Gaza: Stay Human

by Vittorio Arrigoni

It all began after Israel ‘disengaged’ from Gaza in the summer of 2005. The settlers were moved so as to enable the Israel army to control the Strip and employ harsh, retaliatory and punitive action without worrying about the fate of Jewish settlers in it. It was hoped that this cynical act would look like a peace gesture, which indeed it did – for a while at least.

There is a grave danger that the sequel to ‘Operation Cast Lead’ would turn Gaza into a ghost town similar to the dummy village built in the Negev.

Please find within the three-week story of a massacre, written to the best of my ability, more often than not in very precarious conditions, often scribbling about the inferno all around me in a tattered notebook while crouched in an ambulance screaming down the street. Or frantically tapping away at the keyboard of any available computer I could find, often inside a building shaking like a crazed pendulum as explosions went off all around. I must warn you that leafing through this book could prove dangerous. These are harmful pages, blood-stained, imbued with white phosphorous, and as sharp as bomb shrapnel. If read within the quiet of a bedroom, your walls will shake from our cries of terror. I feel concerned for the walls of your hearts, which I recognize have not yet become soundproofed to pain.

Please help yourself to a ticket for a tour of hell that even the poet Dante Alighieri could not have conceived of when waking up from his pillow, full of nightmares.

If truth is the first victim of war, it is then Israel’s absolute priority to assassinate it, before, during and after the conflict.

I own a video camera, but today I discovered what a terrible cameraman I am. I can’t bring myself to film mangled bodies or faces drenched in tears. I just can’t. I start crying myself.

Israel has turned the Palestinian hospitals and morgues into angel factories, not realizing just how much hatred they are generating in Palestine and the rest of the world. The angel factories are churning out angels at the rate of a non-stop production line tonight as well: I can tell from the rumbles of explosions outside my window.

Around here earthquakes are of the unnatural kind, and they’re called Israel.

Corpses don’t eat: they can only provide compost for the earth, and, at the moment, Gaza has never been more fertile from decomposition.

This morning, on the street running parallel to the port, I discovered some craters several metres deep, as if meteors had rained down from the sky, as are often featured in sci-fi movies. The difference here is that the special effects are pretty damn painful.

History is a teacher, but it has no students.

They bomb hospitals, and yet there are some who still champion Israel’s right to self-defence. In any self-styled civilized country, self-defence is proportionate to the attack. In these 20 days we’ve counted 1,075 dead Palestinians, 85% of whom were civilians, and over 5,000 injured, of whom half were under 18 years of age. 303 children have been atrociously massacred. Thankfully, there were still only four victims on the Israeli side. It’s equivalent to saying that for Israel, butchering at least 250 Palestinians is a justified bloodbath in avenging each civilian victim on its own side. How can this lop-sided reaction not take one back to some of modern European history’s bleakest periods?

As I franticly tap at my keyboard in the Ramattan Press Agency office, all the Palestinian reporters around me are wearing bullet-proof vests and helmets. They haven’t come in straight from driving a tank – they’ve simply been sitting in front of their computers the whole time. Two floors above, the Reuters offices were recently struck by a rocket, which seriously injured two. Almost all the floors in the building are empty at the moment, and only the most heroic of journalists are still around.

The story of this hell must somehow continue to be told.

This morning the bombing of the United Nations building also caused many casualties, built, among others, with money from the Italian government. Silvio Berlusconi, where are you?

Hell has switched places and come to the centre of Gaza, and we are the damned, designated as such by an inhuman hatred.

Only last night, Ahmed went against the orders of his apprehensive father and, dragging himself across the floor, dared to look out the window at the hellish scenario all around. He saw the tank moving about 30 metres away, smashing into the shutters of a supermarket and opening a hole in it. He then watched soldiers emerge from the armoured vehicle who cheerfully wandered in to ‘do some shopping’. ‘They filled the tank to the point that they were struggling to get back in.’ He then described the jubilant laughs, the mocking songs, providing a soundtrack to the explosions all night long: ‘Ali, Mohammed, this is a message to your Allah Akbar!’

I’ll confess that my motto ‘stay human’ has been direly tested in the last few days, but has survived intact nevertheless. It pulled through, just as the pride for and attachment to one’s native land, expressed as identity and the right to self-rule, has enabled Gaza’s people to carry on.

