[HCCN] C.Hedges: Tears of Gaza

[Judith Robbins]

The Tears of Gaza Must Be Our Tears By Chris Hedges



http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ 
the_tears_of_gaza_must_be_our_tears_20100809/

Chris Hedges made these remarks Thursday night in New York City at a  
fundraiser for sponsoring a U.S. boat to break the blockade of Gaza.  
More information can be found at www.ustogaza.org.

When I lived in Jerusalem I had a friend who confided in me that as a  
college student in the United States she attended events like these,  
wrote up reports and submitted them to the Israel consulate for  
money. It would be naive to assume this Israeli practice has ended.  
So, I want first tonight to address that person, or those persons,  
who may have come to this event for the purpose of reporting on it to  
the Israeli government.

I would like to remind them that it is they who hide in darkness. It  
is we who stand in the light. It is they who deceive. It is we who  
openly proclaim our compassion and demand justice for those who  
suffer in Gaza. We are not afraid to name our names. We are not  
afraid to name our beliefs. And we know something you perhaps sense  
with a kind of dread. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the  
moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is  
descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the  
Israeli government.

You may have the bulldozers, planes and helicopters that smash houses  
to rubble, the commandos who descend from ropes on ships and kill  
unarmed civilians on the high seas as well as in Gaza, the vast power  
of the state behind you. We have only our hands and our hearts and  
our voices. But note this. Note this well. It is you who are afraid  
of us. We are not afraid of you. We will keep working and praying,  
keep protesting and denouncing, keep pushing up against your navy and  
your army, with nothing but our bodies, until we prove that the force  
of morality and justice is greater than hate and violence. And then,  
when there is freedom in Gaza, we will forgive … you. We will ask  
you to break bread with us. We will bless your children even if you  
did not find it in your heart to bless the children of those you  
occupied. And maybe it is this forgiveness, maybe it is the final,  
insurmountable power of love, which unsettles you the most.

And so tonight, a night when some seek to name names and others seek  
to hide names, let me do some naming. Let me call things by their  
proper names. Let me cut through the jargon, the euphemisms we use to  
mask human suffering and war crimes. “Closures” mean heavily armed  
soldiers who ring Palestinian ghettos, deny those trapped inside food  
or basic amenities—including toys, razors, chocolate, fishing rods  
and musical instruments—and carry out a brutal policy of collective  
punishment, which is a crime under international law. “Disputed  
land” means land stolen from the Palestinians. “Clashes” mean,  
almost always, the killing or wounding of unarmed Palestinians,  
including children. “Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank” mean  
fortress-like compounds that serve as military outposts in the  
campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. “Targeted  
assassinations” mean extrajudicial murder. “Air strikes on  
militant bomb-making posts” mean the dropping of huge iron  
fragmentation bombs from fighter jets on densely crowded  
neighborhoods that always leaves scores of dead and wounded, whose  
only contact with a bomb was the one manufactured in the United  
States and given to the Israeli Air Force as part of our complicity  
in the occupation. “The peace process” means the cynical, one-way  
route to the crushing of the Palestinians as a people.

These are some names. There are others. Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish in the  
late afternoon of Jan. 16, 2009, had a pair of Israeli tank shells  
rip through a bedroom in his Gaza apartment, killing three of his  
daughters—Bessan, Mayar and Aya—along with a niece, Noor.
“I have the right to feel angry,” says Abuelaish. “But I ask,  
‘Is this the right way?’ So many people were expecting me to hate.  
My answer to them is I shall not hate.”

“Whom to hate?” asks the 55-year-old gynecologist, who was born a  
Palestinian refugee and raised in poverty. “My Israeli friends? My  
Israeli colleagues? The Israeli babies I have delivered?”

The Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali wrote this in his poem  
“Revenge”:

At times … I wish

I could meet in a duel

the man who killed my father

and razed our home,

expelling me

into

a narrow country.

And if he killed me,

I’d rest at last,

and if I were ready—

I would take my revenge!

*

But if it came to light,

when my rival appeared,

that he had a mother

waiting for him,

or a father who’d put

his right hand over

the heart’s place in his chest

whenever his son was late

even by just a quarter-hour

for a meeting they’d set—

then I would not kill him,

even if I could.

*

Likewise … I

would not murder him

if it were soon made clear

that he had a brother or sisters

who loved him and constantly longed to see him.

Or if he had a wife to greet him

and children who

couldn’t bear his absence

and whom his gifts would thrill.

Or if he had

friends or companions,

neighbors he knew

or allies from prison

or a hospital room,

or classmates from his school …

asking about him

and sending him regards.

