A Month by the Sea (25 page)

Nasser also treated scores of injuries inflicted by other ‘innovative’ weapons. Some patients, apparently merely in shock when admitted, with not a mark to be seen on their bodies, began to deteriorate within hours – and within a few more hours were dead. Post-mortems revealed internal injuries consistent with the use of thermobaric weapons which Nasser showed me, close up and in colour, on his computer. This ‘portfolio’ included melted brains, shredded lungs, cooked livers, exploded kidneys. Do arms
manufacturers
and their politician customers ever look at such pictures? Do they ever think about children or parents gazing at bodies unidentifiable as their children or parents – mangled beyond recognition as human beings … And why did the Quartet not demand an end to war crimes during those hideous three weeks? Instead, the
Goldstone Report
has been ‘managed’ to Israel’s
satisfaction
, proving yet again – to quote Richard Falk – that ‘The United Nations shows neither the capacity nor the will to implement its own resolutions.’

The current drugs shortage had compelled Nasser to postpone
or cancel numerous operations and many more patients urgently needed to leave the Strip. In May 2011, 92 per cent of applicants for permits to seek medical treatments elsewhere were successful – a considerable improvement on the 2010 monthly average. However, Israel habitually uses slow-motion bureaucracy to torture the gravely ill and their families. The granting of the original permit can still leave patients immobilised at the Erez crossing amidst a tangle of red tape and quite a few die while this is being unknotted. The Shabaans were particularly concerned about the number of IDF-maimed (far in excess of al-Wafa’s capacity) for whom so little can be done on the Strip. In many cases, advanced medical technology could make a life-changing difference were those victims free to travel. No wonder most Gazans want foreign campaigners to emphasise their demand for
freedom
rather than material ‘aid’. Incidentally, I relished Nasser’s only half-joking comment that Hamas’ insistence on its democratic right to rule on the Strip had helped the tiresomely named ‘Arab Spring’.

Then Nasser gave me the good news. Dialysis patients’ timetables had recently been adjusted to make the most of the machines still in working order. And at the beginning of June the Health Ministry had reluctantly authorised the reuse of some ‘disposables’. As a lay person I refrained from comment but my (rather prominent) Green bit reckoned this ‘emergency measure’ might be no bad thing. Octogenarians can remember hospital equipment being routinely sterilised before ‘disposables’ came on stream to generate indecent profits for their manufacturers. Alas! there will soon be no one left to bear witness to those days when we were comparatively free of The Market.

M— had suggested (by mobile) our meeting on the beach, under the awning of a makeshift café, soon after sunrise. As he approached (elderly, tallish, neatly bearded, still wearing his prayer-gown) I
noticed two soberly dressed youths seating themselves half-behind the café trestle-table; they were out of earshot but could keep the surrounding beach – as yet almost deserted – under surveillance.

M— was an old friend of Said Siam, the first Hamas Minister for the Interior, who had topped the poll in Gaza in January 2006. Back in the ’90s, M— told me, while resentment of Oslo was deepening and the Second Intifada brewing, Said had
de facto
resigned himself to the existence of the State of Israel and was developing his political thinking in accordance with that difficult readjustment. (No comparable adjustments were ever made on the Zionist side.) M— added, ‘I say
de facto
because he couldn’t bring himself to put it in simple Arabic. He conveyed it clearly without being explicit. To me that seemed a mistake and I told him so. But he had a tangled constituency to consider.’

Like Dr al-Zahar, Said didn’t last long in the cabinet once attempts began to regain Western funding (lost after the election). On my first (2008) visit to Israel I had heard him included in lists of hardliners who were feared and hated. ‘Hardliner’ is in this context an ambiguous term. It can mean an Islamist fanatic, or a Palestinian who has no scruples about killing Israeli civilians because Israeli soldiers kill (with impunity) so many Palestinian civilians of both sexes and all ages. Or it can, as in Said’s case, mean a Palestinian who greatly upsets Zionists because his realistic grasp of the current political situation and its historical background is frequently and clearly articulated. Mr Siam (a schoolteacher by profession) saw that the indispensable keystone for peace-building is Zionism’s recognition of the injustices done to a people who, as human beings, have certain basic rights. And this, as M— pointed out, is precisely what the famous Olga Appeal, discussed below, argued a few years later.

