Author Archives: News Sources

ISIS holds sway for now

The Economist: The key to defeating the Islamic State (IS) could lie in the armed Sunni groups who already oppose it or who might turn against it if the political conditions were right after the formation of a new government in Baghdad. There are a wide variety of such groups, ranging from tribal militias and neo-Baathist remnants of the former regime to Salafi jihadi groups that have a similar ideology to IS but differ with it on tactics or leadership. At the moment IS has the upper hand, and, barring a few recent clashes, the other groups appear to have been largely co‑operating with it since it captured Mosul, in Nineveh province, in June.

Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, a plethora of jihadi militias emerged, of which al‑Qaida in Iraq, IS’s precursor, was the most prominent. However, despite sharing a similar religious ideology and an opposition to the US occupation and Shia rule, there were frequent disagreements and even clashes between the various jihadi groups, including squabbles over leadership, money and tactics. At the moment, relations with IS are complex and fluid, with some of the militias co‑operating with it in certain areas and clashing with it elsewhere.

Although other jihadi groups see themselves as fighting to establish an Islamic state, IS claims to be that entity, particularly since its declaration of a caliphate on June 29th and its demand that other groups pledge allegiance to its leader, Abu Bakr al‑Baghdadi. This is the issue on which it broke from al‑Qaida central, led by Ayman al‑Zawahiri in Pakistan/Afghanistan. Its relations with other militant groups in Syria is illustrative. Although it has co‑operated with them at times, it has also clashed with them, particularly in the eastern regions where it is strongest and has been consolidating control. It has clashed not only with secular and non‑Salafi militias, such as the Free Syrian Army and the Islamic Front, but also with fellow Salafi groups. It has even fought with its closest relation, Jabhat al‑Nusra (JN), a group that was formed in 2012 by Syrians who had been fighting in Iraq with IS but who rejected Mr Baghdadi’s demand in April 2013 that all other groups pledge allegiance to IS. One key difference is that JN seems to have a vision of an Islamic government within the Syrian nation state, whereas IS’s vision is transnational. [Continue reading…]

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Fascism in #Israel: The militarization of Jewish supremacism

Assaf Sharon writes: Addressing Israel’s offensive in Gaza, John Kerry said: “Israel is under siege by a terrorist organization.” Living in Israel, I found the secretary’s comment baffling. In my city, Jerusalem, the sirens have sounded only three times. Tel Aviv and its vicinity has had it worse, with three dozen sirens or so over the last month. Yet daily routine has not been greatly affected. In the south, near the Gaza strip, things are different. With numerous rockets daily, life in some Israeli towns and villages has become what happens between one rush to the shelter to the next. This is certainly not acceptable, but it is not a siege either. In Jewish history, the archetypical siege is the Roman siege of Jerusalem, described by the first-century historian, Josephus, thus: “Throughout the city people were dying of hunger in large numbers, and enduring unspeakable sufferings. In every house the merest hint of food sparked violence, and close relatives fell to blows, snatching from one another the pitiful supports of life.” In Zionist history, the paradigm comes from 1948, when Jerusalem was once again stricken with hunger and want of basic supplies. Here is how one mother described it in a letter to her son who was fighting in the north: “Whoever doesn’t have food simply goes hungry. There’s no gas for cooking, people gather wood and cook in the street. Other than bread, (and this too only 200 grams per person daily) there’s almost nothing to buy…. Water is delivered in a carriage with an allowance of 1.5 cans per person for a week (can=eighteen liters), which is precious little. And as there is no fuel for cars, the water must be brought (from great distance) from wells.” Today, this description is more suitable to Gaza than to Israel.

But there is another siege haunting Israel today. This siege is internal rather than external, moral rather than physical. The murder of sixteen-year-old Muhhamad Abu-H’deir, burned alive by Jewish extremists on July 2, made headlines worldwide. But the context in which this crime was hatched receives less attention. The day before, as the three Israeli youths kidnapped and murdered three weeks earlier were being buried, hundreds of extremists gathered in Jerusalem under the banner “We want Revenge!” And their slogans clarified: “Death to Arabs” and “Death to Leftists.” As the mob marched to the city center, they pounded on store fronts, demanding Arab blood. A large group gathered outside McDonald’s shouting for its Arab employees to be brought out. Smaller groups roamed the streets looking for Arabs to abuse. A wave of racist violence has been washing the streets since then. Organized mobs of extremists have been marching through the streets of Jerusalem shouting racist slogans, calling, “Death to Arabs!” Like scenes taken from revolutionary films, they block cars and busses mid-street, checking whether there are Arabs inside. If found, they are assaulted verbally as well as physically. Many Palestinians refrain from traveling on the city’s light rail because it has become a regular venue for racist attacks. [Continue reading…]

