Category Archives: War on Gaza

EDITORIAL: When the dead have all been counted, what will Israel have accomplished?

When the dead have all been counted, what will Israel have accomplished?
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 9, 2009

When the neocons start issuing desperate appeals to Israel – don’t stop fighting now – it becomes obvious the war is close to its predictably inconclusive end.

Even the Bush administration, loyal deliverer of Security Council vetoes could not turn back a wave of international pressure last night in New York. By abstaining from the ceasefire resolution last night essentially told Israel, we’re here for you, but we can’t give you any more cover.

Even Israel’s well-oiled media campaign is losing its wheels.

After more than 40 civilians died in a UN school in the Jabalya refugee camp, Israel has now retracted its claim that it was responding to fire from Hamas. “The IDF admitted in that briefing that the attack on the UN site was unintentional,” UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness told Haaretz.

The UN now refuses to collude in the charade of humanitarian aid designed to be an adjunct for extending the military campaign. Three-hour relief windows don’t really work when the IDF starts killing relief workers who have been assured “safe passage.” Listen to NPR’s report on Israel’s apparent inability (or unwillingness) to honor its word.

Pointing to the likelihood that by the end of this war, Israel will have accomplished nothing — at a tremendous price — an editorial in Haaretz said:

Substantive gaps are emerging between Livni, on the one hand, and Barak and Olmert on the other. The latter two want to reach, with the help of Egypt and the United States, an agreement that will secure calm for some time in the south and prevent Hamas from getting stronger in the Gaza Strip. In other words, they will make do with a calm similar to the one that existed on the eve of Operation Cast Lead. Livni insists that a deal should not be allowed to be interpreted as recognition of Hamas. She is concerned that returning to the framework of the lull, which allowed Hamas to arm itself, could restore the group’s military advantage, and she would support a unilateral withdrawal from the Strip, without an agreement, with the understanding that any attempt to attack Israel will be met with severity.

The two positions are reasonable and backed by good arguments, but the conclusion of both is the same: The fighting needs to stop now and the IDF should exit Gaza immediately. After all, while they are debating, the pressure from within and from without is growing. The head of Military Intelligence said yesterday that the IDF is fighting in Gaza in areas that “are crowded and full of traps, between schools and mosques.”

By this he bolstered the assumption, which appears to be self evident, that the more the forces advance, the more complicated the situation will become, fraught with dangers, for both the military and civilians.

In the International Herald Tribune, Gideon Lichfield wrote:

Israel needs instead to abandon its military concept of deterrence in favor of a more pragmatic political one. What could deter Hamas is the fear that by using violence it will lose support among its people.

How to create this? It is worth remembering that Israel launched its operation after the breakdown of a cease-fire that had held, reasonably well, for several months. Each side accused the other of breaching it, both with some justification. Instead of trying to re-establish the cease-fire, Israel’s leaders, driven by the need to bolster their ratings ahead of an election in February, decided to try to strike a decisive blow against Hamas.

What Israel should do now is work for a cease-fire on terms that allow both sides to save some face. It should then do something it has done far too little of in the past: improve Gazans’ living conditions significantly. The aim should be to construct a long-lived state of calm in which Hamas has more to lose by breaching the cease-fire than by sticking to it.

In the longer term Israel will have to accept that Hamas is no fringe movement that can be rooted out and destroyed, but a central part of Palestinian society. This will be the hard part, not least because of the opposition from Hamas’ secularist Palestinian rivals, Fatah.

But even though Hamas’s stated goal is Israel’s destruction, it has said many times that it would accept a truce extending decades. Some former Israeli security chiefs argue that such an accommodation – a peace treaty in all but name – would eventually oblige Hamas to accept Israel’s existence, or else lose its own base of support. It is a gamble, certainly. But the alternative is more innocent lives lost, more extremism and ultimately more trouble for Israel.

