the Israeli government promises that the attacks will continue, and asks its people for patience.

Patience in the face of massacre?

I was on a tour yesterday with the Israeli organization Zochrot. We visited Ras al Ahmar, a Palestinian village in the north close to the Lebanon border, that was destroyed in 1948 and all its inhabitants expelled. We heard the news from Gaza while on our way there, and the leaders of the tour remarked, “Today we talk about a Nakba [catastrophe] that started 60 years ago, and that continues as we speak in Gaza.”

When we arrived back to Tel Aviv in the evening the bus was continuing on to an Israeli protest against the bombing. There are demonstrations and calls for revenge throughout the Middle East. Hamas, who hasn’t carried out a bombing against Israel in almost four years, is calling for a third intifada, a militarized intifada, including suicide bombings.

When I first heard the news yesterday, standing in Ras al Ahmar in front of a landscape of Lebanese mountains, I tried to call my friend Summer, a Palestinian student who has never been able to leave the 140 square miles that make up the Gaza Strip, despite several times being accepted to foreign programs and even being granted visas.

My phone calls wouldn’t go through. Finally, I got her on the phone for a few seconds before the line went. The text message I received from her just afterwards said: “There’s shelling everywhere, more than 120 killed, it’s horrible here!”

When I finally talked to her late last night, she told me she had been in a meeting on a roof when she saw the first F16 drop the first bomb in her area. She went inside. The windows were shaking. Her sister was at the university when a bomb hit. “The bombing is everywhere!” she said. I asked if it was still going on and she said she wasn’t sure, the last bomb she had heard was a half hour earlier.

When I talked to Summer last week and asked how she was, she said fine, and was her usual cheery self. When our connection failed in the middle and I had to call her back, I asked, “Did the electricity cut out?” “Electricity?” she responded. “No, of course we don’t have any electricity; I’ve been talking to you in the dark the whole time.” She went on to tell me she’d waited in line for hours the day before for bread, and hadn’t found any. “They say a truck might get through the crossing tomorrow,” she said hopefully.

At the same time, John Ging, the director of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza said: “Two weeks ago, for the first time in 60 years, we ran out of food.”

This was all during a supposed “cease fire” which meant Hamas was not attacking Israel at all, and Israel was not committing daily bombing massacres against the people of Gaza. But the slow massacre of siege, border closing, lack of fuel and electricity and bread… that was all part of this “cease fire.”

So Olmert’s statement that “[t]he quiet we offered was answered with mayhem. Our desire for calm was answered with terror,” is almost laughable. If it weren’t for 271 dead and 900 injured. If it weren’t for the Bush administration’s statement that the people in Gaza are “nothing but thugs” and that Hamas is to blame for Israel’s largest massacre since 1967.

When I see the footage, and then read these statements, I am speechless with sadness and rage. I cannot respond. But Mourid Barghouti, in his 2003 book I Saw Ramallah, has already responded:

“It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from ‘Secondly.’ Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with “Secondly,” and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim. It is enough to start with “Secondly,” for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous. Start with “Secondly,” and Gandhi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British. You only need to start your story with “Secondly,” and the burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and Victor Jara’s songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet’s bullets, which killed so many thousands in the Santiago stadium. It is enough to start the story with “Secondly,” for my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon her victim. ...

The houses built on top of ours gallantly declare their willingness to understand our odd predilection toward living in camps scattered in the Diaspora of gods and flies, as though we had begged them to throw us out of our homes and to send their bulldozers to destroy them in front of our very eyes. Their generous guns in Deir Yassin forgive us the fact that they piled our bodies high at the sunset hour there one day. Their fighter jets forgive the graves of our martyrs in Beirut. Their soldiers forgive the tendency of our teenagers’ bones to break. Israel the victim polishes its hot, red knife with the sheen of forgiveness.”

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*There are protests all over the world right now. Please find one where you are.*

Caution: Settlers Ahead

"As a Jew, I was ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs in Hebron. There is no other definition than the term ‘pogrom’ to describe what I have seen.” This quote from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came just before I returned to Palestine two weeks ago. In Syria and in Lebanon, I watched as Al Jazeera correspondents reported live from Hebron, showing settlers burning houses and soldiers standing by and watching.

One of my first stops upon return to Palestine was to the Salfit region in the north, quite far from Hebron, to visit friends. I wasn’t thinking about the settlers. I visited a friend whose house is surrounded by the Wall, and asked how things were going. “They,” she pointed towards the settlement behind her house, “have attacked us twice this week.” In the middle of the night, the family had woken to the sounds of stones hitting their house. This has happened before, but not usually twice in one week. No settler has ever been punished for throwing stones at their house, though they have broken windows and water tanks.

I stayed in the area and woke up in the morning to the news that settlers had attacked a nearby village, spray painting racial slogans and stars of David on the village’s mosque. I have seen stars of David painted by settlers before, mostly on the walls of Palestinian shops and homes in Hebron, but I am still taken aback each time I see it. Do they not remember Kristallnacht? Or do they specifically remember Kristallnacht?