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Palestinians returning home find #Israeli troops left faeces and venomous graffiti

The Guardian reports: When Ahmed Owedat returned to his home 18 days after Israeli soldiers took it over in the middle of the night, he was greeted with an overpowering stench.

He picked through the wreckage of his possessions thrown from upstairs windows to find that the departing troops had left a number of messages. One came from piles of faeces on his tiled floors and in wastepaper baskets, and a plastic water bottle filled with urine.

If that was not clear enough, the words “Fuck Hamas” had been carved into a concrete wall in the staircase. “Burn Gaza down” and “Good Arab = dead Arab” were engraved on a coffee table. The star of David was drawn in blue in a bedroom.

“I have scrubbed the floors three times today and three times yesterday,” said Owedat, 52, as he surveyed the damage, which included four televisions, a fridge, a clock and several computers tossed out of windows, shredded curtains and slashed soft furnishings. [Continue reading…]

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#Israel’s campaign to destroy #Gaza’s economy

The New York Times reports: For nearly four decades, Al Awda Co. has stocked Gaza’s shelves with sweets and snacks, starting as a humble refugee-camp bakery and growing into a 180,000-square-foot factory with 600 workers.

On Wednesday, all that was left was a faint whiff of chocolate amid the sour smell of a fire that burned for three days.

A barrage of Israeli artillery turned Al Awda into a charred graveyard of machinery and material. The $1.3 million German control panel that powered the place became a metal cabinet of fried wires. Some 300 tons each of sugar, flour and margarine — gone. Metal roofs collapsed, cinder-block walls had gaping holes, floors were carpeted in rubble.

“I didn’t even go to the third floor; I don’t want to see what’s there,” said Mohammed Al Telbani, 61, who founded the business in 1977. “I’m used to building. I’m not used to destruction.”
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During Israel’s monthlong air-and-ground assault on the Gaza Strip, the world’s attention has focused on the more than 1,800 Palestinians killed and the more than 30,000 homes destroyed or damaged. But as a temporary truce held and talks toward a longer-term cease-fire began Wednesday, business leaders said that 175 of Gaza’s most successful industrial plants had also taken devastating hits, plunging an already despairing economy into a deeper abyss. [Continue reading…]

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‘This is not war. This is eradication’

The Washington Post reports: The scale of destruction and loss over nearly a month of war, Gazans and international aid workers say, is far more devastating than that left after the two previous Israel-Hamas battles, in 2009 and 2012.

“I am 70 years old, and I have not witnessed a war anything like this one,” Muhammed al-Astal said as he inspected the remains of his cream-colored house, which had been devastated by Israeli shells. “This is not war. This is eradication.”

As negotiations began in Cairo on Wednesday to secure a broader truce between Israel and Hamas, the rebuilding of Gaza emerged as a key element of a solution to the current conflict. Under discussion is an international donor conference to raise funds and the reconstruction directed by the Western-backed Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas, which lost control of the coastal enclave when Hamas seized power in 2007.

Billions were also spent on reconstructing Gaza after Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead offensive against Hamas. Back then also, schools, factories, bridges, mosques and more than 6,000 homes were badly damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations. But five years later, many of the structures haven’t been fully rebuilt. Now, the current conflict has brought even more wreckage.

Speaking Wednesday in front of the U.N. General Assembly, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, “The massive deaths and destruction in Gaza have shocked and shamed the world.”

“We will build again, but this must be the last time to rebuild,” the U.N. chief said. “This must stop now. We must go back to the negotiating table.”

Palestinian officials estimate that airstrikes and shelling have wrecked at least 10,000 houses and seriously damaged 30,000 more. As many as 80 mosques have been damaged or destroyed. Many farming areas and industrial zones, filled with the small manufacturing plants and factories that anchored Gaza’s economy, are now wastelands.

