Carter’s Conscience in the Gaza “Animal Cage”

On 16 June, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited the Gaza Strip touring some of the areas worst hit by the 22-day Israeli military operation that took place over the 2008-2009 New Year. Claiming to “hold back tears” at the sight of an American school “deliberately destroyed by bombs from F-16s made in my country,” Carter noted, “tragically, the international community too often ignores the cries for help and the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings.”

It’s not every day that you get a former U.S. president visiting Gaza, or for that matter empathizing with the suffering of its people.

Perhaps he felt guilty for the fact that his administration armed Israel, providing it with 90 U.S.-made F-15′s and F-16s in 1978 — weapons quite possibly used in the destruction he recently witnessed on the ground in Gaza.

A testament of what Carter saw in Gaza can now be seen in a remarkable series of photographs taken by New Yorker Tom Suarez who recently visited the region as a member of a thirteen-person delegation of human rights and anti-war activists organized by Code Pink. Suarez went to Gaza because he believes “outside, first-hand witnesses to the situation are vital, and the more, the better. The West does not believe Palestinians — we’ve been conditioned to contort evidence and reason however much necessary to avoid believing them. But perhaps the Western “narrative” can be shaken by a critical mass of Westerners who can say that with their own eyes they have seen that the scenario upon which U.S. policy is based is a lie.”

His pictures tell a raw accounting of what life is like in Gaza in the wake of Israel’s military assault, while still suffering from a debilitating siege that prevents the entrance of elementary supplies (food, medicine, fuel, spare parts), including those needed to rebuild. Many Gazans have resorted to rebuilding their homes with locally-made mud bricks because they have no faith in regular supplies being let in any time soon.

Suarez’s photographs capture life within Carter’s “animal” cage, a testament to inhuman conditions of cruelty and destruction, but also to the resourcefulness and determination of Gazans to continue living.

To be sure there are plenty of images of children standing about the ruins of their bombed out homes, as well as images of countless bullet holes in the cheap concrete refugee shelters which many Palestinians live in. Three quarters of Gaza residents are refugees, many of them living in eight large refugee camps.

There are also Orwellian images of what makes Gaza “one gigantic prison” according to Israeli human rights organizations: an unmanned Israeli army watch tower on Gaza’s periphery monitors the border through video cameras round the clock, fixed with remote-controlled automatic machine guns operated by soldiers located miles away, firing on anyone who approaches the fence. There are also morbid images of Hebrew graffiti left behind by Israeli soldiers in Palestinian homes, promising “more to come,” and that “you voted for Hamas.” Israeli journalist Amira Hass has also documented how Israeli soldiers left behind pots of urine and fecal matter in the refrigerators of Palestinian homes they occupied.

Suarez also captures some good documentary evidence. There is shrapnel from U.S. guided and unguided weaponry, including an alphabet soup of munition serial numbers which might mean something if there was an organized movement to hold the companies who produce and sell these weapons accountable. Volcanic chunks of rock are all that remain of burned out white phosphorous Israel used in populated areas – that and the scars of what it looks like after it burned the legs of a prepubescent Gazan boy.

But there are also images that reveal another side to life. Gazans going to the beach. A wedding procession. Children playing on computers at a local cultural center.

An image of a cheap red plastic chair comes to mind. Once broken, it is now repaired with simple wire braces. There is also a high prevalence of donkeys in many street shots. While many in the West might assume this to be a routine mode of transportation for Gazans, the reality is that many Gazans have been forced to use donkeys as the only mode of transportation because of the siege, fueling a rising donkey and cart market.

Suarez’s images are worth looking at because they defy the spectacle of the ways in which the conflict is portrayed in the Western media. They testify to why Harvard political scientist Sara Roy calls Gaza “an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers.” She places most of the blame on Israel “but with the active complicity of the international community, especially the U.S. and European Union, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.”

Thanks to Suarez, and perhaps even to Carter’s guilty conscience, many in the West can now see the result of that complicity for themselves, and perhaps work to do something about it.