The 51 Day War Quotes

“In her final paper, one of the Refaat's students reworked Shylock's famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:
Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“When Malcolm X was in prison, his sister told him, Elijah Muhammad said Islam is the true religion of black people and the white man is the Devil? He thought of every white person he had ever met in his life and realized that he had been harmed in one way or another by every one of them," Refaat explained.
"This is what's happening to us in Palestine, because you never come face-to-face with a Jewish person who's not armed to the teeth trying to kill you. And that makes it very hard to break with your prejudice.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Transportation Minister Katz warned. "I prefer one thousand Palestinian mothers crying than letting one Jewish mother cry.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The Israeli military had not only torn through the civilian population of Gaza like a buzz saw during the 51 Day War, killing some 2,200 people-more than 70 percent were confirmed as civilians—and wounding well over 10,000; it had pulverized Gaza's infrastructure. Over 400 businesses and shops had been damaged in targeted Israeli strikes, and at least 120 were completely obliterated; 24 medical facilities were damaged, including the Wafa Hospital in Shujaiya, Gaza's only geriatric rehabilitation facility, whose top three floors were razed by tank shelling. A full one third of Gaza's mosques were bombed, from the Al-Amin Muhammad Mosque, a stately structure built in the center of Gaza City with donations from a Malaysian Muslim charity, to the Al-Omari Mosque, a historical treasure that had stood in the same spot in Jabalia since 647 AD until it was brought to the ground by Israeli missiles on August 2. Gaza’s lone power station was decimated by Israeli airstrikes on July 29, leaving most of Gaza without electricity for over 18 hours a day, and sometimes longer. Perhaps the most disturbing figure was the more than 18,000 civilian homes the Israeli military leveled during its assault on Gaza, leaving at least 100,000 homeless or forced to cram into the already overcrowded homes of relatives.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“I asked Raed if the international community could do anything to help him. “Our message is simple,” he responded. “We don’t need any aid or anything. Just put pressure on the Israelis so they get out of the sea and let us fish and bring a livelihood to our families again.” By October 2014, attacks on Gazan fishermen within the six-mile fishing limit had become routine. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights documented eighteen shooting incidents in the two months after the ceasefire and at least four instances in which fishermen were arrested while working inside the six-mile line. …fishing off the coast in northern Gaza, peppering the crews with rubber-coated steel bullets and arresting seven of them. Not a single rocket was fired into Israel from Gaza in these two months. Amidst the one-way ceasefire, the New York Times described the atmosphere as “a fragile calm.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“These reporters had been closer to the fire than most outsiders—many were targeted in their homes and offices—and produced some of the most bracing coverage of the war as a result. Unlike those of us who came from abroad, the Israeli military did not seem to view local correspondents as journalists deserving of any special protection. They were simply Palestinians who could be eliminated like anyone else, and whose deaths did little to generate international outcry or profuse exhibitions of solidarity. During the military escalation in Gaza in November 2012, when Israel targeted reporters working for the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV for assassination, the Israeli army spokesperson's unit declared that any reporter in the vicinity of Hamas "positions" was a potential target.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Throughout Palestine, victory was understood not necessarily as a decisive military triumph, but as a forceful demonstration of qualities like sumud (steadfastness), fidaa (sacrifice/ redemption), and ebaa (stubbornness in the face of power) during a prolonged trial. This attitude has, of course, been a feature of anti-colonial struggles throughout history, from Vietnam to Algeria to South Africa, but it was especially pronounced in Gaza, where 1.8 million ghettoized refugees were taking heavy losses against a nuclearized army equipped and financed by the superpowers of the West. I witnessed the clearest distillation of this defiance in Beit Hanoun, the decimated northern border city. There, during the mid-August ceasefire, I met a family gathered above the ruins of their home, a four-story structure that had been transformed into a massive crater by a direct hit from an Israeli fragmentation bomb. On a flat slab of concrete that sat above the gargantuan sinkhole, grafiti read "3 to 0," portraying the Palestinian armed factions as the victors of the last three military conflicts in Gaza.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Basha Tower’s destruction was the final indignity for a Gazan media that lost sixteen members during the war, including several who literally died on camera. Curiously, the attacks on journalists and their offices generated little outrage in the West, even when those journalists worked for major Western media outlets. Israel’s bombing of the office owned by the independently contracted stringer for Bloomberg News, Saud Abu Ramadan, was not mentioned in Bloomberg’s coverage of the war. When Israel attacked the Mushtaha building, another office complex in central Gaza City that housed the offices of major foreign news agencies like Andalou and Xinhua, local photojournalist Wissam Nassar told Dan Cohen that the bombings destroyed his car. Nassar’s photography regularly appeared in the New York Times during the war, however, the attack that ruined his vehicle and destroyed a building filled with media offices was absent from the paper’s coverage.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Qananeh viewed the destruction of Basha Tower as an attack on Gaza's entire journalist community. "They target journalists and civilians to silence the media outlets that hurt the occupier in front of world opinion," he told me. "For us in the media, this isn't the first time and it won't be the last time that the enemy targets journalists or journalism headquarters. The occupation does not distinguish between a civilian, a journalist, and a child. They just target Palestinians in a barbaric manner. This is not going to affect us. We will continue to cover all of the crimes of the occupation. As journalists, we have to be the messengers and deliver the news.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The people here are civilians. They are doctors, teachers, businessmen—they're the best of society. So why else destroy this tower but for the savagery and barbarism of the Israelis that target everything on this land: humans, stones and plants? Why else but to plant terror and fear and kick people out of their land?"
