While the fat cats who behave as kings though their kingdom remains occupied argue over whether or not to admit the widely documented war crimes perpetrated against their people happened, the people of Gaza continue to endure.  While their elected “officials” try to strike the right balance of patriotic defiance for their constituents and compliant submission to the army holding the gun to their skulls, the plebs of that war-torn land try to shoehorn some normalcy into the lives of their families.  Though the blockade stills starves the nation and the aid to rebuild after last winter’s massacre slow to arrive, each Gazan in his or her own way try to get just a little slice of normal.

The latest desperate measure taken to that end comes from a zoo in Gaza City.  Unable to import animals for his zoo, Mohammed Bargouthi remains determined to give the children of Gaza some small taste of the exotic that the rest of the industrialized world takes for granted.  Unable to import the genuine article due to Israeli import restrictions, Mohammed decided instead to paint two donkeys with black and white stripes.

“The first time we used paint but it didn’t look good,” Mr Bargouthi told the Reuters news agency. “The children don’t know, so they call them zebras and they are happy to see something new.”

The two genuine zebras that had originally delighted the children that would come to his zoo starved to death last winter during Israel’s offensive.  The $40,000 in bribery required to smuggle replacements through the oft-bombed tunnels going under the Egyptian border is hard to come by and harder still to justify spending for entertainment.  But with a little masking tape and black hair dye, two spectacularly patient donkeys become as good as it is going to come in a land visited by such misery.

If anything could be more heartbreaking than the stories of the Goldstone report are the ones like these.  Tales of a people so deprived of liberty and happiness they literally manufacture their own with a five dollar trip to the drug store.  Stories of parents bound and determined to carve out a little of what we all took for granted growing up, even while the sky falls down around their ears.

As I sit with a full stomach less than a quarter mile from a zoo with the real thing, I wonder if I, pressed with such desperation, would have Mohammed’s determination.

Occupation sews itself into the cultural tapestry of the conquered in disquieting ways.  The national anthems of several African nations are set to traditional French folk tunes.  German silverware can be found in the kitchen drawers of many elderly Polish homes.  One can find a Roman dildo in the National Museum of Ireland.

A forceful penetration that damages more than just a nation’s military might, occupation leaves an impact that endures longer than shattered concrete and pockmarked countryside.  From Carthage to Germania, from Persia to the New World, the after effects of imperialism live long even after the empire dies.  In the music and in the paintings, in the language and in the customs, occupation irrevocably changes the cultural production of the occupied, altering forever even the smallest parts of identity.  One can see it in Anglicanized names and in Catholicized tribes, in the Communized Asia and the Capitalized Middle East.  Every time one sees a picture of a Native American drinking whiskey or an Irishman in a redcoat or a Vietnamese teenager wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt or a bedouin driving a sportscar, one is seeing the real damage of occupation.  The destruction of culture endures far longer that the capture of territory.

So it was suggested by Desmond Tutu in an interview today with Haaretz. Tutu, responding to comments by the newly recrowned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested that the culture of Judaism was damaged by Nazi occupation, so much so they were committing the sins of the former occupiers themselves.

The West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, as it should be.  But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians.

I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians.

The South African archbishop – who should know a thing or two about the damage occupation does – is suggesting that three generations after Israel’s independence the Jewish people are endanger of becoming the tragedy that birthed their nation.  That the horror visited upon their society so damaged their culture that it has become one that has forgotten its morality.  And, in some respects, Tutu is close to being accurate.

But the Israelis are not Nazis and the Palestinians are not Poles.  The tragedies people choose as synonyms for the Palestinian plight are all inaccurate in the sense that they suggest domination, not subjugation.  What makes the Palestinian people so singular in the history of occupation, what makes theirs a beauty unique to the stunning array offered by Arabia is their indefatigability.  How they remain a people occupied, but unconquered.

Just below an article describing Tutu’s interview was a daily reminder of this truth, a dispatch from an NGO working in the West Bank.  USAID, an international aid organization, announced Palestinians were undertaking a four-year, $20 million project to replace all the Hebrew road signs with those reading Arabic and English.  American funded and already underway, the effort is one of little practical value, but huge cultural import.  With Gaza still buried under rubble, a hostile right-wing government stealing the Israeli Knesset, and an Obama administration seemingly preoccupied with domestic concerns, $20 million on road signs seems like a misappropriation by the wildly optimistic.  More now than in the last decade, Palestinian sovereignty seems unlikely and with such suffering throughout the country, surely that sum could be used to better ends.

