Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Hillary Clinton sympathizes with #Israel’s ‘PR problem’

hillary-bibiIn case anyone has the slightest doubt whether Hillary Clinton is running for president in 2016, read her interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic.

She dutifully supports every position the Israel lobby demands and even deftly conjures up a rhetorical connection between jihadists and the nuclear threat from Iran, introducing a piece of non-proliferation jargon into counterterrorism when she refers to the breakout capacity “of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States.”

For a few neocons in Washington who are indulging in fantasies about their political rehabilitation, much of what Clinton says, must be music to their ears. She shares the view frequently expressed by Israel apologists during its assault on Gaza, that Israel is getting more criticism than it deserves.

When it comes to killing Palestinian civilians, Israel still suffers from its “old PR problem.” Indeed, hundreds of dead children always cause a PR problem.

Hillary Clinton: [W]e do see this enormous international reaction against Israel, and Israel’s right to defend itself, and the way Israel has to defend itself. This reaction is uncalled for and unfair.

Jeffrey Goldberg: What do you think causes this reaction?

HRC: There are a number of factors going into it. You can’t ever discount anti-Semitism, especially with what’s going on in Europe today. There are more demonstrations against Israel by an exponential amount than there are against Russia seizing part of Ukraine and shooting down a civilian airliner. So there’s something else at work here than what you see on TV.

And what you see on TV is so effectively stage-managed by Hamas, and always has been. What you see is largely what Hamas invites and permits Western journalists to report on from Gaza. It’s the old PR problem that Israel has. Yes, there are substantive, deep levels of antagonism or anti-Semitism towards Israel, because it’s a powerful state, a really effective military. And Hamas paints itself as the defender of the rights of the Palestinians to have their own state. So the PR battle is one that is historically tilted against Israel.

JG: Nevertheless there are hundreds of children —

HRC: Absolutely, and it’s dreadful.

JG: Who do you hold responsible for those deaths? How do you parcel out blame?

HRC: I’m not sure it’s possible to parcel out blame because it’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe it wasn’t the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the school next door where they were firing the rockets. And I do think oftentimes that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and the children and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the truth.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict and wanted to do so in order to leverage its position, having been shut out by the Egyptians post-Morsi, having been shunned by the Gulf, having been pulled into a technocratic government with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority that might have caused better governance and a greater willingness on the part of the people of Gaza to move away from tolerating Hamas in their midst. So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it made.

That doesn’t mean that, just as we try to do in the United States and be as careful as possible in going after targets to avoid civilians, that there aren’t mistakes that are made. We’ve made them. I don’t know a nation, no matter what its values are– and I think that democratic nations have demonstrably better values in a conflict position — that hasn’t made errors, but ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas.

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Would half Israelis like to see Obama dead?

In a press conference last Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his gratitude for the Obama administration’s resolute support throughout the latest war on Gaza: “I think the United States has been terrific.” He also thanked President Obama for his “unequivocal stand with Israel on our right to defend ourselves.”

While atrocities committed by Israel have been condemned by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, people around the world have marched in solidarity with the Palestinians and there are repeated calls for Israel to be charged with war crimes and be taken to the International Criminal Court, the Obama administration has replenished Israel’s munition supplies and increased funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

With so few friends in the world, one might imagine that most Israelis would be glad they have a friend in the White House.

In an online poll conducted on August 3 by Israel’s most popular TV channel, Channel 2, respondents were asked what they thought the best birthday gift for Barack Obama would be?

The most popular response, coming from 48%, was to give him the Ebola virus.

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Send them parasols?

CODEPINK asks: “Why does our President want to take sides and get involved in a civil war? The US is not the target of ISIS, but if we become involved, we will be.”

A lot of Americans these days, some of whom regard themselves as impeccable humanitarians, have formed the conviction that when it comes to the Middle East (or pretty much anywhere else in the world), intervention by the United States — especially military intervention — can do nothing but harm.

President Obama’s concerns about the Iraqi humanitarian crisis and the safety of US personnel can be solved without dropping bombs. Helping the besieged civilians in Iraq should be an orchestrated international effort, not carried out just by the US — the country that unleashed the sectarian turmoil in the first place. (CODEPINK)

Tens of thousands of Iraqis fled from ISIS, taking refuge on a mountain top where they have no food, water, or shelter. How long could anyone survive in these conditions when daytime temperatures often exceed 100F?

By the time CODEPINK’s wished for international effort could be orchestrated, thousands of those in need of help would be dead.


Channel 4 News spoke to a Yazidi refugee, Barakat al-Issa, who is trapped in the Sinjar mountains: “the situation is very tragic, more than 100 thousand people are trapped in the mountains here, in need of water and food.”

The Americans and Turkish have carried out air drops of aid, but the effort was not sufficient said Mr al-Issa: “They are saying that planes are dropping aid, but this aid is only getting to some 5 per cent of the people who are trapped here, because of the mountainous terrain.”

“People are waiting here for international forces to intervene, in the hope that this will become a safe haven for aid to be delivered.”

“Most of the people here are civilians and they hope a peacekeeping force will come from Iraq or Nato.”

