The April 2009 Harper's offers first-person oral recountings of the Israeli assault on Gaza, collected by Human Rights Watch. I've trusted these sorts of things since encountering as a lad Studs Terkel and Working, and particularly since I began collecting them myself, through 30 years as a journalist, private investigator, and law jockey. There is always something bracing about unfiltered accounts of people's lives.
These statements are not available anywhere on the tubes (except to Harper's print subscribers), so I'm going to quote from them pretty freely below the fold. I doubt I'm violating fair use, as it seems hardly likely HRW slapped a copyright on these accounts. If I'm wrong, some admin can come in and tell me. ; )
Be warned: they're pretty wrenching.
Ziad Deeb is a twenty-two-year-old student whose family was rubbed out by mortar shells fired January 6 in the vicinity of the United Nations–run Fakhoura School in Jabaliya.
I came to see if my family was harmed and to find out where the rocket had hit. As soon as I arrived at the door, another shell landed in front of me. I only heard the whistling in my ear. My legs felt very hot.
When the smoke cleared, I saw that some were dead. Others were dying and reciting their prayers. My cousin Mohammed and my father were lying next to each other, both dead. Next to them was my grandmother, who was also killed. She had been knitting. My brother’s dead body was in front of me, and he had absorbed most of the shrapnel. His name was Mohammed, twenty-four years old. Another small girl, Asil, died—she was nine.
They amputated my legs at Shifa Hospital.
Radwan al-Mardi's six-year-old daughter Nada was shot in the head while holding his hand.
The soldiers were shooting around us but we continued to walk. In one hand I held some bread, in the other I had my daughter’s hand. Just behind us were my two sons, who were holding white flags. The road was torn up by the bulldozers, and Nada was barefoot. I lifted her up whenever there was debris on the ground.
Then she was hit. She fell on her face. I knew she was injured, but I thought she was hit in the arm. She had sand in her mouth, and I cleaned it out. She made a moaning sound, but she couldn’t speak. I dropped the bread and carried her in my arms. I ran and found a car, and they took her to Kamal Adwan Hospital. I still hadn’t realized the bullet had hit her head.
I went to see what happened to the rest of my family. When I got back, she had already been transferred to Shifa Hospital. The bullet had entered the back of her head and lodged behind her eyes. She died at two in the afternoon.
In Juhr al-Dik, Majid Abu Hajjaj's mother and sister were killed by machine-gun fire.
I had already left the area, but I was on the phone with my family all the time when they were under fire. I could hear the explosions in the background. I was calling the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and the BBC, but no one could help us.
They were killed after they left the neighbor’s house. When I came back two days after the ceasefire, I found my sister and mother on the ground. My sister was covered by wires and trash. She had been run over by a tank. The next day the neighbors brought us her severed foot. My mother’s body was partly buried in sand. They’d been lying there for sixteen days.
A Gaza City man, who requested anonymity, told HRW that he was set upon and shot by members of Hamas after he had been overheard criticizing the organization.
I was sitting in my home. A cousin called me to come downstairs. He said there are people outside who want to see you, and your uncle is talking to them.
I found some fourteen masked gunmen. They grabbed me as soon as they saw me. They took me to an open space just next to the mosque. Then they suddenly opened fire at me--four of them. I was hit in both legs. No one was around at the time. They left, and I was screaming for help.
Iman al-Najar of Khuzaa was among a group of Khuzaa women fired upon after Israeli soldiers destroyed homes in their neighborhood and ordered them to walk to the village center.
Rawhiya took a white flag with a group of about fifteen women. She said, “Let’s go together.” When she reached the corner, they fired at her immediately. It was 7:45 a.m. She was hit in the head and fell even though she was holding a white flag. We tried to get her body, but we couldn’t get to it. In the attempt, a girl, Yasmin, was wounded in the arm and leg. I bandaged her wounds and called the ambulance, but they said they couldn’t come.
The Israeli bulldozers were pushing us out. There was lots of dust. We were hugging each other. We said, “Let’s go. It is better to die from bullets than to get buried. At least if we die from bullets, they will see us.”
We decided to go together. When we came under fire, we crawled. We were ashamed to leave Rawhiya behind. We carried the old women and went looking for the nearest U.N. school. But we didn’t want to stay there because we heard that they shelled them too.
We were calling everyone. Where were all the organizations that we see all the time? We called and got only the echo.
As I read these accounts, I glanced across the room at my lover, who was knitting. Where I live, I needn't fear, unlike Ziad Deeb, that a mortar shell might crash through the ceiling and take her life. My daughter's life was utterly changed by a cruel accident in a cold universe, but never did I fear that, as happened to Radwan al-Mardi, she would be shot in the head while she held my hand. I argue with people on this site near every day, but none of them come to my house to shoot me.
Similarly, when I come down off of this mountain, to drive to the town where I labor, I need not worry about dodging the odd rocket. And despite eight years of BushCo propaganda encouraging me to feel such fear, I do not dread, when I climb aboard a bus or order a slice of pizza, that the person next to me may prove to be a human detonator.
We live easy, most of us, here in the USA. What makes us Democrats different from Republicans, I think, is that we're not content to let it go at that: me and mine are fine, nuff said, pass me a cigar. The philosopher William Irwin Thompson, in endorsing Barack Obama in March of last year, did so because he felt Obama had "revealed his sense of a new planetary civilization." It's actually a pretty old idea, expressed in Western texts from Jesus' "least of me," through John Donne's "for whom the bell tolls" and William Blake's "the price of experience," to Kenneth Patchen's "It is my own face I see in the blazing windows of all the houses on earth." Comfort and ease cabined to the privileged few is no comfort and ease at all. Our dear friend Mr. Limbaugh recently lost his lunch over the notion that the Obama administration seeks "fair growth across the globe so that middle classes can rise across the planet." Exploded the GOoPer:
There you have it. He admits it; I don't even have to speculate anymore. We're not talking about just a reordering of American society and culture and economics. No! It's the world. We are going to spread fairness across the world.
