Gaza is not a war

Sunday 3 March 2024 was Day 148 of the genocide in Gaza. Journalists around the world still do not seem to appreciate what those words mean. Even the most liberal press in the United States persist in calling the events live streamed from Gaza and the West Bank as being a war. The Palestinians that we see being killed on Al Jazeera or on social media are not carrying guns. They have no air force like Israel. The Palestinians do not even have a state. The parliament resigned a few days ago. No elections had been held since 2006. The Palestinian Authority has collaborated with the Israeli government for as long as I can remember. They shoot Palestinians in the West Bank, they fire tear gas at them, they steal their money and their taxes but not nearly on the scale as Israel which regularly withholds tax from the workers in the West Bank and those working illegally in Israel. The President of the PA is corrupt. Journos keep referring to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank as a war.

The Holocaust occurred during World War II. People like Primo Levy were put in trains and sent to death camps to work, to be poisoned by gas and to be burnt (Levy escaped that fate by being mofre useful alive because he was chemist who could help the Nazis make rubber tyres in the death camps. Not all the people were Jewish, there were communists, gay people, perceived non-Aryans, trade unionists, Polish people, the list goes on. The holocaust was perpetrated by the Nazis, but not all were soldiers, there were the train drivers, the police, the informers, the shop inspectors. Journalists do not call the holocaust a war. How can they? Not all the Nazis were Germans. They were often French, Dutch, Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish, Hungarian, Italians, and so on. Some of these people were called collaborators, fascists, whatever.

Journalists who are embedded with the Israeli soldiers are not there to report the facts, they are there to excuse the actions of the Israelis to serve up to the Press and Israel lies about what is happening. Somehow they have concocted a war on what we are seeing live streamed is not a war. American journalists keep trying to tell us that what we’re seeing is not what we’re seeing. They’re still trying to tell us that we have not actually been seeing Palestinian journalists being targeted and murdered in Gaza and the West Bank. I’ve heard American journalist fob it off as being collateral damage. Similar things happened during the Iraq war until Julian Assange and Wikileaks exposed the murder of an Iraqi journalist as “collateral murder”. Why is this not clear when it is applied to the Palestinians?

How do I know these things? I simply watch Al Jazeera and read the Electronic Intifada. I have been to over 15 mass rallies organised by Justice for Palestine in Brisbane the Gold Coast and Logan city. I have done the sound at ten (10) of these rallies and listened closely to speeches given by doctors, nurses, lawyers, journalists, mothers, fathers, children, engineers, community workers, psychologists, politicians, clerical workers, teachers, social workers and others. What we have in common is we have seen the same things many of us have friends or relatives in Gaza or in the West Bank who have been targeted by Israeli soldiers. Many of the people target it are women and children old men young man not once have I seen any of these people raise a gun to shoot at Israeli soldiers. So why do people insist on calling it a war? Sure there are people in Gaza who have fired rockets. Some people very few it seems broke through the fence that encircles Gaza. In doing they broke the longest military siege in modern history. The Israeli siege of Gaza has lasted for 18 years (2006-2024). Yet they still call it a war. The siege of Stalingrad lasted from August 1942 – 2 February 1943. No one calls it a war.

Because the siege of Gaza has been punctuated by 15 intense bombardments by Israeli, sometimes accompanied by incursions, even the Palestinians refer to these as wars. There has been no gain or loss of territory by Israel. There is no dispute that Israel controls the water supply, the food that gets in, where people can fish, the electricity, the available fuel. From time to time, Israel has opened up its northern gates to allow Palestinian workers to go to Israel to keep its economy going. The same is true of people from the West Bank. They all go through checkpoints and suffer exhaustive scrutiny and interrogation by Israeli soldiers. There must be another word for this. That is not to say that the people in Raffa, in Gaza city, in Khan Younis, in Jenin, in Nablus, in Hebron or in Jerusalem, do not collectively resist the occupation by Israel. Some children throw stones. Occasionally, someone has a knife. The occupation is not even like the battle of Algiers (1954–1962) where 0the National Liberation Front (FLN) went into Algiers. Their actions were met by French paratroopers attempting to regain territory. The French used illegal methods such as torture to stop the insurrection that followed. In Algiers, there were bombings of cafes and bars where the military and the metropolitan French hung out. None of that in Gaza or the West Bank. There was little support worldwide for the FLN. Yet after their defeat by the French paratroopers the people rose up, and the French could no longer retain the colony of Algeria even though they fired into the demonstrations and killed many people. The people kept coming and became impossible for the soldiers to keep shooting.

Last weekend, George Galloway, a supporter of Palestine for many years, won a bi-election in a northern town of England. The British Press tried to portray it as being caused by the 30% of the people in the electorate being Muslim. Galloway convincingly refuted that, pointing out that the British are fed up with Israel’s genocide. It is not a Muslim thing. The people are at odds with the Tory government and the Labour opposition over the genocide so they elected an independent who stood up against it.

Ian Curr
4 March 2024