Category Archives: Israel

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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#Hamas has a modest demand: That #Israel honor its past agreements

Nathan Thrall writes: The current war in Gaza was not one Israel or Hamas sought. But both had no doubt that a new confrontation would come. The 21 November 2012 ceasefire that ended an eight-day-long exchange of Gazan rocket fire and Israeli aerial bombardment was never implemented. It stipulated that all Palestinian factions in Gaza would stop hostilities against Israel, that Israel would end attacks against Gaza by land, sea and air – including the ‘targeting of individuals’ (assassinations, typically by drone-fired missile) – and that the closure of Gaza would essentially end as a result of Israel’s ‘opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas’. An additional clause noted that ‘other matters as may be requested shall be addressed,’ a reference to private commitments by Egypt and the US to help thwart weapons smuggling into Gaza, though Hamas has denied this interpretation of the clause.

During the three months that followed the ceasefire, Shin Bet recorded only a single attack: two mortar shells fired from Gaza in December 2012. Israeli officials were impressed. But they convinced themselves that the quiet on Gaza’s border was primarily the result of Israeli deterrence and Palestinian self-interest. Israel therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza’s waters.

The end of the closure never came. Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones – agricultural lands that Gazan farmers couldn’t enter without being fired on – were reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank.

Israel had committed to holding indirect negotiations with Hamas over the implementation of the ceasefire but repeatedly delayed them, at first because it wanted to see whether Hamas would stick to its side of the deal, then because Netanyahu couldn’t afford to make further concessions to Hamas in the weeks leading up to the January 2013 elections, and then because a new Israeli coalition was being formed and needed time to settle in. The talks never took place. The lesson for Hamas was clear. Even if an agreement was brokered by the US and Egypt, Israel could still fail to honour it.

Yet Hamas largely continued to maintain the ceasefire to Israel’s satisfaction. [Continue reading…]

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Tweets from #Gaza contradict official U.S.-Israeli claims about collapse of ceasefire

Mondoweiss reports: The PLO and Palestinian Authority both insisted to Mondoweiss that Hamas fighters engaged Israeli soldiers inside Gaza well before the ceasefire took effect – and during an Israeli assault on Rafah leading up to the 8 AM ceasefire.

“They aborted the ceasefire from the beginning,” said Nabil Shaath from the PLO’s Central Committee. A veteran negotiator, Shaath has become the de facto liaison between the PLO and Hamas. He confirmed to Mondoweiss that PA President Mahmoud Abbas received a briefing from Hamas this morning on the incident near Rafah. Shaath’s account reflects details provided directly by Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip.

According to Shaath, at after 6 AM, Hamas fighters engaged Israeli forces in Rafah. He maintained that it was then — almost two hours before the ceasefire went into effect — that the two Israeli soldiers were killed and the other went missing.

Shaath’s account was supported by dispatches published before the ceasefire went into effect by the official Twitter account of Hamas’s Qassam Brigades military wing. In a tweet published at 7:34 AM on August 1, the Qassam Brigades stated, “At 7 AM a group [of Hamas fighters] clashed with [Israeli] forces east of Rafah and caused many injuries and death to them.” [Continue reading…]

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How can journalists be objective when writing about dead children?

Giles Frazer writes: I know that traditional journalism prides itself on maintaining a strict firewall between objective and subjective, between news and comment. The New York Times, for instance, has a separate management structure for each for precisely this reason. But isn’t this just a convenient fiction? I want the paper to write, in big bold capital letters: we hate this fucking stupid pointless war. “Reason is a slave to the passions,” as David Hume famously once put it.

I know, I know: this sort of emotion is not going to solve anything. But in the midst of unimaginable suffering, the idea of calm objectivity feels like a desperate attempt to maintain some thin veneer of civilisation protecting us from the total futility of it all. And when Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev, comes on the radio, intoning that false, calm sympathy straight out of the PR handbook, I want to scream. And the double frustration is that screaming is generally understood to be what you do when you have lost the argument. Whereas I can’t shake the feeling that, in these circumstances, screaming is the most rational thing to do. [Continue reading…]

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The war in #Gaza is a war against civilians

Martin Lejeune writes: I am in the Gaza Strip since the 22nd of July and still cannot believe what is happening here. I am experiencing the worst days of my life. All people in Gaza experience the worst days of their lives. Such massive attacks on Gaza are without precedent. Behind these words hide human tragedies. The humanitarian catastrophe has reached its peak.

The war in Gaza is a war against civilians. I am not the only one saying this, but also the people in Gaza alongside all the journalists that I speak to, who have covered all the wars of the past 10 years (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc…). What is happening here has a new quality. [Continue reading…]

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#Hamas denies taking missing #Israeli soldier

Al Jazeera reports: The al-Qasaam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, has denied capturing a missing Israeli soldier after Barack Obama, the US president, called for his release as a precondition for further ceasefire talks after the latest Gaza truce fell apart after just a few hours.