“Most of the life has been destroyed,” said Mofeed Al-Hasayneh, the Palestinian government’s Gaza-based minister of public works and housing, adding that it could take “seven to eight years” to rebuild the houses and other structures without assistance from the world.

Even international relief organizations, accustomed to working in hard-hit war zones, have expressed shock at the scale of the damage.

“I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before,” Peter Maurer, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said in a tweet Tuesday after visiting Gaza. [Continue reading…]

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Disquiet inside #Israel’s Capitol Hill fortress

JTA reports: If the results of a recent focus group and polls are any indication, the gap is growing between Congress and young Americans when it comes to support for Israel.

Polls conducted in late July by Gallup and the Pew Research Center found that support for Israel is weaker among younger Americans and Democrats than among Americans generally. Add to that the results of a recent focus group culled from 12 congressional staffers — a small but very influential cohort — and pro-Israel activists are worried about the long-term sustainability of broad U.S. support for Israel in Congress.

Last Friday, a select group of Jewish institutions was sent a confidential summary of the staffers discussing the recent Gaza conflict. The tone of the summary, which was obtained by JTA, was one of alarm.

“Congress is supposed to be our fortress,” wrote authors Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi and Meagan Buren, the founder and a former top aide, respectively, at The Israel Project. “While Israel faces Hamas tunnels, it appears that the negativity and lack of support among young people is tunneling its way into congressional offices, even while the congressmen and senators remain steadfast on the surface.” Mizrahi and Buren left The Israel Project in 2012.

Among the statements the dozen congressional staffers agreed on: “Israel attacked Gaza in a wild overreaction.” “It’s Groundhog Day every 18 months, perennial conflict, doesn’t seem like anyone wants peace anymore.” [The Israeli government is] “not peace loving.”

Several JTA interviews with staffers for pro-Israel lawmakers suggested that the Mizrahi report’s conclusion is on target.

“On the Hill and with some people with whom I have spoken who are robust Israel supporters, people are concerned if not angry,” one of the staffers, a Democrat, told JTA. [Continue reading…]

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‘Assad is leading the Alawites to death’

A correspondent for Al-Monitor in Syria writes: Al-Monitor spoke with a young girl during the funeral for her brother, who was killed in a recent battle. She said, “In spite of everything, Assad is our choice and we will not back down on this. The conspiracy against Syria is huge and there is no substitute for Assad, with his political expertise and alliance with Russia and Iran. Without Assad, we will all meet a bad fate and perhaps be killed at the hands of terrorists in the same way that the soldiers of the 17th Regiment were killed in Raqqa.”

This girl summarized the position of many Alawites up until now. However, social media networks show that some supporters of the Syrian regime are growing angry at the corruption and its spread throughout the governmental institutions, while thousands of young men die fighting for their country. One regime supporter wrote on a Facebook page created to protest corruption in Tartus, “The son of a poor man does not own a house, and dies as a martyr in war, while the son of a governmental official builds castles.” So far, their expressions of anger remain limited to Facebook.

In one of the Alawite villages in the countryside of Latakia, sadness and despair are evident on faces everywhere. A village resident in his 60s who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity said, “At least half of the village’s youths are spread among the fighting fronts. Dozens have been killed, and the authorities weren’t even able to recover the bodies of some of them. Assad is leading the sons of the Alawite sect to certain death.” Asked why they fight for Assad and support his authority, even though he is leading them to death, he replied, “Although I believe that Assad is leading the Alawites to death, only a minority of the village residents share this opinion. Even I don’t dare to say this in front of many of them. Most Alawites believe that there is no alternative to Assad, and that they cannot stop fighting alongside him. The extremism of most Islamic opposition brigades pushes [Alawites] to cling tightly to their positions.” [Continue reading…]

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Understanding Syria’s four-front war

Christopher Phillips writes: As the world media has been preoccupied with the Gaza conflict, Syria has just had the bloodiest week of its civil war. Some 1,700 were killed in seven days, with a renewed push from Islamic State (IS) accounting for much of the violence.

Confident after its victories in Iraq and deploying newly looted military hardware, IS’s sudden charge and the reaction to it in Syria and outside, has tilted the conflict on its axis, challenging various assumptions and shifting dynamics. Increasingly, we can talk about a war being fought on four overlapping fronts by four groupings of actors: the Assad government, IS, the mainstream rebels and the Kurds.

