Once again Israel is under fire for using disproportionate force in response to Hamas rocket fire from Gaza. Israeli bombs have left hundreds of Palestinians dead, the bulk of them Hamas militants but dozens of citizens have died as well. So is Israel justified in its retaliation or did it violate international norms on proportionality?
The operative phrase tossed around is "self-defense," enshrined by Article 51 in the UN Charter. If a country -- or non-state actor for that matter -- attacks you, you are entitled to respond to defend yourself. But you cannot respond with disproportionate force. I cannot burn your house down if you spit on me. But I can slug you one in the face and be in the clear.
The targeting of civilians, whether deliberate or not, violates the 1949 Geneva Conventions. As such, Hamas sprinkles its militants around population centers as a form of deterrence but also to maximize world outrage when Israel responds with overwhelming force and ends up killing scores of civilians. What's remarkable is that time and again Israel falls for the bait. Regardless of how many Hamas fighters it kills or what kind of signal it sends to Syria and Iran, world perception is what ultimately matters, not body counts. And the tide of public opinion seems to invariably side with the underdog, regardless of who's to blame.
Hence, Israel now finds itself in the awkward yet familiar position of defending its actions. A state is legally allowed to unilaterally defend itself and right a wrong provided the response is proportional to the injury suffered and is immediate, necessary, refrains from targeting civilians, and requires only enough force to reinstate the status quo ante. Also implied in this argument is the right of Israel to prevent Hamas from carrying out future cross-border attacks.
Yet there is growing confusion as to what constitutes a legitimate military target. Arguably, if a hospital or church is used to house enemy troops, or a bridge is vital to moving militants, then these areas would become fair targets. The same goes for an electric grid. As international legal expert Michael Glennon told me after the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, "Virtually no target can, ipso facto, be de-listed from a list of potential military targets."
Critics say Israel has a history of using disproportionate force. For example, its war with Hezbollah drew international condemnation for its use of cluster bombs and disproportionate use of force, regardless of the fact that Hezbollah provoked the war. In 1993, Israel's seven-day bombing campaign of Lebanon in retaliation for Hezbollah rocket attacks was also criticized. And in 1981, Israel struck Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor without provocation, a move Israelis said was justified under international norms on anticipatory self-defense.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force" against Hamas. The Obama camp has been mum on the issue, only to issue anodyne statements standing by Israel's right to defend itself and urge a peaceful solution. But this issue -- what is an acceptable level of violence in response to attacks by non-state actors -- will rear its ugly head again, whether along the Turkish-Iraqi border, in northwest Pakistan, or in Gaza. There is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a proportionate response to terrorist attacks.
States, especially those with hyperactive militaries and nukes at their disposal, cannot be given carte blanche to retaliate. But it should be in their own self-interest not to respond with disproportionate force. After all, non-state actors tend not to be deterred much less defeated militarily. All that results is a surge in recruits and international sympathy for the non-state actor -- in this case, Hamas. Yes, it's tough for states to sit on their hands in the face of incoming rockets. But to respond, especially with disproportionate force, is suicidal.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Israel rejected any temporary halt to its five-day bombing campaign in Gaza yesterday and continued to hit targets in the Palestinian territory amid the first signs of disagreement over strategy among Israel's leaders.
Israeli troops and tank crews gathered in larger numbers on the Gaza border ready for a new stage in the fighting. A possible invasion by Israeli forces could range from limited ground incursions to a much larger land invasion of Gaza, home to 1.5 million Palestinians. Another call-up of reservists has been approved, bringing the total to 9,000.
Israel widened its buffer zone under military authority around Gaza to a radius of 25 miles after the reach of Hamas rockets extended to the town of Be'er Sheva.
In the first indication of a division over the course of the engagement since the conflict began on Saturday, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, personally championed a continuation of the military campaign while his defence minister, Ehud Barak - Israel's most decorated soldier and a former chief of staff - proposed a 48-hour halt on Tuesday night.
"If conditions will ripen and we think there will be a diplomatic solution that will ensure a better security reality in the south, we will consider it. But at the moment, it's not there," an aide quoted Olmert as saying. "We didn't start this operation just to end it with rocket fire continuing as it did before it began. Imagine if we declare a unilateral ceasefire and a few days later rockets fall on Ashkelon. What will that do to Israel's deterrence?"
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said last night that Israeli attacks on Gaza had to stop before any truce proposals could be considered.
"First, the Zionist aggression must end without any conditions ... Second, the siege must be lifted and all the crossings must be opened because the siege is the source of all of Gaza's problems," he said in a televised speech to Palestinians. "After that it will be possible to talk on all issues without any exception," Haniyeh said, referring to recent truce proposals raised by all parties, including Israel.
Olmert met Barak, foreign minister Tzipi Livni and his senior commanders for an apparently tense four-hour meeting on Tuesday night. A security cabinet meeting yesterday then decided against any pause in the bombing.
The French government had tried to convince the Israelis to accept the pause and to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza. But Israel's leaders are keen not to repeat the experience of the 2006 Lebanon war when divisions over strategy led to recriminations and loss of confidence among the Israeli public.
Israeli jets yesterday bombed smuggling tunnels on the Egyptian border as well as a mosque in Gaza City, which the military said was used to store weapons.
Palestinian militants continued to fire rockets into southern Israel, reaching a new range of around 25 miles and hitting the city of Be'er Sheva. The rockets have killed four Israelis since Saturday. The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza rose to 393 with 1,650 wounded in five days.
Some defence officials have suggested that as the weather improves later this week tanks and troops might be sent into Gaza in another attempt to stop the firing of rockets into southern Israel. A long column of tanks and other army vehicles was seen yesterday on an access road leading into Gaza. Dozens more tanks were parked in fields by the border.
Most military analysts say it is unlikely that Israel would embark on a costly full reoccupation of Gaza and not enough troops are in position for that. More likely is a series of smaller raids. However, although Israel faced little international criticism when the conflict started, pressure for a halt to the violence is growing from western governments as well as the UN and aid agencies.
Gordon Brown yesterday called for an urgent ceasefire amid the "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza. "It is vital that moderation must now prevail," he said after speaking by phone to Olmert - the first time the two leaders have spoken since the crisis erupted.
Brown said: "I have talked to the prime minister of Israel and had assurances from him that there will be access for humanitarian reasons to get stocks in, to get supplies to people in Gaza and to help with the casualties."
Israel has allowed in around 100 trucks loaded with humanitarian supplies on each of the past two days, but that comes after months of severe economic blockade and big shortfalls in Gaza of food and medical supplies. The UN said it was still well short of what was needed.
One Hamas spokesman in Gaza said the group was open to another ceasefire, but wanted Israel's economic blockade lifted. For more than a year Israel has prevented all imports, except limited humanitarian supplies, and prevented all exports from Gaza - in effect destroying private business.
Israeli troops and tank crews gathered in larger numbers on the Gaza border ready for a new stage in the fighting. A possible invasion by Israeli forces could range from limited ground incursions to a much larger land invasion of Gaza, home to 1.5 million Palestinians. Another call-up of reservists has been approved, bringing the total to 9,000.
Israel widened its buffer zone under military authority around Gaza to a radius of 25 miles after the reach of Hamas rockets extended to the town of Be'er Sheva.
In the first indication of a division over the course of the engagement since the conflict began on Saturday, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, personally championed a continuation of the military campaign while his defence minister, Ehud Barak - Israel's most decorated soldier and a former chief of staff - proposed a 48-hour halt on Tuesday night.
"If conditions will ripen and we think there will be a diplomatic solution that will ensure a better security reality in the south, we will consider it. But at the moment, it's not there," an aide quoted Olmert as saying. "We didn't start this operation just to end it with rocket fire continuing as it did before it began. Imagine if we declare a unilateral ceasefire and a few days later rockets fall on Ashkelon. What will that do to Israel's deterrence?"
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said last night that Israeli attacks on Gaza had to stop before any truce proposals could be considered.
"First, the Zionist aggression must end without any conditions ... Second, the siege must be lifted and all the crossings must be opened because the siege is the source of all of Gaza's problems," he said in a televised speech to Palestinians. "After that it will be possible to talk on all issues without any exception," Haniyeh said, referring to recent truce proposals raised by all parties, including Israel.
Olmert met Barak, foreign minister Tzipi Livni and his senior commanders for an apparently tense four-hour meeting on Tuesday night. A security cabinet meeting yesterday then decided against any pause in the bombing.
The French government had tried to convince the Israelis to accept the pause and to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza. But Israel's leaders are keen not to repeat the experience of the 2006 Lebanon war when divisions over strategy led to recriminations and loss of confidence among the Israeli public.
Israeli jets yesterday bombed smuggling tunnels on the Egyptian border as well as a mosque in Gaza City, which the military said was used to store weapons.
Palestinian militants continued to fire rockets into southern Israel, reaching a new range of around 25 miles and hitting the city of Be'er Sheva. The rockets have killed four Israelis since Saturday. The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza rose to 393 with 1,650 wounded in five days.
Some defence officials have suggested that as the weather improves later this week tanks and troops might be sent into Gaza in another attempt to stop the firing of rockets into southern Israel. A long column of tanks and other army vehicles was seen yesterday on an access road leading into Gaza. Dozens more tanks were parked in fields by the border.
Most military analysts say it is unlikely that Israel would embark on a costly full reoccupation of Gaza and not enough troops are in position for that. More likely is a series of smaller raids. However, although Israel faced little international criticism when the conflict started, pressure for a halt to the violence is growing from western governments as well as the UN and aid agencies.
Gordon Brown yesterday called for an urgent ceasefire amid the "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza. "It is vital that moderation must now prevail," he said after speaking by phone to Olmert - the first time the two leaders have spoken since the crisis erupted.
Brown said: "I have talked to the prime minister of Israel and had assurances from him that there will be access for humanitarian reasons to get stocks in, to get supplies to people in Gaza and to help with the casualties."
Israel has allowed in around 100 trucks loaded with humanitarian supplies on each of the past two days, but that comes after months of severe economic blockade and big shortfalls in Gaza of food and medical supplies. The UN said it was still well short of what was needed.
One Hamas spokesman in Gaza said the group was open to another ceasefire, but wanted Israel's economic blockade lifted. For more than a year Israel has prevented all imports, except limited humanitarian supplies, and prevented all exports from Gaza - in effect destroying private business.
Dec. 31, 2008
It was almost a century ago when the British soldier T.E. Lawrence described for posterity the World War I revolt of the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Lawrence helped organize the revolt, and he famously said that combating such an uprising was "like eating soup with a knife."
His adage may not be perfectly applicable to the current Israeli offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, after all, is more than just a rebel group. It is simultaneously a political party, a social-services organization and a terrorist group. It is a sworn enemy of Israel, and it continues to incessantly fire rockets across the border, hoping to kill Israeli civilians at random. The group has a civilian and a military component.
Still, the maxim uttered by Lawrence -- who was later immortalized in the film "Lawrence of Arabia" -- does have a present-day application when speaking of the ongoing fight against terror groups like the Taliban, Hezbollah, al-Qaida. And Hamas. Lawrence was essentially describing the problems that result when a regular army comes up against an irregular fighting force. In military parlance, such a conflict is called "asymmetrical."
Armies and governments prefer to avoid such conflicts. They often end without a clear victor; nobody capitulates, there is no white flag waved, no peace treaties signed. Other rules apply. One of them is the following: If the militarily inferior rebel group manages to survive, it is seen as the victor.
Two years ago, the truth of this rule was brought home to Israel after its summer war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The Israeli army attacked with the goal of ending the Hezbollah threat after the terror group kidnapped two Israeli soldiers at the Lebanese border. But the war, pitting the ultra-modern Israeli force against a few thousand irregulars from Hezbollah, dragged on for weeks. Now the war is seen as a disaster in Israel, and Hezbollah came away seen as the victors, and its image in the Middle East was only strengthened.
Nevertheless, Israeli officials are once again resorting to the all-or-nothing rhetoric heard in 2006. This time around, Defense Minister Ehud Barak has spoken of a "war to the bitter end" and of an "all-out war." This time, the opponent is Hamas.
Israel's anger is understandable. On Dec. 19, Hamas elected not to renew a fragile six-month-long cease-fire with Israel and began once again lobbing explosives at random across the border into Israel. Those rockets have killed four people this week. But the question remains: Is a vast military offensive of the kind we have seen this week the best way for Israel to proceed?
It is certainly risky. Most experts on asymmetrical warfare warn that it is virtually impossible to eliminate a group like Hamas -- with its military and social components -- merely with superior firepower. Furthermore, the offensive strains Israel's relations with its neighbors Jordan and Egypt -- bonds that have never been very tight. It also weakens the positions of those Palestinians who were in favor of a negotiated peace with Israel.
The last five days of Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which have seen over 350 Palestinians killed and many more wounded, have highlighted the problems inherent in such an asymmetrical operation. Planes have targeted mosques because Israel thinks they are being used to cache weapons; apartment blocks where high-ranking Hamas members live have been destroyed, almost guaranteeing civilian casualties. The university was destroyed because it espoused the Hamas ideology. Each one of these targets presents a dilemma -- and the images they create are unhelpful to Israel. Indeed, the only targets that make sense are the smuggler tunnels under the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
It is also unclear that the offensive brings Israel a single step closer to its ultimate goal of eliminating Hamas entirely. Indeed, the more intense the Israeli bombing campaign has become, the more Palestinian rockets have flown across the border into Israel. Hamas may be briefly weakened as its commanders are knocked off and its weapons depots destroyed. But, in the long run, it is difficult to see Hamas not benefiting the same way Hezbollah benefited from the 2006 war. Their aura as resistance fighters can only be strengthened.
Some have argued that the bombing campaign makes it clear to the Palestinians exactly what their support of Hamas can result in. Whether the demonstration of power will make Palestinians more interested in a peace deal with Israel, though, is doubtful.
It is always the case that, when the situation in the Middle East escalates, the world holds Israel to a different standard than its enemies. Israel, surrounded by enemies though it may be, is a democratic society based on the rule of law. Whereas nobody expects much from Hamas, one can hope that Israel would have more regard for civilian casualties. And one can hope that it would learn the lessons of the past.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that the country's leaders "view it as important to keep up the pressure on Hamas," according to the New York Times. Preparations are still being made for a possible ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Should it come to that, no one should be surprised if, in a few months, another investigative committee -- as happened after the 2006 Lebanon war -- comes to the conclusion that the conflict was a mistake.
This time, to be sure, the entire Israeli government was brought in to the decision-making process. But, in 2006, one of the primary criticisms was that Israel had not sufficiently defined its war aims before marching into southern Lebanon. "War to the bitter end," certainly doesn't sound any more precise.
It was almost a century ago when the British soldier T.E. Lawrence described for posterity the World War I revolt of the Arabs against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Lawrence helped organize the revolt, and he famously said that combating such an uprising was "like eating soup with a knife."
His adage may not be perfectly applicable to the current Israeli offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, after all, is more than just a rebel group. It is simultaneously a political party, a social-services organization and a terrorist group. It is a sworn enemy of Israel, and it continues to incessantly fire rockets across the border, hoping to kill Israeli civilians at random. The group has a civilian and a military component.
Still, the maxim uttered by Lawrence -- who was later immortalized in the film "Lawrence of Arabia" -- does have a present-day application when speaking of the ongoing fight against terror groups like the Taliban, Hezbollah, al-Qaida. And Hamas. Lawrence was essentially describing the problems that result when a regular army comes up against an irregular fighting force. In military parlance, such a conflict is called "asymmetrical."
Armies and governments prefer to avoid such conflicts. They often end without a clear victor; nobody capitulates, there is no white flag waved, no peace treaties signed. Other rules apply. One of them is the following: If the militarily inferior rebel group manages to survive, it is seen as the victor.
Two years ago, the truth of this rule was brought home to Israel after its summer war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The Israeli army attacked with the goal of ending the Hezbollah threat after the terror group kidnapped two Israeli soldiers at the Lebanese border. But the war, pitting the ultra-modern Israeli force against a few thousand irregulars from Hezbollah, dragged on for weeks. Now the war is seen as a disaster in Israel, and Hezbollah came away seen as the victors, and its image in the Middle East was only strengthened.
