Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Why did the IDF let Hamas dig so many tunnels into Israel?

For years, the Israeli Defense Forces have been aware of the construction of tunnels from Gaza into Israel, it has known where these are located and it has done nothing.

We hear a lot about Israel’s right to defend itself but what about its responsibilities when defending itself?

I refer not simply to the glaringly obvious responsibility of proportionality in the use of violence, but also the responsibility to take prudent steps to avoid conflict in the first place.

Specifically, since Israel asserts that tunnels from Gaza pose a strategic threat, why has it done so little in the past to prevent these tunnels from being constructed, made such feeble attempts to locate those that exist, and left in place tunnels it already identified?

Israelis frequently assert “we have no choice” when justifying the slaughter of hundreds of innocent people, yet those who are attached to victimhood invariably do this: use the cloak of necessity to cover up their own bad choices.

In reality, Israel rarely lacks the opportunity to make choices; what it lacks is sound judgement.

The latest chapter in Israel’s long narrative — casting itself once again as a victim of necessity — is the current campaign in Gaza whose ostensible purpose is to destroy the “infrastructure” of Hamas’s “terror tunnels.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says: “We will not complete the operation without neutralizing the tunnels, the sole purpose of which is the destruction of our civilians and the killing of our children,” reports the New York Times. “It cannot be that the citizens of the state of Israel will live under the deadly threats of missiles and infiltration through tunnels — death from above and death from below.”

The paper goes on to describe how Israelis are now held captive by their fear of the terror tunnels:

In cafes and playgrounds, on social-media sites and in the privacy of pillow talk, Israelis exchange nightmare scenarios that are the stuff of action movies: armed enemies popping up under a day care center or dining room, spraying a crowd with a machine gun fire or maybe some chemical, exploding a suicide belt or snatching captives and ducking back into the dirt.

“It takes us a little bit to our childhood fairy tales of demons,” said Eyal Brandeis, 50, a political scientist who lives on Kibbutz Sufa, a mile from where 13 militants emerged from a tunnel at dawn July 17. “It’s a very pastoral environment I live in, the quiet, the green grass, the trees. It’s not a pleasant thought that you sit one day on the patio drinking coffee with your wife and a bunch of terrorists will rise from the ground.”

Devils who emerge from the bowels of the earth — their sole intention being to kill or kidnap Israelis. There cannot be any doubt that the Israeli government, like any other, would do everything in its power to protect its citizens from such an awful threat.

Yet Israel bombs Gaza now because in the past it did so little to address this issue.

Either the magnitude of the threat has in recent days been wildly exaggerated, or the IDF is guilty of gross negligence.

(Just to be clear, while the current war on Gaza began in the name of halting rocket attacks, it is now squarely focused on tunnel destruction. This is the justification being used for flattening whole neighborhoods.)

The Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar reported yesterday:

In an interview with Al-Monitor, Efraim Barel, a resident of Nirim village, said that the residents of villages the length of the border with Gaza not only heard and sensed the excavations underway beneath their homes, but even uncovered tunnels in their areas. According to Barel and others, the IDF did nothing about it.

“For years, the residents heard noises,” Barel said. “One Friday, I was lying on the couch and heard loud knocking, boom-boom-boom. I really felt it from under the sofa. My dog started to bark, to go crazy. The army came. They were by me under the house for three days. They asked questions, brought all kinds of instruments to hear noises, and that was the end of it. Later on, there was flooding in the area and then one of the tunnels was exposed. Evidently, that was the tunnel I had heard being dug under my house.”

That the subsoil of this area is well suited to tunneling has been known since Alexander the Great’s siege of Gaza in 332 BC. But unlike the protagonists of that era, Israel has access to technology capable of finding existing tunnels and detecting those under construction — although the narrative of necessity is still being promoted through reporting such as this in Haaretz on July 17:

The IDF has tried almost every possible technological solution in its attempt to find tunnels. They have used geologists, experts in the search for oil and gas, and U.S. Army personnel, but so far no guaranteed solution has been found.

A report in the same newspaper a week later undermines this claim.

Even after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured in a Hamas raid in 2006 and taken back to Gaza through a tunnel, Israel failed to take responsibility for its own defense by preventing new tunnels being constructed and failed to locate and destroy existing tunnels. The means to accomplish both of those goals have long been available and would cost relatively little to implement.

Israel’s failure to shut down the tunnels may even suggest that this was not the result of negligence. On the contrary, by allowing the tunnels to remain in place, Israel’s political and military leadership may have made a conscious choice to retain a pretext for renewed attacks on Gaza — a pretext that could be deployed whenever it suited Israel’s purposes.

How could Israel have addressed this issue before now? Haaretz reports:

There are three main types of technology for locating tunnels; the most common is based on listening for digging. In 2009, scientists at the Technion technology institute’s Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering presented a method for identifying tunnels using a fiber-optic cable.

The Technion’s Assaf Klar and Raphael Linker say the system can even locate narrow tunnels more than 60 feet (18 meters) deep while keeping a lid on false alarms.

“Tunnel excavation is accompanied by the release of stresses that cause permanent — though very tiny — displacements and strains in the ground,” Klar says. “If you can measure these strains in the soil with sensitive equipment, you can find a tunnel’s location.” Tunnel excavation produces a very distinctive signal, he adds.

The research lays the groundwork for an underground fence based on existing technology called BOTDR — Brillouin optical time domain reflectometry. This makes it possible to measure fiber distortion along 30 kilometers using a single device and a standard fiber-optic cable — a cable that costs only a few shekels a meter.

The system is based on so-called wavelet decomposition of the BOTDR signal, a process that breaks down the signal into simpler shapes and filters out irrelevant noise. The signals that remain are then classified by a network that locates tunnels using the computer simulation of tens of thousands of profiles, including disturbances not related to tunneling; for example, raindrops.

“The ability of the BOTDR approach to supply a continuous profile of soil distortions along the fiber-optic line — and the ability of the neural network to identify the relevant profile — are the keys to the system’s success,” Linker says.