The first front is between IS and President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Assad facilitated IS’ rise by cynically releasing jihadists from prison to radicalize the opposition and then deliberately avoiding military confrontation. Its growth has helped him. IS alarmed the West, prompting some to suggest a rapprochement with Damascus is the least bad option; it terrified his own population, reinforcing the government’s message that it was their only defense; and it physically attacked his enemies in the mainstream rebels while avoiding his own troops. Any implicit alliance was shattered this month, however, when IS stormed three separate government targets in Homs, Raqqa and Hassakeh, killing hundreds of government troops, then gruesomely videoing their heads on spikes afterwards.

Such heavy losses have rocked Assad’s domestic supporters, provoking rare outrage and criticism on social media. Most accept the government’s characterization of all the opposition as sectarian jihadists and many, especially Alawis, have sent thousands to die to defeat them.

IS seem the most brutal of all, especially to another core constituent, Syria’s Christians who have been aghast at the recent expulsion of their coreligionists from Mosul. Yet these defeats challenge the government’s ability to actually defend its supporters. [Continue reading…]

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Israelis believe #Hamas was more successful than #Israel in latest war

The Jerusalem Post reports: More Israelis believe Hamas emerged victorious in Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip than think that Israel did, according to a poll published Wednesday.

The poll of 512 respondents, a representative sample of the adult Jewish Israeli population, was taken Monday by respected pollster Mina Tzemach. It was sponsored by strategist Roni Rimon, who worked in the past for Likud and now insists he initiated it on his own out of his own curiosity.

When asked about the results of the operation, only 2.7 percent said it was a big success for Israel and 18.6% said the results for Israel were good for a total of 21.4 percent.

By contrast, 10.4% called the operation in the Gaza Strip a big success for Hamas and 17.8% said the results for Hamas were good for a total of 28%.

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#Obama reaffirms his loyalty to #Israel

The Huffington Post reports: President Barack Obama continued his forceful defense of Israel on Wednesday, blaming Hamas for the conflict in Gaza that has left nearly 1,900 Palestinians and 67 Israelis dead.

“I have no sympathy for Hamas. I have great sympathy for ordinary people who are struggling within Gaza,” Obama said at a press conference, when asked if he agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was both “justified” and “proportionate.”

Obama, who has publicly stood by Israel throughout the crisis, reiterated many of the talking points he and his administration have employed since the war began on July 8.

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Kurds, #ISIS clash near Kurdish regional capital

Reuters reports: Kurdish forces attacked Islamic State fighters near the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil in northern Iraq on Wednesday in a change of tactics supported by the Iraqi central government to try to break the Islamists’ momentum.

The attack 40 km (25 miles) southwest of Arbil came after the Sunni militants inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Kurds on Sunday with a rapid advance through three towns, prompting Iraq’s prime minister to order his air force for the first time to back the Kurdish forces.

“We have changed our tactics from being defensive to being offensive. Now we are clashing with the Islamic State in Makhmur,” said Jabbar Yawar, secretary-general of the ministry in charge of the Kurdish peshmerga fighters.

The location of the clashes puts the Islamic State fighters closer than they have ever been to the Kurdish semi-autonomous region since they swept through northern Iraq almost unopposed in June. [Continue reading…]

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UK Tory campaign chief tells Cameron to ‘ignore Muslims’

Politics.co.uk reports: David Cameron should ignore Muslim voters at the next general election, the Conservatives’ election chief has reportedly told him.

Lynton Crosby believes the prime minister has nothing to gain from taking a harder line against Israel, because the Muslim vote will not be “decisive” in 2015.

“Lynton says there are hardly any of our marginal seats where the Muslim vote will be a decisive factor” a senior Tory told the Times.

A Conservative spokesperson today denied that any such conversation with Crosby had ever taken place.

However, this is not the first time that he has been reported to have made similar comments.

In 2012 Crosby reportedly told Boris Johnson to ignore “the fucking Muslims” in his attempt to be re-elected as London Mayor.

“Lynton’s view was that chasing the Muslim vote and other ethnic groups was a waste of time,” a campaign source told the Daily Mail.

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“In one day, [#ISIS] killed more than 2,000 Yazidi … and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.’ ”

The Guardian reports: Tens of thousands of members of one of Iraq’s oldest minorities have been stranded on a mountain in the country’s north-west, facing slaughter at the hands of jihadists surrounding them below if they flee, or death by dehydration if they stay.

