Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today program about Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, Ron Prosor, brushed aside claims that Israel bears responsibility for the cruel privations that the people of Gaza are suffering. What is often overlooked, he observed, is that there is ample access to the Gaza Strip from Egypt and that all manner of goods can be easily transferred into Gaza across the Egyptian border. Gazans, the ambassador added airily, are even free to import Egyptian belly dancers if they wish.
Considering that a year on from the Israel’s savage incursion into Gaza and three years on from its imposition of the blockade, the plight of the Gaza populace is provoking worldwide horror, the ambassador’s jocular reference to belly dancers will strike many as grotesque. It is rich that Prosor, reflecting the standard Israeli line, believes that the people of Gaza are the authors of their own misfortunes by virtue of having elected a governing party, Hamas, that refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist. For the way in which he spoke about the place conveyed the unmistakable impression that for him Gaza has no human reality. Its inhabitants seem to impinge on his attention merely as a security issue.
There are those who believe that Israel’s barely concealed objective is to subject Palestinians to a process of slow but inexorable genocide. Nothing lends greater weight to this conviction than Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza. What after all is signaled by the very facts of the case — the mass poverty and malnutrition that Israel has forced Gaza to endure, the devastating military attacks and environmental depredation it has inflicted on the area — other than an agenda of progressive liquidation? Certainly, the notion of eliminating the people of Gaza altogether is by no means alien to the mindset that informs Israeli policy-making. Prior to last year’s Gaza offensive, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai observed that Gazans were bringing upon themselves a “greater Shoah”, a holocaust. Here was an officer of a state that endlessly exhorts remembrance of the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry threatening to annihilate Gaza.
WHAT remains staggering is the extent to which Western governments continue to turn a blind eye to Gaza’s torment, behaving as if it is the result not of Israeli policies but of some natural disaster. To his credit, the leader of the British Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, is urging the British government and the international community to exert pressure on Israel to lift its blockade. But the only Western figure of stature who has taken a consistent moral stand over Gaza, tirelessly drawing attention to Israel’s delinquencies and the unspeakable human suffering which they have caused, is former US President Jimmy Carter. Carter’s stance has been all the more admirable in the light of the demonization to which he is subject by a US media that remains overwhelmingly prejudiced in favor of Israel, with Zionist voices drowning out champions of the Palestinian cause and quick to accuse people like Carter of being “anti-American”.
It was his concern that the Palestinian case was not getting a fair hearing in the United States that impelled the Maltese-born, US-based, graphic artist Joe Sacco to produce his remarkable work, “Palestine” (2001), and which has now driven him to turn his attention specifically to Gaza.
Agraphic novel that brilliantly evoked the Palestinian story in all its pathos and resilience, “Palestine” became a much-translated best seller, helping to inform younger Western readers about the Middle East conflict for whom the convention of the cartoon format is far more accessible than a conventional historical or journalistic narrative. Sacco’s latest book, “Footnotes in Gaza”, a challenging sequel to the earlier work, takes the perhaps surprising form of an investigation of two largely forgotten incidents in Khan Younis and Rafah during the Suez crisis in 1956 when Gazan men were massacred by Israeli soldiers. Featuring as a quizzical, faintly comical, character in his own cartoons, just as he did in “Palestine”, Sacco is seen encountering Palestinians who cannot make out why he is so exercised about what happened all those years ago when people are preoccupied with current adversities. It is safe to say that few will finish Sacco’s enthralling book without grasping the rationale behind his approach.
Sacco stayed in Gaza in 2002/2003. Based on many interviews with survivors of the earlier time, his narrative alternates between Gaza at that point and events of 50 years beforehand. In the present, Palestinian homes are being remorselessly destroyed by Israeli bulldozers, with hapless families being made homeless on the pretext that they have been sheltering militants. In the period recalled by Sacco’s elderly interviewees on the other hand and which his pen has brought vividly to life, Palestinian men are being hunted down and slaughtered by Israeli soldiers with a mission to root out Palestinian guerrillas. Things are terrible now. They were terrible then. The effect of “Footnotes in Gaza” is to suggest that Gaza’s past and present agony forms an unbroken continuum. James Joyce said that history was a nightmare from which he was trying to awake. Readers of Sacco’s book are bound to feel that Joyce’s observation applies with particular force to the predicament of the people of Gaza.
One of the most telling passages in Sacco’s book depicts Israeli Gen. Moshe Dayan openly acknowledging the justice of the grievances of displaced Palestinians while just as openly affirming Israel’s determination to be “ready and armed, tough and harsh”, to show no mercy. Illuminating the circumstances in which “hatred was implanted in hearts”, Sacco’s book shows how by vastly superior force of arms Israel ruthlessly subjugated a population of desperate refugees. But it also underlines how Israel’s endless military onslaughts on Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere have ultimately proved counterproductive, with even dark deeds of 50 years ago coming back to haunt the Jewish state. The truth is that its history of relentless brutality has all but destroyed Israel’s moral credibility.
