The conceit of every autocratic leader is that power fits comfortably upon his shoulders. Even if he has not been chosen directly by his people, his right to rule reflects a natural order.
The World Economic Forum at Davos, with all its trappings of civility and reflective sophistication, embodies the same conceit. This is the forum of world governance that repeatedly unwittingly exposes the chasm dividing the world from its leaders.
Yesterday’s session, “Gaza: the case for Middle East peace,” was a pivotal moment in political discourse between the West and the rest of the world. The self-righteous hubris of an enraged Israeli president collided with the outrage of those who refused to ignore his bloodied hands.
To fully understand what happened, watch the one-hour eight-minute discussion. (For readers who want to fast forward to the part where Shimon Peres starts venting his rage, drag the play marker across to 45 minutes 50 seconds.)
Right now, the press has much less interest in exposing Peres’ lies than it has in the headline-grabbing moment — the point at which Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan left the stage in reaction to the insulting behavior of the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius.
The real story — the story that an obsequious press corps has chosen to under-report — was a tirade from Shimon Peres that should rank on a par with Nikita Kruschev’s outburst at the United Nations in 1960 when he pounded his shoe in protest.
Never has the word “peace” been spewed out with such venom as when Peres thundered, “Our aim is peace, not war.”
Yet in response, the bias of opinion inside the hall was quickly exposed. Even though fellow panels members were visibly shocked by the Israeli’s unfettered anger, once Peres had finished his verbal assault on anyone who might dispute Israel’s version of reality, he instantly received a warm round of applause.
Up to that moment, it seems possible that Erdogan might have been willing to allow a potentially impartial audience to form its own judgment, but since Peres’s outburst had not only repeatedly been directed with utter contempt at Turkey’s prime minister but apparently received broad approval among the Davos elite, he felt compelled to respond.
David Igantius reluctantly acquiesced, giving him one minute — but Erdogan exceeded his time. The moderator with taps on the prime minister’s shoulder insisted that, “with apologies, we really do need to get people to dinner.”
Turkey is currently in a position to play a vital, perhaps indispensable role in Middle East peace mediation but a columnist for the Washington Post takes it upon himself to cut short the prime minister’s remarks because the illustrious Davos crowd will be late for dinner!
Had Peres not been given the central seat and had he been sitting right next to Ignatius and had he exceeded his time, would the hack from Washington have had the audacity to try and shut up Israel’s president? It’s hardly likely. Ignatius would have shown due respect to a man whose authority he would never dream of questioning.
Beyond the passion of the moment, the incident exposes the hypocrisy that is embedded in the West’s view of the rest of the world.
If Hugo Chavez, or Muammar al-Gaddafi, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or any other non-Western leader had spoken with the vulgarity, deceitfulness and rage that Shimon Peres displayed, the universal response would have been that this was unbecoming and unacceptable behavior for a political leader on a world stage.
The conceit of Western civilization (within which Israel sees itself embedded and by which Israel is treated as a full participant) is that it has nothing to learn from the dignity of others.
As the self-appointed custodians of civilization we fail to see the degree to which dignity is something we often lack, while so many of those we look down upon regard respectful, dignified behavior as a fundamental mark of humanity. Commensurate with the loss of our dignity has been the rise of our arrogance.
If Israel wants to understand why it is currently viewed with contempt by so much of the world, it should not only consider the misery it has inflicted on millions of Palestinians; it should also consider why it takes pride in having as its preeminent emissary a man who acts like a thug.
If you did not see it already, watch Bob Simon’s report (below), “Is Peace Out Of Reach?” from last night’s edition of 60 Minutes. In the history of American reporting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this is an exceptional piece of journalism. But don’t just watch it — share it by email, embed it on your web site and do whatever else you can to enlighten other Americans who at this time understand so little about the core issues behind the conflict. (The following video is preceded by a 30-second commercial.)
As President Obama’s Middle East Envoy for Peace, George Mitchell, makes his way to the region this week, he should keep in mind a statement that Osama Hamdan, Hamas’s representative in Lebanon, made in a speech in Beirut yesterday. Hamdan said, “the peace process is irreversibly over.”
This bears repeating:
…the peace process is irreversibly over.
There are commentators who will say that this statement is an expression of intransigence and belligerence coming from a resistance movement dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
Far from it — it is merely a statement of fact. Indeed, it is an assessment of an objective reality that is remarkably lacking in venom.
Just suppose that we were at a juncture where 1,300 Israelis had just been brutally killed, 5,000 were wounded, many in a grave condition, 20,000 houses had been destroyed and tens of thousands were now homeless.
Suppose in such a situation Israel’s leaders were to declare that the peace process was irreversibly over, we would now be commenting on their remarkable composure. We would marvel that they would bother making a political statement and not simply a blood-curdling cry of vengeance.
Hamas on the other hand, in spite of the devastation of Gaza, is still committed to politics.
The political imperative of the moment is one of clarification. Hamas sees that Palestinian unity and a Palestinian national movement cannot be built on an illusory foundation.
Meanwhile, Tzipi Livni claims that the carnage in Gaza has advanced the peace process. This is an Orwellian, obscene, and outrageous insult to common sense. It displays a sociopathic view of human suffering.
But it also serves as a reminder and confirmation that Osama Hamdan is right: the peace process is irreversibly over.
If this is a conclusion which can commonly be agreed upon, where do we go from here? Is this not a conclusion that will feed utter despair or a justification for endless conflict?
I believe not.
Political change can only gain traction when it is rooted in objective reality. We can only advance from the conditions we actually inhabit.
For several years now the peace process has floundered because of a glaring contradiction between Israel’s stated aim — a two-state solution — and its actions, which consistently advanced in the opposite direction.
By its own choice, Israel has abandoned the goal of a two-state solution. The so-called peace process has provided the water and the sustenance that has allowed the occupation to flourish.
