Israel’s “Smart” Weapons Kill Sabah Abu Jayab, known to her family and friends as Um Ahmad, walked through her home pointing out everything that had to be replaced after Israelâs 2014 assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.
âThis is all new,â Um Ahmad, a pharmacist, told The Electronic Intifada. She motioned to a balcony equipped with freshly painted walls and new windowsills. Moving to the living room, she said: âThese couches, the chairs over there â all of it is new. We had to replace everything.â
Her home, where she lived with her husband and eight children, was hit by four missiles fired by an Israeli drone during the first week of the Israeli attack. âOnly two of them exploded,â she said. âIf the others had blown up, weâd have all died.â
Not everyone survived. Her eighteen-year-old daughter Amal, who was disabled and unable to walk, died on 17 July, four days after their house was struck.
âShe wasnât hit by the rocket or debris,â Um Ahmad explained, âbut she inhaled a lot of smoke and dust.â
Amal was one of an estimated 2,257 Palestinians killed â including 563 children and 306 women â during Israelâs seven-week attack, according to the United Nations monitoring group OCHA.
âThey were all scaredâ
On 13 July, as missiles pounded their neighborsâ homes during an intensified attack on the Deir al-Balah area in central Gaza, Um Ahmad moved all the children into one room in the back of their house.
âIt was hard to explain to them what was happening and they were all scared,â she said, explaining that Amalâs three sisters are also disabled and unable to walk due to genetic birth defects.
âThere had been no electricity or water for days, and the little ones would jump every time they heard an explosion,â she said.
Um Ahmad explained that they tried to stay in their home because they had nowhere else to go. âIt was hard on the little ones,â she said. âWe knew at any minute we could be hit [by an Israeli strike] like our neighbors.â
Muhammad Abu Jayab, 11, stands on the roof of his home. His neighborâs destroyed house is in the background.
Um Ahmad had to go to her pharmacy to provide medicine for local residents with chronic illnesses and others who had been injured by Israelâs assault. âThere was no way I could not show up to work,â she explained. âPeople with diabetes needed insulin even during times of war [and] others who were hurt needed antibiotics and other medicine.â
The Abu Jayab family home was hit on 13 July. âWe had to carry the four children who donât walk,â she said. âWe took Amal to the hospital because she was in shock and having trouble breathing. They put her on oxygen, but her vital signs seemed fine and she didnât have any external bodily injuries.â Israel’s “Smart” Weapons Kill
Targeting the ill
Amal was unable to eat or speak after the attack and Um Ahmad spent the last four days of her daughterâs life going back and forth between the hospital and the pharmacy where she works. âI showed up that last day and she was dead,â she recounted as she fought back tears.
Israel targeted a medical facility for the disabled on 12 July, the day before the Abu Jayab home was struck. At least four persons were killed and dozens injured when bombs crushed the Mabaret Palestine Society, a center for people with disabilities, in Beit Lahiya, a town in northern Gaza.
On 21 July, Israeli tanks shelled the al-Aqsa hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring forty more, the human rights group Al-Haq reported.
Doctors were forced to evacuate at least fourteen patients who were paralyzed or in a coma at the time, Maâan News Agency reported.
The Israeli army claimed that Palestinian armed groups used the hospital as a base. However it was revealed that Israel used fabricated satellite imagesto âjustifyâ its bombing of al-Wafa.
Ashraf al-Qidra, a spokesperson for Gazaâs health ministry, said that Israel targeted medical facilities and health workers alike. In addition to the hospitals and clinics, three dozen ambulances were destroyed, he told The Electronic Intifada.
âIsrael turned medical centers into unprotected zones, although they are supposed to be protected by international law,â al-Qidra said. âPatients and workers had to always worry whether Israel would target the buildings they were in.â
Al-Qidra added that the medical centers were destroyed or damaged by warplanes, drone strikes and tank shelling alike.
Back in her home, Um Ahmad said, âWhat are we supposed to do now? We just want to live like everyone else. We need food, water and electricity â and we need to keep our children safe. We cannot do that here.â
Isreal is Getting Away with Murder  On January 28th a barrage of Israeli artillery fire struck near the South Lebanese village of Ghajar, killing United Nations peacekeeper Francisco Javier Soria. Soria, 36, was a Spanish citizen deployed with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, a peacekeeping mission tasked with maintaining the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon in the occupied Golan Heights.
