| Israel's fait accompli in Gaza | ||||||||||
| By Eric S. Margolis | ||||||||||
There are two completely different versions of what is currently happening in Gaza. In the Israeli and North American press version, Hamas - 'Islamic terrorists' backed by Iran - have in an unprovoked attack fired deadly rockets on innocent Israel with the intent of destroying the Jewish state. North American politicians and the media say Israel "has the right to defend itself".
According to the UN, most of Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian refugees subsist near the edge of hunger. Seventy per cent of Palestinian children in Gaza suffer from severe malnutrition and psychological trauma. Medical facilities are critically short of doctors, personnel, equipment, and drugs. Gaza has quite literally become a human garbage dump for all the Arabs that Israel does not want. Gaza is one of the world's most-densely populated places, a vast outdoor prison camp filled with desperate people. In the past, they threw stones at their Israeli occupiers; now they launch home-made rockets. Call it a prison riot, writ large.
This has pleased Israel's supporters in North America who have been cheering the war in Gaza and have been backing away from their earlier tentative support for a land-for-peace deal. Israel's successes in having Western media portray the Gaza offensive as an 'anti-terrorist operation' will also diminish hopes of peace talks any time soon. Obama inherits this mess in a few weeks. During the elections, Obama bowed to the Israel lobby, offering a new US carte blanche to Israel and even accepting Israel's permanent monopoly of all of Jerusalem. Obama keeps saying he must remain silent on policy issues until George Bush, the outgoing US president, leaves office, but his staff appear happy to avoid having to make statements about Gaza that would antagonise Israel's American supporters. Unless he moves swiftly to distance himself from the policies of the Bush administration, he will soon find himself facing the same problems and anger as the Bush White House. Arab deal killed The plan, now likely defunct, had called for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders and share Jerusalem in exchange for full recognition and normalised relations with the Muslim world. Arab governments will now be unable to sell the deal as they face a storm of criticism from their own people over their powerlessness to help the Palestinians of Gaza. Egypt, in particular, is being widely accused of collaborating with Israel in further sealing off and isolating Gaza. It seems highly unlikely they will be able to advance a peace plan with Israel for now. This is a bonus for right-wing Israelis, who have always been dead set against any withdrawal and strongly supported the attack on Gaza. Other Israeli factions who were always lukewarm about the Saudi peace plan are now unlikely to reconsider it. Israel's hardliners point to Gaza and claim that any Palestinian state on the West Bank would threaten their nation's security by firing rockets into Israel's heartland. Mighty information machine
Though Israel's use of American weapons against Gaza violates the US Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts, the docile US Congress will remain mute. Israel's assault on Gaza was clearly timed for America's interregnum between administrations and the year-end holidays, a well-used Israeli tactic. It calls for a non-religious state to be created in Palestine, meaning an end to Zionism. Ironically, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and late leader of Hamas, had spoken of a compromise with Tel Aviv shortly before he was assassinated by Israel in 2004. Israel's hopes that it can bomb Gazans into rejecting Hamas are as ill-conceived as its failed attempt in 2006 to blast Lebanon into rejecting Hezbollah. Those Americans who still do not understand why their nation was attacked on 9/11 need only look to Gaza, for which the US is now being blamed as much as Israel. The brutal collective punishment inflicted on Gaza will likely strengthen Hamas and reverse any hopes of a Middle East peace in the coming years. |
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Al Jazeera English - War on Gaza - Israel's fait accompli in Gaza
Friday, January 2, 2009
Did the IAF bomb a Gazan welding truck or a Hamas Grad transport?
 | |
| By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent | |
| |
Just before midnight, on December 29, the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman's Office posted an urgent headline on its Web site: Truck packed with weapons attacked near Jabalya. The subheadline went on to read: "At around 6 P.M., the Israel Air Force attacked a Hamas truck carrying dozens of Grad rockets."
