Music: Imogen Heap — ‘Cycle Song’
The architects of the latest war on Gaza
Israel strongly opposed American recognition of the new government… and sought to isolate it internationally, seeing any small step toward Palestinian unity as a threat. Israel’s security establishment objects to the strengthening of West Bank-Gaza ties, lest Hamas raise its head in the West Bank. And Israelis who oppose a two-state solution understand that a unified Palestinian leadership is a prerequisite for any lasting peace.
Still, despite its opposition to the reconciliation agreement, Israel continued to transfer the tax revenues it collects on the Palestinian Authority’s behalf, and to work closely with the new government, especially on security cooperation.
But the key issues of paying Gaza’s civil servants and opening the border with Egypt were left to fester. The new government’s ostensible supporters, especially the United States and Europe, could have pushed Egypt to ease border restrictions, thereby demonstrating to Gazans that Hamas rule had been the cause of their isolation and impoverishment. But they did not.
Instead, after Hamas transferred authority to a government of pro-Western technocrats, life in Gaza became worse.
Qatar had offered to pay Gaza’s 43,000 civil servants, and America and Europe could have helped facilitate that. But Washington warned that American law prohibited any entity delivering payment to even one of those employees — many thousands of whom are not members of Hamas but all of whom are considered by American law to have received material support from a terrorist organization.
When a United Nations envoy offered to resolve this crisis by delivering the salaries through the United Nations, so as to exclude all parties from legal liability, the Obama administration did not assist. Instead, it stood by as Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, called for the envoy’s expulsion on the grounds that he was “trying to funnel money” to Hamas.
Hamas is now seeking through violence what it couldn’t obtain through a peaceful handover of responsibilities. Israel is pursuing a return to the status quo ante, when Gaza had electricity for barely eight hours a day, water was undrinkable, sewage was dumped in the sea, fuel shortages caused sanitation plants to shut down and waste sometimes floated in the streets. Patients needing medical care couldn’t reach Egyptian hospitals, and Gazans paid $3,000 bribes for a chance to exit when Egypt chose to open the border crossing.
For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it’s worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. [Continue reading…]
Israelis cheer as rockets rain down on Gaza
Israelis cheer as rockets start to rain down along the #Gaza strip. @CNNVideo: http://t.co/q6AeqEMmGG pic.twitter.com/j6PjbzZbLI
— CNN (@CNN) July 17, 2014
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that there are an estimated 57,900 children in Gaza who have experienced death, injury or loss of home over the past ten days and require direct and specialized psychosocial support.
The Palestinian fatality toll since the start of the latest Israeli assault is now 230. According to preliminary information, at least 74 percent (171 people) are civilians, 48 of whom are children and 31 women.
1,764 Palestinians have been injured, of whom 521 are children and 372 women.
22,900 displaced people hosted at UNRWA shelters are in need of emergency food assistance.
This evening, the Gaza health ministry has updated the death toll to 247, with 1910 people injured.
And meanwhile Israelis in Sderot are cheering.
Mondoweiss reports: The Israeli military has destroyed el-Wafa rehabilitation hospital in the Gaza Strip, after first targeting the facility with five missiles on July 11, 2014. The Israeli military began striking the building around 8:oo pm this evening and within two hours all hospital staff and patients had evacuated the only rehabilitation center in the Gaza Strip. As they departed what remained intact from the medical center burned to the ground.
“It’s already destroyed,” said Basman Alashi, director of el-Wafa, continuing, “I don’t know how much is left of it, but we have evacuated all of our patients. We lost power, there was a fire in the building.”
Alashi spoke to me via telephone from his house in Gaza, unable to cross the Israeli shelling to reach the hospital. “I left the hospital at seven and within two hours they had bombed the hospital.” Shells hit every floor of the building, and a fire spread throughout.
Hamas leader says Israel must ‘lift siege’ of Gaza before any ceasefire
The Telegraph reports: Hamas has ruled out a ceasefire deal unless Israel “lifts the siege” on Gaza, the organisation’s political chief has told The Telegraph.
In his first interview since the recent conflict in Gaza, Khaled Meshaal has said his organisation will not accept a simple cessation of fire by both sides, and that the deal must include long term commitments to improve the “rights of the Palestinian people”.
