Scattered thoughts from Gaza to Nablus to Christmas

Scraps of paper everywhere. Thoughts everywhere. Trying to comprehend genocide. Trying to bust through the lies, even though the truth is so painful. Have you turned away yet? Have the statistics numbed you? The total number of Gazan's killed, half of them children? The number of journalists; the number of hospital workers; the numbers from just one family. The range of buildings bombed including hospitals, mosques, shelters, schools, universities, apartment buildings - because there might be a nest of Hamas fighters hiding there. The kinds of deprivations forced on ordinary people: no water to drink, no toilet to flush, no flour mill or bread bakery (bombed), no safety anywhere. I know. I dson't read the lists anymore. I know what is on the lists. And I don't want to see another image of a 2 or 3 year old child's bloody face or of a mother embracing a body bag. Try to stay focused on this: The United States is funding and encouraging genocide. Israel was birthed by lies and the lies provide cover for its goal: take the land and expell the natives. Those whom you can't expell, you can kill or jail, or just starve, little by little for a while, until an opportunity presents itself to finish the job. Here is what I wrote to my local newspaper on November 9th, and which they have refused to print. Why Does Israel Attack Hamas? Who is Hamas? And why does Israel need to destroy Hamas, so much so that Israel is willing to kill thousands of civilians in order, they hope, to be rid of Hamas entirely and forever? Or is there another objective: to be rid of all Palestinians? What I have learned over the last 21 years of frequent visits to Palestine and Israel is that the answers to these questions are not easily available. Our media, which repeats Israel’s official answers, does not help us to understand the facts as Palestinians live them. Hamas came on the scene in Palestine in 1987 as an Islamist alternative to the secular liberation movement headed by Yasser Arafat. At first Hamas refrained from electoral politics but was gaining popularity by providing neighborhood centers, clinics and schools where such essential services were lacking. When they did get on the ballot in 2006, they won local elections all over Palestine: the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Everyone was taken by surprise. I think even Hamas was surprised. Certainly Arafat’s party was not expecting defeat, and the Western democracies were stunned. Their reaction was just as surprising: “No, no, no. They are a terrorist organization and cannot be allowed to win elections. Arrest them!” The international community, led by the US and EU, rejected the election results and supported Israel’s arresting of the elected candidates. But this was not so successful in Gaza. There, Arafat’s party, Fatah, was planning a military take over, but was preempted by Hamas. In a bloody coup Hamas kicked Fatah out of Gaza and has ruled it ever since. Hamas is a political, religious (Islamist) governing body that has an autocratic grip on the 2.3 million Gazans. (I don’t know how many of those civilians actually like Hamas or support it.) They have an army called the Qassam Brigades and seem to tolerate the presence of other armed groups, such as Islamic Jihad. I asked above why Israel needs to destroy Hamas. Yes, Hamas attacked Israel, killing innocent civilians along with many soldiers at several military bases. Such an attack cannot go unpunished, and Israel would have to show its citizens that they will be better protected in the future. But does the punishment require the blanket bombing of an entire population, the targeting of hospitals, schools, refugee camps and shelters? The whole world is horrified by these scenes and the huge death toll, plus the strangulation caused by cutting food and fuel to everyone. Doesn’t Israel see that they are losing the support of popular opinion, most dramatically in the Muslim world, but now in the U.S. as well? Why don’t they stop bombing and starving people and instead negotiate a settlement? Haven’t they won already? They have shown that they are more powerful than Hamas and they have the military support of the United States and its allies. I think the answer is this: the reason Israel will continue its genocide is because they want to be rid of all Gazans. Those they can’t kill with bombs, they will drive South into smaller and smaller areas where there are no resources to support life, and the few that do survive might accept living in Egypt in new refugee camps. Meanwhile, the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem can be killed or driven out by the armed settlers, whose violence has been going on while we are riveted by Gaza. Whole agricultural villages have been evacuated by settler militias, and their homes demolished, their farm animals dispersed. The Israeli army has invaded the West Bank cities and refugee camps, shooting protesters and destroying roads and infrastructure. I have friends in the West Bank, and they tell me that nowhere is safe. They also say that they are not allowed on the major roads, their cities are cut off from surrounding areas by new checkpoints. It feels like this is part of a strategy to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestine/Israel started in 1948 when more than half the population was driven from their homes, their villages leveled to the ground, in order to create an exclusively Jewish state. I would like to be proven wrong. I pray for a ceasefire to happen immediately, for humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza, for settlers to be reined in by Israel instead of supported by the army. I call my Congresspeople and I stand on street corners to show my government that the carnage we are paying for must stop. Not in my name. No more violence. Violence only brings retribution. We all make mistakes, sometimes huge mistakes, but it is never too late to change. P.S. Not all Israelis are supporting the genocide, and many Israeli families of the hostages are calling for “Everyone for Everyone” meaning, all Palestinian prisoners should be freed and exchanged for all of the hostages. It is Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwansaa/New Years, and I don't want to celebrate. I have bought a few gifts, but can't utter the words, "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year", because there is nothing merry or happy about genocide. I do pray for you all to be well, and I pray for God to intervene in the hearts of politicians, generals and weapons manufacturers who believe killing, torturing, brutalizing is okay. I believe Jesus still weeps over Jerusalem.