The article was accompanied by a video just over 2 minutes showing the IAF's perspective from the sky, until just a moment before the explosion. The video shows 15 white figures casually milling between two vehicles. Three long black objects appear between their hands and the white figures lay these objects down on what seems to be a truck. The second vehicle takes off at a certain point and suddenly an explosion sounds and flames cover the screen. An eyewitness said the explosion was caused by an overhead drone. Human rights groups' investigations, however, present a different testimony altogether. According to B'tselem and the Mezan center for human rights, the truck belongs to Ahmed Samur, 55, and is still standing, burnt, beside his workshop in the Jabaliya refugee camp. Next to it hang scorched oxygen balloons, a blade and cables. Nobody dares move the truck or the accompanying accoutrements for fear that the UAVs filming every detail from above will bomb whoever approaches. "Everything is still there on the ground," said Samur on Thursday. "We only moved the dead." Just three hours before the attack, Samur's daughter told him that she had heard on the local radio that a house next to his workship had been bombed. He immediately got into his Mercedes truck, along with his son and a few neighbors and relatives, and went to the workshop to see the damage. They were shocked to discover that the neighboring house had collapsed onto his workshop and decided to pack up the expensive tools and take them home before they could be looted. On the first round, they brought home a drill, a welding torch, a scale, other tools and a gas balloon for cooking. Then they went back to the workshop to pack up the rest: three of six oxygen balloons used for welding, two jerrycans filled with benzene and two filled with diesel. As Samir's son Imad organized the tools in the truck, his brother-in-law packed his own smaller car with 50 packages of welding electrodes, 4 kilograms each, and drove off. Samur himself stood on the other side of the street to keep the dust particles from the burning nearby house from flying into his lungs. He looked at the youths packing the truck and was reminded of working bees in a honeycomb - this was just before 5 P.M., he estimates. "Suddenly I saw a flash of light next to my truck and then it caught fire and I heard the sound of an explosion. I started to run toward the blast, and when I got close and the smoke cleared, I saw bodies, one of them belonging to my son Imad. I fainted. When I woke up they told me that Imad and the seven other young people who were helping him had been killed," he recounted. Speaking to Haaretz by phone, Samur said: "These were not Hamas, they were our children, and I will tell you their names. Imad Samur, 32; Ashraf al-Dabar, 30; Mahmoud Rabayan, 15; Rami Rabayan, 23; Ahmed Hila, 19; Mohammed Mahdi, 17; Wissam Eid, 14; Mohammed Haber, 20. Four others were hurt, two of them seriously: Bilal Rabayan, 19 and his brother Baha, 16. "You have experts and smart people in Israel," he said. "They should come and check my truck and the oxygen balloons. They should see that they were not Grad missiles and they were not anything else. You people are saying they burnt a big truck filled with Grads. Well come and see for yourself." Haaretz asked the IDF spokesperson if the video depicts the truck in question, and was told "the truck's contents were taken from a building that was housing ammunition and rockets." No one in Gaza has denied that Qassams are being manufactured and launched from the Strip, but there are many targets hit by the IAF whose military importance is unclear at best. For instance, a small, empty building in the middle of a playground in the Shabura refugee camp in Rafah which was blown up by the IAF two days ago, in an attack that left two dead. Mezan said the unending IAF attacks have made it very difficult to determine how many of the targets hit were military and which were civilian. | |
Friday, December 26, 2008
Russia bids for control over the Middle East
Russian FM Lavrov announced the upcoming financial support for Palestinians during Abbas’ visit to Moscow. As his presidential term expires on January 9, this seems Abbas’ last official visit - significantly, to Chechnya.
Russian support to Palestinians will come largely in military sphere. In Lavrov’s diplomatic speak, Russia supports Abbas’ “security measures.” The only Fatah’s security measures we see in Israel are related to terrorist attacks: scores of Fatah policemen are vacationing in Israeli jails for terror activity. Not a single Palestinian terrorist was intercepted by Fatah policemen. The few terrorists comfortably jailed in Palestine were arrested by IDF and released to Fatah.
Russian pledge to Palestine has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. Russians never delivered food or other humanitarian supplies to Palestinian refugee camps, but look for “security cooperation” with Palestinians. In plain English, Russians seek a military foothold at Israeli borders. To that end, they pledged ten MIG-29 jets to Lebanon’s Hezbollah government free, and build a mammoth navy base in Syrian port of Tartus. The navy base will host S-300 and later S-400 anti-aircraft defense which would protect most of Syria against Israeli reprisals. Under the Russian ABM umbrella, Syria can develop its nuclear weapons without fearing Israeli preemption.
Russia’s Middle East policy also includes TOR-1M and S-300 deliveries to Iran and joint nuclear program with Egypt.
Russian expansion comes despite that country’s economic troubles. Russian economy relies on oil, gas, and other natural resources almost as much as Saudi Arabia. Oil and gas revenues account for about 60% of Russian budget (both directly and through taxes on businesses which thrive on high oil prices). During the years of windfall oil profits, Russian government built currency reserves, but they dwindle quickly as oil prices fell.
