Gaza 2014 and the ‘duty to investigate’: a review article *

‘In short, Gaza will be unliveable’ by 2020. That terse, if brutally summary, statement ended the September 2015 report on ‘developments in the economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory’ submitted by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to its sixty-second session in late summer. It was just a year after the culmination of Israel’s most recent military assault on the Gaza Strip, Operation Protective Edge and, according to UNCTAD’s researchers, ‘self-sufficiency in Gaza is impossible under conditions of blockade and periodic destruction of infrastructure and private assets’. In introducing its devastatingly bleak findings, however, UNCTAD emphasises the larger context of over six decades of military occupation and the role of multiple other contributors, including the international community and the Palestinian Authority (PA), to Gaza’s dramatic reckoning with a future of unsustainability. ‘The fiscal burden of the humanitarian crises and the occupation-based fiscal losses have diverted donor aid from development to humanitarian interventions and budget support. No amount of aid would have been sufficient’, UNCTAD goes on in its opening resumé, ‘to put any economy on a path of sustainable development under conditions of frequent military strikes and destruction of infrastructure, isolation from global markets, fragmentation of domestic markets and confiscation and denial of access to national natural resources.’ The Gaza Strip, asserts UNCTAD, is not only desperately ‘impoverished’ but is actually in the process of being ‘de-developed’.

Barely a month before UNCTAD’s prognostication of gloom, on 26 August 2015 – as if first anniversaries somehow summoned such accountings – the International Crisis Group (ICG) released its own, somewhat more attenuated, Gaza report, ‘No Exit? Gaza and Israel Between Wars’. Rather than a foregone end-game of sorts, the ICG calculated instead on a recurring vicious circle, an existential, almost Sartrean, scenario of ‘no exits’. After all, wrote the ICG researchers, ‘In the year since the 2014 Gaza War, little has been done to alter the conditions that precipitated it’, so little that ‘the next war is probably just a matter of time.’ In other words, the ICG reiterated its emphasis even as it equivocated in distributing accountability for this ‘pattern’ and its repetitions. ‘Unless Israel and Hamas change their strategies, this pattern of blockade and recurrent war, with casualties on both sides mounting, is set to continue.’

If the ICG and UNCTAD observed the nicety of waiting until a full year had elapsed since the ceasefire that ended the kinetic hostilities waged during Operation Protective Edge, three other reports – generically, even radically, different from each other – chose instead to anticipate the anniversary of its opening salvos and were published in June 2015. Operation Protective Edge began, ‘officially’, on 8 July 2014 and concluded with the still tenuous ceasefire that went into effect on 26 August. This latest – the third – of Israel’s most recent repeated assaults on Gaza was, according to popular punditry and media headlines, a ‘50 day war’. Neither Max Blumenthal, however, nor Atef Abu Saif, nor even the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) subscribed to the imposition of such a truncated chronology and the circumscribed apportioning of responsibility that it entails. Less dire in their predictions than UNCTAD, nor so defeatist as the ICG, Blumenthal, Abu Saif and the UNHRC all nonetheless equally insist on the contextual chronologising of the Gaza narrative. Blumenthal, a Jewish American investigative reporter, provocatively entitled his tale of ‘ruin and resistance in Gaza’ The 51 Day War, while Palestinian writer and diarist Atef Abu Saif enlisted the formalities of his genre to make the temporal point. Abu Saif’s diary, The Drone Eats With Me, opens on Sunday, the 6th of July, and concludes only with an inconclusive ‘Afterword’ following, nearly six months later, his final dated entry of 26th August. And the authors of the UNHRC report insist repeatedly on the relevance of ‘context’ to their mandate as well as to any understanding of the violations of international law committed by the various parties to Operation Protective Edge, not to mention its two precedents, Operation Cast Lead (December 2008–January 2009) and Operation Pillar of Defense (November 2012).