Nevertheless, Israeli officials are once again resorting to the all-or-nothing rhetoric heard in 2006. This time around, Defense Minister Ehud Barak has spoken of a "war to the bitter end" and of an "all-out war." This time, the opponent is Hamas.
Israel's anger is understandable. On Dec. 19, Hamas elected not to renew a fragile six-month-long cease-fire with Israel and began once again lobbing explosives at random across the border into Israel. Those rockets have killed four people this week. But the question remains: Is a vast military offensive of the kind we have seen this week the best way for Israel to proceed?
It is certainly risky. Most experts on asymmetrical warfare warn that it is virtually impossible to eliminate a group like Hamas -- with its military and social components -- merely with superior firepower. Furthermore, the offensive strains Israel's relations with its neighbors Jordan and Egypt -- bonds that have never been very tight. It also weakens the positions of those Palestinians who were in favor of a negotiated peace with Israel.
The last five days of Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which have seen over 350 Palestinians killed and many more wounded, have highlighted the problems inherent in such an asymmetrical operation. Planes have targeted mosques because Israel thinks they are being used to cache weapons; apartment blocks where high-ranking Hamas members live have been destroyed, almost guaranteeing civilian casualties. The university was destroyed because it espoused the Hamas ideology. Each one of these targets presents a dilemma -- and the images they create are unhelpful to Israel. Indeed, the only targets that make sense are the smuggler tunnels under the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
It is also unclear that the offensive brings Israel a single step closer to its ultimate goal of eliminating Hamas entirely. Indeed, the more intense the Israeli bombing campaign has become, the more Palestinian rockets have flown across the border into Israel. Hamas may be briefly weakened as its commanders are knocked off and its weapons depots destroyed. But, in the long run, it is difficult to see Hamas not benefiting the same way Hezbollah benefited from the 2006 war. Their aura as resistance fighters can only be strengthened.
Some have argued that the bombing campaign makes it clear to the Palestinians exactly what their support of Hamas can result in. Whether the demonstration of power will make Palestinians more interested in a peace deal with Israel, though, is doubtful.
It is always the case that, when the situation in the Middle East escalates, the world holds Israel to a different standard than its enemies. Israel, surrounded by enemies though it may be, is a democratic society based on the rule of law. Whereas nobody expects much from Hamas, one can hope that Israel would have more regard for civilian casualties. And one can hope that it would learn the lessons of the past.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that the country's leaders "view it as important to keep up the pressure on Hamas," according to the New York Times. Preparations are still being made for a possible ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.
Should it come to that, no one should be surprised if, in a few months, another investigative committee -- as happened after the 2006 Lebanon war -- comes to the conclusion that the conflict was a mistake.
This time, to be sure, the entire Israeli government was brought in to the decision-making process. But, in 2006, one of the primary criticisms was that Israel had not sufficiently defined its war aims before marching into southern Lebanon. "War to the bitter end," certainly doesn't sound any more precise.
So, why didn't they give peace a chance? Why did the leaders of Hamas and Israel not wait for the incoming US president's inauguration before mutually escalating hostilities? Here was a president-elect chosen, in part, on the expectation that he could enhance prospects for Mideast peace, even if it meant negotiating with people thought to be enemies.
Wallace Shawn: It is not rational to believe that the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be terrorized by force and violence, by cruelty, by starvation or by slaughter into a docile acceptance of the Israeli occupation.
Q & A with Lakhdar Brahimi: What Next for Gaza? Israel
Barbara Crossette: Lakhdar Brahimi, a leading UN troubleshooter in the Middle East weighs in on the crisis in Gaza and speculates on how it may affect Obama's presidency.
» More
Gaza Clouds Obama's Prospects Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
Robert Scheer: So, why didn't they give peace a chance? Why did the leaders of Hamas and Israel not wait for the incoming US president's inauguration before mutually escalating hostilities?
Cheney's Legacy of Deception Dick Cheney
Robert Scheer: In the end, the shame of Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting.
Hurled Shoes: Bush's Epitaph Iraq
Robert Scheer: The loathing that led an Iraqi to hurl shoes at Bush serves as the world's final verdict on US folly in Iraq. It's also a caution for Obama as he ponders Afghanistan.
Why not give that approach an opportunity to succeed regarding the future of Palestine? Why not see if Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose husband had been more successful than any other president in advancing the prospects for peace in the Mideast, could have accomplished more than the lame-duck secretary of state she will soon replace?
The question answers itself.
Unfortunately, neither Hamas's nor Israel's leaders believe that a meaningful peace of the sort all US presidents have endorsed is in their interest. That peace stipulates two independent and viable national entities, one Israeli and the other Palestinian. Clearly, Hamas and its hard-line supporters in the region reject the goal of an Israel at peace with its neighbors and secure within its boundaries, even if those borderlines return to those existing in 1967 at the time of the Six-Day War.
Further, Islamic nations in the region obviously don't want a secure Palestine, as some support only the most radical of Palestinian movements, and the oil-wealthy regimes, while eagerly throwing money at Wall Street, refuse to invest in any serious way in the Palestinian economy.
What is less obvious, particularly to Israel's many knee-jerk supporters in the United States, is that the dominant Israeli politicians of all parties just as consistently reject the goal of a meaningful two-nation solution, if by that is meant a vibrant and truly independent Palestinian state. This last sentence represents heresy to those many who insist, as an article of faith and despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that Israel has never wanted anything but to live in peace with its neighbors.
Their view is colonialist propaganda, pure and simple. I first heard it while reporting from Gaza and the West Bank in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, brought on by Egypt and Jordan, which were then the occupiers of what remained of Palestine. Maybe Israel's leaders, most prominently the conquering war hero Moshe Dayan, meant it when they claimed that they had no desire to permanently occupy this land. After all, they were mostly secular Labor Party Zionists, who shunned any notion of a divine mandate to remain in control of the Promised Land.
Whatever their original intentions, the occupation created its own logic of suppression, first breeding discontent and then rebellion. It doesn't matter whether that rebellion takes the form of stone-throwing or rocket launching; the Israeli response will always be wildly disproportionate, further damning the prospect for rational solutions. And uncritically underwriting that disproportionate Israeli response to any and all dissent will be the United States, the supplier of those F-16s doing so much damage in Gaza today.
But most US presidents, with the possible exception of George W. Bush, came to view the blank check for Israel as a loser's game. The madness at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been widely acknowledged as the prime source of a much greater madness now codified as terrorism. And even Bush, as represented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, recently has been forced by that reality to put pursuing a meaningful peace back on the agenda.
The fact that settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is central to international stability ends up informing US policy, much to the chagrin of the region's hard-liners on both sides. Throw in the prospect of a new US president, who has put the waging of peace into the conversation, and it is understandable why that would threaten many in the Mideast who are wedded to the old ways of doing business. It is why Jimmy Carter, as an ex-president, has worked so courageously to confront that deadly dynamic.
Obama's challenge will be to turn his mantra of change into a practical road map for Mideast peace, a prospect made much more elusive by the Israeli blitzkrieg. But if he fails to do that and simply panders to those who have grown comfortable with this disastrous status quo, he will seriously undermine the prospects for his administration. With our severe economic problems, the last thing we need is increased Mideast instability, driving up US military expenditures and the price of oil.
Wallace Shawn: It is not rational to believe that the Palestinians in the occupied territories will be terrorized by force and violence, by cruelty, by starvation or by slaughter into a docile acceptance of the Israeli occupation.
Q & A with Lakhdar Brahimi: What Next for Gaza? Israel
Barbara Crossette: Lakhdar Brahimi, a leading UN troubleshooter in the Middle East weighs in on the crisis in Gaza and speculates on how it may affect Obama's presidency.
» More
Gaza Clouds Obama's Prospects Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
Robert Scheer: So, why didn't they give peace a chance? Why did the leaders of Hamas and Israel not wait for the incoming US president's inauguration before mutually escalating hostilities?
Cheney's Legacy of Deception Dick Cheney
Robert Scheer: In the end, the shame of Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting.
Hurled Shoes: Bush's Epitaph Iraq
Robert Scheer: The loathing that led an Iraqi to hurl shoes at Bush serves as the world's final verdict on US folly in Iraq. It's also a caution for Obama as he ponders Afghanistan.
Why not give that approach an opportunity to succeed regarding the future of Palestine? Why not see if Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose husband had been more successful than any other president in advancing the prospects for peace in the Mideast, could have accomplished more than the lame-duck secretary of state she will soon replace?
The question answers itself.
Unfortunately, neither Hamas's nor Israel's leaders believe that a meaningful peace of the sort all US presidents have endorsed is in their interest. That peace stipulates two independent and viable national entities, one Israeli and the other Palestinian. Clearly, Hamas and its hard-line supporters in the region reject the goal of an Israel at peace with its neighbors and secure within its boundaries, even if those borderlines return to those existing in 1967 at the time of the Six-Day War.
Further, Islamic nations in the region obviously don't want a secure Palestine, as some support only the most radical of Palestinian movements, and the oil-wealthy regimes, while eagerly throwing money at Wall Street, refuse to invest in any serious way in the Palestinian economy.
What is less obvious, particularly to Israel's many knee-jerk supporters in the United States, is that the dominant Israeli politicians of all parties just as consistently reject the goal of a meaningful two-nation solution, if by that is meant a vibrant and truly independent Palestinian state. This last sentence represents heresy to those many who insist, as an article of faith and despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, that Israel has never wanted anything but to live in peace with its neighbors.
Their view is colonialist propaganda, pure and simple. I first heard it while reporting from Gaza and the West Bank in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, brought on by Egypt and Jordan, which were then the occupiers of what remained of Palestine. Maybe Israel's leaders, most prominently the conquering war hero Moshe Dayan, meant it when they claimed that they had no desire to permanently occupy this land. After all, they were mostly secular Labor Party Zionists, who shunned any notion of a divine mandate to remain in control of the Promised Land.
Whatever their original intentions, the occupation created its own logic of suppression, first breeding discontent and then rebellion. It doesn't matter whether that rebellion takes the form of stone-throwing or rocket launching; the Israeli response will always be wildly disproportionate, further damning the prospect for rational solutions. And uncritically underwriting that disproportionate Israeli response to any and all dissent will be the United States, the supplier of those F-16s doing so much damage in Gaza today.
But most US presidents, with the possible exception of George W. Bush, came to view the blank check for Israel as a loser's game. The madness at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been widely acknowledged as the prime source of a much greater madness now codified as terrorism. And even Bush, as represented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, recently has been forced by that reality to put pursuing a meaningful peace back on the agenda.
The fact that settling the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is central to international stability ends up informing US policy, much to the chagrin of the region's hard-liners on both sides. Throw in the prospect of a new US president, who has put the waging of peace into the conversation, and it is understandable why that would threaten many in the Mideast who are wedded to the old ways of doing business. It is why Jimmy Carter, as an ex-president, has worked so courageously to confront that deadly dynamic.
Obama's challenge will be to turn his mantra of change into a practical road map for Mideast peace, a prospect made much more elusive by the Israeli blitzkrieg. But if he fails to do that and simply panders to those who have grown comfortable with this disastrous status quo, he will seriously undermine the prospects for his administration. With our severe economic problems, the last thing we need is increased Mideast instability, driving up US military expenditures and the price of oil.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Last update - 01:49 29/12/2008
Amira Hass / 'Gaza strike is not against Hamas, it's against all Palestinians'
By Amira Hass
At 3:19 P.M. Sunday, the sound of an incoming missile could be heard over the telephone. And then another, along with the children's cries of fear. In Gaza City's Tel al-Hawa neighborhood, high-rise apartment buildings are crowded close together, with dozens of children in every building, hundreds in every block.
Their father, B., informs me that smoke is rising from his neighbor's house and ends the call. An hour later, he tells me that two apartments were hit. One was empty; he does not know who lives there. The other, which suffered casualties, belongs to a member of a rocket-launching cell, but no one senior or important.
At noon Sunday, the Israel Air Force bombed a compound belonging to Gaza's National Security Service. It houses Gaza City's main prison. Three prisoners were killed. Two were apparently Fatah members; the third was convicted of collaborating with Israel. Hamas had evacuated most of the Gaza Strip's other prisons, but thought this jail would be safe.
At 12 A.M. on Sunday, a phone call roused S. "I wasn't sleeping anyway," he said. "I picked up the receiver and heard a recorded announcement in Arabic: 'This is to warn you that we will bomb the house of anyone who has arms or ammunition at home.'"
Three members of one neighboring family were killed, all young men in their twenties. None of them owned arms or ammunition; they were simply walking down the street when the IAF bombed a passing car. Another neighbor lost a 16-year-old daughter, and her sister was seriously wounded. The IAF had bombed a building that formerly housed the Palestinian Authority's Preventive Security Service, and their school was located next door.
S. saw the results of some of Saturday's bombings when he visited a friend whose office is located near Gaza City's police headquarters. One person killed in that attack was Hassan Abu Shnab, the eldest son of former senior Hamas official Ismail Abu Shnab.
The elder Abu Shnab, whom Israel assassinated five years ago, was one of the first Hamas politicians to speak in favor of a two-state solution. Hassan worked as a clerk at the local university and played in the police band for fun. He was performing at a police graduation ceremony on Saturday when the bomb struck.
"Seventy policemen were killed there, not all Hamas members," said S., who opposes Hamas. "And even those who supported Hamas were young men looking for a job, a salary. They wanted to live. And therefore, they died. Seventy in one blow. This assault is not against Hamas. It's against all of us, the entire nation. And no Palestinian will consent to having his people and his homeland destroyed in this way."
Amira Hass / 'Gaza strike is not against Hamas, it's against all Palestinians'
By Amira Hass
At 3:19 P.M. Sunday, the sound of an incoming missile could be heard over the telephone. And then another, along with the children's cries of fear. In Gaza City's Tel al-Hawa neighborhood, high-rise apartment buildings are crowded close together, with dozens of children in every building, hundreds in every block.
Their father, B., informs me that smoke is rising from his neighbor's house and ends the call. An hour later, he tells me that two apartments were hit. One was empty; he does not know who lives there. The other, which suffered casualties, belongs to a member of a rocket-launching cell, but no one senior or important.
At noon Sunday, the Israel Air Force bombed a compound belonging to Gaza's National Security Service. It houses Gaza City's main prison. Three prisoners were killed. Two were apparently Fatah members; the third was convicted of collaborating with Israel. Hamas had evacuated most of the Gaza Strip's other prisons, but thought this jail would be safe.
At 12 A.M. on Sunday, a phone call roused S. "I wasn't sleeping anyway," he said. "I picked up the receiver and heard a recorded announcement in Arabic: 'This is to warn you that we will bomb the house of anyone who has arms or ammunition at home.'"
Three members of one neighboring family were killed, all young men in their twenties. None of them owned arms or ammunition; they were simply walking down the street when the IAF bombed a passing car. Another neighbor lost a 16-year-old daughter, and her sister was seriously wounded. The IAF had bombed a building that formerly housed the Palestinian Authority's Preventive Security Service, and their school was located next door.
S. saw the results of some of Saturday's bombings when he visited a friend whose office is located near Gaza City's police headquarters. One person killed in that attack was Hassan Abu Shnab, the eldest son of former senior Hamas official Ismail Abu Shnab.
The elder Abu Shnab, whom Israel assassinated five years ago, was one of the first Hamas politicians to speak in favor of a two-state solution. Hassan worked as a clerk at the local university and played in the police band for fun. He was performing at a police graduation ceremony on Saturday when the bomb struck.
"Seventy policemen were killed there, not all Hamas members," said S., who opposes Hamas. "And even those who supported Hamas were young men looking for a job, a salary. They wanted to live. And therefore, they died. Seventy in one blow. This assault is not against Hamas. It's against all of us, the entire nation. And no Palestinian will consent to having his people and his homeland destroyed in this way."
