The Arabs living in the Gaza Strip today are called Palestinians, named partially after the Philistines, but they are not actual descendants. The Philistines left the area in the 6th century BCE, and it was the Romans who renamed the area Palaestina. Of course, the Arabs and Jews from the area have extremely similar genetic ties. But it’s long been one of the most contentious stretches of land, serving as the main land route between Africa and Asia, under administrative control of Egypt, and then the Ottoman Empire for several centuries. The Philistines were a mostly illiterate society who left no written record, but according to Egyptian history, they were a seafaring people who attempted to invade Egypt during Ramesses III rule. Known as the Sea People, the Tjeker and the Peleset invaded, (the Peleset being the namesake, of course) because it served as an important trade and communication nexus along the coast, rich in turquoise, copper, alabaster, mother-of-pearl, and other resources.
The Gaza Strip is not loved by history; it seems cursed, defined by bloodshed and turmoil. It was taken again, during the siege by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, whose Macedonian army finally took Gaza city after three failed attempts, ending the 31st Dynasty of Egypt. Everything was at stake, channeled into this tiny stretch of land, and surely, the military commander in charge of Gaza’s fortress, Batis, knew that beyond Alexander’s intentions of taking Gaza as the main artery between Africa and Asia, he wanted to control all of the Mediterranean coast before invading Persia. All of the men within Gaza were killed, the women and children were sold off as slaves. Batis was killed by Alexander, who then treated him in a display of parading victory similar to how Achilles conquered the Trojan prince Hector. A rope was sewn through Hector’s ankles, between his anklebone and achilles tendon, and he was dragged behind a chariot, under the walls of the city until he died. Achilles was Alexander’s hero, and so he emulated the myth into the real world.
In the myth of Achilles, he was invulnerable except for his one ankle, where his mother Thetis held him as she dipped him into the river Styx as a baby. There is always an Achilles heel, however seemingly invincible the person or nation. Walls, for example, give the country the belief that they are fortified and protected, but they have never worked. Of course, our own Achilles heel is not so complicated. We’re all saying the same thing: why are there so many homeless people left out to die, but then a blank check for the military? Why is there no universal healthcare, but always enough money for war?
During the US’s invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration banned all media coverage of coffins draped in American flags returning from war. It’s crazy he was able to get away with that, but he was smart to, as he was smart in never instituting a draft. There are far more effective ways to enlist people to fight your wars for you, and then to make it disappear from the minds of the concerning populations. Make it disappear. Let days turn into weeks turn into months where you don’t even think about the teenagers we shipped off to die. And you never see the faces of the villages we completely annihilated. When photos returned from the voyeurisms of torture inflicted at Abu Ghraib, I was only sixteen years old, but I remember much of the conversation I heard around from my elders not being about how horrible it was that our government committed such acts, but what a great recruitment tool this was to inspire more terrorists. It wasn’t about resolving the sins we committed, or about how our leaders allowed that to happen, but instead how we gave cause for the other side. Everything now was a board game. We have been reduced to numbers and pieces hurling fire over ramshackle walls.
Because war, for all its all-the-ground brutality and bloodshed, is propaganda, in how it looks to the rest of the world, and there is no recovering from endless reels of dead children. The current war is Gaza is too horrible of a reality. I find myself turning away from it because it is so unbearable and heartbreaking. But then beyond all that, even viewing the war through the lens of war strategy, purely as an inhuman board game of gambit and procedure, it seems like an insane suicidal eternal pact to invade Gaza the way Israel has chosen to. By giving no regard for women or children, or the vast majority of men not involved, you have immediately declared an endless war, spawning a tragedy of optics that will unavoidably give birth to many future generations of reactionaries. I imagine there is some kind of educated guess as to how many future Hamas fighters or sympathizers you create for every child you kill. 5? 10? 100 new fighters for every kid you kill? It surely magnifies.
The only way to secure a safe future for Israel now from Hamas is to kill every person living in Gaza and beyond, to scorch its land into a crater of hell. The minister of heritage, Amichay Eliyahu, who said Israel could just drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza to rid itself of the problem of Hamas, is right in a way. Violence always begets more violence, a common law engraved in the tombstones of history. Israel’s creation of Hezbollah is an obvious example of this. During the Black September of 1970, Palestinian guerrillas spread into South Lebanon, to live and operate amongst the Shi’i population of South Lebanon. After its attacks into northern Israel, Israel subsequently invaded, moving many of its military operations within southern Lebanon. Hezbollah was eventually created, started by Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, Iran’s ambassador to Syria, in 1982. Hezbollah means the Party of God, the name deriving from the passage in the Qur’an, “Those who form the party of God will be the victors.”