Said Siam had long been in the IDF assassins’ sights and after a few near misses a targeted bombing ‘eliminated’ him towards the end of Cast Lead. Israel’s long-term policy of political assassinations
has incidentally drawn attention to Hamas’ high quota of talented leaders. As M— shrewdly observed, Zionists fear Hamas’ collective brain-power much more than its rocket stockpile. He invited me to imagine peace negotiations in which all Hamas’ murdered leaders were sitting opposite the best and the brightest from Zionism’s governing class, everyone peace-seeking in earnest and the convener a neutral, if such exists. Given the quality of the Zionist case, and the sort of military/political hybrids who come to power in Israel, the Palestinians couldn’t fail to win every round.

M— referred scathingly to those official visitors to Gaza (like the VIP I saw zooming through at Rafah) who spend their few hours on the Strip meeting UNRWA representatives and NGO staff but never any member of the democratically elected government. We mustn’t talk to ‘terrorists’, our Washington bosses would never forgive that … Gaza’s present Prime Minster is Ismail Haniyeh, an Arabic literature scholar and a level-headed leader who has always belonged to Hamas’ political wing and narrowly escaped an assassin on 6 September 2003. Immediately after the election he announced that ‘Hamas will formulate its own peace plan, with a long-term truce with Israel at its centre’. By long-term, M— said, Ismail meant 10 or 15 years – preferably 15, by the end of which period, it was hoped, mindsets all round might have shifted. The international media paid little attention to this statement (‘never trust a terrorist!’) but
Ha’aretz
had a cheerful headline: ‘Hamas Appoints Moderates as PM, Speaker of PLC’ (17 February). Exactly one week later
Ynet
reported that Avi Dichter, former Shin Bet chief, Ariel Sharon’s main advisor and now Minister of Internal Security, had proclaimed, ‘The Hamas top man Haniyeh is a legitimate assassination target.’

As M— commented, only the peculiarly twisted Zionist mind could use this phrase. According to Chambers, to assassinate is ‘to murder by surprise or secret assault; to murder (especially a prominent person) violently, often publicly’. Killing may be legal
in self-defence, if one cannot otherwise avoid being killed, but anyone above the mental age of seven can identify ‘legitimate assassination’ as a contradiction in terms. However, Israel routinely deals with political opponents by murdering them and its boast to have made ‘political assassination internationally acceptable’ seems justified, given the muted global reaction to such behaviour.

M— saw a close connection between Zionism’s contempt for the law (international or domestic) and Israel’s refusal to provide that ‘keystone’ Said had spoken of by accepting responsibility for past or present crimes. Which took us back to the Olga Appeal.

In 2004, at Givat Olga overlooking the Mediterranean, a large group of Israeli scholars and activists (supported from a distance by hundreds of their colleagues, including Professor Baruch Kimmerling and Meron Benvenisti, former Vice-Mayor of Jerusalem) met for a three-week discussion, mainly in Hebrew, about changing the political discourse in Israel. The initiators were: Anat Biletzki, Andre Draznin, Haim Hanegbi, Yehudith Harel, Oren Medicks and Michael (Mikado) Warschawski. They were not, they emphasised, launching another political party or movement or lobby. Their aim was:

By this stage we had moved to M—’s home, in one of the less insalubrious corners of Shatti camp, and were sitting in front of a sluggish table fan being sustained by Egyptian shiny biscuits and many little glasses of mint tea.

I told M— about my first impressions of Israel, before my sojourns in the OPT. While waiting to depart from Ben-Gurion airport I wrote in my diary: ‘This country is unreal. It can’t survive in its present form as a Jewish pseudo-democracy.’ My gut-reaction was confined to my diary; after a brief visit it seemed much too presumptuous to be voiced, even among friends. That was in December 2008. By June 2011 my spontaneous choice of the word ‘unreal’, in a scribbled diary entry, seemed fully justified on one deep level – far removed from ‘economic development’.

