January
18, 2024
The
Omari Mosque in Gaza was largely destroyed by Israeli bombardment on Dec. 8,
2023. It was one of the most ancient mosques in the region and a beloved Gazan
landmark.
The
mosque was first built in the early seventh century and named after Islam’s
second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, a successor to the Prophet Muhammad and
leader of the early Islamic community. It was a graceful white stone structure,
with repeating vistas of pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled
by a carved wooden balcony and crowned with a crescent.
The
lower half of the minaret and a few exterior walls are reported to be the only
parts of the mosque still standing.
Gaza
is rich in cultural treasures, with some 325 formally registered heritage sites
within just 141 square miles, including three designated for UNESCO’s World
Heritage tentative list. The Omari Mosque is one of over 200 ancient sites
damaged or destroyed in Israeli raids since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
As
a scholar of Islamic architecture and archaeology, I know the Omari Mosque as a
building that embodies the history of Gaza itself – as a site of frequent
destruction, but also of resilience and renewal. While narratives about Gaza
often center on war and conflict, Gaza’s rich history and pluralistic identity
as expressed through its cultural heritage equally deserve to be known.
Layered
histories
The
sun-soaked coastal enclave of Gaza, with the tidy stone buildings of its old
city and its verdant olive and orange groves, has been a trade hub that
connected the Mediterranean with Africa, Asia and Europe for millennia. It was
famed in particular as a transit point for incense, one of the ancient world’s
most precious commodities. Given its abundant agricultural and maritime riches,
Gaza has known conquest by nearly every powerful empire, including the ancient
Egyptians, the Romans, the early Islamic caliphs, the Crusaders and the
Mongols.
Gaza’s
history of repeated conquest meant that buildings were often destroyed,
reimagined and rededicated to accommodate changing political and religious
practices. New sacred structures were continually built over old ones, and they
frequently incorporated “spolia,” or stones reused from prior buildings. The
Omari Mosque, too, was such an architectural palimpsest: a building embodying
the layered, living material history of the city.
In
the second millennium B.C., the site of the mosque is believed to have been a
temple for Dagon, the Philistine god of the land and good fortune. The temple
is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the one whose walls were felled by the
warrior Samson, who is locally believed to be buried in its foundations.
In
323 B.C., Gaza fiercely resisted the conquest of Alexander the Great, and the
city endured devastating destruction when it was finally subdued. Yet after
Gaza was conquered by the Romans in 50 B.C. it entered a period of renewed
wealth and prosperity. A concentric domed temple was built for Marnas, a god of
storms and the protector of the city, on the site of the future mosque. He was
venerated there until just before 400 A.D., when the Byzantine Empress Eudoxia
imposed the new faith of Christianity and ordered the destruction of the
temple.
The
priests of the temple barricaded themselves inside and hid the statues and
ritual objects in an underground room. But the temple was destroyed and a Greek
Orthodox church rose in its place. The stones, however, preserved the tale: in
1879 a monumental, 10-foot-high statue of Marnas, portrayed in the guise of
Zeus, was excavated and its discovery made international media headlines. The
statue is now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museums.
The
Byzantine church, too, was destined to be transformed. In the early seventh
century, the Muslim general Amr ibn al-As conquered Gaza, and the church was
converted into the Omari Mosque. Yet the continued presence of Gazan churches
and synagogues attested to pluralistic norms that characterized the region
under various Islamic dynasties until the modern era.
Gaza
under Islamic rule
Gaza
thrived under Islamic rule: Medieval travelers described it as a remarkably
fertile, creative and beautiful city, with prominent Muslim, Christian and
Jewish communities. It was still a flourishing urban center when the European
Crusaders arrived. When the city fell to the Crusader King of Jerusalem,
Baldwin III, in 1100, the Omari Mosque was converted once again – this time
into a Catholic cathedral dedicated to St. John the Baptist.
The
Muslim general Saladin defeated the Crusaders in 1187, and Gaza returned to
Islamic rule. The church was transformed back into a mosque, and in the 13th
century its elegant octagonal minaret was raised. Yet the reconversion into a
mosque preserved much of the Crusader church, and the majority of the nave and
the western portal were still visible in modern times.
It
was in this period that the mosque became famed for its extraordinary library
containing thousands of books, the earliest dating to the 13th century. After
the library of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the Omari Mosque’s collection
was one of the richest in Palestine.
In
the 13th century, the mosque endured destruction by the Mongols as well as
major earthquakes that would repeatedly topple the minaret. Its rebuilding
after each of these disasters speaks to the ongoing centrality of the mosque in
the communal life of the people of Gaza.
The
stones tell the tale
Later,
Gaza continued to flourish as a coastal port city, where Muslims, Christians,
Jews and others lived in the vast, cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire.
In
the late 19th century, as scholars explored Gaza’s heritage, an eloquent
reminder of the building’s layered history emerged: a relief on a mosque pillar
depicting a seven-branched menorah and Jewish ritual objects, including a
shofar, or horn, surrounded by a wreath. The name Hanania, son of Jacob, was
engraved in Hebrew and Greek.
