Palestinian children play on the beach in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip

By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank The Egyptian-mediated ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is, ostensibly at least, a wise, dignified and expedient step for several reasons. To begin with, the ceasefire deal would suspend the daily acts of murder and terror carried out by the Israeli occupation forces against the nearly totally unprotected people of the Gaza Strip. For years, the Gestapo-like Israeli army used excessive force, including tanks, warplanes, heavy artillery and other lethal machines of death to wreak death, havoc and terror on the civilian population of Gaza, resulting in the murder and maiming of thousands of innocent people. Thus, the latest arrangement would give the thoroughly tormented Gazans a certain respite, however uncertain, from Israeli terror and criminality. Moreover, the arrangement, which is due to go into effect Thursday morning, is also supposed to lead to the gradual lifting of the 18-month-old harsh and callous blockade Israel has been imposing on 1.5 million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. This alone should be viewed as a worthy achievement if only because Gaza was being decimated by a genocidal siege unprecedented since the Nazi blockade of Ghetto Warsaw in 1943. It is therefore hoped that the gradual dissipation of the nefarious blockade, which really reflects the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mentality, will allow Gaza to revive and rehabilitate itself and bring a smile back on the faces of its tormented children and savaged men and women. Needless to say, the decision by Hamas to accept the ceasefire is a strong proof that Hamas is not a nihilistic organization, e.g. like al Qaeda, as Israeli and Zionist hasbara has been trying to portray the Palestinian-Islamic movement. In fact, Hamas had always called for a cessation of violence in Gaza whereby both sides would refrain from targeting innocent civilians. However, it was always Israel, not Hamas, that rejected such calls by keeping up murderous attacks on Palestinian civilians. Israel, especially when addressing western audiences, repeatedly but mendaciously claimed that its army didn’t deliberately target innocent Palestinians civilians. However, that fact that hundreds of Palestinian children and other civilians continued to be killed and maimed throughout the Gaza Strip, and else where, eviscerated the Israeli pretensions of innocence of any veracity and credibility. In the final analysis, Israel was not only a brutal murderer, but a big a liar as well. After all, killing knowingly is killing deliberately, and when the number of innocent victims is so high, even intent becomes irrelevant. There is no doubt that Hamas’s heroic steadfastness, resilience and patience are being vindicated. Thus, the enduring vigor of Hamas and the people of Gaza, who defied death and clang to life, should serve as a lesson for the Palestinian people that steadfastness in the face of brute power eventually pays off. This is also a lesson for the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) that the stubbornness of justice can eventually triumph over the arrogance of oppression. Winners and losers There is no doubt that the forces of peace and reason on all sides have won against the forces of bellicosity, hatred and terror, especially in Washington and Tel Aviv and some other regional capitals as well. The people of Gaza, the victims of American-Israeli criminality, are undoubtedly the biggest winners of this deal. At least, they can breathe again, following 18 nightmarish months of unimagined brutality and ruthlessness. In addition to the gung-ho neocons in Washington and war-drummers in Tel Aviv who wanted to exterminate Hamas, not a small amount of consternation is also likely to be permeating now in Ramallah where a Zionized group within Fatah had been hoping to see the Israeli army overrun Gaza, murder hundreds, and then hand Gaza over to the Fatah leadership on a silver platter. On this occasion, one feels prompted to call on Fatah to eject these traitors from their midst for the sake of Fatah itself and for the sake of Palestine. Vigilance Nonetheless, it would be naïve, even stupid, to be carried away or give Israel the benefit of the doubt by thinking that the Zionist regime is going to abide by the agreement and terminate its murderous aggressions on our people. Israel, after all, has repeatedly proven itself to be a venomous snake which must never be trusted. Hence, Palestinians, especially Hamas, ought to be constantly vigilant and ready to repulse any Israeli aggression. However, Hamas should make meticulous efforts to preserve the ceasefire since doing so is first and foremost a supreme and paramount Palestinian interest. Hamas should also make it abundantly clear to the military wings of other Palestinian factions that the security and safety of the people of Gaza must not be subject to the whims of this or that faction. In fact, preserving the ceasefire would send a positive message to the international community that Hamas is responsible organization with which “business can be made.” Moreover, a careful abidance by the agreement on Hamas’s part would show good- will toward Egypt whose support and backing is essential for the survival of the Gaza Strip, at least at this juncture of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and liberation from Zionism.