America has been the enabler. It has provided a stage upon which a pantomime of peace could be performed. It has quite effectively silenced those who would disrupt the performance and insisted that we all silently enjoy a show whose tedious enactment perpetually held out the promise of a happy ending.
“When Israel supports a solution of two states for two people, the pressure won’t be on Israel,” Tzipi Livni correctly observed over the weekend.
George Mitchell’s duty, the duty of the international community and of all Palestinian leaders, is to say: the game is up, the show is over. The charade has gone on for long enough. Israel has stated its position on the ground. It’s words have proved to be of no consequence.
Given the realities and ignoring the empty declarations, where does Israel want to go from here?
Democracy: a one-state solution in which Jews and Palestinians have equal rights;
Ethnic cleansing: a state that solidifies its Jewish identity by purging itself of every non-Jewish element; or
Apartheid: the explicit formalization of what is already a practical reality.
These, as Bob Simons correctly observers, are Israel’s choices. America can no longer serve as Israel’s shield in its efforts to conceal a painful reality.
I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine.
I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me.
I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as was Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for Israel in the 1948 war of independence.
My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.
On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians—the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that
“500 of them were militants.”
That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.
The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.
Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.
The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said:
“You make peace by talking to your enemies.”
However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the West Bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.
It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.
Sir Gerald Kaufman has been a Member of Parliament since 1970 and when the Labour Party was in the oppostion served as Shadow Environment Secretary, (1980-1983), Shadow Home Secretary (1983-1987) and Shadow Foreign Secretary (1987-1992). Since 1992 he has been one of the Labour Party’s most influential back-benchers.
“We had no choice,” has become Israel’s national mantra.
But to say “we had no choice,” is to say our actions are not the fruit of our intentions. We are now the instrument of the will of others. Hamas made us do this.
There would be more moral clarity in simply declaring that Israel is a mighty power that has no compunction about the effects of its ruthless efforts to crush its enemies.
Instead, Israel wants to have it both ways: to demonstrate its might even while portraying itself as a helpless victim.
From Avi Shlaim we learn that this moral two-step actually has a name in Hebrew: bokhim ve-yorim. It means “crying and shooting.”
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted – a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, “crying and shooting”.
In one of the latest examples of Israel’s abnigation of responsibility for its own actions, we learn that several children have spent the last few days starving as they huddle next to the bodies of their dead mothers. The Washington Post reports:
The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children — emaciated but alive — in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.
Red Cross officials said rescue crews had received specific reports of casualties in the houses and had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances to the area, located in Zaytoun, a neighborhood south of Gaza City. They said the Israeli military did not grant permission until Wednesday afternoon.
In an unusual public statement issued by its Geneva headquarters, the Red Cross called the episode “unacceptable” and said the Israeli military had “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.”
When rescue workers from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent arrived at the site, they found 12 corpses lying on mattresses in one home, along with four young children lying next to their dead mothers, the Red Cross said. The children were too weak to stand and were rushed to a hospital, the agency said.
This is what happens when a military force, its commanders, its government and the population cheering on this war believes that it has “no choice.”
This is the twilight zone of moral paralysis in which evil takes on the disguise of “necessity.”
The only way to make sense of Israel’s senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza’s prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion’s share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace. [continued…]
Once more, kind hosts among the Palestinian community in Amman provided food and hotel accommodation for us, as well as a full programme of rallies and press conferences. Many of our hosts invited volunteers to their houses, where they enjoyed home-cooked food and convivial company.
By now, the convoy had become a major news story (in some cases the lead story) across the Middle East. The Turkish president even appeared on Syrian TV asking Egypt to facilitate its smooth passage.
Sadly, however, this appeal seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Despite Viva Palestina’s organisers spending months trying to coordinate and cooperate with the Egyptian authorities regarding the convoy’s passage from the Red Sea to Rafah (only half a day’s drive), at the last minute, the Egyptian consulate in Aqaba announced that all aid for Gaza must either be handed over to UNWRA, travel through Israel, or be approved by Israel (!) before coming to Rafah, and that therefore we would not be allowed to land at Nuweiba.
In a meeting with the convoy volunteers on Christmas morning, George Galloway pointed out that if we thought UNWRA was up to the job, we could have simply written them a cheque months ago! He also reiterated that we had no intention of asking Israel for its permission to deliver aid to a sovereign people via a third, also sovereign, country. He begged the Egypian authorities to change their minds, emphasising that on Sunday 27 December, the anniversary of the bombardment of Gaza, the world’s attention should be on Israel and its war crimes, not on Egypt, a fellow Arab nation. [continued…]
Maybe it seems beside the point, even on the eve of Christmas, to ask ourselves what would Jesus do in the Holy Land today. The narrow confines of Gaza, Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria are places where God’s love was long ago supplanted by war for land and ill will among men. It has been a year now since the bloody and fruitless Israeli effort to crush Hamas in what amounts to a massive prison for a million people. Peacemakers in the Middle East are rarely blessed, and often reviled; just ask special envoy George Mitchell. And the truth rarely sets anyone free, as proved most recently by the fact-filled United Nations report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone, which was dissed by Washington and dismissed by Israel.
But given that it’s Barack Obama who’s president of the United States, the Jesus question has a relevance today it wouldn’t have had even a year ago. No, Obama is not the messiah. I’m not saying that. But Obama actually uses the word love in a way that Jesus would have understood. So while the question of what Christ might do in today’s Holy Land is hypothetical, the question of what Obama will do is not. And some of his most cherished ideas about peace, love, and understanding could be put to the test Dec. 31 when activists are hoping to stage a massive Gaza Freedom March. [continued…]
We, representing 1,362 individuals from 43 countries arriving in Cairo to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, are pleading to the Egyptians and your reputation for hospitality.
We are peacemakers. We have not come to Egypt to create trouble or cause conflict. On the contrary. We have come because we believe that all people — including the Palestinians of Gaza — should have access to the resources they need to live in dignity. We have gathered in Egypt because we believed that you would welcome and support our noble goal and help us reach Gaza through your land.
