On Jan. 18, 2009, after 22 days of war, the lives of all Gazans were entangled and broken in the strip’s rubble-filled craters. People worked to retrieve the bodies which lay rotting under heavy slabs of concrete and mangled iron rods. Gaza’s overcrowded cemeteries now had to accommodate over 1,300 more corpses.
One year later, bombed-out buildings still stand, pockmarked and gutted, vestiges of more hopeful times, buildings morphed into unwanted monuments of war.
Little is allowed into the territory located on the Mediterranean Sea. But later this month, hundreds of international activists will attempt to enter the strip via Egypt to take part in the Gaza Freedom March. The march, as it is envisaged, will be a historic non-violent protest in a region known for a history of violence.
The world’s eyes will be, however fleetingly, upon these people of all races, creeds and nationalities who will have left the comfort of their homes to march, despite Israel’s siege, with hordes of Palestinians in Gaza—misery’s palm treed sanctum.
It can be dizzying to attempt to trace back in memory Gaza’s inexorable descent into hope’s abyss, but the world will need to if it is to understand why so many people since the war feel they can longer stand idly by watching civilians wither in this hell-disaster.
Gaza and the West Bank have been under Israeli occupation since the Six Day War—launched in 1967 when Israel’s air force attacked Egypt. The occupied Palestinian territories, constituting 22 percent of what had once been mandate Palestine, came under direct Israeli military control. Resistance to Israeli subjugation inside the territories was relatively passive until it boiled over in 1987 into what became known as the First Intifada, or Palestinian uprising.
The Intifada erupted in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp after a traffic accident near the Erez crossing killed four Palestinians. Word spread that the car accident had been an act of revenge for the fatal stabbing of an Israeli shopping in Gaza the previous day. The car accident and the rumor it spurred may have been a catalyst but anger over Israeli repressions—in the form of house demolitions, mass curfews, extrajudicial killings and torture, to name but a few—had been brewing for years.
Palestinians in Jabalia say they could no longer tolerate the rule of the Israeli military authority with its constant patrols through the camp’s narrow alleyways, and the beatings the soldiers administered to anyone caught out at night. Palestinians were tired of the abuse. The abuse dished out by Israeli bosses in the morning, Israeli soldiers in the afternoons and military patrols at night, which marched through the garbage-strewn laneways and burst into people’s homes arresting young men and dragging them off to interrogation suites.
The men, who, as the cheap pool of indigenous labor went by the thousands to work in Israel for Jewish bosses, had seen what life was like on the other side of the checkpoints. Many of the workers were, in fact, from those very villages beyond Gaza in southern Israel where they were employed, for nearly 80 percent of Gazans are not from Gaza but are refugees from what is now Israel, never allowed to return home.
Once the Intifada had begun, Palestinians also turned on each other. Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the Israelis were summarily executed by the cesspool where Jabalia’s sewage accumulated and permeated into the sand. Children took over the streets and threw stones at anything that moved. No cars were spared. Tires burned in the streets.
The various Palestinian organizations painted their emblems on walls and distributed pamphlets. There were the nationalists, the communists, the Islamists and the secularists. Leaflets were distributed listing the names of Palestinian traitors or directing clashes between Palestinian youth and Israeli forces throughout the occupied territories. Villages proclaimed themselves independent entities, refusing to recognize the authority of the Israeli administration. The Palestinians rose up, determined to shake off the yoke of colonial rule.
The photos of Palestinian youths taking on Israeli tanks and armored vehicles with stones became iconic. But the First Intifada is, in fact, better characterized by civil disobedience in the form of general strikes, boycotts of Israeli products and the refusal to pay the exorbitant taxes demanded of them from their occupiers.
The Israelis responded in brutal force. Soldiers were told to break the bones of Palestinian protesters—a policy encouraged by then Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who later went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, for the signing of the Oslo Accords. Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist in 1995 for being too soft on the Palestinians.
The U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 605 at the beginning of the First Intifada citing Israel for violating the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. By the uprising’s end in 1993, over a hundred Israeli civilians and around 60 soldiers had been killed by Palestinians. Well over a thousand Palestinians had been killed by Israelis. The lopsided death toll has persisted to this day.
Tensions were again running at boiling point after the Oslo accords failed to bring meaningful change to the Palestinians—Israeli settlement construction and expansion on occupied lands continued unabated—and the Camp David Summit in 2000 ended without a settlement being reached. Barak’s offer, often misleadingly described as generous in the media, presented Palestinians with only a sense of sovereignty over East Jerusalem’s holy sites and real sovereignty only over 64 percent of the 22 percent left of mandate Palestine. Violence broke out in September when Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon provocatively visited the Temple Mount compound, site of the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, and considered the third holiest site in Islam, flanked by hundreds of riot police.
Protests were brutally repressed by Israeli security forces. Clashes spread throughout the West Bank, Gaza and Israel proper. The death toll soared as Israel relied on its vastly superior military to quash Palestinian fighting, and Palestinian armed groups used suicide bombers to target Israeli civilians, military personnel and settlers.
