Whem I was in Gaza in March, one of the Hamas people I interviewed was newly elected legislator Jamila al-Shanty. In this piece that I subsequently wrote for Salon, I described her in this way:
- Jamila Shanty is a robust, good-natured woman with a well-defined, expressive face who bustles into our meeting toting a large, tattered briefcase. Formerly a professor of psychology and philosophy at Gaza Islamic University, she relishes her new role in the parliament where, she tells me, she hopes to sit on the political and legal-affairs committees.
“We need to strengthen our internal front and restore some discipline to Palestinian society,” she says of Hamas’ imminent priorities. “We must not give Israel the chance to come in here and bomb… ”
Well, Hamas stuck for many months to the unilateral ceasefire it had maintained, despite strong and continuing Israeli provocation… But that didn’t stop Israel from bombing Gaza (as we know)… or from blocading and stifling and trying to starve it’s 1.3 million people.
Last week, Shanty was one of the prime organizers of the nonviolent action wherein hundreds of women from the Beit Hamoun area defied the Israeli cirfew and went down to the town’s mosque to rescue their menfolk. A couple of days later the Israeli artillery shelled the house where she lives with her sister-in-law, and the sister-in-law’s children. Her sister-in-law Nahla and two of Jamila’s bodyguards were all reportedly killed, though Jamila herself was not there that night.
Yesterday, Ms. Shanty had this very poignant article in The Guardian. It was published under the title “We Overcame Our fear.”
In it she wrote this:
- We still do not know what has become of our sons, husbands and brothers since all males over 15 years old were taken away last Thursday. They were ordered to strip to their underwear, handcuffed and led away.
It is not easy as a mother, sister or wife to watch those you love disappear before your eyes. Perhaps that was what helped me, and 1,500 other women, to overcome our fear and defy the Israeli curfew last Friday – and set about freeing some of our young men who were besieged in a mosque while defending us and our city against the Israeli military machine.
We faced the most powerful army in our region unarmed. The soldiers were loaded up with the latest weaponry, and we had nothing, except each other and our yearning for freedom. As we broke through the first barrier, we grew more confident, more determined to break the suffocating siege. The soldiers of Israel’s so-called defence force did not hesitate to open fire on unarmed women. The sight of my close friends Ibtissam Yusuf abu Nada and Rajaa Ouda taking their last breaths, bathed in blood, will live with me for ever.
Later an Israeli plane shelled a bus taking children to a kindergarten. Two children were killed, along with their teacher. In the last week 30 children have died…
Shortly after announcing his project to democratise the Middle East, President Bush did all he could to strangle our nascent democracy, arresting our ministers and MPs. I have yet to hear western condemnation that I, an elected MP, have had my home demolished and relatives killed by Israel’s bombs. When the bodies of my friends and colleagues were torn apart there was not one word from those who claim to be defenders of women’s rights on Capitol Hill and in 10 Downing Street.
Why should we Palestinians have to accept the theft of our land, the ethnic cleansing of our people, incarcerated in forsaken refugee camps, and the denial of our most basic human rights, without protesting and resisting?
The lesson the world should learn from Beit Hanoun last week is that Palestinians will never relinquish our land, towns and villages. We will not surrender our legitimate rights for a piece of bread or handful of rice. The women of Palestine will resist this monstrous occupation imposed on us at gunpoint, siege and starvation. Our rights and those of future generations are not open for negotiation…
We all need to listen to the pain and the arguments that Ms. Shanty, a very savvy political organizer and community leader, articulates here. We don’t need to agree with everything that she or other women and men from Hamas say in order to recognize and acknowledge that some of what they say has validity. The Palestinian question has to be addressed, and has to be resolved in a fair and sustainable manner; and this will not happen unless the large proportion of Palestinians who share this M.P.’s views are actively included in the peacemaking.
For myself, I want to start by sending Ms. Shanty my heartfelt condolences on the loss of her sister-in-law, her friends, and her family property– and my promise that I will do everything I can to work for a de-escalation of all the violence between Israel and the Palestinians and a fair and sustainable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My country has for far too long given Israel unquestioning support for all the actions it has taken against the Palestinians– including giving Israel huge financial, military, and political support that in recent years has been continued with no linkage made at all between that aid and Israel’s military or diplomatic misbehavior toward the Palestinians (or the Lebanese.) That has to stop. Fair-minded conditionality and accountability has to be established toward both sides in this tragically destructive conflict. And we need to extend equal human respect and concern to people on both sides of the line.