Its
date is uncertain, but it seems likely to have been a column from a synagogue
reused during the building of the Byzantine church, which was used again in the
building of the mosque: yet another layer in the architectural palimpsest that
was the Omari Mosque.
A
few decades later, during World War I, the mosque was severely damaged when a
nearby Ottoman arms depot was targeted by British artillery fire. In the 1920s,
the stones were once again gathered and the mosque was rebuilt.
After
the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, Gaza became the sanctuary of tens of
thousands of Palestinian refugees. The area was primarily administered by Egypt
until it was captured by Israel in 1967.
It
was at some point after the 1967 war, when Jewish symbols had come to be
associated with the state of Israel and its occupation of Gaza, that the
menorah relief was effaced from the column in the mosque.
A
future for the Omari Mosque
On
Dec. 8, 2023, Israel became the most recent military force to target the
mosque. The library, too, may have been ruined, a treasure house of knowledge
that will not so easily be rebuilt. A digitization project completed in 2022
preserves an imprint of the library’s riches. Still, digital files can’t
replace the material significance of the original manuscripts.
The
hundreds of other heritage sites damaged or destroyed include Gaza’s ancient
harbor and the fifth century Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius, one of
the oldest churches in the world.
From
today’s vantage point, it seems extraordinary that the menorah relief had
endured for over 1,000 years: a Jewish symbol unremarkably cohabiting inside a
Muslim prayer hall. In truth, both the relief and its removal embody the story
of Gaza itself, a fitting reminder of the many centuries of destruction,
coexistence and resilience embodied in the mosque’s very stones.
And
if the Omari Mosque’s richly layered history is any indication, the people of
Gaza will raise those stones again.
The
High-Profile Invisibility of the Gaza War
How media biases
cloak the gruesome realities of hunger, displacement, and death.
Zen wisdom tells
us that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Yet it’s easy to fall
into the illusion that when we see news about the Gaza war, we’re really seeing
the war.
We are not.
What we do
routinely see is reporting that’s as different from the actual war as a pointed
finger is from the moon.
The media words
and images reach us light years away from what it’s actually like to be in a
war zone. The experience of consuming news from afar could hardly be more
different. And beliefs or unconscious notions that media outlets convey war’s
realities end up obscuring those realities all the more.
Inherent
limitations on what journalism can convey are compounded by media biases.
In-depth content analysis by The Intercept found that coverage of the Gaza war
by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times “showed a
consistent bias against Palestinians.” Those highly influential papers
“disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used
emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians.”
What is most
profoundly important about war in Gaza — what actually happens to people being
terrorized, massacred, maimed and traumatized — has remained close to invisible
for the U.S. public. Extensive surface coverage seems repetitious and
increasingly normal, as death numbers keep rising and Gaza becomes a routine
topic in news media. And yet, what’s going on now in Gaza is “the most
transparent genocide in human history.”
With enormous
help from U.S. media and political power structures, the ongoing mass murder —
by any other name — has become normalized, mainly reduced to standard buzz
phrases, weaselly diplomat-speak and euphemistic rhetoric about the Gaza war.
Which is exactly what the top leadership of Israel’s government wants.
Extraordinary
determination to keep killing civilians and destroying what little is left of
Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza has caused extremes of hunger, displacement,
destruction of medical facilities, and expanding outbreaks of lethal diseases,
all obviously calculated and sought by Israeli leaders. Thinly reported by U.S.
media outlets while cravenly dodged by President Biden and the overwhelming
majority of Congress, the calamity for 2.2 million Palestinian people worsens
by the day.
“Gazans now make
up 80 per cent of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide,
marking an unparalleled humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s
continued bombardment and siege,” the United Nations declared this week. The UN
statement quoted experts who said: “Currently every single person in Gaza is
hungry, a quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food
and drinkable water, and famine is imminent.”
Israel is waging
a war toward extermination. But for the vast majority of Americans, no matter
how much mainstream media they consume, the war that actually exists — in
contrast to the war reporting by news outlets — remains virtually invisible.
Of course,
Hamas’s Oct. 7 murderous attack on civilians and its taking of hostages should
be unequivocally condemned as crimes against humanity. Such condemnation is
fully appropriate, and easy in the United States.
“Deploring the
crimes of others often gives us a nice warm feeling: we are good people, so
different from those bad people,” Noam Chomsky has observed. “That is
particularly true when there is nothing much we can do about the crimes of
others, so that we can strike impressive poses without cost to ourselves.
Looking at our own crimes is much harder, and for those willing to do it, often
carries costs.”
With the
U.S.-backed war on Gaza now in its fourth month, “looking at our own crimes”
can lead to clearly depicting and challenging the role of the U.S. government
in the ongoing huge crimes against humanity in Gaza. But such depicting and
challenging is distinctly unpopular if not taboo in the halls of government
power — even though, and especially because, the U.S. role of massively arming
and supporting Israel is pivotal for the war.
“For the
narcissist, everything that happens to them is a huge deal, while nothing that
happens to you matters,” scholar Sophia McClennen wrote last week. “When that
logic translates to geopolitics, the disproportionate damage only magnifies.
