SAMAH SABAWI

June 4, 2007

'Don't forget us!" has become a standard way for my uncle in Gaza to end his conversations when we call him from the comfort of our home in Ottawa. So, this week, as we mark the anniversary of 40 years of Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, his plea should not go unheard.

Anyone who has family in Gaza understands well what lies behind the headlines. For at least a year, my in-laws urged us to visit them there, hoping that a visit from the outside world would break their isolation, and that the sight of their grandchildren would bring a sense of normality to their lives and lighten up their dreary existence. Even though we had a dismal chance of being allowed to enter through the tightly controlled Gaza gates, we still planned to try this summer.

You can imagine our shock when, two months ago, we heard my in-laws saying: "Don't come; it is no longer safe." My in-laws, like many in Gaza, were not surprised to see the heightened level of violence between Palestinian factions in what is described here
as "internal fighting." The conflict in Gaza is not a fight born of sectarian tensions, since the vast majority of the population are Sunni Muslims. In fact, the families in Gaza are connected through an intricate social web, and I grew up with the Gazan joke that all Gazans are blood relatives. The violence is not purely political either - it is not unusual for a family to have members who are affiliated with the religious Hamas movement and others who are affiliated with the secular Fatah. People in Gaza know this is a
special kind of war, a war that is funded by outside sources and fuelled by poverty and desperation.

The conflict started as a power struggle between Hamas and Fatah - with Fatah being under immense pressure from the United States and Israel to strip Hamas of its power. But Palestinians also know that now the fighting has gotten out of hand. Neither Hamas nor
Fatah has much success maintaining any ceasefire as frustrated youths, born in the Gaza pressure-cooker with no future prospects and no hope in sight, take over the streets. My cousin described it best: "This is not a civil war. It is a prison riot."

This "prison riot" was inevitable. After Hamas's victory in the Palestinian elections early last year, Israel and the international community starved and imprisoned the 1.4 million Palestinians living inside Gaza in hope that they would overthrow an increasingly
helpless and besieged Hamas government. It was a cruel act that meant collectively punishing an occupied people by attaching strings to badly needed aid.

In the ensuing months, Palestinians found themselves in a unique situation. They were sealed off from the rest of the world, faced shortages of food, water and medicine, suffered high unemployment rates and lived in conditions not fit for animals. The only form of an
income for many of Gaza's youths was to join one militia or another. The more powerless the government became, the more powerful the militias got. Those who did not join a militia had to be in the protection of one. Many in Gaza began to wonder why at a time when basic painkillers were not getting through the Israeli controlled borders, so many guns became available.

See Also:

'Gaza is a jail. Nobody is allowed to leave. We are all starving now'

• What happened after the Six-Day War?

"In violation of international law, Israel has confiscated over 52 percent of the land in the West Bank and 30 percent of the Gaza Strip for military use or for settlement by Jewish civilians...From 1967 to 1982, Israel's military government demolished 1,338 Palestinian homes on the West Bank. Over this period, more than 300,000 Palestinians were detained without trial for various periods by Israeli security forces." Lockman and Beinin: "Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation."

"Under the UN Charter there can lawfully be no territorial gains from war, even by a state acting in self-defense. The response of other states to Israel's occupation shows a virtually unanimous opinion that even if Israel's action was defensive, its retention of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was not...The [UN] General Assembly characterized Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a denial of self determination and hence a 'serious and increasing threat to international peace and security.' " John Quigley, "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice."

• All Jewish settlements in territories occupied in the 1967 war are a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which Israel has signed.

"The Geneva Convention requires an occupying power to change the existing order as little as possible during its tenure. One aspect of this obligation is that it must leave the territory to the people it finds there. It may not bring its own people to populate the territory. This prohibition is found in the convention's Article 49, which states, 'The occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.'" John Quigley, "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice."

• Jerusalem: Eternal, Indivisible Capital of Israel?

"Writing in The Jerusalem Report (Feb. 28, 2000), Leslie Susser points out that the current boundaries were drawn after the Six-Day War. Responsibility for drawing those lines fell to Central Command Chief Rehavan Ze'evi. The line he drew 'took in not only the five square kilometers of Arab East Jerusalem - but also 65 square kilometers of surrounding open country and villages, most of which never had any municipal link to Jerusalem. Overnight they became part of Israel's eternal and indivisible capital.'" Allan Brownfield in The Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, May 2000.

