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MARK TAYLOR
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The grotesque horror of a school field trip arriving at this location from two hours away to watch the mass slaughter from an observation deck was a shock I am overwhelmed by. The first wave of boys pumped celebratory firsts and thrust middle fingers upon their sight of Gaza.
By Matt Hoh
Matt’s Thoughts on War and Peace (11/18/24)
That is Gaza behind me.
The fence line is 600m away. The northern part of Gaza, where Israel is carrying out a genocide within a genocide, systematically starving 300,000 Palestinians to death, is about 2km further.
The absurdity and the obscenity of being able to be this close to 20,000 murdered children, their bodies “prophetic voices from under the rubble” as a colleague called them, is difficult to accept.
The grotesque horror of a school field trip arriving at this location from two hours away to watch the mass slaughter from an observation deck was a shock I am overwhelmed by. The first wave of boys pumped celebratory firsts and thrust middle fingers upon their sight of Gaza.
It was quiet. The sounds of those buried under rubble don’t reach the observation deck. No torn and wrecked bodies could be seen, no sunlight reflected in pools of blood, and no strips of clothes snagged on exposed bones fluttered in the strong wind. We were as close as we could be but so separate and so safe from it. It was sanitary and septic, picturesque.
I felt I was a voyeur, a tourist, a spectator. I felt disgust and disbelief. And I felt an absence within me that I cannot articulate.
To be that close to the cleansing and destruction of 2.2 million people and to be centering now my words on my feelings doesn’t escape me. Perhaps a well-achieved purpose of that observation deck of genocide.
The Nietzsche-ism, stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you, struck me as I stood there.
Stare into Gaza and Gaza stares back is what I am left with now, comfortable in my Jerusalem hotel, just hours after looking into their genocide as if I were on a platform at a national park or on the boardwalk at the shore.
The horror of the genocide I expected but did not see. I thought I might curse and cry. I did neither. The cruel and so very human spectacle of a caged people being destroyed as a display for school children was what I encountered. I did not expect that and I don’t know how to respond.
Note: Americans partially funded this observation deck.
The observation deck in Sderot looking into Gaza.
A school field trip assembled at the observation platform overlooking Gaza.
These are my first thoughts on standing that close to Gaza. I may need to revisit them.
I am in Palestine this week as part of a delegation to be in solidarity with and learn from those engaged in Palestinian liberation. Today, in addition to this visit to the border of Gaza, we met with Rabbis for Human Rights and an October 7th survivor in the Sderot settlement, as well as a Palestinian Lutheran minister in Bethlehem.
Yesterday, we were in Jerusalem’s Old City. Here are my reflections from that visit: [NOTE: I could not found the link Matt mentioned. I have sent him a note asking if he can send it. I will post it when I get it. — MT]
Matthew selfie with Palestine in background.
Please comment and share. I will try and post more from this visit.
Viva Palestina.
26-minute video
Hanan Abu Salameh, 59, was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier while she harvested olives.
On a Thursday afternoon towards the end of last month, a 59-year-old Palestinian woman set out to gather olives on her family’s land near the village of Faqqua, in the north of the occupied West Bank.
It was something that Hanan Abu Salameh had done for decades.
Within minutes, the mother of seven and grandmother of 14 lay dying in the dust of the olive grove, with a bullet wound in her chest - she’d been shot by an Israeli soldier.
Even though the family had co-ordinated their intention to pick olives with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to her son Fares and husband Hossam, the soldier fired several shots as other family members fled for cover.
The IDF says it’s investigating the incident (Hah! as usual!), but Hanan’s grieving relatives have little hope or expectation that her killer will be brought to justice.
This wasn’t an isolated incident.
Harvesting olives is an age-old ritual and also an economic necessity for many Palestinians, but, according to the UN, it is increasingly precarious.
Farmers across the West Bank - internationally regarded as Palestinian land occupied by Israel - face heightened risks, like organised attacks by Israeli settlers seeking to sabotage the olive harvest, along with the use of force by Israeli security forces to block roads and Palestinians' access to their lands.
“Last year we couldn’t even harvest our olives, except for a very small amount,” says Omar Tanatara, a farmer from the village of Umm Safa.
“At one point, the army came, threw the olives we’d already gathered on the ground, and ordered us to go home,” says Omar, who is also a member of the village council.
“Some people were even shot at and olives trees were cut down with saws – that’s how we later found them,” adds Omar, as he and other villagers use small hand-held rakes to pull this year’s harvest from their remaining trees while they can.
