Extraordinary brutality in Palestine and Iraq is not exceptional but typical; indicative of the fervour of colonial and imperial policy, writes Hassan Nafaa* On the Gaza beach, a seven-year-old Palestinian girl was playing in the sand some distance away from her parents who had brought her there for a moment of respite from yet another harrowing day under Israeli economic and military siege. This Palestinian family of modest means and ambitions wanted nothing more than a bit of a change: a fresh seaside breeze instead of the stifling air amid mountains of rubble of the cramped and overcrowded city they called home; a moment's tranquillity to replace the roar of fighter planes overhead and the rumble of tanks on the ground. Hardly had the weary eyes of the parents closed in the soothing shade of their umbrella than an enormous explosion tore through the silence. Little Hoda was too young to understand what was happening, but sudden panic propelled her towards the place where only seconds ago rested her parents and her brothers and sisters. All she found was body parts strewn over blood-soaked ground. Within her rose a scream that none who heard it can forget. That piercing sound Al-Jazeera recorded and transmitted to the world along with the heartrending image of the stunned girl before she was returned to her home, orphaned. Little Hoda, understandably, was still in the grip of shock when, the following day, she related to the same satellite station the story of the nightmare that will undoubtedly haunt her forever. Several months before, in a place far away from the beach where the tragedy of Hoda took place, an even more horrific event awaited Abeer of Mahmoudiya, a town a few dozen kilometres south of Baghdad. The 16-year-old girl had no prospect of a day out at the beach with her family. But she did have to go to the nearby market in order to do some grocery shopping, and this brought her within the sex-starved gaze of American soldiers at the checkpoint on the way to and from the market. There was nothing she could do but endure their lewd scrutiny, but when this evolved into physical sexual harassment the shy teenage girl broke down and told her mother, who told her to stay home, out of harm's way. That did not deter the soldiers from realising their designs on the innocent and defenceless teenage girl. After a week of watching and planning, they stormed her house, fended off her family members and took turns raping her. Then, to hide their crime, they decided to kill not just the girl but also the entire family: Abeer, her mother, her father and her seven-year-old sister. They poured combustible liquid around the house and set fire to it so as to make it appear that the house had burned in an aerial bombardment. The world did not learn of the appalling tragedy of Abeer and her family from Arab satellite news stations, as was the case with Hoda, but rather from the US media itself, albeit several months after the crime. It was not until last week that The Washington Post first exposed the incident, which occurred 3 March, and the story of which began to unfold on the basis of revelations by US soldiers who had served with the perpetrators. In addition, the US military court concerned only began to act after the crime mushroomed into a major political scandal. It is, of course, conceivable to chalk up the tragedies of Hoda Ghalia and Abeer Qassem Al-Jibali to exceptional circumstances. After all, it is possible, in a time of war, that a bomb could misfire and wipe out a family who happened to be enjoying a day's outing on the beach -- a family like Hoda's family. It is similarly possible for a deranged soldier to commit rape and murder in an occupied country, or anywhere for that matter. Unfortunately, however, when viewed against the backdrop of what is actually happening in Palestine and Iraq, one can not help but draw the conclusion that the crimes perpetrated against Hoda and her family and against Abeer and her family are the natural by-product of systematic drives to terrorise the Palestinian and the Iraqi people into accepting the reality of Israeli or US occupation and dominion. There is simply too much evidence of similar incidents to think otherwise. In Iraq, the US occupation army, which was taken aback at the size, vehemence and tenacity of the Iraqi resistance, has resorted to collective punishment against inhabitants of areas that it deems "insurgent strongholds". Its actions have included the decimation of entire urban infrastructures, to which Falluja and other Iraqi cities bare witness. The massacre of Al-Haditha is another glaring incident that is more indicative of policy gone dreadfully wrong than a bout of madness that struck a group of soldiers in the course of combat. When members of an occupation force unit saw one of their colleagues blown to bits by a mine planted by resistance groups, they unleashed their guns in all directions, reaping a toll of 24 dead, most of whom were women, children or old men. This and other types of crimes of war are certain to continue until the US removes itself from the quagmire into which it has sunk in Iraq. Sadly, those who think that the US will end its occupation voluntarily are fooling themselves. The current US administration has made it abundantly clear that it plans to stay in Iraq, for the oil and for other reasons, even at the cost of a full-fledged civil war or the partition of the country. Israel's campaign to bring Palestinians to their knees, forcing them to bow to Israeli dictates, is more obvious. It is impossible to understand Hoda's tragedy outside of the context of the tragedy that has