A Palestinian UN worker inspects debris after an Israeli air strike on a UN school in Gaza where civilians were seeking refuge, 17 January 2009. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)
This month marked six months since the "official" conclusion to Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip, "Operation Cast Lead." From 27 December to 18 January, the might of the one of the world's strongest militaries laid waste to a densely-packed territory of 1.4 million Palestinians without an escape route.
The parallel propaganda battle fought by Israel's official and unofficial apologists continued after the ceasefire, in a desperate struggle to combat the repeated reports by human rights groups of breaches of international law. This article will look at some of the strategies of this campaign of disinformation, confusion, and lies -- and the reality of Israel's war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Very early on in Operation Cast Lead, the scale of Israel's attack became apparent. In just the first six days the Israeli Air Force carried out more than 500 sorties against targets in the Gaza Strip. That amounted to an attack from the air roughly every 18 minutes -- not counting hundreds of helicopter attacks, tank and navy shelling, and infantry raids. All of this on a territory similar in size to the US city of Seattle.
As the International Committee of the Red Cross noted in a report published in June, "during the 22 days of the Israeli military operation, nowhere in Gaza was safe for civilians," with "whole neighborhoods" turned "into rubble." With areas looking "like the epicenter of a massive earthquake," there is still "half a million tons of concrete rubble" to clear. [1]
By the end of an assault which targeted schools, homes, mosques, university buildings, police stations, ministries and the legislative council building, 3,600 housing units were totally destroyed, 2,700 sustained major damage and 52,000 houses need minor repair, according to a joint UNRWA-UNDP housing survey.
Even though Israel had banned the international media from entering the Gaza Strip to see for themselves what was unfolding, enough visuals and testimonies were getting out of the fenced-in territory for Israel to have what it would call a "PR nightmare" on its hands. Israel's spinners and spokespersons fell back on a stock set of responses and talking points.
Israel, they insisted, never targeted civilians -- its military was the most moral army in the world going to extraordinary lengths to protect the innocent. Hamas, on the other hand, was cynically using human shields, firing rockets while hiding amongst their own people. Israel was said to be acting purely in self-defense -- which country, we were asked, would passively tolerate such attacks on its own population?
This latter argument has been ably dealt with elsewhere; this article is more interested in what was happening on the ground in the Gaza Strip. [2] Here the claims of a cowardly terrorist army willing to risk the lives of their own compatriots is key: in order to maintain the fiction that the Israeli army does not target civilians or civilian infrastructure, there must be doubt cast on the "civilian" identity of the dead. So Palestinian fatality statistics are questioned or even scorned -- are we sure the dead were civilians? And when this is harder to deny -- when the morgues are full of women and children -- then the fallback is that the amoral Hamas fighters are to blame for forcing Israel to kill these unfortunates.
Sometimes, however, there were specific incidents of sufficiently immediate shock value -- even for the mainstream Western media -- that simply repeating the standard propaganda lines was not good enough. In these cases, the Israeli army spokespersons would issue a series of conflicting statements of denial, admission, and counter-claim, all in the hope that enough doubt is sown as to draw the sting out of the charge being made.
Before looking at an example of this, there is one other public relations tactic worth examining, used by Israel's defenders in the media during and after the assault -- citing the Jenin "precedent." In 2002, according to this standard propaganda line here reproduced in a 16 February Jerusalem Post editorial ("The first casualty of war: Truth"), "a grossly false narrative of massacre and massed [sic] killings was disseminated by Palestinian officials," and now, in 2009 in Gaza, history was repeating itself, as "the figure '1,300 Palestinians killed, most/many of them civilians'" becomes "embedded in the public consciousness."
The comparison with Jenin is instructive, but not in the way Israel's propagandists suggest: like Gaza this year, Israeli war crimes are denied and obfuscated with a PR operation of moral bluster, claims and retractions. According to Israeli spin, Palestinian "atrocity propaganda" and claims of a massacre in Jenin were disproved when the facts became known. In fact, groups like Human Rights Watch concluded that "many of the civilian deaths" they documented "amounted to unlawful or willful killings by the IDF [Israeli army]." HRW estimated that from 52 Palestinian deaths, at least 22 were civilians "including children, physically disabled, and elderly people." In the Western media, half a dozen victims in a high school shooting is a "massacre" -- as are the suicide bombings inside Israel. But it seems Palestinians cannot be victims of a massacre; only "collateral damage."
