Genocide and Civilisation

Palestinian militant and historian Subhi Yasin wrote in 1959:

“The Israeli gang decided to attack Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, hoping to gain a cheap victory by killing patients. At two in the afternoon on April 5, 1956, the Israelis began bombing the Gaza hospital with heavy artillery for five continuous hours. More than a hundred patients were killed.

“The leaders of the aggression imagined that mass killing of the sick would terrorize the Arabs of Palestine into oblivion. But the opposite of what they expected happened. Their plan failed and their plot was turned inside out.”

Yasin was born in 1920 in a village near Haifa, where he studied, and he fought in the 1936–39 Arab Revolt. Wounded fighting in the Nakba, the catastrophic colonial creation of Israel, he was compelled to move to Damascus, and later lived in Egypt and worked with Palestinian nationalists in the Gaza Strip.

After Zionists attacked the Shifa hospital, he wrote,

“In the evening, Commander Mustafa Hafez gathered his men and put together a plan for a comprehensive attack on the enemy’s hideouts. The violent retaliatory attack began before midnight on April 5, from open and secret bases simultaneously.

“Thereafter, Israel witnessed its darkest nights. On the night of April 6th, the largest guerrilla group entered Israel, numbering 300 commando members. They pierced dozens of miles into the usurped land. Each detachment carried out its role with the best possible courage and organization, hitting targets and taking revenge on those who knew no other language.”

Yasin’s account is recorded by Palestinian historian Esmat Elhalaby, who wrote from Toronto late October:

“To know Palestinian history is to experience endless déjà vu. Every testament to the Palestinian condition speaks indelibly to the present. This is not only because their opponents persist in seeking their dispossession and death, but also because those opponents shamelessly maintain the same idioms of justification.”

Elhalaby cites Palestinian poet Muin Bseiso, born in Gaza in 1926:

“In his Gaza Diaries, Bseiso would write critically of the new humanitarian regime inaugurated after 1948: ‘The program of annihilating the Palestinian Red Indians in the new concentration camps in the Gaza Strip supervised by UNRWA didn’t follow the old traditional methods of genocide.’ In 1956, the Israelis occupied the Strip for the first time.”

Elhalaby writes: “While European capital’s transformation of Ottoman lands, including Palestine, had already started in the 19th century, it was the influx of European Zionist settlers in the first four decades of the 20th century that decisively transformed the relationship between land and labor in Palestine. Existing communal agricultural land was acquired by settlers and the Palestinians who tilled that land were expelled, condemning them to penury, often in new sorts of urban slums in the coastal cities.”

This painting, titled ‘Gaza’, was made last year by Palestinian artist Heba Zagout. By an airstrike on their home on October 13, Israel killed her and two of her children, Adam and Mahmoud. Her sister, Maysaa Ghazi, said that her husband and their two other children, Faisal and Baraa, survived.

Born in Al Bureij refugee camp in 1984, Zagout learnt graphic design at the Gaza Technical College and fine arts at Al-Aqsa University. She was a public school teacher. In an interview two weeks before she was killed she said:

“I consider art a message that I deliver to the outside world through my expression of the Palestinian cause and Palestinian identity. And to express the negative feelings, emotions, and tensions that occur in Gaza.”

“I was born carrying the word refugee with me. I have never seen my home town, but my aunt, Alia, gathered us and told us about my grandfather’s land and the orange groves and the harvest season and a house full of love and life.”

In this poem translated by Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti wrote:

“It’s Also Fine”

It’s also fine to die in our beds
on a clean pillow
and among our friends.

It’s fine to die, once,
our hands crossed on our chests
empty and pale
with no scratches, no chains, no banners,
and no petitions.

It’s fine to have an undustful death,
no holes in our shirts,
and no evidence in our ribs.

It’s fine to die
with a white pillow, not the pavement, under our cheeks,
our hands resting in those of our loved ones
surrounded by desperate doctors and nurses,
with nothing left but a graceful farewell,
paying no attention to history,
leaving this world as it is,
hoping that, someday, someone else
will change it.

