‘Israel’s Inalienable Rights’

Source

By Charles Glass ∙ Takimag.com via NormanFinkelstein.com ∙ January 19, 2009

Self-evident Truths: For Barack Obama on the Eve of His Inauguration as President of the United States.

• Israel has the inalienable right to pursue terrorists in the Gaza Strip and everywhere else they are hiding.
• Israel has the inalienable right to attack houses, mosques, churches, United Nations shelters, schools and hospitals to kill terrorists.
• Israel has the inalienable right to expropriate the land of Palestinian farmers for Israeli Jewish settlers.
• Israel has the inalienable right to arrest, torture and brutalise Palestinians who resist the expropriation of their land.
• Israel has the inalienable right to restrict the movement of Palestinians from one place to another in order to protect the settlements it has built on land expropriated, by inalienable right, from Palestinians.
• Israel has the inalienable right to demolish the houses of Palestinians, provided: the land on which the houses stand are needed for Israeli settlement; the owners of the houses are related to terrorist suspects; or Israeli military commanders determine that demolition is necessary.
• Israel has the right to erect concrete walls within the occupied territories to put more land on the Israeli side of the line for future use by Israeli settlers.
• Israel has the inalienable right to establish road networks that non-Israeli residents of the occupied territories are forbidden to use.
• Israel has the right to instruct the President of the United States how the Secretary of State must vote at the United Nations, which criminals must be granted presidential pardons and how he should treat other nations of the Middle East.
• Israel has the inalienable right to a minimum of $1,500 per Israeli Jewish citizen every year from the American Treasury.
• Israel has the inalienable right to the most sophisticated and lethal American weaponry.
• Israel has the right to deploy any and all American weapons on terrorists, whether in violation of international law or agreements with the United States not to deploy phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilian populations.
• Israel has the inalienable right to defy United Nations resolutions and World Court rulings. (A corollary of this right means that United Nations resolutions do not apply to Israel.)
• Israel has the inalienable right to accuse those who disagree with its occupation “anti-Semites,” unless the dissenters are Jewish, in which case Israel has the inalienable right to declare them “self-hating.”
• Israel has the inalienable right to demand the dismissal of American academics, journalists and politicians who voice opinions that question any of Israel’s inalienable rights.
• Israel has the inalienable right to invoke the memory of the victims of Nazi persecution to exempt itself from blame for any of its actions.
• Israel has the inalienable right to determine what rights the Palestinians have.

Thus,

• The Palestinians have no right to resist military occupation, confiscation of land, seizure of their water supply, collective punishment, arbitrary taxation, torture, public beatings, school closures and the destruction of crops and orchards.
• The Palestinians have no right to disobey Israeli soldiers’ orders or to appeal for outside assistance.
• The Palestinians have no right to non-violent civil disobedience, to armed struggle or to international representation to present their case.
• The Palestinians have no right to withhold taxes that pay for the Israeli occupation.
• The Palestinians have no rights, except those granted to them by the Israeli authorities, whose inalienable rights may not be contested.

Egypt's intelligence blackmails wounded Palestinians to tell about Hamas

Source

[ 23/01/2009 - 04:07 PM ]

CAIRO, (PIC)-- Palestinians citizens wounded in the Israeli war on Gaza and treated in Egyptian hospitals affirmed Friday that elements of the Egyptian intelligence questioned them and asked them to reveal information on the whereabouts of Hamas's arms stores.

The Al-Jazeera net news website on the internet quoted a number of those wounded Palestinians as affirming that elements of the Egyptian security interrogated them in very harsh manner, and asked them to reveal what they know about Hamas's military force, adding that the security officers threatened to deny them medical treatment if they refused to "cooperate".

In a telephone call with news website, one of the wounded Palestinians who remained in Egypt for treatment revealed that the Egyptian security forces asked him to inform Hamas that Cairo will not allow them to "smuggle" weapons through Egypt's borders, and that it will not allow Hamas to rebuild its military capabilities anew.

He also revealed that the Egyptian security promised him of keeping the information he may reveal as confidential, adding that he was asked about Hamas Movement and on the hideouts of its senior leaders.

"At the beginning they treated me in a nice and polite manner, but after I denied knowing anything about Hamas, one of the interrogators beat me on the wound and said: Don't lie, you are from Hamas and the Qassam Brigades, and you should speak, otherwise, we won't allow you to continue medical treatment here, and we will throw you like dogs", the wounded Palestinian underscored.

During the 23 days of the brutal Israeli aggression on Gaza Strip, Egypt remained defiant and refused to open the Rafah crossing point, which is under Egypt's full control, to allow medicine and food into the devastated Strip, although it opened the border terminal for medicine only shortly before the Israeli disgraced failure in the war.

Jew Hatred

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In Zionism, anti-Semitism, politics on 14 January, 2009 at 8:18 pm

The charge of Jew hatred is banded about a lot by the Zionist lobby and used as a political tool. According to Zionist mantra, anti-Zionism is ispso facto Jew hatred, although by that rationale, Zionism is ipso facto Arab hatred, but logic doesn’t factor into the Zionist argument. They also attribute all criticism of Israel to a pathological hatred of the Jews, not entertaining for a minute that hatred of Israel as a genocidal and fascist Jewish colony might be motivated by something other than hatred of Jews.

Obviously, anti-Zionism, which is motivated by opposition to fascism, imperialism, genocide, ethnic-cleansing, racism and collective punishment, is not the same thing as hating Jews for their religious or cultural beliefs. Nor is it the same thing as hating Jews as an ethnic group. I’d go as far as to say that anyone who doesn’t hate Zionism is morally destitute and completely lacking in humanity. If Nazism was evil, so too is Zionism.

Most people outside of America recognise this, they know that anti-Zionism isn’t the same thing as Jew hatred but still so strong and pervassive is Zionists propaganda, that no EU leader dare call Israel to account or call Zionism what it is: a fascist ideology predicated on Jewish racial supremacy. Nor will they point out the unhealthy, undemocratic and corrupting influence that the Zionist lobby has in European politics.

The astute British blogger Michael St. Mark, remarked that:

“The demotion well away from front page newspaper and TV news headlines of the horrendous Gaza situation ( The Independent maybe excepted ) is evidence the entire western MSM is controlled by Jews sympathetic to Zionisterrorism.”

A comment that will no doubt provoke accusations of Jew hatred, even though, in the UK and much of Europe, Jews are undoubtedly an overrepresented group in the media. If the underrepresentation of women and ethnic minorities matters, then so does Jewish overrepresentation. And Michael is absolutely right, the western MSM is at the very least, heavily politically skewed in favour of Zionism, but he didn’t suggest that all Zionists are Jews or that all Jews are Zionist. Clearly, that’s not true, but unfortunately it is the Jews sympathetic to Zionism who are overrepresented. So much so that non-Zionist Jews complain of being marginalised and underrepresented.

Despite the overwhelming public rejection of Zionism as an ideology, Europe’s polity and media continue to support Israel and quite clearly, certain Zionist financiers and organisations are being allowed undue influence over party policy.