Israeli violence had become such a consistent feature of Gazan life that few of Barawi's neighbors were terribly shocked by the destruction of their homes. "We actually got used to all the explosions," he reflected. "Everyone was prepared for their ceilings to collapse on them so they sat in their apartments and played with their kids and did what they normally do. We prepared while watching TV or doing mundane things just to move from this world into the next.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“I immediately recognized the man as Denny Cormier, a sixty-eight-year-old anti-war activist from Santa Fe, New Mexico whom I knew as one of the few Americans who had been living in Gaza for a long term period. After I introduced myself, Cormier explained how he arrived in Gaza earlier in the year and became instantly enchanted. Having left one of America's top retirement destinations, Cormier said he intended to spend his twilight years in the seaside ghetto of Gaza. "Every-where I go here," he remarked with a look of wonder, "I make new friends and people invite me into their homes for dinner. I've never met more beautiful, welcoming people.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“By the end of that first week of August, the number of children killed in Gaza stood at 408. According to an Associated Press (AP) investigation of Israeli airstrikes targeting civilian homes during the 51 Day War, in 83 Israeli airstrikes targeting civilian homes, three or more members of a family were killed.
Among the dead were 108 preschoolers and 19 infants. In all, Israeli attacks on civilian houses killed at least 844 Palestinians during the war, with 89 percent of the dead confirmed by the AP to be non-combatants.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Funding for the Iron Dome system was subsidized by US taxpayers to the tune of $200 million, beginning in 2011. In mid-July, at the onset of the 51 Day War, the US Senate authorized another $351 million subsidy to support the Israeli government request for more Iron Dome systems.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The casualty count at this point in the war gave new urgency to the strategy Qassam Brigades commander Muhammad al-Deif had overseen. By August 3, just after the Israeli army enacted the Hannibal Directive in Rafah, the Israeli death toll stood at just over sixty-seven—almost exclusively soldiers and military personnel. Meanwhile, the Israeli army had killed more than eighteen hundred residents of Gaza, among whom 80 percent were civilians, according to estimates by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights. While Al-Qassam aimed to kill soldiers in close quarters engagements, the Israeli army had resorted to the Dahiya Doctrine, employing disproportionate force to batter Gaza's civilian population in vain hopes that they would turn on Hamas.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The following day, the Israeli army spokesperson's unit attempted to cover up the embarrassment on the battlefield. It claimed in a statement to the media that the soldiers had been killed in a single RPG strike, then insisted that the soldiers had successfully stopped a planned Qassam Brigade attack on civilians living in the adjacent Nahal Oz kibbutz. Both claims were proven false, and the veracity of the video confirmed.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“After attacking the anti-war demonstrations, Order 8 followers proceeded to supply the names of so-called traitors to their employers, pressuring companies and government agencies to fire the anti-war elements burrowing within the system.