He accused the Islamic State militants of kidnapping at least 500 Yazidi women, whose fate remains unknown, and said that dozens of families had been murdered in the south of the Sinjar mountains as they tried to flee. He also repeated allegations that militants had been seen executing women and children.

To advocate neutrality in this conflict seems indicative of either being willfully deluded about the nature of ISIS or the result of simply not paying attention to what has been happening in Syria and Iraq over the last two years.

ISIS, or the Islamic State as it now prefers to be known, is utterly uncompromising. These men have chosen to fight a war that they will either win or lose — don’t expect them to ever send a delegation of negotiators to Geneva or start talking about how they want to live peacefully side by side with anyone. Coexistence is not part of their vocabulary.

Anyone in CODEPINK who is averse to taking sides should watch the video below — or at least as much of it as they can stomach — to witness how these jihadists whose passion for killing has no limit choose to portray themselves.

Some of the latest military action in Iraq appears to already by paying off but the situation remains dire, as Rudaw reports:

Local officials said today that 10,000 Yezidis who were stranded on Mount Shingal for one week were rescued and settled in the town of Zakho.

Medical teams and aid organizations in Zakho have rushed in to assist the rescued families, said Rudaw reporter.

Ashti Kocher, Zakho’s security chief said that Kurdish armed forces have opened a safe corridor for the Yezidis at Mount Shingal.

“We have also cleared about 30 kilometers of the ISIL forces in order to open a road for those families,” said Kocher, who currently leads a Peshmerga unit at Sinune village near Shingal.

Kocher said that the rescued civilians were transported to the Kurdistan Region through Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) which is under the control of Kurdish forces known as the Peoples Protection Units (YPG).

Barakat Issa, Rudaw reporter on Mount Shingal said that the number of Yezidis stranded on the mountain is higher than initially reported. He said that nearly 100,000 people are hiding on the mountain.

Issa said that in the past few days 60 children and elderly have [died] … of hunger and thirst while there is fear that Islamic militants controlling the town of Shingal and other villages have massacred hundreds of others.

Stephen Walt proposes a course of inaction for the U.S. in the Middle East on the grounds that U.S. intervention never has its desired effects, but he adds this caveat:

[T]his argument would not preclude limited U.S. action for purely humanitarian purposes — such as humanitarian airdrops for the beleaguered religious minorities now threatened with starvation in Iraq. That’s not “deep engagement”; that’s merely trying to help people threatened with imminent death. But I would not send U.S. forces — including drones or aircraft — out to win a battle that the Iraqi government or the Kurds cannot win for themselves.

So the anti-interventionist “humanitarian” perspective is this — if I understand it correctly: we should try to make sure the Yazidi do not starve to death on the mountaintop. If, however, they manage to come back down only later to be slaughtered by ISIS, that’s their problem.

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Message for H. Rust

A visitor to this site who goes by the name H. Rust has left multiple comments making evident her sympathies with the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

The fact that there are people who leave comments like this is the reason all comments go into moderation.

I warned H. Rust by email that if she persisted in leaving comments I would block her access to my site. I got no response to the email and am thus posting this public message as a final notification.

Commenting on this site is enabled to provide readers with an opportunity to respond thoughtfully and constructively to what they read; it isn’t there to provide a podium for anyone to vent whatever vile thoughts they might harbor.

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No innocent civilians in #Gaza, says former head of #Israel’s National Security Council

Giora Eiland is a retired Major General from the Israel Defense Forces. As head of Ariel Sharon’s National Security Council, Eiland helped draft Israel’s disengagement plan for removing Israeli military forces and settlers from Gaza.

In an op-ed for Ynet today, “In Gaza, there is no such thing as ‘innocent civilians’,” Eiland provides a rationale for making no distinction between Palestinian fighters and Palestinian children — they all in his mind belong to an “enemy state.”

[W]e must avoid the artificial, wrong and dangerous distinction between the Hamas people, who are “the bad guys,” and Gaza’s residents, which are allegedly “the good guys.” We are dealing with an enemy state, not with a terror organization which is seemingly operating from within an innocent civilian population.

He hardly needed to articulate this view as though it constitutes a policy recommendation, since it appears to be perfectly in accordance with the way in which the Israeli government, its military commanders, and its individual soldiers, have conducted the latest war.

The casualty figures, as compiled by the UN, speak for themselves:

war-on-civilians

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#Obama won’t end #Israel’s war on #Gaza

After an Israeli airstrike near a UN shelter which killed at least 10 people on Sunday, the State Department issued a statement saying: “The suspicion that militants are operating nearby [a UN shelter] does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians.”

From day one in the current war, Israel has attempted to absolve itself for responsibility for civilian casualties by arguing that they are “human shields.” What the State Department finally made clear is that describing civilians as human shields does not make their lives expendable.

The State Department has understood this legal fact from day one but it waited almost a month before asserting this with any force. And even while the Obama administration caught the media’s attention in the last few days for voicing “harsh” criticism of the Israelis, it did so at the very same time as replenishing Israel’s supply of munitions.

