Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Hypocrisy, half-truths, and lies

Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask
Robert Fisk, The Independent: And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie -- heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime -- and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians... And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.

Juan Cole, Informed Comment: The Israeli propaganda blitz around their attack on Gaza has been greeted with uncharacteristic skepticism by the American public and even by some of the mainstream US press... Is it because we have been intensively exposed for the past 8 years to precisely this sort of mental manipulation by Bush-Cheney and their stable of Neoconservatives?

Let's take some of the basic techniques of propaganda practiced by Bush and compare them to those deployed by the Israeli leadership... 1) Deny it all. 2) Pretend that your main concern is for your own victims. 3) Demonizing the opponent, ad hominem arguments. 4) Repetition of simple slogans until they become accepted as true. 5) Use of half-truths. Then there are other techniques such as 6) appeal to fear and 7) appeal to prejudice. Apologists for the attack on Gaza depict Gazans as murderous, jihadi, homophobic, sharia-wielding fanatics, in a word, Muslims, and therefore of course their lives don't matter. Sound familiar? 

Of course, the Neoconservatives had borrowed a lot of their techniques from the Jabotinsky/Likud tradition of revisionist Zionism, so what goes around comes around.

Johann Hari, The Independent: The Israeli government did indeed withdraw from the Gaza Strip in 2005 -- in order to be able to intensify control of the West Bank. Ariel Sharon's senior adviser, Dov Weisglass, was unequivocal about this, explaining: 'The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians... This whole package that is called the Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.' ...

Ordinary Palestinians were horrified by this, and by the corruption of their own Fatah leaders, so they voted for Hamas... Hamas offered Israel a long, long ceasefire and a de facto acceptance of two states, if only Israel would return to its legal borders... The Israeli government reacted by punishing the entire civilian population... It is hypocritical for the Israeli government to claim now to speak out for the safety of civilians when it has been terrorizing civilians as a matter of state policy...

According to the Israeli press, Yuval Diskin, the current head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, 'told the Israeli cabinet [on 23 December] that Hamas is interested in continuing the truce.'... Hamas was requesting two things: an end to the blockade, and an Israeli ceasefire on the West Bank. The cabinet -- high with election fever and eager to appear tough -- rejected these terms. The core of the situation has been starkly laid out by Ephraim Halevy, the former head of Mossad... Hamas militants 'are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967... [But] Israel for reasons of its own, did not want to turn the ceasefire into the start of a diplomatic process with Hamas.'...

The Israeli government wants peace, but only one imposed on its own terms, based on the acceptance of defeat by the Palestinians... The Israelis can keep the slabs of the West Bank on 'their' side of the wall, the largest settlements and control of the water supply... It means a divided Palestine, with responsibility for Gaza hived off to Egypt, and the broken-up West Bank standing alone. Negotiations threaten this vision... But an imposed peace will be no peace at all... Israel will have to talk to the people it is blockading and bombing, and compromise with them.
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'I was just trying to protect my children'

Video: More Children Among Gaza Dead

'I keep the children away from the windows because the F-16s are in the air; I forbid them to play below because it's dangerous. They're bombing us from the sea and from the east, they're bombing us from the air. When the telephone works, people tell us about relatives or friends who were killed. My wife cries all the time. At night she hugs the children and cries. It's cold and the windows are open; there's fire and smoke in open areas; at home there's no water, no electricity, no heating gas. And you [the Israelis] say there's no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tell me, are you normal?' The question came from a resident of Gaza speaking by phone to the Israeli journalist Amira Hass.

Fares Akram, The Independent: The phone call came at around 4:20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. My father was walking from the gate to the farmhouse at the time... The house was reduced to little more than powder, and of Dad there was nothing much left either... Most of the cows lay dead; others had run off injured. Mahmoud, a teenage relative, was with my father when the Israeli bomb smashed into the house. The force of the airstrike threw him 300 metres. They found Mahmoud's body in a neighbour's field.

We buried my father and Mahmoud yesterday morning in a very quick funeral, knowing Israeli tanks were just 3km away, on the outskirts of the city. We could hear the rattle of the machine-gun fire accompanying the tanks. The Israelis may say there were militants in the area of our farm, but I'll never believe it... Up at the border, it is just open farmland with nowhere to hide.

My father, Akrem al-Ghoul, was no militant. Born in Gaza and educated in Egypt, he was a lawyer and a judge... My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers, but, just as I am about to become a father, I have lost my father.

