This Mideast Conflict, lasting for decades already,
having daily the very same "news",
apart from its atrocities, from both sides, has become a hallmark of global
systemic formal logics, of keeping international politics in the "Friend
- Enemy",
in the Either-Or Scheme. It is highly educational, ideological, "informative";
it is a
wonderful "liberation struggle", a defence of culture, tradition and virtues,
a true
"scapegoat", an eternal horror chamber, a bizarre peep-hole of "guinea-pigs"
to come;
a real "pan et circences". It is a classic to teach everybody daily, how
to take sides,
how to "divide et impera"; how to exploit economically a situation, how
to
dominate politically a people, how to discriminate socially a certain "religious"
group, how to destroy all vestiges of a "human being", how to reduce her/him
to a "human bomb", to alienated fragments. Colombia is another "paradigm"
in the Americas. This is the labour essence of "peace", of the New World
Order, of Globalization, which begun already with Carl The Great, the Crusades
and the myriad of colonial, neocolonial upgrades, and now continues with
the
"post-capitalist", postmodern, "new" and "next" economic
" latest" de luxe
versions.
Ongoing
Israeli Repression Fuels Bitterness in Gaza
Uprooting the Olive Branch
by Alisa Solomon
GAZA
STRIP—Ahmad Abu Fadi gestures out over the brown expanse of rubble
baking in the relentless August sun. "It used to be so green here," he
says, "so
peaceful." But that was before the Israeli military destroyed 20 acres
of his orange
groves and parts of his cucumber, tomato, and sweet potato fields, and
two
greenhouses as well. Since the outbreak of the Al Aqsa intifada late last
September,
the Israeli military has ruined thousands of acres of farmland in Palestinian
territories,
among them the farm that Abu Fadi tended here, in Gaza's fertile patch
between the
refugee camps of Khan Yunis and Rafa.
With the trees gone, it's now easy to see tanks looming and an Israeli
flag flapping
atop a military post in the distance, and the red-roofed houses of Jewish
settlements
on the emerald slope below. Abu Fadi shakes his head and laughs bitterly
when asked
whether his trees provided cover for Palestinian snipers shooting at the
settlers—the
reason Israel gives for uprooting hundreds of thousands of olive, fruit,
and citrus trees
throughout the Gaza Strip and the West Bank over the last 11 months. There
was
never any fire from his groves, Abu Fadi says, and anyway, if the issue
were security,
the Israeli army (or IDF) would simply cut the trees, not uproot them so
that they can
never grow back. Indeed, one Gaza farmer, anticipating IDF bulldozers,
chopped
down his own orchards, hoping, with a desperate sort of optimism, to salvage
their
potential for the future. Soldiers came and dug out the roots. Even low-lying
crops in
which no one can hide—squash and lettuce, for instance—have been run over
by
tanks.
According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, based in Gaza City,
one-fifth of
the area's crops have been flattened by the IDF since the conflict flared.
Agriculture
represents 60 percent of the local economy. For Abu Fadi and others like
him, the
bulldozers were just the beginning of an irreversible spiral of devastation.
Now, as the
crops that are left begin to ripen, Abu Fadi and his three sons must watch
them rot on
the vine—or dodge Israeli bullets as they go out to harvest. The risk is
hardly worth it,
he says. The produce they do take in goes bad in its bushels, since merchants
who
used to buy the crops for international sale are now forbidden to export
goods from
Gaza. As for local dealers, their trucks are often held up for hours at
checkpoints,
their goods perishing in the hot sun. Besides, the markets are deserted.
Given the
shelling and even occasional invasions of tanks or army helicopters, customers
are
afraid to come out to the main road. And anyway, with unemployment topping
64
percent in Gaza (Abu Fadi had to dismiss 30 farmhands after his lands were
destroyed), they have no money for shopping.
Unseen IDF soldiers manipulate a traffic light down
below. It can stay red for an hour at a time, then flash green
for half a minute, allowing half a dozen cars to continue on
their way.
The Gaza Strip, jutting up from Egypt along Israel's western coast, has
long been
destitute—refugees fleeing their homes in nascent Israel in 1948 turned
the
238-square-mile area into one of the most densely populated places in the
world.
Today the population exceeds 1.2 million. But never have times been as
hard as these
last 11 months, says Raji Sourani, director of the human rights center.
Gaza has been
sealed off from the rest of the world, he says, and "we are under complete
economic
and social suffocation."
The airport is closed, roads leading out of Gaza are blockaded by the IDF,
and even
streets within the strip are blocked, dividing the region into four disconnected
areas.
Tens of thousands of workers have been barred from their jobs in Israel
for almost a
year. And fishermen on the Mediterranean are shot at by Israeli gunboats
if they float
out more than two miles from the shore. According to surveys released by
the
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in July, 80 percent of Gaza's
residents live
below the poverty line—subsisting on less than $400 a month for a family
of six. "The
most Kafkaesque thing about it," says Sourani, "is that the Western press
takes Israel's
skewed perspective—that we are victimizing them. We are choking under this
occupation, and people are more desperate every day."
