New York City and Tri-State News, Pages 36-37

Gaza Freedom Marchers, Dr. Mads Gilbert On Gaza During and After Israeli Assault

By Jane Adas

THREE participants in the Gaza Freedom March plus one spoke to a crowded hall in New York’s historic Judson Memorial Church in New York on Jan. 21. The sponsoring organizations, too numerous and varied to list, reflect the burgeoning Palestinian solidarity movement, inspiring attorney and panel chair Abdeen Jabara to describe the occasion as not only a report-back, but also a celebration.

The “plus one” was Fida Qishta, a journalist, filmmaker and educator from Rafah, Gaza. Her family home was one of 17,000 that Israel destroyed during its Operation Cast Lead assault on Gaza last year. Because Israel has not allowed building materials into Gaza, her family has been unable to rebuild. Qishta presumes this is because when Israel attacks Gaza again, it will not want to destroy the same houses twice. Her response to the routine accusation by Israel’s apologists that Palestinians teach their children to hate is, “Our children learn from experience and become older than their years. Children who saw parents and others killed in front of their eyes won’t forget.” When Qishta left Gaza in May for training in England, she thought she was saying goodbye to her family for two months, but she has been unable to return. “We don’t need food or clothing; we don’t want money,” she said. “We need to be free to come and go. We need to feel human. People in Gaza are like you—not from another planet.”

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, joined the Gaza Freedom march with his wife and two children, aged 19 and 21. When they were not able to get into Gaza, they decided to go to the West Bank. Ratner last visited Israel 50 years ago. This trip, he stated, made him an activist for Palestine.

The Ratners joined a nonviolent march of mostly young Israelis that began in West Jerusalem, where they were pelted with apples and water. When the marchers entered East Jerusalem, they were greeted with cheers and smiles. In the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, the Ratners met a Palestinian who had fled Haifa in 1948 and who, since 1956, has lived in one of the homes built by the United Nations for refugee families. Recently Israeli soldiers blew off the door of his home and Israeli settlers moved in. Once again he is living in a tent.

On a tour of East Jerusalem with Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, the Ratners stood on a hill overlooking a valley with Ma’ale Adumim in the near distance. There, Ratner said, the architecture of apartheid is visible. He saw roads that connect settlements but divide Palestinian bantustans, the wall that is grabbing 15 percent of the West Bank, the stumps of olive tree orchards, and in the center of the valley a new Israeli police station paid for by an American billionaire. Ma’ale Adumim is called a settlement but, Ratner said, it looks like Beverly Hills. Once you see this, he concluded, the two-state solution seems ridiculous. Ratner described what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank as a “horrific ongoing crime and the world is doing very little about it.” But he is optimistic that civil society can change the equation.

Jenna Bitar, an 18-year-old high school student, was the youngest freedom marcher. She is half Palestinian, but confided that it took Operation Cast Lead for her to become activated. When it became clear that Egypt would not allow the marchers into Gaza, Bitar realized that it didn’t matter because the goal was political: to call the world’s attention to what Israel is doing to Gaza. The experience taught Bitar how to be an activist, when and how far to push the Egyptian government. She also discovered camaraderie. When Bitar sat sobbing after the nonviolent marchers were met with the violent responses of Egyptian police, a stranger stopped to hug her.

Ali Abunimah agreed that the Gaza Freedom March was an incredible way to build solidarity and trust. Although not being allowed into Gaza was frustrating, he said, it was only a taste of what the one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza live every day. He described them as political prisoners in a place that is harder to get into than a maximum-security prison. Referring to a current news item that Egyptian police were blocking people from attending a rally for Palestinians, Abunimah noted that such demonstrations, at much greater personal risk than the internationals experienced, preceded and followed the Gaza Freedom March.

At Columbia University the following day, Abunimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, <http://electronicintifada.net>, and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (available from the AET Book Club), spoke in more detail about Operation Cast Lead. He examined Israel’s claim, much echoed by American politicians and media, that its assault on Gaza was in response to thousands of rockets. By Israel’s own account, from 2001 until now, some 8,000 rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza into southern Israel, killing a total of 24 people. Against these, Abunimah asked, what was Israel firing? He cited the 2007 Human Rights Watch report “Indiscriminate Fire,” which noted that in the 18 months following Israel’s September 2005 disengagement from Gaza, American-supplied Israeli weapons killed hundreds and injured thousands of Palestinians in Gaza. He estimated the payload of the 8,000 rockets fired from Gaza to be 12 tons over an eight-year period, compared to the 100 tons of high explosives Israel dropped on Gaza on the first day alone of Operation Cast Lead. “Earthquake Israel hit Gaza,” Abunimah stated.

Israeli bombing, Abunimah continued, targeted civilian infrastructure, which accounts for 84 percent of the damage, including police stations, the largest flour mill in Gaza, chicken farms, and the water infrastructure. Israel destroyed or damaged 48 percent of Gaza’s 122 health facilities; of its 641 schools, 18 were destroyed and 280 damaged. The human consequences and costs are harder to quantify, Abunimah acknowledged, but he observed that 20 percent of Gaza’s children suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome and nearly 90 percent show some of its symptoms. Israel, he noted, pays to treat its Jewish citizens’ pets traumatized by distant bombing but, having systematically terrorized Palestinians in Gaza, continues its blockade, thus isolating and depriving these human beings of the help they need.

