Palestinian Walks

I'm currently reading a book called Palestinian Walks, by Raja Shehadeh. The book outlines seven walks across the Palestinian hills that Raja made from the 1970s to 2007. Throughout the book he describes the beautiful flora and fauna of the country, while weaving in characters and experiences that took place within that time frame. 

It is a very peaceful approach to portraying the Palestinian crisis, with no direct political or religious interference. The book gives you the feeling that the author is simply writing to conserve his memories of the land and to share its magnificence with those who were not able to experience it for themselves. A land that is no longer available to be experienced. Raja ignites in the reader a sense of true loss. 

The excerpt I'm sharing here, although maybe not the most powerful or descriptive passage in the book, affected me a lot. The horrifying truth that the average Palestinian remaining in Palestine must face and overcome such treatment and hardships as a daily part of life is disturbing. What is more disturbing however is that this is happening in their homes, on their land, amongst their hills... nothing could be more heart-breaking.

Raja's frank and matter-of-fact portrayal of this - in the below passage - left me struggling with feelings of anger, despair, and gut-wrenching guilt. 

Sabri and his family stood their ground. Their ordeal lasted for over twenty-four years. It was still continuing when I visited him in May 2006. Despite the incessant pressure he had managed to stay in his house at the top of the hill. But now the settlement surrounded the house from three sides. A wire fence was built around the house leaving him a passageway only a few metres wide. He was able to save only a fraction of his agricultural land; the rest was taken over by the settlement. The current issue that was absorbing his attention when I visited was that the Separation Wall Israel was building would cut him off from his village and the houses he had built for his children down the hill. He would end up on the side of the settlement, an unwelcome Gentile in the midst of housing planned only for Jews. He was now contesting the path of the wall at the Israeli High Court of Justice, adding another case to the numerous earlier challenges he took to that court expecting justice, only to be rebuffed time and time again. Sabri and I were standing outside in the sun looking at the settlement through the wire fence built around his house. He was telling me about this latest case when we saw an old man walking his Labrador on the other side of the fence. I tried hard to catch the man’s eye. I wanted some indication of how he felt confining his neighbour in this way, but the man would not raise his eyes from the ground. He went solemnly through his walk, keeping pace with his dog, never showing any recognition of Sabri or his guest. 

The resilience of Sabri, whose name itself means patience, was legendary. But the long gruelling struggle against the settlers, the World Zionist Organization and the military government supporting them was taking its toll on him. Though he still had fire in his big black fearless eyes as he spoke with courage and confidence about his plight, his health was deteriorating. It was only on my last visit that I discovered that Sabri, who had ten children, was an only child. He had inherited from his father the large area of family land which he was determined to preserve and pass on to his children. I also realized that the courageous fighter was not concerned with nationalist issues. He believed in only two constants, God and the land. Not to fight in every way possible to hold on to his land was sacrilege.

Gilad Shalit, Human being, JEW!

Gilad Shalit: The Grand Illusion

Gilad Atzmon

A few days ago, Noam Shalit, the ‘father of’ slammed the Hamas for holding his son for no real reason. Miraculously, he managed to forget the fact that his son Gilad was actually a combatant soldier who served as a post guard in a concentration camp and was captured in a fortress bunker overlooking Gaza.

Father Shalit called upon Hamas to: “stop holding us as hostages of the symbols of yesterday's wars". He also claimed that the Hamas is engaged in no less than 'imaginary resistance'. Seemingly, these are some very bold statements from a father who is supposed to be very concerned with his son’s fate.

Gilad Shalit saga is no doubt an exemplary case-study of Israeli identity. In spite of the fact that Gilad Shailt is a soldier who was directly involved in the Israeli military crime against a civilian population, the Israelis and Jewish lobbies around the world insist upon presenting him as an ‘innocent victim’. The leading slogan of the Shalit campaign reads ‘Gilad Shalit, Human being, JEW’. And I ask myself is he really just an ordinary a ‘human being’ as the slogan suggests or rather a chosen one as implied by the ‘Jew’ predicate? And if he is just a human being, why exactly did they add the ‘Jew’ in? What is there in the ‘Jew’ title that serves the Free Shalit campaign?

Apparently the usage of the predicates ‘Human being’ and ‘Jew’ in such a proximity is rather informative and meaningful. Within the post-holocaust Jewish and liberal discourses ‘human being’ stands for ‘innocence’ and ‘Jew’ stands for ‘victim’. Accordingly, the Shalit’ campaign slogan should be grasped as ‘FREE Gilad Shalit the innocent victim’.

One may wonder at this stage, what does it take for a combatant soldier serving as a post guard in a concentration camp to become an ‘innocent victim’? Apparently, as far as Israeli discourse is concerned, not a lot. It is really just a matter of rhetoric.