Zionist propagandists are cynically using accusations of Jew hatred to silence critics of a genocidal fascist regime. Their entire basis for this supposed Jewish hatred is bogus. Although there are religious Zionists, Zionism as a political movement was born out of atheism. Zionism is an atheist ideology — Jewish Social Darwinism — so anti-Zionism is hardly anti-Judaic.

Mideast: Cornering of Civilians Unprecedented, Says UN Official

by David Cronin (brussels)

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Inter Press Service

Israel's refusal to allow civilians any exit route from Gaza as its defence forces rained bombs down on schools and houses appears unprecedented in modern warfare, a United Nations investigator has said.

Richard Falk, the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, described the sealing off of the Gaza Strip in order to ensure that nobody could flee it as 'a distinct, new and sinister war crime.'

'For the first time in a military operation, the civilian population as a whole has been locked into a war zone,' he told a meeting of the European Parliament by telephone. 'No children, women, sick people or disabled people were allowed to leave. For the first time, the option of becoming a refugee has been withheld.'

Arguing that the conduct of the three-week offensive against Gaza could amount to a 'horrible abuse of Israel's role as the occupying power,' he noted that international law - particularly the 1949 Geneva convention - obliges the occupier to provide adequate food and medical facilities to the population it seeks to control. The 18-month blockade which preceded Operation Cast Lead was 'unlawful', he added.

Aged 78, Falk boasts a lengthy record as an academic, and as a campaigner for disarmament and human rights and on environmental issues. Yet his outspoken defence of Palestinian civilians has made him something of a persona non grata for the Israeli government. Last year it refused to allow him to enter the occupied territories, accusing him of an anti-Israel bias.

Zvi Tal, deputy head of Israel's embassy to the European Union, sought to defend the attacks on Gaza by describing the situation there as 'a very peculiar one.'

Since the Islamic organisation Hamas fought its rival Fatah over who should administer Gaza in 2007, the territory has had the status of a 'hostile entity', he said, claiming that Israel bombed UN schools because some gunmen had taken shelter there 'in order to drag us in.'

'Sometimes in the heat of fire and the exchange of fire, we do make mistakes,' Tal told IPS. 'We're not infallible.'

Of the 1,330 people killed during the operation, 904 were civilians. The Palestinian ministry of health has stated that the dead included 437 children, 123 elderly men and 110 women. By contrast, 13 Israelis, three of them non-combatants, lost their lives.

Raji Sourani, Gaza-based director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, noted that more bodies are continuously being extricated from the rubble of razed buildings. He said 27 persons died Jan. 21 alone from injuries in the bombing.

He castigated the EU for not taking a firm line against Israel's actions. The Union abstained from voting on a motion put before the UN Human Rights Council earlier this month on the need to investigate violations of human rights and humanitarian law by Israel. The Czech Republic, which holds the EU presidency, said the motion 'addressed only one side of the conflict.'

Sourani also protested at the decision of EU governments in December to go ahead with a planned upgrading of their relations with Israel. Despite numerous reports that Israel was systematically discriminating against Palestinians, the EU agreed to continue with moves to make Israel a 'privileged partner'. This would integrate Israel into the EU's single market to a large degree.

'It is a shame to see the conspiracy of silence from official Europe,' Sourani added. 'It is a shame that Europe rewarded Israel's de facto apartheid system and its economic and social suffocation of Gaza by upgrading relations with Israel.'

Next week, the EU's foreign ministers will assess the situation in Gaza when they meet in Brussels. A Cypriot member of the European Parliament (MEP) Kyriacos Triantaphyllides, urged them to call off efforts to develop closer ties with Israel.

'We can't talk about upgrading relations with Israel at the moment,' he said. 'I'm sorry, we just can't.'

Hélène Flautre, a French Green MEP, dismissed claims by Israel that it had to bomb schools because Hamas may have been firing from them. 'Just because a fighter is in a school, you cannot go and kill a hundred civilians,' she said. 'That is not allowed under international law.'

Normally, the Red Cross, a humanitarian organisation, refrains from making public comments. Yet it has strongly denounced Israel's activities in Gaza, complaining about how children have been found hungry beside the corpses of their parents because aid workers had been preventing from reaching them.

Vincent Cassard, deputy head of the organisation's Middle East division, complained that 'a number of people died because of lack of access to healthcare' and that half of Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants do not have proper access to water or sanitation. He also protested at how the Al-Quds hospital, run by the Palestinian Red Crescent society, had been targeted by Israeli forces.

Filippo Grandi, deputy chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said that up to 50,000 people sought refuge in schools operated by his agency. On at least three occasions civilians were killed inside or in the immediate vicinity of those schools.

He argued that unless the blockade of Gaza is lifted and progress made towards resolving the underlying political problems there, recovery from Israel's offensive 'will be difficult and I fear impossible.'

© Inter Press Service

Jewish leaders object to Nazi imagery at ralliesJewish leaders object to Nazi imagery at rallies

By ARON HELLER, Associated Press Writer Aron Heller, Associated Press Writer Mon Jan 19, 3:09 pm ET

JERUSALEM – The use of Nazi imagery at recent anti-Israel demonstrations across Europe has fanned the flames of anti-Jewish and incited violence against Jews, the head of Israel's Holocaust memorial said Monday.

Protests against Israel's Gaza offensive have included signs and slogans comparing Israeli soldiers to German troops, the Gaza Strip to the Auschwitz death camp and the Jewish Star of David to the Nazi swastika.

The protests have come amid a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic acts, including attacks on synagogues, beatings of pro-Israel demonstrators and proposed boycotts of Jewish businesses, according to the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League.

Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem museum and memorial, said the comparisons were "manipulative distortions of history" and called for the Holocaust to be left out of contemporary political discourse.

"It is legitimate to constructively criticize the policies of any nation, including Israel. However, the baseless use of Holocaust imagery and terminology as a weapon against Israel has incited a tangible surge of anti-Jewish," he said. "That is the danger inherent when people cynically use the Holocaust to distort a present political conflict."

Most of the protesters reject any accusation of anti-Jewish.

The Nazis and their collaborators murdered 6 million Jews in an attempt to eradicate European Jewry during World War II, shutting them in ghettos and concentration camps and killing them in gas chambers.

More than 1,200 Palestinians were killed during Israel's three-week operation, launched on Dec. 27 to halt near-daily rocket fire from Gaza toward Israel. More than half the dead were civilians, according to the United Nations. Thirteen Israelis also died in the fighting.

Images of the devastation in Gaza — including the bloodied bodies of children and anguished victims in hospitals — stoked protests around the world. Human rights groups accused Israel of using disproportionate force and of not doing enough to protect Gaza's civilian population.

Anti-Semitic incidents during the war spiked markedly in Europe, the Anti-Defamation League said.

Molotov cocktails have been hurled toward synagogues in France, Sweden and Belgium. Jews have been beaten in England and Norway, and an Italian union endorsed a boycott of Jewish-owned shops in Rome.

In Amsterdam, a Dutch lawmaker marched in a demonstration where the crowd hollered "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas." Socialist lawmaker Harry van Bommel said he did not repeat calls for another Holocaust and only chanted, "Intifada, Intifada, Free Palestine."

