This week marks one year since Israel began its attack on the Gaza Strip: a year since phosphorus bombs, dime bombs and other weapons of death and destruction were unleashed on a defenseless civilian population. A year since the people of the world demanded that Israel end its attack on Gaza.
In this Israeli war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, many of our civilians were massacred by Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, condemned by UN experts and leading human rights organizations as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This assault left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were children. Another 5380 Palestinians were injured. We, the 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled from our homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. This came after 18 months of an ongoing, crippling, deadly hermetic Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment described by John Dugard,the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights as “a prelude to genocide.”
The war on Gaza was predicated and advocated for by Israeli generals and politicians. Matan Vilnai, ex-Deputy Defense Minister of Israel, told Army Radio during “Operation Hot Winter” (29 February 2008):
They will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.
In the days following this statement, 107 Palestinians, including 28 children, were killed. The international community failed to take action. This inaction, followed by European declarations of intentions to upgrade their trade agreements with Israel, served as a green light for the atrocities that were to be committed in January 2009.
But the attack on Gaza is not yet over: we, the Palestinians of Gaza are still living with our physical, mental and emotional wounds. Our bodies cannot heal because the medicine that we require is not allowed into the Gaza Strip .Our homes cannot be rebuilt and the mangled steel and concrete cannot be removed because the trucks and bulldozers that can remove them are not allowed into the Gaza Strip.
Never before has a population been denied the basic requirements for survival as a deliberate policy of colonization, occupation and apartheid, but this is what Israel is doing to us, the people of Gaza, today: 1.5 million people live without a secure supply of water, food, electricity, medicines, with almost half of them being children under the age of 15.
It is a slow genocide of the kind unparalleled in human history.
Earlier this month, Ronnie Kasrils, ex South African Intelligence Minister and member of the ANC, said in the UK, that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is far worse than what was done to black South Africans under apartheid. And, former American president Jimmy Carter said, on his visit to Gaza, that the Palestinian people trapped in Gaza are being treated “like animals.”
The people of Gaza need your support to end the blockade. Over 1400 international activists from over 42 countries will be in Gaza on December 31. They will march with us to demand that Israel lift its’ blockade of the Gaza Strip immediately and permanently. We ask you to show your solidarity with Gaza on the same day: wherever you may be, organize a protest, a march or a petition collection in your own country.
There are 1.5 million people in Gaza: we want to see 1.5 million people around the world support us as we take our demands to the Israeli state.
We need you to show Israel that we have a common humanity; that you watch what it does and you will not tolerate it because silence is complicity.
We need you to show Israel on December 31 2009 that there is no place for their kind of war mongering and barbarism in the world and that the people of the world reject it.
We need you to show us, the people of Gaza, that you remember the horror that we face each day, and that you are with us as we fight against the Israeli-apartheid killing machine.
Gaza
20 December 2009
Signed by: Academic Sector Boycott National Committee PNGO (Civil Society Sector)
Labor Sector
Women’s Sector
Students’ Sector
Youth Sector
It is generally recognised that the Middle East peace process is in the doldrums, almost moribund. Israeli settlement expansion within Palestine continues, and PLO leaders refuse to join in renewed peace talks without a settlement freeze, knowing that no Arab or Islamic nation will accept any comprehensive agreement while Israel retains control of East Jerusalem.
US objections have impeded Egyptian efforts to resolve differences between Hamas and Fatah that could lead to 2010 elections. With this stalemate, PLO leaders have decided that President Mahmoud Abbas will continue in power until elections can be held – a decision condemned by many Palestinians.
Even though Syria and Israel under the Olmert government had almost reached an agreement with Turkey’s help, the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejects Turkey as a mediator on the Golan Heights. No apparent alternative is in the offing.
The UN general assembly approved a report issued by its human rights council that called on Israel and the Palestinians to investigate charges of war crimes during the recent Gaza war, but positive responses seem unlikely.
In summary: UN resolutions, Geneva conventions, previous agreements between Israelis and Palestinians, the Arab peace initiative, and official policies of the US and other nations are all being ignored. In the meantime, the demolition of Arab houses, expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Palestinian recalcitrance threaten any real prospect for peace.
Of more immediate concern, those under siege in Gaza face another winter of intense personal suffering. I visited Gaza after the devastating January war and observed homeless people huddling in makeshift tents, under plastic sheets, or in caves dug into the debris of their former homes. Despite offers by Palestinian leaders and international agencies to guarantee no use of imported materials for even defensive military purposes, cement, lumber, and panes of glass are not being permitted to pass entry points into Gaza. The US and other nations have accepted this abhorrent situation without forceful corrective action.
