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Mohammed Omer, Award Winner 2006: Youth
Voice, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Washington, DC), Nov
02, 2006
THE ISRAELIS called it “Operation Rainbow”—and insisted the name was
generated at random by a computer. To the men, women, and children of
Rafah who endured the slaughter, however, it was a bitter footnote to a
week of horror. In Greek mythology, the rainbow was a bridge between
earth and Olympus, between men and gods. In the Old Testament, after
sending a flood that destroyed the world, God set a rainbow in the sky
as a sign of peace and renewal. But in May of 2004, the shells and bombs
in the night sky over Rafah brought only death. “Operation Rainbow” is
an appropriate name in only one way: a year later, the images are still
vivid, their evidence of Israeli terrorism against a civilian population
undimmed.
After nearly three years of intifada, the residents of Rafah were
familiar enough with Israeli incursions—the American-made Apaches
overhead, the tanks and the shelling, followed by the bulldozers that
would destroy homes, infrastructure, lives. Like Israel’s previous
invasions, Operation Rainbow was undertaken “for security reasons,”
ostensibly to find and destroy alleged smuggling tunnels running from
Rafah under the border into Egypt. In May 2004, however, the Israeli
army began its onslaught in the northern part of Rafah—far from the
border in Tal Al Sultan and El Barazil—tearing up streets completely,
destroying electric, water, and sewer lines, flattening whole blocks of
houses, even bulldozing Rafah’s small zoo.
Israeli snipers commandeered taller houses and took up positions on
rooftops, shooting anything and anyone who moved, even killing two
teenagers whose “hostile activity” consisted of taking laundry off a
clothesline and feeding pet doves. All the while, the shells from the
Apache helicopters turned its victims into scattered body parts. As the
week wore on, people ran out of food, water and medicine. Ambulances
were pinned down by Israeli fire and could not reach the injured. The
morgue in Al Najjar hospital was overflowing and, when no one could
venture outdoors to bury their dead, a commercial refrigerator that
usually stored vegetables was pressed into service to hold corpses.
The ceaseless din of explosions and gunfire couldn’t drown out the human
chorus of despair—children crying for a piece of bread, for a cup of
milk, for a drop of water, the laments of parents who had nothing to
give them, the wails of the newly widowed and orphaned, the screams of
the dying and dismembered. But sometimes there was only stunned,
disbelieving silence, as friends and relatives tried to identify their
loved ones from scattered body parts—a leg, an arm, a piece of a
torso—that was all the ambulance drivers could gather.
A year later, the pictures from that time—mere pixels on a computer
screen, after all—are still sickening. For the first time, I was writing
warnings and apologies for the overwhelming gore of my photos.
Nevertheless, the images are easier to bear than the flesh and blood
reality of standing next to a hospital gurney full of bits and pieces of
what were recently living human beings.
The international outcry seemed slow and muted. Before Operation Rainbow
ended, 60 Palestinians had been killed, hundreds injured, many maimed
for life, hundreds of houses destroyed and thousands made homeless. On
May 16, the Israeli Apaches shelled a peaceful demonstration of hundreds
of unarmed men and boys, killing several and injuring scores. They were
asking for food and water, and demanding that the international
community intervene. The Israeli army tried to claim that the
Palestinians had fired first, but dozens of journalists—many of whom
came under fire themselves—had photographs and videos to prove the
demonstrators were unarmed. At that point, even the Bush administration,
usually a reliable accomplice to all of Ariel Sharon’s policies,
couldn’t avoid voicing an official protest. Slowly, the Israeli army
withdrew—although a few days later, as Peter Hansen, then commissioner
of UNRWA, toured one of Rafah’s destroyed neighborhoods, Israeli snipers
killed a three-year-old girl just a block away from the United Nations
delegation.
A year later, Abu Sophi Adjarewaan, 53, spends much of every day at the
mound of rubble that was once his home. Normally, this patriarch of a
large extended family sells fish in the outdoor market, but now the few
local fishermen who can still work rarely get their catch past the
Israeli checkpoints. Nothing has been remotely normal for Abu Sophi and
his family since the Israelis destroyed their home as part of Operation
Rainbow. Every day for a year now, the old man sits on a small black
sofa outside what was once, he will tell you, a sprawling family
compound. Even after a year, even after his married children and their
children salvaged what they could, Abu Sophi seems in shock, unable to
comprehend the unthinkable. He inherited the house from his parents, he
will tell you, and like many family homes, it expanded as his sons
married and had children, as hoarded shekels became an extra room here,
perhaps an extra story there. This was the house where Abu Sophi was
born; it held everything he ever accomplished in life; it was to have
been his legacy to his children.
Now, with money, work, and hope in short supply—indeed, even by the
modest local standards, 80 percent of the families in Rafah live below
the poverty line—Abu Sophi sits in the rubble every day. His little
granddaughter, perhaps 3, stands at his knee, and four or five of her
friends listen intently as he says, “We should be back here. We will be
back rebuilding here some day. The occupation will end. There should be
an end to this injustice.”
His voice, usually quiet, rises on the last words. But this hopeful
moment quickly dissolves into questions without answers. “I hope, I
hope, I hope,” he continues in a whisper, “I can find someone who will
ask the Israeli prime minister, ‘Sharon, why did you destroy my house?
How did it make your country better, or safer, or happier to destroy our
lives?’” Tears stream down his wrinkled face into his white beard as he
asks, “Why, Sharon, why?”
Like everyone in Rafah, I have my own unanswered questions. Some, of
course, concern the future: Can a just peace be negotiated? Will the
cease-fire hold despite all provocation? But in Rafah, one never escapes
the past, so I often ask as well: Who is truly responsible for Operation
Rainbow, for Abu Sophi’s despair? Was it just the Israeli bulldozer
drivers, the Apache pilots, the snipers, the generals who gave the
orders, the Israeli politicians who set policies, and the international
leaders who condone them with their silence? Does responsibility extend
to everyone whose taxes support Sharon and his government? To the
mainstream Western media, who day after day ignore the reality of the
occupation or bury it in the back pages? And why, I wonder even more
often, are good people so indifferent, so comfortable, so complacent, as
the bodies and souls of the innocent are ground into the dust as surely
as their demolished houses? The same decent people who would never,
could never, dismember a living child with their own hands, are still
somehow too busy! to write a letter, sign a petition, march in a
protest. Don’t they understand that silence kills as surely as bombs and
bullets?
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