Israel Bombs Syria

First, from Democracy Now!:

Syria Calls Apparent Israeli Strikes “An Act of War”

Israel appears to be escalating military attacks on Syria after two bombings over a three-day span. A series of large explosions were seen around the Syrian capital of Damascus on Sunday, by all accounts the result of Israeli missiles. The Syrian government says dozens of elite military forces were killed in strikes on several critical army facilities. Anonymous Israeli officials have reportedly confirmed the attack, which marked the third on Syria by Israel this year. An earlier bombing on Friday hit what was alleged to be a site holding Iranian missiles meant for Hezbollah. Syria has called the strikes an “an act of war” that’s “opened the door to all possibilities.” In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged all sides to exercise “maximum restraint … and respect [the] national sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries.”

Report: U.S., Allies Discussed Syria Strikes

The New York Times reports the United States had already been discussing the launch of strikes on Syria in the days before the Israeli attack. The talks were held with Britain and France, with a proposed bombing modeled on the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya. Speaking during a visit to Costa Rica, President Obama appeared to offer tacit support by saying Israel has the right to stop weapons shipments to Hezbollah. Obama also left open the possibility of U.S. military intervention but ruled out deploying troops on the ground.

President Obama: “I’m not going to comment on what happened in Syria yesterday. I’ll let the Israeli government confirm or deny whatever strikes that they’ve taken. What I have said in the past, and I continue to believe is, is that the Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. With respect to the larger issue of Syria, as I said yesterday, I don’t take any options off the table as commander in chief. Circumstances can change, you never know what contingencies you have to deal with. But what I do know is that I cannot see a scenario right now in which American boots on the ground would make any sense.”

The Obama administration is reportedly set to decide in the coming weeks on options ranging from supplying weapons to Syria’s rebels to carrying out air strikes.

–Monday, 6 May, 2013

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/6/headlines#561

 

And From Znet:

Israel Bombs Syria Becomes Israel Is Only Defending Itself

An Israeli plane bombs a target in Syria. The news is passed along first to Fox News, (huh?) by someone in the Administration.

It happened on a Thursday, but we only find out about it late on Friday. The New York Times assigns three reporters to cover the story that goes up on their website in the middle of the morning on Saturday.

Earlier that day, President Obama, speaking in Costa Rica, said there will be no US ground troops on the ground in Syria. Now, the Administration says it is considering “military options.”

Saturday’s New York Times chooses this story for its first page: “ISRAEL TIGHTENS BORDER DEFENSE AS SYRIA ERUPTS.”

And so, the story is reframed with Israel pictured as the defender, not the aggressor. The bombing makes it into the third paragraph of that story on page 1 but refers only to the bombing of “a target.”

Their earlier story has now been moved by the Times deeper into the paper, to the bottom of page 10. That headline reads:  “ISRAEL BOMBS SYRIA as the US Considers Its Own Military Options.”

The report: “American officials did not provide details on the target but, instead, referenced an earlier attack attacking a Syrian military supply effort to Hezbollah.” Unmentioned is that the original report understated the extent of the damage in Syria caused by Israeli bombing.

Reuters was better informed, “Israel has carried out an air strike targeting a shipment of missiles in Syria bound for Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.”

The New York Times does not mention the reaction by Lebanon which issued a statement carried by BBC denouncing the attack as illegal and a violation of their air space. We had to wait until Sunday for Syria’s response reported by AP:

“Syria has condemned the Israeli airstrikes against targets around Damascus, saying the attacks aim “to give direct military support to terrorist groups” fighting the government.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry also said Sunday in a letter sent to the United Nations and the U.N. Security Council that the “Israeli aggression” killed and wounded several people and “caused widespread destruction.”

Syria’s government refers to rebels trying to topple President Bashar Assad’s regime as “terrorists.” Apparently no one has told the AP that many of the “rebels” are actually aligned with Al Qaeda.

CNN reported, “U.S. and Western intelligence agencies are reviewing classified data showing Israel most likely conducted (emphasis mine) a strike in the Thursday-Friday time frame, according to both officials. This is the same time frame that the U.S. collected additional data showing Israel was flying a high number of warplanes over Lebanon.

“One official said the United States had limited information so far and could not yet confirm those are the specific warplanes that conducted a strike. Based on initial indications, the U.S. does not believe Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace to conduct the strikes.

“…The Lebanese army website listed 16 flights by Israeli warplanes penetrating Lebanon’s airspace from Thursday evening through Friday afternoon local time.”

The Times of Israel later confirmed the air strike, adding, “The officials said the shipment was not of chemical arms, but of “game changing” weapons bound for the terror group Hezbollah. One official said the target was a shipment of advanced, long-range ground-to-ground missiles.

A day later, on Saturday, Iran suddenly was dragged into this with the New York Times reporting: “?Israeli aircraft bombed a target in Syria on Thursday to disrupt the pipeline of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah.”

On Sunday, a new raid was reported: A Syrian news agency says the missiles targeted a site near Damascus. Other sources reported many attacks.

The Obama Administration may have encouraged the Israeli attacks when President Obama in what is now said to have been an unexpected “off-the cuff” remark supporting the idea that Syria may have crossed a certain “red-line” despite an admitted lack of evidence.

This “mistake”—a blatant acceptance of the Israeli line — is now being blamed on the front page of the New York Times for “putting the US in a bind,” limiting our options.

Translation: The President “misspoke.” Further unstated translation: it was a fuck-up!

After the last Israeli bombing of Syria on January 31, Iran warned: “Israel will regret its attack against Syria. The Telegraph reported, “Iran’s deputy foreign minister warned of grave consequences for Tel Aviv.”

Already, American right-wing politicians began cheering on the story.

Politico reported, “South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told a crowd here Friday night that Israel has bombed Syria.”

Graham, a Republican who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was addressing the South Carolina Republican Party’s annual Silver Elephant fundraising dinner. He mentioned the attack in passing, amid a longer discourse on U.S. national security policy.

“Israel bombed Syria tonight,” Graham said flatly, before moving on to a longer, dire discourse on the threat of a nuclear Iran.”

You can just smell the aroma of more escalations and of a wider war to come. US news organizations are waffling but accepting Israel’s version even as Israel seems to be leaking it, rather than fully disclosing it.

There are two important aspects of this: what the real endgame is—and why it seems to be more about preparing for war on Iran rather than on Syria?

In 2007, Seymour Hersh wrote about what he called a “redirection” of Israeli strategy:

“To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

Adds Tony Cartalucci on ICH: “Indeed, Israel’s explanation as to why it struck neighboring Syria is tenuous at best considering its long, documented relationship with actually funding and arming the very “terrorist groups” it fears weapons may fall into the hands of.”

The second concern is the question of the reliability of news reporting, including accounts by human rights groups who may be under pressure from funders to go easier on Israel than Syria. Scott Long, a former manager at Human Rights Watch explains the nature of the bias in a recent report.

Notes the Electronic Intifada: “Long’s account indicates that HRW observes a sort of fake balance in which it must artificially generate criticism of Palestinians just in order to offset criticism of Israel’s much greater and more frequent human rights abuses and crimes.”

Writes Long: ”Human Rights Watch, where I worked for many years, strains all its muscles to be completely objective on Israel/Palestine — an effort that has never gotten it a scintilla of credit from the militant pro-Israel side. Its releases on Israel and Palestine are the only ones in the entire organization that are routinely edited by the executive director himself. An informal arithmetic dictates that every presser or report criticizing Israel has to be accompanied by another criticizing the Palestine Authority or Hamas — or, if that isn’t possible (the PA barely retains enough authority to violate anybody’s rights) at least one of the surrounding Arab states.

