|
I
heard the shooting from the balcony of my apartment. Ismail, Yusuf,
and Anwar tried to infiltrate the Netzarim settlement in the Gaza
Strip on Tuesday night. They may have carried knives with them.
That's what Abdul Aziz Rantissi said, a leader of Hamas in
Gaza. They weren't suicide bombers as the New York Times
claimed; they were kids in the 9th grade doing something they
hadn't carefully thought through.
It
was stupid and it was a total waste of their young lives, which
is why Hamas issued a statement calling on children not to act
as martyrs for Palestine until they were ready; until they were
old enough. There were three funerals in Gaza Thursday morning,
April 24th, and the fathers of each of the boys spoke about their
sons to my friend Robert and me. The fathers didn't even
know the three boys were friends and each of the funerals took
place separately in different parts of the city, the families
unknown to each other; the grief equally palpable in each location.
Why
do you think your son did this?
"Why?
Why? Ismail's father threw the question back at us. You tell me,
he said. You tell me why an intelligent boy, the top of his class,
not living in the poverty of Gaza would throw his life away like
this. I ask you. You tell me."
Ismail,
Yusuf, and Anwar didn't have that much in common except that
they were all excellent students and they all, in the last few
months, had spent hours watching the news –Al-Jazeera, Al-Manar,
Abu Dhabi, BBC, CNN – and asking their fathers more and more
about the situation in Palestine. Ismail's father described
it the most eloquently when he said his son kept asking him why
nobody was intervening to help the Palestinians –not the
Americans, not the Europeans, not the Arab world. Why were they
all alone? All three boys had been affected recently by what happened
in Jenin. The Israelis will get away with this massive war crime,
of course.
They
will also get away with murdering three teen-aged boys possibly
armed with knives in an open field at Netzarim. Two of the boys
were unrecognizable to their fathers. The blast of one of the
bullets shattered the skull of Yusuf; Anwar's face had been
shot off. Ismail was shot in the head and chest, but his father
still knew it was his son. As they lay on the ground –dead
or not yet dead, it is unclear – a tank rolled over their bodies
crushing them, disemboweling them, severing their legs from their
bodies. Dogs tore at them after that as they lay there in the
night. At 4:00 on Wednesday afternoon the boys' bodies were
finally handed over to the Shifa hospital in Gaza.
Will
the Israelis come to Gaza?
"Like
I am seeing you."
This
is how human rights lawyer Raji Sourani answered this question.
Not everyone agrees with him; I have to admit, however, that he
has me convinced. The "when" is still an open question.
Probably not while Crown Prince Abdullah is driving around with
George W. Bush at the latter's ranch in Texas. But that visit
is not about Palestine; it's about Saudi Arabia. Don't
be fooled into believing the Arab governments give a whit what
happens to the Palestinians. Only Saddam Hussein is in a hopeless
enough position to issue "fuck yous" to the Americans,
which is no doubt why an Iraqi flag flew at one of the boy's
funerals.
On
TV they're still arguing over whether what happened at the Jenin
refugee camp was a massacre or not. Are there mass graves? Hundreds
of bodies? Wasn't Jenin, after all, a "terrorist nest?"
Didn't the Israelis have the right of "self-defense?"
The questions get more obscene as the reality fades from the screen:
13,000 people have had their lives destroyed. Their homes are
dust, their belongings wiped out, their sons or brothers or fathers
in many cases dead, wounded, or detained in prison. How will the
families survive now? There is no food, water, electricity, shelter.
These are refugees twice over being asked to cope again; villains
for being occupied by America's best friend.
I
hope there are no mass graves. I hope there is no more evidence
of massacre and summary execution. Isn't what happened in
Jenin bad enough? Do thousands of people have to be slaughtered
for the world to pay any attention? For people to understand that
this was an immense war crime? Has the Occupation of Palestine
become so routine, so normal, that the misery it creates is acceptable
until it creates rivers of blood?
A
friend writes that he's sympathetic to my views but am I
not just a little biased? What about the families of the victims
of the terrorist suicide bombings in Israel? Do I not feel their
pain? It takes a polished product of American propaganda culture
to ask this question.
I
tell him that you are only partly human if you can only feel one
people's pain. Not just here in the speck of land called
Israel/Palestine but wherever your finger lands when the spinning
globe stops. The problem is in acknowledging the causes, the responsibility,
and the indiscrimination of suffering. Israelis do not bleed more
when they are killed; their families do not weep more tears. It's
only the news you read that has made you believe this.
My
landscape now is Jabalia, Rafah, Khan Yunis, Bureij – simmering
in nervous anticipation of the coming deluge; my horizons are
the sea, the sky, the desert, and the war. In Jenin last Friday
I met a five year old girl with a feverish face who had gone mad.
She no longer knew who she was or where she was. When I looked
into her eyes I saw nothing. She belongs to the horizon of war.
Jennifer
Loewenstein lives in Gaza City, and works for the Mezan
Center for Human Rights.
|
