Hajj Ali Al Sarakani and his wife Kefayah wait out Israel's latest assault on their neighborhood in Gaza Strip at a UNRWA school.  Israel has vowed to flatten 450 homes.  Outside the windows the Al Sarakani's can see bulldozers and tanks approaching their home of nearly 60 years.  Photo by Mohammed Omer

In a simple phone call, hundreds of families learned life as they knew it was about to end.

Home razzings within Israel and the Occupied Territories continue to function as the Israeli Army's preferred method of collective punishment against the non-Jewish civilian population.  The homes destroyed are always those of Christians and Muslims, never Jewish.  A collection of Jim Crowe style laws on Israel's books remove the ability of non-Jewish citizens to own their homes, whether within Israel or the Occupied Territories, even if their families have occupied the land, with title for centuries.  These laws allow the state of Israel to claim and confiscate non-Jewish land for Jewish Only use, with little or no warning.  In several cases, the Arab residents have been crush alive, usually the elderly and handicap, unable to escape before the bulldozers and bombs flatten their homes.

not Terrorists, but terrorized

This week Israeli officials notified the public of their plans to bomb 450 homes in northern Gaza. Within each home, a family dwells. Bombing will result in another 3,000 people forced into the streets. With homes destroyed, so passes life’s final vestige of security and dignity.

For Hajj Ali Al Sarakani and his wife Kefayah, both seventy-five, time ran out. With their home destroyed, their golden years now vacillate in limbo. Seated together in the hastily created shelter of an UNRWA school, Hajj Ali comforts his wife; his face fractured in disbelief, displays the emotion of incredulity, breaking momentarily from its cast as Israeli tank shells explode nearby, shaking the windows with reverberating sound.  Both jump and tears renewed stream over the weathered hands hiding Kefayah’s face.

Above the constant guttural flutter of a helicopter gunship punctuates the silence between shots. "We evacuated as the shelling escalated, " Hajj Ali begins quietly, pointing out the window to the location his home precariously stands. "We saw tanks and bulldozers approaching our home. A small suitcase is all we could grab.”

Reaching the UNRWA shelter proved difficult as Kefaya, his wife is handicap and moves slowly. Adding to the anxiety of escape, Israeli soldiers continued shooting at fleeing and terrified refugees. For the Al Sarakanis, today constitutes a chilling replay of 1948 when as teenagers the couple escaped a similar assault in Israel, to then safe Egyptian Gaza. Today they join hundreds of families fleeing Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, and sadly note, several are headed by frightened young parents just as they once were.

In the Safe House

As is Islamic custom, women congregate in one portion of the room and men in another. The walls soiled from days of bombing carry a thin gray pale, adding an ashen mystique to pictures and maps there hanging. Attempting to clean, Aisha Al Kafarneh moves between the desks, sweeping.

“They [the Israelis] claim they strike at members of the resistance,” she states, her broom pounding at the dirt which rises, swirling around straw bristles like miniature dust devils on the plain; her anger thus revealed.

“But the fact is they are targeting civilians everywhere. My son cannot move his arm,” she exasperates, pointing to her eldest of four. “He’s paralyzed by the fear we live in!"

Her broom strokes quicken, grinding into the floorboards as her tongue lashes out its next sentence.

"When an Israeli is killed, the world stops! Hundreds of us are killed... silence,” she states disgusted before continuing.

“They cut our water, our electricity…we live in dark houses and now they take these too? Where do they want us to go?” she asks defiantly.  

Jamal Mussa, his wife and six children struggle for normalcy. Beside him his wife comforts their infant as he elaborates on the family’s escape through the artillery shelling and razzing of Beit Hanoun village.

"The bulldozers attacked during the night" he starts. "First they used bulldozers to demolish the streets. Then...we stayed until 7 o'clock, escaping out a back door as our front door fell to the tanks,” he concludes.

But Gazans are not alone. Lebanon too finds itself in Israel’s sights.

Gaza & Lebanon

The land invasion of Gaza began June 28, 2006, predicated on Hamas’ capture of an Israeli soldier during a military raid.  Then, on July 12, 2006 the world’s attention moved north as according to Israel, Hezbollah ‘entered Israeli territory’ and captured two additional Israeli soldiers. This is false.

Both soldiers were captured within Lebanon, in the town of Aitaa al Chaaba as part of an uncovered covert Israeli mission. At the time, Israeli military aircraft were already flying over Lebanese territory. 

Like in Gaza, where Israel continued to fire over 5,000 missiles into the area between October 2005 and June 9, 2006 despite a ‘cease fire’, Israel continued to sporadically fire into Lebanon and breach its borders after it ‘withdrew’.

Both events, the attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, share similarities in execution, context and reason.  Hamas and Hezbollah have similar goals: to end Israel’s illegal occupations and land grabs.  Hezbollah focuses on the Golan Heights, Lebanon and the border where Israel continues to steal topsoil, water and land while infringing upon Lebanon’s sovereignty.  Hamas focuses on the West Bank and Gaza, where Israel continues to steal land, assets, build settlements and appropriate resources for Jewish only use.  Both organizations prevent Israel from annexing its occupied territories and expanding its control over lands it covets.

Syria and Iran

Israel’s immediate inclusion of Syria and Iran to its accusations adds suspicion. Israel’s objective to negate Iran and fashion the Middle East into an Israel-friendly region follows the 1998 Project for the New American Century’s Clean Break policy report created for then Prime Minister Netanyahu. For the past 18-months, Israel and the American neocons exclusively continued to push for an Iranian invasion, against the wishes of the American and Israeli people. Attacking Lebanon and blaming Iran provides such an excuse while the soldier captures provide cover, an exculpation veiled beneath Israel’s insistence it ‘has a right to defend itself’ thus camouflaging what may be the real reasons for Israel’s total assault on both the Lebanon and Gaza.

Conclusion

The victims of these attacks are Lebanese, Palestinian and Israeli. All three peoples represent pawns, predicated on manufactured absolution in an international game of chess executed a board checkered in blood. The illegal occupation of Gaza, West Bank and infringements upon Lebanon are the root causes of Israel’s problem. Fighting is a symptom. No man is an enemy of another if he treats him with dignity, equality and respect.

Occupation, razzing homes, invasion, destruction of infrastructure and nations, this is neither dignity nor defense.

It is how enemies are made.