People in the US have in recent months been (re-)learning that we cannot build our nation’s security on an attempt to dominate others by violence and brute force. The same is equally true for Israel.
We can no longer build our wealth in the west on the expense of dominating the others ostentatiously or by proxy states, equally true in the case of Israel. All this in the name of security.
Your last line distills the most important truth from America’s terror wars these last five years. After 9/11 America could have and should have recognized this truth because Israel has been distilling it in concentrated formula for more than fifty years. Violent dominance not only magnifies the problem of terrorism; it is terrorism.
There has, of course, been no “cease fire.” Israel has been subjected to continuous rocket attacks, as well as the kidnapping of one of its soldiers.
What is true is that there has been no headline grabbing Palestinian attack that has killed several Israeli citizens. This is less a function of Hamas or Palestinian restraint and more a function of Israel adequately defending itself.
And Helena again misleads her readership by describing Shanty’s actions as “nonviolent organizing.” The Hamas members holed up the mosque were anything but non-violent actors. Manipulating women to serve as human shields for them does not constitute non-violent resistance. Rather, it constitutes aiding and abetting the violent actors. The fact that the Hamas-ettes did not pick up a weapon themselves doesn’t change that.
http://www.michaelschmitt.org/images/Directparticipationpageproofs.pdf
Human Rights Watch has suggested that voluntary human shields are similarly not participating in hostilities because “their actions do not pose a direct risk to opposing forces” and they are not “directly engaging in hostilities.” This interpretation is excessively narrow. Most importantly, the standard is participation in hostilities, not engagement therein. In this particular case, the human shields are dleiberately attempting to preserve a valid military objective for use by the enemy. In essence, they are no different from, for instance, point air defenses, which are employed more to protect the target than to destroy attacking aircraft. Indeed, to suggest otherwise would actually run counter to the underlying purposes of humanitarian law in that it would encourage voluntary shields by minimizing the risk they assumed by their actions. This would heighten, in turn, the risk to the civilian population generally by disrupting humanitarian law’s delicate balance between military necessity and protection of civilians.
Michael Schmitt, Professor of International Law and Director of the Executive Program in International and Security Affairs, Marshall Ctr. for European Studies
if anyone doubts the determination expressed in the last paragraph by Mrs Shanty that Helena quotes, I commend Nizar Qabbani’s poems in “On Entering the Sea”.
The truth of Children Bearing Rocks is evident.
“we’ll be swept away-
never mind the slow pace of history
by children bearing rocks.”
You can cut the emotion in Posters with a knife.
“You will not do to our people
what’s been done to the Native Americans
for here we shall stay
on this land that wears
a bracelet of flowers on its wrist”
Do read the rest for yourselves.
It backs up what Helena says with all the impact of a mule’s kick.
The only error Helena has made in her post is her reference to Israel’s “military misbehaviour”. To call wanton and purposeful murder of children, the aged, the shooting of women in the back, “misbehaviour” must be just irony on Helena’s part.
Israel and its supporters, do not know the meaning of shame. Israel’s poster boy, Cabinet Minister Lieberman, well exemplyfies the majority jewish attitudes toward the Palestinians. The best the Palestinians can hope for is deportation;the worst, constant terror, kidnappings, bombing, murder, thievery. This is the Chechnya in Palestine policy that Lieberman is pushing and that indeed is being carried out. Was there not a recent poll where the only country with self-described “Western” values, where a majority of the population approved of torture? Think of it, 56% of Israeli jews approved of torture. Are these people animals?
Israel is not a Western country. It is an expansionist Stalinist empire that should be wiped off the map.
And Vadim, just like a good Stalinist, you too are gyrating to justify shooting women in the back. Was your father also taught at Uncle Joe’s knee?
I think what makes me saddest about argumentative, ideological responses like those submitted by Joshua and Vadim above is that those two commenters give no acknowledgement whatsoever of the pain and sense of ongoing bereavement and abandonment that Ms. Shanty and all other Gazans are feeling these days. None whatsoever. Sad, sad… (But also very revealing.)
I think what makes me saddest about argumentative, ideological entries like those written by Helena above is that the writer gives no acknowledgement whatsoever of the sense of seige, the need for self defense, and also the great sense of bereavement many Israelis also feel these days. None whatsoever. Sad, sad… (But also very revealing.)
