America's complicity in the destruction of Palestine

“In our time,” wrote George Orwell in 1946, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” British colonialism, the Soviet gulag and America’s dropping of an atomic bomb, he argued, “can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.” So how do people defend the indefensible? Through “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” By obscuring the truth.

So it is, more than 70 years later, with Israeli policy toward the Gaza Strip. The truth is too brutal to honestly defend.

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Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. That’s not hyperbole. The United Nations says that Gaza will be “unlivable” by 2020, maybe sooner.

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[T]he actor with the greatest power over Gaza is Israel. Israeli policies are instrumental in denying Gaza’s people the water, electricity, education and food they need to live decent lives.

How do kind, respectable, well-meaning American Jews defend this? How do they endorse the strangulation of 2 million human beings? Orwell provided the answer. They do so because Jewish leaders, in both Israel and the United States, encase Israel’s actions in a fog of euphemism and lies.

  Peter Beinart

While it's true that the language of euphemism and lies exists, so does the obvious truth. It's not like there aren't reports and video footage constantly providing proof of the situation. If American Jews are defending Israel's treatment of Palestine, it's not because they don't know what's really going on.

Earlier this month, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, defended Israel’s shooting of mostly unarmed protesters by declaring that, “We withdrew entirely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, removing every Israeli resident, home, factory and synagogue. We are not responsible for the well-being of the people of Gaza.” American Jewish leaders echo the claim. “Israel withdrew totally” from Gaza, wrote Kenneth Bandler, the American Jewish Committee’s director of media relations, last year.

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These are anesthetizing fictions. Yes, Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers in 2005. But Israel still controls Gaza. It controls it in the way a prison guard might control a prison courtyard in which he never actually sets foot.

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Israel declares parts of Gaza off-limits to the people who live there. Israel has established buffer zones — it calls them Access Restricted Areas — to keep Palestinians away from the fence that separates Gaza from Israel. According to the United Nations, this restricted area has ranged over the past decade from 100 to 500 meters, comprising as much as one-third of Gaza’s arable land. People who enter these zones can — and over the years have been — shot.

In addition to barring Palestinians from much of Gaza’s best land, Israel bars them from much of Gaza’s water. In 1993, the Oslo Accords promised Gazan fisherman the right to fish 20 nautical miles off the coast. But since then, Israel has generally restricted fishing to between three and six nautical miles.

Since sardines, which the United Nations calls Gaza’s “most important catch,” “flourish at the 6 NM boundary,” these limitations have been disastrous for Gazan fisherman.

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The second way in which Israel still controls Gaza is by controlling its borders. Israel controls the airspace above Gaza, and has not permitted the reopening of Gaza’s airport, which it bombed in 2001. Neither does it allow travel to and from Gaza by sea.

Israel also controls most land access to Gaza. It’s true that — in addition to Gaza’s two active border-crossing points with Israel — it has a third, Rafah, with Egypt. But even here, Israel wields substantial influence.

But they "withdrew" from Gaza.

Finally, and perhaps most profoundly, Israel controls Gaza’s population registry. When a child is born in Gaza, her parents register the birth, via the Palestinian Authority, with the Israeli military.

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Israel rarely adds adults to the Palestinian population registry. That means that if you’re, say, a Jordanian who marries someone from Gaza and wants to move there to live with her, you’re probably out of luck. Israel won’t let you in.

But Israel "withdrew".

Israel is even more zealous about limiting the number of Palestinians in the West Bank, where it still has settlers. So when Palestinians move from Gaza to the West Bank, Israel generally refuses to let them update their addresses, which means they can’t legally stay. Israel can even prevent children in Gaza from changing their address to the West Bank to live with a parent.

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You won’t hear about this at the AIPAC Policy Conference. But in these and myriad other ways, Israel constrains the lives of virtually every person in Gaza.

Not "virtually". Literally.

As the indispensable Israeli human rights group Gisha has observed: “Gaza residents may not bring a crate of milk into the Gaza Strip without Israeli permission; A Gaza university cannot receive visits from a foreign lecturer unless Israel issues a visitor’s permit; A Gaza mother cannot register her child in the Palestinian population registry without Israeli approval; A Gaza fisherman cannot fish off the coast of Gaza without permission from Israel; A Gaza nonprofit organization cannot receive a tax-exempt donation of goods without Israeli approval; A Gaza teacher cannot receive her salary unless Israel agrees to transfer tax revenues to the Palestinian Ministry of Education; A Gaza farmer cannot get his carnations and cherry tomatoes to market unless Israel permits the goods to exit Gaza.” Claiming that Israel divested itself of responsibility for Gaza when it “withdrew totally” in 2005 may ease American Jewish consciences. But it’s a lie.

And American Jews who are still supporting the Israeli government know it.

In three wars — in 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014 — Israeli bombing damaged roughly 240,000 Gazan homes. According to The New York Times, Operation Cast Lead alone, in 2008-2009, cost Gaza’s economy $4 billion, almost three times the Strip’s annual GDP. Operation Protective Edge in 2014 damaged or destroyed more than 500 schools and preschools, affecting 350,000 students.

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Israel’s buffer zones and partial blockade make it impossible for the Strip to effectively rebuild. Over the past three years, Israel has, to its credit, loosened restrictions on goods coming in and out of Gaza. Still, the United Nations reports that, in large measure because of “continued export restrictions” and “restrictions on import of material and equipment necessary for local production[B3],” Gaza exported less than one-fifth as much in 2016 as it had in the first half of 2007.

