We are coming up on the anniversary of
a flood when the impoverished Gaza principality was hit with
untreated sewage from war. I happen to sympathize with those
making the claims of malicious punishment, though, perhaps because I
was fortunate to have read up on the subject myself more critically
than even the press has done. Journalism these days has run afoul not
only of facts but of the character of the democratic and Jewish
state.
As reviewed by Israel's respected paper
Haaretz in February of 2015, the general tone covering February's flooding in Gaza was one that was uncovering a lie. “Al Jazeera on Wednesday
retracted its story, based on false claims by Palestinian sources,
that Israel had opened dams and flooded the Gaza Strip. This
invention was repeated by the Agence France Presse (AFP) news agency,
Britain's massively popular Daily Mail, Palestinian news agencies and
countless other Internet and social media sites.” The article
attempts to clarify that “current flooding in Gaza comes as a
result of the heavy winter rains, which have been especially harsh on
the masses of residents made homeless by Israeli air assaults in last
summer's war.” The solution implied here is that Israel needs to
recover its empathetic streak, and think of those least fortunate,
made worse by the organic “heavy winter rains.”1
Generally the truth did move the reporters to describe the seriousness of the situation in Gaza but
they still taunted readers with headlines. Buzzfeed's sassy pick was “No, Gaza Was Not
Flooded By Israel Opening 'The Dams.'”2
It contrasted starkly with its own reporting: An anonymous Palestinian official
told Buzzfeed that “[i]t is easy to say it is dams, easier than
saying that the problem is infrastructure — not having
infrastructure, having bad infrastructure, having what little
infrastructure Gaza destroyed each time there is wa[r] —
that is the truth. If we could rebuild Gaza, we could build a system
that dealt with these horrible floods. But Gaza is in ruins, there is
nowhere for the water to go, and each year it will be the same unless
someone helps us.”
Looking at the record, this doesn't go far enough. The AFP story was indeed retracted,
citing a Belgian hydrology expert Julie Trottier who noted with clear
tepidness that “[t]o my knowledge there is no dam on the Israeli
side and terrain is not suited to the construction of a dam.” The
whole story is that “the waters gathered naturally and it flooded.”
3 But this bears only on flood source not overall water flow. There seems rather to be an interplay of these forces.
A reservoir internal to Gaza indeed was
overwhelmed in 2008.4
But Gaza floods have become beyond severe.
Palestinian director-general of the Khan Younis municipality remarked
on a recent flood that “the amount of water was massive and
unexpected, making it impossible for water pumps or sewage canals to
deal with it. Many are closed or blocked by garbage carried along by
the rainwater.” 5
While it is
technically true that the flood was “natural,” no mainstream
outlet has tried to look at the effects of widening the several rivers in 2004 that indeed empty into the Wadi Gaza. This drew
immediate protest from Israeli environmentalists, which was kept to
the Israeli press.6
The Hebrew article notes Yisrael Katz, a close ally of today's
Netanyahu administration7,
was hired to run the Ministry of Agriculture by Tzachi
Hanegbi. Hanegbi had noted in the previous month that Palestinian
prisoners hunger-striking for being forcibly marched, transfered, and
beaten8,
might as well “starve to death.”9
Israel widening the Nahal Secher in 2004 |
'Israel
doesn’t have any dams in the Nahal Habesor/Wadi Gaza watershed that
it could open to flood Gaza. “There is a diverting dam one meter
high which directs water to reservoirs. This is a low dam which
cannot be opened or closed,' Nechemia Shahaf, head of the Drainage
Authority for the Shikma-Besor Region, told the CAMERA media
watchdog.
