The Plight of Palestinians: Repressed and Forgotten

While Americans retire nightly to their flannel sheets and fluffy pillows, their stomachs well fed, two million Palestinians have no where to flee, their homes flattened, their food, water, and energy resources curtailed. They sleep on sidewalks, or sixty in a room. They suffer cold. Whole families wiped out, yet Israeli bombing and gunfire continues. Israel refuses a pause. Ten thousand dead, many of them children.

It’s Israel’s history, Palestinians the Other, not seen as fellow human beings having legitimate grievances.

In the ongoing invasion of Gaza by Israel’s military, two aerial attacks, two days in a row, were launched on Jabaliya, a camp sheltering 116,000 refugees squeezed into a 1.4 square kilometer area, and one of eight refugee camps in Gaza.

Collectively, they shelter displaced families and their descendants from the 1948 war that gave rise to the state of Israel. Expelled, they’ve been denied resettlement in their native land.

Jabaliya features a high number of UN facilities, including 26 schools, a food distribution center, two health centers, a library, a sanitation facility, and seven wells. It didn’t stop the Israelis. They struck in day light, mothers pursuing their laundry, children playing soccer, men at their jobs.

Bombs meant for Hamas tunnels left deep-seated craters, collapsed buildings, smoking rubble, dismembered limbs, scattered flesh, the screams of the wounded, some buried beneath the rubble.

Israeli bombs took out the Al-Fakhoura School, used as a shelter for thousands of homeless Palestinians in the camp, all of this part of incessant bombing that struck still another school in Northern Gaza, air attacks in the vicinity of three hospitals, and on two ambulances.

Even before the invasion, the camp had periodically suffered electricity outages and 90% water contamination.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, run by Hamas, 195 died and 777 were injured in the two attacks. We may not trust Hamas on the figures, but other authorities think the total death toll may be even higher when bodies are fully recovered.

It’s senseless to go after suspected Hamas tunnels underlying the camp’s infrastructure, as no crater can penetrate deep enough to take out tunnels reenforced with concrete some 200 feet below.

Overall, Gaza has seen its death toll exceed 10,000 dead, many of them women and children, as a consequence of indiscriminate bombings of the civilian infrastructure.

As I write, Israel continues to resist mounting international calls, including those of the US, for a ceasefire. They demand hostages be released first.

Amid its carnage, Israel has held back on humanitarian aid, cut off food supplies, energy and water.

Consequently, Palestinians face the near certainty of widespread famine, disease, and death.

This isn’t the first time Israel bombed the camp with deadly result. During the Gaza War (2014), it bombed a UN school in the camp, killing 20 people.

More recently, unreported in US media, six earlier attacks on the camp occurred before the two major deadly attacks. They include attacks on October 10, 12, 19, and 21.

All of this becomes eerily reminiscent of the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 during Lebanon’s Civil War when up to 3,500 civilians—mostly Palestinians and Lebanese—were slaughtered in 24 hours by Christian Phalangist military aligned with Israel.

Sabra was a neighborhood of Palestinian settlement; Shatila, a refugee camp. The Israel Defense Forces, surrounding Shatila , ordered its allies to clear out the PLO. Though they were receiving reports of the massacres, they didn’t intervene.

A subsequent inquiry under UN auspices concluded in February 1983 that the IDF forces, as the major occupying element, had responsibility for preventing the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. It termed it “a form of genocide.”

An Israeli investigation came to a similar conclusion, holding the IDF responsible for knowing the massacres were taking place, but not intervening. This forced the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon

For too long, successive Israeli governments have ignored the legitimate rights of Palestinians to a sovereign state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The United States has abetted Israeli intransigence with massive funding and weaponry, much of it being used in the present conflict.

In short, it’s complicit in the excesses being committed.

While Hamas committed abominable acts against Israeli civilians, resulting in 1400 deaths with its incursion of October 7, it doesn’t justify Israel’s disproportionate response, nor ongoing West Bank settler violence against Palestinian civilians, more than 100 of them recently killed.

Yes, Gaza elected Hamas in 2006 to represent them, but there haven’t been any elections since. Do all Gazans support Hamas? Probably not, given the suffering Hamas has inflicted on Gazans.

All of this carnage is rooted in Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917, sanctioning a homeland for Israel. Did anyone ask its Ottoman citizenry, the vast majority, Turk and Arab? Few Jews lived in the area that would become Israel.

In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland and forbidden a return, a vengeful response of incalculable cruelty.

The irony is that many Jews, who themselves have suffered historical displacement and genocide, have become perpetrators of its reiteration.

I would remind dissenters that attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. In short, they are war crimes.

–rj