MAY 29, 2018
Fathi Harb should have had
something to live for, not least the imminent arrival of a new baby. But last
week the 21-year-old extinguished his life in an inferno of flames in central
Gaza.
It is believed to be the first
example of a public act of self-immolation in the enclave. Harb doused himself
in petrol and set himself alight on a street in Gaza City shortly before dawn
prayers during the holy month of Ramadan.
In part, Harb was driven to
this terrible act of self-destruction out of despair.
After a savage, decade-long
Israeli blockade by land, sea and air, Gaza is like a car running on fumes. The
United Nations has repeatedly warned that the enclave will be uninhabitable
within a few years.
Over that same decade, Israel
has intermittently pounded Gaza into ruins, in line with the Israeli army’s
Dahiya doctrine. The goal is to decimate the targeted area, turning life back
to the Stone Age so that the population is too preoccupied with making ends
meet to care about the struggle for freedom.
Both of these kinds of assault
have had a devastating impact on inhabitants’ psychological health.
Harb would have barely
remembered a time before Gaza was an open-air prison and one where a 1,000kg
Israeli bomb might land near his home.
In an enclave where two-thirds
of young men are unemployed, he had no hope of finding work. He could not
afford a home for his young family and he was about to have another mouth to
feed.
Doubtless, all of this
contributed to his decision to burn himself to death.
But self-immolation is more
than suicide. That can be done quietly, out of sight, less gruesomely. In fact,
figures suggest that suicide rates in Gaza have rocketed in recent years.
But public self-immolation is
associated with protest.
A Buddhist monk famously
turned himself into a human fireball in Vietnam in 1963 in protest at the
persecution of his co-religionists. Tibetans have used self-immolation to
highlight Chinese oppression, Indians to decry the caste system, and Poles,
Ukrainians and Czechs once used it to protest Soviet rule.
But more likely for Harb, the
model was Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire
in late 2010 after officials humiliated him once too often. His public death
triggered a wave of protests across the Middle East that became the Arab
Spring.
Bouazizi’s self-immolation
suggests its power to set our consciences on fire. It is the ultimate act of
individual self-sacrifice, one that is entirely non-violent except to the
victim himself, performed altruistically in a greater, collective cause.
Who did Harb hope to speak to
with his shocking act?
In part, according to his
family, he was angry with the Palestinian leadership. His family was trapped in
the unresolved feud between Gaza’s rulers, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority
(PA) in the West Bank. That dispute has led the PA to cut the salaries of its
workers in Gaza, including Harb’s father.
But Harb undoubtedly had a
larger audience in mind too.
Until a few years ago, Hamas
regularly fired rockets out of the enclave in a struggle both to end Israel’s
continuing colonisation of Palestinian land and to liberate the people of Gaza
from their Israeli-made prison.
But the world rejected the
Palestinians’ right to resist violently and condemned Hamas as “terrorists”.
Israel’s series of military rampages in Gaza to silence Hamas were meekly
criticised in the West as “disproportionate”.
The Palestinians of the West
Bank and East Jerusalem, where there is still direct contact with Israeli Jews,
usually as settlers or soldiers, watched as Gaza’s armed resistance failed to
prick the world’s conscience.
So some took up the struggle
as individuals, targeting Israelis or soldiers at checkpoints. They grabbed a
kitchen knife to attack Israelis or soldiers at checkpoints, or rammed them
with a car, bus or bulldozer.
Again, the world sided with
Israel. Resistance was not only futile, it was denounced as illegitimate.
Since late March, the struggle
for liberation has shifted back to Gaza. Tens of thousands of unarmed
Palestinians have massed weekly close to Israel’s fence encaging them.
The protests are intended as
confrontational civil disobedience, a cry to the world for help and a reminder
that Palestinians are being slowly choked to death.
Israel has responded
repeatedly by spraying the demonstrators with live ammunition, seriously
wounding many thousands and killing more than 100. Yet again, the world has
remained largely impassive.
In fact, worse still, the
demonstrators have been cast as Hamas stooges. The United States ambassador to
the UN, Nikki Haley, blamed the victims under occupation, saying Israel had a
right to “defend its border”, while the British government claimed the protests
were “hijacked by terrorists”.
None of this can have passed
Harb by.
When Palestinians are told
they can “protest peacefully”, western governments mean quietly, in ways that
Israel can ignore, in ways that will not trouble consciences or require any
action.
In Gaza, the Israeli army is
renewing the Dahiya doctrine, this time by shattering thousands of Palestinian
bodies rather than infrastructure.
Harb understood only too well
the West’s hypocrisy in denying Palestinians any right to meaningfully resist
Israel’s campaign of destruction.
The flames that engulfed him
were intended also to consume us with guilt and shame. And doubtless more in
Gaza will follow his example.
Will Harb be proved right? Can
the West be shamed into action?
Or will we continue blaming
the victims to excuse our complicity in seven decades of outrages committed
against the Palestinian people?
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