The New York Times reports:

For all its outrage over civilian casualties, the United States steadfastly backs Israel’s right to defend itself and shares Israel’s view that Hamas is a terrorist organization. In a world of bitter enmities, the Israeli-American dispute is more akin to a family quarrel.

The White House seems determined to tamp down the latest eruption in tensions. “The nature of our relationship is strong and unchanged,” the press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters on Monday, pointing to comments by Mr. Netanyahu over the weekend, in which he said, “I think the United States has been terrific.”

The two statements are part of a recurring pattern for this administration: an angry outburst, followed by calmer words and the grudging recognition that little is going to change in the fundamental relationship between the United States and its closest ally in the Middle East.

Disputes between the United States and Israel are hardly new. President Ronald Reagan sold Awacs surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia over Israel’s fierce objections. George H.W. Bush held up loan guarantees because of Israeli settlement construction. Bill Clinton fumed after his first Oval Office encounter with a newly elected Israeli prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu.

But the chronic nature of this tension is unusual — and, according to current and former officials, rooted in ill will at the very top. “You have a backdrop of a very acrimonious relationship between the president and the prime minister of Israel,” said Robert M. Danin, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

While tensions between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu only occasionally spill into the open, Mr. Kerry became the subject of very public and vitriolic — albeit anonymous — criticism from Israeli officials for his efforts two weeks ago to negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. His proposal, the officials said, was tilted in favor of Hamas and did not do enough to protect Israel’s security.

Mr. Kerry, American officials responded, based his efforts on an Egyptian cease-fire proposal that had already been accepted by the Israelis. He submitted his ideas to the Israelis, anticipating that they would have concerns. Whatever the precise circumstances, Mr. Kerry found himself excoriated across the political spectrum in Israel.

At the White House, officials were incensed by what they saw as shabby treatment of Mr. Kerry, a loyal friend of Israel. In addition to the cease-fire and the peace talks, they noted, Mr. Kerry went to bat for Israel with the Federal Aviation Administration after it imposed a ban on commercial flights to Tel Aviv following a rocket attack near Ben-Gurion International Airport.

What does batting for Israel against the FAA mean? That at a moment when Israel seemed particularly vulnerable, the Secretary of State for the United States thought that it was his job to place the interests of Israel’s economy above those of his own citizens.

Now that a ceasefire has tentatively taken hold, the U.S. role in negotiations in Cairo, nominally promoting mediation yet predictably operating as Israel’s most loyal supporter, is to make sure that Israel’s interests take precedence above all others.

It is in Israel’s interests that it now contrive an expression of its humanitarian concerns — that after having flattened many parts of Gaza it will pay lip service to the need to consider the welfare of the population.

Yet there seems little doubt that even if the siege is “eased” is various ways, Israel’s war against Gaza will continue.

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#HannibalDirective: #Israel confirms that it killed 130 #Palestinians in effort to ‘rescue’ (kill) one soldier

Haaretz reports: After Friday’s abduction of 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin in the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces executed in full its “Hannibal procedure,” a protocol that calls for the massive use of force in an effort to rescue a captured soldier, even at risk to his life. As a result of the heavy fire in the Rafah area, dozens of innocent civilians were killed.

A senior General Staff officer said Sunday that “a great deal of fire was used in the area, and targets were attacked” in order to isolate it.

According to Palestinian reports, more than 130 Palestinians were killed in this onslaught, with some of the bodies located only in the days after it happened. Palestinians also accused the IDF of attacking vehicles en route to the Rafah hospital, including several ambulances.

IDF sources said that senior commanders in the field ordered the procedure implemented in full. The army knows that innocents were hurt as a result of the massive use of force after the soldier’s capture.

An IDF inquiry concluded that about 75 minutes after a cease-fire was to have taken effect on Friday morning, a Givati Brigade patrol came under heavy fire while moving toward a building where a tunnel shaft was located. Company commander Maj. Benaya Sarel and his communications officer, Staff Sgt. Liel Gidoni, were killed. The IDF now believes Goldin, a squad commander, was also killed in the incident.

Contrary to earlier reports, however, the inquiry concluded that the terrorist who came nearest the three soldiers wasn’t wearing a suicide belt, but simply continued firing his rifle until he was killed.

When other soldiers from the company arrived at the scene a few minutes later, they found three bodies, those of Sarel, Gidoni and a Hamas operative wearing an IDF uniform. They then realized that Goldin was missing. The company’s deputy commander, 1st Lt. Eitan, decided to take some of his men into the tunnel to search for Goldin, in violation of protocol.

A few hundred meters into the tunnel, the troops found some of Goldin’s personal effects, which later helped the IDF to establish that he had been killed. The tunnel itself had several branches, some of them blocked. One led into a mosque, which the soldiers searched, but it was empty. Another led to a Hamas outpost.