In recent days, geology experts have made their own claims; they say technologies indeed exist to locate the tunnels, it’s just that the IDF hasn’t adopted them. “It’s not a challenge and it’s not difficult; solutions are already at hand,” says Dov Frimerman, the former geologist at the Public Works Department.

Frimerman was one of the geologists behind the research into the sinkholes near the Dead Sea. He describes another method for locating underground spaces via radar, which he used to find sinkholes at the Dead Sea.

“If I drive a car or armored personnel carrier with underground radar attached, technically there’s no tunnel I can’t identify up to 10 meters deep,” he says. “You can go over the entire border at 5 kilometers an hour and within three hours mark every tunnel.”

The radar sends electromagnetic waves into the ground and creates a picture of the soil layers — “for example, if there’s a fault. That’s how we found the [hollow] spaces under the parking lot of what was the resort village at Ein Gedi,” Frimerman says.

This American-made radar is relatively simple to use. Frimerman notes that even Hamas’ tunnels more than 10 meters deep can be found by this method when the tunnels slope up into Israeli territory. Also, sealed- and concrete-walled tunnels can be identified this way.

A third method for locating tunnels more than 10 meters deep is microgravimetry, which measures very small variations in gravity.

“The level of precision of this test is in parts of a billion, so there’s no hole or space in the ground up to 100 to 150 meters that can’t be identified with it,” Frimerman says. The equipment was originally developed by NASA and was used to test gravity variations to determine the distribution of minerals in the ground.

The method for locating tunnels by listening for sounds underground is called geo-seismology. It’s based on the use of microphones as underground sensors.

“When you don’t know if there are tunnels you can dig two pits 10 centimeters in diameter and 10 meters deep. You place microphones there, which cost $80 to $100 each, and connect them to equipment that costs $2,500. It’s impossible to reach a distance 100 meters from the microphones without hearing movement in the headphones,” Frimerman says.

“If the tunnel is ready, you can hear whoever is walking in it; you can distinguish between the steps of a person and the steps of a fox, for example. It’s impossible to dig at a distance of 100 to 150 meters from the microphones without noticing the digging.”

For a relatively low price the IDF could spread microphones 100 meters apart and cover the entire Gaza border, Frimerman says. If the position where soldier Gilad Shalit was abducted in 2006 had two microphones near the fence 100 meters apart, no one could have walked through the tunnel without being heard, he adds.

“The technology exists; it’s not clear why they aren’t using it,” he says. “We proposed it 30 years ago.”

Frimerman’s claims are also backed up by one of Israel’s best known geologists, Col. (res.) Yossi Langotsky, the man behind Israel’s massive oil-and-gas discoveries off the coast. He also set up Military Intelligence’s special-operations division and is a two-time winner of the Israel Defense Prize.

The IDF characterizes its current operation as both proactive and defensive: “We’re not willing for [Hamas] to come and meet us in our backyard,” says IDF spokesman Peter Lerner. “We want to meet them in theirs.”

But Israel has been aware of tunnel construction since 2003 and contrary to the IDF spokesman’s claim seems to have been quite content to face Hamas in its backyard. Indeed, one might wonder whether aside from the political value tunnels offer to Israel in providing a ready-made pretext for attacking Gaza at any time, Israel’s unwillingness to prevent tunnel construction may say as much about a more visceral objection: why go to the expense of digging up your own land and installing a network of sensors, when instead you can bomb Gaza, teach Hamas a lesson and show the Palestinians you’re still the boss?

The “terror tunnels” pose less of a threat to Israel than they serve as yet another excuse to ruthlessly bludgeon the residents of Gaza.

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The advantage the Palestinians have over the Israelis

Every chapter in the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians provides graphic examples of the extraordinary inequality between the adversaries.

Israel has F-16s, smart bombs, tanks, artillery, drones, Apache attack helicopters and the financial support of the U.S. government. The military force of the Palestinians poses less threat to Israelis than do daily traffic accidents.

By the metrics of war, whether it’s in terms of deaths, injuries, prisoners taken, territory occupied, or property destroyed, Israel is unequivocally and overwhelmingly the dominant power.

And yet in spite of this dominance the Palestinians have an advantage over the Israelis:

Palestinians are not afraid of Israelis.

Israel, on the other hand, is a country governed by fear — fear of Palestinians, fear of Arabs, fear of Muslims, fear of rejection, fear of isolation, fear of the world, fear of annihilation, and fear of peace.

In every conceivable way, Israel has accrued the material of power — militarily, economically, and politically through its alliance with the United States — but all these physical attributes of power cannot conceal its core weakness.

Meanwhile, the less faith Israel has in itself, the louder it shouts.

Paul Mason writes:

The call to prayer started when it was still dark. There’d only been three or four explosions audible overnight, so people came on to the streets quickly, the women into the courtyard, men and boys onto the vast carpet of the Al-Umari mosque.

There’s a mixture of looks on people’s faces, ranging from devout to simply stunned.

“They are trying to crush the nation,” the imam says, in his sermon. “They don’t understand we are a nation that can’t be crushed.”

They’re the kind of words you hear from people who’ve in fact been crushed, but here amid these ancient arches, and on this day, they’re more than rhetoric.

Because it’s quiet: yes the drones are in the sky, yes there’s the crack of tank fire just past the shattered apartment blocks of Shejaiyah, and the occasional rattle of small arms.

But something has, for now, cranked the intensity of the war down. Overnight, Barack Obama called on Israel to cease fire immediately. The Israeli PM, Binyamin Netanyahu rejected it out of hand. The reason why is understood by the smallest Palestinian child skipping in this medieval yard.

If Israel stops now, Hamas wins a massive moral victory. Netanyahu said as much, on US TV. A poll today says 89 per cent of Israelis want their army to carry on fighting until they “topple Hamas”. It’s a fantasy – and a sick one because, to make it happen, you would have to fill these streets with civilian corpses, and on a scale far in excess of the 1,062 deaths so far.

