Palestine in Words

Accumulating Lies

2009-03-09T14:05:00.001+03:00

Gaza Homes Destruction ‘Wanton’

BBC News

Human rights investigators say Israeli forces engaged in "wanton destruction" of Palestinian homes during the recent conflict in Gaza.

Amnesty International has told the BBC News website the methods used raised concerns about war crimes.

Israel's military said buildings were destroyed because of military "operational needs". The Israeli Defense Forces said they operated in accordance with international law during the conflict.

However, the use of mines to destroy homes contradicted this claim, the head of the Amnesty International fact-finding mission to southern Israel and Gaza, Donatella Rovera, has argued.

Israeli troops had to leave their vehicles to plant the mines, indicating that they faced no danger and that there was no military or operational justification, she said.

Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group that gathers and circulates the testimonies of Israeli soldiers, has also told the BBC News website that its findings from the Gaza war suggested many demolitions had been carried out when there was no immediate threat.

"From the testimonies that we've gathered, lots of demolitions - buildings demolished either by bulldozers or explosives - were done after the area was under Israeli control," said Yehuda Shaul, one of the group's members.

Destruction of civilian property is not illegal in itself under international law, but it must be justifiable on military grounds - for example if the building was booby trapped or being used as cover for enemy fighters.

Thousands of buildings were destroyed in the 22-day Israeli operation. Some of them were police stations, mosques and government premises attacked in targeted airstrikes, in many cases with surrounding buildings left in tact.

Reduced to rubble

There were also whole neighbourhoods reduced to rubble in areas where the Israeli ground forces were present.

Ms Rovera said Amnesty International was concerned about "large scale destruction of homes and other civilian properties" during the conflict.

"The destruction was, in our view, and according to our findings, wanton destruction - it could not be justified on military grounds," she said.

Ms Rovera said her team found fragments of anti-tank mines in and around destroyed properties.

Their use was also consistent with remains of houses, collapsed in on themselves as if blown up from below, rather than destroyed from above as in an airstrike, she said.

Troops would have had to leave their armoured vehicles to plant them and rig up the detonators, she said.

"Unless those operating on the ground felt not just 100% but 200% secure - that the places were not booby trapped, that they wouldn't come under fire - they could not have got out of the vehicles," she said. "They would not have used that method."

"The use of the method tells us even more that there wasn't the kind of danger that might have made it lawful to destroy some of those properties," Ms Rovera said.

"Wanton destruction on a large scale would qualify as a war crime," she said, adding that the practice was among several used in the conflict by both sides that Amnesty is concerned may constitute war crimes.

In one case visited by the BBC, six homes belonging to the extended family of Raed al-Atamna in the Izbit Abed Rabbo area, near the border with Israel, were destroyed. Mr Atamna said a UN ordnance clearance team had found several mines in and around the remains of one of the homes.

He said he and his family had fled the area during the Israeli military operation, and returned to find their homes demolished.

'Substantial operational needs'

The IDF said buildings in the Gaza Strip were destroyed during Operation Cast Lead due to "substantial operational needs".

In a written statement, it said: "For example, buildings were either booby-trapped, located over tunnels, or fire was opened from within them in the direction of IDF soldiers.

"The terrorist organisations operated from within the civilian population, using them as a cover and made cynical use of the IDF's strict rules of engagement, opening fire from within civilian population centres, mosques, schools, hospitals and even private residences of citizens in the Gaza Strip.

"The troops were briefed and trained to avoid harming uninvolved civilians and did all they could to give warning in advance so that civilians could distance themselves from combat zones.

"The IDF emphasises that the terrorist organisation, Hamas, and its infrastructure were the target of Operation Cast Lead, and not the civilian population in Gaza."

A military source said the mines used do not detonate automatically and therefore do not represent a danger when left unexploded in the field.

Outnumbered

2009-03-08T13:07:00.000+03:00

Palestinian Women are Israel’s Demographic Nightmare

Iqbal Tamimi

Apartheid Israel has killed 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza because its fears are of a demographic nature. Its army never cared what age or gender it killed. Israel’s war machine was harvesting Palestinians of all ages and sizes, young and old, disabled and healthy, pregnant women and young girls, the ones resisting the occupation and the ones who are still too young to understand such things.

Israel’s nightmare is on a demographic scale. It is frightened at the prospect of being outnumbered, so their answer is to starve people to death, stop them from receiving medication so that they would die of ‘natural causes’ then bar the media from investigating that, and then knit a freshly made lie to suit its new tailored fib. Israel’s actions translate into the concept of a terrorist in every Palestinian cradle...

During the time, since last December, that Israel was feeling victorious and happy counting 1,300 massacred Palestinians, Palestinian women retaliated by giving birth to 3,570 babies.

The Zionists consider the Palestinian woman a demographic bomb, a highly fertile creature, as fertile as the soil of Palestine. The more Israel sends a Palestinian on a one way trip to the womb of the land, the more Palestinian women’s wombs show generosity, giving birth to more heroes.

At a time when the average fertility in Israel is 2.6 births per woman, Gaza is considered one of the most natal-fertile places in the world, with an average of 6 births per woman. Israel sustains a high percentage of senior citizens while Gaza has an abundance of youngsters. According to UNICEF’s report on the 3rd of March 2009, the total number of children in Gaza is approximately 793,520, or 56 per cent of the population! This was one of the main reasons that forced Israel to stop its military incursions, for there are 4,170 humans per every square Kilometre in Gaza.

This brings us back to Israel’s devious methods of trying to kill women who are considered as factories for making resistance activists, without incurring responsibility directly -- with its blockades and checkpoints where sick women or women about to give birth suffer by not being able to reach hospitals, denying them the right to travel or import foods and medicines, bombing their infrastructure -- leaving them with no water to drink or use for hygiene, the near total shut-down of the sewage-system, spraying them with chemicals from above and burning them with white phosphorus below...

To Whom it May Concern

2009-03-02T13:28:00.002+03:00

THUGS - Terrorists Holding Unilaterally Gilad Shalit

Raja Chemayel

Head Quarters-office,

Under the rubbles of Gaza-City,

3rd Street left to the 2nd Avenue,

Behind all the burned school,

Gaza the liberated...

Announcement of Delay

We regret to announce an unforeseen delay in releasing

that mini-War-Criminal-Israeli-soldier

Mr. Gilad Shalit,

in exchange for

hundreds of innocent-Palestinian-hostages.

The circumstances of this delay

are beyond our control

and yet we ask for apologies.

It came to our attention that Mr. Gilad Shalit

has been hit by some Phosphoric bombs

thrown at us by some barbaric-army, lately...

Gilad has been treated now to cure his

constant-and-permanent-burning-wounds

but the delay is actually to be blamed on

the Regime of Mubarak which is not allowing

the medication to enter at the borders,

so we are using the tunnels, which takes longer

and of course, costs us more.

As soon as those medications will reach us

and as soon as Olmert will be ready to talk

to smaller Terrorists, than he actually is,

we shall, naturally and immediately release Gilad Shalit.

Signed :

THUGS

The rightful Terrorists

defending their own country

from the bigger-unrightful-Terrorists

Ongoing Suffering

2009-03-01T14:41:00.000+03:00

The starving of Gaza; why Israel's offensive against Gaza will continue to claim lives for years to come

Eric Ruder

ISRAEL'S WAR on Gaza took a terrible toll in human casualties. Bodies are still being exhumed from the rubble, and Israel's refusal to open Gaza's border crossings to allow in humanitarian supplies has made treating the injured a tortuously slow endeavor.

But one less-noticed effect of Israel's brutal assault on the civilian and economic infrastructure of Gaza--combined with the suffocating effects of the 18-month siege that came before--is the further destruction of Gaza's long-term ability to provide food for its population.

The United Nations Children's Fund said that economic losses as a result of the war total $1.9 billion, which is significantly larger than Gaza's annual economic output. "According to the World Food Program, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization and Palestinian officials, between 35 percent and 60 percent of the agriculture industry has been wrecked by the three-week Israeli attack," reported Britain's Guardian newspaper.

This could make a huge portion of Gaza's population entirely dependent on food aid from the outside. "When we have given a food ration in Gaza, it was never a full ration, but to complement the diet," said Christine van Nieuwenhuyse, the World Food Program's country director. "Now it is going to be almost impossible for Gaza to produce the food it needs for the next six to eight months, assuming that the agriculture can be rehabilitated."

The effects are hitting home for Samir Sawafiri, a poultry farmer. Surveying the carcasses of some 65,000 chickens strewn across his farm in Zeitoun, while several dozen live chickens--the only ones that survived the war--scrounged for food, Sawafiri told a reporter, "They are all that is left, and I have nowhere to put them."

The poultry farms around Zeitoun, which is on the eastern edge of Gaza City, once provided the bulk of Gaza's fresh eggs. But almost nothing remains standing now.

"I evacuated on January 9," said Sawafiri. "Three days later, on January 12, tanks came with bulldozers and leveled the fields. They wanted to spoil the economy--that's the only answer. There's no justification for what they did."

Rebuilding the farms will require investment running into the tens of millions of dollars, according to Fuad El-Jamassi, director of Gaza's Environmental and Health Ministry. Further complicating the rebuilding process is the fact that Israel does not allow live animals to cross into Gaza. So the only hope of restocking Gaza's poultry farms depends on whether Israel will restrict the import of fertilized eggs, which can then be taken to a hatchery.

The most pressing challenge for many of Gaza's farmers is planting crops in the next week or two, or they will miss the growing season. But their fields have been destroyed by Israel's repeated bombardments, and are strewn with debris, unexploded ordnance and hazardous chemical dust.

Aid organizations such as Oxfam and Save the Children have been waiting for Israel's permission to deliver humanitarian supplies massed at the border. But for more than two weeks, Israel has refused to allow them through Gaza's border crossings. "We've had every reason under the sun given to us for not going in...Security, not the right day, that is was closed for holiday, that the right people were not available, that we would hear tomorrow," says Mike Baily of Oxfam.

Oxfam is seeking to deliver basic items such as food and medicine, but it also plans to do what it can to help Gaza's farmers prepare their fields for the critical planting deadline. "If we don't plant crops now, we won't harvest in three or four month's time, and the one and a half million people of Gaza will be completely dependent on food aid," says Baily.

Evonne Frederickson, an aid worker with Sweden's Palestinian Solidarity Association, tells the same story. Her efforts to get mental health experts and doctors into Gaza have been repeatedly stymied. But she says that Israeli policy toward aid agencies has been capricious for a long time. "Sometimes you get in, sometimes you don't, so they're playing with those who are working with the aid to Gaza," she says.

On February 5, Israel announced it would allow 100 trucks a day through Gaza's border crossings with humanitarian relief supplies. But that's still less than the 130 trucks a day that crossed on average during the second half of 2008, and far less than the 600 trucks a day estimated to be needed to sustain Gaza's population and provide the critical goods necessary for rebuilding its shattered economy.

Another pressing threat to Gaza's agricultural viability is the raw sewage and toxic chemicals that threaten to contaminate the fields and leech into Gaza's groundwater system.

"This is a top priority," said Jens Toyberg-Frandzen, a special representative of the UN Development Program. "The rubble is mixed with poisonous harmful materials, and may include unexploded ordnances. It needs to be urgently removed to protect the lives of Palestinians in Gaza and to facilitate immediate access to basic humanitarian and social services."

El-Jamassi worries about the need for experts familiar with the chemicals used by Israel to assess the situation. "There were many chemicals used here by the Israelis--there has been chemical dust in the air," he said. "We need experts to come tell us what to do, if this is safe. There are no experts here."

Contamination of Gaza's water supply from failed sewage systems also poses a significant risk. According to Rachel Bergstein, who reports regularly on environmental issues in the Middle East:

Gaza's ecological conditions are already conducive to groundwater pollution. The sandy desert soil tends to absorb water--or pollutants like sewage--easily. Also, the groundwater is fairly close to the surface, so access wells are fairly shallow and easily contaminated...

Due to both a lack of investment and an inability to access materials and equipment for repairs, Gaza's sewage treatment infrastructure was in a pretty bad state of disrepair before the war began at the end of December. Israel's military actions caused even more damage to many of the pipes. As a result, top water engineers in Gaza report that the entire system is on the verge of collapse, posing a severe threat to Gaza's groundwater resources.

Palestinian Walks

2009-02-26T11:53:00.004+03:00

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!

2009-02-25T10:26:00.003+03:00

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

2009-02-24T15:03:00.001+03:00

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

2009-02-23T13:54:00.001+03:00

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

2009-02-19T11:04:00.002+03:00

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

2009-02-18T13:13:00.001+03:00

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

2009-02-16T14:49:00.001+03:00

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

2009-02-15T13:33:00.002+03:00

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 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...

