HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014
14 August 2014
Message from Jonathan Chadwick to Theatre for Everybody:
Dear Hossam and Jamal,
I am thinking about you and wondering how you are. How are your families? What is life there like during the truce? How are people coping?
When they announced the extension of the truce to a 5-day ceasefire, I had two reactions at the same time.
One was a sense of immediate short term hope: the bombing may stop, you may have a period of peace to recuperate, you may have more time to spend with friends and family, maybe we can talk on skype, maybe Yara and I can do a guitar exchange skype, I am thinking of a song I would like to teach her! Maybe life can return to normal!
The other was a sense of foreboding and sadness. What does normal mean? Will things return to blockade and siege? Won’t things be worse? Haven’t the Israelis destroyed schools, homes, hospitals, factories, roads, power stations, sanitation, water supply networks? Haven’t they devastated whole townships? Haven’t the people of Gaza been squeezed into a smaller area? But most importantly they have massacred and wounded thousands of people. And they have, through the calculated arbitrary nature of the attacks, terrorised (I wont use the word traumatised) a whole population
What does the extension of the ceasefire really mean?
We’ve already talked, in our conversations about our War and Peace project, about the fact that in the current situation in Palestine ‘Peace’ is used as another means of waging ‘War’.
In the media they try to put across the idea that the ‘War’ has been between Hamas and the Israelis. This is a lie. It isn’t a war. It is an attempt by the occupying power to destroy the population of the country they are occupying. Anyway, the negotiations in Cairo are being conducted with the Palestinian delegation representing the unified leadership of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories.
I don’t want the bombing to start again but the war is definitely continuing.
Israel can play for time now and let their destruction have its effect on the morale of the Palestinian people of Gaza. The Israelis are as dangerous during the ‘peace’ as they are during the ‘war’.
Please tell me how are people coping? So much now depends on the spirit of resistance and resilience of the Gazan people!
In the midst of the bombing the cry went up from the people of Gaza; a demand for justice, for solidarity, for help. It was a cry directed to the world!
I am in that world to which the cry was directed. But I am led to ask two questions:
What world?
Can the people of Gaza depend on the world?
Of course it is to the ‘human’ world that the people of Gaza appeal for help. But looking at the situation now, the people of Gaza appear to me to be isolated. They appear to me to need the solidarity and help of the ‘human’ world even more during the time of ‘peace’ than during the time of ‘war’.
As these events have unfolded over the past month the world to which they appeal has changed. I can only speak about what I witness. I am going to try to explain what has happened. The world has been transformed by the cry of the people of Gaza. This is not to say that the world has successfully responded to this cry.
What is described as the international community has, by and large, succumbed to the basic story that there is or has been a war between Hamas and Israel, that there is some kind of equivalence involved in the ceasefire and that as a nation state Israel has the right to defend itself. The international community is relieved when the truce is effected because the two sides can be brought together to talk and resolve their differences.
The international community that is talked about by the media, is neither international nor a community. It is the dominant group of Western governments led by the US. This loose alliance has totally failed. It has disintegrated from a moral and political point of view. It has as little basis in legitimacy as the claim that Israel has the right to defend itself. International law is unambiguous. Israel as the occupying power does not have this right. See this article by Noura Erekat. It is the Palestinian people who through force of arms have the right to resist the occupation.
What seems to me to have happened is that a radical gap has opened up between the people of the world and these governments that collect themselves together and propose themselves as the ‘international community’. This gap is mitigated by the action of five governments in Latin America: Brazil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador and El Salvador who have withdrawn their embassies from Israel.
The dominant governments, the most powerful public institutions in our world, are failing because they are fundamentally racist. This racism is the inheritance of imperialism, the forced extraction of raw materials from the colonised countries of the world and in particular the reduction of colonised human labour to slavery and the forced transportation and trading in this human labour. These dominant governments conform to imperialism. Their idea of development is imperialist i.e. it rests on the robbery of the people of the world.
The specific instance in Palestine is the theft of the occupied land and resources through illegal settlement by the Israeli state. This is their basic ‘peacetime’ activity.
It is for this reason that one of the most urgent international solidarity responses has been in South Africa. Nelson Mandela asserted:
“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete with out the freedom of the Palestinians.”
It may be of small immediate comfort to the people of Gaza that the governments of the world with striking exceptions have completely failed them, that there has been a much more robust response from the people of the world and that the disjuncture between governments and people has widened further.
Anyway, these last assertion can’t be verified. It is just a subjective observation. And it really isn’t optimistic in the short term. In fact it feels really dangerous. Armed groups appear similar to nation states. Nation states descend to the level of armed gangs and vice versa. The racism which underlies the imperialist ‘theft’ project which was always underpinned by the civilising mission of religion is now replayed as the underscore of an horrendous fugue played out by so-called state and non-state actors. The idea that a human society can be based on racially and religiously pure population is effectively the supporting ideology of an armed gang. This form of human organisation originates within the poisonous corrupt greed of European imperialism and received its most devastating outing on the world stage when the suppressed imperialist ambitions of Germany turned itself inwards on its own population and sought out the Jewish population to subject it to robbery, slavery and extermination.
Have we passed beyond the stage of human history where a society can form a state which is based on anything other than exclusivity.
Jonathan