Once in a while it would be wise to remember that Hamas aren’t a bunch of terrorists, nor a political party, but a movement, and as such they’re impossible to neutralize with storms of cluster bombs.

Voltaire invited us to respect all opinions. I would suggest stopping the sowing of seeds of hatred, sprinkling them with blood and feeding them with terminal resentment. Stay human.

In Gaza, only the dead have seen the end of war. For the living, no ceasefire can make up for the daily battle of a constant quest for survival.

An elderly man, his head wrapped in a kafiyeh, approaches us to ask Natalie, our Lebanese companion with the ISM, where she’s from. Waving his walking stick in the air, as if to draw a wide arc over the devastated landscape before us, he says, ‘Beirut and Gaza, same painting, same artist.’

Over the phone, Ahmed told me about a new kids’ game. Until a few days ago, they amused themselves by relighting the fires, simply kicking the fragments of white phosphorous bombs found scattered all over the Strip. The debris left by these bombs has very long-lasting flammable properties. Even when picked up several days after their detonation, they can still catch fire if shaken about. The Al-Quds Hospital paramedics speak of how they have given up trying to put out the fires provoked by these illegal bombs – their flames seemed to feed off the water being thrown at them. ‘The consequences of all the sh*t that’s been thrown at us in these last three weeks will surface again in the near future, with new cancer cases and deformed babies’, Munir, a doctor at Al-Shifa Hospital told me.

‘The repeated use of air-burst white phosphorous in populated areas’, reports Human Rights Watch, ‘reveals a pattern or policy of conduct rather than incidental or accidental usage.’

only a real democracy puts its army on trial for war crimes. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated that it is not as yet a fully-fledged democracy.

From Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, the search ends in the fenced-off rubble of Gaza City.

Tolerance becomes a crime when it is applied to evil. Thomas Mann

Benjamin Netanyahu, a man with a turret for a head and tank treads for feet.

To the shock of Western diplomats, the delicate role of Foreign Minister was assigned to Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beitenu (‘Israel is our motherland’). No representing the third largest political force in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, during the election campaign Lieberman, in the run-up to the February 2009 elections, made the horrifying argument that an atomic bomb should be dropped on Gaza. During Operation ‘Cast Lead’, he argued that, ‘We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II’,14 which was interpreted by many as alluding to the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 by the Americans in order to force an end to the Second World War. In his first speech as Foreign Minister in April, Lieberman clarified his vision of shalom, of salama, of enduring peace: ‘“Si vis pacem, para bellum” – if you want peace, prepare for war; be strong.’ One could die in Gaza searching for a more explicit way of dressing up ‘might is right’ as ‘peace’.

On the other hand, no one must speak to Hamas – they must be embargoed, and, along with them, 1.5 million Palestinians must also be punished for freely voting for them in democratic elections.

Occasionally, some youth reach a point where they’ve had enough of living without dignity under an inhuman siege, struggling to earn a living for themselves and their families. Perhaps the Israelis may have killed their fathers or brothers in the fields or at sea. So they’ll enrol in some brigade, shoot some homemade rocket towards Israel, just to prove how heroic it is to fight for one’s people, perhaps trying to convince themselves more than their enemy. No Western government protests strongly against the genocidal siege that Gaza is forced to endure, yet for these randomly shot ‘rockets’, thankfully almost always shot without causing any harm, Europe and America’s governments are ready to legitimize a massacre such as the last one endured in Gaza.

John Kennedy once gave a famous speech in West Berlin 1963. Kennedy said, ‘Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was “civis Romanus sum”. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner”.’ He added that, There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that Communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that Communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin. As suggested by Italian blogger, Milena Spigaglia, paraphrasing Kennedy that speech could be rewritten thus to address the siege of Gaza today: There are many people in the world that cannot understand, or claim they don’t understand what the deal between Palestine and Israel is. Let them come to Gaza. Some say that Israel is the force of the future. Let them come to Gaza. Others claim, in Europe and elsewhere, that we are able to cooperate with the Israelis. Let them come to Gaza. And there are even some who say that it’s true, Israel is evil, but it allows for economic progress. Let them come to Gaza.