The Guardian: Among the terrorised was Mahmoud Jaro. He was sheltering with his wife and four young children at his home in Beit Lahiya, on the eastern side of the Gaza Strip, within sight of the Israeli border, when he heard the first tank engines in the early hours of Sunday. He grabbed his children, the youngest only three, and fled. 'I couldn't see anything. The area was dark. They cut off the electricity. We were moving in the pitch dark. There were shells, rockets everywhere. I was just trying to protect my children. They were very scared and afraid. My youngest son was crying all the time.' Eventually the family made it across Beit Lahiya to his in-laws' house in a relatively safer part of the town. 'I don't know what's going on. I don't know what the Israelis want. This time it's from the air, the sea, the ground at the same time. I've never experienced it like this.'

Rami G. Khouri, Middle East Online: Hamas and Hizbullah did not exist before around 1982. Their birth and strength must be understood largely as a response to Israel's occupation and colonization policies in Palestine and Lebanon... Hamas and Hizbullah are the ideological step-children of the Likud Party and especially Ariel Sharon, whose embrace of violence, racism and colonization as the primary means of dealing with occupied Arab populations ultimately generated a will to resist... The more force and brutality Israel uses against Arabs, the greater is the response in the form of more effective resistance movements that have wider public support.
Image source here.
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New weapons and a shortage of body bags

Reuters: People in Gaza were in dire need of food and medical supplies, aid agencies said on Monday, but Israel's ground assault and air raids were hampering relief efforts. Freezing cold is compounding the misery of children... And body bags for victims are in short supply.

Unconventional weapons used against Gazans
Dr. Mads Gilbert: The findings about the uranium I cannot tell you much about, but I can tell you that we have clear evidence that the Israelis are using a new type of very high explosive weapons which are called Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) and are made out of a tungsten alloy. These weapons have an enormous power to explode... The power of the explosion dissipates very quickly and the strength does not travel long, maybe 10 meters, but those humans who are hit by this explosions, this pressure wave are cut in pieces. This was first used in Lebanon in 1006... On the long term, these weapons will have a cancer effect on those who survive. 'I saw a lot of women and children wheeled in, said Fares Ghanem, another hospital official. 'A lot of the wounded were missing limbs and a lot of the dead were in pieces.'

Reuters: Senior UN official said 350 people had been sheltering in the building. According to the Palestinian Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip, at least 631 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2,700 wounded since Israel began its offensive.

Neve Gordon, in The Nation: My mother, like most Israelis, is a devout news consumer, and last night I decided to keep her company in front of the TV... What did manage to unnerve me in the broadcast was one short sentence made by a reporter who covered the entry of a humanitarian aid convoy into the Gaza Strip on Friday... Explaining to those viewers who might be wondering why Israel allows humanitarian assistance to the other side during times of war, he declared that if a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe were to explode among the Palestinian civilian population, the international community would pressure Israel to stop the assault... Not unlike raising animals for slaughter on a farm, the Israeli government maintains that it is providing Palestinians with assistance so it can have a free hand in attacking them.

Robert Fisk, The Independent: Using the old 'enclosed military area' excuse to prevent coverage of its occupation of Palestinian land has been going on for years... The Israelis are so ruthless that the reasons for the ban on journalism may be easily explained: that so many Israeli soldiers are going to kill so many innocents that images of the slaughter would be too much to tolerate... 

But the result is that Palestinian voices -- as opposed to those of Western reporters -- are now dominating the airwaves. The men and women who are under air and artillery attack by the Israelis are now telling their own story on television and radio and in the papers as they have never been able to tell it before, without the artificial 'balance' which so much television reporting imposes on live reporting...

There is also a darker side. Israel's version of events has been given so much credence by the dying Bush administration that the ban on journalists entering Gaza may simply be of little importance to the Israeli army. By the time we investigate, whatever they are trying to hide will have been overtaken by another crisis.
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Monday, January 5, 2009

'Bombing 1.5 million people in a cage'

Blogger in Gaza, In Gaza

'It's hell in here. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza. It is a very young population. Anybody who tries to portray this as a sort of clean war against another army is lying. This is a poor and very young people. And they are able to escape absolutely nowhere. They cannot flee. They are fenced in. They're in a cage. They're bombing 1.5 million people in a cage.'