But then, you have to understand Palestine.  Their Nakba is far from over and those that occupy them are far from leaving.  But, these Palestinians resolve, they will one day.  One day they will have their nation back.  One day they will begin to rebuild what their occupiers have destroyed.

And, they figure, they might as well start with the signs.

An excellent bit of reporting just ran this weekend in the Christian Science Monitor, dispatching from Gaza the story of Abdul Aziz al-Khaldi.  Before Israel began the blockade on Gaza two years ago, Abdul was a middling businessman in Gaza City, earning a fair living as a real estate developer.  But once the blockade of Gaza began, Abdul started to watch the real money roll in.

For Abdul and a small set of profiteers, the blockade has been a boon.  They have prospered while the nation around them crumbles under the vice grip of Israel’s blockade.  Since Israel has choked off the legitimate avenues of commerce upon which the business community of Gaza has traditionally relied, only those with connections to the smuggling tunnels underneath the border to Egypt have been able to do any trade.  Those tunnels, ironically, are controlled only by the same enemy Israel wishes to starve out of the quarantined state.

“Thanks to Israel, while everyone else suffers, day after day Hamas is strengthening itself with the blockade,” says Amr Hamad, executive manager of Gaza’s Palestinian Federation of Industries (PFI), a private-sector organization. “And they are using this position to deepen their roots in Gaza.”

The only way to do business is through smuggling.  The only way to smuggle is with Hamas’ blessing.  Thus, the honest men, women and children starve and suffer under Israel’s lockdown, while the crooks they intended to defuse grow fat off the illicit trade. Hotels and banks, apartment complexes and prime retail frontage; Hamas’ chosen Chamber of Commerce is buying the assets of Gaza in a firesale.  Every day the blockade continues, Israel furthers the reign of Hamas by two.

This emerging trend, more than the rockets, more than the kidnappings, evidence the villainy of Hamas.  Seizing upon the Palestinian exhaustion with Fatah corruption, Hamas was supposed to be the “pure” alternative for Gazan voters.  In addition to being the ones with the guns, Hamas were supposed to be the ones with the principles.  They were supposed to be the soldiers of God rendered incorruptible by their committed service.

They are, instead, the latest set of thieves robbing an already burgled people.  And in their ham-fisted, short-sighted approach to dealing with them, Israel makes their removal from power more difficult each day.

In their desperation, the Palestinians handed complete control to a den of thieves.  So rocked by economic upheaval they and torment by foreign aggressors, they voted in a panic – they trusted the future of the country to those interested only in lining their own pockets.

And before we Americans judge their desperate failure, we must consider if we did any better.

Even in winter, the early afternoons in Gaza remain dusty and warm.  So it must have been on 7 January when three little girls – Amal, Su’ad, and Samar – walked off their front porch and towards the Israeli tanks stopped in front of their home.  With a turret pointed directly at the house, the men sent the girls out towards the IDF soldier with their mother and grandmother, each clutching white bedsheets desperately above their heads.  They waves the hastily made flags of truce frantically as they approached, shit scared and pleading for their lives.

One can picture the mother clutching the littlest Amal close as the troops stared them down.  One can feel the tepid silicon skating across cheeks flushed with panic in the afternoon breeze.

And then, in full sight of the men in the house including the girls’ father, the soldiers opened their guns, killing Amal and Su’ad and paralyzing Samar.  Su’ad was seven years old.  Amal was two.

Stories of atrocity continue to pour out of Gaza following this winter’s occupation by Israel, the latest reporting Palestinian civilians executed by Israeli soldiers under flags of truce.  Published by Human Rights Watch, the investigation details seven incidents of civilians slain by under flags of truce.  Pieced together from eyewitness accounts, ballistics reports and victim autopsies, each case is a tale of unimaginable horror; war stories of the worst sort.  The report is third released by the NGO in the last five months and joins an over-whelming body of evidence produced by a wide array of organizations governmental and non detailing war crime in Israel’s winter offensive.

But while the investigators continue to piece together what happened in Gaza, the United States appears to be disinterested.  The newscycles continue to belong to Iran and North Korea, to Bill Clinton springing journalists from jail in Pyongyang and his wife refusing to channel her husband in the Congo.   Now seven months after the Gaza war, Palestinians are still digging out from under the rubble of their lives while the rest of the world just now catches up with the story.

