This commentary is by Kate Casa of Brattleboro, a former editor of the Brattleboro Reformer and The Commons. She has worked for years in higher education, development, and communications, and has lived in and reported from the Middle East.
As a freelance journalist in Palestine during the first intifada, I witnessed many things that shocked me. I want to tell you about one.
The first Palestinian intifada, the Arabic word for “shaking off,” began in 1987 as a sweeping social mobilization organized by popular committees and grounded in principles of nonviolent resistance. It was carried out through boycotts, marches and strikes. Palestinians developed their own education, civic and food systems and withdrew as much as possible from Israeli control over their lives.
In response to this resistance and the stone-throwing and tire-burning carried out by Palestinian youths against heavily armed soldiers, Israel would frequently place entire communities under curfew. That meant that Palestinians had to stay inside their homes for a given period — sometimes more than a month — and were not allowed to emerge to get food or water, to seek health care, or for any other reason. To do so risked being shot on sight.
At that time, unlike today, journalists could still go in and out of Gaza. That’s where I was one morning in the spring of 1988 when a long curfew on a large refugee camp was ending. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were emerging after being shut up inside their homes for weeks. As I sat waiting to enter the camp, a truck pulled up to the gates carrying sacks of fresh bread, the mouth-watering scent wafting over the area. While the driver waited for the go-ahead, soldiers jumped into the back of the truck, kicking the sacks to the ground where other soldiers slowly and methodically stomped the fresh bread into the dirt.
This was not the most egregious or violent act that I saw in Palestine during the intifada. Israelis routinely demolished the homes of Palestinian suspects, leaving entire families without shelter; they tear-gassed protesters and shot them with rubber bullets and live ammunition designed to maim and kill. But the bread incident has stuck with me all these years because of how random, gratuitous, cold and pointlessly cruel it was.
I doubt anyone explicitly ordered those soldiers to do what they did. It was all part of the systematic process of dehumanizing Palestinians, which was and still is an integral component of Israel’s settler colonial project.
Only if Palestinians are thought of as subhuman — “human animals,” as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant put it last week — could Israel implement a 17-year siege in which 2.3 million people are locked down in the overcrowded Gaza Strip, deprived of livelihoods and hope.
If Israelis considered the Palestinians as human, could they so readily steal their land and water, destroy their crops, arrest their children? Could they justify the settlers who rampage through the West Bank with soldiers accompanying and abetting the looting and destruction? Could they hold hundreds in prison without charge? Could they torture, shoot and kill their fellow humans?
I doubt it.
In a 2018 Al-Jazeera documentary about the “hilltop youth” of the West Bank, extremist settlers talk about killing Palestinians. “I don’t care if Arabs live or die,” says one young woman matter-of-factly. “I prefer them dead.”
Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. From huge cities like Ariel to rustic outposts like the one in the documentary, they sprout and mushroom throughout the West Bank as settlers take land that does not belong to them. The West, in particular the United States, actively supports this illegal activity with billions of dollars’ worth of aid and military equipment and priceless diplomatic pressure on any country that does not comply with Israel’s wishes.
Mainstream U.S. media organizations seldom have the stomach to report what’s happening. After I returned from reporting in Palestine and wrote an op-ed much like this one for The Sacramento Bee, where I was working, an editor labeled my firsthand account “agitprop” and categorically rejected it.
Without accurate reporting, and with Palestinians left out of their own narrative, Americans are hoodwinked into believing the myth of Israel as a valiant little democracy in a sea of hostility — the light of hope for Jews worldwide. To think or say anything different is to be called “antisemitic.” Without understanding or accurate information, few Americans are ready to push back against that.
As I watched that scene in Gaza, I thought about how Israel’s occupation was eroding its morals and values from within. Compelled to serve in the military, generation after generation of Israelis carry out horrendous acts in the name of territorial expansion. To make sense of what they are asked to do, members of this so-called “moral army” see Palestinians as something inhuman to be crushed and destroyed.
The rest of us pay our taxes and avert our gaze from the flagrant human rights abuses taking place with our money on our watch. That makes us complicit. Now see what we all have wrought.