A mathematical approach to objectivity may help accountants detect embezzlement or captains keep ships afloat, but that kind of balance looks ridiculous in the political world, where the incessant fluidity of action disrupts the illusions of double-entry bookkeeping. (The call for an “embargo on arms” to “all sides” is an excellent example of “objectivity” that benefits one side much more than the other.”)

So there you have it: a breaking story, confused stories partial to Israel, and news that is filtered to keep the outrage focused on alleged human rights abuses by countries Washington dislikes.

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He blogs for Newsdissector.net. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

 

–Znet!, 6 May, 2013

 

http://www.zcommunications.org/israel-bombs-syria-becomes-israel-is-only-defending-itself-by-danny-schechter

Guerrilla research exposes sponsors of Israeli apartheid

For the last three and a half years the UK-based research cooperative Corporate Watch has been running a project tracking corporate complicity in the occupation of Palestine.

After a research visit to Palestine in 2010, we wrote a handbook for activists who want to take action in line with the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In January and February this year, we returned to Palestine to find out what was new on the ground.

Much of Corporate Watch’s research has focused on entering Israeli settlements, seeing how they are financially sustaining themselves, what companies are operating or providing services there and how they are facilitating apartheid and colonization.

Surprisingly easy

A lot of people have asked us how we accomplish this. Although we do have a few simple tricks up our sleeves which have helped us in our research, basically it just requires a cover story and a lot of luck. We have explained our presence in the settlements by pretending to be confused tourists, curious students or enthusiastic Zionists, but, more often than not, our investigations have proved surprisingly easy and all of them could be replicated by other BDS activists.

For example we successfully established that one company, EDOM UK, was working with the settlements by turning up at export packing houses posing as travelers in search of organic fruit and vegetables to buy. We have often had to travel for hours to remote places, not knowing if we will find anything useful when we get there and have accepted the relatively small risk of running into problems with the authorities or encountering violence from settlers.

We have been detained a few times and have had a few threats from angry settlers. However, the net results of our research — a wealth of new information for the BDS movement — has definitely outweighed any difficulties we have faced.

We have also concentrated on providing contextual information for BDS campaigns on the effects of corporate activities on Palestinian communities living under occupation. By documenting settlement expansion and by interviewing people in communities threatened with ethnic cleansing, we endeavor to provide the context needed for BDS campaigners to win the arguments which inevitably arise when targeting the profits of complicit firms.

During the last five or so years, a huge amount of work has been done by Who Profits? (a project run by Palestinian and Israeli women), Corporate Watch and local BDS groups to document and catalogue as many of the companies profiteering from the occupation as possible. As a result, the movement now has a lot of resources to build campaigns from.

Although most major international corporations working in the area may be known by now, there is still a lot of work to be done around less obvious organizations, and often these are only found by going out there and looking for them.

Criminal “charity”

One example is Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, a relatively small “charity” with offices in Israel, the US, Germany and the Netherlands. Set up in opposition to the Oslo accords in 1995, Christian Friends is ideologically motivated and supports the settlements though fundraising for projects in the West Bank and encouraging Christian tourists to visit the settlements.

The first time we came across this charity was in 2010 when we spotted a “planted with the assistance of CFOIC” sign by a new olive grove in the Jordan Valley settlement of Maskiot. Maskiot is home to many of the Gush Katif settlers, who used to live in Gaza, and was recognized by the Israeli government as the first new settlement in the Jordan Valley for a decade in 2009.

Al-Maleh, the Bedouin community next to Maskiot, faces increased settler harassment and frequent house demolitions as its existence on the land is threatened by settlement expansion.

Christian Friends currently has 13 projects planned in settlements in the Jordan Valley, as well as in settlements such as Kfar Adumim and Susiya, which are strategically close to the vulnerable Palestinian communities Khan al-Ahmar and Susiya. On our most recent trip we came across a Christian Friends-sponsored playground in the Maale Efrayim settlement.

There is no doubt that any group supporting illegal settlements is complicit in the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land. In the UK, Christian Friends has recently been dropped by World Action Ministries, a charity which used to handle its UK donations, after it had received calls from the public about Christian Friends’ support for the settlements.

World Action Ministries told Corporate Watch that “this made us immediately feel very uncomfortable bearing in mind the advice being given by the United Nations and other bodies at the time [about involvement in the settlements].” Christian Friends has confirmed that donations to it from the UK are now handled by a Christian group called Stewardship Services (UKET).

If BDS activists in Israel, the US, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK collectively challenged Christian Friends’ “charitable” donations to settlements we might be surprisingly effective, and educate the public on the way.

“Occupation is everywhere”

Of course, Christian friends represent only one kind of involvement in the occupation. The fact is that the occupation is everywhere in Palestine and any situation you find yourself in can present an opportunity for information gathering of some description. We often discover companies to add to the boycott list by pure chance.

On our recent research trip we attended a demonstration against Israel’s wall in the West Bank and were arrested. As the police entered our details into a database, we were taking mental notes of the Sagem finger-print scanners, Canon camera system and Garrett metal detectors installed in the police station in the settlement of Shah Binyamin.

Finding new BDS targets and updated information on company activity are not the only reasons why research on the ground is important. It is also essential that existing international campaigns work closely with, and listen to, the people in Palestine who are directly affected by the companies targeted by BDS campaigns.

There is a growing BDS campaign against the British-Danish company G4S targeting its provision of equipment and services to the apartheid wall, the Israeli Prison Service and the settlements. As well as conducting research into G4S’ activities in the settlements, we carried out a series of interviews with Palestinians who had been in the jails where G4S provides equipment and services. Many of them gave us messages to send to the international BDS movement. Corporate Watch will be publishing these interviews in the coming weeks.

Soft drink spin

Companies which are at the receiving end of boycott campaigns are becoming increasingly public relations-savvy, and are putting a lot of effort into spreading disinformation regarding their activities. The most obvious example of this is SodaStream, a maker of fizzy drink machines, which has gone so far as to release a short video, Building Bridges – Not Walls, to show how “beneficial” its business in the West Bank is for the region.

On this visit we wanted to get the story from the communities around Mishor Adumim, the Israeli-controlled industrial zone where SodaStream is located. SodaStream’s main argument in favor of its investment in Mishor Adumim is that it provides essential employment for Palestinians in the area. However, you only have to take the example of Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin community next to Mishor Adumim, to debunk this myth.

Khan al-Ahmar is located in Area C, a zone covering more than 60 percent of the West Bank, where Palestinians are not allowed to build anything. The community is fighting a plan by the Israeli government to forcibly relocate it. If the plan is implemented, the Bedouins would be removed from the area where they have lived since the 1950s.

Far from providing jobs for the people there, the factories in Mishor Adumim are the reason their livelihood has been taken from them, built as they are on land previously used as grazing areas.

According to five interviewees in the wider Khan al-Ahmar area (Abu al-Helweh, Abu al-Mihtawish, Abu Fellah and Kurshan), people from these communities no longer get permission to work in Mishor Adumim at all. This rule was introduced as a collective punishment by the “regional council” for the settlement after the communities started building a school for their children in Khan al-Ahmar in defiance of the building restrictions imposed by Israel in Area C.

By complying with this order denying work permits to Palestinians from the area most affected by the expansion of the settlements Maale Adumim and Kafr Adumim, SodaStream and the other factories operating from within the industrial zone are directly encouraging the ethnic cleansing of the area.

“They destroyed our lives”

As one man who now lives near the Jerusalem suburb of Abu Dis after being displaced from the area in 1998 put it: “We are not allowed to go near them [the factories]. They took our livelihood to build them and we got evacuated for them to build their factories. After they built them there were no resources to live from for us. The gains are nothing compared to what was lost. They destroyed our lives and then gave a few people a job. It is nothing.”