I have discussed ways to assist the citizens of Gaza with a number of Arab and European leaders and their common response is that the Israeli blockade makes any assistance impossible. Donors point out that they have provided enormous aid funds to build schools, hospitals and factories, only to see them destroyed in a few hours by precision bombs and missiles. Without international guarantees, why risk similar losses in the future?
It is time to face the fact that, for the past 30 years, no one nation has been able or willing to break the impasse and induce the disputing parties to comply with international law. We cannot wait any longer. Israel has long argued that it cannot negotiate with terrorists, yet has had an entire year without terrorism and still could not negotiate. President Obama has promised active involvement of the US government, but no formal peace talks have begun and no comprehensive framework for peace has been proposed. Individually and collectively, the world powers must act.
One recent glimmer of life has been the 8 December decision of EU foreign ministers to restate the long-standing basic requirements for peace commonly accepted within the international community, including that Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries will prevail unless modified by a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians. A week later the new EU foreign policy chief, Baroness Catherine Ashton, reiterated this statement in even stronger terms and called for the international Quartet to be “reinvigorated”. This is a promising prospect.
President Obama was right to insist on a two-state solution and a complete settlement freeze as the basis for negotiations. Since Israel has rejected the freeze and the Palestinians won’t negotiate without it, a logical step is for all Quartet members (the US, EU, Russia and UN) to support the Obama proposal by declaring any further expansion of settlements illegal and refusing to veto UN security council decisions to condemn such settlements. This might restrain Israel and also bring Palestinians to the negotiating table.
At the same time, the Quartet should join with Turkey and invite Syria and Israel to negotiate a solution to the Golan Heights dispute.
Without ascribing blame to any of the disputing parties, the Quartet also should begin rebuilding Gaza by organising relief efforts under the supervision of an active special envoy, overseeing a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and mediating an opening of the crossings. The cries of homeless and freezing people demand immediate relief.
This is a time for bold action, and the season for forgiveness, reconciliation and peace.
Children play in the rubble of their homes in Jabaliya, destroyed by the Israeli offensive in January. Photograph: Ashraf Amra/Polaris/eyevine
Ghiada abu Elaish’s fingers twist in her lap and her eyes cloud over as she recalls the day an Israeli shell killed four of her cousins and left her in a coma for 22 days. She has had almost 12 months to reflect on the tragedy, a time in which hatred and anger might have consumed the 13-year-old. Remarkably, though, not only has she survived shocking injuries and a dozen operations, with many more to come, but she has retained both her sweet nature and faith in a bright future.
Which makes it all the harder for her to return each day after school, dressed in the ubiquitous Palestinian uniform of blue-and-white-striped smock over jeans and trainers, to the scene of the massacre – her family home.
It was Friday 16 January and Ghiada was studying for exams. Her father, a pharmacist, woke from a nap, demanding tea and shouting at the younger children to be quiet. “Suddenly I could hear my cousin downstairs, screaming ‘Dead! Dead!'” A shell had hit the building – a block of five apartments, housing the extended Abu Elaish family – smashing windows and causing extensive damage to the flat below.
In the ensuing panic, Ghiada defied her father and followed him downstairs. “One room was completely black. I saw Aya [my cousin], she was on the ground with wood on top of her. There was a big hole in the wall.”
Ghiada tried pulling Aya out from under the furniture. A second shell struck. “There was a big light for a second,” she says. “I saw some windows smash and I heard screaming all around. A piece of shrapnel hit me. I started to scream for help and then fell down unconscious.”
Ghiada’s father, Atta Mohammed abu Elaish, rushed into the room. “I saw bodies without heads and legs. I saw my daughter. I saw her mother screaming.” He ran outside to call an ambulance. “The Israelis stopped the ambulances 250 metres from the house. Some boys from the street came to start ferrying the bodies and the injured out of the building.”
The attack was one of countless assaults during Israel’s 23 days of war on Gaza – Operation Cast Lead – that began on 27 December. But it was also one of the most notorious because Ghiada’s uncle – Aya’s father – was a doctor who worked in Israeli hospitals and was well known to Israeli viewers for advocating peace and reconciliation. All through the conflict, Dr Izzeldin abu Elaish gave regular eyewitness accounts by phone in fluent Hebrew to Israeli television. Within minutes of the attack on his own family, he was back on the phone to a journalist in a Tel Aviv studio, weeping and begging for help as Israeli viewers listened: “My daughters have been killed.”