UN groups say at least 40,000 members of the Yazidi sect, many of them women and children, have taken refuge in nine locations on Mount Sinjar, a craggy mile-high ridge identified in local legend as the final resting place of Noah’s ark.

At least 130,000 more people, many from the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar, have fled to Dohuk, in the Kurdish north, or to Irbil, where regional authorities have been struggling since June to deal with one of the biggest and most rapid refugee movements in decades.

Sinjar itself has been all but emptied of its 300,000 residents since jihadists stormed the city late on Saturday, but an estimated 25,000 people remain. “We are being told to convert, or to lose our heads,” said Khuldoon Atyas, who has stayed behind to guard his family’s crops. “There is no one coming to help.”

Another man, who is hiding in the mountains and identified himself as Nafi’ee, said: “Food is low, ammunition is low and so is water. We have one piece of bread to share between 10 people. We have to walk 2km [1.2 miles] to get water. There were some air strikes yesterday [against the jihadists], but they have made no difference.” [Continue reading…]

George Packer adds: Prince Tahseen Said, “the world leader of the Yazidis,” has issued an appeal to Kurdish, Iraqi, Arab, and European leaders, as well as to Ban Ki-moon and Barack Obama. It reads: “I ask for aid and to lend a hand and help the people of Sinjar areas and its affiliates and villages and complexes which are home to the people of the Yazidi religion. I invite [you] to assume [your] humanitarian and nationalistic responsibilities towards them and help them in their plight and the difficult conditions in which they live today.”

It’s hard to know what, if anything, is left of the humanitarian responsibilities of the international community. The age of intervention is over, killed in large part by the Iraq war. But justifiable skepticism about the use of military force seems also to have killed off the impulse to show solidarity with the helpless victims of atrocities in faraway places. There’s barely any public awareness of the unfolding disaster in northwestern Iraq, let alone a campaign of international support for the Yazidis — or for the Christians who have been driven out of Mosul or the Sunni Arabs who don’t want to live under the tyranny of ISIS. The front-page news continues to be the war in Gaza, a particular Western obsession whether one’s views are pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-peace, or pro-plague-on-both-houses. Nothing that either side has done in that terrible conflict comes close to the routine brutality of ISIS.

Karim couldn’t help expressing bitterness about this. “I don’t see any attention from the rest of the world,” he said. “In one day, they killed more than two thousand Yazidi in Sinjar, and the whole world says, ‘Save Gaza, save Gaza.’ ”

Yesterday, a senior U.S. official told me that the Obama Administration is contemplating an airlift, coördinated with the United Nations, of humanitarian supplies by C-130 transport planes to the Yazidis hiding in the Sinjar mountains. There are at least twenty thousand and perhaps as many as a hundred thousand of them, including some peshmerga militiamen providing a thin cover of protection. The U.N. has reported that dozens of children have died of thirst in the heat. ISIS controls the entrance to the mountains. Iraqi helicopters have dropped some supplies, including food and water, but the refugees are hard to find and hard to reach.

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The false dichotomy between military action and successful diplomacy

Shadi Hamid writes: The Middle East, as a region, is more unstable, divided, and rife with extremism today than it has been at any other point in recent decades. It would make little sense to blame these developments on American military intervention. The past six years have been characterized not by the use of force, but by a very concerted desire on the part of the Obama administration to reduce our regional engagement, in general, and our military footprint in particular.

The presumption was that with the withdrawal from Iraq, a key Arab grievance would be addressed. The Obama administration could, then, re-establish a relationship with the Arab world based on “mutual respect,” leading to a “new beginning.” It wasn’t unreasonable to think this. After all, it was precisely our over-engagement, and the waging of two costly, tragic wars, that appeared to provoke such anger toward the United States. Yet disengagement and detachment haven’t helped matters. Anti-Americanism persists at strikingly high levels and, in a number of countries, attitudes toward the U.S. are more negative under Obama than they were during Bush’s final years.

The Bush administration’s fatal mistake wasn’t military intervention per se, but rather the misapplication of military force under false pretenses. In other words, not all military adventures are created equal: Bad interventions are bad, but good interventions are good.