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With the majority of its beleaguered population under the age of 18, Gaza is described by Max Blumenthal as a ‘ghetto of children’, most of whom have never in their lives left the small densely populated Strip and for whom, the reporter goes on, Israel’s three major military assaults necessarily serve as overdetermining ‘rites of passage’. Blumenthal, whose previous book Goliath: life and loathing in Greater Israel (2014) incurred the wrathful opprobrium of Israel’s supporters, briefly visited the Gaza Strip in the course of Operation Protective Edge. His visit coincided in significant part with Israel’s ground invasion (in addition to its already incessant air and sea bombardment) towards the end of July. The devastation, human and infrastructural, ruthlessly wrought during the protracted sieges on the border towns of Shuja’iya and Khuza’a in particular, are described by Blumenthal as nothing short of criminal activity, conveying the ‘sense that [he] was inside a vast crime scene’. In Khuza’a, for example, the reporter visited the house of Hani Najjar, who was already planning the demolition of his still (mostly) intact home. Whereas it is usually Israeli bulldozers that reduce Palestinian residences to rubble, in this ironic reversal, Israel’s bloody mass execution of several individuals in the Najjar bathroom has left the odious task to the homeowner himself. Distraught, Hani Najjar explains the perverseness of the circumstances to his foreign interlocutor: ‘If you were me, would you come back to live here? … It’s very hard to keep a strong mind. That’s why I decided to never come back here again until this whole house is bulldozed or burnt down.’ Najjar, however, concludes his peroration with a more wonted reassertion of Palestinian recalcitrant endurance in the face of Israeli occupational designs on its lands and its people: ‘Then’, Naffar determinedly announces, ‘we are going to rebuild again.’

Each of the eighteen chapters in The 51 Day War is focused on a similar anecdote: there is indignation at Israel’s heinous Dahiya Doctrine and the sanctioned use ‘of disproportionate force to batter Gaza’s civilian population in vain hopes that they would turn on Hamas’. There is marvel at Palestinian survival strategies such as regrouping in the streets in the makeshift celebration of even unreliable ceasefires. There is, too, the colour-coded tableau of the factionalised organisation of Gazan political life, in which the ‘red flags of the leftist PFLP fluttered beside the green banners of Hamas, [and] next to them were the white and yellow flags of the Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Brigade and the black banners of Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigade’. Blumenthal’s account, for all its anecdotal quality, proceeds more (if sometimes less) chronologically, recapitulating the relentless progress of Israel’s bombing targets as the assault extends from week to week, from individual family residences to large mixed-use tower blocks, calculated, the foreign correspondent notes, to ‘extend the war into the sector of Gazan society that had the least involvement in the conflict’. Finally, Blumenthal derisively considers some of the ex post facto proposals cynically on offer for the ‘rebuilding’ of Gaza, summarised as the ‘Singapore’ or ‘Darfur’ alternatives suggested by representatives of the ‘international investment community’. ‘[T]hroughout the conference in Cairo, the diplomats [had] discussed the destruction of Gaza as though it was the result of a natural disaster – as though the missiles that reduced the strip’s border areas to rubble were meteors that descended from outer space.’

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The Gaza border towns of Shuja’iya and Khuza’a feature prominently as well in the UN Human Rights Council’s ‘Report of the Detailed Findings of the Independent Commission of Inquiry Established Pursuant to Human Rights Council Resolution S-21/1’, according to which the UNHRC aimed at ‘ensuring respect for international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory including East Jerusalem’ (for Blumenthal, like a ‘crime scene’). In establishing the ‘context’ of Operation Protective Edge, however, the Commission inculpates the several alleged parties to the conflict, citing not only Israel’s ‘protracted occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip’, but also the ‘increasing number of rocket attacks [from Gaza] on Israel’. Programmatically organised, as such reports generically are, the 22 June 2015 document nonetheless extends the allegations in a compelling narrative that reveals a radical and violently dramatic disruption of the already challenged relation between characters and setting, between, that is, a Palestinian demography and its historic, now militarily occupied, topography.

The impediments to its work notwithstanding – including ‘restricted access, limited resources, short time frame’ – the Commission nonetheless drafts a powerful and poignant litany of house to house, home by home, human and structural destruction throughout the Gaza Strip. The travails of one family after another provide the groundings for the scripted scenario to the section on ‘Principal findings and conclusions’. The fates of the families of Al Hajj, Al Qasas, Al Najjar, Abu Jabr, Al Hallaq, Ammar, Balatah, and on and on, remorselessly detailed street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, are painstakingly recounted, including individual fatalities, survivors, injuries, the personal losses, as well as the physical rearrangements of the once lived environment. How, the Commission wonders, did ‘residential buildings, which are prima facie civilian objects immune from attack, come to be regarded as legitimate military objectives’? It is a question that escapes answer, given that the ‘evidence is usually destroyed in the attack’, as happened, for example, to the Abu Jabr family home: only a 7-metre deep hole remained ‘where the house had been’. Further complicating the disarrangement to the premises were the corporeal disfigurements and bodily maiming of those individual Palestinians who had only moments before peopled the now obliterated scene. The Report includes, for example, the disturbing testimony of a witness to the destruction of the once proud Al-Salam building in Gaza City, home to the Al Kilani and Derbass families, among others. ‘A cameraman working in a neighbouring building suddenly heard the sound of a massive explosion and headed to the site of the incident. He told the commission that, when he arrived at the tower, “no single body was intact.” Although it was dusty and dark, he could see a woman’s body caught between two floors, and bodies that had landed on an adjacent open area, including the corpse of a woman still holding her small child, who was burned in her arms.’ Gazan families themselves, fearful of such mass destruction, the havoc it wreaked, and its consequences for their familial integrity, often took, the Commission observes with some consternation, to ‘dividing their children into separate groups before fleeing their homes, in the hope that only one group might be fired on and the others would survive’.