This Israeli narrative of the "false massacre" came in useful both in the immediate aftermath of Jenin, and for propaganda purposes during and after Operation Cast Lead. Writing for The Huffington Post on 13 April, Mort Zuckerman asked readers, "Remember another urban myth alleging thousands of citizens massacred in the battle against terrorism in Jenin in 2002 when it turned out no more than 54 died, most of them combatants?" Such an approach forgets Israel's own role in spreading confusion about casualties, and more importantly does the crucial work of distracting from the documented atrocities.
A good example from Operation Cast Lead of Israel's PR machine in action is what happened in Jabaliya on 6 January, when Israeli mortar rounds landed in a busy street outside a school run by UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestine refugees) sheltering those seeking a safe haven from the fighting. A number of people inside the school were injured, and dozens of Palestinians were killed and injured in the street.
For Israeli apologists this became a notorious example of the kind of deception they say is so prevalent. Canada's Globe and Mail featured a story in February alleging that UNRWA officials had helped propagate the claim that Israeli fire had actually hit the school itself ("Account of Israeli attack on Gaza school doesn't hold up to scrutiny," 29 January 2009). Subsequently, newspapers like Haaretz and others led with headlines like "UN backtracks on claim that deadly IDF strike hit Gaza school" (3 February 2009).
The reality -- which was even buried within the very same articles in many cases -- was that UNRWA had always said the attack hit outside the school. In fact, the Israeli military itself, in the immediate aftermath of the strike, said that "it had been returning fire against Palestinian fighters who were shooting mortar shells from within the school" ("UN says school in Gaza where 43 died wasn't hit by Israeli fire," The Washington Post, 7 February 2009).
Jonathan Miller, a journalist with UK television's Channel 4, did an excellent job of exposing this "manufactured controversy." After noting that UNRWA had "said from the outset that the mortars hit outside the school," Miller described how "another UN agency, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in one of its reports on daily incidents, erroneously stated that the mortars had actually hit the school," something later clarified. ("A tale of two Gaza schools," Channel4.com, 6 February 2009)
As Miller commented, Israel was "seizing on a minor error buried in an online publication by a UN agency" and using it as "a smokescreen" to divert attention from more serious incidents, such as the deadly white phosphorus attack "on the last day of the war at another UN-run school just 800 yards up the road."
The one case of a clear lie was highlighted in the report of the UN committee set up by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to investigate attacks on UN property and staff during the hostilities, a 27-page published summary of which was sent to the UN Security Council in May. The first of 11 recommendations by the UN team calls for "formal acknowledgment by the Government of Israel that its public statements alleging that Palestinians fired from within the UNRWA Jabalya school on 6 January and from within the UNRWA Field Office compound on 15 January were untrue and are regretted."
The truth of what happened in Gaza though has been emerging over recent months in various reports that catalog the multitude of crimes committed by the Israeli army. Crucially, what has been documented is not a series of individual mistakes or "bad apples," but evidence of Israel's systematic assault on the fabric of life in the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reported in March on fatalities during the offensive, confirming that there were over 1,400 Palestinians killed. Civilians made up 65 percent of the total, not including the 255 police officers killed by the Israeli army.
In April, Israeli human rights groups including B'Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel released a joint which said that "many civilians were killed in Gaza not due to 'mishaps' but as a direct result of the military's chosen policy implemented throughout the fighting." [3]
Earlier this month, Amnesty International published its own report into Operation Cast Lead, accusing Israel of committing "war crimes" and "acts of wanton destruction." Amnesty insisted that the hundreds of civilian deaths "cannot simply be dismissed as 'collateral damage' incidental to otherwise lawful attacks - or as mistakes." "Amnesty details Gaza 'war crimes," BBC News, 2 July 2009.