The stories coming from this conflict are exposing what, but only the United States has the ability to compel discovery of why.  The legality of the Israeli offensive has been brushed over, a unilateral dalliance that has been overlooked to deal with what the United States considers to be more pressing.  The Obama administration has engaged with Israel on Iran and on settlements, but we have yet to see the president take a stance on the war that Israel slid under the wire before he took office.

War crime is not something we should “move on” from.  The Obama “looking forward” mindset should not apply to little girls getting slaughtered.  At the very least, this administration should compel Israel to justify the conflict, to admit its motivations for invasion.  If those responsible for these atrocities can’t answer for their war crimes, the United States should be able to compel them to explain their war crimes. They should be forced to explain why a two-year-old girl was a tactical threat.  They should admit to the world why they pulled the trigger.

Even in war, civilization has rules that distinguish between the combantants and the civilians, between those waging the war and those suffering from it.  Soldiers get killed.  Little girls get murdered.

Their father are still waiting.  The least we owe them is why.

It is common knowledge that there are many obstacles to Palestinian statehood and the legitimate recognition of Palestinian civil liberties. Israeli policies represent the biggest roadblocks to peace, and for 40 years, Israel has starved, sanctioned, apartheid-ed, and waged indiscriminate warfare on the Palestinian people. Here in the US, Congress, influenced by the hawkish AIPAC, supports and cheers on nearly every act of terror Israel commits against its neighbors, while publicly denouncing Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians. The media also has a very pro-Israel bias, and both the mainstream Left and Right shroud this incredibly complex and delicate issue with black-and-white, good-vs-evil rhetoric.

What is less discussed, but just as harmful to the peace process, is the dictatorial and oppressive governments that control the divided Palestinian territories. There are two police-states in Palestine; Hamas keeps its iron fist over the Gaza strip, and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority (PA) bullies its subjects in the West Bank. These two groups bitterly oppose each other, and in their simultaneous struggle for power and control, Palestinians are caught in the middle.

As the power struggle continues, Palestinians are subjected to random bomb blasts, assassinations by masked gunmen, excruciating torture while detained, no access to lawyers, politically motivated arrests, and the banning of peaceful demonstrations. The Preventive Security Services (PSS) of the PA has been accused of torturing to death Hamas detainees, and human rights groups have expressed concern about frequent Hamas police raids and Palestinian citizens tried in military courts on death row for “collaboration with the enemy,” backed by dubious testimony or hearsay.

The US plays an important role in these Palestinian police states. The Pentagon has a history of funding both sides of military conflicts around the globe, especially off the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is throwing a billion dollars at the Palestinian Authority rather than sending medicine and food to the Gaza Strip that’s in ashes from last Christmas’ blitzkrieg. Their enemies, the Israelis, get $3 billion a year to subsidize settlements, crush Palestinian resistance, slaughter its neighbors, and run its socialist-military-economy. Why are we funding both sides of a bloody, bitter, and complicated conflict?

The twin-police states governing the Palestinian territories are a direct result of brutal Israeli policies, and the cycle conflict continues. Anytime Israel decides it needs a little elbow room (especially when its election season) and decides to drop a million (internationally banned) cluster bombs on dense concentrations of defenseless Arabs, it strengthens the legitimacy of the PA, Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups exist as a violent response to Israel running the largest open air prisons in the world in its Occupied Territories, denying any resemblances of rights to Palestinians, bulldozing their homes, and frustrating every peace deal that would actually work. Constantly finding reasons to seek war and create enemies is Israel’s forte; besides, what else would it do with its massive military might (courtesy of you and I, the taxpayer)?

The Obama Administration’s slightly less friendly stance towards Israel is a positive and welcoming sign, but what this delicate region needs most of all is for the US to mind it’s own business. Ending military aid and remaining neutral would give both sides the incentive to sit down and actually negotiate with each other. But the Pentagon has this paranoid fear that if there is something happening in the world, the US must send arms, influence governments, and arrogantly stick its nose where it doesn’t belong.

I sympathize with the Palestinians, who most of the time act defensively against Israel’s criminal occupations. The last thing they need, however, is for the US to throw matches on the fire with its unnecessary meddling.