The American International School in Gaza was bombed on 3 January, completely destroying the institution. Today it is a twisted wreck of concrete, metal and burnt vans. Surreally, when I visited a few days ago I found two green, grass ovals being watered by a highly effective sprinkler system. Sheep were grazing on the unused land.
Two students of the school, Mohammed Samhadane and Walid Abuzaid, both 13, are like many pimply faced kids all over the world; addicted to violent video games and smoking cigarettes. They told me that like their friends they wanted peace with Israel but believed the state had no desire to negotiate honestly with the Palestinians, especially after the recent Gaza massacre. Politically aware, sceptical towards the claims of Hamas to represent the Palestinian people (they came from Fatah families) and Western-friendly, they resigned themselves to the idea that things might change soon. Maybe.
This attitude has followed me across the Strip. From farmers to Hamas spokespeople and militants to academics, there is a little hope, but only because the alternative is despair and extremism. In a land such as this, where daily life is consumed with finding petrol, a job and respite from the searing heat, politics seeps into every facet of life. I’m yet to meet anybody who doesn’t want to share opinions on the Hamas/Fatah split or President Barack Obama (usually a positive comment that he’s not George W. Bush then dismissal of his chances to change the equation here.)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may believe that the people of Gaza despise the Hamas leadership and want to overthrow its rule but the picture is not that simple. The growing Islamisation of society concerns many Gazans — today I was given a list Hamas is distributing that urges parents not to allow children to wear t-shirts that contain words such as, “Madonna” and “Hussy” — but security has greatly improved since the group took over in 2007.
During Friday prayers in Khan Younis last week, I witnessed thousands of Hamas supporters cheer Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and embrace his message of a devout Islamic society (though he also talked about a Palestinian state along 1967 borders, the internationally acceptable solution to the conflict.) Young men and boys, some devout and some more liberal, clearly found meaning in a movement that deftly melded faith with politics. I was nearly crushed in a push by the crowd to get close to Haniyeh as he departed the mosque.
Unemployment now defines the Gazan population; tens of thousands of Palestinian Authority staff still pull a regular income from the West Bank but are directed by Fatah not to work in Gaza under Hamas. I’ve lost count of the number of men who tell me their wives are begging them to leave home during the day. “1500 people were killed during the war”, one man, Nafez Aldabba, told me, “but more babies than that have been born since because there is nothing to do except sleep, eat and have s-x.”
People like Nafez and his son Mohammed confounded my expectations about attitudes in the Strip and indicated a deep desire in Gaza for some kind of normalised relations with Israel. Mohammed, a militant who fires rockets into Israel and treats all Israeli civilians as legitimate targets, told me that he still supported a two-state solution, the right of return and enforcement of 1967 borders.
He rejected the “extremism” of Hamas. But like his father, he had no faith that Israel would ever end settlement building “and now is even telling America to get lost.”
I rarely hear any hateful comments towards Jews. A few have asked whether public opinion in Australia was supportive of the Palestinians (I replied that recent polls suggest that they are.)
Even farmers with little education stressed their embrace of “all religions” but opposition to Zionism. Hazem Balousha, a Gazan-based journalist who strings for the London Guardian, told me that he believes Israel doesn’t want to overthrow Hamas but merely strangle the economy.
“Most people are fed-up”, he said. “They don’t really care too much about politics but have to focus on getting electricity, cooking gas and how to feed the family every day. They only care about themselves.”
Gaza’s biggest rap group, Darg Team, were a breath of fresh air (their latest single, 23 Days, details the carnage during January’s war.) Six twenty-somethings, with matching white trainers, riff on religion, culture, honour, occupation and the right of return. I asked manager Fadi Srour whether they would perform in Israel.
“We’d like to”, he responded. “Every society has good and bad and we want to reach people directly. We’d love to perform in the Knesset.”
Under Hamas, the band has been unofficially banned but they say they’ll continue performing anyway, going underground, if necessary.
Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist and the author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.
The NazIsrael Defence Forces must by now be the most vilified military in the world.
And to think Frank Lowy’s close friend & confidante Ehud Barak calls the IDF the best military force in the world.
Israel’s illegitimacy as a nation State grows daily.
And to think Rudd & Co are one of only 3 national governments globally who supported Israel’s
terrorism in Gaza last January…..pewkworthy.
Illogical outbursts like Kevin Herbert’s do nothing but tell us that someone calling himself Kevin Herbert has had a burst of strong feelings. “Illegitimacy as a nation State”? As it clearly is a nation state amongst the sovereign states of the world, a member of the UN etc., maybe KH wishes to say that it should never have been created as a nation and that recent events are making that clearer and clearer. If so, why not say so and argue it – including where things started to go wrong and, if, as implied, KH is a moralist, where the morally wrong steps which could have been seen to be such took place?
That members of the IDF often behave badly, like Australians in Palestine 1919, Americans at My Lai (a much worse case), the French in Algeria etc. etc. surely doesn’t mean the IDF isn’t the best military force in the world. I would guess from limited experience and hearsay that the IDF is a lot better on average in its capacity to perform all its main military functions than the US Army, not counting the Rangers, Delta Force, or, by defiinition the Marines. You can count all the Europeans, and the Japanese, who don’t actually fight, out of the competition and Russia, China and India couldn’t match the IDF’s technical and planning know how. The rest of Asia and Africa wouldn’t be in the race.
