Ramzy Baroud, "Humiliation redefined," Al-Ahram Weekly, No. 902, June 19-25, 2008.

[In this week's Al-Ahram Weekly, Ramzy Baroud reflects on the decapitation of a six-year old Palestinian girl, Hadeel Al-Smeiri, by an Israeli tank shell. -jlt]

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Some Palestinians, especially those in Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's camp, are still struggling with their sense of priorities.

The BBC's Jeremy Bowen wrote on 11 June: "The humiliation of June 2007 [when Hamas took over Gaza] will not easily be forgotten by Fatah's people. For the last 12 months the suggestion that they should try to end their argument with Hamas has been guaranteed to get a testy response from senior figures close to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas... One of his senior ministers exploded with such fury whenever I asked him about it that his voice sent the dials on the BBC's recording equipment hurtling into the red."

Reading the above I wondered if the minister would respond with such intensity if Bowen sought his views on the murder of Hadeel or on the fact that the minister's own people are caged, not only in Gaza, but large parts of the West Bank, behind Israeli military barricades, electric fences and security walls?

If the minister fails to appreciate the misery of Hadeel's generation, maybe he should take a few minutes away from his busy schedule to browse some of the grim data on the daily victimisation of Palestinian children. Sigrid Kaag, UNICEF's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, visited the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on 9 June. The poorest of Gaza's slums, it is where the uprising of 1987, unsurprisingly, broke out. "To witness the impact of the current blockade on the children of Gaza firsthand was a daunting experience," Kaag said. "This situation must end."

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, "as of 26 May, 64 children had been killed in the conflict since the beginning of the year -- more than the total child death toll for all of 2007. Fifty-nine of the deaths were in Gaza and another four victims were Israeli children."

Bowen wrote: "The fighter who emptied his Kalashnikov into the desk of Mohamed Dahlan, until that day the Fatah strongman in Gaza, yelled 'this is the fate of traitors like the scumbag Dahlan' as he pulled the trigger, and it was recorded and put on television for all to see." The minister finds it difficult to forgive such an action by Hamas, conveniently forgetting reports in the US media -- Vanity Fair to be more precise -- that Dahlan headed a US-Israeli plot to carry out a military onslaught against the democratically elected government in Gaza. The plan was botched because of Hamas's pre- emptive take-over of the Strip.

Consider this: UNICEF reports that, "across the West Bank some 600 obstacles to movement -- and the barrier separating the West Bank from Israel -- make it difficult for children to attend schools, patients to go to health centres and families to see each other... the closure regime is tightening even for UN humanitarian operations".

Yet the minister, and many like him, find Hamas's violence in June 2007 the pinnacle of humiliation. Puzzling, indeed.

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Read the whole of Baroud's appeal for Palestinians to "unify their ranks" here =>Recommend this Post

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