The Norwegian finance minister took part in a protest where comparisons were made between Nazis and Jews. A British lawmaker whose grandmother died in the Holocaust said Israeli soldiers were acting like Nazis and most recently, a senior Vatican official, Cardinal Renato Martino, said Gaza under the Israeli military offensive resembled a "big concentration camp."

"We have always seen a link between violence in the Middle East to anti-Jewish but we have never seen anything like what we are seeing now," said Abraham Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and the national director of the ADL. "Not on this scale, not in this intensity."

He said similar protests have also taken place in the United States. In San Francisco, protesters burned Israeli flags and carried banners reading "Jews are terrorists," "ZionismNazism," and "GazaHolocaust." Some read "Zionazis."

"If you think Israel is too aggressive, say it! But don't use the words 'Ghetto' and 'Nazi,'" Shalev said.

Speaking at the cornerstone-laying ceremony for a new wing at Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies, he said the school's students study the painful lessons of that era. He said that includes speaking out against injustice anywhere.

"But they also learn that absurd and vicious comparisons of current events in the Middle East to the Holocaust do nothing to further understanding of the current situation," he said. "Instead they cloud our judgment and our perceptions."

Just Following Orders

Just Following Orders

As a young pup new to this “justice for the peoples in the Middle East” thing, I used to do ‘it’, meaning the “Philo-Judaic Two-Step”. I–like many these days–had honed it to a perfectly flawless, perfectly executed response whenever I would get that “Oh my GAAAAAD…Why do you HATE the Jews so much???’ after trying to have an intelligent discussion about the real causes of terrorism, Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty, AIPAC, the war in Iraq, the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians and just about every other damned thing making this world a miserable place to live in these days.

This dance–as many have either witnessed or even executed themselves–is notoriously well-known by now. It is that ridiculous, awkward maneuver one is forced to execute in trying to get back on his or her feet after being knocked off balance with the all-too-typical accusations of “anti-Semitism”, racism or being a Nazi sympathizer for daring to notice the awful smell emanating from that dirty diaper in the Middle East, Israel. It is that “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…I’m not against the Jews, just the Zionists” shtick that well-meaning but naïve operatives use in their attempt at wiping off all the tar and feathers hurled at them by those in the pro-Jewish mob in the interest of shutting them up and shutting down any meaningful debate.

Now however, having learned the lesson the hard way that trying to stay on the “good side” of the Jews (if such a version of reality could actually exist) while at the same time doing my moral duty in speaking out against certain things I know for a fact to be empirically wrong was all a big waste of time, my tactics have changed. The fact is, the Jews–having 2 sets of rules, one for them and one for the rest of us–do not fight fair and anyone who gets into the ring without understanding this fact is just a statistic waiting to happen. While the rest of us Gentiles enter the contest saying “may the best man win”, using nothing but our knuckles and taking our licks as they come, the Jews come into it saying “win at any cost, no matter what kind of rules–moral or otherwise–have to be broken” while bringing along a garbage bag full of dirty tricks and “aids” such as sand for our eyes and brass knuckles for our jaws.

Therefore, my stock answer now when asked the aforementioned non-sequitor concerning my “hatred” for the Jews by the well-trained Pavlovian dogs of the so called “enlightened and superior Judeo-Christian West”–is–again, perfectly flawless and perfectly executed–2 fold.

The first part is what I say to myself, which is, ‘You “hate” them too, you just don’t realize it yet, but trust me, you will soon enough…”

The 2^nd part, which I do allow them to hear is this–

“I am just following orders…”

Yes, I realize this is no longer a viable excuse. We’ve all heard it now a million billion times in all the moralizing we’ve gotten from our “better brethren” in the Jewish community. Year after year after freaking year we’ve had to sit and chant out loud the lessons of the holocaust and how those mean old German soldiers who “followed orders” and assisted “the most evil man in the world” in his plans for establishing a Germans-only state while simultaneously carrying out an extermination campaign against the enemies of that proposed German-only state had no defense.

But in this case, I (we) can, nay, MUST claim this as our defense, because now, as recent events are proving all too well, we are caught between that proverbial rock and a hard place and are forced to choose between two masters.

The fact is that I, you, we, everyone now is a product of the post-holocaust era. It has been our religion, our catechism, our conscience and our mantra now for over half a century. “Never again…Never forget…” Have we forgotten this already? We have been wound into tightly-coiled springs, programmed to snap into action whenever something “pops” up smelling of all that old Nazi business and to start barking and snarling lest another holocaust take place.

And just what are the pillars of this catechism we have all been forced from before birth to embrace?

Well, namely that there are evil men in the world…Evil, insane men with ideas not rooted in reality but rather in pure, irrational, pathological narcissism. Evil men who are so in love with themselves and with their “race” that they advocate building walls around their precious little political/social experiment in order to keep out ‘the other’. Evil men who see themselves as THE Master Race, the embodiment of all that is good in an inherently evil world and destined to rule that world and to wage genocide and enslavement against those deemed inferior.

In other words, the exact situation as it exists today with the Jewish state and how it does business with those in the neighborhood, whether it is the Middle East or elsewhere.

Yes, as much as these same prison guards club us over the head for daring to see the unavoidable and then pointing out the uncanny similarities, the fact of the matter is that Jews and their ideas are the very source of this whole business of Nazism, master racism, genocide, and all the other items, take your pick. Judaism and Nazism are as different each other as the canine is to the dog or the feline to the cat. One merely needs spend a few minutes sampling a few items from the Buffet Judaica for proof of it, including but not limited to the oceans of gentile blood it has shed in the last half century as the logical extension and expression of these ideas.

So in other words, the “anti-Semitism” we are accused of possessing for daring to oppose what’s being done to the Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis and whatnot is just the natural outcome of the indoctrination we have received. We “anti-Semites” are, plainly put, creatures of the Jews’ own making. They train us to be attack dogs programmed to lunge at the throat of certain ideas, and then when they themselves engage in the very activity we have been trained to sink our teeth into and rip to shreds, they are shocked and surprised. They give the attack command and then when we do as programmed we are the bad guys. A half century of twisting and tweaking the collective human mind into reacting to certain ideas and of coloring our view of things–drip by drip, drop by drop with Uncle Abe’s Jewish Mind Dye, and all at once we are supposed to forget all that programming, do a 180 and suddenly recognize the huge distinction between 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.

Well the truth is, as musicians we have only been taught how to play one tune. Just as the law of Jewish mathematics is that all equations, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division always end up with six million as the answer, we gentiles also are Johnny One-notes. Now, having learned to play nothing but chopsticks on the piano for a good half century and being told that this is the only musical composition ever created and they want to hear some Gershwin?

Well, as the old saying goes, “Sorry Charlie…”

I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. Remember that thing called the law of inertia? A body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. You set us in motion a half century ago in this direction and now you expect us to stop abruptly and switch directions as if these laws of physics do not exist? You trained us to eat meat and now expect us to be vegetarians? As the old saying goes, “you bought it, and you got it.”

