Gaza is more than a simplistic morality play/By Mick Hume
THE TIMES, 29/12/08):
Those images of the carnage caused by Israeli airstrikes inside the Gaza Strip brought to mind another film of bomb victims that I watched early this month in Sderot, an Israeli town targeted by rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
In a bomb-proof room at the ambulance station Tiger Avraham, the chief paramedic, showed us his grisly home movie of the aftermath of an attack. We were told that 23 Israeli civilians had been killed, more than a thousand injured and many more traumatised by rockets since 2004. Nobody mentioned the two Gazan youths killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before our visit.
Mr Avraham embodies the Sderot siege mentality: “It is not easy to live here. For five years my little one has slept in a bomb shelter.” He could leave for Tel Aviv or America, but “I am here because it gives a sense of meaning to my life. Here I am not only a Jew, I’m an Israeli.”
Asked his view of Palestinians, he replied: “I am a health worker, not a politician. I hope for peace in the end.” Many of his neighbours have welcomed the military response to rocket attacks that increased to almost 200 in the week since Hamas formally ended its ceasefire with Israel.
In Sderot, where they get a 15-second warning of an attack, the streets are lined with bomb shelters and schools are covered by concrete arches. Behind the police station the twisted remains of rockets are on show - mostly crudely made from lampposts, with some more sophisticated Iranian devices. Many observers object that the airstrikes are disproportionate: the weekend body count was one Israeli killed, more than 290 reported dead in Gaza. The Israelis will counter that those who start a war on civilians are in no position to demand restraint.
To make sense of a conflict in which both sides claim to be victims requires more than an emotional response to gory pictures. I support the Palestinian right to self-determination. But I am disturbed by the rise of anti-Israeli sentiments in Britain and the West, as when my old friends on the Left declared: “We are all Hezbollah now.”
There is a tendency to reduce the Middle East to a simplistic morality play where Good battles Evil, projecting our own victim politics on to other people’s complex conflicts.
The Israelis I met bear no comparison with the caricature of expansionist “Zio-Nazis”. These attacks seem very different from 1967 when Israel occupied Gaza and other territories after the Six-Day War. The Zionist dream of Israel reclaiming the biblical lands is over. Most Israelis seem prepared to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders and abandon Gaza (as they did in 2005) and most of the West Bank while bunkering down behind the big new security barriers that snake across the countryside. An insecure Israel will still lash out when it feels threatened, as it did in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza now, even though such military spasms are likely to be ineffective and even counter-productive.
Israel’s initial response to rocket attacks in this year’s ceasefire was to lock the door by closing the border with Gaza. When we visited the deserted Erez crossing, little food or fuel was getting through, and most of what Gazans survived on was smuggled through tunnels on the Egyptian side. At the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) base, the major commanding the shockingly young men and women soldiers admitted that it was hard “to balance the civilian needs of the Palestinian population” with the security demands of Israelis. “But we will take all steps to protect our soldiers. We just want peace and quiet. If they stop firing at us, more food will go inside.”
His PowerPoint presentation made clear that “the main aim for the IDF” was not to stop the rockets, but to rescue Gilad Schalit, a soldier held in Gaza since June 2006. That seemed a remarkably defensive priority for an army of occupation.
Peering through binoculars over the security fence at the concrete blocks of Gaza, the only sign of life was grazing sheep. Inside, more than 1.5million Palestinians live in grim conditions, governed by the Islamic movement Hamas, which won the 2006 election and last year drove out the last of its opponents in Fatah.
There is talk now of the need to uphold the integrity of the Gaza Strip as Palestinian territory. Yet Gaza is little more than a glorified refugee camp, propped up by 300 international bodies. Is this really for what the Palestinians have been fighting for so long? The other Palestinian territory is the West Bank, where Fatah remains the big movement and the Palestinian Authority sits amid the rubble in Ramallah, while the IDF watches warily from security barriers. How, one might ask, are these two stunted pseudo-statelets at the edges of Israel supposed to be united as a sovereign Palestine? There is futuristic talk of ceding a strip of territory for a tunnel or an elevated roadway to join them.
Back in the real Israel of today, all the big parties in the forthcoming elections agree on the eventual need for a two-state solution. Yet perhaps the Cold War-style stand-off around Gaza, now going through a hot phase, shows that a divisive “two-state solution” is already taking shape on the ground and in hearts and minds: a new partition where ghettoised Palestinians vent their fury at bunkered Israelis who sporadically lash out. When I was there, all sides talked not of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas but of “the lull”.
There is much debate about what impact President-elect Obama might have. Yet the history of the Middle East suggests that outside interference offers no solution. I felt like a tourist taking snapshots of somebody else’s life-and-death issues, a conflict that the peoples themselves ultimately have to resolve.
Back in Sderot, Mr Avraham, the paramedic spoke of his future hopes: “I am left-wing, I believe in peace, we don’t have a choice. I hope to live here side by side one day.”
Just so long, many might sadly say today, as those sides have a security barrier between them.
