The Right to a Little Human Compassion
by Aisha Gawad
Yesterday, Israel declared a ceasefire to its three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip. Soon, photos of collapsed buildings and dead bodies will stop appearing on the front page of newspapers. CNN will no longer stream live videos of bombs falling from Israeli planes, engulfing Gaza in flames. No more crises, no more news. Once the 1,300 dead Palestinians have been put in the ground, the story will go to rest with them.
This was not the first grossly disproportionate offensive Israel has launched against the Palestinians, and it won't be the last. But now that the violence appears to be dying down, the most important story of all is yet to emerge. What happens in Gaza now that so many lives have been lost, and thousands left homeless, without running water, electricity or supplies needed to rebuild their lives? What is perhaps the bigger humanitarian problem in this situation is not the three weeks of violence, but the huge neglect of the Palestinian people and their plight before and after the Israeli offensive. It is because the Palestinians are systematically ignored by the international community that Israel is able to commit such atrocities without reprimand. The most urgent humanitarian need of the Palestinian people is understanding, the sense that the international community cares about what happens to them, the feeling that the death of one Palestinian child is worth the same as the death of one Israeli child. The Palestinians are only a mystery so long as we refuse to learn about them, to at least attempt to understand their point of view. And this, in the long run, is what the conflict as a whole needs if we are ever going to see a resolution.
Most people paying attention to American media, for example, over the past three weeks will know that Israel says its incursion into Gaza was a direct reaction to increased rocket fire by Hamas into Israeli territory. The stated purpose of the military campaign was to destroy Hamas, both militarily and politically, to in effect remove Hamas from power in the Gaza Strip, which it has controlled since June 2007. But would it color Israel's claim if American audiences knew that Hamas was it its politically weakest point before the fighting began? According to a poll conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, the Palestinian people were beginning to reject Hamas on their own, preferring its rival, the secular Fatah movement, currently in control of the West Bank. If an election were held at the time of the poll, conducted December 3-5, Hamas would receive 29 percent of the vote compared to 43 percent for Fatah. The Palestinian people were angry at Hamas for rejecting Egyptian attempts to renew a previous ceasefire agreement with Israel, and the fact that the quality of life of the people had only continued to deteriorate despite Hamas promises to improve it. The borders between Gaza and Israel and Gaza and Egypt remained sealed for months due to Hamas behavior, and the Palestinians sorely needed supplies from the outside.
Hamas was actually at its weakest point politically at the time of the first Israeli bombing. If Israel really wanted Hamas out, it should have let it self-destruct on its own. The Gaza Strip is not populated by 1.5 million Islamic fundamentalists. It is populated by men and women just trying to scrap by a life for their children, by students dreaming of their escape to a better world. They want stability and safety, something Hamas failed to provide them with.
But now, not only did Israel fail to stop the rocket fire, it actually also bolstered Hamas' popular appeal among the people. And it killed more than 1,300 people in the process, over 40 percent of who were women and children, according to the United Nations. The Palestinians were already living in a permanent crisis, and now that Israel has intensified their suffering a hundred times over, anger will begin to take over, and anger will turn the people back to Hamas who offers them the most satisfyingly vitriolic rhetoric against Israel. They are mere words, but that is all a devastated people feels it has to comfort them in the aftermath of disaster, and so they will run back to Hamas just to say they support the enemy of Israel.
Now that Hamas will inevitably bounce back in Gaza, we as an international community cannot continue to ignore the Gazans. If we do, it will only be a matter of months or perhaps a year before we witness the same sort of atrocities on our television screens. We need to acknowledge that even in times of relative quiet, the Gazans are still living in desperate conditions and are in even more desperate need for an option other than politically isolated Hamas. It is our humanitarian duty, no matter where we stand on the Israel-Palestine conflict, to support their desire for a better life, and to help them know that Hamas is not the only one who understands their pain.