With mediators gathered in Cairo in an effort find a solution to a conflict that has already seen more than two hundred Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes, Mr Meshaal, for the first time, laid out the demands of his organisation.
He said that Israel must “stop the aggression” of air strikes against targets in Gaza, release the dozens of Palestinians detained in response to last month’s kidnapping of three Israeli students in the West Bank, and “end the siege on Gaza permanently”.
“These are our clear demands,” said Mr Meshaal. “We won’t accept an agreement that prolongs the suffering of our people anymore. In Gaza, for the past seven years of siege, its 1.8 million people have been living in a prison.”
The demands go much further than a return to the truce brokered in Cairo in 2012, to put an end to eight days of fighting in the Gaza strip.
That truce included a pledge to open a border crossing, intending to ease the blockade of the coastal enclave.
On Thursday, Mr Meshaal said that an easing of the restrictions was no longer acceptable and that Hamas would stop at nothing short of a “full and permanent” lifting of the blockade that, as well as regulating the traffic of people and goods at the border crossing, forbids trade from Gaza’s port.
Since General Abdul Fatah Sisi, who considers Hamas a terrorist organisation, became president of Egypt earlier this year, Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt has also remained mostly closed. [Continue reading…]
Israel launches Gaza ground invasion
Al Jazeera reports: Israeli tanks entered Gaza on Thursday night after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a ground invasion, a major escalation in a ten-day offensive that has already killed more than 230 Palestinians.
Witnesses in Gaza reported heavy bombing from jets, warships and artillery stationed along the border, with much of the firing was directed at northern Gaza. The electricity was cut off across a large swathe of the strip, though it was unclear why.
A statement from Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon described the invasion as focused on destroying tunnels connecting Gaza to Israel.
A group of gunmen tried to enter southern Israel through a tunnel from Gaza on Thursday morning; the army said eight of the 13 attackers were killed, and Hamas claimed responsibility for the operation. It was the second such incident in the past ten days. [Continue reading…]
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.
NBC News pulls Mohyeldin from Gaza after witnessing Israelis kill four children
Glenn Greenwald writes: Despite this powerful first-hand reporting [on Israeli attacks which killed four boys on a Gaza beach yesterday] – or perhaps because of it – [NBC News correspondent Ayman] Mohyeldin was nowhere to be seen on last night’s NBC Nightly News broadcast with Brian Williams. Instead, as Media Bistro’s Jordan Charlton noted, NBC curiously had Richard Engel – who was in Tel Aviv, and had just arrived there an hour or so earlier – “report” on the attack. Charlton wrote that “the decision to have Engel report the story for ‘Nightly’ instead of Mohyeldin angered some NBC News staffers.”
Indeed, numerous NBC employees, including some of the network’s highest-profile stars, were at first confused and then indignant over the use of Engel rather than Mohyeldin to report the story. But what they did not know, and what has not been reported until now, is that Mohyeldin was removed completely from reporting on Gaza by a top NBC executive, David Verdi, who ordered Mohyeldin to leave Gaza immediately.
Over the last two weeks, Mohyeldin’s reporting has been far more balanced and even-handed than the standard pro-Israel coverage that dominates establishment American press coverage; his reports have provided context to the conflict that is missing from most American reports and he avoids adopting Israeli government talking points as truth. As a result, neocon and “pro-Israel” websites have repeatedly attacked him as a “Hamas spokesman” and spouting “pro-Hamas rants.” [Continue reading…]
Malaysia Airlines plane disappears over Ukraine, feared shot down by missile
Spokesman for Ukrainian armed forces tells BuzzFeed they can’t reach MH17 crash site, under rebel control. Says rebels took MH17’s black box
— Mike Giglio (@mike_giglio) July 17, 2014
The Washington Post reports: Malaysia Airlines said Thursday that it lost contact with an airliner that was flying in Ukrainian airspace, raising fears that the plane may have been shot down over eastern Ukraine.
“We lost contact with Flight MH17 in Ukraine,” said Najmuddin Abdullah, who works in Malaysia Airlines’ press office.
An adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister wrote on Facebook that a Buk antiaircraft missile system shot down the plane over the village of Torez, about 25 miles east of the city of Donetsk and within territory held by pro-Russian separatist rebels.
The plane was carrying 280 passengers and 15 crew members, Anton Herashchenko, the Interior Ministry adviser, wrote on his Facebook page, without revealing how he knew the information. He blamed the rebels for the attack.
