Terror and Starvation in Gaza

by John Pilger

New Statesman
22 May 2007

In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how Gaza in
Palestine has come to symbolise the imposition of great power on the
powerless, in the Middle East and all over the world, and how a vocabulary
of double standard is employed to justify this epic tragedy.

John Pilger, renowned investigative journalist and documentary film-maker,
is one of only two to have twice won British journalism's top award; his
documentaries have won academy awards in both the UK and the US. In a New
Statesman survey of the 50 heroes of our time, Pilger came fourth behind
Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. "John Pilger," wrote Harold Pinter,
"unearths, with steely attention facts, the filthy truth. I salute him."

Web link
http://www.newstatesman.com/200701220021

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Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed
to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza,
whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples
of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel
4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas
infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and
Israeli F-16 aircraft.

Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile
from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the
people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and
tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of
the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report
that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in
the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who
have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous
injustice. It would suggest the truth.

"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this
[attack]..." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from
within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an
occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces.
This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless
war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the
poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation
imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass
destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by
the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappé,
"Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them
children".

Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United
Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct
attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine
Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the
words of a former CIA official.

Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's
rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly
allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had
been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The
Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite
a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians
forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest
attacks are aimed at destroying this.

With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan,
wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an
anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by
disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up
into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to
the Iraq of today..."

On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a
Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a
sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman
Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and
the [Israeli] army behaves as a director... The Gaza strip needs to be shown
as what it is... an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community
where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and
perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation."

The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation
sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the
"thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive
any treatment... The shadows of human beings roam the ruins... They only
know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for
them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction
in monstrous proportions".

Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as
if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from
wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but
not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the
incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at
the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off,
yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls
pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men,
women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped
on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.

More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age
of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the
British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the
621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in
their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to
the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound". A friend of mine with the
United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful
childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.

I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children's
community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The
statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of
the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of
exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes
were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent
witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals;
almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed."

He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to
cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses,
then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next
generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an
attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football
players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy,
"because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".

Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists
for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of
Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed
people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises". Just as the
invasion of Iraq was a "war by media", so the same can be said of the
grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the
Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told
that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the
term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young
people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force
and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian.
The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this
confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage,
cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never
Palestinians.

There are honourable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is
one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no
mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of
whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them.
In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and
intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period,
as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were
wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA
complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.

A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel,
especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to
Israel's destruction" and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to
fight not talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on
Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for a
ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological
shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the
sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior
Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine
belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about
political solutions... If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk
to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem of negotiating with the
Israelis [for a solution]."

When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor
wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from
inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told.
They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on
to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there
are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.

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