2009-02-11T14:38:00.001+03:00

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

2009-02-11T13:49:00.003+03:00

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 dâ€™Ãªtre: 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]

Morality Then... and Now

2009-02-09T12:17:00.003+03:00

War Reporters Used to Prefer Morality Over Impartiality

Robert Fisk

The “normality” of war, part two. We had a great storm in Beirut this week, thunder-cracks like gunfire, great green waves crashing below my balcony, rain like hail. So I curled up on my balcony sofa – coat and red scarf and thick socks – and opened a book sent by a kindly Independent reader, a much bent copy of Snyder and Morris’s 1949 A Treasury of Great Reporting. And I began to wonder – in an age when the BBC can refuse help to the suffering because of its “impartiality” – whether we still report war with the same power and passion as the men and women of an earlier generation.

“ ‘Turn back! Retreat!’ shouted the men from the front, ‘we’re whipped, we’re whipped!’ They cursed and tugged at their horses’ heads and struggled with frenzy to get past.” This is William Howard Russell covering the Union rout at Bull Run for The Times. “Soon I met soldiers who were coming through the corn, mostly without arms… The ambulances were crowded with soldiers, but it did not look as if there were many wounded… Men literally screamed with rage or fright when their way was blocked… At every shot a convulsion, as it were, seized upon the morbid mass of bones, sinew, wood, and iron, and thrilled through it, giving new energy and action to its desperate efforts to get free from itself… In silence I passed over the long bridge.”

And here is Archibald Forbes reporting the collapse of the Paris Commune in 1871 for the London Daily News. “The Parisians of civil life are caitiffs to the last drop of their thin, sour, white blood. But yesterday they had cried ‘Vive la Commune!’... Today they rubbed their hands with livid currish joy to have it in their power to denounce a Communard and reveal his hiding place. Very eager at this work are the dear creatures of women… They have found him, the misérable!... a tall, pale, hatless man with something not ignoble in his carriage. His lower lip is trembling, but his brow is firm, and the eye of him has some pride and defiance in it. They yell – the crowd – ‘Shoot him; shoot him!’... men club their rifles and bring them down on that head. They are firing on the flaccid carcass now, thronging about it like blowflies…”

The first German war crime of the 1914-18 war – the sack of the Belgian city of Louvain – was covered by Richard Harding Davis of the New York Tribune, forced by the Germans to stay aboard his military train as it circled the burning city. “When by troop train we reached Louvain, the entire heart of the city was destroyed and fire had reached the Boulevard Tirlemont, which faces the railroad station. The night was windless, and the sparks rose in steady, leisurely pillars, falling back into the furnace from which they sprang… Outside the station in the public square the people of Louvain passed in an unending procession, women bare-headed, weeping men carrying the children asleep on their shoulders… Once they were halted, and among them were marched a line of men. They well knew their fellow townsmen. These were on their way to be shot.”

Now a slightly selfish Quentin Reynolds at the fall of Paris in 1940: “I had stayed behind to write the story of the siege of Paris… Now it developed that there would be no siege of Paris. The Grand Boulevard was almost deserted this morning. One middle-aged woman was sitting at a table at a sidewalk café, one of the very few where one could still get coffee and bread. She had driven into the city that morning in her small one-seated (sic) car. She wanted to sell her car. I bought it on the spot. Now I was mobile.”

And Ed Murrow for CBS in the London Blitz: “Millions of people ask only, ‘What can we do to help? Why must there be 800,000 unemployed when we need these shelters?... What are the war aims of this country? What shall we do with victory when it’s won? What sort of Europe will be built when and if this stress has passed?’ These questions are being asked by thoughtful people in this country. Mark it down that in the three weeks of the air Blitz against this country, more books and pamphlets have been published on these subjects than in any similar period of the war… Mark it down that these people are both brave and patient, that all are equal under the bomb… You are witnessing the beginning of a revolution, maybe the death of an age.”

Finally, the sharp tongue of Rebecca West for The New Yorker at the Nuremberg trials. “Though one has read surprising news of Göring for years, he still surprises. He is, above all things, soft. He wears either a German air-force uniform or a light beach-suit in the worst of playful taste, and both hang loosely on him, giving him an air of pregnancy. He has thick brown young hair, the coarse, bright skin of an actor who has used grease paint for decades, and the preternaturally deep wrinkles of the drug addict; it adds up to something like the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. His appearance makes a pointed but obscure reference to sex… it appears in the Palace of Justice that it is only the Americans and the British who can hold up a mirror to Germany and help her to solve her own perplexing mystery – that mystery which, in Nuremberg and the countryside around it, is set out in flowers, flowers which concert by being not only lovely but beloved… ‘The people where I live now send me in my breakfast tray strewn with pansies,’ says the French doctor who is custodian of the relics at the Palace of Justice (the lampshade made of human skin, the shrunken head of the Polish Jew).”

It’s not just the power of the writing I’m talking about here; the screaming soldiers, the dying Communard, the condemned men, the woman wanting to sell her car, the death of an age, the flowers. These reporters were spurred, weren’t they, by the immorality of war. They cared. They were not frightened of damaging their “impartiality”. I wonder if we still write like this.

Gaza Survey... Assessing the Damages

2009-02-05T10:41:00.002+03:00

CARE, in partnership with Alpha International surveying firm, conducted a three-day phone survey of families in Gaza to gather basic data on the humanitarian needs; status of electricity, water and sewage systems; impact of cash, food and medicine shortages; psychological impact on children; and the condition of displaced people sheltering with families or neighbours. The key findings of the survey are below.

Note on methodology: The sample for the survey included 525 people throughout the Gaza Strip aged 18 years and above. Data collection was conducted between the Jan. 17-19 2009. The sample was selected using stratified random sampling from the Palestinian phone directory, from a master sample of 150,000 phone numbers, mostly land lines. Results from the survey are limited to respondents who had working phone lines. The margin of error for the survey is 4.3%.

About CARE: CARE is one of the world’s largest humanitarian aid agencies, providing assistance in nearly 70 countries. CARE has been working in Israel, West Bank and Gaza since 1948 (with a short break from 1984-1994), initially implementing programs to help refugees after the Holocaust. Since the conflict started Dec. 27, CARE has distributed fresh food, medical supplies, heaters, blankets and plastic sheeting to hospitals, families and feeding centres in Gaza, reaching 160,000 people.

http://www.carewbg.org/index.asp

About Alpha International: Alpha International is an independent private research company that specializes in the area of needs assessment, monitoring and evaluation as well as survey research. Alpha has designed and implemented many surveys in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for both local and international organizations. Alpha adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods in conducting needs assessment and evaluation studies.

Key findings of the survey:

Impact on children: Almost all (95%) households reported a high level of fear among children, with more than half of all children suffering from bed-wetting (62%), general weakness (64%), nervousness (73%), increase aggressiveness (61%), sleeplessness (87%), nightmares (79%), and headaches or stomach aches (57%).

Displaced people: 56% of respondents say they are hosting displaced people. Of those families who are hosting displaced people, 76% of respondents said they are hosting between 1-20 people – mainly relatives, friends or neighbours. The main reasons (42%) for displacement was damage or destruction of their homes.

Access to basic health care: 56% say they have problems accessing basic medications such as antibiotics, and medicine for fever, diabetes, heart disease and hypertension. Of those people, 59% reported health complications and decline in health status as a result of problems accessing basic medications. Half (50%) the respondents said they would not be able to reach a basic health facility if they needed to. (NOTE: One-third of respondents in this survey were contacted before the ceasefire was implemented.)

Water and sanitation: Approximately one-third (32%) of households reported that water was their most urgent need with 71% reporting problems with access or quality of water (high price, damaged networks, lack of availability of water tankers, etc). 47% say there is no garbage collection in their neighbourhood, and the majority (67%) of respondents said they throw waste into the street, raising health risks.

Electricity: While electricity is being restored to some areas of the Gaza Strip this week, 86% of respondents say they have electricity blackouts most or all of the time.

Food security: 86% say they have cash shortages. Half (50%) of respondents said food was their most urgent need. 84% say they have problems accessing food. To cope, people have reduced food consumption or switched to less nutritious food. Food items most requested include flour, bread, sugar, rice, meat and children’s food.

Access to humanitarian assistance: 89% of respondents said they have not received any humanitarian assistance from international NGOs or NGOs during the hostilities.

Unheard Voices

2009-02-04T10:09:00.000+03:00

With Gaza, Journalists Fail Again

Chris Hedges

The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel’s callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press. There were no major newspapers, television networks or radio stations that challenged Israel’s fabricated version of events that led to the Gaza attack or the daily lies Israel used to justify the unjustifiable. Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant stenographers and echo chambers. If we as journalists have a product to sell, it is credibility. Take that credibility away and we become little more than propagandists and advertisers. By refusing to expose lies we destroy, in the end, ourselves.

All governments lie in wartime. Israel is no exception. Israel waged an effective war of black propaganda. It lied craftily with its glib, well-rehearsed government spokespeople, its ban on all foreign press in Gaza and its confiscation of cell phones and cameras from its own soldiers lest the reality of the attack inadvertently seep out. It was the Arabic network al-Jazeera, along with a handful of local reporters in Gaza, which upheld the honor of our trade, that of giving a voice to those who without our presence would have no voice, that of countering the amplified lies of the powerful with the faint cries and pain of the oppressed. But these examples of journalistic integrity were too few and barely heard by us.

We retreated, as usual, into the moral void of American journalism, the void of balance and objectivity. The ridiculous notion of being unbiased, outside of the flow of human existence, impervious to grief or pain or anger or injustice, allows reporters to coolly give truth and lies equal space and airtime. Balance and objectivity are the antidote to facing unpleasant truths, a way of avoidance, a way to placate the powerful. We record the fury of a Palestinian who has lost his child in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza but make sure to mention Israel’s “security needs,” include statements by Israeli officials who insist there was firing from the home or the mosque or the school and of course note Israel’s right to defend itself. We do this throughout the Middle East. We record the human toll in Iraq, caused by our occupation, but remind everyone that “Saddam killed his own people.” We write about the deaths of families in Afghanistan during an airstrike but never forget to mention that the Taliban “oppresses women.” Their crimes cancel out our crimes. It becomes a moral void. And above all we never forget to mention the “war on terror.” We ask how and who but never, never do we ask why. As long as we speak in the cold, dead language of those in power, the language that says a lie is as valid as a fact, the language where one version of history is as good as another, we are part of the problem, not the solution.

“Bombs and rockets are flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza, and once again, The Times is caught in a familiar crossfire, accused from all sides of unfair and inaccurate coverage,” New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt breezily began in writing his assessment of the paper’s coverage, going on to conclude “though the most vociferous supporters of Israel and the Palestinians do not agree, I think The Times, largely barred from the battlefield and reporting amid the chaos of war, has tried its best to do a fair, balanced and complete job—and has largely succeeded.”

The cliché that Israel had a right to defend itself from Hamas rocket attacks—that bombs and rockets were “flying between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza”—was accepted in the press as an undisputed truth. It became the starting point for every hollow discussion of the Israeli attack. It left pundits and columnists chattering about “proportionality,” not legality. Israel was in open violation of international law, specifically Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which calls on an occupying power to respect the safety of occupied civilians. But you would not know this from the press reports. The use of attack aircraft and naval ships, part of the world’s fourth-largest military power, to level densely packed slums of people who were hungry, without power and often water, people surrounded on all sides by the Israeli army, was fatuously described as a war. The news coverage held up the absurd notion that a few Hamas fighters with light weapons and no organization were a counterforce to F-16 fighter jets, tank battalions, thousands of Israeli soldiers, armored personnel carriers, naval ships and Apache attack helicopters. It fit the Israeli narrative. It may have been balanced and objective. But it was not true.

The Hamas rockets are crude, often made from old pipes, and largely ineffectual. The first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001. It was not until June 2004 that Israel suffered its first fatality. There are 24 Israelis who have been killed by Hamas rocket fire, compared with 5,000 Palestinian dead, more than half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. This does not absolve Hamas from firing rockets at civilian areas, which is a war crime, but it does raise questions about the story line swallowed without reflection by the press. I covered the Kosovo Albanians’ desperate attempts to resist the Serbs, which resulted in a handful of Serb casualties, but no one ever described the lopsided Serbian butchery in Kosovo as a war. It was called genocide, and it led to NATO intervention to halt it.

It was Israel, not Hamas, which violated the truce established last June. This was never made clear in any of the press reports. Hamas agreed to halt rocket fire into Gaza in exchange for an Israeli promise to ease the draconian siege that made the shipment of vital material and food into Gaza nearly impossible. And once the agreement was reached, the Hamas rocket fire ended. Israel, however, never upheld its end of the agreement. It increased the severity of the siege. U.N. agencies complained. International relief organizations condemned the Israeli blockade. And there were even rumblings inside Israel. Shmuel Zakai, an Israeli brigadier general who resigned as commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza Division and was forcibly discharged from the military amid allegations that he leaked information to the media, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Dec. 22 that the Israeli government had made a “central error” during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing “to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip. … [W]hen you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,” Zakai said, “it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire. … You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.”