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According to the United Nations, roughly half the people in Gaza are “moderately-to-severely food insecure,” up 30% from a decade ago. Hospitals lack essential drugs. A shortage of teachers and buildings has forced many schools to run double and even triple shifts, which means many children attend school for only four hours a day. (By withholding donations to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which runs many of Gaza’s schools, the Trump administration will likely make this worse). Most people in Gaza receive only a few hours of electricity per day.

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[Allegedly for "security" purposes, Israel] restricts Gaza’s import of many “dual-use” products, from cement and steel to cranes, x-ray machines and smoke detectors to wood planks thicker than 5 centimeters to even the batteries and spare parts needed to power children’s hearings aids. The economic and humanitarian consequences of these restrictions are often grave. And Israel’s definition of “dual-use” is far broader than international standards.

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Families in Gaza cannot travel to the West Bank or Israel proper to see their families unless a “first degree relative” (parent, child, sibling) gets married, dies or is about to die. Letting someone leave Gaza to visit his dying grandparent is an unacceptable security risk, evidently, while letting them leave to visit a dying parent is not.

Israel’s blockade on exports is similarly vast and arbitrary. Israel allows farmers in Gaza to sell tomatoes and eggplants to Israel but not potatoes, spinach and beans. It allows them to export 450 tons of eggplant and tomatoes per month but not more. Spinach, evidently, is more dangerous than eggplant. And 500 tons of eggplant and tomatoes are more dangerous than 450.

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In 2009, Haaretz exposed the way Israeli agricultural interests lobby to loosen restrictions on imports into Gaza when Israeli farmers want to sell surplus goods. In 2011, Israel found itself with a shortage of lulavs, the palm fronds that observant Jews shake on the holiday of Sukkot. So Israel lifted its ban on Gaza’s export of palm fronds. Had the security risk suddenly changed? Of course not.

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[T]errorism doesn’t only require opportunity; it also requires intent. And when you bankrupt a Gazan farmer by blocking his exports or crush a Gazan student’s dreams by denying her the chance to study abroad, you may breed the desperation and hatred that produces terrorism, and thus undermine the very Israeli security you’re trying to safeguard.

This is the same argument people make for US policy in the Middle East: we are creating terorists by interfering and destroying their homes and lives, and therefore making ourselves less safe. The problem with this "argument" is that it is so plainly obvious as to be rendered ridiculous. It shouldn't be necessary to make such an argument. In our case, it's even more ridiculous than it is for Israel since our country is so far separated from the Middle East by distance. It's plainly obvious, however, in both cases, that safety is not really the issue. It's a bugaboo. We - and both Israeli and American Jews - have to dispense with common sense and falsely claim fears for our safety to cover for what is purely prejudice and xenophobia.

American Jewish leaders insist that Israel no longer controls Gaza. But when confronted with the control Israel actually wields, their justifications generally boil down to: “security” and “Hamas.”

Hamas is indeed a brutal and destructive force, to both Israelis and Palestinians. It has a long and ugly record of terrorist attacks. It does not recognize Israel. Its Islamist ideology is deeply oppressive, especially to women, LGBTQ Palestinians and religious dissenters.

But Hamas did not force Israel to adopt the policies that have devastated Gaza. Those policies represent a choice — a choice that has not only failed to dislodge Hamas, but has also created the very conditions in which extremism thrives.

Nor did Hamas exist outside of the Israeli occupation. Hamas was formed in 1987 as a response and resistance to Israeli control of Palestine. Just as the US invasion of Iraq gave rise to al Qaeda (who want to kill us), Israeli policy gave rise to Hamas.

[After its electoral victory in 2006], Hamas proposed a unity government with Fatah “for the purpose of ending the occupation and settlements and achieving a complete withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem, so that the region enjoys calm and stability during this phase.”

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Washington and Jerusalem pressured Abbas to reject a national unity government and govern without a democratically elected parliament. Then, in 2007, the Bush administration encouraged Abbas’s national security advisor, Mohammed Dahlan, to oust Hamas from Gaza by force, a gambit that backfired when Hamas won the battle on the ground. And with Hamas now ensconced in power, Israel dramatically tightened its blockade of Gaza, which it has maintained — with modifications — ever since.

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For more than a decade, Israel’s answer to the problem of Gaza has been collective punishment and terrifying force. For stretches of time, this has kept Gaza quiet. And it may again. In the coming weeks, Israeli soldiers may kill and maim enough protesters to scare the rest back into their prison enclave. But sooner or later, Gaza will rise again. And the longer Israel suffocates its people, the more desperate and vengeful their uprisings will become. [...] According to the United Nations, three hundred thousand children in Gaza suffer from post-traumatic stress from the 2014 conflict alone. Do Israeli and American Jewish leaders really believe that brutalizing them even more by denying them adequate food, education, electricity and water will make them more likely to live in peace with Israel?

That question would be useful only if Israeli and American Jewish leaders were actually interested in peace.

The struggle for human decency, Orwell argued, is also a struggle for honest language. Our community’s complicity in the human nightmare in Gaza should fill every American Jew with shame. The first step toward ending that complicity is to stop lying to ourselves.

But lying to ourselves is all we have to protect our egos, maintain our prejudices and retain control.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.