Another friend told me she had been on a bus the week before that was stopped by Israeli soldiers. “You should turn around and go a different way,” said a soldier to the driver. “There are settlers up ahead waiting to attack.” So the bus turned around, went a different way, and narrowly avoided a different attack by a group of settler women gathered on the side of the road with stones.

Somehow this story is the most frustrating to me. When settlers attack, Palestinians get punished / sent home / re-routed. It is as though the settlers are a natural phenomenon. They could place a sign in the road saying, “Caution: Settlers Ahead” and it would seem as natural to the soldiers as a sign saying “Caution: Storm Conditions Ahead” or “Caution: Road Curves Ahead.” It is as though the condition of settler attacks is unpreventable.

Of course, it is easier for a soldier to re-route a busload of unarmed Palestinian people largely accustomed to occupation than to move a group of armed settlers used to getting their way. But if the Israeli government, with the 4^th largest military in the world, wanted to control a few (or a few thousand) extremist settlers, I am confident that they could. This is not about a natural phenomenon, an inevitable occurrence, an inability of the Israeli government to reign in their population. It is a lack of will.

So when the prime minister of Israel says that he is personally offended by the settler attacks, when he calls them pogroms, one wonders why the Israeli soldiers largely stood by and watched, or even accompanied the settlers on their attacks. One wonders why the perpetrators are not in prison (unless they also attacked soldiers). One wonders why the settlers have not been removed. And the answer is simple: These settlers serve the interests of the Israeli government. I am not sure the government is always thrilled when the situation gets out of control like this (and then reflects badly on Israel in international media), but in general, having a small group of right-wing extremists deflects attention from the root causes of the problem, and deflects responsibility from the government.

Indeed, many Israelis view these settlers with disgust, and think, “If only these people would move out of the West Bank, we would have peace.” The settler movement often retorts, “What is the difference between land we came to control in 1948 and land we came to control in 1967?” Their conclusion (that Jews should fight for exclusive control of all the land) is quite opposite from mine, but the analysis is the same.

And this is why there are three Israeli soldiers for every Israeli settler in Hebron. Because if the settlers were to be removed, and “peace” did not magically appear, then people might start to ask, “Wait, is there another problem?” People might start to realize that occupation is not defined solely by presence of settlers (Gaza is experiencing the worst of occupation right now, though the settlers left more than three years ago). People might start to realize that there are Palestinians inside Israel who are treated less than equally, to say the least. People might start to realize that half of the Palestinian population has never set foot in any part of Palestine, and that more than two thirds are not permitted to live in their original villages. In other words, people might get to the core of the issue.

The ideological settler movement is, in many ways, holding together the fragile house of cards that is Israel. It has worked for a while, but it will not work forever. In front of this house we can add one more sign: “Caution: Collapse of Zionism Ahead.”

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P.S. While settlers are not jailed, these Israelis are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNjggLhQo6w

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Hello from Lebanon

Dear friends,

Thanks to all of you who responded to my last note from Syria. I wrote it while sick and a little down, so I just want to say to any of you who are thinking of visiting Syria, please do. It is an amazing place in many ways. Yes, I feel more comfortable in Palestine, but I have no regrets about my month in Syria. I’m now back in Palestine and my reports will likely start to take on their normal form again, but first, here’s another in the style of a travel blog, this time largely from Lebanon.

After my Arabic class ended, I left for Lebanon for a few days. I went to the bus station in Damascus, got in a shared taxi, paid $15, and was in Beirut a few hours later. Easy as that. There are street signs on the highways near Damascus with arrows pointing in different directions and the words “Lebanon” “Jordan” and “Iraq”. It reminds me of the arbitrariness of borders, and of how small this region is. I often think of Syria and Jordan as huge countries because they’re many times the size of Palestine and Lebanon, but Syria and Jordan combined are only slightly larger than Texas (which is a large state, yes, but it’s one of 50).

In my car ride to Lebanon (as in my car ride from Syria to Jordan the following week), there were several nationalities represented in the car: Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, and American. When the Iraqi man heard that I was American, he began to talk to me in fluent unaccented American English. “I was an interpreter for the US army,” he told me, and began talking about all the medals he received. I was taken aback at first, and admittedly judgmental of someone working with the army, but I was also curious. I asked him why he started working with them, and he thought I asked why he stopped. “Too many threats to my life,” he said. “So now I’ve been in Syria for a couple years, and I’m trying to get to America but they say they don’t have me in the system anymore and won’t issue me a visa, even though I worked with them for 3 years and got all these medals.” We talked a bit about his status in Syria and how he’s able to go to Lebanon (he has work there as an engineer rebuilding some of what Israel destroyed in 2006). I asked him again why he chose to work with the army. “It’s not just about the money,” he said, “though the money was good.” He went on to say that at the beginning of the war, most of the interpreters were Arabs from other countries, not Iraqis. He heard many stories of slight mis-translations leading to what he called “unnecessary killings” (I would argue all the killings are unnecessary), and he wanted to try to help. He is Iraqi, and speaks excellent English, so he thought he could save lives, and indeed, feels that he did.