But there is a line of thinking in mainstream liberal thought that says Islam is just stoneage brutishness, that they’re animals who are constantly pestering the decorum and civil order of our modern western ways. It says, they’re the Allah Akbar people who wrap their women up in black bedsheets to walk around like the dark age ghosts of Halloween. The kind of thinking that Bill Maher and Sam Harris and hordes of others among the hip contrarian intellectual class go to longwinded pains to justify bombing them. If this is how you feel, then your political ideology, your chosen side in this topic, like it was a football team, is shielded with bumpers of intellectual blindness, willful terror it chooses to ignore. Or, if you say, “Bring the hostages home now,” which every sensible person with a heart should believe and call for, you are deemed part of the pro-Israel camp. (I don’t know how Netanyahu can bomb Gaza indiscriminately knowing there are still so many hostages to be found.) There’s been endless mockery of people holding banners that read “Queers for Palestine”—don’t you know they would kill you immediately, for being queer? You can be gay all you want in Israel, not a problem. As if this has anything to do with dropping bombs on hospitals. As if it has anything to do with dropping white phosphorous on kids huddled in fear, boiling their skin down to the bone. And sure, Islam holds a backwards set of beliefs in many regards. You can spend endless time reciting the litany of their sins—their horrific FGM rates, the lack of rights for women, throwing gays from the tops of buildings, bans of free speech. I used to do this, I used to revel in drunken debates where I could prove to the other person that Islam was late to the party of modernity. It’s embarrassing looking back at this period. I actually don’t know what I was trying to prove. Because not only does a religion’s or culture’s set of practices have nothing to do with justifying our cause for bombing their children, it doesn’t hold a candle to the scale and efficiency of slaughter committed by the US, or by Israel as an extension of the US. Having opinions about the beliefs and practices of Muslims is moot. There is only relevancy in what you can change, in what you are partially responsible for. As Chomsky stated, “My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; I can do something about it. …It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.” This is why it’s so important to denounce the violence carried out by Israel, because Israel is an extension of the US, doing the killing for us by proxy.
We have reduced the Palestinians living in Gaza Strip to numbers, digits of horrifying spectacle. As of this writing, more than 11,000 killed in Gaza, one out of every 200. 1.5 million people in Gaza are internally displaced (they even have an acronym for this. IDPs.) At least 42 journalists have been killed. 70 percent of Gazans don’t have access to clean water. The average age in Gaza is 18. There’s a special psychopathy for people explaining away the deaths, an ideological tribalism that explains away the mass slaughter of so many innocent victims. Blaming Hamas for using the Palestinian population as human shields, hiding amongst their own, reportedly hiding some hostages and weaponry in tunnels directly under the hospital ignores the fact that Israel still chose to drop bombs on a hospital.
Our own Achilles heel, the thing that will bring us down in the end, is our disregard for human life. The US has always had a special knack for somehow or other getting involved in all the world’s varying wars, a fully armed death drive, its simultaneous glee for gore and its paranoia of being attacked fueling its Moloch strength for eternity. We’re ready for death. But for all our military might, for all of our intelligence and proficiency for war, we are writing our own destiny of forever-war. Even from a purely selfish, nationalistic view, funding another war in the Middle East is an insane, suicidal pact. We will undoubtedly be the target of future terror attacks, many innocent Americans going about their day will die, and the cause will be because we funded and equipped Netanyauh’s Israel and his commitment to kill more kids. Only a stronger, larger, angrier Hamas will come out of this. And they will in turn kill more innocent people, people you identify as closer to your own, and this will in turn trigger another round of slaughter, a chain reaction of death, forever, through eons and fortunes, until all that’s left is a scorched frontier of strewn bodies piled up so high it blocks out the sun. As a single collective legacy, we have given the Earth and each other nothing but death, death and its cascading posterity. The only thing to do is to end the killing.
Ugh this is so depressing and true. Beautifully written. History repeating itself again and again, we will never learn, death brings more death. Those poor babies.