'We have become the racists ourselves'

How Israel drowns dissent

The Guardian: Firefighters turned their hoses on a peaceful anti-war protester last week... Their actions were, while wholly illegal, none the less emblematic of a massive shift in Israeli public opinion over the last few years, according to Sharon Dolev, the woman on the receiving end of the assault... "We used to hold signs at protests reading 'The occupation will corrupt' ... Now, we can see that it has [come to pass]. As a society, we have lost our ability to see clearly; we have let fear blind us. Once, calling someone a racist was the harshest accusation you could make. Later, you began to hear people say 'I know I'm a racist, but...'; nowadays [during Cast Lead], we heard 'I know I'm talking like a Nazi, but at least the Nazis knew how to deal with their enemies.'" ... She believes that history has come full circle, and that instead of learning the lessons of the Holocaust, "we have become the racists ourselves."

Video: Israeli Soldiers refuse to serve in Gaza

'We are creating bombers from the sons of the dead'

The Guardian: Yitzchak Ben Mocha: 'In the past the army used to put refuseniks in jail for weeks. When they were released, sometimes they would be arrested again and this would go on for months. But now it seems the army doesn't want to admit publicly there are refuseniks... It would to against the image of the whole army and country united.'... No'em Levna, a first lieutenant in the Israeli army, was sent to a military prison for 14 days. 'Killing innocent civilians cannot be justified,' he said. 'Nothing justifies this kind of killing.'...

[Ben Mocha] says he joined the Israeli army believing he would be fighting 'terror organisations,' He found himself suppressing Palestinian aspirations for freedom and putting down protests of Palestinian farmers 'against the incontinent theft of their lands.' He also saw abuses, such as Israeli troops sending Palestinian women and children into houses to ensure they were not booby-trapped, and using civilians as human shields. 'I am not a pacifist. I recognise the necessity of Israel to have a strong defensive army but I'm no longer going to play a part in 40 years of occupation. I told the army I will report for training so that I can always be ready to defend Israel, but attacking Gaza and perpetuating occupation is not defending Israel.'...

Recently the military has preferred to pretend simply that dissenters don't exist -- as hundreds of soldiers and reservists signed petitions refusing to enforce the occupation. The government was particularly embarrassed when 27 pilots said they would no longer carry out killings of Palestinian leaders in Gaza, and when a group of elite commandos refused to serve in the occupied territories.

[Ben Mocha] is disturbed that most of the Israeli public and much of the media is blind to the fact that hundreds of Palestinians have been cut to pieced by Israeli fire power. 'In the long run, it's not a war of defence... In the long run, we are creating more terror.'

Inauguration for the Ages

Artist John Mavroudis' cover illustration for this week's print edition 

of The Nation imagines the US presidential inauguration as one witnessed not in flesh and blood, but in the bonds of justice and peace. List of names and a matching diagram are here.

'I couldn't save anything'

Video: Gaza's destruction revealed

UN: Hundreds of millions needed for Gaza aid

Initial Response Plan and Immediate Funding Needs (.pdf)

UN wants all Gaza borders opened

Tears and anger among wreckage of Gaza 

as families return home

The Times [UK]: Ibrahim Abu Amrin sat on the ruins of his house, dressed in ragged clothes, sheltered by a blanket stretched between poles. Nearby a few of his 13 children dug in the rubble, looking for possessions to salvage. Of the citrus and olive trees that once adorned his garden not a trace was left. 'I couldn't save anything,' said the elderly teacher, with tears in his eyes. 'We have nothing left -- no money, no food. We have nowhere else to go.'... Maha Sultan, 33, returned to retrieve some possessions for her four children. She found her apartment block reduced to rubble... 'In my worst dreams I didn't think it would be this bad,' she sobbed. 'This was the house of my children. All the pictures of my children, my diaries, my wedding ring are gone. The Israelis have wiped out my future and my past.'

IAEA to look into Gaza uranium ammunition claim

Banned while phosphorus shelling

The Times [UK] has uncovered dozens of incidents in which doctors say that civilians have been wounded by white phosphorus, which burns at extremely high temperatures until its oxygen is cut off. Last week UN officials in Gaza were certain that their compound had been hit by white phosphorus shells... Amnesty International said its team had found proof that Israeli forces were using white phosphorus in densely-populated residential areas in Gaza City and in the north...

