Lives smashed short

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Lives smashed short

(Monday 29 December 2008)

EWA JASIEWICZ


EWA JASIEWICZ reports from Gaza on the indiscriminate slaughter being inflicted on ordinary Palestinian people.



AS I write this in the early hours of Saturday, Israeli jets are bombing the areas of Zeitoun and Rimal in central Gaza City. The family I am staying with has moved into the internal corridor of their home to shelter from the bombing.

The windows nearly blew out just five minutes ago as a massive explosion rocked the house. Apache helicopters are hovering above us, while F16s sear across the sky overhead.


UN radio reports say that one blast was a target close to the main gate of Al Shifa hospital, Gaza and Palestine's largest medical facility. Another was a plastics factory. More bombs continue to pound the strip.


Sirens are wailing on the streets outside. Regular power cuts plunge the city into blackness every night and tonight is no exception. But, perhaps, tonight it is the darkest night that people have seen here in their lifetimes.


Over 220 people have been killed and over 400 injured through attacks that shocked the strip in the space of 15 minutes. Hospitals are overloaded and unable to cope.


Doctors at Al Shifa had to scramble together 10 makeshift operating theatres to deal with the wounded.


Al Shifa only had 12 beds in their intensive care unit. They had to make space for 27 today.


There is a shortage of medicine - over 105 key items are not in stock, and blood and spare generator parts are desperately needed.


Head of casualty Dr Maowiye Abu Hassanyeh explained: "We had over 300 injured in over 30 minutes. There were people on the floor of the operating theatre, in the reception area, in the corridors. We were sending patients to other hospitals. Not even the most advanced hospital in the world could cope with this number of casualties in such a short space of time."


And, as Israeli occupation forces chief of staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi said this morning, "this is only the beginning."


But this isn't the beginning. This is an ongoing policy of collective punishment and killing with impunity practised by Israel for decades.


It has seen its most intensified level today. But the weight of dread, revenge and isolation hangs thick over Gaza today. People are all asking: "If this is only the beginning, what will the end look like?"


I resume writing at 11.30am. Earlier, myself and Alberto Acre, a Spanish journalist, were at the border village of Sirej near Khan Younis in the south of the strip.


We had driven there at 8am with the mobile clinic of the Union of Palestinian Relief Committees. The clinic regularly visits exposed, frequently raided villages far from medical facilities.


We had been interviewing residents about conditions on the border.


Stories of olive groves and orange groves, family farmland, bulldozed to make way for a clear line of sight for Israeli occupation force watch towers and border guards. Israeli attacks were frequent. Indiscriminate fire and shelling spraying homes and land on the front line of the south-eastern border.


One elderly farmer showed us the grave-size ditch that he had dug to climb into when Israeli soldiers would shoot into his fields.


Alberto was interviewing a family that had survived an Israeli missile attack on their home last month. It had been a response to rocket fire from resistance fighters nearby. Four fighters were killed in a field by the border. Israel had rained rockets and M16 fire back. The family, caught in the crossfire, have never returned to their home.


I was waiting for Alberto to return when ground-shaking thuds tilted us off our feet. This was the sound of surface-to-air-fired missiles and F16 bombs slamming into the police stations and army bases of the Hamas authority here, in Gaza City, in Diere Balah, Rafah, Khan Younis and Beit Hanoun.


We zoomed out of the village in our ambulance and onto the main road to Gaza City before jumping out to film the smouldering remains of a police station in Diere Balah, near Khan Younis.


Eyewitnesses said that two Israeli missiles had destroyed the police station. One had soared through a children's playground and a busy fruit and vegetable market before striking its target.


There was blood on a broken plastic yellow slide and a crippled, dead donkey with an upturned vegetable cart beside it.


Aubergines and splattered blood covered the ground.


A man began to explain in broken English what had happened. "It was full here, full. Three people dead, many, many injured."


An elderly man with a white kuffiyeh around his head threw his hands down to his blood-drenched trousers.


"Look! Look at this! Shame on all governments, shame on Israel, look how they kills us, they are killing us and what does the world do? Where is the world, where are they, we are being killed here, hell upon them!"
He was a market trader who had been present during the attack.


He began to pick up splattered tomatoes that he had lost from his cart, picking them up jerkily and putting them into plastic bags. Behind a small tile and brick building, a man was sitting against the wall, his legs were bloodied. He couldn't get up and was sitting, visibly in pain and shock, trying to orientate himself.


The police station itself was a wreck, a mess of criss-crossed piles of concrete, broken floors upon floors. We saw the remains of a life at work smashed short. A prayer mat clotted with dust, a policeman's hat, the ubiquitous bright flower-patterned mattresses, burst open. A crater around 20 feet in diameter was filled with pulverised walls and floors and a motorbike, tossed on its side, toy-like in its depths.