Falling into the moral abyss
The gradual process of ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian territories is accelerating, and with it so is the moral culpability of Israel and the supporters of its policies in the United States. More and more people from the mainstream of Israeli politics are voicing alarm. In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg compared the situation in Israel today to Germany on the eve of Nazis coming to power. Writing for The Huffington Post, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy likened Israel to a drunk and the US to a friend who gives them bottle of vodka and keys to his car. Even current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has ordered incessant attacks on Gaza since coming to power, has called recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank "pogroms."
A state founded by Holocaust survivors should be a beacon of morality, not a black hole for it. Supporters of Israeli policy (and I distinguish between support for the Israeli people and support for its government's policies) often justify their support by saying that Israel is the only democracy in the region. Leaving aside certain problematic aspects of that claim, I wonder if these people have ever thought of the implications of Israel, as a democracy, being engaged in continual violations of international law and human rights. Israelis, benefiting from a press that is far more open to the truth about government's policies than the American media, know a great deal about what the leaders they elect are doing, yet they continue to elect them. Thus, the Israeli public has culpability for their government's crimes that citizens under a dictatorship would not have.
Of course, the Israeli government could never have pursued these policies without the money, weapons, and diplomatic cover provided by the US, in particular the US Congress. After all, it is Congress's powers over the "purse strings" rather than the President acting as commander-in-chief that has had a more direct bearing on the colonization of Palestinian territories by Jewish settlers. So many members of Congress have taken money from organizations effectively in exchange for supporting Israeli government interests. So many members of Congress have accepted all-expense paid junkets to Israel, ostensibly for educational purposes. With too few exceptions, they are fully complicit in Israeli government crimes, including war crimes.
What about the American public? I would say that the American public is largely in the dark about what is going on, thanks to a media which makes criticism of Israeli policy practically taboo. Of course, this gives the media a special culpability. Still, there are many Americans who do know the score and fail to speak out. This is particularly true with Gentiles. Let's face it, although Jews make up only a few percent of the US population, the bulk of the outspoken critics of Israeli policy in this country seem to be Jewish-Americans. It may be that Gentiles are afraid to speak out for fear of being labeled "anti-Semitic," but I say that as long as you are not anti-Semitic then you should not be afraid. In fact, if you are a true friend of the Israeli people then you should stand with those in their beleaguered peace movement.
It does Israelis no more good to control Palestinian land, exploit its resources, and inflict misery on its people than it did the US any good to do the same to Iraqis. Most of us know that the crimes our country committed in Iraq were detrimental to our future, so why would we support the Israeli government when it engages in the same self-destructive behavior. My question to Israel's "friends" in Congress would be, "is that what friends are for?" Of course not. Most of our members of Congress (and here is the big surprise!) are too self-serving to care about the impact of their votes so long as it helps them raise money for their next election. They are the kind of "friends" Israel's mother should have warned it against -- if only we were Israel's mother.
The only real threat to Israel's existence comes not from Iran or Hizballah, but from a further loss of morality. It comes from attacking and threatening its neighbors. It comes from dehumanizing the indigenous people of the West Bank and replacing them with religious fanatics. As described by Leonard Fein in the Forward, some settlers view the Israeli government as their "enemy" and have called to establish a "Kingdom of Judea" in the West Bank. It comes from turning Gaza into a massive ghetto and slowly starving it, and now more than anything from bombing it into rubble.
We must condemn Israel's attack on Gaza. I know that it is customary for many to equally condemn both sides whenever violence flares up in the conflict, but there is nothing equal between the two sides. The Palestinians have for decades been subjected to occupation, disappropriation, assassination and siege, always with massive suffering to civilians, and are expected to accept it without lifting a finger. Should the Palestinians put up any resistance, Israel feels free to launch any scale of attack, secure in the knowledge that at most it will be subject to calls for "restraint" and condemnation of violence on "both sides." While I do not like the rockets that get fired from Gaza, as long as we as Americans provide the military, financial and diplomatic support that makes the Israeli occupation and siege possible I feel that we as Americans are in no position to condemn the Palestinian resistance. Remember, we as a society idolize our own forefathers who fought a violent resistance against British colonial rulers who paled in comparison in terms of brutality and repression to those the Palestinians face. Our government must withdrawal all support from Israel and instead should deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid directly into Gaza.
With the US heading into the biggest economic crisis of our lifetimes, the Israeli government must realize that it cannot take American financial and military aid for granted. The Palestinians have offered so many concessions. Israel needs to accept their generous offer before it falls headlong into the abyss.
Titus North is a novelist and an adjunct professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Political Science department. He has worked for the Thomson Corporation since 1989 as a political and financial analyst and currently produces a daily English language digest of the Japanese financial press for Thomson. He was the Green Party Candidate for US Congress in 2006 and 2008.
The gradual process of ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian territories is accelerating, and with it so is the moral culpability of Israel and the supporters of its policies in the United States. More and more people from the mainstream of Israeli politics are voicing alarm. In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg compared the situation in Israel today to Germany on the eve of Nazis coming to power. Writing for The Huffington Post, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy likened Israel to a drunk and the US to a friend who gives them bottle of vodka and keys to his car. Even current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has ordered incessant attacks on Gaza since coming to power, has called recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank "pogroms."
A state founded by Holocaust survivors should be a beacon of morality, not a black hole for it. Supporters of Israeli policy (and I distinguish between support for the Israeli people and support for its government's policies) often justify their support by saying that Israel is the only democracy in the region. Leaving aside certain problematic aspects of that claim, I wonder if these people have ever thought of the implications of Israel, as a democracy, being engaged in continual violations of international law and human rights. Israelis, benefiting from a press that is far more open to the truth about government's policies than the American media, know a great deal about what the leaders they elect are doing, yet they continue to elect them. Thus, the Israeli public has culpability for their government's crimes that citizens under a dictatorship would not have.
Of course, the Israeli government could never have pursued these policies without the money, weapons, and diplomatic cover provided by the US, in particular the US Congress. After all, it is Congress's powers over the "purse strings" rather than the President acting as commander-in-chief that has had a more direct bearing on the colonization of Palestinian territories by Jewish settlers. So many members of Congress have taken money from organizations effectively in exchange for supporting Israeli government interests. So many members of Congress have accepted all-expense paid junkets to Israel, ostensibly for educational purposes. With too few exceptions, they are fully complicit in Israeli government crimes, including war crimes.
What about the American public? I would say that the American public is largely in the dark about what is going on, thanks to a media which makes criticism of Israeli policy practically taboo. Of course, this gives the media a special culpability. Still, there are many Americans who do know the score and fail to speak out. This is particularly true with Gentiles. Let's face it, although Jews make up only a few percent of the US population, the bulk of the outspoken critics of Israeli policy in this country seem to be Jewish-Americans. It may be that Gentiles are afraid to speak out for fear of being labeled "anti-Semitic," but I say that as long as you are not anti-Semitic then you should not be afraid. In fact, if you are a true friend of the Israeli people then you should stand with those in their beleaguered peace movement.
It does Israelis no more good to control Palestinian land, exploit its resources, and inflict misery on its people than it did the US any good to do the same to Iraqis. Most of us know that the crimes our country committed in Iraq were detrimental to our future, so why would we support the Israeli government when it engages in the same self-destructive behavior. My question to Israel's "friends" in Congress would be, "is that what friends are for?" Of course not. Most of our members of Congress (and here is the big surprise!) are too self-serving to care about the impact of their votes so long as it helps them raise money for their next election. They are the kind of "friends" Israel's mother should have warned it against -- if only we were Israel's mother.
The only real threat to Israel's existence comes not from Iran or Hizballah, but from a further loss of morality. It comes from attacking and threatening its neighbors. It comes from dehumanizing the indigenous people of the West Bank and replacing them with religious fanatics. As described by Leonard Fein in the Forward, some settlers view the Israeli government as their "enemy" and have called to establish a "Kingdom of Judea" in the West Bank. It comes from turning Gaza into a massive ghetto and slowly starving it, and now more than anything from bombing it into rubble.
We must condemn Israel's attack on Gaza. I know that it is customary for many to equally condemn both sides whenever violence flares up in the conflict, but there is nothing equal between the two sides. The Palestinians have for decades been subjected to occupation, disappropriation, assassination and siege, always with massive suffering to civilians, and are expected to accept it without lifting a finger. Should the Palestinians put up any resistance, Israel feels free to launch any scale of attack, secure in the knowledge that at most it will be subject to calls for "restraint" and condemnation of violence on "both sides." While I do not like the rockets that get fired from Gaza, as long as we as Americans provide the military, financial and diplomatic support that makes the Israeli occupation and siege possible I feel that we as Americans are in no position to condemn the Palestinian resistance. Remember, we as a society idolize our own forefathers who fought a violent resistance against British colonial rulers who paled in comparison in terms of brutality and repression to those the Palestinians face. Our government must withdrawal all support from Israel and instead should deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid directly into Gaza.
With the US heading into the biggest economic crisis of our lifetimes, the Israeli government must realize that it cannot take American financial and military aid for granted. The Palestinians have offered so many concessions. Israel needs to accept their generous offer before it falls headlong into the abyss.
Titus North is a novelist and an adjunct professor in the University of Pittsburgh's Political Science department. He has worked for the Thomson Corporation since 1989 as a political and financial analyst and currently produces a daily English language digest of the Japanese financial press for Thomson. He was the Green Party Candidate for US Congress in 2006 and 2008.
Almost eight years ago, George W. Bush entered office in the early months of the second Palestinian intifada. Rather than resuming the negotiations facilitated by the Clinton Administration, he chose instead to "pull out" and allow Ariel Sharon, who was favored to win the upcoming Israeli elections, a free hand to end the intifada. According to former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Bush asserted that "sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things." [1] President Bush now leaves office with historically low approval ratings and an economy in shambles. As a consequence of his foreign policy misadventures, Bush also leaves the Middle East in flames and America's reputation in tatters. Yet, one thing has remained constant for the aloof president: deference to an Israeli "show of strength" rather than diplomacy. Only a year ago, Bush hosted the Annapolis conference that "relaunched" the "peace process" and then predictably stood by as it stalled out. Unable to launch a war against Iran, capture Osama bin Laden, pacify Afghanistan or Iraq, or broker a Palestinian-Israeli peace, rather than ride into the sunset in the waning days of his presidency, Bush is determined to leave in a final blaze of malicious incompetence. As it has been so often over the past eight years, the site of his enmity is Gaza.
Similarly, in September 2000 then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, smarting from the failed Camp David negotiations and behind Sharon in the polls, determined that a disproportionate show of force, including deploying Apache helicopters to fire on residential areas, would squelch the fledgling second Palestinian intifada. Known as Israel's most decorated soldier, Barak's ego far outstretches his diminutive stature, and his ambitions were similarly oversized. He believed that he could force concessions on the late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat at the negotiating table and ensure his victory in the upcoming election. Instead, the intifada increased in intensity and Barak and the Labor Party were left to wander the wilderness of Israeli politics. Now hoping to return to political relevance, Barak has masterminded a massive assault on Gaza that builds upon a crippling 18-month-long siege and is designed to dramatically weaken Hamas and reassert Israel's "deterrence factor" in the region. [2]
His counterpart in this effort is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who has political ambitions of her own, namely to be elected prime minister in the upcoming Israeli elections. Like Condoleezza Rice, her American counterpart and friend, Livni likes to claim that Hamas has prevented the achievement of Palestinian rights, while at the same time pursuing and implementing policies which are designed to ensure precisely that result. Like a number of her predecessors, Livni believes that a high Palestinian body count translates into victory at the Israeli polls.
For over a year Israeli politicians and generals have been threatening a massive bombing strike against Iran in attempt to reverse its nuclear program. They have also been saber rattling toward Hizballah in Lebanon, stating that should the militia attack Israel in response to the assassination of its military commander Imad Mughniyah (who was killed by a car bomb in Damascus in February), it would unleash "immense damage and destruction" across the country similar to its bombing of the Dahiya suburb of Beirut and infrastructure all over the country during the July 2006 War. [3] After all of the ominous threats in the international press, overt "military exercises" and an actual strike on a Syrian "nuclear installation," Israel chose a much easier and softer target in Gaza -- a densely packed but well mapped territory thoroughly infiltrated by informers and collaborators with no air force or anti-aircraft defenses and limited offensive weaponry that can be attacked around the clock by air with impunity.
Yet, the US and Israel would be unable to achieve their goals in the region without the complicity of corrupt and feckless Arab leaders, of which there is no dearth. The shocking images from Gaza the past 48 hours would be enough to spur action from most quarters, except apparently from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Since Hamas' election victory in 2006, Abbas has never missed an opportunity to insult his own people in Gaza. Last year after Hamas breached the Rafah border wall and Gazans poured into neighboring Egyptian towns for supplies and a break from Israel's siege, he referred to it as a "Palestinian occupation" of Sinai. As Israel tightened its siege of the Strip, Abbas has either refused to meet with his counterparts from Hamas or has constantly delayed and undermined negotiations by his representatives. When boats from the Free Gaza Movement attempted to breach the Israeli blockade, he referred to it is a "ridiculous game." Now that Israel is pounding Gaza, Abbas has not cut short his travels abroad and predictably has blamed Hamas for the violence. [4]
Meanwhile, unnamed sources close to Abbas have been leaking to The Jerusalem Post that if the Hamas government in Gaza falls, PA forces could step into the breach. [5] These are the same forces which the Post revealed earlier this month were "taught over and over again" that they were not being trained to "learn to fight against the Israeli occupation." Rather, according to US Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who is overseeing the training of the new PA security forces, it was to focus on "the lawless elements within Palestinian society" (i.e., Hamas). [6] This revelation is hardly surprising and confirms reports over the past year in the US, Israeli, and Arab press of complicity between PA forces with Israel, the US, and the governments of Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia to topple the Hamas government and destroy its militia. It is also consistent with the actions of these forces in the PA-ruled West Bank, where Hamas members have been rounded up and arrested with frequent accusations of torture and at least one reported death in custody.
Abbas's decisions, like those of Bush, Livni, and Barak, are also driven by a political calendar. His term as President of the Palestinian Authority expires on 9 January 2009. Hamas representatives have made it clear that they will not recognize Abbas's legitimacy after that date. Since Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007 from forces loyal to Abbas's Fatah party, the PA President and his "emergency government," led by appointed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, have systematically been rewriting Palestinian laws through presidential decrees. [7] In an absurd attempt to validate the extension of his rule beyond next month, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the remnants of which exist largely on paper and in decrepit offices scattered around the world and populated by hacks and sycophants loyal to Abbas, recently declared him "President of the state of Palestine," a title formerly held by Arafat. [8] Yet, Abbas has clearly not stopped to consider exactly what the "state of Palestine" will look like should it require Israeli force to overthrow Hamas and impose a Fatah government in Gaza and ensure its rule in the West Bank.
Or perhaps he already has, and seeks to emulate his allies and patrons in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states. Egypt has not only been complicit in the siege of Gaza, it has benefited from the economic distress and shortages of the imprisoned and impoverished 1.5 million Palestinians in the territory. Egyptian goods, typically of poor quality, are smuggled into Gaza and sold at inflated prices through an extensive tunnel network situated near the southern city of Rafah. The tunnel trade is well documented and clearly exists with the approval of the highest Egyptian government and military authorities, who benefit financially from its existence while they threaten, ridicule and blame the Palestinians in Gaza for their plight. At the same time, Egypt actively colludes with Israel, the US and the PA to ensure that the situation in Gaza does not and will not improve. Meanwhile, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak cynically uses the issue of Palestine and the siege of Gaza to distract his people from his incompetent rule and disastrous economic policies.
While Gaza has teetered on the brink of societal collapse and a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe for more than 18 months, it was revealed last week that Jordan and Saudi Arabia had showered lavish gifts on Secretary of State Rice. [9] Coming soon after Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi threw his shoes at Bush, becoming an instant hero, this stark disparity of responses to American political leaders was further evidence that while US policies may not be popular on the proverbial "Arab street," there will always be Arab rulers willing to lick the boots of successive US administrations that help sustain their unpopular regimes.