More evidence for the deliberate nature of the wide scale destruction has since emerged. On 23 April, Haaretz quoted "two infantry officers who held key positions during the fighting" who told how "we just leveled neighborhoods." British journalist Peter Beaumont wrote in May of "the aftermath of a wholesale urban un-planning through military force." ("Death and devastation in Gaza neatly filed and documented," The Guardian, 29 May 2009). Returning some weeks later, he noted that Israel's targets "suggested wider aims" than simply stopping rocket fire -- "not least the dismantling of Palestinian institutions." ("A life in ruins," The Observer, 5 July 2009)
In June, the BBC reported on the struggle of Gazan industries to rebuild, featuring a family-owned food manufacturer. The businessman, Yaser al-Wadiya, had "photographs of caterpillar tracks amid the ruins of the biscuit factory, which he believes the Israelis finished off with bulldozers after hitting it from the air." The same story then noted that "the UN's top humanitarian official, John Holmes, has accused Israel of the 'systematic levelling' of Gaza's industrial area." ("Gaza industries struggle to rebuild," BBC News, 26 June 2009)
With such a high proportion of civilian dead, it is no surprise that investigations into Israel's operation in Gaza have turned up shocking stories -- and asked difficult questions. In the introduction to Breaking the Silence's collection of testimonies by Israeli veterans of the Gaza assault, the group highlighted how the "bad apples" theory was insufficient: "the massive and unprecedented blow to the infrastructure and civilians of the Gaza strip were a direct result of IDF policy."
Just one month after Operation Cast Lead, Palestinian stories were being corroborated by the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who said "there appeared to be a consistent pattern of Palestinian families being killed by Israeli tank shells fired into their homes, apparently as they approached windows or stepped on to balconies." [4] A delegation of US attorneys visited the Gaza Strip and concluded that "Israeli forces" had indeed "deliberately targeted civilians" during the offensive. [5]
Palestinian testimonies have flooded in of crimes committed by the Israeli army in Gaza, and so have the investigations by human rights groups. At the end of June, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on the use by Israel of aerial drones in attacks that killed dozens of Palestinian civilians. HRW noted that the drones are "one of the most precise weapons in Israel's arsenal" yet "killed civilians who were not taking part in hostilities and were far from any fighting."
Also recently, Amnesty International's detailed study on Operation Cast Lead included cases of "close-ranging shootings" by Israeli soldiers, most of which involved "individuals, including children and women, who were shot at as they were fleeing their homes in search of shelter." [6] Others were simply "going about the daily activities." The human rights body reiterated that "wilful killings of unarmed civilians are war crimes."
A report into the number of children killed by Israel during the war on Gaza (over 300) showed that 38 percent of child fatalities were aged 0-11 years old. The "overwhelming majority" were "killed either whilst inside their own homes or within the near vicinity of their homes." [7] Here is one story:
At approximately 16:00 on 5 January 2009, Amal Olaiwa and four of her children were killed in the kitchen of their home in Shijaiyeh in the east of Gaza City, when the house was struck by an artillery shell. The shell smashed through a bedroom window and landed in the kitchen, decapitating Amal Olaiwa and killing three of her sons and one of her daughters. Three other members of the Olaiwa family were injured in the attack, including Amal's husband, Haider, and her eldest son, Muntasser, who both witnessed the attack.
The victims were identified as: Amal Olaiwa, age 40, Motassem Olaiwa, age 14, Momen Olaiwa, age 13, Lana Olaiwa, age 9 and Ismail Olaiwa, age 7.
Pausing on just some of the names of the victims is perhaps a good moment to make one final point. What the Palestinians ultimately need is not more reports, but action. The investigations are invaluable, of course, helping to show up the Israeli spin for what it is. But unless there is action by both the same civil society producing the evidence of war crimes, as well as the politicians, then we can be sure that more Palestinian names will be added to those of the Olaiwa family, and the hundreds more who perished in Gaza.