This is why Israel is not held to any standards, while those who question that
logic are told to shut up. And if they don’t shut up, they are punished or
threatened.”
Further
normalizing the slaughter are the actions and inaction of Congress. On Tuesday
evening, only 11 senators voted to support a resolution that would have
required the Biden administration to report on Israel’s human-rights record in
the Gaza war. The sinking of that measure reflects just how depraved the
executive and legislative branches are as enablers of Israel.
The horrors in
Gaza are being propelled by the U.S. war machine. But you wouldn’t know it from
the standard U.S. media, pointing to the moon and scarcely hinting at the utter
coldness of its dark side.
Israel’s Genocide, US Assistance, and Consequences Thereof
South
Africa has now presented its charge of Israeli genocide in the International
Court of Justice (ICJ), and Israel has presented its rebuttal. Regardless of
the ultimate judgment, a page has been turned. Israel’s actions in Gaza,
assisted by the US, have changed the geopolitical landscape. The consequences
stand to be dire and lasting.
The
case against Israel
The
case against Israel is stark and simple. The argument in descending order of
import is as follows.
First,
and foremost, is Israel’s disproportionate response and application of
collective punishment. Hamas is a criminal terrorist organization, not a state.
Israel has a right to appropriate self-defense, but it has no right to kill
vast swathes of non-combatant Palestinians as it tries to combat a criminal
organization. The indiscriminate killing constitutes a war crime and crime
against humanity. It becomes genocidal when paired with denial of means of
survival.
Second,
razing Gaza to the ground and intentionally driving an entire population into
the unprotected open guarantees large scale death from lack of shelter, hunger,
and sickness. It echoes the Armenian genocide of 1915.
Third,
the razing of Gaza fits with an Israeli plan for mass expulsion of
Palestinians, a sort of Israeli final solution to the Gaza problem. Such a plan
has long been popular in Israel, pre-dates the Hamas attack, and fits with
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s October 28th quotation of the Bible whereby God
ordered the Israelites to eradicate the Amalekites: “Now go and smite Amalek,
and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay man and
woman, infant and suckling.” That record is suggestive of ethnic cleansing
which turned genocidal in the wake of the October 7th attack.
Fourth,
during the conflict, dehumanizing videos have emerged of Israelis celebrating
the killing of civilian Palestinians, mocking Palestinian suffering,
vandalizing Gazan shops, and desecrating mosques. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav
Gallant described Palestinians as “human animals”. Dehumanization is always
part of the story with genocides. Furthermore, Israel’s shooting of Israeli
hostages waving a white flag who had escaped from Hamas, shows Israel’s take no
prisoners tactics which violate the Geneva conventions. All are part of the
mindset informing Israel’s actions.
Some
claim every Palestinian is a potential terrorist and legitimate target. Not
only is that grotesquely specious, it also tacitly jusifies Hamas’ murders on
grounds that every adult Israeli is a soldier. The horror of Hamas’ October 7th
attack may explain the Israeli public’s desire for revenge and retribution, but
it provides no legal justification for mass murder.
A
tragedy long in the making
Israel’s
embrace of genocide has been long in the making and runs through the extremist
politics of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Their politics fertilized
the seed of racist segregationism, which was always present within Zionist
ideology even if the 19th century founders of Zionism were unaware thereof.
This
is also where the history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict enters. The
vicious cycle of violence fueled the triumph of Begin-Netanyahu extremist
politics. That politics was further reinforced by Israel’s military success and
rise to regional super-power status, which fed a racist trope of Israeli
ubermensch (superman).
Consequences
for Israel
European
Jewry experienced the Holocaust, the worst genocide in history, and Israel was
created in response to that evil. Given that, it is shocking so many Jews and
Israel have embraced actions that qualify as genocide.
That
embrace is a tragedy of extraordinary and historic proportions, and the cost to
Israel and world Jewry stands to be enormous. The “special” has gone out of
Israel, and it is now just a nation among others. Geopolitically, Israel stands
to suffer as its special character has been a source of global support.
Given
the history of Israel’s creation, the embrace is also a stain on the memory of
the Holocaust which is likely to further encourage antisemitism. The
Holocaust’s unique standing was a marker of moral authority. By embracing
genocide, Israel and its supporters have weakened that marker.
Consequences
for the US
As
for the US, the Biden administration has openly and materially assisted Israel
in its genocide. In doing so, the US has further lost international credibility
re its claim to being exceptional regarding democracy and human rights. That
claim was geopolitically beneficial to the US, even if exceptionalism was a
myth based on geography which enabled the US to escape conflicts and
complications that ensnared others. For decades, the US has been losing
credibility owing to its behavior, and support of Israel’s genocide is another
nail in the coffin of exceptionalism.
Blackouts in Gaza must not be used as ‘weapons of war’: Rights group
Gaza
is under a weeklong sustained telecoms outage, the longest since the onset of
the war with Israel.
A
weeklong telecommunications blackout in the Gaza Strip has become a “matter of
life and death” and should end immediately, digital civil rights group Access
Now says during the longest continuous outage since Israel’s war began.