Ameera, aged 15, has lived through night after night of bombing. “I am not frightened,” she says. Why not? “Because I am Palestinian. Palestine will be free, and I say again Palestine will be free, and I am not afraid of any Israeli.” [Continue reading…]

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While slaughtering children, Israelis rescue an owl

The Times of Israel reports: The fighting in Gaza has extracted a grave human toll, but some animals have been affected as well. One was lucky enough to make it to the hospital.

About two weeks ago, a long-eared owl was injured by mortar shrapnel in Kibbutz Nirim, near the Gaza border. The owl was found by Ben Itay, a kibbutz member and veterinary student, who brought him to his home. When rocket fire from Gaza eased enough to allow Ben to bring him to the Zoological Park in Ramat Gan, also known as the Safari, vets discovered that the poor creature had lost his vision in his right eye, had a broken beak, and was suffering from shrapnel in his head.

The bird is undergoing treatment at the animal hospital, and vets hope he will be able to return to the wild.

Let’s hope the owl makes a full recovery — and let’s not forget that the Nazis were great champions of animal welfare. Unfortunately they didn’t extend the same level of concern for the welfare of countless fellow human beings.

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At Iran’s urging, Hezbollah breaks with Assad to support Hamas

As Hamas fighters battle on their home turf against the armed forces of the most militarized state on the planet, most of observers in the region who employ the term “axis of resistance” should have little trouble acknowledging that Hamas is a genuine resistance movement — except that is for Bashar al-Assad.

A few days ago Assad mocked Hamas as “amateurs who wear the mask of resistance.”

Hezbollah, whose own claim to be a resistance movement has been undermined by its willingness to help prop up Assad, has nevertheless reaffirmed its support for Hamas.

Reuters reports:

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah pledged full support on Friday to the Palestinian group Hamas in its conflict with Israel despite a deep rift between the two militant organisations over the civil war in Syria.

“We in Hezbollah will be unstinting in all forms of support, assistance and aid that we are able to provide,” Nasrallah said.

“We feel we are true partners with this resistance, a partnership of jihad, brotherhood, hope, pain, sacrifice and fate, because their victory is all our victory, and their defeat is all our defeat,” he said.

Nasrallah delivered his speech in public in Hezbollah’s stronghold of south Beirut, a rare event for the militant Shi’ite Lebanese leader who has lived in hiding, fearing for his security, after Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel.

That inconclusive 34-day conflict won Hezbollah sweeping support around the Arab world for standing up to Israel’s military superiority. But its more recent military action in neighbouring Syria has eroded that regional backing.

Shi’ite Hezbollah has sent thousands of fighters into Syria to fight alongside President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, helping turn the tide against overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim rebels.

But the Hamas leadership, once based in Damascus, refused to support Assad as he confronted with force peaceful protests which broke out in 2011 and descended into an insurgency and civil war. Since then 160,000 people have been killed.

Adnan Abu Amer reports for Al-Monitor:

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah called [Hamas leader Khaled] Meshaal on July 20. This was the first official contact between Hezbollah and Hamas since April, a Hamas official informed Al-Monitor.

Hezbollah’s official website reported that, during his phone call with Meshaal, “Nasrallah praised the steadfastness of the resistance fighters in Gaza,” stressing that he “stands next to the Palestinian resistance and supports its conditions to end the battle.”

Al-Monitor contacted a Palestinian official in Lebanon who mediated Hamas’ troubled relationship with Hezbollah, who said, “It is no secret that the relationship between the officials has not been great because of the crisis in Syria. But Iran contacting Meshaal through the head of the Shura Council Ali Larijani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and a senior Revolutionary Guard officer on July 7 encouraged Nasrallah to call Meshaal despite the Syrian boycott of Hamas. Therefore, Nasrallah contacting Meshaal has not had positive echoes in Damascus.”

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Bibi = Bashar

When Bashar al-Assad proceeded to destroy Homs and other Syrian cities, President Obama and other Western leaders declared, “Assad must go.”

Homs

Homs, Syria

When Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the IDF to destroy Shujaiyah while killing hundreds of Palestinians across the Gaza Strip, President Obama and other Western leaders declared, “Israel has the right to defend itself.”

Shujaiyah, Gaza

Shujaiyah, Gaza

Shujaiyah, Gaza

Shujaiyah, Gaza

Shujaiyah, Gaza

Shujaiyah, Gaza

In its response to the suffering of the people in Gaza and in Syria, the West has once again shown its impotence and moral bankruptcy.

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A morality lesson on Israel and Hamas from an American four-star general

In spite of this nation’s numerous military misadventures and its corrupt military establishment, many Americans still have an uncritical admiration for this country’s generals — men whose stainless uniforms and steely faces seem to be an outward representation of their trustworthiness and moral stature.

Gen. James T. Conway USMC (Ret)

Gen. James T. Conway USMC (Ret)

Who better to speak in defense of Israel, than a good Christian soldier like retired General James T Conway, former commander of the United States Marine Corps?

Propaganda, which is nothing more than a form of political advertising, works by engaging its target audience emotionally while circumventing any kind of analytical process. It trades in ideas whose truth should seem so obvious that we will accept them without thought. And the easiest way of making an idea seem true is through endless repetition.

The Israeli government and those inside and outside Israel who operate in its service, have settled on two messages — on human shields and tunnels — through which they want to demonize Hamas and cover up war crimes committed by the Israeli Defense Forces.

In “The Moral Chasm Between Israel and Hamas,” an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, this is how Conway regurgitates Israel’s message about human shields:

Israel’s military exists to protect its civilian population and seeks to avoid harming noncombatants, while its adversary cynically uses Palestinian civilians as human shields while deliberately targeting Israeli civilians.

Conway describes the Hamas tunnels, of which Israel is reported to have discovered about 30, as having been “designed for launching murder and kidnapping raids.”