It is rather notable that within the Israeli militarized society, the soldier is elevated, his blood is precious in comparison to ordinary Jewish citizens. Israelis adore their military men and grieve every loss of their armed forces with spectacular laments. Considering the IDF being a popular army, the Israeli love of their soldiers can be realized as just another fashion of their inherent self-loving. The Israelis simply love themselves almost as much as they hate their neighbors. In Israel a death in action of an IDF combatant would receive far more attention than a death of a civilian who was subject of so called ‘terror’. Similarly, in Israel an IDF POW would gather the ultimate media attention. Ron Arad, Ehud Goldwasser and Gilad Shalit are household names in Israel, the names and faces are familiar to all Israelis and others who are interested in the conflict. Considering Israel being in a constant state of war, the collective-over caring concern for the military man is rather enigmatic or even peculiar.

Within the Israeli narrative, the soldier is grasped as an innocent being that is ‘caught’ in a war which he is doomed to fight against his will. The Israeli combatant ‘shoots and sobs’. Within the Israeli deluded mindset and historical narrative, the Israelis ‘seek peace’ and it is somehow always the ‘others’ who bring hostility and violence about. This outright self-deception is so imbued within the Israeli self image, something that allows the Israelis to launch and initiate one war after another while being totally convinced that it is always the ‘Arabs’ who attempt to throw the Israeli into the sea.

In that sense, the Israeli ‘War Against Terror’ should be realized as a battle against the terror within. The constant battle against the ‘Arabs’ is an outlet that resolves the Hebraic self-imposed anxiety which the Israeli cannot handle or even confront. In that very sense throwing white phosphorous on women, the elderly and children acts as a collective Valium pill, it brings peace to the Israeli mind, it smoothes the terror within. Killing en masse resolves the insular Israeli collective state of fear. This explains how come 94% http://news.hosuronline.com/NewsD.asp?DAT_ID=722 of the Israeli Jewish population supported the last genocide in Gaza. The consequences are devastating. The total majority of the Israeli Jews not only say NO to ‘love thy neighbor’, they actually say YES to murder in broad daylight.

In their deluded mindset the Israelis are pushed into ‘no choice’ wars ‘against their will’ in spite of the fact that they are ‘innocent victims’. In fact, this delusion or rather cognitive dissonance stands at the very core of the Israeli unethical existence. The Israeli is submerged in a self-notion of blamelessness, it is somehow always the other who carries the guilt and the fault (i). This total discrepancy between Israeli self-perception i.e., ‘innocence’ and Israeli manifested practice i.e., barbarism beyond comparison, can be realized as a severe form of detachment on the verge of collective psychosis.

The case of Shalit embodies this discrepancy very well. Time after time we are asked by Israeli officials and Jewish lobbies to show our compassion to a combatant soldier that was serving as post guard in the biggest jail in history. An American right-winger, for instance, would probably have enough decency in him not to demand our compassionate empathy towards a USA marine that was injured while serving as a post guard in Guantànamo Bay. Similarly, not many would dare demand our compassionate empathy towards a German platoon who performed a role similar to Gilad Shalit’s in an East European concentration camp in the early 1940’s. Moreover, could anyone imagine the kind of Jewish outrage that would be evoked by an imaginary campaign by a right-wing, white supremacist slogan that reads “Free Wolfgang Heim, Human Being, Aryan”?

As much as I understand Noam Shalit’s deep concerns regarding the fate of his son, I must advise him with the hope that he takes it into consideration. His son Gilad is not exactly an innocent angel. If anything, like the rest of the Israelis, he is an integral part of the Israeli continuous sin. He was a soldier in a criminal army that serves a criminal cause that launches criminal wars. I honestly suggest to Mr. Noam Shalit to consider changing his rhetoric. He should drop his righteous preaching voice and replace it with either dignity or a desperate call for Hamas' mercy. You either acknowledge your son’s deeds and be proud of it as a nationalist militant Jew, alternatively, you may beg for Hamas’ kindness. If I were in his place, I would probably go for the second option. Noam Shalit better drop the word hostage of his vocabulary. Neither he nor his son are Hamas’ hostages. If anything they are both held hostage by a Jewish nationalist project that is going to bring the gravest disaster on the Jewish people. They are both prisoners of a criminal war against ‘thy neighbors’, the Palestinian civilian population.

Considering the crimes against humanity repeatedly committed by Israel, all that is left for the Jewish state is just rhetorical spin that indeed becomes more and more delusional and ineffective. Thus, it didn’t really take me by surprise to find out that Noam Shalit is not just a concerned parent, he is also a profound post-modernist polemicist . "Resistance against what? Against whom? “ wonders father Shalit, trying to dismiss the Palestinian cause altogether. You Hamas are taking us “hostages of symbols that at best belong to yesterday's wars, to yesterday's world, which has since changed beyond recognition."

Mr. Shalit, I would like you to tell us all what has changed ‘beyond recognition’ (except the landscape of Gaza)? Please enlighten us all because as far as we can see, you yourself still live on stolen Palestinian land, making the Biblical call for plunder into a contemporary devastating reality. As far as we can see, your sons and daughters are still engaged in murderous genocidal practices as they have been for the last six decades.