The suicide bomber first came to Israel proper in 1994, some 27 years after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began, and about a decade after the tactic proved successful in pushing back the Israeli army to the South of Lebanon during Israel’s occupation of that country.
Hundreds of Israeli civilians perished during the Second Intifada. Though the Second Intifada was never officially declared over—unsurprising considering it had never had a central leadership to declare its start in the first place—violence had waned by 2008. Roughly 1,000 Israelis had died compared to a staggering 5,000 Palestinians.
But, significantly for Gaza, in 2006, Israel attacked Lebanon after two of its soldiers on a border post were kidnapped by Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group. Violations of the so-called “blue line,” the border demarcation between Lebanon and Israel published by the U.N. after Israel’s withdrawal from the country in 2000, after 18 years of occupation, were frequent. Israel, in particular, had been crossing the blue line on average three times daily prior to its war on Lebanon. The kidnapping was the casus belli Israel had been waiting for to put into motion its pre-planned war. Some 43 Israeli civilians died during the destruction of Lebanon. Israel killed over a thousand Lebanese civilians. Amnesty International’s fact-finding mission to Lebanon after the war found the civilian deaths were the direct result of Israeli policy.
Far from beaten, Hezbollah came out as the ideological winner of the war, having stood up to Israel’s military might. It was a humiliating defeat for Israel, which had vowed to crush the militant group, and influenced its plan to launch a crushing assault on the defenseless population of Gaza some two years later. Israel needed to restore its deterrence capacity; basically its ability to inflict tremendous damage and suffering on a would-be aggressor’s population.
In 2005, with much fanfare, Gaza’s illegal Israeli settler population was pulled out from the strip. Maintaining the settler population in the strategically and economically uninteresting coastal strip had cost the state much, and its nearly 1.4 million Muslims threatened the Jewish identity of the State of Israel if it were to be even ostensibly democratic. Pulling out of Gaza was in no way a sign that Israel had decided to begin abiding by international law and to stop transferring its population to occupied lands. Far from it, Israeli colonization of the West Bank only intensified. According to the Israeli Interior Ministry, the settler population of the West Bank grew by nearly 6 percent in 2006; more than quadruple the rate of the previous year.
But even with the settlers gone, Gaza was not allowed to prosper. Israel may have removed 8,000 Israeli settlers but it remained the legal occupier of Gaza as it continued to exercise effective control over the strip. Israel controls Gaza’s borders, including the sea and air, it intervenes militarily at will, and it controls Gaza’s infrastructure—water, electricity, fuel, imports and exports. As thousands of Gazans began to hope they would be allowed to create a small but affluent independent state on the Mediterranean, the opposite soon became true as Gaza was intentionally de-developed by a punishing siege.
Israel tightened its grip over Gaza after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. Western sanctions ensued. The Palestinians’ vote for Hamas was not a vote for terror or Islamism, but a vote against Fatah’s ineptitude and corruption. Hamas, an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, has been internationally reviled for its anti-Israel rhetoric and use of suicide bombings, but it was originally supported by Israel as an Islamic counterweight to Fatah, the secular nationalist political organization.
Since 2004, Hamas has softened its tone on Israel, stating that it would offer Israel de facto recognition in exchange for a Palestinian state on 1967 borders. Since 2002, the entire Arab world has offered Israel full recognition and normalization of relations if it withdraws to 1967 borders and finds a just settlement to the Palestinian refugee crisis. But Israel does not recognize the Palestinian’s right to exist. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party states in its platform that “The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”
In June of 2006, Palestinians captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, in a cross-border raid. Hamas has used Shalit as a negotiating tool in an attempt to obtain the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. Shalit is the only Israeli in Palestinian custody, while literally thousands of faceless Palestinians languish in Israeli prisons. Hundreds are kept in administrative detention—detention without charge or trial. Israel launched military operations against the Gaza Strip in response to the kidnapping and violence between the two foes escalated.
In 2007, Hamas pre-empted an American-backed plan for forces loyal to Fatah to take over the coastal strip. Gunfights raged on the streets, as Palestinian fighters turned their guns on one another. Since then, the crossings into Gaza have been closed. Only a minimum of basic humanitarian goods has been allowed to pass through. A lack of fuel and electricity has devastated Gaza’s sanitation, health care and water services. Gaza has been deconstructed and its population has become wholly dependent on the black market. Goods are smuggled into the territory via underground tunnels from Egypt. And yet, the situation was to become unbelievably worse in the winter of 2008.
Since 2001, Palestinian groups had been firing unsophisticated rockets into southern Israel. The attacks indiscriminately damage streets, cars, homes and schools, and severely disrupt daily life as civilians are forced to scramble for bomb shelters, but they are rarely deadly. As of Jan. 18, 2009, a total of 28 Israelis had been killed by rockets. Rocket attacks from Gaza spiked in 2006 as Israel tightened its grip over the beleaguered strip and launched military operations against it. In 2006, only 23 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, a relatively small number compared to the 660 Palestinians killed by Israel that same year.