The IDF then sent additional forces to the area, including aircraft and observation equipment. According to an IDF source, virtually all the firepower in the south-central region of the Gaza Strip were sent to the Rafah sector, where the incident took place, on orders from Givati Brigade commander Col. Ofer Winter. This included a tank battalion and an infantry battalion, which helped search for additional tunnel shafts. These forces also laid down heavy fire “from all directions,” including tank shells, artillery bombardments and air strikes, in an effort to isolate the area where Goldin was thought to be, block all access routes to and from it and thereby ensure that nobody could either enter or leave without the soldiers noticing, the IDF source said. This was in line with the Hannibal procedure, which one senior officer said is meant to ensure that “every effort to locate the kidnapped [soldier] and the kidnappers” is made.

Anshel Pfeffer attempts to explain why Israel is willing to kill its own soldiers while attempting to “rescue” them:

Recent reports in the international media suggest that the directive is tantamount to ordering the captured soldier to be shot in order to prevent him being taken prisoner; rather, it is the suspension of safety procedures which normally prohibit firing in the general direction of an IDF soldier, specifically firing to stop an escaping vehicle.

The original order mentioned using light-arm fire, particularly selective sniper fire, to hit the captors or stop their vehicle – “even if that means hitting our soldiers. In any case, everything will be done to stop the vehicle and prevent it from escaping.”

That kind of makes sense — no effort spared in attempting to prevent a soldier being spirited away. But that’s not what just happened:

On Friday morning, when the IDF still believed that Lieutenant Hadar Goldin may have been taken alive by Hamas into an attack tunnel beneath Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, the Hannibal Directive was activated to its most devastating extent yet – including massive artillery bombardments and air strikes on possible escape routes.

Massive bombardment to “save” a soldier falls into the same category of Orwellian doublespeak as the infamous need to destroy villages in order to save them (in Vietnam).

Nevertheless, Pfeffer goes on to say:

Perhaps the most deeply engrained reason that Israelis innately understand the needs for the Hannibal Directive is the military ethos of never leaving wounded men on the battlefield, which became the spirit following the War of Independence, when hideously mutilated bodies of Israeli soldiers were recovered.

So what happened on Friday? Goldin’s body was most likely hideously mutilated by an American-manufactured, Israeli-fired artillery shell and spared the risk of becoming hideously mutilated in some other way.

I’d like to hear Gilad Shalit‘s opinion on how well this rationale holds up.

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The self-aggrandizing pathology of #Israeli identity

During Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, over 1,700 people have been killed. For the Western media, no single death has been deemed worthy of a headline. The dead are counted in numbers. The identities of Palestinians have been most specific when it comes to the numbers of children, yet still to most of the world these remain nameless and faceless young people.

But on Friday the war suddenly focused sharply on a single face and name captured in photos revealing the youthful smile of an Israeli soldier: Lieutenant Hadar Goldin.

In a brutal and cynical act, Hamas had kidnapped the young soldier and in so doing, torn up an agreement for a humanitarian ceasefire — at least, that was the story Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Obama broadcast with outrage and indignation.

Washington must not “ever second-guess me again” on how to deal with Hamas, Netanyahu later demanded while scolding the U.S. ambassador, Dan Shapiro.

It turns out that Goldin was not kidnapped but was killed in battle, according to the IDF. That determination is itself somewhat mysterious. The IDF initially said it was the conclusion reached by a “special committee.”

Just as mysterious is this: “It is understood the army came to its conclusion after examining DNA evidence, reports the BBC’s Bethany Bell in Jerusalem. No body has been found.” Note that: DNA but no body.

Just in case Goldin’s story sounds familiar but you’re not sure why, remember what triggered this war: the “kidnapping” of three Israeli settlers who were reported as missing even when they were already presumed dead.

In a column today, Nahum Barnea writes:

The press conference convened at the Kirya Base in Tel Aviv on Saturday night was meant to be a victory conference. We have been saved: The operation has ended. Hamas has been destroyed. Our forces have returned home safely.

A crowded lineup of State of Israel flags was placed behind Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. The flags conveyed a sense of festivity. The two officials’ faces conveyed a sense of Tisha B’Av.

Netanyahu delayed his appearance by 20 minutes because of the comments made by the family members of kidnapped officer Hadar Goldin. The family demanded defiantly that the IDF avoid leaving the Strip as long as their son was in Hamas’ hands, dead or alive.

Netanyahu and Ya’alon did not accept the demand, but were forced to rewrite their speeches. From an announcement about a unilateral withdrawal of IDF forces from the Strip, Netanyahu moved to vague, unbinding sentences, such as “all options are on the table.” When the Americans say that about Iran, we know there are neither options nor a table, that it’s all talk. I doubt Netanyahu has any options.

It seems highly improbable that Netanyahu was in any doubt that Goldin had been killed and his body will never be recovered, but the IDF announcement to that effect did not come until after the “victory” speech. The timing of that announcement would appear to have fit into a political schedule rather than being determined by a sequence of discovery. Netanyahu was thereby spared from facing questions about why he had decided that Goldin’s body could be left behind.

The grief of Goldin’s family and friends cannot be any less profound than that shared by the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have lost family members.

And yet, when Israel grieves its losses, it doesn’t simply convey how much it cares for its own; it underlines the extent to which it attaches so little value to the lives of others.

