Prospects for genuine support for the people of Gaza has never been so distant
“The loss of any innocent life is a tragedy — Israeli or Palestinian. Hamas not only takes Israelis hostage, but also holds Palestinians hostage. Hamas is not only the enemy of Jews, but the enemy of Palestinians, of peace, of human rights, and an enemy of our common humanity.”
There is no convincing case that can be made against the objective and moral truth of those words. They were spoken this week by Irwin Cotler, Canada’s former justice minister and the founder of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, in support of Ottawa’s just-announced sanctions on the 11 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad warlords who directed the Oct. 7 atrocities in Israel.
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I should say straight away that I’m a senior fellow with the Wallenberg Centre, I’m a hardline advocate of severe global sanctions against human rights abusers and I’ve confessed more than once that in matters of political morality and international human rights, Irwin Cotler is my lodestar. So take what I write here with as many grains of salt as you like.
In any case, I’m going to leave aside questions and arguments about the effectiveness and utility of levelling Canadian sanctions against the already terrorist-listed masterminds of the ghastly Oct. 7 pogrom that claimed the lives of nearly 1,200 people in Israel. I’ll only note in passing that there are another 33 Palestinian terror chieftains who could have appeared on Global Affairs’ sanctions list, but did not. And for reasons no one has been able to explain, the fountainhead of all this terror, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Tehran, is still not registered on Canada’s terrorist list.
Cotler is correct that the loss of any innocent life is a tragedy, and the war triggered by the carnage of Oct. 7 has so far cost the lives of perhaps 20,000 Palestinian non-combatants in Gaza. Because of that, I’m turning here to Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a Palestinian refugee, a patriot, and a courageous Middle East analyst whose perspective can be understood as an Arab iteration of Cotler’s standpoint.
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I still can’t find any occasion of Alkhatib’s interventions in debates about the Israel-Gaza conundrum in which he’s turned out to be wrong. So it’s useful to pay attention to what he says. And he says this:
Now more than ever, there should be a worldwide movement to force Israeli authorities, the United Nations’ various agencies and western governments to focus on relieving the suffering of the Palestinians of Gaza. But here’s what’s standing in the way: the Palestinians’ western “friends” are the Palestinians’ worst enemies. They’ve sucked the life out of every conversation where measures to lift the weight of agony from the Palestinians of Gaza should be the only item on the agenda.
For years, Alkhatib has attempted to develop humanitarian lifelines into Gaza, to find ways around the troubled UN Relief and Works Agency, to build support for a UN-supervised international airport beyond the control of Hamas, and so on. But as Gaza’s suffering has become more acute than any point in its history, the prospects for genuine support for the people of Gaza has never been so distant.
“And so I have been trying to put my voice out there, out of sheer frustration and anger with these people who are speaking on behalf of the Palestinian people. These are the people who are supposed to be highlighting the plight of the Palestinians. They are supposed to be humanizing the suffering of the people of Gaza, and trying to effect public opinion in western audiences, to move things forward.
“Instead you get this useless feel-good activism. I have tried to be measured, and it’s proving to be very, very challenging. I have tried. I want to say this more forcefully. I have tried to be measured, but a lot of the so-called ‘pro-Palestinian’ movement is now overtly pro-terror, and pro-Hamas, and pro Islamism.”
At least 30 members of Alkhatib’s family in Gaza have been killed since the war began, so I wanted to know how his remaining relatives are getting on.
As of last weekend, an aunt he’d lost contact with was at the Al Amal Hospital with her daughters and grandchildren in Khan Younis, so that was a relief to learn. Around 8,000 displaced Gazans had been sheltering at the hospital for several weeks, and the Israel Defence Forces is disputing reports that soldiers “stormed” the hospital this week to evacuate it, so for now there’s nothing to do but wait to hear what’s happening there.
On Oct. 13, Alkhatib’s childhood home in Gaza City was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike. Among the many family members sheltering there, all survived with injuries, some of them life-threatening — all except for his 13-year-old cousin Farah, who was killed instantly.
Alkhatib’s mother is in the United Arab Emirates after having obtained a visa to visit a daughter there immediately before the war began, so at least she’s safe. On Dec. 14, an Israeli airstrike destroyed her own childhood home in Rafah, the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city. Among the 31 people who died in the house that day — nine children among them — were five of Ahmed’s aunts and uncles, and most of his cousins.
His uncle Riyad was killed in another airstrike in Gaza City, and his uncle Rahim is stuck there trying to care for a physically disabled son who can’t easily be moved. The rest of the family is dispersed throughout the Gaza Strip. Alkhatib’s father, a doctor, pass away three years ago, so at least he didn’t live to see what has become of his beloved Gaza.
Alkhatib left to study in the United States in 2005. Two years later, Hamas seized Gaza from the Palestinian Authority, and Alkhatib was granted asylum in the United States where he earned a degree in intelligence studies from American Military University, and now works mainly in the field of international aid, mostly privately-funded projects in Africa. He still can’t understand why his proposal for World Food Program airdrops into Gaza, to forestall a looming famine, hasn’t gotten any traction.
Alkhatib has no kind words for the Israelis’ prosecution of the war: no matter the efforts the IDF is making to keep non-combatants out of harm’s way, tens of thousands of Gazan civilians have been killed and wounded. Roughly half the buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed, at least half the population of about two million people is living in rubble or in tents and under tarpaulins, and people are sick and hungry and terrified. The smell of death is everywhere.
That is what the “pro-Palestinian” movement should be focused on, Alkhatib says. “Instead, they’re running around chanting ‘from the river to the sea.’ These people would not last a second living under Hamas in Gaza. But all we hear from them is ‘resistance’ and ‘intifada.’ These words mean nothing to Palestinians except for war and death.”
Irwin Cotler is right, and Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is right: The loss of any innocent life is a tragedy.
And innocents in Gaza continue to die.
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