As individuals who believe in justice and human rights, we have spent our hard-earned, and sometimes scarce, resources to buy plane tickets, book hotel rooms and secure transportation only to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza living under a crushing Israeli blockade.
We are doctors, lawyers, students, academics, poets and musicians. We are young and old. We are Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists and secular. We represent civil society groups in many countries who coordinated this large project with the civil society in Gaza. [continued…]
As the days of December 2009 draw in, two events which each have a role to play in world peace draw closer. The first is on the 27th and is commemorating the start of the 22 day attacks on Gaza, an operation which targeted unarmed civilians, schools, hospitals, journalists and emergency staff. The second, The Gaza Freedom March will take place on the 31st. The Gaza Freedom March is a historic moment, the magnitude of which has not been seen in Palestine since 1967. Chiseled on the lessons learnt from South Africa’ struggle for liberation against apartheid and from Gandhi’ Satyagraha approach during the campaign for India’ independence, the Gaza Freedom March is walking in the same shoes.
In order to find out more about the Gaza Freedom March I met up with Dr. Haidar Eid, a member of the Steering Committee for the March in Gaza. [continued…]
Only 2 days to go before our attempt at trending #GAZA on twitter to raise global awareness on commemorating one year since the massive Israeli assault and siege. You can read the initial post here. Here are some updates and instructions I thought would be useful for all of us involved in the campaign:
How does a topic trend on twitter and why is that important?
At every given time, twitter lists a number of “trending,” i.e. popular topics being discussed frequently by a large number of people. These topics get a lot of needed attention – especially if we know they are otherwise going to be ignored by mainstream mass media. With all the odds against the Gaza Freedom March and Viva Palestina, we need to make sure that we are reporting the news of what’s happening with their campaigns, as well as reminding the world of the one-year commemoration. Topics trend on twitter when a large number of people mention it frequently over a substantial period of time. It also depends on the percentage of tweets, the hour, how active the twit-o-sphere is, etc. Based on a little research I did today, here’s how we can get it done: [continued…]
Joe Sacco’s gripping, important book about two long-forgotten mass killings of Palestinians in Gaza stands out as one of the few contemporary works on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle likely to outlive the era in which they were written.
Sacco will find readers for “Footnotes in Gaza” far into the future because of the unique format and style of his comic-book narrative. He stands alone as a reporter-cartoonist because his ability to tell a story through his art is combined with investigative reporting of the highest quality.
His subject in this case is two massacres that happened more than half a century ago, stirred up little international attention and were forgotten outside the immediate circle of the victims. The killings took place during the Suez crisis of 1956, when the Israeli Army swept into the Gaza Strip, the great majority of whose inhabitants were Palestinian refugees. According to figures from the United Nations, 275 Palestinians were killed in the town of Khan Younis at the southern end of the strip on Nov. 3, and 111 died in Rafah, a few miles away on the Egyptian border, during a Nov. 12 operation by Israeli troops. Israel insisted that the Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces were still facing armed resistance. The Palestinians said all resistance had ceased by then. [continued…]
(UPDATE: Since the graphs appearing below have been removed from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) website, some readers might have doubts about there authenticity. However, Jeffrey Goldberg who blogs at the Atlantic, has kindly alerted me to the source that the MFA continues to cite for its statistics on rocket fire from Gaza in 2008. The graphs I reproduced can be found in that document.
Goldberg writes: “Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs cites this report [PDF] that claims that 362 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel from Gaza into Israel during what the report calls the ‘lull’ in the fighting. I think it’s fair to say that, though the numbers of rocket and mortar attacks dropped off dramatically during the ceasefire, there were, indeed, attacks.”
What Goldberg fails to point out is that of these 362 rockets and mortars fired, 324 were launched after Israel broke the ceasefire on November 4, 2008. During the period in which the ceasefire was being maintained by both Hamas and Israel from June 18 until November 4, there were a total of 38 fired. This averages 8.5 rocket and mortar attacks per month. As far as I am aware, none of these were conducted by Hamas and the level of attacks can be seen as a measure of the effectiveness (not absolute) with which Hamas was able to reign in other militant groups such as Islamic Jihad.)
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For four months, from Summer into Fall, the truce between Israel and Hamas was a stunning success. Indeed, if Israel doubted Hamas’ ability or willingness to engage in a truce, the Jewish state would have had no reason to request that the truce be extended as its expiration approached and passed in late December.
But now is a time of war and not only is talk of a truce being ruled out by the authors of this war but history is being re-written in order to degrade the value of a ceasefire. The memory of a period of recent calm that was the most durable peace that the residents of southern Israel have experienced in recent years must now be erased.
The Israeli government’s own graphical representation of the calm told the story in terms that even a child could understand. This is the graph that the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs displayed on its web site demonstrating that from July to October, rocket fire, if not reduced to a perfect zero, came stunningly close. From an average of 179 rockets per month in the preceding period of 2008, the number fell to just three per month:
Now that the Israeli propaganda machine is revved up to full throttle, the image of an effective truce no longer suits the Israeli government’s purposes. Instead it has become more convenient to try and hide the numbers — with numbers! The foreign ministry has thus removed the simple graph shown above and replaced it with this:
In the earlier image, graph blocks dramatically portrayed the rise and fall in rocket fire rates. In the revised image, blocks of equal size (containing numbers) are used to obscure the graph. The effect, clearly intended, is to try and portray the lull as really nothing more than a minor undulation in a period of unremitting attacks.
The message Israel now wants to sell is that the truce never really worked. Instead of acknowledging that the truce effectively collapsed when Israel launched Operation “Double Challenge” on November 5, the rocket fire that followed that Israeli raid is being used to obscure the fact that rocket fire had effectively been curtailed up to that point.*
On the IDF Spokesman web site, a post on rocket statistics simply omits the part of the record that Israel now finds inconvenient to acknowledge:
Between Hamas’ takeover and the start of the Tahadiya (State of Calm), (June 14, 2007 – June 16, 2008), there was an average of over 361 attacks per month—an increase of an additional 350%.
