Te gast: Robert Fisk<\/p>\n
How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the
\nnarrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in
\nany other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first
\nreports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas
\nrockets are detonating live in Gaza.
\n<\/p>\n
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived
\nin Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in
\nArabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created
\nand ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and
\ngrandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million
\nPalestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose
\nfamilies once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real
\nstory: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.<\/p>\n
But watching the news shows, you’d think that history began yesterday, that
\na bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the
\nslums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began
\nfiring missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the
\nrighteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters
\nkilled in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose
\nmore recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in
\nthe story.<\/p>\n
Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished
\nGaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The
\nexistence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of
\nPalestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out
\nthrough fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of
\nrefugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and
\nwhen a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn’t worry the world.
\nWell, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated few
\nsquare miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been
\nliving in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and
\ndarkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West. Gaza was always an
\ninsurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel Sharon’s bloody
\n“pacification”, starting in 1971, to be completed, and Gaza is not going to
\nbe tamed now.<\/p>\n
Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice – I’m talking
\nabout the late Edward Said, not the corrupt Yassir Arafat (and how the
\nIsraelis must miss him now) – is silent and their predicament largely
\nunexplained by their deplorable, foolish spokesmen. “It’s the most
\nterrifying place I’ve ever been in,” Said once said of Gaza. “It’s a
\nhorrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way
\npeople live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I
\nsaw in South Africa.”<\/p>\n
Of course, it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to admit that
\n“sometimes also civilians pay the price,” an argument she would not make, of
\ncourse, if the fatality statistics were reversed. Indeed, it was instructive
\nyesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully
\nparroting Israel’s arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death
\ntoll by saying that it was “pointless to play the numbers game”. Yet if more
\nthan 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure
\nthat the “numbers game” and the disproportionate violence would be all too
\nrelevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than
\nIsraeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas members. But
\nwhat of the rest? If the UN’s conservative figure of 57 civilian fatalities
\nis correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.<\/p>\n
To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli onslaught
\nwhile blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy and Israeli
\npolicy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is following the same
\ndog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his predecessor.
\nAs usual, the Arab satraps – largely paid and armed by the West – are
\nsilent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which will
\n(if it even takes place), appoint an “action committee” to draw up a report
\nwhich will never be written. For that is the way with the Arab world and its
\ncorrupt rulers. As for Hamas, they will, of course, enjoy the discomfiture
\nof the Arab potentates while cynically waiting for Israel to talk to them.
\nWhich they will. Indeed, within a few months, we’ll be hearing that Israel
\nand Hamas have been having “secret talks” – just as we once did about Israel
\nand the even more corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and
\nwe will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.<\/p>\n
C 2008 The Independent Te gast: Robert Fisk How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be … Lees verder
\nRobert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He
\nis the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for
\nCivilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"