SodaStream’s PR strategy relies on putting across an impression of openness. The company has paid for journalists to visit its Mishor Adumim factory and is planning to fly over Member of Parliament and the UK Conservative Party’s Mike Weatherley, whose constituency is close to the Sodastream shop in Brighton. We decided to call the firm’s bluff and offered to visit the factory on our own expense. SodaStream, clearly not keen to answer difficult questions, replied saying that, regrettably, it did not have capacity to facilitate our visit.

Excuses

Many companies take a very different approach to SodaStream and attempt to minimize or hide their role in working with the settlements. When corporate complicity in the occupation is exposed, PR executives respond by giving the same excuses — either that the companies were not aware that this was going on or that it was a temporary arrangement which came about through some novel circumstance that will not happen again.

When we were leaked evidence that the own-brand agricultural produce stocked by the British supermarket chain Morrisons was being packaged in an illegal settlement, we were told that this was a short-term arrangement necessitated by the lack of a suitable packing house inside Israel.

The lesson to be learned from this is that companies are very unlikely to consider justice and freedom for Palestinians of their own accord and that it is up to all of us to continue to find ways of obtaining and exposing this information. If we don’t, companies will continue to take advantage of the captive workforce provided by the occupation to make a fast buck.

The power of BDS is that everyone can contribute. If you are traveling to Palestine, consider spending time investigating those making money out of the occupation. If campaigning at home, use evidence gained by others and your own research to challenge companies locally. Remember: the fact that so many corporations now go out of their way to try to disassociate themselves from what we find means that we have come a long way already.

Therezia Cooper and Tom Anderson are pen names for two boycott, divestment and sanctions activists and researchers. They have volunteered with various solidarity groups in Palestine and are the authors of Targeting Israeli Apartheid: A Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Handbook published by Corporate Watch. Corporate Watch’s Palestine project can be followed at corporateoccupation.org or via twitter @corpoccupation

 

–The Electronic Intifada, 20 March, 2013

 

http://electronicintifada.net/content/guerrilla-research-exposes-sponsors-israeli-apartheid/12291

“United by Loss, Israeli & Palestinian Dads Call for a Joint Nonviolent Intifada Against Occupation”

AARON MATÉ: The death of a Palestinian prisoner in Israeli custody has sparked new protests in the occupied West Bank and even talk of a third intifada. The Israeli government claims the prisoner, Arafat Jaradat, died of a heart attack, but Palestinians say he succumbed to wounds sustained during a brutal torture. At a news conference in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority minister for prisoner affairs said Israel is responsible for Jaradat’s death.

ISSA QARAQEA: [translated] There were visible marks in the autopsy that made it clear that the detainee Arafat Jaradat was badly tortured, which caused his immediate death. Israel bears responsibility for killing him during the interrogation.

AARON MATÉ: Arafat Jaradat had been arrested for throwing rocks at Israeli settlers.

Well, on Monday, thousands turned out as he was laid to rest in his home village of Sair. More than a dozen Palestinians were reportedly wounded in the ensuing clashes with Israeli soldiers across the West Bank.

Jaradat’s death comes amidst a sustained campaign over the plight of more than 4,500 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Around 3,000 Palestinian prisoners recently refused to eat meals in solidarity with five hunger-striking detainees. Protests in support of the prisoners have led to several clashes with Israeli troops over the past week. In the face of the growing outrage and with President Obama set to visit the region next month, Israel has asked the Palestinian Authority to contain the protests.

The conditions on the ground recall those that sparked the First Intifada in 1987, reviving speculation that we are potentially witnessing the dawn of a third uprising against Israeli occupation.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to turn now to a new documentary about a Palestinian and an Israeli who were once dedicated fighters for their respective causes but have since renounced violence and become leading voices for peace. Both of the men, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, came face-to-face with the price of war when their young daughters were killed, one by Israeli border police and the other by a Palestinian suicide bomber. The film is called Within the Eye of the Storm. It chronicles these two men’s personal stories and their unlikely friendship. This is a clip from the film.

RAMI ELHANAN: [translated] On the 4th of September, 1997, two Palestinian terrorists blew themselves up. They killed five people that day. One of them was my daughter, Smadar.

BASSAM ARAMIN: [translated] I got a call from my eldest daughter, Arin. She was yelling, “Abir, Abir, Daddy! She was shot in the head by soldiers, and she is wounded.” I was in an Israeli prison for seven years when I was 17. I believed in eliminating the other side, which I didn’t even know.

RAMI ELHANAN: [translated] I never gave a thought to the other side. I didn’t consider that another side existed. I went through a process.

AMY GOODMAN: A clip from the trailer of the new documentary, Within the Eye of the Storm.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. Bassam, a former Fatah fighter, now a peace activist with Combatants for Peace, spent seven years in an Israeli prison. His 10-year-old daughter Abir was killed January 16, 2007, when an Israeli border police chief fired rubber bullets in a school zone. And Rami is a former Israeli reserve soldier turned peace activist, leading member of Parents Circle-Families Forum, an organization for those who lost children in conflict but nevertheless want peace. His 14-year-old daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem in September of ’97.

Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, welcome to Democracy Now! You come at a very difficult time, if there is any time that isn’t difficult in the Occupied Territories. Bassam, what message do you have for President Obama as he is about to leave for Israel?

BASSAM ARAMIN: Yes, we have actually a hope that Mr. Obama will make a difference this time, not to wait for another four years. I ask him to stop the unconditional support for one side against the other, because it doesn’t help us. We will continue fight each other because of this policy, so please be objective, and be pro-Palestine-and-Israel, and be pro-peace.

AARON MATÉ: Bassam, we said at the top that there’s talk of this starting a third intifada. Do you think that’s accurate?

BASSAM ARAMIN: You know, actually, since like many months, the situation in Palestine is very bad. The behavior of the Israeli occupation became more aggressive. The killing of Arafat Jaradat, who is from my village, it’s too much. It’s too much, actually. The Palestinian people have no hope. They cannot continue living under this brutal occupation, by this way, without any hope. And we always actually call for the third intifada, which must be a different one. We call for a Palestinian-Israeli intifada against our common enemy: the Israeli occupation. We must join forces, Israelis and Palestinians, to end this occupation by nonviolent intifada, which must be started.

AMY GOODMAN: Rami Elhanan, you lost your daughter, as did Bassam. Do you share Bassam’s view on this? What would an Israeli-Palestinian intifada look like?

RAMI ELHANAN: Well, certainly I do, with all my heart. I think we both paid the highest price as an outcome of this outrageous occupation, the last occupation that exists on earth. And I think we need to do everything in our power to prevent more losses from more innocent people. And the only way to do it is by joint forces, Israeli and Palestinians, peace seekers, who will fight this horrible occupation with nonviolent resistance.

AARON MATÉ: Rami, if you could tell us your story, what you’ve done in Israel since your daughter was killed?

RAMI ELHANAN: Well, for the last 15 years, I devoted my life to go everywhere possible, to talk to anyone possible, to convey the message that we are not doomed. This is not our destiny to keep on killing each other forever, and we can change this endless cycle of violence and revenge and retaliation. The only way to do it is simply by talking to each other.

AMY GOODMAN: How did your daughter die? You, yourself, are a former Israeli soldier. Talk about what happened. It was 1997?

RAMI ELHANAN: It was the 4th of September, 1997, Thursday afternoon. Two Palestinian suicide bombers blew themselves up in Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem, killing five people, including three little girls. One of them was my 14-years-old Smadar. It was the first day of school. And it changed my life and blew up the bubble that I was living in.

AARON MATÉ: And talk about what you’ve done. You’ve gone and you’ve spoken to many people. And actually, in this film there’s clips of people confronting you with hostility about your activism.