In the wake of Saturday's bombing of Gaza, the Arab League led by Qatar announced an emergency session would convene ... at the end of the week! Qatar, which has emerged as a power broker in the region after resolving fighting in Lebanon between the government and opposition parties in May, clearly does not believe that more than 300 dead and at least 1,400 wounded requires immediate action. Or perhaps they recognize what everyone else does: that the Arab League is an empty vessel whose emergency meetings and pronouncements are utterly worthless. This is the company that Abbas keeps and this will be the future of Palestine unless Palestinians take steps to reclaim their national movement and adopt a leadership worthy of their cause and their sacrifices.
Nor has Hamas offered a viable alternative for most Palestinians and they are not blameless in this murderous assault. Their rule of Gaza bears all the hallmarks of their Fatah predecessors: long on rhetoric and short on achievement. Moreover, Hamas has behaved precisely as Fatah did in Gaza during the Oslo period and as it currently does in the West Bank, including arresting and torturing political opponents. Indeed, Hamas has been saved from its own myopia by the ruthlessness of those aligned against it, as the siege has provided the movement with a convenient excuse for its shortcomings. In an interview with Al Jazeera on Saturday, Hamas' exiled leader Khaled Meshaal called for a "third intifada." As has been demonstrated repeatedly in Palestinian history an intifada without a unified leadership or a strategy is doomed to fail with dire consequences for the future. Merely calling for an intifada is not the same as planning and preparing for one. If Hamas is to be a viable alternative to Abbas, it must decide if it will continue to adopt the policies and rhetoric of past Palestinian leaders where every failure is an achievement and every disastrous defeat a victory. Otherwise, they have similarly sacrificed their people on the rocks and shoals of tired slogans and empty promises.
Caught between this collection of madmen, criminals and fools are the people of Gaza, who have suffered for far too long and have paid an unbelievable price for simply being Palestinian. After more then 30 months of sanctions and siege, many have become desperately poor, living a daily reality of constant terror and deprivation that few can imagine. Yet, in the face of overwhelming cruelty and a conspiracy of silence and indifference they persevere. That they must do so is an indictment of us all.
Osamah Khalil is a doctoral candidate in US and Middle East History at the University of California, Berkeley. He can be reached at ofkhalil A T gmail D O T com.
Endnotes
[1] Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
[2] Richard Boudreaux, "Israel has learned from its failure in Lebanon," The Los Angeles Times 29 December 2008; Ethan Bronner, "With Strikes, Israel Reminds Foes It Has Teeth." The New York Times 29 December 2008.
[3] Amos Harel, "IDF plans to use disproportionate force in next war," Haaretz. 5 October 2008.
[4] The Jerusalem Post, "'Hamas could have prevented massacre,'" 28 December 2008.
[5] Khaled Abu Toameh, "PA 'ready' to take Gaza if Hamas ousted," The Jerusalem Post, 28 December 2008.
[6] David Horovitz, "Dayton: New PA forces are the most capable ever," The Jerusalem Post,, 11 December 2008.
[7] Reuters, "Palestinian laws get overhaul with little oversight, says the West," 29 August 2008.
[8] Khaled Abu Toameh, "PLO declares Abbas 'president of State of Palestine,'" The Jerusalem Post, 24 November 2008.
[9] Matthew Lee, "Arabs lavish jewels on Secretary of State Rice," Associated Press, 23 December, 2008.
Similarly, in September 2000 then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, smarting from the failed Camp David negotiations and behind Sharon in the polls, determined that a disproportionate show of force, including deploying Apache helicopters to fire on residential areas, would squelch the fledgling second Palestinian intifada. Known as Israel's most decorated soldier, Barak's ego far outstretches his diminutive stature, and his ambitions were similarly oversized. He believed that he could force concessions on the late Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat at the negotiating table and ensure his victory in the upcoming election. Instead, the intifada increased in intensity and Barak and the Labor Party were left to wander the wilderness of Israeli politics. Now hoping to return to political relevance, Barak has masterminded a massive assault on Gaza that builds upon a crippling 18-month-long siege and is designed to dramatically weaken Hamas and reassert Israel's "deterrence factor" in the region. [2]
His counterpart in this effort is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who has political ambitions of her own, namely to be elected prime minister in the upcoming Israeli elections. Like Condoleezza Rice, her American counterpart and friend, Livni likes to claim that Hamas has prevented the achievement of Palestinian rights, while at the same time pursuing and implementing policies which are designed to ensure precisely that result. Like a number of her predecessors, Livni believes that a high Palestinian body count translates into victory at the Israeli polls.
For over a year Israeli politicians and generals have been threatening a massive bombing strike against Iran in attempt to reverse its nuclear program. They have also been saber rattling toward Hizballah in Lebanon, stating that should the militia attack Israel in response to the assassination of its military commander Imad Mughniyah (who was killed by a car bomb in Damascus in February), it would unleash "immense damage and destruction" across the country similar to its bombing of the Dahiya suburb of Beirut and infrastructure all over the country during the July 2006 War. [3] After all of the ominous threats in the international press, overt "military exercises" and an actual strike on a Syrian "nuclear installation," Israel chose a much easier and softer target in Gaza -- a densely packed but well mapped territory thoroughly infiltrated by informers and collaborators with no air force or anti-aircraft defenses and limited offensive weaponry that can be attacked around the clock by air with impunity.
Yet, the US and Israel would be unable to achieve their goals in the region without the complicity of corrupt and feckless Arab leaders, of which there is no dearth. The shocking images from Gaza the past 48 hours would be enough to spur action from most quarters, except apparently from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Since Hamas' election victory in 2006, Abbas has never missed an opportunity to insult his own people in Gaza. Last year after Hamas breached the Rafah border wall and Gazans poured into neighboring Egyptian towns for supplies and a break from Israel's siege, he referred to it as a "Palestinian occupation" of Sinai. As Israel tightened its siege of the Strip, Abbas has either refused to meet with his counterparts from Hamas or has constantly delayed and undermined negotiations by his representatives. When boats from the Free Gaza Movement attempted to breach the Israeli blockade, he referred to it is a "ridiculous game." Now that Israel is pounding Gaza, Abbas has not cut short his travels abroad and predictably has blamed Hamas for the violence. [4]
Meanwhile, unnamed sources close to Abbas have been leaking to The Jerusalem Post that if the Hamas government in Gaza falls, PA forces could step into the breach. [5] These are the same forces which the Post revealed earlier this month were "taught over and over again" that they were not being trained to "learn to fight against the Israeli occupation." Rather, according to US Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who is overseeing the training of the new PA security forces, it was to focus on "the lawless elements within Palestinian society" (i.e., Hamas). [6] This revelation is hardly surprising and confirms reports over the past year in the US, Israeli, and Arab press of complicity between PA forces with Israel, the US, and the governments of Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia to topple the Hamas government and destroy its militia. It is also consistent with the actions of these forces in the PA-ruled West Bank, where Hamas members have been rounded up and arrested with frequent accusations of torture and at least one reported death in custody.
Abbas's decisions, like those of Bush, Livni, and Barak, are also driven by a political calendar. His term as President of the Palestinian Authority expires on 9 January 2009. Hamas representatives have made it clear that they will not recognize Abbas's legitimacy after that date. Since Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007 from forces loyal to Abbas's Fatah party, the PA President and his "emergency government," led by appointed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, have systematically been rewriting Palestinian laws through presidential decrees. [7] In an absurd attempt to validate the extension of his rule beyond next month, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the remnants of which exist largely on paper and in decrepit offices scattered around the world and populated by hacks and sycophants loyal to Abbas, recently declared him "President of the state of Palestine," a title formerly held by Arafat. [8] Yet, Abbas has clearly not stopped to consider exactly what the "state of Palestine" will look like should it require Israeli force to overthrow Hamas and impose a Fatah government in Gaza and ensure its rule in the West Bank.
Or perhaps he already has, and seeks to emulate his allies and patrons in Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states. Egypt has not only been complicit in the siege of Gaza, it has benefited from the economic distress and shortages of the imprisoned and impoverished 1.5 million Palestinians in the territory. Egyptian goods, typically of poor quality, are smuggled into Gaza and sold at inflated prices through an extensive tunnel network situated near the southern city of Rafah. The tunnel trade is well documented and clearly exists with the approval of the highest Egyptian government and military authorities, who benefit financially from its existence while they threaten, ridicule and blame the Palestinians in Gaza for their plight. At the same time, Egypt actively colludes with Israel, the US and the PA to ensure that the situation in Gaza does not and will not improve. Meanwhile, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak cynically uses the issue of Palestine and the siege of Gaza to distract his people from his incompetent rule and disastrous economic policies.
While Gaza has teetered on the brink of societal collapse and a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe for more than 18 months, it was revealed last week that Jordan and Saudi Arabia had showered lavish gifts on Secretary of State Rice. [9] Coming soon after Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeidi threw his shoes at Bush, becoming an instant hero, this stark disparity of responses to American political leaders was further evidence that while US policies may not be popular on the proverbial "Arab street," there will always be Arab rulers willing to lick the boots of successive US administrations that help sustain their unpopular regimes.
In the wake of Saturday's bombing of Gaza, the Arab League led by Qatar announced an emergency session would convene ... at the end of the week! Qatar, which has emerged as a power broker in the region after resolving fighting in Lebanon between the government and opposition parties in May, clearly does not believe that more than 300 dead and at least 1,400 wounded requires immediate action. Or perhaps they recognize what everyone else does: that the Arab League is an empty vessel whose emergency meetings and pronouncements are utterly worthless. This is the company that Abbas keeps and this will be the future of Palestine unless Palestinians take steps to reclaim their national movement and adopt a leadership worthy of their cause and their sacrifices.
Nor has Hamas offered a viable alternative for most Palestinians and they are not blameless in this murderous assault. Their rule of Gaza bears all the hallmarks of their Fatah predecessors: long on rhetoric and short on achievement. Moreover, Hamas has behaved precisely as Fatah did in Gaza during the Oslo period and as it currently does in the West Bank, including arresting and torturing political opponents. Indeed, Hamas has been saved from its own myopia by the ruthlessness of those aligned against it, as the siege has provided the movement with a convenient excuse for its shortcomings. In an interview with Al Jazeera on Saturday, Hamas' exiled leader Khaled Meshaal called for a "third intifada." As has been demonstrated repeatedly in Palestinian history an intifada without a unified leadership or a strategy is doomed to fail with dire consequences for the future. Merely calling for an intifada is not the same as planning and preparing for one. If Hamas is to be a viable alternative to Abbas, it must decide if it will continue to adopt the policies and rhetoric of past Palestinian leaders where every failure is an achievement and every disastrous defeat a victory. Otherwise, they have similarly sacrificed their people on the rocks and shoals of tired slogans and empty promises.
Caught between this collection of madmen, criminals and fools are the people of Gaza, who have suffered for far too long and have paid an unbelievable price for simply being Palestinian. After more then 30 months of sanctions and siege, many have become desperately poor, living a daily reality of constant terror and deprivation that few can imagine. Yet, in the face of overwhelming cruelty and a conspiracy of silence and indifference they persevere. That they must do so is an indictment of us all.
Osamah Khalil is a doctoral candidate in US and Middle East History at the University of California, Berkeley. He can be reached at ofkhalil A T gmail D O T com.
Endnotes
[1] Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
[2] Richard Boudreaux, "Israel has learned from its failure in Lebanon," The Los Angeles Times 29 December 2008; Ethan Bronner, "With Strikes, Israel Reminds Foes It Has Teeth." The New York Times 29 December 2008.
[3] Amos Harel, "IDF plans to use disproportionate force in next war," Haaretz. 5 October 2008.
[4] The Jerusalem Post, "'Hamas could have prevented massacre,'" 28 December 2008.
[5] Khaled Abu Toameh, "PA 'ready' to take Gaza if Hamas ousted," The Jerusalem Post, 28 December 2008.
[6] David Horovitz, "Dayton: New PA forces are the most capable ever," The Jerusalem Post,, 11 December 2008.
[7] Reuters, "Palestinian laws get overhaul with little oversight, says the West," 29 August 2008.
[8] Khaled Abu Toameh, "PLO declares Abbas 'president of State of Palestine,'" The Jerusalem Post, 24 November 2008.
[9] Matthew Lee, "Arabs lavish jewels on Secretary of State Rice," Associated Press, 23 December, 2008.
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday Dec. 30, 2008 05:33 EST
George Washington's warnings and U.S. policy towards Israel
University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes -- July 1, 2008:
A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 18 countries finds that in 14 of them people mostly say their government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just three countries favor taking the Palestinian side (Egypt, Iran, and Turkey) and one is divided (India). No country favors taking Israel's side, including the United States, where 71 percent favor taking neither side.
CQ Politics, yesterday:
Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle rallied to Israel’s cause Monday as it pressed forward with large-scale air attacks against Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip. . . .
“I strongly support Israel’s right to defend its citizens against rocket and mortar attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza, which have killed and injured Israeli citizens, and to restore security to its residents,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev. . . .
His view was echoed by leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week,” Howard L. Berman , D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the ranking Republican on the House committee, also expressed support for the Israeli offensive. . . .
The White House on Monday also took Israel’s side in the fighting, demanding that Hamas halt its rocket fire into Israel and agree to a last ceasefire.
Earlier this week, Nancy Pelosi issued an identical statement, and yesterday Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer did the same.
There sure is a lot of agreeing going on -- one might describe it as "absolute." The degree of mandated orthodoxy on the Israel question among America's political elites is so great that if one took the statements on Gaza from George Bush, Pelosi, Hoyer, Berman, Ros-Lehtinen, and randomly chosen Bill Kristol-acolytes and redacted their names, it would be impossible to know which statements came from whom. They're all identical: what Israel does is absolutely right. The U.S. must fully and unconditionally support Israel. Israel does not merit an iota of criticism for what it is doing. It bears none of the blame for this conflict. No questioning even of the wisdom of its decisions -- let alone the justifiability -- is uttered. No deviation from that script takes place.
By itself, the degree of full-fledged, absolute agreement -- down to the syllable -- among America's political leaders is striking, even when one acknowledges the constant convergence between the leadership of both parties. But it becomes even more striking in light of the bizarre fact that the consensus view -- that America must unquestioningly stand on Israel's side and support it, not just in this conflict but in all of Israel's various wars -- is a view which 7 out of 10 Americans reject. Conversely, the view which 70% of Americans embrace -- that the U.S. should be neutral and even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally -- is one that no mainstream politician would dare express.
In a democracy, one could expect that politicians would be afraid to express a view that 70% of the citizens oppose. Yet here we have the exact opposite situation: no mainstream politician would dare express the view that 70% of Americans support; instead, the universal piety is the one that only a small minority accept. Isn't that fairly compelling evidence of the complete disconnect between our political elites and the people they purportedly represent?
There is, of course, other evidence for that proposition: the fact that overwhelming majorities of Americans have long wanted to withdraw from Iraq was completely dismissed and ignored by our bipartisan political class, which continued to fund the war indefinitely and with no conditions. But at least there, Democratic leaders paid lip service to the idea that they agreed with that position and some Democrats went beyond rhetoric and actually tried to stop or at least limit the war. But in the case of Israel, not even that symbolic nod to American public opinion occurs among the political leadership.
The other striking aspect of this lockstep American consensus is that the Gaza situation is very complex, and a wide range of opinions fall within the realm of what is reasonable. Even many who believe that Israel's attack is morally and legally justifiable as a response to Hamas rockets and who generally side with Israel -- such as J Street -- nonetheless oppose this attack on strictly pragmatic grounds: that it won't achieve anything positive, that it will exacerbate the problem, that it makes less likely a diplomatic resolution, that there is no military solution to the rocket attacks. Others condemn Hamas rocket attacks but also condemn the devastating Israeli blockade and expanding settlements. Others still who may be supportive of Israel's right to attack at least express horror over the level of Palestinian suffering and urge greater restraint.