On Nov. 4 – 5, Israel launched Operation “Double Challenge”, targeting a tunnel Hamas was building as part of a plan to kidnap Israeli soldiers.
From the end of Operation “Double Challenge” until the end of the Tahadiya, (Nov. 4 – Dec. 19, 2008) a period of only a month and a half, there were 170 mortars, 255 Qassams, and 5 Grads fired upon Israel’s civilian population centers.
Since the end of the Tahadiya (Dec. 19, 2009) until the beginning of Operation “Cast Lead,” (Dec. 27, 2008) a period of little more than a week, there were approximately 300 mortars and rockets fired onto Israel.
Since the begining of Operation “Cast Lead”, there have been an additional 500 launches, 284 of which have been verified as rockets (both Qassams and Grads), and 113 as mortars.
Was four months of calm really worthless? Given that it became the precursor to war, the answer now apparently is yes.
But it didn’t have to turn out this way. The effectiveness with which Hamas enforced a truce should have provided the impetus for Israel to lift its economic siege of Gaza.
Instead, we are once again witness to Israel’s seemingly insatiable appetite for war, even while it never tires of professing its love of peace.
* Should anyone doubt that the Israeli raid (official declarations about Israel’s commitment to the truce notwithstanding) constituted a unilateral breach of the truce, consider what Israel and the world’s response would have been in the event that the raid had been launched from Gaza. Hamas gunmen conducted a raid inside Israeli territory, killing six Israeli soldiers.
That wouldn’t have been described as a breakdown in the truce; it would have been regarded as an act of war.
“After the Second Lebanon War, we learned some very valuable lessons. We learned that we had been living in an imaginary world and that the most dangerous type of war is the one that you call peace. We learned that we are not in fact in a ‘peace process’ at all. We are at war.
“Today the question is still asked, ‘But how do we WIN?’ And that is another question coming directly from a Western mindset. There is no such thing as winning in this new kind of war. The war is ongoing, with periods of more violence and periods of less violence, during which the enemy regroups and plans his next attack. When we feel the enemy is getting strong, we must be prepared to make preemptive strikes, hard and fast at key targets, with viciousness, as the enemy would do to us. Only then can we acquire, not peace, but sustained periods of relative calm.” — Ariel Siegelman
The Gaza experience was very different from the Lebanon War and even those of us who were there are trying to fully understand why. Lebanon was a wake-up call for Israelis and was the result of many years of foolish thinking. Since the so-called “Middle East Peace Process” began in the early 1990s with the Oslo Accords, many Palestinian children were raised on ideals of jihad (holy war) and hatred of Israel and the West, while Israeli children were generally taught that “peace is on the horizon”. A euphoric and asinine attitude persisted on the Israeli street throughout the 1990s, leading to the problems that we experienced in Lebanon. The Israeli political echelons and the upper ranks of the army had not established any real plans for entering Lebanon because they wanted to believe that, just like Jordan and Egypt, we had another border about which we could begin to relax. The Israeli public wanted to believe that we really were getting closer to peace. Not only was the army unprepared on a tactical level, but, since the threat was largely marginalized, the equipment that was available to reservists during the Second Lebanon War was far from adequate. Furthermore, the reservists themselves were generally psychologically and physically unprepared for war. They had lived for at least six years—since Israel pulled out of southern Lebanon in 2000—in a bubble of “peace”. In 2004, the army had claimed that we would never go back to Lebanon.
A New Kind of War
After the Second Lebanon War, we learned some very valuable lessons. We learned that we had been living in an imaginary world and that the most dangerous type of war is the one that you call peace. We learned that we are not in fact in a “peace process” at all. We are at war. On their own accord, many reservists began formidable fitness programs. The army invested in state-of-the-art equipment for us. We began planning for possible wars and attacks that might occur at any or all of our borders. And the whole army became much more serious about training again. The debacle of Lebanon set the stage for the success of Gaza. If there is one thing that Israelis are good at, it is taking lessons from their losses and being creative on the battlefield.
The Israel Defense Force (IDF) developed a different mentality toward Gaza. Lebanon, before the war, was very quiet and even boring, giving the perception that it was not a threat. Gaza, on the other hand, was always considered a hot zone. Certainly since Lebanon, we were told that “it [was] not a matter of IF, it [was] a matter of WHEN.” As Special Forces operators we were often crossing into the Strip and we knew the enemy. Now, after the Gaza war, the world has developed a perception that Hamas is not nearly on the level of Hezbollah. That in itself shows how successful we were—and lucky. Hamas is NOT a ragtag group of thugs. They are a vicious, well-trained, well-supplied, motivated, and creative fighting force. They are an unconventional army, no less capable than Hezbollah. The difference between Lebanon and Gaza is simply how Israel adapted to the enemy. Lebanon reminded each individual soldier that he has to be a warrior. It reminded the army that good intelligence and well thought out plans with realistic goals are key elements to the solution. It reminded the home front that we are still in a “war process” and it reminded the government that ego has no place in war and that politicians who are incompetent at military actions should step aside and allow those who know to take charge.
