Why Israel targets the kids

The direct and witnessed experiences of children in Palestine:



There is a famous photo of a young boy strapped to the hood of an Israeli jeep, to protect the soldiers from Palestinian stones, and hundreds of photos documenting Israeli soldiers' deliberate targeting of children in street attacks. A popular punishment for Palestinian kids who throw rocks at the occupying army is to smash their fingers to pieces. To break the hand of a stone-thrower, the soldiers reasoned, would stop them from throwing stones for at least a month. But few people really have a sense for the scale of state-condoned violence against Palestinian children.

The reason why Israel targets children is because the Palestinian children are active participants in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza's struggle against Israeli military occupation. During the first and second Intifada young kids threw stones, erected roadblocks, burned tires, marched in demos, became lookouts, wrote political slogans on walls, and confronted settlers and soldiers during raids on refugee camps and neighborhoods. Between December 1987 and December 1993, Palestinians under sixteen were 40 percent of an estimated 130,000 Palestinians seriously injured by Israeli soldiers. Essentially one of out every twenty Palestinian children. In order to crush the Intifada, it seemed, all Israel had to do was crush the spirit of the youth.

The IDF violates human rights and the 'rights of the child' as sketched out in the UN declaration, Rights of the Child. But in the few cases where the IDF was tried for their 'unauthorized' assaults, soldiers are punished lightly, and the charges are swept under the table in kangaroo courts. The IDF imposes curfews and other collective punishments on local Palestinan populations, but looks the other way when settlers set out on vigilante rampages against affected Palestinian communities. Thirty seven children were killed during the first five months of the First Intifada from the excessive use of tear gas in confined places. PTSD among children is common. This brutality is summarized in a pithy UNRWA brief, and added to a mound of UN briefs documenting the devastation of an entire people.

My Snacktivism with the ISM

On Monday I had the pleasure to eat lunch with Rachel Corrie's parents and Paul Larudee from the ISM and Free Gaza project. Rachel Corrie was killed in Rafah, Gaza while trying to prevent an Israeli bulldozer from destroying a house, and since then her death has gained widespread notoriety. Rachel's father had gone to Rafah after her death to talk to the people there, and the media had said that he was kidnapped. I asked him about this because I read of his own account and knew that he maintains that he was never kidnapped. Nonetheless, this is the story that made headlines. At any rate, what is happening in Rafah as I write this is quite panicky.

Taxation + Terror + Blockade = Gaza

We can understand why Israel would like Fatah to lead Gaza instead of Hamas, but this preference has turned into a policy of terror. The walled border between Egypt and Gaza explodes every time Mubarak builds a barrier to prevent fleeing Palestinians from escaping Israeli attacks and economic warfare.

Though Israel claims to have pulled out of Gaza and handed over sovereignty to the PA in 2005, Israel still 1) withholds tax revenues collected in Gaza by Israel, 2) has worked to cut-off international aid to Gaza, 3) restricts the movement of goods and services in and out of Gaza, 4) imposes banking restrictions on Gazans, and 5) cuts power to Gaza, leaving them in darkness. So how is Gaza not occupied by Israel?

Banksy's West Bank

The 400+ mile concrete wall separating Palestine from Palestine has at least one purpose--the public display of art. Banksy, the UK-based guerrilla artist, recently stenciled several images on the wall, now making it reminiscent of the art the appeared on Berlin's "anti-fascist" Wall shortly after its fall. One of his new pieces is of a little girl in a pink dress frisking an Israeli soldier. It is almost exactly like the image on a UK wall of Scotland Yard frisking the little girl in a red dress. All of the new images were thrown up in the areas surrounding Bethlehem, a major pilgrimage site at this time of year. On the website, Banksy encourages people to visit Bethlehem and witness the uselessness of the wall for themselves. Like most walls in history, this one has only served to keep people who have legitimate claims to the land out. The ICJ stated that the barrier was "contrary to international law" and the UN stated that the wall created significant humanitarian and economic issues, not to mention that Palestinian land was confiscated to create the barrier. Initially contemplated by Israel as a security barrier, it has now become a political, economic, and humanitarian barrier.

The Denial of Political Teleology

A political teleology would seek to understand and establish an issue's underlying political causes. A denial of the causes would leave only the effects for discussion. Whether that denial is a strategy or an ideology I have not decided yet. In this blog I explore the issue in more detail regarding the debate on the Palestinians' right of return. While debates about what can be portmanteau'd "political teleology" are extreme and intense between Israelis and Palestinians themselves, there is a prevailing denial of that political teleology in the mainstream international press and in all sorts of NGO and international bodies.

The Statute of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) states in the 2nd general provision that its work ought to be "entirely non-political in character." Meaning that the work it does is supposed to be strictly "humanitarian" in character.

I find it rather presumptuous that an international body for the amelioration of political and economic refugees believes that its work can be entirely non-political. Consider the Palestinian refugee crisis. If the work in Palestine is non-political in character, it essentially means doing nothing to address the underlying political causes of the crisis. Decidedly "temporary" solutions, or series of temporary solutions, appear to be the permanent objective of the UN in Palestine. But it is also historically untrue that the UN's work in Palestine has been non-political in character.

