Tag: Gaza

Out of Nowhere: Gaza in Poetry

I’m about to eat breakfast, but I feel guilty for the good life I wake to daily when so much of the world, removed from our shores, knows only war, destruction, death, and incalculable grief: Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine and Gaza. Still others.

I am moved by Palestinian-American poet and physician Fady Joudah’s recent poem about Gaza. The death toll, vastly civilian, now approaches 70,000.

Joudah has lost 100 members of his Gaza family. He has served as a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders.

Since his poem is under copyright, I can only share an excerpt:

“And out of nowhere…”

And out of nowhere a girl receives an ovation
from her rescuers, all men on their knees and bellies
clearing the man-made rubble with their bare hands, disfigured by dust into ghosts.
All disasters are natural including this one, because humans are natural.
The rescuers tell her she’s incredible, powerful,
and for a split second, before the weight of her family’s disappearance sinks her, she smiles,
like a child who lived for seven years above ground receiving praise.

PostScript:
Joudah is a winner of The Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and long listed for the National Book Award for Poetry (2024).

—rj

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others: A Review

Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images) Susan Sontag (Photo by Deborah


Taking photos is now so universally accessible via our smartphones that we’re likely to take it for granted.

Until recently, it required buying a dedicated camera, inserting a film roll, setting the lens, then waiting—perhaps a week or more—to see the results of a distant lab.

I think of photos as a freeze on time, lovers as Keats reminded us, still fresh in their youth; sons and daughters, children still; parents and grandparents as we remember them. But photos, buttressed with videos, do even more, providing a window on what ails us.

Susan Sontag in her splendid book I’ve just read, Regarding the Pain of Others, argues that the visual not only helps us remember, but sensitizes us to the plight of those who acutely suffer while we warm ourselves under the blankets on cold winter nights, our bellies full. A moralist and cultural critic, she takes on the scourge of war’s ravages, a predominantly male enterprise it seems, unleashing the human capacity to inflict limitless evil, often with impunity.

Photography reminds us of Hiroshima and Nagasaki viewed aerially following their atom bomb devastations, incinerating 200,000 civilians within minutes; of emaciated prisoners released from Nazi death camps, the residue of 12 million exterminated; of ethnic strife in Bosnia in 1992, culminating in Srebrenica; of the dead and dying of 9/11; the machete butchering, killing 500,000 Tutsis in Rwanda. We cannot afford to let their horrors be relegated to the dumpsters of oblivion.

I remember Vietnam and My Lai (1968) and the American massacre of 500 villagers, the burning of their village, that consolidated American resistance to a needless, barbarous conflict consuming 64000 allied lives and 900,000 Vietnamese, ending a president’s re-election bid. Without film crews, we would have lacked evidence, much like when unleashed Soviet troops raped 130,000 German women after taking Berlin.

The trail is long. Much of Sontag’s narrative isn’t pleasurable reading to be sure, but without photography’s capability for exactitude, man’s inhumanity will never be addressed and perhaps, though distantly, vanish like slavery from the human repertoire. It is our duty not to turn aside, but remember and, beyond acknowledgement, understand war’s antecedents and protest their repetition.

I mourn Sontag’s passing from us in her prime—her cerebral introspection of what ails us, delivered always with compassion and unceasing hope that we can and will do better.

After reading her book, I thought of Palestinians in the Gaza strip, desperate for food, killed daily, many of them women and children. As I write, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) informs us that 900 Palestinians seeking food have been killed since mid-May. Unlike other conflicts, the foreign press has been banned from access to Gaza.

I think, too, of Putin’s accelerated nightly aerial assaults, on Ukraine, targeting civilian infrastructures: hospitals, ambulances, apartment buildings, shopping malls and, by day, farmers plowing their fields.

Photography offers documentation. Sontag was right: without photography, we are denied access to the truth and the scourge of war is assured its continuence.

—rj





No Other Land: A Story That Must Be Told

The Academy Awards take place tonight, but I may not watch.

I have misgivings, particularly about the industry’s apparent exclusion of films that highlight the Palestinian plight in Israel.

Like many others, I don’t miss theaters. It’s nice just lounging in an easy chair, scrolling through endless streaming choices on a big-screen TV, microwaved popcorn at hand. Traditional studios have taken the hint, shifting their priorities toward digital platforms.