Instead of minding its own business and building a modern economy, Putin-Medvedev’s government grew increasingly hostile. Domestically, the regime amended the high treason law: the new formulation easily includes all dissidents. The tax administration hunts down crisis-stricken businesses: the reduced tax revenues are blamed on evasion rather than economic downturn. In the “near abroad”, Russia continues military incursions in Georgia and introduced gas blockade of Ukraine. Russian Gazprom monopoly refused transporting Asian gas to Ukraine, and slapped it with gas prices substantially higher than those offered to West European customers.
Russia cannot gain rich or advanced countries on its side. They are either not interested in Russian overtures, or prefer relations with the West, if only for economic reasons. Russians have nothing to offer Saudi Arabia or Emirates, but court the world’s outlaws such as Iran or Venezuela.
The Old Europe also falls victim to Russian bullying: France and Germany, the EU cheerleaders, depend on Russia for gas supplies, as are most other European countries. Staunchly anti-American EU embraces Russia if not for any other reason than to slap the United States. In its latest meeting at FM level, NATO discussed Georgia: not the way of defending it from Russia, but how to get over it and re-establish ties with Russia.
US-Russian nuclear cooperation, arms reduction, and anti-missile treaties are practically abandoned. Russia threatened to stop dismantling its nuclear warheads and selling the uranium to America, though the deal went on smoothly for fifteen years. Putin resumed militarily useless but highly provocative flights of Russian nuclear-armed strategic bombers around Europe.
Russia’s increasingly strong relations with Hezbollah, Hamas, and PLO are best viewed on the background of its worldwide strategy. Lacking funds to buy clients with aid, having too little economic clout to obtain friends with trade advantages, Russia resorted to the old Soviet tactics of stirring trouble. That policy amounts to racketeering: if Russian role is not acknowledged, regional troubles ensue. Propping the miscreants like Iran or PLO is way cheaper than staging conflicts and immensely cheaper than any civilized way of spreading one’s influence.
Unless Russia breaks again into the post-democratic anarchy, it is out to create major troubles for the world.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Clashes erupt in Israeli-run prison
| Clashes erupt in Israeli-run prison | |||||||||||||
| | |||||||||||||
At least seven Palestinian detainees and three Israeli guards have been injured in a prison riot, according to Yaron Zamir, a prison service spokesman. The clashes in the Ofer detention centre near the West Bank town of Ramallah erupted on Saturday when dozens of Palestinian inmates started throwing objects at guards who had entered to search a prison ward, Zamir said. "Following the violence a larger force was sent into the ward and order was restored shortly afterwards," he told the AFP news agency. Seven prisoners injured after inhaling tear gas were treated at the jail. Three guards were lightly injured by objects thrown at them, Zamir said. More than 11,000 Palestinians are held in Israeli prisons, many of them detained for long periods without trial. Nour Odeh, Al Jazeera's correspodent reporting from Ramallah, said: "Palestinian detainees inside the miltary camp tried to prevent Israeli prison authorities from raiding their sections and undertaking a search of the wards. She said that calm appears to have been restored and situation brought under control. But it is unclear whether the Israeli authorities will respond to the Palestinian prisoners' frustrations and grievances after the latest incident. Gaza fatality In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, a Palestinian man has been killed in an Israeli missile attack - the first death since the end of a six-month-old ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which controls the Palestinian territory. Ali Hijazi, 22, and two other men who were wounded in Saturday's incident were members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, witnesses said.
The air raid targeted a group of fighters firing rockets towards Israel, an Israeli military official said. The attack in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip came a day after the end of the ceasefire. Sherine Tadros, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Gaza, said: "The [Israeli] military told us that six projectiles have been launched from the Gaza Strip towards southern Israel. "This is coming as very sad news for the people here who once again find themselves in the position they were in before the ceasefire, in terms of this almost daily aggression by Israel and very uncertain times in terms of what will happen next. "From the Israeli side they have said that ... as long as there is peace from the Palestinian side they will respond with peace. But if there is aggression by Palestinian factions, they will fight back with force." A ceasefire agreed in June officially ended at daybreak on Friday, after Hamas said it would not renew it. Hamas blamed Israelis for the failure of the ceasefire, saying that they had not lived up to their obligations under the deal by continuing a blockade of the Gaza Strip. |
Monday, November 3, 2008
McCain's Shameful Slur
fighting words
McCain's Shameful Slur
The Republicans' appalling attack on Rashid Khalidi.
Posted Monday, Nov. 3, 2008, at 12:09 PM ET
On the clouded synapses of Sen. John McCain, it became clear as his campaign limped and lurched to its close, the termites had been dining long and dining well. However much one might have admired the low comedy of his closing routine on Saturday Night Live, it had to be admitted that even in that context, he looked a trifle glassy and elderly, not to say lost. No doubt there was some safe refuge to be taken, by himself and his absurd choice of running mate, in self-deprecation. The true ghastliness, however, was revealed in the crudeness of the McCain-Palin attempt to deprecate others.
A few feeble cracks on a comedy show are not enough to erase the memory of a vulgar and vicious attack, mounted on a rival candidate McCain has publicly called "honorable," only a few days earlier. It had been said that Sen. Barack Obama had once attended a dinner for professor Rashid Khalidi, a distinguished Palestinian academic. It was further said that the Los Angeles Times, which had first reported the five-years-ago dinner in Chicago, was deliberately withholding a videotape of the evening that would show Obama in the audience while tough criticism of Israel was being voiced. Here is how the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States described the situation in a radio interview in Miami:
I'm not in the business of talking about media bias, but what if there was a tape with John McCain with a neo-Nazi outfit being held by some media outlet? I think the treatment of the issue would be slightly different.
I presume that in this fantastic piece of semicoherent Florida pandering McCain meant to imply the wearing of a neo-Nazi outfit rather than the membership of one, but it was hardly necessary for him to be so arch as to disclaim an interest in "talking about media bias." After all, his campaign maintains and accouters a running mate who will do all that for him and will furthermore read anything that is put in front of her (or, if it is a hoax call, will believe anything that is told to her) and who opined, on the same subject:
What we don't know is how Barack Obama responded to these slurs on a country that he professes to support, and the reason we don't know is the newspaper that has this tape, the Los Angeles Times, refuses to release it. It must be nice for a candidate to have major news organizations looking out for their best interests like that.
And it must be easy for a woman who couldn't, when first asked, name a single newspaper or magazine that she had ever read, to become such an instant expert on the press. It was last April when the paper disclosed the original event. Now it's being accused of covering up the event!
My main point, though, is not to call attention to the bullying and demagogy of McCain's attack. It is to observe how completely it undermines any claim on his part to foreign-policy experience. Khalidi has been known to me for some time and can easily be read and consulted by anyone with the remotest curiosity about the Israeli-Arab dispute. He is highly renowned, well beyond the borders of his own discipline, for his measure and care and scruple in weighing the issue. If he is seriously to be compared to a "neo-Nazi," then the Republican nominee has put the United States in the unbelievable position of slandering the most courageously "moderate" of the Palestinian Arabs as a brownshirt and a fascist. What then has been the point of every negotiation on a two-state solution since President George H.W. Bush convened the peace conference in Madrid in 1991? Nazis, after all, are to be crushed, not accommodated. One would have to think hard before coming up with a more crazy and irresponsible statement on any subject. Once again, it seems that McCain utterly lost his bearings.
I put the word moderate in quotation marks above because I dislike employing it in its usual form. Rashid Khalidi's family is a famous one in Jerusalem, long respected by Arab and Christian and Jew and Druze and Armenian, and holding a celebrated house and position in the city since approximately the time of the Crusades. I have had the honor of being invited to this very house. If Rashid chooses to state that he doesn't care to be evicted from his ancestral home in order to make way for some settler from Brooklyn who claims to have God on his side, I think he has a perfect right to say so. I would go further and say that if Barack Obama was looking for a Palestinian friend, he could not have chosen any better. But perhaps John McCain has decided that he doesn't need any Palestinian friends and neither do we. Perhaps he thinks it's all right to refer to refugees and victims of occupation, who have been promised self-determination and statehood at the podium of the United Nations and the U.S. Congress by George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, as if they were Hitlerites. How shameful. How disgusting. How ignorant.
One could go a step further and say that many Israelis have used the words apartheid and terrorist to describe at least some of their government's policies. In just the same way, one could note that Khalidi has clearly denounced violence when used by his "own" side, and also—this I remember very well from meeting him in Beirut in the 1970s and '80s—when employed by regimes like the Syrian. But somehow this evidence and this reflection has become beside the point. McCain saw a chance to deal a cheap and low blow, and he had the ideally ignorant deputy to reinforce him. The slander, after all, might get them through another news cycle and perhaps adhere some defamatory mud to their opponent. Who cares that it made the United States of America look thuggish and ignorant and petty in the eyes of any thinking person in the Middle East? Anyone who does care should be getting ready to vote against this humiliating ticket, a team that so farcically and horribly unites the senescent and the puerile.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2203619/