His death came in the midst of a recent flare-up of violence between Israel and Hezbollah, and Spainâs ambassador to the United Nations placed blame for the incident upon the Israeli Defence Forces, citing an âescalation of violence [which] came from the Israeli side.â The exact circumstances which led to Soriaâs death are still under investigation; Israeli officials expressed condolences for  his death and said their forces were responding to fire in the area.
What is clear however is that Israeli forces have been killing an alarming number of United Nations personnel in the course of their recent military operations â and that UN officials have vociferously criticized the attacks, sometimes saying they appeared deliberate.
This past summer in the Gaza Strip, Israel forces attacked seven different schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, schools that had been serving as temporary shelters for the displaced population of the territory. Despite repeated warnings, condemnations and entreaties, United Nations targets were hit again and again by Israeli airstrikes and shelling during the conflict.
As many of 46 civilians are believed to have been killed in these attacks, as well as eleven UNRWA staff members. One particularly lethal strike on a UN-administered elementary school in Beit Hanoun killed 15 civilians and wounded 200 others. That attack reportedly sent shrapnel flying into crowds of families who had been awaiting transportation in the schoolâs playground.
In the wake of these and other bombings, UNRWA chief Chris Gunness broke down in tears during a live television interview while decrying the â[wholesale] denialâ of Palestinian rights by Israeli forces during the operation.
Instead of offering contrition for these deadly incidents, Israeli officials continued to justify them with unsubstantiated, and vigorously denied allegations that UNRWA schools were near sources of rocket fire and were thus simply caught in the crossfire. An investigation by Human Rights Watch looking at several of Israelâs attacks on these schools said that they, âdid not appear to target a military objective or were otherwise unlawfully indiscriminate.â
Indeed, the idea that Israelâs repeated bombing of these schools may have simply been âmistakesâ is difficult to countenance.
In one shelling incident which targeted a school in Rafah, United Nations personnel notified the IDF on 33 separate occasions that the facility was being used as a shelter for civilians. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon publicly denounced the attack as a âmoral outrage and a criminal actâ, adding that ânothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping childrenâ.
Even the United States, normally Israelâs most uncritical defender on the world stage, was moved to state that it was was âappalledâ by what it described as a âdisgracefulâ attack on the school.
As egregious as these incidents were however, they are far from the first time in recent years in which Israel has targeted United Nations operations for shelling and airstrikes.
During the 2008-2009 Gaza War, Israeli forces targeted not only UNRWA schools (one of them pictured above) but even the compound housing the headquarters of the agency in the Gaza Strip. That attack, which involved the use of illegal white phosphorus munitions, destroyed tons of vital food aid and medical supplies which the large refugee population of the territory relied upon for basic sustenance.
Isreal is Getting Away with Murder At the time, Israeli officials claimed that they had been responding to rocket fire which had emanated from the compound, a claim which UN officials described as âtotal nonsenseâ.
In another notorious incident from Israelâs 2006 war with Lebanon, Israeli aircraft and artillery bombed a single United Nations outpost for upwards of six hours, despite receiving repeated pleas during this time from UN officials to cease fire. Four peacekeepers were killed in what then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan described as an âapparently deliberateâ act.
Israel has long had a contentious relationship with United Nations agencies operating in the Middle East. Israeli officials have in past accused UN personnel of offering shelter to militants (a charge the organization strenuously denies), and has also more broadly suggested that the organization is responsible for prolonging the Israel-Palestine conflict due to its provision of refugee status and services to displaced Palestinians and their descendants.
In the wake of the most recent Gaza conflict, some Israeli political figures even called for UNRWA to formally be recognized as a âhostile organizationâ, an outrageous suggestion which nevertheless provides some insight into the hostility with which the UN is often viewed today in official circles.
Israelâs repeated bombing and shelling of United Nations positions in the region comes against this backdrop, with Soriaâs death being only the latest incident in which Israeli forces have been responsible for killing UN personnel. To date, no one has been held legally responsible for any of these attacks.
