Newsgroup: it.arti.cinema
Titolo: [OT] Rafah

Before Rafah
============
Yitzhak Laor
20 May
London Review of Books
On Sunday 16 May, a day before the IDF launched its
long-awaited, well-planned attack on the civilian
population of Rafah, the Israeli chief of staff, Major-
General Moshe (Boogey) Ya'alon said it was 'almost the
last chance' for such an operation and that 'special
conditions were in place' for an imminent attack. By
'special conditions', of course, he meant the public
desire for revenge following the deaths of 13 soldiers
in Gaza in the space of 48 hours. It was a convenient
opportunity to start a war. But he also meant that
sooner or later the Jewish settlements blocking Rafah's
access to its beach would be evacuated, so there was no
choice but to destroy as much of Rafah as possible, and
as soon as possible.
José Saramago, visiting Israel in March 2002, before
the invasion in which Israel reoccupied the
territories, said that Israel had two problems. The
first, he said, is that the settlements need the army.
Everyone agreed. The second is that the army needs the
settlements. Nobody agreed. Nobody even listened. Yet
Ya'alon knows that without the settlements he would
have no excuse for patrolling the Gaza strip. Do
Israelis understand the military's motives? No. Many
Israelis, probably the majority, would gladly turn
their backs on the settlers. Not on the military,
though. Therefore, the whole political campaign against
the extreme right is futile. Behind the extreme right
lurks the 'moderate army', and the army is the one
player in Israeli society whose motives are never
questioned.
Israeli militarism is about Israel's faith in this huge
benevolent apparatus. The army is always described in
terms of 'our boys out there', sons, lads, children, a
poor, beleaguered David. That's us, the eternal
victims. And the enemy is always Goliath, even the
children who defied the IDF in Rafah three days ago and
therefore had to die while demonstrating, empty-handed,
in solidarity with the thousands whom the benevolent
military had thrown out of their shacks and houses.
That same Sunday, 16 May, before the lethal convoy left
on its way to Rafah, was almost a euphoric day among
more moderate Israelis. On Saturday night, 150,000
people rallied in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to call for
peace, more or less. It was the largest rally Israel
had seen for many years. The main speaker at the
demonstration was Shimon Peres, foreign minister in
Sharon's former government, a man for all seasons and
suits. His excellent speech was broadcast live on
Israeli TV, even on the state-owned channel, which has
become almost a Likud station. Yet we shouldn't be
surprised at the favourable TV coverage, just as we
shouldn't be surprised that all three Israeli
newspapers were very excited about the rally the
following day, even Ma'ariv. 'We are not the Left, we
are the majority of the people,' Peres declared. But
that wasn't what the rally was about. And it wasn't
about the IDF policy of daily killings: the strategy
that ensures our war will never end. It was about the
Gaza settlers and everyone's opposition to them.
It was only when soldiers were killed for no purpose
other than to defend the settlers that public outrage
brought Israelis to say: 'Something must be done.' This
is a mode Israelis adopt from time to time. But this
'something must be done' always goes in two directions.
The first leads to the demonstration square (and then
back home). The second leads to the military operation
that has just won ecstatic support. People in the West
don't know that the demonstrators are people who love
the army, that the peace movement in Israel is still
deeply involved in the military love affair, that no
peace demonstration in Israel has ever dared say that
the military might be participants in atrocities or
warmongering. The phrase 'war crimes' is not allowed at
these demonstrations, because such words bring the
army, not only Sharon, into the frame of 'evil'.
The rally's organisers - Peace Now, Labour and Meretz -
invited General Yom-Tov Samya to speak. And he did.
Military men at a peace demonstration: how nice. Only
he hadn't come to say that he was tired of war, or that
he'd once been wrong; he hadn't come to call for more
moderate behaviour by the army. Samya had been the head
of the IDF's Southern Command; for years he was in
charge of the war against the Gaza strip. It was under
his command that dozens of houses were demolished in
Rafah and their poorest inhabitants thrown into the mud
during the very cold winter of 2001. It was in his
glorious day that 'war crimes' started to be part of
the discourse. It was under his command that some
officers formed the refusenik movement Courage to
Refuse and went to prison. Of course they weren't
allowed to speak on the podium at Saturday night's
rally. In fact, the organisers had issued a press
release in which they promised not to invite any
refuseniks to speak.
The rally in effect constituted a licence for the
military to complete their dirty war: not because it
was so friendly to the army but because it made it
possible for nothing to be said about the imminent
attack. Everybody knew there was a major attack on the
way. Experts had argued on TV talkshows about whether
the army would be given the green light. But not a word
was said about it on the podium in front of the 150,000
moderate Israelis. The entire demonstration was about
supporting Sharon against the settlers. The biggest
banner in the rally read: 'Arik, the people are with
you.' The Zionist Left had, yet again, produced an
imaginary battlefield in order not to fight the real
battle. Why are we for Sharon? Because he was supposed
to be against the settlers. Where was the voice warning
about the coming war in densely populated areas?
Nowhere.
And so it began, as always, by frightening the civilian
population: poor, isolated refugees in a world that
doesn't know what Palestinians want, or how they live.
So they took their children and their mattresses and
left, again, and the army continued to spread its
stories about the tunnels of munitions running under
the houses, and finally - with the Supreme Court
authorising them to destroy more houses, because we're
in a state of war, which the army declared, created,
produced - the forces went in.
Since that attack, which turned into a blood-bath,
there have been demonstrations in Tel Aviv every day.
Not massive, but larger than before. Some are being led
by Courage to Refuse activists. There were clashes with
police, there were arrests, yet the majority of
Israelis went silent again. The Supreme Court justices,
the professors of ethics, the chiefs of staff: they
might meet at a university seminar on 'Morality and
War' or 'International Law and Terrorism'. But right
now the army is busy.
According to the Israeli sociologist Alina Korn, there
has been a ghettoisation of the Palestinians since the
early 1990s. It's not bantustans that the authorities
have in mind, but ghettos, detached from each other,
dependent on Israeli military authority. The ghettos,
which are already numerous, multiply, and the
conditions differ from place to place. Ramallah is
visible to the West, so life there is more bearable.
Hebron is hidden. Rafah is entirely cut off. The
Israeli army didn't kill the children in Rafah
intentionally, it will be said. Who will remind us that
for three months now, the army has been killing unarmed
Palestinians demonstrating peacefully along the Wall
that's going up in the West Bank?
Israeli families of dead soldiers or dead civilians get
a follow-up, even on foreign TV, for they had a future
ahead of them before they died. Did the Palestinian
children who died in Rafah have any future? No. So they
are dead, and it will be over in a few days.
Palestinians don't get a follow-up, not even on foreign
TV. Maybe there'll be a documentary movie, followed by
some public discussion about whether to allow the movie
to be publicly screened, or whether it's another sign
of 'the new anti-semitism'. Nothing will be followed
up. The Israeli army is secure. It calls itself the
Israel Defence Force.
===================================================
Yitzhak Laor is a novelist and poet who lives in Tel Aviv
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n11/laor01_.html
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NB: Don't forget to also send it to the nearest 
Israeli Embassy:
http://www.embassyworld.com/embassy/israel1.htm
 
(It will be good when the foreign ministry will be
alarmed by many of its embassies)
for your convenience, here are the combined email 
addresses we collected (please add your own): 
To: 
s...@justice.gov.il
 
Copies to: secretar...@USA.gov, 
e...@un.org
, 
un...@palnet.com
, 
romano...@cec.eu.int
 
for a regularly updated site of life in Rafah 
(by just somebody) 
http://www.rafahtoday.org