Dozens lost their jobs, most of them Palestinian citizens of Israel who had taken to Facebook to protest the army's actions in Gaza. When a postal employee posted a call for sending leftists to gas chambers, however, her government employer defended the statement on the grounds of free speech.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“A week later, a mob of assorted right-wing nationalists assaulted an anti-war rally in Haifa, bombarding the gathering of Palestinians and leftists with a hailstorm of stones while police stood by and watched. After burning a Palestinian flag while chanting "Death to Arabs," a group of right-wing activists went looking for Arabs to assault. They found Suhail Assad, the deputy mayor of the city, beating him and his son so severely that they had to be hospitalized. When police passed by, the assailants simply walked away, and the police made no arrests.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Throughout the 51 Day War, The Shadow organized alongside Michael Ben-Ari, a ringleader of some of the settlement movement's most extreme elements. Ben-Ari was a former lieutenant of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the patron saint of Israel's ul-tra-nationalist right who immigrated from Brooklyn to Israel in 1971 to organize militant cells among fanatical Jewish youth.
Though he was banned from the Knesset, where he served during the mid-1980s, for his open calls for violence, and his Kach party was outlawed, Kahane's influence has lived on in the discriminatory laws introduced by mainstream parties and through acolytes like Ben-Ari, who held a seat in the Knesset from 2009 to 2013. While in the Knesset, Ben-Ari turned his parliamentary field offices into organizing hubs for the anti-Af-rican movement, which organized vigilante patrols that harassed and incited violence against the sixty thousand non-Jewish African refugees living in Israel. Through Lehava, a radical hate group dedicated to preventing romantic relationships between Jews and Arabs, Ben-Ari and fellow Kahanists held rallies in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel to spread held rallies in mixed Jewish-Arab cities across Israel to spread fear and hatred of supposedly predatory Arab males. In June, Lehava had helped organize the "Death to Arabs" rallies in Jerusalem that inspired the killing of Muhammad Abu Khdeir.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Over the sound of gritty break-beats and stirring string samples, The Shadow and Subliminal defended cops and lonized army service, upending the anti-authority sensibility that defines traditional rap culture. When the two self-styled Zionist rappers performed during the bloodiest days of the in-tifada, their audiences often erupted with chants of "Death to Arabs!"
In June, following the abduction of the three Israeli teens, Subliminal took to Facebook to lash out at a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Knesset, Haneen Zoabi, who had objected to her interviewer's characterization of the kidnappers as terrorists. "I'm not ashamed to say that I hope she'll be run down [in an auto accident] and die, or slip in the bath and rip her head off, or eat a rotten egg and die of food poisoning, or anything.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Calls for ethnic cleansing and even incitement to genocide have become a routine feature of mainstream Israeli discourse while a majority of Jewish Israelis favor a broad array of policies aimed at forcible segregation, discriminatory laws and population transfer.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The invasion of Gaza served as a bonanza for right-wing political mobilization, catalyzing an ultra-nationalist march through the institutions of the Jewish state. The right-wing's wartime success represented the culmination of the process the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling of Hebrew University called "politicide," or the calculated destruction of part or an entire community of people in order to deny them self-determination.
"Murders, localized massacres, the elimination of leadership and elite groups, the physical destruction of public institutions and infrastructure, land colonization, starvation, social and political isolation, re-education, and partial ethnic cleansing are the major tools used to achieve this goal," Kimmerling wrote in his classic 2003 biography of Ariel Sharon, the rightist war-nor politician and then-Prime Minister he cast as the architect
of the practice.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The wounds Homs described were telltale signs of Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME), an experimental munition that generates high intensity explosions in a concentrated area. Since 2006, doctors in Gaza have documented unusual injuries suggesting the weapon's use by the Israeli military against civilians.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“With the sound of exploding bombs growing closer, Qadan and his family escaped again, to his brother's house in western Rafah, where they remained for the next three days. Qadan told me he did not seek shelter in an UNRWA school because Israel had begun shelling those, too. There was no sanctuary anywhere in the Gaza Strip, not in UN-operated schools, nor in hospitals.
