On
Sept. 29th Members of the militant wing of Hamas
fired a Qassam rocket across the Gaza border into
the Israeli town of Sederot killing two small children.
This is not the first time Hamas members have fired
rockets into Israel, though it is one of the only
times such an act has killed civilians. The Qassam
strikes are largely symbolic attempts to send Israel
the message that Palestinians will not acquiesce
in the decades' old occupation of their land and
Israel's long-term designs.
Besides
being illegal and immoral since they target
innocent civilians- these strikes are strategically
stupid: They present Israel with the perfect pretext
for carrying out its goals of grabbing more land,
appropriating for itself all of the natural resources,
and evicting and re-concentrating the indigenous
population into isolated, overcrowded and militarily
enclosed landed prisons. Sure enough, Israel has
once again made cynical use of the terrible deaths
of innocents by using them as an excuse to launch
"Operation Days of Penitence," an open-ended
massive military incursion into the northern Gaza
Strip one that has likely been planned for
months if not years.
Already,
in just over a week, Israeli soldiers have killed
nearly 100 people, many of them civilians and more
than a quarter of them children. They have demolished
the homes of dozens of families, torn up whole streets,
wrecked businesses, uprooted trees, forced schools
to close, cut off the water and electricity supplies
to thousands of people, carried out air raids, extra-judicial
killings and shut down the heavily fortified checkpoints
within Gaza and along its borders preventing the
flow of human and vehicular traffic. They have besieged
the desperately overcrowded Jabalia refugee camp,
a half square mile of land home to 106,000 people,
taken control over the towns of Beit Hanoun and
Beit Lahia in north Gaza, and are preventing international
emergency aid organizations from distributing food,
water and medical supplies. They intend to create
a five mile "buffer zone" ostensibly to
make the successful launching of Qassam rockets
impossible but in effect annexing the northern Gaza
Strip (including its illegal Jewish settlements)
to Israel before "disengaging" itself
from the Gaza Strip the latest euphemism for
redeploying the Israeli Occupation Forces in and
around Gaza "in exchange" for the annexation
of yet more West Bank land to Israel.
In
sum, Israel has created this latest humanitarian
crisis in order to let an occupied, disinherited,
and suffering people know who's boss and it
is succeeding handily thanks to the help of its
foremost champion. On Tuesday, 5 October 2005 the
United States vetoed a United Nations' Security
Council Resolution criticizing Israel's latest invasion
of Palestinian land. Combined with the greater than
usual absence of media coverage of this event, the
US veto stops any further knowledge or discussion
of the latest Israeli crime against Palestine.
The
timing couldn't be more perfect. With US presidential
elections pending, real debate about the Israeli
designs on Palestine is especially unwelcome. No
candidate serious about his political career can
afford to criticize Israel no matter how mildly.
Influential political constituencies combined with
the power of the corporate media trash the reputation
of anyone daring to suggest Israel must be stopped.
Perhaps
even more importantly, to get to the heart of the
Israel-Palestine issue would mean questioning the
whole of US foreign policy in the Middle East; it
would highlight the fact that in no Arab or Muslim
country in the world (let alone elsewhere) can people
discuss US foreign policy in the Middle East without
immediately identifying its fawning, egregious and
criminal policy towards Israel as their primary
grievance. It would divulge the dead end and chaos
towards which our leading presidential candidates
are heading in Iraq by exposing the superficial,
externally imposed "solutions" they advocate.
It would suggest that there are real, justifiable
reasons for the growing anti-American sentiment
in that region and beyond.
This
is unacceptable--and so the criticism is silenced.
Powerful pro-Israel organizations within the United
States, including but not limited to the organized
mainstream American Jewish community are allowed
to prevail over our opinions with their increasingly
vicious and racist propaganda against Arabs and
Muslims. It is they who prevent us from even hearing
about individual Palestinians such as 13-year-old
Iman al-Hams from Rafah who, on her way home from
school this week, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers
claiming she was a suspected terrorist. Doctors
found 20 bullets in her body--five of them in her
head.
Who
here would ever know?
This
article is reproduced with permission from the author.
Jennifer Loewenstein is a freelance journalist and
human rights activist. She worked at the Mezan Center
for Human Rights in Gaza City, Gaza for 5 months
in 2002. In February 2003 Jennifer founded the Madison-Rafah
Sister City Project and visited Rafah in January
2004 for its first delegation to the city. She teaches
at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. She can
be reached at: jsarin@facstaff.wisc.edu