While Article 13 of the UN Charter guarantees that any person ought to have the ability to leave his country and have the right to return to it, what has followed Israel's creation in 1948 has been considerable political hypocrisy about it internationally. Of course, the UN established the state of Israel in 1948, and this was itself a highly political solution to a refugee crisis. Are the Palestinians to receive no political attention?

Yes, in fact, they receive some political attention from the UN. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has made all sorts of political recommendations to the UNGA and the Security Council that would allow for a Palestinian right of return. The GA Resolutions 194, 393, 394, and 513 are in agreement. Yasser Arafat and the PLO have used these recommendations in their speeches at UN bodies and other international forums. Further, every organization involved in the Palestinian conflict has a very distinct political agenda. The aid offered, the contractors involved with the UNRWA, their promotion of admission of refugees into neighboring states, etc., cannot be done without a political understanding and a political agenda in mind.

The UNHCR mandate implies that while a refugee crisis may be political in nature, its own work shall be entirely non-political. (Which is also not true, ideally and historically.) But the UNHCR mandate makes a terrible distinction; it is often understood to mean there are either political or humanitarian refugee crises. There are refugee crises that are caused by natural or environmental factors, a tsunami, for example. This would be a strictly non-political and humanitarian issue, unless there were political recommendations made about storm infrastructure, say. Yet the majority of refugee crisis have essentially political causes. The UNHCR treats all refugee crises in the non-political way.

This agenda is largely misguided. And we see misguided behavior reflected elsewhere. The American mainstream media treat the Palestinian Right of Return as an entirely non-political issue. Instead of addressing the issue as having distinct political causes and effects, it is often treated as a kind of natural phenomenon, much like a tsunami: there are forces which are naturally opposed to one another (which they are not prepared to explain) and thus the mitigation of conflict can be achieved by simply addressing the effects of the crisis. And we therefore fall into an ideology of accepting a non-political teleological account of the crisis.

Now A Three-State Solution to Palestine

This year a Jewish study found that 46% of Palestinians prefer a two-state solution, and only 26% prefer a bi-national solution to the Palestinian Question. But the two-state solution, which has been integrated into Bush's Road Map for Peace in Palestine, never envisioned a completely divided Palestinian Authority.

Hamas, the militant Sunni Islamist party elected to the PA last January, replaced the old majority, Fatah. PA salaries, which depend on foreign aid, have dropped since Hamas was elected. Hamas admirably began a 10-year truce with Israel after they were elected, as well. But from the start, Fatah tried to prevent Hamas from getting full control of the PA military--called the PA security services--which are a cornerstone of political power and a job scheme for unemployed militants, and which had become bloated with Fatah loyalists during the secular party's long and corrupt rule. Hamas responded to this by making an extremely disciplined “Executive Force” of its own loyalists to the PA roster in Gaza, where its stronghold is.

Fatah won the favor of the US, which has turned its presidential guard into an elite force to counter Hamas, whose weapons and troops are superior. The US State Department says Hamas's funding comes from Iran. Under the guise of strengthening Mr Abbas as a moderate (unlike Hamas, which still refuses to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state), Bush has provided $59m for training and supplying the presidential guard with non-lethal equipment, which Israel has let enter Gaza. Israel (Olmert) would also like to strengthen Fatah. Israel and Hamas's truce was ended when Israeli forces attacked Hamas for shipping weapons into Gaza, which it technically does not "own" anymore, so it should be out of Israel's jurisdiction.

The Western support for Mr Abbas's troops, along with the now 15-month-old Western boycott of the PA, is part of a conspiracy to force Hamas out of power. Although it's hardly a secret conspiracy. All levels of defense are beefing up Fatah, when it is clear that Hamas has won a clear democratic majority regardless of their being on the terrorist list in many Western countries. The debate over the security services was aggravated by Western pressure to keep it in the hands of Fatah, the minority party. This is why democracies can fail, and why other democracies wish to explore coercive means of getting the parties they'd like in power.

Fatah's propagandizes that Hamas staged a coup against them, which is impossible if you're already the head of government. And so Fatah has officially outlawed Hamas's "paramilitary" organization, which was to be the security services, and has sworn in emergency cabinets to reclaim power. Hamas then fires from Lebanon to attack Israel, reminiscent of last August. It's a war on all fronts now.

The Palestinian democracy has failed for sure, and that's why massive fighting has taken place this week in Gaza. Fatah now has been ousted from Gaza, where Hamas has total control. Israel invaded Gaza today, to crush Hamas and to move people to the West Bank. So Perhaps the answer to the Palestinian Question is tripartite. Mahmoud Abbas's West Bank will become a flourishing democracy, and Ismael Haniyeh's Gaza will become a militant "Hamastan". Western "history" will hail Fatah as the rightful democratic leader, despite faulty Western intervention, and Hamastan will be demonized as the failed militant state, listed as an "axis of evil" and would its credibility crushed so much that it could not attract one dollar of Western FDI. Western propaganda has and is determined to spoil the fruits of any Hamas-led government.