A few times, I’ve ve been tempted to return to the theater to see films like Top Gun: Maverick for its effects, or Oppenheimer, for its brilliant portrayal of a conflicted scientist. But I always hold off, knowing that within months, I can rent or buy the film and avoid the steep ticket prices.

Now comes another film, a documentary No Other Land, winner of the Berlin International Film Festival and the Gotham Award for Best Documentary, now an Oscar nominee.

Yet no American studio dares to sponsor it.

Jointly directed by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, No Other Land lays bare the struggles of Masafer Yatta, a West Bank community facing near-daily assaults from Israeli Defense Forces and encroaching settlers who want them gone, the latter, an updated version of the Ku Klux Klan. The IDF claims it needs the land for a military training base.

Two weeks before the film’s Oscar nomination, masked settlers stormed Masafer Yatta, destroying homes. In one instance, caught on film, a resident was shot in the stomach. The filmmakers themselves have been harassed, even shot at, over five years of production.

Palestinian director Basel Adra, a Masafer Yatta resident, has been targeted multiple times. Yet he refuses to leave the land where his family has lived for generations.

His Israeli co-director, Yuval Abraham, told The New York Times:
“I look at Basel, who’s living a much more difficult life than myself, and as long as he’s continuing, I feel like I also have to continue. Even if reality is only changing for the worse, it’s not as if we know what would happen if there is no documentation.”

So far, the film has reached just 23 American theaters. Still, the directors hope for broader exposure to awaken audiences to Israel’s deepening colonization of the West Bank and shift public perception.

But in America, supporting Palestinian rights often invites accusations of antisemitism. Trump has proposed deporting Palestinian student protesters. As for Gaza, he advocates expelling its 2 million inhabitants without a right of return.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, The Message, devotes half its pages to his time in the West Bank. Some criticize him for omitting Hamas’ attack on Israel and its atrocities. Daniel Berner of The Atlantic calls Coates’s analysis simplistic. Yet liberal Israelis, though a minority, may find his perspective compelling.

Coates focuses on the West Bank, not Gaza. In an interview with New York Magazine, he remarked: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.”

As expected, some have labeled him antisemitic. The New Republic sees it differently, calling the backlash a massive media failing: “Coates is not antisemitic to defend Palestinian human rights” (Shiner, October 2, 2024).

If No Other Land makes it to my local theater, I’ll give up my easy chair, venture out to the theater, pay the ticket price, not only to witness a remarkable documentary, undertaken at great risk, but to lend my support to a story centered in truths that must be told.

RJoly

Biden plays politics: The Gaza fiasco


On one hand, President Biden urges a ceasefire in the nearly six month Gaza conflict; on the other, he has stealthily authorized a potent new military aid package to Israel that includes jets, 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs.

Although 2000 pound bombs are capable of taking out whole city blocks and have been abandoned by most Western militaries for employment in urban locales, they have dominated Israel’s aerial assault on Gaza, with the death toll currently estimated at 33,000, the vast majority of them civilians.

Anonymous Pentagon sources disclose the armament transfer includes transfer of 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines at a cost of 2.5 billion.
Biden isn’t mandated to disclose any of this to lawmakers since Congress had approved the transfer in 2008, presently unfulfilled.

Israel is currently the largest recipient of U.S. aid since the 1970s, receiving on average $1.8 billion in military and $1.2 billion in economic aid annually.

Such aid incentivizes documented Israeli violations of Palestinian rights by humane organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They have included ongoing abusive detention practices (including the torture of prisoners), restrictions on freedom of movement of Palestinians, the targeting of medical personnel and facilities, and severe damage to infrastructure such as water and electricity to Palestinian civilians prior to Israel’s current Gaza incursion.

It does not move the needle to a two state solution.

All of this comes even as Biden expresses concern over a pending Israeli assault on the alleged remaining Hamas stronghold of Rafah along the Egyptian border and UN warnings of incipient mass starvation. 1.2 million Gaza refugees have sought refuge in this enclave.

Jewish pressure weighs heavily on the Biden administration in an election year with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee donating millions to unseat Democrats deemed unfriendly to Israel. A recent Pew Research survey indicates 80% of American Jews regard aid to Israel as essential.

Those constituencies calling for suspension of aid to Israel are branded as anti-Semite, with surging efforts to pass legislation abridging their First Amendment right to free speech.

Republicans, even more than Democrat leaning Jews, have vigorously supported aid to Israel, though increasingly resistant to approving aid to a besieged Ukraine.

