By Kevin Gosztola
“…new torments and new tormented souls I see around me wherever I move, and howsoever I turn, and wherever I gaze.” –Third Circle, Inferno by Dante Alighieri“Consider well the seed that gave you birth: you were not made to live your lives as brutes, but to be followers of worth and knowledge.” –Ulysses, Inferno
Dr. Mads Gilbert’s declared on Sky News, “This is an all out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and we can prove that with the numbers.” He added, “The average age of the Gaza inhabitant is 17-years. It’s a very young population and 80% are living below the poverty limit of the U.N.”
Gilbert further stated, “This is a poor and very young people and they are able to escape absolutely nowhere because they can not flee like other populations can in wartime. Because they are fenced in and they are in a cage. So, they are bombing one and a half million people in a cage. And young people and poor people and, you know, you can not separate between the civilians and the fighters in such a situation.” [emphasis added]
Abu Khaled could not believe his ears when he heard the thundering of Israeli warplanes.
Helplessly, the panicked father put his arms around his three wounded children who laid at one of Al-Shifa hospital’s rooms.
“I was petrified,” he said recalling last night’s nightmare.
Israeli aircraft flew over al-Shifa, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, leaving hundreds of injured and their family members fearful of a possible strike.
Abu Khaled tried desperately to calm his terrified children as they saw the jets flowing overhead and unleashing tens of light and stun bombs over the hospital’s facilities.
“We could not sleep for the rest of the night.”
The Israeli military claimed on Monday that a number of senior Hamas leaders were hiding in the hospital.
Many fear the Israeli claims will be used as pretext to target the hospital, which has been overwhelmed with the influx of people injured since Israel unleashed its military juggernaut against Gaza on December 27.
“The hospital is neither a military barrack nor a resistance headquarter,” Basem Na’eem, the minister of health in the Gaza government, told IOL.
“Al-Shifa is the only hope left for thousands of victims of the savage Israeli massacre.”
Israel has used similar claims as a pretext to bomb out scores of mosques and schools during its onslaught, which has killed more than 550 people so far.
Israeli tanks, artillery and warplanes pounded the impoverished enclave of 1.6 million on Monday, January 5, for the tenth straight day, killing more than 40 people.
Madness
Just like Abu Khaled, Om-Said could not believe it when she was told that the hospital sheltering her injured child could be the next target on Israel’s hit list.
“This can not be true! Not hospitals too,” Om-Said told her neighbor, Om-Ammar Yasin, shaking her head in disbelief.
“My husband heard it on the Israeli radio,” Om-Ammar asserted.
“Beside, they did not respect the houses of God why should hospital be any safer.”
Just as they speak, Israeli warplanes fired tens of light and stun bombs over the hospital.
“The Israelis have gone completely mad,” a terrified Om-Said said, holding her son tight.
“Have not they spelled enough blood already?”
Like other doctors in al-Shifa, Raed Harara desperately tried to soothe his horrified patients and their families.
“They started to scream of panic. We tried to calm them but we were panicking ourselves,” said Dr. Harara.
“We were telling them ‘no way they would hit a hospital,’ but deep down we were thinking ‘there is nothing the Israelis would not do’,” he added.
“They already hit mosques and schools so why not hospitals.”
Al-Shifa is not the first Gaza medical facility fearful of a possible Israeli bombardment.
Al-Wafaa Hospital for Disabled has already received a warning from the Israeli military to evacuate before an imminent air strike.
“They warned us to evacuate but where would we go with all the patients, and why?” asked Mohamed Abu-Ryiala, the director of the hospital’s boarding facility.
“This is insane. Are the disabled poses a threat to Israel now?”
Yet, many know the newspeak which Israel uses and which the U.S. graciously promotes.
The world is supposed to fear Hamas’ rockets. And, the world is supposed to also fear that Hamas will use civilians as “human shields.” Therefore, civilian deaths, rather than using the old collateral damage argument, are deaths that can be explained by the “fact” that Hamas is using civilians, even in hospitals as they lie on the hospital bed with their insides spilling out all over into the hands of doctors like Dr. Mads Gilbert.
