For over two weeks, the Gaza strip (already besieged
for the past 7 years) has been subjected to continuous
bombardment from air and sea. This is the third war to
be waged on the strip in the span of 5 years and it is
more than likely going to be the deadliest.
Approximately 800 Gazans, mostly children and women,
have already been murdered.
In the past 10 days, the Israelis have added their
ground force to the fire power, using heavy caliber
artillery and tanks to shell the densely populated
strip, compounding the suffering of the population and
increasing the scope and space of its ongoing
massacre.
For those living in Gaza, language cannot depict the
scale of the tragedy. Many families have lost all or
most of their members. As one health official in Gaza
said, "Entire families have been wiped out of the
civil record." This doesn't seem to be the result of
simple failure to observe the principle of "disproportionality,"
but rather an evident disregard for life. Nowhere
seems to be sacred or safe in the face of an
onslaught, where residential areas are considered
legitimate targets. Mosques, hospitals, ambulances,
medical teams, UN run schools and children playing
soccer on the beach have all been targeted.
The images look barbaric enough for anyone viewing,
not experiencing them. But for the Palestinians, this
is not the first time they find themselves before this
ordeal. For the past 60 years, Israel has been
slaughtering Palestinians wholesale with impunity.
Ordering or participating in killing, displacing and
dispossessing Palestinians are amongst the few things
that any successful Israeli politician would have done
at one point of his/her public career. As a nation,
Israel was created by that very process of decimation,
dispossessing, and displacement of Palestinians.
Gaza is a living testimony of that process. Most of
its residents, who have been starved for the past 7
years and now bombed, are families who were originally
forced in 1948 and 1967 to flee their hometowns and
villages, which were subsequently annexed by Israel.
Contrary to the image of an Israeli victim of Arab
terrorism, which many Western politicians allege, what
is indeed taking place is the reverse. The suffering
of the Palestinians as a result of the terror of the
Israeli state is immeasurable. Beyond death and
dispossession, generations of Palestinian children
have been forced to endure unbearable psychological
scars, as they were made refugees time and again.
Despite this, it is the Palestinians who are seen to
be responsible for the war by much of Western media
and the official rhetoric emerging from most Western
capitals. In the face of the enormity of the
Palestinian suffering, Western leaders (such as US
Secretary of State John Kerry, UK Foreign Minister,
Philip Hammond) have chosen to blame the victim and
side with the oppressor.
In siding with the oppressor, these leaders invoke
Israel's right to self-defense. However, the facts on
the ground don't support this claim. A close look at
the figures of the dead and the injured suggests the
exact opposite. Israel is committing genocide, not
engaging in self-defense.
In the past 17 days of the one-sided onslaught, there
are over 780 Palestinians who were killed in targeting
residential areas in Gaza. Over 4,000 have also been
injured. The figure of internally displaced
Palestinians has surpassed 120,000. The figures on the
Israeli side are lower. Only dozens were killed and
injured. The difference in both cases is not just in
the asymmetry of the death toll. The nature of those
killed is also indicative of the kind of conflict we
are witnessing and the level of deception in the
comments and communiqué issued in Western capitals
about it.
Of the Israeli fatalities, 94% are military personnel
(30 out of the 32 are soldiers). Most of those injured
are soldiers as well. The ratio of combatant to
civilian death on the Palestinian side is starkly
different. According to the UN and the health services
in Gaza, over 80% of those killed in Israeli raids and
continuous shelling are civilians and one third are
children. The UK Telegraph has recently published the
names of 132 of these children. Today this number has
risen to 181 according to UNICEF.
The genocidal nature of this onslaught is also clear
from the circumstances of death as well. All the
Palestinians killed, so far, were killed inside
Palestinian borders, within residential areas and
often as they stayed in their homes. In contrast, all
Israeli fatalities (except two, the total number of
those died as a result of rockets fired from Gaza)
were engaged in combat.
Given the asymmetry of death, of the ratio of
civilians to militants, and given the Israeli
unchallenged dominance of air and sea space, it is
genocide or ethnic cleansing that is more befitting
descriptor of what Israel is doing in Gaza. Western
leaders' argument that Israel is defending itself is
simply not supported by facts. It is morally
reprehensible and inexcusable.
The Israelis claim that they are trying to neutralize
the rocketry of the Palestinian resistance, which
target Israeli towns. This claim is further
strengthened by a corollary claim that Hamas, which
runs the strip, is a terrorist organization. Western
and Israeli leaders allege that it targets civilians.
Today, the UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond,
speaking in Cairo, repeated the same claim and blamed
Hamas for starting this round of conflict. But these
claims are neither true, nor do they justify the
savagery of the current onslaught on Gaza, where
civilians, women and children, not rocket launchers
are bearing the brunt of the assault.