The reason why this is laughable to
those who identify with the state requires understanding state
culture. In mainstream thought, violence – as bombing and flooding
polluted areas clearly are – tends to be understood as an exception
to state doctrine. Perhaps the leading theorist on violence, Steven
Pinker, summarized in his 2011 tome that to “cultivate faculties of
empathy and self-control” requires “state
control and its monopolization of violence, the growth of craft
guilds and bureaucracies, the replacement of barter with money, the
development of technology, the enhancement of trade, the growing webs
of dependency among far-flung individuals” which “all fit into an
organic whole.” Indeed, another State Department cable
argues that the “most compelling argument for restarting the water
projects is to show publicly visible support for a successful
post-disengagement Gaza economy.13
According to prevailing wisdom
then, being severely punished is a symptom that Gaza is backward, and not corruption and criminality, which, misogyny and its own prisoner tactics aside, is actually not a
very big problem for Gaza when it comes to Hamas services.14
Violence as committed by states exhibiting civilized traits cannot be
said to be done out of lack of empathy, but empathy that hasn't found
its proper form. Civilized states might be forced to use violence at
some point, but generally do not seek it out. As the pro-Israel group
J Street put it in 2013, “We should take heart that the centrist
heart of Israeli politics is alive and well, and the seemingly
inexorable rise of the ultra-right has been halted.” 15
But like most states practicing
conscious displacement of the indigenous population by settlers, this
cannot be done with an honest reading of history. In a letter
rebuking Mark Twain's resistance to the colonization of the
Philippines, a reader gave flak that “[t]here is no people in the
Philippines. There are a number of distinct tribes... none really
civilized.” 16
This is exactly the sentiment argued again in 1970 by the Prime
Minister of Israel, there never really was any displacement. “I’m
not saying that there are no Palestinians, but there is no such thing
that can be entitled Palestinian people.”17
Another illustrative example, reviewing
the history of the violent colonization of the Philippines, historian
John Morgan Gates wrote, “On the surface, most of the changes
taking place in the American pacification campaign appeared to
increase its severity and to abandon the policy of benevolent
pacification, but this was not the case.” 18
He noted dryly:
Unfortunately,
some Americans did not have as good an understanding of the new
policy as General Bell, and for them it represented the inauguration
of a campaign of severity. Consequently, some enlisted men could
interpret the new policy as one of 'taking
no prisoners' with MacArthur "sweeping everything as he goes,"
and officers could write of substituting "the effective noose
for the futile school-book.”
The cruelties and abuses that appeared in increasing numbers during
1900 continued, and those men who so desired could interpret the new
pacification policy as a sanction for such action.
Simply put: we meant well.
1.
Feb 25, 2015. Al Jazeera,
Britain's Daily Mail Retract False Reports That Israel Opened Dams
to Flood Gaza
7. Washington Post July 28, 2015 Israelis scold Huckabee for saying Iran deal sends them to ‘door of the oven’; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/28/israelis-scold-huckabee-for-saying-iran-deal-sends-them-to-door-of-the-oven/↩ ret 2/2/2016
Haaretz;
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.644227,
ret 2/3/2016
2.
Buzzfeed February 24, 2015. No, Gaza Was Not Flooded By
Israel Opening “The Dams”
3.
AFP wire via Daily Mail, February 27, 2015; Gaza
floods: dispelling the myth about Israeli 'dams' ;
↩http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-2972288/Gaza-floods-dispelling-myth-Israeli-dams.html)
5.
Middle East Eye 10 November 2015. Torrential rains pound
Gaza, causing heavy flooding
6.
שיקום" נחל
סכר הפך אותו ל"כביש
מהיר" October, 3, 2004;
http://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/1.951313 and mirrored https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/1.951313;
Hebrew; accessed 9/4/2015 See also: http://www.kkl.org.il/eng/tourism-and-recreation/forests-and-parks/nahal-besor-south.aspx for Habesor Stream. "the Beersheba River flows into the Besor River, which ... spills into the Mediterranean Sea within the area of the Gaza
Strip, creating a lake where waterfowl can be observed amid the lakeside
vegetation"
7. Washington Post July 28, 2015 Israelis scold Huckabee for saying Iran deal sends them to ‘door of the oven’; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/07/28/israelis-scold-huckabee-for-saying-iran-deal-sends-them-to-door-of-the-oven/↩ ret 2/2/2016
8. Haaretz Sep 19,
2004. Security Prisoners Charge Guards With Humiliating Them;
http://www.haaretz.com/security-prisoners-charge-guards-with-humiliating-them-1.135028↩
ret
2/3/2016
9. Haaretz Aug 13,
2004
http://www.haaretz.com/news/hanegbi-prisoners-on-hunger-strike-can-starve-to-death-1.131545↩.
ret
2/3/2016.
10.
Znet. Sharon’s Gaza Pullout November 16,
2004https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/sharons-gaza-pullout-by-tanya-reinhart/↩
ret
2/2/2016
12. Times of Israel;
February 25, 2015; False ‘Israel drowns Gaza’ claims sweep
internet↩
14.
Wikileaks. SECURITY DETERIORATES, PA HESITATES BUT HAMAS CONSOLIDATES
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05TELAVIV5716_a.html↩
ret
2/2/2016
15.. J Street website. January 25th, 2013. Window of
Opportunity http://jstreet.org/blog/post/window-of-opportunity_1 ret
2/2/2016
16.
New York Times archive, anonymous letter.
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9D07E5DD103DEE32A25753C1A9659C946097D6CF
17.
Golda Meir, 1970 as cited in S Daniel Abraham Center for Strategic
Dialogue
http://www.fes.org.il/src/File/DiscourseCulturePublication2013a.pdf#page=18
ret
3/8/2014. Mirror:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140801225535/http://www.fes.org.il/src/File/DiscourseCulturePublication2013a.pdf
ret 2/3/2016↩
18.
1937; Schoolbooks and Krags; the United States Army in the
Philippines, 1898-1902
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/philamer/AFJ2305.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext)
ret
2/2/2016