The Writing On The Wall

Gaza Aftermath - Coming home

Palestinian Center for Human Rights

n this new series of personal testimonies, PCHR looks at the aftermath of Israel’s 22 day offensive on the Gaza Strip, and the ongoing impact it is having on the civilian population.

Words by Malian/PCHR

One of the most important factors in recovery from trauma is the ability to find sanctuary in the comfort of one’s home. The right to safety and security. For many people in Gaza, this right has been repeatedly violated, in the form of the destruction of their personal property, often wantonly, by Israeli military forces.

Alongside the 1,000s of homes partially or completely destroyed by bulldozers, tank shells and bombs dropped by F-16 fighter jets, are the homes that have been defaced by graffiti left by individual Israeli soldiers and the vandalisation of civilian property within them.

At Mos’ab Dardona’s home in Jabal Al Rayes, northeast Gaza, Israeli soldiers who had taken up positions in civilian houses in the area left behind intricate drawings on the walls, some depicting soldiers urinating on toppled mosques, or devouring Palestinian villages. In the house next door, belonging to Ibrahim Dardona, soldiers left behind dozens of bags of faeces in the bedrooms, despite the presence of a functioning toilet, and left crude sexual diagrams on the walls.

"The writing left by Israeli soldiers in the homes in Gaza provides an insight into the disturbing culture of hatred and racism towards Palestinians and Arabs which exists among parts of Israeli society," says Hamdi Shaqqura, PCHR’s director of democratic development. "In light of the evidence PCHR has gathered of the wilful and wanton killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, this graffiti is even more disturbing."

The thousands of people who have been unable to return to what remains of their homes after Israel’s offensive are hard to count precisely. Hastily erected refugee tent camps that are unsuitable at this time of year have been largely abandoned and internally displaced people have moved in with extended family members.

Others have had to move back into their partially destroyed homes, clear up the debris and sometimes the evidence of the deaths of loved ones, and try to get on with their lives. The Dardona families have moved back into their houses, and are torn between unwillingness to destroy evidence of the behaviour of Israeli soldiers and reluctance to endure the constant reminders of the horrors that took place here. And there are similar cases in other parts of the Gaza Strip.

In the largely agricultural area of Johr-ad-Dik, Israeli forces established bases in some of the homes in the early days of their ground offensive. Tank tracks cut huge swathes through the fields and hundreds of olive and citrus trees were destroyed. Half the population of 2,500 was displaced.

At dawn on 4 January 2009, the first full day of Israel’s ground offensive, a shell landed near the home of Saleh Abu Hajaj in Johur-ad-Dik. Radio interceptions made by the Israeli military ordered local residents to evacuate their homes. Saleh’s 36 year old daughter Majeda Abu Hajaj tied a white scarf to a stick and led a group of civilians out of her neighbour’s house.

As they were trying to escape, tanks opened fire on the group and Majeda was shot dead, allegedly in the back. Moments later her 64 year old mother Raya, was also shot and bled to death a few metres from her daughter. Majeda and Raya’s bodies were not recovered until Israel’s declaration of a unilateral ceasefire sixteen days later. These attacks may constitute willful killings, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and war crimes.

Israeli soldiers set up military positions in the Abu Hajaj house after the killings, and left graffiti in every room. Above Majeda’s bed are the words "Death will find you soon" scrawled in red pen. Other parts of the house carry the words "Have you ever wondered what hell looks like? Well… look around you -----! Ha ha ha"

In the Zeytoun district, where 27 members of the Samouni family were killed by an airstrike while sheltering in a building they had been placed in by the Israeli army, there are more chilling messages on the walls. In Talal Al Samouni’s home Israeli soldiers wrote the words "Die you all", "Make war not peace", "Arabs need to die" and a gravestone engraved with the words "Arabs 1948-2009" referring to the dates between the creation of the state of Israel and its latest military offensive.

A stairwell in Rashad Helmi Al Samouni’s house a few doors down includes the following sentences written in chalk:

"There will be a day when we kill all the Arabs"

"Bad for the Arabs is good for me"

"A good Arab is an Arab in the grave"

"Peace now, but between Jews and Jews, not Jews and Arabs"

While much of the graffiti is inflammatory and disturbing, there are also more human expressions written by weary Israeli soldiers such as: "How much longer will we be here…?", "Until when?", "We want to go home" and "I have no other country".

There have been many serious allegations made about the conduct of Israeli soldiers who were operating in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is currently investigating many of these cases and will be bringing evidence to light in due course. But whatever the outcome of such investigations, it will do little to comfort the thousands of civilians whose sense of safety they should feel in the privacy of their own homes has been so categorically violated.

Source

Posted by JNOUBIYEH at 9:49 AM


The Writing On The Wall

By AMIRA HASS

We came to annihilate you; Death to the Arabs; Kahane was right; No tolerance, we came to liquidate. This is a selection of graffiti Israeli soldiers left on the walls of Palestinians' homes in Gaza, which they turned into bivouacs and firing positions during Operation Cast Lead. Here and there, a soldier scribbled a line of mock poetry or biblical quote in the same sentiment. There were also curses on the Prophet Mohammed and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, along with shift schedules and favorite soccer teams.

When the homes' owners returned, they usually found widespread devastation - whether from the first shells the Israel Defense Forces fired to chase away the inhabitants, or from break-ins and the destruction of furniture, clothing, walls, computers and appliances. Frequently the breached homes remained standing in a neighborhood whose other houses were turned into rubble by bulldozers. The residents also found the trash the soldiers left behind.

In Israel, research institutes count every abusive slogan scrawled on Jewish cemeteries abroad and document every problematic article, to monitor the upsurge in anti-Semitism. The media attributes importance to every piece of graffiti against assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. But the everyday racism - both institutionalized and popular, declarative and practical - against the Arabs of Israel and the Palestinians in the West Bank are usually cautiously and frugally covered.

No wonder the Hebrew graffiti, whose writers were also destructive, on walls in the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods were not picked up by Israeli antennae, always so sensitive to racism against Jews.

The military spokespeople could dismiss the reports and testimony of the killing of many civilians at short or long range as fabricated or manipulative, or could answer generally that the terrorists were responsible because they were hiding nearby. Israeli society, from whose view Cast Lead has been buried in a closed archive, is always ready for any trick to explain how righteous and morally superior its army is.

But the photographic evidence of the Hebrew graffiti is hard to deny or call fabricated; all the more so when it appears alongside the names of army units and individual soldiers. Indeed, the military spokesman said the graffiti contravenes the values of the IDF, and the IDF views it gravely.

Not all the soldiers wrote graffiti, but the comrades and commanders of those who did neither stopped them nor erased what they scrawled. So this is where we can praise the soldiers' sincerity and integrity. They felt free to write what they did because they - like the pilots and operators of the missile-bearing drones - knew they had received from their government and commanders a free hand to attack a civilian population. Why then should there be a problem with the words they chose? What they wrote on the walls reflects their understanding of the spirit of their mission.

Unlike the older commanders, who are permitted to speak to certain journalists acceptable to the army, and who recite carefully what the IDF's legal advisers and the State Prosecutor's Office tell them to say, the writers of the graffiti - soldiers in the regular army who grew up with the occupation and Israel's military superiority - have not yet understood that the world makes more than weapons. It also makes laws, rules and human norms.

Their commanders permitted them to contravene norms they are obviously unaware of. Unlike those who formulate the IDF Spokesman's responses, the young, unsophisticated soldiers are inexperienced at covering up the army's actions and its mission, their mission, with words that blur the truth.

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Posted by JNOUBIYEH at 3:45 PM