The Gaza War: Time for Introspection…

The December-January war in Gaza came and went too fast for people in the United States who weren’t already convinced to come to a moral reckoning with what was being done in our name, and with the money and weapons we provided. Unlike the Iraq war, advertised for over a year before, this one took place in the shadow of a U.S. national election campaign that was generally unconcerned with Israel and Palestine.

But there should be no mistake for United States residents that this war was ours. The United States government was nearly unique in providing unqualified support to the Israeli assualt, which left over 1300 people dead. Near-unanimous votes in both houses of the U.S. Congress backed the Israeli position, nearly word for word. The unprecedented demand that the Palestinian side renounce violence per se as a condition of negotiations was included in that endorsement. The new president, Barack Obama, maintained a strategic silence but made clear that “Israel’s security” is “sacrosanct” in the campaign.

The depth of this support cannot be pinned entirely on the pro-Israel lobby, athough its operation is a part of the way Washington works, with clear parallels to the Indonesia lobby that maintained a flow of arms during more than two decades of the occupation of East Timor. But US support is also an issue of popular mentality, of the minds and perspectives in our community. It combines Christianity and Fundamentalist apocalyptic viewpoints with a common self-perception of our societies as divinely blessed cities on a hill in a hostile wilderness. This perspective is the ideology that was needed by our shared histories as a settler colonial states, reinforced over the past forty years by anti-Arab racism. It’s about resonance, a shared politics that makes it possible to endorse one another’s crimes. Smart analyses of these political affinities has come from both right (see Walter Russell Mead writing in Foreign Affairs last summer) and left (see chapter 4 of Retort collectives’ Afflicted Powers).

Somehow these ideological limitations seem to distort American perceptions more than Israeli ones when it comes to Israeli actions. No doubt this combines real and legitimate guilt and remorse over antisemitism (though rarely does that come with a real self-examination about antisemitism in American history) with the World War II-centered story of American nationalism. The fact that defeating Nazi antisemitism is at the center of the last war most Americans can be proud of has made many reluctant to criticize the Jewish state that emerged in the years that followed.

But not keeping our eyes open gets us into big trouble. Fortunately, the Israeli media some times offers an up-close view that is sadly lacking in our own. So too, of course, do the Arab and international media. Right now, the Gaza war is being examined in a big way. Take a look…

• Amos Harel, “IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement“
• Harel, ‘Shooting and crying’
• Harel, Probe into Gaza op allegations comes too late
• Uri Blau on the t-shirts Israeli army units make to psych themselves up for war.
• Democracy Now!, “Israel Promises Internal Probe After Soldiers Describe Civilian Killings, Lax Rules of Engagement in Gaza Attack“

Change will come from us, when and where it comes…

It’s 19° here in DC this morning, where I will be joining some six or seven digit number of people outside for the inauguration. Washington is an old hometown to me, but it does have a different feel when it’s claimed as a front yard by people from across the country. Walking around last night, I saw more people on the street than I ever have, black folks selling “I was there” sweatshirts, and other black folks dressed to the nines out partying, a big time reception or three in different night spots, people dressed to be dropped off in limos (and clearly used to that too) walking through the cold because of the security perimeter, and a cleared out and brightly lit Pennsylvania Ave. surrounded by security fencing but nonetheless open to the public.

And in the past month, I’ve seen a disastrous war, bought, paid for, armed, and endorsed by my country but carried out in Gaza. I’ve called my black, Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn, Ed Towns, only to hear the exact Israeli line from his legislative aide, calling the deadliest assault in Palestine in three decades an act of “self defense.” Now over 1300 people are dead, and 50,000 are homeless.

I’ve also seen on video a black man shot in the back in Oakland, while waiting to be cuffed by BART police. And Oakland was my city, and New Year’s is my holiday in the Bay, and I had helped break up a fight earlier in the week, so I can sure imagine being swept up when the cops arrived. Oscar Grant could have been me.

These causes for despair can be healed, but it will be us, our actions that heal them by standing up and challenging injustice. I’m proud of so many people for standing up to these two in recent weeks (on Gaza | on Oscar Grant). They are what I have to celebrate today.

A couple months ago, I signed on to a call for a Bloc to be present at today’s inauguration called “Celebrate People’s History, Build Popular Power.” Given today’s mega-concert like feel, it might not be the action with the greatest impact. But I’m grateful for a way to set myself a bit apart today, to say the words “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” in a way that can never be the same as listening to the same words. To make the future we want, we all need to produce rather than consume our politics. See you in the streets, celebrating and fighting.