Biden would do well to mind an increasingly assertive Muslim-American electorate that threatens to boycott him in November.

Meanwhile, any full scale attack on densely populated Rafah, gateway for food convoys, would conceivably result in thousands, not hundreds, of killed and maimed.

The morally compromised Biden administration has been complicit in Israel’s blitzkrieg that includes mosques, churches, hospitals and refugee camps, abetted by American armaments.

For this, the U.S. proves deserving of world condemnation.

The elephant in the room is Biden; but then again, endeavors to dislodge him by voting for his Republican adversary are surely non sequitur.

Conversely, efforts to encourage divestiture at home and abroad of Israel merit encouragement. They brought down South Africa’s apartheid regime.

America must do what is right, not what is easy.

–rj

US Complicity: A Lack of Political Will


KHAN YUNIS, GAZA -t. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

If ever there’s been a clarion call for the United States to abandon its military support for Israel, it’s now. Prime Minister Natanyahu has made it clear to Washington that there will be no Palestinian state on the West Bank, rejecting Secretary of State Blinken’s recent plea for a two state resolution as Israel’s surest means to security.

Nor will the Prime Minister, a friend of Donald Trump since the 1980s, scale back Israel’s offensive in Gaza until total victory and return of remaining hostages is achieved.

As I write, nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and children; hospitals, mosques, churches and refugee camps bombed; and a frightened civilian population, 1.9 million of them, or 80% of the Gaza population, herded into a southern corridor, and confronted with disease and starvation.

This constitutes the true genocide, which South Africa has brought to the attention of the International Court of Justice (ICC), the UN’s highest court. Fifty-six other nations support the suit, but not the United States and UK. The European Union has chosen silence.

KHAN YUNIS, GAZA – General view of buildings which were destroyed during Israeli bombardment. Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

South Africa has also filed a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC), not to be conflated with the ICJ, though both are located in the Hague. The ICJ can issue arrest warrants, as it did for Vladimir Putin, who must now avoid signatory countries that include South Africa.

What’s not received ample attention is the economic plight Palestinians face. Before Hamas’ October 7 incursion, 400,000 Palestinians were employed by Israel, largely in construction, agriculture and service sectors. I87,000 Gazans have had their work permits canceled; similarly, 167,000 Palestinians on the West Bank.

In the meanwhile, Israel has set up worker recruiting offices in India and Sri Lanka, with the goal of importing between 50,000 to 100,000 replacements.

This may be part of a long term stategy by Israeli nationalists to encourage Palestinians to leave Israel. Take, for example, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s call for Palestinian residents of Gaza to leave, replaced by Israelis, who could “make the desert bloom.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration, despite its call for a cease fire and a two state solution, is unwilling to risk political capital and rebuff Netanyahu by suspending military aid to Israel.

By default, it’s rendered the US complicit in Israel’s criminality, angered Progressives, alienated the Muslim community, made the US a global atavar of hypocrisy, and risks dragging the country into a wider conflict, inflicting incalculable consequences, both home and abroad.

–rj

“I Grant You Refuge”: Hiba Aba Nada’s Final Poem

Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator Hiba Aba Nada, age 32, wrote this poem ten days before her death in her home on October 20, 2023 from an Israeli bombing attack in south Gaza that killed many others. In the poem, God proffers an afterlife of refuge for the besieged and dying. In the closing verse, He assures the martyrs’ ultimate triumph:

1.
I grant you refuge
in invocation and prayer.
I bless the neighborhood and the minaret
to guard them
from the rocket

from the moment
it is a general’s command
until it becomes
a raid.

I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones who
change the rocket’s course
before it lands
with their smiles.

2.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones now asleep like chicks in a nest.

They don’t walk in their sleep toward dreams.
They know death lurks outside the house.

Their mothers’ tears are now doves
following them, trailing behind
every coffin.

3.
I grant the father refuge,
the little ones’ father who holds the house upright
when it tilts after the bombs.
He implores the moment of death:
“Have mercy. Spare me a little while.
For their sake, I’ve learned to love my life.
Grant them a death
as beautiful as they are.”

4.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and death,
refuge in the glory of our siege,
here in the belly of the whale.

Our streets exalt God with every bomb.
They pray for the mosques and the houses.
And every time the bombing begins in the North,
our supplications rise in the South.

5.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and suffering.

With words of sacred scripture
I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous
and the shades of cloud from the smog.