Ben White is a freelance journalist and writer whose articles have appeared in the Guardian's 'Comment is free', The Electronic Intifada, the New Statesman, and many others. He is the author of Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide (Pluto Press). He can be contacted at ben A T benwhite D O T org D O T uk.
Endnotes
[1] "Gaza: 1.5 million people trapped in despair," International Committee of the Red Cross, 29 June 2009 (accessed 18 July 2009).
[2] See for example, Nancy Kanwisher et al., "Reigniting Violence: How Do Ceasefires End?," The Huffington Post, 6 January 2009; Jim Holstun and Joanna Tinker, "Israel's fabricated rocket crisis," The Electronic Intifada, 6 January 2009.
[3] "Independent apparatus needed for investigation of Operation Cast Lead," B'Tselem, 22 April 2009
[4] "Gaza case studies: Weapons use," BBC News, 23 February 2009
[5] "American NLG Lawyers Release New Findings that Israel Violated International Law, US Domestic Law in Gaza," National Lawyers Guild press release, 2 April 2009.
[6] "Amnesty accuses Israel of using human shields in Gaza," Agence France Presse, 1 July 2009.
[7] "War Crimes Against Children," Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), May 2009.
Ringworm and Radiation
By Barry Chamish August 19, 2004  On August 14, at 9 PM, Israel's Channel Ten television screened a documentary film which exposes the ugliest secret of Israel's Labor party founders: the deliberate mass radiation poisoning of nearly all Sephardi youths of a generation. "The Ringworm Children" (translated in Hebrew as "100,000 Rays"), directed by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias, recently won the prize for "best documentary" at the Haifa International film festival, and in the past year has made the rounds of Jewish and Israeli film festivals around the world. But it had yet to come to Israeli television screens. The subject is the mass irradiation of hundreds of thousands of young Israeli immigrants from Middle Eastern countries -- Sephardim, as they are called today. The story goes like this: In 1951, the director general of the Israeli Health Ministry, Dr. Chaim Sheba, flew to America and returned with seven x-ray machines, supplied to him by the American army. They were to be used in a mass atomic experiment with an entire generation of Sephardi youths to be used as guinea pigs. Every Sephardi child was to be given 35,000 times the maximum dose of x-rays through his head. For doing so, the American government paid the Israeli government 300 million Israeli liras a year. The entire Health budget was 60 million liras. The money paid by the Americans is equivalent to billions of dollars today. To fool the parents of the victims, the children were taken away on "school trips" and their parents were later told the x-rays were a treatment for the scourge of scalpal ringworm. 6,000 of the children died shortly after their doses were given, while many of the rest developed cancers that killed thousands over time and are still killing them now. While living, the victims suffered from disorders such as epilepsy, amnesia, Alzheimer's disease, chronic headaches and psychosis. That is the subject of the documentary in cold terms. It is another matter to see the victims on the screen. To watch the Moroccan lady describe what getting 35,000 times the dose of allowable x-rays in her head feels like. "I screamed make the headache go away. Make the headache go away. Make the headache go away. But it never went away." To watch the bearded man walk hunched down the street. "I'm in my fifties and everyone thinks I'm in my seventies. I have to stoop when I walk so I won't fall over. They took my youth away with those x-rays." To watch the old lady who administered the doses to thousands of children: "They brought them in lines. First their heads were shaved and smeared in burning gel. Then a ball was put between their legs and the children were ordered not to drop it, so they wouldn't move. The children weren't protected over the rest of their bodies. There were no lead vests for them. I was told I was doing good by helping to remove ringworm. If I knew what dangers the children were facing, I would never have cooperated. Never!" Because the whole body was exposed to the rays, the genetic makeup of the children was often altered, affecting the next generation. We watch the woman with the distorted face explain, "All three of my children have the same cancers my family suffered. Are you going to tell me that's a coincidence?" The majority of the victims were Moroccan because they were the most numerous of the Sephardi immigrants. The generation that was poisoned became the country's perpetual poor and criminal class. It didn't make sense. The Moroccans who fled to France became prosperous and highly educated. The common explanation was that France got the rich, thus smart ones. The real explanation is that every French Moroccan child didn't have his brain cells fried with gamma rays. The film made it perfectly plain that this operation was no accident. The dangers of x-rays had been known for over