Ten days into the war being waged by Israel, and there are still accounts being posted on the Internet that would lead one to suggest to the author, “Why not go join the Jerusalem Post or the Washington Post? You would make a good journal—I mean, propagandist.”
Noah Liben, who graduated the joint program with Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2004, issued a retort to Anna Baltzer. His retort titled, “The other side of the story: My response to Anna Baltzer,” was posted as a headline on OpEdNews for all to read yet it did not become a popular article that was widely recommended in email and it did not receive any Diggs and as for ratings, somebody called it “Funny.” (Most primary headline articles on OpEdNews normally are shared widely through email.)
The fact that Liben’s editorial did not get Diggs or ratings or a high number of emails does not mean he is wrong. Yet, what was said is false and hard to stand by especially if you hold up one of the best editorials written in the past week—Jeremy Hammond’s “Top 5 Lies About Israel’s Assault on Gaza.”
The claim that Hamas’ “ideology is to use civilians as human shields for its fighters” is made sharply in Liben’s editorial. Besides the fact that using civilians as human shields is a tactic and nothing ideological, Hammond explains through Lie #3 why Liben’s claim is false:
There has been no evidence that Hamas has used human shields. The fact is, as previously noted, Gaza is a small piece of property that is densely populated. Israel engages in indiscriminate warfare such as the assassination of Nizar Rayan, in which members of his family were also murdered. It is victims like his dead children that Israel defines as “human shields” in its propaganda. There is no legitimacy for this interpretation under international law. In circumstances such as these, Hamas is not using human shields, Israel is committing war crimes in violation of the Geneva Conventions and other applicable international law.
This “hiding behind civilians” idea is a myth, which Israel has used before. It’s an old trick that still works. But, thanks to the Internet, one can go to Salon.com and see how Israel used this to justify its attacks on Hezbollah in 2006.
Mitch Prothero writes, “Hezbollah fighters — as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers — avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators — as so many Palestinian militants have been.”
And, Prothero suggests that the bombing of innocent civilians in 2006 was a tactic that Israel thought would work because eventually, it would have to kill some Hezbollah fighters.
Liben’s editorial, like many editorials in circulation, ignore the role of the U.S. in building up Hamas. The U.S.’ support of Fatah has built up Hamas and allowed for its brand of extremism to govern Palestinian territories.
The report from Vanity Fair titled, “The Gaza Bombshell”, which was released in April 2008, states:
… a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.
Liben (and others like Rob Kall, who is executive editor of OpEdNews) have cited Nizar Rayan as evidence of how difficult it is to discern between innocent civilians and terrorists.
First off, Liben does not accurately convey what happened. He says “two of Rayan’s wives and his four children” were killed. On the contrary, Chris Hedges’ editorial “click here in the Rubble” says “his four wives and 11 children also were killed.” And, since Hedges and Rayan were students of theology who engaged in discussions frequently “on the nature of belief, Islam, the Koran, the Bible and the religious life” together in Gaza, one must accept Hedges’ report on the deaths as truth and Liben’s as false.
Hedges describes why a father like Rayan might turn his sons into suicide bombers:
The only route left for most young men in Gaza to affirm themselves is through death. I have attended countless funerals there. The decision of the young men, sometimes boys, to die is usually a conscious one. It is born of this despair and rage. It is born of a sense of impotency and humiliation. It is born of a belief that to not accept sacrifice, even death, is to dishonor those who have gone before, to neglect the family members, relatives and friends who lost their land, endured the decades-long humiliation and abuse of occupation, and suffered or died resisting.
The young in Gaza have nothing to do. There are no jobs. They have nowhere to escape to. They cannot marry because they cannot afford housing. They cannot leave Gaza, even for Israel. They sleep, sometimes 10 to a room, and live on less than $2 a day, surviving on United Nations or Hamas charities and food donations. Martyrdom is the only route offered to those who want to achieve a measure, however brief, of recognition and glory.