A new kind of enemy has become formidable over the last ten years. Western armies can look to Lebanon and Gaza to gain lessons for operating against this enemy. Even now, the Western concept of warfare is quite conventional, prompting us to think that if we can capture territory, and certainly if we can neutralize the enemy’s leadership, we will win. And we are confused when, no matter how well we do on the battlefield, the enemy continues and even increases its attacks. What we have not yet come to grips with is that the enemy is not playing by our rules. The new war is unconventional and is motivated by ideology. The enemy cannot hope to match Western technology, so he operates in a way to make the technology relatively meaningless. He simply refuses to meet the conventional army on the battlefield. The Western army invades enemy lands with almost no resistance, even captures the enemy’s leadership, developing the erroneous conception that victory has been achieved. Only then do the conventional soldiers begin being blown up by an enemy that cannot be identified or differentiated from the civilian population. The conventional soldier has no idea of how to operate in this environment because he is looking for a uniformed foe. A nine year-old child with a bomb does not fit the Western model of “combatant” and takes soldiers by surprise. The conquest of territory by a Western army only brings new targets closer to the terrorist so that he does not need to travel as far to blow up Western targets. It does not serve to bring the enemy to his knees. Likewise, Middle Eastern societies are tribal in nature and are fiercely proud of their ideology. They will not play chess with a conventional army, accepting defeat simply because their king is captured or their territory is occupied.
Lebanon: What NOT to do
Lebanon is a perfect example of the wrong way to confront the problems that the West faces in this new kind of war. The challenges that US forces face in Iraq are comparable. Let’s forget about the lack of Israeli leadership in 2006 and simply analyze the strategy. Israeli soldiers understood that the goals upon entering Lebanon were to destroy Hezbollah and end rocket attacks from the northern border. These goals were difficult to achieve and set Israel up for failure. Hezbollah, like any terrorist movement, is an ideology, and unless you are willing to kill everyone, an ideology cannot be toppled through military conquest. There only had to be one vigilant team left alive who held to its creed for Israel to fail in achieving its goals. Likewise, the moment that one rocket hit Israel from Lebanon after it withdrew to its own borders, Hezbollah would be victorious. Israel fell into the age-old trap that has caused much larger and seemingly stronger armies to be defeated by their unconventional foes: a poor evaluation of the enemy. It made no difference how much destruction Lebanon incurred or how many men Hezbollah lost. Perception is the deciding factor in this new kind of war. Hezbollah came out of the war appearing strong and, therefore, gained the respect of the world. Once the Israeli army entered from the south, the only real strategy for achieving its elusive goals was to reach the Litani River with ground forces, sweeping through Lebanese villages and towns. The Western military model had the Israelis convinced that by moving from one line on the map to another, all of the territory in between would be “conquered”. In the unconventional model, every moment that the army was moving forward, they provided ample targets to Hezbollah, who were attacking while retreating. They did not have to hold territory and they did not need to kill or injure huge numbers of Israeli soldiers. They only had to instill fear in the conventional force, a sense of hopelessness in the Israeli home front, and frustration in the military ranks. There are no front lines or rear lines in the new kind of war; the enemy will hit you from behind just as quickly (if not more quickly) as he will hit you from the front, and if you understand how the enemy operates, you can combat his ability to achieve his objectives.
Gaza: The Learning Curve
The lessons of Lebanon were immediately put into practice in preparing for the next conflict. The Special Forces (SF) were always very adept at urban warfare tactics, and during missions in the West Bank we operated ferociously, pulling missions almost every night. This combat experience produced a very high level of operational knowledge which trickled down through army doctrine for how to deal with our enemies. The regular army, and certainly the reserves, were lacking in their fighting skills in general until after Lebanon. In 2006, army leadership put new policies into action. The army supplied new gear to almost all combat units. Reservists had never seen such good equipment and their duty stopped being a vacation and became intensified training. The construction of an urban warfare training facility was completed in the desert, at about the same time that the Second Lebanon War was being fought. This facility is, perhaps, the most advanced urban warfare training facility in the world. It is built like the other facilities that we use, just much bigger. It resembles a real Arab city with Middle Eastern architecture, complete with mosques, schools, hospitals, large multi-story buildings, streets, squares, alleys, and vehicles. This offered the first opportunity for large scale training that allowed us to practice the concert of war, with SF, regular infantry, tanks, and artillery all operating together as a symphony. There is a strict training rotation that has all combat units drilling open-field combat techniques and urban warfare every few months. For almost three years, there were no illusions; we knew that we were training for Gaza. Unlike Lebanon, we knew that when we entered Gaza, the military goals and the execution of the missions in order to reach those goals would be methodical and well-prepared.
The IDF entered Gaza with realistic goals—significantly reduce Hamas’ ability to inflict damage on Israel and Israeli targets. We were told specifically that our goal was NOT to topple Hamas and was NOT to destroy all of its capabilities. Those goals would have been too difficult to achieve and would have set us up for defeat and a blow to the morale of the army and the nation. Likewise, the tactics would be unconventional. We were not to think in terms of conquest and holding territory. Concepts of front and rear lines had no place in this war. We were to frustrate and attack at the morale of the enemy, fighting much like he would fight us. The only rule was, don’t fight by the rules. The IDF went in, simply to wreak havoc on Hamas without getting into any situations that could afford our enemies the opportunity to achieve anything that would resemble a victory. We were to keep them at arm’s length, not attempt to engage them in combat, and use anything within our means to destroy them. And when Israel decided the desired perception had been reached (because perception is everything in these kinds of conflicts), we pulled out. Unlike Hezbollah, Hamas came out of this conflict without the world taking them very seriously. Even though Hamas was still shooting missiles into Israel, in a desperate attempt to save face, its capabilities had been seriously reduced and Israel had achieved its goals.
A New Kind of Success
It is not good training, technology, or strategy that makes bullets miss their targets or causes your eye to notice a trip-wire. For those experiences, I have to thank the Big Guy upstairs. He and I became very close during those cold nights. With all of our training and preparation, we were still afraid to go into Gaza. We knew the enemy and we had lost men even in the last year to their ambushes. When we were entering the Strip, we were fully prepared for high casualties. In Gaza they were waiting for us; they were looking for a fight. There were snipers, teams that were waiting to ambush us with anti-tank rockets, Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), booby traps, and mortars falling around us.