Israel, we know from papers such as Haaretz, started planning this assault last March. The Israeli army deliberately broke the truce when it carried out an attack on Nov. 4 that killed six Hamas fighters. It timed the attack, the heavy air and naval bombardment and the invasion of Gaza to coincide with the waning weeks of the Bush administration. Israel knew it would be given carte blanche by the White House. Hamas responded to the Nov. 4 provocation in the way Israel anticipated. It fired Qassam rockets and Grad missiles into Israel to retaliate. But even then Hamas offered to extend the truce if Israel would lift the blockade. Israel refused. Operation Cast Lead was unleashed.

Henry Siegman, the director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council of Foreign Relations, noted correctly that Israel “could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.”

There were a few flashes of integrity in the American press. The Wall Street Journal ran a thoughtful piece, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,” on Jan. 24 that was unusual in view of the acceptance in U.S. press coverage that Hamas is nothing more than an Islamo-fascist organization that understands only violence. And some journalists from news organizations such as the BBC did a good job once they were finally permitted to enter Gaza. Jimmy Carter wrote an Op-Ed article in The Washington Post detailing his and the Carter Center’s efforts to prevent the conflict. This article was an important refutation of the Israeli argument, although it was ignored by the rest of the media. But these were isolated cases. The publishers, news executives and editors largely accepted without any real protest Israel’s ban on coverage and allowed Israeli officials to fill their news pages and airtime with fabrications and distortions. And this made the war crimes carried out by the Israeli army easier to commit and prolong.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is acutely aware of Israel’s violations of international law, has already begun to reassure his commanders that they will be protected from war crimes prosecution.

“The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the State of Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza,” he said.

Israel’s brutal military tactics, despite the lack of coverage in the American press, have come under intense international scrutiny. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, blame the high civilian death toll on indiscriminate firing and shelling, as well as the use of white phosphorus shells in civilian areas. Israel has admitted using white phosphorus in Gaza but insists the chemical, used for smoke screens and to mark spots to be shelled or bombed, was not used directly against civilians.

Hamas is an unsavory organization. It has made life miserable for many in Gaza and carried out a series of death-squad-style executions of alleged opponents. But Hamas, elected to power in 2006, also brought effective civil control to Gaza. Gaza, ruled by warring factions, warlords, clans, kidnapping rings and criminal gangs, had descended into chaos under Mahmoud Abbas’ corrupt Fatah-led government. Hamas, once it assumed power, halted suicide bombing attacks on Israel. It ended rocket fire into Israel for almost a year. It upheld its agreement with Israel. Hamas’ willingness to negotiate with Israel, albeit through Egyptian intermediaries, led al-Qaida, which has been working to make inroads among the Palestinians, to condemn the Hamas leadership as collaborators.

Israel and the United States carried out an abortive and desperate attempt to overthrow Hamas by arming and backing a Fatah putsch in June 2007. They wanted to install the pliant Abbas in power. Hamas resisted, often with violent brutality, and expelled Abbas and the Fatah leadership from Gaza to the West Bank. Israel has now decided to do the dirty job itself. It will not work. Israel broke and discredited Yasser Arafat and Fatah in much the same manner. Abbas and Fatah have no authority or credibility left. Abbas is seen by most Palestinians as a pliant Israeli stooge. Israel is now destroying Hamas. Radical Islamic groups, such as al-Qaida, far more violent and irrational, stand poised to replace Hamas. And Israel will one day look wistfully at Hamas just as it does now at Fatah. But by then, with Israel surrounded by radical Islamic regimes in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and even Jordan, as well as fighting a homegrown al-Qaida movement among the Palestinians, it may be too late.

The Israeli government bears the responsibility for its crimes. But by giving credibility to the lies and false narratives Israel uses to justify wholesale slaughter we empower not only Israel’s willful self-destruction but our own. The press, as happened during the buildup to the Iraq war, was again feckless and gutless. It bent to the will of the powerful. It abandoned its sacred contract with its readers, listeners and viewers to always tell the truth. It chattered about nothing. It obscured the facts. It did this while hundreds of women and children were torn to shreds by iron fragmentation bombs in a flagrant violation of international law. And as it failed it lauded itself for doing “a fair, balanced and complete job.”

Israel Must be Stopped

2009-02-04T09:41:00.000+03:00

It is Time to Say "Enough"

Gilad Atzmon

It was rather encouraging to see PM Erdogan standing up for a humanist cause in Davos. But it didn’t really take me by complete surprise. Once again it has been proven that as far humanity and ethics are concerned, Islam and Muslim leaders are at the forefront together with only very few decent popular leaders such as Chavez and Morales.

At the end of the day, it was PM Erdogan who opened his mouth and told the world leaders present that which they should have grasped on their own a long time ago. While Western leaders kept silent about Israeli war crimes, it was PM Erdogan who stood up for the truth, telling President Peres that his hands were soaking with children’s blood. ‘You are raising your voice Mr Peres because you are submerged with guilt.’ I may as well note that unlike PM Erdogan, I myself wouldn’t count on President Peres’ conscience. The old man has spent the best part of his adult life amongst the leading policy makers of a racist state. His name is intrinsically linked with numerous massacres. As if this is not enough, Peres was also a leading figure behind the notorious Israeli WMD project. I guess that if there is any humanity in Peres, it must be very well hidden indeed.

For years it has become clear that the Palestinian people have been facing almost alone the most devastating form of state terrorism. And yet, in spite of the crimes against humanity repeatedly conducted by the Jewish state, whether it was ethnic cleansing, massacres, land confiscation, or even just racist laws, the Western world kept silent. It always kept silent. Absolutely nothing had been done to stop American and Western support of the Jewish state. Nothing had been done to halt the constant flow of weapons and lethal ammunition from America to Israel. Nothing had been done to curtail the devastating influence of Jewish political lobbies in Western capitals. Time after time we have been watching American-made F16 planes decorated with the Star of David dropping bombs on innocent civilians. Yet, not a single Western state leader had the elementary ethical integrity to stand up and say, NO more, enough is enough.

I know very well, it is not easy to support the Palestinian people. As much as we support their cause, their right of return and their struggle for liberation, empathic feelings of solidarity with Palestinians had over and over again been shattered very successfully by Israeli and Jewish well financed and dedicated pressure groups.

For decades we have been terrorized by institutional Jewish political lobbies. Politicians are intimidated on a regular basis but it goes further. As bizarre as it may sound, in the solidarity movement we hardly hear the voice of any major leading intellectuals, poets, artists or academics. It is not that artists and academics fail to support the Palestinian cause. Quite the opposite, every ethical person on the planet supports the Palestinians, yet, everyone who expresses support of Palestinians’ rights is immediately bullied into submission by a bunch of relentless Zionist operators. For many years, Jewish lobbies have been pretty effective in silencing and targeting any form of criticism of Israel by labeling it as anti-Semitic.

However, the tide is rapidly turning. Israel’s latest spectacle of brutality in Gaza had a very big impact indeed. It had left no room for doubt: to save what is left of humanity and the notion of humanism is to save the Palestinians from Israeli cruelty. Every humanist agrees that Israel must be stopped. Its military and political leadership must be brought to justice. Its military destructive capacity must be reduced to zero. Unfortunately we cannot count on Western leaders. They have all failed all the way through. PM Erdogan however, has managed to plant a glimpse of hope in our bleeding hearts.

Saving all of us from the display of Israeli brutality is not an option anymore. It is an urgent necessity. As much as it will save the lives of Palestinians, as much it will save our young children from the sight of Biblical carnage in its making, dismantling Israel power is also a necessary move that will save the Israelis from themselves and their proven lethal inclinations. It may also save world Jewry of the grave disaster Israel is set to bring on them unless they are stopped.

There is not much time on our side. According to some polls 94% of the Israelis supported the attack in Gaza. 92% supported the air raids against Palestinians. As we can discern, there is no force in Israel that can stop this deadly enthusiasm. The Israelis cannot save themselves from themselves. For the sake of world peace we must confront them using every possible measure within our disposal to bring them towards an elementary humane understanding and ethical awareness.

I am deeply grateful for the words of PM Erdogan, and like millions around the world who have shown their approval of his actions at Davos, I am grateful for his ethical stance.

Collective Numbness

2009-02-02T09:30:00.002+03:00

When Did We Stop Caring about Civilian Deaths During Wartime?

Robert Fisk

I wonder if we are “normalising” war. It’s not just that Israel has yet again got away with the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza.

And after its own foreign minister said that Israel’s army had been allowed to “go wild” there, it seems to bear out my own contention that the Israeli “Defence Force” is as much a rabble as all the other armies in the region. But we seem to have lost the sense of immorality that should accompany conflict and violence. The BBC’s refusal to handle an advertisement for Palestinian aid was highly instructive. It was the BBC’s “impartiality” that might be called into question. In other words, the protection of an institution was more important than the lives of children. War was a spectator sport whose careful monitoring – rather like a football match, even though the Middle East is a bloody tragedy – assumed precedence over human suffering.

I’m not sure where all this started. No one doubts that the Second World War was a bloodbath of titanic proportions, but after that conflict we put in place all kinds of laws to protect human beings. The International Red Cross protocols, the United Nations – along with the all-powerful Security Council and the much ridiculed General Assembly – and the European Union were created to end large-scale conflict. And yes, I know there was Korea (under a UN flag!) and then there was Vietnam, but after the US withdrawal from Saigon, there was a sense that “we” didn’t do wars any more. Foreigners could commit atrocities en masse – Cambodia comes to mind – but we superior Westerners were exempt. We didn’t behave like that. Low-intensity warfare in Northern Ireland, perhaps. And the Israeli-Arab conflict would grind away. But there was a feeling that My Lai had been put behind us. Civilians were once again sacred in the West.

I’m not sure when the change came. Was it Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel’s allies of 1,700 Palestinian civilians? (Gaza just missed that record.) Israel claimed (as usual) to be fighting “our” “war against terror” but the Israeli army is not what it’s cracked up to be and massacres (Qana comes to mind in 1996 and the children of Marwahine in 2006) seem to come attached to it. And of course, there’s the little matter of the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988 which we enthusiastically supported with weapons to both sides, and the Syrian slaughter of thousands of civilians at Hama and. ...

No, I rather think it was the 1991 Gulf War. Our television lads and lasses played it for all it was worth – it was the first war that had “theme” music to go with the pictures – and when US troops simply smothered alive thousands of Iraqi troops in their trenches, we learned about it later and didn’t care much, and even when the Americans ignored Red Cross rules to mark mass graves, they got away with it. There were women in some of these graves – I saw British soldiers burying them. And I remember driving up to Mutla ridge to show a Red Cross delegate where I had seen a mass grave dug by the Americans, and he looked at the plastic poppy an American had presumably left there and said: “Something has happened.”

He meant that something had happened to international law, to the rules of war. They had been flouted. Then came Kosovo – where our dear Lord Blair first exercised his talents for warmaking – and another ream of slaughter. Of course, Milosevic was the bad guy (even though most of the Kosovars were still in their homes when the war began – their return home after their brutal expulsion by the Serbs then became the war aim). But here again, we broke some extra rules and got away with it. Remember the passenger train we bombed on the Surdulica bridge – and the famous speeding up of the film by Jamie Shea to show that the bomber had no time to hold his fire? (Actually, the pilot came back for another bombing run on the train when it was already burning, but that was excluded from the film.) Then the attack on the Belgrade radio station. And the civilian roads. Then the attack on a large country hospital. “Military target,” said Jamie. And he was right. There were soldiers hiding in the hospital along with the patients. The soldiers all survived. The patients all died.

Then there was Afghanistan and all that “collateral damage” and whole villages wiped out and then there was Iraq in 2003 and the tens of thousands – or half a million or a million – Iraqi civilians killed. Once more, at the very start, we were back to our old tricks, bombing bridges and radio stations and at least one civilian estate in Baghdad where “we” believed Saddam was hiding. We knew it was packed with civilians (Christians, by chance) but the Americans called it a “high risk” operation – meaning that they risked not hitting Saddam – and 22 civilians were killed. I saw the last body, that of a baby, dug from the rubble.

And we don’t seem to care. We fight in Iraq and now we’re going back to fight in Afghanistan again and all the human rights and protections appear to have vanished once more. We will destroy villages and we will find that the Afghans hate us and we will form more criminal militias – as we did in Iraq – to fight for us. The Israelis organised a similar militia in their occupation zone in southern Lebanon, run by a crackpot Lebanese army major. But now their own troops “go wild”. And the BBC is worried about its “impartiality”?

Back on Track?

2009-02-01T10:18:00.000+03:00

Gaza Children Return to School After War

Ben Hubbard

Tens of thousands of children returned to schools across Gaza on Saturday after three weeks of war, playing games for some relief from the devastation and telling friends and teachers about the explosions they'd heard and relatives they'd lost.

In one classroom, signs with the names of three 14-year-old boys killed in the fighting were set on their desks _ and their deskmates sat with stunned expressions next to the empty seats as the teacher encouraged the class to talk about their experiences during the war.

"It's very hard when one used to see 30 students in class, and after what happened, I see 27," their teacher, Bassam Salha told the class at the U.N.'s Fakhoura Elementary school. "We lived three weeks in sadness, I want you students to help me to get out of the sad mood I am in now."