By way of contrast, imagine the response if Hamas or Hezbollah had repeatedly and unrepentantly killed United Nations officials in the course of their conflict with Israel. Imagine if United Nations schools housing thousands of displaced civilians been struck time and again by militant groups, who in the wake of the bloodshed either denied responsibility outright or sought to justify their actions.
Furthermore, imagine if these attacks inflicted widespread civilian casualties and came despite repeated pleas and entreaties from UN officials to cease fire.
The outcry would rightly be deafening, yet this is exactly what Israel has done again and again in its conflicts in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip without consequence. As a result of this burgeoning culture of impunity, partly enabled by the unprecedented diplomatic protection offered to Israeli officials by the United States, UN personnel and facilities have increasingly been subject to deadly violence from the Israeli military.
As Pierre KrähenbĂźhl, commissioner-general of UNRWA, stated in the aftermath of a deadly bombing against a UN-administered school in Gaza this past summer, âthis [attack] is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today, the world stands disgraced.â
Israel is under an obligation to terminate its breaches of international law; it is under an obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the wall being built in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, to dismantle forthwith the structure therein situated, and to repeal or render ineffective forthwith all legislative and regulatory acts relating thereto, in accordance with paragraph 151 of this Opinion; -International Court of Justice in the Hague Press Release 2004/28
Speaking engagement :The Intifada within the American, Israeli, Islamic Triangle was a debate that took place on the 8th of November 1989 at the University of Pennsylvania .
Sponsored by The International Student Council
Co-Sponsored by: Senior VP for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Education, School of Communications, Middle East Studies Comittee, University Office of International Prgorams, Department of Political Science, Department of History.
Gaza (along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem) is occupied Palestinian territory under international law, determined by the vast majority of the world, as well as the highest court in the world, the UNâs International Court of Justice. Gaza cannot commit aggression against Israel, since Israel is in constant and continual commission of illegal aggression against Palestine by occupying it (illegally and sadistically blockading it and frequently committing terrorism against its civilians, including by targeting them with chemical weapons provided by US taxpayers â see âRain of Fireâ by Human Rights Watch). As documented by Amnesty Intâl, Human Rights Watch, and many others, Israel intentionally targets and murders civilians, including children, en masse.
But, even ignoring international law and that Gaza is under illegal Israeli occupation, Gaza did not initiate this current round of violence; Israel did:
Western/US/Israeli propaganda says the violence started with the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli youths on June 12th. That is a lie:
On May 20th, the Israeli government murdered 2 unarmed Palestinian teens, one on video, and wounded a third.
The firing of pathetic scrap metal rockets from impoverished Gaza, which have killed no one, were in fact launched in response to earlier Israeli bombings, killings, assassinations, and arrests of Palestinians, including children.
Since the year 2000, Israel has killed 1,500 Palestinian children, while Palestinians have killed 132 Israeli children. That means Israel has killed over 1,000% percent more Palestinian children than vice versa.
According to a landmark, comprehensive study of all of Israelâs wars, by Zeev Maoz, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis, former head of the Graduate School of Government and Policy and of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, and former academic director of the M.A. Program at the Israeli Defense Forcesâ National Defense College:
â. most of the wars in which Israel was involved were the result of deliberate Israeli aggressive design . None of these wars â with the possible exception of the 1948 War of independence â was what Israel refers to as Milhemet Ein Berah (war of necessity). They were all wars of choice . â â Defending the Holy Land, pg. 35, (bold added)
âI review a number of peace-related opportunities ranging from the Zionist-Hashemite collusion in 1947 through the collapse of the Oslo Process in 2000. In all those cases I find that Israeli decision makers â who had been willing to embark upon bold and daring military adventures â were extremely reluctant to make even the smallest concessions for peace . I also find in many cases Israel was engaged in systematic violations of agreements and tacit understandings between itself and its neighbors.â â Defending the Holy Land, pg. 40
Israel has violated more UN resolutions than any other country. That includes Iraq under Hussein.
Hamas is the government elected by Gaza in elections that Jimmy Carter (and many others) observed and said were completely fair and free. Israel constantly says Hamas uses human shields. But in Israelâs biggest massacre of Gaza, the one in 2009, all the human rights organizations, including Amnesty, HRW, and the jurist Richard Goldstone, found that Hamas DID NOT use human shields. On the contrary, Israel used human shields, which is a regular practice for Israel. Israel uses civilians as human shields.