The successes that we saw in Gaza resulted from a combination of an appropriate response to the new kind of enemy, a healthy Israeli attitude that fiercely guarded its men and its right to stop intolerable attacks against its people, and protection from the Almighty, which some people call “luck”. I saw an attitude that I have been waiting to see for a long time from a nation that has too often apologized for every move that it makes. Today the question is still asked, “But how do we WIN?” And that is another question coming directly from a Western mindset. There is no such thing as winning in this new kind of war. The war is ongoing, with periods of more violence and periods of less violence, during which the enemy regroups and plans his next attack. When we feel the enemy is getting strong, we must be prepared to make preemptive strikes, hard and fast at key targets, with viciousness, as the enemy would do to us. Only then can we acquire, not peace, but sustained periods of relative calm.
Ariel Siegelman is Vice President of Security Training for The Draco Group, a service provider in advanced security and training. He served in the Israel Defense Force, Special Forces, as a counter terror operative, counter terror sniper and counter terror instructor, and remains active in these capacities in the Reserves. He can be reached at ariel@thedracogroup.com
This article originally appeared on The Colloquium, a US Army Combined Arms Center blog, March, 2009.
“Why,” I have often been asked, “haven’t the Palestinians established a peace movement like the Israeli Peace Now?”
The question itself is problematic, being based on many erroneous assumptions, such as the notion that there is symmetry between the two sides and that Peace Now has been a politically effective movement. Most important, though, is the false supposition that Palestinians have indeed failed to create a pro-peace popular movement.
In September 1967 – three months after the decisive war in which the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem were occupied – Palestinian leaders decided to launch a campaign against the introduction of new Israeli textbooks in Palestinian schools. They did not initiate terrorist attacks, as the prevailing narratives about Palestinian opposition would have one believe, but rather the Palestinian dissidents adopted Mahatma Gandhi-style methods and declared a general school strike: teachers did not show up for work, children took to the streets to protest against the occupation and many shopkeepers closed shop.
Israel’s response to that first strike was immediate and severe: it issued military orders categorising all forms of resistance as insurgency – including protests and political meetings, raising flags or other national symbols, publishing or distributing articles or pictures with political connotations, and even singing or listening to nationalist songs. [continued…]
There is an internal document that has not been leaked, or perhaps has not even been written, but all the forces are acting according to its inspiration: the Shin Bet, Israel Defense Forces, Border Police, police, and civil and military judges. They have found the true enemy who refuses to whither away: The popular struggle against the occupation.
Over the past few months, the efforts to suppress the struggle have increased. The target: Palestinians and Jewish Israelis unwilling to give up their right to resist reign of demographic separation and Jewish supremacy. The means: Dispersing demonstrations with live ammunition, late-night army raids and mass arrests. Since the beginning of the year, 29 Palestinians have been wounded by IDF snipers while demonstrating against the separation fence. The snipers fired expanding bullets, despite an explicit 2001 order from the Military Adjutant General not to use such ammunition to break up demonstrations. After soldiers killed A’kel Srour in June, the shooting stopped, but then resumed in November.
Since June, dozens of demonstrators have been arrested in a series of nighttime military raids. Most are from Na’alin and Bil’in, whose land has been stolen by the fence, and some are from the Nablus area, which is stricken by settlers’ abuse. Military judges have handed down short prison terms for incitement, throwing stones and endangering security. One union activist from Nablus was sent to administrative detention – imprisonment without a trial – while another activist is still being interrogated.
For a few weeks now, the police have refused to approve demonstrations against the settlement in Sheikh Jarrah, an abomination approved by the courts. On each of the last two Fridays, police arrested more than 20 protesters for 24 hours. Ten were held for half an hour in a cell filled with vomit and diarrhea in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem.
Israel also recently arrested two main activists from the Palestinian organization Stop the Wall, which is involved in research and international activity which calls for the boycott of Israel and companies profiting from the occupation. Mohammad Othman was arrested three months ago. After two months of interrogation did not yield any information, he was sent to administrative detention. The organization’s coordinator, Jamal Juma’a, a 47-year-old resident of Jerusalem, was arrested on December 15. His detention was extended two days ago for another four days, and not the 14 requested by the prosecutor.
The purpose of the coordinated oppression: To wear down the activists and deter others from joining the popular struggle, which has proven its efficacy in other countries at other times. What is dangerous about a popular struggle is that it is impossible to label it as terror and then use that as an excuse to strengthen the regime of privileges, as Israel has done for the past 20 years.
The popular struggle, even if it is limited, shows that the Palestinian public is learning from its past mistakes and from the use of arms, and is offering alternatives that even senior officials in the Palestinian Authority have been forced to support – at least on the level of public statements.
Yuval Diskin and Amos Yadlin, the respective heads of the Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence, already have exposed their fears. During an intelligence briefing to the cabinet they said: “The Palestinians want to continue and build a state from the bottom up … and force an agreement on Israel from above … The quiet security [situation] in the West Bank and the fact that the [Palestinian] Authority is acting against terror in an efficient manner has caused the international community to turn to Israel and demand progress.”
The brutal repression of the first intifada, and the suppression of the first unarmed demonstrations of the second intifada with live fire, have proved to Palestinians that the Israelis do not listen. The repression left a vacuum that was filled by those who sanctified the use of arms.
Is that what the security establishment and its political superiors are trying to achieve today, too, in order to relieve us of the burden of a popular uprising?
Our endless wars are nightmares. Few enough would disagree with that, even, I suspect, among the supportive 58% in that poll or the 54% who “approve of the president’s performance as commander-in-chief.” If only we could wake up.
I was reminded of our strange dream-state recently when I reread the article that sparked the creation of what became TomDispatch. I first stumbled across it in the fall of 2001, after the Towers came down in my hometown, after that acrid smell of burning made its way to my neighborhood and into everything, after I traveled to “Ground Zero” (as it was already being called) to view those vast otherworldly shards of destruction via nearby side streets, after I spent weeks reading the ever narrower, ever more war-oriented news coverage in this country, and after I watched George W. Bush and Company mainlining fear directly into the American bloodstream, selling the eternal terror of terror and the president’s Global War on Terror that so conveniently went with it.