*

But if he turned

out to be on his own—

cut off like a branch from a tree—

without a mother or father,

with neither a brother nor sister,

wifeless, without a child,

and without kin or neighbors or friends,

colleagues or companions,

then I’d add not a thing to his pain

within that aloneness—

not the torment of death,

and not the sorrow of passing away.

Instead I’d be content

to ignore him when I passed him by

on the street—as I

convinced myself

that paying him no attention

in itself was a kind of revenge.

And if these words are what it means to be a Muslim, and I believe it  
does, name me too a Muslim, a follower of the prophet, peace be upon  
him.

The boat to Gaza will be named “The Audacity of Hope.” But these  
are not Barack Obama’s words. These are the words of my friend the  
Rev. Jeremiah Wright. They are borrowed words. And Jerry Wright is  
not afraid to speak the truth, not afraid to tell us to stop  
confusing God with America. “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed  
Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands [killed] in New  
York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” Rev. Wright  
said. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians  
and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff  
we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front  
yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

Or the words of Edward Said:

Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in  
the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning  
away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be  
the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to  
appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you  
want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate;  
your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or  
prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible  
mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize,  
perhaps even an ambassadorship.

For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par  
excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a  
passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such  
habits. Personally I have encountered them in one of the toughest of  
all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about  
one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled,  
blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to  
serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken  
supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him  
or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an  
unafraid and compassionate intellectual.

And some of the last words of Rachel Corrie to her parents:

“I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really  
scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of  
human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all  
to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t  
think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to  
dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for  
my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is  
what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base  
reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is  
not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not  
at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world.  
This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you  
decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital  
Lake and said: “This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.” I  
did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a  
comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in  
complete unawareness of my participation in genocide. More big  
explosions somewhere in the distance outside. When I come back from  
Palestine, I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty  
for not being here, but I can channel that into more work. Coming  
here is one of the better things I’ve ever done. So when I sound  
crazy, or if the Israeli military should break with their racist  
tendency not to injure white people, please pin the reason squarely  
on the fact that I am in the midst of a genocide which I am also  
indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely  
responsible.”

And if this is what it means to be a Christian, and I believe it  
does, to speak in the voice of Jeremiah Wright, Edward Said or Rachel  
Corrie, to remember and take upon us the pain and injustice of  
others, then name me a Christian, a follower of Jesus Christ.

And what of the long line of Jewish prophets that run from Jeremiah,  
Isaiah and Amos to Hannah Arendt, who reminded the world when the  
state of Israel was founded that the injustice meted out to the Jews  
could not be rectified by an injustice meted out to the Palestinians,  
what of our own prophets, Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein,  
outcasts like all prophets, what of Uri Avnery or the Israeli poet  
Aharon Shabtai, who writes in his poem “Rypin,” the Polish town  
his father escaped from during the Holocaust, these words:

“These creatures in helmets and khakis,

I say to myself, aren’t Jews,

In the truest sense of the word. A Jew

Doesn’t dress himself up with weapons like jewelry,

Doesn’t believe in the barrel of a gun aimed at a target,
But in the thumb of the child who was shot at—

In the house through which he comes and goes,

Not in the charge that blows it apart.

The coarse soul and iron first

He scorns by nature.

He lifts his eyes not to the officer, or the soldier

With his finger on the trigger—but to justice,

And he cries out for compassion.

Therefore, he won’t steal land from its people

And will not starve them in camps.

The voice calling for expulsion

Is heard from the hoarse throat of the oppressor—

A sure sign that the Jew has entered a foreign country

And, like Umberto Saba, gone into hiding within his own city.

Because of voices like these, father

At age sixteen, with your family, you fled Rypin;

Now here Rypin is your son.

And if to be Jew means this, and I believe it does, name me a Jew.  
Name us all Muslims and Christians and Jews. Name us as human beings  
who believe that when one of us suffers all of us suffer, that we  
never have to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for us all, that  
the tears of the mother in Gaza are our tears, that the wails of the  
bloodied children in Al Shifa Hospital are the wails of our own  
children.

Let me close tonight with one last name. Let me name those who send  
these tanks and fighter jets to bomb the concrete hovels in Gaza with  
families crouching, helpless, inside, let me name those who deny  
children the right to a childhood and the sick a right to care, those  
who torture, those who carry out assassinations in hotel rooms in  
Dubai and on the streets of Gaza City, those who deny the hungry  
food, the oppressed justice and foul the truth with official  
propaganda and state lies. Let me call them, not by their honorific  
titles and positions of power, but by the name they have earned for  
themselves by draining the blood of the innocent into the sands of  
Gaza. Let me name them for who they are: terrorists.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mainetalk.org/pipermail/hccn_mainetalk.org/attachments/20100812/5ead3b9a/attachment.htm>