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Two Years After Gaza
by: Lizzy Ratner
The Nation
In January 2009, during a lull in the bombing of Israel's
"Cast Lead" operation against Gaza, I spoke by telephone
with an old family friend, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, from
his home on Gaza's Salah al-Din Street. In a voice etched
with panic, he told me about his family's dwindling water
supply, his children's terror, his dream of escaping. He
asked if I could help find a way for him and his family
to leave the Gaza Strip. I made some genuine efforts to
solicit help from friends with more connections than I,
people who might actually be able to do something, but
it pains me to this day that I did not do more. The next
time we spoke, it was about the death of his three
daughters.
On January 16, 2009, three of Dr. Abuelaish's eight
children?Bessan, 21, Mayar, 15, and Aya, 14?were killed
when Israeli soldiers trained the nozzle of their tank on
the Abuelaish house and fired. Twice. The blasts killed
all three girls immediately, as well as their cousin Noor,
and it wounded their sister, Shatha, another cousin and an
uncle. Dr. Abuelaish himself was unharmed, but in a harrow-
ing turn of events that is now well and painfully known,
he phoned Israeli newscaster Shlomi Eldar and, in a frantic
tangle of Hebrew and Arabic, begged for help on Israel's
nightly news. "Oh God, oh my God, my daughters have been
killed. They've killed my children," he cried. "Could some-
body please come to us?" The phone call, which was broad-
cast live throughout Israel, sounds like a shriek out of
hell. It is almost impossible to listen to.
In the wake of this tragedy, Dr. Abuelaish, a well-known
peace activist, remained resolutely, even stubbornly,
committed to reconciliation and understanding. He did not
want revenge. He just wanted accountability. "They were my
beloved girls, very beautiful, very kind. Why were they
killed?" he asked in a phone conversation shortly after
his daughters' deaths. "I don't ask for anything, just
[for the Israeli military] to admit and say sorry."
"Take responsibility," he begged.
Now, two years have passed, and Dr. Abuelaish is suing the
state of Israel. He is asking for the apology he never got
and for damages, which, he said, would go to the foundation
he started in memory of his daughters. He did not want to
sue. He still believes in peace and rapprochement. But he
wrote in an e-mail, "I was forced to go to the court as I
did not find any open minds, ears, or hearts from the
Israeli government. I did my best for about two years to
settle it peacefully. Unfortunately [I] did not succeed."
That Dr. Abuelaish did not succeed should distress anyone
with the slightest bit of empathy. And it should disturb
anyone who cares seriously about human rights, peace and
basic justice. Because if Dr. Abuelaish can't find open
minds, ears or hearts in the Israeli government?Dr.
Abuelaish, who has continued to look for the best in Israel
even after his daughters' deaths, who has both prominent
connections and international stature, who was nominated
for a Nobel Peace prize?then who can? What about all the
other victims whose stories are not as famous but are no
less harrowing?
Certainly there are plenty of them: parents like Khaled and
Kawthar Abed Rabbo, who watched a soldier gun down their
daughters, Souad and Amal, ages 7 and 2, as they left their
house, white flags waving; or women like Abir Mohammed
Hajji, who lost her husband, young daughter and unborn baby
during a days' long odyssey to find refuge during the
invasion. More than 300 Palestinian children died during
those twenty-two days, and hundreds of adult civilians
lost their lives. Another 5,300 Palestinians were seriously
wounded.
In the wake of Cast Lead, there have been efforts to bring
some kind of justice to bear for these victims. The Gold-
stone Report, the convulsive United Nations document that
found that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes
during the Gaza conflict, provided mechanisms for aiding
and acknowledging the many civilians who lost lives,
relatives, limbs and livelihoods in the war. These
mechanisms included prosecution of perpetrators and
compensation for victims?and helped earn the report the
unmitigated condemnation of the Israeli government. And
yet, while the Goldstone Report has been vehemently
denounced by the likes of Alan Dershowitz and Benjamin
Netanyahu as an attack on Israel's legitimacy, its mission
is far more simple and nowhere as sinister: it is to induce
Israel, as well as Hamas, to take accountability, claim
responsibility, for the many, many people who lost their
lives in a torrent of disproportionate force?all in the
hopes of preventing that disproportionate force in the
future. Call it a roadmap to end impunity.
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Dr. Abuelaish himself has often dreamed aloud that his
daughters' deaths would help bring an end to the blood-
letting. "If I could know that my daughters were the last
sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and
Israelis, then I would accept their loss," he writes in
his powerful, just-released book, I Shall Not Hate. But if
the prospect of peace is measured in a government's willing-
ness to take responsibility, even apologize, the odds do
not look promising.
A statement issued by the Israeli Defense Ministry's legal
adviser in response to Dr. Abuelaish's lawsuit suggests
just how far the government is from acknowledging
responsibility. "Despite the severe outcome, from a legal
standpoint our stance is that the operation during which
Dr. Abuelaish's family members were hurt was an operation
of war," the legal adviser, Ahaz Ben-Ari, told the press.
"The State of Israel does not carry the responsibility for
the damage it caused."
And yet this "damage" that Ben-Ari refers to so casually
wasn't a car or a house or a television set. It was Bessan,
Mayar and Aya, three young girls who were killed in an
attack that has become famous as a symbol of the brutal
excesses of Israeli military might. And, sadly, they have
not been the last. Earlier this month, a 36-year-old woman,
Jawaher Abu Rahma, died after soldiers doused her and
others with excessive quantities of tear gas at a non-
violent protest in the West Bank town of Bil'in. She is
but one of the most recent.
As I write this, I can't help but think of the happy-heart-
breaking day in February 2000 when I first visited Gaza
with Dr. Abuelaish. He and my mother had become friendly
several years earlier and would often meet when they were
on each other's side of the globe. He would visit when he
was in the United States, as he did when he joined us in
sitting shiva for my grandmother in 2004; and she would
cross into Gaza when she was in Israel, as she and I both
did on that crystalline day in 2000. On this particular
visit, we had made our way down from Jerusalem to Be'er
Sheva, where Dr. Abuelaish was practicing medicine at
the time, and he then escorted us through the corrugated
fortress of the Erez checkpoint and on to his home in the
Jabalya refugee camp. Dr. Abuelaish was born and raised
in the camp (his parents had originally lived in a town
called Huj, later a kibbutz in Israel, until they were
expelled in 1948), and he made a voluble guide as he
drove us into that walled-off world of Gaza. This world
was one that many Jews don't go to see, but that, if
they did, would (or should) shatter their hearts. It's
a place where open sewers run in the dusty streets, where
concrete homes stand half-open to the elements, where
electricity flickers feebly and where the tourniquet of
the occupation chokes almost everything but poverty.
And yet, it is also a place where, ten years ago, doe-eyed
children played cheerfully in the courtyard of a United
Nations school, where generous hosts presented feasts of
chicken and hummus to almost-strangers, and where a
doctor's young daughters proudly showed off their artwork.
At the end of the day, in a scene that somehow conjured
Chagall in its beauty and absurdity, Dr. Abuelaish treated
my mother and me to a trip to a strawberry patch where we
munched lush strawberries pulled straight from the
impossible, brown dirt.
Now, of course, much of that world is gone. The strawberry
patches. The schools. The Abuelaish girls.
So, two years later, I echo Dr. Abuelaish's plea: admit
and say sorry.
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