The Gaza Withdrawal is NOT the Path to Peace
by Amira Hass

The government hospital in Rafah last week received a donation from a Palestinian NGO—four mortuary refrigerators with room for 24 bodies, in addition to the old refrigerator, which catered for only six bodies. There won't be any need for the macabre photographs of the dead casualties, held a week or more in commercial refrigerators ordinarily used to hold food. The new equipment is the quintessence of the Palestinian expectations for the coming year or two, at least: Sharon will try to advance his disengagement plan; the IDF will continue to strike in Gaza; Rafah will continue to be the focus of those attacks; many Palestinians will be killed and many will be rendered homeless. While in Israel there will be debate about formulas for disengagement, Palestinians will try to strike at the army, mine roads, develop the Qassam, and get weapons from whatever source they can. In Israel the debate will be over the pain of evacuating settlements, Egypt will make its proposals, and the IDF will demolish more Palestinian homes and what remains of their fields, orchards and groves. But quietly. Just like overnight on Saturday, when another 23 homes of refugees were demolished in J block of the Rafah refugee camp. Who heard about it? Who protested? These scenes of destruction, which have been part of life in Rafah and Khan Yunis since 2001, usually don't appear on our TV screens, in our consciousness or our consciences. Already, the number of Palestinians who have lost their homes in Gaza due to house demolitions—some 17,000, according to UNRWA—is more than double the number of Israeli settlers in the Strip. That's why the dragged-out talk in Israel about disengagement sounds, in Rafah in particular and in the Strip in general, like an Israeli trick to escape the daily and very contemporary reality of destruction.

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The Scale of the Carnage
Palestinian Misery in Perspective

The media usually focuses on the latest casualty and quickly forgets those who died even a few days before. The American media in particular has a Dracula-like predilection for warm bodies, and no interest in cases where blood has already dried. Unfortunately this ahistoric focus on the last victim hides the scale of mass crimes and the responsibility of various perpetrators. Whether in Iraq, Palestine, Colombia, or Haiti, it is necessary to locate human rights abuses in a wider context to appreciate the scale of what is occurring on the ground. In the case of Palestinian casualties, it is all too evident that CNN, BBC, and most other major media are mostly interested in today's casualties: they seem to studiously ignore precedents, and above all, they will not refer to the pattern of killings as systematic in nature. Of course, admitting that such killings are systematic would imply that Israel is committing "crimes against humanity", a precursor to genocide. When the media seeks to whitewash "friendly" mass crimes, there is a tendency to fixate on specific instances to the exclusion of broad patterns. Even when a pattern of killings and other abuses is chronic and systematic, the BBC/CNN will tend to focus on specific cases without reference to broader trends. When referring to Palestinian conditions, what we find is that reports of casualties, house demolitions, and dispossession in these media outlets pertain to specific cases and not to general patterns [1]. Incidentally, the opposite is true when there is an incident of Palestinian violence; here lists and charts are available to highlight their context.

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Time to put the US media on trial for complicity in genocide?

Following pressure from the Israeli public, international condemnations and a UN resolution, and a flurry of rare coverage of Rafah from American cable news networks, Israel's "Operation Rainbow" was 'concluded' in Rafah on 24 May 2004. According to Israel at least. Since then, during a one week period in Rafah (27 May-2 June 2004), Israel destroyed another 39 Palestinian homes, leaving at least another 485 Palestinian civilians homeless, and razed another 24 dunums[1] of Palestinian land. Google News continuously crawls more than 4,500 news sources from around the world, yet a search for the keyword "Rafah" shows that, beyond the Israeli press, supplementary news websites such as the Electronic Intifada, and a handful of US newspapers, coverage of the latest demolitions following "Operation Rainbow" has been minimal, particularly in the United States.

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Israel: Now you see it, now you don't

King County Democrats just pulled off a nifty magic trick. They made Israel disappear. Not the country, mind you, but the word -- as it had appeared in proposed language for the party's 2004 county platform. The plank called for the United States to stop sending aid to Israel unless it treats the Palestinian people with dignity and respect. But when county Democrats, preparing for the big state convention, ironed out the final wrinkles of the platform Tuesday, "Israel" vanished. Poof.

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