Gideon Levy writes:
All at once the last doubts have disappeared and the question marks have become exclamation points. Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu Al-Aish wrote a short book in which he invented the killing of his three daughters. The 29 dead from the Al-Simoni family are now vacationing in the Caribbean. The white phosphorus was only the pyrotechnics of a war film. The white-flag wavers who were shot were a mirage in the desert, as were the reports about the killing of hundreds of civilians, including women and children. “Cast lead” has returned to being a phrase in a Hanukkah children’s song.
A surprising and unexplained article in The Washington Post by Richard Goldstone caused rejoicing here, a Goldstone party, the likes of which we haven’t seen for a long time. In fact, Israeli PR reaped a victory, and for that congratulations are in order. But the questions remain as oppressive as ever, and Goldstone’s article didn’t answer them – if only it had erased all the fears and suspicions.
Anyone who honored the first Goldstone has to honor him now as well, but still has to ask him: What happened? What exactly do you know today that you didn’t know then? Do you know today that criticizing Israel leads to a pressure-and-slander campaign that you can’t withstand, you “self-hating Jew”? This you could have known before.
Was it the two reports by Judge Mary McGowan Davis that led to your change of heart? If so, you should read them carefully. In her second report, which was published about a month ago and for some reason received no mention in Israel, the New York judge wrote that nothing indicates that Israel launched an investigation into the people who designed, planned, commanded and supervised Operation Cast Lead. So how do you know which policy lay behind the cases you investigated? And what’s this enthusiasm that seized you in light of the investigations by the Israel Defense Forces after your report?
You have to be a particularly sworn lover of Israel, as you say you are, to believe that the IDF, like any other organization, can investigate itself. You have to be a blind lover of Zion to be satisfied with investigations for the sake of investigations that produced no acceptance of responsibility and virtually no trials. Just one soldier is being tried for killing.
Electronic Intifada reports:
As Palestinians were preparing for their weekend this Thursday afternoon, all of a sudden barrages of Israeli artillery fire and air raids by warplanes struck several regions of the Gaza Strip. Five Palestinians were killed and about thirty more injured.
Israeli shells struck farm land, homes, a mosque and an ambulance, and the injured were evacuated to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza and the Abu Yousif al-Najjar hospital in southern Gaza.
At the admissions department at al-Shifa hospital, Muhammad al-Madhoun, a journalist, told The Electronic Intifada how he was injured by a huge explosion as he sat at a relative’s home in the al-Saftawi neighborhood in northern Gaza.
“All of a sudden, we heard an explosion and saw pillars of smoke. Then I felt I had a big strike on my head, then I saw nothing and put my hand on my back to find blood. I fell down on the floor and awoke to find myself at the hospital,” al-Madhoun said, surrounded by medical staff.
Sources at the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City said that they received six injuries earlier this afternoon; among them were two women and several children.
Haaretz reports:
The Iron Dome missile defense system on Thursday successfully intercepted for the first time a Grad rocket that was fired at the Israeli city of Ashkelon from the Gaza Strip.
Iron Dome’s success Thursday marks the first time in history a short-range rocket was ever intercepted.
According to reports from the area, the interception could be seen in Israeli towns near northern Gaza. The second Iron Dome battery was positioned in the area of Ashkelon over the weekend, in addition to a battery already placed north of Be’er Sheva.
Following the attack on the bus, in which a 16-year-old boy was seriously wounded and the bus driver was hurt moderately, a barrage of 15 rockets and mortars were fired at southern Israel, most of them hitting open areas.
Ahram Online reports:
Palestinian crossings official Raed Fattouh, who coordinates entry of goods between Israel and Gaza, said that Israeli authorities are prohibiting the passage of at least 700 goods into Gaza.
In a press statement Wednesday morning, Fattouh made clear that the Israeli Occupation Forces are preventing 50 per cent of Gaza imports to pass due to excuses that are unsubstantiated and unconvincing.Fattouh pointed out that most of the prohibited material belongs to the building and construction sector, which increased the housing problem in the strip that had been piling up for four years.
The Washington Post reports:
The democratic uprisings that have swept through the Middle East will make it harder for Israel to reach a peace deal with Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said this week.
That stance puts Netanyahu at odds with others here, including his defense minister, who say the changes in the region add urgency to Israel’s pursuit of a peace accord. It will also dampen expectations that Netanyahu will use a visit to Washington next month to outline any bold new ideas about breaking a negotiating impasse.
“Any potential deal with the Palestinians has to account for the tremendous instability in the region,” Netanyahu said in an interview at his Jerusalem office. “The majority of the Israeli public wants to be sure those concessions don’t endanger Israel’s security.”
Netanyahu has always struck a cautious line on relinquishing more of the West Bank to Palestinian control and has long insisted on the need for strong security guarantees, such as maintaining an Israeli military presence in the disputed territory of the Jordan Valley, part of territory that Palestinians want for a future state. But the tumult in Jordan and Egypt makes him even more cautious about making concessions, a senior Israeli official said.
Al Jazeera reports:
Israeli troops have stormed Awarta village in the northern West Bank, arresting more than 100 women as they hunted the killers of an Israeli family from the illegal settlement of Itamar, officials said.