For many and maybe most Israelis, non-Israeli non-Jewish life apparently isn’t worth much. Nor can much worth or credence be attached to the words of those Israelis who profess their grief at the loss of innocent life when in the very same breath they justify their own brutality.

These justifications always assert that Israel only kills in accordance with the dictates of necessity. Israel uses violence when left with no other choice.

But to claim that when killing a man designated as a “terrorist” it is sometimes unavoidable to sacrifice the lives of those around him is a bald-faced lie. I repeat: it is a lie. And it is a lie that has been repeated again and again over the last month as whole families have again and again been slaughtered.

If the same “terrorist” happened to be surrounded not by his family but he was in a crowded part of Jerusalem surrounded by Jewish Israelis, the calculus would be completely reversed.

The necessity of saving the lives of the Israelis would suddenly trump the necessity of killing the “terrorist.”

(And note: we now live in a word where the term terrorist simply means: someone whose right to life has been revoked and who can therefore be killed without any legal process. Every terrorist is marked for summary execution.)

This is what exposes the lie — a lie used just as often by Americans as it is by Israelis — of so-called “collateral damage”: No government ever has the audacity to refer to its own citizens as collateral damage. This is a designation reserved for lives, always non-white, that are regarded as being worth less.

These are people who get eliminated supposedly because they are unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in reality they are viewed by their killers as having lives that simply aren’t worth protecting.

Anyone who believes that the life of a Jew has greater intrinsic value than that of anyone else, is, I would say, a racist.

Some may believe that among the tribes of humanity the Jewish people are something akin to endangered species — that there is a Jewish imperative for survival that non-Jews cannot understand. Of course, your not Jewish, you can’t understand, erects a wall that even the most agile gentile cannot spring over.

Even though the Jewish fear of annihilation is authentically grounded in the memory of the Holocaust and centuries of antisemitism, this fear appears in recent decades to have metastasized and grown into a rage for survival, justifying murder.

All forms of survivalism are pathological in their refusal to embrace the universal reality of death: the fact that no one’s life is so precious that it cannot be lost or so durable that it will never end.

The stridency with which Israel has come to assert its right to exist and its right to defend itself, fuels a self-righteous passion in which Israelis believe they have a right to kill Palestinians. Such a right can only be claimed by a people who hold themselves in too high regard.

Around the world there are many endangered peoples and endangered cultures — neither Jewish Israelis, Jews in general, nor Jewish culture face such a threat of extinction. What they face is a fear of annihilation that for many forms the core of their identity.

Anyone, Jewish or not, whose life becomes molded by their fear of death ends up strangling the very thing they hold too tight. We can only embrace life by also facing our own mortality.

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#Hamas statement on the violation of the ceasefire and the missing #Israeli soldier

Since the mainstream media so widely reported that Hamas “violated” the internationally brokered ceasefire in Gaza on Friday, it’s worth hearing in full Hamas’s own explanation about what happened. The following press release comes from Hamas’s military wing, the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades and appeared in English on their website yesterday.

Statement Clarifying the Zionist Enemy’s Violation of the Humanitarian Ceasefire, the Claim of the Disappearance of One Soldier, and the Clashes East of Rafah

The Zionist Enemy violated the humanitarian ceasefire yesterday, Friday, 1 August 2014, by moving forces to the East of Rafah, the continued artillery shelling, and the deployment of snipers on many fronts in the Gaza Strip. In addition, Enemy Forces committed a terrible massacre against civilians in Rafah, killing dozens; and the killing of Palestinian civilians continues. The Zionist Enemy claims the disappearance of one soldier. In this regard, Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades, after conducting an internal review in the relevant circumstances, affirms the following:

1- Zionist Enemy Forces used the talks about a humanitarian ceasefire to advance troops more than two kilometers inside the Gaze Strip to the east of Rafah. Our assessment is that one of our deployed ambushes clashed with the advancing troops. The clash started around 7:00 a.m., before the humanitarian ceasefire. Enemy artillery and air force directed its fire on civilians after 10:00 a.m. in a flagrant violation of the ceasefire, under the pretext of searching for a missing soldier.

2- We lost contact with the troops deployed in the ambush; and assess that these troops were probably killed by enemy bombardment, including the solider said to be missing, presuming that our troops took him prisoner during the clash.

3- Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades has no information till this moment about the missing soldier, his place, or the circumstances of his disappearance.

4- We informed the mediators who participated in arranging the humanitarian ceasefire of our agreement to cease fire against Zionist cities and settlements; and that we cannot operationally cease fire against troops inside the Gaza Strip that conduct operations and move continuously. These Enemy Forces could easily come in contact with our deployed ambushes, which will lead to a clash.

One of several features of the latest turn of events that has received little to no attention in the media, is the fact that Israel claimed it had agreed to a ceasefire yet it also asserted its right to continue its military operations during the ceasefire. A ceasefire that is used to reposition troops, search for tunnels, or pursue other strategic objectives, is not a ceasefire; it is a subterfuge.

