A short movie and a good book

Check out the great short movie made by ‘Waltz with Bashir’ animator Yoni Goodman about the situation of civilians in Gaza during the recent war. One thing that people working with the many international relief organizations here in Israel/Palestine note is that it is almost unprecedented for the civilian population of a war zone to be prevented from leaving it, as just about all of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians were during the recent war.
AP’s been doing some good coverage from Palestine this week. This story has a bit of background about the movie.
At a broader level, I’ve been reading Jonathan Cook’s remarkable latest book Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair which pulls together the whole history of the Zionist movement in Palestine, showing the continuity of the Zionists’ efforts– right until the present day– to try to empty Palestine of its indigenous residents. One important point he makes is that the deliberate inculcation of despair amongst Palestinians is a big part of this plan, with the goal being that the despairing Palestinians will eventually abandon their long commitment to their native land and just up and leave it.
The short text on the book’s back cover that summarizes the book’s argument includes this:

[Israel] has industrialized Palestinian despair through the ever more sophisticated systems of checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. It has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative ‘defence’ industry by pioneering the technologies needed for crowd control, surveillance, collective punishment and urban warfare.

I don’t know if Jonathan wrote that text himself. I suspect he did. But I find it an extremely astute description of the situation.
I’m about three chapters into the book, which seems really well done. Jonathan is a pioneering and steadfast British writer who’s lived in and reported from Nazareth in northern Israel for several years now. On his website he writes,

I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ – a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.
Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.
From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism’s appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.

Update 3:10 a.m. EST Christiane also recommends this excellent French-language graphic-art report on Gaza. (I think one of the Swiss socialist MPs mentioned there is the son of Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the ICRC… Anyway, many Swiss people understand a lot about international humanitarian law.)