And yet, when we don’t “get it” the way they want, does that superior, enlightened Jewish intellect recognize that the house falling down around the entire project is of their own doing? Do they recognize that–having turned us all into attack dogs trained to spring into action by certain words and actions means we can turn on them as well?

Sadly, the answer is “no”. We don’t “get it” and we don’t see things “their way” because we, not they, are backwards, contradictory and stupid.

But then, why should anyone be surprised? After all, if it is one thing established now as an empirical fact of raw scientific data is that the Jews–by virtue of the thinking patterns set down by their religious/tribal mindset–NEVER learn. They have had 4000 years to “figure it out” that this “Chosen people” thing is NEVER going to fly, never has and never will, and yet they still keep trying. Despite all the failed attempts in applying this irrational idea in the real world, a world where laws of nature MUST be obeyed lest things fall apart, like madmen out to prove that the earth is flat instead of round they circumambulate the globe, year after year after year, arriving at the same ports and yet fail to see that all of this is a living contradiction to their theories.

So in closing, don’t feel bad, fellow gentiles, at being called “anti-Semitic” or whatever tar and feathers our “better” Jewish brethren hurl at us. Indeed, it is a badge of honor to be called such in the face of what is taking place today. Being “anti-Semitic,” anti-Judaic or whatever thing they want to call it is a blessing and we should all rejoice in it the same way we should rejoice the fact we are born with certain survival instincts that cause us to pull our hand away from something hot. It is something put into our immunological systems to protect us from the virus of predatory, backwards Judaic thinking, something which, as is clearly evident today, cannot end except with deadly results. In short, being “anti-Semitic” as they refer to it means to be a friend of humanity and a lover of righteousness, and some of the greatest examples mankind has produced–including but not limited to Jesus Christ and Mohammed–were “anti-Semites” of the highest quality. Therefore we should be honored to call ourselves descendents of their lineage.

And when all these things fail, the one remaining, incontrovertible and irrefutable truth left as a defense is that being aghast and against the fruits of Jewish power in the world today is but a part of training we all received before even being born. It was in the wombs of our mothers and in the air we breathed in our first breaths, and in the final analysis we are all merely following orders.

(c) 2009 Mark Glenn

Correspondent, American Free Press Newspaper

www.americanfreepress.net

nomorewarsforisrael@gmail.com

New evidence of Gaza child deaths

New evidence of Gaza child deaths Christian Fraser , BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7843307.stm Gaza, Jan 22, 2009 Four-year-old Samar Abed Rabbu is a little girl with a captivating smile to melt the heart of the most hardened correspondent. Samer's two sisters did not survive the attack When we first came across her in the hospital in the Egyptian town of El-Arish, just over the border from Gaza, she was playing with an inflated surgical glove beneath the covers. The doctors had puffed air into the glove, trying to distract her from the further pain they had to inflict inserting a drip. Samar had been shot in the back at close range. The bullet damaged her spine, and she is unlikely to walk again. At her bedside, her uncle Hassan told us the family had been ordered out of their home by Israeli soldiers who were shelling the neighbourhood. A tank had parked in front of the house, where around 30 people were taking shelter. The women and children - mother, grandmother and three little girls - came out waving a white flag and then, he said, an Israeli soldier came out of the tank and opened fire on the terrified procession. Samar's two sisters, aged seven and two, were shot dead. The grandmother was hit in the arm and in the side, but has survived. Young victims One of the most alarming features of the conflict in Gaza is the number of child casualties. More than 400 were killed. Many had shrapnel or blast injuries sustained as the Israeli army battled Hamas militants in Gaza's densely populated civilian areas. But the head of neurosurgery at the El-Arish hospital, Dr Ahmed Yahia, told me that brain scans made it clear that a number of the child victims had been shot at close range. Samar's uncle said the soldier who had shot his niece was just 15m (49ft) away. ''How could they not see they were shooting at children?'' he asked. When we finally got into Gaza, we tried to investigate further. There are no houses left - no mosques, no factories, and no orchards Finding a house, even with an address, in a neighbourhood that has been bombed into oblivion, where all landmarks have been obliterated and even the locals cannot find their bearings, is not easy. But we eventually met a man who knew Samar's family and took us to the family house, or what was left of it. The four-storey building has been concertinaed to the ground. Father's agony Khalid Abed Rabbu wears on his face all the pain of Israel's bloody three-week campaign in Gaza. In his hand he carried the teddy bear that had belonged to his daughter, Samar's six-year-old sister. Its head had been blown off, apparently in the same burst of gunfire that had cut his daughter in half. He described the events of that night almost identically to his brother. There were minor discrepancies, but he too believes his daughters were shot in cold blood. Khaled Abedrabou found toys in the wreckage of his house "There were soldiers leaning against the tank eating crisps," he said. "But then one of them jumped down and walked towards the house with an M16 automatic rifle." He showed me a photo of his eldest daughter under shrouds in the mortuary. "What has my family done to Israel," he cried. "What has Samar done to deserve all this pain?" We have put the family's allegations to the Israelis. So far they have told us that they can not comment on specific cases. Their spokesman said they had made every effort to limit civilian casualties but were fighting a terrorist organisation that often uses the civilian population as cover. Troubled neighbourhood The Israelis say is evidence that on many occasions when civilians were killed their troops had been responding to incoming fire. There are reports of the neighbourhood where the family lived, known as Ezbat Abed Rabbu, had been used by militant fighters in the past. During an incursion in the spring of 2008 the Israelis took over Khalid's house for two days. But Khalid insists he is not Hamas, he is not a fighter. He said he worked for the Palestinian Authority and is a member of Fatah, Hamas's political rivals. "There were no fighters here," he added, picking up crisp bags printed with Hebrew lettering that the soldiers seemed to have left behind. "Do you think soldiers eat crisps sitting on their tanks when there is incoming fire?" Samar's father and her uncle have not spoken to each other since she left Gaza for treatment in Egypt, yet in separate interviews they told us the three girls were outside the house, in plain view, when they were shot. We toured the part of Jabaliya where the Abed Rabbus lived. In an area that must cover at least a square mile, there are no houses left - no mosques, no factories and no orchards. The entire neighbourhood has been devastated. It may be true that fighters were hiding in the alleys of Jabaliya. It is possible that rockets were being fired from here towards Israel. But for the people who lived here, this is a story of wanton destruction. The world must now decide whether the Israeli action here was justified under the rules of war. From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Thursday, 22 January, 2009 at 1100 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.

Operation Cast Ballot

22/01/2009
The political calculation behind Olmert’s war
By Tom Streithorst
The American Conservative
January 26, 2009 Issue

Al-Manar.com.lb is not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.

According to the Israeli media, four days before Gaza was attacked, Hamas offered to extend the ceasefire and end all rocket fire into southern Israel. In return, they asked for a lifting of the blockade choking Gaza and an extension of the ceasefire to the West Bank—reasonable enough demands. But the Israeli cabinet rejected the offer and decided to go to war.

Let us not forget who broke the ceasefire. Until Nov. 4, when the Israelis sent in commandos and killed six Palestinian militants near Khan Yunis, for the most part the ceasefire held. During the six-month truce, despite the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza’s borders, not one Israeli died or was wounded from rocket attacks.

