The geography of occupation

This has never been a war of equals. It is war between an occupier and an occupied people. The demonisation of Palestine – Gaza in particular – has distorted many people’s understanding of the human and physical geography of Israel-Palestine. Gazan protections are further, systematically discounted by confusing ‘Gaza’ with ‘Hamas’.

Israel and Gaza both deeply enmesh military and civilian space. The government of Israel has long justified its aggressive force-protection stance by labelling its army as civilians in uniform. One distinct project of the occupation has been to normalise its geography – to civilianise space that is occupied and therefore not Israel’s. Every settlement has been built on occupied land. Towns feign normality within sight of the blockade walls around Gaza.

Within sight: I remember some Sederot residents watching the bombing of Gaza in 2014. Watching it, eating popcorn. Their behaviour made me sick. It is not easy for me to remember that the most debased civilian is still a civilian.

The Israeli performance of permanent, normal, civilian life was always predicated upon an oppressed, abnormal, militarised life right next door. Pictures of Gaza in darkness are backlit by the bright lights of Israeli towns. From Gaza with its perpetual water deprivation one can see the irrigated, verdant fields of Israel. Israel told itself that Palestinians were out of sight, out of mind – but one million Gazan children have been born behind Israel’s blockade wall, and they have been seeing their occupier every day of their lives.

It was always hard to believe that Israel and Gaza coexisted at the same time, in so very nearly the same space – but they do. Because of that proximity, when Hamas fighters broke through the blockade fence they walked not only onto Israeli territory but into towns.

This faux-civilian configuration was always doomed because the occupation must end. Occupation and apartheid have never, will never make anyone safe. I feel such anger at the myth Israelis have told and Zionists have retold, urging people to bring their children to settle these military spaces. Israel built walls to hide the truth, and sent its armed youth to maintain the fiction at the expense of Palestinians.

Living in Gaza with family in Israel, I turned to the universal concepts of human rights to live with my ceaseless fears for my Gazan colleagues and my irrational but persistent, loving concern for my family. I still believe that the world is better off with those agreed standards of universal rights and civilian protections. Where they have been violated, those violations are not ‘just what happens in war’. Provocations and aspirations not withstanding, those acts are wrong.

I do not condemn this uprising. Occupied people have a legal right to armed resistance. No other path has worked, and Palestinian life has become intolerable. It is not a crime to break through that wall – only the fiction of occupation could pretend that it would not happen – but where war has degenerated into the abuse, killing or kidnapping of civilians, those are crimes. So are the bombings of Gazan apartment buildings and the confinement of two million people behind that wretched, loathsome blockade wall.

If human beings are equal and our rights are universal then all the violations are wrong. I call for the protection of Gazan civilians by calling for the protection of all civilians.

Netanyahu has issued a delusional instruction for Gaza to ‘leave now’ before he turns his chosen parts of Gaza to rubble, a deserted island. Leave how, to where?

He has stated it. He has begun. He has cut electricity, fuel and food supplies to a trapped population. I take him at his word. These are massive crimes that can still be prevented.

States cannot stand by while this grows and deteriorates even further. Stop this. Step in, stop it now. Terrible things are unfolding. Please, stop them. Help to wrench this onto a real, credible path toward justice and safety for all who live between the river and the sea.

Marilyn Garson

Fred Albert