Zuraya Hadad instinctively winces as we watch a video of the incident in which her ribs were broken by a masked man wielding a large stick.
The Israeli peace activist had been helping Palestinian farmers pick their olives when she was assaulted without provocation.
Rather than arresting her attacker, Israeli soldiers, who’d accompanied settlers to the site, just told him to move on.
“Even when we come to help, it doesn't guarantee that the Palestinians can harvest their olives,” Zuraya tells me as she recovers from her injuries at home.
“We try to raise awareness, but in the end it's either the settlers steal the olives or cut the trees, or they remain unpicked and go to waste.”
Land is at the heart of the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians - who controls it and who has access to it.
For thousands of Palestinian families and villages, cultivating and harvesting olives is a big part of their economy.
But many say that, in recent times, access to trees on their land has been impeded, often violently by Israeli settlers.
Hundreds of trees - which can take years to reach fruit-bearing maturity - have been deliberately burned or cut down, says the UN.
Israeli peace activist Zuraya Hadad was attacked by a masked man as she accompanied Palestinian farmers to the harvest.
After being gathered by hand, villagers from Umm Safa take sacks full of olives to the nearby factory, where the presses have restarted this season.
Olives are the most important agricultural product in the West Bank. In a good year, they're worth more than $70m (£54m) to the Palestinian economy.
But income was well down last year and this year will be even worse, says factory owner Abd al-Rahman Khalifa, as even fewer farmers are able to harvest their crop owing to attacks by settlers.
“Let me give you an example,” he tells me.
“My brother-in-law in Lubban - next to the Israeli settlement - went to pick his own olives, but they broke his arms and they made him leave along with everyone who was with him.”
“We, as Palestinians, don’t have petrol or big companies. Our main agricultural crop is olives,” he adds. “So, like the Gulf depends on oil, and the Americans on business, our economy is dependent on the olive tree.”
On the hill overlooking the olive groves of Umm Safa stands an illegal settler outpost - a farm.
The extremist settler who runs it, Zvi Bar Yosef, was sanctioned this year by the UK and other Western governments for repeated acts of violence against Palestinians, including twice threatening families at gunpoint.
Over the last year of the war in Gaza, Jewish settlers have been emboldened by the support of far-right Israeli ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir.
As national security minister, he has given out free firearms to hundreds of settlers and has encouraged them to assert their right to what - they say - is their "God-given" land.
Ben-Gvir has also been accused of openly supporting the disruption of olive harvesting on Palestinian land.
At the olive press, farmers wait patiently in the yard to witness the transformation of the olives they’ve been able to gather this year into "liquid gold".
The olive tree has been a symbol of this land for centuries.
For generations of Palestinians, it is their link to the land - a link that is under threat now more than ever.
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Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
One of the very few good things coming out of the relentless nightmare happening in Gaza is that at long last the western world is getting a clear look at Israel. The real Israel.
Not the Israel they teach you about in school. Not “the only democracy in the middle east,” where Jews were given safe haven after their victimization at the hands of the Nazis and managed to create a thriving society despite existing in a sea of savage enemies bent on their destruction.
Not that Israel. The real one. Arguably the most racist society on earth, whose existence has depended on nonstop violence, theft, tyranny and abuse since its very inception.
The real Israel, whose government is deliberately and methodically starving Palestinian civilians to death by the tens of thousands just for being the wrong ethnicity.
The real Israel, whose snipers routinely murders Palestinian children by shooting them in the head.
The real Israel, whose military is so sadistic that it created an AI system to specifically target suspected Hamas fighters when they are at home with their families, and called the AI “Where’s Daddy?” because it would be killing fathers when they are at home with their children.
dressed in the undergarments of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children.
The real Israel, where Palestinian doctors are raped and tortured to death.
The real Israel, where the majority of men do not believe acquaintance rape or spousal rape are real crimes, and where the majority do not believe the soldiers accused of raping and torturing a Palestinian prisoner to the point of severe injury should face criminal charges.
The real Israel, who routinely bombs buildings full of civilians and then uses sniper drones to pick off the survivors, including children.
The real Israel, whose drones have been heard playing the sounds of crying babies and screaming women in order to lure out civilians so they can be killed.
The real Israel, who has damaged or destroyed 94 percent of the healthcare facilities in Gaza with hundreds of targeted attacks.
The real Israel, whose military forces target medical staff so methodically that doctors and nurses in Gaza reportedly change out of their uniforms when they leave the hospital in order to avoid assassination.
The real Israel, who hates truth so much that it has been killing historic numbers of journalists in Gaza while preventing foreign journalists from entering the enclave.