'We were attacked by an army. But we are not an army, we have no way to defend ourselves... We will go back to our home. We are not political but we will go on with Hamas. This is how it is.'

Image: University of Palestine; source here.

He gone

Image source here.

The language we speak

Peace is in the eye 

of the beholder

Chris Hedges, Truthdig: 

The American and Israeli doctrine of pre-emptive war, disproportionate force and ruthless occupation to bring about peace and harmony is a fantasy. Such a doctrine regurgitates the old arguments for 19th century European colonialism... 

The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them -- violence. The rockets fired into Israel are a response to the siege and occupation. They are a response to the language Israel uses when it addresses the Palestinians. And as long as the siege and occupation continue, as long as Israel speaks to the Palestinians through explosions and airstrikes, so will armed resistance to Israel...

Those who tell the grieving families in Gaza or Iraq or Afghanistan to use moral suasion and nonviolence to counter tank blasts and airstrikes in crowded neighborhoods are as self-deluded as pro-war Israeli and American politicians who think they can blast their way to a solution...

We have to stand in the shoes of those we brand as the enemy. We have to see ourselves as others see us. Israel must negotiate with Hamas and end its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank to secure a lasting peace. We must withdraw our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and negotiate with those arrayed against us to find stability. Until this happens, we all remain on a merry-go-round of death.

Image source here.

The side of justice

'The forces of the universe are on the side of justice... We got orders now to break down the bondage and the walls of colonialism, exploitation, and imperialism, to break them down to the point that no man will trample over another man, but that all men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.' 

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

in 'The Birth of a New Nation' sermon, delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 7 April 1957.

Image source here.

'There are witnesses'

Gazans count 

the cost of war

Video: Destroyed homes 

greet returning Gazans

Self-Deception and the Assault on Gaza

David Bromwich, The Huffington Post: What prompts the fantasy that you can 'kill all the terrorists' without sowing the seeds of new terrorism? Partly, the fantasy comes from the idea that any civilian deaths you cause will be forgiven; but, much more, it derives from the secondary fantasy that civilian deaths will go mainly unwitnessed. They will be recorded as numbers, perhaps, but they will pass out of the awareness of the world. That is not the way things work, of course. There are people in the world -- not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of millions -- who feel more closely allied to the killed than they do to the killers...

If nobody existed on earth except Israel and the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, the way would lie open now for the fulfillment of the doctrine. Israel could finish the job begun in 1948: the job of expulsion, the forced transportation elsewhere of the Palestinian people as a whole. But again, the problem recurs: the world is larger than Israel and Gaza. There are witnesses.

Indiscriminate slaughter from the air

Simon Jenkins, The Guardian: The bombing of urban infrastructure is an act of terror... If Israel fails to win its political objectives in Gaza, it will in part be because of its massively destructive attempt to terrify the Palestinians into surrender from the air. Every errant missile explodes on the television screens of the world. In the complex politics of war, these weapons are like torture. They numb moral sensibility and do harm beyond all justification of victory.

It rains death in Gaza

Leila Elias, The Morning Call: They say silence is golden. Today we see that silence now is heavy, leaden proof that Palestinians are non-human entities. The silence of world governments is the evidence. The grossly disproportional use of force by Israel in densely populated Gaza ignites little or no response from the powers of the world. Pictures of death and destruction -- mosques, a university, a police station, fishing boats, the fish market, the bodies and body parts being pulled from demolished homes and buildings, mothers screaming for their children, brothers searching for their sisters, a baby reaching for her dead mother under the rubble of a bombed house -- have dented the conscience of only a few... We wonder how we allow ourselves to watch the obliteration and annihilation of a people?

Image: al-Quds hospital; source here.

The US and Israel: 'Unqualified support'

Unanimous Consent

When Israel acts, Congress applauds. No debate required.

Glenn Greenwald, in The American Conservative: In most of the world, the Israeli attack on Gaza is viewed as an intensely controversial act and, more commonly, an excessive, unjustifiable, and brutal assault on a trapped civilian population. But not in the United States -- at least not among America's political and opinion-making elite... When it comes to Israel's various military actions, there is far more dissent within Israel... than there is within the US, where such criticism is all but nonexistent. Indeed, in the US Congress, there is far more unqualified support for Israel's wars than for America's own... It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to find in American political life any other issue of this consequence, complexity, and controversy that generates such absolute agreement within our political class.