“It is
unconscionable to toy with connectivity amidst unprecedented violence and
unfathomable human suffering,” Marwa Fatafta, the group’s policy and advocacy
director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement on Thursday.
“Internet
shutdowns must not be used as weapons of war. Access Now continues to call for
an immediate physical and digital ceasefire and for the full restoration of
telecommunications services in the Gaza Strip.”
Palestinian
internet service provider Paltel announced the complete loss of all
telecommunications services in Gaza “due to the ongoing aggression” on January
12. Cloudflare Radar’s data confirmed a drastic drop in traffic.
The
watchdog NetBlocks, which monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the
internet, said on Thursday the incident had passed the 144-hour mark. “The
disruption is the ninth and longest sustained telecoms outage since the onset
of the present conflict with Israel,” it said on the social media platform X.
Internet
shutdowns have hampered the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza’s 2.3 million
people, 85 percent of whom are internally displaced. The outages also have made
it extremely challenging to document and share information about what is
happening on the ground.
Since
the beginning of the war on October 7, internet traffic in the Gaza Strip has
undergone multiple blackouts and shutdowns. Repair crews have had trouble
reaching damaged sites during heavy Israeli bombardments and have at times
taken significant personal risks to restore connections.
Access
Now said it found the outages across Gaza resulted from a combination of direct
attacks on civilian telecommunications infrastructure, restrictions on access
to electricity and technical disruptions to telecommunications services.
The
blackouts have occurred as Israel has carried out a devastating bombardment of
Gaza, killing at least 24,620 people and wounding 61,830, according to
Palestinian authorities.
Access
Now found air strikes by Israeli forces on October 9 destroyed a building
containing both offices and infrastructure for Paltel and Jawwal, two of the
main telecommunications providers in the Gaza Strip.
Al-Watan
Tower, another building that houses media offices and serves as a hub for
internet service providers, has also been the target of Israeli air strikes.
The Gaza Strip: a Struggle For Daily Survival Amid Death,
Exhaustion And Despair
Every
time I visit Gaza, I witness how people have sunk further into despair, with
the struggle for survival consuming every hour.
In
the south, around Rafah, makeshift structures of plastic sheeting have
mushroomed everywhere including on the streets, with people trying to protect
themselves from the cold and rain. Each one of these flimsy shelters can be
home to over 20 people. Rafah is so congested that one can barely drive a car
amid the sea of people. The population of Rafah has almost quadrupled, with
more than 1.2 million people.
Everyone
I met had a personal story of fear, death, loss, trauma to share. Over the 100
days, the people of Gaza have moved from the sheer shock of losing everything,
in some cases every member of their family, to a debilitating struggle to stay
alive and protect their loved ones.
In
Deir al-Balah, in the middle areas, I visited one of our schools turned
shelter. The overcrowding was claustrophobic, and the filthiness was striking.
I heard stories of women foregoing food and water to avoid having to use the
unsanitary toilets. Skin diseases and headlice are rife with those affected
stigmatized. People were struggling for food and medicine during the day,
feeling cold and damp during the night. They wish to return to their lives
before the war but realize, with deep anxiety, that this is unlikely to happen
anytime soon.
With
the scarcity of commercial goods allowed into the Strip, the price of basic
commodities has increased up to ten times, from the rarely available fruits and
vegetables to baby milk to a used blanket on sale. Mountains of uncollected
rubbish now fill the streets. The chronically ill do not have sufficient
medicine and must learn to live with alternatives or do without, from basic
insulin for diabetes to daily tablets for high blood pressure. People are not
able to wash and stay clean. Long and repeated blackouts in telecommunications,
including internet and mobile phones add to the distress as people feel cut off
from the rest of the world. The siege is the silent killer of many.
There
is very little information about the north of the Gaza Strip, as access to the
area remains highly restricted. I was not authorized to visit; our convoys and
aid trucks are often delayed for long hours at the checkpoint. Meanwhile, many
desperate people now approach our trucks to get food directly off them, without
waiting for distribution. By the time the Israeli authorities give our convoys
the greenlight to cross, trucks are almost empty.
Our
UNRWA staff are equally impacted. Despite this, they work tirelessly to support
the people around them. I am not able to
reassure them that they, let alone their families or UN facilities, will be
safe.
This
has gone on for far too long. There are no winners in these wars. There is
endless chaos and growing despair. I call once again for an immediate
humanitarian ceasefire that can bring some respite and enable a much needed and
significant increase in the flow of basic supplies, including through the
commercial route. Anything short of this will prolong the misery of an entire
population.
US Officials Care More
about Protecting Oil Tankers than Palestinians
While Israel continues its military
offensive in Gaza, the United States is directing a major military operation in
the Red Sea, where U.S. warships are maintaining a persistent presence to
protect shipping lanes.
With its recently launched Operation
Prosperity Guardian, the United States is leading a multinational military
coalition to occupy the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab, where oil tankers and
commercial vessels have come under attack by Houthi militants in Yemen. The
U.S.-led military intervention has brought the United States into direct
conflict with the Houthis, who insist that they will continue their attacks
until Israel ends its military offensive in Gaza.