As we crossed the border into Lebanon, I was struck by its beauty. I was there last February, when the mountains were all covered in snow, a different kind of beauty. But the greenness this time, the different colors in fact, were gorgeous. We weaved in and out of the mountain roads, and I started to see billboards for tattoo removal and other signs that distinguish Lebanon from Syria. And then, of course, the destruction. I remember reading about the Israeli bombing of the only road from Lebanon to Syria, but the sight of the bridge, or rather the pillars with no road on top, still undergoing reconstruction, was eerie. I imagined people in their cars plunging hundreds of feet to their death in the rocky ravine below.

This abrupt entry of memories of war into otherwise normal life would be repeated again and again in the coming days. Sitting in traffic, a driver would point to the bombed bridge next to us and say, “Traffic wasn’t like this before the summer of 2006.” Walking to a fancy café in the evening, my friends would tell me how they walked there once during the war and were terrified. When we arrived at the café they told me the whole area had been closed during the war. “Was the Lebanese army here preventing people from entering?” I asked. “No,” they said, “the army wasn’t allowed in either. Hizbollah controlled the area.”

You can’t walk or drive in Beirut without seeing destruction, construction, and a plethora of martyr posters. Except for the hairstyles and clothing, it’s hard to tell if the martyrs are from 1976, 2006, or sometime in between. I walked by one poster that at first glance looked like another martyr poster. A young man wore military gear and held what looked like an automatic weapon. Then I noticed the word “paintball” at the bottom of the poster. It was an advertisement. Strikingly similar.

I took a day to visit the south with my friend. I spent only about a half hour in each of Saida, Sur, and Bint Jbayl, but even the ride was worth it. I saw the hills with olive groves and thought, “This looks like the rural West Bank.” I saw the sea to our right and thought, “This looks like the road between Haifa and Tel Aviv.” I saw the specific shade of green and thought, “This looks like Jenin.” And of course, it is all of those things. And probably, had Israel not taken over in 1948, northern Palestine today would look quite similar (almost like it does now, but without all the Hebrew and red rooves).

We arrived in Bint Jbayl, the town that successfully resisted a ground invasion by the Israeli army in 2006. Many buildings still show the scars from bombing, but mostly life just continues. I realized that while I think of Bint Jbayl and Qana (which we also drove through) as sites of resistance or massacre, they are first and foremost places, like any other, of daily life. I looked up at the mountain and thought about how Palestine (Israel) is just on the other side. As I walked around with my Palestinian Lebanese friend who will likely never set foot in Palestine, I again thought of the arbitrariness of borders.

In Beirut I went to a play with my host and the kids from the Palestinian organization she works with. It was a story of a family from a fictional island who has many adventures traveling by boat around the world, but they are always trying to find their way home. I asked my host later if it was a reference to the right of return for Palestinian refugees. For Palestinians, she said, and Iraqis, and everyone else. I wondered if the actors were Palestinian, or Lebanese, or Iraqi, knowing how ethnically divided Lebanon is. But I was then comforted by the thought that it doesn’t matter, that one thing I like about Lebanon is that it seems to have a strong, or at least visible, progressive scene that does cross those boundaries.

As I got ready to leave for Syria, my friend said she would love to come to Damascus with me, that she had never been. She had been talking about it for days and I wasn’t sure why it wasn’t set in stone yet. She finally convinced her mother to ask her father. His response: No, the situation is too uncertain. “The situation?!” my friend asked angrily. “It’s been the same for 30 years!” Yes, her mother said, and it’s too uncertain. We never know what might happen.

I think about the concept of security, something most certainly missing from people’s lives in Lebanon and Palestine, and something largely present for people in Syria and Jordan. I had a conversation with a Palestinian friend the other day in which he said, “I don’t like Syria. You always feel like Assad is breathing down your back, you can’t say what you think, especially if it has anything to do with him.” I argued, “But people there live mostly happy, secure lives, with government services (health, education) provided. And Palestinians there too.” He agreed. “Sure, in Lebanon the Palestinians’ conditions are awful, the law discriminates openly against them, but they are free to speak and associate as they want. I prefer Lebanon and Palestine to Syria and Jordan.” I had a similar conversation with another friend, but with the opposite perspective: “Talk is nothing. So what about freedom of speech if we don’t have our basic needs?” This is of course a simplification of the countries in this area, but it’s an interesting context to think about.

Of course, there are certain things that do cross all the boundaries, that unify all the people of the region, and that once again remind me of the arbitrariness of borders. Right now, there is one that stands out to me most: Turkish soap operas (dubbed into Arabic). :)