Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a security meeting with senior Israeli
Defense Forces commanders near Gaza on July 21, 2014. (photo: Israel government
photo)
Gaza:
Living and Dying With Drones
By Ann Wright, Consortium
News
10 July 16
While U.S. political leaders claim to uphold universal human
rights, nearly all are selective in sympathizing with Israel in its lopsided
war against the Palestinians as reflected in the 2014 slaughter in Gaza,
recalls Ann Wright.
Two
years ago, on July 7, 2014, the Israeli government launched a horrific 51-day
air, land and sea attack on the people of Gaza. Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) fired missiles, rockets, artillery and tank shells relentlessly on 1.8
million Palestinians squashed by Israeli land and sea blockades into a narrow
strip 25 miles long and 5 miles wide, one of the most densely populated places
in the world.
Of the
2,219 or so Palestinians killed (estimates vary), some 1,545 were civilians and
nearly 500 of them were slaughtered by Israeli assassin drones, a style of
warfare that has become the norm for both the United States and Israel. Drones fly
above Gaza 24 hours a day watching the movements of every Palestinian and ready
to fire rockets at those chosen to die by the Israeli Defense Force and its
political masters.
This
pattern goes back well before 2014. Al Mezan Center for Human Rights documents that, from
2008 until October 2013, out of 2,269 Palestinians killed by Israel, 911 were
killed by drones, most during the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead. In the 2012
Operation Pillar of Defense, 143 out of 171 Palestinians killed by Israel
were by drone attack.
In the
2014 Israeli attack on Gaza, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights documents 497 Palestinian civilians killed
by drones. At the end of the 51 days, besides the 2,219 overall death toll,
1,545 were civilians, including 556 children. Among the 10,600 or so wounded
were 2,647 children, according to the Mezan Center.
There
was devastation, too, to Gaza’s infrastructure. The Mezan Center listed 8,381
houses destroyed and more than 23,000 damaged. The devastation extended to
schools (138 damaged or destroyed) and hospitals and health facilities (26
damaged). According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), over 273,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had
been displaced of whom 236,375 (over 11 percent of the Gazan population) were
taking shelter in 88 United Nations schools.
On the
other side, Palestinian militias shot homemade rockets killing 66 Israeli
soldiers, five Israeli civilians, including one child, and one Thai citizen in
Israel.
The
51-day Israeli attack on Gaza should not be characterized as a war between
opposing forces but rather as a massive one-sided attack on Palestinians made
at the choosing of Israel with its overwhelming military air, sea and land
forces backed up with endless military supplies and equipment from the United States,
including the missile system called the “Iron Dome.”
Now
two years after the Israeli attack on Gaza, the tensions in the West Bank are
exploding. Beginning in October 2015, a few West Bank Palestinian youth have
forsaken non-violent confrontation with Israeli military and have taken up
knives instead of rocks in the latest intifada against Israeli occupation and
oppression, against the continued building of illegal settlements on
Palestinian lands and against the imprisonment of hundreds of Palestinian
youth.
The
use of knives against IDF soldiers has expanded to deaths of Israeli civilians
as well, including a 13-year-old girl in her home. Thirty-four Israelis, two
U.S. citizens, an Eritrean and a Sudanese have been killed in the knife, gun or
car ramming attacks. Meanwhile, 214 Palestinians have been killed by IDF
soldiers during this period.
The
potential for Israeli response/revenge to these knife attacks is great and
would probably not be directed to just the West Bank but also toward Gaza.
As with
other conflicts, the stories of death and of survival of civilians trapped in
merciless bombings and fighting should compel leaders to work to end conflicts,
but seldom do.
Drones
at Dinner
A new
book, published on July 5, chronicles the 2014 IDF attack on Gaza and focuses
on the psychological and physical destruction suffered by the people of Gaza by
one particular weapon system — the assassin drone that killed 497 civilians
during the 2014 attack.
Palestinian
writer Atef Abu Saif recounts the day-by-day life of a family and a community
under fire from an enemy in the sky, beginning on July 7, 2014. The book
entitled Drone Eats With Me — A Gaza Diary is
a graphic description of life under fire and particularly with the assassin
drone lurking in the sky 24 hours a day waiting for its next victim.
“The
drone keeps us company all night long. It’s whirring, whirring, whirring,
whirring is incessant — as if it wants to remind us it’s there, it’s not going
anywhere. It hangs just a little way above our heads.”
After
the drone crosses off another victim, “the noise of this new explosion subsides
it’s replaced by the inevitable whir of a drone, sounding so close it could be
right beside us. It’s like it wants to join us for the evening and has pulled
up an invisible chair.”
Atef
describes his life during the 51-day attack: “Our fates are all in the hands of
a drone operator in a military base somewhere just over the Israeli border. The
operator looks at Gaza the way an unruly boy looks at the screen of a video
game. He presses a button and might destroy an entire street. He might decide
to terminate the life of someone walking along the pavement, or he might uproot
a tree in an orchard that hasn’t yet borne fruit. The operator practices his
aim at his own discretion, energized by the trust and power that has been put
in his hands by his superiors.”
Atef
says many entities known and unknown join his family at mealtime: “The food is
ready. I wake the children and bring them in. We all sit around five dishes:
white cheese, hummus, orange jam, yellow cheese, and olives.
“Darkness
eats with us.
“Fear
and anxiety eat with us.
“The
unknown eats with us.
“The
F16 eats with us.
“The
drone, and its operator somewhere out in Israel, eats with us.
“Our
hands shiver, our eyes stare at the plates on the floor.”
While
the Israeli drone eats with the families in Gaza, U.S. drones eat with the
families in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Libya.
Ann
Wright served 29 years in the US Army and retired as a Colonel. She also served
as a US diplomat for 16 years and resigned in March 2003 in opposition to
President Bush’s war on Iraq. She is a coordinator for the US campaign for the
Women’s Boat to Gaza. She is the co-author of Dissent:
Voices of Conscience.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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