ONE of the most enduring Hollywood motifs is the battle between the good little guy and the big, bad, bullying forces of evil.This theme has been repeated in galactic soap operas like Star Wars, boxing epics like Rocky, swords-and-sandals extravaganzas like Braveheart and, lately, CGI-laden epics like Lord of the Rings and Avatar.
Unfortunately, glorification of the little man is often limited to reel and not real life. It certainly, until very recently, did not apply in the never ending Israel-Palestine face-off.
The tragedy about the conflict is the way in which the Palestinians are out-muscled in almost every aspect of warfare -- physical, economic and media/propaganda.
Israel's army is better equipped, better trained and greater in number than the Palestinian resistance. They have the support of the mighty United States.
They certainly have more wealth. They also, for the longest time, have had the support of a sympathetic global media.
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| Children in Palestine, like children everywhere, love to be photographed - even if an Israeli tank is around the corner. |
The picture most often painted is one of brave Israeli forces putting their lives on the line to fend off hordes of bloodthirsty Hamas terrorists out to maim and kill innocent Israeli civilians in kamikaze attacks.
When I went there in January to cover the latest Gaza conflict, it was with this image floating at the back of my mind. The reality though, was very different.
At the Al-Shifa hospital, I saw men, women and children who'd had their limbs blown off by Israeli ordnance. I saw pictures of bodies piled upon other bodies. Some were victims of weapons like white phosphorus, which are in contravention of the Geneva Convention.
The statistics said it all. For every dead Israeli in the conflict, there were about 100 Palestinian bodies.
The carnage was as brilliant as it was diabolical. The incoming army pulverised the court complex, the International Red Cross building, the central police agency compound and ministry buildings, among others.
The surgical precision of the destruction -- some buildings were flattened while adjacent ones were untouched -- testified to the fact that the attacks weren't random strikes. They were calculated to bring Gaza to its knees, administratively as well as militarily.
It wasn't just that. Marauding Israeli tanks avoided roads and made a beeline for villages, farms and homes, making sure the Palestinians were deprived of their homes and their food.
One scene in particular is still vivid in my mind. It is of a village between Rafah and Gaza, which made its living rearing and selling chickens.
When we (my counterpart from Harian Metro, our photographer and I) went there, we were confronted with the decaying and putrid forms of thousands of chickens (we would later learn that there were about 100,000 birds) amid the rubble of what was once a huge warren of coops.
We were told that they were blown apart by Israeli tanks.
The story doesn't end there. The villagers, all part of the extended Samuni family, managed to escape the attacking forces.
However, some laggards -- I think there were 24 of them -- were captured by the Israeli army. They were held for four days without food and water.
The army, before it left, ringed the house they were held in with explosives and blew them up.
There are other stories, too. For example, a group of Christian and Muslim doctors from Israel, in Palestine to help the legions of wounded, related how the Israeli government refused to allow volunteer Jewish doctors to enter Gaza.
A visit to a cemetery in Gaza also highlighted the fact that for Palestinians, sudden, violent death isn't the unexpected occurrence that is for most of us, but a sadly common fate.
A large number of gravestones indicated that the deceased had perished as a result of Israeli aggression.
These incidences are just the tip of the iceberg of atrocities the Palestinians have been subjected to since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.
More than 78 per cent of their land was ripped away from them and arbitrarily handed over to the Jews.
The Palestinians, in 1967, also lost the West Bank area that they had originally been allocated.
Today, the displaced Palestinians and their descendants number more than the approximately six million Jews Adolf Hitler killed during the Holocaust.
But, like the Jews, the Palestinians refuse to simply lie down and die. For every tale of woe we heard, we saw with our own eyes a community that refused to accept defeat simply because they are outgunned and out-financed.
The adults were still defiant and the children still bright-eyed, even under the deadly wake of Israeli planes overhead.
They were still trying their best to live as normal a life as possible, even if that meant school, trade or romance would have to be sandwiched between gruelling shifts of digging smuggling tunnels to Egypt.
This time round, there is reason to hope that normalcy might one day return to Palestine and Israel. There has been a turning of the tide of global popular opinion.
No longer are Palestinian supporters relegated to the sidelines of the international pressure groups.
Now, supporters of the cause range from Hollywood celebrities to Jewish professionals in Israel.
Amid such increasing international backing and with a new, more approachable US president in office, there might be hope that the Palestinians may one day get a fair shake after all. God knows, it's long overdue.
Yet, for every supporter, there are some naysayers who just won't go away, no matter what anybody tells them.
A classic example is a commentator on the nstgaza. blogspot.com blog.
The person, who called himself Gunasheel, responded to my assertion that "the Arabs here (in Palestine) aren't extremists or terrorists" very sarcastically indeed.
He said: "And you know this because.....?
"a. You lived there your whole life;
"b. you have documented proof or [sic] this?
OR;
"c. reporting out of emotional issues tied to religion?"
The sooner people like Gunasheel realise that the issue in Palestine is not one of race or religion, but one of a people, occupied unfairly, trying their best to overthrow the yoke of oppression, the sooner we will come to a peace accord in the land of milk and honey.
Until then, the only place we will see the little guy getting what he deserves is in a Hollywood fantasy.
source: NST 26.12.2009