RAMI ELHANAN: Well, that’s part of the game. I mean, this is the price you have to pay if you are willing to talk to your society, which turns you a cold soldier and try to ignore their reality. And your role in this equation is to put cracks in the wall of hatred and fear that divide our two nations, and sometimes it can be very difficult. I’m doing it for the last 14 years, and it gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

AMY GOODMAN: Bassam Aramin, tell us about your daughter. When was she killed, and how did she die?

BASSAM ARAMIN: She was killed in the 16th of January, 2007, in front of her school 9:30 in the morning by an Israeli border police in Israel who shot and killed her in her head from the back from a distance of 15 to 20 meters, without anything. Just it was one bullet, and Abir fell down and died. She was only 10 years old. She wasn’t Fatah member or Hamas member. There were no demonstrations or violence or intifada. And she passed away after two days in Hadassah Hospital.

Again, this was like easy to go to the easy way, but we decide not to revenge, because we need to break this circle of violence and blood. And I have another five kids, and I have Israeli friends who have kids. We need to protect them. And I always said that they are all our kids, and they are all our children. I didn’t find the answer to kill an Israeli daughter or even to kill the Israeli killer, because he’s a teenager, and I consider him a victim to the past or to the memory or to the education or to the situation. We are normal people living in unnormal situations, so unfortunately sometimes our behavior became very brutal.

AARON MATÉ: Bassam, you won a judgment from an Israeli court over the killing of your daughter, which is quite rare. Can you talk about the case? And are you satisfied with how it was resolved?

BASSAM ARAMIN: Yeah, actually, after four years after they denied that the Israeli soldiers was there at all in the town, then after four-and-a-half years I need to prove that my daughter had been killed with a rubber bullet. And it was the first time that I win the case, the civil case. But my goal was to bring this hero, victim or whatever, this soldier, to the trial, and the Supreme Court decided that after four-and-a-half years, which is a long time, there’s no evidence, so they closed the file for the fourth time. Unfortunately, they have not—I have nothing to do in Israel, but I always said I have the world, and I believe in justice. And all the justice lovers around the world must support me, including many, many hundreds of my Israeli brothers and Jewish brothers around the world. And all the human beings around the world must support me because I ask to bring this man to justice, because he killing a daughter, a 10-years-old daughter, not because he’s an Israeli and I’m a Palestinian, because my child wasn’t a fighter, and she had nothing to do with this conflict.

AMY GOODMAN: We will leave it there, and I want to thank you both for being with us, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan—Bassam, a former Fatah fighter; Rami, a former Israeli soldier. Both lost their daughters. This is Democracy Now! We will link to your website. Within the Eye of the Storm is their new film.

 

–Democracy Now!, 26 February, 2013

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/26/united_by_loss_israeli_palestinian_dads
 

Zunes: “Only the People of the US Can End Israel’s Occupation”

Only the People of the US Can End Israel’s Occupation

Last month’s elections in Israel demonstrated that the Israeli electorate’s shift to the right is not inexorable. But they are unlikely to bring peace any closer by themselves.

Centrist parties—particularly a new secular group known as Yesh Atid, which won a surprising second place—did better than expected, while the right-wing Likud Bloc of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu lost seats. However, Netanyahu—who has made clear his unwillingness to allow for the creation of a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel, and who has escalated the illegal colonization of occupied East Jerusalem and other places in the West Bank—will likely remain prime minister.

The good news is that Netanyahu will need to put together a coalition government with more centrist parties, instead of with far-right and fundamentalist parties, as observers had expected. This makes war with Iran and other provocative actions by the Israeli government less likely.

Exit polls indicate that Israelis were primarily interested in domestic issues, especially the declining fortunes of the country’s middle class, which is struggling with stagnant wages, rising housing costs, and reckless privatization that has made a handful of Israelis very wealthy at the expense of the majority. In the decades since the government of the social-democratic Labor Party, Israel has gone from being one of the most egalitarian countries in the world to one of the most unequal, at least among advanced industrialized countries. A series of right-wing governments have shredded the country’s once-vaunted social welfare system, and exciting socialist initiatives like the kibbutz movement have faded. However, the Israeli people have engaged in massive protests against the growing economic injustice, including the first general strike in more than a generation, as well as demonstrations and occupations involving tens of thousands, easily eclipsing Occupy Wall Street in their numbers.

However, left-wing parties did not seem able to harness the energy of this movement, and progressives had to settle for the prospect that the new governing coalition will likely emerge from the center-right rather than extreme right and fundamentalist parties. Indeed, as an indication of how far to the right Israeli politics have gone, the Kadima Party, founded in 2005 by former right-wing prime minister and war criminal Ariel Sharon, is now considered part of the “center-left” bloc.

While Israeli politics has shifted to a more hardline position, the Palestine Liberation Organization has become more moderate. The PLO-led Palestine Authority, now recognized as a state by the United Nations, is solidly under moderate and pragmatic leadership, and has agreed to a peace settlement along the lines of the one proposed by President Bill Clinton in December 2000—a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including Arab-populated parts of East Jerusalem, with some limited territorial swaps to allow Israel to keep most of its settlements.

This would leave Israel with 78 percent of historical Palestine and the Palestinians with 22 percent. Netanyahu, however, insists this is too much and instead supports only limited Palestinian autonomy over a series of tiny non-contiguous cantons in parts of the West Bank, with Israel effectively annexing the rest of the occupied territory. President Barack Obama has called for mutual compromise between these two positions.

Like citizens of other countries, Israelis are divided between left, right, and center. Those on the left—for either principled or pragmatic reasons—recognize the need for their government to make the necessary territorial compromises for peace. Those on the right—for either religious or nationalist reasons—are unwilling to do so.

The majority of Israelis remain in the middle. They are willing to accept these necessary compromises, but only if they know there will be negative consequences for doing otherwise, such as losing the more than $3 billion in annual U.S. aid or the assurance that the U.S. will veto U.N. Security Council resolutions that challenge the Israeli occupation. A threatened suspension of the U.S. economic largesse might finally force more Israelis to make the connection between the heavily-subsidized settlement housing in the West Bank and the lack of affordable housing within Israel itself, or the huge financial burden of the continued occupation with the cutbacks in domestic spending.

Conversely, if Israelis know that U.S. support will be forthcoming regardless, this key swing constituency is likely to continue backing parties that support the occupation and colonization of the West Bank.

As a result, the best hope for peace will have to come from the United States pressuring Israel to end its unjust, illegal, and ultimately self-destructive policies toward the Palestinians. And that will only happen if the American people are willing to pressure the Obama administration to do so.

Stephen Zunes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Stephen is a professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.

 

–Stephen Zunes,  Nation of Change, 9 February, 2013

http://www.nationofchange.org/only-people-us-can-end-israel-s-occupation-1360420441.

Chomsky: Impressions of Gaza

Prof. Noam Chomsky’s first-hand account of the Occupation of Gaza, based on his trip there in October, provides important background on the current bombardment of the Gaza strip.–USC SJP blog editors.

Noam Chomsky: Impressions of Gaza

Even a single night  in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force. And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to begin to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where a million and a half people, in the most densely populated area of the world, are constantly subject to random and often savage terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade, and with the further goal of ensuring that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement that will grant these rights will be nullified.

The intensity of this commitment on the part of the Israeli political leadership has been dramatically illustrated just in the past few days, as they warn that they will “go crazy” if Palestinian rights are given limited recognition at the UN. That is not a new departure. The threat to “go crazy” (“nishtagea”) is deeply rooted, back to the Labor governments of the 1950s, along with the related “Samson Complex”: we will bring down the Temple walls if crossed. It was an idle threat then; not today.

