Op-Ed
Speaking With Their Feet
Email: 
Share: 
Brutal Honesty
November 6, 2006 - 1:00amResponding to “rocket fire” originating in Gaza, the Israeli army has shelled and bombed it for the past 14 months. Since June, it has killed over 300. On Wednesday, the town of Beit Hanoun was the site of a very illustrative chapter in the offensive.
Armed Palestinians — BBC says 15; The New York Times says 60 — hid from the Israelis in the Um al-Nasir mosque. The two armed groups exchanged fire, and eventually an Israeli bulldozer tore down one wall of the mosque. During the standoff, Hamas radio broadcasted the location of the mosque and asked local women to stand outside it. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Haniyeh called them “human shields.”
Hundreds of women responded. They brought female attire, entered the mosque and dressed the men, while others gathered outside. Though unarmed men are visible between them, Israel claims that eight “gunmen” were in the crowd, and it shot at the women. According to the women, all the men escaped uninjured, but Israeli spokesperson Avital Leibovich says, “Unfortunately, because the militants shot at our forces, sometimes we had to respond.” Video (grainy on YouTube, see for yourself) does not indicate that anyone in the crowd of women had guns. In addition, clearer video and eyewitness reports indicate that no one in the crowd of women was armed.
Middle-aged women Ibtisam Masoud and Rawda Khelah were shot and killed by Israelis outside the mosque. We could argue whether they were technically civilians or combatants. What’s absolutely clear, instead, is the sentiment behind one of the middle-aged survivor’s words. “We risked our lives to free our sons,” Um Mohammed told Agence France-Presse.
Survivior Nahed Abou Harbiya told the BBC Arabic Service, “All the women headed to the mosque to get the Palestinian resistance men ... But the Israeli occupation forces were firing heavily at us with their machine guns and also threw stun grenades at us … We entered the mosque and indeed we got all the resistance men out and put female attire on them so that the Israeli occupation forces wouldn’t arrest them,” she said.
Speaking with their bodies, hundreds of women in Gaza stood between “Palestinian resistance men” and the Israeli army. These women stared at flash grenades and into gun barrels, knowing full well that the chance of death was great. Their reasons for doing so are clear in their descriptions: they call those in the mosque “resistance men” and “our sons,” instead of the New York Times’ “gunmen” and “militants.” Harbiya owns her actions and expresses her role in the escape, saying “indeed, we got all the resistance men out.” She, and the hundreds with her, was obviously in support of whoever was inside the mosque, so full of support that she risked her life to protect them and aid in their flight.
Describing the men not as terrorists, not as anti-Semites, and not as radicals, Um Mohammed calls the men Israel tried to kill “our sons.” Acting as mother to shield her children, she says, was the goal. We should be overwhelmed by the willingness of hundreds of women to “risk our lives to free our sons.”
Yet it is hardly difficult to understand why these middle-aged women would stand in front of tanks, bulldozers, grenades, sniper rifles and uzis. What kind of suffering could be so heinous and so horrific that these women would risk their lives to aid the “resistance men?”
Looking backward, we know Israel’s assault on Gaza began almost immediately after it abandoned the area last year. It fired shells into Gaza — tens of thousands of them. Cannonballs rained for months and months, with 2,000 in the first two weeks of April alone. Then on June 10, one of them landed at a beach in Gaza and killed all 7 members of Huda Ghalya’s family. Most of the world stared in horror at the image of her in tears, surrounded by the body parts of her family. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz apologized for the “accident,” then retracted his apology and claimed the shell was not Israeli, though the Ghalya family’s injuries indicate it was. Israel’s shells are, in fact, far more dangerous than what Israel claims demands its invasion of Gaza: Hamas’ small, highly inaccurate quassam rockets fired from that region.
Then, there’s also a good chance one of the women outside the mosque had a miscarriage. Since withdrawal, Israel has routinely flown its American-made and financed fighter jets over Gaza at supersonic speed, shattering windows, triggering spontaneous abortions, frightening children and attacking the psychology of a million people. Last year, the head of the U.N. Development Programme in Gaza, Khaled Abdul Shafi, “urg[ed Israel] to stop ... the sonic booming and the air raids immediately, because we simply think that this is a violation of basic human rights, especially rights of children to live in peace and to be educated in peace.”