While the casualties and damages inflicted by either side, so to speak, are less distinguished from each other in the UNHRC Report’s discussion of its ‘general findings and conclusions’, the differing ‘impacts’ are rendered tellingly uneven in its penultimate section, ‘VI Impact’, subdivided into VI.a on Israel and VI.b on Gaza. Regarding the ‘impact’ of Operation Protective Edge on Israel and its population, the Commission relied on submissions from that population which ‘recount[ed] the distress and anger of Israelis who point out three matters of particular concern to them; (i) the trauma caused by the constant threat of rocket attacks, infiltrations and displacement; (ii) insufficient time to carry out effective emergency procedures during attacks; and (iii) the adverse impact of the conflict on local businesses and the overall economy’. In contrast to these discomfitures, the Commission discovered a veritable panoply of grievous violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people of Gaza, including (as adumbrated in the Report) the right to life and security, the right to housing, the right to electricity, water, and sanitation, right to an adequate standard of living and the right to health. If UNCTAD predicts that Gaza will be ‘unliveable’ by 2020, its current post-Protective Edge circumstances, and the sustained air, land and sea blockades imposed by Israel, would hardly seem conducive to enhanced sustainability even in 2015. Much like the 2009 Goldstone Report (on the 2008–9 Operation Cast Lead), however, the 2015 Report concludes with the reiterated injunction on the ‘duty to investigate’.

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That very duty of investigation, the urgent responsibility that it entails, invoked by the researchers for the UNHRC, has been and continues to be deliberately thwarted by the state of Israel in its stubborn denial to the Commission/s of access, ‘despite repeated requests’, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, as well as the Gaza Strip. Similarly, Egypt declined to facilitate UN entry into Gaza through the Rafah entry point on its border. Max Blumenthal, for his part, had been able to spend at least a brief time in Gaza at the height of the hostilities, the launch of the ground invasion and the major assaults on Shuja’iya and Khuza’a, despite the physical danger to journalists, Palestinian and foreign alike, compounded by the political intimidation that they faced. The very title, however, of Atef Abu Saif’s ‘diaries from a city under fire’, The Drone Eats With Me, betrays a strikingly different perspective, a personal intimacy with the violent contusions of daily life endured in Gaza during ‘Operation Protective Edge’, an intimacy that includes breaking bread – providing hospitality, so to speak – with the ‘unmanned’ weaponry of the enemy, the drone. The drone, nefarious world-wide through its recent deployments, in particular in Obama’s policy of extrajudicial executions in the ‘war on terror’, was notoriously developed in Gaza. For it has long served as an Israeli laboratory for the development of the deadly weapons that will become crucial to the US’s ever more lethal – and irresponsible – armoury. As Blumenthal had noted on entering Gaza in The 51 Day War, ‘The first thing a visitor hears is the hum of the Israeli drone that hovers constantly over Gaza …’. Gaza, Blumenthal observed, is not only a ‘ghetto of children’, it is ‘among the most closely surveilled and intensely controlled patches of earth on the planet’.