The purposeful humiliation is also not new, though it constantly takes new forms. Thirty years ago political leaders, including some of the most noted hawks, submitted to Prime Minister Begin a shocking and detailed account of how settlers regularly abuse Palestinians in the most depraved manner and with total impunity. The prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri wrote with disgust that the army’s task is not to defend the state, but “to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim (“niggers,” “kikes”) living in territories that God promised to us.”

Gazans have been selected for particularly cruel punishment. It is almost miraculous that people can sustain such an existence. How they do so was described thirty years ago in an eloquent memoir by Raja Shehadeh (The Third Way), based on his work as a lawyer engaged in the hopeless task of trying to protect elementary rights within a legal system designed to ensure failure, and his personal experience as a Samid, “a steadfast one,” who watches his home turned into a prison by brutal occupiers and can do nothing but somehow “endure.”

Since Shehadeh wrote, the situation has become much worse. The Oslo agreements, celebrated with much pomp in 1993, determined that Gaza and the West Bank are a single territorial entity. By then the US and Israel had already initiated their program of separating them fully from one another, so as to block a diplomatic settlement and punish the Araboushim in both territories.

Punishment of Gazans became still more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: they voted the “wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world, electing Hamas. Demonstrating their passionate “yearning for democracy,” the US and Israel, backed by the timid European Union, at once imposed a brutal siege, along with intensive military attacks. The US also turned at once to standard operating procedure when some disobedient population elects the wrong government: prepare a military coup to restore order.

Gazans committed a still greater crime a year later by blocking the coup attempt, leading to a sharp escalation of the siege and military attacks. These culminated in winter 2008-9, with Operation Cast Lead, one of the most cowardly and vicious exercises of military force in recent memory, as a defenseless civilian population, trapped with no way to escape, was subjected to relentless attack by one of the world’s most advanced military systems relying on US arms and protected by US diplomacy. An unforgettable eyewitness account of the slaughter — “infanticide” in their words — is given by the two courageous Norwegian doctors who worked at Gaza’s main hospital during the merciless assault, Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, in their remarkable book Eyes in Gaza.

President-elect Obama was unable to say a word, apart from reiterating his heartfelt sympathy for children under attack — in the Israeli town Sderot. The carefully planned assault was brought to an end right before his inauguration, so that he could then say that now is the time to look forward, not backward, the standard refuge of criminals.

Of course, there were pretexts — there always are. The usual one, trotted out when needed, is “security”: in this case, home-made rockets from Gaza. As is commonly the case, the pretext lacked any credibility. In 2008 a truce was established between Israel and Hamas. The Israeli government formally recognizes that Hamas observed it fully. Not a single Hamas rocket was fired until Israel broke the truce under cover of the US election on November 4 2008, invading Gaza on ludicrous grounds and killing half a dozen Hamas members. The Israeli government was advised by its highest intelligence officials that the truce could be renewed by easing the criminal blockade and ending military attacks. But the government of Ehud Olmert, reputedly a dove, chose to reject these options, preferring to resort to its huge comparative advantage in violence: Operation Cast Lead. The basic facts are reviewed once again by foreign policy analyst Jerome Slater in the current issue of the Harvard-MIT journal International Security.

The pattern of bombing under Cast Lead was carefully analyzed by the highly informed and internationally respected Gazan human rights advocate Raji Sourani. He points out that the bombing was concentrated in the north, targeting defenseless civilians in the most densely populated areas, with no possible military pretext. The goal, he suggests, may have been to drive the intimidated population to the south, near the Egyptian border. But the Samidin stayed put, despite the avalanche of US-Israeli terror.

A further goal might have been to drive them beyond. Back to the earliest days of the Zionist colonization it was argued across much of the spectrum that Arabs have no real reason to be in Palestine; they can be just as happy somewhere else, and should leave — politely “transferred,” the doves suggested. This is surely no small concern in Egypt, and perhaps a reason why Egypt does not open the border freely to civilians or even to desperately needed materials

Sourani and other knowledgeable sources observe that the discipline of the Samidin conceals a powder keg, which might explode any time, unexpectedly, as the first Intifada did in Gaza in 1989 after years of miserable repression that elicited no notice or concern,

Merely to mention one of innumerable cases, shortly before the outbreak of the Intifada a Palestinian girl, Intissar al-Atar, was shot and killed in a schoolyard by a resident of a nearby Jewish settlement. He was one of the several thousand Israelis settlers brought to Gaza in violation of international law and protected by a huge army presence, taking over much of the land and scarce water of the Strip and living “lavishly in twenty-two settlements in the midst of 1.4 million destitute Palestinians,” as the crime is described by Israeli scholar Avi Raz. The murderer of the schoolgirl, Shimon Yifrah, was arrested, but quickly released on bail when the Court determined that “the offense is not severe enough” to warrant detention. The judge commented that Yifrah only intended to shock the girl by firing his gun at her in a schoolyard, not to kill her, so “this is not a case of a criminal person who has to be punished, deterred, and taught a lesson by imprisoning him.” Yifrah was given a 7-month suspended sentence, while settlers in the courtroom broke out in song and dance. And the usual silence reigned. After all, it is routine.

And so it is. As Yifrah was freed, the Israeli press reported that an army patrol fired into the yard of a school for boys aged 6 to 12 in a West Bank refugee camp, wounding five children, allegedly intending only “to shock them.” There were no charges, and the event again attracted no attention. It was just another episode in the program of “illiteracy as punishment,” the Israeli press reported, including the closing of schools, use of gas bombs, beating of students with rifle butts, barring of medical aid for victims; and beyond the schools a reign of more severe brutality, becoming even more savage during the Intifada, under the orders of Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, another admired dove.

My initial impression, after a visit of several days, was amazement, not only at the ability to go on with life, but also at the vibrancy and vitality among young people, particularly at the university, where I spent much of my time at an international conference. But there too one can detect signs that the pressure may become too hard to bear. Reports indicate that among young men there is simmering frustration, recognition that under the US-Israeli occupation the future holds nothing for them. There is only so much that caged animals can endure, and there may be an eruption, perhaps taking ugly forms — offering an opportunity for Israeli and western apologists to self-righteously condemn the people who are culturally backward, as Mitt Romney insightfully explained.

Gaza has the look of a typical third world society, with pockets of wealth surrounded by hideous poverty. It is not, however, “undeveloped.” Rather it is “de-developed,” and very systematically so, to borrow the terms of Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza. The Gaza Strip could have become a prosperous Mediterranean region, with rich agriculture and a flourishing fishing industry, marvelous beaches and, as discovered a decade ago, good prospects for extensive natural gas supplies within its territorial waters.

By coincidence or not, that is when Israel intensified its naval blockade, driving fishing boats toward shore, by now to 3 miles or less.

The favorable prospects were aborted in 1948, when the Strip had to absorb a flood of Palestinian refugees who fled in terror or were forcefully expelled from what became Israel, in some cases expelled months after the formal cease-fire.

In fact, they were being expelled even four years later, as reported in Ha’aretz (25.12.2008), in a thoughtful study by Beni Tziper on the history of Israeli Ashkelon back to the Canaanites. In 1953, he reports, there was a “cool calculation that it was necessary to cleanse the region of Arabs.” The original name, Majdal, had already been “Judaized” to today’s Ashkelon, regular practice.

That was in 1953, when there was no hint of military necessity. Tziper himself was born in 1953, and while walking in the remnants of the old Arab sector, he reflects that “it is really difficult for me, really difficult, to realize that while my parents were celebrating my birth, other people were being loaded on trucks and expelled from their homes.”

Israel’s 1967 conquests and their aftermath administered further blows. Then came the terrible crimes already mentioned, continuing to the present day.