Indeed, they had: Bissan, 20, Miar, 15, and Aya, 14, were dead, along with another cousin, 17-year-old Nour. Ghiada was in a critical condition; another of the doctor’s daughters was also wounded.
The injured girls – thanks to that live TV broadcast – were unusually and swiftly evacuated to a hospital in Tel Aviv, where Ghiada was found to be suffering from multiple problems with her heart, kidneys, stomach and legs. She remained in hospital in Israel for four and a half months.
Now, Ghiada says, she thinks about that day “always”, but tries not to let others see her pain. “When I am crying, I go to my room and cry alone,” she says. Does she feel angry? No, she says, just sad. And she plans to stay put in Gaza: “Maybe others would like to emigrate, but that’s not for me.”
Toll of death and destruction
But if Ghiada expresses no bitterness, her father insists she is angry and so is the rest of the family. “It’s very hard for us,” he says. “That accident took Bissan, Nour, Miar, Aya – and my brother.” Dr Abu Elaish has left Gaza for Canada. “He is the eldest brother, the father of the family, and now he’s gone. How can we forgive?”
The shelling of the Abu Elaish family was unusual in that it caught the attention of the Israeli public, but what Ghiada continues to endure 12 months on is shared by many of Gaza’s 750,000 children – half of its population.
More than 1,400 Gazans were killed in the 23 days of the Israeli assault, including several hundred children. The actual number is in dispute. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented 313 deaths, almost 40% of them less than 10 years old. Other Palestinian groups say the toll was much higher. More than 1,600 children were injured.
But the 23-day war is only part of the story. The long history of Israeli assaults on Gaza, and the two-and-a-half-year-long blockade of the territory after Hamas took power, has exacted a toll on almost every aspect of children’s lives: schooling, housing, leisure time, what they eat, what they wear, how they see the future.
A Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) survey earlier this year found that about 75% of children over the age of six were suffering from one or more symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Almost one in 10 ticked off every criteria.
“The majority of children suffer many psychological and social consequences,” says Dr Hasan Zeyada, a psychologist with GCMHP. “Insecurity and feelings of helplessness and powerlessness are overwhelming. We observed children becoming more anxious – sleep disturbances, nightmares, night terror, regressive behaviour such as clinging to parents, bed wetting, becoming more restless and hyperactive, refusal to sleep alone, all the time wanting to be with their parents, overwhelmed by fears and worries. Some start to be more aggressive.”
Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, professor of psychiatry at al-Quds university in Gaza, says the conflict has a different impact on boys and girls. “Girls have more anxiety and depression, boys are more hyperactive.”
Some children no longer look on their homes as a place of safety, security and comfort. Others don’t even have a home to go to. The Israeli bombardment damaged or destroyed more than 20,000 houses, forcing some families into tents and others into crowding in with relatives. Hamas distributed money to displaced families to rebuild their homes but the Israeli blockade has created a desperate shortage of materials. Almost one year later, some children still have no roof over their head.
Hanan Attar, a slight 10-year-old wearing flip-flops several sizes too big for her small feet, is wistful as she recalls the house destroyed by an Israeli tank shell. “We had land, my father is a farmer,” she says. “We used to grow watermelons, but the land was too close to the border and we can’t get there now.”
Home is now a tent on a patch of scrubby sand, shared by 10 members of her family, including a 50-day-old baby sister with a pinched face and a tin of formula milk perched on her rusting iron crib. The baby, Haneen, is seriously underweight at only 3kg, and is not growing. Her mother, Arfa, 40, cannot breastfeed because she is taking medication for back problems; the formula costs 45 shekels (£7.50) a tin, money that the family has to borrow. The father, too, is sick as well as unemployed. He reaches on top of a tall fridge that dominates the tent to pull down a sheaf of x-rays showing how his leg, broken in the conflict, is pinned together with metal.
“We are civilians, we don’t belong to any faction,” he says. “What are we guilty of so that we have to live like this? I spent my entire life building up my home. In one hour everything was gone.”
Hanan doesn’t complain about the tent, but says “the house was better”. She adds: “A snake came one night and bit my mother. I can’t sleep at night; I’m scared of the snakes and the dogs.”
Meals are cooked on a Calor gas stove; the toilets – a hut donated by an Arab charity – are shared by all the families in the compound of tents. “There are big queues,” says Hanan. Winter is coming; the tent is “freezing”, she says.
There is a community of tent families, circled round the shared lavatories. The children play as all children do, kicking a football, wrestling, dragging sticks through the sand. The families are doing their best in near-impossible circumstances. Some families have even planted small gardens in the scrub: corn and a few flowers.