Meanwhile, an Israeli foreign office official said President Barack Obama's newly-appointed special envoy to the Middle East is expected in Israel on Wednesday for talks on reviving Mideast peace negotiations after the Gaza fighting and on ensuring an arms blockade on the territory's Hamas rulers.

George J. Mitchell will meet with Israel's prime minister and other leaders, as well as the Palestinian president and prime minister in the West Bank, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because there has not yet been an announcement from Washington. The White House and State Department declined to comment.

Also Saturday, international aid organizations called for the unfettered entry of humanitarian and building supplies into Gaza. The territory's borders with Israel and Egypt have remained largely closed since a cease-fire took hold earlier this week, though supply convoys have been able to come through.

In Israel, the defense minister was to propose to the Cabinet on Sunday that the government provide "moral and legal support" for officers in potential court cases related to the war's conduct.

The reopening of schools, a week after a tentative cease-fire, marked a small step back to normalcy for Gaza's 1.4 million residents. Israel had launched a 22-day air and ground assault, aimed at stopping rocket fire by Gaza militants on southern Israel.

Some 280 children were among the 1,285 Palestinians killed in the offensive, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were also killed during the fighting.

The scores of schools run by the United Nations _ which are attended by 200,000 children _ reopened along with Gaza's public schools, which Hamas has run since seizing the territory in 2007. "Getting these children back to school was our absolute priority," John Ging, Gaza head of the U.N. agency that cares for Palestinian refugees, told the Associated Press.

In one school, first-grade girls with white ribbons in their hair swept shattered glass from the courtyard. More than 30 U.N. schools were damaged in the fighting. The schools were also used as makeshift refuges by tens of thousands of Gazans fleeing clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants in border areas, and by others whose homes were destroyed in the fighting.

At the Fakhoura Elementary school in the town of Jebaliya, volunteers from an Islamic aid organization led the children through a series of songs and clap games in the courtyard.

Talking to his students, Salha recalled the three lost classmates, calling one, Ahed al-Quddas a "very naughty student, but he was light-hearted." Another, Bashar Naji, "was always giving the right answers," he added.

One of Naji's friends spoke up, "I don't know what I'm going to do after him _ he used to help me in answers and the others at the same time."

During the fighting, Palestinian militants fired rockets from next to the school, where hundreds of Gazans had huddled, according to witnesses. Israeli forces responded with mortars that hit near the school and killed 42 people, most civilians.

At the Asma elementary school in the Shati refugee camp, three blood stains and a large hole in the bathroom wall marked the spot where a Jan. 5 missile strike made a direct hit and killed three boys and teens, ages 10, 17 and 19. The three, who were among hundreds taking refuge at the school, were using their cell phones to light the way to the bathroom when struck, witnesses said.

Hundreds of students sat in the courtyard, eating U.N.-provided bread, cheese and cucumbers. Many had lost relatives.

Fifth-grader Noor Abdel-Ali, said two of her brothers were killed in the first day of air strikes. Suhaib, 30, was working at a police station that was bombed, and Yousef, 18, was in the Internal Security building when it was hit, she said.

"I feel alone because they used to come visit me at school," said Noor, 10. "My friends are around me here, but I'm still sad that they died."

Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Ministry said it would ask the Cabinet at its weekly meeting Sunday to provide legal support to army officers in potential court cases resulting from the war's conduct.

In a statement, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the war on Hamas Israel was exercising "the right, indeed the obligation, of any country, under international law to defend itself and its citizens."

Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights groups have said they are seeking to build a case that Israel violated the laws of war. The groups are focusing on suspicions that Israel used disproportionate force in its onslaught and failed to protect civilians.

Israel, which denies any violations, is gearing up to protect its soldiers from any attempted prosecution, including with Barak's motion to the Cabinet. The rights groups say it is too early to say if they would seek any such prosecution, and it is not clear at what court it could be attempted.

In Paris, thousands demonstrated to show support for Gazans. The marchers carried Palestinian flags, chanted "resistance! resistance!" and waved banners like one reading "Shame on Israel" in English.

Meanwhile, half a dozen international aid groups called for the free passage of humanitarian aid and construction materials through Israel's border crossings with Gaza.

The Israeli army said more than 125 trucks a day _ on some days nearly 200 _ have entered Gaza since fighting ended on Jan. 17.

"We are looking at providing (aid) for months and even years to come," said Mohammed Ali Abu Najila of Oxfam told a news conference at Gaza City's Shifa Hospital. "Lives are hanging in the balance and they depend on unrestricted humanitarian access and increasing funding."

The border crossings are a central issue in efforts to work out a long-term cease-fire. Israel and Egypt had enforced a border blockade following the Hamas takeover in 2007, and have said they will only open the gates if Hamas accepts the deployment of border monitors, as a way of halting weapons smuggling.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said a Hamas delegation to Cairo would discuss this and other issues with Egyptian leaders to create a detailed agreement.

Indirect Murder

2009-01-30T20:08:00.001+03:00

At a Border Crossing, Drivers and Truckloads of Aid for Gaza Go Nowhere

Michael Slackman

EL AUJA BORDER CROSSING, Egypt — France sent technical equipment to help Gazans draw water from the ground. The Swiss sent blankets and plastic tarps. Mercy Corps, a relief agency, sent 12 truckloads of food. And on Tuesday all of it, including dozens of other trucks carrying sugar, rice, flour, juice and baby formula, sat in the hot sun here going nowhere.

This normally quiet commercial crossing between Egypt and Israel has been turned into a parking lot of stalled, humanitarian aid, and in the city of El Arish there are even greater quantities of food, clothing and essential supplies, sitting, waiting and baking in the sun. Some supplies are loaded onto dozens of trucks parked on city streets, but much more is stored in the open areas of a local sports stadium, also waiting, also going nowhere. Only medical supplies seem to be getting through to Gaza.

Since the cease-fire, Israel has allowed some humanitarian supplies into Gaza, but the territory is still desperately short of the necessities. Israel closed all the crossings into Gaza on Tuesday after an Israeli soldier was killed in a bombing on the Israeli side of the border. But that changed nothing at this crossing, where the flow has been stalled for days.

Officials and volunteers in Egypt blame the Israelis, saying that even before the passage stalled Israel had allowed supplies to pass through for only 19 hours each week. Israeli officials said that Egypt had not done enough to coordinate the flood of aid coming to Gaza, and that they hoped a system would soon be in place to remedy the problem.

In the meantime, truckloads of humanitarian aid are sitting in Egypt. That includes 13 generators and Amir Abdullah’s trailer full of food.

“All our lunchmeat, it’s all going to go bad,” said Mr. Abdullah, whose tractor-trailer loaded with food and blankets sat in a line outside the stadium in El Arish for 24 hours without moving.

But he is a newcomer to the great humanitarian wait for Gaza.

“We are getting a lot of assistance, but they let very few trucks through,” said Hany Moustafa, who manages the stadium. “We have trucks we loaded up five days ago still sitting here, waiting.”

There has been an outpouring of support for Gazans, mostly from the Arab world, but also from Europe, Venezuela and nongovernmental organizations, officials here said. Medical supplies go straight into Gaza through Egypt’s crossing at Rafah.

But Egypt will not allow anything else to pass through Rafah, insisting that all other aid travel first into Israel and then into Gaza. That is where the bottleneck has occurred. Two of the main problems have been the short window for supplies to pass and Israel’s decision to let few trucks go through, officials and volunteers here said. But another problem has to do with Egypt’s being unprepared to meet strict Israeli packing requirements, which would allow the goods to be passed through security scanners and onto Israeli trucks for delivery to Gaza.

The Egyptians tried to send through trucks carrying bags of flour and sugar, for example, only to have the Israelis send them back. Much has been repacked and reshipped, but some of the returned items are spilled out over the sandy earth at the crossing.

“The trucks get to Auja and they sit,” said Ahmed Oraby, head of the Red Crescent office in El Arish. “Many trucks that left are now coming back. They don’t take anything.”

At the United Nations, John Holmes, an emergency relief coordinator, said the scale of the destruction meant that far more than the current movement of aid was needed urgently. “Enough will always be allowed in for people to exist, but not enough for the conditions for people to live,” Mr. Holmes told reporters.

In recent days, officials and drivers at the crossing said that the trickle of trucks passing through this month had all but stopped. None went on Thursday. Friday and Saturday are days off, so nothing passed. On Sunday, a few trucks went through, aid workers said. Monday, nothing. Tuesday, nothing.

“I have been sitting here for three days, and before that I was in Arish for four days,” said Sayed Ahmed Sorour, seated in the cab of a truck hauling clothing and blankets. “Nobody is telling us anything. Not Egypt. Not Israel. Nobody explains to us why we are stopping here.”

Mr. Sorour’s truck was about 10th in line in front of the gate to enter the border zone. About 30 trucks in all were parked outside the gate, their drivers tired, dirty and frustrated after days of waiting, sleeping in their cabs and killing time.

Inside the gate, parked in the sand near the border with Israel, there were an additional 30 truckloads of flour and sugar and, from the French, the technical gear and bottles of Evian. An Egyptian state security officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work, said there did not seem to be any rational explanation for how the crossing worked. He said he and the other officers simply waited for the Israelis to tell them how many trucks to let in, and they complied.

By 5 p.m., when it was clear that Yasir Hussein was not going to get to deliver his goods, again, he and some other drivers laid down a blanket, warmed some water on a small gas burner and shared small glasses of tea. Mr. Hussein said he was hauling a load of food donated by the Swiss and had been sitting at the gate since Thursday.

“We are not moving, and no one is saying anything,” he said. “We are just trying to help.”

2009-01-28T14:14:00.001+03:00

Obama and Gaza...

2009-01-28T14:12:00.000+03:00

Interview: Noam Chomsky

Interviewd by Amy Goodman

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama, speaking at the State Department yesterday. A Hamas spokesperson told Al Jazeera television Obama’s position toward the Palestinians doesn’t represent a change. Osama Hamdan said, “I think this is an unfortunate start for President Obama in the region and the Middle East issue. And it looks like the next four years, if it continues with the same tone, will be a total failure.”

Well, for more on this, we are joined by Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for over half-a-century. He has written over a hundred books, including Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Noam.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Glad to be with you again.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, let’s start off by your response to President Obama’s statement and whether you think it represents a change.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s approximately the Bush position. He began by saying that Israel, like any democracy, has a right to defend itself. That’s true, but there’s a gap in the reasoning. It has a right to defend itself. It doesn’t follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. So we might agree, say, that, you know, the British army in the United States in the colonies in 1776 had a right to defend itself from the terror of George Washington’s armies, which was quite real, but it didn’t follow they had a right to defend themselves by force, because they had no right to be here. So, yes, they had a right to defend themselves, and they had a way to do it—namely, leave. Same with the Nazis defending themselves against the terror of the partisans. They have no right to do it by force. In the case of Israel, it’s exactly the same. They have a right to defend themselves, and they can easily do it. One, in a narrow sense, they could have done it by accepting the ceasefire that Hamas proposed right before the invasion—I won’t go through the details—a ceasefire that had been in place and that Israel violated and broke.

But in a broader sense—and this is a crucial omission in everything Obama said, and if you know who his advisers are, you understand why—Israel can defend itself by stopping its crimes. Gaza and the West Bank are a unit. Israel, with US backing, is carrying out constant crimes, not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, where it is moving systematically with US support to take over the parts of the West Bank that it wants and to leave Palestinians isolated in unviable cantons, Bantustans, as Sharon called them. Well, stop those crimes, and resistance to them will stop.

Now, Israel has been able pretty much to stop resistance in the Occupied Territories, thanks in large part to the training that Obama praised by Jordan, of course with US funding and monitoring control. So, yes, they’ve managed to. They, in fact, have been suppressing demonstrations, even demonstrations, peaceful demonstrations, that called for support for the people of Gaza. They have carried out lots of arrests. In fact, they’re a collaborationist force, which supports the US and Israel in their effort to take over the West Bank.

Now, that’s what Obama—if Israel—there’s no question that all of these acts are in total violation of the foundations of international humanitarian law. Israel knows it. Their own advisers have told each other—legal advisers have explained that to them back in ’67. The World Court ruled on it. So it’s all total criminality. But they want to be able to persist without any objection. And that’s the thrust of Obama’s remarks. Not a single word about US-backed Israeli crimes, settlement development, cantonization, a takeover in the West Bank. Rather, everyone should be quiet and let the United States and Israel continue with it.

He spoke about the constructive steps of the peace—of the Arab peace agreement very selectively. He said they should move forward towards normalization of relations with Israel. But that wasn’t the main theme of the Arab League peace proposal. It was that there should be a two-state settlement, which the US blocks. I mean, he said some words about a two-state settlement, but not where or when or how or anything else. He said nothing about the core of the problem: the US-backed criminal activities both in Gaza, which they attacked at will, and crucially in the West Bank. That’s the core of the problem.

And you can understand it when you look at his advisers. So, say, Dennis Ross wrote an 800-page book about—in which he blamed Arafat for everything that’s happening—barely mentions the word “settlement” over—which was increasing steadily during the period when he was Clinton’s adviser, in fact peaked, a sharp increase in Clinton’s last year, not a word about it.

