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Het hieronder weergenomen artikel werd op Substack gepubliceerd door Chris Hedges, verdere woorden zijn overbodig:
The Cost of Bearing
Witness
There are scores of Palestinian
writers and photographers, many of whom have been killed, who are
determined to make us see the horror of this genocide. They will
vanquish the lies of the killers.
CHRIS
HEDGES
23
DEC 2023
Bearing Witness - Mr. Fish
Writing and photographing in wartime
are acts of resistance, acts of faith. They affirm the belief that
one day - a day the writers, journalists and photographers may never
see - the words and images will evoke empathy, understanding, outrage
and provide wisdom. They chronicle not only the facts, although facts
are important, but the texture, sacredness and grief of lives and
communities lost. They tell the world what war is like, how those
caught in its maw of death endure, how there are those who
sacrifice for others and those who do not, what fear and hunger are
like, what death is like. They transmit the cries of children, the
wails of grief of the mothers, the daily struggle in the face of
savage industrial violence, the triumph of their humanity through
filth, sickness, humiliation and fear. This is why writers,
photographers and journalists are targeted by aggressors in war —
including the Israelis — for obliteration. They stand as witnesses
to evil, an evil the aggressors want buried and forgotten. They
expose the lies. They condemn, even from the grave, their killers.
Israel has killed at least 13 Palestinian poets
and writers along with at least 67 journalists
and media workers in Gaza, and three in Lebanon since Oct.
7.
I
experienced futility and outrage when I covered war. I wondered if I
had done enough, or if it was even worth the risk. But you go on
because to do nothing is to be complicit. You report because you
care. You will make it hard for the killers to deny their crimes.
This
brings me to the Palestinian novelist and playwright Atef Abu Saif.
He and his 15-year-old son Yasser, who live in the occupied West
Bank, were visiting family in Gaza — where he was born — when
Israel began its scorched earth campaign. Atef is no stranger to the
violence of the Israeli occupiers. He was two months old during the
1973 war and writes “I’ve
been living through wars ever since. Just as life is a pause between
two deaths, Palestine, as a place and as an idea, is a timeout in the
middle of many wars.”
During
Operation Cast Lead, the 2008/2009 Israel assault on Gaza, Atef
sheltered in the corridor of his Gaza family home for 22 nights with
his wife, Hanna and two children, while Israel bombed and shelled.
His book “The
Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire,” is an account
of Operation Protective Edge, the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza
that killed 1,523
Palestinian civilians, including 519 children.
“Memories
of war can be strangely positive, because to have them at all means
you must have survived,” he notes sardonically.
He
again did what writers do, including the professor and poet Refaat
Alareer, who was killed,
along with Refaat’s brother, sister and her four children, in an
airstrike on his sister’s apartment building in Gaza on Dec. 7. The
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said that Alareer
was deliberately targeted,
“surgically bombed out of the entire building.” His killing came
after weeks of “death threats that Refaat received online and by
phone from Israeli accounts.” He had moved to his sister’s
because of the threats.
Refaat,
whose doctorate was on the metaphysical poet John
Donne, wrote a poem in November, called “If I Must Die,”
which became his last will and testament. It has been translated into
numerous languages. A reading of the poem by the actor Brian Cox has
been viewed almost
30 million times.
If
I must die,
you
must live
to
tell my story
to
sell my things
to
buy a piece of cloth
and
some strings,
(make
it white with a long tail)
so
that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while
looking heaven in the eye
awaiting
his dad who left in a blaze—
and
bid no one farewell
not
even to his flesh
not
even to himself—
sees
the kite, my kite you made,
flying
up above
and
thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing
back love
If
I must die
let
it bring hope
let
it be a tale.
Atef,
once again finding himself living amid the explosions and carnage
from Israeli shells and bombs, doggedly publishes his observations
and reflections. His accounts are often difficult to transmit because
of Israel’s blockage of Internet and phone service. They have
appeared in The
Washington Post, The
New York Times, The
Nation and Slate.