The Drone Eats With Me lives – and transcribes – that closeness and intensity from Sunday 6 July through Thursday 26 August without missing a day in the latest and longest instalment of the Israeli serial drama of Gaza invasions. It is a story punctuated in the summer of 2014 by two additional, competing, world historical rituals, the World Cup, whose final rounds overlapped with the early days of Operation Protective Edge, and Ramadan, with its festive culmination in the three days of Eid, beginning mid-invasion on 26 July. Atef Abu Saif also celebrates his birthday, and he and his wife their wedding anniversary, at all of which occasions the drone is in indiscreet and unwelcome attendance. Not least of the occasions, however, is iftar, the daily breaking of the Ramadan fast: ‘The heaviest passages in the round-the-clock bombardment’, remarks the diarist, ‘seem to be the two times of the day when we’re serving food – the suhoor and the iftar.’ Abu Saif, European-educated resident of Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza and noted writer, is also the editor of the acclaimed Book of Gaza (2014), a collection of ten short stories by Gazan writers. In early summer 2014, he had only just returned from the volume’s launch in the UK to partake in the observance of Ramadan with his family in Gaza.

But what might Gaza look like, how does it appear, not to a foreign journalist or to a UN commission, or even to one of its own following a short visit abroad, but to a drone, one that ‘eats’ daily with the territory’s inhabitants? Abu Saif tentatively speculates on the spectacular routine one evening early in the siege: ‘This is how Gaza looks on a computer screen – a thousand images captured by a speeding drone and relayed back to a computer, perhaps a laptop on a desk … The drone keeps us company all night long.’ But what kind of company does a drone provide to the people it oversees, spies on, whose every movement, encounter, it tracks, even to what traditional delicacy is being served to break the fast at iftar that evening at sunset? Zohdi, a regular at the nightly shisha rituals that Abu Saif shares with his friends at a local café, warns his neighbours that they must beware of the drone, the information-seeking, death-dealing weapon that, according to Zohdi, might ‘interpret the heat signal [from the shisha’s coals] as a weapon’. Abu Annas, another of the company, is sceptical, but Abu Saif has no such doubt regarding the remotely controlled intentionality of the drone: ‘Zohdi is right’, he records, with a disconcerting gesture towards an aborted empathic connectivity, ‘Neither the drone nor its operator need an excuse to attack a group of people wasting their time trying to forget the war with a shisha pipe. But we should not give it an excuse. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the drone operator; we have to think like a drone operator; we have to respect his blind following of commands, the dumb logic of his mission goals. We need to keep that operator’s unquestioning obedience ever present in our minds.’ Gaza, as Max Blumenthal recalls, feels like a ‘crime scene’.

Gaza, however, once the drone has passed, the bombs fallen, the soldiers returned to their own safe havens, Gaza will no longer look, or even feel, quite the same, the demography and topography again observed to have collapsed, near unrecognisable, into, onto, each other. On the day of the ‘first truce’ (16 July), for example, Abu Saif notes that the ‘street looks like a sculptor’s workshop, fragments everywhere, and yet the form of his subject is still deep in the stone, yet to reveal itself’. By 27 July, following the Shuja’iya massacre, however, the expected revelation has been irreparably distorted: ‘The houses once stood there individually, distinct from each other and from the street. Now you can’t distinguish anything from anything else … Houses no longer have any shape or form. A balcony sits in the middle of the street like a broken chair.’ In other cases, likewise artistically surreal, ‘Many buildings have simply disappeared, as if a designer somewhere had simply Photoshopped them out of the picture, the designer being an F16 pilot, a drone operator, a soldier sitting in a warship or a tank. Each designer competes for a turn to delete the next part of the photograph.’ The omnivorous drone that eats with Atef Abu Saif, watches football matches, partakes of Ramadan sweets, is also frustrated by endless blackouts, even observes the anniversary of Mahmoud Darwish’s death, ‘one of the few writers in our national literature’, opines Abu Saif on 11 August, ‘along perhaps with Ghassan Kanafani, who really captures this idea of home’.

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Just how ‘sustainable’, however, is that longstanding and perduring Palestinian ‘idea of home’? Will Gaza have become ‘unliveable’ by 2020 as UNCTAD has so direly predicted? Or will, more along the lines drafted by the International Crisis Group, there be, according to ‘pattern’, yet another Israeli ‘operation’, to follow on those of Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense, and Protective Edge? In the Afterword to The Drone Eats With Me, appended in hindsight in February 2015, the diarist was guarded at best in his outlook: ‘It’s been nearly six months since the war ended, and reading over this diary now, my first instinct is to feel a little foolish about the hopes expressed on the last day of the war.’ The ‘duty to investigate’, not to be discounted, remains all the more imperative. As Abu Saif probed, even in moments of what might still appear to have been foolishness, if not foolhardiness, pleaded even, ‘Who will convince this generation of Israelis that what they’ve done this summer is a crime? … Who will convince the international community it has a responsibility to be objective when things like this happen?’