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Revealed: Gaza orphans Israel trip was government-backed PR stunt | The Electronic Intifada
An Israeli initiative to exploit a group of Palestinian orphans from Gaza to burnish Israel’s blood-soaked image backfired on Sunday when Hamas, the Palestinian political and military resistance movement, put a stop to it.
A group of children whose parents were killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza last summer and several adult chaperones were about to pass through the Erez crossing into Israel on Sunday to be greeted by Israeli officials and a media throng.
But Hamas officials halted the visit. According to a statement posted on Facebook by the interior ministry in Gaza, security services stopped “37 children of martyrs from departing to the lands occupied in 1948 [Israel] for a suspicious visit to several settlements and occupied cities.” It said the step was taken “to protect the culture of our children and our people and protect them from the policy of normalization.”
But it appears the children – though they were the props – were not the target.
The visit was the brainchild of an Israeli operative deeply involved in settlements in the occupied West Bank, working closely with the Israeli government.
It involved Palestinian counterparts in Israel with ties to the ruling Likud party and the Zionist political establishment.
It is unlikely that the non-governmental organization in Gaza that helped coordinate the visit was aware of these facts when it agreed to take part.
Priceless propaganda
The children had been scheduled to visit the Palestinian town of Kafr Qasim and the Bedouin forced-resettlement town of Rahat. They were also to be received by Palestinian Authority de facto leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.
But the week-long visit would also have provided Israel with priceless photo opportunities of happy, smiling Gaza children at the zoo in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, as well as several Israeli settlements.
Such propaganda would have provided a marked counterpoint to the indelible images from the summer of some of the more than five hundred children killed and thousands injured and terrorized by Israel’s attack.
Israeli media, public relations officials and international media sympathetic to them, including the BBC and AP, have presented Hamas’ action as preventing hapless orphans from making what Reuters termed “a rare goodwill visit to the Jewish state.”
Exploiting orphans
Many commenters on social media have noted that Israel advocates fully supportive of the siege of Gaza and of restrictions that routinely prevent Palestinian students, medical patients and loved ones of prisoners passing through Erez, were suddenly outraged that this particular group of children had been stopped.
Marian Houk, a journalist currently based in Ramallah, said it was “hard to understand” Israel’s decision to allow the orphans in to “visit kibbutzes, a zoo” and Mahmoud Abbas, while it had recently “refused to allow a man from Gaza to visit his dying 18-month-old son in the West Bank, and then refused to allow him to attend the funeral.”
The story of Israel’s refusal to let Bakr Hafi visit his young son, Emir, who died on 14 December, was told by Haaretz.
The Electronic Intifada’s Rami Almeghari reported last year on the case of twelve-year-old Amal Samouni, who has shrapnel in her skull from Israel’s 2009 attack on Gaza, and was denied permission to travel through Erez for treatment in the West Bank.
Not surprisingly, news of the visit provoked a fierce outcry from Palestinians on social media.
................
on Twitter
“Look kid, this is where the Israeli artillery was stationed when it bombed your house, cool, right? Love us! We just killed ur parents,” Twitter user @ANimer quipped, imagining an exchange between one of the orphans and his Israeli hosts.
Settlement promoter behind visit
Media have identified the organizer of the initiative as Yoel Marshak, an official of the Kibbutz Movement. Kibbutzim are Zionist communal settlements whose influence and popularity peaked in the mid-twentieth century.
Although they took over much land from Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1948 – atrocities in which many kibbutz members participated – kibbutzim long enjoyed a progressive, or even socialist image in the West due to their collectivist ideology. This was used for years to effectively market Zionism to a poorly informed or credulous international audience.
Reuters labels Marshak a “peace activist,” but a more accurate descriptor might be “land-theft activist.” He is himself an agent encouraging Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank on behalf of the Israeli government.
Marshak presents the hosting of the orphans as utterly selfless. “We initiated this to plant seeds of peace,” Marshak told the English-language Times of Israel.
“In a few years, when these children become the leaders of the Gaza Strip, they will remember this positive experience well and know that they can live in peace, nation next to nation. We don’t have to fight and kill, we can also hug and extend our hand in friendship.”
Marshak told the Arabic-language website Lakom that the visit is “the least that we can offer these orphans whose families were killed by our army.”
He also denied any political connotations for the visit.
“To turn this into a political act ahead of the Israeli elections [in March] is to exploit the pain of these orphans,” Marshak told Times of Israel.