Palestine Inside Out – An Everyday Occupation. Saree Makdisi. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2008.

This has been one of the most difficult books that I have ever read. It removed me from my academic detachment with which I read the majority of books and took me into emotions ranging from frustration, sadness, melancholy through to anger and belligerence. A compelling read, yet at the same time I had to put it down every so many pages in order to contemplate, digest, or simply escape what in sum could be called the constant inhuman brutality of one human against another. It is a brutality that is as much psychological as physical, as much emotional as bodily. While the media presents a relatively constant stream of news violence from Israel-Palestine, with the Israelis purportedly “responding” to Palestinian “terrorists”, the truth of life for the average Palestinian is not just this asymmetrical violence, but the daily violence perpetrated by the occupation, a collective punishment on the Palestinian population that “because the destruction is routine, it generally takes place out of the view of the global media.” It is death, destruction, eviction, genocide by a million cuts, applied over and over and over with full control of the geographical and cultural landscapes under the rule of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

Demographics

The underlying theme of the book is of demographics, the Israeli project to empty the land of Palestinians and not allow the right of return under any circumstances. This is accomplished by using not only pure physical force, but also by using cultural, social, and economic disenfranchisement using a “complex series of bureaucratic and administrative hurdles”, the main one being to prove that one has land in the first place.

Saree Makdisi’s conclusion to her first section of the book is that the whole extended Peace Process “has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land,” with the result that “the Israeli occupation has slowly and methodically accomplished precisely what it set out to do forty-one years ago.” As the oft quoted Dov Weisglass stated, “this whole package [of Palestine] has been removed from our agenda indefinitely…with authority and permission...with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

Those are not the statements that raise my emotions – rather they rile my intellect at the culpability and ignorance of the political elites in all parties involved, Palestinian included as Makdisi treats the PA and Fateh harshly. What does raise the emotions is the writing that relates the daily trials and tribulations that the Palestinians suffer under the occupation of the IDF, the ever-changing rules and regulations, the whim of any Israeli who can do whatever to a Palestinian and suffer no consequences for that action. The daily frustrations of life under occupation are immense as presented in the anecdotal accounts and the summary statistics of each section of this book.

Attending school, growing food, tending one’s gardens and fields, getting married, visiting a neighbour, a market, a business, going to university, a hospital, travelling to another country, are all under the combination of strict and confusing regulations combined with the whim of the IDF soldiers and commanding officers in the field (always a Palestinian field at that). Nightly raids, curfews, harassment by settlers, home invasions, tear gas attacks, rubber coated metal bullets, sonic boom attacks at night to disrupt sleep, legalized torture, arrests, human shields, beatings, bulldozers smashing homes with or without occupants, uprooting and burning of agricultural production, machine guns, tanks, armoured vehicles and tanks invading streets, helicopters and jets patrolling overhead – there does not appear to be a moment that the Palestinian people are not subject to some form of humiliation, deprivation, and cruelty from the Israeli occupiers. “The double process of Jewish settlement and Palestinian unsettlement, is played out on an intimately small scale, and on a daily basis throughout the West Bank.” [italics added] As for Gaza, “it is a controlled strangulation that apparently falls within the generous limits of international toleration,” a toleration abetted by a compliant media that does not put it all into the context of a ‘Washington consensus’, occupation, and international law.

International war crimes

As a secondary but very strong theme the above all come under international war crimes. While Makdisi does not state it, it could be said the whole of the Israeli State is guilty of war crimes, either under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, the UN Charter with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva conventions, and other international resolutions, conventions, and agreements. These agreements are abrogated unilaterally, constantly, and with the current full approval of the United States government, and the European governments who all buy into the “terrorist” war either through their own ignorance or their own unstated hidden benefits.