Let’s first consider the claim that Hamas uses human shields, since this has become Israel’s favorite explanation for why the IDF has killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

The human shield, as a concept, is a mainstay of American movie and TV drama. We all know how it works.

The bad guys hold women and children at gunpoint and the good guys hold fire because they don’t want to kill the innocents.

It’s an expression of the moral depravity and cowardice of evil men who know how to exploit the good intentions of righteous men. (It’s also a narrative in which the heroes and villains are all men and the powerless women can do no more than hope they fall into the right arms.)

So how does this work in Gaza. The evil Hamas fighters hide behind the women and children and then the Israelis kill the women and children.

Wait a minute! That’s not how it’s supposed to work. What’s the point of holding a human shield if your adversary has little interest in protecting the life of that supposed “shield”?

This gets to the nub of the issue: the only kind of human shield worth holding is one whose life is valued by your adversary.

The Israelis understand this. That’s why, as has been well documented, they have been seen using Palestinians as human shields.

The closest Hamas can come to making forcible use of human shields is by taking prisoners. Which brings us to the tunnels.

The tunnel is the perfect abode of the bogeyman. It has iconic power in the representation of an invisible evil force — a force which emerges out of darkness and might spring up from anywhere. No wonder Israel’s propagandists believe they can use the “terrorist-tunnel threat” to their advantage.

There’s no question that militants in Gaza have constructed tunnels under the fortified perimeter which surrounds the open-air prison of the Gaza Strip. We can also surmise that these have not been constructed to provide “escape” routes to Israel.

What we can deduce is that far more time and effort has been invested in the construction of these tunnels than in their use. Moreover, if or when any of these tunnels gets put into service there is a high probability that the IDF will quickly thereafter discover the tunnel’s location and just as quickly destroy it.

The implication, therefore, is that these tunnels have been constructed as part of a defensive infrastructure to only be used at a time of necessity. That inference is further reinforced by the fact that extended periods of calm during which ceasefires have been in effect, have not been interrupted by the Palestinians going on the offensive and trying to capture Israeli soldiers in the vicinity of the fence.

* * *

I don’t actually know whether General Conway is a Christian soldier. He could believe in the non-dual philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. He could be a Sufi, or he might be an initiate of the Kabbalah.

What I do know is that when Conway left the Pentagon, like so many of his other colleagues, he passed through the revolving door that leads straight into the defense industry. There he became a director of Textron, a corporation one of whose subsidiaries, AAI, manufactures drones used by Israel.

I have little doubt that when sales reps for AAI tout the effectiveness of their products, they proudly point out how they have been “battlefield tested” by the IDF.

In other words, to be absolutely blunt, when General Conway takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to offer lessons on the morality of Israel’s current war on Gaza, I have little doubt that this is a war from which Conway is personally profiting — and therein, I would suggest, lies the real morality tale.

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Israel’s economic interests come first, airline safety considerations second

The FAA has lifted its ban on U.S. airlines flying to Israel. It issued this statement last night:

The FAA has lifted its restrictions on U.S. airline flights into and out of Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport by cancelling a Notice to Airmen it renewed earlier today. The cancellation is effective at approximately 11:45 p.m. EDT.

Before making this decision, the FAA worked with its U.S. government counterparts to assess the security situation in Israel and carefully reviewed both significant new information and measures the Government of Israel is taking to mitigate potential risks to civil aviation.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has followed the FAA’s lead — sort of.

EASA had previously recommended that airlines refrain from using Ben Gurion. Now they recommend that National Aviation Authorities should “base their decisions for flight operations to and from Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport (LLBG) in Israel on thorough risk assessments, in particular using risk analysis made by operators.” They say that their revised recommendations are based on “information provided by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of Israel and following coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration.”

Individual airlines may still choose to avoid Israel. In its most recent statement, Lufthansa said: “At the present time no adequate authoritative new information is available that would justify a resumption of flights.”

Hamas has pointed out that since the airport is being used by Israeli military aircraft, it remains a military target.

Israel’s military use of a civilian airport must also mean that by Israel’s definition of the term, passengers and staff at Ben Gurion are being used as “human shields.”

What kind of “new information” could the Israeli government have provided in order to reverse the FAA’s earlier decision? Was it this?

“We knew about that rocket,” said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev. “We were tracking it for about three minutes, our Air Force. We could have taken it down, but because we saw that it wasn’t going to hit inside the airport, we let it through.”

When the rocket struck Yehud, just north of the airport, Col. Effi Mishov, the commander of the Dan district in the Home Front Command, said: “The Iron Dome is a great answer to the threat, but it is not 100 percent effective.”

Was Mishov lying when he suggested that the rocket had slipped past Iron Dome, or was Regev lying when he said “we let it through”?

Regev’s claim is wildly implausible. If the air force was tracking the path of this rocket with pinpoint accuracy, then they could see it was going to land in a residential neighborhood. Their mission isn’t just to protect the airport; it is to protect Israelis. Moreover, if they believed they could allow a rocket to come down so close to the airport without airlines and aviation authorities seeing this as a security threat, the Iron Dome operators must be delusional.

Mishov provided the only plausible explanation: the missile shield is not completely effective. No such shield exists in Israel or anywhere else.

Given that no evidence has been presented which could lead anyone to conclude that the safety risk at Ben Gurion airport is any less today than it was yesterday, it seems reasonable to infer that the FAA yielded to political pressure.

Meanwhile, Hamas spokesman Osama Hamden is hopefully correct in saying that the partial closure of Israel’s vital gateway to the world should give Israelis a better idea of what it means to live under siege.

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Israel Air Force didn’t see any need to protect Tel Aviv suburb from rocket strike

Following yesterday’s rocket strike that resulted in most foreign airlines cancelling flights to Ben Gurion International Airport, the Israeli government says they let the rocket through without intercepting it because they could see it wasn’t going to hit the airport.

The Jerusalem Post reported:

Similarly to an incident last week, when a large chunk of shrapnel crashed through the roof a house in the Tel Aviv area, this strike was also in a run-down neighborhood of dilapidated houses.