That's right. We are. And one of the places we're going to spread it is to Palestine.
I/P discussion on this site is generally so wearisome. It is stubbed with rhetorical land mines--terrorist, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, holocaust, neocons, extremist, fascist, racist, anti-semitic, dual loyalty, Zionist, right to exist, war crimes, colonialism--that too often blow to bits any hopes of real communication. When I read I/P threads here, I sometimes feel like an awful lot of the participants are suffering from the malady described by Fred Neil in "Everybody's Talkin'":
everybody's talkin' at me
can't hear a word they're saying
only the echoes
of my mind
Still, like that other bloody mess of a partition blithely left behind by butcher-boy British colonialists--the thoughtless carving, much of it during a single lunch, into stupid and unsustainable segments, of Britain's Indian empire--the relicts of the partition of Palestine are appropriate topics for a website organized around the American political party now responsible for, 60 years on, dealing with what remains, in both regions, an appalling mess. It would be nice, though, if I/P debate here could proceed as civilly as does debate when the nations under discussion are those emergent from the partition of India: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Bangladesh. If wishes were horses . . . .
Gaza does not represent the most concentrated area of human suffering on the planet--Africa, anyone?--but it's close. Suffering there was immense prior to the Israeli holiday assault; now, after a mad eruption of military keynesianism, Gaza infrastructure, largely built via US funds, which in December and January was largely destroyed via US funds, must, largely via US funds, be built again.
The Israeli assault on Gaza was unsupportable, on any level. Even those inclined to support it because they supported its goals--to end rocket fire into Israel and destroy Hamas--must concede it failed to achieve either goal. Meanwhile, mothers were flattened by tanks, grandmothers were mashed by mortars, six-year-old girls took bullets to their brains while holding the hands of their daddies. And people hardened their hearts to Israel, in Gaza and all over the globe.
The Israeli refusal to complete the partition of Palestine, by letting go of the West Bank and connecting it in some meaningful fashion to Gaza, is equally unsupportable. Israel needs to dismantle its West Bank settlements, just as it did in Gaza, and go home. If a new and truly independent Palestine then proves war-like, Israel may choose to respond as would any other nation-state threatened by an agitated neighbor. It would have something like nation-state tradition and international law on its side. It would not be mucking about in this half-arsed suspended-animation of an occupation that exists in a legal twilight zone and makes friends of nobody.
And if they want to put up a wall, on their own territory, who's to stop them? Though, as a people with a keen sense of history, in no small part due to their 2000-year persecution by the Christianized West, they must know that such a wall, in the long run, will prove no more effective or eternal than did Hadrian's Wall, the Great Wall of China, or the wall that once divided Berlin.
Some people here are already prepared to dismiss Obama as some sort of Bushling on I/P. I'm not one of them. He instructed his Secretary of State to criticize new settlements in the West Bank and the demolition of Palestinian homes. Those who would deride as clown-car comedy John Kerry's strained receipt of a letter to Obama from Hamas maybe do not recall that Andrew Young was once fired as Ambassador to the UN when it became known he had communicated with the PLO, back in the day when the PLO was considered the Evil Entity in the region, rather than Hamas.
Especially in an administration's early days, little things can be important. Thus, even Obama's decision to heave the bust of Winston Churchill out of the Oval Office, which has enraged the Limbaughs and the sundowned Brits, sounds the right note: though remembered primarily in this country for his leadership of Britain during WWII, Churchill is remembered throughout most of the world, including the Arab world, as a fucking menace: a raving racist and bloody warmonger, the quintessential arrogant and ham-handed colonialist, an Anglo-supremacist freak mumbling about "wogs" from out one side of his cigar and "reds" from out the other. (As George Orwell noted in a typically astute essay, Churchill may have been the right man to rouse Britain during the bleak days of WWII, but he was a Major Danger at all other times.)
On tax policy, I hope Obama will Be Like Ike, and, before the end of his two terms, with the help of "more and better Democrats," return the top income tax rate to 90%, as it was under Eisenhower. So too on I/P do I hope Obama will Be Like Ike, and say "No." When in 1956 Britain, France, and Israel conspired to seize the Suez Canal, Eisenhower told them to bugger off; he in fact threatened to collapse the British pound if Anthony Eden, who would soon resign over the fiasco, did not skedaddle his tommies home.
Obama can first say "no" to any hallucinations Benjamin Netanyahu may have about a military strike on Iran. He can next say "no" to any Israeli blockade of Gaza. He can say "no" to continued Israeli intransigence on negotiations to complete the partition of Palestine. And he can say "no" when Netanyahu approaches him for help when Bibi is inevitably rocked by some new sleazy scandal.
America is a friend to Israel, but real friends don't let friends persist in destructive behavior. Israel's assault on Gaza occurred before Obama took office; the reason, I believe, was because Israel wasn't sure how Obama might react to such an onslaught, and so sought to achieve its goals before he assumed office. That uncertainty, I think, is reason for us to hope that this man, who surged into office on hope, may, slowly, but steadily, do the right thing. I don't want the Iman al-Najars of this world, next time they call for help, to "get only the echo." As an American, as a human being, I can't stomach it anymore.