10th Day Death Toll

On January 3, as Israeli forces moved into Gaza, 10,000 from all over Israel marched in Tel Aviv. According to Israeli group Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), as the the march began to disperse, 'a large crowd of rightists started to attack them,' and the police 'disappeared from the scene.' It was impossible to hold a public rally. Here is a translation of the speech Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom founder, journalist, and former Knesset member, was prevented from giving at the end of the march.
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Wars against ideas always fail

McClatchy: Medical officials in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip said Monday that Israeli attacks had killed 523 Palestinians, including 111 children. Israel has barred international news media from Gaza since the operation began, and the numbers couldn't be verified... 'Usually you have people trying to flee the area of conflict,' said John Ging, the head of the United Nations refugee agency in the Gaza Strip. 'But they don't have this choice in Gaza because they are trapped in a very, very densely populated area.'

The Globe and Mail: Gaza's biggest hospital, Shifa, was swamped by the bloodshed. Bodies were two to a morgue drawer, the wounded were being treated in hallways because beds were full, and three preschool boys killed in an artillery strike Monday were laid out on a floor. Since Israel mounted its ground offensive three days ago, most of the dead and wounded arriving at Shifa have been civilians, including 16 who dies in various attacks across Gaza on Monday. Ten of them were children... Of the 80 confirmed deaths, at least 70 were civilians.

The Toronto Star: Saudi Arabia said the international community should do more to stop Israeli 'barbarity' in its military offensive. 'To say that Israel barbarity is self-defense is to close one's eyes to the history of Israeli occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories, practices of closure and terror, and the massive imbalance in power between the two sides,' a cabinet statement said.

Sunday 4 January in Istanbul, Paris, Rabat (Morocco), Beirut, Athens Thessaloniki, Oslo, Washington DC, Montreal, Karbala (Iraq), Sydney, and Melbourne.

Paul Woodward, War in Context: Wars against ideas always fail. The only things that bombs and bullets can destroy are human lives and property... Israel's drive to annihilate its enemies is borne out of a seemingly irrepressible arrogance. Yet ultimately nothing gets destroyed -- it merely goes through a process of transformation... Israel presents an existential threat to Hamas -- not the other way around. It's plain for the world to see. The difference between Israel and Hamas is that Hamas does not fear its annihilation... The movement is much more durable than its constituent parts.
Image source here.
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Pictures coming out of Gaza

Israeli Foreign Affairs minister Tzipi Livni admitted Sunday that her government is resisting a diplomatic solution and wants to keep the war going as long as possible, but one impediment is 'the pictures coming out of Gaza.'
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Sunday, January 4, 2009

'The inhumanity of this situation'

'There were shells, rockets everywhere'
The Guardian: Eric Fosse, a Norwegian doctor there, said Hamas fighters were a small minority of the casualties brought in. 'This hospital has been filled up with patients. This morning they [Israeli forces] bombed the fruit market. There were a large number of casualties. We became like a field hospital. There were two patients at a time in the operating rooms and we were operating on other people in the corridors. Some were dying before we could get to them.'

Moawya Hasanian, the head of al-Shifa's emergency and ambulance department, said the hospital had taken in 33 dead and 137 wounded by lunchtime on Sunday. Among those killed was a paramedic after his ambulance was hit by Israeli fire. Three of his colleagues were wounded. 'Only three of the dead are from Hamas, the rest are civilians. There are many children under 18. There are many in critical condition. We are working under pressure. It's not easy to work with bombs and air strikes everywhere. It's not easy for ambulances to move.'

John Ging, the head of the relief agency in Gaza, described the situation there as 'inhuman.' 'We have a catastrophe unfolding in Gaza for the civilian population. The people of Gaza City and the north now have no water. That comes on top of having no electricity. They're trapped, they're traumatised, they're terrorised by this situation. They're in their homes. They're not safe. They're being killed and injured in large numbers, and they have no end in sight. The inhumanity of this situation, the lack of action to bring this to an end, is bewildering to them.'

The UN has been particularly angered at the contention of the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Ging also accused Israel of a campaign of destroying public buildings vital to the administration and governance of Gaza. 'The whole infrastructure of the future state of Palestine is being destroyed,' he said. 'Blowing up the parliament building. That's the parliament of Palestine. That's not a Hamas building. The president's compound is for the president of Palestine. Schools, mosques.'