A Quibble

Mark Slouka, in Harper's: What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about, particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some redeeming twinge of shame -- no longer. Today, across vast swaths of the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We're deeply loyal to it. Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.

Punishing the Palestinians

Ralph Nader, In the Public Interest: Why? The Congressional response: 'Hamas terrorists' everywhere. Sure, defending their Palestinian families is called terrorism. The truth is there is no Hamas army, airforce and navy up against the fourth most powerful military in the world. As one Israeli gunner on an armored personnel carrier frankly said to The New York Times: 'They are villagers with guns. They don't even aim when they shoot.' ... What is going on in Gaza is what Bill Moyers called it earlier this month -- 'state terrorism.' ... 

Since 2002, more than 50 Arab and Muslim nations have had a standing offer, repeated often, that if Israel obeys several UN resolutions and withdraws to the 1967 borders leaving 22 percent of the original Palestine for an independent Palestinian state, they will open full diplomatic relations and there will be peace. Israel has declined to accept this offer.

Now I Understand Why They Hate Us

How a middle-class white guy came to accept the evil embedded in American political and military might.

Image source here.

300+ British academics: 'Israel must lose'

Growing outrage at the killings in Gaza

Statement in The Guardian: The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine in more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel's ongoing appropriation of their land and resources. Israel's war against the Palestinians has turned Gaza and the West Bank into a pair of gigantic political prisons. There is nothing symmetrical about this war in terms of principles, tactics or consequences. Israel is responsible for launching and intensifying it, and for ending the most recent lull in hostilities.

Israel must lose. It is not enough to call for another ceasefire, or more humanitarian assistance. It is not enough to urge the renewal of dialogue and to acknowledge the concerns and suffering of both sides. If we believe in the principle of democratic self-determination, if we affirm the right to resist military aggression and colonial occupation, then we are obliged to take sides ... against Israel, and with the people of Gaza and the West Bank.

We must do what we can to stop Israel from winning its war. Israel must accept that its security depends on justice and peaceful coexistence with its neighbours, and not upon the criminal use of force.

We believe Israel should immediately and unconditionally end its assault on Gaza, end the occupation of the West Bank, and abandon all claims to possess or control territory beyond its 1967 borders. We call on the British government and the British people to take all feasible steps to oblige Israel to comply with these demands, starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Signatures

'Hamas is not going away'

Hamas announces cease-fire in Gaza, gives IDF week to leave

Hamas declares a 

counter-ceasefire

Paul Woodward, War in Context: Hamas has succeeded in turning the tables on Israel... If they start pulling out right away they will appear to be complying with Hamas' terms. If they drag their feet and as a consequence rocket fire resumes, they will appear to have squandered an opportunity to end the fighting... The underlying message is the message that Israel and its allies have thus far been extraordinarily obstinate in refusing to learn: Hamas is not going away.  They can either be fought or engaged but those who still cling to the fantasy of Hamas' annihilation are nursing a destructive delusion.

Israel accused of war crimes over 12-hour assault 

on Gaza village

White flags ignored and houses bulldozed with families inside

Fida Qishta and Peter Beaumont, The Observer: Israel stands accused of perpetrating a series of war crimes during a sustained 12-hour assault on a village in southern Gaza last week in which 14 people died. In testimony collected from residents of the village of Khuza'a by the Observer, it is claimed that Israeli soldiers entering the village:

* attempted to bulldoze houses with civilians inside;

* killed civilians trying to escape under protection of white flags;

* opened fire on an ambulance attempting to reach the wounded;

* used indiscriminate force in a civilian area and fired white phosphorus shells.

If the allegations are upheld, all the incidents would constitute breaches of the Geneva conventions.

Israel readies post-war battle for public opinion

AFP: Israel is readying a new offensive -- the battle for public opinion once there is a full account of the destruction and civilian deaths in the battered enclave... The government has begun assembling 'incriminating' information on the many buildings hit during the offensive to prove they were legitimate targets... Official figures show that around 4,000 residential buildings, 51 government buildings and 20 mosques have been levelled... The extensive list also catalogues damage to roads, schools, the electricity grid and the water network... 

Israel's battle over the perception of the war will be a global one, with at least six ministers fanning out to different countries... 'Israel will also show that it warned civilians before carrying out strikes... by phone or by dropping leaflets.'... The measures were mostly ineffective in the densely-populated area whose borders have been closed by Israel and Egypt... Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN refugee agency said... 'There is no place to flee.'