TONY KARON: The war isn’t over, but Israel has lost

The war isn’t over, but Israel has lost
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, January 9, 2009

Repeating behaviors that have produced catastrophic failures and expecting a different result is insane; and when a person’s psychotic behavior puts himself those around him in immediate physical danger, the responsibility of those who claim to be his friends is to restrain him. But even as Waltz With Bashir shows in multiplexes across the world as a grim reminder of the precedent for Israel’s brutal march of folly in Gaza, the U.S. (and the editors of the New York Times and Washington Post) insist that there is a sanity and rationality to sending one of the world’s most powerful armies into a giant refugee camp to rend the flesh and crush the bones of those who stand in its way — whether in defiance or by being unlucky enough to have been born of the wrong tribe and be huddling in the wrong place. By fighting its way to their citadel, they would have us believe, Israel can destroy Hamas and usher in a golden age of peace. Or, to borrow from the casual callousness of Condi Rice during the last such display of futile brutality, we are witnessing, again, the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” Israel failed in 2006, just as in 2002 and 1982. This time, they tell us, will be different.

And then the horror unfolds, as it always does — the hundreds of civilians butchered as they cowered in what they were told were places of safety, mocking the Israel’s torrent of self congratulation over its restraint and its brilliant intelligence — and the hopelessly out-gunned enemy manages to survive, as he does every time. And by surviving, grows stronger politically. No matter how many are killed, the leaders targeted by Israel’s military are endlessly regenerated in the fertile soil of grievance and resentment born of the circumstances Israel has created. Circumstances it has created, but which it, and its most fervent backers refuse to acknowledge, much less redress. [continued…]

EDITORIAL: The consequences of moral paralysis

Israel (and a world that looks the other way) is in the grip of a moral paralysis
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 8, 2009

“We had no choice,” has become Israel’s national mantra.

But to say “we had no choice,” is to say our actions are not the fruit of our intentions. We are now the instrument of the will of others. Hamas made us do this.

There would be more moral clarity in simply declaring that Israel is a mighty power that has no compunction about the effects of its ruthless efforts to crush its enemies.

Instead, Israel wants to have it both ways: to demonstrate its might even while portraying itself as a helpless victim.

From Avi Shlaim we learn that this moral two-step actually has a name in Hebrew: bokhim ve-yorim. It means “crying and shooting.”

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted – a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, “crying and shooting”.

In one of the latest examples of Israel’s abnigation of responsibility for its own actions, we learn that several children have spent the last few days starving as they huddle next to the bodies of their dead mothers. The Washington Post reports:

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday that it had found at least 15 bodies and several children — emaciated but alive — in a row of shattered houses in the Gaza Strip and accused the Israeli military of preventing ambulances from reaching the site for four days.

Red Cross officials said rescue crews had received specific reports of casualties in the houses and had been trying since Saturday to send ambulances to the area, located in Zaytoun, a neighborhood south of Gaza City. They said the Israeli military did not grant permission until Wednesday afternoon.

In an unusual public statement issued by its Geneva headquarters, the Red Cross called the episode “unacceptable” and said the Israeli military had “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded.”

When rescue workers from the Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent arrived at the site, they found 12 corpses lying on mattresses in one home, along with four young children lying next to their dead mothers, the Red Cross said. The children were too weak to stand and were rushed to a hospital, the agency said.

This is what happens when a military force, its commanders, its government and the population cheering on this war believes that it has “no choice.”

This is the twilight zone of moral paralysis in which evil takes on the disguise of “necessity.”

MUST READ: Avi Shlaim puts the Gaza catastrophe in its historical context

How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
By Avi Shlaim, The Guardian, January 7, 2009

The only way to make sense of Israel’s senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza’s prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion’s share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace. [continued…]

EDITORIAL: Israeli propaganda campaign downplays the success of the truce – UPDATED

Israeli propaganda campaign downplays the success of the truce
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 4, 2009

(UPDATE: Since the graphs appearing below have been removed from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) website, some readers might have doubts about there authenticity. However, Jeffrey Goldberg who blogs at the Atlantic, has kindly alerted me to the source that the MFA continues to cite for its statistics on rocket fire from Gaza in 2008. The graphs I reproduced can be found in that document.

Goldberg writes: “Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs cites this report [PDF] that claims that 362 rockets and mortars were fired into Israel from Gaza into Israel during what the report calls the ‘lull’ in the fighting. I think it’s fair to say that, though the numbers of rocket and mortar attacks dropped off dramatically during the ceasefire, there were, indeed, attacks.”