Lubna Karam, 28, of Gaza City, said airstrikes had shattered her home's living room windows days before, letting cold air pour in. She said she feels under threat at all times, and her family has taken to sleeping in the hallway for safety. 'We keep hearing the sounds of airplanes and we don't know if we'll live until tomorrow or not.' Mansour, 21, of the Rafah refugee camp on the Gaza-Egypt border, described watching his neighbor pile a mattress and blankets on a donkey cart to flee, but hadn't decided if he'd do the same. 'Where can we go? It's all the same.' 'When there was a siege, we kept talking about a catastrophe,' said Hatem Shurrab, 24, of Gaza City. 'But then the airstrikes started, and now we don't even know what word to use. There's no word in the dictionary that can describe the situation we are in.'

Glenn Greenwald, Salon: One should be clear that sociopathic indifference to (or even celebration over) the deaths of Palestinian civilians isn't representative of all supporters of the Israeli attack on Gaza. [But] those who favor the attack... are certainly misguided about the likely outcome... Those who giddily support not just civilian deaths in Gaza but every actual and proposed attack on Arab/Muslim countries -- from the war in Iraq to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to the proposed attacks on Iran and Syria and even continued escalation in Afghanistan -- are able to do so because they don't really see the Muslims they want to kill as being fully human.

On Wednesday, the Israeli supreme court ordered that the international media could not be excluded from Gaza. Today, 4 days later, Israel has not only continued exclusion, but are pushing reporters even further back from the Israel/Gaza border. The reason Israel has done this must be that they will do whatever they must -- including ignoring their own high court -- to limit evidence that Gazans are indeed human beings and that they are suffering the horrors that occur when war is unleashed on densely-packed urban civilians. Israel knows full well that reporting from Gaza turns Gazans from vague abstractions to suffering human beings. And they will not allow that reality to be communicated to the world.
Image source here. 
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Losing the war of public opinion

Juan Cole, Informed Comment: Israel's political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power... If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless... If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace...

The big long-term problem Israel has it that its assiduous colonization of the West Bank has made a two-state solution almost impossible, turning it into an Apartheid state. And if you go on practicing Apartheid long enough, that begins to attract boycotts and sanctions. And forestalling a Palestinian state means that likely the Palestinians will all end up Israeli citizens...

War on them, circumscribe them, colonize them all you like. They aren't going anywhere, and you can't keep them stateless and virtually enslaved forever, occasionally exterminating some of them as though they were vermin when they make too much trouble. That, sooner or later, will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state... For it to lose the war of global public opinion may ultimately be more consequential.

Gideon Levy, Haaretz: Nobody has asked whose blood is being spilled and why. Everything is permitted, legitimate and just. The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind... Here lie their bodies, row upon row, some of them tiny. Our hearts have turned hard and our eyes have become dull. All of Israel has worn military fatigues, uniforms that are opaque and stained with blood and which enable us to carry out any crime... Nobody is coming to the rescue -- of Gaza or even of the remnants of humanity and Israeli democracy... When the time comes for reckoning, we will need to remember the damage this war did to Israel. The blood pipeline it laid has been completed.

Karma Nabulsi, The Guardian: As a way to share time on the phone, while my friend Houda's neighborhood was under aerial assault for more than 40 minutes, she and I discussed at length comparisons between previous Israeli military sieges we had been under. The carefully planned and premeditated strategy of terrorising an entire population by intensive and heavy bombardment of both military and civic institutions -- destroying the entire civic infrastructure of a people 
-- was identical. What is unprecedented here is that in Gaza there is nowhere to evacuate people to safety: they are imprisoned on all sides, with an acute awareness of the impossibility of escape. Land, sea, sky: all will kill you.

David Bromwich, Huffington Post: There is a word for the straightforward killing of enemies by a superior force where the victims are sparsely equipped and the odds one-sided. Much of the world is calling Israel's actions in Gaza a massacre... In the past ten years the US and Israel have shared a fantasy. The fantasy says that the Arabs understand only force. It says we can end terrorism by killing all the terrorists. The neighbors of the terrorists will be overawed. No new terrorists will be created. Finally, when every face on the president's fifty-two card deck is crossed out and the known composition of Hamas is dead, we can 'address the social conditions' that foster terrorism. But perhaps there are no such conditions. Do the terrorists not hate for hate's sake?

Reza Aslan: 'A war to the bitter end.' That is how Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak described his country's latest military campaign in the Gaza strip... But if war is indeed an accurate description of the current conflict, then can we continue referring to Hamas' attacks against Israel as acts of terrorism? If a government declares war against a terrorist group, does it not in effect transform the group's members from terrorists into soldiers? In a battle between a state like Israel and a 'non-state entity' like Hamas, are acts of terror distinguishable from acts of war?