After the Israeli incursion in early November, retaliatory rocket fire naturally ratcheted up, providing the provocation that led to the Israeli invasion. Since the beginning of the Israeli bombing, four Israeli civilians have been killed by rocket fire, four more than died during the previous six months. More rockets have been fired out of Gaza just about every day since the war began than during the entire six months of the truce. It seems that if the Israeli goal was to protect their citizens, they aren’t going about it very well.

I would suggest, from personal experience, that protecting the citizens of Sderot might not be the main motivation of the Israeli government.

In 2002, toward the end of the second Intifada, I was working in Jerusalem for an American television network. Essentially I was on suicide-bomb watch. Although we would do an occasional story on the 24-hour curfews randomly imposed on the West Bank or on Palestinian children killed while riding their bicycles in broad daylight in a middle-class neighborhood in Jenin, the reason our bosses in New York paid us to sit in Jerusalem was to cover suicide-bomb attacks on Israelis. Dead Palestinians rarely make news. Dead Israelis do.

For the first six weeks of my tour, tranquillity reigned within Israel. No suicide bombs anywhere. While being paid combat wages, I mostly lollygagged by the pool. A colleague told me, “It’s too quiet, Sharon is going to do something.” I thought he was paranoid, perhaps even anti-Semitic.

On Friday, July 19, 2002, we heard that Hamas was about to declare a truce. If a bunch of journalists knew about it, surely the Israeli government did, too. Although I was happy that peace was about to break out in the Holy Land, I was sorry that my sinecure was about to end. Without the threat of suicide attacks, my bosses would surely pull me out.

Over the weekend, the rumors coalesced. The truce was to be declared on Tuesday. But on Monday night, 12 hours before Hamas was to declare a unilateral ceasefire, the Israelis decided to bomb the center of Gaza City, targeting a Hamas leader. They killed him along with 14 civilians, nine of them children. To no one’s surprise, Hamas decided not to declare a truce. A week later, the first suicide bomb in months. The day after, the shocking attack on Hebrew University, which killed five students. The war was back on.

The Israeli government explained the air attack of June 22, 2002 by saying that they found a high-value target, Saleh Shahada, and had to take advantage of the actionable intelligence. At the time Shahada was sleeping in his home. He probably had slept there before. Was taking him out worth disrupting the proposed ceasefire? Kill one man, make a martyr of him, and someone else will inevitably replace him. It doesn’t seem logical if your goal is peace and tranquillity.

There is, of course, a cynical viewpoint, one shared by most journalists and just about all the Palestinians I talked to at the time: disrupting the proposed ceasefire was not a regrettable result but the very purpose of the attack. A truce without preconditions would make Hamas seem moderate and sensible and would not play well in Israeli propaganda. Better to goad them, even at the cost of increased hostility, even if it provoked retaliation, even if it meant more Israelis would die.

On Feb. 10, Israel holds elections. Before the invasion, the ruling Kadima Party was expected to lose. Since the invasion, their poll numbers have risen. Perhaps this, rather than the protection of Sderot from homemade rockets, better explains the slaughter in Gaza.

Ja! Vote Kadima! Contributed by Edna Spennato (Thanks)

Posted in Gaza, Tzipi Livni tagged Gaza, Israel, war criminal, blitzkrieg, human rights violations, Israeli election, livni, massacre at 6:27 pm by ednaspennato

Photomontage, Edna Spennato, 9 Jan 2009.

Published at WUFYS.

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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.’

15 January

Lies and Truths

Out of the rubble

Last Updated: January 23. 2009 9:30AM UAE / January 23. 2009 5:30AM GMT

Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh inspect Haniyeh’s destroyed Gaza City office after an Israeli bombing in 2006. Samuel Aranda / Corbis

The war on Gaza has brought Palestinian politics to a breaking point. Mouin Rabbani wonders if a new national movement can emerge.

Speaking to his people on January 18, hours after Hamas responded to Israel’s unilateral suspension of hostilities with a conditional ceasefire of its own, the deposed Palestinian Authority prime minister Ismail Haniyeh devoted several passages of his prepared text to the subject of Palestinian national reconciliation. For perhaps the first time since Hamas’s June 2007 seizure of power in the Gaza Strip, an Islamist leader broached the topic of healing the Palestinian divide without mentioning Mahmoud Abbas by name.

At a press conference the following day convened by Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson of the Martyr Izz al Din al Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing, the movement went one step further. “The Resistance”, Abu Ubaida intoned, “is the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”.

What these statements make clear is that Hamas will no longer engage with Abbas, and is even less inclined to throw him a lifeline in the form of a national unity government he would appoint. These statements are not so much a direct challenge to his leadership as a confirmation that his legitimacy has been fatally damaged by the Gaza war. Even his hand-picked prime minister, Salam Fayyad, told journalists that the PA in Ramallah has been “marginalised”.

Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip has produced a transformational moment in Palestinian politics. It is a moment all too reminiscent of the period succeeding the 1967 War when the credibility of the prevailing Arab order collapsed and – deriving their legitimacy from the barrel of a gun – Yasser Arafat and a coalition of Palestinian guerrilla organisations seized control of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

With the peace process reduced from a means to an end, and statehood transformed into a formula to perpetuate Israeli rule and Palestinian fragmentation, the struggle for Palestinian self-determination appears to be again emerging front and centre. Palestinians no longer seem inclined to choose their leaders on the basis of heroism around the negotiating table, frequency of meetings with world leaders, nor even necessarily electoral performance. The devastation in Gaza has made the inclination to challenge Israel and its occupation and the will to defy international pressure the central criteria for Palestinians. But Abbas will not be a party to this process: instead his ejection from the body politic has become its non-negotiable precondition. Because if there is one message it is “no more business as usual.”

How this process will develop remains to be seen. Hamas may or may not have the will and capacity to replace Fatah’s hegemony with its own, and may or may not have the foresight and wisdom to work with rather than against other Palestinian organisations. It is a process that is certain to see the formal renunciation of the catastrophic Oslo agreements, and perhaps the abolition of the PA as well.

The reasons for Abbas’s demise are few, and they predate the Israeli attack on Gaza: he long ago placed all of his eggs in the Israeli-American basket. Acting as if his chickens had already hatched, his inability to deliver any tangible achievement has instead meant they came home to roost with a vengeance.

Key to this is Abbas’s relationship to his people: simply put, it never existed. Arafat saw the Palestinians as the ace in the deck to be played when all else failed, and understood that his leverage with outside actors derived from their conviction that he represented the Palestinian people. If he consistently failed or refused to properly mobilise this primary resource, he at least always held it in reserve.

Abbas has by contrast been an inveterate elitist, who seems to have regarded the Palestinian population as an obstacle to be overcome so that the game of nations could proceed – there are after all only so many seats at the table where great statesmen like George Bush and Ehud Olmert together create the contours of a new Middle East. For Abbas, legitimacy meant the leverage you have with your voters by convincing them you represent others.