On
the first day of the Israeli bombardment, a friend, the young poet
and musician Omar Abu Shawish, is killed, apparently in an Israeli
naval bombardment, though later reports would say he was killed in
an airstrike as he was walking to work. Atef wonders about the
Israeli soldiers watching him and his family with “their infrared
lenses and satellite photography.” Can “they count the loafs of
bread in my basket, or the number of falafel balls on my plate?” he
wonders. He watches the crowds of dazed and confused families, their
homes in rubble, carrying “mattresses, bags of clothes, food and
drink.” He stands mutely before “the supermarket, the bureau de
change, the falafel shop, the fruit stalls, the perfume parlor, the
sweets shop, the toy shop — all burned.”
“Blood
was everywhere, along with bits of kids’ toys, cans from the
supermarket, smashed fruit, broken bicycles and shattered perfume
bottles,” he writes.
“The place looked like a charcoal drawing of a town scorched by a
dragon.”
“I
went to the Press House, where journalists were frantically
downloading images and writing reports for their agencies. I was
sitting with Bilal, the Press House manager, when an explosion shook
the building. Windows shattered, and the ceiling collapsed onto us in
chunks. We ran toward the central hall. One of the journalists was
bleeding, having been hit by flying glass. After 20 minutes, we
ventured out to inspect the damage. I noticed that Ramadan
decorations were still hanging in the street.”
“The
city has become a wasteland of rubble and debris,” Atef, who has
been the Palestinian Authority’s minister of culture since 2019,
writes in the early days of the Israeli shelling of Gaza City.
“Beautiful buildings fall like columns of smoke. I often think
about the time I was shot as a kid, during the first intifada, and
how my mother told me I actually died for a few minutes before being
brought back to life. Maybe I can do the same this time, I think.”
He
leaves his teenage son with family members.
“The
Palestinian logic is that in wartime, we should all sleep in
different places, so that if part of the family is killed, another
part lives,” he writes. “The U.N. schools are getting more
crowded with displaced families. The hope is that the U.N. flag will
save them, though in previous wars, that hasn’t been the case.”
On
Tuesday Oct. 17 he writes:
I
see death approaching, hear its steps growing louder. Just be done
with it, I think. It’s the 11th day of the conflict, but all the
days have merged into one: the same bombardment, the same fear, the
same smell. On the news, I read the names of the dead on the ticker
at the bottom of the screen. I wait for my name to appear.
In
the morning, my phone rang. It was Rulla, a relative in the West
Bank, telling me she had heard there’d been an airstrike in Talat
Howa, a neighborhood on the south side of Gaza City where my cousin
Hatem lives. Hatem is married to Huda, my wife’s only sister. He
lives in a four-story building that also houses his mother and
brothers and their families.
I
called around, but no one’s phone was working. I walked to al-Shifa
Hospital to read the names: Lists of the dead are pinned up daily
outside a makeshift morgue. I could barely approach the building:
Thousands of Gazans had made the hospital their home; its gardens,
its hallways, every empty space or spare corner had a family in it. I
gave up and headed toward Hatem’s.
Thirty
minutes later, I was on his street. Rulla had been right. Huda and
Hatem’s building had been hit only an hour earlier. The bodies of
their daughter and grandchild had already been retrieved; the only
known survivor was Wissam, one of their other daughters, who had been
taken to the ICU. Wissam had gone straight into surgery, where both
of her legs and her right hand had been amputated. Her graduation
ceremony from art college had taken place only the day before. She
has to spend the rest of her life without legs, with one hand. “What
about the others?” I asked someone.
“We
can’t find them,” came the reply.
Amid
the rubble, we shouted: “Hello? Can anyone hear us?” We called
out the names of those still missing, hoping some might still be
alive. By the end of the day, we’d managed to find five bodies,
including that of a 3-month-old. We went to the cemetery to bury
them.