“This is about the protection of one
of the major commerce routes of the world in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab,” a
senior official in the Biden administration said.
Strategic Waterways
For years, the U.S. military has
played a central role in the Red Sea, a large waterway between northeastern
Africa and the Arabian peninsula that facilitates regional commerce. In April
2022, the U.S. military oversaw the creation of Combined Task Force 153, a
multinational naval partnership to patrol the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandab, and Gulf
of Aden.
“As everyone can appreciate, those
waters are critical to the free flow of commerce throughout the region,” Vice
Admiral Brad Cooper, the regional U.S. naval commander, explained at the time.
The Red Sea is a vital shipping
route, accounting for nearly 15 percent of all seaborne trade. It facilitates
commerce between Europe and Asia, enabling commercial ships to save time by
passing through the Middle East rather than taking a longer route around
Africa.
The Red Sea is also a major transit
route for the world’s oil and natural gas. Significant amounts of oil from
Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the Persian Gulf are routed through
the Red Sea to markets in Asia, Europe, and North America. Overall, the Red Sea
accounts for 8 percent of global trade in liquefied natural gas and 12 percent
of seaborne trade in oil.
“The Red Sea is a vital waterway,”
White House spokesperson John Kirby said at a January 3 press briefing. “A
significant amount of global trade flows through that Red Sea.”
Of particular concern to U.S.
officials is the Bab al-Mandab, a strait at the southern end of the Red Sea.
Only 18 miles wide at its narrowest point, the strait forms a chokepoint that
forces commercial vessels into tight shipping lanes. As of early 2023, an
estimated 8.8 million barrels of oil passed through the Bab al-Mandab every
day, making it one of the world’s most significant chokepoints.
“The Bab al-Mandab Strait is a
strategic route for oil and natural gas shipments,” the U.S. Energy Information
Agency notes.
Operation Prosperity Guardian
Now that the Houthis are attacking
commercial vessels in the Red Sea, the United States is establishing a larger
military presence in the region with Operation Prosperity Guardian. Under this
new initiative, the United States is working with its coalition partners to
establish what U.S. officials call a “persistent presence” in the southern Red
Sea, meaning that coalition warships and other military assets will remain
actively spread out across the area in a kind of military occupation.
“Together, we now have the largest
surface and air presence in the southern Red Sea in years,” Cooper said at a
January 4 press briefing.
As part of the operation, warships
from France, Great Britain, and the United States are positioned throughout the
southern Red Sea. They have been reinforced by the Eisenhower Carrier Strike
Group, which is located in the Gulf of Aden.
Already, the U.S.-led military
coalition has engaged in hostilities with the Houthis, including one incident
on December 31 in which U.S. forces sank three Houthi small boats, killing 10
fighters.
“It’s up to the Houthis to halt the
attacks,” Cooper insisted. “They’re the instigator and initiator.”
The United States and the Houthis
This is not the first time that the
United States has come into conflict with the Houthis. For years, the United
States supported Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen against the Houthis. Both the
Obama and Trump administrations provided a Saudi-led military coalition with
advanced weaponry and military advice, even as it repeatedly committed war
crimes by striking civilian targets.
The Saudi-led military intervention
sparked one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, leading to the deaths of
more than 377,000 people. A temporary truce that began in April 2022 led to a
reduction in hostilities, but the war has never ended, creating fears that it
could reignite at any moment.
“Nobody should believe that the
current state of affairs with relatively low levels of fighting is going to
last,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted late last year.
Throughout Saudi Arabia’s military
campaign in Yemen and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the United States has
been the main power behind the scenes, arming its allies while their military
operations have caused tremendous harm to civilians. Officials in Washington
have insisted that they have sought to minimize civilian casualties, but their
priority has been to prevent the wars from disrupting commerce in nearby
waterways, especially in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab.
“There’s no question in my mind that
this is very important, not only to the countries in the region but globally,”
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said last month, referring to the need to
ensure freedom of navigation. “What the Houthis are doing affects commerce
around the globe.”
U.S. Considerations
As several powerful companies have
begun halting their operations in the Red Sea, some current and former U.S.
officials have been calling for stronger military action, such as military
strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen. The United States previously took
direct action against the Houthis in October 2016, when a U.S. warship fired
cruise missiles against radar sites in Yemen.
Still, high-level officials have
been careful about taking the war directly to the Houthis. So far, President
Biden has decided against striking Houthi targets, even after being presented
with military options.
A major concern in Washington is
that any kind of escalation against the Houthis could reignite the war in
Yemen, which has already left the Houthis with the upper hand. When former CIA
analyst Bruce Riedel considered the prospect of a U.S. war in Yemen late last
year, he questioned whether the people of the United States would support such
a war.
“I would venture that if you ask 100
Americans, ‘who are the Houthis?’” Riedel said, “99 percent of them would say,
‘the whats, the whats?’”
