Gaza: An Appalling and illegal Occupation!

http://newjersey.indymedia.org/feature/display/15359/index.php

by Vincent Fischer

Wednesday, January 19, 7 PM at the HalfKing, a Chelsea restaurant and bar, co-owner and author Journalist Scott Anderson talked about his article, “Gaza’s Apocalypse Zone” which appears in this month’s Vanity Fair.
Accompanying the talk, comprised mostly of reading selected passages from the fifteen page article, was a slide show presentation of black and white photos recently taken in the Gaza Strip.

Befitting the gravitas of the situation in the Gaza strip, Mr. Anderson conducted his oratory sotto voce. His demeanor and hushed tones seemed suitable and entirely appropriate, except when the door that separated the dining section from the bar opened. At such times, the din of the revelry from the barroom overtook and momentarily drowned out the muted and grave conversation of the journalist. The well-heeled bourgeois intelligentsia audience pretended not to notice the interruption, as they listened aghast at the hardships, on all sides, in the Gaza Strip. After a moment or two, the door would slam shut and it was again possible to listen.

On the periphery of the cramped standing room area, I quietly made my way to the edge of the dining tables where the smartly-dressed invited guests dined on salads such as the smoked salmon salad with cucumber, capers and horseradish, washed down by domestic and imported white wines like the Due Torri Pinot Grigio. The few feet closer made a difference. It was now possible to hear even when the door swung open.

From the far end of the room, Mr. Anderson indicated to his assistant, seated center controlling the slide-show, when to forward to the next still photograph. He did so by pausing, furrowing his eyes slightly, and gently nodding until the cue was read and the next photograph, corresponding to his yarn, appeared on the screen.

The mainstream upscale liberal literary set that comprised the audience sat rapt as they listened to Scott Anderson orally relate the horror of the situation. I’m not sure how many were aware of the subtle techniques in framing, or media manipulations, they were subject to during the course of the evening.

There is a connection between ideas and situations. The misperception that most Americans labor under is that both sides in the conflict are equally at fault. The idea is lodged into subconscious of the minds of the populace where, securely anchored, an immovable colossus, it blocks reason, common sense and basic decency. It is a myth which has served the Zionist state well, and which is perpetuated by writers such as the Vanity Fair contributor Scott Anderson.

At the end of the presentation, there was a question and answer session. One seated patron, a sixty year old man with a ruddy complexion, related a story he had read recently. There had been a collapse of an arms smuggling tunnel in Gaza. The Israelis had helped to save some of the smugglers who were trapped in the tunnel. He wanted to know if the Israelis were given credit, any credit at all, for helping to save Palestinians. When the author stated that he did not know, the businessman seemed rankled and vexed, presumably at the injustice of the Israeli humanitarian mission going uncredited. .

Another woman, dressed in business attire, urgently raised her hand and was duly called upon. She wished to know the story behind the tale of the one armed man, and if the case was ever solved. In fact, the case was solved. An unidentified man had tried to cross the no man’s land between Egypt and Rafah. In the process, he was shot through the heart by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The man was not armed and did not appear to be an insurgent, as the IDF later concluded by examining his corpse. The author speculated that perhaps the man was mentally ill, but that no one knows the exact reason why the man made the fatal journey.

No one in the room, seated or standing, questioned the morality of shooting, in cold blood, someone crossing a border. No one bothered to notice aloud that the United States does not shoot people crossing its borders illegally. In the mainstream American mind, there is a blindness when it comes to Israel. Israel is the exception to the rule. This is known as exceptionalism, a belief that a particular nation is above the law; that it does not have to conform to generally agreed upon principles and norms . Authors such as Mr. Anderson, knowingly or unknowingly, facilitate the collective unconscious of the mainstream American mind. This is the same consciousness which allows otherwise decent human beings to turn a blind to Israel, and in so doing, allows our American ally to perpetrate unimaginable tyranny on a largely defenseless civilian population.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that the speaker was horrified by what he both witnessed and chronicled in Gaza. What I am saying is that the author’s framing of the conflict, retelling of IDF propaganda and his omission of salient facts does not seem worthy of a writer of his stature, nor the venues he writes for. In common parlance, the author has no balls. Furthermore, he does not help his Zionist brainwashed American readers to connect the dots.

I raised my hand. It was not easy taking a contrarian position. My voice faltered a bit, but I nevertheless asked the author why he had written that the IDF were so considerate that they dusted the furniture and rolled up carpets when they occupied Palestinian houses during the course of military incursions. The author scowled, as he snapped back that he did not know what I was talking about and had never written that. When I mentioned it was in his NY Magazine times piece, in 2002, he said that he remembered, but didn’t write the part about the IDF dusting the furniture. He stated that many people thought the article was pro-Israeli, but really the article was about the Israeli Refuseniks, those soldiers who refuse to serve in the illegally occupied territories.

In retrospect, I find the author’s denial of a pro-Israeli bias in the Times Magazine Piece of May 2002 interesting, as the article was perceived by the pro-Israeli NeoCon bloggers at the time as laudatory and favorable. And, yes, the author did relate the notion, farcical in the extreme, that the IDF rolls up household carpets when they appropriate homes during incursions.

I also pointed out to the audience that not every Palestinian child who is murdered by IDF is committing suicide. The reason I mentioned this is that the author had related a tale told to him by an IDF officer about a Palestinian girl who wanted to commit suicide. She walked toward the officer, but the officer didn’t shoot the girl. The IDF officer spoke of breaking every rule in his own book in not murdering the child. She had on her a book bag which could have contained a bomb. It turns out, and we have the IDF officer’s word, that the girl’s uncle had been abusing her, and that’s why she wanted to commit suicide.

