admin“I noticed something that I will never forget for as long as I live,” Mankell says. “I looked at his feet. He had no shoes. Instead he had painted shoes on his feet. He had used the colours in the ground and in the roots to replace his shoes. He had come up with a way to keep his dignity.”
Such scenes will evoke poignant memories among those who have witnessed cruelty and degradation, which are everywhere. One striking case, though only one of a great many, is Gaza, which I was able to visit for the first time last October.
There violence is met by the steady resistance of the “samidin” — those who endure, to borrow Raja Shehadeh’s evocative term in “The Third Way,” his memoir on Palestinians under occupation, 30 years ago.
Greeting me on my return home were the reports of the Israeli assault on Gaza in November, supported by the United States and tolerated politely by Europe as usual.
Israel isn’t Gaza’s only adversary. Gaza’s southern border remains largely under the control of Egypt’s dreaded secret police, the Mukhabarat, which credible reports link closely to the CIA and the Israeli Mossad.
Just last month a young Gaza journalist sent me an article describing the Egyptian government’s latest assault on the people of Gaza.
A network of tunnels into Egypt is a lifeline for Gazans imprisoned under harsh siege and constant attack. Now the Egyptian government has devised a new way to block the tunnels: flooding them with sewage.
Meanwhile, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports on a new device that the Israeli army is using to counter the weekly non-violent protests against Israel’s illegal Separation Wall — in reality an Annexation Wall.
The samidin have been ingenious in coping with tear gas so the army has escalated, spraying protesters and homes with jets of a liquid as noxious as raw sewage.
These attacks provide more evidence that great minds think alike, combining criminal repression with humiliation.
The tragedy of Gaza traces back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror or were forcibly expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces.
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion held that “The Arabs of the Land of Israel have only one function left to them — to run away.”
It is noteworthy that today the strongest support for Israel in the international arena comes from the United States, Canada and Australia, the so-called Anglosphere — settler-colonial societies based on extermination or expulsion of indigenous populations in favour of a higher race, and where such behaviour is considered natural and praiseworthy.
For decades Gaza has been a showcase for violence of every kind. The record includes such carefully planned atrocities as Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 — “infanticide,” as it was called by Norwegian physicians Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, who worked at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital with their Palestinian and Norwegian colleagues through the criminal assault. The word is apt, considering the hundreds of children massacred.
Violence ranges through just about every kind of cruelty that humans have used their higher mental faculties to devise, up to the pain of exile.
The pain is particularly stark in Gaza, where older people can still look across the border toward the homes from which they were driven — or could if they were able to approach the border without being killed.
One form of punishment has been to close off more of the Gazan side of the border, turning it into a buffer zone, including half of Gaza’s arable land, according to Harvard’s Sara Roy, a leading scholar on Gaza.
While a showcase for the human capacity for violence, Gaza is also an inspiring exemplar of the demand for dignity.
Ghada Ageel, a young woman who escaped from Gaza to Canada, writes about her 87-year-old refugee grandmother, still trapped in the Gaza prison. Before her grandmother’s expulsion from a now-destroyed village, “she owned a house, farms and land and she enjoyed honour, dignity and hope.”
Amazingly, like Palestinians generally, the elderly woman hasn’t given up hope.
“When I saw my grandmother in November 2012 she was unusually happy,” Ageel writes. “Surprised by her high spirits, I asked for an explanation. She looked me in the eye and, to my surprise, said that she was no longer worried about” her native village and the life of dignity that she has lost, for her irrevocably.
The village, her grandmother told Ageel, “’is in your heart, and I also know that you are not alone in your journey.
Don’t be discouraged. We are getting there.”’
The search for dignity is understood instinctively by those who hold the clubs, and who recognize that apart from violence, the best way to undermine dignity is by humiliation. That is second nature in prisons.
Noam Chomsky’s latest book is Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire (Metropolitan Books 2013). He is a professor of linguistics and philosophy at MIT. This article is adapted from the Edward W. Said lecture given by Noam Chomsky in London on March 18, 2013. This article is reproduced from http://www.alternet.org
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