The Horrors of This War and All Wars

I've not been writing, just trying to keep up with the news and the feeling of being overwhelmed with grief. But when I saw the photos of Palestinian men stripped of all clothes except underpants, handcuffed behind their backs and kneeling in the dirt - a lot of men of all ages, sizes and shapes, stripped of their dignity, on display before the world with nothing left to prove they are human beings, my outrage drove me to speak up. After these men lost their homes to the bombs, and maybe lost their wives and children under the rubble, after they were forced to seek shelter in a public school classroom with forty other people and share a toilet with 200 other people, and beg for food and be unable to protect their families as is expected of men...after all that, this. Nakedness. Israel knows that Arab men are very private with their bodies. That's why it choses this means of humiliation and uses it at checkpoints throughout the West Bank, making individual men strip down in front of everyone waiting: women, children, their own children. Not just to show who is in control, but to break the spirit. But it is not working. The men show no emotion but their silent faces say, "You cannot see into me. You cannot know me or what I am feeling right now. And that makes you a little afraid, because you know that what you are doing is wrong. Deep inside you know that, and it will haunt you." I took my shock at the photos of near-naked men in Gaza to the weeklky peace vigil in Greenfield. There I saw a Palestinian friend, and I told him of my horror. And he said, "This is not new. It happened in all the wars on Gaza before this one** and in Israeli prisons. It has happened to me." Oh. So it is just another weapon of war. I had forgotten about Abu Ghraib where American soldiers made Iraqi Arab men pile on top of one another - also naked. I think I am shocked now as I was then, because I forget how degrading war can be. I need to write to share with you the other things about this war that shake my belief in he goodness of humans. The gratuitous, numerous ways to make Gazans suffer, like having to leave their cars and walk the 10-15 miles towards a supposedly safer place. Like making a man abandon his wheelchair and walk through the checkpoint, even thogh he cannot walk. Like taking away water for drinking, for flushing the toilet, for washing a baby's soiled bottom, for menstrating women and girls.``Yesterday I saw a video of a hastily errected tent city that had forgotten to provide toilets, so the people were digging holes in the sand and trying to erect a canvass curtain around the holes, for privacy. Today I saw a video of that same tent city, or one just like it, in the pouring rain and at least six inches of water on the ground, no way to keep dry inside or outside the tents, and I thought about those holes-in-the-ground toilets... I make myself imagine living like this - cold, hungry, dirty, helpless and grieving loss of home, of loved ones, of all comfort and normalcy, and then having to find the energy to care for small children. I don't think I could do it. I ask God to help me to understand how some people can treat other people this way. But there is no understanding. I want it to stop. I want you to stop it. I want to believe it can be stopped. **Israel bombed Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, and twice in 2021.