befallen other Palestinian children. According to Israeli official sources, 755 children have been killed and 355 thrown in jail since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada on 28 September 2000 to 21 June 2006. It is very difficult to believe that all those dead children were victims of accident. And even if we could get our head around that one, it is impossible to believe that hundreds of children somehow mistakenly ended up in prison. It is painfully evident to anyone with an ounce of conscience that Israel is using children as pawns in order to blackmail their parents into relinquishing Palestinian demands for freedom and independence and to avenge itself against all who cling to these demands regardless of the sacrifices. Israel has tried to delude us into believing that its problem is not with the legitimate resistance to the occupation, the logic of which it could understand and which it was prepared to deal with in accordance with international laws and conventions. Rather, it insisted, its problem was with "terrorists" who blew themselves up on buses, in restaurants and in clubs. The recent resistance operation that led to the capture of an Israeli soldier paid to this illusion. Although the Palestinian resistance factions that mounted the raid restricted themselves to military targets -- barracks and soldiers, whose guns and missiles reap a new harvest of casualties by the day -- Israel's knee-jerk response was to bomb electricity stations and water mains and to unleash a barrage of aerial assaults that, until the moment of writing, have claimed 60 lives and hundreds of wounded, most of whom were civilians. Although the captive soldier is a standing member of the Israeli army, Israel responded by kidnapping ministers of the democratically elected Palestinian Authority. Again, one can not escape the conclusion that Israel used the captured Israeli soldier as yet another of its endless train of pretexts to set into motion a plan it had prepared well in advance. With or without excuses furnished by the Palestinians, Israel will forge ahead with its greater Zionist design and is bent on removing any obstacles that stand in its path. The crux of the problem is that Israel regards the Palestinians not as a collection of individual human beings but as a "demographic bomb" that has to be defused. If Israel truly acknowledged that the Palestinians were a people with legitimate rights, then it would recognise that the only solution to the conflict is the division of historic Palestine between two peoples, each of whom have their own rights and duties, and it would strive to put this solution into effect. However, Israel refuses to grant that the Palestinians have rights on the land that it regards as the "Promised Land" for God's one and only chosen people, the Jews, most of whom still live abroad. Therefore, its sole concern is to eliminate the "demographic peril", its solution for which is to pen the Palestinians into high security wards overseen by the Israeli army. But to pass this solution off requires a fiction, and this is to construct a political linkage between these wards and call it a state. That way, Israel can pretend to the world, and the US in particular, that it has not abandoned the roadmap and that it is doing all that it can to put into effect Bush's vision of two states living side-by-side in peace. The Arab people have no doubt that there is an organic link between the events in Iraq and those in Palestine. They know that the screams of Hoda in Palestine and of Abeer in Iraq are variations on the cries of an Arab nation that is in the process of being violated and debased by the US and Israel in the name of the fight against terrorism. However, the very self-evidence of this begs a question. This question has not so much to do with what motivates the US and Israel -- the one driven by insatiable greed and power-hungriness to make a grab at Iraq's enormous reserves of oil at a time when the Arab world is at one of its weakest ebbs ever; the other intent on taking advantage of the same circumstances in order to end the Palestinian problem in a way that promotes and secures the Zionist land grab. One can grasp these motives, as distasteful as one finds them. But what one fails to grasp is the degree of indolence that seems to have infected Arab regimes in the face of these enterprises. Can they possibly believe that they can safeguard their interests if the American and Israeli projects succeed? No one in their right mind, one would think, would suggest that even those regimes that are on the friendliest terms with the US and have the most normalised relations with Israel wish these projects success. However, the fact that barely a peep is heard from these regimes smells strongly of collusion. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that those Arab governments, in particular, whose coffers are filled with revenues from inflated oil prices are incapable of exerting some leverage to repel the economic blockade of the Palestinian people or of openly insisting upon a timeframe for the US withdrawal from Iraq. This realisation has led the Arab people to the regretful conclusion that their regimes have, willingly or under duress, become tools of US and Israeli policies. The only hope left is that the screams of Hoda in Palestine and of Abeer in Iraq help expose the masks of US, Israeli and Arab policies. It is patently obvious that behind these masks all these parties are colluding in the rape of two nations with only popular resistance left to defend their honour. * The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