Mr. Shalit, I suggest that you wake up and the sooner the better. Nothing really changed, at least not in the Israeli side. The only change I may discern is the cheering fact that you and your people do not win anymore. Yes, you manage to kill children, women and old people, yes, you have managed to drop unconventional weapons on civilians dwelling in the most populated area on this planet and yet, you fail to win the war. Your military campaigns achieve nothing except death and carnage. Your murderous genocidal actions attained nothing but exposing what the National Jewish project is all about and what the Israeli is capable of. Your imaginary power of deterrence is melting down as I write these words and Hamas rockets keep pounding Southern Israel. Yet, the Jewish state has secured itself a prominent position as the embodiment of evil. If there is a ‘change beyond recognition’ to be detected is the fact that after Gaza we all know who you are and what you stand for.

Wrap Up

Gaza war summary

B. Michael 

Did the army draw lessons from its past performance? 

Unclear. The praise being lavished on the IDF still requires verification. This army participated in two wars: In Lebanon it was fired at and it emerged out of it by the skin of its teeth. In Gaza it was almost not fired at, and it immediately “won.” Therefore, the only learned conclusion we can draw from the Gaza events for the time being is that it is much easier to win without an enemy.

 

Did the Palestinians learn their lesson?

No. Death and destruction do not educate nations. This is just the way it is. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed in the second Intifada, yet this didn’t quite turn us into peace-lovers. It also didn’t make us moderate or logical.

 

Was our deterrence was restored? 

No; among other things, because we never had “deterrence.” Israel has been pulverizing the Palestinians for dozens of years now, yet they are having difficulty grasping this, and continue not to be deterred. This will be the case this time around as well.

 

Did we prove to the world that Hamas is hiding behind civilians? 

I’m sorry, but we haven’t done that either. We are the only ones who can buy this excuse. Gaza is all about crowded civilians, and underground movements are not regular armies. They live within their people. Didn’t Menachem Begin hide in a residential building in northern Tel Aviv? And weren’t kibbutzim and other communities replete with mythological arms caches? And weren’t members of the underground Haganah movement hiding among women and children? And weren’t roads at borderline communities mined to protect against invading Arab armies? But how can I compare. After all, this is us, and they are just them.

 

Was the army’s morality proven again? 

Oy vey. A moral army is not one that kills civilians and then rushes to boast how moral it is. A moral army is one that goes out of its way to avoid killing civilians, even at the price of risk-taking. When the brutal British occupier assassinated the Stern Gang’s commander it shot him at point-blank range at his hideout in the heart of a Tel Aviv neighborhood. The moral Israeli occupier would have apparently dropped a one-ton bomb on the entire neighborhood and explained that it did not wish to jeopardize its troops.

 

Did the media draw lessons from the past? 

Most certainly. Democracy’s watchdog was wonderfully tamed and became a dog hungry for patting that only wishes to safeguard the government. So there, something did come out of all this operation after all.

Ray of Hope

Global boycott movement marks its successes 

Jeff Handmaker

Responding to the many calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, solidarity movements around the world have marked many successes. It is important for human rights advocates to build on this momentum and seize the opportunity to do what is within their power to try and hold Israel accountable for its abuses of human rights and other international laws.

Since the initial BDS call by Palestinian intellectuals and academics in October 2003, which was followed by separate calls for sports, arts, economic and other calls for BDS, there has been a seismic shift in the global solidarity movement for human rights in Israel-Palestine. Lawyers, doctors, academics, students, trade unionists, school teachers and many other activists have marked successes around the world. Their efforts are an inspiring reflection of the South African anti-apartheid movement, where BDS was also used very effectively.

In first few weeks of 2009 alone, European, North American and South African solidarity movements have made remarkable progress:

• A growing number of politicians in Europe and North America have put forward uncomfortable, probing questions to their governments and clearly want to do more. One example is the "Break the Silence" campaign within the Dutch Labor Party.
• Numerous letters and opinion pieces have been published by prominent figures in major national newspapers, including statement by prominent lawyers and professors published by The Sunday Times on 11 January 2009.
• The global "Derail Veolia" campaign has grown in leaps and bounds. An important success was the decision by the Stockholm municipality to cancel an agreement with Veolia Transport, on the basis of its involvement in the Jerusalem light-rail project, to the tune of several billion euros.
• There have been calls for international investigations of war crimes from the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the UN Human Rights Council, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the head of UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestine refugees) and the UN Secretary General as well as scores of high-profile international lawyers around the world.
• The European Parliament managed to halt negotiations on strengthening the trading relationship between the EU and Israel in the framework of the Association Agreement and there are new, emboldened efforts to try and get the Association Agreement suspended altogether.
• Countless demonstrations have taken place in villages, towns and cities around the world, from Cape Town to Swansea and from Stockholm to Montreal and they are attracting decent publicity. Where there has been no television crew present, activists have made effective use of online resources such as YouTube.
• In South Africa there was a major success when dockworkers affiliated with SATAWU and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) refused to unload a ship containing Israeli goods. The story made national headlines for several days.
• Academic boycott is taking hold in academic institutions around the world -- students in particular have been leading the way on this, but academics also.