Avrum Burg, interviewed by Tony Karon, in Time: My idea of Judaism can be represented through a classic Talmudic dilemma: You are walking along by the river and there are two people drowning. One is Rabbi [Meir] Kahane, and the other is the Dalai Lama. You can only save one of them. For whom will you jump? If you jump for Rabbi Kahane because genetically he's Jewish, you belong to a different camp than mine, because I would jump for the Dalai Lama. As much as he's not genetically Jewish, he's my Jewish brother when it comes to my value system. That's the difference between me and the Jewish establishment in Israel and America.
Image source here.
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Saturday, January 3, 2009

World demonstrates for Gaza

Photostory: World demonstrates for Gaza

The marchers included comedian Alexei Sale. 'As a Jew, it's very moving to see so many people who are outrages at Israel's actions,' Sayle said. 'Israel is a democratic country that is behaving like a terrorist organization.'

'Regardless what they say in this building (House of Commons), regardless what they say in Washington or the Hague, these are war crimes,' shouted Robert Assaly, an Anglican priest from Montreal who was a speaker at the rally.

The move was almost immediately met with largely unanimous international condemnation, with the United Nations hastily arranging an overnight emergency session and Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon calling for 'an immediate end' to the operation.

The United States also warned Israel in a statement that while it blamed Hamas for the tension, it had grown 'deeply concerned about the humanitarian situation' in Gaza as the tanks rolled in. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack added: 'We have expressed our concerns to the Israeli government that any military action needs to be mindful of the potential consequences to civilians... It is obvious a ceasefire should take place.'

In Europe there was hurried diplomacy. Foreign Secretary David Miliband said: 'Unfolding events show the urgent need for the immediate ceasefire that we have called for.' Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said: 'The Israeli ground offensive in Gaza, while widely anticipated, will be greeted with horror around the world.'
Image source here.
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Gaza Humanitarian Situation Report

For 3 January 2009
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

HTML here.
PDF here.
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Israel moves into Gaza: 'nowhere to run'

Haaretz: Large numbers of forces are taking part in this stage of the operation including infantry, tanks, engineering forces, artillery and intelligence with the support of the Israel Air Force, Israel navy, the Shin Bet security service and other security agencies. Meanwhile, the cabinet has authorized an emergency call up of tens of thousands of IDF reservists. The invasion stepped up airstrikes on Gaza, bombing the main road that runs throughout the strip in three different spots, making travel from one side of the Strip to the other close to impossible. Palestinian health officials in Gaza reported Saturday evening that 13 people had been killed in another IAF bombing of a mosque in Beit Lahiya. They said that 26 Palestinians had died in IAF raids after dark Saturday.

Saturday's incident brought the Palestinian death toll to at least 446, with about 2,050 wounded... The plight of the 1.5 million Palestinians crammed into Gaza was growing more desperate even before the mosque was hit. People sheltered in their homes and humanitarian agencies warned that food, water and medical supplies were running short. 'Nobody feels safe,' and International Committee of the Red Cross worker said in a report on the body's website. 'The problem is that we have nowhere to run for shelter.' Bombs have damaged the water system and utilities were barely functioning. The electric power plant has shut down and the sanitation system cannot treat the sewage. In the winter cold, fuel for heating and cooking gas was no longer available, aid agencies said. 'We do not sleep at night. We stayed awake the whole night because of the planes,' said Umm Kamel, a mother of 11.
Image source here.
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Friday, January 2, 2009

Help us, 'we are addicted to territories'

Israel needs its usual friends to help again -- 
this time for real
Editorial, The Daily Star, Lebanon: From its inception in the late 19th century, Zionism has been reliant on an international network of Jewish individuals and organizations. These have given generously of their money, time and resources to support various facets of the Zionist project: Lobbying the international community to accept the establishment of a Jewish state, arming the Jewish terrorists who made mandate Palestine ungovernable, developing a potent military machine, funding the colonization of occupied land, and shielding Israel from the diplomatic consequences of its actions...

Now Israel needs help again. It needs reasonable people who share the faith of most of Israel's citizens to rescue them -- and their Arab neighbors -- from a degenerate political class that is leading all of us to disaster... It is moderate Jewish Americans who can be the most helpful by taking back control of the so-called 'Israel lobby' from the zealots who have made it the swamp of militaristic racism that it is...

Israel's blitzkrieg against the Gaza Strip is just the latest evidence for the essential fecklessness that infects the country's political class. A week into a campaign that has killed more than 400 people -- dozens of them children or other innocent civilians, and dozens more just young men who signed up to serve as police officers at a time of widespread unemployment -- Israeli leaders are not talking about a political solution.

