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OUR
FRIENDS IN GAZA: WHERE ARE THEY NOW, ONE YEAR LATER?
By
Joseph E. Mulligan, S.J.
Michigan Peace Team
Member
At this time last
year, Fr. David Smith and I were in Gaza as members of the Michigan Peace Team,
accompanying the Palestinians in their situation of oppression and learning
first-hand the effects of the Israeli blockade. For several days we were guests
of the Latin Rite (Roman Catholic) pastor at Holy Family parish in Gaza City;
later we stayed with a Palestinian family in the southern city of Rafah at the
border with Egypt.
On our visits to universities, hospitals, and schools, and in our conversations
with people in their homes, we learned that Israel's restrictions on incoming
supplies were having a disastrous effect on the civilian population. Hospitals
did not have enough medicines, nor did they have sufficient fuel to run the
generators needed to keep life-support equipment functioning when Israel would
cut off the incoming electricity supply.
Moreover, since Gaza was not allowed to import building materials, most
construction work was on hold. And many people with serious illnesses were dying
because Israel would not allow them in to be treated at the more modern Israeli
hospitals. For more details on this, see my article on Gaza in
Commondreams
.
We photographed people in the courtyard of Holy Family Church in Gaza City,
parishioners in their homes, children in the streets of Rafah. As I later showed
those pictures in my PowerPoint package to people in the U.S., I wondered aloud
whether some of the subjects had fallen victim to the blockade or to the
occasional Israeli military incursions which supposedly targeted "militants" but
which invariably took the lives of many noncombatants.
Now, with the Dec. 27 commencement of Israeli air attacks on Gaza and the Jan. 3
invasion by ground forces, there is all the more reason to fear that some of the
children and others we met a year ago are dead or seriously injured. Israel has
launched hundreds of air strikes in Gaza, which has no anti-aircraft
installations and, of course, no army or air force.
BBC News reported on Jan. 5 that, according to the Palestinian health authority,
"509 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed since the Israelis began
their assault on Gaza eight days ago. It says 21 of the 70 people killed since
the beginning of the ground offensive were children. Some 2,500 people have
reportedly also been wounded. The figures could not be independently verified.
Israel is refusing to let international journalists into Gaza despite a ruling
by its a supreme court to admit a limited number of reporters."
BBC had reported previously that since Dec. 27 four Israelis had been "killed by
rockets fired from Gaza, which is under Hamas control."...
The Israeli government seeks to justify its onslaught as necessary in order to
stop the rocket attacks launched from Gaza into nearby areas of Israel. However,
the Israeli attacks are not achieving that result; and they have taken large
numbers of Palestinian civilian lives, and that is terrorism, which is to be
condemned whether it takes the form of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel or
rockets fired indiscriminately at Israeli civilian areas or Israeli bombings of
Gaza which may be aimed at "militants" but which invariably result in the death
and maiming of many civilians. The latter is "state terrorism," which is not
usually presented by the media as terrorism since it is the "official" action of
a government and its army.
The terms "state terrorism" and "crime against humanity" can also be applied to
Israel's policy of closing the borders of Gaza, which it surrounds on all sides
except at the Egyptian border. This restriction of necessary supplies like food,
medicine, fuel has caused a humanitarian crisis among the civilians of Gaza and
constituted a form of ongoing Israeli aggression during the recent six-month
ceasefire.
This fact (which is part of the "siege of Gaza"), plus the seemingly permanent
Israeli occupation of the West Bank part of Palestine, must be seen as the
occasion and provocation of Palestinian resistance. A true peace must be based
on justice; and for many, including many Israelis who do not support their
government's aggressive policies, justice means an end to the Israeli occupation
of Palestine.
This perspective was presented in a Dec. 27 press release from
The Israeli Committee Against House
Demolitions (ICAHD):
"Let's be crystal clear. Israel's massive attacks on Gaza today have one
overarching goal: conflict management. How to end rocket attacks on Israel from
a besieged and starving Gaza without ending the impetus for those attacks, 41
years of increasingly oppressive Israeli Occupation without a hint that a
sovereign and viable Palestinian state will ever emerge.
"Indeed, the Occupation, in which Israel controls Gaza under a violent siege
which violates fundamental human rights and international law, is not even
mentioned in Israel's PR campaign. Speaking to the international community,
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni insists that no country would tolerate its citizens
being attacked, a seemingly reasonable statement were it not for Israeli
sanctions on Gaza supported by the US and Europe - sanctions that preceded the
rocket fire on Israel - or the fact of Israeli Occupation in general. Solely
focusing on the rocket attacks conceals the political policy that led to them."
www.icahd.org/eng/news.asp?menu=5&submenu=1&item=646
I am equally concerned for the safety and peace of my Jewish friends in Israel
as I am for my Palestinian friends whom I met in the West Bank and Gaza. I
stayed with my Jewish friends in their home near Tel Aviv and attended a holiday
"concert for peace" with them in Jerusalem. I, along with other MPT members,
stayed with Palestinian friends in their home, which is a large cave, about 100
miles south of Jerusalem, and I also visited Christian Palestinians in
Bethlehem.
We expect the incoming Obama administration to denounce the current Israeli
aggression and, after Jan. 20, to be an even-handed broker between Israel and
Palestine, discontinuing the traditional unconditional support by the US. for
hard-line, extremist Israeli government policy. U.S. aid to Israel, which
amounts to about $3.5 billion a year, which is mostly military aid, and which
includes the F-16s and the Apache helicopters now raining terror on Gaza, must
be made contingent on Israeli respect, in practice, for the Palestinian right to
freedom and sovereignty.
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Joseph E. Mulligan lives in Nicaragua. He worked for six weeks as a member of
the Michigan Peace Team in Palestine in late 2007 and early 2008.
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