Days are short in Palestine. It is pitch black by 5pm and
winter has not yet even solidified over the barren, beige land, scarred with
barbed wire and mountains of trash.
Lives are short here too.
At 6pm last night I received a call from a local friend in
Ramallah to inform me that Rushdi Tamimi had passed after being shot twice by
Israeli soldiers the previous day, and that people were amassing at the
hospital in commiseration. Collectively in the bland parking lot of Ramallah
Hospital, Palestinians attempted to scrape together some narrative and
coherency from yet another meaningless, unaccounted for and unrecorded death.
There were no hot-shot journos milling about with the family
over plastic cups of instant coffee and silent weeping. The mercurochrome
hospital lobby stood empty as this is not a news-making story. They were
chasing rockets and international diplomats.
Instead, Tamimi was a young man from Nabi Saleh, a small and
impoverished village about 30 minutes from Ramallah. His life has been
structured by the checkpoint outside his backyard where 18 year old bored
Israeli soldiers decide who is accorded the dignity of freedom of movement and
speech. He never left the West Bank – he had the wrong coloured ID pass, which
he carried with him at all times should a soldier, at a whim, demand of Rushdi
Tamimi that he provide proof of Rushdi Tamimi.
As Gaza goes up in flames, Palestinians of the West Bank
have been struggling against the chains of occupation to do something; to do
anything. Ramallah, the ‘seat of Palestinian power’ and Palestinian Authority
(PA) ‘HQ’ is entirely impotent and inert to in anyway protect, serve or even
provide for Palestinians in Gaza, let alone intervene to halt the Israeli
assault.
At the time of writing, since Wednesday 14 November 116
Palestinians have been killed, including the massacre of two entire families in
their residential homes, 25 mosques have been targeted, the Gazan media centre
has been repeatedly decimated, a school bombed, residential areas targeted, and
the central bank in Gaza City destroyed. 3 Israelis were killed on the first
day of violence.
Gaza is an isolated, overpopulated, impoverished,
militarized open-air prison. A large percentage of the overall population of
1.7 million are third generation Palestinian refugees, who were ethnically
cleansed from their homes and villages in the establishment of the Israeli
state in 1948.[i] Israel has imposed an inhumane blockade on Gaza since 2006, disallowing
the flow of food aid, medical supplies, and construction materials amongst
other necessities of life and dignity.[ii]
Israel maintains a complete monopoly over the flow of
Palestinian bodies here too – no one is allowed out and no Palestinian from the
other West Bank territories is allowed in. The ‘checkpoints’ strategically
dotted across the country are the gates to the prison and every single one is
Israeli controlled, in Gaza and in the West Bank.[iii] It is an advanced system
of encirclement, suffocation and dehumanisation.[iv]
So as the ghastly events have unfolded over the past days,
Palestinians here in Ramallah have been bolted to their seats and forced to
merely watch the horrific destruction. Moreover, their pain and outrage has
been silenced and deemed unfounded by the one-sided media coverage from global
media power-houses such as the BBC, CNN and the New York Times.[v] We are
informed of Israel’s right to self-defence and the trauma Israelis in Tel Aviv
and Southern Israel are suffering. What has been occurring in the West Bank has
been largely unreported.
In all villages and towns across Palestinian territories
protests and marches have been called for daily. It is unclear who really does
the initiating and there are multiple sources of mobilization, including Fatah
and the Popular Struggle Co-ordination Committee. As the crowds in town squares
and focal points start to thin out, students jump into cheap taxi minibuses
called “service” and speed to checkpoints. Armed with nothing but courage, lost
youth and burning frustration, they seek to draw out soldiers and create some
kind of confrontation.
The balance of force in these events is heartbreakingly
uneven. IDF solders are armed with the most advanced military weaponry in the
world, and as one can see in this amateur video capturing the shooting of
Tamimi in Nabi Saleh -http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=539757 - they are ‘attacked’ by desperate children and
young adults in jeans and torn t-shirts.
If you think this is utter stupidity – I could not agree
with you more. There is no logic to throwing yourself in the line of a force
such as this.
But what else do they do? Their brothers and sisters in Gaza
are being massacred and they are powerless. Their life in the West Bank is
untenable and there is no sure sight of change or resolution.
Furthermore, the umbrella Palestinian representative, the PA
has been shown over years of the humiliating Middle East Peace Process
negotiations to have been entirely outmanoeuvred, outmuscled and economically
and politically trumped.[vi] The release of the ‘Palestine Papers’ in 2011 show
they have been prepared to even give up the demand to address the heartbeat of
Palestinian injustices – the Right of Return of 1948 refugees.[vii]
As cease fire negotiations are deliberated over in Egypt,
not only are lives continuously being taken in Gaza, but in the West bank too:
3 fatalities have been confirmed and around 50 injuries, several of which are
severe to critical. But it is not just the number of actual corpses that is so
distressing, it is the lack of value of life here and in Gaza. The sheer
incoherency and emptiness of existence is at the apex of the overall crime of
Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
So what does peace and political negotiation to end the Gaza
conflict 2012 mean in such a context of lifelessness and moral depravity? What
is left for Tamimi’s younger brothers when Ban Ki Moon and Hilary Clinton jet
out and Israel declares a return to normality? Will their life have value? What
kind of ‘normality’ does the world leave Palestinians to cling to?
That’s just it. There is no normalcy here, and Israel should
not be engaged with on the premise of being a normal, civil state if there are
to be any scraps of stolen hope left in the wretched lives of Palestinians.
[i] Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)
[ii] http://www.iss.europa.eu/uploads/media/EU_and_the_Gaza_blockade.pdf
[iii] Checkpoints also circle the Palestinian territories
and communities living in the West Bank. At any given time these can be shut
down, as Gaza’s have been since 2006.
[iv] Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine (2009)
[v]
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/2012111874429224963.html;
http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-assaults-gaza-bbc-reporting-assaults-truth/11894
[vi] Ilan Pappe, The Bureaucracy of Evil: The History of the
Israeli Occupation (2012)
[vii]
http://www.aljazeera.com/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112214310263628.html.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/01/2011125125430514484.html