Anyone minimally objective and well-intentioned finds Hamas rocket attacks on random Israeli civilians to be highly objectionable and wrong, but even among those who do, one finds a wide range of views regarding the Israeli offensive. But not among America's political leadership. There, one finds total, lockstep uniformity almost more unyielding than what one finds among Israeli leaders themselves -- as though Israel's wars are, by definition, America's wars; its enemies are our enemies; its disputes and conflicts and interests are, inherently, ours; and America's only duty when Israel fights is to support it uncritically.
* * * * *
All of that underscores one vital point I want to emphasize with regard to the commentary I've written on Israel and Gaza the last couple of days. Yesterday, George Mason Law Professor David Bernstein wrote another thoroughly childish response to something I wrote, and it merits very little attention [he continues to insist that I let him pay for me to vacation in Sderot so that I will see the light on the justifiability of Israel's assault on Gaza, which is exactly the same type of "argument" as if I offered to sponsor an online fundraiser to pay for him and his family tomorrow to travel to and vacation in Gaza City so he can blog from there about how restrained and justified and necessary the Israeli strikes and blockade are, which -- one would have thought (wrongly) -- anyone above the age of 12 would recognize as a juvenile and emotionally manipulative means of argumentation].
Bernstein's mentality is echoed by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who defends Israel's actions by approvingly quoting Barack Obama's statement that "If someone was sending rockets on my house where my daughters were sleeping at night, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." But that mindset justifies any and all actions by any group with a legitimate grievance, as in: "if my family and I were forced to live under a 4-decade foreign occupation and had our land blockaded and were not allowed to exit and my children couldn't access basic nutrition or medical treatment, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing." That happens also to be the same mentality that was used to justify the 9/11 attacks ("if my family and I were forced to live in a region in which a foreign superpower dominated our politics and propped up brutal dictators for its own ends, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Muslims to do the same thing").
But -- just like those who insist that American Torture is different because American leaders use it for noble ends -- this is nothing more elevated than an adolescent refusal to view the world through any prism other than complete self-centeredness, where one's own side merits infinite empathy and the "other side" merits none. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute -- like most intractable, bloody, hate-driven, decades-long wars -- there is endless blame to go around to countless parties. Commentary which fails to recognize that, or, worse, which insists it's not true, is almost certainly the by-product of this blind self-regard.
* * * * *
The real point here is that none of these intractable disputes between Israel and its various neighbors should be a focal point of American policy at all. Yet the above-documented orthodoxy has ensured that it is. And -- at least in the U.S. -- that is the real issue, the reason why the Israeli attack merits so much discussion in the U.S. even among those who would just as soon refrain from having any involvement. In his reply yesterday, Bernstein wrote:
I find it rather amusing that Greenwald refers to me as an "Israel-obsessive." I blog a fair amount about Israel, not least because I'm there twice a year and my wife is Israeli. Greenwald, meanwhile, blogs far more about Israel, without similar ties. What does that make him?
Bernstein obviously has absolutely no idea what "ties" to Israel I do or don't have; he simply fabricated that claim. But (other than for those interested in Bernstein's honesty -- and I'm not one of them), that point is entirely irrelevant. The reason Americans need to be interested in what Israel does is obvious, and it has nothing to do with one's "ties" to that country.
As I wrote on Saturday regarding Israel's varied wars, walls and blockades: "since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars, including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis themselves." With our bipartisan policy of blind and absolute support for Israel -- not just rhetorical but military and material as well -- our political leadership has inextricably (and foolishly) tied American interests to Israel's interests.
Matt Yglesias made a similar point yesterday:
Jonathan Zasloff offers the futility argument with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
All those who insist that the United States should “solve” the problem should explain how. And if they can’t do that, then maybe they should take some quiet time.
I think that would be an appealing solution to a lot of people who have no real desire to try to sit in delicate judgment weighing the moral balance between a Hamas movement that seems indifferent to human life, and an Israeli government that’s lashing out brutally as part of a domestic political drama. But as long as Israel is by far the largest recipient of US foreign assistance funds and by an even larger margin the largest per capita recipient of US foreign assistance funds, then I don’t see how “quiet time” is a realistic option.
Americans shouldn't be in the position of endlessly debating Israel's security situation and its endless religious and territorial conflicts with its neighbors. That should be for Israeli citizens to do, not for Americans. But that distinction -- between the U.S. and Israel -- barely exists because our political leaders have all but eliminated it, and have thus imposed on U.S. citizens responsibility for the acts of Israel.
In doing so, they have systematically ignored the unbelievably prescient warnings issued by George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address, and have thereby provoked exactly the dangers he decried:
Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . . . .
In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.
It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. . . .
So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.
It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
Uncritical support for someone's destructive behavior isn't "friendship"; it is, as Washington said, slavishness, and it does no good either for the party lending the blind support nor the party receiving it. It's hard to overstate the good that would be achieved if the U.S. simply adhered to those basic and self-evidently compelling principles of George Washington, who actually knew a thing or two about the perils of war.
* * * * *
If someone asked me to recommend just one must-read article on the Israeli-Gaza conflict, I would select this column from yesterday in The Guardian by Israeli-American journalist Nir Rosen. I disagree with several of his points, particularly some of the specific ones about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but his generalized explanation about how the concept of "terrorism" is distorted and exploited by stronger countries can't be emphasized enough.
UPDATE: To underscore the point: during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, the Bush administration purposely expedited shipments of bombs to Israel to enable Israel to drop those bombs on Lebanon. We fed Israel the bombs they used on the Lebanese. A similar American action seems to have occurred with regard to the bombs that the Israelis are now dropping on Gaza.
UPDATE II: Polls taken in the U.S. during the 2006 Israeli incursion into Lebanon bolster the above point regarding American public opinion. A USA Today/Gallup poll (.pdf) asked: "In the current conflict, do you think the United States should take Israel's side, take the side of Hezbollah, or not take either side?" A large majority (65%) answered "neither," while only 31% wanted to take Israel's side.
A Washington Post poll actually found that a plurality of Americans (46%) blamed "both sides equally" (Israel and Hezbollah) for the war and believed (48%) that Israel's claimed "bombing [of] rocket launchers and other Hezbollah targets located in civilian areas" was "not justified." The lockstep, uncritical support for everything Israel does in the political class is completely unrepresentative of American public opinion.
Tuesday Dec. 30, 2008 05:33 EST
George Washington's warnings and U.S. policy towards Israel
University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes -- July 1, 2008:
A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 18 countries finds that in 14 of them people mostly say their government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just three countries favor taking the Palestinian side (Egypt, Iran, and Turkey) and one is divided (India). No country favors taking Israel's side, including the United States, where 71 percent favor taking neither side.
CQ Politics, yesterday:
Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle rallied to Israel’s cause Monday as it pressed forward with large-scale air attacks against Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip. . . .
“I strongly support Israel’s right to defend its citizens against rocket and mortar attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza, which have killed and injured Israeli citizens, and to restore security to its residents,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev. . . .
His view was echoed by leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week,” Howard L. Berman , D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, the ranking Republican on the House committee, also expressed support for the Israeli offensive. . . .
The White House on Monday also took Israel’s side in the fighting, demanding that Hamas halt its rocket fire into Israel and agree to a last ceasefire.
Earlier this week, Nancy Pelosi issued an identical statement, and yesterday Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer did the same.
There sure is a lot of agreeing going on -- one might describe it as "absolute." The degree of mandated orthodoxy on the Israel question among America's political elites is so great that if one took the statements on Gaza from George Bush, Pelosi, Hoyer, Berman, Ros-Lehtinen, and randomly chosen Bill Kristol-acolytes and redacted their names, it would be impossible to know which statements came from whom. They're all identical: what Israel does is absolutely right. The U.S. must fully and unconditionally support Israel. Israel does not merit an iota of criticism for what it is doing. It bears none of the blame for this conflict. No questioning even of the wisdom of its decisions -- let alone the justifiability -- is uttered. No deviation from that script takes place.
By itself, the degree of full-fledged, absolute agreement -- down to the syllable -- among America's political leaders is striking, even when one acknowledges the constant convergence between the leadership of both parties. But it becomes even more striking in light of the bizarre fact that the consensus view -- that America must unquestioningly stand on Israel's side and support it, not just in this conflict but in all of Israel's various wars -- is a view which 7 out of 10 Americans reject. Conversely, the view which 70% of Americans embrace -- that the U.S. should be neutral and even-handed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generally -- is one that no mainstream politician would dare express.
In a democracy, one could expect that politicians would be afraid to express a view that 70% of the citizens oppose. Yet here we have the exact opposite situation: no mainstream politician would dare express the view that 70% of Americans support; instead, the universal piety is the one that only a small minority accept. Isn't that fairly compelling evidence of the complete disconnect between our political elites and the people they purportedly represent?
There is, of course, other evidence for that proposition: the fact that overwhelming majorities of Americans have long wanted to withdraw from Iraq was completely dismissed and ignored by our bipartisan political class, which continued to fund the war indefinitely and with no conditions. But at least there, Democratic leaders paid lip service to the idea that they agreed with that position and some Democrats went beyond rhetoric and actually tried to stop or at least limit the war. But in the case of Israel, not even that symbolic nod to American public opinion occurs among the political leadership.
The other striking aspect of this lockstep American consensus is that the Gaza situation is very complex, and a wide range of opinions fall within the realm of what is reasonable. Even many who believe that Israel's attack is morally and legally justifiable as a response to Hamas rockets and who generally side with Israel -- such as J Street -- nonetheless oppose this attack on strictly pragmatic grounds: that it won't achieve anything positive, that it will exacerbate the problem, that it makes less likely a diplomatic resolution, that there is no military solution to the rocket attacks. Others condemn Hamas rocket attacks but also condemn the devastating Israeli blockade and expanding settlements. Others still who may be supportive of Israel's right to attack at least express horror over the level of Palestinian suffering and urge greater restraint.
Anyone minimally objective and well-intentioned finds Hamas rocket attacks on random Israeli civilians to be highly objectionable and wrong, but even among those who do, one finds a wide range of views regarding the Israeli offensive. But not among America's political leadership. There, one finds total, lockstep uniformity almost more unyielding than what one finds among Israeli leaders themselves -- as though Israel's wars are, by definition, America's wars; its enemies are our enemies; its disputes and conflicts and interests are, inherently, ours; and America's only duty when Israel fights is to support it uncritically.
* * * * *
All of that underscores one vital point I want to emphasize with regard to the commentary I've written on Israel and Gaza the last couple of days. Yesterday, George Mason Law Professor David Bernstein wrote another thoroughly childish response to something I wrote, and it merits very little attention [he continues to insist that I let him pay for me to vacation in Sderot so that I will see the light on the justifiability of Israel's assault on Gaza, which is exactly the same type of "argument" as if I offered to sponsor an online fundraiser to pay for him and his family tomorrow to travel to and vacation in Gaza City so he can blog from there about how restrained and justified and necessary the Israeli strikes and blockade are, which -- one would have thought (wrongly) -- anyone above the age of 12 would recognize as a juvenile and emotionally manipulative means of argumentation].
Bernstein's mentality is echoed by The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, who defends Israel's actions by approvingly quoting Barack Obama's statement that "If someone was sending rockets on my house where my daughters were sleeping at night, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." But that mindset justifies any and all actions by any group with a legitimate grievance, as in: "if my family and I were forced to live under a 4-decade foreign occupation and had our land blockaded and were not allowed to exit and my children couldn't access basic nutrition or medical treatment, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing." That happens also to be the same mentality that was used to justify the 9/11 attacks ("if my family and I were forced to live in a region in which a foreign superpower dominated our politics and propped up brutal dictators for its own ends, I would do everything to stop it, and I would expect Muslims to do the same thing").
But -- just like those who insist that American Torture is different because American leaders use it for noble ends -- this is nothing more elevated than an adolescent refusal to view the world through any prism other than complete self-centeredness, where one's own side merits infinite empathy and the "other side" merits none. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute -- like most intractable, bloody, hate-driven, decades-long wars -- there is endless blame to go around to countless parties. Commentary which fails to recognize that, or, worse, which insists it's not true, is almost certainly the by-product of this blind self-regard.
* * * * *
The real point here is that none of these intractable disputes between Israel and its various neighbors should be a focal point of American policy at all. Yet the above-documented orthodoxy has ensured that it is. And -- at least in the U.S. -- that is the real issue, the reason why the Israeli attack merits so much discussion in the U.S. even among those who would just as soon refrain from having any involvement. In his reply yesterday, Bernstein wrote:
I find it rather amusing that Greenwald refers to me as an "Israel-obsessive." I blog a fair amount about Israel, not least because I'm there twice a year and my wife is Israeli. Greenwald, meanwhile, blogs far more about Israel, without similar ties. What does that make him?
Bernstein obviously has absolutely no idea what "ties" to Israel I do or don't have; he simply fabricated that claim. But (other than for those interested in Bernstein's honesty -- and I'm not one of them), that point is entirely irrelevant. The reason Americans need to be interested in what Israel does is obvious, and it has nothing to do with one's "ties" to that country.
As I wrote on Saturday regarding Israel's varied wars, walls and blockades: "since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars, including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis themselves." With our bipartisan policy of blind and absolute support for Israel -- not just rhetorical but military and material as well -- our political leadership has inextricably (and foolishly) tied American interests to Israel's interests.
Matt Yglesias made a similar point yesterday:
Jonathan Zasloff offers the futility argument with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
All those who insist that the United States should “solve” the problem should explain how. And if they can’t do that, then maybe they should take some quiet time.
I think that would be an appealing solution to a lot of people who have no real desire to try to sit in delicate judgment weighing the moral balance between a Hamas movement that seems indifferent to human life, and an Israeli government that’s lashing out brutally as part of a domestic political drama. But as long as Israel is by far the largest recipient of US foreign assistance funds and by an even larger margin the largest per capita recipient of US foreign assistance funds, then I don’t see how “quiet time” is a realistic option.
Americans shouldn't be in the position of endlessly debating Israel's security situation and its endless religious and territorial conflicts with its neighbors. That should be for Israeli citizens to do, not for Americans. But that distinction -- between the U.S. and Israel -- barely exists because our political leaders have all but eliminated it, and have thus imposed on U.S. citizens responsibility for the acts of Israel.
In doing so, they have systematically ignored the unbelievably prescient warnings issued by George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address, and have thereby provoked exactly the dangers he decried:
Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . . . .
In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.
It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. . . .
So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.
It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.
Uncritical support for someone's destructive behavior isn't "friendship"; it is, as Washington said, slavishness, and it does no good either for the party lending the blind support nor the party receiving it. It's hard to overstate the good that would be achieved if the U.S. simply adhered to those basic and self-evidently compelling principles of George Washington, who actually knew a thing or two about the perils of war.
* * * * *
If someone asked me to recommend just one must-read article on the Israeli-Gaza conflict, I would select this column from yesterday in The Guardian by Israeli-American journalist Nir Rosen. I disagree with several of his points, particularly some of the specific ones about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but his generalized explanation about how the concept of "terrorism" is distorted and exploited by stronger countries can't be emphasized enough.
UPDATE: To underscore the point: during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, the Bush administration purposely expedited shipments of bombs to Israel to enable Israel to drop those bombs on Lebanon. We fed Israel the bombs they used on the Lebanese. A similar American action seems to have occurred with regard to the bombs that the Israelis are now dropping on Gaza.
UPDATE II: Polls taken in the U.S. during the 2006 Israeli incursion into Lebanon bolster the above point regarding American public opinion. A USA Today/Gallup poll (.pdf) asked: "In the current conflict, do you think the United States should take Israel's side, take the side of Hezbollah, or not take either side?" A large majority (65%) answered "neither," while only 31% wanted to take Israel's side.
A Washington Post poll actually found that a plurality of Americans (46%) blamed "both sides equally" (Israel and Hezbollah) for the war and believed (48%) that Israel's claimed "bombing [of] rocket launchers and other Hezbollah targets located in civilian areas" was "not justified." The lockstep, uncritical support for everything Israel does in the political class is completely unrepresentative of American public opinion.