Finally, to the gentleman vexed about the presumed lack of goodwill showed Israel by Palestinians over the tunnel collapse rescue, I spoke directly and pointedly to him that the problem is the occupation. Neither the author nor anyone else in the room brought up the word occupation during the course of the evening.

It is probably true that the mainstream publishing world, the so called “liberal” elite, is not kind to authors that are perceived as too pro-Palestinian. For example, does anyone know whatever happened to Joel Greenberg, the erstwhile NY Times reporter, who covered the conflict in a fairer manner than many of his compatriots? Still, even allowing for the constraints of the prevailing framework that predominates our corporate media as well as social structure, Mr. Anderson is a journalistic wimp. Maybe he feels safer among Hamas gunmen in Rafah, than in editorial board meeting in New York City. If so, how sad. Perhaps though, the part-time restaurateur knows where his bread is buttered. In any case, I’m reminded of Steinbeck’s quote on journalism:

"What can I say about journalism? It has the greatest virtue and the greatest evil. It is the first thing a dictator controls. It is the mother of literature and the perpetrator of crap”.

To his credit, the author has placed himself in harms way to bring an important story to the American public. However, I disagree with the lack of context, unfettered promotion of IDF mythology, and overt and covert support for and apology of Israel’s sins. Although the author spent some time meeting with militant gunmen, it seems that he did not spend very much time living alongside ordinary Palestinians.

When it comes to Israel/Palestine having been weaned, since birth, on a steady diet of Pro-Israel point of view and outright propaganda, the American public is incapable of even the most mundane abstraction. That is why I disagree with Scott Anderson’s stealth framing. If you are relating IDF mythology verbatim, as the author does, then in the interest of balance, accuracy and decency it would be appropriate to add how Israel violates international rules of warfare and U.N. Resolutions. The home demolitions themselves are illegal, as well as being militarily unnecessary. Otherwise, it appears, as it does to me, that Mr. Anderson is a willing and complicit mouthpiece for the IDF.

How is it that in his fifteen page article on Gaza that the word occupation is only mentioned once, and then explained only in terms of the military benefit that Israeli planners saw in in 1967. Might there not have been another reason for the occupation? Needless to say, Mr. Anderson does not bother to inform his readers that the settlements are illegal under international law, under article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention

Why is that everything Israel does is rationalized and explained, and in the mainstream press, Palestinian are portrayed as irrational, out of control, or worse. This is not to say that Anderson does not point out that there are extremists on both sides because he does. In fact, the three times he uses the word “victim” in his tract it is applied equally to both Palestinian and Israeli. It is this kind of moral relativism, the illegal settlers of Gaza are suffering too, that is disingenuous.

Considering the desperate and horrific situation that the author chronicles among the Palestinians in Rafah, I’m not really sure what purpose it serves for the author to question militants on their views regarding a specific form resistance. I mean can you imagine the outrage, rightly so, that would be leveled at someone who dared to criticize the tactics of the Jewish Resistance in the World War Two ghetto of Warsaw? How is the situation in Rafah today any different? Or am I to agree with the pro-Israeli point of view that the purposeful murder of a child every few days, and an entire civilian population held captive, walled-in, is not, in any way, shape or form, reminiscent of the Nazi ghettos because to say so may offend some sensibilities? What a convenient excuse. What a bankrupt deus ex machina.

For some reason though, Scott Anderson feels it entirely appropriate to grill young fighters about their views on suicide bombing. In the interest of equality, why doesn’t Mr. Anderson ask Israelis if they think they think the figures on the following graph are okay?

You could say that what is missing in Mr. Anderson’s work is journalist integrity. I might not go that far myself, but I can’t help from feeling that he could have reminded his readers that the elite Israeli Palsar Tzanhanim (paratrooper reconnaissance commandos) when setting up shop in requisitioned Palestinians houses during the spring of 2002, probably only rolled up the carpets because he was there. He may have balanced this with the numerous reports of the IDF smearing excrement on the walls of houses, business and schools that they rampaged throughout the occupied West Bank.

I did ask the author if his assessment of the situation in Palestine changed after his visit to the area. He said that it did not. That he was for the Oslo accords. Again, in the interest of accuracy, he may have mentioned that during the Oslo negotiations, the settler population doubled. Then again he chose to name his talk at the Half-King, “Gaza’s Grand Delusion” rather than something more appropriate such as the “An Appalling and illegal Occupation.”

If Scott Anderson’s vaunted impartiality extends to other spheres of his daily life, then an ax murderer would be lucky to have him on his jury. He certainly does make a world of allowances for vicious unlawful offenders. In Mr. Anderson’s world view, Gush Katif’s settlers are the moral equivalents of the besieged residents of Rafah. Both seeing themselves in his words “in the vanguard of a great and noble struggle”. Much ado is made about the entrepreneurial colonizers, though he calls them residents, of Gush Katif who have made a thriving business of hothouse produce. No mention of the fact that the settler agribusiness has drained the Palestinian’s aquifers, and within twenty years they will be dry.

There is a lot of hot air blowing though. It’s in the words of the apologists for state sponsored terrorism and apartheid states.

(for more facts and graphs on Palestine see link)
See also:
http://www.icahd.org/eng/projects.asp?menu=3&submenu=1