It would appear that for low-income Israelis, their government doesn’t believe it’s worth the expense of firing Iron Dome missiles that may themselves be worth more than the houses likely to be destroyed. The government appears to have as little regard for the occupants of those houses.

“We knew about that rocket,” said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev. “We were tracking it for about three minutes, our Air Force. We could have taken it down, but because we saw that it wasn’t going to hit inside the airport, we let it through.”

In an interview on CNN, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had just flown to Israel on El Al, said: “If you don’t feel safe here, I don’t know where you would feel safe.”

He also said: “If you have a standard [like the FAA is applying to Ben Gurion] you would close every airport in the United States. You’d close down every airline.”

Really?

Yehud, where the Hamas rocket struck yesterday, is on the north side of the airport. That means that during its descent, the rocket almost certainly passed within hundreds of feet of aircraft touching down, taking off, taxiing on the runway, or at their departure gates.

What Bloomberg is calling an “overreaction” by the FAA would by most people’s standards be a prudent and necessary response to what was in fact a very close call.

If what Mark Regev said is true — that the rocket was being tracked — then however effective Iron Dome might be when deployed, the judgement of its operators seems to be severely impaired.

Meanwhile, when Bloomberg claims that Israel is the safest country in the world, how does that square with the repeated claims that Israelis are living in an intolerable situation?

It would appear that what really worries Israel more than Hamas is a hit to the economy and a dip in tourism.

Everybody seems comfortable, everybody thinks they are well protected by a army and an air force that knows how to fight and is out there trying to protect them. And when they walk down the streets and they send their kids to school and they go to the parks, when they get to a concert, they feel safe.

Who cares about the rockets? Just don’t shut down the airport.

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Hamas has shattered the Israeli illusion that the status quo is sustainable

Noam Sheizaf writes: I’ve exchanged emails with people in Gaza in the past few days. These are people who don’t care much for Hamas in their everyday lives, whether due to its fundamentalist ideology, political oppression or other aspects of its rule. But they do support Hamas in its war against Israel; for them, fighting the siege is their war of independence. Or at least one part of it.

The demand that the people of Gaza protest against Hamas, often heard in Israel today, is absurd. Even if we disregard the fact that Israelis themselves hate protests in times of war, they still expect the Palestinians to conduct a civil uprising under fire. The people of Gaza support Hamas in its war against Israel because they perceive it to be part of their war of independence. A Hamas warrior who swears by the Quran is no different from a Vietcong reciting The Internationale before leaving for battle. These kind of rituals leave a strong impression, but they are not the real story.

Israelis, both left and right, are wrong to assume that Hamas is a dictatorship fighting Israel against its people’s will. Hamas is indeed a dictatorship, and there are many Palestinians who would gladly see it fall, but not at this moment in time. Right now I have no doubt that most Palestinians support the attacks on IDF soldiers entering Gaza; they support kidnapping as means to release their prisoners (whom they see as prisoners of war) and the unpleasant fact is that most of them, I believe, support firing rockets at Israel.

“If we had planes and tanks to fight the IDF, we wouldn’t need to fire rockets,” is a sentence I have heard more than once. As an Israeli, it is unpleasant for me to hear, but one needs to at least try and understand what lies behind such a position. What is certain is that bombing Gaza will not change their minds. On the contrary.

“But if they didn’t fire rockets or launch terror attacks there would be no siege. So what do they want?” the Israeli public asks. After all, we already left Gaza. [Continue reading…]

When Israelis say “we left Gaza,” it’s as though the territory was granted independence and political autonomy. Of course withdrawal meant no such thing.

“The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians,” said Dov Weisglass, adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Indeed, by removing a few thousand vulnerable Jewish settlers and Israeli troops, one of the most tangible effects of this so-called withdrawal was to make Gaza easier to bomb.

As soon as Israel puts troops back on the ground in battle, the clock starts ticking. Sooner or later, the price — in terms of Israeli casualties — risks becoming unsustainable. The alternative — occasional air strikes — is as easy as mowing the lawn.

All that Hamas can do is try and make the cost of the latest operation as high as possible and by this measure, in the eye of some observers, Hamas can already declare victory.

Ariel Ilan Roth, Executive Director at Israel Institute, who has served in the Israeli navy, writes:

War is not an exercise in fairness, but in the attainment of strategic objectives.

And, on that score, Hamas has already won. It has shattered the necessary illusion for Israelis that a political stalemate with the Palestinians is cost-free for Israel. It has shown Israelis that, even if the Palestinians cannot kill them, they can extract a heavy psychological price. It has also raised the profile of the Palestinian cause and reinforced the perception that the Palestinians are weak victims standing against a powerful aggressor. Down the road, that feeling is sure to be translated into pressure on Israel, perhaps by politicians and certainly by social movements whose objective is to isolate Israel politically and damage it through economic boycotts.

As multiple airline now cancel flights to Israel because of safety concerns, they might not be joining the boycott movement (BDS), but the effect could to some degree be the same.

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‘Israeli Defense Forces should be given the Nobel Peace Prize’

Granted, when Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, addressed the Christians United for Israel Summit in Washington on Tuesday, he would have been warmly received whatever he said. Indeed, had he gone on stage and simply let out one long mellifluous fart, he would surely have won extended applause from such an uncritical audience.

Nevertheless, when claiming that the Israeli army should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for its “unimaginable restraint” in Gaza, Dermer was not just speaking to his evangelical friends — he was addressing and insulting all Americans.

Sure, ever since Barack Obama was prematurely awarded the prize it has been a tarnished honor, but this refrain that Israel exercising restraint as it kills hundreds of civilians, including more than a hundred children, is an effort to make people doubt what they are through news reports and social media being shown many times a day.

The Israelis like Dermer, with unimaginable conceit, are saying: don’t believe your own eyes; listen to our message of peace because really, unless you’re an Israeli, you couldn’t possibly understand what’s happening in our neighborhood.