The signs are easy to see, even on a brief visit. Sitting in a hotel near the shore, one can hear the machine gun fire of Israeli gunboats driving fishermen out of Gaza’s territorial waters and towards shore, so they are compelled to fish in waters that are heavily polluted because of US-Israeli refusal to allow reconstruction of the sewage and power systems that they destroyed.

The Oslo Accords laid plans for two desalination plants, a necessity in this arid region. One, an advanced facility, was built: in Israel. The second one is in Khan Yunis, in the south of Gaza. The engineer in charge of trying to obtain potable water for the population explained that this plant was designed so that it cannot use sea water, but must rely on underground water, a cheaper process, which further degrades the meager aquifer, guaranteeing severe problems in the future. Even with that, water is severely limited. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which cares for refugees (but not other Gazans), recently released a report warning that damage to the aquifer may soon become “irreversible,” and that without remedial action quickly, by 2020 Gaza may not be a “liveable place.”

Israel permits concrete to enter for UNRWA projects, but not for Gazans engaged in the huge reconstruction needs. The limited heavy equipment mostly lies idle, since Israel does not permit materials for repair. All of this is part of the general program described by Israeli official Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, after Palestinians failed to follow orders in the 2006 elections: “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” That would not look good.

And the plan is being scrupulously followed. Sara Roy has provided extensive evidence in her scholarly studies. Recently, after several years of effort, the Israeli human rights organization Gisha succeeded to obtain a court order for the government to release its records detailing plans for the diet, and how they are executed. Israel-based journalist Jonathan Cook summarizes them: “Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day … an average of only 67 trucks — much less than half of the minimum requirement — entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.” And even this estimate is overly generous, UN relief officials report.

The result of imposing the diet, Mideast scholar Juan Cole observes, is that “[a]bout ten percent of Palestinian children in Gaza under 5 have had their growth stunted by malnutrition … in addition, anemia is widespread, affecting over two-thirds of infants, 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, and over a third of pregnant mothers.” The US and Israel want to ensure that nothing more than bare survival is possible.

“What has to be kept in mind,” observes Raji Sourani, “is that the occupation and the absolute closure is an ongoing attack on the human dignity of the people in Gaza in particular and all Palestinians generally. It is systematic degradation, humiliation, isolation and fragmentation of the Palestinian people.” The conclusion is confirmed by many other sources. In one of the world’s leading medical journals, The Lancet, a visiting Stanford physician, appalled by what he witnessed, describes Gaza as “something of a laboratory for observing an absence of dignity,” a condition that has “devastating” effects on physical, mental, and social wellbeing. “The constant surveillance from the sky, collective punishment through blockade and isolation, the intrusion into homes and communications, and restrictions on those trying to travel, or marry, or work make it difficult to live a dignified life in Gaza.” The Araboushim must be taught not to raise their heads.

There were hopes that the new Morsi government in Egypt, less in thrall to Israel than the western-backed Mubarak dictatorship, might open the Rafah crossing, the sole access to the outside for trapped Gazans that is not subject to direct Israeli control. There has been slight opening, but not much. Journalist Laila el-Haddad writes that the re-opening under Morsi, “is simply a return to status quo of years past: only Palestinians carrying an Israeli-approved Gaza ID card can use Rafah Crossing,” excluding a great many Palestinians, including el-Haddad’s family, where only one spouse has a card.

Furthermore, she continues, “the crossing does not lead to the West Bank, nor does it allow for the passage of goods, which are restricted to the Israeli-controlled crossings and subject to prohibitions on construction materials and export.” The restricted Rafah crossing does not change the fact that “Gaza remains under tight maritime and aerial siege, and continues to be closed off to the Palestinians’ cultural, economic, and academic capitals in the rest of the [occupied territories], in violation of US-Israeli obligations under the Oslo Accords.”

The effects are painfully evident. In the Khan Yunis hospital, the director, who is also chief of surgery, describes with anger and passion how even medicines are lacking for relief of suffering patients, as well as simple surgical equipment, leaving doctors helpless and patients in agony. Personal stories add vivid texture to the general disgust one feels at the obscenity of the harsh occupation. One example is the testimony of a young woman who despaired that her father, who would have been proud that she was the first woman in the refugee camp to gain an advanced degree, had “passed away after 6 months of fighting cancer aged 60 years. Israeli occupation denied him a permit to go to Israeli hospitals for treatment. I had to suspend my study, work and life and go to set next to his bed. We all sat including my brother the physician and my sister the pharmacist, all powerless and hopeless watching his suffering. He died during the inhumane blockade of Gaza in summer 2006 with very little access to health service. I think feeling powerless and hopeless is the most killing feeling that human can ever have. It kills the spirit and breaks the heart. You can fight occupation but you cannot fight your feeling of being powerless. You can’t even dissolve that feeling.”

Disgust at the obscenity, compounded with guilt: it is within our power to bring the suffering to an end and allow the Samidin to enjoy the lives of peace and dignity that they deserve.

Noam Chomsky visited the Gaza Strip on October 25-30, 2012.

–Chomsky.info, 4 November, 2012

http://chomsky.info/articles/20121104.htm

Al Jazeera: “Gaza: A people under siege”

The head of the military wing of Hamas, Ahmed al-Jabari, was assassinated during a series of Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, following a week of escalating violence.

Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since 2006 when Israel pulled out its settlers. Deprived of building materials, food and medicines, the territory is sometimes described as an “open air prison”.

Israel says their recent aerial bombardment marks the beginning of a broader operation against Hamas in Gaza, who they blame for rocket attacks into southern Israel.

Hamas says Israel has “opened the gates of hell” and they will “regret” the military campaign.

 

–Al Jazeera, 15 November, 2012

 

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2012/11/2012111517327712311.html

CLICK ON THE ABOVE LINK TO LAUNCH THE INTERACTIVE VERSION OF THE IMAGE BELOW

 

 

Jonathan Cook on “Israel’s starvation diet for Gaza”

Israel’s starvation diet for Gaza

 

Six and a half years ago, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections and took charge of Gaza, a senior Israeli official described Israel’s planned response. “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Although Dov Weisglass was adviser to Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the day, few observers treated his comment as more than hyperbole, a supposedly droll characterization of the blockade Israel was about to impose on the tiny enclave.

Last week, however, the evidence finally emerged to prove that this did indeed become Israeli policy. After a three-year legal battle by an Israeli human rights group, Israel was forced to disclose its so-called “Red Lines” document. Drafted in early 2008, as the blockade was tightened still further, the defense ministry paper set forth proposals on how to treat Hamas-ruled Gaza.

The fine print

Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day.

The Israeli media have tried to present these chilling discussions, held in secret, in the best light possible. Even the liberal Haaretz newspaper euphemistically described this extreme form of calorie-counting as designed to “make sure Gaza didn’t starve.”

But a rather different picture emerges as one reads the small print. While the health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition — requiring 170 trucks a day — military officials then found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure.

The reality was that, in this period, an average of only 67 trucks — much less than half of the minimum requirement — entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.

To achieve this large reduction, officials deducted trucks based both on an over-generous assessment of how much food could be grown locally and on differences in the “culture and experience” of food consumption in Gaza, a rationale never explained.

Chronic malnutrition

Gisha, the organization that fought for the document’s publication, observes that Israeli officials ignored the fact that the blockade had severely impaired Gaza’s farming industry, with a shortage of seeds and chickens that had led to a dramatic drop in food output.

UN staff too have noted that Israel failed to factor in the large quantity of food from each day’s supply of 67 trucks that never actually reached Gaza. That was because Israeli restrictions at the crossings created long delays as food was unloaded, checked and then put on to new trucks. Many items spoiled as they lay in the sun.

