Gaza Destroyed

A Desolation that Will Never Be Peace

There are times when writing feels like trying to speak in the midst of a howling gale, and the 21st century has often felt like that to me. This is an age where people slaughter airplane passengers and office workers in the name of God; where you bomb cities and torture people and call it spreading democracy or counterterrorism; where you murder old people and partygoers and call it resistance.

But even in these grim decades, where the next worst thing always seems to be waiting round the corner, the horror of what is now unfolding in Gaza plumbs new depths. Two days ago an Israeli military spokesman pledged to turn Gaza City into a ‘city of tents.’ This morning I woke up to discover that the Israeli military has ordered 1.1 million people in Gaza City to leave their homes and move south within 24 hours.

This is first of all, an abomination - a genuinely monstrous act that only makes ‘sense’ within the grim and shallow logic of counterterrorism. It’s an act that will reverberate for decades, and will stain the name of the country that carried it out and the countries that allowed it to happen. It will shake our flimsy international ‘order’ to its foundations, and plunge Israel, the Middle East and the wider world into a new era of conflict with no endpoint, no possibility of ‘victory’ - nothing but death, destruction and the toxic spread of fascistic, religious and ethnic hatred.

It is an act of collective punishment of a whole people, and it is very likely to become an act of ethnic cleansing, carried out under the rubric of counterinsurgency, retaliation and ‘protection’, which makes the entire population of Gaza responsible for the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas last weekend.

It doesn’t matter how loudly Israel says it’s not doing this - this is what it’s actually doing. And let’s remember - because too many people forget or never knew - that collective punishment has been the governing principle of Israeli military policy ever since the state was founded.

In Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank, the principle has always been the same: when Israel is attacked it attacks the civilian population that the attackers come from.

It doesn’t matter whether such attacks are directed against civilians or military targets. The logic is always the same: to ‘deter’ further terrorist attacks, Israel must turn the civilian population against whatever armed organisation is attacking it and punish the population for supporting or not opposing these organisations in the first place.

This principle has been applied over and over again, against Palestinian raiders in the 1950s; against the PLO in Jordan, against Shi’a populations in South Lebanon, and repeatedly, in Gaza. It has never ‘worked’ even on its own terms. It hasn’t made Israel secure. As last weekend’s atrocities proved, it hasn’t deterred anyone. On the contrary, it has created a vast reservoir of hatred and resentment throughout the countries and communities where it has been applied.

Let them hate as long as they fear may have worked for the Romans, in the short term, but it won’t work for Israel. It can’t work, in a world where killing people is not that difficult, for anyone who wants to do it, and where political problems do not have military solutions.

Violence begets violence, and it begets hatred and it begets vengeance, and this should be obvious to anyone with even a Beano-level understanding of humanity.

Because, odd as it seems to those who cheerlead operations like the one that is now unfolding, people who are being bombed, whatever they may think of the armed organizations that ‘invited’ such attacks, always know where the bombs come from. They know who is driving them from their homes or killing them in their homes, and they know that a country that behaves like this is their enemy, and they will fight it, by any means possible, even if fighting it simply means hurting it in its weakest points, and bringing even more devastation on themselves.

This is one reason why, whatever Gazans may feel about Hamas and its tactics, they haven’t turned against it and come running towards Israel with flowers in their hands, looking for a friendly hug. Because as horrific as last weekend’s murderous assault was, it is just the latest horrific chapter in a festering and vicious conflict, in which both sides have dealt blow after blow without ever being able to destroy each other.

Does Hamas also bear responsibility for this calamity? Of course, and not only because of the massacres last weekend. But it is entirely facile for the fourth most powerful military power in the world to refuse to negotiate with Hamas because of what its charter says.

Making peace means making peace with people you don’t like, and Israel has never had any interest in doing this. And now the deadly game that we have witnessing every since 2006/7 is approaching breaking point, not just for Hamas, but for an entire society.

Because what is happening now is different in scale and intent. It isn’t just vengeance, and it isn’t just ‘counterinsurgency’. It has a terrifying, apocalyptic, blood-chilling finality about it, coupled with an indifference to its consequences and a lack of any coherent strategic outcome that borders on insanity, and makes cavemen look dignified.

Israel, with the support of the most powerful liberal democracies of the ‘international community’ - the US, the EU, the hapless and ridiculous UK - is preparing to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and turn an entire population, most of whom are already refugees and the descendants of refugees, into refugees again.

This simply can’t be done, without creating a human catastrophe on a scale we haven’t since World War 2. You can’t move 1.1 million people anywhere that quickly. You can’t ask 1.1 million people to live in a territory half the size of the area they already inhabit, where another million people are living under bombardment, where there is no government and no agency to look after them, where hospitals are being bombed, and where there is no food, water, or fuel.

Watching this happen, I often find myself thinking of the people I once knew in Gaza, when I taught English there for two summers in the mid-1980s, and again as a member of the World University Service delegation on education during the first Intifada.

Even then, Gaza was known in Israel as Indian country - a reservation where you could get your throat by the Arab fanatics. That’s not what I found. Gaza certainly looked like an American cavalry fort, with its dusty stockades flying the Star of David, where soldiers watched the population through binoculars. But the Palestinians I met were not who Israel said they were.

I found a people misused by history, victims of decisions taken by empires and nations far from their borders, where families spoke to their relatives across the Rafah ‘shouting fence’ that marked the southern border, but could not meet them. I saw the pool of sewage at Djabalia refugee camp - a camp that is only days from obliteration - where the Israeli army forced the entire male population to stand up to their waists following the invasion of the strip in 1967.

