12/08/14 – Jen Marlowe – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate you all tuning in.
Coming up in half an hour, Robert Stinnett.
But first, it's Jen Marlowe.
She's got this piece at tomdispatch.com, and we're running it today at antiwar.com as the spotlight as well.
One family, two doors, nowhere to run.
Welcome to the show, Jen.
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
Thanks, Scott, for having me.
How are you doing?
I really appreciate you joining us.
And now I'm paging down because I realize that I don't have your whole bio.
But here it is.
It says human rights activist, author, documentary filmmaker, and founder of Donkey Saddle Projects.
Her books include I Am Troy Davis and The Hour of Sunlight, One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker.
Her films include Witness Bahrain.
Ooh, that's a whole other interview you and I are going to have to do.
And One Family in Gaza.
The blog is donkeysaddle.wordpress.com.
Great.
I'm glad I remembered to page down there.
That would have reminded you otherwise.
Oh, okay.
Well, good.
Yeah, you got to stick up for yourself, man.
All right.
Now, listen, this is just horrible.
So I'm going to be quiet and let you tell the story, please, if you would.
The Awadja family.
Great article.
I don't mean horrible article.
I mean horrible subject matter.
Wonderfully written story here.
Thank you.
You know, the power of the story just really tells itself.
And I was honored to be able to be a vehicle for the family.
I met the Awadja family in Gaza in August of 2009, which was several months after the first Gaza war that Israel termed Operation Cast Lead.
And when I met the family, their home had just been destroyed in Operation Cast Lead, and their nine-year-old son had been killed in a very brutal way.
And the whole family, including the smaller children, witnessed the execution-style murder of their nine-year-old son and brother.
So I met them in 2009, a few months after that, about six months after that, and the family was living in a tent near the rubble of their destroyed home.
And I had a video camera with me, although I did not come to Gaza intending to make a film, but I had brought my camera with me.
But after meeting this family and hearing their story, I felt compelled to use the camera as a platform for them to tell their story to a wider audience.
And what moved me so much was not only the trauma and the horror that they had lived through, but also the parents' determination to be able to create a future for their surviving children.
Their love for their children came shining through so greatly, and their belief in nonviolence.
They're struggling to help their children heal from the trauma that they had lived through.
That just spoke volumes.
And the film featured not only the tragedy, the story of their tragedy, but also the story of this family trying to rebuild and help their children heal.
And that was in 2009, and that film I made based on that was called One Family in Gaza.
And through this One Family story, it was a lens into the wider story of what all families in Gaza were enduring.
And I stayed in touch with the families in the years since then.
Okay, now stop right there for just one second.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but I want to say real quick.
I'm sorry.
I read the Word document and approved it, and I never got a chance.
I only just realized that the videos are actually embedded here in the article.
It's the spotlight again today at Antiwar.com.
You can watch both movies there, One Family in Gaza and the update.
They're both embedded in the actual article.
So I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to watch them before the show.
I only read the article, but I can't wait to see them.
So that's an important point I wanted to bring up for the audience.
And then secondly, I just wanted to clarify on one point of fact, if I could.
When you mentioned the killing of the 9-year-old son, you called it execution style.
And I wonder if you could be specific of what exactly happened.
Absolutely, and I can tell it to you as the parents told it to me.
The family had been in their home.
It was 2 in the morning on January 4th.
And the Operation Cast Lead had started a week before that as an air bombardment campaign.
And on the morning of January 4th is when the ground invasion began.
And the 12-year-old daughter woke her parents up.
She had seen soldiers outside the house.
And the family lit candles to put in the window of their house to show that there was that the house was occupied by a family to let the soldiers know that.
And yet very soon after that, the house began to crumble literally on top of the family's head.
And they realized a bulldozer, a military bulldozer was pushing the house down.
And so they grabbed their children, the smallest ones, and they fled the house.
The next morning after they returned to see that their house had been totally destroyed, all of a sudden gunfire surrounded the family again.
And the 9-year-old boy, Ibrahim, was shot nonfatally as the family was fleeing.
And the mother and the father were also shot nonfatally.
The father, after 9-year-old Ibrahim was shot, the father scooped him up as they began to run.
And then the mother, who was hit in both of her hips with bullet fire, she managed to get the other kids behind a mug brick wall.
But Kavao, who was hit in the chest, had fallen in the road and was holding 9-year-old Ibrahim in his arms.
At that point, a soldier approached on foot and at close range shot 9-year-old Ibrahim in the face, according to what both parents told me.
The father pretended to be dead, and that might have been why the soldier didn't shoot him as well.
And the mother, the soldier actually turned towards the mother, who was trying to protect the other children, and she screamed, you know, you've already killed the father and the son.
Please spare the rest of the children.
And the soldiers retreated at that point.