Image source here.

'Picture of victory'

Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom:

The smoke from Lebanon War II is hanging over the Gaza war. Everybody in Israel swore to learn its lessons. And the main lesson was: not to risk the life of even one single soldier. A war without casualties (on our side). The method: to use the overwhelming firepower of our army to pulverize everything standing in its way and to kill everybody moving in the area. 

To kill not only the fighters on the other side, but every human being who might possibly turn out to harbor hostile intentions, even if they are obviously an ambulance attendant, a driver in a food convoy or a doctor saving lives. to destroy every building from which our troops could conceivably be shot at -- even a school full of refugees, the sick and the wounded. To bomb and shell whole neighborhoods, buildings, mosques, schools, UN food convoys, even ruins under which the injured are buried...

This would have been impossible, had not the whole country been infected with blunted sensitivities. People are no longer shocked by the sight of a mutilated baby, nor by children left for days with the corpse of their mother, because the army did not let them leave their ruined home. It seems that almost nobody cares anymore: not the soldiers, not the pilots, not the media people, not the politicians, not the generals. A moral insanity...

The Israeli Barak understands that if the American Barack gets angry, that would mean disaster. Conclusion: the horrors of Gaza must stop before the inauguration. This week that determined all political and military decisions... In Israel, all the talk is about the 'picture of victory' -- not victory itself, but the 'picture.' That is essential, in order to convince the Israeli public that the whole business has been worthwhile...

According to the classic military definition, the winner in a battle is the army that remains on the battlefield when it's over. Hamas remains. The Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip still stands, in spite of all the efforts to eliminate it. That is a significant achievement... The very fact that a guerilla force of a few thousand lightly armed fighters held out for long weeks against one of the world's mightiest armies with enormous firepower, will look to millions of Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims, and not only to them, like an unqualified victory...

The worst results of this war are still invisible and will make themselves felt only in years to come: Israel has imprinted on world consciousness a terrible image of itself. Billions of people have seen us as a blood-dripping monster. They will never again see Israel as a state that seeks justice, progress and peace.

Image source here.

American Conservative: What Israel Lost

Another War, Another Defeat

John J. Mearsheimer, The American Conservative: When a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don't believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win... Israel's leaders remain determined to control all of what used to be known as Mandate Palestine, which includes Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians would have limited autonomy in a handful of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves, one of which is Gaza. Israel would control the borders around them, movement between them, the air above and the water below them.

The key to achieving this is to inflict massive pain on the Palestinians so that they come to accept the fact that they are a defeated people and that Israel will be largely responsible for controlling their future. This strategy... is commonly referred to as the 'Iron Wall.' What has been happening in Gaza is fully consistent with this strategy... Even before Hamas came to power, the Israelis intended to create an open-air prison for the Palestinians in Gaza and inflict great pain on them until they complied with Israel's wishes...

There is little reason to think that the Israelis can beat Hamas into submission and get the Palestinians to live quietly in a handful of Bantustans inside Greater Israel. Israel has been humiliating, torturing, and killing Palestinians in the Occupied Territories since 1967 and has not come close to cowing them. Indeed, Hamas's reaction to Israel's brutality seems to lend credence to Nietzshe's remark that what does not kill you makes you stronger...

But even if the unexpected happens and the Palestinians cave, Israel would still lose because it will become an apartheid state... There is also little chance that people around the world who follow the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will soon forget the appalling punishment that Israel is meting out in Gaza... Moreover, many of us who were once wholly sympathetic to Israel now see that the Israelis are the victimizers and the Palestinians are the victims. What is happening in Gaza will accelerate that changing picture of the conflict and long be seen as a dark stain on Israel's reputation.

US media shows 'a bit of courage'

Israel's Free Ride Ends

Michelle Goldberg, in The Guardian: It's a common, almost clichéd observation that the American media is less critical of Israeli policy than the Israeli media. In mainstream American depictions of the ceaseless misery of the Middle East, Israeli righteousness and Arab violence are routinely emphasised. The reality of Israeli settlements and Palestinian suffering have been, at best, a footnote...

