Israel/Palestine

The cynical Israeli invasion of Gaza

Published on January 5, 2009

Gaza

What more can you say than what the cartoon (found at Permanent Revolution) already expresses? The idea that Israel’s aerial attacks against and subsequent invasion of Gaza are a response to Hamas terrorism doesn’t pass the laugh test. We know this attack has been planned for a long time, we’ve seen the preparations, we know it fits the Israeli strategy of ratching up the pressure on Gaza. We’ve seen it all before, back in 2006, when the Israeli army did the same in their first attempt to topple Hamas. That ended with a Fatah driven coup against the democratically elected Hamas governement which saw Hamas ousted from power in the West Bank but the opposite happening in Gaza. With Fatah now powerless or unwilling to take on Hamas again, Israel now has to effect regime change on its own. Hence the ground invasion.

table showing a huge drop in attacks during the ceasefire

The reason we cannot take Israel at its word about why they moved from economic strangulation and “surgical strikes” to a fullblown airwar and invasion is shown in the graph above, taken from official Israeli sources. What do you see? That during the ceasefire agreed to between Hamas and Israel in June last year, attacks from Gaza decreased dramatically, only picking up again after Israel started attacking in force. There’s a lot of manufactured outrage spread by Zionist apologists about these attacks, but what they forget to mention is that during the ceasefire Israel did not lift its blockade, nor stopped its policy of extrajudicial assasinations, with 22 Palestinians having been killed by Israeli forces during the truce. The number of Israelis killed? Zero.

Everything about this invasion is cynical and calculated, from the way its being justified to the date it was implemented, two days after Christmas, when all the lights have gone off in the world’s government buildings anyway. It’s been so cynical I haven’t really been able to write about it so far, as it has just made me too depressed and outraged. Fortunately, there’s Lenin’s Tomb, which has done splendid work reporting on the invasion and its background.

Night and fog

Published on November 18, 2008

Israel is disappearing Palestinian minors:

On 2 November, a military court of appeals judge in Ofer Military Base denied the appeal of Salwa Salah and Sareh a-Siuri, both seventeen years old, to overturn renewal of the administrative detention orders issued against them.

The two were arrested in the middle of the night in June and have been held in administrative detention in Israel since then. In October, the army renewed the detention order until 3 January 2009. B’Tselem calls on the army to release the two girls immediately or, if it has evidence against them, to prosecute them as provided by law.

Yes, it’s all done nice and legal, but it shows how any justice system is perverted when it has to operate in service of an Apartheid
state.

Breaking the Israeli stranglehold on Gaza

Published on August 26, 2008

Activists manage to break through the Israeli blockade of the Gaza coast:

GAZA, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Two boats carrying activists challenging an Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip reached the shore of the Hamas-controlled territory on Saturday.

The 44 “Free Gaza” activists from 17 nations, who had set out on Friday from Cyprus in two wooden boats, were met by thousands of Palestinians who cheered along the shoreline at their arrival.

“Today is a special day, we hope it’s the beginning. We have opened the path and we hope there will be more travellers,” said Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian peace activist, after the ship anchored off shore.

Israel may have “withdrawn” from Gaza back in 2005, but took care to keep its control of Gaza’s borders; all its borders, not just the ones with Israel. The usual excuse is terrorism, but the reality is the slow economic strangulation of Gaza as part of a deliberate strategy to starve the territory into submission. Even the sea is off-limit for the people of Gaza, with Israeli warships firing on any fishing ship getting too far out of the coast. What the activists attempted to do is draw attention to this strangulation, but also to actually break the blockade. Just having another press stunt is not enough, but fortunately it seems the presence of the activists has enabled some fishermen to actually fish:

A statement by the group said the activists boarded Palestinian fishing boats on Monday and travelled with local fishermen eight miles (13 km) off shore, passing a 6-mile limit they said was generally enforced by the Israeli military.

The Gaza fishermen said that Israeli ships normally fire at them in deep waters and they had not travelled that far from shore in more than five years.

“We hope we will be able to go that far every day because it is our right, and it should not be a one-time event because of the presence of the foreigners,” said 27-year-old fisherman Fawzi al-Hessi.

