Gaza

I have been incredibly bothered in the past two weeks about what is happening in Gaza. The continued news reports of hundreds of Palestinians dying due to Israeli bombing is horrifying. On my way to work this morning, I heard this story on NPR. What struck me was the part of the story about a nine-year old girl who hasn’t spoken since the bombing on Saturday. She had been in the hospital when the Mosque next door was bombed. She was unconscious and then in a coma for 6 hours, but couldn’t be moved immediately because the paramedics feared the Israelis would bomb the ambulance.

I have a friend who has been living in Gaza working with Sabeel. On his blog, he wrote yesterday about his reaction to the bombing of civilian populations, which expresses my feelings better than I. As I’ve seen the news stories (especially those on the U.S. reaction), I’ve had this feeling of unease. As he writes:

It is difficult to cull any sort of truth out of US news reports on the situation there. US media outlets repeat the lies told to them by Israeli officials and US government officials. Israel only bombs military targets. Its airstrikes are ‘surgical.’ The Hamas government is full of ‘thugs’ who want to destroy the state of Israel. (The Bush administration continues its time-tested conflict resolution technique of calling the people we don’t like names. Good work, United States. Way to rise above).

It seems to me that the attitude of black and white and good and evil which the Bush administration has purported to live by (particularly via sound bites) has included the notion that Israel is always in the right. Neither Israel or Hamas have clean hands. However- Palestinian children are not terrorists. And yet:

Take this article in Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which tells us that when the Israeli air force began dropping bombs on the Gaza Strip (with is 1.5 million people crunched in a walled slip of land sandwiched between Egypt, Israel, and the sea, Gaza is reportedly the most densely populated place on the planet), students were just getting out of school for their lunch break. Targets included a mosque near a hospital and TV stations. At least 15 civilians were killed just in the first wave of strikes.

Or this article, in which an Israeli “Defense” Force commander admits that the purpose of the bombing is to “send Gaza decades into the past” and ‘achieve “the maximum number of casualties.’” Woo! Achievement!

Or this one, which notes that the IDF (most Palestinians refuse to use this acronym, preferring IOF for Israeli Occupation Force) had “emphasized that civilians located in areas whence Palestinians launch rockets and who quarter Hamas operatives in their homes are liable to be hurt.” By Hamas operatives, we of course mean everyone who works for the government in Gaza. Including, say, hospital employees in (not quite a state)-run hospitals.

This strike by Israel is theoretically in response the decision by Hamas to terminate the ceasefire on December 24th by firing rockets into Israel. However, sources reported that over six months ago Israeli Defense Forces were preparing for this operation- ‘even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas’.  The statement released by the Bush administration serves as evidence of the fact that either they don’t know, or don’t care, to find out the truth.  In this short clip, Gordon Johndroe explains that Israel is only targeting Hamas (see quote above as contradictory evidence).

Bush Administration statement on Hamas, Israel

David then refers to this post from November 5th:

I wanted to write that tomorrow, we could go back to the struggle. But for today, that all of you should spend time in well-earned celebration. I was even willing to ignore, just for a day, at least, the Israeli special forces invading Gaza on election night, while the world focused on the U.S., in flagrant violation of the ceasefire agreement.

But then, on the way to work, traffic was stopped dead by two massive trailers, carrying bulldozers, escorted by military police jeeps. All too familiar. I texted my roommate as I watched. Here we go again.

So I got out of the bus and followed them. They held up traffic for about 45 minutes before moving into West Shoufat. I lost them at one point, after the bulldozers had been unloaded. I wandered through olive groves and neighborhoods I’d never seen before, trying to avoid the soldiers. By the time I arrived at the Bishara house, it was surrounded by soldiers and police, and those two, ominous, ueber-jack-hammers-on-treads, courtesy of Hyundai, waiting.

I spoke to a few onlookers. Saw the family, watching in disbelief. Called ICAHD. Called EAPPI. EAPPI called OCHA. All those acronyms, up against machine guns and bulldozers and riot police.

I went to Sabeel to bring some people from the office, with cameras. By the time we got back, the demolition had started. By the time I went to get two EAs and a friend from the Lutheran Church, it was over. It was a small house. It only took those two monstrosities 20-30 minutes to turn it into rubble.

The soldiers left. The bulldozers rolled on past us, onward, it turns out, to more demolitions in Bustan and Silwan. The family remained, staring, giving interviews in quiet, angry, despairing voices.