In
the evening, I went to see Wissam in the hospital; she was barely
awake. After half an hour, she asked me: “Khalo [Uncle], I’m
dreaming, right?”
I
said, “We are all in a dream.”
“My
dream is terrifying! Why?”
“All
our dreams are terrifying.”
After
10 minutes of silence, she said, “Don’t lie to me, Khalo. In my
dream, I don’t have legs. It’s true, isn’t it? I have no legs?”
“But
you said it’s a dream.”
“I
don’t like this dream, Khalo.”
I
had to leave. For a long 10 minutes, I cried and cried. Overwhelmed
by the horrors of the past few days, I walked out of the hospital and
found myself wandering the streets. I thought idly, we could turn
this city into a film set for war movies. Second World War films and
end-of-the-world movies. We could hire it out to the best Hollywood
directors. Doomsday on demand. Who could have the courage to tell
Hanna, so far away in Ramallah, that her only sister had been killed?
That her family had been killed? I phoned my colleague Manar and
asked her to go to our house with a couple of friends and try to
delay the news from getting to her. “Lie to her,” I told Manar.
“Say the building was attacked by F-16s but the neighbors think
Huda and Hatem were out at the time. Any lie that could help.”
Leaflets
in Arabic dropped by Israeli helicopters float down from the
sky. They
announce that anyone who remains north of the Wadi waterway will be
considered a partner to terrorism, “meaning,” Atef writes, “the
Israelis can shoot on sight.” The electricity is cut. Food, fuel
and water begin to run out. The wounded are operated on without
anesthesia. There are no painkillers or sedatives. He visits his
niece Wissam, racked with pain, in al-Shifa Hospital who asks him for
a lethal injection. She says Allah will forgive her.
“But
he will not forgive me, Wissam.”
“I
am going to ask him to, on your behalf,” she says.
After
airstrikes he joins the rescue teams “under the cricket-like hum of
drones we couldn’t see in the sky.” A line from T.S Eliot, “a
heap of broken images,” runs through his head. The injured and dead
are “transported on three-wheeled bicycles or dragged along in
carts by animals.”
“We
picked up pieces of mutilated bodies and gathered them on a blanket;
you find a leg here, a hand there, while the rest looks like minced
meat,” he writes. “In the past week, many Gazans have started
writing their names on their hands and legs, in pen or permanent
marker, so they can be identified when death comes. This might seem
macabre, but it makes perfect sense: We want to be remembered; we
want our stories to be told; we seek dignity. At the very least, our
names will be on our graves. The smell of unretrieved bodies under
the ruins of a house hit last week remains in the air. The more time
passes, the stronger the smell.”
The
scenes around him become surreal. On Nov. 19, day 44 of the assault,
he writes:
A
man rides a horse toward me with the body of a dead teenager slung
over the saddle in front. It seems it’s his son, perhaps. It looks
like a scene from a historical movie, only the horse is weak and
barely able to move. He is back from no battle. He is no knight. His
eyes are full of tears as he holds the little riding crop in one hand
and the bridle in the other. I have an impulse to photograph him but
then feel suddenly sick at the idea. He salutes no one. He barely
looks up. He is too consumed with his own loss. Most people are using
the camp’s old cemetery; it’s the safest and although it is
technically long-since full, they have started digging shallower
graves and burying the new dead on top of the old—keeping families
together, of course.
On
Nov. 21 after constant tank-shelling, he decides to flee the Jabaliya
neighborhood in the north of Gaza for the south, with his son and
mother-in-law who is in a wheelchair. They must pass through Israeli
checkpoints, where soldiers randomly select men and boys from the
line for detention.
“Scores
of bodies are strewn along both sides of the road,” he writes.
“Rotting, it seems, into the ground. The smell is horrendous. A
hand reaches out toward us from the window of a burned-out car, as if
asking for something, from me specifically. I see what looks like two
headless bodies in a car — limbs and precious body parts just
thrown away and left to fester.”