The Palestinians themselves than are realistic about the chances of Israel allowing this situation to continue once the cameras have gone… To properly break the stranglehold the Israelis have on Gaza, not to mention the West Bank, there needs to be constant pressure from Europe and America and our governments need to stop supporting Israel.

Israel/Palestine: when did the NYT get a clue?

Published on June 2, 2008

Because this article by Jeffrey Goldberg is surprisingly insightful:

“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Mr. Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.

Other Israeli leaders have spoken with similar directness. The former prime minister, and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, told The Jerusalem Post in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state that might then become another Belfast or Bosnia.”

[…]

And the best way to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state is to reverse — not merely halt, but reverse — the West Bank settlement project. The dismantling of settlements is the one step that would buttress the dwindling band of Palestinian moderates in their struggle against the fundamentalists of Hamas.

No, these ideas aren’t particularly shocking, radical or even progressive, but the fact that they can now be expressed in the New York Times, perhaps the cheerleader for zionism must be a good thing. For too long American zionism in particular has held to the idea that Israel could have its caek and eat it: have a greater Israel incorporating the Occupied Territories without having to deal with the Palestinians, the idea that the Palestinians could be bought off by a sham state. If it is no longer beyond the pale to demand a Palestinian state controlling the whole of the Occupied Territories, progress has been made. That said, I still believe even this maximalist two-state solution is least acceptable valid solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. My preference is still a new state, neither Jewish nor Palestinian but open to both.

I also think that the idea that in Israel there’s a greater range of debate possible on this subject, while true, should not be taken too optimistically. there are still incredibly strong political pressures against any Israeli politician being too accomedating to the Palestinians, or being too realistic in which Palestinian organisations are credible discussion partners. Some of these pressures are from imported superzionists from America or Europe, but there are plenty of domestic wingnuts as well. the main difference between Israel and the US is that the day to day reality of Zionist Israel is harder to ignore.

Dutch media bias in the Middle East

Published on April 16, 2008

Branko reports on the findings of political scientist Jacqueline de Bruijn on how the Dutch media reports on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. The results are depressing but unsurprising:

the press under-reports Israeli attacks on Palestinians, even when there are dozens of victims, but it reports on every Palestinian attack on Israelis, even when there are no victims;

as a result, the few times Israeli aggression is reported on, this makes it seem that the supposedly rare Israeli attack is a response to a continuous stream of Palestinian aggression

As one person cynically noted: dead Palestinians are not news, simply because there are so many of them. Israel’s state propaganda makes handy use of this fact by continuously stressing that its attacks are merely responses to Palestinian aggression (a tactic Israel also uses with the PR for its attacks on Lebanon). What makes the whole matter worse is that Israel’s heavy handed violence against the occupied population is actually beneficial for this PR strategy. There’s no reason for Israel to tone down the murderousness of its regime.

[…]

For the press to combat this bias, it first has to recognize that it does have a problem. Everybody can see that De Bruijn’s qualitative statements are correct simply by opening the newspaper and observing the loaded language, regardless of the merits of De Bruijn’s methodology and quantitative statements. Next, the press has to figure out how to attack this problem.

De Bruijn presented her findings during a meeting in which the press were present. Also there was essayist Mohammed Benzakour who came with an equally interesting observation: several of the major Dutch newspapers have correspondents in Israel who are allied with the Zionist cause. The correspondent for Algemeen Dagblad and broadcaster EO (evangelists) is former chairman of the Nederlandse Zionisten Bond and has a daughter who works as press spokes person for the Israeli army, and the correspondent of the Volkskrant organizes trips to Jerusalem for Cidi. That does not necessarily invalidate their reporting (for all I know they take great care to remain as objective as possible), but it does signal a clear conflict of interest, which should in turn alert news consumers. Then again, why should I consume news from a suspect source?

I’ve noticed the tendency of the Dutch media to largely look at the conflict through Israeli eyes before, so it’s good to see my suspicions being confirmed. It’s also another blow against zionist propagandists like the bad news movement who like to pretend the Dutch media are biased against Israel.