Israel's 22-day-long bombardment of Gaza, the greatest use of military force in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 1967 and what several commentators have already referred to as the Palestinian Sharpeville, has greatly fueled BDS efforts.

Especially before the blockade and recent carnage in Gaza, some activists raised concerns that by pursuing BDS, they may be curtailing dialogue, isolating progressive elements within Israel or even harming Palestinians. However, these concerns have greatly diminished as activists have realized how effective a mechanism BDS really is. In any event, the existence of a dialogue towards a just and sustainable peace between Palestinians and Israel is clearly non-existent, and there is little incentive on the part of Israel to engage in this any time soon. Progressive elements within Israel are still very marginal, but growing and many of these courageous, progressive Israelis have themselves called for BDS against Israel. As for harm against Palestinians, the fact that Palestinians themselves have called for BDS should be as clear a sign as any that the cost of not responding to the call causes far more harm.

Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, activists should continue to grasp the opportunities that BDS offers and build up the momentum that has been generated. As Israeli apartheid week, taking place worldwide from 1-8 March (see http://apartheidweek.org), solidarity activists should continue to work within the narrow, but highly significant space that exists for them to try and hold the Israeli government, and their own governments, accountable for abuses of human rights and humanitarian law against Palestinians.

Worthy of Life

Rules of War Weren’t Made for Only One People

Robert Fisk

The third and very final part of the “normality” of war. I have just finished reading Lyn Smith’s Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust. I admit to a personal interest. Lyn is a friend of mine for whom I have been recording my memories of Middle East wars for the Imperial War Museum. Nothing I have ever seen can equal this, however, and I can give only one example from the terrifying, outrageously brave and moving book this is.

It is the testimony of Leon Greenman, a British Jewish inmate of Auschwitz-Birkenau who arrived at the extermination camp with his wife and child. It speaks for itself. All other passages pale beside it:

“We were bullied out of the train and stood about waiting. It must have been about half past two in the morning. It was dark, a blue light was shining on the platform. We saw a few SS men walking up and down. They separated the men from the women. So I stood right in front of the men and I could see my wife there with the child in her arms. She threw me a kiss and she showed the baby ... Then one of the prisoners in a striped uniform commanded us to follow him. Well, we turned to the left and walked a little way for two or three minutes. A truck arrived, stopped near us and on the truck were all the women, children, babies and in the centre my wife and child standing up. They stood up to the light as if it was meant to be like that – so that I could recognise them. A picture I’ll never forget. All these were supposed to have gone to the bathroom to have a bath, to eat and to live. Instead they had to undress and go into the gas chambers, and two hours later those people were ashes, including my wife and child.”

I recalled this searing passage this week when I received a letter from a reader, taking me to task for my “constant downplaying of the suffering of the Palestinians on the grounds that their deaths and suffering are minimal when compared with that of the Second World War”. Now, I should say at once that this is a bit unfair. I was especially taking exception to a Palestinian blog now going the rounds which shows a queue of Palestinian women at one of Israel’s outrageous roadblocks and a (slightly) cropped picture of the Auschwitz selection ramp, the same platform upon which Leon Greenman was separated from his young wife and child more than 60 years ago. The picture of the Palestinian women is based on a lie; they are not queuing to be exterminated. Racist, inhumane and sometimes deadly – Palestinian women have died at these infernal checkpoints – but they are not queuing to be murdered.

Yet our reader does have a point. The Second World War, she says, “does put it in a category apart ... but surely if one is caught up in any war and sees one’s loved ones killed or maimed, one’s home destroyed ... then that must be the greatest cataclysm in one’s life. The fact that a hundred others, a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million are suffering likewise is immaterial to the individual’s suffering. The Second World War lasted six years. The Palestinian suffering has lasted over sixty…”

And yes, I’ll go along with this. If it’s an individual being deliberately killed, then this is no less terrible than any other individual, albeit that this second person may be one of six million others. The point, of course, is the centrality of the Holocaust and – Israel’s constant refrain – its exclusivity. Actually, the Armenian Holocaust – as I’ve said on umpteen occasions – is also central to all genocide studies. The same system of death marches, of camps, of primitive asphyxiation, even a few young German officers in Turkey watching the genocide in 1915 and then using the same methods on Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. Numbers matter.

But our reader has another point. “After all,” she says, “in the Second World War, after the entry of the US and USSR on our side, people could feel pretty positive about the outcome. But where is such hope for the Palestinians? And now to cap the horror the BBC is refusing to even show an appeal to help Gaza…” I’m not at all sure that W Churchill Esq would have entirely placed such confidence in the outcome of the Second World War – he was initially worried that the Americans would use up their firepower on the Japanese rather than against Hitler’s Germany.