Julia Ioffe writes: Russian state media reported in late June indicate the rebels got a hold of a Buk missile system, a Russian/Soviet surface to air system. Rebels are now denying that they shot down the plane, but there are now screenshots floating around the Russian-language internet from what seems to be the Facebook page of Igor Strelkov, a rebel leader in eastern Ukraine, showing plumes of smoke and bragging about shooting down a Ukrainian military Antonov plane shortly before MaH 17 fell. “Don’t fly in our skies,” he reportedly wrote. If that’s true, it would seem rebels downed the jetliner, having mistaken it for a Ukrainian military jet.
This all has to be confirmed, though the separatists did issue statements saying they downed an Antonov this morning and took five of its crew members hostage. There is also an off-chance that the Ukrainian miliatry did it, having also declared a no-fly zone in the area recently. The rebels are, of course, busily blaming the Ukrainian military.
UNRWA strongly condemns placement of rockets in school
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East: Yesterday, in the course of the regular inspection of its premises, UNRWA discovered approximately 20 rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip. UNRWA strongly condemns the group or groups responsible for placing the weapons in one of its installations. This is a flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law. This incident, which is the first of its kind in Gaza, endangered civilians including staff and put at risk UNRWA’s vital mission to assist and protect Palestine refugees in Gaza.
Immediately after discovery, the Agency informed the relevant parties and successfully took all necessary measures for the removal of the objects in order to preserve the safety and security of the school. UNRWA has launched a comprehensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding this incident.
UNRWA has strong, established procedures to maintain the neutrality of all its premises, including a strict no-weapons policy and routine inspections of its installations, to ensure they are only used for humanitarian purposes. UNRWA will uphold and further reinforce its procedures.
Palestinian civilians in Gaza rely on UNRWA to provide humanitarian assistance and shelter. At all times, and especially during escalations of violence, the sanctity and integrity of UN installations must be respected.
Life and death in Aleppo: ‘You don’t get used to fear’
As Israel has once again been brutally collectively punishing the population of Gaza, the misery not far away in Syria has continued while attracting a small fraction of the world’s attention. This year, in Aleppo alone, 2,000 people have been killed with 560 of them children. The principle instrument of death has been barrel bombs dropped by the Assad air force.
A Syrian correspondent for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting writes: “Three barrel bombs, two missiles, five mortars… No, no the last explosion is caused by a barrel not a mortar.” This is the first discussion I have with my half-asleep self while turning off my morning alarm. I still use an alarm even though one is provided by the noise of missiles landing nearby.
It takes a couple of minutes to recognise where I am. Had I been told three years ago that I would be living in Aleppo, Syria’s second city, in the middle of war, an expert in distinguishing explosives by their noise, I would have laughed. Before the war, I was living in Damascus. Before the war, the regime had for many years been quietly imprisoning those who opposed it, but I didn’t know about the political prisoners until I went to university. Then I discovered that many of my relatives were killed in the 1980s when, in response to an uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood, the regime massacred thousands, including civilians, in the city of Hama.
Bringing myself back to today, I make my coffee while reading Facebook to see what damage last night’s bombings caused. I am lucky to have the money to pay for a satellite internet connection. This is the only way to get online here in the rebel-held areas of Syria because for almost two years all means of communication have been cut — landlines, the mobile network and the internet — as collective punishment for areas that rebelled against the regime. Fighters and activists use walkie-talkies but as a woman I am not allowed to use one. This area of the city has long been very conservative and women don’t participate in public life; now it is also a frontline in a warzone, even more of a male-only domain. [Continue reading…]
Weeks of combat in Iraq show Shiite militias have few offensive capabilities
McClatchy reports: The sectarian Shiite militias that the government in Baghdad has dispatched to fill the void created by the collapse of the Iraqi army are proving ill-equipped for offensive operations intended to reverse gains by the radical Islamic State, Iraqi soldiers and military experts studying the current military situation have concluded.
The inadequacy of the militias to turn the tide was demonstrated again on Wednesday six miles south of Tikrit, the central Iraqi city that Islamic State fighters seized June 11 and that Iraqi forces and Shiite fighters have been trying to reclaim for more than two weeks.
