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Germans to the Gazan Front
The UN stopped urgently needed delivery of food and medical stuff to the population of Gaza after the Israeli occupation troops killed a second UN contractor in a UN marked truck today during a three hour cease fire announced by Israel.
The International Red Cross, in an 'extraordinary statement', says Israeli occupation troops hindered for days access to wounded children laying among many dead and without help while being very near to an Israeli position. The Israeli troops, for days, made no attempt to help the wounded kids a few meters away from them.
Those are the neutral voices.
The first aim of Livni and Barak in initiating this slaughter is to get re-elected.
The strategic point evolving now is to cut the only lifeline left to the people in Gaza. To close down the very dangerous tunnels to Iran Egypt by inserting either U.S. controlled Fatah (Dahlan) troops (unreliable) or international entities (manipulable) into the area .
That could happen and would be devastating for the people in Gaza.
Some politicians in my country, Germany, seem to be willing (in German) to send troops to make sure of that.
German troops did a good job guarding concentration camps a historic while ago. That is likely the reason why Israeli politicians would now welcome such troops guarding the Gaza-Egypt crossings.
They know that these troops are more competent than the IDF …?
b, for once you are mistaken. Malooga understands. These are long-term plans for final solutions that go way way beyond the current players. They have been in place for a long time and this is but a stage. The final solution is an ethnic Jewish state with no possible competition. What we are witnessing now is genocide for a very specific purpose – to eliminate a so-called “demographic threat.”
There is no other explanation for the events that we are witnessing. As evidence. may I refer you to this document for further elaboration, and then kindly review this piece. Then tell me if everything we have witnessed over the past 8 years does not neatly fit exactly within this framework and this plan. We are dealing with something more monstrous here than most people can really contemplate.
Now consider that Barak today boasted to the Hebrew press that this war had been in intensive planning for two years (long before the elections were ever even publicly scheduled), and understand that there is nothing accidental about anything whatsoever, even about the fact that 5 rockets were fired today from the north and “nobody in Lebanon knows who did it.” Consider also that a Red Cross report on Gaza done before Operation Cast Lead even started found that fully 50% of children under 12 in Gaza had lost their will to live. Then you will appreciate the true nature of what is being done. There is nothing random about it. As John Pilger wrote today:
They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist”. They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and that the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” of 1947-48 resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Israeli army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing”. Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon: “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them'”.
The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapam party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the road with them because such is the imperative of strategy. And this we say . . . who remember who used this means against our people during the [Second World] War . . . I am appalled.”
Every subsequent “war” Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first against Israel. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein have undermined this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called Zionism. “It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Pappé on 2 January, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system . . . Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].”
The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now “Operation Cast Lead”, which is the unfinished “Operation Justified Vengeance”. This was launched by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with George W Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time.
Why are the academics and teachers silent? Are British universities now no more than “intellectual Tescos”?
In that same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of new Labour’s enduring complicity in Palestine’s agony. However, the Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries [because] the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial”. This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians”. What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, then Israeli chief of staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks. On 23 November 2001 Israeli agents assassinated the Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud and got their “trigger”: the suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.
Something uncannily similar happened on 4 November last year when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people. Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger”: a ceasefire sustained by the Hamas government – which had imprisoned its violators – was shattered as a result of the Israeli attacks, and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be called Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed”. On 23 December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Behind this sordid game is the “Dagan Plan”, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon during his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organisation, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has brought about the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, now effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah, under Mahmoud Abbas, is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign, relayed through mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in the US, which say Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and is to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, since long before its creation. “We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.”
In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power”. Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce reported as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, most states agree. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity”.
When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority, followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments”, and perhaps, finally, into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed . . . Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.”
Dr Dahlia Wasfi is an American writer on Iraq and Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-Semitic,” she wrote on 31 December. “But I’m not talking about the World War II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [the president of Iran] or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years . . . Since Arabs are Semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-Semitic than this.” She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young American who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. “I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting, and for which my government is largely responsible.”
Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility”. Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction, but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform. With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable, invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-Semitism. The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.
Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plead for help? Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries”?
Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third American Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure that the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 2,500 jammed the auditorium. Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete; the literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabo kov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”
If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised people. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants war criminals impunity and immunity through our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or it gives us the power to speak out. For the moment I prefer my own memory of Gaza: of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity”, as Karma Nabulsi put it. On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No one had told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together, and a few of them climbed on to a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, in the belief that the world will not forget them.
The only possibly adequate weapon against this atrocity is to call it by its right name and expose this insane scheme for what it is.
Posted by: bea | Jan 9 2009 3:54 utc | 17
Thank you bea (and John Pilger in his very powerful piece), for writing what I have been unable to express.
This conception has sat on my desk before me for three days and I have been unable to put my feelings into words. Yesterday, I couldn’t even turn on the computer.
