http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/bring-israelis-palestinians/24316
Gaza is not just about them, it’s about us, too
Jon Snow
She lay in my arms. Just weeks old, a tiny baby. Her Palestinian father had just handed her to me at the infernal steel border building at the exit of Gaza into Israel. She did not cry. She just looked at me with her beady, dark eyes.
Her father was trying both to open her pram, and steady his wounded wife in her wheel chair. Their luggage was scattered at the final entry gate as if just thrown through it.
We shared no common language, it had just seemed inevitable that as the only other able-bodied human in this absurd transit room, I should care for the baby.
I know not their story, nor how, alone seemingly, they were the only Palestinians, in that brief half-hour of Israeli aerial ceasefire, to have been allowed across.
But holding this girl baby connected me again to the wardfuls of small children so brutally smashed by this odious war. Connected me too to the ever-present reality that the average age in Gaza is 17 and that a quarter of a million are children are, like the babe in my arms, small children.
I could see the young Israeli IDF guards peering at me through the steel room’s bullet-proof glass. They were the same women who, from another glass window, had barked commands at me though a very public address system.
“Feet apart!” they said. “Turn! No, not that way – the other!” Then, in the next of five steel security rooms I passed through - each with a red or green light to tell me to stop or go – a male security guard up in the same complex above me shouted “Take your shirt off - right off. Now throw it on the floor… Pick it up, now ring it like it was wet” (it was wet, soaked in sweat).
From entering the steel complex until I reach the final steel clearing room where I held the baby, I was never spoken to face to face, nor did I see another human beyond those who barked the commands through the bullet-proof windows high above me.
Finally, even a little reluctantly, I handed my little bundle of humanity back to her father. At that point, the nicest of Israelis, a British-born captain greeted me by name and then moved straight to the aid of the arriving Palestinians.
My own bags came through, my lightweight laptop lying askew with the screen open on top of them. The people behind the glass had had it for fully half an hour.
As I waited for my camera crew and waved goodbye to my Palestinian family, I pressed the laptop on. There was my familiar screen saver but suddenly imposed over by a sequence of pretty black and yellow tartan-like barcodes and a wide top-to-bottom stripe of white, edged with vertical coloured lines.
When I remonstrated later with the senior Israeli military PR officer, he didn’t deny that “they” had probably done it. He added: “You never know, it may all go away.” It hasn’t.
Palestinians mourn relatives killed in an attack on a UN-run school in Gaza
Nor has Gaza’s agony, which deepened with the UN school attack as I was crossing. I feel guilty in leaving, and for the first time in my reporting life, scarred, deeply scarred by what I have seen, some of it too terrible to put on the screen.
It is accentuated by suddenly being within sumptuously appointed Israel. Accentuated by the absolute absence of anything that indicates that this bloody war rages a few miles away. A war that the UN stated yesterday has reduced 55 per cent of Gaza’s diminutive land to a no-go area.
Go tell that to the children playing in the dusty streets or the families forced out of shelters like the UN school compound, to forage for food beneath shells and missiles.
In and out of an Israeli transit hotel for a few hours in Ashkelon, an hour from the steel crossing-point from Gaza, there were three half-hearted air raid warnings. Some people run, but most just get on with what they are doing.
They are relatively safe today because Israel is the most heavily fortified country on earth. The brilliant Israeli-invented, American-financed shield is all but fool-proof; the border fortifications, the intelligence, beyond anything else anywhere.
This brilliant people is devoting itself to a permanent and ever-intensifying expenditure to secure a circumstance in which there will never be a deal with the Palestinians. That’s what it looks like, that is what you see. It may not be true.
The pressure not to go on this way is both internationally and domestically a minority pursuit.
Smoke rises from the Gaza Strip after an Israeli air strike
Leaving Israel and beleaguered Gaza far below me, I lay back in my BA seat headed for London. I donned my headphones and listened to Bach’s heavenly violin concerto in E major, and wept, as I rarely have as an adult.
I wept for two peoples with remarkable similarities. Two peoples of extraordinary gifts and ability. Two peoples living in an area far smaller than England, one of which besieges the other, both of which target each other’s civilians.
This is humankind’s most grievous cancer, for its cells infect conflicts in every corner of the world. We fail as humankind if we do not devise a coming-together. Our leaders, as a vast priority, have to try and try again to use every mechanism in our rare animal capacity - our considerable intellects – to bring these peoples to resolution whatever the cost.