I think, however, there is yet one more point. The rules of war – the Geneva Conventions and all the other post-Second World War laws – were meant to prevent another Holocaust. They were specifically designed to ensure that no one should ever again face the destruction of Mrs Greenman and her child. They were surely not made only for one race of people. And it is these rules which Israel so disgracefully flouted in Gaza. It’s a bit like the refrain from Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara and a whole host of other apparatchiks when the torture at Abu Ghraib was revealed. Well, yes, they told us, it was bad – but not as bad as Saddam Hussein’s regime.

And of course, this argument leads to perdition. True, we were bad – but not as bad as the Baath party. Or the Khmer Rouge. Or Hitler’s Germany and the SS. Or the Ottoman Turks – though I noticed movingly that one of Lyn’s Jewish Holocaust survivors mentions the Armenians. No, the numbers game works both ways. A thousand Palestinians die in Gaza. But what if the figure were 10,000? Or 100,000? No, no, of course that wouldn’t happen. But the rules of war are made for all to obey. Yes, I know that the Jews of Europe had no Hamas to provide the Nazis with an excuse for their deaths. But a Palestinian woman and her child are as worthy of life as a Jewish woman and her child on the back of a lorry in Auschwitz.

A Mighty Big Tunnel

If Israel's weapons came through a tunnel 

Kathy Kelly

Since I returned from Gaza people have asked me, how do the people of Gaza manage? How do they keep going after being traumatized by bombing and punished by a comprehensive state of siege? I wonder myself. I know that whether the loss of life is on the Gaza or the Israeli side of the border, bereaved survivors feel the same pain and misery. On both sides of the border, I think children pull people through horrendous and horrifying nightmares. Adults squelch their panic, cry in private and strive to regain semblances of normal life, wanting to carry their children through a precarious ordeal.

And the children want to help their parents. In Rafah, the morning of 18 January, when it appeared there would be at least a lull in the bombing, I watched children heap pieces of wood on plastic tarps and then haul their piles toward their homes. The little ones seemed proud to be helping their parents recover from the bombing. I'd seen just this happy resilience among Iraqi children, after the 2003 "Shock and Awe" bombing, as they found bricks for their parents to use for a makeshift shelter in a bombed military base.

Children who survive bombing are eager to rebuild. They don't know how jeopardized their lives are, how ready adults are to bomb them again.

In Rafah, that morning, an older man stood next to me, watching the children at work. "You see," he said, looking upward as an Israeli military surveillance drone flew past, "if I pick up a piece of wood, if they see me carrying just a piece of wood, they might mistake it for a weapon, and I will be a target. So these children collect the wood."

While the high-tech drone collected information, "intelligence" that helps determine targets for more bombing, toddlers collected wood. Their parents, whose homes were partially destroyed, needed the wood for warmth at night and for cooking. Because of the Israeli blockade against Gaza, there wasn't any gas.

With the border crossing at Rafah now sealed again, people who want to obtain food, fuel, water, construction supplies and goods needed for everyday life will have to increasingly rely on the damaged tunnel industry to import these items from the Egyptian side of the border. Israel's government says that Hamas could use the tunnels to import weapons, and weapons could kill innocent civilians, so the Israeli military has no choice but to bomb the neighborhood built up along the border, as they have been doing.

Suppose that the US weapon makers had to use a tunnel to deliver weapons to Israel. The US would have to build a mighty big tunnel to accommodate the weapons that Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Caterpillar have supplied to Israel. The size of such a tunnel would be an eighth wonder of the world, a Grand Canyon of a tunnel, an engineering feat of the ages.

Think of what would have to come through.

Imagine Boeing's shipments to Israel traveling through an enormous underground tunnel, large enough to accommodate the wingspans of planes, sturdy enough to allow passage of trucks laden with missiles. According to the UK's Indymedia Corporate Watch, 2009, Boeing has sent Israel 18 AH-64D Apache Longbow fighter helicopters, 63 Boeing F-15 Eagle fighter planes, 102 Boeing F-16 fighter planes, 42 Boeing AH-64 Apache fighter helicopters, F-16 Peace Marble II and III Aircraft, four Boeing 777s, and Arrow II interceptors, plus Israel Aircraft Industries-developed Arrow missiles, and Boeing AGM-114 D Longbow Hellfire missiles.

In September of last year, the US government approved the sale of 1,000 Boeing GBU-9 small diameter bombs to Israel, in a deal valued at up to $77 million.

Now that Israel has dropped so many of those bombs on Gaza, Boeing shareholders can count on more sales, more profits, if Israel buys new bombs from them. Perhaps there are more massacres in store. It would be important to maintain the tunnel carefully.

