Reflections of War
On December 27, 2008, Israel's already crippling siege on the neighbouring Gaza Strip escalated into a brutal war. Al Jazeera was the only global news network reporting from both inside Gaza and Israel for the entirity of the conflict. Throughout Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros brought news of the human tragedy unfolding to living rooms throughout the English speaking world. They found themselves as vulnerable as the civilians of Gaza and now they give their full accounts of what it was really like to report that war.
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International outrage at the war on Gaza has triggered calls to boycott, divest and sanction Israel.Just this week, student activists at a small US college said they persuaded their university to divest from corporations that support Israeli occupation.A movement like the one that ended South African apartheid may be tough to build in the US. But it could be gathering steam. Al Jazeera's Josh Rushing reports from New York city.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpV4rvAOxXo
While Israel is going to the polls, the story of how their army conducted its war on Gaza is slowly being pieced together. Two Gaza residents have told al Jazeera that they were used as human shields by the army - a military tactic that is specifically forbidden by Israeli law. The Israeli army denies the allegations. Hoda Abdel Hamid reports from Gaza.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acaU4D6dUqU
Counselors and teachers are addressing the trauma and fears of students in Gaza [GALLO/GETTY] As students filed into the courtyard of Asma elementary school in Gaza City for the first time since the Israeli offensive began, they were greeted by a bleak reminder of the violence that left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead and thousands injured.
A hole punched by an Israeli rocket scarred the courtyard latrine and blood soiled the wall beside it. Asma is one of over 600 schools in Gaza - most of which reopened on January 24 - that is today facing a large number of post-war operational challenges.
Educators across the Gaza Strip are now considering whether to reschedule exams which were abandoned when Israel began bombing the territory on December 27.
Teachers are also faced with the task of teaching in rooms which had served as shelters for dozens of refugees.
Addressing the trauma
Inside the classrooms, debris left by the scores of refugees housed there until a few days ago still covered the floors – a box of tomatoes, empty bottles and, in some rooms, the shattered remnants of boards and chairs used for firewood in the absence of gas and electricity.
Many teachers say that a normal curriculum cannot be administered until students have been treated for trauma from the deaths of their classmates and family members.
"In the morning when I was working among the students, some of them were very frightened," said Amirah Hamdan, a teacher at Asma who handles the morning attendance call.
"They thought that the war would start again because they were in the school."
Other teachers and administrators say they will take the next few days to help the school's nearly 900 students put the war behind them and return to their studies, but the first day made it clear that this will take time.
Students at the Asma school were mostly glad to return, though many were still shaken by the violence of the past few weeks. Nour Abdel All, 10, says she lost two of her seven brothers during the war and is worried that she will lose more.
When she is old enough to work, she says, she would like to teach human rights, an attitude inspired by the loss of her brothers.
The bombing terrified her and she is still scared - particularly of the Israeli fighter jets.
"I pray that God will one day burn them all," she says
School exams
Suha Dawoud, a supervisor at Asma, says her daughter was one of many students who had been taking her annual exams when the Israeli attacks began.
"They [the students] are not in a state of mind in which they can concentrate and focus," says Dawoud.
"Even the most disciplined student would not be able to cope with examinations after the horrible scenes they have watched either on TV or on the ground."
However, many students had been performing poorly at school even before Israel launched the war on Gaza on December 27.
The Israeli blockade has stifled the local economy forcing many students to reportedly abandoned their studies and seek employment.
Turning to education
Several schools in Gaza were damaged in the Israeli attacks [AFP] Many Palestinians see education as one of the few paths available to them to leave the territories in search of better lives.
In recent decades, the West Bank and Gaza Strip have posted better high school enrolment rates than Lebanon and higher literacy rates than Egypt and Yemen.The Palestinian territories and diaspora have produced many influential academics, such as Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi and Mahmoud Darwish.
"Our goal is to keep the wheel of education going, because education is what our children have. It is their actual wealth," says Dawoud.
"We do not have resources here in Gaza. We do not have raw materials or industry. We have nothing other than education itself."
Educators like Dawoud are also up against the prevailing atmosphere of occupation and violence.
Graffiti depicting armed and masked men cover the walls, the faces of fallen "martyrs" glare down from lamppost signs, and digital gunfire sputters from internet cafes as rows of children sit enthralled by military-themed video games.
Even in Dawoud's classes, the air of violence is there.
As a kind of therapy, she often gives children papers and pencils and asks them to draw what they are feeling.
"You might be shocked," she says.
"Blood, destruction, people killing each other; guns are in their paintings and drawings."
Angry students
At the Palestine Secondary School for Boys, a government-run school for some 700 students in Gaza City, administrators have decided to cancel exams altogether.
They had been scheduled for December 29 – two days after the Israeli assault began.
El-Khalily, the school's manager, told Al Jazeera that on their first day back, teachers did not hold regular class session but instead chose to help students cope with what they had seen and heard during the war.