It does not help that they are aided and abetted in this by other countries in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is no more than a quisling state under the influence of the U.S., seeking its own influential advantage in the area. Egypt, having settled on “peace” with its former opponent, also receives large sums of American money and does not seem terribly interested at the governmental level in the situation if Palestine. They had a tremendous opportunity when Hamas forced open the Rafah gates to allow humanitarian assistance of basic food stuffs and medicines and energy supplies into Gaza, instead opting to kowtow to the wishes of the Israelis and Americans in continuing the oppression and illegality of the occupation (Abbas is also implicated in supporting the closing as it “also punished Hamas”). (Okay, Gaza is not “occupied” but is still under full concentration camp style control of the IDF). Jordan has always sought its own betterment in its ongoing engagement with Israel, securing its own position in the West Bank during the nakba, and combating its large internal displaced Palestinian population after the 1967 war.

Finally, the United States provides a generous $3 billion in aid a year, money that releases other money to help subsidize the settlements that have caused the disintegration of a contiguous Palestinian state. This is an error of omission by Makdisi that may or may not be purposeful for several possible reasons, but is not included in her historical and foreign policy discussions. Following on that is the fleeting mention of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, probably the most influential lobby group in the world today, effectively keeping the U.S. congress in captivity to Israel’s own viewpoint. My reading coincided with the finale of the American primaries ending with Obama’s speech to AIPAC (how timely is that!) stating his unwavering support for Israel and the status quo, with his sights set further out towards Iran. I do not have the audacity to hope that any significant change will occur with Obama as president. The United States remains culpable of war crimes along with Israel.

More ethnic cleansing

Makdisi covers many other sub-topics and themes throughout the work. The wall, the nature and processes of the settlements, the concept of “equality” in relation to the concept of Jewishness and a Jewish state, the use of the military as ‘global’ torture on the whole population are all covered throughout the work, both in anecdotal form and in essay-documentary form.

The idea of “voluntary transfer” occurs throughout the book, supported mainly from quotes from Israeli sources, with the concept described such that the Palestinians “will not be able to continue living under these sorts of conditions. They will abandon their homes and go to the big cities at which point it will be possible to expand the borders of the State of Israel without paying the demographic price.” It is not terribly “voluntary” when such extreme asymmetrical pressure is applied by one group on another.

This latter idea leads into the nakba and its current historical revisions with more modern historians accessing information from the IDF archives and using Israeli sources that clearly outline the intent to clear much of Palestine of its population, even before the Israeli declaration of itself as a state. All these topics are related under the overall idea of the demographic problem, and other discussions focus on the goals of Zionism as being integrated with that of imperialism, occupation, and settlement, all necessitating the use of force in order to achieve the given goals. Another way of defining the demographic pursuits of the Israeli government is as expressed by an Israeli school director, Yair Farjun who stated, “Anyone who tells you that there was no ethnic cleansing here will be lying.”

Context and solutions

Hamas and Hezbollah enter the discussion most forcefully in the “Coda” the books final section discussing possible solutions. With a great assist from the Washington consensus media, both groups are identified out of context as terrorist groups that hate us for what we are and thus use fanatical suicide bomb terrorists to destroy innocent civilians, without considering in context the “aerial and artillery bombings, fuel-air explosives, flechette rounds, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, phosphorous and napalm” as well as new experimental weapons including the “dense inert metal explosive” by Israel that are equally as indiscriminate but hugely more powerful and destructive. The Israeli weapons are used over a much broader section of the Palestinian population without any real concern for civilian deaths. Within context, suicide bombers can be viewed as “an almost inevitable product of forty years of military occupation.”

As for the solution itself, Makdisi views the one state solution as the most realistic. In a de facto manner, there already is one state, Israel, with many little prison like cantons scattered in parts of the West Bank, segregated by the wall, the bypass roads, and the settlements along with the associated rules and regulations that trap the Palestinians in an ever decreasing realm of violent non-mobility. Different authors have different opinions on the best solution to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, some supporting the two state solution, others identifying the one state solution as the best. Somehow under current circumstances, neither seems practicable or achievable without a major dynamic shift in either the Israeli viewpoint or that of the United States and its European allies. The status quo of forty years of “negotiations” has served Israel well as it slowly and criminally cut away at the Palestinian landscape: the current lack of any united Palestinian governmental structure and over-whelming American support for Israel would indicate that this process will only continue.

As pessimistic as that view is (and it is mine, not the authors), books such as Saree Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out will add to the growing list of works that nibble away at the American-Israeli decontextualized and international criminal actions that sustain the repression of the Palestinian people. It should not be an easy read – it is more than history and current events, but should reach the soul of the reader, awakening or revitalizing a basic revulsion of man’s incomprehensibly stupid emotional, physical and spiritual brutality against other humans.