So the thrust of his remarks, Obama’s remarks, is that Israel has a right to defend itself by force, even though it has peaceful means to defend itself, that the Arabs must—states must move constructively to normalize relations with Israel, but very carefully omitting the main part of their proposal was that Israel, which is Israel and the United States, should join the overwhelming international consensus for a two-state settlement. That’s missing.

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Professor Noam Chomsky, author of many books on the Middle East. Among his books are Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, also Hegemony or Survival. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Noam Chomsky, I’d like to ask you about the enormous civilian casualties that have shocked the entire world in this last Israeli offensive. The Israelis claim, on the one hand, that it’s the unfortunate result of Hamas hiding among the civilian population, but you’ve said in a recent analysis that this has been Israeli policy almost from the founding of the state, the attack on civilian populations. Could you explain?

NOAM CHOMSKY: They say so. I was just quoting the chief of staff—this is thirty years ago, virtually no Palestinian terrorism in Israel, virtually. He said, “Our policy has been to attack civilians.” And the reason was explained—you know, villages, towns, so on. And it was explained by Abba Eban, the distinguished statesman, who said, “Yes, that’s what we’ve done, and we did it for a good reason. There was a rational prospect that if we attack the civilian population and cause it enough pain, they will press for a,” what he called, “a cessation of hostilities.” That’s a euphemism meaning cessation of resistance against Israel’s takeover of the—moves which were going on at the time to take over the Occupied Territories. So, sure, if they—“We’ll kill enough of them, so that they’ll press for quiet to permit us to continue what we’re doing.”

Actually, you know, Obama today didn’t put it in those words, but the meaning is approximately the same. That’s the meaning of his silence over the core issue of settling and takeover of the Occupied Territories and eliminating the possibility for any Palestinian meaningful independence, omission of this. But Eban [inaudible], who I was quoting, chief of staff, would have also said, you know, “And my heart bleeds for the civilians who are suffering. But what can we do? We have to pursue the rational prospect that if we cause them enough pain, they’ll call off any opposition to our takeover of their lands and resources.” But it was—I mean, I was just quoting it. They said it very frankly. That was thirty years ago, and there’s plenty more beside that.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Obama’s call to open up Gaza, to end the blockade of Gaza on the Israelis, do you see that as any kind of a meaningful turn?

NOAM CHOMSKY: It would—those are nice words. And if he did it, that would be fine. But there isn’t any indication that he means it. In fact, this morning on the—Israel has already made it clear, stated explicitly, its foreign minister Tzipi Livni, that they’re not going to live up to the ceasefire until Gaza returns to them a captured soldier. Well, that avoids the fact that Israel is far in the lead, not in capturing soldiers, but in kidnapping civilians, hijacking ships, bringing them to Israel as hostages. In fact, one day before this Israeli soldier was captured at the border, Israeli forces entered Gaza and kidnapped two civilians and took them to Israel, where they were hidden away in the prison system sometime. So, and in fact, according to reports I just received from Israel—I can’t give you a source—they say that the radio news this morning has been reporting steadily that Amos Gilad, who’s the go-between between Israel and Egypt, notified the Egyptians that Israel is not interested in a ceasefire agreement, but rather an arrangement to stop the missiles and to free Gilad Shalit. OK, I presume that will be in the newspapers later. So, yes, it’s nice to say, “Let’s open the borders,” but not avoiding the conditions that are imposed, in fact, not even mentioning the fact that the borders have been closed for years because the United States has backed Israeli closure of them.

And again, his main point, which he started with, Israel, like any democracy, has a right to defend itself. That is true, but deceitful, because it has a right to defend itself, but not by force, especially when there are peaceful options that are completely open, the narrow one being a ceasefire, which the US and Israel would observe for the first time, and the second and the deeper one, by ending the crimes in the Occupied Territories.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, the timing of all of this—can you talk about Election Day here in the United States, November 4th, what exactly happened there, and then the fact that it went from Election Day to three days before the inauguration of Barack Obama, Israel’s announcement of the unilateral ceasefire?

NOAM CHOMSKY: On Election Day, November 4th, Israel violated—violently violated a ceasefire that had held, free will, in fact, a sharp reduction in rockets, probably not even from Hamas. It had been established in June or July. On November 4th, Election Day, presumably because the attention was shifted elsewhere, Israeli forces entered Gaza, killed half a dozen, what they call, militants, and the pretext was they found a tunnel in Gaza. Well, you know, from a military point of view, that’s an absurdity. If there was a tunnel and if it ever reached the Israeli border, they’d stop it right there. So this was obviously just a way to break the ceasefire, kill a couple of Hamas militants and ensure that the conflict would go on.

As for the bombing, it was very carefully timed. And, in fact, they’ve told us this. They’ve told us it was meticulously timed for months before the invasion, a very target-selected timing, everything. It began on a Saturday, timed at right before noon, when children were leaving schools, people milling in the streets of the densely populated city, perhaps the most densely in the world. That’s when it began. They killed a couple hundred people in the first few minutes.

And it ended—it was timed to end right before the inauguration. Now, presumably the reason was—Obama had kept silent about the atrocities and the killings, a horrible, horrible story, which you can see on Al Jazeera and little bits of it here. He had kept silent on the pretext that there’s only one president. Well, on Inauguration Day, that goes. There’s two—there’s a new president. And Israel surely wanted to make it—to ensure that he would not be in a position where he would have to say something about the ongoing atrocities. So they terminated it, probably temporarily, right before the inauguration. And then he could go on with what we heard today.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, I want to turn for a second to George Mitchell, who President Obama has tapped as the special envoy to the Middle East. Mitchell is the retired Senate majority leader, best known for helping to broker Northern Ireland’s landmark Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which ended decades of bloody conflict. In 2000, Mitchell was appointed by former president Bill Clinton to head a committee investigating ongoing Israeli-Palestinian violence. Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, welcomed Obama’s appointment of Mitchell, saying Israel holds him in, quote, "high regard.” This is some of what George Mitchell had to say yesterday.

GEORGE MITCHELL: The Secretary of State has just talked about our long-term objective, and the President himself has said that his administration—and I quote—“will make a sustained push, working with Israelis and Palestinians to achieve the goal of two states: a Jewish state in Israel and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security.”

This effort must be determined, persevering and patient. It must be backed up by political capital, economic resources, and focused attention at the highest levels of our government. And it must be firmly rooted in a shared vision of a peaceful future by the people who live in the region. At the direction of the President and the Secretary of State, and in pursuit of the President’s policies, I pledge my full effort in the search for peace and stability in the Middle East.

AMY GOODMAN: Obama’s new Middle East envoy, former senator George Mitchell. Noam Chomsky, your response?

NOAM CHOMSKY: In Ireland, Mitchell did quite a commendable job. But notice that in Ireland, there was an objective, and he helped realize that objective: peaceful reconciliation. Britain took into account for the first time the grievances of the population, and the terror stopped. OK? And the terror was quite real.

In Israel, again, you have to look at what he avoided. He says, “Yes, we want to have a Palestinian state.” Where? OK? He said not a word about—lots of pleasantries about everyone should live in peace, and so on, but where is the Palestinian state? Nothing said about the US-backed actions continuing every day, which are undermining any possibility for a viable Palestinian state: the takeover of the territory; the annexation wall, which is what it is; the takeover of the Jordan Valley; the salients that cut through the West Bank and effectively trisect it; the hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints designed to make Palestinian life impossible—all going on, not a word about them.

So, OK, we can have—in fact, you know, the first Israeli government to talk about a Palestinian state, to even mention the words, was the ultra right-wing Netanyahu government that came in 1996. They were asked, “Could Palestinians have a state?” Peres, who had preceded them, said, “No, never.” And Netanyahu’s spokesman said, “Yeah, the fragments of territory that we leave to them, they can call it a state if they want. Or they can call it fried chicken.” Well, that’s basically the attitude.

And Mitchell had nothing to say about it. He carefully avoided what he knows for certain is the core problem: the illegal, totally illegal, the criminal US-backed actions, which are systematically taking over the West Bank, just as they did under Clinton, and are undermining the possibility for a viable state.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Noam Chomsky, for Americans who want to figure out how to move now with the new Obama administration to end these atrocities that are occurring in the Middle East, what do you suggest? And also, what’s your viewpoint of the divestment movement? Many young people are urging something similar to South Africa, to begin pressing increasingly for divestment from Israel.

NOAM CHOMSKY: The position that people who are interested in peace ought to take is very straightforward. I mean, a majority of the American population, considerable majority, already agree with the full Arab League peace plan, not the little sliver of it that Obama mentioned. The peace plan calls for a two-state settlement on the international border, maybe with minor modifications. That’s an overwhelming national consensus. The Hamas supports it. Iran has said, you know, they’ll go along with it.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam, we only have thirty seconds.

NOAM CHOMSKY: OK, so we should push for that.

Is divestment a proper tactic? Well, you know, if you look back at South Africa, divestment became a proper tactic after years, decades of education and organizing, to the point where Congress was legislating against trade, corporations were pulling out, and so on. That’s what’s missing: the education and organizing which makes it an understandable move. And, in fact, if we ever got to that point, you wouldn’t even need it, because the US could be brought in line with international opinion.

AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, we want to thank you very much for being with us. And from all of us at Democracy Now!, condolences on the death of Carol, your wife of more than half a century.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Thanks, Noam. Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A Lifetime of Mental Baggage

2009-01-27T12:31:00.000+03:00

Profound psychological damage in Gaza

Eva Bartlett

The streets leading from the seriously-damaged Wafa rehabilitation center in Shejaiyeh were filled with black filth smelling of sewage. The hospital -- attacked on 12 January with a chemical bomb that may well have been white phosphorus and which set fire to the roof, and whose four different buildings were shelled intensely on 15 January -- is trying to rebuild and reopen, as is the shelled, burned, seriously-damaged al-Quds hospital in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City.

Even today, after mentioning to the Canadian TV crew accompanying me that fire blobs had burned up 'til yesterday, we found still more blobs spread out, smoldering and willingly breaking into white smoking fires anew. I have seen this often enough now. They were impressed by it, by the fact that it's now eight days after the fire and the blobs are still simmering, smoldering, ready to flame up.

The Red Crescent team of the north of Gaza had gathered at the Ezbet Abed Rabu station, to cut swathes of transparent plastic into lengths to be further cut to fit glass-less windows, blown out in the bombings on and around the houses. This is the first step in providing some immediate relief from the cold. For the homeless, however, I don't know what will be offered, or if tents are available.

In the next few hours, I was able to meet another extended family, take their testimonies that included the shelling of their house, phosphorus-like fires, sadistic drawings left behind by the Israeli soldiers occupying the house, the imprisonment of the elderly parents for four days with no food, no water, no toilets, no medicines, and the killing of their sheep and goats. The mother was terrified, and thanked me in a stream of frightened babble intermixed with gratitude for listening. "We saw terrible things, terrible things," she said. "They've come three times, and this was by far the worst ever. I saw dead bodies on the streets. We are just an old man and woman; why did they do this to us?" The medicine and insulin that she should have been taking lay in the dirt, stepped on, where they were thrown by soldiers who took the couple from their one-room house to a room of their sons' house. The older man pulled an inhaler out of his breast pocket, saying that this too was denied to him during his imprisonment.

I also returned to the home of my friends, to take the testimony of Abu N. who I'd worried so much about. Two days ago when I'd first seen him again, after nearly three weeks of wondering if he was still alive, he was pale, sallow, nervous, and looked defeated. Yesterday, too, he looked weak, less the proud elderly man he'd been before. Today, I was gratified to see much of his former self returning, despite his ordeal, despite the killing of his wife. He and one son chuckled as they vied for conversation time, his English returning only in bits but his determination to practice it returning in waves. Seeing the two, so crushed by the loss of Umm N., returning to life was inspiring.

Rudely, I left before a meal, though all insisted I stay. Normally, I would not turn it down, particularly after they had just begun to get their house into less of a disaster state: feces cleaned up from where the occupying soldiers had strewn it, all over the house; bags of soldiers' filthy leavings taken out; soldier-soiled clothing gathered, bagged, and burned; and the many shattered dishes and broken items cleared out. It is barer, and there are so many new holes from the bullets and tank shells. The indescribable, terrible, stench still lingers, that of an army which occupied the house for two weeks and left shit and unknown foul smells throughout the house. It is a stench I've smelled in other houses in the area occupied by the Israeli army.

But even though I was very happy they had progressed enough to cook in their kitchen and bask in the hospitality they love, I had to leave, to allow time for visiting Arafa's family.

Fourteen days after his murder, the family was finally able to begin the three-day mourning process. I visited them on the last day, unaware until today that it was happening. I found his widow as expected, grieving painfully and lamenting the loss of a kind man, good husband and loving father. After seeing bodies in many states of injury, near death, and savagely-rendered death, I found that I am still able to cry. While the horrors of Israel's continual bombing, I'd become surprisingly immune to shock or fear from the noise or notion of being hit, and even to death. But just looking into Arafa's widow's eyes, seeing her pain and remembering my own pain at losing him, my emotions proved to be intact still, meaning that a lot will surface later, in quieter times.