Israel Revives Hamas
posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 12/30/2008 @ 10:04am
As Israel presses its bloody assault on Gaza, dropping broad hints that it is planning a ground attack to complement four days of bombings that have killed hundreds, it's clear that Israel's actions are likely to bolster, not weaken, the very enemy it is fighting.
Writing in the Washington Post, Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab points out that, before the latest crisis, Hamas was in sharp decline. The headline on his thoughtful piece is: "Has Israel Revived Hamas?" He says: "Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine."
Over the past two years, Kuttab notes, Palestinian support for Hamas -- an ultrareligious, terrorist-inclined wing of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood movement -- has declined sharply, from a 30 percent in 2006 to 22 percent in August, 2007, to just 17 percent in 2008 -- compared to 40 percent for Fatah, the mainstream, secular nationalist wing of the Palestinian body politic. Kuttab points out that Hamas has "turned down every legitimate offer from its nationalist PLO rivals and Egyptian mediators." Now, he says, the attacks are a "bonanza for Hamas" and says that Israel's assault will achieve "results exactly the opposite of its publicly proclaimed purposes."
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, and reflecting the views of Israel security hawks such as Bibi Netanyahu, Bret Stephens says that the Israeli campaign -- like the campaign in Lebanon that killed thousands in 2006, in the disastrous war against Hezhollah -- will not defeat Hamas. "The green flag of the movement will fly defiantly over the tallest building left standing," says Stephens. Unless, that is, the Israelis learn from Lebanon, 2006, and act decisively to crush Hamas once and for all. Problem is, that's an impossible task. Far more likely, Israel will end up radicalizing the Palestinians once again, weakening Fatah and strengthening Hamas. And that makes peace talks, and a settlement, less likely.
An intelligent news analysis piece in the Times from Stephen Farrell asks the key question:
The questions remain: Why did Hamas end its six-month cease-fire on Dec. 19? Will it -- can it -- unleash suicide bombers into Israel in retaliation? And will the devastation in Gaza make Palestinians fall into line behind Hamas, as they reliably have in the past, or will Hamas lose their support as Gazans count the escalating cost in blood and destruction?
Why, indeed? Like Israeli extremists such as Netanyahu, who thrive on conflict, Hamas too seems to have believed that it could revive itself by provoking its giant military adversary.
Farrells wonders: "A major question remains whether Hamas expected the shock-and-awe Israeli offensive that has left Gaza reeling." Hamas may not have expected the full brutality that Israel unleashed. In yesterday's post, I pointed out that the Mossad is reported to have concluded that Hamas was only seeking to make a show of force before trying to rengotiate the ceasefire on more favorable terms. But, in any case, its foolhardy decision to have ended the ceasefire and unleashed the rocket barrage seems idiotic in retrospect.
Yesterday, on NPR, I heard the official Hamas spokesman say -- without a shred of credibility or evidence -- that the rocket barrage since December 19 was unleashed by Israeli provocateurs in Gaza, seeking to provide Israel with an excuse for its all-out bombing campaign. Comments like that can only make Hamas look like pathetic, conspiracy-mongering fantasists.
Farrell's analysis points out that many Palestinians, so far at least, are rallying around Hamas, and he wonders:
More important is whether once away from television cameras and foreign journalists, Palestinians will vote for Hamas in presidential and parliamentary elections, which could take place within a year.
In Israel, the bloody holocaust they've unleashed is an election game, wherein Netanyahu and his slightly more moderate rivals in the Olmert-Livni bloc compete with each other to show who is best at slaughtering Palestinians. In Palestine, a similar election dynamic is underway.
In all of this, Obama continues his silence. Here's a way for him to end it: He ought to blame President Bush for his stunning refusal to get involved earlier this month, when Hamas started to say it that it would end its ceasefire. That was a perfect opportunity for the United States to end its boycott of Hamas and to sit down with Egypt, the Palestinian Authority under President Abbas, and Saudi Arabia and talk to Hamas. And Obama ought to say so. Don't hold your breath waiting for him to do it, though. We only have one incompetent president at a time.
posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 12/30/2008 @ 10:04am
As Israel presses its bloody assault on Gaza, dropping broad hints that it is planning a ground attack to complement four days of bombings that have killed hundreds, it's clear that Israel's actions are likely to bolster, not weaken, the very enemy it is fighting.
Writing in the Washington Post, Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab points out that, before the latest crisis, Hamas was in sharp decline. The headline on his thoughtful piece is: "Has Israel Revived Hamas?" He says: "Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine."
Over the past two years, Kuttab notes, Palestinian support for Hamas -- an ultrareligious, terrorist-inclined wing of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood movement -- has declined sharply, from a 30 percent in 2006 to 22 percent in August, 2007, to just 17 percent in 2008 -- compared to 40 percent for Fatah, the mainstream, secular nationalist wing of the Palestinian body politic. Kuttab points out that Hamas has "turned down every legitimate offer from its nationalist PLO rivals and Egyptian mediators." Now, he says, the attacks are a "bonanza for Hamas" and says that Israel's assault will achieve "results exactly the opposite of its publicly proclaimed purposes."
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, and reflecting the views of Israel security hawks such as Bibi Netanyahu, Bret Stephens says that the Israeli campaign -- like the campaign in Lebanon that killed thousands in 2006, in the disastrous war against Hezhollah -- will not defeat Hamas. "The green flag of the movement will fly defiantly over the tallest building left standing," says Stephens. Unless, that is, the Israelis learn from Lebanon, 2006, and act decisively to crush Hamas once and for all. Problem is, that's an impossible task. Far more likely, Israel will end up radicalizing the Palestinians once again, weakening Fatah and strengthening Hamas. And that makes peace talks, and a settlement, less likely.
An intelligent news analysis piece in the Times from Stephen Farrell asks the key question:
The questions remain: Why did Hamas end its six-month cease-fire on Dec. 19? Will it -- can it -- unleash suicide bombers into Israel in retaliation? And will the devastation in Gaza make Palestinians fall into line behind Hamas, as they reliably have in the past, or will Hamas lose their support as Gazans count the escalating cost in blood and destruction?
Why, indeed? Like Israeli extremists such as Netanyahu, who thrive on conflict, Hamas too seems to have believed that it could revive itself by provoking its giant military adversary.
Farrells wonders: "A major question remains whether Hamas expected the shock-and-awe Israeli offensive that has left Gaza reeling." Hamas may not have expected the full brutality that Israel unleashed. In yesterday's post, I pointed out that the Mossad is reported to have concluded that Hamas was only seeking to make a show of force before trying to rengotiate the ceasefire on more favorable terms. But, in any case, its foolhardy decision to have ended the ceasefire and unleashed the rocket barrage seems idiotic in retrospect.
Yesterday, on NPR, I heard the official Hamas spokesman say -- without a shred of credibility or evidence -- that the rocket barrage since December 19 was unleashed by Israeli provocateurs in Gaza, seeking to provide Israel with an excuse for its all-out bombing campaign. Comments like that can only make Hamas look like pathetic, conspiracy-mongering fantasists.
Farrell's analysis points out that many Palestinians, so far at least, are rallying around Hamas, and he wonders:
More important is whether once away from television cameras and foreign journalists, Palestinians will vote for Hamas in presidential and parliamentary elections, which could take place within a year.
In Israel, the bloody holocaust they've unleashed is an election game, wherein Netanyahu and his slightly more moderate rivals in the Olmert-Livni bloc compete with each other to show who is best at slaughtering Palestinians. In Palestine, a similar election dynamic is underway.
In all of this, Obama continues his silence. Here's a way for him to end it: He ought to blame President Bush for his stunning refusal to get involved earlier this month, when Hamas started to say it that it would end its ceasefire. That was a perfect opportunity for the United States to end its boycott of Hamas and to sit down with Egypt, the Palestinian Authority under President Abbas, and Saudi Arabia and talk to Hamas. And Obama ought to say so. Don't hold your breath waiting for him to do it, though. We only have one incompetent president at a time.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
This statement was issued in response to Israel's attack in Gaza by Professor Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and a longtime member of the Nation editorial board.
27 December 2008
The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war.
Those violations include:
Collective punishment – the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.
Targeting civilians – the airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.
Disproportionate military response – the airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza's elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.
Earlier Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza's besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims.
Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response. I note that Israel's escalating military assaults have not made Israeli civilians safer; to the contrary, the one Israeli killed today after the upsurge of Israeli violence is the first in over a year.
Israel has also ignored recent Hamas' diplomatic initiatives to reestablish the truce or ceasefire since its expiration on 26 December.
The Israeli airstrikes today, and the catastrophic human toll that they caused, challenge those countries that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israel's violations of international law. That complicity includes those countries knowingly providing the military equipment including warplanes and missiles used in these illegal attacks, as well as those countries who have supported and participated in the siege of Gaza that itself has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.
I remind all member states of the United Nations that the UN continues to be bound to an independent obligation to protect any civilian population facing massive violations of international humanitarian law – regardless of what country may be responsible for those violations. I call on all Member States, as well as officials and every relevant organ of the United Nations system, to move on an emergency basis not only to condemn Israel's serious violations, but to develop new approaches to providing real protection for the Palestinian people.
27 December 2008
The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war.
Those violations include:
Collective punishment – the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.
Targeting civilians – the airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.
Disproportionate military response – the airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza's elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.
Earlier Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza's besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims.
Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response. I note that Israel's escalating military assaults have not made Israeli civilians safer; to the contrary, the one Israeli killed today after the upsurge of Israeli violence is the first in over a year.
Israel has also ignored recent Hamas' diplomatic initiatives to reestablish the truce or ceasefire since its expiration on 26 December.
The Israeli airstrikes today, and the catastrophic human toll that they caused, challenge those countries that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israel's violations of international law. That complicity includes those countries knowingly providing the military equipment including warplanes and missiles used in these illegal attacks, as well as those countries who have supported and participated in the siege of Gaza that itself has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.
I remind all member states of the United Nations that the UN continues to be bound to an independent obligation to protect any civilian population facing massive violations of international humanitarian law – regardless of what country may be responsible for those violations. I call on all Member States, as well as officials and every relevant organ of the United Nations system, to move on an emergency basis not only to condemn Israel's serious violations, but to develop new approaches to providing real protection for the Palestinian people.
Gaza: "This is only the beginning"
Ewa Jasiewicz writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 28 December 2008
27 December 2008
As I write this, Israeli jets are bombing the areas of Zeitoun and Rimal in central Gaza City. The family I am staying with has moved into the internal corridor of their home to shelter from the bombing. The windows nearly blew out just five minutes ago as a massive explosion rocked the house. Apache helicopters are hovering above us, while F-16s soar overhead.
United Nations radio reports say one blast was a target close to the main gate of al-Shifa hospital -- the largest medical facility in Gaza. Another was a plastics factory. More bombs continue to pound the Strip.
Sirens are wailing on the streets outside. Regular power cuts plunge the city into blackness every night and tonight is no exception. Only perhaps tonight it is the darkest night people have seen here in their lifetimes.
As of this writing, more than 220 people have been killed and at least 400 injured through attacks that shocked the Strip in the space of 15 minutes. Hospitals are overloaded and unable to cope. These attacks come on top of the already existing humanitarian crisis that came about because of the 18-month Israeli siege which has resulted in a lack of medicines, bread, flour, gas, electricity, fuel and freedom of movement.
Doctors at al-Shifa Hospital had to scramble together 10 make-shift operating theaters to deal with the wounded. The hospital's maternity ward had to transform their operating room into an emergency theater. Al-Shifa only had 12 beds in their intensive care unit, they had to make space for 27 today.
There is a shortage of medicine -- over 105 key items are not in stock, and blood and spare generator parts are desperately needed.
Al-Shifa's main generator is the life support machine of the entire hospital. It's the apparatus keeping the ventilators and monitors and lights turned on that keep people inside alive. And it doesn't have the spare parts it needs, despite the International Committee for the Red Cross urging Israel to allow it to transport them through Erez checkpoint.
Al-Shifa's Head of Casualty, Dr. Maowiya Abu Hassanieh explained that "We had over 300 injured in over 30 minutes. There were people on the floor of the operating theater, in the reception area, in the corridors; we were sending patients to other hospitals. Not even the most advanced hospital in the world could cope with this number of casualties in such a short space of time."
As Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli occupation forces Chief of Staff, said this morning, "This is only the beginning."
But this isn't the beginning -- it is an ongoing policy of collective punishment and killing with impunity practiced by Israel for decades. It has seen its most intensified level today. But the weight of dread, revenge and isolation hangs thick over Gaza. People are all asking: If this is only the beginning, what will the end look like?
11:30 am
Alberto Acre, a Spanish journalist, and I were on the border village of Sirej near the city of Khan Younis in the south of the Strip. We had driven there at 8am with the mobile clinic of the Union of Palestinian Relief Committees. The clinic regularly visits exposed, frequently raided villages far from medical facilities. We had been interviewing residents about conditions on the border. Stories of olive and orange groves, and family farmland, bulldozed to make way for a clear line of sight for Israeli army watch towers and border guards. Prior to today, Israeli attacks have been frequent -- indiscriminate fire and shelling sprayed homes and land on the front line of the south eastern border. One elderly farmer showed us the grave-size ditch he had dug to climb into when Israeli soldiers would shoot into his fields.
Alberto was interviewing a family that had survived an Israeli missile attack on their home last month. It had been a response to rocket fire from resistance fighters nearby. Four fighters were killed in a field by the border. Israel had rained rockets and M-16 fire back. The family, caught in the crossfire, has not returned to their home.
I was waiting for Alberto to return when ground shaking thuds tilted us off our feet. This was the sound of surface to air fired missiles and F-16 bombs slamming into the police stations and bases of the Hamas authority across Gaza. We zoomed out of the village in our ambulance, and onto the main road to Gaza City, before jumping out to film the smoldering remains of a police station in Deir al-Balah near Khan Younis. Eyewitnesses said two Israeli missiles had destroyed the station. One had soared through a children's playground and a busy fruit and vegetable market before striking its target.
Civilians dead
There was blood on a broken plastic yellow slide, and a crippled, dead donkey with an upturned vegetable cart beside it. Aubergines and splattered blood covered the ground. A market trader present during the attack began to explain in broken English what happened: "It was full here, full, three people dead, many, many injured." An elderly man with a white kuffiyeh scarf around his head threw his hands down to his blood-drenched trousers and cried, "Look! Look at this! Shame on all governments, shame on Israel, look how they kill us, they are killing us and what does the world do? Where is the world, where are they, we are being killed here, hell upon them!"
He began to pick up splattered tomatoes he had lost from his cart, picking them up jerkily, and putting them into plastic bags, quickly. Behind a small tile and brick building, a man was sitting against the wall, his legs were bloodied. He couldn't get up and was sitting, visibly in pain and shock, trying to adjust himself, to orientate himself.
The Deir al-Balah police station itself was a wreck, a mess of twisted piles of concrete -- broken floors upon floors. Smashed cars and a split palm tree split the road.
We walked on, hurriedly, with everyone else, eyes skyward at four US-made Apache helicopters whose trigger mechanisms are supplied by the United Kingdom's Brighton-Based EDM Technologies. They were dropping smoky bright flares -- a defense against any attempt at Palestinian missile retaliation.
Turning down the road leading to the Deir al-Balah Civil Defense Force headquarters we suddenly saw a rush of people streaming across the road, shouting "They've been bombing twice, they've been bombing twice!" We ran too, but towards the crowds and away from "a ministry building," which our friend explained could be a possible second target as the Apaches rumbled above.
Arriving at the police station we saw the remains of a life at work smashed short. A prayer matt clotted with dust, a policeman's hat, the ubiquitous bright flower-patterned mattresses, burst open. A crater around 20 feet in diameter was filled with pulverized walls and floors and a motorbike, tossed on its side like a toy.
Policemen were frantically trying to get a fellow worker out from under the rubble. Everyone was trying to call him on his cell phone. "Stop it everyone, just one, one of you ring," shouted an officer. A fire licked the underside of a room now crushed to just three feet high. The men rapidly grasped and threw back rocks, blocks and debris to reach the man.
