This book primarily focuses on one event in November of 1956, in a town in the Gaza Strip called Rafah. In this particular event, hundreds of young, unarmed men, mostly of military age, were rounded up in a local school yard by the Israeli army. Most were severely beaten on the head as they entered the yard. They were questioned. Held all day, they were made to sit in their own piss. Some rubbed sand in their wounds to stop the bleeding. Suspected soldiers were imprisoned or killed on the spot. After all the soldiers had been weeded out, the rest were released, sent home. Later, families ran into the night, looking for their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, their sons. They found them dead in the streets, slumped against walls, face down in the dirt, or piled with others on the outskirts of town. 50. 60. 70 corpses, tossed together like fish. The families carried them off using blankets. They brought them to the local cemetery, buried five, six bodies in preexisting graves. They had no time. They were already breaking curfew.
So this is the terrible subject of Sacco's book but he finds it hard to stay on topic, as he is researching in present day Rafah and present day Rafah is an exceedingly violent area. Every day something new is happening. Every day, Palestinian homes are being bulldozed by the IDF (Israeli Defense Force). The IDF claims they are being fired upon by these houses, snipers on the rooftops. Possibly, though not likely, and hardly a reason to bulldoze someones home, displacing an entire family. But such is the power of the IDF, whose power is all but total in Palestine.
So we call Palestinians terrorists. They hate America. They loved Saddam Hussein. They hate Jews. But what if we step back for a second and examine why we think these things. Well, most of it has to do with because that is what the US government and the Israeli government and the media want us to think. But think about it this way, with a little empathy.
We have tanks and high powered rifles and night vision and Kevlar and helicopters and jets and bulldozers and jeeps and uniforms and money and power and we call ourselves an army of soldiers. They have few guns and fewer soldiers and fewer weapons and virtually no money and we call them terrorists. We call them terrorists because...they use suicide bombers, killing untold amounts of innocent victims? No one can support that. I do not support terrorism. What is the difference between terroism and the army? Isn't the IDF guilty of atrocities perpetrated against innocent Palestinians? But all Palestinians are terrorists so it doesn't matter, right? What I'm saying, if we think about it a little differently and think, well what is the alternative? How else are the Palestinians to defend themselves? And at this point, it's a quagmire, it's just eye for an eye stuff. 5 Palestinians killed one day, 3 Israelis killed as retaliation. And on and on and on.
But do Americans understand any of this, question any of this? Do we know about this displacement, these bulldozed homes? What if you lived in an area where at any moment, your home could be bulldozed by the government? Living under curfew, sniped at from towers at night? Do we understand this type of life? If we were faced with death, every day, faced with displacement, every day, what would we be compelled to do? Would you hate your oppressor? Would you cheer those that helped you? Curse those that funded your enemy? So then, how can we judge what we don't know for certain. How can we judge what we do not understand?
Everything is gray.