The insinuation that Hamas has started this round of
conflict is a lie. The current round started after
three Israeli teenage settlers (one at least of whom
was a soldier) were kidnapped and later found
murdered. Although the event took place in the West
Bank, and although no Palestinian group claimed
responsibility, Israeli government immediately pointed
fingers at Hamas. Hamas has denied involvement,
knowledge of the teenagers' kidnaping or who did it
until it became news. Some press reports have pointed
out that Israel deliberately misled its public and
knew of the of the victims' deaths and whereabouts
days before it made that information public. A recent
report in one German channel suggests that the Israeli
government simply used the event as a pretext to
attack Gaza. Despite its knowledge of the teenagers'
death, the Israeli government continued to raid and
arrest Palestinian activists under the pretext that it
was conducting a search for the abducted.
In the process, Israel arrested hundreds of
Palestinians and killed a dozen. Many of the arrested
were prisoners who were originally freed as a part of
a prisoners' swap with Hamas in 2011. This was not
only a breach of the terms of the prisoners' exchange
but a clear provocation to involve Hamas. To add more
fuel to the fire, Israeli settlers kidnapped and
burned a Palestinian boy alive. It is within these
circumstances that the resistance groups in Gaza began
firing missiles toward Israeli cities in retaliation
to the collective punishment, mass arrests and killing
of Palestinian activists.
Beyond the immediate context, Israel deliberately
breached the 2012 ceasefire brokered by Egypt, which
mandated Israel to lift the siege on Gaza. Israel did
the opposite. It tightened the siege. Since the fall
of Morsi, Egypt joined Israelis in the effort to
isolate Gaza, closing its borders, making the already
unbearable situation catastrophic.
It is now the position of the Palestinian groups that
Israel must first cease its onslaught on Gaza and
honor its earlier agreements. Quieting the missiles in
Gaza, without lifting the siege, will only mean more
suffering to the crowded strip. Israel's choice to
violate its agreements and to focus its military
campaign on residential areas is what defines the
current conflict and manufactures the tragedy. The
solution therefore lies in integrating Gaza through
trade with the rest of the world.
The notion advanced in an article published today on
the Foreign Policy's website that Israel is compelled
to pursue "an eye for a tooth" policy to establish
deterrence is not only a disingenuous attempt to make
palatable the cowardly mass killing of civilians. It
is misguided in essence as well. Israel has exhausted
all violent means to force Palestinians to submission
and has so far earned neither rest nor reverence.
Deterrence has always been an Israeli policy objective
and has always failed. Despite its disproportionality,
and Western praise of its efficient military
establishment, Israel is not safer today than the time
when it pursued deterrence against Palestinians armed
mostly with stones. Rather than being a constructive
course that would contribute to a peaceful future,
Israeli attempts to bomb Palestinians to submission is
only going to create further risks for its future
generations and diminish the prospect for any peace.
It is relatively cheaper for the Israelis to withdraw
from the Occupied Territories in 1967 and to stop
besieging Gaza from sea, air and ground.
Despite the factual errors about the 2006 war on
Lebanon in FP's article, the allusion to a parallel
with Gaza is a stretch. Unlike Hezbollah in Lebanon,
who kidnapped soldiers to trade for its prisoners in
Israel, an objective it successfully achieved, the
Palestinian Resistance is driven by a much bigger and,
for that matter, a more just cause. Resistance against
occupation is enshrined in all laws and highly
regarded by all cultures (including the West whose
moral superiority the FP's article praises), and it is
not going to stop regardless of what the outcome of
the current killing spree in Gaza is. Israel's
deterrence has been eroding and whatever moral claims
it had is also vanishing into thin air with every
child blown to bits and pieces by its artillery or
bombers. That trend will continue.
The Palestinians do not stand alone and the Israeli
brutality will only rekindle the anti-Israeli
sentiment in the region. The fact that many of the
neighbors are either busy in their own civil wars or
are shackled by despots is not a guarantee of a stable
future. The region is going through a radical change,
and within a decade, Israel will be fully surrounded
by actors who are not fettered by fear of loss either
of lives or infrastructure. Nor would these societies
of warriors be shackled by the international
conventions, which the Israelis and the Western
governments backing them make mockery of at the
moment, feeling that military superiority makes them
beyond reproach.
What Israel is sowing today, it will surely harvest
tomorrow, and no amount of pontification from Western
missionary professors, driven by a contradictory
mission to on the hand justify mass murder and on the
other hand flaunt the supremacy of Western war ethics,
will be of much use to them.
- Ahmed Meiloud is a PhD student at the School of
Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the
University of Arizona. He contributed this article to
PalestineChronicle.com.
Add Comments