We made our way to al-Aqsa Hospital. Trucks and cars loaded with the men of entire families -- uncles, nephews, brothers -- piled high and speeding to the hospital to check on loved ones, horns blaring without interruption.
Hospitals on the brink
Entering al-Aqsa was overwhelming -- pure pandemonium, charged with grief, horror, distress and shock. Limp, blood-covered and burnt bodies streamed by us on rickety stretchers. Before the morgue, tens of shouting relatives crammed up to its open double doors. Our friend explained that "they could not even identify who was who, whether it is their brother or cousin or who, because they are so burned." Many were transferred, in ambulances and the back of trucks and cars to al-Shifa Hospital.
The injured couldn't speak. Causality after casualty sat propped against the outside walls, being comforted by relatives, with wounds temporarily dressed. The more drastically injured were inside, where relatives jostled with doctors in constant motion to bring in their injured in scuffed blankets. Drips, bloody faces, scorched hair and shrapnel cuts to hands, chests, legs, arms and heads dominated the reception area, wards and operating theaters.
We saw a bearded man on a stretcher on the floor of an intensive care unit, shaking and shaking, involuntarily, legs rigid and thrusting downwards -- a spasm consistent with a spinal cord injury. Would he ever walk again or talk again? In another unit, a baby girl, no older than six months, had shrapnel wounds to her face. A relative lifted a blanket to show us her fragile bandaged leg. Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was making stilted, repetitive, squeaking sounds.
A first estimate at al-Aqsa Hospital was 40 dead and 120 injured. The hospital was dealing with casualties from the bombed market, a playground, a Civil Defense Force's station, a civil and traffic police stations -- all were leveled. Two of the dead were carried out on stretchers from the hospital. Their bodies were lifted up by crowds of grief-stricken men and taken to the graveyard accompanied by cries of "There is not God but God!"
Who cares?
Many Palestinians in Gaza feel that no one is looking out for them apart from God. Back in al-Shifa Hospital tonight, we met the brother of a security guard who was sitting in the doorway of the former headquarters of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The building collapsed on top of him after an Israeli missile strike. He said to us, "We don't have anyone but God. We feel alone. Where is the world? Where is the action to stop these attacks?"
Majid Salim, stood beside his comatose mother, Fatima. Earlier today she had been sitting at her desk at work at the Khadija Arafat Charity, located near the headquarters of Hamas' security forces in Gaza City. Israel's attack had left her with multiple internal and head injuries, a tube down her throat and a ventilator keeping her alive. Majid gestured to her, "We didn't attack Israel, my mother didn't fire rockets at Israel. This is the biggest terrorism, to have our mother bombarded at work."
The groups of men lining the corridors of the over-stretched al-Shifa hospital are stunned, agitated, patient and lost. We spoke to a group of men whose brother had both arms broken and serious facial and head injuries. They explained that "We couldn't recognize his face, it was so black from the weapons used." Another man turns to me and said. "I am a teacher. I teach human rights -- this is a course we have, human rights." He paused. 'How can I teach, my son, my children, about the meaning of human rights under these conditions, under this siege?"
The UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and local government schools have developed a human rights syllabus, which teaches children about international law, the Geneva Conventions, the International Declaration on Human Rights, and The Hague Regulations. One goal of the program is to develop a culture of human rights in Gaza, and to help generate more self-confidence and a sense of security and dignity for the children. But the contradiction between what should be adhered to as a common code of conduct agreed to by most states, including Israel, and the realities on the ground is stark. International law is not being applied or enforced with respect to Israeli policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, inside Israel, or the millions of refugees living in camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
How can a new consciousness and practice of human rights ever graduate from rhetoric to reality when everything points to the contrary in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Israel? The United Nations have been spurned and shut out by Israel. Earlier this month, Richard Falk, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, was held prisoner at Ben Gurion Airport before being unceremoniously deported. The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet. In the Jabaliya refugee camp alone, Gaza's largest, 125,000 people are crowded into a space of only two square kilometers. Bombardment by F-16s and Apache helicopters at mid-morning, as children leave their schools for home, reveals an utter contempt for civilian safety. This is compounded by an 18-month siege that bans all imports and exports, and has resulted in the deaths of more than 270 people as a result of a lack of access to essential medicines and treatment. Israel is granted immunity by an international community that offers empty phrases for Israel to "urge restraint" and "minimize civilian casualties."
A light
There is a saying here in Gaza: "At the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel." Not so funny when you consider that Gaza is being kept alive through the smuggling of food, fuel and medicine through an exploitative industry of over 1,000 tunnels running from Egypt to the southern city of Rafah. On average, one to two people die every week in the tunnels. Some embark on a humiliating crawl to get their education, see their families, to find work, on their hands and knees. Other tunnels are reportedly big enough to drive through.
As bombs continue to blast buildings around us, jarring the children in this house from their fitful sleep, the saying could take on another twist. After today's killing of more than 200, is it that at the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel, and then a grave? Or is it a wall of international complicity and silence?
Yet, there is a light through the wall -- a light of conscience turned into activism by people all over the world. We can turn a spotlight onto Israel's crimes against humanity and the enduring injustice here in Palestine, by coming out onto the streets and pressuring our governments; demanding an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation, broadening our call for boycott, divestment and sanctions, and for a genuine and just peace. Through institutional, governmental, and popular means, this can be the light at the end of the Gaza's tunnel.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist, community and union organizer, and solidarity worker. She is currently Gaza Project Co-coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement.
Ewa Jasiewicz writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 28 December 2008
27 December 2008
As I write this, Israeli jets are bombing the areas of Zeitoun and Rimal in central Gaza City. The family I am staying with has moved into the internal corridor of their home to shelter from the bombing. The windows nearly blew out just five minutes ago as a massive explosion rocked the house. Apache helicopters are hovering above us, while F-16s soar overhead.
United Nations radio reports say one blast was a target close to the main gate of al-Shifa hospital -- the largest medical facility in Gaza. Another was a plastics factory. More bombs continue to pound the Strip.
Sirens are wailing on the streets outside. Regular power cuts plunge the city into blackness every night and tonight is no exception. Only perhaps tonight it is the darkest night people have seen here in their lifetimes.
As of this writing, more than 220 people have been killed and at least 400 injured through attacks that shocked the Strip in the space of 15 minutes. Hospitals are overloaded and unable to cope. These attacks come on top of the already existing humanitarian crisis that came about because of the 18-month Israeli siege which has resulted in a lack of medicines, bread, flour, gas, electricity, fuel and freedom of movement.
Doctors at al-Shifa Hospital had to scramble together 10 make-shift operating theaters to deal with the wounded. The hospital's maternity ward had to transform their operating room into an emergency theater. Al-Shifa only had 12 beds in their intensive care unit, they had to make space for 27 today.
There is a shortage of medicine -- over 105 key items are not in stock, and blood and spare generator parts are desperately needed.
Al-Shifa's main generator is the life support machine of the entire hospital. It's the apparatus keeping the ventilators and monitors and lights turned on that keep people inside alive. And it doesn't have the spare parts it needs, despite the International Committee for the Red Cross urging Israel to allow it to transport them through Erez checkpoint.
Al-Shifa's Head of Casualty, Dr. Maowiya Abu Hassanieh explained that "We had over 300 injured in over 30 minutes. There were people on the floor of the operating theater, in the reception area, in the corridors; we were sending patients to other hospitals. Not even the most advanced hospital in the world could cope with this number of casualties in such a short space of time."
As Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli occupation forces Chief of Staff, said this morning, "This is only the beginning."
But this isn't the beginning -- it is an ongoing policy of collective punishment and killing with impunity practiced by Israel for decades. It has seen its most intensified level today. But the weight of dread, revenge and isolation hangs thick over Gaza. People are all asking: If this is only the beginning, what will the end look like?
11:30 am
Alberto Acre, a Spanish journalist, and I were on the border village of Sirej near the city of Khan Younis in the south of the Strip. We had driven there at 8am with the mobile clinic of the Union of Palestinian Relief Committees. The clinic regularly visits exposed, frequently raided villages far from medical facilities. We had been interviewing residents about conditions on the border. Stories of olive and orange groves, and family farmland, bulldozed to make way for a clear line of sight for Israeli army watch towers and border guards. Prior to today, Israeli attacks have been frequent -- indiscriminate fire and shelling sprayed homes and land on the front line of the south eastern border. One elderly farmer showed us the grave-size ditch he had dug to climb into when Israeli soldiers would shoot into his fields.
Alberto was interviewing a family that had survived an Israeli missile attack on their home last month. It had been a response to rocket fire from resistance fighters nearby. Four fighters were killed in a field by the border. Israel had rained rockets and M-16 fire back. The family, caught in the crossfire, has not returned to their home.
I was waiting for Alberto to return when ground shaking thuds tilted us off our feet. This was the sound of surface to air fired missiles and F-16 bombs slamming into the police stations and bases of the Hamas authority across Gaza. We zoomed out of the village in our ambulance, and onto the main road to Gaza City, before jumping out to film the smoldering remains of a police station in Deir al-Balah near Khan Younis. Eyewitnesses said two Israeli missiles had destroyed the station. One had soared through a children's playground and a busy fruit and vegetable market before striking its target.
Civilians dead
There was blood on a broken plastic yellow slide, and a crippled, dead donkey with an upturned vegetable cart beside it. Aubergines and splattered blood covered the ground. A market trader present during the attack began to explain in broken English what happened: "It was full here, full, three people dead, many, many injured." An elderly man with a white kuffiyeh scarf around his head threw his hands down to his blood-drenched trousers and cried, "Look! Look at this! Shame on all governments, shame on Israel, look how they kill us, they are killing us and what does the world do? Where is the world, where are they, we are being killed here, hell upon them!"
He began to pick up splattered tomatoes he had lost from his cart, picking them up jerkily, and putting them into plastic bags, quickly. Behind a small tile and brick building, a man was sitting against the wall, his legs were bloodied. He couldn't get up and was sitting, visibly in pain and shock, trying to adjust himself, to orientate himself.
The Deir al-Balah police station itself was a wreck, a mess of twisted piles of concrete -- broken floors upon floors. Smashed cars and a split palm tree split the road.
We walked on, hurriedly, with everyone else, eyes skyward at four US-made Apache helicopters whose trigger mechanisms are supplied by the United Kingdom's Brighton-Based EDM Technologies. They were dropping smoky bright flares -- a defense against any attempt at Palestinian missile retaliation.
Turning down the road leading to the Deir al-Balah Civil Defense Force headquarters we suddenly saw a rush of people streaming across the road, shouting "They've been bombing twice, they've been bombing twice!" We ran too, but towards the crowds and away from "a ministry building," which our friend explained could be a possible second target as the Apaches rumbled above.
Arriving at the police station we saw the remains of a life at work smashed short. A prayer matt clotted with dust, a policeman's hat, the ubiquitous bright flower-patterned mattresses, burst open. A crater around 20 feet in diameter was filled with pulverized walls and floors and a motorbike, tossed on its side like a toy.
Policemen were frantically trying to get a fellow worker out from under the rubble. Everyone was trying to call him on his cell phone. "Stop it everyone, just one, one of you ring," shouted an officer. A fire licked the underside of a room now crushed to just three feet high. The men rapidly grasped and threw back rocks, blocks and debris to reach the man.
We made our way to al-Aqsa Hospital. Trucks and cars loaded with the men of entire families -- uncles, nephews, brothers -- piled high and speeding to the hospital to check on loved ones, horns blaring without interruption.
Hospitals on the brink
Entering al-Aqsa was overwhelming -- pure pandemonium, charged with grief, horror, distress and shock. Limp, blood-covered and burnt bodies streamed by us on rickety stretchers. Before the morgue, tens of shouting relatives crammed up to its open double doors. Our friend explained that "they could not even identify who was who, whether it is their brother or cousin or who, because they are so burned." Many were transferred, in ambulances and the back of trucks and cars to al-Shifa Hospital.
The injured couldn't speak. Causality after casualty sat propped against the outside walls, being comforted by relatives, with wounds temporarily dressed. The more drastically injured were inside, where relatives jostled with doctors in constant motion to bring in their injured in scuffed blankets. Drips, bloody faces, scorched hair and shrapnel cuts to hands, chests, legs, arms and heads dominated the reception area, wards and operating theaters.
We saw a bearded man on a stretcher on the floor of an intensive care unit, shaking and shaking, involuntarily, legs rigid and thrusting downwards -- a spasm consistent with a spinal cord injury. Would he ever walk again or talk again? In another unit, a baby girl, no older than six months, had shrapnel wounds to her face. A relative lifted a blanket to show us her fragile bandaged leg. Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was making stilted, repetitive, squeaking sounds.
A first estimate at al-Aqsa Hospital was 40 dead and 120 injured. The hospital was dealing with casualties from the bombed market, a playground, a Civil Defense Force's station, a civil and traffic police stations -- all were leveled. Two of the dead were carried out on stretchers from the hospital. Their bodies were lifted up by crowds of grief-stricken men and taken to the graveyard accompanied by cries of "There is not God but God!"
Who cares?
Many Palestinians in Gaza feel that no one is looking out for them apart from God. Back in al-Shifa Hospital tonight, we met the brother of a security guard who was sitting in the doorway of the former headquarters of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The building collapsed on top of him after an Israeli missile strike. He said to us, "We don't have anyone but God. We feel alone. Where is the world? Where is the action to stop these attacks?"
Majid Salim, stood beside his comatose mother, Fatima. Earlier today she had been sitting at her desk at work at the Khadija Arafat Charity, located near the headquarters of Hamas' security forces in Gaza City. Israel's attack had left her with multiple internal and head injuries, a tube down her throat and a ventilator keeping her alive. Majid gestured to her, "We didn't attack Israel, my mother didn't fire rockets at Israel. This is the biggest terrorism, to have our mother bombarded at work."
The groups of men lining the corridors of the over-stretched al-Shifa hospital are stunned, agitated, patient and lost. We spoke to a group of men whose brother had both arms broken and serious facial and head injuries. They explained that "We couldn't recognize his face, it was so black from the weapons used." Another man turns to me and said. "I am a teacher. I teach human rights -- this is a course we have, human rights." He paused. 'How can I teach, my son, my children, about the meaning of human rights under these conditions, under this siege?"
The UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and local government schools have developed a human rights syllabus, which teaches children about international law, the Geneva Conventions, the International Declaration on Human Rights, and The Hague Regulations. One goal of the program is to develop a culture of human rights in Gaza, and to help generate more self-confidence and a sense of security and dignity for the children. But the contradiction between what should be adhered to as a common code of conduct agreed to by most states, including Israel, and the realities on the ground is stark. International law is not being applied or enforced with respect to Israeli policies toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, inside Israel, or the millions of refugees living in camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
How can a new consciousness and practice of human rights ever graduate from rhetoric to reality when everything points to the contrary in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Israel? The United Nations have been spurned and shut out by Israel. Earlier this month, Richard Falk, the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, was held prisoner at Ben Gurion Airport before being unceremoniously deported. The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions on the planet. In the Jabaliya refugee camp alone, Gaza's largest, 125,000 people are crowded into a space of only two square kilometers. Bombardment by F-16s and Apache helicopters at mid-morning, as children leave their schools for home, reveals an utter contempt for civilian safety. This is compounded by an 18-month siege that bans all imports and exports, and has resulted in the deaths of more than 270 people as a result of a lack of access to essential medicines and treatment. Israel is granted immunity by an international community that offers empty phrases for Israel to "urge restraint" and "minimize civilian casualties."
A light
There is a saying here in Gaza: "At the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel." Not so funny when you consider that Gaza is being kept alive through the smuggling of food, fuel and medicine through an exploitative industry of over 1,000 tunnels running from Egypt to the southern city of Rafah. On average, one to two people die every week in the tunnels. Some embark on a humiliating crawl to get their education, see their families, to find work, on their hands and knees. Other tunnels are reportedly big enough to drive through.
As bombs continue to blast buildings around us, jarring the children in this house from their fitful sleep, the saying could take on another twist. After today's killing of more than 200, is it that at the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel, and then a grave? Or is it a wall of international complicity and silence?