It was obvious that war was on the way, and that the men (and woman) who were leading us into it had expansive dreams and gargantuan plans. Somewhere in that period, probably in late October 2001, a friend sent me a piece by an Afghan-American living in California that spurred me to modest action. [continued…]
Look around Balochistan, and you may not see much. Pakistan’s largest province is also its poorest and least inhabited – an expanse of rocky deserts and ramshackle villages where hardy tribesmen live by ancient laws. But to outside eyes, Balochistan’s barren sands glisten with hidden value.
Mining companies eye its natural riches: vast and largely untapped reserves of copper, natural gas and possibly oil. Criminals see easy money: the world’s heroin superhighway, a network of smuggling trails, cuts through its lonely borders. Foreign governments consider its location: wedged between Iran and Afghanistan, and covering two-fifths of Pakistan, Balochistan occupies highly strategic real estate.
But for the black-turbaned clerics commanding the Afghan Taliban, the desolate province offers something else: a welcoming rear base. As the Taliban insurgency oozes across Afghanistan, Nato generals complain that the fighting is being directed from Balochistan. [continued…]
n Thursday morning as Pakistan’s Defence Minister was preparing to board a flight to China for an official visit, he was detained by Pakistani security officials and was told he had been barred from leaving the country. An altercation ensued, but the country’s top civilian defence official was told by the police and soldiers that they take orders from senior generals and judges, not government ministers.
Minister Ahmad Mukhtar was told by the security officials that they were acting on instructions from the National Accountability Bureau, an arm of Pakistan’s intelligence service created by former military ruler Pervez Musharraf to harass political opponents with corruption charges. The Defence Minister was told his name was on an ‘Exit Control List’ even though he has never been convicted of a crime. Clearly, Pakistan has entered a decisive stage. Imagine the U.S. Defence Secretary being detained by U.S. marshals at JFK airport or the RCMP telling Peter MacKay, he cannot leave the country.
What was bizarre about this development is that although it was Pakistani’s Interior Ministry that was supposed to have issued the orders, the Interior Minister himself was named as someone not allowed to travel abroad without special permission. Clearly the administration of the government in Islamabad has been taken over by plainclothes military intelligence officials.
A coup by any other name is still a coup. [continued…]
I‘ve written many times before about Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was abducted by the U.S. in late 2001, tortured at Bagram, sent to Guantanamo for seven years — where he was never charged with any crime and was interrogated overwhelmingly about Al Jazeera’s operations, not about Terrorism — and then suddenly released without explanation last year, as though the whole thing never happened. The due-process-free imprisonment of this journalist by the U.S. government was ignored almost completely by the American media (other than Nicholas Kristof), even as it righteously obsessed on the far shorter imprisonment of journalists by countries such as Iran and North Korea (hey, look over there at those tyrannical countries – they imprison our journalists!!!!!). Aside from al-Hajj, we’ve imprisoned numerous other journalists without charges in Iraq — and continue to this day to do so — including ones who work for Reuters and the Associated Press.
Today, The New York Times’ media reporter Brian Stelter profiles al-Hajj, who is now an on-air correspondent for Al Jazeera. The article recounts the details of al-Hajj’s detention, his description of his torture, and the physical and psychological wounds he still suffers from his treatment at the hands of his American captors. All things considered, the article is a decent effort to explain what happened, and Stelter deserves credit for bringing some desperately needed attention to this story. Nonetheless, the article contains some rather striking and revealing passages, beginning with this:
Among Al Jazeera’s viewers in the Arab world since the 9/11 attacks, perhaps nothing has damaged perceptions of America more than Guantánamo Bay. For that reason, Mr. Hajj, who did a six-part series on the prison after his release, is a potent weapon for the network, which does not always strive for journalistic objectivity on the subject of his treatment. In an interview, Ahmed Sheikh, the editor in chief of Al Jazeera, called Mr. Hajj “one of the victims of the human rights atrocities committed by the ex-U.S. administration.”
It’s amazing that the NYT would claim that Al Jazeera’s description of the Bush administration’s conduct as it concerns al-Hajj and other detainees — “one of the victims of the human rights atrocities committed by the ex-U.S. administration” — departs from precepts of “journalistic objectivity.” How can the lawless detention, brutal torture, numerous detainee deaths, obvious targeting of unfriendly media outlets, and explicit renunciation of the Gevena Conventions be described in any other way? The breach of “journalistic objectivity” comes not from calling this conduct what it is, but from refusing to do so — from obfuscating what took place by using soothing euphemisms and according equal deference to the plainly false denials of those who did it, such as what takes place in these passages Stelter wrote: [continued…]
The funeral of a prominent dissident cleric in the holy Iranian city of Qum turned into a huge and furious antigovernment rally on Monday, raising the possibility that the cleric’s death could serve as a catalyst for an opposition movement that has been locked in a stalemate with the authorities.
As mourners carried the body of the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, tens of thousands of his supporters surged through the streets of Qum, chanting denunciations of the leadership in Tehran that would have been unthinkable only months ago: “Our shame, our shame, our idiot leader!” and “Dictator, this is your last message: The people of Iran are rising!” [continued…]
President Ahmadinejad has betrayed the Iranian Revolution, violated the country’s Constitution and may be unable to serve his full term, his most vocal opposition rival has told The Times.
In a surprising twist, however, Mehdi Karroubi warned the West against exploiting the regime’s weakness to strike a deal to halt a nuclear programme that was, he insisted, for peaceful purposes.
“Nuclear science and achieving peaceful nuclear technology is a right reserved for all NPT [Nuclear Proliferation Treaty] members,” he said. “We ask Western governments not to use this internal situation as a bargaining chip with the present Iranian Government to reach agreements which would undermine the rights of the Iranian people.”
