[Peace-discuss] Another note

[Morton K. Brussel]

Ilan Pappe, like Amira Hass [See http://www.zmag.org/content/ 
showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=10871], Uri Avnery,  and some  
others, is one of the relatively few Israelis who have consistently  
and openly defied and criticized his own governments' policies. He  
has had a hard time as a result, but persists…

Genocide In Gaza

by Ilan Pappe
	
September 04, 2006


A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September,  
another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded  
in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many  
more will be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in  
the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds  
are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.

The Israeli leadership is at lost of what to do with the Gaza Strip.  
It has vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government  
assumes that the West Bank, unlike the Strip, in an open space, at  
least on its eastern side. Hence if Israel, under the ingathering  
program of the government, annexes the parts it covets - half of the  
West Bank - and cleanse it from its native population, the other half  
would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least for a while and would  
not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it won the  
enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such an  
arrangement can not work in the Gaza enclave - Egypt unlike Jordan  
has succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the  
Gaza Strip for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt.  
So a million and half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel - although  
geographically the Strip is located on the margins of the state,  
psychologically it lies in its midst.

The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world,  
and one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere,  
disables the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment  
Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967. They were relative better  
period where movement to the West Bank and into Israel for work was  
allowed, but these better times are gone. Harsher realities are in  
place ever since 1987. Some access to the outside world was allowed  
as long as there were Jewish settlers in the Strip, but once they  
were removed the Strip was hermetically closed. Ironically, most  
Israelis, according to recent polls, look at Gaza as an independent  
Palestinian state that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge. The  
leadership, and particularly the army, see it as a prison with the  
most dangerous community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one  
way or another.

The conventional Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing employed  
successfully in 1948 against half of Palestine's population, and  
against hundred of thousand of Palestinians in the West Bank are not  
useful here. You can slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West  
Bank, and particular out of the Greater Jerusalem area, but you can  
not do it in the Gaza Strip - once you sealed it as a maximum- 
security prison camp.

As with the ethnic cleansing operations, the genocidal policy is not  
formulated in a vacuum. Ever since 1948, the Israeli army and  
government needed a pretext to commence such policies. The takeover  
of Palestine in 1948 produced the inevitable local resistance that in  
turn allowed the implementation of an ethnic cleansing policy,  
preplanned already in the 1930. Twenty years of Israeli occupation of  
the West Bank produced eventually some sort of Palestinian  
resistance. This belated anti-occupation struggle unleashed a new  
cleansing policy that still is implemented today in the West Bank.  
The Gaza imprisonment in the summer of 2005, which was paraded as an  
Israeli generous withdrawal, produced the Hamas and Islamic Jiahd  
missile attack and one abduction case. Even before the abduction of  
Giald Shalit, the Israeli army bombarded indiscriminately the Strip.  
Ever since the abduction, the massive killing increased and became  
systematic. A daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children  
is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often  
in microscopic fonts.

The chief culprits are the Israeli pilots who have a field day now  
that one of them is the General Chief of Staff. In the 1982 Lebanon  
war, the Israeli airforce issued orders to its pilots to abort  
mission if within 500 square meters of their target they spotted  
innocent civilians. Not that these orders were kept, but the pretense  
for internal moral consumption was there. It is called in the Israeli  
airforce, the 'Lebanon Procedure' [Nohal Levanon]. When the pilots  
asked a year ago if the 'Lebanon procedure' is in tact for Gaza, the  
answer was no. The same answer was given to the pilots in the second  
Lebanon war.

The Lebanon war provided the fog for a while, covering the war crimes  
in the Gaza Strip. But the policies rage on even after the conclusion  
of the cease-fire up in the north. It seems that the frustrated and  
defeated Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing  
fields in the Gaza Strip. There are no politicians who are able or  
willing to stop the generals. A daily killing of up to 10 civilians  
is going to leave few thousands dead each year. This is of course  
different from genociding a million people in one campaign - the only  
inhibition Israel is willing to undertake in the name of the  
Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing you raise the number  
to horrific proportions and more importantly you may force a mass  
eviction in the end of the day outside the Strip - either in the name  
of human aid, international intervention or the people's own desire  
to escape the inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness is going  
to be the response, and there no reason to doubt that this will the  
Gazan reaction then the massive killing would continue and increase.

Much depends on the international reaction. When Israel was absolved  
from any responsibility or accountably for the ethnic cleansing in  
1948, it turned this policy into a legitimate tool for its national  
security agenda. If the present escalation and adaptation of  
genocidal policies would be tolerated by the world, it would expand  
and used even more drastically.

Nothing apart from pressure in the from of sanctions, boycott and  
divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza  
Strip. There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it. Brave  
pilots refused to partake in the operations, two journalists - out of  
150 - do not cease to write about it, but this is it. In the name of  
the holocaust memory let us hope the world would not allow the  
genocide of Gaza to continue.


Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department  
of political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for  
Palestinian Studies in Haifa. His books include among others The  
Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992), The  
Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A History of  
Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East (London and  
New York 2005) and forthcoming, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)