Rocket attacks are wholly illegal under international law since they lack the targeting capabilities to avoid civilian casualties. Israel’s siege of Gaza is also illegal as it collectively punishes the entire civilian population of the strip.
On June 19, 2008, Hamas and Israel reached a ceasefire. What happened during the ceasefire is of critical importance to understanding the context of Israel’s war on Gaza, launched later that year—a war foreshadowed when Israel’s deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, had threatened a Holocaust on Gaza a few months before the ceasefire came into effect.
Hamas abided by the ceasefire despite Israel’s failure to lift its siege. Rocket fire from the strip was reduced by 97 percent. The rockets that were fired were from groups other than Hamas, and in response to the killing of associates by Israel in the West Bank. It was Israel which broke the ceasefire on Nov. 4, 2008, killing 6 Palestinians. Hamas only resumed firing rockets after Israel broke the ceasefire.
Israel had been planning its attack on Gaza for months. As Israel had been preparing for a negotiated ceasefire, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the Israel Defense Forces to plan for war. A very close historical parallel can be drawn with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization in Lebanon had been abiding by a ceasefire for almost a year and pursuing diplomatic methods instead of resorting to violence. The PLO’s restraint frightened Israel as it threatened to render Arafat a legitimate negotiating partner for peace in the eyes of the west. So Israel used an assassination attempt on an Israeli diplomat in London by an anti-Arafat group as casus belli to attack and invade Lebanon. Later the same year, with its troops in Beirut, the Israeli Defense Forces sent its Phalangist militia allies into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and watched on as the camps’ civilian population was systematically butchered. Then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was held personally responsible by Israel’s own Kahan Commission. Sharon went on to become Israel’s prime minister in 2001.
Fast-forward to Dec. 2008, in Gaza. Hamas was pursuing diplomatic means and this terrified Israel lest Hamas be seen as an able negotiating partner. Determined to crush and delegitimize Hamas, it schemed to attack Gaza. The war’s timing (start: US election; end: Obama’s inauguration) was deliberate and impeccable. The beginning of the war also coincided with upcoming elections in Israel. Tzipi Livni, the foreign affairs minister and leader of the Kadima Party, as well as Ehud Barak, Defense Minister and head of the Labor Party, were both candidates to become Prime Minister.
On Dec. 27, 2008, Israel attacked Gaza. Some 22 days later over 1,300 Gazans were dead, including hundreds of women and children. The Israelis lost 13 people, including three soldiers accidently killed by its own military. Around 15 percent of all buildings in Gaza were damaged. Around 50,000 or more Gazans were homeless. Israel damaged or destroyed 50 U.N. facilities, 21 medical facilities, 1,500 factories and workshops, 20 mosques and 10 water sewage pipes. Schools and universities came under attack. The estimated damages at the war’s end stood at two billion dollars. Hamas remained as strong as ever.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International accused Israel of war crimes, including the possible murder of unarmed civilians waving white flags. On Nov. 5, 2009, the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the Goldstone report, a U.N. investigation which found both Israel and Palestinians militants guilty of war crimes. The investigation was headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, a South African Jew whose daughter lives in Israel, and a former war crimes prosecutor at the U.N. tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The 575-page report accused Israel of committing war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. It also accused Hamas of war crimes for its indiscriminate rocket attacks, but the brunt of the criticism was reserved for Israel whose war crimes were far more extensive and destructive.
Little has changed in Gaza since the war’s end. Israel refuses to allow much of anything to pass through. Egypt also enforces a blockade in the South of the strip at the behest of the Israelis and the Americans, and to contain Hamas which the Egyptian government sees as a threat.
The earth beneath Egypt’s border is crisscrossed with tunnels that Israel periodically bombs. Reconstruction materials have not been allowed through so many Gazans still live in tents next to the rubble of their homes. The unemployment rate in the Gaza strip was above 45 percent before the start of the war, the highest in the world. Now Gaza has no functioning economy to speak of. Gaza’s fishermen are not even allowed to cast their nets more than three miles from shore without being harassed or attacked by the Israeli navy.
The material damages to Gaza are calculable, the psychological trauma is not. Many school children are too afraid to go to school. Men search in despair for ways to provide for their families. Gaza’s people have been turned into beggars and smugglers. If food does not come through the tunnels then it likely comes from the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.
International activists have attempted to sail to Gaza from Cyprus laden with humanitarian supplies and toys for Gaza’s children. They have been stopped and arrested by the Israelis. In the 1940s it was the British who intercepted ships of European Jews attempting to reach Palestine. Now it is the Israelis who want to prevent any immigration to Gaza.
This month, despite the pernicious siege, hundreds of people from around the world, including authors, students, politicians, artists and a holocaust survivor, will cross the Sinai together and attempt to enter Gaza.
In 1930, thousands of Indians marched on the Dharasana Salt Works. They were viciously beaten, but British colonial policy in India was shown to be unsustainable. The Gaza Freedom March is a part of a larger peaceful protest movement for Palestinian rights. Its adherents hope their methods will attract the world’s attention to the Palestinian struggle for independence, and render Israeli bullets as impotent as British guns were made by Ghandi and his supporters.