But Hanan – who wants to be a doctor so she can treat the sick – says she spends most of her time in the tent with her seven brothers and sisters. Do they think they will ever go back to a proper home? “God knows,” says Arfa.
Overcrowding, lack of privacy and poverty are contributing to what some in Gaza call the “mental siege” . Tensions within families are increasing, say Gaza’s mental health experts. “Some parents themselves have depression and anxiety. Some become more aggressive towards their children,” says Zeyada.
John Ging, director of UN operations in Gaza, puts it like this: “Parents are sitting there in their homes, very upset and very frustrated at the their situation, and that is of course having ramifications for the home environment.” Has there been an increase in domestic violence? “Of course . . . children are losing respect because of the breakdown of the role-model structure. They see their parents as incapable of providing for them, they’re seeing their parents as a failure.”
Lost childhoods
Part of the problem is the lack of release and entertainment for children. There are few gardens or parks, no cinemas or theatres, many sports facilities have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombing, and one of Gaza’s great natural advantages – a 25-mile stretch of sandy beach facing the Mediterranean – is hiding a fresh danger.
In the summer months, families flock to the beach on Fridays and Saturdays. The sight of children splashing in the waves is cheering until one remembers that every day 20m gallons of raw sewage is pumped into the water. Since Gaza’s sewage processing plant was bombed after the kidnap of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in July 2006, there has been no alternative means of disposal. Now, according to Save the Children, children are developing skin diseases as well as bacterial infections from swimming in polluted water.
“There are not enough safe places for children to play,” says Mona al-Shawa, head of the women’s unit at the PCHR. To counter this, the UN organised a hugely popular “Summer Games” during the long school break, despite objections from Hamas about boys and girls mixing together. “There were those on the political side saying kids should be going to summer camps, not doing sport and recreation, but preparing for a future life of militancy,” says Ging.
Ging says schooling has also suffered. Thirty-two of the UN’s 221 schools were damaged in the Israeli assault, plus scores more government ones. None have been repaired because Israel does not allow construction materials into Gaza, saying they could be used to make weapons.
“So the schools, where the windows were blown out or other damage was done, have been cleaned up, made safe, and continue in operation today without the physical repairs because we haven’t been allowed to bring in one pane of glass or one bag of cement since last January,” says Ging.
Israel did permit a consignment of wood into Gaza to make school desks for 8,000 children, but then blocked delivery of the steel necessary to complete them. “Now you see three kids squashed on to a desk,” says Ging. “How are teachers supposed to give each child the attention they need?”
There is also a shortage of school books and pens, and what does arrive mostly has to be smuggled through underground tunnels from Egypt.
The result is children attending overcrowded schools on a double or even triple shift system that has contributed to a continuing decline in education levels. One in five of the 200,000 pupils at the UN’s 221 schools in Gaza failed basic Arabic and maths exams this year.
Engendering extremism
“It’s shocking for them but it’s also alarming for us in terms of the future,” says Ging. “The objective of the [Israeli] policy is to counter extremism. Education is probably the most effective tool through which you will counter extremism, by developing a positive and well-educated mindset. And yet we are being prevented by the policy from educating these children.”
It is, he says, “facilitating the destruction of a civilised society and, worse than that, the development of an extreme society”.
One of the starkest examples of school destruction is the American International school, Gaza’s elite fee-paying institution in Beit Lahiya, which was bombed in the early hours of the morning of 3 January. The Israeli military claimed it was being used as a rocket-launching site. Now, where once stood science laboratories, computer rooms, a music centre and sports fields, there is a mountain of crushed masonry, twisted metal girders, broken glass and droppings from the sheep that roam the deserted site. To the side of what was once the main building lies a row of burned-out schoolbuses. The odd fragment of textbook can be seen amid the rubble.
Then there is the difficulty of trying to concentrate in class when children are clawed by hunger. Three-quarters of Gazans rely on food handouts, according to the UN. Save the Children says it is seeing newborn babies suffering from malnutrition. Anaemia, especially among girls, is common.
The UN has started feeding children in its schools because, says Ging, “they’re coming to school without breakfast and therefore their attention span is very short and the academic results will then reflect that”.
Food, at least, is something that is relatively easy to fix. There are many less tangible issues that concern child experts, such as a lack of healthy role models. “During the war, children could see that their parents could not fulfil their needs,” says Zeyada. “They see their fathers as weak, powerless. They see parents can’t give them feelings of security, can’t protect them. So they look towards other figures. That might be God as an absolute power – so children might go towards religion, become more fanatic. Some identify with fighters from Hamas and other groups.