Blue sky, toxic sea
Nora Barrows-Friedman writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 9 June 2008

Palestinian fishing boats in a Gaza City port, May 2008. (Wissam Nassar/ MaanImages)

For the three days I've been in Gaza I've heard nothing but horror stories. My friends, the journalists, the health workers, the students, the taxi drivers, the intellectuals, they all speak with a certain heaviness and a guttural frustration that gets trapped in the back of throats, in the smoke they exhale from chain-smoked cigarettes, over and over and over.

Last night I saw a friend, Mohammed, whom I haven't seen in three years and sadly lost touch with in between. Since I was here last, he got married, had a baby, and now has one more on the way. After a week-long trip to Europe last year as a part of his work with an international aid organization, he was held first for five days at the Cairo airport, in a small room with ten other Palestinians from Gaza, before they were transfered to a detention center and held for 60 days in al-Arish, in the seam zone between Egypt and Rafah crossing in southern Gaza. The Egyptians did this in an act of collaboration with the Israelis. With friends in the West Bank, the Jordanians use the same tactics of interrogation and humiliation at the border, but detention without reason doesn't happen. Yet.

But Mohammed said that he'd do it again, just to get out. He told me between cigarettes that he'd be happy to spend three days out in the world even if it meant another 60 days in an Egyptian detention center.

On a massive and wide-ranging scale, every single aspect of life in Gaza is punctuated by the Israeli occupation and the blockade. There are 1.5 million people here, trapped and hermetically sealed, in this 22-mile by 6-mile strip of devastated open-air prison compound. Fuel is scarce and the streets are thick with the soupy smoke of cooking gas, falafel oil and benzene as Israel's collective punishment policies force people to fill their cars with their families' gas rations.

This trickles down. Hospitals, grocery stores, butcheries, fishing boats, administrative centers, schools, factories, clinics, they all either run on generators or have been forced to quit operations altogether because of the fuel crisis. In the sewage treatment facilities, the fuel shortages mean that sewage plants can't operate at full capacity -- and remember, there are 1.5 million people here -- so millions of gallons of raw sewage are being dumped into the sea, untreated, making the ocean extremely toxic.

Giardia, dysentery, cholera -- diseases not known just five miles up the beach, in the cities of historic Palestine (some call it Israel), where toilets flush and water is safe to drink, where people lay in the mid-day sun getting tan and drinking pina coladas and speaking a language resurrected just in the last hundred years, unknown to the indigenous and dispossessed here in Gaza -- are now common. And once Palestinians get really sick, hospitals try to do all they can to alleviate the pain and eradicate the disease, but, as my friend told me, since the blockade began last summer, there are 95 medicines on the "blacklist" -- prohibited from entering Gaza.

The number one medicine that is becoming scarce? Try to guess.

I visited al-Awda hospital in the northern Gaza Strip. The pharmacist took me into his small supply warehouse and showed me around. He took me to the small shelf where they store all the anesthesia medications, and said that they have only a two-week supply left. Israel is banning anesthetics from reaching patients in Gaza, as well as chemotherapy and heart medications.

Banning anesthetics -- a sadistic, wretched, unbearable policy. It's clear that the Zionists want the Palestinians in Gaza to feel as much pain as possible, literally. "We can't even live month-to-month," the doctor told me. "We have to just live day by day, hour by hour."

We honor the doctors and medical workers at al-Awda. We praise their work. We pray that their ambulance, a donation from the Spanish government, has enough fuel to reach the injured in the next Israeli air strike or gunship attack or sniper assault.

It's hard not to lose sight. It's hard being here. It's painful to see friends and colleagues suffer like this, uncontrollably and unmitigated.

People can't hang on much longer. There is a collective buzzing in the bones. This is an untenable situation. Human beings should never have to live like this, oppressed and sickened and terrified and malnourished and imprisoned in the eastern Mediterranean, while up the beach a nuclear-saddled military occupier state congratulates itself for possessing the "most moral army in the world." Shame on Barack Obama for slithering up to Israel and its financial enablers.