He
tells his son Yasser: “Don’t look. Just keep walking, son."
In
early Dec. his family home is destroyed in
an airstrike.
“The
house a writer grows up in is a well from which to draw material. In
each of my novels, whenever I wanted to depict a typical house in the
camp, I conjured ours. I’d move the furniture around a bit, change
the name of the alley, but who was I kidding? It was always our
house.”
“All
the houses in Jabalya are small. They’re built randomly,
haphazardly, and they’re not made to last. These houses replaced
the tents that Palestinians like my grandmother Eisha lived in after
the displacements of 1948. Those who built them always thought they’d
soon be returning to the beautiful, spacious homes they’d left
behind in the towns and villages of historic Palestine. That return
never happened, despite our many rituals of hope, like safeguarding
the key to the old family home. The future keeps betraying us, but
the past is ours.”
“Though
I’ve lived in many cities around the world, and visited many more,
that tiny ramshackle abode was the only place I ever felt at home’”
he goes on. “Friends and colleagues always asked: Why don’t you
live in Europe or America? You have the opportunity. My students
chimed in: Why did you return to Gaza? My answer was always the same:
‘Because in Gaza, in an alleyway in the Saftawi neighborhood of
Jabalya, there stands a little house that cannot be found anywhere
else in the world.’ If on doomsday God were to ask me where I would
like to be sent, I wouldn’t hesitate in saying, ‘Home.’ Now
there is no home.”
Atef
is now trapped in southern Gaza with his son. His niece was
transferred to a hospital in Egypt. Israel continues to pound Gaza
with over 20,000 dead and 50,000 wounded. Atef continues to write.
The
story of Christmas is the story of a poor woman, nine months
pregnant, and her husband forced to leave their home in Nazareth in
northern Galilee. The occupying Roman power has demanded they
register for the census 90 miles away in Bethlehem. When they arrive
there are no rooms. She gives birth in a stable. King
Herod - who learned from the Magi of the birth of the
messiah - orders his soldiers to hunt down every child two years old
and under in Bethlehem and the vicinity and murder them. An angel
warns Joseph in a dream to flee. The couple and infant escape under
the cover of darkness and make the 40-mile journey to Egypt.
I
was in a refugee camp in the early 1980s for Guatemalans who had fled
the war into Honduras. The peasant farmers and their families, living
in filth and mud, their villages and homes burned or abandoned, were
decorating their tents with strips of colored paper to celebrate
the Massacre
of the Innocents.
“Why
is this such an important day?” I asked.
“It
was on this day that Christ became a refugee,” a farmer answered.
The Christmas
story was not written for the oppressors. It was written for
the oppressed. We are called to protect the innocents. We are called
to defy the occupying power. Atef, Refaat and those like them, who
speak to us at the risk of death, echo this Biblical injunction. They
speak so we will not be silent. They speak so we will take these
words and images and hold them up to the principalities of the world
— the media, politicians, diplomats, universities, the wealthy and
privileged, the weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon and the Israel
lobby groups — who are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza. The
infant Christ is not lying today in straw, but a pile of broken
concrete.
Evil
has not changed down the millenia. Neither has goodness.
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Zie ook: 'Het is geen antisemitisme om kritiek te uiten op de oorlogsmisdaden van Israël: intussen bijna 20.000 Palestijnse doden waaronder 9.000kinderen.....' En zie de berichten onder de links in dat schrijven!!
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Let op!! De ruimte om reacties weer te geven werkt niet, zo merkte ik onlangs. Als je commentaar hebt doe dit dan via het mailadres trippleu@gmail.com, ik zal deze dan opnemen onderaan in het bewuste artikel, althans als je geen geweld predikt, voorts plaats ik jouw reactie ook al staat deze diametraal tegenover dat bericht. Alvast mijn dank voor jouw eventuele reactie, Willem.
