Liben’s editorial, like many editorials in circulation, ignore the role of the U.S. in building up Hamas. The U.S.’ support of Fatah has built up Hamas and allowed for its brand of extremism to govern Palestinian territories.
The report from Vanity Fair titled, “The Gaza Bombshell”, which was released in April 2008, states:
… a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.
Liben (and others like Rob Kall, who is executive editor of OpEdNews) have cited Nizar Rayan as evidence of how difficult it is to discern between innocent civilians and terrorists.
First off, Liben does not accurately convey what happened. He says “two of Rayan’s wives and his four children” were killed. On the contrary, Chris Hedges’ editorial “click here in the Rubble” says “his four wives and 11 children also were killed.” And, since Hedges and Rayan were students of theology who engaged in discussions frequently “on the nature of belief, Islam, the Koran, the Bible and the religious life” together in Gaza, one must accept Hedges’ report on the deaths as truth and Liben’s as false.
Hedges describes why a father like Rayan might turn his sons into suicide bombers:
The only route left for most young men in Gaza to affirm themselves is through death. I have attended countless funerals there. The decision of the young men, sometimes boys, to die is usually a conscious one. It is born of this despair and rage. It is born of a sense of impotency and humiliation. It is born of a belief that to not accept sacrifice, even death, is to dishonor those who have gone before, to neglect the family members, relatives and friends who lost their land, endured the decades-long humiliation and abuse of occupation, and suffered or died resisting.
The young in Gaza have nothing to do. There are no jobs. They have nowhere to escape to. They cannot marry because they cannot afford housing. They cannot leave Gaza, even for Israel. They sleep, sometimes 10 to a room, and live on less than $2 a day, surviving on United Nations or Hamas charities and food donations. Martyrdom is the only route offered to those who want to achieve a measure, however brief, of recognition and glory.
Hedge’s commentary has provided some of the best insight into the conflict. It has explained many of the nuances and details the media refuses to shine a light on. Not even on the pages of al Jazeera will you find a paragraph as eloquent as the following paragraph from his editorial “Party to Murder”:
Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate and time and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love. “Expose thyself to what wretches feel,” King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, “and show the heavens more just.”
The paragraph’s prose drags you to the next paragraph where you are once again caught with the barbs that point out of more phrases describing the terror.
“Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods…A war? Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder.”
It is murder…And both sides carry it out. One side is justified while the other is not. And, therein lies the problem---the world cannot agree on whose repsonse is justified so the conflict wears on.
For that reason, the words of Wendy Pearlman, author of Occupied Voices: Stories of Everyday Life from the Second Intifada is an essential read. Human insight into the horrors that humanity faces in Gaza and the West Bank is the only way to a peaceful solution that will allow for Palestinians to escape the oppression that is being wrought upon them by Israeli apartheid.
Pearlman, with a keen sense of what Westerners are thinking and why they ultimately are more compassionate toward Israel than Palestinians, explains in the introduction of her book:
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