Two-year toll of the aggression

Author: Abdel Ghani Salama

Statistics from two years of the assault are frightening and terrifying by every measure: around a quarter of a million people killed, wounded or missing. All residents of the Gaza Strip suffer psychological trauma and endure the horrors and severe consequences of the war, living in dire, coercive conditions unfit for human life. Beyond the enormous destruction and the visible catastrophic losses, which are irreparable, there are invisible losses.
The war has warped many psyches and brought out the worst in people. New categories have appeared that we neither knew of nor expected. At every stage and in every place war profiteers emerge: people who were considered decent before the war suddenly became brokers and began to exploit others in the most brutal ways — owners of uncultivated land renting it at exorbitant prices, those with apartments or even a single room taking advantage of the displaced, owners of pickup trucks or vans demanding astronomical sums for rides that cost them less than 5 percent of the price demanded. Exchange shops and money changers now charge commissions of up to 50 percent. Some building owners are trying harshly to evict displaced people from around their properties. Numerous groups have taken to stealing aid and selling it at sky‑high prices. Some traders hoard goods and present them like a stock market with profits tens or hundreds of times their value. Even stallholders not only raise prices but extract extra profit by differentiating between cash sales and app payments. Their latest invention is buying paper banknotes at about 70 percent of their value in exchange for coins, and refusing to accept certain denominations. Some hospitals charge fees to treat bombing victims and the wounded. Even burying a martyr now costs around 1,000 shekels or more.
Exploitation has become the most common trait (not to generalize), with anyone hunting for any opportunity to take advantage of others. The struggle to survive has become the prevailing rule; mercy has disappeared or nearly so.
All this is part of the everyday (exploitative) interactions that have become normal and public — without even mentioning assaults, thefts, looting, beatings and assaults with available weapons, and even murders, the spread of gangs and roadblocks, and general lawlessness. Armed groups, some masked and some unmasked, assault people with clubs, break limbs mercilessly, shoot at knees (to create permanent disability) or to kill, carry out extrajudicial mass executions, and threaten anyone who opposes them. They prey on the weak under the pretext that they are thieves or spies, without investigation or trial, merely on suspicion or over family or partisan disputes — and they leave war profiteers alone or share their gains.
Citizens, intellectuals, holders of advanced degrees, civil servants, workers, craftsmen and professionals, students and their teachers, and those who were once wealthy or modest alike have become crushed, seeking a tent, a box of aid, or a pickup to carry their belongings in a march of displacement toward the unknown — an endless journey of suffering.
The aim here is not to portray a distorted image of society today, but this is the reality in all its ugliness; this is the naked truth, the sad reality of Gaza.
We say it with regret, humiliation and deep sorrow: the most bitter question is how did we reach this wretched state? For what? For whose benefit? What have we gained?
This is the greatest crime in history committed by Israel, and we know these are ordinary and expected byproducts of a state of war and the severe pressures suffered by our people in the Strip as a result of the harsh conditions. The question is: did those who called for the war and applauded it not know that any society subjected to such an aggressive and brutal war would inevitably reach this outcome? What did they prepare and how did they prepare to avoid reaching this state or to deal with it? The answer: nothing.
If the yield of two years of aggression was to bring the Palestinian cause back to the fore, we should ask ourselves: who caused the marginalization of the cause in the first place? Was it not division and poor performance? Was it not possible to return the cause to the forefront by other means? Was it not possible to confront the enemy, resist it populary and militarily and engage with it daily but by less costly and wiser means?
The problem is that the cause was returned in a negative form, summarized by images of queues of humiliation and turning Palestinians into beggars for aid. The cause was reduced to relief and assistance, emptied of its national and political content and turned into a humanitarian issue — a return to its original square, the Nakba square — and on top of that a revival of Arab and foreign tutelage and the era of the High Commissioner.
Another illusion abundant in Arab discourse is the claim that the assault “exposed Israel’s face and morally toppled it.”
History has not seen an occupying power collapse merely because its ugliness was exposed or its image was shaken. Powers fall when they lose their material and political balance and international support, and reaching that point still requires bitter effort and struggle.
Moreover, the ongoing assault on Gaza has become a cover under which Israel practices its violations and advances its settlement project in the West Bank without noise.
More dangerous still is that daily loss of life in terrifying numbers and this frightening scale of destruction have become routine — repeated daily in the media until they have become ordinary and elicit little attention. In other words, the world has become accustomed to Israeli criminal practices, and Israel has exploited that to carry out what it could not previously implement — actions it once carried out cautiously and slowly within certain calculations — now executed quickly, intensively and without restraint.
In the first Nakba refugees were expelled but found tents, schools and health care, and soon they awoke and launched an armed uprising. In this new Nakba the displaced are driven from their homes and find nothing: no tent, no school, not even a horizon. How many years will it take to regain hope?