Another major concern is that a U.S.
war against the Houthis would create further complications for the United
States and its allies. If the United States attacked the Houthis, then the
Houthis might respond by bringing the war to areas beyond the Red Sea, such as
Israel. Already, the Houthis have launched drones and missiles toward Israel.
Officials in the Biden
administration have been so concerned about the implications of going to war
against the Houthis that they have not accused the Houthis of attacking the
United States, even as the Houthis have repeatedly fired drones and missiles in
the direction of U.S. warships. Administration officials have claimed that they
cannot conclude with certainty that the Houthis have deliberately targeted U.S.
military forces.
Additional members of the current
U.S.-led military coalition share similar concerns, with some even going so far
as to refuse to disclose their participation in the U.S.-led military
coalition. Whereas some are concerned about retaliation, others fear what
people might think about their participation in a military operation that is
indifferent to the suffering of the people of Gaza.
“Not all want to become public,”
Kirby acknowledged.
Implications for Gaza
While officials in Washington weigh
their options, they are doing little to address the core issue, which is
Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza. The Biden administration opposes a
ceasefire, even as it repeatedly demands that the Houthis end their attacks on
commercial vessels in the Red Sea.
Essentially, the Biden
administration is engaging in a form of imperial management, as its works to
help Israel continue its military campaign in Gaza while limiting its effects
on regional dynamics and global markets. Rather than backing a ceasefire, the
Biden administration is hoping to minimize the repercussions of Israel’s
offensive for the global economy and contain any movement toward a wider war.
What the Biden administration has
shown, in short, is that it cares far more about protecting fossil fuels and
the world’s most powerful businesses than it does about protecting the people
of Gaza.
Silence is
Complicity: Americans Must Oppose the Ongoing Israeli Assault on Gaza
Nothing can justify this.
Collective punishment is a war crime.
More than two million
Palestinians in Gaza are facing an existential threat at the hands of Israel, a
nuclear-armed state with the full backing of the United States. It is critical
that Americans do everything we can to end the violence and destruction immediately.
Silence in the face of clear evidence of crimes against humanity and stated
intent to destroy a people is complicity. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, for
example, has declared that Israel will break the “backbone” of the “entire
nation” in Gaza and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has vowed that “we
will eliminate everything.” The scale and scope of the damage caused since
confirm that these statements were not hyperbolic or idle threats. This is
exactly what is happening.
The ongoing Israeli assault on
Gaza has killed more than 24,000 people and injured another 61,000. According
to Oxfam, 250 more Palestinians are killed every day; a far higher death rate
than any other conflict in the 21st century. Seventy percent of those killed
are children and women. In the first month of the assault alone, Israel killed
ten times as many Palestinian children as the illegal Russian invasion of
Ukraine killed in its first year. Eighty-five percent of the population of Gaza
is displaced, forced from their homes by Israeli soldiers, tanks, and fighter
jets. Hundreds of schools, health facilities and religious sites have been
attacked, and nearly 70% of the homes in Gaza have been destroyed by what US
President Joe Biden and independent United Nations experts have called
indiscriminate Israeli bombing.
Palestinians in Gaza are also
dying of hunger, cold, and disease. According to Human Rights Watch, hundreds
of thousands face famine because Israel is using mass starvation as a weapon of
war. On January 5, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian
Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths stated that “Gaza has
simply become uninhabitable. Its people are witnessing daily threats to their
very existence – while the world watches on.” This cannot be dismissed as
simply “what happens in war.” Many experts in the field have characterized the
Israeli assault on Gaza as genocide. The South African government has brought a
petition to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of
violating the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide. South Africa is seeking a provisional measure that would force Israel
to end its military onslaught in Gaza.
The ongoing Israeli assault came
in reaction to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack in Israel that killed more
than 1,100 people, including nearly 700 civilians. No matter the perpetrator,
intentionally attacking civilians—and failing to distinguish between military
and civilian targets—is strictly forbidden under international humanitarian
law. The Hamas-led attack was abhorrent and clearly violated international law.
But we must be crystal clear: The attack on October 7 does not, and cannot,
justify indiscriminate bombing and intentionally starving millions of civilians
in response. Nothing can justify this. Collective punishment is a war crime.
Moreover, it is crucial to
understand that the October 7 attack, and the genocidal Israeli reprisal, did
not happen in a vacuum. The most recent escalation is situated in a broader
context of repeated Israeli military assaults on Gaza in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014,
and 2021 that together killed more than 4,000 Palestinians and injured 20,000
more. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, between the
year 2000 and October 6, 2023, more than 10,000 Palestinians were killed by
Israel. Around 1,300 Israelis were killed in that same period. Israel has
maintained a near-total blockade of Gaza since 2007. And Israel has conducted
an illegal 56-year military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East
Jerusalem that began in 1967, during which it has continuously, and illegally,
annexed Palestinian land. As the occupying power, Israel has specific
responsibilities under international law. It is obligated to end its occupation
and until it does, Palestinians have a well-established right to resist.