I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.

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

The Truth Must be Told: The Tragedy of Gaza


As we all know, several thousand Gaza Hamas fighters bulldozed their way through an Israeli security fence on October 7, 2023, and committed some of the most barbaric crimes against humanity not seen since Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Holocaust.

More than 1400 Israelis died, most of them civilians, some slaughtered in nearby fields while celebrating the ending of Sukkot, an annual fall event in the Jewish calendar; others, in their beds on nearby kibbutzim. Reports are that Hamas insurgents raped, pillaged, and slaughtered even children, including babies. More than 200 civilians and soldiers were taken hostage, including citizens of other countries. Israeli wounded stands at 4600.

The Israeli response has been unceasingly withering in Gaza, Prime Minister Netanyahu declaring war on Hamas, calling up 300,000 reservists, bombing Gaza’s civilian infrastructure daily, and ordering one million Gaza civilians to evacuate to southern Gaza.

A land invasion of Gaza by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is anticipated. They will face up to 50,000 Hamas fighters, dispersed in a labyrinthian tunnel weave, threatening a Stalingrad consequence of casualties in house-to-house fighting. American pressure has slowed any launching of an immediate invasion, but not halted the daily bombing, killing 700 civilians in the last twenty-four hours, half of them women and children.

Hezbollah, to the north in Lebanon, have been firing rockets into nearby Israeli border towns, forcing their evacuation and possibly opening a second front in a dangerously escalating Middle East conflict. Iran has pledged to intervene if Israel launches a land invasion of Gaza.

In the meantime, the death toll of Gaza civilians now exceeds 5,000, including more than 2000 children, the cut off of food, water, and energy to Gaza, the forestalling of shipments of humanitarian aid from Egypt, which threatens the closure of hospitals treating thousands of wounded civilians. Mass starvation and disease looms as an aftermath, Israel insisting that hostages be released, despite international calls for restraint and observance of humanitarian values.

Recently, a Christian hospital in Gaza came under rocket attack, killing 500 people among those taking shelter. International intelligence indicates it was an errant Hamas rocket that caused this tragedy. Nonetheless, the World Health Organization has documented 171 Israeli attacks on health care in the occupied Palestinian territory,” killing 473 health workers.

As I write, unrest continues on the West Bank, with some 100 Arab protestors killed. A pending historic security alliance has been withdrawn by the Saudis and Israel’s peaceful relationship with Jordan has been strained. Settler crimes against West Bank farmers have been chronicled over the years, with killing of livestock, destruction of olive groves, and slaying of those who resist.

The U.S. response has been typical, Biden ordering two aircraft carriers into the gulf and threatening to intervene should Hezbollah open a second front.
It has called for a two state settlement for many years, yet overlooked Israeli intransigence. It gives $3 billion in aid annually to Israel and recently concluded a $37 billion loan agreement in military aid. Israel will have access to the F-35, the world’s most advanced fighter jet.

At home, dissenters are regaled as antisemitic. Many, including Democrats, have called for disbandment of Palestinian student campus organizations and denounced the growing Leftist faction in the Democratic Party that includes Bernie Sanders. Frenzied Republicans, increasingly resistant to continuing aid to Ukraine, have no difficulty supporting huge expenditures to Israel. Lindsey Graham says, “Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place!”

There is, in short, a context for Arab and Palestinian resentment and outburst.
We seem to have learned nothing from the rage that lay behind the 9/11 horror. We began two long wars, fought by America’s poor White and Blacks. We lost both. Did Vietnam teach us nothing?

Do we lust for another war? Have we forgotten George Washington’s warning to avoid “entangling alliances”? “The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave” (Farewell Address).

UN secretary-general António Guterres speaks for me: “Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” He likewise condemned Hamas: “No injustice to the Palestinians justifies the appalling attacks by Hamas.”

The Israeli response to Guterres? “Due to his remarks we will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives” (Gilad Erdan, Israel ambassador to the UN). “The time has come to teach them a lesson. Guterres should resign.”

Hamas was elected to power in 2006. There have been no elections since. Does “Israel’s right to defend itself” (Biden) justify its war on Gaza civilians, half of whom are children?

Ultimately an apartheid Israel will reap its own folly. Israel’s growing Arab population will soon outnumber Israelis. It will become a South Africa before Nelson Mandela’s victorious crusade for a liberated biracial nation enjoying equity.

-rj