PAVING THE WAY TO THE ABYSS
The Gaza War and the wall of denial
by Adam Keller
The war in Gaza -- the last act of the Bush era -- was cut off just before the inauguration in Washington, as if by pulling a switch. The planes stopped bombing, the soldiers were all hastily withdrawn, and Israelis were told that "Operation Cast Lead" had been a complete success and a victory -- not like that Lebanon fiasco of 2006. People accepted that it had been indeed "a victory." After all, the number of Israeli casualties had been negligible, and who cares about the number of dead Palestinians? As a matter of fact, the horrifying images shown on international networks, of the many dead and among them hundreds of children, had hardly been seen by Israelis -- people mostly relying on the self-censored national channels.
Still, there was no mood of celebration. And as the Israeli communities living near the Gaza border found out the hard way: the problems hadn't been solved at all. They still couldn't go about their lives without fear of being hit by a missile -- dangerous enough, however primitive.
And on the other side of the border, the people in the Gaza Strip are still besieged and deprived of their daily needs. Such foodstuffs as pasta were only allowed into Gaza in February after the US envoy asked, "What is wrong with pasta?"
With Israeli authorities still denying entry to construction materials, thousands of ruined Gazan houses remain piles of rubble, despite the billions officially allocated for "reconstruction of Gaza." (Instead of waiting for Godot, some homeless Palestinians start re-learning the traditional skills of using mud and straw to build...)
As a matter off act, something did change, and it may turn out to be significant: the way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perceived internationally.
Throughout the world, people remember the dead children, the images of horror. A lot more criticism is voiced; Israel is facing a UN investigation into its bombing of UN installations, Europe is less inclined to upgrade trade relations, Judge Fernando Andreu of Spain's National Court refused to halt judicial proceedings in a war crimes suit lodged against six senior Israeli military officers and leading politicians.
An Israeli cancer researcher, approaching a British colleague with a suggestion for a joint project, was shocked to get the response: "Please don't take this personally, but I feel unable at this time to work jointly with a person whose country has done what Israel did in Gaza. I hope your country will return to the way of peace, and things would change also for me" (Ma'ariv, May 8).
Inside Israel so far, denial reigns. The tendency to suppress guilt with self-righteousness got to new heights: "The IDF is The World's Most Moral Army", was how the Defence Minister rejected testimonies of his own soldiers.
The conscientious minority in Israel grows bitter in return, vehemently rejecting that false righteousness, young dissidents increasingly alienated from the country of their birth. Some manifesting it by radical words and radical deeds, confronting the civil and military authorities at the risk of physical harm and imprisonment. A greater number reacting by dropping out of public life and retreating into "internal exile" -- or seeking a new life on other shores, a growing hemorrhage of Israel's young.
Lacking a great countermove, back into sanity, future historians might well count the Gaza War of December 2008 and January 2009 as a major signpost on Israel's road into the abyss.
Protesting the carnage
The three weeks of carnage started at noon on December 27, 2008. Israeli planes struck Gaza and in the space of one minute killed more than a hundred Palestinians, mostly trainee policemen and the family members who came to their graduation ceremony. Civil police. They had not, in fact, trained for any kind of fighting.
Being in uniform and answerable to an elected government dominated by Hamas was enough to get them classed as "terrorists" and justify their killing in the eyes of most Israelis. But not all.
Six hours later on the same day, with exuberant reports of ever-new bombings and killings filling the airwaves, there were already a thousand demonstrators gathered at the Tel Aviv Cinemateque and embarking on a protest march to the Ministry of Defence. Five of them got arrested in a confrontation with mounted police -- the first of hundreds to follow.
On January 3, some ten thousand demonstrators filled the entire width of the four-lane Ibn Gvirol Street, Tel-Aviv's biggest thoroughfare -- marching, chanting slogans, and tangling with extreme-right counter-demonstrators (far less in number, but very aggressive and enjoying the all but open favour of the police).
Day after day, activists got at an early morning hour on the side of the road leading to the Sde Dov Airfield in North Tel Aviv. Air Force personnel, arriving for another day of duty, were faced with signs reminding them that they were accomplices to the killing of civilians. Day after day, activists were violently dispersed and detained, and yet the vigil was always renewed on the following morning.
There was no day without intensive protest. Sometimes militant marches and rallies, sometimes silent candlelight mourning vigils and the symbolic planting of olive trees by Israelis and Palestinians together. Protests there were in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Haifa, and in Arab Israeli towns and villages.
Even in some Negev locations daily targeted by the missiles from Gaza.
Defying both the missiles and the role assigned to them in the media as "The Reason Why We Are Fighting", some residents of bombed Be'er Sheba stood in the Courthouse Plaza with "Cease Fire Now!" signs -- and were immediately set on by police and dragged off to detention. Officially, for "having violated the Civil Defence Regulations."
Human Rights activists had to work day and night, sifting through the ceaseless flood of reports from Gaza with details of new horrors. For example, the white phosphorous, burning to and into the bones of those on whom if fell from the air. At the same time, direct access to Gaza was completely banned, making verification difficult to impossible.
Nearly the only direct verification available was from those Palestinians possessing both a loaded and functioning mobile phone (a rare commodity in wartime Gaza) and the phone number of sympathetic Israelis. In such desperate calls, very detailed stories were told of specific woes -- of family members killed in front of one's eyes in the ruins of a home, or slowly dying for lack of medical treatment, or starving in a besieged house with the slightest peek outside tantamount to nearly certain death.
Caring Israelis -- human rights and humanitarian workers and some journalists such as the indomitable Amira Hass of Ha'aretz -- spent enormous effort to arrange a temporary local truce to evacuate such marooned families. But even when liaison officers in Tel Aviv seemed genuinely willing to help, their influence on the fighting forces in Gaza seemed incomplete, to say the least. Often, help for the trapped Gazans came only after days -- too late for far too many of them.