What Goldberg fails to point out is that of these 362 rockets and mortars fired, 324 were launched after Israel broke the ceasefire on November 4, 2008. During the period in which the ceasefire was being maintained by both Hamas and Israel from June 18 until November 4, there were a total of 38 fired. This averages 8.5 rocket and mortar attacks per month. As far as I am aware, none of these were conducted by Hamas and the level of attacks can be seen as a measure of the effectiveness (not absolute) with which Hamas was able to reign in other militant groups such as Islamic Jihad.)
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For four months, from Summer into Fall, the truce between Israel and Hamas was a stunning success. Indeed, if Israel doubted Hamas’ ability or willingness to engage in a truce, the Jewish state would have had no reason to request that the truce be extended as its expiration approached and passed in late December.

But now is a time of war and not only is talk of a truce being ruled out by the authors of this war but history is being re-written in order to degrade the value of a ceasefire. The memory of a period of recent calm that was the most durable peace that the residents of southern Israel have experienced in recent years must now be erased.

The Israeli government’s own graphical representation of the calm told the story in terms that even a child could understand. This is the graph that the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs displayed on its web site demonstrating that from July to October, rocket fire, if not reduced to a perfect zero, came stunningly close. From an average of 179 rockets per month in the preceding period of 2008, the number fell to just three per month:

Now that the Israeli propaganda machine is revved up to full throttle, the image of an effective truce no longer suits the Israeli government’s purposes. Instead it has become more convenient to try and hide the numbers — with numbers! The foreign ministry has thus removed the simple graph shown above and replaced it with this:

In the earlier image, graph blocks dramatically portrayed the rise and fall in rocket fire rates. In the revised image, blocks of equal size (containing numbers) are used to obscure the graph. The effect, clearly intended, is to try and portray the lull as really nothing more than a minor undulation in a period of unremitting attacks.

The message Israel now wants to sell is that the truce never really worked. Instead of acknowledging that the truce effectively collapsed when Israel launched Operation “Double Challenge” on November 5, the rocket fire that followed that Israeli raid is being used to obscure the fact that rocket fire had effectively been curtailed up to that point.*

On the IDF Spokesman web site, a post on rocket statistics simply omits the part of the record that Israel now finds inconvenient to acknowledge:

Between Hamas’ takeover and the start of the Tahadiya (State of Calm), (June 14, 2007 – June 16, 2008), there was an average of over 361 attacks per month—an increase of an additional 350%.

On Nov. 4 – 5, Israel launched Operation “Double Challenge”, targeting a tunnel Hamas was building as part of a plan to kidnap Israeli soldiers.

From the end of Operation “Double Challenge” until the end of the Tahadiya, (Nov. 4 – Dec. 19, 2008) a period of only a month and a half, there were 170 mortars, 255 Qassams, and 5 Grads fired upon Israel’s civilian population centers.

Since the end of the Tahadiya (Dec. 19, 2009) until the beginning of Operation “Cast Lead,” (Dec. 27, 2008) a period of little more than a week, there were approximately 300 mortars and rockets fired onto Israel.

Since the begining of Operation “Cast Lead”, there have been an additional 500 launches, 284 of which have been verified as rockets (both Qassams and Grads), and 113 as mortars.

Was four months of calm really worthless? Given that it became the precursor to war, the answer now apparently is yes.

But it didn’t have to turn out this way. The effectiveness with which Hamas enforced a truce should have provided the impetus for Israel to lift its economic siege of Gaza.

Instead, we are once again witness to Israel’s seemingly insatiable appetite for war, even while it never tires of professing its love of peace.

* Should anyone doubt that the Israeli raid (official declarations about Israel’s commitment to the truce notwithstanding) constituted a unilateral breach of the truce, consider what Israel and the world’s response would have been in the event that the raid had been launched from Gaza. Hamas gunmen conducted a raid inside Israeli territory, killing six Israeli soldiers.

That wouldn’t have been described as a breakdown in the truce; it would have been regarded as an act of war.