“Without hope, we are moving fast towards more aggressive children, more fanatics. If the siege ended you would see positive changes among children. They [Israel] are creating their enemies. They are pushing a new generation of children to believe in violence as a way of solving their difficulties. They are creating their own enemies of the future.”
In September 2007 Israel declared Gaza a “hostile entity”. “I said at that time, and I continue to say it, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Ging. “You designate it as a hostile entity, you treat it as a hostile entity and in fact what happens is you generate hostility. And that’s precisely what we have been witnessing here at the grassroots level for the last two and a half years under this illegal siege . . . We have more extremism in Gaza every single day.”
Yet through it all, it is striking how many Palestinians cling to a belief in a better future. For all her traumas, Ghiada hasn’t given up. She attends a thrice-weekly English lesson after school to improve her chances of fulfilling her dreams.
The teacher hands Ghiada a question to answer to the class in English: If you were a colour, what colour would you choose? The girl doesn’t hesitate. “Red,” she tells the class.
The teacher asks the students what the colour red means to them. Blood, suggests one; danger, says another, both witnesses to last year’s carnage. Ghiada considers for a moment, then replies: “It makes me happy. It’s the colour of love.”
And what will Ghiada do with her English? She wants to be an airline pilot, she says.
Ironically that’s one career choice that will certainly require emigration: Gaza has no aeroplanes and the runway of its only airport was bulldozed to rubble by the Israeli army years ago.
The 23-day war in numbers
Statistics from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme
• 1,420 Palestinians killed, 446 of them children
• 5,320 injured, 1,855 of them children
• 4,000 houses destroyed
• 16,000 houses damaged
• 94.6% of children aged six-17 heard the sound of sonic jetfighters
• 91.7% of them heard shelling by artillery
• 92% saw mutilated bodies on TV
• 80% were deprived of water or electricity
• 50.7% left home for a safer place
• 25.9% report one symptom of PTSD
• 39.3% report more than one symptom
• 9.8% report full criteria of PTSD
Statistics from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
• 1,414 Palestinians killed during the conflict, including 313 children, of which: – 31% girls, 69% boys
– 15% under 5; 23.3% 5-10; 62% 11-17
– 73% died from bombs; 19.8% from artillery shells; 5.4% shot; 1.5% from white phosphorous
• 5,300 Palestinians injured, including 1,606 children
• 36 UN schools damaged
• Approximately 20,000 homes completely or partially destroyed
I’m going to discuss the utility of non-violent resistance as it applies to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict and, specifically, the occupation and blockade of the Gaza strip. Even more specifically, I’m going to discuss the Gaza Freedom March (GFM), of which I’m one of the organizers. But before discussing Palestinian non-violence, several things must be clarified. One is that no one — least of all me, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn — has the slightest right to dictate to the Palestinians how to end the blockade or resist the occupation. Another is the need to avoid the nearly inevitable antiseptic air to talk by Westerners discussing Palestinian non-violence. Antiseptic, because it is cleansed of the complicating grit of the occupation within which non-violence must take place. There’s also usually a tacit subtext, usually a four-word question: Where Is Their Gandhi? That question could not be more in error. I hope to show why.
Furthermore, the justification for non-violence that I want to get at is not a principled justification rooted in an unyielding commitment to pacifism, roughly the Quaker position. Most people do not espouse non-violence because it is inherently superior to violence. Non-violence is only better than violence if it can reach the same goals with less human suffering — counted up with the starkest metrics: less death, fewer mangled children. Absolute commitment to non-violence is not a position I’m going to discuss here, except to suggest that a tactical commitment to non-violence can move close, edge up, to the very edge of principle — if indeed it can be shown, or at least suggested, that situations that are resolved violently could be resolved non-violently, at a lesser price in blood, the only consideration worth attention. This is Howard Zinn’s non-violence. It is also, against prevailing interpretations, Gandhi’s.
It’s not that violence never works. In fact, it works really well. Anthropologist David Graeber comments, “violence is veritably unique among forms of action because it is pretty much the only way one can have relatively predictable effects on others’ actions without understanding anything about them.” Want some land? Carry out a terror attack on its inhabitants. They’re likely to flee. They try to reclaim it? Shoot the first one who tries in the head. After a while, they stop trying. Then, it’s yours. Until someone with a bigger gun comes along. It’s cyclical. Most Palestinians know very well why Israel is no longer occupying southern Lebanon. It’s because of Hezbollah. And Palestinians and Israelis both know that Hezbollah repulsed the summer 2006 invasion through violence. It works. The question is if something else can work better.