The Israeli army said Hadar Goldin, 23, went missing when its soldiers, two of whom were killed, were attacked while trying to destroy a Hamas tunnel in southern Gaza.

Obama’s comment at a White House news conference on Friday suggested the limited impact that diplomacy is having as the violence continues in the besieged strip.

“If they are serious about trying to resolve this situation, that soldier needs to be unconditionally released as soon as possible,” he said.

The al-Qasaam Brigades said: “We have no idea about where the Israeli soldier is or what is the situation.

“We lost contact with the group who made the suicide mission near Rafah after it was done.

“And we believe everyone in this group was killed by an Israeli airstrike including the Israeli soldier who the Israelis are talking about having disappeared.” [Continue reading…]

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On #Gaza, #Israel is losing the #Obama coalition

Peter Beinart writes: In Chicago, Barack Obama lived across the street from a very unusual synagogue, KAM Isaiah Israel, and its very unusual rabbi, Arnold Jacob Wolf. Wolf had been the founding chairman of Breira, the first American Jewish group to advocate a Palestinian state, and throughout his career, he passionately challenged Israeli settlement policies and the American Jewish organizations that justified them. In 1970, in words that could have been written this morning, Wolf denounced American Jewish leaders who, on the issue of Israel, “do not demand support, but rather submission…Any congregation whose allegiance is the least bit critical, any rabbi who holds independent views of the Middle Eastern situation, is eyed with suspicion, if not with downright hatred.”

Wolf liked Obama, but considered him timid. One month before Obama’s election, and three months before Wolf’s death, the octogenarian rabbi predicted that although Obama “knows more than most people do about the [Middle East] situation…he’s going to go very cautiously and not do anything that shakes up the Jewish community. I’m not sure I agree with that, but that’s what’s going to happen.”

Wolf was right. Obama has been cautious. He’s put far less pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu to stop settlement growth than George H.W. Bush put on Yitzhak Shamir. He’s been far more indulgent of Netanyahu’s war in Gaza than Ronald Reagan was of Shamir and Menachem Begin’s war in Lebanon.

But although Obama has not changed the American debate over Israel, the Obama coalition has. Look at the polls taken during this war. A majority of Americans defend Israel’s actions and blame Hamas for the violence. But among the demographic groups that backed Obama most strongly, it’s the reverse. First, young people. According to Gallup, while Americans over the age of 65 support Israel’s actions by a margin of 24 points, Americans under 30 oppose them by a margin of 26 points. Second, racial and ethnic minorities. White Americans back the war by 16 points. Non-whites oppose it by 24 points. Third, liberals. According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives are 54 points more likely to blame Hamas for the fighting than Israel. Among liberals, it’s tied. Continue reading →

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Racists are rampaging through #Israel

Philip Kleinfeld writes: In Israel, racism and extremism are exploding. It began shortly after the kidnapping of three Israeli boys—Naftali, Gilad and Eyal—in Gush Etzion, that led to the assault in Gaza which has seen over 1,000 killed. A Facebook page calling for the murder of Palestinians went viral. In one photo, a soldier posed broodingly with his gun, the word “vengeance” written on his chest. In another two teenage girls smiled happily with a banner that read: “Hating Arabs is not racism, it’s values.”

A few days later, at the boys’ funeral in Modiin, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu fanned the flames. “May God avenge their blood,” he said to the gathered mourners. “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created,” he tweeted later.

Bibi got his wish. Over the weeks that followed, videos began to emerge almost daily of right-wing mobs roving across cities from Jerusalem to Beer Sheva, waving Israeli flags and screaming “Death to Arabs!”

Many ended in physical assaults. Last Thursday two Palestinian men were attacked on Jaffer Street in West Jerusalem as they delivered food to a grocery market. The following day two more Palestinians, Amir Shwiki and Samer Mahfouz, were beaten unconscious in the Eastern part of the city by a gang of 30 young Israelis wielding sticks and metal bars. [Continue reading…]

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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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Arab ‘leaders,’ viewing #Hamas as worse than #Israel, quietly support destruction of #Gaza

The New York Times reports: Battling Palestinian militants in Gaza two years ago, Israel found itself pressed from all sides by unfriendly Arab neighbors to end the fighting.

Not this time.

After the military ouster of the Islamist government in Cairo last year, Egypt has led a new coalition of Arab states — including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — that has effectively lined up with Israel in its fight against Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip. That, in turn, may have contributed to the failure of the antagonists to reach a negotiated cease-fire even after more than three weeks of bloodshed.