“It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé on 2 January, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system . . .
This quote expresses the kernel of what I have been trying to say. It is the very heart of the matter.
Perpetrators of genocide get away with what they do by breaking up the narrative of History, the master plan, into a series of discrete, unconnected, confusing, sometimes even contradictory, events. Once events are so broken, then it is easy to supply false, or partial, narratives to explain them. And it is easy to mislead people.
This is a very important point.
This is what the Nazis did. This is what the US did in Rwanda, Serbia, Iraq, particularly Fallujah, and before that in a battalion of false wars and dead people, commencing with the pre-meditated slaughter of its own Native population.
And the lies and methods are always the same.
That is what one should learn from studying History, not arcane facts or dates, but how entire populations are systematically de-humanized and then exterminated, or subjugated, always based upon the same lies and the same fracturing of narrative, of discourse. And, also, how some manage to successfully resist and survive, and to re-humanize themselves in the eyes of their former exterminators.
The human animal is the only animal that struggles so against itself.
But this breaking of events…this is what made me so angry that I couldn’t express myself.
By denying the course of events, by breaking the narrative apart, you are not only denying the genocide of the Palestinians, you are denying the genocide of my own people, the Eastern European Jews — for it was this very method which was employed by the Nazis — and infinitely more importantly, you are denying every other genocide, full or partial, that ever happened in Human History.
Many Jews, not just Zionists, employ the phrase, “Never Again.” As we are tragically seeing, too often that phrase really means, “Never again for MY people.”
What is missing is the method, the praxis, for turning an empty statement into a meaningful living affirmation that guides our lives.
And that method, as Holocaust researchers know, is the re-connecting of History, the re-assembling of meaningless events into a meaningful narrative, and the exposure of the murderous ideology or system — which is always one of hate beneath a crown of rectitude — to the harsh, disinfectant light of day.
If we can’t connect the lies of the past into an understanding of the present, of how things got to be the way they are, we will be denied a future.
These genocides do not “just happen.” A King does not wake just up one day and say, “Oh, it’s a nice day; I think I’ll kill off the Marmites today.” No, it just doesn’t work that way (except, perhaps, on Monty Python). These events are always based upon an ideology, a belief system, that allows one group to de-humanize another. Then, a series of provocations must be built up in order to overcome the natural humanity of the people, their innate resistance to hate and murder. In order to do that, each event must be systematically de-contextualized and made to stand alone.
This is how genocide is committed. And it always cowers below the false crown of holiness, of righteousness, or rectitude. Because without the imprimateur of that crown, it stands naked and exposed for what it truly is: heinous and barbaric, and yet, also, even ridiculous and infantile — and always inhuman.
These exact same methods are employed to oppress people, to deprive them of hard-won rights and freedoms. Ironically, being unable to confront the heart of the matter until now, I instead detailed this same process, but only in depriving people of their rights, in another thread on this blog.
My spiritual brother on this blog, r’giap, used to speak about “doing the work,” or “how important the work we do on this blog is.” Of course he is right.
But, they can lie faster tan we can confute them. This is a fact.
So, yes, we must confute their lies, one by one, and bring the light of truth to their falsehoods. And that alone can seem like more than a full-time job as lies rain down upon us like hail in a bitter storm.
But that isn’t enough, it is not sufficient of us. For we must also strive to expose their open plans, their secret plans, their cabals, their brutality. We must do it methodically and scientifically, not paranoically. That is what they are so afraid of, and why the phrase “conspiracy theory” is employed by those who seek to cover over their crimes as the ultimate insult. For it is true, they do feel insulted to be exposed and to have their lies and their hate exposed.
And then we must educate others, not only of the specific methods of the group we are focused upon, but also of the pattern of domination — the fracturing of events, and the sanctifyingly murderous ideology or system which supports it, so that they can think for themselves and see the emperor behind the curtain — every emperor and two-bit gangster — for who he is, naked and exposed, without the protective clothing of ideology.
And finally, we must be ensure that we use this new-found awareness to inform our own actions. For what is the point of this “work” which we do together on this blog, and in the rest of our lives, if we continue to make the same mistakes — because we are afraid of what we see, because of sentimentality, because of pollyanaish optimism, because of trust in our subjugators; for so many reasons — and therefore perpetuate the suffering or slaughter of ourselves and others, especially when we could have made a difference.
In Buddhist theology, the Buddha is one who has gone upon an inner quest to realize the unity of life. And the Bodhisattva is one who has reached Buddhahood and then continues beyond. The Bodhisattva seeks to end the suffering of all beings so that they can have that same realization. I know that realization to be true for myself. And it is described in all religious traditions. But it is not enough to rest in that realization. When everyone around you is being murdered, and everything around you is being destroyed, one can be excused if one forgets their essential unity with their destroyer. And so it is incumbent upon all of us to do everything we can to remove unnecessary suffering in this world.