In discussing Palestinian non-violence, however, we do nothing but insult the Palestinian struggle if we forget its background: the occupation. The occupation is tragic, permanent, perpetual, unyielding violence. Tel-Aviv University Professor Eyal Benvenisti comments that the “continued rule of the recalcitrant occupant” should be characterized as an “aggression.” That is what the people living in Gaza and the West Bank are resisting. And that was the Cast Lead operation: 1,400 dead, threats of a Shoah from Israeli military officers, the ecology and economy of Gaza shattered, the land “dying,” according to one of the authors of the Goldstone Report, with Gaza’s water source on the verge of collapse, the people, the victims of deliberately injurious policies intended to get them to overthrow their legitimately elected government. Subject to de-development, massacre, and occupation, it would be weird, or insolent, to discuss non-violence, except for one fact: Palestinian civil society very much supports non-violence. The non-violent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement — which the GFM does not take a stand on — has garnered immense support in Gaza and the West Bank, and in the Palestinian Diaspora. So have the Free Gaza ships, by now a flotilla of them, which have arrived in the Gaza City seaport. As have innumerable marches and demonstrations.
Palestinian civil society hasn’t embraced non-violence out of some strange, inexplicable, dreamily Utopian impulse, either. It has embraced non-violence because it’s well aware that non-violence often works, very well. A recent study, investigating the “strategic effectiveness” of violent and non-violent campaigns in struggles between “non-state and state actors,” examined hundreds of conflicts from 1900 to 2006. The results showed that “that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns.” There are good reasons for this, reasons directly related to the thinking underlying the Gaza Freedom March.
Non-violence contributes greatly to a movement’s legitimacy both in the eyes of potential participants and in the judgment of the world. More legitimacy means more participants. More participants means more pressure on the target. Non-violence can impel greater recognition of grievances and, in turn, great and greater support from both inside and outside the conflict zone for the group engaging in non-violence. This can lead to the “alienation of the target regime.” Furthermore, governments are able to easily justify “violent counterattacks against armed insurgents,” whereas state repression against practitioners of non-violence can quickly backfire.
We know that this is true. A baton slammed down upon a non-violent resister evokes more sympathy than a guerrilla fighter shot down by a helicopter gunship. Why this is so isn’t entirely clear. Nor is it entirely justified. When the issues are clear and the cause is pure in our collective imaginary, as with John Brown’s heroism at Harper’s Ferry, we stand by violent insurgents. The Israel-Palestine conflict, to many people, is not as clear-cut as the struggle against Southern slavery, nor is the Palestinian national liberation struggle, given its historical and contemporary leadership, without moral and political ambiguities. Still, no one, almost no one, can support land theft, or the attempted destruction of national consciousness. And a group of people non-violently protesting the seizure of their land cannot be demonized like guerrilla fighters. But they could be still ignored.
The Gaza Freedom March aims to make sure that this round of Palestinian non-violence will not be ignored. Others have been. We are following a path blazed by Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., sure. But it’s also a path that’s been blazed in Beit Hanoun and Gaza City, in Ramallah and Nablus, in Ni’lin and Bil’in. Non-violence is not an import from Planet Gandhi. In March 1920, Palestinians protested the Balfour Declaration with testaments, declarations, petitions, manifestos, assemblies, delegations, processions, marches and motorcades. In 1936, Palestinians held a conference to organize an overwhelmingly non-violent General Strike to protest the encroachment of nationalist settlers on Palestinian land. They were told to simmer down by neighboring Arab states — a recurring pattern. For 50 years, their existence, their clinging to national consciousness was a form of non-violent resistance itself, too.
But passive resistance, what Palestinian scholar Salim Tamari calls sumud, steadfastness, “a development strategy of survival and communal preservation until the unfavorable political conditions allow for an external intervention,” would soon change to active resistance, what Gandhi called satyagraha, as the First Intifada erupted. Overwhelmingly non-violent, Palestinians engaged in mass demonstrations, transportation strikes, fasting, flag-raising, and other forms of non-violent civil disobedience. Teenagers would refuse to disperse when tear-gassed, or shot up with live ammunition. Israel resorted to this regularly, responding to the Intifada with mass arrests, murders, curfews, assassinations. Yitzhak Rabin said that he would hammer the largely non-violent mobilization with “force, might, and beatings.” By December 1989 the IDF had killed over 600 Palestinians, injured perhaps 20,000, jailed perhaps 50,000. It assassinated Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir, gunning him down in Tunis as he was contemplating re-emphasizing non-violence, well aware of the stunning impact that melees between non-violent Palestinians and the Israeli Defense Forces were having on the world’s consciousness. Some contend that this non-violence broke the IDF, sending it into disarray, until the Palestinian leadership subverted this grassroots process. Indeed, it was only due to the Intifada that the Oslo talks took place, flawed as they were. It could have been otherwise.