“The Arab states’ loathing and fear of political Islam is so strong that it outweighs their allergy to Benjamin Netanyahu,” the prime minister of Israel, said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington and a former Middle East negotiator under several presidents.

“I have never seen a situation like it, where you have so many Arab states acquiescing in the death and destruction in Gaza and the pummeling of Hamas,” he said. “The silence is deafening.” [Continue reading…]

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Senate blocks aid to #Israel

Politico reports: In the end, the Senate couldn’t even agree to deliver emergency aid to one of the United States’ closest allies.

A last-ditch effort to deliver aid to Israel during its war with Hamas died on the Senate floor, as Republicans blocked the proposal over concerns that it would increase the debt.

After Senate Republicans blocked Democrats’ $2.7 billion border aid package, which also included $225 million for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system and $615 million to fight Western wildfires, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tried to split off the Israel and wildfire money as a standalone bill, hoping to put aside the dispute over border funding and appeal to Republicans’ deep ties to Israel.

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Why are American journalists afraid of asking #Israeli officials tough questions?

Chris McGreal writes: Here are a few questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza:

What would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land?
What does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine’s right to exist?
What should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s was found addressing rallies under a banner reading “Death to Arabs”?

These are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won’t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism.

But it’s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all.

In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation.

So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked. [Continue reading…]

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Can Palestinian men be victims? Gendering #Israel’s war on #Gaza

Maya Mikdashi writes: Every morning we wake up to an updated butcher’s bill: one hundred, two hundred, four hundred, six hundred Palestinians killed by Israel’s war apparatus. These numbers gloss over many details: the majority of Gazans, one of the most populated and impoverished areas in the world, are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine. It is under a brutal siege, and there is nowhere to hide from Israel’s onslaught. Before this “war” Gaza was a form of quarantine, a population held captive and colonized by Israel’s ability to break international law with impunity. They are population in a relationship of dependency — for food, for water, medicine, even for movement — with their colonizers. In the event of a ceasefire, Gaza will remain colonized, quarantined, and blockaded. It will remain an open-air prison, a mass refugee camp.

One detail about the dead, however, is repeated often in Western-based mass media: the vast majority of murdered Palestinians in Gaza are civilians — and sources say that a “disproportionate” number are women and children. The killing of women and children is horrific — but in the reiteration of these disturbing facts there is something missing: the public mourning of Palestinian men killed by Israel’s war machine. In 1990 Cynthia Enloe coined the term “womenandchildren” in order to think about the operationalization of gendered discourses to justify the first Gulf War. Today, we should be aware of how the trope of “womenandchildren” is circulating in relation to Gaza and to Palestine more broadly. This trope accomplishes many discursive feats, two of which are most prominent: The massifying of women and children into an undistinguishable group brought together by the “sameness” of gender and sex, and the reproduction of the male Palestinian body (and the male Arab body more generally) as always already dangerous. Thus the status of male Palestinians (a designation that includes boys aged fifteen and up, and sometimes boys as young as thirteen) as “civilians” is always circumspect.

This gendering of Israel’s war on Gaza is conversant with discourses of the War on Terror and, as Laleh Khalili has argued persuasively, counter-insurgency strategy and war-making more broadly. In this framework, the killing of women and girls and pre-teen and underage boys is to be marked, but boys and men are presumed guilty of what they might do if allowed to live their lives. [Continue reading…]

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Is #IronDome better at destroying missiles or spreading fear?

A Dutch-Israeli family from Amsterdam, Hilla Dayan and PW Zuidhof with their three small children, are taking a “war vacation” in Tel Aviv. They write that as “Israeli and Dutch citizens who want to see an end to the occupation our politics combined with the fact that we don’t live in Israel makes us outsiders, if not outright ‘traitors.'”

Letter from Tel Aviv: It took us few rather disorienting days here to slowly come to the conclusion that the palpable collective fear is disproportionate to the actual threat.

Government propaganda, lies and deceptions to galvanize support for the war is relentless and the Iron Dome system, the system that intercepts Hamas rockets, is just part of it. An expert opinion according to which the Israeli population is almost 100% safe even without it because of the inferiority of Hamas’ weapons and the abundance of shelter infrastructure seemed credible. Deep inside, we believe, everyone knows that the chance something will happen to you here is statistically negligible. It can happen, like the chance of dying in a shocking aviation disaster as what happened this summer to hundreds of Dutch citizens, but it is very unlikely.

One commentator rightly said that Iron Dome functions as the Deus-ex-Machina of this war. Everyone but us is convinced it saves lives. We see it more as a psychological warfare device. Curiously, much of the explosion sound that gets people so worked up here is largely produced by the Iron Dome system itself. What is striking if not outright suspicious is that there is hardly any information in the aftermath of interceptions; we know nothing about it and nobody cares. [Continue reading…]

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