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A plan to conquer #Gaza

It might seem reasonable to call Moshe Feiglin an Israeli right-wing extremist, but he’s also the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and a member of the ruling Likud party. He exemplifies the fact that the mainstream in Israel has moved so far to the right, the extremity is not so far from the center.

Feiglin has a “solution” for Gaza and if it contains any measure of restraint it is that he says that it should only be hit by conventional weapons. His willingness to hold back on the use of nuclear weapons says less about wanting to spare Palestinian lives than the fact that in his plan he sees the Gaza Strip being fully occupied by Jews and becoming part of Israel.

In his plan, “the IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations.”

The only consideration he offers to the population of Gaza is this: “One warning from the Prime Minister of Israel to the enemy population, in which he announces that Israel is about to attack military targets in their area and urges those who are not involved and do not wish to be harmed to leave immediately. Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel’s humanitarian efforts.”

Sinai is part of Egypt. In his plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza, Feiglin does not make clear whether he envisages that Israel would claim unilateral control over the Egyptian border, providing Palestinians with an escape route.

Feiglin is notorious for his racism. He once said: “You can’t teach a monkey to speak and you can’t teach an Arab to be democratic. You’re dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers. The Arab destroys everything he touches.”

Feiglin’s ambition — apart from wanting to destroy Gaza — is to replace Netanyahu as leader of Likud. He has twice received 23% of the vote in contests for the party leadership.

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#Israel: missing soldier was killed in combat – claims about #Hamas ceasefire breach and kidnapping fall apart

As Mondoweiss reported earlier, there is timestamped evidence that the battle in which Goldin was killed began before the ceasefire was due to start. If the IDF was launching an assault on Rafah at 7am on Friday morning, it’s hard to believe that they expected to implement a ceasefire one hour later.

Having initially claimed that Goldin had been kidnapped, the IDF has been surprisingly swift to conclude that he is dead. One would expect that such a conclusion would require some kind of physical evidence, yet the area in which he is believed to have died could hardly allow any kind of search. Moreover, the fact that this conclusion has been reached by a committee suggests that rather than being based on forensic evidence, this determination is more likely a logical inference. The inference being: the area of Rafah in which Goldin went missing was bombed so heavily by Israel that no human being could have survived and therefore he must be dead.

In other words, the Hannibal procedure was successful in preventing an Israeli soldier being abducted.

Israel has seized on yesterday’s events and decided to abandon efforts at reaching a ceasefire on the pretext that Hamas cannot be trusted to comply with any agreement. The basis for that accusation, however, now looks very sketchy.

What seems more plausible is that the failure of the ceasefire has either provided Israel with an opportunity or the ceasefire was indeed engineered to fail precisely because the Israeli government has no intention of negotiating an end to this war.

The Associated Press reports:

In a phone call with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, Netanyahu vented his anger, according to people familiar with the call.

Netanyahu told Shapiro the Obama administration was “not to ever second-guess me again” and that Washington should trust his judgment on how to deal with Hamas, according to the people. Netanyahu added that he now “expected” the U.S. and other countries to fully support Israel’s offensive in Gaza, according to those familiar with the call.

The New York Times reports:

Israel will continue its military campaign in the Gaza Strip as long as necessary to stop Hamas’s attacks on Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday evening, but he added that once the army’s operations to destroy tunnels into Israel were completed, Israel would decide how to redeploy its forces, suggesting a de-escalation of the ground war in Gaza.

“From the beginning, we promised to return the quiet to Israel’s citizens, and we will continue to act until that aim is achieved,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a nationally televised statement with his defense minister beside him. “We will take as much time as necessary, and will exert as much force as needed.”

Israel was not ending its operation unilaterally, he said, adding: “We will deploy in the places most convenient to us.”

Mr. Netanyahu praised the United States for supporting Israel and asked for international help to rebuild Gaza and secure its “demilitarization.”

The current war is really nothing more than a continuation of the struggle that has lasted throughout Israel’s history. Its goal is to subjugate the Palestinian people, an effort that compels resistance, and so the struggle continues.

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Capture of #Israeli soldier will alter course of war on #Gaza

While many Israelis and their supporters are predictably going unhinged in reaction to reports of the capture of one of their soldiers, at Haaretz, Amos Harel offers some sober analysis.

Two points he makes are worth underlining:

  • If he is alive, 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin “should be viewed as a prisoner of war,” and “not kidnapped”;
  • Hamas is unlikely to reveal whether Goldin is alive or dead — that information itself is a bargaining chip.

I would add two additional points:

  • There is no way of independently confirming right now exactly when Goldin was captured and thus whether it was after the ceasefire was supposed to have started;
  • nor as far as I have seen has there been any confirmation that Hamas agreed to let the Israelis continue destroying tunnels during the ceasefire, which raises the possibility that Israel had already broken the ceasefire. (For instance, there could have been an understanding that the IDF would desist in this military activity even while publicly declaring otherwise.)

[D]espite the understandable anger and worry, we should take note of the differences between the capturing of 2nd Lt. Hadar Goldin and that of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by Hamas during a time of military tension, but not during a war. Further, Shalit’s capturing led to incredible public unity and pressured the government to make a rare deal to release prisoners (1,027 terrorists), a concession many considered overly excessive.