More recently, the people of Ni’lin and Bil’in have been demonstrating weekly against the theft of their land by the separation Wall. And in Gaza, in the thick of imprisonment and collective punishment, they have formed human chains, with thousands of participants, and gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures, organized candle-lit protests, children and adults chanting in Arabic, demonstrating against the closure of their power plants due to insufficient fuel. The point of all this is not to genuflect to Palestinian ingenuity before moving onto Western intervention, nor to fetishize Palestinian resistance. The point is to show that right now, there is constant non-violent resistance. The point is to make sure it can’t be ignored. The point is to amplify it. That’s the question before us.
So when Gershom Gorenberg or other writers wax on about their search for a Palestinian Gandhi, about their desire to see a March to the Dead Sea in lieu of the Salt Marches, about the search for satyagrahis, about the failure of the Palestinian people to produce a non-violent response to occupation, there’s more than a bit of disingenuousness visible. It’s willful blindness: most Americans may not know about the First Intifada, but such writers surely do. But it serves its purpose. If you don’t discuss Palestinian non-violence, you don’t have to discuss the Israeli response: to the First Intifada, crushing violence. Or to current efforts: brute obstinacy, rubber bullets, real bullets, a refusal to enforce the rulings of its own High Court of Justice, continued occupation. Israeli politicians are not stupid. They haven’t forgotten the effects of the First Intifada. It is hard to sustain an image as a beacon of Middle Eastern democracy when video footage emerges of your armed forces pummeling children. It’s an untenable situation, in a way: repress non-violence and destroy your legitimacy, or let it bloom and encourage further resistance.
But there’s a caveat. If non-violent resistance has no visibility, it cannot be effective. The world’s publics can’t pressure a state to change its policies if they have no idea what those policies are. They can’t cause an uproar over murders that they don’t know are happening.
Some murders the world knows about. And some murders it doesn’t. Here’s one of the latter: Bassem Ibrahim Abu-Rahma. He was killed in April 2009 by a high-velocity tear-gas grenade that collapsed his chest in Bi’lin. Here are a couple of the former, the names that people are more likely to know: Rachel Corrie, plowed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer. Tom Hurndall, shot in the head by an Israeli sniper. Tom and Rachel were brave, no question, but we do not know their names because they are brave. Or not just for that reason. Brave Palestinian practitioners of non-violence are killed constantly, and we don’t know their names or their words or their faces. They don’t have plays written about them. They don’t have lectures named after them.
There’s a reason for this, and that reason is institutional racism. Western politicians and Western parliamentarians, Western press agencies and Western pundits, have the tendency to pay a lot more attention to the activities, the lives, the deaths, of those from the West, compared to those from the global South. There’s more mourning over a white corpse than a brown corpse — normally the shield protecting a lot of unpleasant actions perpetrated by the strong upon the weak.
But the Gaza Freedom March will appropriate that shield. We will appropriate that shield and re-forge it into a lever and wedge it into the wall of ignorance protecting the illegal blockade. That’s where Western intervention comes in. When 1,300 people from Europe and South Africa, from the Philippines and the United States, from Japan and Brazil and New Zealand, jump on jetliners, cross every ocean, fly into Cairo, get ferried in a convoy of 20 buses to el-Arish, then to Rafah, and ask the Egyptian authorities to let us into Gaza, they’ll let us in. And then we will meet 50 or 100 or 150,000 Palestinians. We will commemorate the Cast Lead massacre, and bear witness to the rubble of the winter attack. Then with musicians and writers, French and Filipino Senators, Alice Walker and Ali Abunimah, Rabbis and Holocaust survivors, members of the Palestinian Diaspora, we will march nearly to the threshold of the Erez crossing, together, and say: Israel, the whole world is watching. Lift the blockade. The trick, though, is making sure the whole world is watching.