And on top of this, Israel further adjusted the formula so that the number of trucks carrying nutrient-poor sugar were doubled while the trucks carrying milk, fruit and vegetables were greatly reduced, sometimes by as much as a half.

Robert Turner, director of operations for the UN agency for Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip, has observed: “The facts on the ground in Gaza demonstrate that food imports consistently fell below the red lines.”

It does not need an expert to conclude that the imposition of this Weisglass-style “diet” would entail widespread malnutrition, especially among children. And that is precisely what happened, as a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross found at the time. “Chronic malnutrition is on a steadily rising trend and micro-nutrient deficiencies are of great concern,” it reported in early 2008.

Collective punishment

Israel’s protests that the document was merely a “rough draft” and never implemented are barely credible — and, anyway, beside the point. If the politicians and generals were advised by health experts that Gaza needed at least 170 trucks a day, why did they oversee a policy that allowed in only 67?

There can be no doubt that the diet devised for Gaza — much like Israel’s blockade in general — was intended as a form of collective punishment, one directed at every man, woman and child. The goal, according to the Israeli defense ministry, was to wage “economic warfare” that would generate a political crisis, leading to a popular uprising against Hamas.

Earlier, when Israel carried out its 2005 disengagement, it presented the withdrawal as marking the end of Gaza’s occupation. But the “Red Lines” formula indicates quite the opposite: that, in reality, Israeli officials intensified their control, managing the lives of Gaza’s inhabitants in almost-microscopic detail.

Experiments in social engineering

Who can doubt — given the experiences of Gaza over the past few years — that there exist in the Israeli military’s archives other, still-classified documents setting out similar experiments in social engineering? Will future historians reveal that Israeli officials also pondered the fewest hours of electricity Palestinians in Gaza needed to survive, or the minimum amount of water, or the smallest living space per family, or the highest feasible levels of unemployment?

Such formulas presumably lay behind the decision to bomb Gaza’s only power station in 2006 and subsequently to block its proper repair; the refusal to approve a desalination plant, the only way to prevent over-drilling contaminating the Strip’s underground water supply; the declaration of large swaths of farmland no-go areas, forcing the rural population into the already overcrowded cities and refugee camps; and the continuing blockade on exports, decimating Gaza’s business community and ensuring the population remains dependent on aid.

It is precisely these policies by Israel that led the United Nations to warn in August that Gaza would be “uninhabitable” by 2020 (“Gaza in 2020 – A livable place?,” 27 August 2012).

Doctrines for destruction

In fact, the rationale for the Red Lines document and these other measures can be found in a military strategy that found its apotheosis in Operation Cast Lead, the savage attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09.

The Dahiya doctrine was Israel’s attempt to update its traditional military deterrence principle to cope with a changing Middle East, one in which the main challenge it faced was from asymmetrical warfare. The name Dahiya derives from a neighborhood of Beirut Israel leveled in its 2006 attack on Lebanon.

This “security concept,” as the Israeli army termed it, involves the wholesale destruction of a community’s infrastructure to immerse it so deeply in the problems of survival and reconstruction that other concerns, including fighting back or resisting occupation, are no longer practicable.

On the first day of the Gaza offensive, Yoav Galant, the commander in charge, explained the aim succinctly: it was to “send Gaza decades into the past.” Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai may have been thinking in similar terms when, months before Operation Cast Lead, he warned that Israel was preparing to inflict on Gaza a “shoah,” the Hebrew word for Holocaust.

Seen in this context, Weisglass’ “diet” can be understood as just one more refinement of the Dahiya doctrine: a whole society refashioned to accept its subjugation through a combination of violence, poverty, malnutrition and a permanent struggle over limited resources.

This experiment in the manufacture of Palestinian despair is, it goes with saying, both illegal and grossly immoral. But ultimately it is also certain to unravel — and possibly sooner rather than later. The visit this week of Qatar’s emir, there to bestow hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, was the first by a head of state since 1999.

The Gulf’s wealthy oil states need influence, allies and an improved image in a new Middle East wracked by uprisings and civil war. Gaza is a prize, it seems, they may be willing to challenge Israel to possess.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

 

—Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 24 October, 2012.

 

http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-starvation-diet-gaza/11810

Criticizing Israel, Gunter Grass, and Anti-Semitism

Despite Israeli charges, Gunter Grass is not an anti-Semite

German author Gunter Grass has been accused by Israel of spreading blood libel and being an anti-Semite. That is not true; he simply opposes the Netanyahu government

Gunter Grass, the famed German author, got himself into hot water recently. He wrote a controversial poem (unfortunately, I failed to find an adequate English translation, though I did see an adequate Hebrew one), which accused Israel of possessing nuclear weapons, plotting an attack against Iran, possibly using nukes against it and possibly using German-supplied nuclear submarines to deliver those weapons. For his trouble, the Israeli Embassy in Berlin denounced him, saying, “What must be said is that it belongs to European tradition to accuse the Jews of ritual murder before the Passover celebration… It used to be Christian children whose blood the Jews used to make matza (unleavened bread), today it is the Iranian people that the Jewish state purportedly wants to wipe out.”

Impressive use of the anti-Semitism charge, which is diplomatic Israel’s first line of defense these days. But is it true? Let’s pick it apart, beginning with Grass’s claims.

Does Israel have nukes?  According to just about every source in the world, the answer is yes. Shimon Peres is widely credited as the father of the Israeli nuke plan and has never denied it. John Crossman (formerly Mordechai Va’anunu) served 18 years, many of them in solitary confinement, in an Israeli prison for exposing this truth.

Are those weapons supervised? Of course not. Israel is above such petty laws.

Is Israel plotting an attack against Iran? Yes. Netanyahu and his ministers have said so time and time again. Recently, Netanyahu said that an attack on Iran is not an “if” question but rather a “when” question. His Minister of Security, Ehud Barak, said openly that in case of such an attack, Israel expects 500 casualties (Hebrew). This week, the government ministers were informed that this number has been notched down to 300 (Hebrew).

Is Israel considering using nukes against Iran? Yes, or at least it gives good reason to believe it does. Netanyahu has said time and time again that “all options are on the table,” and that means the nuclear option is on the table as well. Reuters has reported that Israel considers using tactical nukes, as did a Fox News commentator, quoting an Israeli source claimed to be knowledgeable and accurate (here, around the 2:15-2:25 mark). One could plausibly make the claim that this is just psychological warfare on Israel’s part, and that not even Ehud Barak is that insane; but can one blame Grass for falling victim to Israel’s psychological offensive? When you’re playing the regional madman, don’t blame people if they think you’re actually barking mad.

Will German-provided submarines be used to deliver those tactical nuclear weapons? Quite possibly. Israel’s Dolphin-class submarines, provided by Germany, are widely assumed to be armed with nuclear weapons.

Is Netanyahu considering wiping out the Iranian people? Considering some of his statements, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. One of Netanyahu’s aides claimed Netanyahu thinks of the Iranians as Amalek, the mystical people who are the enemies of God and who are to be wiped out to the last. Netanyahu never formally retracted this genocidal comment, and he never paid a public price for it. He also keeps referring to the Iranians as Nazis – and to Nazis and Iranians as Amalekites.

So, basically everything said by Grass is plausible, at least within the frame of the psychological warfare waged by Israel. The truth is never anti-Semitic. There was no blood libel here, no anti-Semitism, no claim of children’s blood used for ritual purposes. Furthermore, criticism of Israel’s intended policy has nothing whatsoever to do with Judaism or Jews. The claim (often made by Israeli officials) that Israel represents world Jewry, and that hence any attack on it is an attack on them, is a claim that Jews everywhere owe allegiance to a country of which they are not citizens and to which they never made any formal vow of loyalty, and thus can credibly be considered to be itself anti-Semitic.

