Vijay Prashad - Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation

Palestine is easily forgotten. There is war. There is suffering. The war ends. The suffering vanishes. Silence.

Was there even a war? Palestine is under occupation, and has been since 1967, since 1948. An occupied land is not at war, can never be at war. It is occupied. Occupation is a state of war. The occupied space retaliates. It seeks its freedom. It is punished. Was Operation Protective Edge a war or a punishment? Operation Grapes of Wrath, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Pillar of Cloudnames less of defense and more of vengeful retribution.

On the night of Tuesday, July 29, 2014, three shells hit the Jabalia Elementary Girls School in Gazaa UN-designated emergency shelter for 3,300 Palestinians. Those who had taken refuge there came because the Israelis had warned them to leave their homes. The UN had given the Israelis the coordinates of this school seventeen times. Their warnings made no impact. The shells killed at least sixteen people and wounded hundreds. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) chief, Pierre Krhenbhl, said in a powerful statement, Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today, the world stands disgraced.

Israel destroyed Gazas only power plant, which impacted the already fragile sewage and water purification system as well as food storage. Electricity was mostly off, which meant that the Palestinians were cut off from the world. As it is, when Israel conducts its operations inside Gaza, it seals the area, preventing media from entrance. The aftermath of these operations has been devastating, whether in Gaza Citys neighborhood of Shujaiyya or the town of Khuzaa. Forty-four percent of Gazas 140 square miles (360 square km) was designated a buffer zone by the Israelis. By the end of this pummeling Gazas Ministry of Health puts the figure for the dead at over 2,000 and the wounded over 11,000. Seven of ten Palestinians killed in this war were children.

The UN Human Rights Council voted for an investigation of alleged war crimes by Israel against the Palestinians. The call for accountability came from most of the worlds states. But accountability there will not be. Indeed, there is barely memory. Palestine is forgotten.

As I write these lines, Jerusalem is in torment. Tensions are about as high as they were in 2000when Ariel Sharon went to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. I watch a video taken by BTselem of a disabled twelve-year-old boy, a-Rajbi, being detained by two strapping Israeli soldiers; they handcuff him brutally as he stands there and screams near his village of Jabel Johar, Hebron, near the settlement of Kiryat Arba. The settlers stand and cheer, one throwing out a clichd racist slur. I watch another video of an Israeli officer accusing Israeli activists of treason for trying to prevent the removal of Palestinian farmers from their land. There are fast-moving tragedies. Already the 2014 Gaza War seems dwarfed by the escalation in Jerusalem.

One day Palestine will become what it wants. But that day is not now. Now Palestine is a shadow.

One more war, one more exhausting period for the Palestinians filled with death and destruction, terror and its traumas. Wars come in a sequence: 2014, 2012, 2009, 2006 This chain of numbers says nothing of the everyday war that eclipses the smiles of ordinary people who have to make bare lives in extraordinary times. Every document of the Israeli occupation and suffocation of Gaza resembles every other one. There are the forensic texts of human rights groups and the UN commissionsactuaries of the occupation, the authors of these documents give us the scaffolding of devastation. Poets and filmmakers, storytellers and pamphleteers fill their artifacts with sentiment. How many times can a human being hear that in seven weeks the Israelis killed over 2,000 people, injured tens of thousands, demolished the lives of hundreds of thousands, wiped out buildings that heal, teach and shelter?