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Holocaust and Genocide in Gaza
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by Liza Burr, W A M M
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Gaza has endured illegal Israeli military occupation since June 1967. With an area of 139 square miles, it has the highest population density in the world, according to Sabeel. The majority of Gazans are refugees driven from their homes in what is now Israel, in 1948.
After the withdrawal of Israeli settlers from Gaza in August 2005, Israel intensified its occupation of the Strip both militarily and economically; the term siege is often used to describe this intensification. In the December 2006/January 2007 issue of the WAMM newsletter, I discussed both sieges in my article “Making Life Unlivable in the Inferno of Gaza.” Indicative of the military siege, from 2005 to 2007 a total of 1,290 Gaza Palestinians were killed by the IDF, of whom 222 were children.
Thus the “war” on Gaza that began December 27 is an accelerated reincarnation of the bombings, shellings, ground incursions, and assassinations already occurring there. As of this writing, over 1,100 Palestinians have been killed and more than 5,200 wounded. At least 700 civilians are among the dead, including more than 350 children. (Democracy Now, 1/16/08)
The West Bank, too, has had no dearth of raids, arrests, and assassinations, along with major settlement expansion and a significant increase in the number of checkpoints (from 521 to 699, according to Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, physician, political activist, advocate for the development of Palestinian civil society and grassroots democracy, and international spokesman for the Palestinian NGO sector). Palestinians under Israeli occupation have no security. Without the occupation, there would be no sieges, rockets, or war.
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Photo from International Middle East Media Center |
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The economic siege of Gaza reduced the number of trucks crossing daily into Gaza with food, medicine, and other goods from a maximum of 600 to about 70 or fewer; however, Sara Roy, a Harvard senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, documented less than 5 trucks a day in November 2008, and according to Barghouthi the border remained “hermetically sealed 70 percent of the time.” Eighty percent of Gazans have fallen below the poverty line and are now critically dependent on international agencies for food.
The sporadic and diminishing availability of electricity and fuel has also had a devastating impact, particularly on hospitals. During the cease-fire from June to December 2008, 262 Gazans died from lack of adequate medical care. By mid-January up to a million Gazans (two-thirds) lacked electricity, a third of Gazans lacked running water, and a third had occasional running water. Author Chris Hedges reported in mid-December that 46 percent of Gaza’s children were acutely anemic, thousands of children needed hearing aids because Israeli sonic booms had deafened them, 18 percent were afflicted with stunted growth, and half of them had “no will to live.” Malnutrition, he wrote, affected 75 percent of Gaza’s population.
The UN’s “special rapporteur for human rights” in occupied Palestine, Richard Falk, condemned the economic siege as criminal collective punishment, for which “Israeli military and civilian authorities . . . should be held accountable.” An obvious example of structural violence (like the occupation), the economic siege is an act of war in itself.
Israel’s “Operation Molten Lead,” launched on Dec. 27, was planned for as long as a year in advance together with a public relations campaign, orchestrated by a National Information Directorate, which highlighted several key points: the assault was solely a defensive response to Hamas rockets (in eight years 8,500 such rockets killed 20 Israeli civilians); it was restricted to Hamas “militants” and the “terror” infrastructure, while civilian casualties were kept to a minimum. Further, Israel accused Hamas of breaking the six-month cease-fire ostensibly in effect since June 19. In fact, it was Israel that broke the cease-fire on November 4, when it killed six Palestinians inside Gaza; nor had Israel ever lifted its economic siege in compliance with the truce agreement.
Israel’s war propaganda was enhanced by its exclusion of foreign journalists from Gaza. On January 4, Chris McGreal of the Guardian wrote that Israeli air strikes were occurring “every 20 minutes on average,” and that at least one-third of the casualties were civilians and policemen. By January 13, the Palestinian death toll exceeded 930 and the number of wounded was above 4,000. There is no question that Israel targeted Gaza civilians and their infrastructure: examples of the latter include government ministries, mosques, schools, the main university, apartment buildings and houses, TV stations, hospitals and clinics, and ambulances. Since there was no exit from Gaza, the largely unarmed population had nowhere to hide.
Interestingly, in a December 29, 2008 interview on “All Things Considered,” Ahmed Yusuf, adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, maintained that the firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel was actually in the hands of collaborators directed by Israel; he denied that Hamas fighters were firing the rockets. Indeed, without the rockets, Israel’s rationale for bombing and invading Gaza would collapse.
Explanations for Israel’s war on Gaza have been offered by external observers and analysts, to say nothing of Palestinians in the Territories. Israel’s ultimate objectives, determined by the ideology of Zionism, do not seem to have changed.
Mentioned in my earlier article were the hypotheses of Israeli Tanya Reinhart (who was an Israeli professor of linguistics and a critic of “Israel’s war against the Palestinians”), who said the goal was to starve, bomb, and terrorize the population into submission; and of Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, who said it was to prevent Palestinian statehood and escalate hatred between Israelis and Palestinians.
In the recent war context, Barghouthi identified Israel’s targeting of Palestinian policemen (“and not Hamas militants”) as evidence of its intention to replace internal law and order in Gaza with anarchy and chaos. In addition to destroying Gaza’s infrastructure and maximizing Palestinian casualties there, Israel’s goals were seen to include regime change in Gaza and a definitive disconnect between Gaza and the West Bank; Sara Roy (London Review of Books, January 1, 2009) wrote that Israel sought to “foist Gaza onto Egypt.” Reducing Gaza to a humanitarian crisis was read as an attempt to render it politically and economically nonviable.
Highlighted by Norman Finkelstein, a scholar of the Nazi Holocaust and the Israel-Palestine conflict (on Democracy Now, January 8, 2009) are repeated statements by the Hamas government affirming its acceptance of a two-state solution in line with the “international consensus” (minus Israel and the U.S.). Finkelstein termed this diplomatic opening by Hamas a “peace offensive”; Israel’s war on Gaza would then be an attempt to defeat Hamas’s peace offensive. Similarly, in an article published in the Guardian (January 7, 2009), Israeli professor of international relations at Oxford University Avi Shlaim remarked that Hamas is (and has been) ready to negotiate with Israel, but has found no response, because Israel prefers domination to coexistence, war to peace. Israel rejects “Palestinian national identity,” strenuously opposing the Palestinians’ political “struggle for independence and statehood.” Israel, he concludes, qualifies as a rogue state by virtue of its flaunting of international law, deployment of WMD, and exercise of state terrorism: “Israel’s entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza.”
Weapons prohibited under international law that were deployed by Israel in its war on Gaza include white phosphorus (used by the U.S. in Iraq), depleted uranium (used by the U.S. in Iraq), and the “genotoxic DIME bomb” (developed in the U.S. and “first tested on Gazans in 2006” [Al-Jazeera, January 11, 2009). For this reason and others, the UN and various human rights groups have accused Israel of committing war crimes. The full spectrum of weapons with which Israel has waged its war on the people of Gaza was produced and supplied by the U.S. American taxpayers pay Israel about $7 million dollars a day; with much of that money Israel purchases U.S.-made ammunition, F-16s, Apache helicopters, naval gunboats, and other lethal paraphernalia. The non-defensive use of any weapons derived from the U.S. violates the U.S. Arms Export Control Act. As democratic citizens of the superpower that enables Israel to inflict intolerable suffering and death on a defenseless and immobilized civilian population, Americans bear a heavy responsibility to speak out against this genocide.
Liza Burr is a WAMM member. A Jungian analyst, she teaches part-time at Metro State and St. Catherine’s in the field of religion.. |
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© 2009 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete February 2009 Index - click here
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