All of Israel’s actions are
enabled by the unwavering economic, diplomatic, and military support of the
United States. Across decades, the US has sent Israel billions of dollars to
fund its military and it has consistently stymied efforts to hold Israel accountable
for violations of international law. As we speak, American-made and supplied
weapons are being used to kill and injure tens of thousands of Palestinian
civilians. That means that Americans have an urgent obligation to do everything
that we can to oppose the violence and to work toward an immediate ceasefire.
We need to demand an end to the siege and longstanding blockade so that
critically needed aid can enter Gaza. We must push for an end to the illegal
Israeli military occupation and support efforts to hold all perpetrators of war
crimes and crimes against humanity accountable. Finally, it is imperative to
advance serious diplomatic negotiations that create just, peaceful, and lasting
solutions that foreground the right to Palestinian liberation and
self-determination that has been denied by Israel for decades.
Palestinians
struggle to rebuild their lives after West Bank settler pogroms
A surge in
settler violence since Oct. 7 has robbed multiple Palestinian communities of
their land and livelihoods. Now they don't know where to go.
Naama Abiyat’s
children are all she has left. I meet the 29-year-old mother of five inside a
thinly-walled tent where she is living in the southern occupied West Bank; the
tent is nearly empty, save for a blanket she received from passers-by and a few
wooden logs. Her children interrupt our conversation from time to time,
demanding her attention and letting her know that they are cold.
Until two months
ago, Abiyat had her own room, a house, a garden, and an olive grove in
Al-Qanoub — a small, family-oriented village with 40 residents, located north
of Hebron. Between Oct. 11 and Nov. 1, however, the entire community fled after
a series of pogroms by Israeli settlers who descended from the nearby
settlement of Asfar and the adjacent outpost of Pnei Kedem. The settlers burned
houses, set their dogs on the farm animals, and, at gunpoint, ordered the
residents to leave or else they would be killed.
Since then,
Abiyat and her children have been wandering, without land and without a home.
Along with four other families who were displaced from Al-Qanoub, they set up
temporary tents on the outskirts of the town of Shuyukh, closer to Hebron.
On the day of
the expulsion, the settlers refused to allow them to take anything from the
burning village: her husband’s ID card, vehicles, mattresses, cell phones, bags
of olives, keys — “and my clothes,” one of her sons adds. Everything was left
behind, and much of it stolen. Abiyat’s eldest son, who is 11 years old, can no
longer go to his school near the village, as there is nobody who can drive him
there.
In the days
leading up to her family’s decision to flee the village, Abiyat would sleep
outside with her children, fearing that settlers would set their house on fire
while they slept, as had happened to one of her neighbors. “At night, we’d lock
the house, turn off the lights, and then go down to the olive trees to sleep
under the sky,” she says.
Now, Abiyat is
busy figuring out how to get enough money to buy firewood for the winter. “I’m
talking to you, and my whole body is exploding,” she says. “Everything here is
scorpions and snakes. The children are in a difficult mental state. Nothing
excites them in life anymore.”
Under the cover
of war, a total of 16 Palestinian villages in the West Bank — collectively home
to over 1,000 people — have been entirely depopulated as a result of a surge in
settler violence and pogroms against Palestinian herding communities. Separated
from their communities and forced to live in tents on land belonging to other
Palestinians, the displaced families are all demanding the same thing: to be
able to return home.
‘They told us we
had an hour to leave’
Before the war
began, the village of Southern a-Nassariyah in the Jordan Valley was home to
five families, numbering 25 people in total. On Oct. 13, all of them fled their
homes under the threat of violence by Israeli settlers. They are currently
living in tents near the village of Fasayil, on land owned by a local resident
who allowed them to stay on the condition that they leave by April. The
displaced families do not know where they will go next.
“They turned us
into laborers. By God, they turned us into laborers,” says Musa Mleihat,
placing a cup of tea on a stool outside the tent that has become his home. On
the day of his expulsion, he lost his land, which meant losing his livelihood:
no longer able to graze his flock, he was forced to sell most of his family’s
sheep and goats.
Some of the
other villagers have begun working as agricultural laborers in nearby
settlements. The settlement of Tomer, for example, is known for its dates and
pineapples, and hires Palestinian workers while illegally paying them under
minimum wage. Many of the displaced villagers say becoming a laborer is part of
the cost of being forced off their land.
Southeast of
Ramallah, the 180 residents of the village of Wadi al-Siq were also forcibly
displaced as a result of a settler pogrom. On Oct. 12, settlers and soldiers
raided the village, shot at and drove out the women and children, before
kidnapping three men, handcuffing them, stripping them naked, urinating on
them, beating them until they bled, and sexually abusing them.
“After they
blindfolded people, they told us we had an hour to leave the village, and after
that anyone who stayed would be killed,” Abd el-Rahman Kaabna, the head of the
village, recounts. Three months after the expulsion, he is still struggling to
cope with the experience, which deeply affected his children — they’ve been
wetting the bed ever since.
Kaabna explains
that his whole life has changed as a result of the expulsion. The community of
Wadi al-Siq was completely broken up: most of the villagers, including Kaabna,
are scattered in tents east and south of the town of Ramun, while others are
near the town of Taybeh, close to Ramallah. All of them are living on other
people’s land.
