Mostly Gunmen:
The Banality of Gaza
by C. L. Cook
 Writing for Reuters Wednesday, June 27, 2007 of the Israeli Defense Force launching of what was described then as the "biggest incursion" into Gaza since the Hamas government expelled Fatah militants, Nidal al-Mughrabi sedately relates, "Israeli forces killed at least 12 Palestinians, mostly gunmen but also a 12-year-old boy and other civilians."
al-Mughrabi's words smooth the edges of the horror, (after all, it's merely one more in an endless stream of atrocity committed against the prisoners of Gaza), soothing with bland tone and neutered language the destruction of a dozen lives. He can almost be forgiven his mechanically reproduced account; why stretch for superlatives that has not, and still can not, do justice to this? It's just another day, and another dozen dead; but it's reassuring they killed were "mostly gunmen."
There was bound to be blood. Nidal says the "operation[s]" in
Gaza City and Khan Younis are an apparent "signal" from Israel. Twelve
reported dead today, though it's a figure subject to change, (as it
changed over the course of the day's news tickers: 8, 10, 12, 13 dead),
and what message was Israel anxious enough to send to end 8, 10,
or 12 people?
As the surgeons say; "If it isn't bleeding, you're not operating."
What
Nidal describes as "strong military pressure" currently being applied
across Gaza seems to be an attempt to make of Gaza what the IDF and
their agents enabled in Beirut those long bloody years ago; an
"eruption" of violence through the arming of one party, in support of an
effort to engender a civil war. Similar to what America, using Israel's
well-practiced "Rules of Engagement," has very nearly accomplished in
Iraq; an endless orgy of "Blue on Blue," Arab on Arab warfare. It's a notion
George W. Bush admitted in an interview the day after Wednesday's
massacre, saying Israel was a very good model for Iraq's future; or was
it meant to be the other way around?
Though Reuters would pay
its stringers to report the casualties of this calculated stratagem as
"radical," "militant," "terrorist" gunmen, (or "human shields," the
killing of which is rationalized as necessary to get at the radical,
militant, terrorist gunmen cowering behind), the truth is: these
"other" civilians are actually less caught in the cross-fire than
purposefully placed in the cross-hairs by an ascendant, neo-military
philosophy that targets civilians first.
As Lebanon proved last summer,
the new way of war is the targeting of civilians and the infrastructure
necessary to support a modern, urbanized society not as last resort,
but as first wave. Hitler called it, "Blitzkrieg;" Rumsfeld, "Shock
and Awe."
But you won't hear that from the usual, suspect sources of the evening news.
It's
not just Nidal al-Mughrabi, or his colleagues "Jeffrey Heller in
Jerusalem, and Haitham Tamimi in Ramallah," (credited with contributing
to the Reuters article), to be considered. When covering Gaza and the
Palestine-Israel issue, Reuters and the rest cull their vocabularies,
insisting on colourless, abstract words and phrases in a designed
effort to render the vivid, ongoing criminality banal, making of
this outrage something akin to a weather report, obscuring its obscene
blood reds and gas-chamber greens; making pale, barely newsworthy, the
systematic erasure of a people, it becomes day-for-night fiction;
murder, destruction, and gore presented as a tedious, insoluble
problem, best dealt with by changing the channel: a Holocaust denied.
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