Local residents and Iraqi media reported that the Iraqi military backed by militias attempted to push through the town of Awja toward Tikrit but were beaten back by heavy machine-gun and mortar fire from Islamic State positions.
“It was a big battle and the Iraqi army and the Iranian militias have gone,” said one local resident, whose reference to the Shiite militias as Iranians is common, if inaccurate, in heavily Sunni regions of Iraq. “They withdrew to a base south of Awja.” The resident declined to be identified for security reasons.
A Twitter account associated with the Islamic State posted photographs of what it said was the aftermath of the fighting, including images of burning armored vehicles and at least one destroyed pickup truck emblazoned with the logo of SWAT, a highly trained Iraqi army special forces unit. The photographs were consistent with descriptions of the fighting, the units present and the location of the battle, though their authenticity could not be confirmed.
The apparent defeat underscored a growing sense that the Iraqi security forces have misplaced their hopes that the Shiite militias would prove decisive in the fight against the Islamic State. While the militias are given credit for stopping the Islamic State’s advance on cities such as Samarra, home of a major Shiite religious shrine, and Baghdad, they’ve proved ineffective in retaking ground. Their casualties apparently have been high. [Continue reading…]
UN ends border ban to bring food to millions of desperate Syrians
AFP reports: Aid agencies said Tuesday they were ready to truck desperately-needed supplies to 2.9 million more Syrians after the UN Security Council finally passed a resolution backing cross-border convoys.
“UN agencies have supplies ready to go to all of those hard to reach areas. They had those in place for some time,” Amanda Pitt, spokesperson for the UN’s humanitarian aid coordination arm, told reporters.
The United Nations estimates that 10.8 million people — or half the pre-war population — need aid in Syria, many in areas cut off by fighting.
Reuters adds: The U.N. World Food Programme rushed on Wednesday to put monitors at Syrian border posts, and the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF had aid ready for the first convoys to cross into rebel-held areas under the authorization of the U.N. Security Council.
Dahr Jamail: Incinerating Iraq
Who even knows what to call it? The Iraq War or the Iraq-Syrian War would be far too orderly for what’s happening, so it remains a no-name conflict that couldn’t be deadlier or more destabilizing — and it’s in the process of internationalizing in unsettling ways. Think of it as the strangest disaster on the planet right now. After all, when was the last time that the U.S. and Russia ended up on the same side in a conflict? You would have to go back almost three quarters of a century to World War II to answer that one. And how about the U.S. and Iran? Now, it seems that all three of those countries are sending in military hardware and, in the case of the U.S. and Iran, drones, advisers, pilots, and possibly other personnel.
Since World War I, the region that became Iraq and Syria has been a magnet for the meddling of outside powers of every sort, each of which, including France and Britain, the Clinton administration with its brutal sanctions, and the Bush administration with its disastrous invasion and occupation, helped set the stage for the full-scale destabilization and sectarian disintegration of both countries. And now the outsiders are at it again.
The U.S., Russia, and Iran only start the list. The Saudis, to give an example, have reportedly been deeply involved in funding the rise of the al-Qaeda-style extremist movement the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Now, facing that movement’s success — some of its armed followers, including undoubtedly Saudi nationals, have already reached the Iraqi-Saudi frontier — the Saudis are reportedly moving 30,000 troops there, no doubt in fear that their fragile and autocratic land might someday be open to the very violence their petrodollars have stoked. Turkey, which has wielded an open-border/safe haven policy to support the Syrian rebels fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime, including ISIS and other extremist outfits, is now dealing with kidnapped nationals and chaos on its border, thanks to those same rebels. Israel entered the fray recently as well, launching airstrikes against nine Syrian “military targets,” and just to add to the violence and confusion, Assad’s planes and helicopters have been attacking ISIS forces across the now-nonexistent border in Iraq. And I haven’t even mentioned Hezbollah, the Jordanians, or the Europeans, all of whom are involved in their own ways.
Since 2003, Dahr Jamail, a rare and courageous unembedded reporter in Iraq, has observed how this witch’s brew of outside intervention and exploding sectarian violence has played out in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. It couldn’t be a sadder tale, one he started reporting for TomDispatch in 2005 — even then the subject was “devastation.” Nine years later, he’s back and the devastation is almost beyond imagining. As he now works for the website Truthout, this is a joint TomDispatch/Truthout report.Tom Engelhardt
A nation on the brink
How America’s policies sealed Iraq’s fate
By Dahr Jamail[This essay is a joint TomDispatch/Truthout report.]