Gaza update

Life for one-and-a-half million people in Gaza has been getting dramatically worse in the past two years. The territory has been surrounded by walls, barbed wire, and an electrified fence. Its older residents can look across these lines towards the lands and ruined villages from which they were expelled in 1948 and 1967. Across the border, an armed conflict is asymmetrically raging. Armed Palestinian factions launch small-scale rockets at Israeli coastal cities in hopes of emulating the pressure that led to the 2002 Israeli withdrawal from occupied southern Lebanon. Meanwhile a far greater Israeli arsenal targets Gaza’s cities, and periodically pushes in with tanks, armored vehicles and soldiers who raid Palestinian homes. The most recent Israeli push—in response to the death of an Israeli student at Sapir College from rocket fire—is still in progress, although a 2-day “interval” was observed while US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the region. The impact confirmed by B’Tselem so far is:

From 27 February to the afternoon of 3 March, 106 Palestinians were killed in the Gaza Strip. Contrary to the Chief of Staff’s contention that ninety percent were armed, at least fifty-four of the dead (twenty-five of them minors) did not take part in the hostilities. In addition, at least forty-six minors were wounded.

I’m confident you haven’t heard the names of any of these children, nor the circumstance of their deaths. Here’s B’Tselem again:

The killing of four children – ‘Ali Dardona, age 8, Muhammad Hamudah, 9, Dardona Dardona, 12, and ‘Omer Dardona – and wounding of two others while they played soccer in the street, east of the Jabalya refugee camp on 28 February. B’Tselem’s investigation indicates that Qassam rockets may have been fired earlier about 100 meters from where the children were. However, no armed Palestinians were killed or injured in the incident.

The killing of Iyad and Jacqueline Muhammad Abu-Shabak, brother and sister, 16 and 17 years old, when they were watching the fighting from the window of their house east of Jabalya. According to testimonies by family members, the two were shot in the head and chest.

The killing of six-month-old Muhammad al-Bur’i, at the family’s home in the Rimal section of Gaza on 27 February, and the wounding of others, in the shelling of the nearby Interior Ministry building. The building is a civilian office building, and not a legitimate military target.

Current operations, of course, come with the full support of the U.S. government, and presidential hopefuls McCain, Clinton and Obama.

Unfortunately, missiles and invading soldiers may not be nearly as destructive as the policies of “economic warfare” (in the words of the Israeli government), which now extend to restricting, and at times cutting off, electricity and fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip. The result is a new humanitarian crisis. A joint report, The Gaza Strip: A humanitarian implosion, on the current depth of the crisis has been released by eight UK human rights and aid groups, including Oxfam and Amnesty International. According to Geoffrey Dennis, Chief Executive of CARE International UK:

Unemployment has soared and 80% of people in Gaza are now dependent on food aid compared to 63% in 2006. Water and sewage infrastructure is on the point of total collapse. Unless the blockade ends now, it will be impossible to pull Gaza back from the brink of this disaster and any hopes for peace in the region will be dashed.

Key facts in the report:

• 80% of families in Gaza currently rely on food aid
• 95% of Gaza’s industrial operations are suspended due to the ban on imported raw materials and the block on exports
• 18.5% of patients seeking emergency treatment in hospitals outside Gaza in 2007 were refused permits to leave
• Hospitals are currently experiencing power cuts lasting for 8-12 hours a day
• 40-50 million litres of sewage continues to pour into the sea daily

“Humanitarian crisis” means daily disasters. Here’s one father’s description from the inside.

The U.S. role in the Fatah-Hamas battles of 2007 is the subject of a new Vanity Fair exposé. David Rose reports in “The Gaza Bombshell,” that the U.S. armed Fatah to expel the popularly elected Hamas government from Gaza.

In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.

…

Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets.

This shipment, and arms and training that followed, were joined by the leak of a State Department-drafted “Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency”:

The early drafts stressed the need for bolstering Fatah’s forces in order to “deter” Hamas. The “desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political decisions … such as dismissing the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”

Hamas read this as a call for a coup. So did Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser, a neo-conservative by the name of David Wurmser:

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.

Hamas seized complete control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007. Outsiders like myself were left to see it as mere internecine warfare. Now we have questions to ask about how our government armed one political party to oust the other, while backing the siege that keeps Gaza’s Palestinians on the edge of survival.