And this realization leads to the subsequent realization that so many Palestinians don't really have a means of addressing: their pain and psychological scarring -- particularly as so many have repeatedly endured invasions, as well as other emotionally-damaging things like living under military occupation, being imprisoned or having family members imprisoned, and living under siege and in closed borders, to name but some.

Abdallah, one of Abu N.'s grandchildren, cries pretty much all of the time I see him now. He was a bit of a cheeky six-year-old when I first met him two months ago. Now he seems stuck in his memories of bomb explosions and drone sounds. The drones I can identify with: even now, near midnight on 20 January, two days into the ceasefire, the drones circle. The very distinct noise the drones here make is not a noise I can disassociate from the three weeks of precise bombardment and death which accompanied it. And very likely Abdallah won't get any sort of therapy for this, although his family is compassionate, and he will have to carry this baggage along with future baggage, as will the majority of those here. The most visible aspects of this war on Gaza are the massive craters, the demolished houses and buildings in every direction, in every town and city, the burnt-out warehouses and shops and hospital rooms and schools and cars, and the amputated limbs, the burned skin, the still-burning fires. But those very deep emotional injuries are what were intended to cripple society even more than physical damage.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who spent eight months in 2007 living in West Bank communities and four months in Cairo and at the Rafah crossing. She is currently based in the Gaza Strip after having arrived with the third Free Gaza Movement boat in November. She has been working with the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza, accompanying ambulances while witnessing and documenting the ongoing Israeli air strikes and ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Hamas is Their Best Bet

2009-01-26T09:54:00.002+03:00

Israel's Lies

Henry Siegman

Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas's capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.

I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel's actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF's carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF's Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha'aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel's government of having made a 'central error' during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing 'to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,' General Zakai said, 'it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they're in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.'

The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel's intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn't even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza's population.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision, citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel's leaders as a 'plucked chicken'. They armed and trained his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas - brutally, to be sure - pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush administration imposed the blockade.

Israel seeks to counter these indisputable facts by maintaining that in withdrawing Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Ariel Sharon gave Hamas the chance to set out on the path to statehood, a chance it refused to take; instead, it transformed Gaza into a launching-pad for firing missiles at Israel's civilian population. The charge is a lie twice over. First, for all its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah's rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.

The greater lie is that Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza was intended as a prelude to further withdrawals and a peace agreement. This is how Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass, who was also his chief negotiator with the Americans, described the withdrawal from Gaza, in an interview with Ha'aretz in August 2004:

What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements [i.e. the major settlement blocks on the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns . . . The significance [of the agreement with the US] is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush's] authority and permission . . . and the ratification of both houses of Congress.

Do the Israelis and Americans think that Palestinians don't read the Israeli papers, or that when they saw what was happening on the West Bank they couldn't figure out for themselves what Sharon was up to?

Israel's government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a 'terror organisation' (Israel's preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons. According to Benny Morris, it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. He writes in Righteous Victims that an upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 'triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict'. He also documents atrocities committed during the 1948-49 war by the IDF, admitting in a 2004 interview, published in Ha'aretz, that material released by Israel's Ministry of Defence showed that 'there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought . . . In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.' In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF carried out organised executions of civilians. Asked by Ha'aretz whether he condemned the ethnic cleansing, Morris replied that he did not:

A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists.

It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a 'terror organisation'. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas's ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn't determine Hamas's actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah's actions.

These are not the conclusions of an apologist for Hamas but the opinions of the former head of Mossad and Sharon's national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy. The Hamas leadership has undergone a change 'right under our very noses', Halevy wrote recently in Yedioth Ahronoth, by recognising that 'its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future.' It is now ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state within the temporary borders of 1967. Halevy noted that while Hamas has not said how 'temporary' those borders would be, 'they know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their co-operation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: they will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.' In an earlier article, Halevy also pointed out the absurdity of linking Hamas to al-Qaida.

In the eyes of al-Qaida, the members of Hamas are perceived as heretics due to their stated desire to participate, even indirectly, in processes of any understandings or agreements with Israel. [The Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled] Mashal's declaration diametrically contradicts al-Qaida's approach, and provides Israel with an opportunity, perhaps a historic one, to leverage it for the better.

Why then are Israel's leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian 'state' made up of territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain permanent control. Control of the West Bank has been the unwavering objective of Israel's military, intelligence and political elites since the end of the Six-Day War.[*] They believe that Hamas would not permit such a cantonisation of Palestinian territory, no matter how long the occupation continues. They may be wrong about Abbas and his superannuated cohorts, but they are entirely right about Hamas.

Middle East observers wonder whether Israel's assault on Hamas will succeed in destroying the organisation or expelling it from Gaza. This is an irrelevant question. If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity, it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition.

If Barack Obama picks a seasoned Middle East envoy who clings to the idea that outsiders should not present their own proposals for a just and sustainable peace agreement, much less press the parties to accept it, but instead leave them to work out their differences, he will assure a future Palestinian resistance far more extreme than Hamas - one likely to be allied with al-Qaida. For the US, Europe and most of the rest of the world, this would be the worst possible outcome. Perhaps some Israelis, including the settler leadership, believe it would serve their purposes, since it would provide the government with a compelling pretext to hold on to all of Palestine. But this is a delusion that would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing the operation in Gaza were outweighed by the strategic cost - and were probably no greater than any gains Israel may have made early in the war in selective strikes on key Hamas facilities. 'Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal, or at least one it can credibly achieve?' he asks. 'Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel's actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.' Cordesman concludes that 'any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends.'

Finkelstein Interview

2009-01-26T00:14:00.001+03:00

Norman Finkelstein: Israel is a Satanic state

Interviewed by SELÇUK GÜLTASLI

American Jewish Professor Norman Finkelstein has heavily criticized Israel over its operation in Gaza. A son of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein has been barred from Israel for 10 years and was denied tenure at DePaul University in Chicago because of his critical stance on Israeli policies.

According to Finkelstein, Israel, a state built on the ashes of the Holocaust, is now committing a holocaust against Palestinians in Gaza. In a telephone interview with "Today's Zaman," Finkelstein said Israel was a "terrorist state" created by the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948. Praising Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish people for their courage in supporting Palestinians, Finkelstein referred to Israel as a "satanic" and "lunatic" state. Finkelstein's parents survived the Nazi camps in World War II and then immigrated to the US.

After his book “The Holocaust Industry,” in which he accused many prominent Jewish leaders of abusing the victims of the Holocaust, was published, Finkelstein was almost declared persona non grata by America’s influential Zionist circles.

What does Israel want to achieve with this operation?

Basically, Israel wants to achieve two goals: to restore what it calls its deterrence capacity -- that means to spread fear among Arab states about itself. This is a core principle of Israeli strategic doctrine. Arab states have to be afraid of Israel, afraid of its military might, and Arabs should do what Israelis want. They shall follow Israeli orders.

Israel’s military deterrence suffered a setback in May 2000, when Hezbullah succeeded to expel Israeli occupying forces from south Lebanon. Almost immediately in the aftermath of the failure, Israel planned another war with Hezbullah to re-establish its deterrence capacity. In 2006, after long preparation and using its air force, Israel suffered another ignominious defeat in Lebanon against Hezbullah.

The second goal was to defeat the Palestinian peace offensive. This has been another basic principle of Israeli doctrine: You do not negotiate with Arabs. You give them orders. The Palestinian organization Hamas was becoming too moderate; it was transmitting, giving the signal that it was ready to go along with the two-state settlement based on pre-1967 borders. The leadership of Syria and the West Bank have also been making statements like this. So Israel started to get worried that it would be obliged to negotiate a settlement which the international community has been supporting for the last 30 years.

Those who are against this settlement are the US or Israel, backed by the US. So when Hamas was becoming moderate and holding to the cease-fire it agreed in June 2008, it was showing herself to be a credible negotiating partner. Hamas was standing by its word. In the meantime, Israel has neglected another core principle of cease-fire, namely easing the blockade. So Israel had to defeat this Palestinian peace offensive. It always does this. It provokes Palestinians into reacting, and it wants to either destroy Hamas or inflicts so much damage that Hamas will have to say it will never negotiate with Israel. That is exactly what Israel wants. Israel never wants a moderate negotiating partner because if there is one, pressure on Israel will grow. Hamas is willing for a settlement; Hamas stands by its word. But Israel does not want to negotiate.

What you are basically saying is that Israel is not interested in peace at all.

Israel wants peace in its terms, and its terms are that West Bank should belong to their state.

Will the operation be successful?

First of all, we have to use proper language. There is no operation, and there is no war. What is happening is a slaughter, a massacre. When you have 200 to 300 kids killed, that is not a war. When you have a strong military going in against a defenseless population, that is not a war. When you shoot a fish in a barrel, we do not call it a war. As an Israeli columnist put it, it does not need too much courage to send jets and helicopter gunships to shoot inside a prison. What just happened was not a war. One-third of the casualties were children. It was not a war; it was a just a massacre.

In terms of the Israelis’ goals, you have to say it was successful. It inspired fear among Palestinians and Arabs generally that Israel is a lunatic state and that you have to follow its orders. No. 2, it destroys Hamas as a negotiating partner. You now hear from Hamas that it will not negotiate peace. That is what Israel wanted.

On your Web site, there is an argument that the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by the Nazis. Do you agree with that?

I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becoming an insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of the world wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but this state wants war, war and war. In the first week of the massacres, there were reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all its ground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Then there were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunatic state.

But do you agree with the characterization?

Look at the pictures and decide for yourself. I am not going to tell people what they should think about it. But what I say is they should look at the pictures and decide for themselves.

Why have you been barred from entering Israel for 10 years? As the son of Holocaust survivors, you cannot enter Israel.

Let’s be clear on a certain point. I was not entering Israel; I have no interest in going to Israel. I was going to see my friends in the occupied Palestinian territories. And Israel blocked me to go and see my friends in the West Bank. Under international law, I do not think they have any right to do that. I was not posing any security threat to Israel. The day after I was denied entry to Israel, the editorial of "Haaretz" was asking, “Who is afraid of Norman Finkelstein?” They were also saying that I was not a security threat. I do not have any particular interest to go and visit that lunatic state.

There are Jewish intellectuals who now call Israel a “terrorist state.” Is that a correct description?

I am not sure how you cannot agree with that. The goal of the operation was to terrorize the civilian population so that Palestinians would be afraid of Israel. This is the dictionary definition of terrorism. The dictionary definition of terrorism is targeting a civilian population to achieve a political goal. The goal of this operation or rather massacre was to terrorize the civilian population and to wreck and destroy as much civilian infrastructure such that the Palestinians would submit. When you attack schools, mosques, ambulances, hospitals, UN relief organizations, what is that? If this is not terrorism, then what is terrorism?

In your famous book, The Holocaust Industry, you argue that the state of Israel, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, cast itself as a victim state in order to garner immunity to criticism. Have we seen this during the Gaza operation?

They tried to use the Holocaust; it was funny in a very sick way. The leader of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, wrote an article, and he said it is no coincidence that this war in Gaza is occurring around Jan. 27, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day. He wants to pretend some connection. In fact there is a connection, and the connection is Israel is committing a holocaust in Gaza. But that is not the connection he had in mind. He wanted to play the Holocaust card; I think that it is not working very much anymore. It was clear that during this last massacre in Gaza, liberal Jewish public opinion turned against Israel. If you look at the petitions, demonstrations, letters, support to Israel, not only in the international community but also among the Jewish community, is diminishing. So the Holocaust card, the anti-Semitic card, is not working as efficiently as it was working once.

You will probably be called anti-Semitic as well.

I do not think this propaganda is successful anymore.

In your book Beyond Chutzpah, you argue that Israel was created after the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but the question whether it was premeditated remains to be answered. If it is premeditated, then can it be called genocide?

Well, it was premeditated, and I think the record is pretty clear. Even Israel’s former minister of foreign affairs, Shlomo Ben-Ami, in his book published several years ago called “Scars of War,” said that it was quite clear that it was a premeditated expulsion in 1948 and it was anchored in the Zionist philosophy of transfer. Ethnic cleansings are ethnic cleansings, and they are war crimes.

Why do you think US media is so one-sided and so pro-Israeli?

I think it has two components. First of all, Israel serves American interests in the region and American media always give a free pass to those states that serve American interests. That is the overall picture and not much different from other parts of the world. The horrendous governments like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, they also get free passes in the American media. This is the larger context.

And there is, of course, the secondary factor, which is the ethnic element. In many of these newspapers and the media in general, there is a large Jewish presence, and there is a sense of Jewish ethnic solidarity, which plays a role. But I think we have to qualify the secondary factor in two ways. We should not lose sight of the primary factor, which is Israel is the client state of US.

No. 2: In this past war, the liberal Jewish population mostly under the age of 40 completely defected from the war, the massacre. They have been opposed to the massacres from the first day.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been very critical of Israel on Gaza, and some American circles lambasted him in return. What do you think about his stance?