For Americans, it was like the news from nowhere. Years had passed since reporters bothered to head for the country we invaded and blew a hole through back in 2003, the country once known as Iraq that our occupation drove into a never-ending sectarian nightmare. In 2011, the last U.S. combat troops slipped out of the country, their heads “held high,” as President Obama proclaimed at the time, and Iraq ceased to be news for Americans.
So the headlines of recent weeks — Iraq Army collapses! Iraq’s second largest city falls to insurgents! Terrorist Caliphate established in Middle East! — couldn’t have seemed more shockingly out of the blue. Suddenly, reporters flooded back in, the Bush-era neocons who had planned and supported the invasion and occupation were writing op-eds as if it were yesterday, and Iraq was again the story of the moment as the post-post-mortems began to appear and commentators began asking: How in the world could this be happening?
Iraqis, of course, lacked the luxury of ignoring what had been going on in their land since 2011. For them, whether Sunnis or Shiites, the recent unraveling of the army, the spread of a series of revolts across the Sunni parts of Iraq, the advance of an extremist insurgency on the country’s capital, Baghdad, and the embattled nature of the autocratic government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki were, if not predictable, at least expectable. And as the killings ratcheted up, caught in the middle were the vast majority of Iraqis, people who were neither fighters nor directly involved in the corrupt politics of their country, but found themselves, as always, caught in the vice grip of the violence again engulfing it.
Revisiting Kurdistan: ‘If there is a success story in Iraq, it’s here’
Luke Harding writes: The news from Iraq has been grim of late. Sectarian killings, political feuding and the flamboyant rise of Islamist fanaticism. Last month, Isis – the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, one of a series of radical Sunni groups – carried out a stunning military advance. Its fighters captured Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace. They now control most of Sunni Iraq. Their goal is Baghdad and the overthrow of Iraq’s Shia-dominated government.
Meanwhile, Isis’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has declared a new Islamic state, spanning Syria and Iraq. He has proclaimed himself caliph. The international community has expressed support for Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki has vowed to crush Isis. But with the army in retreat – many divisions ran away last month – he has taken other measures. They include turning off the electricity to Isis-controlled areas and bombing from the sky. Critics say Maliki’s divisive sectarian policies have brought Iraq to disaster.
One part of Iraq, however, has largely escaped the mayhem engulfing the rest of the country. It is Kurdistan, the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Its capital, Irbil, is a haven of religious tolerance and relative safety. The suburb of Ainkawa, for example, is home to a large Christian community: nuns and a Chaldean church. There’s also a pleasant beer garden where crowds gathered over the weekend to drink Efes and to watch the World Cup final on a giant screen.
Beneath Irbil’s ancient citadel are cafes where those who are not fasting during Ramadan can eat lunch – shielded by a tactful white cloth. The city is predominantly Kurdish, but also home to Arabs who escaped from Baghdad as security deteriorated, and a recent wave of refugees who fled Mosul as Isis arrived. If there is a success story in Iraq, it’s here. [Continue reading…]
New study shows how existing cropland could feed billions more
Phys.org: Feeding a growing human population without increasing stresses on Earth’s strained land and water resources may seem like an impossible challenge. But according to a new report by researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, focusing efforts to improve food systems on a few specific regions, crops and actions could make it possible to both meet the basic needs of 3 billion more people and decrease agriculture’s environmental footprint.
The report, published today in Science, focuses on 17 key crops that produce 86 percent of the world’s crop calories and account for most irrigation and fertilizer consumption on a global scale. It proposes a set of key actions in three broad areas that that have the greatest potential for reducing the adverse environmental impacts of agriculture and boosting our ability meet global food needs. For each, it identifies specific “leverage points” where nongovernmental organizations, foundations, governments, businesses and citizens can target food-security efforts for the greatest impact. The biggest opportunities cluster in six countries—China, India, U.S., Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan—along with Europe.
“This paper represents an important next step beyond previous studies that have broadly outlined strategies for sustainably feeding people,” said lead author Paul West, co-director of the Institute on the Environment’s Global Landscapes Initiative. “By pointing out specifically what we can do and where, it gives funders and policy makers the information they need to target their activities for the greatest good.” [Continue reading…]
Music: Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny — ‘Our Spanish Love Song’
Israel intentionally kills civilians; it doesn’t have the courage to talk to Hamas
Jon Snow on Channel 4 News challenges an Israeli government official in a way you will never witness on American television:
Human Rights Watch: Israeli air attacks in Gaza investigated by Human Rights Watch have been targeting apparent civilian structures and killing civilians in violation of the laws of war. Israel should end unlawful attacks that do not target military objectives and may be intended as collective punishment or broadly to destroy civilian property. Deliberate or reckless attacks violating the laws of war are war crimes, Human Rights Watch said.
Israeli attacks in Gaza since July 7, 2014, which Israeli officials said delivered more than 500 tons of explosives in missiles, aerial bombs, and artillery fire, killed at least 178 people and wounded 1,361 as of July 14, including 635 women and children, according to the United Nations. Preliminary UN reports identified 138 people, about 77 percent of those killed, as civilians, including 36 children, and found that the attacks had destroyed 1,255 homes, displacing at least 7,500 people.
“Israel’s rhetoric is all about precision attacks but attacks with no military target and many civilian deaths can hardly be considered precise,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Recent documented cases in Gaza sadly fit Israel’s long record of unlawful airstrikes with high civilian casualties.” [Continue reading…]
Israelis take pride in ‘how few’ Palestinians they kill
Israel takes greater care to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza than the United States did in Iraq and Afghanistan, Haaretz military analyst Amos Harel said today.
True.
And so what?
Is Israel facing a barrage of criticism from the Pentagon? If it was, Harel might have a point. But it is not. Indeed, many of those who currently criticize Israel for abusing its own power, have been equally critical of America’s military excesses.
Uriel Heilman, managing editor for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, attempts to explain the disparity in casualties between Palestinians and Israelis — currently 213:1 — by saying:
[T]he most important element in interpreting the death toll: While Hamas measures its success by how many Israelis it is able to kill, Israel measures its success in part by how few Palestinian civilians it kills.
By this measure, Israel could achieve the greatest success by not bombing Gaza in the first place.
The effectiveness of Iron Dome is well established. Israel, in its position of unassailable dominance, is perfectly capable of de-escalating by refraining from acts of provocation or retaliation.
The current assault on Gaza, like previous ones, has little to do with destroying Hamas or establishing “quietness,” as Benjamin Netanyahu puts it. It is a ritual beating whose purpose is to re-assert the authority of the Palestinians’ military overlord.
In spite of this, or in fact, because of this, many Israelis want to be seen and to see themselves not as brutes crushing their weak opponents. Instead, they prefer the image of restrained and compassionate human beings who only use violence when they “have no choice.”
Thus the ongoing effort to mask the evidence and paint a picture in which one side, Hamas, is lashing out with the use of indiscriminate violence, while the other, Israel, keeps count of the number of missiles it hasn’t fired because it takes so much care to protect innocent life.
Contrary to Heilman’s claim, Hamas measures its success by retaining the ability to mount some form of defense. If they possessed guided weapons systems and had the surveillance capabilities to identify targets, there is little reason to doubt that Hamas would act differently than any other actor in a similar situation: it would maximize the strategic and political value of striking military targets.
On the other side, in spite of Israel’s assertions that it exercises restraint, every day we witness new examples of senseless violence — today with the deaths of Ahed Bakr, aged 10; Zakaria, 10; and two other boys from the Bakr family, both named Mohammad, aged 11 and nine. These children were struck down by an Israeli missile while playing on a beach.
How can Israel which kills “so few” Palestinians, explain why so many are children and babies?
#GazaUnderAttack he was playing a football ?!! why IOF killed this child ? pic.twitter.com/eABKdkmquY
— Mohammad Y. Hasna (@Eng_mhasna) July 16, 2014
Palestinian girls cry over their Brothers who killed by Israel in beach of #Gaza pic.twitter.com/rjEF3qZKRU
— Palestine | פלסטינה (@iPalestinian91) July 16, 2014
Lama Al Satari, 5 months old.She was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Rafah. #Gaza RIP little princess 🙁 نامي بسلام pic.twitter.com/pgl55nQKQ0
— Dima Eleiwa (@DimaEleiwa) July 16, 2014