Rather than being a response to rockets fired from Gaza, Abunimah cited two factors behind Israel’s assault on Gaza. The medium-term goal, he said, is overtly political: regime change to reverse the 2006 democratic Palestinian parliamentary elections won by Hamas, which, he maintained, represents to the U.S. and Israel resistance to Israel’s occupation. After the cutting off of international aid and the U.S.-sponsored effort to overthrow Hamas failed, Abunimah explained, Cast Lead was meant to be the knockout blow to allow the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority to resume control of Gaza. Abunimah believes the long-term goal that began with Israel’s disengagement to be demographic: subtracting 1.5 million Palestinians from the area Israel overtly controls in order to maintain a Jewish majority there.

As for the peace process and President Barack Obama’s recent statement that both sides need to make bold moves, Abunimah asked what that would be for Palestinians—to demolish their own homes? He expressed little confidence in Obama’s silence or special envoy George Mitchell’s travels, but was certain that the exposure of the true face of Israel will shake its legitimacy—and without moral or political legitimacy, Abunimah concluded, Israel can only rely on walls, fences, and force.

Dr. Mads Gilbert in Princeton

At a Feb. 4 presentation sponsored by the Princeton Middle East Society, Dr. Mads Gilbert told of someone who had changed his life, a boy named Khalid. Gilbert, an anesthesiologist, teacher, and specialist in emergency medicine, has for nearly three decades participated in Norwegian Aid Committee’s medical missions to conflict areas, such as Angola. In 1981 he went to Lebanon, where he met Khalid, who lived in the Sabra refugee camp in West Beirut. Gilbert showed his audience two photos of Khalid. In one, taken shortly after an Israeli F-16 bombed the camp, killing his mother, Khalid’s mangled arm has just been amputated. Now an orphan, he sits slumped next to a small plastic bag containing all his belongings. In the second photo, taken a week later, Khalid himself is dressing his stump. Khalid not only took control of his own situation, but also tended to other patients and sang to lift their spirits. For Gilbert, the two photos represent the balance between suffering and struggle, a symbol of the dignity and strength of the Palestinian people. Khalid made him realize that people who have been bombed don’t need pity; they need solidarity.

Over the past five years, Dr. Gilbert has worked in Gaza as a teaching affiliate at Al Quds Hospital. His hometown, Tromsø, two hours into the Arctic Circle, is twinned with Gaza City, a project he recommended Princeton explore. Gilbert’s many visits made him well aware that Israel’s blockade of Gaza had brought an imprisoned population of mostly refugees to the breaking point. For example, Gilbert reported, Gaza has the lowest per capita water consumption in the world and is being made into a desert. The effect is visible from a stunning satellite photo: Israel all vivid greens and browns; Gaza entirely bleached out.

So when Gilbert, home with his family celebrating Christmas in 2008, learned of the onset of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, he immediately contacted his medical colleagues in Gaza offering to bring an emergency medical team—not because Gaza lacks skilled doctors, he explained, but for solidarity, so Palestinians would not feel abandoned. It took only 10 minutes for the director of the University Hospital of North Norway to give him permission to go with full pay, and the team had the complete support of the Norwegian government and people. This was only possible, he noted, due to 30 years of solidarity work within Norway, a country that used to be the most pro-Israel in Europe.

By New Year’s Day 2009, Gilbert and his colleague Dr. Erik Fosse, a cardiac surgeon, were at work in Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, where Gaza’s minister of health had sent them. After 12 days, a second Norwegian team replaced them. In an attempt to impose a news blackout, Israel had refused to allow reporters into Gaza during Cast Lead and disparaged local reporters as untrustworthy. What, then, Gilbert asked, were they to do with these two blond Norwegians who gave scores of satellite interviews to anybody who asked? Even Fox News interviewed Gilbert. He described the reporting as fair enough, but the headline labeled him “an apologist for Hamas.”

Gilbert returned to Gaza in August to revisit some of his patients, especially the children. He found many of them living in tents with no safe water, no functioning sewage system, inadequate food, and bombed-out schools. Even before Operation Cast Lead, a 2008 study found that three of four children in Gaza had experienced extreme trauma. The most important way to help them, Gilbert maintained, is to rebuild their homes and schools. The international community has committed $5.4 billion to rebuild Gaza, but Israel will not allow the necessary materials in. Given this situation of manmade poverty and starvation, Gilbert believes Israel is on the edge of moral implosion, in which the U.S. is complicit.

He and Fosse have written about their experiences in Eyes in Gaza, which will be available in English in May. In the book and through their presentations, they tell what happened during their time at Shifa Hospital through the narratives of patients and their families, which, Gilbert said, are quite different from the “polished version of reality” given to Americans.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York City metropolitan area.