And so Wafa had actually thought, the mother had actually thought that her husband had been killed as well.
In reality, Kavao was still alive, but his 9-year-old son, who was in his arms, had just been murdered.
So it's not, you know, it's easy to kind of fill in gaps sometimes and imagine, well, there must have been a firefight with some Hamas terrorists, and the little boy just happened to be nearby or some kind of made-up thing that people like to tell themselves.
But so anyway, I think it's important to nail down those details.
And then so one of the things that you mentioned was, well, I mean, as you just described, the whole family was there, the ones who survived saw what happened.
And you talk at length in the article about the trauma that they've suffered and what their lives are like now after seeing the Israeli so-called defense forces murder this 9-year-old boy, their brother, right in front of their face like this, destroy their house like this.
And that's really what the film focuses on.
And so much of what the article focuses on is the aftermath, because I think so often we only pay attention to a situation at the moment of the acute trauma, at the moment of an attack, at the moment of an invasion.
But what happens afterwards when the tanks finally do leave and the guns are silent and then the attention turns and we never see what it's like for the families living in the aftermath of that and how long and how profound and how deep the impact of that trauma is.
And that was what I was hoping to reveal with the film.
And as I stayed in touch with the family and saw the ways in which that impact and that trauma continued over time and over years, and then of course with new and fresh trauma added to that, to me that was a very powerful window into what all people in Gaza are living through and are enduring.
And it's something we don't see, because if we pay attention to Gaza, it's only when rockets are flying out of Gaza targeting Israeli communities near Gaza or when the shelling and the tanks and the warplanes are shelling Gaza.
Right.
All right.
Now, so we've only got about 30 seconds before we have to take this break.
So when we get back from the break, we'll talk all about the aftermath.
And I'd like to give you a chance to, if you could, give us a little bit of kind of, you know, description, anecdotes, the way you do in the article about the way that the children act out, that kind of thing.
Make it feel real for people, because, well, you know, we're all victims of American TV here.
People in the Gaza Strip, you've got to really make them human or they just don't seem real to the average American, I think.
Anyway, Jen Marlow, on the other side of this break.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Jen Marlow.
She's the author of this great piece at TomDispatch.com and at AntiWar.com today.
It's called One Family, Two Doors, Nowhere to Run.
And you can find her original documentary here, One Family in Gaza, and the follow-up.
Both videos embedded in the article today as well.
So I will urge you to look at it.
And so, yeah, I was hoping, Jen, that you could tell us a little bit about, you know, the way you quote the mom here explaining the children's psychological problems that they have now in trying to grapple with living in an Israeli prison like this.
Absolutely.
And the signs of trauma were evident in the children right after the violence that they endured, the acute violence that they endured in 2009.
And a particularly poignant example of that that the family told me about was one of the things that the family endured after their home was destroyed and the 9-year-old boy was killed.
And the parents were both injured.
They had no way to get any help.
And they ended up hiding underneath the rubble of their destroyed home, underneath the collapsed ceiling for about four days without any food or any clean water.
And the mother described for me how nine months after that their 3-year-old son, whose name is Dia, still went to sleep holding a loaf of bread, clutching a loaf of bread in his arms.
And if you tried to take it from him as he was sleeping, he would wake up and hold it tighter and say, no, it's mine.
The experience of such deprivation made this little boy have to go to sleep hugging a loaf of bread.
And the trauma for the children, their nightmares, their fears, their insecurity persisted.
And when I saw the family the next time after I had originally filmed with them in 2009, it was in 2012, and they were at that moment finally rebuilding their destroyed home.
After three years of living in tents and impermanent housing situations, they were finally rebuilding their home.
And the mother told me something that took my breath away.
She told me that as they were making the plans to rebuild the home, the children were insisting that the home be built with two doors.
And when the parents asked why two doors, the kids wanted one door, that was just the regular door to enter and exit the house, and the second door as an escape door, so that when the Israelis destroyed their home again, they would have a door to escape from.
And the parents kept trying to reassure the children, nothing like this is going to happen, we're going to be safe, we're going to be okay.
And the children kept insisting, no, daddy, two doors.
We need two doors in our house so that we can run away.
Right.
Okay, now before we get to what happened right after that, then, I just wanted to mention this one thing.
This is the one that really got me.
It reminded me of my young nephews and stuff, you know, people who have young males in their family.
If you can picture a little kid who, as it says here, when he kisses you, you can feel the violence in his kiss.
He kisses you and then he pushes you away.
He might punch or slap you.
So this is a kid who's how old, what, five or six years old or something?
Well, he was three years old at that time.
Oh, yeah, right.
He's a little bit older now.
So imagine that three-year-old kid who he's so screwed up, he just can't even hug right.
He's just completely broken.
Yeah, he's internalized so much all of the violence he's experienced that even when he's trying to show affection, that comes out as violence.