Cursed with exceptional self-regard, Abbas has always shown disinterest in the opinions of others. From the moment he convinced himself of the sincerity of Bush’s visions, which put the onus on the Palestinians to prove they qualify for membership in the human race and are worthy of being spoken to by Tsipi Livni and Condoleezza Rice, there was no turning back. Henceforth the Palestinian security forces would point their weapons exclusively at their own people, and only Saeb Erakat would be aimed at Israel. At the United Nations, once a primary arena for the Palestinian struggle, Abbas’s emissary Riad Mansour was too busy drafting a resolution declaring Hamas a terrorist entity to deal with more trivial Palestinian concerns. It was simply impossible to steer Abbas towards a change of course, let alone a national dialogue that could produce a genuine strategy.

By the expiration of his presidency on January 9, his constitutional status had become the least of his problems. Each and every one of his policies had failed. In the West Bank, settlement expansion was proceeding at an unprecedented pace while the Wall neared final completion, rendering talk of a two-state settlement all but moot.

After Hamas triumphed in the 2006 parliamentary elections, Abbas’s ceaseless scheming to remove the Islamists from office and overturn the election’s results – characteristically in active partnership with outside forces rather than the Palestinian electorate – was a veritable carnival of folly and incompetence. When Hamas acted first in 2007, it took the Islamists only several days to dispose of those few forces still prepared to fight for Mohammed Dahlan.

While many are arguing that Abbas is now paying the price for his passivity while Israel slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, this is only one part of the story. At least as important is the manner in which he has conducted himself since December 27 – comprehensively out of touch with his own people, as if deliberately so, and dealing with the Gaza Strip as if it is a foreign country he has never heard of.

In his initial response Abbas laid responsibility for the conflict at Hamas’s doorstep, in one stroke reducing his role to that of a factional leader opportunistically siding with his cousin against his brother. More to the point, he unleashed the full power of his security forces against his own people. Not to prevent a Hamas coup in the West Bank, or even attacks against Israel, but to suppress pro-Palestinian demonstrations of the kind permitted even within Israel.

He responded to Israel’s launching of a land offensive on January 3 by announcing that he was delaying for one day his visit to the UN Security Council. Not to lead his people, but rather to meet Nicolas Sarkozy. Since then he has barely visited Palestine; on his last sojourn he stayed only long enough to inform the Qataris that he could not attend their emergency meeting to discuss the war.

That last was the mother of all miscalculations. Where Arafat would either have skipped all summits, or alternatively insisted on attending precisely because of pressure to stay away, Abbas produced one lame excuse after another: that the Doha meeting lacked a quorum and was therefore not a formal Arab League meeting (as if anything less is undeserving of his presence); that he couldn’t obtain an Israeli permit; and that he was under too much pressure to attend.

Rebuffing Qatari assurances that no other Palestinians would be invited, he didn’t seem to realise that even an empty Palestinian chair would be a major scandal at home. As it happened, he cleared the way for Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal to speak to the world on behalf of the Palestinian people. If Meshaal has yet to succeed in wearing the cloak of Palestinian national leadership, he has at least irrevocably wrested it from the shoulders of Mahmoud Abbas.

There is no longer anything Abbas can say or do to remain in power. The only relevant question is if he will jump before he is pushed – with the coup de grace almost certain to come from within the Fatah movement or the ranks of the public rather than Islamist circles.

No less importantly, there is now also nothing his sponsors and allies can do to save his skin. Utterly cynical initiatives like that by the Europeans promising aid to a national unity government – which, when formed in 2007, served as a pretext for them to continue to boycott the PA – will achieve nothing. Bribes, threats, even wars or peace conferences can no longer prevent the emergence of a new Palestinian national movement. We do not yet know its shape, nor how it will emerge. At this point the only certainty is that unless it can more authentically represent the will and aspirations of its people – by challenging rather than accommodating the status quo – and thereby make more effective progress toward basic objectives, it will not last long.

Mouin Rabbani is a contributing editor at Middle East Report.

How Good-Looking is my Middle Eastern Entourage?

SourceClick on image to enlarge

Oy oy oy, we knew our Obambi'le wouldn't let us down.

The whole world is throwing their shoes at us and screaming for sanctions against Yisrael, but on his first day at the Oival Office, our goy golem reached out his hand of friendship to us, the Jewish people.

Feh! The anti-semites in Scandinavia, Jordan and even here in the UK are leaving our persimmons and avocados to rot in our warehouses, the Italian islamofascists are boycotting Jewish businesses, the Syrian holocaust deniers are holding Goyza War Crimes Exhibitions, and even in Yisrael itself some meshuggenah human rights activists have set up a War Crimes Tribunal website giving instructions for the arrest of our Olmert, Barak and Tzipi'le!

Click on image to enlarge

And what did our Obambi'le do on his first working day as POTUS'le? Did he call up that fahklumpte Ban Ki-moon to convey his concern about the civilian casualties and the accidental bombing of UN schools, food aid warehouses and hospitals? Oy, no. Auntie has the feeling the UN party-poopers weren't even invited to the Inauguration Ball!

No, as soon as his morning coffee was on his desk, our beautiful shabbat goy President called our Olmert to rejoice in the partnership netween Yisrael and Americe. And then he called our loyal friend, Hosni'le, who helped us keep food and doctors from finding their way to the hamasniks from Egypt during the war.

And then Obambi made a very special call to our Mahoud'le Abbas, letting him know that it doesn't matter that he's no longer president, to us he will always be the leader of the Palestinian people, especially the Goyzans.

Obambi'le understands us, the Jewish people. He is mishpokhe.

Nu shoin, if you prick us, do we not bleed? And if you play music to us, shall we not dance?

United Against the Goyzans

Fahklumpt — mixed up, confused
Feh - the shortest, most efficient way to say that something smells
Golem - an artificial creature created from mud by a rabbi using magic, endowed with supernatural strength and used to further the goals of its creator. The most famous was made by Rabbi Loew in the 16th century to defend the Jews of Prague from a pogrom.
Meshuggenah - crazy, someone who is nuts
Mishpokhe - family, kin, can also mean "crime family"
Shabbat goy - the gentile employed in a Jewish household on the Sabbath-day to perform services which are religiously forbidden to Jews on that day

Ignoring the roots of conflict

Source

Dalila Mahdawi, The Electronic Intifada, 22 January 2009



A Palestinian boy stands behind a fence at a UN school in Gaza where his family was forced to seek refuge. Israel's attacks on Gaza have affected all 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged territory. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

My uncle, aunt and cousins in Gaza have not showered for more than two weeks now. I make a point of this because Samuel Wurzelbacher, otherwise known as "Joe the Plumber" who was propelled into the limelight for questioning then US President-elect Barack Obama, has become a so-called "war correspondent" in the southern Israeli town of Sderot. Talking to The Guardian from his new beat, he spoke with sympathy about how difficult life must be for Sderot's residents. "The people of Sderot can't do normal things day to day, like get soap in their eyes in the shower, for fear a rocket might come in. I'm sure they're taking quick showers. I know I would."

