Mayhem on Gaza Border Continues

The Gaza/Israel borderline is on the verge of experiencing a third successive Friday mass demonstration in the Hamas and populist Palestinian “March of Return” campaign.  We at The Third Narrative have been intensively debating the nature of this action, whether it’s best understood as a mostly peaceful demonstration or a violent threat to Israel.  (See this post following the first Friday confrontation.) 

Calling it the March of Return is in itself problematic, embodying the Palestinian claim of a “right of return” for generations of refugees and their descendants emanating from the 1948 Israeli war of independence/Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).  Even if totally peaceful in practice (i.e., not accompanied by firebombs, rock slingers and burning tires as they are) this is understandably viewed as an existential threat to their country by most Israelis, with a mass of people demanding access– more or less literally– to Israeli towns and homes. 

Members of The Third Narrative online community disagree on whether Israel has responded with a justified level of lethal force.  For example, Rebecca (who prefers to retain a level of anonymity online) posted “Real People are Dying in Gaza” at her Mystical Politics blog, including the following:

I feel sick about what is happening in Gaza. I’ve read all the justifications for why Israeli forces have to use live fire, about how Hamas is using a civilian protest to try to get terrorists to the border to enter Israel and attack Israelis (which may be true, at least in part), about how all the Palestinians demonstrating at the border are terrorists. What do Palestinians themselves say? Do we automatically think that everything the IDF spokesperson’s office says is true?

And, they aren’t all terrorists. One non-terrorist was shot and injured today, and then died of his wounds — a Palestinian journalist, a photographer named Yasser Mourthaja [pictured above]. He was wearing a vest that had PRESS printed on it.

From Elior Levy, … the Palestinian affairs correspondent and analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot:

“During the night two Palestinians died from their injuries as a result of the confrontations on the Gaza border yesterday. One of them was a journalist – Yasser Mourthaja, documentary photographer. He was shot in the stomach in the southern (Gaza) strip when he was photographing demonstrators. He wore a vest on which was written PRESS. The number of Palestinians killed yesterday stands at 9.”

Mourthaja was not the only Palestinian journalist who was injured by Israeli forces on Friday. The Palestinian journalists’ union said that six others were injured. “The union said the six were shot despite wearing clothes clearly identifying themselves as journalists, adding it held Israel ‘fully accountable for this crime’.”

(Click here to link to the Washington Post story.)

In response, it was pointed out that Mourthaja (claimed by Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman to be a Hamas officer) was heading toward the border fence for a closer look, to where he would be obscured by the smoke of burning tires, a smokescreen that covers Palestinians attacking the fence with firebombs or other means.  To make this more complicated, if Israeli soldiers are authorized to fire at Gazans very close to the fence where their vision is obscured by smoke, they would not be able to clearly identify who they are shooting at.  So is the shooting justified?

To make matters worse in the past few days, a video was released on the Internet showing an Israeli sniper shooting a man across the line who was simply standing on the Gaza side, and then crudely rejoicing over the hit with his IDF comrades as if this were a game.  Most people believe this occurred during the latest round of demonstrations, but it may have happened another time, because the scene depicted is quiet, with few people in view and no evidence of smoke or other signs of a mass demonstration.  In either case, this shows what appears to be a case of murder.

But parsing out a proper Israeli response to the ongoing Palestinian action is far from simple.  The other week, The Forward published two pieces, one by an Israeli and another by a Palestinian with diametrically opposing views:

• “What Israelis Hear When You Say There Was A ‘Massacre’ In Gaza“

• “What Really Happened In Gaza“