Palestine: The War On Children
By John Pilger
Arthur Miller wrote, “Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that
the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be
internally denied.”
Miller’s truth was a glimpsed reality on television on June 9 when Israeli warships fired on families picnicking on a
Gaza beach, killing seven people, including three children and three generations. What that represents is a final
solution, agreed by the United States and Israel, to the problem of the Palestinians. While the Israelis fire missiles
at Palestinian picnickers and homes in Gaza and the West Bank, the two governments are to starve them. The victims will
be mostly children.
This was approved on May 23 by the US House of Representatives, which voted 361-37 to cut off aid to non-government
organisations that run a lifeline to occupied Palestine. Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues and tax receipts
amounting to US$60 million a month.
Such collective punishment, identified as a crime against humanity in the Geneva Conventions, evokes the Nazis’
strangulation of the Warsaw ghetto and the US economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s. If the perpetrators have lost their
minds, as Miller suggested, they appear to understand their barbarism and display their cynicism. “The idea is to put
the Palestinians on a diet”, joked Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.
This is the price Palestinians must pay for their democratic elections in January. The majority voted for the “wrong”
party, Hamas, which the US and Israel, with their inimitable penchant for pot-calling-the-kettle-black, describe as
terrorist. However, terrorism is not the reason for starving the Palestinians, whose prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, had
reaffirmed Hamas’s commitment to recognise the Jewish state, proposing only that Israel obey international law and
respect the borders of 1967. Israel has refused because, with its apartheid wall under construction, its intention is
clear: to take over more and more of Palestine, encircling whole villages and eventually Jerusalem.
The sniper’s wound
The reason Israel fears Hamas is that Hamas is unlikely to be a trusted collaborator in subjugating its own people on
Israel’s behalf. Indeed, the vote for Hamas was actually a vote for peace. Palestinians were fed up with the failures
and corruption of the Yasser Arafat era. According to former US president Jimmy Carter, whose Carter Centre verified the
Hamas electoral victory, “public opinion polls show that 80 percent of Palestinians want a peace agreement with Israel”.
How ironic this is, considering that the rise of Hamas was due in no small part to the secret support it received from
Israel, which, with the US and Britain, wanted Islamists to undermine secular Arabism and its “moderate” dreams of
freedom. Hamas refused to play this Machiavellian game and in the face of Israeli assaults maintained a ceasefire for 18
months. The objective of the Israeli attack on the beach at Gaza was clearly to sabotage the ceasefire. This is a
time-honoured tactic.
Now, state terror in the form of a medieval siege is to be applied to the most vulnerable. For the Palestinians, a war
against their children is hardly new. A 2004 field study published in the British Medical Journal reported that, in the
previous four years, “Two-thirds of the 621 children ... killed [by the Israelis] at checkpoints ... on the way to
school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half the cases to the head, neck and chest — the
sniper’s wound”. A quarter of Palestinian infants under the age of five are acutely or chronically malnourished. The
Israeli wall “will isolate 97 primary health clinics and 11 hospitals from the populations they serve”.
The study described “a man in a now fenced-in village near Qalqilya [who] approached the gate with his seriously ill
daughter in his arms and begged the soldiers on duty to let him pass so that he could take her to hospital. The soldiers
refused.”
Gaza, now sealed like an open prison and terrorised by the sonic boom of Israeli fighter aircraft, has a population of
which almost half are under 15 years of age. Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children’s community health
project, told me, “The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4% of the children we studied suffer trauma ...
99.2% had their homes bombarded; 97.5% were exposed to tear gas; 96.6% witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or
neighbours injured or killed”.
These children suffer unrelenting nightmares and “night terrors” and the dichotomy of having to cope with these
conditions. On the one hand, they dream about becoming doctors and nurses “so they can help others”; on the other, this
is then overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experience this
invariably after attacks by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes are no longer football players, but a confusion of
Palestinian “martyrs” and even the enemy, “because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships”.
That these children are now to be punished further may be beyond human comprehension, but there is a logic. Over the
years, the Palestinians have avoided falling into the abyss of an all-out civil war, knowing this is what the Israelis
want. Destroying their elected government while attempting to build a parallel administration around the collusive
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas may well produce, as the Oxford academic Karma Nabulsi wrote, “a Hobbesian vision of
an anarchic society ... ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and broken into ethnic and religious
tribalism, and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Ariel Sharon] had in store for us.”
The new 'body count’
The struggle in Palestine is a US war, waged from the US’s most heavily armed foreign military base, Israel. In the
West, we are conditioned not to think of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict” in those terms, just as we are conditioned
to think of the Israelis as victims, not illegal and brutal occupiers. This is not to underestimate the initiative of
the Israeli state, but without F-16s and Apaches and billions of US taxpayers’ dollars, Israel would have made peace
with the Palestinians long ago. Since the Second World War, the US has given Israel some $140 billion, much of it as
armaments. According to the Congressional Research Service, the same “aid” budget was to include $28 million “to help
[Palestinian] children deal with the current conflict situation” and to provide “basic first aid”. That has now been
vetoed.
Nabulsi’s comparison with Iraq is apposite, for the same “policy” applies there. The capture of Abu Musab al Zarqawi was
a wonderful media event: what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called “action as propaganda”, and having little bearing on
reality. Washington and those who act as its bullhorn have their demon — even a video game of Zarqawi’s house being
blown up. The truth is that Zarqawi was largely their creation. His apparent killing serves an important propaganda
purpose, distracting us in the West from the US goal of converting Iraq, like Palestine, into a powerless society of
ethnic and religious tribalism. Death squads, formed and trained by veterans of the CIA’s “counter-insurgency” in
Central America, are critical to this. The Special Police Commandos, a CIA creation led by former senior intelligence
officers in Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, are perhaps the most brutal. The Zarqawi killing and the myths about his
importance also deflect from routine massacres by US soldiers, such as the one at Haditha. Even the puppet prime
minister Nouri al-Maliki complains that murderous behaviour of US troops is “a daily occurrence”. As I learned in
Vietnam, a form of serial killing, then known officially as “body count”, is the way the US fights its colonial wars.
Put out more flags
This is known as “pacification”. The asymmetry of a pacified Iraq and a pacified Palestine is clear. As in Palestine,
the war in Iraq is against civilians — mostly children. According to Unicef, Iraq once had one of the highest indicators
for the well-being of children. Today, a quarter of children between the ages of six months and five years suffer acute
or chronic malnutrition, worse than during the years of sanctions. Poverty and disease have risen with each day of the
occupation.
In April, in British-occupied Basra, the European aid agency Saving Children from War reported: “The mortality of young
children had increased by 30 per cent compared with the Saddam Hussein era.” They die because the hospitals have no
ventilators and the water supply, which the British were meant to have fixed, is more polluted than ever. Children fall
victim to unexploded US and British cluster bombs. They play in areas contaminated by depleted uranium; by contrast,
British army survey teams venture there only in full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. Unlike the children
they came to “liberate”, British troops are given what the Ministry of Defence calls “full biological testing”.
Was Arthur Miller right? Do we “internally deny” all this, or do we listen to distant voices? On my last trip to
Palestine, I was rewarded, on leaving Gaza, with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled
compounds. Children are responsible for this. No-one tells them to do it. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied
together, and one or two climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it, believing they will
tell the world.
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[From http://www.johnpilger.com .]
From Green Left Weekly, June 28, 2006.