So we hope that Palestinian bravery and our solidarity and your support will get the attention of the world: of the world’s press agencies and parliamentarians, presidents and prime ministers. We think we can turn institutional racism into a lever, a very long lever, reaching all the way to New York and London, Paris and Brussels and Berlin, the major political, military, and economic partners and supporters of Israel. Because it is tacit acceptance, tolerance, silence, including a too muted fury, that enables the blockade to continue. The blockade is a physical fact. But it’s a mistake to consider it merely a physical fact. The physical fact can be temporarily removed, only to be rebuilt. We know that, because Hamas blew up the southern wall in January 2008 in order to briefly alleviate the suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants. More than a physical fact, the blockade is guarded by another wall, a symbolic wall, a wall of legitimacy, or perhaps not so much legitimacy as apathy, or tolerance, or simply ignorance. That is the wall that we are targeting. If people push hard enough on that lever, the symbolic wall surrounding the physical barrier will come crashing down, and perhaps, if we are lucky, it will bring the physical wall crashing down, too.
Max Ajl blogs on climate change and Israel-Palestine at www.maxajl.com. He is one of the core organizers of the Gaza Freedom March. His views here are his own. This essay was adapted from a talk he gave at Amherst College on 3 December 2009
A British court issued an arrest warrant for Israel’s former foreign minister over war crimes allegedly committed in Gaza this year – only to withdraw it when it was discovered that she was not in the UK, it emerged today.
Tzipi Livni, a member of the war cabinet during Operation Cast Lead, had been due to address a meeting in London on Sunday but cancelled her attendance in advance. The Guardian has established that Westminster magistrates’ court issued the warrant at the request of lawyers acting for some of the Palestinian victims of the fighting but it was later dropped.
The warrant marks the first time an Israeli minister or former minister has faced arrest in the UK and is evidence of a growing effort to pursue war crimes allegations under “universal jurisidiction”. Israel rejects these efforts as politically motivated, saying it acted in self-defence against Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza.
Livni, head of the opposition Kadima party, played a key role in decisions made before and during the three-week offensive. Palestinians claim 1,400 were killed, mostly civilians; Israel counted 1,166 dead, the majority of them combatants.
No one involved in the Westminster episode was prepared to confirm, on the record, what had transpired in a chaotic series of highly sensitive legal moves. But a pro-Palestinian group welcomed news of the abortive move as “long overdue”.
The Foreign Office, clearly deeply embarrassed by the episode, said in a statement: “The UK is determined to do all it can to promote peace in the Middle East and to be a strategic partner of Israel. To do this, Israel’s leaders need to be able to come to the UK for talks with the British government. We are looking urgently at the implications of this case.”
Livni’s office said she had decided in advance not to come to the UK but lawyers seemed unaware of that when they approached the court last week. The judge refused to issue the warrant until it was clear Livni was in fact in the country, as he was erroneously informed on Sunday.
The former minister had been scheduled to speak at a Jewish National Fund conference. “Scheduled meetings with government figures in London could not take place close to the conference and would have necessitated a longer-than-planned absence from Israel,” her office told the Ynet website.
It is the second time in less than three months that lawyers have gone to Westminster magistrates court asking for a warrant for the arrest of an Israeli politician. In September the court was asked to issue one for the arrest of Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act, which gives courts in England and Wales universal jurisdiction in war crimes cases.
Barak, who was attending a meeting at the Labour party conference in Brighton, escaped arrest after the Foreign Office told the court that he was a serving minister who would be meeting his British counterparts. The court ruled he enjoyed immunity under the State Immunity Act 1978.
According to Israeli sources, ministers who wish to visit the UK in a personal capacity have begun asking the Israeli embassy in London to arrange meetings with British officials. These offer legal protection against arrest.
Livni, crucially, cannot enjoy any such immunity as she is an ex-minister. Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, is in the same position.
Because of the potential damage to UK-Israeli relations – and because of legal pitfalls facing those who disclosed information about the application – few people with any detailed knowledge of it were prepared to comment today.
The Ministry of Justice, Scotland Yard and clerks at the magistrates court refused to discuss the matter. A statement issued by HM Court Service implied that there had been no application for an arrest warrant, stating “there is no record of any such hearing”. A spokeswoman maintained that this was not a misleading statement.
Samuel Hayek, chairman of the Jewish National Fund UK, the charity whose conference Livni had been due to attend, said: “I am not at liberty to confirm her precise reasons for not attending.” He added: “In any event, it is regrettable that the British government is unable to conduct free dialogue with Israel’s most senior statesmen and politicians.”
Tayab Ali, the solicitor who tried to obtain a warrant for the arrest of Barak on behalf of 16 Palestinians, said his firm was “ready, willing and able to act for clients to seek the arrest of anyone suspected of war crimes” who travelled to the UK.
Livni’s office described her as “proud of all her decisions regarding Operation Cast Lead”. It added: “The operation achieved its objectives to protect the citizens of Israel and restore Israel’s deterrence capability.”
