Gaza's rubble buries Blinken's legacy

We never fail to quizzically scratch our heads whenever State Department officials, folks not known to claim modesty as their top virtue, tell us that their government agency is the advance guard of America’s indefatigable campaign to wage global peace, especially in the Middle East.

At noon on Tuesday, this columnist scratched his head till it hurt as he watched Anthony Blinken, in his last week at Foggy Bottom as secretary of state, deliver a public speech to an audience at the Atlantic Council in Washington — one where he was interrupted by a heckler three minutes into it and then by another five minutes later.

In his speech, Mr. Blinken laid out a blueprint for the “rebuilding” and “governance” of post-war Gaza that he hoped the incoming administration would take as a reference point and run with it as policy over the next four years.

No need here to reiterate the minutiae of the plan he outlined. No doubt you have watched, as I have, the soon-to-be former secretary of state speak his mind on the matter at theAtlantic Council event or read critiques of the speech itself in the media the following day.

Nor is there need to reiterate that, whichever way Mr. Blinken chose to cut it, America’s stance on, not to mention complicity in the carnage in Gaza has left America morally weaker on the public stage, rendering it impossible for Washington to argue convincingly that the US is a force for good in the world.

We do need, however, to ask this: When the Secretary made a case in his speech for the “rebuilding” and “governance” of Gaza, what did he mean? To rebuild what and govern whom? Gaza is no longer a human habitat. Gaza today is a ravaged wasteland.

A generation destroyed

According to data provided by the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT), which uses satellite images to support decisions on how to aid regions ravaged by disaster, roughly 257,500 “housing units” (the group’s term for “homes”) have been destroyed, leaving virtually the entire 2.3 population of Gaza homeless.

The amount of debris accumulated by the destruction of these homes, along with the destruction of mosques, community centres, shops and the like, as well as by the deliberate detonation of public buildings such universities and infrastructure sites, has left millions upon millions of tonnes of debris piled up that, some experts estimate, would take 14 years to dispose of.

Reportedly, If piled up in heaps, it would be the equivalent of 11 enormous heaps, each the size of the Great Pyramid in Giza in Egypt. Or, looked at differently, three times as many buildings have been reduced to rubble in the Gaza Strip as there are buildings in the whole of Manhattan Island in New York.

And since this unimaginably immense quantity of debris cannot be disposed of in a tiny enclave like Gaza, experts say, clearly much of it will have to be transported to landfills outside the Strip’s borders.

Look, let’s be real, Israel has levelled Gaza to the ground, inflicting on it a fate reminiscent of the annihilation of the ancient Phoenician city of Carthage by the Romans in 146BC and the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongolian hordes in 1258.

And think of the trauma endured by the survivors. You see, when you destroy a family home, you destroy a family’s heart. What makes for us human beings a house a home — or in the Palestinian vernacular a ‘dar’ a ‘beit’ — is the fact that, over the years, the decades, we come to anchor our meaning as human beings in it. In it are found those irreplaceable “things”, things we call memorabilia, that define a family’s lifetime of memories. And contained within its walls is our inner history.

And, yes, look, even victims of the ongoing California wildfires who lost their homes not to missiles or to 2,000-pound bombs but to nature’s force majeure seem, as you listen to their plaints, to share the same anguish as that of Gazans about losing their homes.

Here’s Abeer Barakat, 42, an educator, who lost her family home in al-Rimal in northern Gaza being quoted in a CNN news report on Friday: “Every piece of furniture, every corner of our home ... it was the center of our life. It’s not just walls. It’s our emotions. Our memories. Love stories, sad stories. It’s not only our home that is broken. Our hearts are broken. We are no longer the same. Nothing is the same”.

This is a lament echoed by two million Gazans today.

It is also Anthony Blinken’s legacy, one he tried to manicure in his speech.

As he returns to private life, that legacy will follow him — as it will equally follow the president he had served — for keeps. And there will be no two ways about it.

Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.