Two students from the school were killed during the war and another five were wounded.
Teachers at the school are worried that student anger could lead to violence and failing grades in the days ahead.
"Maybe a teacher is explaining a lesson and the student is in another mental place," says Nour El-Deen, an English teacher.
"His body is with the teacher, yes, but his mind is out. He is thinking of destruction, demolition."
The Gaza-Warsaw comparisons have not just been made, predictably, by Hamas leaders such as Mahmoud al-Zahar.
They have also been made by Arabs and Muslims around the world, by anti-war movements in Europe and the US, on the opinion pages of major US newspapers, by Richard Falk, the UN Human Rights Rapporteur, by Jewish members of the British parliament, and even by some American Jewish and Israeli critics of the war.Images from Gaza have been juxtaposed next to images from the Warsaw Ghetto, with the aim of demonstrating the similarities between the two.Evoking memories
It was inevitable that the Gaza-Warsaw comparison would be made, especially once the war started. It is so difficult to get the mainstream media in the West, and particularly in the US, to pay attention to the suffering of Palestinians, that many seem to have concluded that only the most powerful comparisons will get peoples' attention.
There are, indeed, disturbing similarities between the two situations.
Even the tunnels of Gaza have been compared to those used by Jews to smuggle food and other essential goods into the Ghetto from the "Aryan side".Psychological harm
These comparisons reflect an intolerable situation that is not just a humanitarian disaster, but has included the systematic commission of war crimes, and through them, crimes against humanity. The fact that the situation in Gaza has existed for decades has deepened the suffering, and the level of culpability.
But thank God, Gaza is not the Warsaw Ghetto. Even after the latest war, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank remain rooted to the soil, not buried beneath it.
Hamas's Mahmoud al-Zahar has described Israel's attack on Gaza as "total war". This language is clearly intended to link Israel's actions in Gaza to genocide, and particularly Germany's total war against the Jews during the Second World War, in their effect if not their intention.
If such a comparison has merits, the Gaza-Warsaw comparison would similarly hold true, giving the accusations of a Palestinian Holocaust merit. The February 29, 2008 warning by Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defence minister, that Palestinians risked "bringing an even bigger Shoah" (the Hebrew word for Holocaust) upon themselves if they did not stop firing Qassam rockets into Israel, reveals that Israeli officials are well aware of the magnitude of the suffering they have inflicted on the people of Gaza.Defining genocide
Yet, however horrific the situation in Gaza, it does not meet the definition of genocide used by the main bodies that prosecute such crimes, such as the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice. All of these bodies define genocide as involving the intention to bring about the "physical-biological destruction" of a large enough share of an "entire human group" (national, ethnic, racial or religious) as to put the group's continued physical existence in jeopardy.The Warsaw Ghetto was used by the Nazis to confine Jews into the smallest possible space, eventually in preparation for their ultimate extermination - which became official Nazi policy within a year of the ghetto's creation. Out of an initial population of over 400,000 Jews, 100,000 had died of disease and starvation by the time the uprising began in 1943. To be comparable, by 2007 over 300,000 Gazans would have to have died from similar causes. Ultimately, more than 300,000 Jews were shipped to the Treblinka extermination camp and murdered. At most, only about 200 Jews survived the uprising.Ninety-eight per cent of Warsaw's Jews perished. More broadly, about 63 per cent of Europe's pre-war Jewish population were killed during the Holocaust.
The roughly 6,500 Gazans killed by Israel since it unilaterally withdrew its soldiers and settlers in 2005 equals 0.4 per cent of the population of the Strip.
In comparison, upwards of 75 per cent of Rwanda's Tutsi population, about 800,000 people, were murdered during the 100 days of genocide in 1994. Over 200,000 Bosnian Muslims (10 per cent of the pre-war Muslim population) were killed by Serbs between 1993 and 1995. The Gazan death toll would have to be more than 20 times greater to approach Bosnia, 175 times more to approach Rwanda.Historical contextPointing out that the suffering endured by Gazans is not comparable in scope to the Holocaust or other well-known genocides, does not diminish it. However, it is crucial to provide accurate historical context to the current conflict, for two reasons.
Weeks after Israel's war on Gaza, the suffering of people in the Strip has not ended. Israel maintains a blockade, on land, in the air and at sea. For fishermen in Gaza, making a living has become harder and more dangerous, as Al Jazeera's Mike Kirsch reports.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNG0updjaX4
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Gaza: The Case for Middle East Peace The uncertainty and complexity surrounding the crisis in Gaza have captured the attention of the world. What needs to be done to prevent the Middle East peace process from slipping away yet again? Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General, United Nations, New York Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey Amre Moussa, Secretary-General, League of Arab States, Cairo Shimon Peres, President of Israel Chaired by David Ignatius, Associate Editor and Columnist, The Washington Post, USA