According to the UN, “The word ‘genocide’ was coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people.”

The crime of genocide is committed with intent to destroy a people grouped into a race, religion, ethnicity or nation: by killing them, or causing them serious bodily or mental harm, or inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their destruction, or imposing measures to prevent births among them, or forcibly transferring their children to another group.

“Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted – not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and ‘substantial.’”

On October 17, Israel killed Mohammed Sami Qariqa, 24, by bombing the Ahli Baptist Hospital in the city of Gaza.

Qariqa was a visual artist and was employed by the Tamer Institute for Community Education in Jabaliya. They remembered him as “the heart of the studio. He actively contributed to all our initiatives, being the first to volunteer and last to leave. Mohammed’s artistic project aimed to bridge the gap between art and technology, safeguarding Palestinian art from theft, particularly from the Israeli occupation, by linking it to QR codes.”

When Israel bombed the hospital, the oldest in the Gaza strip, killing hundreds, Qariqa “was trying to calm the children... by singing them songs and doing drawings.”

He shared his last video from the Ahli Baptist hospital on October 17, captioned with the song:

“Peace to Gaza, peace, peace
Peace be upon all sad eyes
Her tears overflow with grace and pride
Peace, peace, peace to Gaza

Today while I was at the Arab National (Baptist) Hospital, I saw families and their children in a state of fear and psychological pressure due to the continuous bombing of the Gaza Strip.

I tried to relieve them of this fear and panic by requesting help from a team of civilian volunteers inside the hospital, as we changed this state for them into a state of playing, laughing, yelling loudly, and letting go of themselves. It is like trying to provide psychological first-aid for the children and families by preparing a designated, safe place for play and entertainment.

What I did today was an attempt with simple means through which I was able to discharge everyone inside the hospital and transfer them to a condition perhaps much better than they were in..

I will never forget the look and sound of their laughter at this moment.

We're all trying to be okay..”

In 1938, in The Arab Awakening, Lebanese-Palestinian intellectual and diplomat George Antonius wrote on the colonial plan to settle Palestine:

“The scheme is based on the expectation that the Arabs would, or could be made to, renounce their natural and political rights in any part of Palestine; that frontiers may be laid down in defiance of physical features and of ingrained habits of human intercourse; that trade and good government can thrive in a small country not larger than Wales, after its dissection into some half-dozen entities made up of separate states, enclaves and corridors; and that a population of 300,000 settled people, deeply attached to their homes and their culture, would submit to either of the alternatives proposed for them by the Royal Commission: forcible eviction or subjection to a Jewish state to be established over their heads.

“It runs counter to the lessons of history, the requirements of geography, the natural play of economic forces, and the ordinary laws of human behaviour. It reproduces some of the most discredited and dangerous features of the Treaty of Versailles. It pays scant regard to the doctrine of consent. In drawing it up, the Commissioners appear to have overlooked that it is no more feasible to drive a peasantry from its soil than to impose an alien government upon an unwilling population, except by constant resort to force; and that the use of superior force to hold down a nationally-conscious people, while it may for a time achieve its immediate purpose, is bound sooner or later to defeat its own ends.”

“The moral and political objections to the scheme may be judged in the light of the preceding chapters of this narrative. By no stretch of the word can it be said to conform to the obligations incurred by Great Britain, if the obligations are examined as a whole, with due regard to all the relevant records, and not selectively in the manner of the Royal Commission. Nor is there any justification for the claim that it does justice to both the Arabs and the Jews. The claim is set forth in the concluding pages of the Report with a wealth of argument and an eloquent appeal to the spirit of compromise; but it turns out on examination to rest rather on verbal niceties than on a basis of substance. In substance, the scheme offers the Jews a good deal more and the Arabs a good deal less than they possess or was promised to them; and the appeal for compromise is in effect an appeal to the Arabs to get out and make room for a Jewish state.”

