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The Lessons of Violence
By Chris Hedges
21/01/08 "Truthdig"
-- -- The Gaza Strip is rapidly becoming one of the worst
humanitarian disasters in the world. Israel has cordoned off the
entire area, home to some 1.4 million Palestinians, blocking
commercial goods, food, fuel and even humanitarian aid. At least
36 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since Tuesday and
many more wounded. Hamas, which took control of Gaza in June,
has launched about 200 rockets into southern Israel in the same
period in retaliation, injuring more than 10 people. Israel
announced the draconian closure and collective punishment
Thursday in order to halt the rocket attacks, begun on Tuesday,
when 18 Palestinians, including the son of a Hamas leader, were
killed by Israeli forces.
This is not another typical spat
between Israelis and Palestinians. This is the final, collective
strangulation of the Palestinians in Gaza. The decision to block
shipments of food by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
means that two-thirds of the Palestinians who rely on relief aid
will no longer be able to eat when U.N. stockpiles in Gaza run
out. Reports from inside Gaza speak of gasoline stations out of
fuel, hospitals that lack basic medicine and a shortage of clean
water. Whole neighborhoods were plunged into darkness when
Israel cut off its supply of fuel to Gaza’s only power plant.
The level of malnutrition in Gaza is now equal to that in the
poorest sub-Saharan nations.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert uses words like war to describe the fight to
subdue and control Gaza. But it is not war. The Palestinians
have little more than old pipes fashioned into primitive rocket
launchers, AK-47s and human bombs with which to counter the
assault by one of the best-equipped militaries in the world.
Palestinian resistance is largely symbolic. The rocket attacks
are paltry, especially when pitted against Israeli jet fighters,
attack helicopters, unmanned drones and the mechanized units
that make regular incursions into Gaza. A total of 12 Israelis
have been killed over the past six years in rocket attacks.
Suicide bombings, which once rocked Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, have
diminished, and the last one inside Israel that was claimed by
Hamas took place in 2005. Since the current uprising began in
September 2000, 1,033 Israelis and 4,437 Palestinians have died
in the violence, according to the
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. B’Tselem noted
in a December 2007 report that the dead included 119 Israeli
children and 971 Palestinian children.
The failure on the part of
Israel to grasp that this kind of brutal force is deeply
counterproductive is perhaps understandable given the
demonization of Arabs, and especially Palestinians, in Israeli
society. The failure of Washington to intervene—especially after
President Bush’s hollow words about peace days before the
new fighting began—is baffling. Collective abuse is the most
potent recruiting tool in the hands of radicals, as we saw after
the indiscriminate Israeli bombing of Lebanon and the American
occupation of Iraq. The death of innocents and collective
humiliation are used to justify callous acts of indiscriminate
violence and revenge. It is how our own radicals, in the wake of
9/11, lured us into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Israel has been attempting to
isolate and punish Gaza since June when
Hamas took control after days of street fighting against its
political rival Fatah. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas, a Fatah leader, dissolved the unity government. His
party, ousted from Gaza, has been displaced to the
Israeli-controlled West Bank. The isolation of Hamas has been
accompanied by a delicate dance between Israel and Fatah. Israel
hopes to turn Fatah into a Vichy-style government to administer
the Palestinian territories on its behalf, a move that has
sapped support for Fatah among Palestinians and across the Arab
world. Hamas’ stature rises with each act of resistance.
I knew the Hamas leader Dr.
Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who was assassinated by Israel in
April of 2004. Rantissi took over Hamas after its founder, Sheik
Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated by the Israelis in March of that
year. Rantissi was born in what is now Israel and driven from
his home in 1948 during the war that established the Jewish
state. He, along with more than 700,000 other Palestinian
refugees, grew up in squalid camps. As a small boy he watched
the Israeli army enter and occupy the camp of Khan Younis in
1956 when Israel invaded Gaza. The Israeli soldiers lined up
dozens of men and boys, including some of Rantissi’s relatives,
and executed them. The memory of the executions marked his life.
It fed his lifelong refusal to trust Israel and stoked the rage
and collective humiliation that drove him into the arms of the
Muslim Brotherhood and later Hamas. He was not alone. Several of
those who founded the most militant Palestinian organizations
witnessed the executions in Gaza carried out by Israel in 1956
that left hundreds dead.
Rantissi was a militant. But he
was also brilliant. He studied pediatric medicine and genetics
at Egypt’s Alexandria University and graduated first in his
class. He was articulate and well read and never used in my
presence the crude, racist taunts attributed to him by his
Israeli enemies. He reminded me that Hamas did not target
Israeli civilians until Feb. 25, 1994, when Dr. Baruch
Goldstein, dressed in his Israeli army uniform, entered a room
in the Cave of the Patriarchs, which served as a mosque, and
opened fire on Palestinian worshipers. Goldstein killed 29
unarmed people and wounded 150. Goldstein was rushed by the
survivors and beaten to death.
“When Israel stops killing
Palestinian civilians we will stop killing Israeli civilians,”
he told me. “Look at the numbers. It is we who suffer most. But
it is only by striking back, by making Israel feel what we feel,
that we will have any hope of protecting our people.”
The drive to remove Hamas from
power will not be accomplished by force. Force and collective
punishment create more Rantissis. They create more outrage, more
generations of embittered young men and women who will dedicate
their lives to avenging the humiliation, perhaps years later,
they endured and witnessed as children. The assault on Gaza, far
from shortening the clash between the Israelis and Palestinians,
ensures that it will continue for generations. If Israel keeps
up this attempt to physically subdue Gaza we will see Hamas-directed
suicide bombings begin again. This is what resistance groups
that do not have tanks, jets, heavy artillery and attack
helicopters do when they want to fight back and create maximum
terror. Israeli hawks such as Ephraim Halevy (a former head of
Mossad), Giora Eiland (who was national security adviser to
Ariel Sharon) and Shaul Mofaz (a former defense minister) are
all calling for some form of dialogue with Hamas. They get it.
But without American pressure Prime Minister Olmert will not
bend.
Israel, despite its airstrikes
and bloody incursions, has been unable to halt the rocket fire
from Gaza or free
Cpl. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured in the summer
of 2006. Continued collective abuse and starvation will not
break Hamas, which was formed, in large part, in response to
Israel’s misguided policies and mounting repression. There will,
in fact, never be Israeli-Palestinian stability or a viable
peace accord now without Hamas’ agreement. And the refusal of
the Bush administration to intercede, to move Israel toward the
only solution that can assure mutual stability, is tragic not
only for the Palestinians but ultimately Israel.
And so it goes on. The cycle of
violence that began decades ago, that turned a young Palestinian
refugee with promise and talent into a militant and finally a
martyr, is turning small boys today into new versions of what
went before them. Olmert, Bush’s vaunted partner for peace, has
vowed to strike at Palestinian militants “without compromise,
without concessions and without mercy,” proof that he and the
rest of his government have learned nothing. It is also proof
that we, as the only country with the power to intervene, have
become accessories to murder.
Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New
York Times and author most recently of “American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America,” can be found every
other Monday on Truthdig.
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