So Palestinians in Gaza, 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them dependent on foreign aid, 60 percent unemployed and 100 percent depressed and traumatized in one way or another, keep struggling and looking up toward the endless sky. Even though the sea is toxic, they still swim and fish and fly kites above the waves. I am trying to figure out what it is that sustains them. Every time I ask someone how they cope, they smile and say, "Because I have to -- for my children, my spouse, myself."

A resilience, a steadfastness -- sumoud -- that we westerners can't even fathom.

Musa Keilani

Despite any level of objectivity it may have and of understanding American politics, it is difficult to find fault with the Palestinian Hamas’ assertion that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has confirmed US “hostility” to Arabs and Muslims in a speech to the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington. That “confirmation”, if you will, underlines the reality that prospects for Middle East peace remain as grim as ever even if Obama makes history by becoming the next president of the US.

Indeed, Obama was only reaffirming the steady and consistent political line adopted by almost every US presidential candidate, whether Democrat or Republican, when he told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on Wednesday that he supported Israel and that occupied Jerusalem should “remain” the “undivided” capital of the Jewish state. It was only expected of him to say so, particularly at a forum like AIPAC, without whose support no presidential candidate stands any chance of making his way to the White House, as past elections have shown.

However, it was disappointing to see and hear Obama, the first black American to secure nomination as presidential candidate representing one of the two major parties in the US, follow the same line, given the assumption of many that he has his own mind when it comes to dealing with foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East.

Hamas responded immediately, saying it considered Obama’s statements “to be further evidence of the hostility of the American administration to Arabs and Muslims”.

Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri said Obama’s statements on Jerusalem “confirm the consensus of the two American political parties on unlimited aid to the (Israeli) occupation at the expense of Palestinians and Arabs”. The speech, he said, “destroys any hope for change in American policies towards the Arab-Israeli conflict”.

Such thoughts are of course shared by a majority in the Middle East. The Arab world is resigned to the reality that nothing the Arabs do - short of blindly accepting Israel’s terms and give up most of their legitimate rights - would ever lead to any shift in the present US approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Of course, Hamas could not claim it has offered anything new and has met the minimum requirements of any hope in a change in the US policy. That was underlined when Obama reiterated that he would not deal with Hamas until it recognises Israel and renounces “violence” - read armed resistance against the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands. He added that engaging Hamas would only take place at a time and location chosen by the United States, and would only go forward if it served US foreign policy goals.

Well, the rest of the world is wondering about what US foreign policy goals are and whether those goals have any relevance to the foundations for international conduct and the rights of people and countries.

It was also a stock phrase that Obama used when he said he would push for a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict if he were elected to the White House in November and declared that “Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable”.

The catch here is rather simple: Israel’s security is not determined by whatever parameters the international community considers as the basis for any country’s security. Israel has set its own “security” parameters and considerations and refuses to budge, a position that is wholeheartedly endorsed and supported without question by the US.

Reason, logic, fairness, objectivity and international legitimacy are not applied to question Israel’s insistence that occupation of Arab territories is vital to its “security”. Indeed, Hamas is only strengthening Israel’s argument by repeatedly declaring that it is not ready to enter a permanent peace agreement with the Jewish state and that the best it would accept is a long-term truce.

To be fair to Obama, he displayed a clear understanding of the situation on the ground in the Middle East in one part of his AIPAC speech.

He said: “Hamas now controls Gaza. Hizbollah has tightened its grip on southern Lebanon, and is flexing its muscles in Beirut. Because of the war in Iraq, Iran - which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq - is emboldened, and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation. Iraq is unstable, and Al Qaeda has stepped up its recruitment....”

Obama blamed the Bush administration’s policy and approach for the setbacks Washington suffered in the Middle East. However, he used it as a weapon to attack his Republican rival John McCain, who is known to be an ardent supporter of the Bush administration’s policy and approach in the Middle East.

We in Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world would have been elated had Obama referred to the fundamental flaws in the decades-old US approach to the Middle East and pledged to address them in a just and fair manner so that his country could regain the trust, respect and admiration it once enjoyed as the “leader of the free world”. Nowhere in his statements have we found any such hint, and that only adds to the pessimism over prospects for fair and just peace in the Middle East under a possible Obama administration.


* Published in the JORDAN TIMES on June 8, 2008.