Appealing to the Israeli High Court in November, 2005, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, citing international law, argued that “the booms are collective punishment against the civilian population and thus illegal.” The Court has yet to rule, though another petition was submitted in July when the current siege began and Israel bombed power plants and tore up crop fields and roads as part of what P.M. Olmert claimed was “necessary” to find captured soldier Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Though Shalit’s father urged Olmert to accept Hamas’ terms for a prisoner exchange (the release of its women and children from Israeli prisons), Olmert refused, and his country’s assault on Gaza has radicalized women like Um Mohammed, who now describes the armed men inside the mosque as her sons.
What’s happening to Gazans shocks the conscience, and explains why hundreds of women would risk their lives to shield 15 men resisting it. The women at the Um al-Nasir mosque expressed collective ownership of the Hamas “resistance men” and their struggle, risking their lives to prevent Israel from capturing them. In Gaza, it’s obvious how Israel creates enemies, some willing to die to oppose it.
Jeff Purcell is a graduate student in Africana Studies. He can be reached at jlp56@cornell.edu. Brutal Honesty appears Mondays.
This "rocket fire" you
This "rocket fire" you mention in passing at the beginning of your "column" is very real. These "resistance fighters" have been shelling the nearby Israeli towns of Ashkelon and Sderot since the Israelis pulled out of Gaza last year. These towns are in Israel proper and were never part of any "occupied" territory, so what reason could these "resistance" fighters have for constantly bombarding them with rockets?
Maybe in your next column you could maybe devote a full sentence as to why this "rocket fire" is justified, or gasp, dare I say, condemn it as the horrific act that it is?
Jeff Purcel on 'Speaking with their feet'
Thank you for a very uplifting write up about the women in Gaza. While most of the media in the U.S. refer to these young men as gunmen, militants and sometimes terrorists, you refer to them rightly as resistance men. The men and women of Gaza and the nearby refugee camps are resisting a terrible and humiliating occupation of 38 years by Israel.
The individuals that resisted occupation in France and Poland and other countries during the Nazi occupation during the 2nd World War were honored as heroes.
The silence of the U.S. government, congress and the media only encourages the Israel government to carry on with its barbaric actions against the Palestinians. In fact, morally they become partners in these ongoing crimes.
I pray that you will be able to withstand the expected verbal attacks by rabid supporters of Israel and may you continue to have the strength to stand for what you think is right.
Please Jeff
If the Israelis wanted to inflict suffering on Gaza, they would carpet bomb the area, in response to the rocket fire (you see, it doesn't even need scare quotes) that comes from Gaza on a regular basis.
But Israel doesn't, because it has one of the most humane armies on this planet (if it didn't, Gaza and the West Bank would be glass by now.)
And that is why the women served as human shields in Gaza -- because they thought that Israel wouldn't fire upon them, so they could rescue their terrorist relatives. But it is not Israel that creates this mentality. It is the culture of death and hatred of Jews that has been fostered by Palestinians over the past decades, even through the sham Trojan Horse peace process, trading land and control for spurious promises.
This is a war, and by voluntarily standing as self-described "human shields," they place themselves firmly in the military theatre. And at that point, they cede their civilian status.
It's easy to blame everything on Israel, but you only have to ask why after Israel disengaged from Gaza, "rocket fire" still emanated from the border. The Palestinian leadership in Gaza are malcontents, and they have a reason to be. Instead of building a civilized society, they have embezzled money from their people, and have kept their constituents in perpetual poverty, so as to firmly enroot the seeds of irrational hatred. Perhaps, Jeff, you can talk about that in your next column. But why would you want to explore anything besides the blindingly superficial?
Nadim, you are as
Nadim, you are as misinformed as Jeff Purcell.
"While most of the media in the U.S. refer to these young men as gunmen, militants and sometimes terrorists, you refer to them rightly as resistance men."
What are they resisting? Israel withdrew from Gaza and expelled its own citizens last August, leaving the Palestinians in complete control of the strip. How can you call firing rockets into undisputed Israeli territory "resistance"? It is not resistance, it is terrorism. Any IDF action brought upon Beit Hanoun was a direct result of this continued rocket fire.
