| Palestinians suffer as world turns toward Iraq
by Jimmy Osborn
Guest Writer
As America’s attention is directed toward Iraq, Israel has been taking advantage. Recently, the Israeli Occupation Forces have terrorized Palestinian cities, refugee camps and civilians, but this has not made news in the United States. The major media has been unquestioning of the policies and logic passed down from Washington and has particularly failed by ignoring the human rights disaster that has been taking place in the Occupied Territories of Palestine.
Jan. 25, Gaza City – Forty Israeli military vehicles accompanied by bulldozers and combat helicopters invaded and shelled a neighborhood in Gaza City. Dozens of homes, civilian facilities and over 50 shops were destroyed or damaged. Twelve Palestinians were killed and 40, mostly civilians, were injured. The Israeli army left the town burning.
Feb. 18, Gaza City – Israel conducted an all-night raid on Gaza City. Eight Palestinians were killed, including five civilians, and 15 were injured. Of the injured was a physician attempting to treat the wounded. Other medical personnel were denied access to those injured.
Feb. 23, Beit Hanoun, Gaza – Israeli forces seized control over the town. Six houses, belonging to the families of activists, were destroyed. Israeli shelling killed at least seven, including a factory worker, two security officers, and three children.
March 1, Khan Younis, Gaza – Military bulldozers and 30 heavy military vehicles raided the Khan Younis refugee camp killing two and injuring 39, including 10 children. A civilian was killed in his home while Israeli tanks fired shells and denied access to medical personnel. Israeli tanks and demolition vehicles damaged the neighborhood school and hospital, injuring several inside, and demolished an apartment building and dozens of houses.
March 3, Al-Bureij, Gaza – Israeli forces invaded the al-Bureij refugee camp killing eight, destroying 14 houses and a mosque. Among the dead, a pregnant women was killed beneath the ruins of her demolished house and a child, 13, was shot several times. Six Palestinians that were detained have subsequently been subject to torture and inhumane treatment by Israeli soldiers.
March 6, Jabalya, Gaza – Dozens of Israeli tanks and helicopters invaded the Jabalya refugee camp killing 11, injuring over 100, destroying eight houses and damaging seven civilian facilities. The dead were mostly civilians, including three children, two old men, a policeman and a fireman trying to extinguish a fire started by Israeli tank shells. More than half of those injured were civilians.
March 8, Gaza City – Israeli helicopters bombed a civilian car killing four inside. Israel has carried out several of these extrajudicial assassinations in an attempt to destroy Palestinian political leadership. Since September 2000, almost half of those killed in Israeli assassination attempts have been bystanders.
March 16, Rafah – Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist and college student, was killed when an Israeli military bulldozer crushed her. Eyewitnesses and human rights groups reported that the driver saw her and refused to stop. Rachel was attempting to prevent Israeli forces from destroying Palestinian homes and property. This incident has received no condemnation from U.S. officials.
March 17, Nusseirat – Israeli military kills 11 Palestinians in neighborhoods in Gaza. At least six of the dead were civilians, including three children. Israel killed seven Palestinian children in this week alone.
These attacks have escalated significantly since the world turned its attention to Iraq. Israeli forces have already killed over 200 Palestinians and injured hundreds in the first 10 weeks of 2003. Significantly, this escalation in state violence does not parallel any collective Palestinian escalation.
Amira Hass, a journalist for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, reports on the Palestinian situation: “The daily routine nowadays for every Palestinian in Gaza or in the West Bank is made up of an unending series of calamities,” and “the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] continues the killing of civilians every day.”
Her ultimate fear is over the increasing popularity of those in Israel who advocate a program of ethnic cleansing, sometimes called “transfer”—the implications of which should not be unfamiliar to Jewish Israelis. “Recent developments in Israel are disturbing: fundamentalist and apocalyptic beliefs are on the rise, moral considerations have disappeared from politics and the IDF has devised new forms of oppression.” Concerning the future safety of Palestinians, Hass warns, “The threat of mass expulsion is all too real.”
But living with this fear has become routine for Palestinians who have been under the weight of Israel’s military occupation for 36 years. Though violence has escalated in recent months, the pattern is familiar. In its refusal to withdraw from the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 and its desire to remove the Palestinians from their own land with fear and terror, Israel has employed violent tactics that, if used by other countries, would be immediately condemned by Washington (however, this has not stopped the rest of the world, the United Nations and every relevant human rights group from condemning Israel’s occupation and atrocities).
Further, neither the Oslo peace process nor the Camp David accords have improved the situation for those living in the West Bank and Gaza. Because of the imbalance in power that exists between the Israeli government and Palestinian leadership, negotiations have neglected to address the need for decolonization and Palestinian independence. Instead they have served to institutionalize Palestinians’ dependence upon Israel—politically, economically and socially.
Palestinians are amongst the poorest people in the region, their economy paralyzed by the Israeli closure system. During the last decade of the “peace process” unemployment in the occupied territories increased tenfold. Now the majority of Palestinians live below the poverty line. All the while, Israel has increased its construction of illegal settlements and succeeded in dividing and enclosing West Bank towns so that all Palestinians now live within Israeli watch.
The Palestinians’ worsening situation is not an accident but rather the realization of Israeli leadership policy, concerning which the records inside Israel are remarkably clear: curfews, checkpoints, military control of both internal and external borders and isolation of Palestinian towns from each other and from the outside world. Trenches are dug to prevent access by emergency vehicles to towns. Neighborhoods are indiscriminately raided and shelled. Water wells are destroyed. Trade and production are limited. All these methods are intended to make life inside the Occupied Territories a constant experience of death and terror. Separation. Forced transfer.
These policies receive no condemnation; rather, the U.S.-Israel alliance has put virtually all onus on the weaker party in this hegemonic relationship. Most recently, Washington and Israel have refused to negotiate further with Palestinian leadership, demanding that Arafat give power to a prime minister. On the other hand, the Palestinians cannot make similar demands of Israeli leadership because it is Israel that dictates the terms of negotiations.
George Bush has attempted to appeal to Arab opinion in the midst of his war against Iraq by proposing a new road map to peace in Palestine. However, his plan is more of the same: demanding concessions from a people that has been deprived of all rights by an occupying power. Attention is diverted from the decades-old military occupation, and a reality is constructed in which the victims become criminals and the real perpetrators of terror continue to kill, hidden beneath the ideology of the powerful.
Last month some 80 Palestinians were murdered and over 200 injured in the West Bank and Gaza. This month the numbers are already the same. During the first week of March, Israel killed dozens and injured over 250, mostly civilians, and mostly within refugee camps. Dozens of homes and shops have been destroyed, leaving families on the streets—refugees many times over.
The violence continues—indeed a cycle of violence. But the cycle has causes, deeply rooted relationships and systems. Because of this, it has solutions.
We must ask: is this massacring an acceptable response to the terrorism of a few groups that form a small minority among Palestinians? Although this really isn’t the right question, as the vast majority of these recent Israeli attacks have not been targeted at any aggression. It’s time to consider what those on the ground in the Occupied Territories have known for years: that sending 40 tanks and Apache helicopters into a refugee camp, demolishing homes and shelling anything that moves is not a solution to terrorism, nor does it make Israel safer, but in fact may be a cause.
Looking at causes has always been difficult for Americans. It would require us to question the institutionalized apartheid at the heart of Israel’s history, and that would bring us all too close to a vision of our own bloody hands.
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