Raytheon, one of the largest US arms manufacturers, with annual revenues of around $20 billion, is one of Israel's main suppliers of weapons. In September last year, the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved the sale of Raytheon kits to upgrade Israel's Patriot missile system at a cost of $164 million. Raytheon would also use the tunnel to bring in Bunker Buster bombs as well as Tomahawk and Patriot missiles.

Lockheed Martin is the world's largest defense contractor by revenue, with reported sales in 2008 of $42.7 billion. Lockheed Martin's products include the Hellfire precision-guided missile system, which has reportedly been used in the recent Gaza attacks. Israel also possesses 350 F-16 jets, some purchased from Lockheed Martin. Think of them coming through the largest tunnel in the world.

Maybe Caterpillar Inc. could help build such a tunnel. Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of construction (and destruction) equipment, with more than $30 billion in assets, holds Israel's sole contract for the production of the D9 military bulldozer, specifically designed for use in invasions of built-up areas. The US government buys Caterpillar bulldozers and sends them to the Israeli army as part of its annual foreign military assistance package. Such sales are governed by the US Arms Export Control Act, which limits the use of US military aid to "internal security" and "legitimate self defense" and prohibits its use against civilians.

Israel topples family houses with these bulldozers to make room for settlements. All too often, they topple them on the families inside. American peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death standing between one of these bulldozers and a Palestinian doctor's house in 2003.

In truth, there's no actual tunnel bringing US-manufactured weapons to Israel. But the transfers of weapons and the US complicity in Israel's war crimes are completely invisible to many American people.

The US is the primary source of Israel's arsenal. For more than 30 years, Israel has been the largest recipient of US foreign assistance and since 1985 Israel has received about 3 billion dollars each year in military and economic aid from the US ("US and Israel Up in Arms," Frida Berrigan, Foreign Policy in Focus, 17 January 2009)

So many Americans can't even see this flood of weapons, and what it means, for us, for Gaza's and Israel's children, for the world's children.

And so, people in Gaza have a right to ask us, how do you manage? How do you keep going? How can you sit back and watch while your taxes pay to massacre us? If it would be wrong to send rifles and bullets and primitive rockets into Gaza, weapons that could kill innocent Israelis, then isn't it also wrong to send Israelis the massive arsenal that has been used against us, killing more than 400 of our children in the past six weeks, maiming and wounding thousands more?

But, standing over the tunnels in Rafah that morning under a sunny Gaza sky, hearing the constant droning buzz of mechanical spies waiting to call in an aerial bombardment, no one asked me, an American, those hard questions. The man standing next to me pointed to a small shed where he and others had built a fire in an ash can. They wanted me to come inside, warm up, and receive a cup of tea.

Refugee

Refugee

Mahmoud Darwish 

They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You’re a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You’re a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You’re a refugee.

Denial of Basic Human Needs

Both the below articles were taken from PRESSTV (http://www.presstv.ir). I think they are a clear example of the Israeli policy, as outlined by Dov Weisglass - adviser to Olmert - in 2006, "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."  

Israel denies Gaza access to clean water

Israel has refused to allow a French-made water purification system into Gaza amid a drinking water crisis in the Palestinian strip. 

The French Foreign Ministry said Friday that Tel Aviv had blocked the entry of a much-needed water purification station into Gaza and had forced its repatriation. 

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Eric Chevallier said the move has sparked an outcry in the Elysée, prompting it to summon the Israeli ambassador to Paris to explain why the system was denied access. 

"There were a very great number of steps taken at all levels to try to get the water purification station into Gaza," he said, adding that Israel's explanation was not satisfactory. 

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recently warned that Israel's 23-day onslaught on Gaza has pushed its sewage system on the brink of collapse and thus increased risks of groundwater contamination in the Palestinian territory. 

"The most dangerous thing is the contamination of drinking water with sewage. We need an international organization like the World Health Organization to investigate the matter," said Monther Shoblak, head of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU). 

According to the UN, Israel's three week-long saturation bombing of the Palestinian territory has seriously damaged pipes and has left drinking water in very short supply. 

Warning of the serious public health risks, the World Bank has urged the Israeli government to allow enough fuel into Gaza to operate some 170 water and sewage pumps there. 

The bank called on Israel to allow maintenance crews to shore up a sewage lake in northern Gaza before it overflows at the expense of the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the area.

UN warns of acute food crisis in Gaza

The United Nations says Gazans face an acute food crisis and accelerating rates of malnutrition as a result of the war on the territory. 

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Friday that Israel's offensive into Gaza has taken a heavy toll on the territory's agriculture sector and has heightened risks of food insecurity and undernourishment. 

"Almost all of Gaza's 13,000 families who depend on farming, herding and fishing have suffered damage to their assets during the recent conflict and many farms have been completely destroyed," reads a statement by the FAO. 

The Rome-based FAO asserted that the 1.5 million population of Gaza are suffering from an acute shortage of nutritious, locally-produced and affordable food. "Meat and animal protein is generally unavailable," it added. 

