Ok, now I’m pissed.

I no longer recall whatever it was I was planning on writing earlier today. Apparently I’ve  moved from stunned horror over the damned flotilla and its implications to being crazy pissed off, and this transition has clouded my memory.

Because here’s the deal: The manner in which Israel handled the aid flotilla to Gaza was immoral, indefensible, murderous, and IMO, self-defeating. As I’ve said before, I’m pretty sure that the non-violence of the activists wasn’t perfection itself — after all, if I had armed soldiers lowering themselves onto my boat in the dead of night in international waters, I might well hit them with anything that came to hand. I might have even come prepared for such an eventuality, if only because I’d studied Israel and learned that the Israeli military invariably responds to any opposition with the biggest show of force it can muster. And no level of non-non-violence excuses or forgives Israel’s behavior. Trained commandos cannot simply set off to attack civilians on the high seas, no matter the provocation. Of course the flotilla was a provocation — it was designed, all along, to draw attention to Israel’s collective punishment of the population of Gaza. Of course the activists didn’t acquiesce to Israel’s demands that they turn around, of course they knew something crazy would happen, of course they were taking an enormous risk to make a political point — that is the way that civil disobedience and activism work! Israel has so much to answer for, and I am sickened by the efforts of the Israeli government and many Israeli citizens (and their supporters) to explain away the disaster that they brought on themselves — and the nine lives that the commandos took.

But do you want to know what’s a million, gajillion times worse than the flotilla incident? The motherfucking occupation.

Why the hell did it take the deaths of nine foreign nationals for the world to notice the occupation?

Yesterday I wrote about 300,000 people living in abject poverty, and no electricity for half the day, and 27 people who died in 2009 awaiting permission to leave Gaza for medical care, all the direct result of the blockade. And while the blockade has been particularly egregious — it’s all just a harsher version of what daily life has been like in Gaza and the West Bank since 1967.

For more than four decades, Palestinians have watched as their lands were taken, their children killed, their freedom of movement strangled, their ability to work and/or feed their families snatched, their tax revenues stolen, and their suffering ignored, belittled or flat-out denied. The Palestinians in Gaza live in the knowledge that Israel can and may very well invade with the full force of the Middle East’s most powerful army at the drop of a hat; the Palestinians in the West Bank have helplessly watched their small piece of land sliced and diced and cut in half by walls and roads and road blocks (and an arbitrary system of population control that means everyone needs a permit to go nearly anywhere), cutting families in half, farm lands in half, communities in half, and cutting students, professionals, and manual laborers off from schools, offices, and jobs. Not to mention hospitals and regular health care.

Yes, they have fought back, and yes some of them have done horrible, horrifying, horrific things in the name of self-defense. Some of them are rank anti-Semites, and would be even if there weren’t an occupation, because some people are just bad. Many, many — far too many — innocent Israelis have died and while I know that many think I excuse their deaths, I absolutely do not.

But what gets me is that Israel continues to act as if all of that is surprising — no: Appalling! How dare they not like us? How dare they maintain their own national narrative, even after we won the war? How dare they try to defend themselves — indeed, come to that, how dare they behave as if we were in a state of war and arm themselves for that war? We are the only ones with the right to arm ourselves! We are the only ones with the right to feel threatened! Palestinians who are not Zionists are terrorists!

So slowly, slowly, over 43 years, Israel has deepened its hold on the territories, its occupation becoming more and more stultifying, more and more brutal, more and more inimical to the barest possibility of an actual resolution of (rather than endless blood-soaked management of) the conflict — and the world got used to it. Until nine non-Palestinians were killed in international waters.

Then, suddenly, the world noticed.

I mean no disrespect to those killed on Sunday — they surely knew that in trying to draw attention to the blockade and the occupation behind it, they ran the risk of violence, and yet they bravely took that risk. They did not deserve to die, and I mourn their loss.

But I mourn also the thousands and thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel in the course of 43 years of occupation: Men, women, children, combatants and noncombatants alike, more than 6,200 in the last decade alone. I wish the world had raised a hue and cry for them.

If we had, perhaps the flotilla wouldn’t have even been necessary.

********************

Earlier:

Israel/Palestine: the basics.

Israel/Palestine peace advocacy – places to start.

Israel/Palestine – a reading list.

Posted by emilylhauser on June 1, 2010

https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/06/01/ok-now-im-pissed/