“We feel like
strangers here,” he says. “We don’t have the homes we used to live in, with
open fields and pastures. Today I live in an olive grove, and the landowner
keeps asking me how long we’ll stay.”
Kaabna’s sons,
aged 6 and 8, have not been attending school since the expulsion. In Wadi
al-Siq, there was one school for students through 8th grade, but after the
residents left, “settlers stole everything inside, including the children’s
books. A month ago, they brought a tractor and demolished all of our houses.”
‘The village was
filled with memories’
Settlers have
destroyed or burned homes in several of the villages that Palestinians were
forced to abandon in recent months, making it impossible for their former
residents to return. In this way, settlers are finishing the job of Israeli
government policy that for years has sought to force Palestinians out of Area
C: refusing to recognize their villages, preventing them from accessing water
and electricity, and demolishing their homes. According to data provided by the
Civil Administration — the bureaucratic arm of the occupation — to the Israeli
planning rights NGO Bimkom, between 2016 and 2020, it issued 348 times more
building permits to Israeli settlers than it did to Palestinians living in Area
C.
The village of
Zanuta in the South Hebron Hills, which was home to 250 residents before the
war started, is the largest village to have been ethnically cleansed by
settlers in recent months. Settlers subsequently destroyed the village school,
along with 10 residential buildings. When the residents of Zanuta attempted to
return, a Civil Administration inspector told them that if they set up a single
tent, the army would consider it to be “new construction” — and demolish it.
After fleeing
their homes, Zanuta’s residents have been dispersed to six different locations:
some are currently living near the Meitar checkpoint at the southern edge of
the West Bank, some near the Tene Omarim settlement, and others have rented
land wherever they were able to find it. “We miss each other,” Fayez al-Tal, a
former resident of the village, tells me. “From the day we left Zanuta, we
haven’t seen each other.”
Not only did the
residents lose most of their grazing lands, they were also forced to sell most
of their flocks because of the huge fees — NIS 70,000 (around $18,500) per
family — required for transporting all of their property from the destroyed
village, buying new tents and shacks, and buying food for their remaining sheep
and goats which are no longer able to graze.
The 85 residents
of Ein al-Rashash, a herding village near Ramallah, packed their belongings and
fled in the first days of the war. “The village was filled with memories from
our childhoods,” one of the residents says. Today, the villagers are living in tents
and aluminum shacks that they constructed atop rocky soil, next to the town of
Duma. They do not know what they will do next.
“There are no
settlers here, but there are other problems: the Civil Administration,” Awdai,
who lived in Ein Rashash, explains. After he and others started setting up
their tents, a drone from the Civil Administration came and photographed them.
A demolition order may soon follow.
‘The government
supports the settlers’
In recent years,
dozens of herding outposts have been established throughout Area C of the West
Bank, and have become a driving force behind the increase in violence against
Palestinians. For many former residents of depopulated villages, however, fear
of the settler “thugs” is not the sole reason for their displacement, nor what
prevents them from returning home. The deeper problem is the backing they
receive from the Israeli army and police.
“We know how to
protect ourselves,” al-Tal, from Zanuta, says. “But if we do that, soldiers
will shoot us, or we will end up in prison. The government supports the
settlers.” In the past, he recounts, when soldiers or police arrived in the
village during a settler raid, they would arrest Palestinians. Residents of
each of the displaced villages say the same: the army protects the attackers
and arrests those who are attacked.
On Jan. 3, a
hearing was held at the Israeli Supreme Court regarding an appeal filed on
behalf of the residents of Zanuta and other villages that were either fully or
partially depopulated. The appeal demanded that the state specify how it is
working to protect these communities from settlers and requested that the
authorities create conditions on the ground that will allow the displaced
communities to return to their lands.
Qamar
Mashraki-Assad and Netta Amar-Shiff, who represented the Palestinians, told the
judges that police routinely ignore complaints about settler violence and
systematically refuse to collect evidence in the field. In addition, the army
does not act in accordance with its obligation under international law to
protect the occupied population.
In the hearing,
Roey Zweig, an officer in the IDF Central Command — which is responsible for
army units that operate in the West Bank and for construction in Area C —
claimed, absurdly, that settler violence has actually decreased of late due to
measures that the army has begun to implement. Throughout his remarks, Zweig —
who, in 2022, while serving as the commander of the Samaria Brigade, said that
“the settlement [project] and the army are one” — referred to the depopulated
villages as “Palestinian outposts,” repackaging the term for Israeli hilltop
communities in the West Bank that are ostensibly illegal even under Israeli
law.
Residents in
each of the depopulated villages know the names of the settlers who terrorized
them, and the settlements or outposts from which they descended. For months, if
not years, these settlers have worked systematically to expel them, take over
their land, and threaten them with violence.
Yet according to
a security official who spoke to +972 Magazine and Local Call, dealing with
settler violence and the expulsion of Palestinian communities “is not within
the mandate” of the Civil Administration. Claims of discrimination in building
permits or enforcement, the official said, should be “directed elsewhere”
because the Civil Administration is “only an executive body,” not a “political”
one.
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