For nearly two weeks, the Air Force, Navy and Army of Israel, the world’s fourth largest military power, have bombarded the defenceless citizens of Gaza, whose government possesses not a single plane, and has no navy and no army. Hamas has used only inaccurate rockets, which, by comparison with Israel’s mighty arsenal, are almost as ineffective as the stones of the last intifada.
The BBC, which has frequently been accused of a pro-Israeli bias, struggled yesterday to provide ‘balance’ after showing footage of Palestinian women and children fleeing for their lives in Beit Hanoun, against a backdrop of Israeli shells blasting buildings to smithereens. A reporter on the leafy, suburban, Israeli side of the border found an angry Jewish citizen to interview, who claimed his life was in danger from Hamas’s rockets. Seeking to demonstrate their destructive power, he directed the cameraman to film a small round chip in the immaculate white rendering of his luxurious villa. It could have been fixed in two minutes with a tube of poly-filler. Not so the 1,000 or more buildings in Gaza which have been razed to the ground.
The citizens of Gaza are imprisoned in just 360 square kilometres from which there is no escape because Israel and Egypt control all the border crossings and refuse to open them. This must be the only ‘war’ in history from which there are no refugees. 1.5 million Syrians have found a safe-haven in little Lebanon, and a million more in Jordan.
But when the Israelis send Palestinian families chilling telephone or loudspeaker warnings to leave their homes, where are they to go? They just scatter, hopelessly, in all directions; 50,000 are currently sheltering in United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) schools.
At the time of writing, 316 Gazans have been killed, 75 of them children, while just two Israelis have died. Many commentators in the British press are comparing Israel’s murderous rampage to ‘shooting fish in a barrel’.
This the third time in six years that Gaza has been attacked by Israel, but this time it is different because Tel Aviv has become answerable to the international community. Independent satellite television stations and Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter ensure that the truth cannot be concealed, controlled or filtered despite the best efforts of Hasbara (Israel’s department of spin) and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s sinister, silver-tongued, spokesman, Mark Negev.
When four little boys were deliberately shot by Israeli artillery as they raced for their lives along the beach by Gaza’s harbour; when not one, but two, rehabilitation hospitals were ordered to evacuate their incapacitated patients in the middle of the night; when three children were shot on a roof top where they’d gone to play because they weren’t allowed out by parents worried for their safety... the world knew about it in seconds and was, rightly, aghast.
Celebrities — today’s opinion formers whether we like it or not — have expressed their horror at Israel’s violence. American pop star Rihanna, American NBA star, Dwight Howard and Italy’s World Cup goalie, Gianluigi Buffon all tweeted the hash tag #FreePalestine, even if the first two later took down their tweets. Hollywood comedian and actress, Whoopi Goldberg, retweeted, ‘The men, women & children in Gaza, Palestine have been getting Massacred for the past week.’ Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters and American musician, Neil Young, released a statement on Facebook saying, ‘We stand with those who oppose the Israeli Government’s brutal policies ... Please join us and countless other artists all over the world in solidarity with the oppressed and the disenfranchised’. The list goes on...
Public opinion changing
And so we come to the only good news about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The plight of the Palestinians — which was overshadowed by the Arab revolutions for the past three years — is firmly back in the spotlight and, worldwide, public opinion is changing. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement is galvanised by the bloodshed, there are demonstrations around the world in support of the Palestinians — including one that was held on Saturday outside Downing Street — and even the mainstream press has largely been critical of Israel.
Public opinion is changing in Gaza, too. I have been in constant touch with family there throughout the bombardment. My cousin’s house was flattened in Deir Al Balah — thank God he was visiting his father at the time; it is Ramadan but there is little food, little fuel, no electricity and hardly any clean water for iftar meals after dark. And yet... morale is surprisingly high. People have united around the resistance and show unprecedented willingness to sacrifice their lives. Many have refused to heed Israeli warnings of imminent attack, staying at home and awaiting their fate. It is widely believed that the Egyptian truce initiative (penned by former British premier Tony Blair) was a cynical ploy to produce a pretext to invade. Hamas were not consulted and the terms of Cairo’s initiative were clearly going to be unacceptable. Hamas insists that lifting the blockade is a precondition for a ceasefire and Gaza’s weary citizens, who have been under siege since 2007, agree. “Life in Gaza has become little more than a slow death,” a relative told me last week. “Enough is enough. Let us live like normal people or let us die.”
Sitting on its hands
Hamas’s own survival depends on the outcomes of this battle and it is likely to fight to the bitter end. Politically isolated since losing Egypt’s support, and financially desperate, it has to demonstrate that it can deliver. The rest of the Arab world has shamefully sat on its hands; only Turkey — which was previously engaged in rapprochement with Israel — has unreservedly criticised Tel Aviv’s unacceptable violence that Foreign Minister Ahmet Davotoglu said was testing ‘the conscience of humanity’.
Israel has achieved none of its military aims in Gaza. Its aircraft have yet to succeed in hitting one rocket launcher or any of Hamas’s leaders; its tanks and bulldozers have uncovered only one tunnel.
Israel’s leaders come and go, Arab regimes rise and fall, but the spirit and culture of the Palestinian resistance has remained steadfast for 66 years. Despite the bloodshed, despite the cruelty, the humiliation and the suffering, despite the terrible howls of mourning and the dead children in their arms, the Palestinian people will continue to resist as long as there is an occupation and one day they will prevail.
Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of digital newspaper Rai alYoum: http://www.raialyoum.com. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@abdelbariatwan.