I wish he had gone further. I wish he had gone as far as Qatar, Mauritania, Bolivia and Venezuela in breaking diplomatic relations with that lunatic state. But as far as he has gone, the point on which he stands, has been terrific. And I was glad to see Hamas respected the gestures of the Turkish government and said they would be willing to have Turkish troops stationed on “our border.” That is a very high praise for the Turkish government.

Turks are showing Palestinians compassion, decency and justice. All the Turkish people should take pride in this stance, as was the case on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was the Turkish people and government who showed courage. Ninety-six percent of the Turkish people opposed the war in Iraq. The Turkish government refused to give Americans use of their land to attack Iraq. Now Turkish people and the Turkish government are redeeming themselves again by standing on what is right, what is decent and what is just. I say the highest praise for Erdogan and the Turkish people.

How do you feel about Israel’s operation in Gaza personally as the son of Holocaust survivors?

It has been a long time since I felt any emotional connection with the state of Israel, which relentlessly and brutally and inhumanly keeps these vicious, murderous wars. It is a vandal state. There is a Russian writer who once described vandal states as Genghis Khan with a telegraph. Israel is Genghis Khan with a computer. I feel no emotion of affinity with that state. I have some good friends and their families there, and of course I would not want any of them to be hurt. That said, sometimes I feel that Israel has come out of the boils of the hell, a satanic state. Ninety percent of the population continues to cheer, to exalt and feel proud and heroic. They send a Sherman tank to a playground and torch children. Is this heroism? Is this courage?

You were not allowed to teach at DePaul University despite a very good academic record and also had some problems in getting your Ph.D. from Princeton. Why?

Well, I had some problems. I really cannot discuss my problems in the face of what is going on in Gaza. It will be so silly, trivial and stupid. Three hundred or so children -- they were incinerated to death; phosphorus bombs were thrown indiscriminately over Gaza. Everything these people wanted to rebuild was destroyed again. This Israeli state invaded in 1978, again in 1982, again in 1993, again in 1996, again in 2006, and 2008, and it always destroys, destroys and destroys. And then these satanic narcissistic people throw their hands up in the air and ask, “Why doesn’t anybody love us? Why don’t our neighbors want us to be here?” Why would they?

Utopian Visions

2009-01-24T20:46:00.003+03:00

Peace Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Chris Hedges

I do not like Hamas. I detest religious fundamentalism and the use of suicide bombers. I find the group’s anti-Semitism and ruthless silencing of internal Palestinian opponents repugnant. The rocket attacks on Israeli civilians are a war crime. But this does not negate the legitimacy of Palestinian resistance to the long Israeli siege and occupation of Gaza.

The moral scum of any society rises to the surface in war. Those who have a penchant for violence and an access to weapons dominate the landscape. It was the criminal class and gangsters who first organized the defense of Sarajevo. It was the thugs of Gaza who took control to confront the Israeli army. This is nothing new in wartime. Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause. But there are moments when a people face the terrible tragedy of resistance or obliteration. This was true in Sarajevo. It is true for the Palestinians. It does not make it pretty or good. It is what happens.

The condemnation of the Palestinians for the use of force ignores the long violence of Israeli occupation. Those who call on the Palestinians to embrace nonviolence preach an airy utopianism. Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued that the rise of fascism in Europe had to be countered by force, broke with liberal humanists over the issue of pacifism. He attacked pacifism as “simply a version of Christian perfectionism.” And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who preached nonviolence during the civil rights movement, never finally claimed to be a pacifist, although he understood and warned about the moral contamination of violence.

“If we believe,” Niebuhr wrote in his essay “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” “that if Britain had only been fortunate enough to have produced 30 percent instead of 2 percent of conscientious objectors to military service, Hitler’s heart would have been softened and he would not have dared attack Poland, we hold a faith which no historic reality justifies.”

“Yet most modern forms of Christian pacifism are heretical,” Niebuhr wrote. “Presumably inspired by the Christian gospel, they have really absorbed the Renaissance faith in the goodness of man, rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin as an outmoded bit of pessimism, have reinterpreted the cross so that it is made to stand for the absurd idea that perfect love is guaranteed a simple victory over the world, and have rejected all other profound elements of the Christian gospel. … This form of pacifism is not only heretical when judged by the standards of the total gospel. It is equally heretical when judged by the facts of human existence. There are no historical realities which remotely conform to it. It is important to recognize this lack of conformity to the facts of experience as a criterion of heresy.”

Pacifism, in times of war, always falls swiftly out of favor—indeed it is often branded as a form of treason—and the myth of human advancement, backed by war and violence, becomes the dominant ideology. The myth of human advancement is ironically often kept alive by pacifists in peacetime. This myth is used to feed the aggressiveness and cruelty of those who call for the use of violence to cleanse the world, to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, of “the evildoers.” The danger is not finally pacifism or militarism. It is this latent aggressiveness and cruelty, wedded to the poisonous belief in the possibility of collective moral progress, a belief that defies human history and human nature. The belief that we can use violence to advance the world morally becomes especially dangerous in a crisis when human beings feel, or are made to feel, threatened and afraid. It informs and enlarges our innate human aggression. This is our disease. It is the disease of most Israelis.

This aggressiveness, as Sigmund Freud wrote, “… waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.”

It is fear, ignorance, a lack of introspection, a failure of empathy and the illusion that we can create a harmonious world that lead us to sanction the immoral, to embrace Immanuel Kant’s “radical evil”. This is what Israel is doing in Gaza. It is what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. And pacifism, ironically, subtly feeds these illusions.

The American and Israeli doctrine of pre-emptive war, disproportionate force and ruthless occupation to bring about peace and harmony is a fantasy. Such a doctrine regurgitates the old arguments for 19th century European colonialism. Violence and force will not make Israel, or us, safe. It will not turn foreign cultures into carbon copies of our own. It will not make possible our perverted and narrow ideal of human advancement. The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them—violence. The rockets fired into Israel are a response to the siege and occupation. They are a response to the language Israel uses when it addresses the Palestinians. And as long as the siege and occupation continue, as long as Israel speaks to the Palestinians through explosions and airstrikes, so will armed resistance to Israel. Once the dogs of hate and force are unleashed—and it is we and Israel who unleashed them—armed resistance is inevitable.

The Palestinian reaction to Israeli occupation should be familiar to Israelis. Tzipi Levni, Israel’s foreign minister, says that the Israeli government will have no dealings with Hamas terrorists. But Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, the chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, which fought against the British occupation of Palestine. The underground Jewish group set off a massive bomb in the King David hotel in Jerusalem, a blast in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews. These Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Tell me the moral difference between Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Stern gang and Hamas. I fail to see one.

Israel hopes to cut a deal with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah. But the Israeli government squandered the chance to make a deal with Fatah. Israel once could have negotiated with the Fatah leader, Yasser Arafat, but it steadfastly refused. Arafat’s life ended with him surrounded by Israeli troops and unable to leave his bunker in Ramallah. Hamas, because of Fatah’s corruption and incompetence, won the Palestinian election in 2006. And all the bombing and shelling will not make Hamas, or some even more radical version, go away. Israeli will have to negotiate with Hamas or with no one.

War always opens a Pandora’s box of new problems, new disasters, increased suffering and dilemmas. It becomes its own culture. It radically alters reality through massive acts of industrial slaughter. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. Hamas is a distasteful and morally bankrupt organization. But the utopian project to bend Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan by force to our will has created a hell on earth for Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians and only enflamed these conflicts. The killings carried out by the United States and Israel dwarf the massacres carried out by Saddam Hussein, including his genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the Shiites. We have become terribly efficient killers and the most potent recruiters for the region’s jihadists.

The echoes of Israel’s ruthless slaughter in Gaza, and our slaughters in Iraq and Afghanistan, will reverberate in the months and years ahead in expanded acts of terrorism and a new implacable militancy by the Palestinians and the Muslim world. There is a cause and effect. And those who tell the grieving families in Gaza or Iraq or Afghanistan to use moral suasion and nonviolence to counter tank blasts and airstrikes in crowded neighborhoods are as self-deluded as pro-war Israeli and American politicians who think they can blast their way to a solution.

The military occupation of Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan has failed. It has furthered the spread of failed states. It has increased authoritarianism, savage violence, instability and anarchy. It has swelled the ranks of our real enemies—the Islamic terrorists—and opened up voids of lawlessness where they can operate and plot against us. It has nearly scuttled the art of diplomacy. It has left us, like Israel, an outlaw state creating more outlaw states.

The rise of militarism is a familiar path taken by collapsing states. Militarism arrests social decay. It shoves this decay underground where it cannot be challenged by critics and social movements. Those who launch crusades hold out beautiful fantasies of freedom, liberation and peace. But the impossibility of these utopian dreams always turns these projects for human advancement into squalid justifications for atrocity. Realism, as John N. Gray writes, “requires a discipline of thought that may be too austere for a culture that prizes psychological comfort above anything else, and it is a reasonable question whether western liberal societies are capable of the moral effort that is involved in setting aside hopes of world-transformation.”

It is realism, an unflinching acceptance of our stark and severe limitations and an end to self-delusional utopian visions—those that embrace force and those that do not—that we must accept if we are to survive as a nation and finally as a species. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. We have to stand in the shoes of those we brand as the enemy. We have to see ourselves as others see us. Israel must negotiate with Hamas and end its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank to secure a lasting peace. We must withdraw our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and negotiate with those arrayed against us to find stability. Until this happens, we all remain trapped on a merry-go-round of death.

Ulterior Motives

2009-01-22T10:10:00.001+03:00

Targeting civilians was a deliberate part of this bid to humiliate Hamas and the Palestinians, and pulverise Gaza into chaos

Ben White

January 21, 2009 The Guardian - The scale of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government's long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser put it, in a wonderful bit of unintentional irony, "When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath?"

Despite a mass of evidence that includes Israel's targets in Operation Cast Lead, public remarks by Israeli leaders over some time, and the ceasefire manoeuvring of this last weekend, much of the analysis offered by politicians or commentators has been disappointingly limited, and characterised by false assumptions, or misplaced emphases, about Israel's motivations.

First, to what this war on Gaza is not about: it's not about the rockets. During the truce last year, rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was reduced by 97%, with the few projectiles that were fired coming from non-Hamas groups opposed to the agreement. Despite this success in vastly improving the security of Israelis in the south, Israel did everything it could to undermine the calm, and provoke Hamas into a conflict.

Israel broke the ceasefire on 4 November, with an attack in the Gaza Strip that killed six Hamas members, and the following day severely tightened its siege of the territory. Imports were reduced to 16 trucks a day, down from 123 daily just the previous month (and 475 in May 2007). Following the unsurprising surge in Palestinian attacks, Israeli officials claimed that an all-out war was unavoidable; without mentioning that an operation had been planned for some months already.

Second, the current operation is only in a limited sense related to both the upcoming Israeli elections and restoring the IDF's so-called deterrence. While it has been pointed out that a hardline approach to Palestinian "terrorism" can play well with the Israeli public, wars are not necessarily Israeli politicians' tactic of choice - the Lebanon war was fought a few months after one.

Israel is also supposed to be restoring the reputation and "deterrence factor" of its armed forces, after their humiliation in Lebanon in 2006. Suffice to say that until this weekend's unilateral ceasefire, in an aid-dependent enclave defended by an almost entirely isolated militia, Israel's operation had already lasted three times longer than the 1967 war when Israel defeated its Arab neighbours and occupied the rest of Mandate Palestine.

These three suggested motivations have sometimes reached the level of assumed knowledge, providing the background for further comment and reporting. Based on this kind of analysis, then, criticism of Palestinian civilian casualties is framed as "disproportionate" or "heavy-handed", but fundamentally a case of self-defence. It is understood that any democratic nation would have to respond to terrorist rocket fire, but Israel has gone a bit too far.

There is, however, no shortage of evidence available that points to rather different Israeli aims. Estimates for the proportion of civilian deaths among the 1,360 Palestinians killed range from more than half to two-thirds. Politicians, diplomats and journalists are by and large shying away from the obvious, namely that Israel has been deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians and the very infrastructure of normal life, in order to - in the best colonial style - teach the natives a lesson.

Given the enormous scale of what Palestinians have described as a "war of extermination" - it appears that some 15% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip were completely destroyed or collapsed and there is an estimated $1.4bn worth of destruction to vital civil infrastructure - it is impossible to list every atrocity. Israel has repeatedly hit ambulances, medics, clinics, and hospitals, while last week, aid volunteers who tried to douse a fire in a Red Crescent warehouse (attacked by Israel) were then shot at by Israeli forces.

UNRWA facilities have also been attacked, including several schools sheltering civilians - just this last weekend, a civilian refuge was repeatedly shelled. Last week, the UN headquarters was also shelled, hitting a vocational centre, a workshop, food warehouse, and fuel depot. Like the massacre of 6 January, Israeli officials quickly began to produce a confusing fog of denials, apologies, promised enquiries and contradictions.