Policemen were frantically trying to get a fellow worker out from under the rubble. Everyone was trying to call him on his Jawwal.


"Stop it everyone! Just one, one of you ring," shouted a man who looked like a captain.


A fire licked the underside of an ex-room now crushed to just three feet high. Hands alongside hands rapidly grasped and threw back rocks, blocks and debris to reach the man.


We made our way to the Al Aqsa hospital. Entering the building was overwhelming, pure pandemonium, charged with grief, horror, distress and shock.


Limp, blood-covered and burnt bodies streamed by us on rickety stretchers.


Casuality after casualty sat propped against the walls outside, being comforted by relatives, wounds temporarily dressed. Inside was perpetual motion and the more drastically injured.


Relatives jostled with doctors to bring in their injured in scuffed blankets.
Blood-streamed faces, scorched hair and shrapnel cuts to hands, chests, legs, arms and heads dominated the reception area, wards and operating theatres.


We saw a bearded man on a stretcher on the floor of an intensive care unit, shaking and shaking, involuntarily, legs rigid and thrusting downwards.
A spasm coherent with a spinal cord injury. In another unit, a baby girl, no older than six months, had shrapnel wounds to her face. A relative lifted a blanket to show us her fragile bandaged leg. Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was making stilted, repetitive, squeaking sounds.


A first estimate at Al Aqsa hospital was 40 dead and 120 injured. The hospital was dealing with casualties from the bombed market, playground, Civil Defence Force station, civil police station and also the traffic police station. All levelled. A working day blasted flat with terrifying force.


And according to many people here, there is nothing and nobody looking out for them apart from God.


We went back to Al Shifa hospital in the evening. We met the brother of a security guard who had had the doorway he had been sitting in and the building fall down upon his head.


He said to us: "We don't have anyone but God. We feel alone. Where is the world? Where is the action to stop these attacks?"


Majid Salim stood beside his comatose mother Fatima.


Earlier today, she had been sitting at her desk at work at the Hadije Arafat Charity.


Israel's attack had left her with multiple internal and head injuries, a tube down her throat and a ventilator keeping her alive.


Majid gestured to her. "We didn't attack Israel. My mother didn't fire rockets at Israel. This is the biggest terrorism, to have our mother bombarded at work."


There is a saying here in Gaza, we spoke about it jokingly last night. At the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel.


Not so funny when you consider that Gaza is being kept alive through the smuggling of food, fuel and medicine through an exploitative industry of over 1,000 tunnels running from Egypt to Rafah in the south.


On average, one to two people die every week in the tunnels. Some embark on a humiliating crawl to get their education, see their families, to find work, on their hands and knees. Other tunnels are reportedly big enough to drive through.


Last night, I added a new ending to the saying. At the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel and then a power cut.


Today, there's nothing to joke about. As bombs continue to blast buildings around us, jarring the children in this house from their fitful sleep, the saying could take on another twist.


After today's killing of over 200, is it that, at the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel and then a grave? Or a wall of international governmental complicity and silence?

Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist, union organiser and solidarity worker. She is currently Gaza Project Co-coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement - www.FreeGaza.org. This article was contributed to PalestineChronicle.com

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[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Holocaust in Gaza

(Tuesday 30 December 2008)

JOHN WIGHT


JOHN WIGHT is outraged at Israel's brutality. But our supine leaders won't condemn the onslaught.

ISRAEL has unleashed hell on Gaza. At time of writing, over 360 men, women, and children are known to have been slaughtered in air strikes using US-supplied fighter aircraft.

Over 1,000 are known to be injured, many of whom will undoubtedly die as a direct consequence of Israel's ongoing siege, which has created a dire shortage of basic medicines and has left medical facilities in Gaza degraded and overwhelmed.


In the immediate aftermath of its operation, the Israeli military issued a statement warning that this is only the beginning, that operations against Gaza will deepen, in a haunting reminder of the threat made earlier in the year by Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, who promised the Palestinians of Gaza a "shoah" - or holocaust.


Surely now it is time to stop equivocating when it comes to this issue. Surely now the world must stand up and take action in response to what is the most sustained, barbaric and brutal occupation in modern history in a part of the world where crimes against humanity have been allowed to exist for too long under the guise of exceptionalism, victimhood and democracy.


In response to Israel's latest outrage, the usual round of supine statements calling for Hamas to stop rocket attacks against Israeli towns in resistance to the occupation of Palestinian land have been released from capitals throughout the West.


Yet again, the world is being regaled by claims from Israeli spokespeople and their supporters that an existential threat to Israel from Hamas and Palestinian terrorists lies at the root of the current crisis.