"Food supplies were already running low in Gaza due to the closing of its borders in the 18 months prior to the Israeli military offensive," the FAO continued. 

According to relief workers, the humanitarian situation in the impoverished strip is at its worst with over 1.1 million people -- about 75 percent of the residents of Gaza -- dependent on food aid. 

This comes as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recently warned of a looming drinking water crisis in the Palestinian territory as a result of attacks on the aging water pipes in the strip. 

According to the office, drinking water in Gaza is scarce as Israel has pushed the Gaza sewage system to the brink of collapse and has thus increased risks of groundwater contamination. 

"The most dangerous thing is the contamination of drinking water with sewage. We need an international organization like the World Health Organization to investigate the matter," said Monther Shoblak, head of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU). 

The military operations on Gaza came at a time when Palestinians were already suffering from an 18-month blockade, which stripped the area of vital goods, including food, fuel, medical supplies and construction materials. 

We Need to Talk...

Listen Up, George

Nicholas Noe

Working for (then) First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during the summer of 1999, I learned something very simple but also very important about politics: if you want to gain people's trust and find just solutions to the issues they face, you have to, as a first step, listen as broadly as possible.

(Now) Secretary of State Clinton understood exactly that when she launched her first ever run for public office by travelling the length and width of New York over the course of several weeks, hearing the diverse array of problems which the people of the state faced both upstate and down. Predictably, much of the New York media derided "Hillary's Listening Tour" as a clumsy ploy that stood little chance of overcoming her status as a "carpetbagger" (she had never held residency in New York until she ran for Senate). By the time the tour was done, however, Hillary and the campaign both believed that she had firmly planted her feet as a credible candidate in one of the most politically bruising states – primarily because she understood and could sincerely articulate the concerns of different New Yorkers, not just those New York City types with which she identified most.

President Obama, for one, appears to have taken notice of the approach. In his first interview Monday with an Arab TV network, Al-Arabiya, he told the interviewer that his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, was headed to the region to listen, "because all too often the United States starts by dictating – in the past on some of these issues – and we don't always know all the factors that are involved. So let's listen."

On its face, the break with the old Bush administration way of dealing with the Middle East could not be more clear. After all, Karen Hughes, Bush's former counsellor and PR envoy to the Arab and Islamic worlds, had clumsily set up a "war room" at the State Department for the overriding purpose of getting the US message out better, faster and wider, rather than learning more about what the people in the region had to say about the policies themselves.

But, as Mitchell visits the princes, kings, lame duck presidents and prime ministers and other assorted rulers in the region (otherwise known as US allies), two important poles will apparently be missing from this particular "listening tour": the political parties that are increasingly playing central roles in the Arab-Israeli conflict, specifically Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as the people themselves whom these parties partially represent through democratic institutions.

So, President Obama may have been fudging it when he told Al-Arabiya that Mitchell, "is going to be speaking to all the major parties involved". (In fact, Obama did not mention Hamas during the interview; strangely, was not asked about them; and had already made it clear that Mitchell would not be meeting with them). As Ian Black also commented, he should have been more forthright, certainly.

The deeper problem, though, lies in the overall approach – one that seems, at the outset at least, couched and clothed in the guise of change, but holding fast to some of the same destructive assumptions, calculations and fears that have failed the US, the Arabs and the Israelis in the past. If a sincere engagement with Hamas and Hezbollah is politically impossible – a confounding position given the US's direct negotiations with Sunni jihadists in Iraq who have killed US troops, elements of the Taliban that have supported al-Qaida, and Iran itself – then Mitchell should at least start by unshackling one debilitating aspect of US policy and spend some time listening to those average people who support the groups we say we will not deal with.

Take some time, then, to listen to the residents of Gaza. (Incredibly, the Quartet's envoy, Tony Blair, has never even visited the Strip.) And spend some time in the southern suburbs of Beirut, too, if your portfolio permits, listening to people who are not members of Hezbollah, but who can articulate a compelling set of reasons why they support the party's de facto and de jure status as a resistance group in Lebanon. Both Hamas and Hezbollah would be hard-pressed to prevent you from making such visits, given their oft-stated attitudes on the importance of change in US policy, as well as their open calls to deal directly and fairly with the region's people.

Of course, this type of "listening tour" would probably not, on its own, recalibrate the US position as mediator in the region – a recalibration for which many here are desperately hoping. But it certainly stands a better chance of demonstrating some of the humbleness that Obama has said is a founding principle for resolving conflict, in contrast to the Bush administration's practice of ignoring and aggressively isolating whole peoples and movements.

As the entire region stands perched on the edge of a potentially violent series of showdowns – in particular, with the cracks already appearing in the Hamas-Israeli ceasefire in Gaza – it is critical to start a credible listening process now, even if it involves those voices which seem at first glance to be so unfamiliar and dangerous.

More Media Lies

Will AP Ever Stop Lying For Israel? 