Was it really necessary to shed so much blood to learn that just as Israel's 2006 goal of 'eliminating' Hizbullah was futile, the same would be true of Hamas now? Was it really necessary to make orphans, widows and grieving parents of so many people to learn that killing Arabs will not make their grievances go away?...

Israel's recent leaders have failed each and every test put before them. More importantly, they have betrayed both their own people and their co-religionists abroad... If heavy pressure is not at last applied for the current generation to be replaced, the Israeli government will continue to be a menace to its neighbors, to US interests in the Middle East, and to the long-term welfare of the Israeli people.

Alex Sinclair, Jewish World: For the past eight years, we have had an American president who was Israel's 'greatest friend' -- a friend who stood by grinning feebly while we sank deeper and deeper into a mess.

Israel is like an alcoholic, except we are addicted to territories. Just as an alcoholic denies that he has an addiction, we too deny ours by talking about 'painful compromises' without making any, or by waiting until we have already resigned from politics before daring to tell truth, or by moaning about religious extremists while voting for factions which in turn give these fundamentalists our money.

Meanwhile, our supposed best friend has stood by, watching us, supporting us, even taking care of us... while never actually plucking up the courage -- the friendship -- to put a hand on our shoulder and say: 'You need to stop.' ... We need a new type of friend -- a true friend, one that will lead an intervention for us...

We are so addicted to the territories that we will never leave them of our own accord. Our political system can't create the will for us to do that, and centrist Israelis' fear of tearing the social fabric of the country prevents us from forcing the religious right to do what we all know they need to do...

Our friend, President Obama, needs to make the intervention for us, with the support by our family, the American Jewish community... We are increasingly faced with a choice: Escape the addiction or let the addiction kill us.
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'An experiment by other means'

Uri Avnery: Molten Lead
The logical conclusion for an Israeli government seeking peace would have been to make wide-ranging concessions: ending of the occupation, signing of a peace treaty, foundation of the State of Palestine, withdrawal to the 1967 borders, a reasonable solution of the refugee problem, release of all Palestinian prisoners. That would have arrested the role of Hamas for sure...

The official name of the war is 'Cast Lead,' two words from a children's song about a Hanukkah toy. It would be more accurate to call it "the Election War"...

The timing was chosen meticulously from another angle too. The attack started two days after Christmas, when American and European leaders are on holiday until after the New Year... That ensured several days free from outside pressures. Another reason: these are George Bush's last days in the White House. This blood-soaked moron could be expected to support the war enthusiastically, as indeed he did. Barack Obama has not yet entered office and had a ready made pretext for keeping silent: "there is only one President." The silence does not bode well for the term of president Obama...

Some time ago I wrote that the Gaza blockade was a scientific experiment designed to find out how much one can starve a population and turn its life into hell before they break. This experiment was conducted with generous help of Europe and the US... The present war is a continuation of the experiment by other means.

Israel's war in Gaza is an act of political insanity. It is the product of a deeply disturbed society, able neither to curb its military arrogance nor calm its profound paranoia... Israel wants dominance, not peaceful coexistence...

Israel has never liked Palestinian moderates, for the simple reason that concessions might have to be made to them. To avoid being drawn into negotiations, it has always preferred Palestinian radicals -- and when they were not there it has done everything it could to create them... It may be that the war was launched precisely because Hamas has recently shown signs of moderation. Its key spokesmen have expressed their readiness to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders...

Israel never liked the truce with Hamas and chose not to respect its terms. Instead of easing the blockade on Gaza -- as it was meant to do -- it tightened it, reducing the crowded, suffering strip to abject misery. And it unilaterally broke the truce by an armed incursion on 4 November...

One-sided, Israel-only deterrence lied at the heart of Israel's security doctrine. It wants total freedom to hit, and never to be hit back. It relies on brute force to protect itself... It is totally opposed to a regional balance of power which might force it to moderate its actions...

All Israel's political leaders gave their approval to the war... All are drunk with military power. All cheered the mounting Palestinian casualties. None seems able to come to terms with what a real peace might entail. Perhaps none of them can truly believe that Israel's crimes can ever be forgiven or forgotten, and that they have no option, therefore, but to go on killing.
Image: source unknown
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Thursday, January 1, 2009

2009















Image: 'Wonder,' Khaled Abdullah/Reuters

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