Only one case, of all the multitude of Gaza horrors, really got through the barriers of self-censored media and mass narrow-mindedness. Dr. Az a-Din Abu al-Ayash -- who works at an Israeli hospital, who has very many Israeli friends, who was interviewed in impeccable Hebrew to Israeli TV and whose three daughters were killed by a shell shot into the family home by an Israeli tank in the very midst of that interview to Israeli TV.
Such a story -- and with the bereaved doctor showing an incredible and complete lack of any vindictiveness -- could not fail to get through and arouse wide public sympathy.
For several nights there were candlelight support vigils -- and not necessarily by the hardcore opponents of the war -- outside the Tel Hashomer Hospital, where Doctor Abu al-Ayash and his two surviving daughters were hospitalized. Even so, there were those who said that "he was to blame, for letting Hamas shoot from his house" (a version dispelled by the army's investigation).
Balance Sheet
In spite of the conspicuous dedication, physical and moral courage displayed in these dark days, the movement of Israelis opposing the Gaza War was not as successful as one might have wished it to be. Certainly not when placed in comparison with, for example, the movement opposing the First Lebanon War in 1982, which had in effect set the template for anti-war campaigns in Israel.
In 1982 the movement had started very small -- but had soon gathered a snowballing momentum. To the point that within months the war became a highly contentious and controversial subject -- and some months later, it was no longer such, because there was a clear majority opposing the war.
There was no comparable snowballing momentum in 2009. To be sure, the war ended after three weeks, and there is no way of knowing how things would have developed had it continued for many months or years. (Nobody is sorry we did not find out!) Still, it is a fact that on its first day the Gaza war was opposed by virtually all of Israel's Arab citizens, but only by a radical minority among the Jews -- and that the situation was essentially the same also on the war's last day.
Any of the present-day Western democracies, of which Israel claims to be one, would have had to take seriously this kind of situation: A community numbering fully twenty percent of the entire citizen body being massively mobilized against a war prosecuted by the government. Especially, with this firm opposition manifested in peaceable mass rallies numbering in the tens of thousands and in clearly-stated declarations of its elected representatives -- overcoming and transcending the (considerable) political and ideological difference between them.
Political scientists Oren Yiftahel, Asad Ghanim and Yoav Peled define Israel as ethnocracy rather than democracy. Indeed, in the Israeli mainstream, such events as the January 3 mass anti-war rally in the Arab town of Sakhnin was at best dismissed with "Well, they are Arabs themselves." At worst, the anti-war vehemence of Arab Israelis was cited as proof that "They are all disloyal, siding with the Enemy."
This would, in the immediate aftermath of the war, become the basis of Avigdor Lieberman's inflammatory and all too successful elections campaign, calling for Arabs to be deprived of Israeli citizenship unless they sign a "loyalty pledge." (Up to the time of writing, no concrete move was made to actually implement any such vicious measure -- but the police did raid and arrest hundreds of Arab activists, mostly on no other charge than having held completely peaceful anti-war protests).
For their part, the demonstrations in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem -- even the mass ones, newsworthy by any objective standard -- went grossly under-reported, and often completely ignored, by the mainstream media. And such reports as were published at all were often highly hostile -- and a clear effort was often discernible to emphasize the presence of Arab demonstrators and downplay the Jewish ones.
Warmongers could rely on support from "The Left" -- for example, from such as the singer Ahinoam "Noa" Nini, with her long-established credentials as a "peace-seeker" and a regular performer at past peace rallies. In this war, she made a particularly vicious call, "as a supporter of peace", to make war and "totally destroy Hamas, the enemy of Israelis and Palestinians alike." (Immediately after the war, she actually intended to sing at a Tel Aviv benefit evening, collecting donations to help newly homeless Gazans; a strong protest petition against "the singer who launched the planes and tanks" prevented her arrival.")
Not so different was the call of the world-famous Amos Oz -- often considered as "guru" and "spiritual guide" in such formations as the parliamentary Meretz Party and the extra-parliamentary Peace Now Movement. On December 26 he published -- very conspicuously, on the front page of Yediot Aharonot -- an op-ed article calling for just such a massive air strike on Gaza as the Air Force launched on the very next day ("Something must be done, Israel must defend its citizens against Hamas aggression").
Already by the next week, Oz changed his tune and -- together with his long-standing sidekick the writer A.B. Yehoshua -- stated that "The bombing has done its job" and that the time has come for a ceasefire. Such volte-face of the intellectual doves is, in fact, a long-standing pattern, remembered from countless past wars.
The government welcomed Oz's initial "Kosher certificate" and used it to claim that "the war enjoys a national consensus, from Right to Left." His second thoughts were simply shrugged off and ignored.
And they had a reason. In the second week of the war, Peace Now -- Amos Oz's staunch followers -- decided at last to call its supporters out on the streets in opposition to the war. In the past -- for example, in 1982 and again in 1988 -- there had been a very clear pattern: first the radicals came out on the streets, mobilizing as many as they could, and then Peace Now followed with many times that number. Not so in 2009.
The Peace Now rally was, in fact, far smaller than that organized by the radical groups a week before, a demonstration of weakness. And in the elections that followed upon the war, the Meretz Party -- in the composition of whose list of candidates Amos Oz had taken a personal hand -- went down to the brink of extinction.
There is little inclination in our corner of the woods to shed tears for Amos Oz's richly earned discomfiture. But nor would it serve any useful purpose to gloat at the deep crisis enveloping what is variously known as the Mainstream Peace Movement or the Zionist Left. A crisis greatly reducing the effectiveness of the Israeli peace movement as a whole.