Yet, there is a light through the wall -- a light of conscience turned into activism by people all over the world. We can turn a spotlight onto Israel's crimes against humanity and the enduring injustice here in Palestine, by coming out onto the streets and pressuring our governments; demanding an end to Israeli apartheid and occupation, broadening our call for boycott, divestment and sanctions, and for a genuine and just peace. Through institutional, governmental, and popular means, this can be the light at the end of the Gaza's tunnel.
Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist, community and union organizer, and solidarity worker. She is currently Gaza Project Co-coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
To be in Gaza is to be trapped
Gaza. Always the suffering of Gaza, most potent symbol of the tragedy of Palestine. In 1948, during the Nakba – or "The Catastrophe" as Palestinians describe the war that gave birth to the state of Israel – 200,000 refugees poured into Gaza, swelling its population by more than two-thirds. Then Gaza fell under Egyptian control.
The six day war of 1967 saw more refugees, but with it came the occupation of Gaza by Israel – an occupation that, despite Israel's declaration under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that it would unilaterally withdraw its settlements and troops in 2005, has never really ended.
It has not ended, for to be in Gaza is to be trapped. Without future or hope, limited to a few square miles. Its borders, land and sea, are defined largely by Israel (with Egypt's compliance along the southern end of the Strip).
It is not open to the ocean apart from a narrow outlet accessible only to the fishing fleet, a coastal blockade policed by Israel's gunboats, the boundaries of which have only recently been tested by boats of protesters sailing from Cyprus to draw attention to conditions inside Gaza.
Once it was possible for Gazans to pass with relative ease in and out of the Strip to work in Israel. In recent years, the noose around the 1.5 million people living there has been tightening incrementally, until a whole population – in the most densely settled urban area upon the planet – has been locked in behind walls and fences.
Since Israeli troops overran the Strip in 1967, Israeli politicians and generals have always seen it as a problem – a hotbed of radicalism and opposition. And so Israel has ventured failed experiment after experiment in the attempt to control Gaza. It has tried everything except the obvious – to allow its people to be free.
It has tried directly managing Gaza, and a brutal policy of quarantine backed by tanks, jets and gunboats. It has attempted the maintenance of strategic settlements, which only provided a focus for resistance against the patrolling troops. And when that failed, Israel retreated – only to find that, without a proximate enemy, those living inside turned to attacking the nearby towns with crude missiles.
Ironically, one of Israel's experiments involved assisting in the creation of Hamas, which had its roots in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, to counter the power of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation. Israel has been determined to push Hamas ever closer to all-out war since insisting that even though it won free and fair Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, its right to govern could not be treated as legitimate.
Since Hamas took power in Gaza in summer 2007, after a short, brutal struggle with Fatah, Israel's policy has been one of collective punishment, summed up in the policy of "no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis". Not a visible humanitarian crisis, at least.
For what has been going on inside Gaza since the economic blockade began a year and a half ago has cynically stretched the definition of what constitutes the boundaries of such a crisis.
Those seeking urgent medical care outside Gaza's walls are forced to go through a long and humiliating process. Even some of those who are allowed to leave, human rights groups say, have been pressured into becoming informers for Israeli intelligence.
One in two Gazans is now living in poverty. Aid is sporadic, and as the World Bank warned at the beginning of December, the blockade has forced Gaza to become reliant on smuggling tunnels (taxed by Hamas), which risked destroying its conventional economy. Inflation for key products smuggled through the tunnels is rampant, which in turn has brought cash to Hamas.
Equally worrying, from a long-term point of view, has been the corrosion of Gaza's institutions and social cohesion, which has resulted in sporadic eruptions of inter-factional and inter-clan violence.
What Israel hopes to achieve with the present military offensive – beyond influencing the coming Israeli elections – is not clear. For if a long-anticipated ground operation, leading to a partial reoccupation on the ground, is to follow these air strikes – as it did in the war in Lebanon in 2006 – it will have to achieve what neither Hamas nor its rival Fatah can: unifying Palestinian society once more against a common enemy, as Gaza was once united against Israeli settlements inside its boundaries.
If that is not the intention, it is hard to see what Israel's actions are meant to achieve in a community that cherishes its martyrs; where violent death is intended to reinforce social cohesion and unity.
For in the end what has happened in the past few hours is simply an expression of what has been going on for days and months and years: the death and fear that Gaza's gunmen and rocket teams and bombers have inflicted upon Israel have been returned 10, 20, 30 times over once again. And nothing will change in the arithmetic of it.
Not in Gaza. But perhaps in a wider Arab world, becoming more uncomfortable by the day about what is happening inside Gaza, something is changing. And Israel has supplied a rallying point. Something tangible and brutal that gives the critics of its actions in Gaza – who say it has a policy of collective punishment backed by disproportionate and excessive force – something to focus on.
Something to be ranked with Deir Yassin. With the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Something, at last, that Israel's foes can say looks like an atrocity.
Gaza. Always the suffering of Gaza, most potent symbol of the tragedy of Palestine. In 1948, during the Nakba – or "The Catastrophe" as Palestinians describe the war that gave birth to the state of Israel – 200,000 refugees poured into Gaza, swelling its population by more than two-thirds. Then Gaza fell under Egyptian control.
The six day war of 1967 saw more refugees, but with it came the occupation of Gaza by Israel – an occupation that, despite Israel's declaration under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that it would unilaterally withdraw its settlements and troops in 2005, has never really ended.
It has not ended, for to be in Gaza is to be trapped. Without future or hope, limited to a few square miles. Its borders, land and sea, are defined largely by Israel (with Egypt's compliance along the southern end of the Strip).
It is not open to the ocean apart from a narrow outlet accessible only to the fishing fleet, a coastal blockade policed by Israel's gunboats, the boundaries of which have only recently been tested by boats of protesters sailing from Cyprus to draw attention to conditions inside Gaza.
Once it was possible for Gazans to pass with relative ease in and out of the Strip to work in Israel. In recent years, the noose around the 1.5 million people living there has been tightening incrementally, until a whole population – in the most densely settled urban area upon the planet – has been locked in behind walls and fences.
Since Israeli troops overran the Strip in 1967, Israeli politicians and generals have always seen it as a problem – a hotbed of radicalism and opposition. And so Israel has ventured failed experiment after experiment in the attempt to control Gaza. It has tried everything except the obvious – to allow its people to be free.
It has tried directly managing Gaza, and a brutal policy of quarantine backed by tanks, jets and gunboats. It has attempted the maintenance of strategic settlements, which only provided a focus for resistance against the patrolling troops. And when that failed, Israel retreated – only to find that, without a proximate enemy, those living inside turned to attacking the nearby towns with crude missiles.
Ironically, one of Israel's experiments involved assisting in the creation of Hamas, which had its roots in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, to counter the power of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation. Israel has been determined to push Hamas ever closer to all-out war since insisting that even though it won free and fair Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, its right to govern could not be treated as legitimate.
Since Hamas took power in Gaza in summer 2007, after a short, brutal struggle with Fatah, Israel's policy has been one of collective punishment, summed up in the policy of "no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis". Not a visible humanitarian crisis, at least.
For what has been going on inside Gaza since the economic blockade began a year and a half ago has cynically stretched the definition of what constitutes the boundaries of such a crisis.
Those seeking urgent medical care outside Gaza's walls are forced to go through a long and humiliating process. Even some of those who are allowed to leave, human rights groups say, have been pressured into becoming informers for Israeli intelligence.
One in two Gazans is now living in poverty. Aid is sporadic, and as the World Bank warned at the beginning of December, the blockade has forced Gaza to become reliant on smuggling tunnels (taxed by Hamas), which risked destroying its conventional economy. Inflation for key products smuggled through the tunnels is rampant, which in turn has brought cash to Hamas.
Equally worrying, from a long-term point of view, has been the corrosion of Gaza's institutions and social cohesion, which has resulted in sporadic eruptions of inter-factional and inter-clan violence.
What Israel hopes to achieve with the present military offensive – beyond influencing the coming Israeli elections – is not clear. For if a long-anticipated ground operation, leading to a partial reoccupation on the ground, is to follow these air strikes – as it did in the war in Lebanon in 2006 – it will have to achieve what neither Hamas nor its rival Fatah can: unifying Palestinian society once more against a common enemy, as Gaza was once united against Israeli settlements inside its boundaries.
If that is not the intention, it is hard to see what Israel's actions are meant to achieve in a community that cherishes its martyrs; where violent death is intended to reinforce social cohesion and unity.
For in the end what has happened in the past few hours is simply an expression of what has been going on for days and months and years: the death and fear that Gaza's gunmen and rocket teams and bombers have inflicted upon Israel have been returned 10, 20, 30 times over once again. And nothing will change in the arithmetic of it.
Not in Gaza. But perhaps in a wider Arab world, becoming more uncomfortable by the day about what is happening inside Gaza, something is changing. And Israel has supplied a rallying point. Something tangible and brutal that gives the critics of its actions in Gaza – who say it has a policy of collective punishment backed by disproportionate and excessive force – something to focus on.
Something to be ranked with Deir Yassin. With the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Something, at last, that Israel's foes can say looks like an atrocity.
Gaza massacres must spur us to action
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2008
"I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel's latest massacres were broadcast around the world.
A short time earlier, US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel's attacks, and others will follow.
Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers. Among those Israel labels "terrorists" were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school.
Shmerling's joy has been echoed by Israelis and their supporters around the world; their violence is righteous violence. It is "self-defense" against "terrorists" and therefore justified. Israeli bombing -- like American and NATO bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is bombing for freedom, peace and democracy.
The rationalization for Israel's massacres, already being faithfully transmitted by the English-language media, is that Israel is acting in "retaliation" for Palestinian rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since the six-month truce expired on 19 December (until today, no Israeli had been killed or injured by these recent rocket attacks).
But today's horrific attacks mark only a change in Israel's method of killing Palestinians recently. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.
What the media never question is Israel's idea of a truce. It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.
As John Ging, the head of operations of the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), told The Electronic Intifada in November: "there was five months of a ceasefire in the last couple of months, where the people of Gaza did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence. We in fact at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food."
That is an Israeli truce. Any response to Israeli attacks -- whether peaceful protests against the apartheid wall in Bilin and Nilin in the West Bank is met with bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel's attacks, killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never ceased for one single day during the truce. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has acceded to all of Israel's demands, even assembling "security forces" to fight the resistance on Israel's behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian or her property or livelihood from Israel's relentless violent colonization. It did not save, for instance, the al-Kurd family from seeing their home of 50 years in occupied East Jerusalem demolished on 9 November, so the land it sits on could be taken by settlers.
Once again we are watching massacres in Gaza, as we did last March when 110 Palestinians, including dozens of children, were killed by Israel in just a few days. Once again people everywhere feel rage, anger and despair that this outlaw state carries out such crimes with impunity.
But all over the Arab media and internet today the rage being expressed is not directed solely at Israel. Notably, it is directed more sharply than ever at Arab states. The images that stick are of Israel's foreign minister Tzipi Livni in Cairo on Christmas day. There she sat smiling with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Then there are the pictures of Livni and Egypt's foreign minister smiling and slapping their palms together.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported today that last wednesday the Israeli "cabinet authorized the prime minister, the defense minister, and the foreign minister to determine the timing and the method" of Israel's attacks on Gaza. Everywhere people ask, what did Livni tell the Egyptians and more importantly what did they tell her? Did Israel get a green light to turn Gaza's streets red once again? Few are ready to give Egypt the benefit of the doubt after it has helped Israel besiege Gaza by keeping the Rafah border crossing closed for more than a year.
On top of the intense anger and sadness so many people feel at Israel's renewed mass killings in Gaza is a sense of frustration that there seem to be so few ways to channel it into a political response that can change the course of events, end the suffering, and bring justice.
But there are ways, and this is a moment to focus on them. Already I have received notices of demonstrations and solidarity actions being planned in cities all over the world. That is important. But what will happen after the demonstrations disperse and the anger dies down? Will we continue to let Palestinians in Gaza die in silence?
Palestinians everywhere are asking for solidarity, real solidarity, in the form of sustained, determined political action. The Gaza-based One Democratic State Group reaffirmed this today as it "called upon all civil society organizations and freedom loving people to act immediately in any possible way to put pressure on their governments to end diplomatic ties with Apartheid Israel and institute sanctions against it."
The global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (http://www.bdsmovement.net/) provides the framework for this. Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term commitment to make sure we do not wake up to "another Gaza" ever again.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2008
"I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel's latest massacres were broadcast around the world.
A short time earlier, US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel's attacks, and others will follow.
Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers. Among those Israel labels "terrorists" were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school.
Shmerling's joy has been echoed by Israelis and their supporters around the world; their violence is righteous violence. It is "self-defense" against "terrorists" and therefore justified. Israeli bombing -- like American and NATO bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is bombing for freedom, peace and democracy.
The rationalization for Israel's massacres, already being faithfully transmitted by the English-language media, is that Israel is acting in "retaliation" for Palestinian rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since the six-month truce expired on 19 December (until today, no Israeli had been killed or injured by these recent rocket attacks).
But today's horrific attacks mark only a change in Israel's method of killing Palestinians recently. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.
What the media never question is Israel's idea of a truce. It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.
As John Ging, the head of operations of the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), told The Electronic Intifada in November: "there was five months of a ceasefire in the last couple of months, where the people of Gaza did not benefit; they did not have any restoration of a dignified existence. We in fact at the UN, our supplies were also restricted during the period of the ceasefire, to the point where we were left in a very vulnerable and precarious position and with a few days of closure we ran out of food."
That is an Israeli truce. Any response to Israeli attacks -- whether peaceful protests against the apartheid wall in Bilin and Nilin in the West Bank is met with bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel's attacks, killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never ceased for one single day during the truce. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has acceded to all of Israel's demands, even assembling "security forces" to fight the resistance on Israel's behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian or her property or livelihood from Israel's relentless violent colonization. It did not save, for instance, the al-Kurd family from seeing their home of 50 years in occupied East Jerusalem demolished on 9 November, so the land it sits on could be taken by settlers.
Once again we are watching massacres in Gaza, as we did last March when 110 Palestinians, including dozens of children, were killed by Israel in just a few days. Once again people everywhere feel rage, anger and despair that this outlaw state carries out such crimes with impunity.
But all over the Arab media and internet today the rage being expressed is not directed solely at Israel. Notably, it is directed more sharply than ever at Arab states. The images that stick are of Israel's foreign minister Tzipi Livni in Cairo on Christmas day. There she sat smiling with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Then there are the pictures of Livni and Egypt's foreign minister smiling and slapping their palms together.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported today that last wednesday the Israeli "cabinet authorized the prime minister, the defense minister, and the foreign minister to determine the timing and the method" of Israel's attacks on Gaza. Everywhere people ask, what did Livni tell the Egyptians and more importantly what did they tell her? Did Israel get a green light to turn Gaza's streets red once again? Few are ready to give Egypt the benefit of the doubt after it has helped Israel besiege Gaza by keeping the Rafah border crossing closed for more than a year.
On top of the intense anger and sadness so many people feel at Israel's renewed mass killings in Gaza is a sense of frustration that there seem to be so few ways to channel it into a political response that can change the course of events, end the suffering, and bring justice.
But there are ways, and this is a moment to focus on them. Already I have received notices of demonstrations and solidarity actions being planned in cities all over the world. That is important. But what will happen after the demonstrations disperse and the anger dies down? Will we continue to let Palestinians in Gaza die in silence?
Palestinians everywhere are asking for solidarity, real solidarity, in the form of sustained, determined political action. The Gaza-based One Democratic State Group reaffirmed this today as it "called upon all civil society organizations and freedom loving people to act immediately in any possible way to put pressure on their governments to end diplomatic ties with Apartheid Israel and institute sanctions against it."
The global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (http://www.bdsmovement.net/) provides the framework for this. Now is the time to channel our raw emotions into a long-term commitment to make sure we do not wake up to "another Gaza" ever again.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
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