Those are just some of the more shocking examples from a military operation that has targeted everything from schools, money-changers and a bird farm, to entire apartment blocks, harbours, and a market. Palestinians have been killed when Israeli tanks fired shells at residential neighbourhoods. Every day has brought fresh horrors; last Wednesday, for example, 70 unarmed civilians including 18 children were killed by the Israeli military. This week's Observer carried a story alleging Israel bulldozed homes with civilians inside (not for the first time) and shot those waving white flags. Little wonder that Israeli officials predicted with concern that "negative sentiment" towards the state would "only grow as the full picture of destruction emerges".

Much of this is widely known, and easily accessible; yet still the analytical emphasis has remained on Palestinian rockets, Israeli elections, and deterrence. I would like to suggest three alternative purposes for Israel's Operation Cast Lead that go beyond the usual perspectives, and presuming with Yale professor David Bromwich that "if Israel in 2009 reduces to rubble a large portion of the Gaza Strip and leaves tens of thousands homeless, there is a strong chance that this was what it intended to do".

The first aim is to humiliate and weaken Hamas. On the one hand, this seems obvious, but contrary to how the goal is often understood, this is not primarily to protect the Israeli public - as pointed out previously, ceasefires and negotiations are far more likely to deliver security for Israeli citizens - but rather it is a political goal. Hamas had withstood isolation, a siege, mass arrests, and an attempted western-backed coup. Moreover, cracks were appearing in the international community's resolve to parrot Israel's line on Hamas. The group, with its resilience and ability to deliver on negotiated ceasefires, was threatening the chance to make a deal with the Ramallah "moderates", and so:

A hammer blow that shattered the movement, launching some of the resulting splinters in directions that once again put all of them beyond the pale, was the most effective way to keep at bay those third parties reaching the conclusion that engaging rather than excluding Hamas could enhance the prospects of peace.

Back in December, before both the end of the six-month truce and the start of Operation Cast Lead, foreign minister Tzipi Livni stated that an extended truce "harms the Israel strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement". By the end of the month, Livni would be telling a press conference that "Hamas wants to gain legitimacy from the international community" and stressing that it is "important to keep Hamas from becoming a legitimate organisation" (apparently winning a democratic election isn't enough to confer legitimacy).

Just as Israel chose "blood over diplomacy" in order to avoid enhancing "Hamas's image as a responsible interlocutor", so this weekend, Israel chose a unilateral ceasefire for the same reason, "hoping to send the message that Hamas is not a legitimate actor". A war begun in order to delegitimise Hamas would not make way for a ceasefire in which Hamas was a partner at the negotiating table.

Hence Israel decided to shortcut the Egyptian-driven efforts at securing a ceasefire, and opt for a unilateral approach that allows Israel, the US, Egypt, Mahmoud Abbas, Britain - in fact, every interested party, except the Gaza Strip authorities - to work together on an apparent solution. It is also worth pointing out that the unilateral nature of the ceasefire frees Israel to define an infringement or collapse on its own terms.

The second aim of Israel's war is to teach a lesson to the Palestinians in Gaza, and elsewhere, that the only way to avoid the wrath of the Israeli military is to accept Israel's idea of a two-state solution, a generous concession to be gratefully received by Abbas and fellow moderates. It is a reflection of the approach outlined by the IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, in 2002 that "the Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people".

On 4 January, Israeli President Shimon Peres said that Hamas needed "a real and serious lesson"; days later, he was more explicit, reportedly declaring Israel's aim to be "to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel". The next day, the Washington Post also described how Israeli officials were hoping that the attacks would mean "that Gazans become disgusted with Hamas and drive the group from power".

This Israeli strategy was previously deployed in Lebanon in 2006, when senior military commanders redefined civilian villages as "military bases" which would be subjected to "disproportionate force" causing "great damage and destruction". As I previously noted, the lessons learned in Lebanon were not just wrong, but criminal: a retired IDF major general and former adviser to the prime minister, Giora Eiland, reflected in a paper that "the destruction of homes and infrastructure and the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people are consequences that can influence Hezbollah's behaviour more than anything else".

Ironically, the same Peres who now justifies collective punishment, in 2002 chastised Avigdor Lieberman for suggesting that the IDF should bomb civilian targets, warning the minister that such a tactic would be a war crime. The last three weeks show that proposals made by Israel's political extremists and originally considered outlandish, do not take long to become normal policy.

Deliberately targeting civilians and vital infrastructure for political purposes links smoothly, into the post-conflict phase, with the Israeli and US plan to try and rescue the deeply discredited image of the Palestinian Authority through a politicised reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. As US state department spokesman Sean McCormack coyly put it, the "military solution" must be followed up by investing in infrastructure and helping the population "so that they can make a different kind of political decision".

The third aim of Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip is to further "catastrophise" the territory, reducing the capacity for continued existence to the barest of minimums - perhaps to bring about "an end to the persistence of Gaza's ordinary people in wanting the chance of a peaceful and dignified life". One obvious benefit to Israel of pulverising "civilian Palestinian infrastructure" is that "people who lack collective institutions and are reduced to scrabbling for their very survival are easier to dominate".

Yet, there is more going on here. Israel seeks to turn the Gaza Strip into a depoliticised humanitarian crisis, always on the brink of catastrophe, always dependent; its population reduced to ration-receiving clients of international aid. Yitzhak Rabin famously wished that Gaza "would just sink into the sea", but perhaps the best Israel can do is to share the problem with the international community, possibly to the extent of troops on the ground.

Increasingly focusing on Egyptian responsibility is also part of this, whether in terms of arms smuggling, aid supplies, or for some, direct rule.

In all of this, the Gaza Strip has become a laboratory for future possible scenarios in the West Bank (where a process of "development-isation" and NGO-funded occupation is well established). All three of these Israeli aims - to delegitimise and sideline Hamas, to persuade Palestinians to give up their resistance and to shirk responsibility for a shattered Gaza Strip - require the deliberate commission of war crimes and gross human rights abuses. As time will tell, they are also doomed to fail.

Getting the Word Out

2009-01-21T13:15:00.002+03:00

Why is the American media so biased in the coverage of the Israeli - Palestine conflict?

We are Wide Awake

Israel's Cold War mentality enabled them to attempt to blind the world to The War on Gaza by banning media. But the times had already changed for eye witnesses now tell their own story without editing or censoring on You Tube and Google News.

"Israel's version of events has been given so much credence by the dying Bush administration that the ban on journalists entering Gaza may simply be of little importance to the Israeli army. By the time we investigate, whatever they are trying to hide will have been overtaken by another crisis in which they can claim to be in the "front line" in the "war on terror".

Another crisis of Israel's own making hit You Tube moments after Mark Regev, the Israeli Government’s official spokesman finally admitted what everyone with an Internet connection and interest already knew; which was that Hamas did not break the ceasefire. "In May there were 149 rocket attacks. In June before the ceasefire started on the 18th, there were 84. In the rest of June, three. Throughout July, August, September and October, there were just fifteen attacks and Israel agrees that none of these rockets were fired by Hamas."

According to Richard Falk, the UN's special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, "There is a well-grounded view that both the initial attacks on Gaza and the tactics being used by Israel are serious violations of the UN charter, the Geneva Conventions, international law and international humanitarian law. There is a consensus among independent legal experts that Israel is an occupying power and is therefore bound by the duties set out in the Fourth Geneva Convention. The arguments that Israel's blockade is a form of prohibited collective punishment, and that it is in breach of its duty to ensure the population has sufficient food and healthcare as the occupying power, are very strong."

Among the increasing crisis facing Israel are the growing numbers of global voices sending the UN messages and websites requesting you to add your call to the list for a creation of the Israeli War Crimes Tribunal.

The next crisis on the horizon and more bad PR for the sorry state of Israel, the self-proclaimed "only democracy in the Middle East" will happen by April 21, 2009 when Mordechai Vanunu's fifth year of restrictions expire.

Since April 2004, Vanunu has walked the streets of east Jerusalem and spoken with thousands of internationals in person and via the Internet. Israel, however commanded him not to speak to anyone unless they are Israeli citizens, denied him the right to leave the state, to come within 300 meters of foreign embassies, to leave Occupied Jerusalem without prior permission from security agencies; all based on the 1945 British Mandate State of Emergency Regulations, which expired and led to Israel's statehood.

The State of Israel will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion it will guarantee freedom of religion [and] conscience and will be faithful to the Charter of the United Nations.- May 14, 1948 (The Declaration of the Establishment of Israel).

Vanunu was born in 1954, and had a second coming into the world on April 21, 2004 upon release from 18 years in Ashkelon Prison –most all in solitary-sentenced for treason. Vanunu has consistently maintained that due to a crisis of conscience and desire to prevent a nuclear holocaust, he was lead to covertly photograph inside of Israel's clandestine underground WMD facility. Vanunu's two rolls of film document the fact that Israel had manufactured upwards of 200 nuclear warheads by 1985.

Upon release from Ashkelon, Vanunu stated, "I'm not speaking in Hebrew. If Israel doesn't let me speak to foreigners I am not speaking in Hebrew…I was kidnapped in Rome, Italy by Israel's spy on 13 September and I was brought to Israel, arrived at... prison on 7 October 1986 until today…in very cruel, barbaric treatment by Israel's spy [agency] Mossad.

"I am not harming Israel. I am not interested in Israel. All this bullshit, blah blah blah, about secrets, is dead. My case is dead. The article was published. There are no more secrets. All the secrets were published and is in the hand of the whole world. All the world, every state, 180 states received these secrets. I am now ready to start my life.

I am not harming Israel. I am not interested in Israel. I want to tell you something very important. I suffered here 18 years because I am a Christian, because I was baptized into Christianity. If I was a Jew I wouldn't have all this suffering here in isolation for 18 years. Only because I was a Christian man."

Annually, since 1986, Vanunu has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2007, Vanunu was nominated by Bishop Desmond Tutu, who received the Nobel Prize in 1984, for his courageous and fearless opposition against the South African apartheid system.

Same Old Stories

2009-01-20T23:35:00.002+03:00

So, I asked the UN secretary general, isn't it time for a war crimes tribunal?

Robert Fisk

It's a wrap, a doddle, an Israeli ceasefire just in time for Barack Obama to have a squeaky-clean inauguration with all the world looking at the streets of Washington rather than the rubble of Gaza. Condi and Ms Livni thought their new arms-monitoring agreement – reached without a single Arab being involved – would work. Ban Ki-moon welcomed the unilateral truce. The great and the good gathered for a Sharm el-Sheikh summit. Only Hamas itself was not consulted. Which led, of course, to a few wrinkles in the plan. First, before declaring its own ceasefire, Hamas fired off more rockets at Israel, proving that Israel's primary war aim – to stop the missiles – had failed. Then Cairo shrugged off the deal because no one was going to set up electronic surveillance equipment on Egyptian soil. And not one European leader travelling to the region suggested the survivors might be helped if Israel, the EU and the US ended the food and fuel siege of Gaza.

After killing hundreds of women and children, Israel was the good guy again, by declaring a unilateral ceasefire that Hamas was certain to break. But Obama will be smiling on Tuesday. Was not this the reason, after all, why Israel suddenly wanted a truce?

Egypt's objections may be theatre – the US spent £18m last year training Egyptian security men to stop arms smuggling into Gaza and since the US bails out Egypt's economy, ignores the corruption of its regime and goes on backing Hosni Mubarak, there's sure to be a "compromise" very soon.

And Hamas has had its claws cut. Israel's informers in Gaza handed over the locations of its homes and hideouts and the government of Gaza must be wondering if they can ever close down the spy rings. Hamas thought its militia was the Hizbollah – a serious error – and that the world would eventually come to its aid. The world (although not its pompous leaders) felt enormous pity for the Palestinians, but not for the cynical men of Hamas who staged a coup in Gaza in 2007 which killed 151 Palestinians. As usual, the European statesmen appeared hopelessly out of touch with what their own electorates thought.

And history was quite forgotten. The Hamas rockets were the result of the food and fuel siege; Israel broke Hamas's own truce on 4 and 17 November. Forgotten is the fact Hamas won the 2006 elections, although Israel has killed a clutch of the victors.

And there'll be little time for the peacemakers of Sharm el-Sheikh to reflect on the three UN schools targeted by the Israelis and the slaughter of the civilians inside. Poor old Ban Ki-moon. He tried to make his voice heard just before the ceasefire, saying Israel's troops had acted "outrageously" and should be "punished" for the third school killing. Some hope. At a Beirut press conference, he admitted he had failed to get a call through to Israel's Foreign Minister to complain.

It was pathetic. When I asked Mr Ban if he would consider a UN war crimes tribunal in Gaza, he said this would not be for him to "determine". But only a few journalists bothered to listen to him and his officials were quickly folding up the UN flag on the table. About time too. Bring back the League of Nations. All is forgiven.

What no one noticed yesterday – not the Arabs nor the Israelis nor the portentous men from Europe – was that the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting last night was opening on the 90th anniversary – to the day – of the opening of the 1919 Paris peace conference which created the modern Middle East. One of its main topics was "the borders of Palestine". There followed the Versailles Treaty. And we know what happened then. The rest really is history. Bring on the ghosts.