Category Archives: Gaza

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…]

Facebooktwittermail

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.

Facebooktwittermail

#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.

Facebooktwittermail

#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.

Facebooktwittermail

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…]

Facebooktwittermail

Amnesty demands U.S. stop arms transfers to #Israel amid growing evidence of #warcrimes in #Gaza

Amnesty: The US government must immediately end its ongoing deliveries of large quantities of arms to Israel, which are providing the tools to commit further serious violations of international law in Gaza, said Amnesty International, as it called for a total arms embargo on all parties to the conflict.

The call comes amid reports that the Pentagon has approved the immediate transfer of grenades and mortar rounds to the Israeli armed forces from a US arms stockpile pre-positioned in Israel, and follows a shipment of 4.3 tons of US-manufactured rocket motors, which arrived in the Israeli port of Haifa on 15 July.

These deliveries add to more than US$62 million worth of munitions, including guided missile parts and rocket launchers, artillery parts and small arms, already exported from the USA to Israel between January and May this year. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

UN chief: #Israel responsible for ‘reprehensible’ school attack

Colum Lynch reports: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon directly accused Israel of shelling a U.N.-protected shelter housing more than 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza as part of what he said was an “outrageous” and “unjustifiable” strike that left at least 16 civilians dead and lent urgency to the need for an “immediate, unconditional cease-fire.”

In a scorching rebuke from the normally mild-mannered diplomat, Ban charged that Israel’s action constituted a “reprehensible” assault on civilians and demanded that those responsible for the strike be held accountable. The shelling of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School marked the fifth time since the conflict began on July 8 that a U.N.-protected shelter has been hit with incoming fire, but the incident is the first time that Ban has directly blamed Israel. That leaves open the possibility that some of the other facilities were hit by Hamas rockets. Israeli officials have said the militant group stores weapons in U.N. facilities and uses them to fire rockets into the Jewish state.

“This morning, yet another United Nations school sheltering thousands of Palestinian families suffered a reprehensible attack. All available evidence points to Israeli artillery as the cause,” Ban said during a stop-off in Costa Rica. “Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

American Jews are distancing themselves from #Israel

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

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

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

Facebooktwittermail

After #Gaza, #Palestine’s uprising will spread to the West Bank

Khaled Elgindy writes: Given the intensity of the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, it is easy to forget that the current crisis began in a different part of Palestine. The kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank led to a severe Israeli crackdown on Hamas, which responded with a barrage of rocket fire at Israel from Gaza. Meanwhile, the murder of a Palestinian teenager by Jewish extremists sparked several days of violent protests by Palestinians in East Jerusalem and elsewhere. The shift in venue served Israel’s interests, diverting the conflict away from sensitive and strategically vulnerable areas. For Israeli policymakers, another concentrated war against Gaza was preferable to the possibility of another West Bank uprising against Israel, akin to the so-called intifadas that occurred in the late 1980s and the early 2000s. Contrary to what Israelis may have hoped, however, the present war has made a third intifada more, not less, likely.

For most of the past decade, Israel’s de facto policy has been to deepen Palestinian geographic and political division by maintaining the schism between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Although the current Israeli government has made no secret of its opposition to any Palestinian government that includes or is even accepted by Hamas, which it views as a vicious terrorist organization that is beyond the political pale, Israel’s policy of isolating Gaza from the West Bank began before Hamas’ rise to power. In fact, it was the closure of Gaza’s borders in late 2005 shortly after Israel unilaterally removed its settlers and soldiers from Gaza that helped pave the way for Hamas’ election and created the conditions for the endless cycle of violence in Gaza that we see today. As Dov Weissglas, chief of staff to Israel’s former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, put it at the time, Israel’s disengagement from Gaza would serve as “formaldehyde … so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” By cutting Gaza loose, along with its 1.5 million Palestinians, Israel could then focus on consolidating its control over and colonization of the West Bank.

Since then Israel, with U.S. and international backing, has treated Palestine as two separate conflicts, rather than one. By maintaining security cooperation and a diplomatic relationship with Fatah in the West Bank, Israel hoped to maintain calm in areas adjacent to its main population centers as well the settlement project itself. At the same time, by treating Hamas-controlled Gaza as a perpetual “enemy entity,” subject to air, land, and sea blockades, Israel reserved the right to periodically go to war against Gaza, a process that Israeli military officials refer to as “mowing the grass.” In this way, Israel would free itself from having to deal with the underlying causes of the conflict, most notably its 46-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This has produced the worst of all possible outcomes, simultaneously increasing the likelihood of violent confrontations with Hamas while decreasing the likelihood of resolving the conflict with Abbas’ PA. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. resupplies Israel with munitions as Gaza offensive rages

Reuters reports: The United States has allowed Israel, waging an offensive in the Gaza Strip, to tap a local U.S. arms stockpile in the past week to resupply it with grenades and mortar rounds, a U.S. defense official said on Thursday.

The munitions were located inside Israel as part of a program managed by the U.S. military and called War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel (WRSA-I), which stores munitions locally for U.S. use that Israel can also access in emergency situations.