I wonder what Wurzelbacher would make, then, of the "day to day" lives of the people in Gaza, whose water tanks have run dry, who have no electricity, and where many are struggling to pay for flour, the price of which has jumped to around 160 shekels (around $40) a sack due to the recent onslaught. I wonder, too, what Wurzelbacher would think of my uncle's recent argument with his wife about the family's sleeping arrangements. When Israel began its latest military campaign on 27 December, my aunt had wanted everyone to sleep in one room so they could all die together if the house was struck. However, my uncle meanwhile thought they should spread out to increase the chance of someone surviving.

Wurzelbacher is amongst many who either do not know or choose to ignore the essence of the Palestine-Israel conflict. What the Israelis unleashed on Gaza is not, as our debutant journalist friend would have us believe, simply about rockets falling on the homes of Israelis. Has Wulzerbacher ever thought to ask himself what would compel a human being to launch a rocket in the first place? In plain language, Israelis live under rocket fire because their government has for the last 41 years pursued a policy of occupation and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. It is irrational and hypocritical to think that the people of the occupied West Bank or Gaza, many of whom are refugees from villages where Israeli towns like Ashkelon and Sderot now stand, have no right to resist their extermination. To borrow that tired phrase so often used by the Israelis, no people could tolerate for so long those who are attacking them. And yet, this is precisely what is expected of the Palestinians.

It must not be forgotten that long before Hamas was a feature on the Palestinian political landscape, the Apartheid state of Israel was doing everything it could to make life unbearable for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as part of a concerted plan to rid historical Palestine of its native inhabitants.

According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, between 1967 and 2007, Israel erected 121 settlements in the West Bank, with an additional 100 illegal "outposts," in which the most right-wing Jewish settlers live. "Twelve other settlements are located on land annexed by Israel in 1967 and made part of Jerusalem," the group says. Even while claiming to be negotiating a peace deal last year, Israel was busy planning and building new settlements. No Palestinian can enter these exclusive Jewish colonies, which are heavily guarded by soldiers, nor can they use the roads that lead to them, built on confiscated Palestinian land.

Israel has tried to undermine the possibility of a contiguous and viable Palestinian state ever emerging by erecting an Apartheid Wall that snakes through the West Bank and eats away at more Palestinian land. This potent symbol of apartheid, which is considered unlawful by the International Court of Justice, has divided families, separated farmers from their land, students from their schools and universities, workers from their jobs, and the sick from their medical treatments. To get anywhere in the West Bank, Palestinians must pass through a myriad of road blocks and checkpoints, transforming an otherwise simple journey into a time-consuming, frustrating and humiliating experience. Palestinians are subject to arbitrary detention, luggage and body searches and interrogation at the will of Israeli soldiers. They are required to obtain a special permit to enter Jerusalem, making it virtually off limits to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

Palestinians are subject to curfews, some lasting up to 40 days, during which they are forbidden from leaving their houses. They are granted few permits to build or repair their houses, and Israel punishes those who build without approval by demolishing their homes. In an act of collective punishment, Israel also bulldozes the houses of families of suspected resistance fighters, often without warning those inside beforehand. The Israeli Committee against House Demolitions estimates that more than 19,850 Palestinian homes in the West Bank have been torn down since 1967.

A "law of return" means that anyone in the world who claims to be of Jewish descent can gain Israeli citizenship. At the same time, Palestinians like my own father have no right to return to the place where they were born, let alone pass on their nationality to their children. The movement of Palestinians is closely monitored and controlled by the Israelis. My cousin, who traveled from Gaza to live in his home village in the West Bank has been missing for two weeks now. It is likely he has been arrested for this so-called violation (as he only had a permit to visit), but the Israelis haven't even bothered to inform anyone of his whereabouts.

These tedious lists of grievances, which could go on for pages, illustrate that no Palestinian, whether they choose to resist Israeli oppression or not, can escape the ritual humiliation and degradation of occupation. It should now be clearer to Wurzelbacher that it is this daily regime of confiscation, desperation, humiliation and discrimination that compels Palestinians to resist Israel's policies of exclusion, just as Native Americans and black South Africans were compelled to resist their oppression. Even Ehud Barak, Israel's Defense Minister, who played a crucial role in designing the Gaza onslaught, acknowledges this fact. In 1998 he told the Israeli daily Haaretz that "If I were a Palestinian of the right age, I'd eventually join one of the terrorist organizations."

No family in Gaza has emerged physically or psychologically unscathed from Israel's latest push to crush the Palestinians. Through their wanton use of extraordinary military force, the Israelis have sown the seeds of the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters. The children who witnessed their parents and siblings torched by white phosphorus, crushed by a bomb, or riddled with bullets will never forget such horrors. This is to say nothing of the total blockade Israel continues to impose on Gaza. However, the Palestinians will not be beaten, shelled or starved into submission. Violent and nonviolent Palestinian resistance will continue until Israel uncurls its iron fist and agrees to a fair and just peace. After all, justice for the Palestinians is the only way for Israel to be a "State" rather than an Apartheid State and in so doing truly ensure the safety of its own citizens.

Dalila Mahdawi is a journalist with The Daily Star in Lebanon.

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BY TOPIC: Gaza massacres

US academics: join us in boycott call

Source

Appeal, USCACBI, 22 January 2009

Mission statement

Responding to the CALL of Palestinian civil society to join the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, we are a US campaign focused specifically on a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, as delineated by PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel):
In light of Israel's persistent violations of international law, and

Given that, since 1948, hundreds of UN resolutions have condemned Israel's colonial and discriminatory policies as illegal and called for immediate, adequate and effective remedies, and

Given that all forms of international intervention and peace-making have until now failed to convince or force Israel to comply with humanitarian law, to respect fundamental human rights and to end its occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine, and

In view of the fact that people of conscience in the international community have historically shouldered the moral responsibility to fight injustice, as exemplified in the struggle to abolish apartheid in South Africa through diverse forms of boycott, divestment and sanctions;

Inspired by the struggle of South Africans against apartheid and in the spirit of international solidarity, moral consistency and resistance to injustice and oppression,

We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.

These nonviolent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall;

2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and

3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194."
PACBI and the entire BDS movement (representing the overwhelming majority among Palestinian civil society parties, unions, networks and organizations) view three fundamental Palestinian rights, sanctioned by international law and universal human rights principles, that ought to be respected by Israel to end the boycott. All we endorse and struggle to achieve is an end to Israel's three-tiered injustice and oppression:

1) occupation and colonization in the 1967-occupied Palestinian territory;

2) denial of the refugees' rights, paramount among which is their right to return to their homes of origin, as per UN General Assembly Resolution 194; and

3) the system of racial discrimination, or apartheid, to which Palestinian (all non-Jewish) citizens of Israel are subjected.

The principles guiding the PACBI campaign and the three goals outlined above are also points of unity for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USCACBI). We believe it is time to take a public, principled stance in support of equality, self-determination, human rights (including the right to education), and true democracy, especially in light of the censorship and silencing of the Palestine question in US universities, as well as US society at large. There can be no academic freedom in Israel/Palestine unless all academics are free and all students are free to pursue their academic desires.

If you are committed to these principles of unity, and wish to work on a campaign of boycotting academic and cultural institutions guided by this approach, please join our campaign.

