The Palestinian struggle is the struggle of all us

Interview with GIUDITTA BRATTINI - by VALERIO GUIZZARDI and GIGI ROGGERO

In his recent interview with Commonware, Sam Andersonsaid that “the youth in Ferguson now realize and see themselves as no different than the youth in Gaza.” This reference is not random, but refers to the Palestinian struggle as a struggle of all and for all. Giuditta Brattini, who for many years has remained committed to the everyday Palestinian resistance, explains this in detail in the following interview. She has been in Gaza for a number of weeks to monitor the public hospitals with the “Gazella Onlus” project, which arranges for the adoption of children who have been injured in Israeli attacks. The interview allows us to understand the situation in the Gaza Strip and the development of resistance, as well as to clarify many uncertainties and perceptions, not to mention many embarrasing and complicit silences that in recent weeks have weakened our ability to build a strong mobilization in support of the Palestinian struggle.

“I started my work in Rafah, visiting public hospitals hit during this criminal Israeli aggression. We started from Al Najar Hospital, which, with a capacity of no more than 58 beds, can only be called a hospital euphemistically. During the 35 days of Israeli attacks, it is this hospital that has responded to the major catastrophes in the area of Rafah, and we’re talking about a population of about 300,000 people. It has been blocked for several days by Israeli tanks, so you could not leave the hospital and which has also made it difficult for the wounded to come here. I’m talking about the health situation because it is one of most dire in Gaza. The hospitals have been decreed a target and Israel has not spared them from bombings, which happened at the Al-Wafa Hospital, the only hospital in Gaza for rehabilitation, and after three attacks was completely destroyed on July 19 with the evacuation of the remaining 26 patients. The hospitals in the north have not fared well. Beit Hannoun, for example, only has 15 out of 66 beds available after suffering a heavy attack at the end of July. The same goes for Al-Alaqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, which has also suffered serious damage and where there were four deaths among patients and hospital staff during the attacks. Sensitive sites, the ones that international law deems as protected in this kind of war situation, are also attacked; but I do not like to call it this [a war situation]. Gaza is not a war but a criminal aggression against a population that has resisted sixty years of occupation.”

This is a first fundamental definition to understand what is happening: it is criminal aggression, therefore there is no international law that has...

“In fact, it is not even respected for sensitive sites, and this also applies to the UNRWA schools, which have been reopened to house the displaced. We are talking about 250,000 displaced in UNRWA schools and as many in the government schools. Even UNRWA schools have been subject to Israeli attacks, and where Palestinians who were refugees after being forced to flee their homes were killed. In terms of the humanitarian intervention, the situation is really weighty. I arrived while the truce was going on, initially for 5 days and then it was extended, and as you know after a few days it was broken and the bombing started again. This meant that some of the displaced people who had fled to the schools have returned home (which, although bombed or hit by attacks, in some way remained livable) to recover a normal life. The ability of Palestinians to regain a normalcy of life is amazing, even after 35 days of attack. After two days, however, they were again displaced into schools, which were overcrowded, with hygienic conditions at rock bottom, where water is distributed by tanks, where electricity is only on for a couple of hours a day. Thus, even health and hygiene is very low and at risk. I visited some schools of displaced persons and they told me that skin diseases such as dermatitis or scabies are very frequent, that there have been several cases of viral meningitis, and that infections that lead to high fever and are hitting the most vulnerable, children and the elderly, all of which are the result of extreme poverty and very low hygiene standards; so there is a spread of infectious diseases. Moreover, all the medical and paramedical staff of the hospitals have worked in very difficult conditions, 24 hours at time and many times without having materials such as disposable gloves and syringes, with the constant danger of transmission of infection. The ministry of health reported that the first treatments for the wounded were being done in the first free places, even if it was a floor or a table or whatever. It is easy to imagine what this may entail for the future. All of Shifa Hospital – the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, the one that is accomodating the wounded coming from other places – has become, with the gardens and around the small park, a camp for the displaced. They are not only giving assistance to the displaced whose homes were destroyed, but also to those who have relatives and patients who have no other place to go, and they have made a tent in public spaces around the hospital to provide for them. Here, too, the hygienic conditions are alarming, there are no toilets, running water does not exist, there is no electricity. This situation will surely pose other risks to public health in the coming months, because what you are experiencing today, along with the inability to have a sanitation situation with a minimum guarantee, will be the source of other diseases and infections.”

What are the processes and problems you encountered in carrying out your project?

