Works In Progress - June 2003

"The relationship between Israel and Gazacould be characterized as de-development. De-development is the deliberate, systematic deconstruction of an indigenous economy by a dominant power(It) isdesigned to ensure that there will be no economic base, even one that is malformed, to support an independent indigenous existence."

-Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip, 1995

"I think it may be official now that Rafah is the poorest place in the world. There used to be a middle class here recently. And then the bulldozers come and take out people's vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can't".

-Rachel Corrie, Gaza, 2003

April 8, 2003. The startling roar of the American-made F-16 explodes over the rooftops of Gaza City. The fighter jet targets a Subaru in the street and shoots two missiles, killing its two Palestinian occupants, "wanted" by Israel. After a few minutes the street has filled with onlookers and rescue workers. Now the helicopters arrive, firing more missiles into the crowd. Three adults and two children are blown apart. Forty-seven are wounded. Hundreds gather at nearby Shifa hospital, where "women searched screaming through the halls for their children. The wounded included children, women and the elderly." (New York Times). Next day, same again, five more killed in Gaza, including a 16-year old boy. Back in Olympia, Rachel Corrie's hometown newspaper reports none of this.

Gaza stretches for some 28 miles along the sandy eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and at only about 6 miles wide on average, it's a tiny place. A million Palestinians live there, mostly refugees expelled from their villages in what became Israel. Three quarters fall below the UN poverty level, and many have lived out all their days in the squalid refugee camps that became permanent. 6700 Jewish settlers live there too, taking up most of the sea coast and controlling fully half the Gazan territory. This means they each have 84 times more land than Palestinians. They're also allowed to pump 16 times more water, the most precious resource. They dig the deep wells, 3-500 meters, while Palestinians are re stricted to 100 meters, and no new Arab wells are allowed. The water supply is overused, which means the sea water is breaching the freshwater aquifer, and salinity levels are dangerously high. The water is further contaminated by sewage runoff, as 80% of Palestinians have an extremely inadequate sewage system, and 10% have none at all.

All of the Israeli settlers there, and all of the land and water confiscated for their use, are in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Security Council resolutions that are not enforced, at U.S. insistence.

The soldiers of the Israeli Occupation Forces are not encountered face to face in Gaza, as they more often are in the West Bank. They are hidden inside the sniper towers, inside tanks, helicopters, bulldozers. The tanks shoot at people's homes every night, and the bulldozers come without end, demolishing house after house. 600 homes leveled just in the town of Rafah in the past 30 months. In the early morning of May 1, they demolished 8 homes in Rafah, then went on to destroy the electrical, communications and sewage networks in the area.

The same nightat 2 a.m.dozens of heavy military vehicles attacked the al-Shojaeya neighborhood in Gaza City. Who in this country saw what happened on their TV? Who in the country that paid for it read the names of the dead in their newspapers? They roared into the neighborhood as everyone slept, bringing the bulldozers to simply tear down walls of houses so they could move from one house to another. They took positions on rooftops and opened fire on the neighborhood.

Ameer Ahmed 'Ayad Someone's two-year old boy. Killed by bullets to the chest and abdomen.

Mohammed Nasser al-Dahdouh, age 13, and Ahmed Ramadan al-Tatar, age 13, both killed by bullets to the chest and abdomen. Baker Subhi Muhaisen, 41, a disabled man, killed by a bullet in the chest. Eight killed in all, 37 others wounded, and the ambulances prevented from reaching them.

Israelis die too. Sometimes the Occupation forces get killed, sometimes the settlers, but in this uprising the overwhelming majority have been innocent civilians going about their daily life inside Israel. They have names too. Jewish parents wail inconsolably at their children's funerals too. In the U.S., certainly in most media coverage, the Israeli victims are easier for us to identify with. They are more similar to us culturally, but it's not just that. It's also that we can see that they were murdered intentionally, as civilians. And Israel's killings of Palestinians just don't seem to be the same. Even if Israel is simply willing to kill civilians in the process of targeting 'militants', isn't that less of a crime than killing them intentionally? I think this perception is what allows Americans to distance themselves from Israel's actions, and our responsibility for it.

But I think the perception is a false one, for several reasons. First, because Israel does kill civilians intentionally, and they do it all the time. Countless human rights reports accuse them of "wanton" killing of civiliansit just never gets reported here. And we've all heard the lurid details of the suicide bombers using explosives packed with shrapnel, an extreme of cruelty, designed to shred people's bodies. But who has heard of Israel's use of "flechette anti-personnel tank shells," which "launch thousands of small metal darts over an area approximately 300m long and 100m wide?" Israel uses them indiscriminately in civilian areas, killing many Palestinians, including children. The Israeli Supreme Court just upheld their use, although they violate international humanitarian law. Anything morally superior here, compared to the suicide bomber? As long as it never gets reported, we never have to confront it.