Urgent appeal

Furthermore, we are also responding to the Open Letter to International Academic Institutions from the Right to Education campaign at Birzeit University in Palestine (17 January 2009):
In light of the ongoing massive Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, in which more than 1,200 people have been killed -- more than 1,000 (86 percent) of whom were civilian men, women and children -- and where more than 4,000 have been maimed and injured, the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University calls upon the international academic community, unions and students to show support and solidarity with the people of Gaza by calling upon their respective governments to impose immediate boycott, divestment and sanctions against the state of Israel until it abides by international human rights and humanitarian laws, dismantles its apartheid regime spanning both the occupied territories and Israel proper, and commits to pursuing a long-lasting, just peace.

The war on Gaza marks a breaking point: the world cannot remain silent while Israel instigates a war (they broke the ceasefire by killing six Palestinians on 4 November 2008 and four more on 17 November 2008), annihilates all civilian infrastructure, targets civilian shelters, prevents medical teams from reaching victims, uses internationally banned substances like white phosphorous on civilians, prevents medical aid and equipment from entering the Strip, cuts off fuel, electricity and running water making daily life, especially for the injured, a living hell, and prevents anyone from escaping their carnage. These are not actions of a state which respects international laws and norms. Distinguished international lawyers have denounced the disproportionality of Israel's attacks as a war crime, and its indiscriminate killing as a crime against humanity.

Enough is enough."
Gaza is but the latest incident in a series of ongoing Israeli massacres, from Deir Yassin (1948) to Kafr Kassim (1956) to Jenin (2002) to the wars on Lebanon (from 1980s to 2006). All demonstrate a pattern of violence by a state that will not end its violations of international law and war crimes on its own, without international pressure. We must act now. As academics working in the US, we wish to focus on campaigns in our universities and in institutions of higher education to advocate for compliance with the academic and cultural boycott, a movement that is growing internationally across all segments of global civil society.

This call for an academic and cultural boycott parallels the call in the non-academic world for divestment, boycott and sanctions by trade unions, churches and other civil society organizations in countries such as the United States, Canada, Italy, Ireland, Norway, the United Kingdom, Brazil, South Africa and New Zealand.

Actions

Since Israeli academic institutions (mostly state-controlled) and the vast majority of Israeli intellectuals and academics have either contributed directly to maintaining, defending or otherwise justifying the above forms of oppression, or have been complicit in them through their silence, we call upon our colleagues to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel's occupation, colonization and system of apartheid, by applying the following:

1. Refrain from participation in any form of academic and cultural cooperation, collaboration or joint projects with Israeli institutions;

2. Advocate a comprehensive boycott of Israeli institutions at the national and international levels, including suspension of all forms of funding and subsidies to these institutions;

3. Promote divestment and disinvestment from Israel by academic institutions;

4. Work toward the condemnation of Israeli policies by pressing for resolutions to be adopted by academic, professional and cultural associations and organizations;

5. Support Palestinian academic and cultural institutions directly without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support.

As educators and scholars of conscience in the United States, we fully support this call. We urge our colleagues, nationally, regionally, and internationally, to stand up against Israel's ongoing scholasticide and to support the nonviolent call for academic boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions.

Please email us with your full name and institutional affiliation if you fully endorse the Mission Statement of US ACBI Campaign and authorize us to use your name publicly: uscom4acbi A T gmail D O T com.

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BY TOPIC: Boycott, divestment and sanctions
BY TOPIC: Gaza massacres

Worse than an earthquake

Worse than an earthquake
Source

Kathy Kelly writing from Rafah, occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 22 January 2009

A Palestinian wounded in Israel's assault on Gaza is treated for burns at a hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, 12 January 2009. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

Traffic on Sea Street, a major thoroughfare alongside Gaza's coastline, includes horses, donkeys pulling carts, cyclists, pedestrians, trucks and cars, mostly older models. Overhead, in stark contrast to the street below, Israel's ultra-modern unmanned surveillance planes crisscross the skies. F-16s and helicopters can also be heard. Remnants of their deliveries, the casings of missiles, bombs and shells used during the past three weeks of Israeli attacks, are scattered on the ground.

Workers have cleared most of the roads. Now, they are removing massive piles of wreckage and debris, much as people do following an earthquake.

"Yet, all the world helps after an earthquake," said a doctor at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. "We feel very frustrated," he continued. "The West, Europe and the US watched this killing go on for 22 days, as though they were watching a movie, watching the killing of women and children without doing anything to stop it. I was expecting to die at any moment. I held my babies and expected to die. There was no safe place in Gaza."

He and his colleagues are visibly exhausted, following weeks of work in the intensive care and emergency room departments at a hospital that received many more patients than they could help. "Patients died on the floor of the operating room because we had only six operating rooms," said Dr. Saeed Abuhassan, an intensive care unit doctor who grew up in Chicago. "And really we don't know enough about the kinds of weapons that have been used against Gaza."

In 15 years of practice, Dr. Abuhassan says he never saw burns like those he saw here. The burns, blackish in color, reached deep into the muscles and bones. Even after treatment began, the blackish color returned.

Two of the patients were sent to Egypt because they were in such critical condition. They died in Egypt. But when autopsies were done, reports showed that the cause of death was poisoning from elements of white phosphorous that had entered their systems, causing cardiac arrest.

In Gaza City, the burn unit's harried director, a plastic surgeon and an expert in treating burns, told us that after encountering cases they'd never seen before, doctors at the center performed a biopsy on a patient they believed may have suffered chemical burns and sent the sample to a laboratory in Egypt. The results showed elements of white phosphorous in the tissue.

The doctor was interrupted by a phone call from a farmer who wanted to know whether it was safe to eat the oranges he was collecting from groves that had been uprooted and bombed during the Israeli invasion. The caller said the oranges had an offensive odor and that when the workers picked them up their hands became itchy.

Audrey Stewart, a human rights worker, had just spent the morning with Gaza farmers in Tufaa, a village near the border between Gaza and Israel. Israeli soldiers had first evacuated people, then dynamited the houses, then used bulldozers to clear the land, uprooting the orange tree groves. Many people, including children, were picking through the rubble, salvaging belongings and trying to collect oranges. At one point, people began shouting at Audrey, warning her that she was standing next to an unexploded rocket.

The doctor put his head in his hands, after listening to Audrey's report. "I told them to wash everything very carefully. But these are new situations. Really, I don't know how to respond," he said.

Yet he spoke passionately about what he knew regarding families that had been burned or crushed to death when their homes were bombed. "Were their babies a danger to anyone?" he asked us.

"They are lying to us about democracy and Western values," he continued, his voice shaking. "If we were sheep and goats, they would be more willing to help us."

Dr. Saeed Abuhassan was bidding farewell to the doctors he'd worked with in Gaza. He was returning to his work in the United Arab Emirates. But before leaving, he paused to give us a word of advice. "You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that American people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza," said Dr. Saeed Abuhassan. "And this, also, is why it's worse than an earthquake."

Kathy Kelly co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence and can be reached at kathy A T vcnv D O T org.


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BY TOPIC: Gaza massacres