This occurred, of course, during the so-called ceasefire (7 Gazans were also killed by Israelis during this time). And yet, Hamas is the terrorist organization who broke the ceasefire. Read the rest of David’s thoughts on his blog. The short version is that the stories that we DON’T hear in the United States make it much harder to hold up this paradigm of completely right and completely wrong, and Israel has the right to do whatever it wants (with the near-full support of the United States).

This gives new meaning to ‘proportionate response’:

Nor will you hear about Israel closing crossings into Gaza in violation of the ceasefire agreement, as early as December 18, the day before the ceasefire ended and rocket attacks from Gaza increased. (These rockets, by the way, have no explosive head, have killed less than 20 people in 8 years, are unguided, homemade from PVC pipes, mainly land in the middle of the Negev desert, and, when they do hit something, usually hit something in the Israeli town of Sderot, an impoverished ‘development’ town that has been primarily abandoned by the Israeli government.)

But none of that–none of that–can possibly compare to the shear terror, the shear mind-numbing destruction, of pounding 1.5 million people, many of whom live in crowded refugee camps, with bombs, rockets, and sonic booms. Of explosions in the street. Of desperately hunting for children amidst the wreckage.

This response is appalling. If you noticed above, Johndroe states that the bombing by Israel will end when Hamas stops firing their rockets.  The unwavering support of the U.S. government towards this behavior just because it is Israel perpetrating it is immoral. Check out the transcript from Sunday’s Meet the Press where Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was interviewed by David Gregrory.  Given my friend David’s comments about Israel bulldozing Palestinian homes in Gaza, I have to believe that the Foreign Minister is not telling the whole truth when she says:

LIVNI: Our goal is not to reoccupy Gaza Strip. We left Gaza Strip. We took off for the south. We dismantled all the settlements. But since Gaza Strip has been controlled by the extremists and since Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas and since Hamas is using Gaza Strip in order to target us, we need to give an answer to this.

The conversation continues further:

GREGORY: The Bush administration has been supportive of the campaign so far in Gaza but has warned Israel about avoiding civilian causalities. What kinds of consultations have you had with Secretary of State Rice?

LIVNI: Well, of course, we are in a very close connection. I am in a very close connection with Secretary Rice, and we had some talks only last night.

The idea — and this is according also to our values — we are targeting Hamas, we are not looking for civilians to kill. More than that, during this military operation, we are trying to avoid any kind of civil casualty. Israel called the population of Gaza to leave places in which they know that Hamas has its own headquarters.

Since Hamas is using the civilian population and is acting and targeting Israel from civilian population centers, we called the civilians to leave these places. We are trying to make all the effort in order to target only terrorists and Hamas headquarters and places. But unfortunately, in war, like any war, sometimes also civilian pays the price.

I have my doubts about the concerns of the Israeli government towards the Palestinian civilians, but perhaps I’m just too cynical.  The stories individuals are sharing, the flood of people fleeing from displaced persons camps in Gaza to Egypt, indicate that there is much more to the story than the Israeli government is letting on to the United States.

Let me leave you with these thoughts from David. Maybe there is a way to encourage peace in the land of Christ’s birth:

We encourage the paradigm of the “war on terror” that allows anything, ANYTHING, to be done to people as long as it is by a government we support and the targets are Muslim. We send the F-16s and the Apache and Blackhawk helicopters and the M-1 tanks and the M-16 machine guns and that other hardware that was so fascinating to me when I was a kid. We don’t fund Qassam rockets. We sure do fund the Israeli bombs. Companies that we invest in profit from the building of the Wall around Gaza and in the West Bank, from every helicopter and missle that is sold. Our churches and our universities profit. Our tax money goes to pay for it.

We can end this. I encourage you to visit the site of the US Campaign to End the Occupation and support efforts to end military aid to Israel as long as it uses its military to oppress and violently attack civilian populations. I encourage you to find out about divestment efforts in your churches and schools and if there isn’t one, enlist the US Campaign’s help in starting one. I encourage you to read some of my friends postings which I’ll be putting up here, and to educate yourself about the situation. I encourage you to write letters to editors, to Congresspeople, to President-elect Obama. To ask for prayers for Gaza in your church. To organize discussion groups at school. Because each bomb that drops on Gaza is our bomb.