The military also used bulldozers to destroy Palestinian houses in a northern farming village east of Tubas, in an area under Israeli control, according to Palestinian security officials.
In Awarta, hundreds of troops entered the village shortly after midnight on Thursday and imposed a curfew after which they began rounding up women, many of whom were elderly, local council head Tayis Awwad told the AFP news agency.
They continued to carry out house-to-house searches through the night, he said.
The women were taken to a military camp where troops took their fingerprints – and DNA samples – before most were released, said the Palestinian sources.
Quick! How soon will the “international community” erect a no-fly zone over Gaza in accord with their new found humanitarian responsibility to protect civilians? I wish they would speed this up because I’m holding my breath here…
This is just sick. A firecracker-on-steroids takes out an Israel school bus and injures two Israelis–an event that’s all over the MSM’s front pages across the Western world–and now we’ve got another slaughter of Gazans. And the Obama and Rice are gearing up to have the UN deep-six the Goldstone Report because it’s supposedly “unfixable.”
Over at CounterPunch.org today, in a piece entitled “The Tragedy of Judge Goldstone,” Lawrence Swaim, Executive Director of the Interfaith Freedom Foundation, puts it down to religious pathology engendered by the Holocaust:
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Israel is a political entity, but the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not about politics. It is not about geo-politics. It is about pathology. Historical events have driven the main actors insane. The political class of Israel is crazy, and the Christian West is crazy to give them impunity for their crimes, mainly because the Christian West has never come to terms with the Holocaust. [. . .]
What is spectacularly disturbing about this pathology is that Jews, who were heroic standing up to Christian pressure to conform and convert for sixteen centuries, cannot stand up to Israel, the state supposedly founded to be a refuge for them. Zionism has turned out to be an almost diabolically self-defeating prison for the Jewish soul. The Nazis could burn the bones and skin of European Jews, but only traumatized Jews could themselves attack Jewish culture and religion from within. Yet we must remember that the proximate cause of this psychic violence was the Holocaust, which was merely an application of the industrial method to that familiar Christian institution, the pogrom. If Judaism is imploding today and becoming Judeo-Zionism, that is only because the teachings of Jesus morphed into imperial Christianity in the West, with its exploitation, its torture and its patriarchal wars. Christians invented anti-Semitism, which gave us the Holocaust, which gave us the state of Israel.
http://www.counterpunch.org/swaim04082011.html
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I think he’s right to call this pathology, rather than politics or geopolitics. (Although I would put some emphasis on that militarization of Christianity called the Crusades.) More anti-Zionist writers ought to be focussing on this pathology. Avraham Burg, in his *The Holocaust is Over* tried to make an issue of it when he wrote:
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The Shoah has become our life, and we will not forget it and will not let anyone forget us. We have pulled the Shoah out of its historic context and turned it into a plea and a generator for every deed [perpetrated against the Palestinians]. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah, and therefore all is allowed—be it fences, sieges, crowns, curfews, food and water deprivation, or unexplained killings. All is permitted because we have been through the Shoah and you will not tell us how to behave.
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And someone called Mark Wauck, writing at Mondoweiss, maybe a year ago wrote:
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What exactly are the “lessons of the Holocaust?“ For Neocons, the obvious lesson is that Jews need a Fortress Israel that they can withdraw to in time of persecution. I have actually had highly-educated and intelligent Jews tell me that—if persecution should arise they can always flee to Israel. Like, if their American neighbors start forming into murderous anti-Semitic mobs they’ll somehow be safe crammed cheek by jowl into a tiny Levantine state, in a world awash in nuclear weapons [that could take out the whole state of Israel with one well-placed bomb]. The Neocon response to this objection, of course, is to enlist the United States in a global search and destroy mission to level any country that expresses hostility to Israel. I submit, without denying the real threats that face Jews, that that is a mistaken lesson, a false lesson.
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Not merely a “false lesson” but a pathological response to history.
I have to suspect there’s not a single person in the world who doesn’t ascribe Goldstone’s retraction to anything but severe peer pressure and vilification. Nice friends you have Richard.
Somebody should point out to Netanyahu that nothing Israel could relinquish to the Palestinians — right up to handing back 100% of the land stolen from them, can in any way be considered a ‘concession’. On the contrary, everything Israel has is a product of the concessions granted to the Zionists.
If anyone was in doubt about the kind of care for the Palestinians afforded by the IDF they need only look at the supposed criminal investigation for the murders of the illegal settlers that resulted in the arrests at Awarta. Do they even bother with arrest warrants and reasonable justification for carrying off over 100 women in the middle of the night? Can one expect them to take any care not to kill civilians when unleashed on a military assault like Cast Lead?
The more times that these actions occur, the more convinced that the Israeli’s are chasing the bogyman, who doesn’t exist. Collateral damage, perpetrated by none other than the Israeli’s themselves. The same with the bombing that killed the English lady. But the kicker, is that the rockets and mortars come from double agents within Gaza. Perhaps it reads no way jay, but, on the other hand, desperate people do desperate things under stress.
All the posters above have already made my points so I will just remind everyone of one thing.
The Zionist and Israel are Not going to change of their own accord.
So whatever ending for I/P or Palestine or Israel we imagine, we have to start with that fact.