He also urged the West against trying to help the opposition in its battle against the regime, saying that such efforts would “pave the way for suppression and accusations of dependency on foreigners”. He added: “The challenges in this country should be solved by its own people.” [continued…]
American special forces have conducted multiple clandestine raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas as part of a secret war in the border region where Washington is pressing to expand its drone assassination programme.
A former Nato officer said the incursions, only one of which has been previously reported, occurred between 2003 and 2008, involved helicopter-borne elite soldiers stealing across the border at night, and were never declared to the Pakistani government.
“The Pakistanis were kept entirely in the dark about it. It was one of those things we wouldn’t confirm officially with them,” said the source, who had detailed knowledge of the operations. [continued…]
Few people by now can be unaware of Blackwater, later known as Blackwater Worldwide and now as Xe. The private security agency formed in 1997 and based in North Carolina is owned by Erik Prince, a former member of the US Navy Seal special forces, and has long-standing links with both the CIA and the FBI.
Its presence in Pakistan has been an open secret for some years. The investigative journalist and writer Jeremy Scahill, an authority on Blackwater and author of the bestselling Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, revealed last month that it has been there since 2006. He says Blackwater is being employed for covert ops, essentially intended to target high-value al Qa’eda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, but it has also assisted in providing information for drone attacks and has kidnapped suspects and transported them covertly to the US for interrogation.
In other words, it is an American agency with a licence to kill or kidnap, thus exonerating official American agencies that might one day be held accountable. (Although personally I doubt if the CIA will ever be held accountable. I continue to aver that it is the only real rogue intelligence agency in the world. Mossad might enjoy liberty of action for any operation, but it cannot undertake one without the approval of the Israeli prime minister: no such restriction applies to the CIA.) [continued…]
The international community has betrayed the people of Gaza by failing to back their words with effective action to secure the ending of the Israeli blockade which is preventing reconstruction and recovery, say a group of 16 leading humanitarian and human rights groups in a new report released today (22 December) ahead of the anniversary of the start of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza (27 December-18 January).
The Israeli authorities have allowed only 41 truckloads of all construction materials into Gaza since the end of the offensive in mid-January, warn the groups, which include Amnesty International, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Medical Aid for Palestinians, Mercy Corps and Oxfam International. The task of rebuilding and repairing thousands of homes alone will require thousands of truckloads of building materials, they add.
Little of the extensive damage the offensive caused to homes, civilian infrastructure, public services, farms and businesses has been repaired because the civilian population, and the UN and aid agencies who help them, are prohibited from importing materials like cement and glass in all but a handful of cases, says the report. [continued…]
Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s – it emerged at the weekend.
The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”.
The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran’s state-run Press TV tonight reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians. [continued…]
A struggle for the character of the Western Wall, this city’s iconic Jewish holy site and central place of worship, is under way, and it is being fought with prayer shawls and Torah scrolls.
On Friday, sheets of rain obscured the Old City’s ancient domes. But by 7 a.m. about 150 Jewish women had gathered at the Western Wall to pray and to challenge the constraints imposed on them by traditional Jewish Orthodoxy and a ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court.
Under their coats many of the women, supporters of a group of religious activists called Women of the Wall, wore a tallit, or fringed prayer shawl, a ritual garment traditionally worn only by men. Some wore their prayer shawls openly, an illegal act in this particular setting that can incur a fine or several months in jail. [continued…]
he Knesset Law and Constitution Committee conducted a heated debate Tuesday on two parallel law proposals that would enable certain communities in Israel to handpick their residents.
The proposals come amid controversy over a number of Jewish communities in the north who have refused entry to Arabs wishing to reside there.
The laws proposed by MKs Israel Hasson and Shai Hermesh (Kadima) and the committee’s chairman MK David Rotem (Yisrael Beiteinu) circumvent the High Court decision that the reception committees are illegal.
MK Ahmed Tibi condemned the bills, which passed a preliminary vote a few weeks ago, claiming they would only allow systemic racism to take hold.
“This law is like pissing in mid-air,” said Tibi. “Racism is starting to be legislated in the statute book. There is an influx of racist law proposals; you aren’t even ashamed of yourselves.”
“This country is Jewish and democratic: Democratic towards Jews, and Jewish toward Arabs,” Tibi said, adding that that if Israel’s declaration of independence was to be voted on in the Knesset today, it would not pass.
The proposals were actually meant to enable communal settlements, like moshavim, to disqualify candidates on grounds of economic status or incompatibility with the settlement’s lifestyle. The debate quickly developed, however, to the fact that the committees would be able to prevent Arab landowners from building on community land.
In any other part of the world, a new prime minister’s visit to a neighboring country would be a fairly routine event. But Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s trip to Syria over the weekend has been treated here as a kind of Lebanese national drama, the subject of almost endless commentary in newspapers and television shows.
It is not that anything really happened. Mr. Hariri and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria exchanged some thoroughly forgettable diplomatic banter and posed for photographs.
Instead, the trip epitomized a national story with anguished, almost operatic dimensions: a young leader forced to shake hands with the man who he believes killed his father. And it served as a reminder of this region’s deep attachment to political symbolism.
For many Lebanese, the visit was a measure of Syria’s renewed influence over Lebanon after years of bitterness and struggle since the Syrian military’s withdrawal in 2005. That withdrawal came after Mr. Hariri’s father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was killed in a car bombing that many here believe to have been ordered by Syria.
The withdrawal was a blow to Syrian prestige, and afterward Saad Hariri seemed to have the entire Western world at his back as he built a movement for greater Lebanese independence and pushed for an international tribunal to try his father’s killers.
But since then, the United States and the West have chosen to engage with Syria, not isolate it. And Saudi Arabia, which has long backed Mr. Hariri and competed with Syria for influence here, reconciled with the Syrians earlier this year, leaving them a freer hand to guide politics in Lebanon as they once did. [continued…]
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e had no choice,” has become Israel’s national mantra.