What this conceit amounts to is self-deification and a conviction in the god-like authority of ones own beliefs.

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Gaza, the mainstream media, 2009 and 2014

A reader comments:

Remarkably, coverage by the AP, NYT, and Washington Post make it hard to escape the conclusion that the Israelis are remorseless thugs. Does this reflect a shift in mainstream attitudes?

I think the shift has less to do with changing attitudes than with a change in location.

In 2009 during Operation Cast Lead, the Israelis prevented the international media from entering Gaza. The only on-the-ground reports in English were coming from Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros. Even though they did an incredible job in reporting the war, the Western media was virtually all camped on the Israeli side of the border.

In 2014, there are now dozens of American and other Western reporters inside Gaza.

As much as many observers are in the habit of maligning the mainstream media for its bias and its subservience to government officials, generally speaking, journalists are inclined to report what they see.

In Gaza what they see is the carnage and destruction wrought by Israel. What else can they report?

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The creation of Hamas

A commenter wrote this:

Perverse that the organization called a “Terrorist Organization” by the world media and political community was founded in part by Israel as a means of keeping violent militancy under close surveillance and control in Palestine/Gaza/West Bank.

This comment reiterates an oft-repeated view that Hamas was created with Israel’s approval. This is a misrepresentation of history.

In Hamas Unwritten Chapters, Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian scholar with close ties to Hamas, describes how the organization came into existence.

Although formally announced in 1987 at the beginning of the First Intifada, Hamas began as a branch of Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928. The ability for Ikhwan to thrive in Gaza was provided by the Israeli occupation which began in 1967. Prior to that, Ikhwan had been suppressed by the Egyptian authorities.

Tamimi writes:

Israel opted to revive certain aspects of archaic Ottoman law in its administration of the affairs of the Arab populations in the West Bank and Gaza. This permitted the creation of voluntary or non-governmental organizations such as charitable, educational and other forms of privately funded service institutions. This was a fortunate development for the Palestinians under occupation. For the first ten years of occupation, from 1967-1977, the Israeli occupation authorities pursued a policy of ‘non-intervention’ drawn up and supervised by Moshe Dayan, then Minister of Defence in the Labour government. The intention was to be responsive to Palestinian wishes, allowing them the freedom to enjoy their non-political institutions as far as these institutions remained consistent with Israel rule and posed no threat to it… [It was under these conditions that] the Ikhwan succeeded in more than doubling the number of mosques under their authority.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, following seven years of intermittent civil conflict in that country. Israeli forces advanced all the way to the Lebanese capital Beirut, with the eventual eviction of the PLO from Lebanon. While Beirut was under siege by the Israeli forces, commanded by Israel’s then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, between two and three thousand unprotected and unarmed Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps were massacred by Israel’s ally, the Christian Lebanese Forces. Palestinian populations across the world felt a suffocating sense of anger, impotence and frustration.

Amid all these dramatic events, pressure was mounting on the Ikhwan in Palestine to take action on behalf of their cause. Their social reform program had seemed to absorb all their efforts at a time when developments in and around Palestine called for a more dramatic response. Having successfully outflanked the nationalist and leftist forces within Palestinian society the Islamists now faced the criticism that while others had been making sacrifices resisting occupation they had restricted themselves to social and educational services. Their detractors went so far as to accuse them of brokering a deal with the Occupation Authorities, as a result of which their activities were tolerated and their projects were licensed. The Islamists’ enemies embarked on old-fashioned Nasir-style propaganda, labeling the Ikhwan as the invention of Britain or the United States, or as lackeys of the Zionists.

From 1979 to 1981, throughout the network of the Ikhwan organization inside Gaza and the West Bank, the younger members, who were electrified by Saraya Al-Jihad’s resistance operations, voiced one persistent question: “Why are we not involved in the military resistance to occupation?” [Saraya Al-Jihad was a group of Islamic-oriented members of Fatah that had launched a campaign of armed resistance in the West Bank.] Little was known at the time about a plan to engage in military action which had already been drawn up, during the same period of soul-searching, by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, as the leader of the Ikhwan in Gaza. Clearly, the Ikhwan, or at least some of its leaders, could no longer withstand the pressure from within their own ranks and the mounting scepticism of Palestinian society as a whole. They had also begun to suffer, perhaps, from a growing sense of guilt on their own part over their inaction.

No one took the decision to ignite the Intifada on 8 December 1987; it was triggered by an accident, which in turn set off the spontaneous explosion of anger by the masses. However, it was an explosion anticipated by the Palestinian Ikhwan, for which they had been preparing since at least 1983. The day the Intifada began, the institutions created by the Ikhwan inside and outside Palestine came into action, with each performing the tasks assigned to it. The Ikhwan had no option except to seize the occasion. They needed to exploit it the the limit of their ability, in order to reinstate themselves as the leaders of the jihad to liberate Palestine. Had they not done so, it would have meant the demise of their movement. In addition, only the Ikhwan had the intention, the will, the infrastructure and the global logistical support to keep the flame of the Intifada alight for as long as it could be maintained.

For the Ikhwan, now acting under the name of Hamas, the Intifada was a gift from heaven. They were determined to end the occupation, and to ensure that this would be only the beginning of a long-term jihad. They mobilized their members, employing the network of mosques and other institutions under their control, foremost amongst which was the Islamic University [in Gaza]. They called for civil disobedience and organized rallies, which almost inevitably culminated in stone-throwing at Israeli troops, burning the Israeli flag and setting up improvised road blocks with burning tyres. The Intifada was an explosion of anger in the face of the occupation, sparked off by the dreadful and inhumane conditions endured by the Palestinians for many years and the humiliation and degradation to which they had been subjected. However, the Ikhwan’s slogans were not confined to demands for the end of the occupation. They went further, also demanding the abolition of the state of Israel. Most of the demonstrators had been refugees, and their real homes were not the squalid and wretched UN camps of Gaza or the West Bank but the hundreds of towns and villages that once stood where Israel exists today.