forty years. We read the official guidelines for x-ray treatment in 1952. The maximum dose to be given a child in Israel was .5 rad. There was no mistake made. The children were deliberately poisoned. David Deri makes the point that only Sephardi children received the x-rays: "I was in class and the men came to take us on a tour. They asked our names. The Ashkenazi children were told to return to their seats. The dark children were put on the bus." The film presents a historian who first gives a potted history of the eugenics movement. In a later sound bite, he declares that the ringworm operation was a eugenics program aimed at weeding out the perceived weak strains of society. The Moroccan lady is back on the screen. "It was a Holocaust, a Sephardi Holocaust. And what I want to know is why no one stood up to stop it." David Deri, on film and then as a panel member, relates the frustration he encountered when trying to find his childhood medical records. "All I wanted to know was what they did to me. I wanted to know who authorized it. I wanted to trace the chain of command. But the Health Ministry told me my records were missing." Boaz Lev, the Health Ministry's spokesman chimes in: "Almost all the records were burned in a fire." We are told that a US law in the late '40s put a stop to the human radiation experiments conducted on prisoners, the mentally feeble and the like. The American atomic program needed a new source of human lab rats and the Israeli government supplied it. Here was the government cabinet at the time of the ringworm atrocities: Prime Minister - David Ben Gurion; Finance Minister - Eliezer Kaplan; Settlement Minister - Levi Eshkol; Foreign Minister - Moshe Sharrett; Health Minister - Yosef Burg; Labor Minister - Golda Meir; Police Minister - Amos Ben Gurion. The highest ranking non-cabinet post belonged to the Director General of the Defence Ministry, Shimon Peres. That a program involving the equivalent of billions of dollars of American government funds should be unknown to the Prime Minister of cash-strapped Israel is ridiculous. Ben Gurion had to have been in on the horrors and undoubtedly chose his son to be Police Minister in case anyone interfered with them. Finance Minister Eliezer Kaplan was rewarded for eternity with a hospital named after him near Rehovot. But he's not alone in this honor. Chaim Sheba, who ran Ringworm Incorporated, had a whole medical complex named after him. Needless to say, if there is an ounce of decency in the local medical profession, those hospital names will have to change. After the film ended, there was a panel discussion which included a Moroccan singer, David Edri, head of the Compensation Committee for Ringworm X-Ray Victims, and Boaz Lev, a spokesman for the Ministry Of Health. TV host Dan Margalit tried to put a better face on what he'd witnessed. He explained meekly that "the state was poor. It was a matter of day to day survival." Then he stopped. He knew there was no excusing the atrocities which the Sephardi children endured. But it was the Moroccan singer who summed up the experience best. "It's going to hurt, but the truth has to be told. If not, the wounds will never heal." There is one person alive who knows the truth: Shimon Peres. The only way to get to the truth and start the healing is to investigate him for his role in the mass poisoning of over 100,000 Sephardi children and youth. But here is why that won't happen. The film was aired at the same time as the highest-rated TV show of the year, the finale of Israel's talent-hunt show: "A Star Is Born." The next day, the newly-born star's photo took up half the front pages. There was not a word about "The Ringworm Children" in any paper, nor on the Internet. Until now. Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
Book review: "Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide"Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 27 July 2009 In a burst of uncharacteristic honesty, the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert asserted in 2007 that "[m]ore and more Palestinians ... want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one ... That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle - and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state." The apartheid paradigm here fearfully evoked by Olmert has crept slowly but surely into mainstream political discourse on the Palestine issue, but is still avoided by many who are otherwise supportive of the Palestinian cause. This is because the paradigm seems to offer a hostage to fortune: it is too easy for Israel's apologists to rebut it by instancing the many systemic differences between Israel and apartheid South Africa. What has often been overlooked is that the UN General Assembly's International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (November 1973) extended the term to "similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa" while defining the crime in more general terms as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them." Israel's practices need not be compared with those of