Israel's own military coordinator for the West Bank and Gaza, General Amos
Gilad,
has summed up the consequences bluntly: The economic strangulation and
political
repression in the territories is precisely what is driving young men to
enlist as suicide
bombers. The conditions in the territories, he told the Israeli press in
late August,
produce "a fool's cycle of violence in which Hamas grows stronger, we respond,
and,
as a result, the hardship in the territories grows and Hamas grows even
stronger. If
the situation continues, we are likely to be confronted with . . . five
terror attacks a
day."
The hatred festers especially because Palestinians experience the siege
as plain,
gratuitous cruelty. There's no better symbol of this than the bizarre checkpoint
at the
intersection of the main north-south road of Gaza and a Jewish-only road
that leads to
the Netzarim settlement. A tall, concrete cylindrical structure stands
beside the
crossroads like a medieval guard tower. Machine-gun barrels and a megaphone
protrude from a slit near the top, manned by unseen IDF soldiers. They
manipulate a
traffic light down below. It can stay red for an hour at a time, then flash
green for
half a minute, allowing half a dozen cars to continue on their way. Occasionally
a
voice will emerge from the megaphone: "You, in the blue shirt, in the second
taxi. Get
out!" And the man in the blue shirt will oblige, only to hop into a taxi
farther down the
line to try again.
Palestinians can't interpret the scene as anything other than an exercise
in control and
humiliation. After all, the crowded taxis, crop- and water-bearing trucks,
private cars,
and buses are not attempting to enter Israeli territory, only trying to
move from one
point to another in Gaza—an area that is supposed to be under autonomous
Palestinian
control. The soldiers up high in the guard post never search a car trunk
or check an
ID, so the claim that they are performing a "security function," says one
driver stuck
in the mayhem for an hour in the noontime sun, is "utterly preposterous."
And he lets
out a deep guffaw, explaining that finding humor in the absurdity is the
only way he
manages to survive. Boys walk from car to car, peddling lemonade and nuts.
Of course, Palestinians in the West Bank feel much the same way at checkpoints
where soldiers actually do inspect cars and IDs. Drives that once took
20 minutes can
take upward of five hours as roadblocks delay and redirect traffic all
over the
territories, even as settlers whiz along on the Jewish-only bypass roads.
And while
some Palestinians grant that looking in trunks for weapons may be legitimate,
they still
question the way soldiers flauntingly take breaks after each inspection,
before calling
the next car forward. Meanwhile, those on foot—old women with parcels on
their
heads, men with briefcases, kids with knapsacks—generally walk right through.
Young men, though, are frequently stopped, and, according to recent reports
in the
Israeli press, forced to stand in the sun for several hours, or even beaten.
Indeed, in
mid August, six IDF soldiers were arrested on suspicion that they had brutally
beaten
a group of Palestinian taxi passengers, and forced them at gunpoint to
thrash each
other.
Recently, in the leading Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, columnist Gideon Levy
offered his
fellow citizens a colorful description of the checkpoints, concluding,
"If more Israelis
were exposed to this slice of reality, which is a regular part of Palestinian
life, and saw
with their own eyes the ordeals endured by ordinary, innocent Palestinians,
they might
gain a better understanding of the roots of the hatred the Palestinians
feel for them.
One roadblock is enough to understand it."
Even so, the ubiquitous checkpoints are only the most visible manifestation
of the
ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. One of its most punishing
aspects is literally underground: water.
Water has long been a crisis in the region. Israel faced its own dire shortages
this
summer, and citizens were discouraged from watering their lawns. Even so,
according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, the average
Israeli
consumes six times as much water as the average West Bank resident. B'Tselem
reports that some 200,000 Palestinians living in 218 West Bank villages
are not
connected to any water network and thus have no running water. Meanwhile,
Gaza's
water is increasingly salinated and polluted by untreated sewage and fertilizers
running
off from Israel, and the settlements' heavy water use has contributed to
the
"over-extraction" of the local aquifer, putting future supplies in doubt.
The crisis has
intensified since October because water tankers have not been able to move
freely
through the territories.
Naifa, 30, prays that the water tanker will make it up the road to her
village near the
southern West Bank city of Yatta on its regular run every 20 days. And
if it does, she
explains, she has a new worry: how to come up with the 200 shekels (about
$50) she
pays each time to supply her family of seven for the three weeks. Her husband
had
been working in nearby Ber Sheva until the intifada started. He's been
jobless ever
since.
Though a city of 50,000 with a plumbing system, Yatta is not much better
off these
days than the villages without any infrastructure. Last Saturday, when
the town was
visited by a mobile clinic from Israel's Physicians for Human Rights—who
defied
Israeli law forbidding them from entering the territories to help address
the medical
crises the closures have aggravated—Yatta had been without water for four
days.
According to Yatta's mayor, Khalil Mo'sd Younis, men from the nearby settlement
sabotage their system repeatedly, turning off the pipes at night. "Who
are we going to
complain to," he asks with a rhetorical sweep of his hand, "the IDF?"
"Israelis think that the occupation ended with the Oslo accords," notes
Ruchama
Marton, president of the physicians group. "So they think that zero hour
for the
current conflict is Camp David. What they don't recognize is that the oppression
has
continued for the last 34 years. And so they also don't recognize that
the Palestinians
are, quite simply, resisting it."
Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com
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