“The Commissioners would have stood on firmer ground had they put forward a scheme based on real compromise, that is to say on equivalent sacrifices on the part of all the three parties concerned. But what the Partition scheme does is to require different things of each: of the Arabs, the real and substantial sacrifice of something they own and want to keep; of the Zionists, the nominal sacrifice of something they do not own but want to have; and of the mandatory Power no sacrifice whatever. For the scheme has been so devised as to allow Great Britain to retain her strategic and economic position, enable the Zionists to become absolute masters of western and northern Palestine, and achieve those two aims at Arab expense.

“The array of moral, political and practical obstacles in the way of the scheme is formidable and renders it manifestly inapplicable. There is no need to analyse it in greater detail: it can never be carried into execution.”

“The treatment meted out to Jews in Germany and other European countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modem civilisation; but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate Jewish suffering and distress. To place the brunt of the burden upon Arab Palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilised world. It is also morally outrageous. No code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another. The cure for the eviction of Jews from Germany is not to be sought in the eviction of the Arabs from their homeland; and the relief of Jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population.”

“The renunciation will not be easy. Jewish hopes have been raised to such a pitch that the non-fulfilment of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state in Palestine will cause intense disillusionment and bitterness. The manifold proof of public spirit and of capacity to endure hardships and face danger in the building up of the national home are there to testify to the devotion with which a large section of the Jewish people cherish the Zionist ideal. And it would be an act of further cruelty to the Jews to disappoint those hopes if there existed some way of satisfying them, that did not involve cruelty to another people. But the logic of facts is inexorable. It shows that no room can be made in Palestine for a second nation except by dislodging or exterminating the nation in possession.”

The photographs are by Palestinian artist and photographer Karimeh Abbud, born in Bethlehem in 1893 in a family who moved from Lebanon to Palestine in the mid-1800s.

After graduating from the American University in Beirut in the 1920s, Abbud opened a home studio in Bethlehem, where she “became renowned for adding color to her prints. She would import printing paper from Egypt and develop the pictures in her own darkroom. Women from conservative families soon began to muster the courage to visit her and get their portraits done”.

Abbud’s studio prints were only discovered in the 2000s, after an Israeli collector announced he had acquired them, reportedly from houses that were raided in the Nakba.

“As I look out of the window this morning, the Israeli army’s tanks are just a few hundred metres away. They have apparently reached deep into the centre of Gaza City during the night,” writes Palestinian writer and journalist Mohammed Mhawish in an article published November 21.

“In recent days, we have felt a growing sense that we will be unable to survive Israel’s bombardment much longer.

“Fear and deprivation have been our constant companions – we are struggling around the clock.

“My parents, in their 60s, have not taken their daily medication for more than a month. They’re defying horror and illness all at once.

“My attempts to go out and get their medication have all been a failure. Walking out to the pharmacy is no longer possible – both the pharmacy and the streets have been destroyed.”

His account was published by Al Jazeera, which said it lost contact with him on November 20.

Besieged in Beirut in 1982 by Israeli bombardment, Muin Bseiso and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asked in a poem addressed to a soldier, “inhabitant of the tank,” with the refrain, “Are you safe?”

“Can one piss in a tank?Can he read in the tank?Can a person fly pigeons in a tank?Can one fuck in a tank?Or plant trees in the tank?…How long have you been in the claws of the tank?How long have you been safe?”

“In the last hour before the ceasefire”

“For the souls of the martyrs”

Bseiso died in London in 1984. His family wanted to bury him in Gaza but Israel refused, and he is buried in the Arba’inat Cemetery in Cairo. Darwish remembered him this way:

“Bad poetry, for him, even if it plays an advanced role, is a form of counter-revolution, as Palestine cannot forgive the insult inflicted on its beauty and justice – a bad Palestinian poem.”

“Or he was haunted by another obsession: to deepen his stamp on time, and to put his signature on everywhere. To plant a tree, to translate Gaza into the largest number of languages. To build a hut from the rain, to build a hut from the wind. He would repel the idea of death like a fly.”

“And we took refuge in the heavens,” November 2022

“We will not leave our country,” November 21