“The activities of the ‘Gazelle Onlus’ project are difficult. I was in the area north of Beit Hannoun, bordering the Erez border, and the town was truly unrecognizable, the houses were destroyed, so tracing where the children lived was difficult. The children were found in good condition; those who survive will always give a smile. We have talked with the ministry of health about the traumas of these children, traumas that they bring with them and aggressiveness they demonstrate with each other even in simple games. Among other things, the start of school, which was supposed to be August 24, will definitely be postponed. We hope that a month is sufficient. If possible, by verifying those conditions that will grow over these months, we would want to give life to some forms of social recovery to the children that have to return to school, because they are all traumatized, they lived for 35 days under bombing, always moving around with the remaining terror of being killed by a bomb.”

Let us now look more closely the political situation.

“On the political aspect, the fact that on Thursday three important figures of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas were killed in Rafah is likely to cause an escalated response. The day before Hamas had declared that no one in Israel can feel safe since they will continue launching rockets on Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and the towns near the border of the Gaza Strip. But here we are talking about a rocket launch that, as you know, does not have a clear direction in the sense that it is not a technology that is able to actually hit a predetermined target. It is launched on one side and it arrives where it arrives. I make this clarification because they keep talking about a war going on as if there were two armies facing each other; however, the reality is that a resistance made up of men, women and children are surviving a siege that has lasted for more than eight years and more than sixty years of occupation; international law also recognizes that a people can resist by all available means. On the other side there is an army with drones and aircraft, such as the F-16 that can accurately hit all the targets they want. So there is a people that is defending itself with all the right of those who want their own self-determination and who want to see their own future; on the other hand, there is the continuing aggression of the Zionist government. I do not speak anymore about Israel, but of a Zionist government. And when someone asks why we are with the Palestinians and against Israel, I say I’m against Zionism, because it is a danger to humanity, it is the twin of racist and nazi-fascist culture. It is a danger that, if it advances, will condemn us to living in conditions of oppression, racism, denying the opportunity for independent decision-making. The Palestinian people’s struggle is a struggle for all of us. It may seem a strange thing, but during a public meeting in June in Beit Lahija I really appreciated what the leader of the Islamic Jihad said clearly to the world, and in particular to those in the Middle East: ‘you have to look to Palestine because the resistance is here.’ You’re fighting in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and everywhere the Middle East is a focal point of war, but he wanted to clarify that the resistance is in Palestine. I took this message in its full significance, because this is a fight against a model of fundamentalism and colonialism that we cannot accept.”

You have precisely defined the framework of a resistance that has been going on for over sixty years, one that has to deal with a criminal aggression that continues and which every two or three years takes the form of an open military attack. The Italian media and the West, perhaps even more today than in the past, are engaged not only in supporting Israel, but also in an operation of systematically obscuring and mystifying what is happening in Palestine. It seems, however, that the level of popular resistance is the highest that it has been in the last eight years at least, so much so that the Israeli attempts to invade by land were prevented. Can you confirm this impression?

“But, it should be clarified that, unlike what gets said, it is a mistake to claim that Hamas is a resistance. Today the resistance in the Gaza Strip is made from al-Qassam Brigades, the Popular Resistance Committees, the resistance of the Popular Front, and even Fatah. So, there was a unification of purpose and a pooling of all that could be done to resist this yet another assault.”

What you’re saying is particularly important here, because even in circles close to the movement, there are those who seem to practice the so-called policy of equidistance, such as “neither Israel nor Hamas.” Can we say that such a position is tantamount to saying: “with Israel”?

“I do not understand what it means to say not one is not with Hamas. Hamas is an Islamic resistance movement that was democratically elected in Gaza and the West Bank, afterwards the international community said that it was an Islamic terrorist movement and that they did not want to recognize it. It is a movement that was voted in democratically, which has never ruled except in the Gaza Strip, at the same time that all its deputies and mayors elected were arrested and were not able to exercise that right that the people had given it. So, to say that you are not with Hamas today means that you are not with the resistance, which is not only made up of Hamas. I should point out that I make no distinction between armed resistance and resistance of citizens: the resistance is resistance. Otherwise we end up in the game of the left that delegitimizes armed resistance. No, there is a resistance: there are those who choose to resist by staying in their own homes, as did some families of Khan Younis that went up on the roof although the Israelis told them to leave—they were bombed and are dead. It is these same people who are now in an armed resistance trying to counter the siege and the Israeli occupation. Resistance is resistance, and each exercises resistance in the best way they understand. We should not give space to those who want to delegitimize armed resistance by opposing it to a non-violent resistance: there is no such thing, it does not even exist in international law. So the resistance in Palestine today is made up of a series of armed groups that together are making a politics of a certain type, and of a resistance of the people. They are side by side. I am here today with the Palestinians and resist with them. Also to give continuity to daily life is to resist, in the same way as firing rockets at Israel. On the contrary, these matters are low and little regarded amongst those happening this country, because here people are risking their lives every day.