GENOCIDE IN GAZA

Oct. 31 – I am returning to this page that I started about a week ago, couldn’t finish, and picked up again 3 days ago. It seems like each day of horror changes what I want to say, but can’t find the words for. I had counted out the vitamins I would need for 23 days, packed the gifts in the carry-on bag, along with a couple of things I had been asked to bring, and decided on which shoes to take for the olive picking days when the terrain would be rough and full of thorny underbrush. Everything was ready for the final packing when October 7 happened. I waited two days before writing my Palestinian friends asking if I could still come. Only their “no” could keep me away. Then the airline cancelled all flights into Tel Aviv, the olive picking program cancelled, and Israel closed all West Bank cities and roads. Had I already been there, I would not have been able to go anywhere and would have been a burden to my friends. I had plans, two months in the making, to be in Palestine from Oct. 12- Nov. 2. As in previous trips there, I hoped to hear and report on people’s personal stories of their lives under occupation, and their expectations for the future. My other motivation was to be with “my family” in Nablus, whom I hadn’t seen for four years. And now they and other close friends are in danger. For the first week, I felt an immense grief – not just for my friends but for the people of Palestine who are being murdered by the thousands. And for the fact that my government, using my money, is paying for this genocide at this very moment, bombing their homes and even their hospitals and places of shelter. This genocide is being justified because Hamas started the war, and committed atrocities killing 1400 Israeli Jews, most of them civilians. There are many facts we will never know about this attack by Hamas, but we do know that there are at least a 1000 Jewish families in grief and millions more in fear of another attack. Their sense of security is shattered, and their loved ones gone forever. Another thing we know is that this war started with a tank bursting through a fence. We know the fence was thought to be impenetrable and was meant to keep Palestinians living in Gaza from leaving Gaza. We know that Israel controlled the fence and its few points of entry and exit, and severely restricted who and what could pass in either direction. Some 18,500 day laborers were granted permits to work inside Israel but not to live there. Some 400 trucks were allowed into Gaza every day to supply a bare minimum of daily necessities like food, water, building materials, fuel , and medicines. A very few Gazans who needed to leave for specialized medical care actually got out; some of them only when they agreed to be collaborators with Israeli security. This fence was all about Israel’s supposed security. A few of those who applied for permits to access medical care in Israel did not want to give exit permits except for a few thousand day-laborers to work inside Israel, in construction or farm work. In addition to that restriction on movement, Israel also controlled what products could enter Gaza, such as food, fuel, medicines, construction materials and water. And what farm produce could leave Gaza to be sold in Israel. Israel also controlled Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline, limiting how far out fishermen could go, and definitely forbidding escape by sea. The only airport was destroyed long ago. where Gazan fishermen could cast their nets, which also meant no one could escape Gaza by sea. Gaza had no airport and thus no control over their airspace. Gaza became known as the largest open-air prison in the world, a bare 24 miles long and 6 miles wide, with 2.3 million inmates. Finally, we know that Palestinians in Gaza have been screaming to a deaf world about their conditions since 2006, when Israel declared their newly elected government a terrorist organization and looked for new ways to undermine them. In 2007, Israel sealed the borders and the international community went along with their propaganda about the evil Hamas government. Let me say here, that my West Bank Palestinian friends never liked Hamas’ politics nor its theocracy, but recognized that they gained popularity by providing schools and clinics where they were lacking, and at times seemed like the only organized resistance to Israel’s control. For sixteen years Hamas has asked the international community to intervene to end collective punishment, which is illegal under international law. Their cries were not heeded. To the contrary, Israel, with U.S. funding, has repeatedly bombed the open-air prison with devastating loss of life and infrastructure: in 2008-09 (Operation Cast Lead), 2012 (Pillar of Cloud), 2014 (Protective Edge), 2018 attacking the nonviolent Great March for Return, 2022, May (Break the Wave), and August (Breaking Dawn). Even the Palestinian Authority, which the international community recognizes as the legitimate government of the West Bank, has done nothing except collaborate with Israeli security. What should Hamas have done to free its people? We who believe in nonviolence should have an answer. I don’t. When I saw the image of a Palestinian tank breaking through the fence, I cheered. That was before I heard the reports from the Israeli side of the slaughter of civilians, including youth at a music festival. I didn’t want to believe it. I have had to face that these murders happened. At the same time, It is more than possible that many executions were committed by non-combatants who saw the broken fence and entered Israel, driven only by a thirst for revenge. We will never know what the Hamas military command (the Qassam Brigades) told their armed forces to do or not to do. Regardless of their intentions, Hamas used violence. And regardless that international law allows colonized people to use weapons to fight for their rights, it does not allow targeting civilians. And regardless that killing civilians is a war crime, 90% of the casualties in today’s wars are civilians. “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” We humans seem unwilling to learn that lesson.

