Gaza Strip’s Universities Destroyed in Cultural Genocide

Latest–Israel deprives the Palestinians of water
The Zionists of Israel have not only been stealing from the Palestinians of the West Bank, but poisoning their water wells as Al Jazeera has reported. The latest method for taking over the West Bank includes sending in concrete trucks to pour concrete down Palestinian-owned water wells in order to cut off their water supply, as reported at the Middle East Monitor.
The justification again and again is “if we do not crush them, they will crush us” even though the Israelis are the dominant oppressive regime powered by their National Law to disregard the Palestinians as humans. The warning to humanity is clear: if today the “human-animals” are Palestinians, tommorrow they may be all the “goyim,” the term applied to all non-Jews. However the United States continues to see Israel as their democratic ally; never mind that in Israel, people of other faiths are not loved, but in fact, despised.
If the reasoning that it is okay to eliminate the “human-animals” holds true, then in the United States, should we not eliminate a lot of infants in the crib, since those infants are the progeny of ex-cons, Moslem, and nonwhites? Why is the United States letting in so many people of color at the border, people that the IDF would most likely gun down?
The perplexity might be explained by the fact that the U.S. has more resources, so the hasbara-system protects the chosen well enough that they can travel up the pipeline and serve as guard-dogs for empire at the higher echelons in media, publishing, academia, pharma, information technology, government, patents, stockbrokerage, banking, espionage, and so on. Anyone who has been around realizes that one often hits a brick wall with regard to being placed in a niche-market or hired to work only as a specialist. (The fact that even in Women’s History Month, most of the public cannot name even one single famous Asian-American woman deserving of historical mention, tells you who runs the government.) This is how hasbara trains the American public to remain largely oblivious, content, and proud in their ignorance of everything except ostentatious consumerism.
Gaza’s Universities are Destroyed
But in Gaza, as Chris Hedges talk with Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina reveals, the IDF has a policy of bombing symbolic community institutions and their personnel. Already as covered extensively at Doctors Without Borders, medical institutions and educational facilities were targeted, but also targeted were mosques and institutions of higher learning. According to The Real News Network, “Israel Destroyed My University, Where is the Outrage?” Israel has now destroyed or damaged all of Gaza’s 12 universities, and also targeted 280 government schools and 65 UN schools, many of which were sheltering civilians when they were attacked.
“The Israeli attacks have killed 94 university professors. These include Professor Sofyan Taya, the president of the Islamic University of Gaza, an award-winning physicist, and UNESCO chair of astronomy, astrophysics, and space sciences in Palestine, who died alongside his family in an airstrike, Dr. Ahmed Hamdi Abo Absa, dean of the software engineering department at the University of Palestine reportedly shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he walked away, having been released from three days of enforced detention…”
It feels like it is deliberate and planned when the Mossad or IDF calls your cellphone, leaves messages, and then a few days later, bombs your home, killing everyone in the family. According to Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina, it was only because he was away in north Gaza that he escaped the bombing of his home neighborhood in south Gaza that killed 102 members of his family. He still has siblings in north Gaza and near Khan Younis. Although Dr. Alhusseina left Gaza because he holds a dual citizenship passport, he looks defatigated and traumatized. He describes in detail the university he founded and was Vice President at, Al Israa University. The campus was left in a rubble after the detonation of 315 mines placed throughout.
Once it had 4300 students, many on scholarship, with facilities for nursing, engineering, medicine, law, court trial, and media studios. It even had a new museum housing 3000 artifacts from the Roman period that the IDF looted. The campus was taken down as a psyche-op that lasted 70 days; first it was occupied as a military base including positioning snipers within its buildings, also using it as a detention and interrogation center. Then the mines were planted and the buildings were blown up.
“And it’s shocking what they did to the university. Why would you stay in it for 70 days and then go boobytrap it and blow it up in front of people while cheering? I don’t understand…It has never been for Hamas there…There was no weapon…If they had something, they would’ve had videos or pictures…”
Ahmed recalls the university in detail, which had been planned so carefully to become a recognizable grand monument in Gaza, almost like a hotel in its elegance and state-of-the-art laboratories, seven floors that offered so many hopes and dreams for everyone, now in the rubble. At least for now, he is not very optimistic about the future for Palestine:
“They want to wipe out everything that points to the Palestinian identity or Palestinian culture. It’s like the propaganda says: ‘People with no land came to a land with no people.’ They consider there were no Palestinians and they’re still saying it now…But they don’t want people to educate themselves. They don’t want education. They want to destroy universities because that’s the only way the Palestinian has. We have no weapon, we have no future. Every Palestinian…will send their kids to college. It becomes like a necessity..”
Chris complimented Dr. Alhussaina over the fact that Palestinians have achieved such a high literacy rate, 97%, and historically Palestine had been Muslim (which also encourages self-discipline, morality, and literacy). So the fact is that they are not the barbaric Philistines, who were exiled and destroyed in the days of King Nebuchadnezzar in 604 BC in Babylon. During the month of Ramadan and fasting from sunrise to sunset, spiritual rewards are sought instead of earthly gains by devoting oneself to prayer and study of the Quran.