During November 2008 I had repeatedly encountered Zionism’s evasion of reality – its refusal to accept responsibility for ‘the Problem’, its chilling depiction of Palestinians as sub-humans. For more than sixty years Israel’s governments have been deftly manipulating their kaleidoscopic population, conditioning people to think of themselves as under permanent threat from malicious forces plotting to obliterate their country. This explains my initial perception of Israel as an artificial creation, founded on self-deceit and bolstered by the success of world-deceiving propaganda. It
seems all the ingredients of the Problem have been poured by Zionism into a misshapen mould – then turned out and presented to a gullible public as ‘the real situation’. Whereupon most of the Western world, prone to what Tony Judt diagnoses as
post-Holocaust
‘self-blackmailing’, tries to deal fairly with this malformed mass of ‘history’. And always the spectre of ‘anti-Semitic’ accusations hovers over the scene, prompting official visitors – if inclined to protest against the Occupation, the settlements, the Apartheid Wall – to preface their timid criticisms by expressing a sympathetic understanding of Israel’s ‘security concerns’. Yet those concerns would not exist were Zionism to take the Olga gathering’s advice and ‘redress the continued injustice inflicted on the Palestinians, generation after generation’. Olga continues: ‘Only thus shall we Israeli Jews stop being plagued by the past’s demons and make ourselves at home in our common homeland … If we approach the Palestinians with an open mind and a willing spirit, we shall find in them what we bring with us.’

On al-Jazeera, in December 2011, Teymoor Nabili talked with Yehuda Bauer, the Hebrew University’s esteemed Holocaust scholar, who was introduced with the observation that Israel is ‘a region where there are as many versions of history as there are people telling them’. To an extent this is true of every region and every history. However, al-Jazeera seemed to be conniving here with those who like to present the Problem as one in which each side has a valid argument – or both sides are equally intransigent. Yet certain basic facts, such as those confronted in the Olga document, are not dependent on any historian’s interpretation or analysis. They stand alone, needing no explanation – only recognition.

M— was the third Gazan to tell me of his past support for suicide bombers and his present conviction that their missions had been a mistake. In the two other cases no remorse was felt; those jihadists regretted the Israeli lives lost only when it became obvious that most Palestinians condemned mass-assassinations – though
they might lack the courage to say so aloud. Moreover, the missions had been counterproductive on the international political stage, losing popular support for ‘the cause’ and not being destructive or dramatic enough to scare governments.

M—’s case was different. I felt honoured and very moved when, during our second meeting, he described his ‘conversion’. Suddenly the slaughtering of civilians had looked like an unIslamic crime. ‘It happened after the war on Gaza. All our dead and wounded made me think “No! Humans should not do this to one another!” I’m an old man, I don’t know why something changed inside me
then
… We’ve all seen many corpses, killed by Israelis or other Palestinians. When our missions were successful I never got excited and happy, I never liked this way of war. But we needed action at the time and what else to do? I’m careful now, not letting martyrs’ families see I’m changed. They need respect, to feel sons, brothers, husbands will always be honoured.’

Latterly M— had become a closet binationalist, inspired by Ehud Olmert’s prognosis at the end of the futile 2007 Annapolis ‘peace’ talks. Then Israel’s Prime Minister spurred on the BDS movement by saying, ‘If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights … as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.’ Already Zionists recognise binationalism as a serious threat to their Jewish state. The argument that a two-state solution would leave Israel’s borders indefensible has carried much weight for many years with Zionism’s supporters. But in the twenty-first century, could even AIPAC justify arguing against the
establishment
of a one-person-one-vote secular democracy? However, as M— saw it, binationalism’s main opponents will not be Israelis but those US Zionists. ‘They don’t have to live with our conflict,’ he said. ‘We and the Israelis both want peace. Zionism only offers more conflict.’