The two most destructive conflicts in the Middle East today are in Syria and Iraq, two countries that have imploded not because of too much intervention, but because of too little. In Syria, our failure to intervene with air support to help rebels hold territory and targeted military strikes to diminish the regime’s ability to kill not only exacerbated the humanitarian toll, but also undermined “moderates” — who have begged endlessly for the most basic weaponry — and strengthened extremist groups like ISIS. The claim, oft-repeated by opponents of intervention, that “there is no military solution” is a straw man, setting up a false dichotomy between military action and successful diplomacy, when the two, in fact, go hand in hand. Assad has no real incentive to negotiate in good faith in the absence of a credible threat of military force.

Consider ISIS’s recent capture of territory in the strategic Syrian city of Deir Ezzour. The group’s military success had very little to do with hatreds of any kind, ancient or otherwise, and more to do with the failure of the international community to support the rebels of the Free Syrian Army, who warned American officials, including Samantha Power, that ISIS was closing in. For weeks, they pleaded for assistance but were ignored. “The FSA numbers are big, but we don’t have weapons, we don’t have ammunition, we don’t have anything,” complained one FSA commander.

In Iraq, the original sin was the Bush administration’s decision to invade in 2003 (or was it the elder Bush’s failure to back the Iraqi uprising of 1991, effectively allowing Saddam to stay in power?). But, again, there was nothing inevitable about the fall of Mosul to ISIS in June and the eruption of civil war in Iraq. To emphasize, as Obama has, that this is a conflict between Iraqis and must be resolved by Iraqis, is banal and self-evident, but it also implies — in the context of Obama’s broader approach to the region — a certain studied detachment. This is not our civil war, but theirs. Except that the U.S., through a staggering combination of incompetence, neglect, and myopia, is directly implicated in the country’s political deterioration. As Ali Khedery, the longest continuing serving U.S. official in Iraq, writes: “The crisis now gripping Iraq and the Middle East was not only predictable but predicted — and preventable. By looking the other way and unconditionally supporting and arming Maliki, President Obama has only lengthened and expanded the conflict that President Bush unwisely initiated.”

If anything, the lesson of Bosnia, Kosovo, and, for that matter, Rwanda, is that supposedly “primordial” conflicts over religion, sect, and ethnicity are the very ones, due to their intractability and viciousness, that are more likely to require outside military intervention. Ultimately, the end of the Bosnian war did not mean that Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats hated each other any less; it meant that, despite their hate, they would agree to abide by a peace agreement. This return to “politics” would not have been possible without, first, the resort to force by NATO and the international community. [Continue reading…]

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Fascism in #Israel: No room for dissent — or human sympathy

Gregg Carlstrom reports: Decades ago, a commentator coined the phrase “quiet, we’re shooting” — a reflection of the Israeli public’s tendency to rally behind the army in wartime. But this time, public dissent hasn’t just been silenced, it’s been all but smothered. A popular comedian was dumped from her job as the spokeswoman for a cruise line after she criticized the war. Local radio refused to air an advertisement from B’Tselem, a rights group, which simply intended to name the victims in Gaza.

Scattered anti-war rallies have drawn small crowds, mostly in the low hundreds; the largest brought several thousand people to Tel Aviv on July 26. But most of the protests ended in violence at the hands of ultranationalists, who attacked them and set up roving checkpoints to hunt for “leftists” afterwards. Demonstrators have been beaten, pepper-sprayed, and bludgeoned with chairs.

In hundreds of interviews with Israelis over the past month, there has been little criticism of their government’s actions, much less sympathy for Gaza’s. “We have suffered terribly, but when you are pushed into a corner, you have no choice,” said one man in Ashkelon. “Their children? What about our children? If they cared about their children, they wouldn’t have chosen Hamas,” said a woman in Kiryat Malachi, a city in Israel’s south.

The media, by and large, has become a unanimous choir in support of destroying Hamas. The only exception is Haaretz, where Gideon Levy, one of the newspaper’s best-known columnists, has started reporting with a bodyguard after he was accosted during a live television interview in Ashkelon. Yariv Levin, a Knesset member from Likud and a chairman of the governing coalition, wants to charge Levy with treason because of his writing.

“I’ve never had it so harsh, so violent, and so tense,” Levy said.

“We will face a new Israel after this operation … nationalistic, religious in many ways, brainwashed, militaristic, with very little empathy for the sacrifice of the other side. Nobody in Israel cares at all.” [Continue reading…]

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