• The history of Israeli expansionism

"The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them." David Ben-Gurion, in 1936, quoted in Noam Chomsky, "The Fateful Triangle."

"The main danger which Israel, as a 'Jewish state', poses to its own people, to other Jews and to its neighbors, is its ideologically motivated pursuit of territorial expansion and the inevitable series of wars resulting from this aim...No Zionist politician has ever repudiated Ben-Gurion's idea that Israeli policies must be based (within the limits of practical considerations) on the restoration of Biblical borders as the borders of the Jewish state." Israeli professor, Israel Shahak, "Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3000 Years."

In Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharatt's personal diaries, there is an excerpt from May of 1955 in which he quotes Moshe Dayan as follows: "[Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no - it must - invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge...And above all - let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space." Quoted in Livia Rokach, "Israel's Sacred Terrorism."

• Israel's decades-old rejection of peaceful settlements 

"Senator [J.William Fulbright] proposed in 1970 that America should guarantee Israel's security in a formal treaty, protecting her with armed forces if necessary. In return, Israel would retire to the borders of 1967. The UN Security Council would guarantee this arrangement, and thereby bring the Soviet Union - then a supplier of arms and political aid to the Arabs - into compliance. As Israeli troops were withdrawn from the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank they would be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. Israel would agree to accept a certain number of Palestinians and the rest would be settled in a Palestinian state outside Israel.

"The plan drew favorable editorial support in the United States. The proposal, however, was flatly rejected by Israel. “The whole affair disgusted Fulbright,” writes [his biographer Randall] Woods. “The Israelis were not even willing to act in their own self-interest." Allan Brownfield in "Issues of the American Council for Judaism," Fall 1997.

• Examples of Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians

A study of students at Bethlehem University reported by the Coordinating Committee of International NGOs in Jerusalem showed that many families frequently go five days a week without running water. It also said that “water quotas restrict usage by Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, while Israeli settlers have almost unlimited amounts.”

"A summer trip to a Jewish settlement on the edge of the Judean desert less than five miles from Bethlehem confirmed this study. While Bethlehemites were buying water from tank trucks at highly inflated rates, the lawns were green in the settlement. Sprinklers were going at mid day in the hot August sunshine. Sounds of children swimming in the outdoor pool added to the unreality." Betty Jane Bailey, in "The Link", December 1996.

"You have to remember that 90 percent of Palestinian children two years old or more have experienced - some many, many times - the [Israeli] army breaking into the home, beating relatives, destroying things. Many were beaten themselves, had bones broken, were shot, tear gassed, or had these things happen to siblings and neighbors...The emotional aspect of the child is affected by the [lack of] security. He needs to feel safe. We see the consequences later if he does not. In our research, we have found that children who are exposed to trauma tend to be more extreme in their behaviors and, later, in their political beliefs." Dr Samir Quota, director of research for the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, quoted in "The Journal of Palestine Studies," Summer 1996, p.84

"There is nothing quite like the misery one feels listening to a 35-year-old [Palestinian] man who worked fifteen years as an illegal day laborer in Israel in order to save up money to build a house for his family only to be shocked one day upon returning from work to find that the house and all that was in it had been flattened by an Israeli bulldozer. When I asked why this was done - the land, after all, was his - I was told that a paper given to him the next day by an Israeli soldier stated that he had built the structure without a license. Where else in the world are people required to have a license (always denied them) to build on their own property? Jews can build, but never Palestinians. This is apartheid." Edward Said, in "The Nation", May 4, 1998.

• Below are some excerpts from the U.S. State Department's Reports on Human Rights Practices during the first Intifada.

1988: “Many avoidable deaths and injuries” were caused because Israeli soldiers frequently used gunfire in situations that did not present mortal danger to troops. Israeli troops used clubs to break limbs and beat Palestinians who were not directly involved in disturbances or resisting arrest. At least thirteen Palestinians have been reported to have died from beatings.”

1989: Human rights groups charged that the plainclothes security personnel acted as death squads who killed Palestinian activists without warning, after they had surrendered, or after they had been subdued.

1991: [The report] added that human rights groups had published “detailed credible reports of torture, abuse and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees in prisons and detention centers."