And this is a three-year-old child who his only playground was the rubble of his destroyed home.
I filmed him and his five-year-old sister, and you'll see this in the film, you know, climbing and jumping on their collapsed roof, rolling bullet shells and shrapnel down the slope of their collapsed roof.
And that was their only playground.
All right.
So then they rebuilt the house and with two doors, right?
Well, I think they probably built the house with one door.
I'm not sure if they built it.
Oh, I thought they actually had gone ahead and said, okay, you know, we have to.
You know, I'm not sure because I actually never had the chance to see the new house, and I never will have the chance to see the new house because, tragically, the children were presciently correct about their fear that their home would be destroyed again.
Because they built the house.
It was completed in 2013.
In February of 2014, they finished the final step, which was putting glass in the windows.
And just that a few months later, this past summer, July 2014, the next most recent Gaza war began.
And the entire neighborhood evacuated, the entire neighborhood where the Awaja family lives.
And one day in the midst of the war, when there was a humanitarian ceasefire, the father, Kamal, was able to get back to the house to see what had happened.
And he found that his house and, indeed, the entire neighborhood had been completely demolished once again.
So the home that they had finally rebuilt to try to provide for their children some modicum of safety, some modicum of security, was once again a pile of rubble.
Right.
And then so now what are they doing?
They're just living on the rubble?
They are living in a tent next to the rubble of their home and trying to get for their children the basic needs.
Initially, in the first couple of weeks after they returned back to the home, they had literally nothing but the tent, nothing to separate them from the ground except for the nylon of the tent.
No mattresses, no blankets.
The children were sleeping outside at night, even in the cold at night.
I've been able to send the family some support.
And there's actually, if you follow the link in the article, there's an Indiegogo campaign that I set up on behalf of the family so folks can help me in sending the family some ongoing support.
And so far with that support, they've been able to get a little gas stove to cook with because of those initial weeks.
The mother, the only thing she had to cook over was wood that she was scavenging from the remains of her home.
She would cook over an open fire that was made from the wood she scavenged from her destroyed home.
Now the family has a little gas stove to cook with.
They've been able to get some beds for the kids, but they're still in the tent.
They've been able to make some kind of bathroom facility so that the hygiene situation is not quite as bad as it was in the first weeks when they were back and there was no water and there was no bathroom facility.
So slowly they're trying to put together some infrastructure for survival.
But of course survival alone is a far cry from being able to live a life of dignity, with security, with freedom, with safety.
And that's what the people in Gaza are desperately need.
Yes, they need their homes rebuilt and yes, they need food and yes, they need water.
But they need more than all of that, the ability to build a future for themselves and for their children.
And that can only happen not with humanitarian aid, but with the end of the Israeli occupation and the end of the ongoing siege.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Freedom only can provide for that.
And the thing is here too, is this story that you're telling, this absolute nightmare, is this is a story that's just replicated over and over and over again, thousands and thousands of times across.
I just saw a tweet, I retweeted, I don't know how accurate this is or the source, what the hell.
But it says 77 family lines eliminated, 2260 people killed, more than 10,000 injured, 1800 orphaned.
This is a war on a society.
They talk about pinprick strikes on Hamas and whatever, and it's just a damn lie.
Yeah, in the pinpricks, on those pinprick strikes on Hamas, said in quotes, in the 2014 Assad alone, those pinprick strikes killed over 500 children.
And if you add the number of children that were killed, including in the 2009 and 2012 and 2014 combined, it's 872 children in Gaza who were killed.
In those same three assaults, there was also from mortar fire coming from Gaza, there was also a three-year-old little Israeli boy who was killed.
And that death is a tragedy.
That death of that Israeli boy should never have happened.
It's inexcusable and indefensible that that Israeli child had the absolute right to grow up with safety and security and to build a future for himself and to have dreams and to accomplish those dreams.
That child's life is incredibly important, but that child's life is not more important than the 872 children in Gaza who were killed and whose families are living with the devastation of that.
And I think we as a society, there's a real imbalance, not only in the power, the military power and the political power between Israelis and Palestinians, but in the value that we accord human lives.
We accord Israeli lives so much more worth than Palestinian lives.
And, of course, those lives are equally valuable.
And until we recognize the equal humanity of all children, Israeli and Palestinian, this is due to continue.
That's Jen Marlow.
Her new piece is at TomDispatch.com and AntiWar.com, One Family, Two Doors, Nowhere to Run.
Go and read that.
The movie is One Family in Gaza.
And the update, both videos are embedded in this article.
It's the spotlight today on AntiWar.com.
Thank you so much, Jen.
Thanks, Scott.
It was really great to have the chance to discuss with you.
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Why doesn't the president force an end to the occupation of Palestine, a leading cause of terrorist attacks against the United States?
AIPAC and the Israel lobby.
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