Exposing the narrative of domination, re-connecting fractured events, and explicating the justifying system or ideology, are the most powerful tools we have to end real suffering in the real world which were born into and are destined to suffer through and die in.
Posted by: Malooga | Jan 9 2009 6:36 utc | 26
Here is another excellent piece by Avi Shlaim, an Israeli who has come to a rude awakening:
How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state’s legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions
The only way to make sense of Israel’s senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza’s prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion’s share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism….
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
Israel’s settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel’s propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel’s terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel’s cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted – a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, “crying and shooting”.
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak – terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel’s entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel’s soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel’s objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel’s forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel’s spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel’s actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel’s objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel’s insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel’s concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel’s record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism – the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel’s real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace.
Apologies for the long post but right now I have no time or energy to excerpt…
Posted by: bea | Jan 9 2009 11:51 utc | 37
Although the article concerns itself with civilian deaths in Afghanistan, I thought it is befitting the mass murder unfolding in Gaza. Via Uruknet:
Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday condemned the reported killing of 17 civilians, including women and children, in a US-led coalition operation in eastern Afghanistan, the presidential palace said in a statement….
Unable to seek revenge independently, many Afghan men in southern and eastern Afghanistan have joined the Taliban ranks after losing members of their families in international military operations, according to Afghan officials.
At least 1,500 civilians were among the 4,000 people killed in the first eight months of 2008, according to United Nations officials in Afghanistan.
Just like Afghani men in many cases are joining the Taliban, not due to their firm believe in the Taliban’s extreme Islamic dogma, but to enlist with the only force out there that is fighting the invaders that killed their loved ones, so will Hamas be strengthened by USrael’s despicable attacks on Gaza’s civilian population.
Israeli analysts have been studying the Palestinian resistance for more than half a century and by now have surely figured out that any military counter-insurgency measures against an opponent that actually lives in the warzone, is like punching your fist into a bucket of water – the moment you pull it out its back to how it was. My bet is that Israel’s strategists know full well that the bloodshed will not bring about the end of Hamas, quite contrary, if anything their current onslaught will increase the groups popularity amongst the huddled up masses in Gaza’s basements. So why, if not to feed the flames, this gruesome Israeli military incursion?
Just like the many Arab dictatorships need Zionist Israel to provide the diversion needed to keep their own citizens under control, does USsrael need Hamas’s and the various martyr brigades existence, their sporadic suicide bombs and mortar attacks. Without them, without the constant fighting, they’d have no more excuse to continue the illegal land grab they are engaged in, and are getting away with under the cover of war. The way those assholes see it, the more civilians die in the onslaught the better, it means more enraged Palestinians, more olive groves and houses that can be annexed while whimpering about the raging Palestinians.
With all our focus on Gaza, it’s also worth remembering that our troops, US and allied forces around the world are just as barbaric as the IDF’s henchmen. Looking at the numbers quoted in the Uruknet article, 1500 civilians killed in 8 mths in Afghanistan, pretty much in the same fashion as their Muslim brothers in Palestine, leaves one in no doubt that our own governments, people we elected, are just as guilty as Livni or say, Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Minister for Palestinian Deaths. One has to wonder if the Allies’ strategic planning in Afghanistan isn’t in line with Israel’s strategy of antagonizing the civilian population in order to create the conflict needed to justify ones presence in Pipelineistan.
So whilst I understand that people could do with a stiff drink, it should not be to help us forget our frustrations and to numb the anger, but to warm us up for the cold outside, where we will have to march till our feet start bleeding. Lets not succumb to the feeling of hopelessness and our insignificance. We are not powerless, quite the opposite, WE are the power, we are the people. Should enough of us make a stand, putting for a change our money where our mouths and keyboards are, marching hand in hand by the tens of millions against the system, show enough courage to engage in civil disobedience and withholding war taxes, we will make a difference. 10 million people giving $100 ea, and there is a billion dollars to fight this insanity. And when the money runs out in three months time, we do it all over again, until those fuckers learn that we are serious. We, not Obama, have to get the snowball rolling. He won’t, we must.
Short from traveling to Palestine ourselves to oppose in Rachel Corrie’s spirit the crimes against humanity committed against nearly helpless people, we can also do our bit from wherever we are, in multiple different ways. Donate to any organization that is dedicated to easing the Palestinian suffering, whilst at the same time boycotting any goods and services coming from Israel, or firms associated and in business with Israel. Seeing that there are only three links allowed per comment, I will put some links and tips on how to get active in my next comment. Any old way, no more time to waste, the people in Gaza and Afghanistan are counting on us, desperately.
Posted by: Juan Moment | Jan 9 2009 12:02 utc | 39
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