The question is, why does Israel
constantly create sonic booms over Gaza,
rip up olive trees, shut down entrance crossings and go out of its way to
frighten children? The answer is simple;
to harass, to make life for the Palestinian as intolerable as possible.
As soon as Israel
moved its settlers out in 2005, Palestinians, in Gaza were blasted day and night with sonic
booms. When American made F-16s break
through the sound barrier at low altitude, it creates an earth rattling explosion
feeling like a mega ton bomb. Windows shatter, walls crack and every object in
the house rattles. These “sound bombs” strike without warning, like a sledge hammer. They
cause fear in men, miscarriages in women, and traumatize children. Even teenagers
suffer anxiety attacks, experience muscle spasms, nose bleeds, loss of hearing
and have difficulty breathing. Three or four times a night, these low level
shock waves blast the nervous system , especially of infants and old
people. .
One Gaza Mother asked:
Why
punish all of
Gaza’s
Palestinians? Is it to make us all so afraid we can’t close our eyes? To make
us beg for mercy? To make us want it to stop at any expense? It is cruel. It is inhumane. It is collective
punishment. It is psychological torture in its rawest, most disturbing form.
And so the war on
Gaza
continues. Terror and torture
[1]
This kind of intimidation has nothing to do with security, When
our president says that Israel
has a right to defend itself he chooses to ignore Israel’s sonic boom program which
has no purpose other than to harass. Could
you imagine a surgeon operating on a loved one when suddenly… BOOM!
And, how does the Israeli Defense Force ripping up newly
planted olive trees defend Israel? Since the second intifada in 2000, about 465,000
olive trees have been destroyed by the Israeli military. My friend, Bert Weaver,
volunteered to go with a team to the West Bank
and re-plant olive trees. They worked
for ten days, planting thousands of little seedlings while the IDF sat on a
hill and watched. On the last day of
their work, soldiers came down, announced that the field had been confiscated
for 24 hours for “security reasons.” As
soon as Bert and his friends got out of the way, bulldozers came in and ripped
up ever tree. Why? The answer is not
security. That may be the excuse, but
the real reason is harassment.
Bert wrote, “For our group it was a vivid experience of the
gross injustice Palestinians live with every day. It is one thing to hear and
read about injustice, but when you experience it first hand it carries a very
different weight.”
[2]
Another kind of harassment was expressed by Eran
Efrats. Some call him a traitor. Others
say he is an enemy of Israel. I think of him as simple a person of
conscience. He is one of the hundreds of
Israeli soldiers who are now called “refusenics”. He refuses to continue
serving in the Israeli military because of its record in the occupied
territories.
Efrats tells of being ordered to enter a Palestinian home at
2 o’clock in the morning for “mapping”.
Mapping meant to arouse the family, rough them up a bit and draw a floor
plan, showing rooms, closets, windows and doors. This takes a few hours. In the meantime the
family stands aside frightened and hoping no harm will come to their
children. When Sergeant Efrats turned
his map into his superior officer, he was told to
throw it away. “We have
mapped that home a hundred times.” It
was then the Efrats joined an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers working
to raise awareness about the daily reality in the
Occupied Territories.
He asked, what was the purpose of the
mapping? It was not security. It was harassment.
[3]
Worse than having your home “mapped” is having your home
destroyed..
Salim Shawamreh applied for a building permit every year for
four years at the cost of $5,000 per application and had been turned down every
time. So, facing the needs of his expanding family, he built on his own land, without
Israel’s
permission. Then it happened. Salim responded
to the banging on his door. There stood a Civil Administration inspector with
an automatic weapon strapped across his chest looking more like a gangster than
a government official, “Is this your house?”
“Yes,” Salim
answered, “It’s my house.”
“No, now it
is our house.”
In the next hour, Salim was beaten, handcuffed and forced to
watch his home destroyed. He had no
permit. But, as Jeff Halper says, “Everyone knows that
Israel does not
give building permits to Palestinians.”
[4] Since 1967, more than 27,000 Palestinian homes
have been destroyed. Salim had just
joined 160,000 other Palestinians who had seen their home, life investment and
dignity stripped from them.
When a man cannot provide a home for the safety and security
of his family, he is emasculated. He looses not only his pride but his sense of
worth. When a woman looses her home, she has no context in which to feel like a
wife and mother. She either strives to survive on the streets or she bunks in
with another family, where some other
women is keeper of the home By the way,
only 2% of homes demolished are related
to punishment for acts against Israel. All the rest are for stealing land to give to
Jews or for no more purpose than pure harassment.
A major form of harassment ignored by the world and
supported by the U.S. is the
hassle of waiting at crossing gates to enter or leave the Occupied Territories.
