A year after the rape of Gaza, one Palestinian family remembers:
Until a year ago, Kamal Awaja would often spend the hour before dusk in his garden, teaching his six children the names of the trees and flowers, and encouraging each one to pick a shrub as their own. Ibrahim, his nine-year-old son, chose the red rosebush.
But a year ago today, everything changed as Israel launched its military offensive […]. After a week of fierce fighting, the gun-barrel of a tank smashed through the family's living room window, forcing them to flee to nearby fields as their house was demolished.
Then, as they crept back at dawn to salvage warm clothes, Israeli soldiers opened fire. Both Awaja parents were wounded, and Ibrahim was hit fatally, dying in his father's arms as he tried to rescue him.
It gets worse, if you can believe it:
But reliving her son's death a year later, there is another, more harrowing detail that preys on Mrs Awaja's mind. She says that as she hid behind a wall while her husband limped away to find help, Israeli soldiers used Ibrahim's corpse, which was lying in a road, as target practice.
"Each time the bullets would hit, his body leapt up off the road a little bit," she said. "It was as though he could still feel the pain even though he was already dead."
But on the bright side, the family—which remains homeless (like so many other Palestinian families) because Israel won't allow building supplies into Gaza—has only been attacked by packs of wild dogs twice.
And as Israel scales new heights of cruelty through its continuing siege of Gaza, it falls once again to people like Gideon Levy to demonstrate that not all Israelis have become hopeless moral cripples—much like the White Rose demonstrated that not all Germans were, either:
One way or another, the year since December 27 was a year of shame for Israel, greater shame than any other time. It is shameful to be Israeli today, much more than it was a year ago. In the final tally of the war, which was not a war but a brutal assault, Israel's international status was dealt a severe blow, in addition to Israeli indifference and public blindness to what happened in Gaza. […]
Today it is more shameful to be an Israeli because the world, as opposed to Israelis, saw the scenes. It saw thousands of dead and injured taken in the trunks of cars to something between a clinic and a primitive hospital in an imprisoned and weakened region one hour from flourishing Tel Aviv, a region where the helpless had nowhere to run from Israel's arsenal. The world saw schools, hospitals, flour mills and small factories mercilessly bombed and blown up. It saw clouds of white-sulphur bombs billowing over population centers, and it saw burned children.
Thank goodness my tax dollars were used for this and not something frivolous, like, say, building public transportation or making sure everyone in the country can get medical treatment when they need it.
The Distant Ocean 
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
– W B Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’.
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Now, now, let’s not get emotional. The Paper of Record had a story on Christmas about the controversy between those who say Israel did the right thing killing all those terrorists who hid among the civilian population (this is an article of faith, btw, that goes unquestioned in the piece) vs. a few crazed people like Richard Goldstone who say they committed war crimes. The Israelis point out that all civilized folk face the same problem they have and so the laws of war should be changed to allow them to kill as many people as they feel necessary, again because they try so hard not to kill civilians but just can’t help doing it, so savage and ruthless are their cowardly opponents. This is a POV that will probably resonate with any White House occupant, most definitely including the current one. Clearly this controversy needs to be covered fairly, with copious attention to the views of Israeli experts on terrorism. Anything else would be unprofessional. As for this blog, I won’t take anything you say seriously on this subject unless you invite Michael Oren to type in a guest column.
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Hello I am the for real Ambassador Michal Oren, John invited me to type a guest column. Here goes. I have realized I have been wrong about Israel before but never again. From now on anything John says well that’s what I agree. Thanks bye.
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Well, that’s okay, then. Carry on.
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There’s something sadly futile about Gideon Levy’s article, when you know that a significant piece of “the world” that “saw the scenes” suppressed them in the media, ensuring that the public never saw disturbing images that might have changed general perception of what was going on. Levy goes on to say that “the world has forgotten”, but I believe the Western world never cared in the first place, or cared only to protect the image of Israel in the media. Even my most intelligent friends at the time refused to criticize Israel, always falling back on those Palestinian “terrorists” lobbing rockets into Israel as the instigators of the situation and initiators of their own misfortune. Which leads me to what now seems to be the fallback position of every apologist for every American or Israeli atrocity: It’s the victims’ own fault. While this position always requires rewriting the applicable history, in our amnesiac world it always carries the day.
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We’ve all been condemned to the fiery inferno of Algore’s breath anyway, so what does a little regional genocide like this matter?
What’s the time on the carbon doomsday clock now? Nothing like a little “unequivocated science” to brighten my day. It’s funny that on Oct. 14 whence commenced this discussion:
http://www.distantocean.com/2009/10/your-daily-dose-of-sunshine.html#comments
that Kenneth Trenbertha “a senior scientist and the head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On October 14, 2009, he wrote to the CRU’s Tom: “How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12182009.html
Yes, I am attempting to hijack this thread, likely a violation of the Patriot Act, but I’ve already been excommunicated from the cult of Global Warming, so what the al, might as well give you guys the gift of righteous indignation and snarkatory masturbation in response to my blasphemy; season’s greetings.
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Marcus, it’s bad for your blood pressure to seethe like that for months. But since you were seething all that time, you could probably have waited until an actual global warming post came along.
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There’s something sadly futile about Gideon Levy’s article…
I know what you mean, and I got a bit of that feeling from some of the things he said. But it’s often difficult to see large-scale changes as they’re occurring, and as I’ve written before, I think Israel’s Gaza invasion (and the aftermath, including things like the Goldstone report) has been a turning point in world opinion. Open opposition to Israel is happening much more often, and even though Israel is having some success maintaining its dictatorship of opinion I’d say the heavy-handedness of its response is only making it more of a pariah. Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.
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Perhaps Canada isn’t the place to be to know what’s going on in the wider world. Because Uri Avnery in today’s CounterPunch says much the same thing as Levy and your comment:
The Gaza War – from the decision to throw the army into a densely populated area to the use of white phosphorus and flechette munitions – has raised a dark cloud over Israel. The Goldstone report, coming as it did after the gruesome pictures broadcast throughout the war by all the world’s TV networks, has produced a terrible impression. Hundreds of millions of people saw and heard, and their attitude towards Israel has changed for the worse. This will have far-reaching impact on the decisions of governments, the attitude of the media and in thousands of big and small decisions concerning Israel.
One can hope.
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Nah, I wasn’t seething. I think it’s hilarious the way people start frothing at the mouth when I doubt the premises of their self-righteousness. I could have waited for a man-made global warming post, but what if the blog waited for man-made global warming to happen to post about it? Cows can only fart so much.
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Marcus, I appreciate your comments on most topics here, but on this one you’re trolling (literally—tossing out attacks in order to provoke a response, with the explicit goal of hijacking a discussion). And I’d gently suggest that a posting that centers around a family watching their freshly killed 9-year-old son’s body being used for target practice is a particularly poor place for that.
If you do want to discuss this in the future, please keep in mind what I said a few weeks ago about the Golden Rule.
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