It is a claim of victimhood that has been repeated so often during the years of this perennial struggle that it has assumed the status of received truth.


It is a received truth which flies in the face of a history of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and occupation.


As such, one of the most disgraceful aspects of this ongoing conflict is the way in which our mainstream media continues to present it as a struggle between two equal sides.


Wherever and whenever possible, the media acquiesces to Israel's role of victim, as a courageous little outpost of Western civilisation amid Arab hordes committed to its destruction.


Alarm bells should be set ringing when we hear such easy assertions being made by mainstream commentators and journalists, because we've been here before, haven't we?


In fact, the entire history of empire, colonialism and imperialism is replete with oppressors attempting to portray themselves as victims and their victims as terrorists and savages who need to be either tamed, cleansed or subjugated. And, of course, this is always in the interests of civilisation or security and stability.


Think of the British empire, the nazi occupation of Europe, the French and US occupation of Vietnam, the French occupation of Algeria, the British occupation of Ireland and think of Israel's occupation of Palestine. The same pattern emerges.


Among these examples, the state of Israel has enjoyed something of an Indian summer in terms of its ability to continue to deny the Palestinians their national, civil and human rights.


This is largely due to the guilt which still pervades the upper reaches of European and US society over the European Holocaust in which the Palestinians played no part.


This guilt has combined with strategic objectives, namely oil, to provide Israel with the economic aid that has enabled it to amass the fourth-largest military in the world, a nuclear arsenal and, with it, legitimacy for a state policy of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.


That the Palestinians have managed to survive 60 years of occupation, expropriation, economic embargo and state terror is testament to their courage and indomitability.


But even a courageous people can only survive such brutality for so long without succumbing and being sent into the night, which is why, now more than ever, the campaign to boycott Israel must be stepped up in line with the call from Palestinian civil society.


It is a sobering thought to consider that, 60 years ago, 530 Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed and that 750,000 men, women, and children were forcibly expelled by zionist terrorist organisations like the Stern Gang and Irgun in the process of 78 per cent of historic Palestine being expropriated.


The extent of this crime against an entire people mirrored the horror of the crime committed by the nazis which preceded it.


Those who sought sanctuary in another's land did so in the name of the victims of the Holocaust. But perpetrators of crimes against humanity can never claim to act on behalf of victims of crimes against humanity.


It is a cruel irony of history that the victims of the genocide carried out by the nazis are wedded to the victims of Israel's barbarism which followed through a bond of human suffering that transcends ties of religion, race or ethnicity.


The continued siege of 1.5 million human beings in Gaza is biblical both in its scale and cruelty.


Israel's excuse for continuing the siege is continuing rocket attacks from Gaza into adjacent Israeli towns, in particular, the Israeli town of Sderot.
But, again, we see the work of a generation of scholars in service to Israel and its interests in the rewriting of history.


In the case of Sderot, a determined attempt has been made to suppress the fact that this is a town established on land where the Palestinian village of Najd once stood.


Najd's inhabitants were forcibly expelled from their village on May 13 1948 by the Negev Brigade of the then nascent Israeli army, before Israel was declared a state and before any Arab armies entered Palestine.


Therefore, in accordance with UN Resolution 194 and also with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, Section 2, the villagers of Najd have the right to return to their homes.


The village of Najd was destroyed and settled by zionists in 1951. It has been known ever since as the Israeli town of Sderot. Hundreds of other Israeli villages have similar origins.


Therefore, the question that a world interested in justice should be asking the Israeli government is a simple one. Do the Palestinians have the right to exist?


As we wait for the Israeli government and its supporters to answer this question, all people of conscience and consciousness must answer the plea for solidarity from the long-suffering Palestinians of Gaza.
Their cause is the cause of humanity in our time.

Details of the demonstrations against Israeli aggression

London
Wednesday
2-4pm, outside Israeli Embassy, Kensington High Street
Thursday
2-4pm, outside Israeli Embassy
Friday
2-4 pm, outside the Egyptian Embassy, 26 South Street, London W1
Call for Egypt to open the border immediately
Saturday
12.30pm for national rally at Embankment
Bristol
Wednesday, Friday
5-6pm and Saturday 3-4pm, opposite the Hippodrome
Cardiff
Wednesday
New Year Vigil, 12 noon to 1pm Nye Bevan Statue, Queen Street
Portsmouth
Saturday
11am, Guildhall Square
Hull
Saturday
11am, Queen Victoria Square
Glasgow
Saturday
12 noon, outside Lloyds TSB St Vincent Street then assemble for demo at Blytheswood Square 2pm
Edinburgh
Saturday
12 noon, foot of the Mound, Princes Street