Now, the circumstances are different. First, the changes to the governing coalition and the increasing intensity of the conflict with Hamas since Shalit’s return will prevent the government from engaging in another prisoner exchange swap. Second, a capturing during a war is completely different. Even though Israel fights a terrorist organization, and not a country, 2nd Lt. Goldin should be viewed as a prisoner of war, as IDF officers suggested, and not kidnapped. During wars, prisoners are taken, as soldiers also fall (63 soldiers and 3 civilians at this point).

Despite the great pain and sadness surrounding a captured soldier, this should not shape the face of this particular conflict – not in making concessions and not in negotiations, not in sobering assessments of this operation’s achievements or the need to either retreat or move forward. Instead, the cabinet must now make rational decisions about the course of the war in light of the incident near Rafah Friday morning.

Since the fighting began on July 7, Hamas has made many attempts at capturing IDF soldiers, with the understanding that getting their hands on a live soldier would be achievement, as well as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the Israeli government in releasing Palestinian security prisoners – a rehashing of the Gilad Shalit deal – that could also improve the Hamas position at the conflict’s end. Every Hamas squad that ventured into Israeli territory through underground tunnels to carry out an attack was accompanied by a second squad with orders to capture, armed with anesthetics, syringes and handcuffs.

According to initial reports from army sources, the incident began shortly after 9:30 A.M. on Friday morning near northwest Rafah in south Gaza. A Hamas suicide bomber detonated near a contingent of Givati Brigade soldiers, while they also took fire. Two were killed and others were injured. As medics began treating the wounded, it was discovered that 2nd Lt. Goldin was missing. The soldiers then found the tunnel shaft that was used by the attackers to escape. A senior commander ordered the soldiers to pursue the attackers through the tunnel, which they did, eventually reaching an empty mosque. Other Special Forces soldiers were called to the scene and began conducting searches, which are still ongoing. The soldiers’ entry into the urban area was accompanied by artillery fire and aerial support, the heaviest the IDF has used up until this point. The Palestinians have reported dozens of casualties.

The IDF is still unsure of Goldin’s condition, or if he was injured or killed by the blast. After the previous incident that gave rise to suspicions of a kidnapped soldier – the APC that was attacked in Shujaiyeh on July 20 – it was quickly surmised that the missing soldier, Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul, was killed during the attack. A few days later he was declared a fallen soldier whose place of burial was unknown. This time, the situation is more complex. This will affect the way in which searches are conducted, as well as Hamas’ bargaining ability. After Shalit was kidnapped, the organization immediately announced that it was holding a live soldier. Later, Hamas was scolded by Hezbollah, which stated that revealing the soldier’s condition should have been part of the negotiations, as Israel could be made to pay for such information. That is the script Hezbollah followed after it kidnapped two soldiers, and is the same script that Hamas followed regarding Oron Shaul.

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#Israel prefers to kill its own soldiers rather than see them captured

The New York Times reports: A newly agreed cease-fire in the Gaza conflict collapsed hours after it came into effect on Friday with the Israeli military announcing that a soldier appeared to have been captured by Palestinian militants who emerged from a tunnel near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

Gaza health officials said that 35 Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded as Israeli forces bombarded the area. Palestinian witnesses said by telephone that Israeli tank shells hit eastern Rafah as residents returned to inspect homes they had evacuated.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said that government forces were moving to destroy a tunnel, as the terms of the cease-fire allowed for, when several militants came out of the ground.

Colonel Lerner said the militants included at least one suicide attacker, that there was an exchange of fire on the ground and that initial indications were that a soldier was apparently dragged back into the tunnel. He was unable to offer details about the soldier’s condition or whether anyone was killed in the attack. He said the episode began at around 9.30 a.m., roughly 90 minutes after the 72-hour cease-fire came into effect.

“The cease-fire is over,” Colonel Lerner said, adding that the military was carrying out “extensive operations on the ground” to try to locate the missing soldier. He did not identify the soldier but said that his family had been notified.

Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior official in the political wing of Hamas, the Islamic group that dominates Gaza, told the Turkish news media that Hamas had taken a soldier captive but claimed the event took place before the cease-fire began. [Continue reading…]


To “subvert capture of soldier” means to implement what the IDF calls the “Hannibal Procedure.”

In an interview in 1999, IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz explained: “an abducted soldier, in contrast to a soldier who has been killed, is a national problem.”


If the second lieutenant is still alive, Israel now has a national problem.

The IDF’s response appears to be to try and kill everyone in the vicinity of Goldin’s capture — even if that means killing the soldier himself.


Officially, the IDF says that a soldier cannot be intentionally killed, but Haaretz reported in 2011:

While the protocol permits risking the life of the abducted soldier, a kind of “Oral Law” that goes further has developed, which holds that a dead soldier is better than an abducted one. It is supported by many commanders, even at the brigade or division level, who call for using all available means to foil an abduction, including even firing a tank shell or carrying out an aerial strike against the vehicle carrying the abductors and the kidnapped soldier.