I think what is also sad is that Helena does nothing whatsoever of the racist hate speech of commenters like KKKassandra
Helena, the new realities nowadays:
The shelling and killing of UN peacekeepers was a mistake.
Quna II was a mistake.
Beit Hanoun was a mistake.
Millions of cluster bombings littering southern Lebanon is not a war crime.
The biggest enviromental disaster commited by Israel was a human error….
These are recent mistakes, in the past 5 months…
Living in fear, translates to: excuse for all what the nation of Israel does !
Israelis, feeling bereaved with respect to Gaza? Really? Bereaved with respect to what deaths?
I am certainly prepared to recognize that residents of Sderot and that region of southern Israel may feel very uneasy and fearful… as residents of northern Israel did during the Hizbullah rocket attacks. But let’s not get overheated with our vicarious emotionality here, Joshua, and claim there have been “bereavements” in southern Israel.
And note, meanwhile that Israel got Hizbullah to stop the rocket attacks. How? Through (indirect) negotiations that led to a reciprocal ceasefire… This has held well since August 14– with the exception of Israel’s very violative overflights of Lebanon– and has allowed calm to return and rebuilding to get underway in communities both sides of that border. If I were a resident of Sderot I would be strongly urging a similar ceasefire in the south.
I really don’t see why you should ever think Israel could build a sense of security for its people through pursuing a policy only of imposing insecurity on their neighbors. Won’t work. (And actually, would you want it to? Is that the kind of Israel you would feel comfortable continuing to support?)
Joshua writes: “Helena again misleads her readership …. “. The implication being that “Helena’s readers” are mindless disciples sitting at Helena’s feet, utterly dependent on her for their information and their opinions of the Middle East War?
If this is indeed what you are thinking, Joshua, then you have utterly missed the mark. The reality is that Helena’s readers (and very likely Helena herself) have been engaged, and are presently engaged, in a stupendous mental effort to free themselves from the suffocating political propoganda veil which envelopes this country. We have had it beaten into our heads, and a whole generation of Americans have imbibed with their mothers’ milk, the idea that the cause of Israel is right, just and holy, and that we MUST support Israel as an article of faith, civility and democracy.
In this country the cause of Israel has become the political third rail. It used to be a purely domestic policy that was the third rail in American politics. But finally an American president managed the unheard-of feat of touching the Social Security Administration and surviving for a second term. And in place of that venerable American institution we now have what? Incredibly, INCREDIBLY!, we now have the holy cause of a foreign nation. We have sent the treasure that should have gone to our old age, to our failing health and capabilities, to our needy children — we have sent that off to a foreign country in pursuit a losing war.
Helena does not instruct us or lead us or mislead us. She provides a forum so that we can discuss these things together, and maybe, hopefully, try to figure out how to turn around the Queen Mary mid-ocean. While it is interesting to hear from the other side occasionally, do not labor under the misconception that you will be able to present arguments that might sway us on our ways of thinking about the Middle East War. The arguments you present we have already heard, and have laboriously rejected over a long period of time.
Joshua, you came the closest you ever have on this blog to abandoning your ideological talking points and revealing your humanity when you wrote of “the sense of seige, the (perceived) need for self defense, and the great sense of bereavement many Israelis feel these days … ”
I think Helena misread you there didn’t she? You were not referring to Israeli feelings of bereavement with respect to Gaza, were you? Isn’t it a feeling of bereavement for what Israel has become? In spite of all the noble intentions, the “purity of arms”. In spite of wanting only a safe haven for persecuted Jews, in spite of all this. Yes, such sadness.
“We have sent the treasure that should have gone to our old age, to our failing health and capabilities, to our needy children — we have sent that off to a foreign country in pursuit a losing war.”>/i>
Indeed you’re right, “a losing war” for the benefit of Israel to be expanding more and more in the ME.
“I would like to take this time to list my own reasons for thanking and blessing Israel, our lone ally in the Middle East, for everything she has done for us, since I am quite sure most Americans are unaware of just what kind of friend she has been to us.
For extorting from me and my fellow Americans $4,000,000,000.00 a year for the last 4 decades, we bless thee.
For taking our most sophisticated weapons technology and stealing it for yourself without paying the American patent holders, we bless thee.
For taking that high-tech military technology and selling it to our enemies, such as the Russians and Chinese, thus further endangering us, we bless thee.”
http://crescentandcross.wordpress.com/2006/11/09/israel-we-bless-thee/