Dan Alba

In opening a scathing dismantlement of historical myths on Israel-Palestine, world-renowned investigative journalist, John Pilger, recently wrote:

"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie."

When life-saving — arguably genocide-preventing — information is systematically and deliberately misreported and concealed by the world's largest news organizations, you can safely consider it, too, an act of lying.

On January 9, The Associated Press released a report titled "A look at the Islamic militant Hamas group." Like virtually all AP reports on Israel-Palestine, it is loaded with examples of journalistic malpractice: omission of the most basic and vital facts, use of the most sensationalistic or flatly wrong language, contradictions, and untruths.

From the report:

NAME: Arabic for "zeal." Is acronym of Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah, or Islamic Resistance Movement. Use first was in 1987 leaflet presaging launch of first Palestinian uprising against Israel, 1987-93.

GOAL: To establish Islamic theocracy in Israel, West Bank and Gaza Strip. Does not recognize state of Israel and committed to its destruction.

OPERATIONS: Built grass-roots base through preaching and network of health, education and welfare services in Gaza Strip and West Bank. Preaches armed resistance against Israel and has staged dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks, killing hundreds. Listed as terror group by U.S., European Union and Israel. [1]

In the "NAME" point, AP admits that the name of the organization reveals its main purpose (resistance). So, why do AP reports always refer to Hamas as the "Islamic militant group" or "violent Islamic extremist group"? Why is AP so troubled by the phrase Islamic resistance movement, or even Palestinian resistance group? Is it the same reason AP doesn't mention Hamas' raison d’être: resisting the belligerent Israeli occupation of Palestine?

In the "OPERATIONS" point, AP firstly mentions Hamas' social and political foundations; so again, why refer to Hamas as solely "militant"? Are armed, occupying, belligerent Israeli "troops" not also "militant"? And what of their religious designations? Are they not "Jewish militants"?

In the "GOAL" point, AP uses deceitfully sensationalistic language and contradicts what it reported in "NAME." AP is basically lying here. Hamas' primary stated goal is to liberate Palestine from the Israeli occupation. The establishment of an Islamic state ("theocracy") is ancillary thereto. A theocracy was, in fact, established in the Levant more than 60 years ago; it is known as Israel ("the Jewish state").

And when reporting that Hamas is "dedicated to [Israel's] destruction," AP omits Hamas' peaceful and quite rational overtures these last few years, contradicting that sensationalistic and Orwellian inversion of reality. And what are the authoritative legal grounds for requiring Hamas to "recognize" Israel? There are none. And morally speaking, how can a stateless group of individuals be held at bay over their refusal to recognize an already established state? If anything, the roles should be reversed. Does Israel recognize statehood for Palestinians? Is Israel dedicated to the destruction of Palestine? Historical and ongoing facts on the ground (as opposed to loosely-interpreted and mostly irrelevant words in a charter) scream, "duh!"

AP mentions Hamas' violent and arguably immoral tactics. Indeed, detonating a bomb, knowing that non-combatant civilians will die as a result, is immoral and deserving of public contempt. On the other hand, if AP's readers knew that many, if not most, of those attacks were aimed at armed-to-the-teeth, belligerent "troops" and "settlers," then perhaps AP's readers would wonder whether there was no other feasible way of hitting legitimate military targets in resistance to the unbearable occupation. Furthermore, AP conceals another vital fact: Hamas, for more than four years now, has honored its commitment not to employ "suicide bombing" as a resistance tactic. [2] 

Other Huge and Unavoidable Questions

As an unspoken rule of thumb, AP's reportage on Israel-Palestine is decidedly Israeli-centric. [3]

How else can AP answer the following questions honestly without admitting to blatant journalistic fraud?

• Why hasn't AP released a similar report on the state of Israel? What is there to hide?
• AP parrots the official (and dishonest) Israeli line, that Israel launched the current carpet-bombing and invasion of Gaza in order to stop the firing of rockets into Israel, as if it were the Gospel; so why won't AP even mention the Palestinian reason for firing those rockets?
• When reporting that Hamas et al. are considered terrorist organizations by the U.S., Israeli, and other governments, why not also mention that Hamas et al. consider certain U.S. and Israeli entities to be terrorist organizations? The Iranian Parliament actually made the designation official!
• Why does AP insist that Hamas are clearly and uniquely the violent, extreme, and iron-grip faction — and that their politicall opposition, Fatah, are clearly the "moderates" — when moderatiion is defined by stuff like this, this, and this?
• If it is so true, so relevant, and so worth constantly repeating that Hamas is dedicated to Israel's destruction, then how, pray tell, should Hamas go about defeating the world's 4th-most-powerful military, which is nuclear-armed and blindly backed and subsidized by the world's preeminent superpower?

Perhaps AP takes its readers for such ignorant fools because AP, being "the world's largest and most trusted independent source of news and information," is supremely confident in its ability to get away with massively misinforming them to the point of utter state-worshiping servility.