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How Israel — as humane as the IRA — uses warnings to terrorize civilians

I grew up in Britain during the era when the Provisional IRA was conducting a bombing campaign in Northern Ireland and on the mainland. I don’t remember the Provos ever being praised for the fact that they would typically phone the police to issue a warning before their bombs detonated. No one ever dubbed them the most humane terrorist organization in the world.

Danny Morrison, a former IRA prisoner interviewed on the BBC shortly after 9/11 wanted to emphasize, however, that the IRA should not be compared to Al Qaeda:

“Certainly there were civilians killed in the course of this last 30 years, but by and large the IRA made attempts to issue warnings before bomb attacks. That’s the distinction between the people who carried out the attacks in America.”

By the same standard, those who accuse Israel of engaging in state terrorism, should be absolutely clear: Israel’s acts of terror are more like those of the IRA (except on a vastly larger scale), than Al Qaeda’s attacks.

During its 30-year campaign, the IRA killed about 650 civilians. In the last 11 days, Israel has killed about 230 civilians.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous writes: Gamal Magdi Mushtaha had been up all night, unable to sleep, when his cell phone rang at 7:30 a.m. on Friday. The man on the other end of the line identified himself as an Israeli military officer. “Gamal,” he said, addressing the father of three by his first name, “you have to leave your house.”

To anyone other than a resident of Gaza, the call would be baffling. But Mushtaha, a 39-year-old contractor from Shejaiya, a town east of Gaza City, knew what this was about. The Israeli military was going to bomb his home.

He argued with the officer, explaining to him that five families live in the three-story house, including 15 children. “I told him I’m not wanted, that I’m a civilian,” Mushtaha says. “He just said my house was a target and I had five minutes to get out.”

Mushtaha woke up his family and rushed them out the door and down the street. A few minutes later he watched as his home was reduced to rubble in a double airstrike — one missile falling after the other. “I don’t know where to go or what to do. I have no home now,” he says.

Israel has lauded its warnings to Palestinians ahead of bombing their homes as a humanitarian act, a magnanimous gesture towards its enemy and a tactic designed to minimize civilian casualties. But in Gaza, it is a cruel reminder of how powerless residents are in the face of Israel’s military machine and their inability to prevent the wanton destruction of their lives. From Gaza City in the north to Khan Younis in the south, Palestinians in Gaza are being told to leave their homes, businesses, even hospitals to make way for Israeli bombs. Too often, they have nowhere to go. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. media execs prefer biased reporting on Gaza

Michael Calderone reports: CNN has removed correspondent Diana Magnay from covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after she tweeted that Israelis who were cheering the bombing of Gaza, and who had allegedly threatened her, were “scum.”

“After being threatened and harassed before and during a liveshot, Diana reacted angrily on Twitter,” a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement to The Huffington Post.

“She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew,” the spokeswoman continued. “She certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.”

The spokeswoman said Magnay has been assigned to Moscow.

Magnay appeared on CNN Thursday from a hill overlooking the Israel-Gaza border. While she reported, Israelis could be heard near her cheering as missiles were fired at Gaza.

After the liveshot, Magnay tweeted: “Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #gaza; threaten to ‘destroy our car if I say a word wrong’. Scum.” The tweet was quickly removed, but not before it had been retweeted more than 200 times.

If Magnay’s use of the word “scum” was so regrettable, what would have been a more appropriate way of describing this group of Israelis?

Bloodthirsty. Savage. Callous. Inhumane. Hateful. Vengeful. Sadistic.

Any of those terms could have been accurately used by Magnay and yet there’s no doubt that CNN would have been just as apologetic.

The only way she could have reported what she was witnessing right next to her and avoided criticism, would have been to say nothing at all.

This is what American media too often now demands from its reporters who cover Israel: silence or unabashed bias in favor of the Jewish state.

Might Magnay’s removal — preceded by NBC removing Ayman Mohyeldin from Gaza — prompt a rebellion among mainstream American journalists?

If only… Unfortunately, having been duly warned, it’s much more likely that nearly everyone will decide it’s not worth taking the risk of stepping out of line.

The exceptions will remain a few curmudgeons like AP’s Matt Lee who is afforded some latitude precisely because he is an exception. (Unfortunately, Lee’s acts of rebellion are confined to briefing rooms in Washington where they get less attention than they deserve.)

But having said that, what are we to make of the vile behavior of Israelis who celebrate carnage?

Do they reveal something about the nature of Israel and the meaning of Zionism?

To some extent, yes.

Palestinians, the enemy, the other, have been reduced to a sub-human status. Their lives are viewed as worthless.

Is this not an inevitable consequence of founding a state on the idea that the rights of one group of people, of one religious identity, have the exclusive authority to run that state?

And yet, should we not also acknowledge that there are base instincts that make people everywhere capable of acting with the same callousness displayed by the “scum” in Sderot?

If you think it couldn’t happen here — wherever that might be — you’re probably wrong.

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British members of parliament accuse Israel of war crimes

“The United States Senate is in Israel’s camp,” said Senator Lindsey Graham as on Thursday evening the Senate expressed its unanimous support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.

What’s new? As Pat Buchanan once said: Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.

Servile elected representatives, obsequiously following the directions of the Israel lobby might be business as usual in Washington, but that’s not how democracy works everywhere.

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Human microbes. Who is the host?

Imagine New York City with the lights all on, but nobody home — indeed, nobody anywhere. A city fully intact and yet uninhabited. Would it still be a city, or would we refer to it as the place formerly known as New York City?

The image I’m conjuring up is not meant to represent the aftermath of some catastrophe, but rather, if we were to think of NYC as representing a human body, what that body would be like if it was stripped of its microbial life.

When the human body is described as being a host to a multitude of microbial organisms, by implication those organisms are viewed as guests. We might have some sense that we need these guests — even that we cannot survive without them — but they belong to us rather than us to them.