Americans going to see Dr. Yassine in Baltimore
for medical treatment have no idea that he is not allowed to visit his wife in Gaza. She has a Palestinian passport. He, on the
other hand, born to parents living in a refugee camp in Beirut, is classified simply as a stateless
“refugee.” His wife, Leila El-Haddad, can be with her husband only when she can
get through the crossing point and visit him in America. After which, she had to return to Gaza
On November 21, 2006, Leila found herself with her 2 year
old son lined up with thousands of penniless Palestinians waiting to cross the
Rafah gate. Hoping to get close to the head of the line, she arose predawn,
packed her belongings, picked up her son and lined up for the crossing to
open. All day long, she waited, cared
for a toddler while fighting to keep her place in line. From 4 AM until sunset,
she waits. The gate did not open. So, she rushed back to the overnight ghetto
seeking a room for another night. She tries again to enter
Gaza the next morning. “It is hard not to
believe that
Israel
“takes pleasure as we languish in uncertainty.”
[5] This went on every day for 15 days. Finally
on December 6
th, she and her son found themselves among the few who
managed to make it through the Rafah crossing. She writes
I think the most disturbing and
overwhelming feeling of all is having to come to grips with the realization
that your life and how you live that life continue to be controlled wholly and
absolutely by an Occupier and that its ability to deny you entry to your own
home so abruptly, so arbitrarily, and yet so methodically – largely because of
the acquiescence and complicity of the world—has become so accepted… You cannot
fly. You cannot fish, you cannot move, you cannot breath, you cannot live. If
you meet all these “cannots,” then you know you are from
Gaza… Yet, the rest of the world goes on
uninterrupted.
[6]
Some actions of
Israel go far beyond harassment in
showing the Palestinians and the world just who has the upper hand. I would put the killing of Hamas leaders in
the category. On December 14, 2006,
Israel’s high
court of justice ruled unanimously to legalize assassinations by Israeli forces
against Palestinians. “According to the
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, 339 Palestinians have been extra-judicially
killed over the past six years, almost half of them bystanders.
[7]
One can only imagine how out of control our media and congress
would be if Hamas had established a program of targeted killings of 339 Jews in
Israel simply because Gaza did not like them.
And sometimes, just sometimes, harassment takes the form of
humiliation. Such as when a ten year old
Palestinian girl is taken into a room by herself and ordered by Israeli
soldiers, probably female soldiers, to remove her clothes. When she was down
to nothing but panties and a tee shirt, she was forced to take them off also as
though she could be carrying an automatic gun or grenade beneath her
underwear. The fourth Geneva Convention
says, “No child shall be subject to … degrading treatment or punishment.” It also says, “Women shall be especially
protected against any attack on their honour.”
When an old woman, a holocaust survivor, who had become
critical of Israel’s humiliating policies toward those who were not Jews, is
taken aside and cavity searched because she is suddenly classified an a
terrorist, that is a pure violation of the Geneva Convention’s standards for
any civilized nation. Never the less, it gets worse.
I don’t know what to call it when a young woman, with cerebral
palsy, while being strip searched in the Ben Gurion airport before a long
flight to the U.S.
is forced to give up her maxi pad. According to IfAmeicansKnew.org, that is
exactly what happened to Maysoon Zayad on July 31, 2006. She was not allowed to buy
sanitary products as she waited for hours. She said:
Nothing, can be more embarrassing
for a woman than to be forced to sit there in a wheelchair and bleed all over
herself.”
[8]
Add to Israel’s list of harrassments a few things such as
building more settlements, cutting off Palestinian freedom to move from one
place to another within their own country by an apartheid wall and Jewish only
roads, cutting off access to electricity,
water and even education, denying trade by disallowing exports, and denying
such imports as medicines, sugar, coffee, shoes, blankets, diapers, toys and
the list goes on and on, you will have a nation of frustrated and hopeless people.
Over time, someone will pick up any weapon they can find and push back. A people will endure only so much humiliation
and neglect. Then something is bound to happen and it probably will not be good,
not for Palestine, nor Israel or the United States.
Thomas Are
November 20, 2014.
[1] Laila
El-Haddad
Gaza Mom (Just Word Books,
Charlottesville, Virginia,
2013) p.96.
[2] From
Bert’s written personal report of his trip to the
West
Bank, February, 2009.
[3] Lecture
delivered by Eran Efrats, December 17,
2013 at
Oakhurst Baptist
Church,
Decatur, Georgia.
[4] The
story of Salim Shawamreh is found in Jeff Halper’s book,
An Israeli in Palestine,
(Pluto Press, 2012) in
association with The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
[5] Laila
El-Haddad,
Gaza Mom, (Best World Books,
Charlottesville, Virginia,
2013) p. 186.
[8] All
three of these strip search stories come from a video
Behind the Barbed Wire, on what we aren’t being told about
Israel-Palestine but need to know, produced by IfAmericansKnew.org.