We know that the whole world does not want to recognize that Israel is committing a crime. We remember the heaviest attacks, in July 2006, ‘Cast Lead’ in 2008 and 2009, then November 2012, and now this new aggression; but in the Gaza Strip there are daily attacks, we don’t always have the more than 2,000 dead that was brought by this latest assault, but here not being able to live and walking down the street with death is a daily fact. This is true in an attack like the present, as well as in everyday life for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

Your description perfectly frames the matter: the resistance is resistance, it includes all those who fight in an armed mode and those who do not, by using the means that are more suitable in each instance. Among the groups that are part of the resistance, is there still the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine? We ask this because it was, as you know, a point of reference for Italian militants, and from here today and in recent years it is difficult to understand what its political impact and consistency.

“To this question I can answer only partially: yes, it exists, they do politics and activities in the field, with the difficulties and limitations that can be imagined. Several leaders or other entities engaged in the resistance groups are not visible in these times, for obvious reasons. Here the life of the Palestinians who are considered targets to hit is hard, so they are not visible.”

Previously you had started describing the groups that make up the resistance, would you like to add something on that subject?

“I can only reiterate what has been said in an interview in Gaza on July 4 by the leader of the Al-Qassam Brigades: he reiterated the total connection of all forms of resistance inside the Gaza Strip, with all the material and physical capacity that can be made available. Meaning it renders the resistance stronger, while there were probably there some difficulties in the attack of 2008, which happened so suddenly, leaving little room for a phase of organizing. In these 35 days we have instead witnessed a strong Palestinian resistance, not only in terms of the number of dead soldiers, which of course when compared to the resistance is irrelevant, but is significant when you are faced with the reality of incomparable armaments and technologies. Israel has faced great difficulty in this invasion, which is also aided by the fact that it does not have a comprehensive knowledge of the territory; probably these young Israeli soldiers, called to do military service from 18 to 21 years, along with reservists, probably do not even have the inner strength to carry on a fight. It is perhaps more a call to arms than something they feel they should do. In Palestine, instead they fight because they want to maintain land rights and escape this occupation that is destroying the Palestinian people. The beliefs are so totally different: from this side you know why you fight; on the other, I have seen pictures of young Israelis who applauded tanks when they were striking down a house, this gives you a sense of the subjects with which we have to deal. They can win only because they have a greater number of soldiers and technologies that are incomparably more powerful, if it were for other reasons they would not escape. It is a struggle in which there are those convinced of what they are doing and are fighting tooth and nail, and there are those with a show of force that you do not even know if it means anything to them, other than a simple desire for conquest of the territories.”

We would be interested to learn how this difference determined the rise in the capacity of resistance in recent years. You also spoke of the various forms through which the resistance is exercised, from those on the level of the military to those families that go up on the roofs and brave bombings. So, how is the resistance exercised daily and what is the difference when compared to previous years?

“First of all there is a continuity in the value given to their own land, to their own identity and the right to self-determination. It is not simple, there is no country like Palestine that has endured over sixty years of occupation. And there are all the distortions along with that occupation, because then there are the collaborators and all those mechanisms that in Italy we saw in our short period of occupation. Then there is the destruction of civil society, the attempt to continuously bring new ways that are designed to try and make them give up their right to self-determination. A mistake that I think has been made for too many years in this regard is to talk about Palestine and to simply think about some specific group, the Popular Front or Fatah, these are dicourses that I have heard from debates amongst the comrades. We must firmly take a united position: we are with the Palestinians because they are fighting against the occupation. Of course we would like a certain model of society, one to which, moreover, the Palestinians have always looked; however, this, can not become an internal division within ourselves today. I did not tear my clothes in 2006 when Hamas won the elections, like many others did. The point is not about the party that wins the election, because we risk losing sight of the real issue, namely the struggle of the Palestinian people against the occupation. All the rest of us who are outside, we must set that aside. After we can create a discourse about the model of society we want.

I return to the question of how they resist. I’ve been in the homes of some of the displaced who have returned to the UNRWA school. Even before some houses were barely livable, they were without electricity or a water system, and now after the bombings you can imagine what they are like. There is this attachment to the land and its meaning for their lives. So the everyday forms of resistance also consist in wanting to go home, that you have with or without a truce, whether they are livable or not, while going to a UNRWA school becomes a loss in respect to their will to resist.”

It is a desire to gain their own normality of life, which means self-determination...

“In the Gaza Strip, as in the occupied territories, there is a high school, the services (if they were not constantly bombarded or threatened) work, they have a sea full of fish, it is in a geographically important position, with deposits of natural gas—it is easy to understand that this is the throat of Israel. And these are some of the reasons for the ongoing siege in the Gaza Strip, because it is definitely a strategic territory.