Why?

The “I” that stands at the center, possessed — or so it imagines — with some kind of regal authority over this domain called a person, is really a fiction.

Life in the city which is the body, continues just the same whether the monarch is awake or unconscious.

Jane Brody writes: We may think of ourselves as just human, but we’re really a mass of microorganisms housed in a human shell. Every person alive is host to about 100 trillion bacterial cells. They outnumber human cells 10 to one and account for 99.9 percent of the unique genes in the body.

Katrina Ray, a senior editor of Nature Reviews, recently suggested that the vast number of microbes in the gut could be considered a “human microbial ‘organ’” and asked, “Are we more microbe than man?”

Our collection of microbiota, known as the microbiome, is the human equivalent of an environmental ecosystem. Although the bacteria together weigh a mere three pounds, their composition determines much about how the body functions and, alas, sometimes malfunctions.

Like ecosystems the world over, the human microbiome is losing its diversity, to the potential detriment of the health of those it inhabits.

Dr. Martin J. Blaser, a specialist in infectious diseases at the New York University School of Medicine and the director of the Human Microbiome Program, has studied the role of bacteria in disease for more than three decades. His research extends well beyond infectious diseases to autoimmune conditions and other ailments that have been increasing sharply worldwide.

In his new book, “Missing Microbes,” Dr. Blaser links the declining variety within the microbiome to our increased susceptibility to serious, often chronic conditions, from allergies and celiac disease to Type 1 diabetes and obesity. He and others primarily blame antibiotics for the connection. [Continue reading…]

Want to diversify your own ecosystem?

It’s easier than you might imagine. Just start making your own kefir — a fermented milk drink. There’s very little skill required.

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Respecting resistance

Hamid Dabashi writes: Like any other richly diversified society, Palestinians are composed of followers of many religions, politics, and ideologies. Palestinians are Christian, Muslim, atheists, and agnostic. They are nationalist and/or socialists. They are secularists, Islamists, post-Islamists, and post-secularists. They are feminists, modernists, post-modernists, deconstructionists, and they are nativists at times, cosmopolitan at others, unionists, pacifists, militants, you name it. One of them was a founding figure of a school of critical thinking called post-colonial studies.

By far the most consistent and the most definitive aspect of Palestinian resistance to the occupation and theft of their homeland over the decades has been non-violent civil disobedience. Resistance for Palestinians is definitive of who and what they are. They might be a poet like Mahmoud Darwish, a novelist like Ghassan Kanafani, a film-maker like Michel Khleifi, an artist like Mona Hatoum, a feminist like Lila Abu Lughod – but in doing what they do, whatever they do, they oppose and defy the armed robbery of their homeland.

But there are also those Palestinians who have taken arms and opposed villainy by violence. As part of this resistance, Hamas is integral to the Palestinian national liberation movement, but like any other forms of resistance, Hamas is not definitive to Palestine.

What the Israeli propaganda machinery does is to reduce the entirety of Palestine, the rich and diversified tapestry of Palestinian resistance, to Hamas, then demonise Hamas. The strategy works, especially aided and abetted by major state-sponsored or corporate media like BBC, ABC, or CNN. Execute this strategy, and go on a rampage against Palestinians, maim and murder them with impunity.

Now for the sake of argument: Suppose we wake up tomorrow morning and there is no Hamas to shoot off any useless rockets towards Israel. Then what? The magnificent Israeli benevolence will move into operation and return the stolen Palestine to their rightful owners? Of course not. Suppose Hamas did not even exist since its founding in 1987. Then what? Israel would have by now returned Palestine to its rightful owners? Of course not.

Palestinians are varied and Palestinians are entirely entitled to resist and oppose the occupation and theft of their homeland by any means they deem necessary – whether it is by a beautiful song by Muhammad Assaf, a magnificent poem by Mahmoud Darwish, a film by Elia Suleiman, a novel by Ghassan Kanafani, a book on Palestinian costumes by Widad Kawar, or another on Palestinian cuisine by Rawia Bishara or by the militant Marxist organisation PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), or indeed through the Islamist ideology of Hamas.

One may not agree with Hamas, may not join them, but one cannot reduce the entire tapestry of Palestinian resistance to Hamas, or tell Hamas to disband, for Israelis are [not] about to return Palestine to its rightful owners.

So the bogus proposition that Hamas provokes Israel to attack Gaza is not only narratively false because Israeli military operations in Palestine always predate any Hamas operation, but also because Palestinians in their entirety are neither reducible to Hamas nor can they be denied the right to resist occupation in whatever form they deem necessary.

In the West, on the Left, and especially post-9/11, there has been a reluctance to acknowledge the legitimacy of armed resistance.

No doubt many people fear that if they utter anything resembling an expression of sympathy for an organization such as Hamas, they might risk being branded as a supporter of terrorism, or even worse, attract the unwelcome attention of state security services such as the FBI or the NSA.

When it comes to resistance, it’s much safer to place oneself on the side of non-violent resistance because it seems both morally and legally a much more easily defensible position to assume.

The problem is, to allow that the legitimacy of resistance might be determined by whether it is violent or non-violent, seems to misconstrue the psychological foundation upon which resistance rests: the willingness to fight back against agents of oppression.

How those facing oppression choose the means to fight back, may be a purely pragmatic choice or it might spring from moral principles.

But it was Mahatma Gandhi, the most iconic champion of non-violent resistance, who once said:

Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence… I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor.

Firing rockets into Israel might look from the outside like a pointless exercise that not only threatens the population in whose direction they fall, but also prolongs the misery of the Palestinians themselves, yet more than anything these rockets are a gesture of defiance — a refusal to cower.

What Israel wants is for the Palestinians to cower in silence — for “quietness” to be imposed by force. But the Palestinians are not cowards.

Those of us with the privilege of living in the West, have no right to pass judgement on the means of resistance the people of Gaza employ. Indeed, we should respect their refusal to bow down when facing pressures to which most of us would easily yield.

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