Hedge’s commentary has provided some of the best insight into the conflict. It has explained many of the nuances and details the media refuses to shine a light on. Not even on the pages of al Jazeera will you find a paragraph as eloquent as the following paragraph from his editorial “Party to Murder”:
Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate and time and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love. “Expose thyself to what wretches feel,” King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, “and show the heavens more just.”
The paragraph’s prose drags you to the next paragraph where you are once again caught with the barbs that point out of more phrases describing the terror.
“Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods…A war? Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder.”
It is murder…And both sides carry it out. One side is justified while the other is not. And, therein lies the problem—the world cannot agree on whose repsonse is justified so the conflict wears on.
For that reason, the words of Wendy Pearlman, author of Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada is an essential read. Human insight into the horrors that humanity faces in Gaza and the West Bank is the only way to a peaceful solution that will allow for Palestinians to escape the oppression that is being wrought upon them by Israeli apartheid.
Pearlman, with a keen sense of what Westerners are thinking and why they ultimately are more compassionate toward Israel than Palestinians, explains in the introduction of her book:
The suffering of people on both sides increases daily and the violence shows few signs of abating. Observers in the West, horrified by suicide bombings, often ask why there is no Palestinian Gandhi. They question why the Palestinians have failed to develop a nonviolent liberation movement more capable of winning the sympathy of the international community and liberal Israelis alike. They wonder what kind of society this is in which young men and women in the prime of life line up for the chance to kill themselves and innocent civilians in suicide attacks and the majority of the public supports their deeds.
The absence of Gandhi has pained progressives and liberals in America who think a Palestinian Gandhi could bring an end to the horror. But, those who yearn for a Palestinian Gandhi fail to realize that those similar to Gandhi could exist in Gaza and never become a lightning rod for attention like Gandhi might have been because of the control that Israel has over media in the Palestinian Territories. Also, the U.S. has considerable control over the messages that reach people here in America and that has a way of letting those in U.S. government get away with supporting occupation in Israel by offering arms and more to Israel.
Again, many Gandhis could exist and never become anything like the Gandhi the world remembers. Israel would not want any Palestinian to become a martyr.
U.S. and Israel would never let Palestinian revolutionaries use their spirituality like Gandhi. And, I suggest that what we think a Palestinian Gandhi would be is wrong; a Palestinian Gandhi would be more like a Nizar Rayan than the Gandhi we remember. (Gandhi was a Hindu and those who are revolting in Gaza are primarily Muslim.)
Obviously, the U.S. and Israel would not allow a Nizar Rayan to live freely.
But, let’s say the U.S. and Israel began to do right all of a sudden. The people of the world especially those in America will not sympathize with a Nizar Rayan (or Gandhi) if they continue to lack an understanding of Palestine life under Israeli apartheid.Pearlman states a few pages later:
“…History has proven that Israel cannot pound the Palestinians into submission. No amount of military force can restrain a people committed to the justice of the cause. Neither security walls nor checkpoints will stop those who feel that they have nothing left to lose and no other way out of intolerable oppression.”
Israel’s leaders know this reality and with Bush still in power and with a propaganda machine working magnificently, Israel presses on. Israel creates pockets of purgatory here, there, and everywhere thinking eventually they will get rid of Hamas.
Media outlets are now suggesting Israel is going for a full-blown regime change, but what is regime change? Palestinians have never controlled the state which brings horror and humiliation to their families each and every day.
Still, President-elect Barack Obama clings to the idea that there is one president at a time.
I will continue to insist that when it comes to foreign affairs, it is particularly important to adhere to the principle of one president at a time, because there are delicate negotiations taking place right now and we can’t have two voices coming out of the United States when you have so much at stake. [emphasis added]
Obama’s voice could bring a halt to the Inferno being created by Israel. But, alas, he silences himself.