"The men and women of Gaza and the nearby refugee camps are resisting a terrible and humiliating occupation of 38 years by Israel."
Why are there still refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank after 38 years of "occupation"? These "refugees" are descendants of the Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel during the 1948 war, mostly at the urging of their Arab neighbors. They should be living in permanent settlements by now. Instead, the corrupt Palestinian leaders, formerly lead by the extremely corrupt Arafat, decided to buy weapons to "resist the occupation" (and also keep a lot for themselves), rather than build permanent homes for their people.
You and everyone else it seems has forgotten that most Jews in Arab countries were forced out after 1948 and fled to Israel. Are they living in refugee camps today? No. They were integrated into Israel as citizens. This ever-extending "refugee" status is a construction by the Palestinian and other Arab leaders to maintain a false grievance against Israel. After all, if you are happy and your society is prospering, there would be no reason to go blow yourself up.
Jeff fancies himself a
Jeff fancies himself a progressive and smugly awards himself full marks for his views on the following: women's rights, freedom of religion, non-racism, and homosexual rights. He also digs Hamas.
Here are some facts about Hamas:
1. Hamas calls explicitly for destruction of Israel and the cleansing of all Jews from the Middle East. It has NEVER pretended to support a two state solution.
2. Quotes approvingly from the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in its founding charter.
3. Actively persecutes and tortures homosexuals, as did Fatah when it ran the Palestinian Authority. Homosexuals routinely flee to Israel.
4. Uses children (occasionally retarded children) as human bombs to slaughter civilians with bombs packed with nails for maximum carnage. In recent times those nails have been smeared with rat poison to stop the blood from coagulating.
5. Uses, as Jeff's article demonstrates, non-combatants (i.e. woman and children) as human shields. Which is to say, Hamas not only targets "enemy" women and children, but routinely hides among in its own women and children, safe in the knowledge that some of them will be killed and maimed and that well-meaning but confused teenage radicals in expensive western universities will blame the beastly Zionist oppressors. Far from being embarrassed by this particular crime against humanity (explicitly condemned by the Geneva Convention), Jeffrey positively wets himself with approval, albeit from a safe distance.
6. Has a user friendly children's website. In 2004, HamasKidz dot com featured a photograph of a popular female children's television star who'd recently detonated herself at a Jerusalem bus stop. After the detonation. After her head had been separated from her body.
7. Boasts among its most popular adherents a female Member of Parliament who is in the process of breeding human bombs. Two of her sons have detonated themselves among unarmed civilians ("they blow up so fast, these days!"), and she dearly hopes the others will follow suit as soon as they've completed their midterms. She was elected by a landslide.
8. Finally, Hamas expresses unqualified support for the equal rights of women and religious minorities. Just kidding. It doesn't.
Here's a little quiz for Jeff. Which is the only country in the middle east in which Arabs are freely elected to a sovereign parliament, the rights of homosexuals are protected, the rights of women are protected, freedom of (and from) worship is protected? Hint: it's not Yemen.
If Jeff puts down his Chomsky Reader and thinks *really* hard, it's gonna dawn on him that the principles that (he flatters himself) motivated him to be a teenage subversive - women's rights, gay rights, workers' rights, freedom of speech and religion etc. - have been flushed down the toilet in favor of a shoddy Manichean master-narrative that privileges all "resistance" to western liberal democracy, even if that resistance calls unashamedly for the murder of Jews and the establishment of fundamentalist theocracy, with all its attendant horrors.
Speaking of Hamas' beloved tactic of "suicide bombing," Martin Amis addresses the moral confusion of chaps like Jeff:
"Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion ... Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason."
Personally, I admire Jeffrey's chutzpah, the way he smugly exudes unctuous moral superiority while identifying himself as a Hamas fellow-traveller, nay, as a Hamas-groupie. I'm a fan. God bless you, Jeff.
Yours,
Anthony
How do you defend a female
How do you defend a female homicide bomber who not only kills herself but tries to inflict as much death and carnage as possible? In your words, such actions "shocks the conscience."
Great comment!
Anthony, brilliant comment. You said eloquently everything I would have liked to say. It's refreshing to get some critical thinking around here.