Death in Gaza, Déjà Vu
by JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
It is a recurring nightmare. The sounds and smells are so familiar;
the tension in the air so thick that you can see it like the grit and
grime that collects on your clothes and shoes after being outside for
only a short while. In July, sand blows in off the shore whipping its
tiny grains across your face until your eyes sting shut with tears.
Drones buzz in the night sky and tracer flares speed past like little
comets. In November there is a chill in the wind when the booms go off
in the dusty overcrowded streets of Gaza. The killing is high speed and
slow motion together; and later, in January, when the rains start, the
streets will flood and the muck and debris of the earth surges upward
making patterns of dirty, broken-lace detritus on the curbs and
corners, unable to drain away quickly enough for easy passage. Dying in
the cold and damp is worst of all when your limbs are left to bleed
uncovered. Month after month, the leitmotif of death in all its
creative varieties eats away at the people of Gaza. Were it not so
unnatural, we might wonder if the seasons had somehow been poisoned.
Forty-six-year-old Ahmad Jabari and his companion, Mohammad al-Homs,
were together in their car when Israel incinerated them with the
astonishing accuracy of its high-tech, precision-strike weapons. Were
they conscious in those last seconds? Did an instant of suspended
animation allow them to bid their world good bye? On the dark side of
the Manichaean universe into which we have cast them, is it heresy to
imagine they may have loved or have been loved; that mourning and
bereavement would ensue? That whole families would be shattered again
by death? Israeli aerial attacks hit 20 targets on the first day
alone of the latest operation to target alleged ?missile silos,?
weapons? storehouses, and ?terrorists? the righteous can kill with
particular impunity ? like Jabari, whose position as head of the Qassam
Brigades, or military wing of Hamas, could hardly merit condemnation.
Aerial strikes now soar into the hundreds and every non-combatant
person is at risk. It is becoming more and more difficult to cover up
the fact that the civilian population of Gaza, the families, children,
shopkeepers, street vendors, pharmacists, doctors, construction
workers, teachers, journalists, and others are not the ?collateral
damage? in an angry war against ?militants,? ?terrorists,? and
primitive rockets. Rather they are themselves are the primary targets.
They are the ones who must be culled from the land. The ?militants? are
merely the means to their demise. The ?unpeople? who clutter the land
like trash are the genuine, singular targets of US-Israel foreign
policy, standing as they do between the messy, inconvenient present and
the most sacred and coveted of goals: rule over the land unencumbered
by Arabs; access and control of the resources with no pretense of
sharing; open spaces for development and investment and future profits.
That the planners will also get tourist attractions of a bygone
civilization whose cultural artifacts can be served up as souvenirs in
shops with restaurants serving ?native? cuisine may have been
unintended, but are opportune, byproducts. When Gaza is flushed free
of its human squalor and the land and resources reintegrated
methodically into the Jewish State, quietly and without fanfare,
America?s Israeli terror over the land will end, or so it is presumed.
Events could still go this quietly, and Palestinians will be likened to
the Sioux. Will it be so easy to assure?
Jabari was a perfect Kill: easy to transform from unsuspecting
passenger in a car to calculating killer. The top military brass in Tel
Aviv and Washington understand this as well as the servile journalists
and sycophants whose job it is to lull even half-interested TV viewers
across an ocean with ?narratives? based on lies. ?By nature of his
position, Jabari has been responsible over the past decade for all anti-
Israel terror activity emanating from the [Gaza] Strip,? a Shin Bet
security agent said to the Times of Israel. Guilt by title; and the
appropriation of the language of good for the Good, and bad for the
Bad. Such logic will lead us to the alternatives already available,
based as they are on an Original Myth: disengage from the rest of the
natives until they turn to grass and stone, or pretend they were never
there to begin with and proceed accordingly anyway: A land without a
people for a people without a land.
Since Wednesday, November 14th, 2012 the IDF has hit well over 1000
targets of ?terror? in its self-defense against families and children.
There is no reason we should have to imagine what this looks like in
the painfully dilapidated territory of Gaza, bombed and wrecked beyond
repair so often, so repeatedly, and with a wrath that defies
comprehension that one has to ask how it is that people still go on
with life as well as they do?lacking water, electricity, arable land,
employment, safe homes, sewage plants, functioning flour mills and
fresh air. There are a hundred thousand photographs of the pock-marked,
bullet-sprayed buildings, homes, and mosques. There are over a thousand
posters of the martyred Palestinian (and foreign) resistance fighters.
There are shelves stacked and overflowing with video footage from
various international media and endless records of the maimed, the
imprisoned, the tortured and humiliated, the hospitalized, the bed-
ridden and the dead. NGOs served a great purpose, historians will
decide, in preserving the precise, detailed records of every name
unjustly abused. There are the wounded souls themselves who carry a
burden of unbearable loss; who weep in silence for the dead. A
Palestinian Ghost Dance may conjure the ancestors of old but it will
also offer more incentive to annihilate the eerie traces of human
attempts at self-preservation. A manifest destiny is a bullet to the
brain of a peaceful protester in Bil?in whose turn at Gaza is fast
approaching.
* * *
Gaza again is a living hell, all of it on record for the world to see.
The death toll is climbing by the hour. The photos are everywhere but
the New York Times has only a paragraph on the fear Israeli children
experience from the loud noises and clamor. You have forgotten the
other half of humanity, Mr. Publisher. Not the other half, really; the
other 9/10ths of the world. When will you comment on the trauma the
Gazan child experiences, and repeatedly, with children across the world
under the bombs of the United States and Israel?
All the sounds and sights and smells of slaughter verify the damage
and danger of aerial assaults and targeted killings; Apartment
buildings still buzzing with human activity when missiles pierced
through their ceilings offer up their dead and wounded to the deafening
skies. Progressive US President Barak Obama and his allies applaud
Israel?s masterful techniques of preventive war as self-defense; its
sophistication at using state of the art weaponry against mosques,
homes, markets and schools; re-emphasize at press conferences the right
of Israel to defend itself against the human cattle they have justly
corralled into densely packed camps to be bound and slaughtered or
starved and transferred elsewhere. All of it is happening again, today,
before our very eyes; before the universal documents proclaiming the
rights of mankind and international humanitarian law; before the
leaders who have so eagerly abandoned due process and civil liberties
but fear the rising tide of rebellion in the Middle East and elsewhere?
How dare we pontificate on the atrocities of Damascus after sponsoring
such a Juggernaut for Jerusalem? For Gaza? What educated public can
still claim they didn?t know? How can anyone any longer pretend the
earth was not boiling beneath us like lava under an active volcano?
Jennifer Loewenstein is faculty associate in Middle East Studies at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also a long-time human
rights activist and a freelance journalist. She can be reached at:
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