But there's more to say on this question of culpability. In December, 200l, Arafat declared "a complete cessation of military activities, especially suicide attacks", expending great political capital in persuading the Islamist groups to abide by it. But in the three weeks the Palestinian side halted attacks, Ariel Sharon "mounted sixteen invasions into (Palestinian) territories and killed twenty-one Palestinians, eleven of them children", journalist Graham Usher reported. They also assassinated a Fatah military leader, Ra'ed Karmi, on January 14, ending Arafat's commitment to the cease-fire and inaugurating the bloodiest period since the 1967 occupation, with 275 Palestinians and 105 Israelis killed in the month of March alone. Again in July, 2002, the two top Hamas leaders in Gaza said the group "would end its attacks on Israeli civilians if Israel withdrew from the West Bank Palestinian cities, freed recently detained Palestinian prisoners, and ended its policy of assassinations" (Usher). The next day Israel dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment block in Gaza, killing a top Hamas leader who had supported the cease-fire, and (incidentally) killing nine children and five adult civilians. Hamas retaliated with two suicide bombs that left seventeen Israelis dead.

It's an open secret that Ariel Sharon benefits from the suicide bombings. They are deadly, but not on a scale that could ever threaten the state. But they are useful too, which is why Israel sabotages the cease-fires. They provide the excuse Israel needs to employ its own violence, and you need to use a lot of violence if you mean to dispossess an entire people of its land. That is, after all, what Israel has been doing, methodically and relentlessly, for the last half century. By now it is very far along in the process of the destruction of Palestinian society.

Enter the Road Map. America's new plan for a "two state solution". No doubt the average US citizen, heavily sedated by decades of propaganda from the Free Press and the ecucational system, will assume only the noblest intentions from Washington. But one should forgive the average Palestinian for a certain skepticism. Here, after all, is the country which used its Security Council veto, as far back as 1976, to block a PLO-backed offer for a two-state solution. Which from the 1970s undertook to finance and protect the vast network of illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, vetoes every international effort to prevent their expansion, and vetoes even the dispatch of unarmed observers to protect Palestiniansbut now here we come with a plan for a two-state solution.

So take a look. Road Map, Phase I. "The Palestinians immediately undertake an unconditional cessation of violencesuch actions should be accompanied by supportive measures undertaken by Israel. Palestinians and Israelis resume security cooperationto end violence, terrorism, and incitement through restructured and effective Palestinian security services." Anyone looking for symmetry here will be disappointed. Violence and terror are by definition Palestinian, and the very method proposed for ending violence is to use more of it, but only against the Palestinians. This is the plain translation of the bland euphemism "througheffective Palestinian secu Western values is the root of the problem. The farce reaches truly operatic proportions as the "road map" goes on to insist that the Palestinians must "build a practicing democracy based on tolerance and liberty" while living under a military occupation. The U.S. media also reported with a straight face as Bush insisted on the selection of Road Map-supporting Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister as a prerequisite to this 'democracy", although his stance earns him a whopping 3% support in polls.

The Palestinians are then to be rewarded for good behavior with the "option" of an "independent Palestinian state with provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty".

Eventually a Permanent Status Agreement is promised.

The Palestinians remember the last time they were asked to go along with a set of phased negotiations: it was the 1993-2000 Oslo Peace Process. And although our media won't report it, Palestinians are perfectly well aware that Israel used those years to double the West Bank settlements. And to build 250 miles of Jewish-only highways that divided the Palestinians into tiny disconnected Apartheid-style bantustans. Then they heard Israel's own offer of a Final Solution. Abandon your claim to your right of return, (although it is enshrined in international law), accept that nearly all the settlements will remain, rity services".

Never is Israel called upon to "end violence". It is asked to refrain from any "attack on civilians", in accordance with last year's U.S.-sponsored Tenet work plan. Unacknowledged is Israel's retention of the right to "targeted killing", of "militants". Needless to say, the Palestinians receive no such right to attack Israeli militants.

Next, "Arab states cut off public and private funding and all other forms of support for groups supporting and engaging in violence and terror." The U.S. doesn't have to stop sending the F-16s and attack helicopters to Israel.

So the weaker party is to disarm completely. Then the Bush plan calls for Palestinians to "hold free, open, and fair elections", "in the context of open debate and transparent candidate selection (in an) electoral campaign based on a free, multiparty process." (Maybe Florida could send monitors!) The whole point here is to pretend that a lack of Palestinian commitment to liberal and that we will forever encircle and control your tiny hamlets within an Israeli West Bank and Gaza. We will control your use of the land, your access to water, your imports and exports, your borders and your airspace forever. Jerusalem, the center of Palestinian life, will remain ours, even the Haram al-Sharif, Islam's third holiest shrine, and we will continue the city's ethnic cleansing as we wish.

So you get the idea about the 3% support for the Road Map. Call this what it is. Rachel Corrie saw it, and she named it. She said "I'm witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide." We can close our eyes, and pretend we don't see. But we are all implicated.

Tom Wright directed the 1997 documentary Checkpoint: The Palestinians After Oslo. He lives in Olympia, Washington.