According to the UNRWA, by Saturday, August 2, the Israeli military had attacked a full third of Gaza's hospitals, along with fourteen primary healthcare clinics and twenty-nine ambulances belonging to either the Red Crescent or the Ministry of Health.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“We could see tall buildings totally leveled,” Qadan said. “People were being shelled, their bodies flying into pieces right in front of our eyes. We survived because God watched over us. We were running bl;indly, we just wanted to survive. We were running like insane people — we weren’t thinking about anything.” Miraculously, the Qadan family arrived at Al-Najjar Hospital without losing a single member. But they were not safe yet. “The moment we got to the hospital and could catch our breath,” Kamal Qadan said, “Israel called the hospital and said they were going to bomb it.” “The condition in the hospital was disastrous,” he continued. “It was full of wounded patients and martyrs. The Israelis insisted on bombing the hospital, so we evacuated and left the dead bodies. It was such a hideous scene I cannot even put it into words. It was insane, we were waiting and the hospital was begging the Israelis to delay and give us some time to evacuate and get the wounded out. The whole time, ambulances were rushing to the hospital with large numbers of injured people. Some of the ambulances arriving at that time had been attacked.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Abu Said told us his cousin witnessed a missile strike in the middle of a crowd attempting to flee from the Israeli bombardment engulfing the neighborhood. “There was a huge number of martyrs there,” he said, claiming Israeli forces deliberately concentrated their shelling on the crossroads to prevent anyone from escaping. “They trapped us,” he said.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“According to Arad, the Hannibal Directive represented “a radical change from this way of thinking that propped up the value of human life.” It was a disturbing sign of the dominance of a ruthlessly authoritarian right wing, he argued. “Now, in place of the government serving its citizens,” Arad wrote in the Israeli daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, "it is the citizens who are forced to pay with their lives in order to serve the interests of government. This is simply called fascism.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The Hannibal Directive was established in 1986 following the Jibril Agreement, a prisoner exchange in which Israel traded 1,150 Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers. Amidst the political backlash, the Israeli military drafted a secret field procedure to prevent future kidnappings. The proposed operation was named after the Carthaginian general who chose to poison himself rather than be held captive by the enemy. Among those who drafted the doctrine were Asa Kasher, a Tel Aviv University philosophy professor who serves as a house “ethicist” for the Israeli military and developed the army’s so-called “purity of arms” doctrine, which governs its policies on attacking civilian targets. Kasher denied knowledge of the policy in a 2003 exchange with one of his students but now admits its existence and has even defended Ofer Winter’s decision to implement it.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“The soldiers ordered the family to evacuate the house under the shelling their army had just initiated. Then they summoned Mahmoud’s father, Abdul Hadi El Said. As soon as he appeared at his doorstep, they asked him if he spoke Hebrew. When he answered in the affirmative, the soldiers shot him in the chest, leaving him to die. This was one of several cases I documented in which Gaza residents described to me the shooting of older male relatives who had revealed their ability to speak Hebrew. Were the men shot because the soldiers feared Hebrew-speaking Palestinians might be able to decipher their orders? Were orders issued to kill them? I found no answers among the survivors of the shootings, only harrowing testimony that formed a clear and chilling pattern. The Israeli military has offered no explanation either.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“When Rahman returned to his home during the first temporary cease-fire on August 2, however, he found rubble of his neighbors’ home littered with human flesh and dismembered limbs. Some had not been able to escape after all.
According to Rahman and several of his neighbors, Israeli troops from the Givati Brigade ordered the Wahadan family who lived next door to him to remain in their home when they invaded on July 17, warning them that if they attempted to evacuate they would be shot. Seven military-aged males among the family were blindfolded and abducted to Israeli prisons, where they were subjected to days of interrogations about Hamas, tunnels, and guerrilla operations they had no involvement in. The rest of the family — women, children, and an older man — were then kept on the ground floor of the house for six days.
During that time, while the Israeli army engaged in periodic clashes with fighters from the Al-Qassam Brigades and other armed factions operating around Beit Hanoun, it held the Wahadan family in the ground floor of the house, refusing to allow them to leave as the soldiers maintained the home as a base of operations. When it appeared that a brief ceasefire would take hold on July 25, the soldiers retreated from the home, but ordered the family to stay inside. The following day, with the Wahadans still inside their home under direct army orders, the Israeli military called in strikes on the area, killing every trapped member of the family. In the course of an hour on July 26, much of Beit Hanoun was destroyed under a storm of Israeli artillery shells.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

“Like his neighbors who had eked out a living in the rich soil lining Gaza’s borders, Abu Rahman had lost virtually everything at the hands of the Israelis. In 2005, Israeli bulldozers razed his citrus grove to extend the buffer zone, wiping out trees that provided oranges throughout the Gaza Strip. They then destroyed the wells he used to irrigate his land. And when they returned that summer, they leveled his four-story home, killed his flock of eighty goats and incinerated the five tons of wheat he had stored there. Bees buzzed from out of the first floor, which lay below three layers of concrete floor like a destruction sandwhich, the only survivors of his apiary. “In the blink of an eye, everything my father worked for, for seventy years, was gone,” Rahman said.”
― Max Blumenthal, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza