War on Gaza

IDF soldiers talk about their war crimes

Israel/Palestine, War on Gaza
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That the IDF committed war crimes in their invasion of Gaza (let’s not even mention the invasion itself was a warcrime) was known on day one of the invasion. Evidence for that however only came from such unreliable witnesses as the victims themselves, or United Nations employees, or western journalists in Gaza, so it was largely rejected by Israel and its defenders. But now the Israeli newspaper Haaretz is reporting the personal experiences of IDF soldiers during the Gaza invasion and those are less easy to sweep aside:

The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children. “There was a house with a family inside …. We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof,” the soldier said.

“The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn’t understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he … he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders.”

According to the squad leader: “The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.

“I don’t think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his
job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to … I don’t know how to describe it …. The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way,” he said.

The IDF has ordered an internal probe into these allegations. This always is a great comfort to victims of Israeli aggression, as without exception it turns out they weren’t shot, it was all a big misunderstanding or just an innocent little mistake.

The strictly impartial BBC, operating on behalf of the Israeli government

Auntie Beeb, Manufacturing Consent, War on Gaza
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To update an old Young Ones joke. As seen on Prog Gold, the current BBC’s director general is quite cozy with the Israeli government, which of course did not influence the decision to remain impartial by not broadcasting an appeal for the IDF’s victims. Now Ellis Sharp reminds us that he has been impartial towards Israel from the start of his tenure when in 2004 the then Middle East correspondent was transferred to Africa:

Orla Guerin’s offence was to run stories not just about the grief of Israeli families who had lost family members to suicide bombers but also stories about the grief and suffering of ordinary Palestinian families. As one blogger put it at the time:

Guerin’s real sin, of course, is to show some sympathy for the victims of the Israeli bombing (that’s enough to brand her a “terrorist”).

Within days of Thompson meeting Sharon, Guerin was sacked as BBC TV Middle East correspondent and transferred to Africa.

As you’ll remember, Thompson became director general because his predecessor had to resign after the BBC got caught on a technicality and was keelhauled for it in the aftermath of the Hutton Inquiry. Thompson was brought in as very much a pair of safe hands who wouldn’t rock the boat, follow the establishment line ever more so than his predecessors and not embarass the government. Despite this, there have been several scandals during his tenure, from running unwinnable contests to sexing up a documentary about the royal family to of course the Ross/Brands clusterfuck. This seemed to have made the BBC gunshy, prone to overreact and moreover, seemed to have lost the corporation its political nous.

So while the BBC has always been careful to not upset Israel or its zionist cheerleaders in the UK, always had an internal bias towards Israel, it used to be much more subtle about this. Even five years ago, I don’t think it would’ve been so blatant as to refuse air time to a genuinely humanitarian appeal for the inhabitants of Gaza. But because the corporation has been so battered by the same politicians and tabloids that are such great friends of Israel as well, because it has been caught with its pants down so often lately, it has overreacted. And now even those people who are normally the first to accuse it of a pro-Palestinian bias are disgusted.

Poor Auntie Beeb. It just cannot win.

Dutch government does not believe Israel has committed warcrimes

Dutch politics, War on Gaza
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Which means the following are not warcrimes or have not happened, according to the Dutch government (in Dutch).

To Balkenende and his fellow moral crusaders, so happy to tell us what’s wrong and right, what Israel has been up to in Gaza is of no great concern. The only thing that should be condemned is Hamas violence.

Biggest douche in the universe

Numpties, War on Gaza
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heckuva job Brownie

No, not socalled psychic John Edward, but heckuva job Brownie, the guy who helped fuck up disaster recovery in New Orleans after Katrina so much. You’d think somebody so monumental incompetent would shut the fuck up forever afterwards, but the fool seems to have reinvented himself as a low-rent conservative media personality, de rigeur blog and all.

Which is where the Sadly-Nosians found him, talking smack about Dr. Mads Gilbert, a medical relief worker in Gaza. Apparantly Brownie can, with his great expertise in humanitarian relief efforts, tell when a video of a Palestinian child dying in hospital is “so fake it’s funny, but only after the Kerning Kommandos at Little Green fascists alerted him to it.

Un-fucking-believable. The guy who did his best to make Katrina as big a disaster as possible, somebody who in a just world would’ve become a ditchdigger in Patagonia out of pure shame, is fisking a medicial relief worker in Gaza. It’s beyond satire, but it is fitting; it’s not like Brownie cared much about the suffering of brown people much back in 2005. Somebody who was so criminally neglectant doing his job protecting Americans isn’t going to lose much sleep on the question of why Palestinians would put together such an elaborate fake when there are so many real victims of Israeli bombs
lying around…

The real question is why this asshole can still get speaking arrangements? Who is paying for the priviledge of hearing him speak, unless it’s to applaud his job performance with an impromptu tribute of tomatoes or dogshit?

Israeli war aims: ethnical cleansing Gaza?

War on Gaza
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Israel always had a bit of a problem with Gaza ever since it conquered the territory in 1967. It’s one of the most densely populated places in the world, it houses a lot of people driven out of their homes in 1948, doesn’t really have that much going for it and is therefore less of a prize than the West Bank is. As Christopher Hitchens (!) recounts in his foreword to Edward Said’s Peace and its discontents, Gaza has always been seen by the Israelis as a trap to spring on the Palestinians; as Moshe Dayn allegedly put it, “a bridge to doublecross”. The Israeli withdrawal from it in 2005 was therefore a bit of p.r. stunt; Israel could do with Gaza much more easily than it can do without its control of the West Bank. And because they kept control of the borders, airspace and the sea, the Israelis thought they had created more or less the largest open air prison in the world, a ghetto even, which if the inhabitants got too uppity could always be choked off. As Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Ehud Olmert put it in 2006 “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. Olmert himself talked of “not allowing a humanitarian crisis in Gaza” but having no intention of “making their lives easier”. Such nice, humanitarian gestures are of course much more easy to pull off if there aren’t settlers stuck in the middle of Gaza of course.

But as we’ve seen again and again in the years since the Israeli withdrawal, the Gazans have not let themselves be cowed, voting in a Hamas government despite Israeli, European and American warnings about what would happen if they did, the rockets have continued to be launched against Sderot (founded in 1951, but once the site of a Palestinian village called Najd), so talk has been turning in Israel to more extreme measures…

Back in March of 2008, Lenny reported about a plan for a possible ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, (or as the Israelis might call it, the establishment of a security zone), based on a report by an Israeli television channel. More rumours of such a plan have been floating around ever since and ever since the war began I’ve been thinking this was going to be the IDF’s ultimate war aim. When the ground invasion began this seemed to be further confirmed and now we learn that the Israeli defence minister has been asking legal approval to “evacuate” thousands of residents of Gaza City. It may not be necessary, as already some fifteen thousands people have
fled towns in northern Gaza, after being threatened by Israeli pamphlets and radio announcements…

But, as the inhabitants of southern Lebanon found out back when Israel targeted their country in 2006, fleeing does not make you safe. Even United Nations schools, known to the Israelis to be UN schools, with the UN having provided the IDF with the full details and GPS coordinates of all their buildings in the Gaza Strip, are not safe: thirty dead when an Israeli tank shelled it. As per usual the IDF blames their enemy for making them shoot the school, as the troops in question were supposedly fired upon. Of course, everytime something likes this happens, the IDF trots out the same old story and every time it turns out to be a lie.

So don’t put too much faith in all the “diplomatic efforts” being undertaken by the various bigwigs to end this conflict, especially when Tony Blair, with his usual brilliant prioritising thought the most important question was to stop Hamas getting weapons. This conflict will end when Israel wants it to end, or is forced to do so. If we don’t ratch up the pressure on Israel quickly, this will end with ethnic cleansing. When you have people like Avedon Carol talking about getting ‘a chill up my spine when I heard they were talking about a “permanent solution” to the Palestinian issue’, you know this is going to get much worse before it gets better, if it ever will. But it only will if we make the Israelis stop.