......................
An Israeli initiative to exploit a group of Palestinian orphans from Gaza to burnish Israel’s blood-soaked image backfired on Sunday when Hamas, the Palestinian political and military resistance movement, put a stop to it.
A group of children whose parents were killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza last summer and several adult chaperones were about to pass through the Erez crossing into Israel on Sunday to be greeted by Israeli officials and a media throng.
But Hamas officials halted the visit. According to a statement posted on Facebook by the interior ministry in Gaza, security services stopped “37 children of martyrs from departing to the lands occupied in 1948 [Israel] for a suspicious visit to several settlements and occupied cities.” It said the step was taken “to protect the culture of our children and our people and protect them from the policy of normalization.”
But it appears the children – though they were the props – were not the target.
The visit was the brainchild of an Israeli operative deeply involved in settlements in the occupied West Bank, working closely with the Israeli government.
It involved Palestinian counterparts in Israel with ties to the ruling Likud party and the Zionist political establishment.
It is unlikely that the non-governmental organization in Gaza that helped coordinate the visit was aware of these facts when it agreed to take part.
Priceless propaganda
The children had been scheduled to visit the Palestinian town of Kafr Qasim and the Bedouin forced-resettlement town of Rahat. They were also to be received by Palestinian Authority de facto leader Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.
But the week-long visit would also have provided Israel with priceless photo opportunities of happy, smiling Gaza children at the zoo in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, as well as several Israeli settlements.
Such propaganda would have provided a marked counterpoint to the indelible images from the summer of some of the more than five hundred children killed and thousands injured and terrorized by Israel’s attack.
Israeli media, public relations officials and international media sympathetic to them, including the BBC and AP, have presented Hamas’ action as preventing hapless orphans from making what Reuters termed “a rare goodwill visit to the Jewish state.”
Exploiting orphans
Many commenters on social media have noted that Israel advocates fully supportive of the siege of Gaza and of restrictions that routinely prevent Palestinian students, medical patients and loved ones of prisoners passing through Erez, were suddenly outraged that this particular group of children had been stopped.
Marian Houk, a journalist currently based in Ramallah, said it was “hard to understand” Israel’s decision to allow the orphans in to “visit kibbutzes, a zoo” and Mahmoud Abbas, while it had recently “refused to allow a man from Gaza to visit his dying 18-month-old son in the West Bank, and then refused to allow him to attend the funeral.”
The story of Israel’s refusal to let Bakr Hafi visit his young son, Emir, who died on 14 December, was told by Haaretz.
The Electronic Intifada’s Rami Almeghari reported last year on the case of twelve-year-old Amal Samouni, who has shrapnel in her skull from Israel’s 2009 attack on Gaza, and was denied permission to travel through Erez for treatment in the West Bank.
Not surprisingly, news of the visit provoked a fierce outcry from Palestinians on social media.
................
on Twitter
“Look kid, this is where the Israeli artillery was stationed when it bombed your house, cool, right? Love us! We just killed ur parents,” Twitter user @ANimer quipped, imagining an exchange between one of the orphans and his Israeli hosts.
Settlement promoter behind visit
Media have identified the organizer of the initiative as Yoel Marshak, an official of the Kibbutz Movement. Kibbutzim are Zionist communal settlements whose influence and popularity peaked in the mid-twentieth century.
Although they took over much land from Palestinians ethnically cleansed in 1948 – atrocities in which many kibbutz members participated – kibbutzim long enjoyed a progressive, or even socialist image in the West due to their collectivist ideology. This was used for years to effectively market Zionism to a poorly informed or credulous international audience.
Reuters labels Marshak a “peace activist,” but a more accurate descriptor might be “land-theft activist.” He is himself an agent encouraging Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank on behalf of the Israeli government.
Marshak presents the hosting of the orphans as utterly selfless. “We initiated this to plant seeds of peace,” Marshak told the English-language Times of Israel.
“In a few years, when these children become the leaders of the Gaza Strip, they will remember this positive experience well and know that they can live in peace, nation next to nation. We don’t have to fight and kill, we can also hug and extend our hand in friendship.”
Marshak told the Arabic-language website Lakom that the visit is “the least that we can offer these orphans whose families were killed by our army.”
He also denied any political connotations for the visit.
“To turn this into a political act ahead of the Israeli elections [in March] is to exploit the pain of these orphans,” Marshak told Times of Israel.
......................