I visited Khan Younis refugee camp, where, in 1956, Israeli troops lined up 278 unarmed Palestinians and shot them. This massacre is remembered by Palestinians - Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, Hamas’s political spokesman in 2004 saw his uncle shot there - but the outside world has never even registered it.

It wasn’t until Joe Sacco included it in his Footnotes on Gaza docu-comic in 2009, that it made even a ripple. By that time al-Rantisi was dead, blown to pieces by an Israeli missile only a month after his predecessor was blown to pieces by an Israeli missile.

Long before the all-out wars of the 21st century, this history of dispossession, massacres, punitive raids, and house demolitions was ingrained in the collective memory of the population. Everyone, from the oldest Palestinian to the kids in the refugee camps who followed you around waving V-for-Victory signs, knew someone who had been killed, shot, imprisoned, or beaten.

Most people also knew why they were there. Passengers in taxis zipping up and down the strip would ask you politely ‘You know about Balfour?’ in reference to the Balfour Declaration. Or they would ask my opinion on the Labour Party Conference - in the UK.

They breathed politics, because they had no choice. Politics had placed them where they were, and yet the Gazans still kept up the British military cemetery where soldiers were buried during Allenby’s 1917 campaign. That campaign resulted in the British Mandate, and the implementation of Balfour’s decision to favour ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, and yet the graveyard of the invaders was as immaculately kept up, as if Palestinians were buried there.

Did the dreamily romantic Tory lord know that ‘national home’ meant ‘Jewish state?’ Historians have long argued about that one, but the Palestinians I met in Gaza, who lost their homes in what is now southern Israel, and sometimes went to look at them just to remember that past, understood the forces that had dispossessed them.

In the mid-80s, Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation was still largely ‘secular’, and Israeli repression of the nationalist organizations appeared to be matched by a surprising leniency towards the Muslim Brotherhood - the precursors to Hamas - who seemed to be able to operate with more freedom than the PLO or any other affiliated organizations.

This was a time when ‘the West’ saw political Islam in many countries in the Middle East as a useful tool and a counterweight to the left - nice move there chaps - so it would not have been surprising for Israel to do the same.

These were the kinds of things we talked about, but not only that. The people I met were courageous, passionate, and linked by a sense of collective purpose and collective identity. I have never, before or since, encountered people with such a strong sense of who they were and who they wanted to be. So everyday in Gaza was a political education for me, and I have never forgotten it.

But the Palestinians were also funny, and curious and knowledgeable about the world they wanted to be a part of. And there were moments of pleasure that you could only find in Gaza. Sitting under the palm trees near Khan Younis or Djabalia watching the surf roll in during one of those unforgettable Gaza sunsets. The long lunches in Gazan homes. The young Palestinian who swam out to save me when I went swimming off Beach Camp and got caught out by the strong Gaza undercurrent. The teenage schoolgirls who came to our school and sang ‘One man went to mow’ in English to entertain us.

I remember the wit, the humour, and the ordinary humanity of the people I met in Gaza City and the camps. I remember Ghazi, the caretaker at the school where we stayed who desperately wanted to learn English, and kept saying ‘I am a university’ or ‘I am a chair’, when you asked him what his name was. I remember the young woman - already a military veteran - who lost an arm fighting Sharon’s soldiers, and led a successful strike in a women’s prison, in which tear gas was pumped into her cell.

I remember the kids I taught at UNRWA schools, who thrust their hands into the air whenever you asked them a question, even if they didn’t know the answer. No apathy there: they came from families who knew what education meant, and what it meant not to have it.

And they also knew what community meant. One Palestinian teacher from Djabalia became lonely and homesick during a two-week visit to London - the only time he had been abroad in his life - because he couldn’t stand the alienation, cynicism and indifference of the city.

And on that third visit, with the World University Service, I saw the kids of Gaza once again, drawing pictures of helicopters and soldiers, beating and shooting them, the same kids who had been arrested by Israeli soldiers for attending clandestine classes, because schools had been closed as ‘centres of nationalism.’

All that was before Hamas. And I’ve thought of these people over the years, and wondered how many of them survived wars that seemed unimaginable when I knew them. They lived their lives while I was living mine, in a claustrophobic world of violence, occupation, and trauma, and yet they had so much more humanity, dignity, and grace than the likes of Lindsey Graham and Douglas Murray, who are now salivating at the prospect of their destruction.

That these people should now be removed again, and depicted as soulless fanatics, subhuman inhabitants of a ‘terrorist hub’ or written off as unavoidable collateral damage, is a tragedy piled upon tragedy - a moral failure of barely credible proportions.

And that is why I have accompanied this article with a picture of a beach, not more destroyed buildings. Because the beach was always the only escape in Gaza, the place where the sweetness of life became possible, where Ai Weiwei once met a group of laughing young women in hijabs and long dresses looking through a book of Andy Warhol’s paintings, while making his film about refugees.

Ai Weiwei was surprised, but then Gaza is a surprising place. And if there are people there who have done monstrous things, they are not monsters, and no country has the moral right to destroy their society.

If this happens, then the great powers that are allowing it to happen, and that never stop talking about peace, human rights, and international law, will never be able to use these terms again, without being reminded of the time they stood back, and allowed the Israeli military to make a desolation, that has nothing do with peace.