The 40-Year Occupation

Americans believed they won the War in Iraq just months after the invasion, but it is losing and perhaps has already lost the occupation. Israelis were in a similar state of mind after the Six Day War of 1967. Our occupation has lasted 4 years. But Israel's has lasted 40. The speed and scope of that war led many Israelis to see a divine hand in their victory. This changed Israel itself, giving birth to an irredentist religious-nationalist movement intent on permanent colonization of the occupied lands. After six days Israel had conquered not just Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights but also the old city of Jerusalem and the West Bank—the biblical Judea and Samaria where Judaism began. In theory, these lands might have been traded back for the peace the Arabs had withheld since Israel's founding. That is what the UN Security Council proposed in Resolution 242. But Israelis were intoxicated by victory and the Arabs paralysed by humiliation. Israel then embarked on its hubristic folly of annexing the Arab half of Jerusalem and—in defiance of law, demography and common sense—planting Jewish settlements in all the occupied territories to secure a Greater Israel.

Palestinians were scattered by the fighting that accompanied Israel's founding in 1948. Some fled beyond Palestine; others became citizens of the Jewish state or lived under Egypt in Gaza and Jordan in the West Bank. After '67 the disputed territories (Gaza and West Bank) were reunited under Israeli control and so sharpened their own thwarted hunger for statehood. Gaza and the West Bank were technically already occupied by Transjordan and Egypt before 1967. And according the British Palestinian Mandate, Egypt had no rights to Gaza. And decades later, Egypt and Jordan did make peace with Israel, the Palestinians did not recover Gaza and the West Bank. This has left some 4m Palestinians desperate for independence but in a confined land choked by Jewish settlements—along with the fences, checkpoints and all the hardships and indignities of military occupation. Ariel Sharon, it is true, dragged Israel out of the Gaza Strip two years ago. But it hasn't made any difference. The Palestinians will not consider peace unless they get the West Bank and Arab Jerusalem too. And Hamas, basically now the Palestinian government, says it will not make a permanent peace even then.

Lebanese Politics

Lebanese police invaded a flat in Tripoli 7 days ago tied to the Fatah al-Islam called Nahr al-Bared. It's a Palestinian Refugee camp on the coast, where about 30,000 displaced refugees live. I can easily see how radical jihadism could spread within the walls of such a large camp, and this is a lesson for the 13 other refugee camps in Lebanon, and for 4.3m+ Palestinian Refugees in the Pan-Arabic region. Though considered small and marginal, Fatah al-Islam has been linked to sporadic bomb attacks that have hit Christian areas of Lebanon recently. Once the group was provoked, they responded by firing at the military posts around the camp and hijacking military vehicles. Shootouts have happened for 7 consecutive days.

There's been more internal violence this week since Lebanon's Civil War in 1970-1990. Since Hizbullah's war with Israel last year (known to Israelis as the Second Lebanon War) Lebanon's Western-backed government has been locked in a stand-off against a pro-Syrian coalition, led by Hizbullah, the Shia party, over the opposition's demand for a veto-wielding share of cabinet seats. Lebanese political structure is obviously flawed if groups are barred from influence. Though the fighting in the north pits a widely disparaged Sunni Muslim group against a national army that embraces all Lebanon's faiths, I'm sure Lebanese view the clash through the prism of this wider political dispute over power in the government.

Lebanon is suspecting that Syria has something to do with this, since it just ended a 29-year occupation of Lebanon, and it might want to get involved in Lebanese politics. Another alleged Syrian aim is to block the setting up of an international tribunal to try suspects in a string of political murders beginning with the assassination in February 2005 of Rafik Hariri, a five-times Lebanese prime minister. Mass protests after his death is what shamed Syria into withdrawing its troops--but it left in place many forces that concur with Syria's view of Lebanon as a bulwark against Western influence. Lebanon says that it's no secret Fatah al-Islam is linked to the Syrian Fatah al-Intifada. Lebanon has 400,000 Palestinian refugees, and Syria is even accused of recruiting them into jihadist groups to attack the US presence in Iraq and the Lebanese army.

Hizbullah is a terrorist organization to the Bush Administration. But once this violence erupted in shootouts so far involving stolen tanks and rocket fire throughout the cities, Hizbullah and other rival political parties united to condemn Fatah al-Islam. Hizbullah even urged the Lebanese government to storm the camp and destroy the radicals. But just last year Hizbullah was shelling cities in Israel.

The US military was commanded to relieve the Lebanese army with weapons-aid, which it used to bomb indiscriminately on civilian Palestinians in the camp. One UN aid convoy crept into the camp, but was forced to retreat under heavy fire. At one point Palestinians inside the camp started protesting Fatah al-Islam and were gunned down. They were obviously holding the camp hostage at that point, but the Lebanese army kept shelling indiscriminately.