As for “terrorism”, while it is legitimate to question the morality of methods of warfare which kill a lot of civilians and even compare the methods with those of terrorists it is not really helpful to rational discussion not to recognise that terrorism, in the sense of deliberate killing and injuring of the weak, especially civilians, because they are soft targets and the terrorists have no chance of winning a war by conventional means (but may be able to reduce others to such a state of fear and despair that they will concede a lot) is indeed a special tactic of the relatively weak but totally single-minded. Bombing of German cities didn’t occur until Germany had attacked others. The onslaught of Gaza didn’t occur until Israel had been subjected to hundreds, or thousands, of (not very effective) rocket attacks. You could argue that excesses of that kind of retaliation by a relatively powerful state actor are even worse than some terrorism but it doesn’t help to conflate the two.
Isn’t it BTW a damning criticism of any violent action that it doesn’t even have the pragmatic virtue of being likely to succeed? The terrorist attacks in Bali were utterly indefensible by that criterion, as are the recent ones in Djakarta. Jewish terrorism in Palestine after WW2 did work rather well in making the UK want to give up its mandage ASAP. Palestinian terrorism allied to the birth rate means that Israel’s real area of dysfunction – it’s domestic politics with government hamstrung by impossible coaltions of people with extraordinarily different cultures, secular and religious – is having and will have extremely serious problems in reaching any solution. Few democratic states act effecctively on the most serious issues much ahead of disaster and Israel will perhaps have proved to have thrown away as many chances as the Palestinians before some settlement is reached. It may therefore turn out to be a settlement that Israelis would abhore if offered to them now. Why, oh why, can’t the Palestinians be offered a slice of Jerusalem as a capital? (No doubt Iran won’t nuke Jerusalem anyway but there would be a lot to be said for having both capitals side by side, not least becasue Israel will always be able to threaten the use of superior force).
Words clearly fail you..as does your attempt to hide your far right wing fascist views behind a classical name.
Another Zionist far right zealot attempting rational argument but ending up in glaring sophistry..why are we surprised? Those Aussie Jews who turn away from the reality of Israeli mass torture, apartheid, State sanctioned murder, war crimes etc etc against the Palestinians, are moral cowards.
Get out of their country, and the rockets will stop. Which part of that simple proposition don’t you understand.
The sophistry of the Dover Heights/Balaclava armchair militarists always shows them up for what they are…modern day fascist Nazis.
Words words words with no meaning whatsoever…..
Well Kevin Herbert does have some problems doesn’t he? Could those bilious eruptions be some sort of displacement activity that obscures, at least for him, the anguish his own failings or misfortunes? Or could he just be an old-fashioned anti-Semite, possibly one who gathers up every unattractive happening that can be termed “Jewish” to consolidate his hate?
As it happens I have absolutely no Jewish ancestry (nor has my wife) but have long taken an interest in what has flowed from the Balfour declaration and the extraordinary, possibly insoluble, problems of the Middle East. I have never been to Israel.
KH’s opinion of what is sophistry as contrasted with subtle appreciation of the complicated facts and an attempt at accurate discrimination in usage on sensitive subjects wouldn’t, on the evidence of his output, be worth much. Consider my comments as attempting to honour
Antony Lowenstein’s courage at least. (There is a kind of exhibitionist who can be mistaken for a genuninely courageous speaker of the truth as he sees it, and either of course can be mistaken, but I don’t take AL to be an exhibitionist, though I don’t know him).
“Get out of their country and the rockets will stop” suggests a rather vague understanding of the Palestine issue. There are no settlers any longer in Gaza and haven’t been for a long time but that hasn’t stopped the rockets fired from a territory under a completely different government from that of the West Bank. The West Bank is where the settlers are and the rockets aren’t being fired from there, not even at the settlers for the most part, and certainly not into Israeli towns which have never been outside the state of Israel since it was formed. Is KH serious about suggesting that it is OK for Hamas to fire rockets at Israeli civilians within Israel because there are Israeli settlements still in the West Bank that the Fatah government is seeking, by negotiation, to have removed? And what about the rockets fired from Lebanon indiscriminately at places inhabited within Israel by civilians? Is it not reasonable for Israeli’s to worry that there is a fixed determination amongst Arab Muslims to push Jews out of Israel? Or is KH in fact saying that Israel belongs to some Arabs who are entitled to get Jews out of the whole territory of Israel? That inference does seem open on the words quoted at the beginning of this par. , in which case, if KH is not just careless, he is off the planet so far as any realistic discourse is concerned.
So, if KH wants to show that he know enough about the subject or can think rationally enough about it to involve others in his obsessions let him demonstrate that there is some sense in saying “Get out of their country” which has a sufficient relation with Hamas rocketry from Gaza. At least I know that my American Jewish friend, of Israeli parentage, who says that the best thing about Israel is that it keeps the mad Jews out of America and that the country is run with the efficiency of a Latin American country does know what he is talking about…..
Right, now I understand…
KH is a raving loony spitting venom at the Israellis at every opportunity.
M is much more verbose to the point of being unintelligible.
Isn’t the Middle East conflict worthy of better analysis than has come from either?
Speaking from what I believe to be an ethical viewpoint, it is difficult to justify the creeping continuity of Israellis taking more and more land from the Palestinians. It is equally impossible to justify either side’s reliance upon invisible friends in the sky as justification for their attitudes towards each other. Religion adds nothing to society, yet costs so much.
The antidote to religion is perhaps education, which makes this a promising starting point, for all nations. Why, in Australia, the churches have charitable status whilst at the same time promoting uncharitable acts is beyond comprehansion. Are schools pushing a religious story an asset to society or are they, as it appears to me, divisive and antithetical to peace, knowledge and goodwill?
I feel that the same is true of many international conflicts. Any action towards better educational outcomes is, when seen in this light, justified and urgent.
Imagine a world with a combined education and peacemaking budget equal to or exceeding the military budgets.
If religion meant anything at all, it would support peace and avoid war. This is definitely not the case, hence, religion – of all types – will find no place in a peaceful world.