That the capture of a soldier creates a national problem is supposedly a reflection of the degree to which Israel sees each soldier’s life having inestimable value, but that would seem to conflict with the idea that a dead soldier is better than a captured one.

Given the extent to which Israel demonizes its enemies, there seems to be another factor at play. That is, while Israel asserts its “right” to imprison the whole population of Gaza, for Hamas to take a prisoner results in an intolerable disruption of the balance of power.

One way or another, Israel is then forced to negotiate with an adversary which it otherwise views with disgust and contempt.

Negotiation and war itself demands that the enemy be viewed with respect, yet it wounds Israel’s pride if it has to talk to terrorists.

Once again, Israel seems to be a victim of its own arrogance. It wants a ceasefire in which it can continue military operations — destroying tunnels. It wants a ceasefire in which its troops do not withdraw from Gaza.

In other words, Israel demands the right to make all the rules and throws deadly and explosive tantrums when it fails to get its way.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote:

There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.

Israel has either been at war or on a war footing throughout its existence. Indeed, many Israelis seem to believe that their willingness to fight is the only thing that ensures the Jewish state’s survival. They regard this as their strength when on the contrary, it suggests a foundational weakness.

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#Israel tells #Hamas: You can keep your rockets

In the tweet embedded below, the number of casualties is probably exaggerated, but the purpose of the photograph is obvious: to show that Hamas, just like Israel, has soldiers. Obviously they aren’t as well equipped as the IDF and they use different tactics, but in ways that the media generally prefers to ignore, there are many of the elements of conventional warfare taking place in Gaza — soldiers fighting soldiers.


This is also asymmetric warfare — an expression that has acquired some Orwellian undertones. The asymmetry is often treated as conferring advantages on the weaker side, for instance by saying that they merely have to survive to win.

There is, however, a much more traditional and unambiguous way of characterizing asymmetric warfare: David and Golliath.

Right and might are on opposite sides.

Many Israelis express frustration with the fact that so many people outside the conflict sympathize with the Palestinians and suggest that a lack of sympathy for Israel may be a symptom of antisemitism.

In reality, all it generally reflects is a pervasive humanitarian inclination: to side with and empathize with the underdog.

We each recognize our own vulnerability to malicious attacks and hope that there is such a thing as common humanity: that people can be willing to help each other on no other basis than we recognize fellow human beings.

To their consternation, Eli Lake and Josh Rogin report: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his military will not stop until it dismantles a labyrinth of tunnels often burrowed under private homes and even beneath Gaza’s mosques. But Netanyahu has not called for destroying the organization that built those tunnels: Hamas — and he won’t, multiple Israeli officials told The Daily Beast. Which raises the question: Why are Israeli forces in Gaza — at the cost of more than 1,300 lives and a rising tide of global condemnation — in the first place?

“You have to think through what comes next,” a senior Israeli official said this month when asked why Israel was not pursuing regime change against Hamas. “You don’t want to actually administer Gaza and you don’t want someone worse taking over.”

Another senior Israeli official said that Jerusalem’s military did not even seek to take out the entire stockpile of Hamas rockets. Instead, he said, this latest round of fighting was aimed at creating deterrence and destroying the tunnels. More recently, Israeli officials have said they also seek to demilitarize Hamas.

A third official added Israel would accept leaving Hamas for now with its current store of missiles, if the Egyptian government were to agree to more stringently monitor goods passing over its border with Gaza. Under this plan, Cairo would police how much concrete and iron comes into the country to keep Hamas from rebuilding the labyrinth of tunnels that pass under the Israeli and Egyptian borders, allowing them to smuggle in both more tunnel building material — and the rockets (or machine tools to make them) that have rained down on Israeli cities.

The fact that Gazans have become so proficient at tunneling is not the result of having teams of over-sized rodents. It is the result of the political policies of the Israeli and Egyptian governments. The flow of goods into and out of Gaza can be just as easily managed as it is in any other part of the world where there are border crossings. That’s the function of border crossings.

Israel did not put Gaza under siege for the sake of Israel’s national security. The siege was never designed to prevent the flow of weapons. The purpose of the siege is to punish and apply pressure on the whole population. It is a tool of psychological warfare.

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American Jews are distancing themselves from #Israel

Until recently, American Jews willing to speak out against Israel knew that by doing so they were stepping outside the mainstream. They needed sufficient conviction to withstand the frowns of their relatives. But something different is happening now. Liberal Jews who still see themselves as pro-Israel are finding it increasingly difficult to witness what Israel is doing. Ezra Klein, for instance, writes: “I haven’t become less pro-Israel. But I’ve become much more pessimistic about its prospects, and more confused and occasionally horrified by its policies.”

Tom Gara, referring to Klein’s essay, makes this prediction:

Some may want to hold on to their pro-Israel sentiment by differentiating between Israel and Netanyahu, but when 50% of Israelis think that Netanyahu has been too soft on Gaza, it’s increasingly hard to see that this is a differentiation worth making. The ugly truth may be that Netanyahu is an all too faithful representation of the nation he leads.

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