The real Israel, who has been knowingly attacking the locations of humanitarian aid workers.
The real Israel, whose citizens are so warped and twisted that they attend boat tours to cheerfully witness the devastation in the Gaza Strip.
The real Israel, whose citizens set up blockades to prevent aid trucks from getting to starving civilians in Gaza while they enjoy barbecues and set up bouncy castles and cotton candy machines for their children.
The real Israel, whose TikTok influencers started a viral trend mocking the suffering of civilians in Gaza.
The real Israel, whose citizens will travel to another country and tear down Palestinian flags and sing about how there are no children left in Gaza and then cry victim when people fight back.
This is the real Israel, in all its glory. And it is good that it is being seen.
The sooner everyone stops supporting this freakish, murderous society and begins insisting that normal human values win out over the demented forces which keep it going, the sooner there can be peace in the region. And the better off our entire species will be.
All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone
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Thinkers, Rhodes, Greece, 2006. (Riccardo Romano, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Special to Consortium News
I spent the past two weeks on my ancestral island of Rhodes, Greece, helping my cousin settle his late father’s estate. It’s no surprise that everybody — and I mean literally everybody — wanted to talk about this month’s U.S. presidential election.
Greece has long had an anti-American streak stemming from U.S. support for the 1967-1974 military dictatorship that killed, tortured, and imprisoned thousands of people just because of their political views. Indeed, the governing conservative New Democracy Party (ND) wins elections only because there are so many socialist and communist parties that they split the left-wing vote and allow the conservatives to govern.
But much to my surprise, every leftist I’ve spoken to, including just about everybody in my own family from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) to the Socialist Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) has offered full-throated support to Donald Trump.
After hearing this over and over again, I decided to probe a little to get to the bottom of how lifelong socialists and communists can support a billionaire businessman who leads a capitalist and conservative political party. But the reasons for their admiration of Trump were quite simple. They saw Donald Trump as the anti-war candidate.
They hate what is happening to the Palestinians and Lebanese, despite the fact that their government is unabashedly pro-Israel (as is Donald Trump.) They hate that the United States has armed one Orthodox Christian country, Ukraine, against another, Russia. And they hate that the United States has done nothing about the 50-year-long Turkish military occupation of Cyprus.
The Greeks genuinely believe that if anybody is going to end the Ukraine war or tell the Israelis to stop killing civilians in Palestine and Lebanon, it’s going to be Donald Trump. (I disagree strongly that Trump has any love whatsoever for the Palestinians. Indeed, he’s been Benjamin Netanyahu’s lapdog for years.)
But the Greeks argue that Democrats have only made the international situation worse, so why not give Trump another chance to make things better, like he did with North Korea, at least temporarily.
Trump, in Yuma, Arizona, in June 2020, walking along the completed 200th mile of the border wall with Mexico. (White House/Shealah Craighead)
There’s another issue that the Greeks agree with Trump on, too. That’s the issue of immigration. The Greeks are well known for their hospitality. There’s even a word for it: Filoxenia, which means “love of the stranger.”
When Afghanistan and Iraq began falling apart, private Greek citizens actually stood on the beaches to welcome them as they washed ashore in rafts and to give them food and clothes. That changed when the European Union gave Turkey billions of dollars to hold refugees in Turkey and the Turks instead began forcing them across the border into Greece and just pocketing the money.
The Greeks, in turn, built a wall along the land border with Turkey. That enraged the Turks, of course, but the wall actually worked. And when Trump started talking about building a wall along the southern border with Mexico, the Greeks were all in.
As a progressive American voter, and a truly independent one at that, I’m not optimistic about the next four years. Abortion is of primary importance to me. So are the environment, workers rights, health care and education. I support easier immigration and an easier and quicker path to citizenship. Donald Trump will likely destroy all of that.
With that said, I believe that there are two areas where Trump is right. One is his support for a less interventionist foreign policy. The other is criminal justice reform. Trump issued a lot of pardons when he was president. He issued a lot of commutations. And he worked to do something about the sentencing disparities between white people convicted of crimes compared to people of color. At least there was that.
Donald Trump already has served one term as president. Consequently, he’ll be a lame duck beginning the moment he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20 with nobody on Capitol Hill owing him anything. He’ll be permanently out of office in four years.
Is it possible that we could be pleasantly surprised, then, on some of these issues? I expect to be far more disappointed than anything else. But I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer. I’m going to try to convince myself that some good will come of this. I don’t know exactly what it’ll be.
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