http://www.sunspot.net/content/opinion/story?section=opinion&pagename=story&storyid=1150520209874
Getting an eyeful in Gaza
By Michael F. Brown, Baltimore Sun,
Originally published Dec 11 2000
GAZA CITY -- Children have a keen sense of justice where racism is
present. This was so in the American civil rights movement. It was
equally the case in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa just
more than a decade ago.
Today, it is no less true with Palestinian youth who know that the
land they call Palestine is being inexorably cleansed of their
presence. Righteous anger at injustice leads Palestinian children to
resist Israeli efforts to relegate them to a tiny, open-air prison in
Gaza and to isolated patches of turf in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem.
Having developed a relationship with the small mental health
community in Gaza, I know many of the Palestinians who have battled
for years in a vain effort to stave off long-term mental health
problems among Palestinian children, the sort that result from seeing
young friends killed in front of them by a sniper's silent bullet.
Missile-firing helicopters will not make the work easier. Parents --
the same Palestinian parents viciously accused in American papers of
sending their children out to be slaughtered by Israeli forces -- are
seeking mental health advice as never before on how to insulate their
children psychologically from the terror raining down on them from
overhead.
The missile that wrought havoc in four Shati refugee camp houses may
not be remarked upon at all by the American media as they pay tribute
to Israeli "restraint," but it is etched in the minds of children I
met there.
At the individual level, mental health practitioners in Gaza have
helped a great deal. But at the macro level, they never had a chance.
In Gaza, where 1.2 million Palestinians live, each Israeli bullet
sends shock waves rippling through the tightly bunched families of
the refugee camps. Each victim is known. Whether it is a 5.56 mm
bullet explosively fragmenting its way through a young boy's abdomen
or shrapnel from a shell finding its way into a little girl's eye,
they know. And they remember. The pain will not go away. And the
humiliation will linger.
An occupying army that shoots a 12-year-old boy dead and then seeks
to convince the world that Palestinians did it is asking for trouble.
Likewise, an occupying army that assassinates a Fatah leader and
regards as acceptable the simultaneous gruesome disemboweling of two
women in their 50s is asking for trouble. My own anger and that of my
neighbors builds when a U.S.-made missile crashes into a house about
60 yards from my own.
Israel can sign a just peace or insist on humiliating Palestinians
and breaking up their land into noncontiguous bantustans (territories
in South Africa that were set aside for blacks under apartheid and
called homelands), seeking to make them grovel to obtain permission
to travel from one Palestinian city to another. But Palestinians will
not accept it. And hearts will grow cold and full of hate for those
who would oppress them rather than allow them to live a dignified
existence.
Having been forced to cede 78 percent of historic Palestine at the
outset of these negotiations, Palestinians appear to me more
determined than ever to cling all the more fiercely to those scraps
of land remaining to them.
In the end, Palestinians will be living proof that "truth crushed to
earth will rise again." The uprooted olive tree, the overturned rock
retaining wall of the West Bank and the leveled orange tree where
Muhammed Al-Durrah was murdered are all reminders of the truth of
their cause.
After 52 years, Palestinians are still told that it is their choice
to end the violence. It is not. Such notions misapprehend the reality
of occupation. The choice rests with Israel as the occupying power
creating the conditions that fuel resistance.
That Israel purposively colonized this land through building
settlements intended to scuttle any hope of a future peace deal is
not the fault of Palestinians.
The burden of a remedy to the problem of the settlements lies with
Israel; the Palestinians cannot be expected to make further
concessions.
Nobody forced Israel to violate the Fourth Geneva Convention's
prohibition against injecting a civilian "settler" population into
occupied territory. Yet Israel did so at a terrible cost to all
parties involved.
That the resistance of Palestinian children to the excessive violence
and expansionist bigotry of an occupying power is not hailed in the
West is more a question of how little fundamental questions of
justice matter there in today's political climate and not a barometer
of the justice of their claims. Palestinian children cry out for a
just peace even if the world's only superpower does not.
Michael F. Brown, a Baltimore resident, works with a Palestinian
human rights organization in the Gaza Strip.