Those images of the carnage caused by Israeli airstrikes inside the Gaza Strip brought to mind another film of bomb victims that I watched early this month in Sderot, an Israeli town targeted by rockets fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
In a bomb-proof room at the ambulance station Tiger Avraham, the chief paramedic, showed us his grisly home movie of the aftermath of an attack. We were told that 23 Israeli civilians had been killed, more than a thousand injured and many more traumatised by rockets since 2004. Nobody mentioned the two Gazan youths killed in an Israeli airstrike the day before our visit.
Mr Avraham embodies the Sderot siege mentality: “It is not easy to live here. For five years my little one has slept in a bomb shelter.” He could leave for Tel Aviv or America, but “I am here because it gives a sense of meaning to my life. Here I am not only a Jew, I’m an Israeli.”
Asked his view of Palestinians, he replied: “I am a health worker, not a politician. I hope for peace in the end.” Many of his neighbours have welcomed the military response to rocket attacks that increased to almost 200 in the week since Hamas formally ended its ceasefire with Israel.
In Sderot, where they get a 15-second warning of an attack, the streets are lined with bomb shelters and schools are covered by concrete arches. Behind the police station the twisted remains of rockets are on show - mostly crudely made from lampposts, with some more sophisticated Iranian devices. Many observers object that the airstrikes are disproportionate: the weekend body count was one Israeli killed, more than 290 reported dead in Gaza. The Israelis will counter that those who start a war on civilians are in no position to demand restraint.
To make sense of a conflict in which both sides claim to be victims requires more than an emotional response to gory pictures. I support the Palestinian right to self-determination. But I am disturbed by the rise of anti-Israeli sentiments in Britain and the West, as when my old friends on the Left declared: “We are all Hezbollah now.”
There is a tendency to reduce the Middle East to a simplistic morality play where Good battles Evil, projecting our own victim politics on to other people’s complex conflicts.
The Israelis I met bear no comparison with the caricature of expansionist “Zio-Nazis”. These attacks seem very different from 1967 when Israel occupied Gaza and other territories after the Six-Day War. The Zionist dream of Israel reclaiming the biblical lands is over. Most Israelis seem prepared to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders and abandon Gaza (as they did in 2005) and most of the West Bank while bunkering down behind the big new security barriers that snake across the countryside. An insecure Israel will still lash out when it feels threatened, as it did in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza now, even though such military spasms are likely to be ineffective and even counter-productive.
Israel’s initial response to rocket attacks in this year’s ceasefire was to lock the door by closing the border with Gaza. When we visited the deserted Erez crossing, little food or fuel was getting through, and most of what Gazans survived on was smuggled through tunnels on the Egyptian side. At the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) base, the major commanding the shockingly young men and women soldiers admitted that it was hard “to balance the civilian needs of the Palestinian population” with the security demands of Israelis. “But we will take all steps to protect our soldiers. We just want peace and quiet. If they stop firing at us, more food will go inside.”
His PowerPoint presentation made clear that “the main aim for the IDF” was not to stop the rockets, but to rescue Gilad Schalit, a soldier held in Gaza since June 2006. That seemed a remarkably defensive priority for an army of occupation.
Peering through binoculars over the security fence at the concrete blocks of Gaza, the only sign of life was grazing sheep. Inside, more than 1.5million Palestinians live in grim conditions, governed by the Islamic movement Hamas, which won the 2006 election and last year drove out the last of its opponents in Fatah.
There is talk now of the need to uphold the integrity of the Gaza Strip as Palestinian territory. Yet Gaza is little more than a glorified refugee camp, propped up by 300 international bodies. Is this really for what the Palestinians have been fighting for so long? The other Palestinian territory is the West Bank, where Fatah remains the big movement and the Palestinian Authority sits amid the rubble in Ramallah, while the IDF watches warily from security barriers. How, one might ask, are these two stunted pseudo-statelets at the edges of Israel supposed to be united as a sovereign Palestine? There is futuristic talk of ceding a strip of territory for a tunnel or an elevated roadway to join them.
Back in the real Israel of today, all the big parties in the forthcoming elections agree on the eventual need for a two-state solution. Yet perhaps the Cold War-style stand-off around Gaza, now going through a hot phase, shows that a divisive “two-state solution” is already taking shape on the ground and in hearts and minds: a new partition where ghettoised Palestinians vent their fury at bunkered Israelis who sporadically lash out. When I was there, all sides talked not of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas but of “the lull”.
There is much debate about what impact President-elect Obama might have. Yet the history of the Middle East suggests that outside interference offers no solution. I felt like a tourist taking snapshots of somebody else’s life-and-death issues, a conflict that the peoples themselves ultimately have to resolve.
Back in Sderot, Mr Avraham, the paramedic spoke of his future hopes: “I am left-wing, I believe in peace, we don’t have a choice. I hope to live here side by side one day.”
Just so long, many might sadly say today, as those sides have a security barrier between them.
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