In history, Muslims had also treated the Jews kindly even when they underwent persecutions in Europe. Jews could travel and settle inside the Ottoman Empire and construct normal lives of dignity and self-respect while practicing Judaism, according to Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi in “How Moslems Treated Jewish People Throughout History.” The ill-will began only in the 20th century when the Zionists began clearing the land of Palestinians by persecuting and slaughtering them. However today, it is by far the worst Nakba ever undertaken.
Palestinian Lives in Exchange for Brave New Israel
When Dr. Chris Hedges asks Dr. Ahmed Alhussaina to reflect on what he hopes for the future of Palestine and for Gaza, his answers are poignant and full of forebolding.
“If you have no hospitals, no schools, no universities, no mosques to pray, and no place to go, what else would you have there? They won’t be alive in there…I think after this, the Palestinian people will have reached a point of despair. I don’t think anybody thinks there is a future for peace with Israelis…Like you said, all these kids that lost their parents, lost their relatives, lost their homes, what are they going to think? They think they’re going to want to live in one-state or two-states, next to somebody who killed their parents? I think they are destroying the two-state solution and that’s what they wanted to do for tens of years, decades, because Netanyahu said that he doesn’t believe that there should be a Palestinian state. They don’t want it. They want a one-state solution for themselves, by themselves. They want a Jewish state like they passed a law a couple of years ago…”
However in the immediate future, besides a coordinated suppression of information and statistics on the dying civilians inside Gaza or undergoing detention from the West Bank, the “final solution” for the homeless residents of Gaza looks to be inevitable before the planned IDF onslaught against Rafah. Dr. Alhussaina believes the push to Sinai is relentless, and that if this is successful, it will empower the IDF to similarly cleanse the West Bank of its Palestinians, although the “mop up” also remains in North and Central Gaza in the interim.
“The goal is to evacuate people from Gaza. They want Gaza an empty land…They want to make it so people have no choice but to leave…Their goal is to push people into the Sinai desert, into Egypt, and it’s going on step-by-step…My own belief is they’re going to start bombing and pushing the people toward the border. Then they bomb the walls of the border, make it open, and people will run for their lives. They’re going to go in there and then once they go in there, they’ll seal it and stop them from coming in or back to their places.”
All of this is for the future of Israel and visionary plans to develop their gas fields discovered off their Mediterranean coastline. The Tamar, and Leviathan, and Gaza Marine, and several smaller natural gas fields are on track for full development by 2030, which contain an estimated 1,100 cubic kilometers worth of natural gas reserves. Along with multinationals from Western nations, combined undersea pipelines are already partially developed to Egypt, Jordan, and heading towards Cyprus, then Greece, and Italy. A map from Palestine Chronicle shows how Gaza will be the base for pipelines possibly for transport across the Negev, but also to the usual sort of refineries and industrial facilities associated with developing liquified natural gas, or refining petroleum.
None of these plans are concocted with the inclusion of the Palestinian people’s voices or vote, except perhaps the Palestinian Authority, long seen as merely a puppet government. The rate of destruction, suffering, and death taking place inside Gaza and the West Bank almost precludes their inclusion in the new technocratic economy, because Israel is already speculating on how the land may be developed for exotic coastal resorts.
United States of Israel-Palestine, The True Possibility
If only Israel had embraced the opportunity to develop humanistic healthy exchanges with the Palestinians, even if they want to control the reins of power. Consider that the Moslems exercise such great control during Ramadan, not eating or drinking all day until sunset, for an entire month, and praying so assiduously. They are not descendants of the Philistines, whom according to Twins Tours “Geography of the Holy Land” were completely destroyed when they were captured and forced to migrate to Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar in 604BC. Today’s Arab Palestinians are 97% literate and focus very much on education and going to college—a far cry from the heathenism and chaos that reigns in Haiti.
The evidence of peaceable, informed, ambitious Moslems that is more or less a brother-religion to Judeo-Christianism is the tolerance that Muslim countries held towards Jews for centuries despite their persecutions elsewhere, as explained in the Lecture, “How Muslims Treated Jewish People Throughout History.” They allowed Jews to conduct business, set up shops, trade, build synagogues, live alongside them, attend universities, and even serve as high-ranking ministers in government. The ill-will only began after the Zionists began treacherously murdering Palestinians in the 1940s to clear the way for Zionist settlement in Palestine.
United States of Israel-Palestine should have combined the brains-and-brawn of both the Zionists and the Palestinians. Zion has many talented skilled mostly indoor technical and rabbinical types, even if they spurn the outdoors and working in the sunlight. In contrast, the Palestinians are highly skilled in animal husbandry and agronomy and would have brought to their United States of Israel-Palestine their excellence in folk-arts. A marrying of such talents would have brought such balance and excellence such as originally conceived of in the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights. Instead, Zion is investing in death, death culture, and futuristic-thinking at the cost of the present, to the consternation of most of the world.
Image from Palestine Chronicle, “PA, Egypt Sign Deal to Develop Natural Gas Field Off Gaza”