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A couple of the comments -
Jon that was unbearably moving. I am probably one of perhaps millions looking on impotently and wondering where this may all end. Hamas undoubtedly have a case to answer but Israel seems (to an outsider) to have lost all sense of decency and perspective–there seems no will to find a solution, and their appalling spokespeople seem to be constantly on the edge of aggression should anyone challenge them. Israel and the Jewish nation have for many of us a deep well of goodwill–we all know their history–but that well has run dry and the time for accountability has arrived.
Paul, it’s not the Jewish people who are doing this, it’s zionists and zionism which in fact has many Christian fundamentalist supporters who believe that a big war in Israel will bring back Jesus. It’s mainly (at least in the beginning in roughly 1897 when Theodor Herzl founded zionism) a secular European colonial movement. I’d like to think of Netanyahu and his fascist cronies as using Jews as human shields in order to commit his crimes against humanity, war crimes, apartheid, etc.There are so many of all faiths and no faiths who really want to see justice for the Palestinian people and full equality for them.
This is not a story of a misunderstanding between equal sides. There is a historical context in which Palestinians lost their country, Palestine, and their territory has been steadily shrinking ever since due to settlement expansion and land grabs. The Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in a genocide from December 1947 which has been creeping along to this day.
Gaza has been under a 7/8 year brutal blockade by Israel that many international legal experts agree is collective punishment and illegal. I appreciate your wish for peace, but you need to understand the problem more deeply and what is at the root cause of it before you can hope for peace and justice and before you can even claim that an occupied people have leaders with ‘too much power’. The Palestinian people for all intents and purposes are virtually powerless and most certainly lack the financial, military and political support of the world’s only superpower (unlike Israel which enjoys impunity and political cover from the US and the UN).
Some charge that Israel controls the US but it’s essentially the US which uses Israel as a proxy in the Middle East and the Palestinians are the population paying the price for US imperialism in the region, which began as European, specifically British imperialsim, after the Ottoman Empire fell.
As for Gaza, I agree that rockets, if aimed at civilians (whether Israeli or Palestinian) constitutes a war crime. Over 10 years, 29 Israelis have ever died from Gazan rockets compared to hundreds of Palestinian children, men and women in just recent days. I am not exaggerating. I wonder how many people actually know this fact?
Remember: the rockets from Gaza are right now being used by the government of Israel as a justification for genocide.
Gazans, even if they do not think the rockets are very effective, say that this is the only time the world pays their plight any attention. It’s tragic that the only time people look at Gaza is when their children are being blown to bits by the Israeli army, navy and airforce combined.
You can criticise Hamas for ‘not investing in education or jobs’- but they can’t- they’re under a blockade and have no money even for government salaries. After Hamas was elected, for instance, all financial assistance stopped going to Gaza because Israel wanted it so. It’s also up to Israel what is imported into the Gaza Strip and what gets exported (see Israeli organisation ‘Gisha’ for detailed statistics).
At one point, Israel did not allow in books or children’s crayons so for all the money in the world, Gazan children couldn’t have a normal education. Israel keeps bombing their schools, which are already overcrowded from previous bombings that destroyed schools that could not be rebuilt because, yes, Israel did not allow concrete into Gaza. I really could go on about the inhuman conditions this people is subjected to. South Africa during apartheid did the same with subjugating a people while making sure they did not reach similar human development. It’s carefully planned and executed. And it’s called apartheid.
I just want to mention that it is actually quite offensive to say that they ‘may as well be murdering their own people’. Tell that to a Palestinian in Gaza who has lost his whole family to an Israeli bomb or a woman who was carrying her baby while holding a white flag when an Israeli sniper shot her baby in her arms. Could you say the same for Jews in the ghetto who had the courage to fight back? Would you say to their descendants that ‘they may as well have murdered themselves’? Is this how we are conditioned to think of Palestinian lives? That they may as well murder themselves if they have the dignity and immense courage to fight their oppression? No, Robert, ISRAEL is doing a perfectly fine job of genocide without need for western apologies.
Palestinians have a legal right to resistance, even armed. That Israel is slaughtering them should not be blamed on the victims who have a right to resist and defend themselves (funny how this right isn’t invoked for Palestinians).
As others have observed before me, there can be no peace without justice and who of us has the right to be telling Palestinians otherwise? Aren’t we all equal and deserving of our rights? Isn’t this why they are called inalienable? That programme on BBC3 sounds appalling. It was liberal fluff that painted a dangerous picture of a false reality because the Palestinians really do have international law (land, refugee rights, right to freedom of movement, etc) on their side. That this BBC3 programme tried to dilute Israel’s very real moral and legal responsibilities as occupier and aggressor is appalling. But, as so many are now protesting, the BBC is pretty appalling in its ‘coverage’ of the occupation.
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