Israel, however, did not cite an emergency when it made its latest request about 10 days ago, the defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The United States allowed Israel to access the strategic stockpile anyway to resupply itself with 40mm grenades and 120mm mortar rounds to deplete older stocks that would eventually need to be refreshed. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Goliath is still pounding David into the dust

Andrew Sullivan writes: I have only one thing to add to the endless news of Israel’s brutal, unrelenting onslaught in Gaza: and it’s at the very end of a live TV interview Chris Gunness did today. Gunness is the head of the UN’s Relief and Works Agency in Gaza. Israel bombed another of their schools today, killing children sleeping in a place they thought was safe. This seems to me to be the only human response:

I’m trying to restrain my emotions for the sake of intellectual clarity. In that spirit, a reader rightly noted how the US, in Afghanistan, has also killed children in collateral damage. That’s undeniable, and because we do not have video or photographs of the aftermath of drone strikes, we may be, in Gaza, seeing something that we too have done in counter-terrorism, and not fully owned. An independent study – at variance with official statistics – came to the following, harrowing conclusion:

“TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562 – 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474 – 881 were civilians, including 176 children. TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228 – 1,362 individuals,” according to the Stanford/NYU study.

I cannot verify this – but I do not dispute the core point it makes. Singling out Israel for blame in atrocities is unfair when the US has done exactly the same – and when the level of sheer annihilation and misery in, say, Syria rivals and easily surpasses the gruesome toll and utter devastation in Gaza. But there are differences as well. The grimmest survey finds that the US killed 176 children over eight years; Israel has now killed over 250 children in a few weeks. And Syria is a full-scale civil war with evenly matched forces. Gaza is utterly at the mercy of Israel, whose Iron Dome has kept civilian Israeli deaths to a bare minimum. So this is truly a Goliath vs David moment in Gaza. And Goliath is still pounding David into the dust.

Facebooktwittermail

Poll: More than 50% of Jewish Israelis think Netanyahu is being too soft on Gaza

Kerry-Anne Mendoza writes: A poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute at Tel Aviv University has found that just 4% of Jewish Israelis believe excessive force has been used on Gaza, while more then 50% argue not enough.

Before we move on, it is worth a brief reminder of the devastating results of the attacks on Gaza. Here are the losses from the UN’s latest report:

Yet according to Strategist Roni Rimon, who sponsored the poll, Netanyahu would pay a political price at home if he pushed for peace:

All the compliments Netanyahu has received for running the operation, his restraint, thinking things through, and obtaining international support will be lost and will be replaced with criticism. But this is the test of a leader. If he believes that the greater good of Israel requires a cease-fire because of relations with the United States and the international community, he will put ratings aside and do what he thinks is right. We shall wait and see.

Another poll released Monday showed similar results. The poll showcased that less than 10% of Israeli Jews supported a ceasefire with Hamas, while 86.5% opposed ceasefire.

Something truly toxic is spreading across Israel. It’s called fascism, and it manifests itself in the words and deeds of lawmakers, troops and ordinary citizens. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘The world stands disgraced’ as Israel bombs another UN school

UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl said: Last night, children were killed as they slept next to their parents on the floor of a classroom in a UN designated shelter in Gaza. Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today the world stands disgraced.

We have visited the site and gathered evidence. We have analysed fragments, examined craters and other damage. Our initial assessment is that it was Israeli artillery that hit our school, in which 3,300 people had sought refuge. We believe there were at least three impacts. It is too early to give a confirmed official death toll. But we know that there were multiple civilian deaths and injuries including of women and children and the UNRWA guard who was trying to protect the site. These are people who were instructed to leave their homes by the Israeli army.

The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times, to ensure its protection; the last being at ten to nine last night, just hours before the fatal shelling. [Continue reading…]

Amnesty International says the attack should be investigated as a possible war crime.

Facebooktwittermail

Gaza and Syria: Mutual struggle, mutual solidarity

leilashrooms writes: I spent a lot of time in Gaza during the first two years of the Syrian revolution. Unlike in other social contexts, where I often hesitated to talk about Syria fearful of having to deal with stupid reactions or banal analysis, in Gaza this wasn’t an issue with people I met. People in Gaza who experience terror on a daily basis never failed to ask me how my family in Syria was doing, or express their solidarity with the Syrian uprising against the terror of the Assad regime. Through their own experience, they empathized with the suffering of the Syrian people, understood their desire for freedom and supported their resistance to tyranny.

The news that well over a thousand people have been killed in Israel’s latest onslaught on Gaza is sickening. One of the most advanced militaries in the world is raining down bombs on 1.8 million people, over half of them children. There is no place for Gazans to escape or to seek shelter and protection with their families. They are under blockade, locked into an open air prison, in one of the most densely populated places on earth. Whole families have been massacred; houses destroyed; hospitals, schools and essential services such as water and electricity supply have been targeted. It is horror beyond words.

Once again the Zionist State continues its onslaught with the acquiescence, or worse, the direct complicity of regional powers who have never done anything better than voice empty rhetoric in support of the Palestinian resistance. In fact, they have done far worse. Sisi’s regime in Egypt collaborates with Israel to maintain the blockade, and with both Israel and Saudi Arabia to pressure the Palestinian resistance to submit to a ceasefire on Israel’s terms. Meanwhile, Sisi sends weapons to support Assad’s tyranny in Syria and crushes political opposition at home. The Assad regime, that supposed bastion of the Palestinian people’s struggle for liberation, has not fired one rocket in the direction of its border with Israel since 1973. Currently it busies itself with crushing the Palestinian people in Yarmouk Camp, Damascus, with its own crippling blockade, and raining bombs down on civilians in Aleppo. And the Palestinian Authority, with its illusory quasi-state trappings, has once again shown it’s nothing more than an Israeli and Western stooge contracted out in the service of the occupation and the Ramallah elite. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail