Have your cake

By this time, I think it’s safe to assume that it’s common knowledge that what shattered the ceasefire Egypt brokered in June was not Qassams raining on Sderot, but Israel’s 4 November attack on Gaza, which killed six. Just coincidentally, that was the day of the historic US presidential election. As Jim Lobe and Ali Gharib reported on IPS 7 January

While the major U.S. news wire Associated Press (AP) reported that the attack, in which six members of Hamas's military wing were killed by Israeli ground forces, threatened the ceasefire, its report was carried by only a handful of small newspapers around the country.

The Nov 4 raid -- and the escalation that followed -- also went unreported by the major U.S. network and cable television new programmes, according to a search of the Nexis database for all English-language news coverage between Nov. 4 and 7.

Although I have not managed to find the text of the ceasefire document, if there ever was one, or even a summary of its terms, it’s hard to imagine that it countenanced attacks like Israel’s on 4 November. So it seems a trifle understated to assert that it ‘threatened the ceasefire’.

Lobe and Gharib quote Stephen Zunes, ‘an expert on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict at the University of San Francisco’, in much the same vein, ‘It was a huge, huge provocation, and it now appears to me that it was actually intended to get Hamas to break off the ceasefire’.

In his now famous letter to US Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice, Congressman Dennis Kucinich wrote,

I believe that Israel’s most recent attacks neither further internal security nor do they constitute “legitimate” acts of self-defense. They do, however, “increase the possibility of an outbreak or escalation of conflict,” because they are a vastly disproportionate response to the provocation, and because the Palestinian population is suffering from those military attacks in numbers far exceeding Israeli losses in life and property.

In reality, the slaughter Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is not a disproportionate response to the provocation. It is the provocation. As if to underscore Israel’s attitude to the truce, on the day the bombing started, Barak Ravid reported in Ha’aretz, ‘Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.’

Nor is this the first time that Israel has decided to interrupt a period of ‘calm’. In the Huffington Post on Tuesday, Nancy Kanwisher, Johannes Haushofer, & Anat Biletzki, discussing their study of ‘conflict pauses’, write,

We defined "conflict pauses" as periods of one or more days when no one is killed on either side, and we asked which side kills first after conflict pauses of different durations. As shown in Figure 2, this analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern -- in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause -- becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.

My understanding is that the terms of the tahadiyeh required Israel to lift its siege. That it declined to do so suggests that the ceasefire was effectively unilateral on the part of Hamas in the first place. Of course, there are claims that Hamas was also in violation. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni addressing a press conference in Sderot on 31 December said,

Now, one of the elements of the truce declared six months ago was full cessation of the smuggling of weapons through these tunnels. Unfortunately, Hamas did not do that, and violated this agreement.

========

UPDATE:
Here is the text of the agreement according to the Working Group on the Middle East Peace Process blog [hat tip to Kathy Kelly]:

Ceasefire Understanding between Hamas and Israel as Mediated by Egypt

1. Mutual agreement to cease all military activities by the start of “zero hour” on Thursday, June 19, at 6:00AM.
2. Duration of ceasefire is six months according to agreement concluded among the national parties under Egyptian auspices.
3. Ceasefire will be implemented under national consensus and under the Egyptian auspices.
4. After seventy two hours from the start of the ceasefire, the crossing points will be opened to allow 30% more goods to enter the Gaza strip.
5. Ten days after that (i.e., 13 days after ceasefire begins), all crossings would be open between Gaza and Israel, and Israel will allow the transfer of all goods that were banned or restricted to go into Gaza.

Note that it does not mention 'smuggling of weapons'. Indeed, 'all goods that were banned or restricted' implicitly permits it.

==========

Clearly, there was no impediment under the terms of the agreement to Israel, already boasting the fourth most powerful military apparatus on the planet, from replenishing their own munitions. Indeed, according to a Reuters report carried today in Ha’aretz,

…the U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command (MSC) said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as "ammunition" on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January.

In the wake of the UN Security Council Resolution 1860 (cf. Jews sans frontières), calling for an ‘immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire’, the US is shipping arms to Israel in the midst of its gruesome attack on the Gaza Strip, just as it did as Israel was reducing much of Lebanon to rubble in 2006. But there is nothing to worry about, because according to the doubtless trustworthy Air Force Lt. Col. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, ‘The delivery of ammunition is to a pre-positioned U.S. munitions stockpile in Israel in accordance with a congressionally authorised 1990 agreement between the U.S. and Israel…This previously scheduled shipment is routine and not in support of the current situation in Gaza.’ Thankfully, the Greek government has prevented this from proceeding, for the time being.

Doubtless with a view to minimising civilian casualties, ‘In September, the U.S. Congress approved the sale of 1,000 bunker-buster missiles to Israel. The GPS-guided GBU-39 is said to be one of the most accurate bombs in the world’, Reuters further reports.

The way the media have been reporting on this, you’d think it went without saying why Israel is entitled to exploit a ceasefire to prepare for its next onslaught and Hamas is not. And I suppose it does. After all, Hamas is among the 42 groups on the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTO). Israel is not.

Section 140(d)(2) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, Fiscal Years 1988 and 1989 defines "terrorism" as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents."

So that neatly gets Israel off the hook, whatever they do, however motivated. Similarly, echoing what has become a commonplace, ‘The [US] House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution Friday "recognizing Israel's right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza"…The bill, which was sponsored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, passed by a vote of 390 to 5’, according to CNN. I have seen nothing from Pelosi or any of the others asserting this right that suggests that they have even considered the possibility that Hamas might be entitled to exercise such a right.

Although widely treated as such, Israel’s right to defend itself may not be such a trivial issue. As the Zionist colonial project is inherently racist and imperialist, and therefore indefensible, I’d argue that it does not. But surely it does have the right and obligation to protect its citizens. One way it could go about this might be to eschew provocations like the 4 November attack. Another would be to refrain from subjecting Palestinians to a suffocating siege. Or it could treat the occupied population with the consideration required by the Fourth Geneva Convention, or its own Palestinian citizens with the full rights of citizens. Or the Israeli government could provide for the wellbeing of the one third of Israeli children who go to bed hungry every night, according to the charities that claim to be trying to feed them. Or it could deploy the billions it extorted from Germany as Holocaust reparations to provide a dignified senescence for the tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors currently living in abject poverty there…

Another commonplace that keeps coming up is that while Hamas deliberately targets civilians, while using Palestinian civilians as human shields, Israel is always conscientious to a fault not to harm non-combatants. On 2 January, infamous Harvard Law Professor Alan M Dershowitz, for instance, wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

Hamas has fired thousands of rockets designed to kill civilians into southern Israel… the terrorists exploit the morality of democracies…Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it…These despicable tactics -- targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians -- can only work against moral democracies that care deeply about minimizing civilian casualties…

With 1000 GPS-guided GBU-39 bunker busters, ‘one of the most accurate bombs in the world’, at its disposal, along with all the latest high tech ‘smart’ weapons, you’d think that the Israeli military could manage at least to kill more combatants than civilians. But now that the UN’s early estimate that ‘at least 25%’ of the dead – that is, women and children – were non-combatants, has been superseded by more accurate appraisals, it transpires that they comprise most of the killed and injured. There are all kinds of speculations about how the IDF manage to miss so often. Their Code of ethics prescribes

Purity of Arms - The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.

Israel’s apologists opine that Hamas places non-combatants in the line of fire by using civilian facilities for military purposes. But that can’t be right because the IDF ‘will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants’. It could be that they’re not really sure how to use those smart weapons, or have poor aim. But by far the most plausible explanation is that the targeting of civilians is deliberate. The vacillating pretexts they’ve come up with for bombing UNWRA’s Fakhura and Asma schools where refugees were sheltering on Tuesday and eventual admission to UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness ‘that the attack on the UN site was unintentional’, strongly suggest that they think they have something to hide.

Dr Rice seems unconcerned about this. After all, to avoid slaughtering non-combatants ‘is very difficult in circumstances like Gaza, which is a very densely populated area…I might note it's also an area in which Hamas participates in activities like human shields, using buildings that are not designated as military buildings to hide their fighters. So it's hard’.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was more forthright at her Sderot press conference, admitting,

During this operation, Israel had a list of targets that are related directly to Hamas. We are talking about headquarters, we are talking about the places in which they gather; we are talking about the places where they manufacture missiles and we are talking about all of the places that are connected to Hamas as a government, not legitimate, but a government as a terrorist organization. All of these attacks are directly targeted at places that we know are part of Hamas…[emphasis added]

In other words, the objective is not just to remove ‘the infrastructure of terror’, but any infrastructure that Hamas currently controls, and if civilians get in the way, so be it.

The accusation that Hamas deliberately targets Israeli civilians is also problematical. Since the Qassam and other rockets in their armoury are not guided, it seems preposterous to suggest they are targeting anything in particular. Unless, of course, Sderot, and now Ashkelon and other nearby cities, are free of military targets. As Jonathan Cook pointed out during the assault on Lebanon in 2006, Israel doesn’t permit the locations of its military facilities, including arms factories, to be divulged. So for all we know, there may be legitimate military targets in or near Sderot, and that is where Gazans firing rockets hope they will land.

Use of weapons that can’t be aimed accurately does raise the question of whether they ought to be used at all. After all, as Chomsky and others argue, and I concur, actions that predictably harm civilians are morally equivalent to those that deliberately do so. But the only evidence we have that Qassam rockets predictably harm civilians is the hasbara establishment’s assertion that they deliberately target civilians, which is itself implausible. So I am not convinced that the few Israeli victims of Qassams were in fact predictable. Furthermore, I am not prepared to condemn Palestinians for resisting Israeli oppression, not to mention military assaults, using the only weapons at their disposal. That said, while I understand the impulse to retaliate, rocketing and suicide bombing Israeli targets of any kind has proven just as ineffective as nonviolent forms of resistance, and counterproductive to boot.

Furthermore, last February, there was a kerfuffle over the threat to sack Palestinian filmmaker, Nizar Hassam, from his post as a lecturer at Sderot’s Sapir College on the grounds that he had asked a student to come to class out of uniform and unarmed. The most recent information I’ve managed to find on this issue was a 7 March 2008 letter from Mervat Hatem, president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America to Dr. Ze’ev Tsahor, President of Sapir College, deploring the ad hoc procedures deployed in disciplining Hassan. At that point, Tsahor seemed to think Hassan’s sacking was imminent but I don’t know whether he was ultimately sacked or not. What is not in doubt is that armed and uniformed Israeli soldiers are lurking around Israeli academic institutions. Does that make the universities legitimate military targets? Or is it just a case of soldiers hiding behind noncombatants? Of course, the reservist in question was either off duty or AWOL, it might be objected. But then, when Israel dropped a one tonne bomb on Nizar Rayyan’s house on New Year’s Day, killing him along with his four wives and eleven children, surely he must have been off duty, too. Every time there’s a suicide bombing, the media shriek in unison how despicable, dastardly, and cowardly the terrorists are to target civilians like that. Anyone who’s been to Israel knows that armed and uniformed soldiers travel on public transport and frequent pizza parlours and felafel stalls. When Israeli soldiers eat a slice of pizza or catch the bus home for the weekend, they are noncombatants. When a ‘Hamas gunman’ does so, he’s hiding behind civilians.

Anyway, Israeli universities are not reticent about how much they contribute to training officers and developing military technology. The December 2008 University of Haifa Newsletter, for instance, boasts of its naval officers training course. By the standards Israel is applying in selecting targets in Gaza, that would make it perfectly legitimate to lob a rocket or two at Haifa University. Unless, that is, it’s argued that it’s ok for the University of Haifa because they’re training official, registered cadets for service in a legitimate navy of a recognised state, while the Islamic University and the Police Academy are just training terrorists. How do we know they’re terrorists? They work for the Hamas administration – ‘the infrastructure of terror’.

Getting back to IDF ethics, Dershowitz asserts, ‘It [Israel] goes to enormous lengths to reduce the number of civilian casualties -- even to the point of foregoing legitimate targets that are too close to civilians.’ (And see Franklin Lamb’s two Counterpunch articles.)

Writing in the erstwhile liberal magazines The new republic and Dissent, Michael Walzer, authority on ‘just war theory’ and professor emeritus at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton NJ, where Einstein used to work, reckons that in judging ‘proportionality’, you have to ask, ‘Is the attacking army acting in concrete ways to minimise the risks they impose on civilians? Are they taking risks themselves for that purpose?’ [Hat tip to the pseudonymous troll posting on the Alef list for the Walzer and Dershowitz articles.]

Jonathan Cook answers in Counterpunch on 9 January,

Criticism by international watchdog groups over the increasing death toll in Gaza mounted this week as the first legal actions inside Israel were launched accusing the army of intentionally harming the enclave’s civilian population.

The petitions – over attacks on medical personnel and the shelling of United Nations schools in Gaza – follow statements by senior Israeli commanders that they have been using heavy firepower to protect soldiers during their advance on built-up areas. “We are very violent,” one told Israeli media. [emphasis added]

And that’s apart from the hospitals, the ambulances, barring the Red Cross…the whole litany of atrocities that Israel is perpetrating day after day. ‘all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property’, indeed!

Even if it happens to be the case that Hamas deliberately targets, or predictably harms, Israeli noncombatants, it is indisputable that Israel routinely does so, along with other forms of collective punishment, like the siege of Gaza, the checkpoints, house demolitions, and so forth. The rationale is, ‘If we make their lives sufficiently miserable, they will overthrow Hamas’. Perhaps Hamas has simply borrowed a leaf out Israel’s book. Maybe they imagine that if they make life in Sderot uncomfortable enough, Israelis will rise up and overthrow their terrorist government. [Hat tip to Mark Marshall for the graphic]

In a similar vein, you see comments on blogs and elsewhere suggesting that civilians in Gaza deserve their fate because they elected ‘the terrorists’ in 2006. Those killing Israeli civilians might equally claim that they merit their fate because they elected an acknowledged war criminal, Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister. Some of his predecessors were also known terrorists, like former Irgun member Yitzchak Shamir. Menachem Begin, also of the Irgun, was one of the authors of the July 1946 bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, a terrorist act that killed 91 and that Israelis celebrated by erecting a plaque in July 2006. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of those dancing in the streets of New York on 11 January in celebration of the carnage in Gaza were among those who took such umbrage at the callousness of Palestinians who were purported to have done so when the World Trade Center came down.

The double standards the apologists for Israel apply are not just completely over the top, but utterly transparent. Seriously, I’d be embarrassed to be so hypocritical, particularly with such deplorable motives. Imagine, trying to justify this slaughter!

Human shields

Back in August, I posted on Jonathan Cook’s discussion of Israeli use of Israeli citizens as human shields in last year’s Lebanon war. In an important new article in yesterday’s Counterpunch, he provides new evidence that it was overwhelmingly Israel and not Hizb’allah that was ‘cowardly blending’ with the civilian population and the inconsistent approach that the Human Rights Watch reports adopted to war crimes.

HRW did made a brief reference to the possibility that Israeli military installations were located close to or inside civilian communities. It cited examples of a naval training base next to a hospital in Haifa and a weapons factory built in a civilian community. Its researchers even admitted to watching the Israeli army firing shells into Lebanon from a residential street of the Jewish community of Zarit.

This act of “cowardly blending” by the Israeli army -- to echo the UN envoy Jan Egeland’s unwarranted criticism of Hizbullah -- was a war crime. It made Israeli civilians a potential target for Hizbullah reprisal attacks.

So what was HRW’s position on this gross violation of the rules of war it had witnessed? After yet again denouncing Hizbullah for its rocket attacks, the report was mealy-mouthed: “Given that indiscriminate fire [by Hizbullah], there is no reason to believe that Israel’s placement of certain military assets within these cities added appreciably to the risk facing their residents.”

In other words, some are guilty unless proven innocent and others are innocent even after proven guilty.

No successor of Rabin

Yesterday, I received Adam Keller’s translation of an op ed piece in last Thursday’s Israel HaYom ‘Israel today’. Moriah Shlomot, former Secretary General of Peace Now, writes,

Year after year, I return to the Rabin Square with devotion and determination. On years of near-despair as on better years, I feel obliged to share in the collective memory. This is the annual moment when the Peace Camp stands up to be counted, and in my view those who dig into details miss the main point.

That would doubtless be the peace camp as manifest in Peace Now, the organisation that spawned Amir Peretz, who served as Defense Minister during last year’s merciless bombing of Lebanon. The very Peace Now whose incumbent Secretary General, Yariv Oppenheimer, was recently observed harassing Palestinians at a Jordan Valley checkpoint and explained that among his three reasons for participating in the very occupation he purports to oppose,

The second reason derives from the will to maintain the democratic character of this country. As a citizen, it is my right to protest and act against decisions made on political and military levels. As a soldier, I must fulfill my duty and cannot pick and choose operations I wish to undertake. (Except for obviously illegal acts, for example the killing of innocents, undue violent behavior, humiliation, torture).

Not to mention ‘obviously illegal acts’ like occupying territory acquired by force of arms and restricting the movement of the occupied population.

This year, Shlomot hesitates, because

…Defence Minister Ehud Barak is due to speak at this year’s Rabin Memorial Rally. This is good enough a reason to doubt and hesitate, to think twice about attending. Barak is the worst of the leaders staffing the government ministries and taking charge of the people’s hopes.

Barak is no successor of Rabin - because Oslo, with all its faults and deficiencies, was based on mutual confidence. Barak has severely damaged the confidence between us and the Palestinians, as well as between Jews and Arabs inside Israel.

The beatification of Rabin as some kind of peacemaker is naïve in the extreme. Oslo had nothing to do with confidence. It was always a transparent stratagem to enlist a Palestinian elite in sharing the responsibility for social control and other administrative tasks in the occupied territories. I appreciate that honeyed phraseology confected with ‘peace’, ‘negotiations’, and ‘diplomacy’ can win the heart of any liberal, even while the confectioner’s boot is planted squarely on the neck of some untermensch.

The confidence she writes of exists only in the imagination of people who believe that dividing a Palestinian state, comprising 22% of historical Palestine in two separate enclaves, from a Jewish state in the other 78%, is the best approach to reconciling the two peoples. The principal difference between Rabin’s approach and Barak’s is the proportion of land they wanted to keep for themselves and the number of enclaves to divide the Palestinian state into.

What interested me about this paragraph was Shlomot’s apparent wish to distinguish ‘the Palestinians’ and ‘Arabs inside Israel’. As Jonathan Cook has pointed out, there is a long tradition of dividing people who identify as Palestinians into three groups: the refugees, ‘the Israeli Arabs’, and ‘the Palestinians’, that is, the subjects of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied territories. The division is real. Under the Oslo regime, only ‘the Palestinians’, as defined, are to be represented in any interaction with the Israeli state. With the dissolution of the PLO into the PA, the refugees lost any semblance of representation. And the Israeli Arabs are of course amply represented by their state – the Jewish state. They are no less occupied than their relatives in the territories, but it usually impacts less dramatically on their quotidian existence. So the only Palestinians Israel would have to negotiate with were the ones they could reduce to desperation by checkpoints, house demolitions, extrajudicial executions, etc.

At the same time, the distinction aims to deprive Palestinians of ‘peoplehood’ or ‘nationhood’. One of the populations achieved some recognition as a separate people precisely when Oslo saddled them with the PA. As Golda Meir famously quipped,

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

Sunday Times, 1969-06-15; The Washington Post, 1969-06-16

Presumably, had there been no ‘Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people’, it would be ok to take their land. It’s another one of those bizarre arguments that the Hasbara establishment has cultivated for decades and has gained the status of common sense. Like the argument that the refugees have no right to return because they are alleged to have left of their own accord. As if that deprived them of their right. What gives the refugees the right to return to their homes in ‘Israel proper’ is not that they were forced and stampeded out at gunpoint, although they were, it’s that they come from there. The reason I oppose the appropriation of any part of Palestine is not that the Palestinians did or did not conceive of themselves as a national group or a people at some point in time. Nor is it that their ancestors have been living in Palestine for hundreds, if not thousands of years, although they have. It’s that they were living there when the Zionist movement decided that it wanted their land to colonise with European Jews. The displacement of people from their homes is a very severe attack. All the more so when it is permanent, and especially when the motivation is the convenience of a settler population intent on ethnic cleansing.

It’s not for nothing that ‘The International Community’ has belatedly recognised ethnic cleansing as a crime against humanity. Ilan Pappe has demonstrated conclusively that the Jewish majority in part of Palestine that made the formation of the state of Israel a possibility was achieved through a quite deliberate and orchestrated campaign of precisely what is today known as ethnic cleansing.

Neither Israel, constituted as an ethnocracy, nor The International Community, with its well earned Holocaust guilt, is ever likely to take on the ramifications of the historic crime that gave rise to Israel. But I harbour some hope that at least the peace camp can someday jettison these downright puerile arguments that the Palestinians somehow deserved their dispossession.

[Hat tip to Sol Salbe.]

Oslo violence process

Apologists for Israel frequently accuse the Palestinians of resorting to violence against Israeli civilians as a matter of preference. 'If they would only learn from Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi, they'd have achieved everything they could possibly want by now. But as long as they insist on terrorising innocent heavily armed Israeli civilians, the Jewish state must of course deploy maximum force to protect its helpless citizens. The only possible alternative is to allow the bloodthiursty Arabs carry out the second Holocaust they have always longed for.' You know the kind of thing.

There is a number of responses to these accusations. The most obvious is that Israel could, in accordance with its fabled 'purity of arms', practice a little less ultraviolence itself. Then perhaps the Palestinian retaliation would take different forms. Jonathan Cook points out that in reality, Palestinian acts of nonviolent resistance, large and small, public and private, are going on all the time. Every week at the Apartheid Wall in Bil'in and every time a child evades a checkpoint to get to school, what we are witnessing is nothing other than nonviolent resistance. But these actions somehow don't attract the international media. So they can engage in nonviolent resistance and nobody even notices, or they can engage in violence and earn the opprobrium of the civilised world. Heads Israel wins, tails the Palestinians lose.

In his article in The Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints: Reactions to imperialism and neoliberalism, that appeared on Znet last week, Bashir Abu-Manneh, citing Cheryl Rubenberg, makes a point that frankly hadn't occurred to me.

The nature of the second Intifada was very different than the first, however. One of Oslo’s practical consequences was that the Israeli army had redeployed outside major population concentrations, making it extremely difficult for enclaved Palestinians to get at or confront the occupation forces, unlike in the first Intifada. Being fragmented by checkpoints and confined to their locales ‘rendered mass action virtually impossible’. Reflecting the effects of the siege regime through the 1990s, there has thus been a systematic weakening of the capacity of Palestinian society to act and organize as a national collective. As Rema Hammami and Salim Tamari argue, Oslo destroyed all resources for civil rebellion:

Save for massive candlelight marches and funeral processions within the cities, the population at large has been left with virtually no active role in the uprising. This is clearly not by choice, but as a consequence of the fact that the kinds of political structures that made grass-roots organizing the main thrust of the first intifada, at least in the early years, no longer exist. Popular and neighborhood committees as well as mass organizations (and most of the political movements that sustained them) began to collapse at the end of the first intifada under the cumulative weight of Israeli anti-insurgency methods. Their recovery was preempted by the Gulf War and, even more profoundly, by Oslo and the state formation process it set in motion. The demobilization of the population and their deepening alienation from political action (until the current uprising) has been one of the most salient outcomes of PA rule.

'Cowardly blending'

In his latest article on Counterpunch, Jonathan Cook, conducts a timely review of a few matters that have come to light in the year since Israel’s devastating war on Lebanon last July and August.

Among other things,

Recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN. Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. The UN's admission has been mostly ignored by the international media.

Also, far from the unexpected wanton cross border ‘kidnapping’ of innocent Israeli reservists we’ve heard so much about,

Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese

Israel had tried to justify its wanton bombing of civilian targets in Lebanon on the grounds that the unscrupulous Hizb’allah combatants were hiding and launching attacks on Israel from areas populated with concentrations of civilians. Doubtless there is much learned opinion on whether ‘international law’ deems this legitimate. As I read it, this is actually a step or two beyond ‘Duh! We didn’t know there’d be civilians there!’. It presupposes a doctrine that non combatants are legitimate targets if they are compelled to serve as human shields – in other words, humans are useless as shields. UN official, Jan Egeland, famously backed up Israel’s claim with his ill considered accusation of Hizb’allah of ‘cowardly blending’.

It turns out, however, that

…Hizbullah had invested much effort in developing an elaborate system of tunnels and underground bunkers in the countryside…Also, common sense suggests that Hizbullah fighters would have been unwilling to put their families, who live in south Lebanon's villages, in danger by launching rockets from among them. [my emphasis]

…According to the UNIFIL, some 33 of these underground bunkers ­ or more than 90 per cent -- have been located and Hizbullah weapons discovered there, including rockets and launchers, destroyed.

…Relying on military sources, Haaretz reported last month: "Most of the rockets fired against Israel during the war last year were launched from the 'nature reserves'." In short, even Israel is no longer claiming that Hizbullah was firing its rockets from among civilians.

Not only were Hizb’allah fighters not hiding among civilians, those levelling the accusation, the Israelis themselves, had in fact ’built many of its permanent military installations, including weapons factories and army camps, and set up temporary artillery positions next to -- and in some cases inside -- civilian communities in the north of Israel’, as Jonathan Cook was himself probably the only one to point out last year during the fighting, notwithstanding the military censor.

The Arab Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth, has been compiling a report on the Hizbullah rocket strikes against Arab communities in the north since last summer. It is not sure whether it will ever be able to publish its findings because of the military censorship laws.

…The Association has…found that in every case there was at least one military base or artillery battery placed next to, or in a few cases inside, the community. In some communities there were several such sites.

Armed and uniformed soldiers are of course a common sight anywhere in Israel. They crowd every bus, every disco, every pizza parlour and felafel stand. But somehow, the hasbara machine has managed to paint the Hizb’allah fighters as those who are ‘cowardly blending’, while the Israelis doing exactly the same thing are heroic. And when a terrorist attacks the soldiers on a bus or at a felafel stand, the spin is always on the ‘collateral damage’, the innocent bystanders. They were the real targets, however many soldiers may have been in range. As far as I’m aware, we have only the hasbara establishment’s word for it that Palestinian terrorists always target civilians and any military losses are the real collateral damage. If that is the sole source, since we already know that they are the ones who would have us believe that the Israeli military never targets civilians and in fact goes to extraordinary lengths to absolutely rule out any accidental harm to civilians, I guess it must be true.

Jonathan was also among the only ones, if memory serves, who took on Human Rights Watch, when they

…argued that, because Hizbullah's basic rockets were not precise, every time they were fired into Israel they were effectively targeted at civilians. Hizbullah was therefore guilty of war crimes in using its rockets, whatever the intention of the launch teams. In other words, according to this reading of international law, only Israel had the right to fire missiles and drop bombs because its military hardware is more sophisticated -- and, of course, more deadly.

The HRW position is simply bizarre. It effectively advocates banning oppressed and occupied people from armed resistance and elevates it to a matter of principle. Meanwhile, with their inaccurate weapons, Hizb’allah managed to hit 119 Israeli soldiers, nearly three times as many as the 43 Israeli civilian victims, 18 of them Arab. And Israel’s precision weaponry killed over 1000 civilians, many times more than the handful of Hizb’allah fighters killed.

Hasbara is quite amazingly effective. The obvious, and obviously correct, interpretation of these data, particularly in historical context, is utterly off the radar. Only bolshie crackpots even consider the possibility either that Israel deliberately targeted civilians or that Hizb’allah might have tried to focus on military targets, even though it was clear at the time that that was precisely the situation. As more and more evidence comes to light, the lunar conspiracy theory will be shown to be as sound as it always has been. By then, unfortunately, the entire population of the civilised world will have fully internalised the myth of ‘cowardly blending’, if we haven’t already, just like we have the myth of ‘wiping Israel off the map’ and the Iranian nuclear weapons program, Saddam’s WMD, the Kosovo genocide, and a long, long list of other outright fabrications swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the vigilant, responsible, independent media.

Anyway, Jonathan, who does not resile from calling it as he sees it, concludes by summarising:

The evidence so far indicates that Israel:

· established legitimate grounds for Hizbullah's attack on the border post by refusing to withdraw from the Lebanese territory of the Shebaa Farms in 2000;

· initiated a war of aggression by refusing to engage in talks about a prisoner swap offered by Hizbullah;

· committed a grave war crime by intentionally using cluster bombs against south Lebanon's civilians;

· repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many civilians, even though the evidence is that no Hizbullah fighters were to be found there;

· and put its own civilians, especially Arab civilians, in great danger by making their communities targets for Hizbullah attacks and failing to protect them.

It is clear that during the Second Lebanon war Israel committed the most serious war crimes

So it is not propitious that

In the meantime, there is every indication that Israel is planning another round of fighting against Hizbullah after it has "learnt the lessons" from the last war.

Welcome to the blood bank

The headline says, ‘Blood banks to accept donations from Ethiopian immigrants’. But it wasn’t true, as the very first sentence of the article makes abundantly clear.

The health ministry announced on Wednesday that blood donations would be accepted from anyone born in Israel, including Israeli-born Ethiopians.

Apparently,

Last November, young Ethiopian activists staged a demonstration across from the Prime Minister's Office protesting the policy that dictated the disposal of Ethiopian blood donations.

Until now, blood donated by Ethiopians was discarded …Health Minister Yaacov Ben Izri (Pensioners) [said] ‘As a minister, I am troubled by the negative and erroneous stigma with which Israel's Ethiopian Jews have been labeled, as a result of publications taken out of proportion and present a reality which does not reflect the truth’.

Like many realities in Israel that do not reflect the truth, there is apparently no retreat from racism. Even if you’re Jewish, if you’re black, only the blood of the Israeli born is good enough, in the words of Gadi Yavarkan, the chairman of the Ethiopian rights advocacy group, ‘to save a Jewish soul.’

According to the Meir Panim charity, 670,000 Israeli children go to bed hungry. So that’s how the safe haven for the world’s Jews treats its own Jewish minorities and its most vulnerable. You wouldn’t want to be a Goy!

The conference up in Herzliya had a session on Monday morning entitled, ‘Israeli Arabs and the Jewish State’. The website provides summaries of most of the papers in shall we say not entirely idiomatic English. According to the summary, Hagai Meirom, Treasurer, Jewish Agency for Israel, acknowledged discrimination against the Palestinain minority,

It is my view that we do not need to forgo the essence of the state of Israel; there is still a possibility to create joint lives. We need to provide them with the minimal conditions for them to be able to live here in equality. We discriminate the Arabs in terms of resources and investments…

Predictably, in the context of a Conference on the Balance of Israel’s National Security, he saw

This is another threat this state is facing. This threat is not the Arab minority itself, but rather the fragile relationship between Arabs and Jews in this land.

At the same session, Dr. Dan Schueftan, Deputy Director, National Security Studies Center, University of Haifa, asserted,

…in the short term we are facing a dead end. The source of the basic view of the Arab minority in Israel is that equality is not the main issue. As far as they are concerned, nothing short of the destruction of the Jewish enterprise will be enough…Therefore, even if Israel continues to close the gap between both social statuses, Israel will still be illegitimate. This is why equality is not the core issue.

As far as the Arabs are concerned we have reached a dead-end…That is why we are making a fundamental mistake when trying to create symmetry on the basis of justice…

As far as the Jews are concerned, they also consider this situation to be a dead-end because they have no intention of doing what the Arab minority demands.

There is even a structural problem in the socio-economic field. The per-capita income of the Muslim population is substantially smaller than the income of non-ultra religious Jewish families.

even when there is an attempt to have a dialog, the dialog fails.

Here is where I am supposed to reassure you and tell you that everything will work out, however I claim the opposite: it will not work out. There is a consensus on the Palestinian side that has adopted the Palestinian ethos while well aware of its price. On the Jewish side there is a belief that there is no solution for this problem and accepts that as reality.

On a national level the situation is getting worse. Both sides are not content, but when facing the alternative the status quo will remain.

Anyway, that’s some of what they’re saying in public.

As Jonathan Cook (this is the same article I linked to in the comment on ‘the page of time’ on 20 January) wrote recently, to nullify the threat of accusations of apartheid, Israel

…could say that all Palestinians who identified themselves as such -- whether in the occupied territories or inside Israel -- must now exercise their rights in the Palestinian state and renounce any claim on the Jewish state.

It could achieve this

*by redrawing borders, using the wall, so that an area densely populated with Palestinian citizens of Israel known as the "Little Triangle", which hugs the northern West Bank, would be sealed into the new pseudo-state;

* by continuing the process of corralling the Negev's Bedouin farmers into urban reservations and then treating them as guest workers;

* by forcing Palestinian citizens living in the Galilee to pledge an oath of loyalty to Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state" or have their citizenship revoked;

* and by stripping Arab Knesset members of their right to stand for election.

If Jonathan is right, and he’s taking justifiable pride in the accuracy of some of his predictions, ‘the status quo’ is a pretty rosy outlook.

For a Palestinian Israeli view, you can check out the two Dam video clips Mark posted on Jews sans frontieres today, and the Dam site, with three tracks you can play from the top page.

Move to the back

On Friday, Left I on the news reported on an article in Ha’aretz about a woman savagely beaten on the Egged No 2 bus in Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia, it transpires that

Some lines, mainly running in and/or between major Haredi Jewish population centers, are classified as 'Mehadrin' buses. These buses, while identical to others, can be used by anyone whether Haredi or not, but travellers should note that men and women (with the exception of husband and wife, or parents with children) are not supposed to sit next to each other, and women may be expected to sit in the back of the bus, while the men are supposed to sit in front. For women, a modest style of dress would also be recommended (meaning, no miniskirts or bare shoulders). These are guidelines that most of the riders of these specific lines insist on. These rules on these mehadrin buses are not 'law', and anyone can ignore them, but it is seen as disrespecting the local population.

Apparently anyone can ignore them, but at their own peril. I couldn’t find any corroboration on the Egged site, but it says that information on local bus routes is only in Hebrew.

So the days of ‘move to the back of the bus’ are not over yet in Israel, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. Even Jews haven’t achieved full civil rights, if they’re women. I wonder if that’s why observant Jewish men thank a supernatural being every morning she lo asani ishah ‘who didn’t make me a woman’?

Meanwhile, Jonathan Cook reports that Israeli security guards both in Israel and at overseas airports are racially profiling Arabs.

"The countries in which these [Israeli security] investigations take place do not supervise them, and prefer to ignore their discriminatory nature and the human rights violations committed on their own soil," the report [by lawyer, Tarek Ibrahim, on behalf of the Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism] states.

Israeli security staff identifies most Arab passengers through clothing, appearance or accent, or through questions about their name or where they live. If there is doubt, passengers are asked to show their Israeli ID card, which is believed to reveal their ethnicity in coding.

Once identified, Arab passengers' luggage and passports are marked with specially colour-coded labels.

And it’s not just their luggage that gets special treatment. The report includes accounts from several victims.

Ibtisam Maranah, a film director who represented Israel at an international film festival in the Netherlands in 2005 along with several Jewish colleagues, reports that Israeli staff took her off alone to an underground section of the Dutch airport, away from the rest of her group and local airport staff, where she was made to undress.

As Jimmy Carter says, ‘Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew’, or indeed, woman.

Human Rights Watch outed, etc.

You might recall my mentioning on 23 November the Jerusalem Post’s report on the new Human Rights Watch report accusing Palestinians of war crimes for protecting individual houses with ‘human shields’. Then, on 29 November, Norman Finkelstein (reprinted immediately on CounterPunch) came out against the report and called for letters to HRW demanding a retraction. This morning there was a press release from the International Solidarity Movement citing the relevant sections of the Geneva Conventions and establishing quite convincingly that HRW’s accusation was completely groundless, in their own terms. Finkelstein’s page provides links for those who want to write to Kenneth Roth and Sarah Whitson, which I encourage you to do. There are also letters from other readers on that page.

Now, Jonathan Cook has also made an impressive contribution to the discussion of the issue, which you should read in full. Among his observations,

Women volunteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind his head.

A few days ago I wrote that Gaza residents traumatized by projectiles falling on their homes didn’t have the option of fleeing because ‘of course departure is not an option for them’. A correspondent has written casting doubt on this assertion, ‘From what I've read, it seems that Israel is perfectly willing to let Palestinians leave for other countries. If that is true, that means departure is an option’. On reflection, I wrote, ‘I have heard that, too. In fact I think foundations exist, possibly run out of Yisrael Beitenu, that will pay their way and even give them a little grant. But I'm not real sure how it works and frankly, I can't imagine anyone in Gaza being able to avail themselves of such an opportunity, as there are no Israeli officials there to entertain an application and the borders are closed.’ If you can shed any light in the issue, please let me know and I’ll post an update.

Hot on the heels of their recent military intervention in Tonga to protect the monarchy from prodemocracy ‘rioters’, in the interests of stability and democracy, Ha’aretz reports that New Zealand has now humiliated itself again by withdrawing a warrant for the arrest of Moshe Ya’alon for war crimes.

The warrant names Ya'alon for ordering an Israel Air Force attack on the home of senior Hamas official Salah Shehada in the Gaza Strip in 2002. Shahada, the founder of Hamas' military wing, and one of his aides were killed in the attack along with 13 civilians.

This morning’s mail also brought an interesting ‘cogitation’ from MediaLens’s David Edwards, where he discusses some of the mechanisms that the educational system deploys in turning us into compliant ‘responsible’ members of society, regardless of considerations of what I think he would call ‘compassion’, and I would call ‘solidarity’. Among the specific ploys that teacher John Taylor Gatto mentions in his book Dumbing Us Down,

The point is that a child who accepts the label ‘not very bright’ will, in his or her own mind, deem risible the notion that he or she might seek to understand the world, much less to challenge the assumptions accepted by the society by which he or she has been labelled. For a ’failure’ who has been successfully undermined in this way, to reject the labelling system itself will seem like the most obvious and wretched sour grapes. How can this one individual be right against a whole world of opinion? And from where can we gain the confidence that has been stripped away from us by the very system we are presuming to challenge?

On the other hand, the ‘bright’ child will feel a sense of affirmation and belonging that will make him or her disinclined to challenge the fundamental legitimacy and wisdom of the source of his or her own self-esteem. These are the ’winners’ who populate our public [i.e. private] schools, Oxbridge universities and corporate media offices.

Edwards also points out that ‘a lot of ’dim’ children are too ’bright’, or at least too true to themselves, to tolerate the trivia imposed on them as ’education’. To be indifferent to what is of minimal human significance is not a sign of stupidity.’

When I was a kid, maybe 6 or 7 years old, my grandmother took me to see a western and after some gripping scene I discovered to my horror that M&Ms actually do melt in your hand. This was a seminal event in my life, to which I attribute my low tolerance for bullshit. My mother recently reminded me of it out of the blue, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just my fevered imagination. Nevertheless, I did well in school until I dropped out in grade 10 - a decision I have never had cause to regret. I wish I’d been allowed to do it earlier. One of the many advantages was that they never got around to teaching me to hate Shakespeare.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how disappointed I was not to have run into the socialists at the secularism rally I attended. Well, I finally found them yesterday selling papers in Kızılay. I anticipate that this is going to have a significant positive impact on my energy level and my motivation to learn Turkish. It’s also possible that it will also impact on the time available for my cyberlife.

I’m going to post this before it gets too long, but I’m currently writing something about Jimmy Carter’s speech broadcast Thursday, Democracy Now!, and the DN interview with Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah. I may post it later today.

High on what?

According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour in an interview with The Jerusalem Post Thursday,

"In one case you could have, for instance, a very objectionable intent - the intent to harm civilians, which is very bad - but effectively not a lot of harm is actually achieved," she said. "But how can you compare that with a case where you may not have an intent but you have recklessness [in which] civilian casualties are foreseeable? The culpability or the intent may not sound as severe, but the actual harm is catastrophic."

Believe it or not, she is attributing the objectionable intent to those firing Qassam rockets. I suppose it should be welcome that she at least recognizes that the IOF is culpable for the foreseeable, but of course unintentional, Palestinians who just happen to be accidentally killed and injured by Israeli artillery barrages, missiles, bullets and other obviously harmless projectiles.

On CounterPunch the other day, Kathleen Christisson issued a moral challenge,

…any Jew anywhere who allows Israel to commit these acts and pursue these policies in the name of all Jews -- for Israel does claim to act in the name of Jews everywhere -- without speaking out against Israel, without screaming protests, must be ashamed. Any American who allows the United States to support Israel -- to support it militarily with infusions of arms in the billions of dollars every year and to sustain it morally and psychologically -- without loud protest should be ashamed.

Further on the Gemayel assassination, Charles Glass writes,

So, what can the United States do? I can tell you what it has done. In 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger approved the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In 1982, his successor, Al Haig, encouraged Israel's invasion. Then, in 1990, another American secretary of state, James Baker, gave the go-ahead for the Syrian army to return to the parts of Lebanon from which it had been excluded in 1982. Neither Syria nor Israel entered Lebanon without an American okay. An American diktat could keep them both out, if the US cared as much about Lebanon as its politicians claim.

Jonathan Cook, as always worth a read, makes a convincing, if admittedly inconclusive, case that the Syrians are not necessarily the ones with most to gain from the assassination,

Gemayel's death, and Syria's blame for it, strengthens the case of the neoconservatives in Washington -- Israel's allies in the Administration -- whose star had begun to wane. They can now argue convincingly that Syria is unreformed and unreformable. Such an outcome helps to avert the danger, from Israel's point of view, that White House doves might win the argument for befriending Syria.

For all these reasons, we should be wary of assuming that Syria is the party behind Gemayel's death -- or the only regional actor meddling in Lebanon.

In much the same vein, Robert Fisk writes,

That little matter of the narrative - and who writes it - remained a problem yesterday, as the Western powers pointed their fingers at Syria. Yes, all five leading Lebanese men murdered in the past 20 months were anti-Syrian. And it's a bit like saying "the butler did it". Wouldn't a vengeful Syria strike at the independence of Lebanon by killing a minister? Yes. But then, what would be the best way of undermining the new and boastful power of the pro-Syrian Hizbollah, the Shia guerrilla army which has demanded the resignation of Siniora's cabinet? By killing a government minister, knowing that many Lebanese would blame the murder on Syria's Hizbollah allies?

For another take on the NYT coverage of the assassination, Chris Marsden writes in WSWS,

What the Times presents as an accidental result of Gemayel’s assassination provides a more convincing argument for anti-Syrian forces being responsible than its own efforts to blame Hezbollah or Syria.

As the Times predicted, Hezbollah has been forced to put the planned anti-government rallies announced earlier by its leader Sheik Hasan Nasrallah on hold. Instead, Gemayel’s funeral yesterday was the focus of a massive demonstration by anti-Syrian and pro-government forces.

In today’s Times, Steven Erlanger, always ready to cast a critical eye on events in Palestine, writes,

After another surge of violence in and around the Gaza Strip over the past month, Israel and the Palestinians moved gingerly on Friday toward reinstating an often-broken cease-fire between them.

Not worth mentioning in the newspaper of record is that the surge of violence has been perpetrated by the occupying military force. Not worth mentioning is that artillery and firearms are discharged with an intent to cause harm. And above all, it is not only not worth mentioning, but forbidden to mention, that the ‘often-broken cease-fire’ was unilateral, that Hamas refused to respond to Israeli provocation for over a year and a half.

True to form, history in the NYT’s view, began on 25 June,

Israel re-entered Gaza in late June in response to the capture of a soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, by a group of Palestinian militants that included Hamas.

That the Israeli military kidnapped two Palestinian civilians the previous day, civilians, not coincidentally, whose names the NYT will not publish, couldn’t possibly have anything whatever to do with Shalit’s capture. Once again, small mercies. At least Mr Erlanger has managed to temper his language – usually, Shalit is ‘kidnapped’ or ‘abducted’, as if his tank crew were not a legitimate military target. As if it was some kind of crime. Which of course it was. By definition. What the occupied and oppressed do is criminal, what the occupiers and oppressors do is anticipatory retaliation, or the like.

Sometimes I feel like it must be tiresome reading about the cynical bullshit I see in the media. But people read the bullshit itself every day, day in day out – I know people who actually subscribe to the hard copy of the Times, so I guess I’ll just keep it up.