Now that the Israeli army has most recently been occupied in dealing out death and demolition--retail--in Gaza much like it did in Jenin a couple of years ago, comparisons with the remarkably similar (and getting more similar every day) U. S. occupation of Iraq are inevitable. But since it is terrifically difficult for CPT to get inside Gaza these days, in order to put in words what is happening there, I have had to first imagine--inspired by videoed news images and reports via Arabic, western, and Israeli news sources, as well as the internet-- how ominous and menacing the explosive filled days and nights must be for everyone involved: 1) the tens of thousands of furious frightened Palestinians crowded inside the teeming overcrowded and slowly being circumscribed Rafah refugee camp, and 2) the seven to eight thousand or so equally furious adamantly defiant Israeli settler/squatter/intruders living in Gaza territory, none of whom know whether or not he or she or the children may be the next to be murdered.
Sitting on the other side of an ideological divide, these Israelis are determined to remain entrenched atop prime Gazan real estate in their ticky-tacky subsidized dwellings-that-Sharon-built and, which, now in an historic about face he is seriously proposing to abandon. Where the settlers are concerned, it's hard for them these days to tell--from their point of view--the good guys from the bad guys. (Is there--because of settler outrage--a potentially gruesome similarity between the last days of Yitzhak Rabin and one of the days ahead for Ariel Sharon? Or was the political outlet Sharon gave his followers to express their political will in the form of the Likud party disengagement referendum enough to insure that--unlike Rabin-- whatever happens in the waning months of his government, Ariel Sharon, at least, will die in bed and not at the hands of a fellow Israeli?)
Meanwhile, as a result of the terrible repressive facts on the ground, the metaphor that comes to mind most readily to express the innermost circle of hell that has become Gaza--especially for the Palestinians--is to equate the rising tide of blood and home demolitions there with the made-in-U. S. A. nouveau-hell that has been imposed on Iraq.
Here's what I mean.
With attention in the U. S. fixed on the escalating carnage mutually perpetrated and perpetuated on the one hand by the persistent Iraqi armed resistance to the U.S inspired occupation of Iraq and on the other by the diminishing Coalition of the Willing (which opposition candidate Kerry has vowed to at least not reduce any further with respect to U. S. troop strength there and which, therefore, makes him a kind of occupation fellow traveler), I had for quite some time been describing occupation butchery and incarcerations in Iraq somewhat facetiously--but nevertheless accurately--as "Gaza East." But then those recent stories concerning the tortures and even murders, which reportedly took place inside a U. S. military prison in Baghdad and elsewhere, got me thinking that I had it backwards and that all along I should have been calling Gaza "Iraq West."
But then for a time last week it seemed that I had been right the first time: the Israeli army's currently murderous destructive Rafah operation made the U. S. violence in Iraq seem to be--relatively speaking--a reflection of what Israel has been doing for several years in Gaza. So it was back to referring to Iraq as "Gaza East." But then came the killing-field atrocity in northern Iraq, where a wedding party was decimated by the occupation. So once again it seemed to be relevant to be talking about Gaza as "Iraq West."
Now with U. S. and Israeli occupational practices so remarkably and transparently similar, some assessors have begun looking back in order to figure out who first learned what from whom and when; or, putting it another way: which came first the chicken or the egg? For instance, the fashion for a while has been to claim that Israel's military has played a mentoring role to the U. S. in dealing with urban resistance. Stories still circulate that prior to the invasion of Iraq the U. S. sent Special Forces personnel to observe first hand the way the Israeli army handled the Palestinian uprising especially in and around Jenin.
But I think that this is letting off the hook the folks who brought you My Lai, the School of the Americas, Guantanamo Bay, and who disingenuously included the Al Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad on the list of the very first sites to be targeted for destruction. It gives U. S. military professionals less credit for grim originality and sadistic professional expertise when it comes to torture and other forms of prisoner abuse than they deserve. The best one can say about Jenin and other killing venues during the second uprising in the West Bank is that what the Israelis taught our boys and girls in uniform was more in the form of a refresher course than actually tutoring them in innovative techniques in violent mass repression and suppression.
Meanwhile Palestinian reaction to the Iraq torture stories has been invariably different from the how-can-this-be-astonishment of so many Americans. That's because where most Palestinian male adults, older youth, and also too many Palestinian women are concerned, when it comes to being on the receiving end of arbitrary detentions and the cruel and inhuman treatment that invariably accompanies that in prisons run by some so-called democracies, they've been there and done that.
Detention without charges and the niceties of due process, which are supposed to prevent extra judicial torture and lesser punishments, but does not, is the name of the game in the current shameful holier than thou neo-democratic wolf in sheep's clothing post-totalitarian environment in which we now are being obliged to live. It comes to the world courtesy of a radicalized Israel and the radical American right; and Palestinians have been sensitive to this awful truth for a long long time.
This new but old as the hills condition ignores boundaries of conscience in the form of internationally agreed to conventions with respect to occupation and incarceration practices and instead seems to be hell bent on systematically eliminating all restraints on coercive violence. And that is why Palestinians scoff bitterly when they hear or read about Israelis who describe their army as the "most moral in the world." Palestinians are also among the first to point sadly to an immoral (or at least amoral) equivalent to that description, which has been revived in the U. S. to describe its military. It is an old canard that portrays U. S. men and women involved in the ongoing occupation of Iraq as "freedom fighters."
So these days when it comes to assessing the use and abuses of military coercion by both Israel and the United States, it really doesn't matter which comes first, the chicken or the egg, when both the chicken and the egg are diseased and/or rotten.