Slowly, though, something is changing. As Israel pulverises Gaza, questions and doubts about Israeli policy are becoming more prominent in the American media. The failure of the war in Iraq and the attendant discrediting of neoconservatism has opened up new space in the American conversation. With the American right dejected and weakened, there's less pressure on the press to display the kind of boorish one-sidedness that self-congratulatory conservatives like to call 'moral clarity.' Israel's disproportionate retaliation in Gaza is increasingly recognised as both brutal and, in all likeihood, ultimately futile. In destroying Gaza, Israel is also destroying the American taboo that has ensured the country such unstintingly favourable media coverage.

No doubt, some of Israel's most aggressive partisans are going to be alarmed by this sudden shift in the American discourse. They're used to dismissing the world's criticism of Israel as the mutterings of antisemites and bien-pensant third-worldists. The US has been a cocoon that protects Israel and its advocates from facing harsh judgments. But Israel has been ill served by America's endless indulgence. What is happening in Gaza endangers, first and foremost, the benighted people who live there and who are dying by the hundreds. It also endangers Israel itself, pushing already elusive prospects for peace ever more out of reach.

An American media that turned a blind eye to Israeli expansionism and human rights abuses ultimately made the Jewish state less, not more, secure. Without the US putting pressure on Israel to dismantle the settlements and loosen the blockade in Gaza, leaders there had neither the incentive nor the political cover to do so. Now that the American press is displaying a bit of courage in facing an unfolding catastrophe abetted by American leadership, perhaps our politicians will have room to do the same.

'This is a war of extermination'

Israel strikes Gaza ahead of unilateral ceasefire vote

AFP: At least 1,205 Palestinians, including 410 children, have been killed since the start of Israel's deadliest-ever assault on the territory on December 27, according to Gaza medics, who said another 5,300 people have been wounded. Those slain in the war also include 108 women, 113 elderly people, 14 paramedics, and four journalists... 

Hamas remained defiant: 'This unilateral ceasefire does not foresee a withdrawal' by the Israeli army... As long as it remains in Gaza, resistance and confrontation will continue.' Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had been trying to broker a bilateral truce between Hamas and Israel, also said troops must leave Gaza immediately.

Israel TV news broadcasts a Gaza father's heartbreak

LA Times: Dr. Iss el-Deen Aboul Aish, who gave frequent interviews to the Israel media, was minutes away from giving another when he called Shlomi Eldar, screaming and weeping with grief... 'O God, oh my God, my daughters have been killed. They've killed my children... Could somebody please come to us?' ... Aboul Aish was a single father. His wife had died of cancer. He made his daughters sleep close to the walls of their home in hopes that would keep them safe if airstrikes or artillery collapsed the ceiling.

'I don't know how this man will stand on his feet again after this tragedy,' Dr. Liat Lerner-Geya, an Israeli who worked with Aboul Aish, told the Hebrew-language news website Ynet. 'He would come to Israel and sleep at friends' houses for three nights. Even though he had all the necessary permits, they always gave him trouble at the crossings. But he believed there should be coexistence and practiced this in his work.' 

After the newscast, Eldar met with reporters. He said the doctor told him that evening 'that since his wife's passing, the girls had been his entire life. He said his eldest daughter wanted to study at Haifa University. Just today another one of his daughters told him that evening that she had gotten her period. "In the middle of war you get your period. You are a woman now."' She and her sisters are dead.

The news spread across Israel's websites; the video of the doctor's broadcast quickly made it to YouTube. 'They were girls, only girls. I want to know why they have killed them. Who gave the order to fire?'

Videos:

Israel TV airs Gaza doctor's pleas after children killed

Gaza doctor's tragedy caught on Israeli TV

The Palestinians say: 'This is a war of extermination'

Ahdaf Soueif, The Guardian: Everyone says something new is going on here; something different... They describe bombs which break into 16 parts, each part splintering into 116 fragments, the white phosphorus which water cannot put out; which seems to die and then flares up again... 

The doctors speak of a disproportionate number of head injuries -- specifically of shrapnel lodged in the brain. They also speak of the extensive burns of white phosphorus. These injuries are, as they put it, 'incompatible with life.' They are receiving large numbers of amputees... Damage done to the bone by explosive bullets is so extensive that the only way the doctors in Gaza can save lives is by amputating.

One of the nurses said to me that the nurses and paramedics were horrified by what they were seeing. 'We deal with cases all the time,' she said. 'But what we're seeing these days we've never seen before or imagined.' ... 'Look!' On a rubble-strewn street lay the body of a roasted and charred child. Two bones were sticking out where her thighs had been. 'The dogs ate her legs.'

Image source here.