24 February 2008

ALMOST TOO MUCH TRAGEDY FOR MY HEART TO BEAR

This month, I am a chronicler of death. There is nothing much to say here in the realm of subtle political analysis or historical criticism. Rather, there is death in abundance.

After the chaos of last month’s tightened Israeli embargo and subsequent breaching of the border between Gaza and Egypt by Hamas militants, the people of Gaza experienced, throughout February, a fresh round of hellish madness. By 3 February, the Gaza-Egypt border was finally sealed by Egyptian forces, after two weeks of unchecked and jubilant Palestinian border-crossing. Then, 4 February saw the year’s first (and the first in over a year’s time) Palestinian suicide bombing within Israel. An Israeli woman and the two bombers were killed in the attack at a shopping mall in the southern Israeli town of Dimona.

The next day, Hamas claimed responsibility and announced that the attackers had come from the occupied West Bank, dispelling the notion that the bombers were Gazans who had crossed the breached border into Egypt and then entered Israel via the largely unprotected border between Egypt and Israel that runs for 150 miles across the Sinai desert. But this didn’t stop Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s security cabinet from initially approving, on 6 February, the construction of a “reinforced” fence along this stretch of border, at a price that will surely climb to billions of dollars.

It’s important to note that, if Hamas did indeed carry out the Dimona bombing (for which it and other groups have claimed responsibility), then the bombing is the first attack that Hamas has carried out inside Israel since 2004. In spite of big media’s building-up of Hamas in our minds as a truly monstrous organization peopled by fanatics hellbent on bloodshed, members of Hamas themselves, and many observers of the situation all over the globe, do indeed see Hamas as the defender of Palestine, and Israel as the clear aggressor in this fight. The numbers do tell a story. In four years, not a single Hamas fighter has killed an Israeli within Israel, while, in that same period of time, untold thousands of Hamas members (and anyone who happened to be anywhere near them) in Gaza and the West Bank were gunned and missiled down by Israeli troops.

And this trend, of course, continues. On 5 February, seven Palestinian police officers were killed when an Israeli missile struck their police station in Gaza. On Wednesday, 6 February, two Palestinian children living on a communal farm near Gaza City were killed by an Israeli airstrike, four Hamas fighters were wounded by Israeli fire in northern Gaza, two Hamas fighters were killed near Rafah, and two young Israeli girls were wounded by a Qassam rocket fired from Gaza into the Israeli commune of Kibbutz Beeri, which lies only four miles from the border with Gaza. Also, and importantly, Israeli troops carried out one final attack late Wednesday night, launching an airstrike on a metal workshop in Gaza City, injuring none, but destroying the workshop. This last attack is important because it demonstrates how the IDF often takes advantage of the chaos of war to carry out attacks that not only target militants and their bystanders, but also the civilian infrastructure of Palestine and consequently the livelihoods of ordinary Palestinians. This unarguably amounts to collective punishment.

On Thursday, 7 February, seven Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes. Six militants were killed in an airstrike near the Jabaliya refugee camp and a teacher, 38 years old, was killed in a separate airstrike that, later on, struck a school in Beit Hanoun. Three students, each aged 16, were also wounded.

Then, on Thursday night, Israel began gradually cutting back electricity to the Gaza Strip, which is the very move that seems to have started this latest round of madness back in mid-January. As I’ve pointed out in previous reports, this is textbook collective punishment, something that the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and anyone with an ethical tug in their heart, expressly forbids. Myriad human rights groups, the European Union, and the UN have all condemned Israel’s cutting of fuel and electricity to Gaza.

“It’s their choice. They need to choose if they want to keep investing in rockets and in attacking Israel or if they want electricity from Israel,” said Shlomo Dror, Israeli defense ministry spokesman, plainly and publicly admitting Israel’s culpability in collective punishment.

Also that Thursday night, Hamas (seemingly unaffected by Israel’s threats of—and clear willingness to commit—collective punishment) happily announced that it had launched 40 rockets and 60 mortars into Israel since Tuesday afternoon.

Thoughout Saturday, 9 February, myriad Israeli airstrikes throughout Gaza killed one and injured two. That day, Hamas launched another dozen rockets, seriously wounding two Israeli brothers. Their family in the southern Israeli town of Sderot had been outside when air-raid sirens began blaring. Seconds later, the rocket landed a few yards away from the two brothers, ages 8 and 19, as they ran for cover.

In response to this, Olmert publicly called for calm in Israel, where all-out war on Hamas was being fervently called for in some very significant circles. (It must be asked: What do they think is currently going on if they’re calling for all-out war?)

As an example of the anger being felt in Israeli halls of power, Meir Sheetrit, Israeli interior minister, publicly suggested that the IDF select a neighborhood in Gaza, give its residents one day to get out, and then destroy the entire neighborhood. Wow. What an asshole. Thankfully, Olmert disagreed, saying, “Anger is not an operational plan. We must operate in a methodical and organized fashion, over time.”

Then, on Monday, 11 February, as everyone expected, Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak ordered the IDF to prepare for a major incursion into Gaza, and, in the middle of the night on Monday-Tuesday, the IDF carried out a small raid on Gaza, injuring two Palestinians. Also, the IDF raided the West Bank town of Nablus, rounding up and arresting five Palestinians. The IDF also claimed that they seized about $850,000 (which they claimed was being used to fund militant groups) from “money-changing offices” in Nablus. By 18 February, though, this incursion into the Gaza and the West Bank had netted the IDF over 80 Palestinian political prisoners. (And this, of course, comes on the heels of Israel’s releasing of 429 prisoners in November as a stated “gesture of good will” prior to November’s much-touted peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, which we now see has accomplished absolutely nothing. Let’s also keep in mind that, in the last year and a half alone, Israel has slowly increased the number of Palestinian political prisoners it holds from around 9,000 to about 11,000 now, despite these tiny fluctuations they say are motivated by good will.)

THE REAL TRAGEDY

On 19 February, in addition to the fact that a 10-year-old Palestinian boy, Tamer Abu Shaar, was shot in the head and killed by an Israeli soldier in Deir al-Balah in Gaza, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas met in Jerusalem with Olmert, as part of an agreement they made in Annapolis to meet every three months to review the status of their progress toward peace.
I must take pause here. The situation on the ground is difficult enough to bear. Airstrikes and ground incursions and rocket launchings are occurring daily. Children are being killed. All of this is bad enough, but when you add to the situation the fact that the supposed leaders of each side are sitting down together, affably discussing the progress of their “peace” in the midst of all the godawful madness of war, the situation is more than merely horrible or intolerable—it’s staggeringly nonsensical. Either these “elected leaders” are idiots or they don’t really lead anyone. Either way, sadly, everyone’s screwed.