Dismantle Guantanamo

Thirty men have died since they were cleared and released from Guantanamo prison. What did they die of? Where were they? Does anyone know? Did we here in the U.S. care? Weren’t they “the worst of the worst” who plotted 9/11? Our government, through four administrations, would have us forget these men, and forget the 35 Muslim men still isolated under military detention at Guantanamo. They would have us forget many things about Guantanamo which otherwise would reveal a cruel and cold-blooded policy of dehumanizing people in order to support a War on Terror. I was just in Washington DC as a member of Witness Against Torture to protest the 21st anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo, and I have some questions. Do we need a War on Terror? Many of us thought so, to answer 9/11, to protect the United States. But, did it have to be a military war? Did it have to target Muslim men? Did it have to ignite a latent Islamophobia? So many questions. So few truthful answers. But we do have some facts. Guantanamo Prison, outside of U.S. borders, on the island of Cuba, received its first prisoners on January 11, 2002. Since then 779 Muslim men and boys have been held there, almost all without being charged or tried for a crime, almost all released after years of detention so that there are only 35 left. So surely those 35 are guilty of something. But no. Twenty of them have also been cleared for release, since February of 2021, yet are still locked up – waiting. Cleared for release means some third country has to take them off our hands, because we, who have abused them for up to 20 years, refuse to take them, by Congressional order. While the U.S. begs and bribes other countries to receive these men, the men sit in their cells and wait, thus prolonging the agony of not knowing if or when freedom will come. Yet, freedom has not proved to be free. Aside from the aforementioned 30 who have died since they were released, hundreds more are caught in limbo, without a passport, without a job, without medical care or insurance, and without being reunited with their families! Some are in countries where they don’t speak the language; some are shunned as ex-Gitmo, as if they HAD committed a crime. What do we owe to these men? – for they ARE men, humans like us, deserving of respect and care. (We tortured some of them, in the most despicable ways, but that truth too is hidden in the secret Senate “Torture Report”.) If you think we owe them some token repair, you can help through the Guantanamo Survivors Fund. ( www.nogitmos.org ) Full disclosure: Ten of the 35 men at Guantanamo today have been charged, but their confessions were obtained under torture and thus being questioned. Two men have been tried and convicted. Ironically, the so-called, self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and his four co-conspirators, all at Guantanamo under military detention like the rest, have not been tried. Does this look like a functioning judicial system? Is this the way to spend our resources, at the cost of $14,000,000 per prisoner per year? Let us NOT forget Guantanamo, but instead work to dismantle it. It is part of a wrongful, violent, inhumane system of our government. It is our responsibility. Let us create healthy systems that are inclusive and based on justice for all. Guantanamo is not that. Sherrill Hogen, a member of Witness Against Torture, No More Guantanamos, and World BEYOND War, lives in Charlemont 413-625-8195