Had the Israeli Foreign Ministry any shame left, it would not use the phrases it did against Grass. But, unsurprisingly, it did. The good thing which may come out of this affair is that people may learn to discount screeches of anti-Semitism from Israel with a sigh of “there they go again.”

–Yossi Gurvitz, +972 Magzine, April 5, 2012

http://972mag.com/despite-israeli-accusations-gunter-grass-is-not-an-anti-semite/40250/

“Forget the fairytale: the US doesn’t love Israel”

It is possibly the greatest of American political myths, repeated ad nauseam by presidential candidates in their election campaigns. President Barack Obama has claimed that the United States enjoys a special bond with Israel unlike its relations with any other country. He has called the friendship “unshakeable,” “enduring” and “unique,” “anchored by our common interests and deeply-held values.”

His Republican rival, Mitt Romney, has gone further, arguing that there is not “an inch of difference between ourselves and our ally Israel.” A recent Romney election ad, highlighting his summer visit to Israel, extolled the “deep and cherished relationship.”

But, while such pronouncements form the basis of an apparent Washington consensus, the reality is that the cherished friendship is no more than a fairy tale. It has been propagated by politicians to mask the suspicion — and plentiful examples of duplicity and betrayal — that have marked the relationship since Israel’s founding.

Politicians may prefer to express undying love for Israel, and hand over billions of dollars annually in aid, but the US security establishment has — at least, in private — always regarded Israel as an unfaithful partner.

Distrust

The distrust has been particularly hard to hide in relation to Iran. Israel has been putting relentless pressure on Washington, apparently in the hope of maneuvering it into supporting or joining an attack on Tehran to stop what Israel claims is an Iranian effort to build a nuclear bomb concealed beneath its civilian energy program.

While coverage has focused on the personal animosity between Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the truth is that US officials generally are deeply at odds with Israel on this issue.

The conflict burst into the open recently with reports that the Pentagon had scaled back next month’s joint military exercise, Austere Challenge, with the Israeli military that had been billed as the largest and most significant in the two countries’ history (“US scales back military exercise with Israel, affecting potential Iran strike,” Time, 31 August 2012).

The goal of the exercise was to test the readiness of Israel’s missile-defense shield in case of Iranian reprisals — possibly the biggest fear holding Israel back from launching a go-it-alone attack. The Pentagon’s main leverage on Israel is its X-band radar, stationed in Israel but operated exclusively by a US crew, that would provide Israel with early warning of Iranian missiles.

A senior Israeli military official told Time magazine what message the Pentagon’s rethink had conveyed: “Basically what the Americans are saying is, ‘We don’t trust you.’”

But discord between the two “unshakeable allies” is not limited to Iran. Antipathy has been the norm for decades. Over the summer, current and former CIA officials admitted that the US security establishment has always regarded Israel as its number one counter-intelligence threat in the Middle East.

Broken promises on spying

The most infamous spy working on Israel’s behalf was Jonathan Pollard, a naval intelligence officer who passed thousands of classified documents to Israel in the 1980s. Israel’s repeated requests for his release have been a running sore with the Pentagon, not least because defense officials regard promises that Israel would never again operate spies on US soil as insincere.

At least two more spies have been identified in the past few years. In 2008 a former US army engineer, Ben-Ami Kadish, admitted that he had allowed Israeli agents to photograph secret documents about US fighter jets and nuclear weapons in the 1980s. And in 2006 Lawrence Franklin, a US defense official, was convicted of passing classified documents to Israel concerning Iran.

In fact, such betrayals were assumed by Washington from the start of the relationship. In Israel’s early years, a US base in Cyprus monitored Israeli activities; today, Israeli communications are intercepted by a team of Hebrew linguists stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Documents released in the past few weeks by the Israeli air force archives also reveal that Israel eventually identified mysterious high-altitude planes that overflew its territory throughout the 1950s as American U2 espionage planes (“US espionage planes violated Israeli airspace in the 1950s, IAF archives reveal,” Haaretz, 30 August 2012).

In a sign of continuing US caution, Israel has not been included in the coterie of countries with which Washington shares sensitive intelligence. The members of the “Five Eyes” group, consisting of the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, have promised not to spy on each other — a condition Israel would have regularly flouted were it a member.

Indeed, Israel has even stolen the identities of nationals from these countries to assist in Mossad operations. Most notoriously, Israel forged passports to smuggle Israeli agents into Dubai in 2010 to assassinate leading Hamas member Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

Israel is far from a trusted ally in the US “war on terror.” A former intelligence official told the Associated Press in July that Israel ranked lower than Libya in a list of countries helping to fight terrorism compiled by the Bush administration after the 11 September 2001 attacks.

So why all the talk of a special bond if the relationship is characterized by such deep mistrust?

Bomb aimed at America?

Part of the answer lies in the formidably intimidating tactics of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, spoke for a growing number of observers last year when he wrote that the US Congress was effectively “bought and paid for” by Israel’s lobbyists.

That power was all too evident this month when the Democratic National Convention adopted an amended policy designating Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, in opposition to both international law and the vocal wishes of delegates.

But there is another, less spoken-of reason. Francis Perrin, the head of the French Atomic Agency in the 1950s and 1960s, when France was helping Israel develop a nuclear weapon against the wishes of the US, once observed that the Israeli bomb was really “aimed against the Americans.”

Not because Israel wanted to attack the US, but because it realized that — once it possessed the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East — the US would rarely risk standing in its way, however much its policies ran counter to US interests.

For that reason, if no other, Israel is determined to stop any rival, including Iran, from getting a nuclear weapon that would end its monopoly.

Jonathan Cook won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

 

 

–The Electronic Intifada, 12 September, 2012

 

http://electronicintifada.net/content/forget-fairytale-us-doesnt-love-israel/11662

Israeli Judge Clears Military in Rachel Corrie Case

Israeli Judge Clears Military for 2003 Killing of Rachel Corrie

An Israeli judge has cleared Israel’s military of responsibility for the killing of the U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie. A 23-year-old college student, Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza nine years ago. She was standing in front of a Palestinian home to help prevent its demolition. Today’s ruling came in a wrongful death civil suit brought by Corrie’s family, with the judge rejecting any negligence on the part of the driver and finding that Corrie’s death resulted from “an accident she brought upon herself.” Corrie family attorney Hussein Abu Hussein denounced the verdict.

Hussein Abu Hussein: “This verdict distorts the strong evidence presented in court and contradicts fundamental principles of international law with regard to protection of human right defenders. In denying justice in [the] Rachel Corrie killing, this verdict speaks to the systematic failure to hold the Israeli military accountable for continuing violation of basic human rights.”

The ruling follows an earlier internal Israeli army investigation that also exonerated the bulldozer drivers. The Corrie family had been seeking a symbolic $1 in damages, as well as legal fees.

–Democracy Now!, 28 August, 2012

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/28/headlines#8283

For a little Jogging of Historical Memory…

Four eyewitnesses describe the murder of Rachel Corrie

American peace activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by an Israeli bulldozer driver on 16 March 2003 while attempting to defend a Palestinian doctor’s home from demolition. Four of the seven International Solidarity Movement members present have written their recollections of the incident: Tom Dale (US), Greg Schnabel (UK), Richard Purssell (UK), and Joe Smith (US). Greg and Richard’s accounts are more formal accounts. Tom and Joe’s accounts are excerpted from e-mails to friends and families. Courtesy of the International Solidarity Movement…

–The Electronic Intifada, 19 March 2003

http://electronicintifada.net/content/four-eyewitnesses-describe-murder-rachel-corrie/4460