apartheid South Africa -- which they often resemble -- but evaluated on their own terms in the light of the Convention. The UN itself contributed to the occultation of the Convention's relevance by omitting it from its 2002 "Compilation of International Instruments," apparently on the mistaken belief that with the end of South Africa's apartheid regime it had become obsolete. In 1987 the Israeli academic Uri Davis published Israel: An Apartheid State, following it in 2004 with Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within. In 2001 he founded the Movement Against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine (MAIAP). These hints were taken up by organizations like the Stop the Wall Campaign, which consistently proposed the apartheid paradigm as something more than a mere analogy with South Africa. The "A-word" made a dramatic entry on the world stage with the publication in 2006 of former US President Jimmy Carter's Palestine Peace not Apartheid which, however, used the term rather diffusely and fallaciously exempted "sovereign" Israel (as distinct from the West Bank and Gaza Strip occupied in 1967) from its application. Nonetheless, the term had entered the mainstream and now seems likely to stay there. In this context, Ben White's new book fulfills a consolidating role, drawing together the various strands of the apartheid debate within a number of different contexts. In his introduction White cites the UN Convention's definition of apartheid and highlights a number of the "inhuman acts" that it cites, while underlining the differences as well as the similarities between the cases of Israel and South Africa. While respecting White's reluctance to over-elaborate, it might have been worthwhile to extend this chapter a little by, for example, stressing Uri Davis' repeated emphasis that apartheid is in essence "the regulation of racism in law," and not merely a catalogue of inhuman acts. The first part of the book accurately traces the entire history of "the conflict" from 1897 (the first Zionist Congress) to the present in a mere 28 pages, a breathtaking achievement indeed. White is uncompromising and surely correct in seeing the apartheid paradigm at work from the foundation of Israel in 1948, and in diagnosing its premises in the utterances and machinations of the likes of Herzl (founder of political Zionism) and Ben-Gurion (Zionist "pioneer" and the first Israeli Prime Minister). Part II characterizes the specificities of Israeli apartheid under 17 headings from "Israel a state for some of its citizens" through "The occupation" and "The separation wall" (apartheid, of course, being the Afrikaans word for separation) to "The fragmentation of Palestine." White reminds us that "around half of the entire Palestinian population as a whole are not ruled by Israel at all: they are the refugees and their descendants who were denationalized, expelled and forcibly kept out of their homeland by the first, dramatic acts of Israeli apartheid." Part III is entitled, self-explanatorily, "Towards Inclusion and Peace -- Resisting Israeli Apartheid." White focuses first on organizations on the ground in Israel/Palestine -- Adalah (the Legal Centre for Minority Rights in Israel), ADRID (Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally Displaced), ICAHD (Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions), Popular Committees Against the Wall (particularly those in the Palestinian villages of Budrus and Bilin), and Zochrot ("remembrance" in Hebrew), "an organization made up of Israelis concerned with raising awareness of the Nakba amongst their own people" (Nakba, Arabic for "catastrophe," is the name Palestinians give to their forced expulsion from their homeland in 1947-48). Next he turns to "International Solidarity," concentrating on activities rather than organizations: boycotts, divestment, sanctions (three strategies often grouped together as BDS), protest and education, support for grassroots Palestinian and Israeli groups, and trips to the region, whether of a "fact-finding" or more committed nature. In pondering "a different kind of future," White stresses that there is no point in "trying to 'undo' things that cannot be undone." He castigates rhetoric about a "two-state solution" or demands that Palestinians should "compromise," as if the solution could by-pass the dissolution of Israeli apartheid. It is only by "guaranteeing the collective and individual rights of all the peoples of Palestine/Israel, that the people of the region can realize the kind of peaceful tomorrow previous generations have been denied." White concludes with an invaluable list of "frequently asked questions" plus their answers, and a useful glossary. For all those engaged in the "cleaner struggle" against Israeli apartheid that Ehud Olmert so dreads, this little book is an invaluable tool. For those who simply wish to brush up rapidly on the facts of the Israel/Palestine issue, it is equally invaluable. Raymond Deane is a composer and political activist (www.raymonddeane.com)Related Links
