I keep wanting to get to Lawrence Wright’s piece on Gaza in the New Yorker this week. I hear it is not very good, that it essentially parrots the Israeli view of the situation, and begins and ends with Gilad Shalit, with hardly a mention of the 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel. Proportion.
Also I wonder whether he describes something that Judge Richard Goldstone describes in his amply-documented report, the wanton destruction of Palestinian factories. Below are three of my pictures of the ruins of a tile factory in Izbat Abd Rabbo, a village in the east of Gaza.
In the top pictures Majed Abdullah Al-Athamna, a taxi company owner whose business was destroyed (and whose family was decimated in a 2006 attack), holds a huge cable that leads back to the blue modern framing of the Al Hadad factory building, now crumpled. He says Israeli bulldozers used the cable to pull down the tile factory. Fares Akram, a human rights investigator for Human Rights Watch, translated for Al-Athamna and confirmed his story.
Goldstone refers to the "systematic" destruction of factories in the Gaza strip, flour milll, poultry, cement. This is another such factory. What was the possible rationale for this destruction in a blockaded, starved territory, besides hatred and "persecution," a word Goldstone uses. And never forget: when just one Israeli port was blockaded, in 1967, with what righteous violence the Israelis responded.