I would like to return to the issue of attacks on schools and hospitals. I do not know what truth there is in the news circulated that the UNRWA school was bombed because there were deposits of rockets for the resistance found there, and as well I do not know who is hidden in the hospitals. Here’s just one example: during our [Italian] resistance, the churches sheltered partisans and they also housed devices that could be used to fight. Hence, this vague condemnation based on the fact that in a school they would have found rockets is ridiculous. It could be considered appropriate or not, but it is not for us to say: when there is a resistance, any action to could be considered legitimate. Then they change the story and they say that the weapons inside the UNRWA school caused the deaths of civilians. Not so, it is absurd. Resisting also means the using certain spaces, but not because we want civilians to be affected, absolutely not, but because it is part of the paths inside a resistance, armed and unarmed, that is a matter of fact.”

Even this distinction is important, because in Italy many, even in areas close to us, have used exactly this type of discourse to argue that in Palestine civilians are being held hostage...

“Whoever makes these claims has already trampled and buried the Italian resistance. It’s the same with all those left-wing pacifists who come here, a nod to the Palestinian people and at the same time go to visit the bombed house in Israel. We are not right; these things that are happening cannot be made comprehensible. The death of one Palestinian is not equal to the death of one Israeli, they are dead for two different reasons and no one has the right to put them on the same side of the scale. For how they arrived and they lived, similarly in what remains in their death, before and after also. So emotionally and sentimentally everyone can shake hands with whomever he wants, but that is a personal journey; historically you cannot mix these things. In Italy, the attempt to put the dead partisans and the dead of the Republic of Salò on the same level is something to be fought; here they are doing the same thing, equating the dead Palestinian and Israeli dead. No, the dead Palestinian is criminally murdered, the dead Israeli is a response by the Palestinian people to aggression. On this ground we must not be afraid to say how things are. This does not mean to be against the Jewish people as such, it is not so, just that we are supporting the fight against a culture of Zionist colonization.

I would like to add one more thing. Do you remember the L’Aquila earthquake? Major disasters and business reconstruction and squandering of money that had already begun. In Palestine it is the same thing and it is through international cooperation, here there is already talk of rebuilding. It has been 12 years since I came here, I can testify that every time there was a sewer bombed, a water well bombed, a center bombed, a school bombed, etc. .: it is like they create issues, they bomb, they kill a few, then they go back and rebuild, then maybe resume bombing after six months. The international cooperation projects, however, are made with public money, also the European level needs to start and open up a field of battle, it is not possible. It is said that Italy has already arrived with 350,000 Euro of material goods, then we will put another million Euro, but to rebuild what? Roads that have been dug by the caterpillar as they entered the Gaza Strip? Or is it to rebuild bombed UNRWA schools, or the powerhouse that is waiting to be bombed again? You have to start saying that international cooperation is a service that is made for someone, because here there is the business of those who will rebuild that has specific interests. It needs to start being said that this public money, that we want to be able to decide that if an intervention of international cooperation is to be made that there must be a plan for a resolution of the conflict, otherwise it does not do anything. These things must be clear, it is useless to rebuild a school in order to destroy it again after three months. It is useless for the Renzi government to bring money here in this form: to give humanitarian aid, as they call it, to come here to rebuild, and the thing they say about weapons and aircraft that are sold to Israel? This also falls under the path of humanitarian aid? The European economic policy on Palestine will be one of the factors that will determine the continuation of the occupation. Here we must say that it is Israel that needs to rebuild, which international law also says: the occupying state must provide for the needs of the population under occupation. What Israel should think of rebuilding [is] the health and education aspects of the Palestinians.”

Is there anything in your opinion that moves the Israeli society?

“I am always happy when there is an Israeli who takes to the streets for Palestine, but I would set out some questions. First, they ought to explain why people 18 years of age are forced to leave school to do compulsory military service, and this says a lot about Isreal’s kind of politics. If there was a civil society that against this, these these conditions would start to change from within. There is another issue that makes me smile: I knew of refuseniks ten years ago; today there are no more. Those who pretend to be refuseniks are actually conscientious objectors, brought to Italy by some associations of the left. The refusenik was the one who refused to go and bomb the people of Gaza, but that has not refused the weapons; conscientious objectors, however, are the ones who rejects weapons a priori, but not because they are used to bomb the Palestinians. There seems to be a growth of conscientious objectors, but even so this is an aspect of Israeli civil society that from the point of view of Palestine does not concern us. This example helps us understand that there is a very confusing representation of Israeli society, some take to the streets but vote for a colonialist government and continue to go in the military and those who do not go there as conscientious objectors are presented without reason as pro-Palestinian.

In Italy there are those who idealize Palestine, who say how good the Palestinians are, who discusses whether the resistance is armed or not, but then we’re not doing anything, even from the point of view of building serious political relationships. The truth is that at this time the Palestinian people are really pulling out the best, with this extraordinary dignity in resistance. Dignity comes out not only during the bombing, but when you bear no longer having a home and your own place, and despite this resist with extraordinary determination.”

 

* Translation by Lenora Hanson.