By HANNAH MERMELSTEIN I saw this sign as I was entering Nablus last week, again on my way to Ramallah, and again near Bethlehem. The phrase is printed in Hebrew, presumably by Israeli settlers, on huge signs throughout the West Bank. Israeli racism rarely shocks me anymore, but its blatant display still makes me stop and catch my breath as I translate it into other contexts. Imagine driving through the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood in a US city or town and seeing a enormous sign that says, “The war is with the Blacks.” I think about security. Israel’s abuse of the word has rendered the concept almost meaningless in the region, but the importance of security on individual and communal levels cannot be underestimated. However, most discussions I see in the media about security ignore the Palestinian people’s right to security. “The war is with the Arabs” is a new sign, as far as I know, but for years in the West Bank I have seen stars of David scrawled on Palestinian shops and homes, and signs like “Death to Arabs” and “Kahane was right” (Kahane was an extremist political leader who promoted ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people; this sign is essentially equivalent to “Hitler was right” in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood). But signs are not only created; they are also destroyed. Since 1948, Palestinian people inside Israel have experienced erasure and denial of their identities that is perhaps stronger than that of any other group of Palestinian people. I visited a friend in Lyd last week who lives on Giborai Yisrael (“Heroes of Israel”) Street. Driving around the Palestinian neighborhoods in Lyd, we passed roads bearing the names of Herzl, Jabotinsky, and other Zionist leaders. None of the old Arabic street names remain. Even large cities with considerable Palestinian populations are now seeing Arabic names officially erased from signs. In Arabic script, “Yaffa” will become “Yafo,” “Nasra” will become “Natzeret,” and “Al Quds” will become “Yerushalayim.” Lack of security goes beyond denial of identity and history as visually expressed through signs. A Palestinian friend with Israeli citizenship told me he has heard a rumor that a huge piece of land in Jordan is being cleared and built up for the eventual arrival of the Palestinian population of Israel after they are transferred from their homes. “It may be conspiracy theory,” he said, “but I don’t know.” “I’d like to think that Israel couldn’t get away with that,” I responded. “Of course they can,” another friend from Lyd said, “and if the conditions are right, they will.” Imagine living day to day thinking you might be expelled from your country in the near future. Or in Gaza, wondering if you will be killed tomorrow, or if you will ever be able to come in and out of your country at will. Or in the West Bank, if your son will be arrested, or if you will be able to get through the checkpoint in the morning to get to work. Or in Jerusalem, if your residency will be stripped or your house destroyed. Imagine little correlation between choice and consequence, an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect. If you are just as likely to get shot and killed sipping tea in your doorway, or sitting in your fourth grade classroom, or participating in a demonstration, or joining the armed resistance, is it any surprise that some choose each? A friend of mine from the West Bank once told me that she never feels safe, so safety is not a consideration for her in making decisions. As much as I may try, I cannot truly imagine this lack of control. I met a woman in Jerusalem who was displaced from her home by settlers, physically removed from her house by dozens of Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night. Twice a refugee (1948 and 2008), Um Kamel currently lives in a tent near her house that has been destroyed and re-pitched six times in the past six months. This is perhaps the height of insecurity, yet Um Kamel stays strong and determined. Many in Palestine would call it sumoud, or steadfastness. This kind of strength is seen remarkably often in Palestine, and indicates a deeper security that comes in part from faith. Faith in God, sometimes, but also faith in each other, in the justice of one’s cause, in the tide of history that has shown that no single occupation in Palestine lasts forever. This, of course, is also Israel’s deepest fear. That no matter how many walls they build, how many people they imprison, how many homes they destroy, how many signs they erase, and how many people they expel, true security will remain elusive, and eventually, Zionism will fail. As many older Palestinian people have said to me, with security, “We have lived through many occupations. This too shall pass.” Hannah Mermelstein is co-founder of Birthright Unplugged and Students Boycott Apartheid. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and works with the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel and the Palestine Education Project. She can be reached at hmermels@hotmail.com
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