Israel forced Palestinian civilians to dig and lay naked in trenches around Israeli tanks. See here at 6:45.
XIV. THE USE OF PALESTINIAN CIVILIANS AS HUMAN SHIELDS
âThe Mission received allegations that in two areas in north Gaza Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields⌠The Mission found the foregoing witnesses to be credible and reliable. It has no reason to doubt the veracity of their accounts and found that the different stories serve to support the allegation that Palestinians were used as human shields.â
Noam Chomsky: âHamas is regularly described as âIranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.â One will be hard put to find something like âdemocratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensusââblocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.â
In the history of all rocket and mortar fire into Israel, 26 people, total, have been killed. And remember, Palestine breaks ceasefires far less often than Israel, as documented above.
This number of 26 is in contrast to the minimum number of 1,400 people who were murdered by Israel in a single one of its terrorist atrocities, the 2009 Gaza Massacre.
Noting that in the current massacre, zero Israelis and over 100 Palestinians have thus far been killed, and noting that Gaza is a concentration camp â Israel allows no one to enter or leave â Dan Sanchez gives a perfect description of the disparity in arms between the US/Israeli war machine and Palestinian scrap metal projectiles: âThey [the Gazans] are like fish in a barrel, being blasted by a shotgun from above. Itâs like some of the fish in the barrel pathetically spitting water at the gunman, and [US media calls] that a âshooting battle.â
The rhetoric and tactics of Hamas and other groups resisting Israeli occupation and colonization can be brutal (though far less so than Israel). Propagandists try to attribute this to anti-Semitism, to distract from the fact that these groups are resisting having their country stolen and their people dispossessed and annihilated. Native American resistance to European colonizers was sometimes extremely brutal, as was their rhetoric, but everyone universally recognizes that this was not because of âanti-White-ismâ, or âanti-European-ismâ, but because they were having their land stolen and their people massacred, the same thing that Israel is doing to the Palestinians.
Palestinians have the right under international law to resist occupation, ethnic cleansing, colonization, aggression, and annexation. Miko Peled, son of an Israeli general, recently stated that if Israel doesnât Like rockets, they should decolonize Palestine. Dr. Norman Finkelstein notes that âThe Palestinians have the right to use arms to resist an occupation . However, the fact that morally and legally they have that right doesnât mean that itâs the most prudent strategy. In my opinion, a national Palestinian leadership committed to mobilizing nonviolent resistance can defeat the Israeli occupation if those of us living abroad lend support to it.â
In 1948, the people who wanted to form a Jewish state carried out a massive terror and ethnic cleansing campaign against the occupants of Palestine, expelling about half of them (750,000) from their land and into concentrated areas (Gaza and West Bank). Israel has slowly continued colonizing even those areas, which were specifically reserved by the UN for Palestinians. Israel takes all the best land and resources, such as water. Here is a visualization of what has happened, and is currently happening with massive support from Obama:
Israeli settlement building in Palestine is a war crime under international law. Under Obama, Israeli settlement building is up over 130%.
For about 40 years, there has been an international consensus that Israel must stop colonizing territory outside its 1967 borders. The consensus has been blocked by the United States, in isolation from the international community (much like the USAâs isolated, strong support for South African Apartheid). Every year there is a UN vote on the issue, and every year it goes about 165 to 2, the world against the US and Israel. This continues under Obama. All human rights groups support the consensus, as does Hamas, the Arab League, Iran, the Organization of the Islamic Conference⌠Virtually everyone, except the US and Israel. (More details on this page.)
Hypocricy Defined
Palestinians are brutalized, repressed and impoverished by Israel. To get a quick visual understanding of the difference between Gaza and Israel, take a look at the images of people and cities being wantonly pummeled by Israeli terrorism when you search the word âGazaâ, and the images of opulence, wealth and luxury that come up when you search âTel Avivâ.
Israel, whose government intentionally targets, tortures, and murders civilians, including children, including with chemical weapons, and whose government uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, and whose government is the last entity on Earth carrying out old-style ethnic cleansing and colonization of foreign countries, is the single biggest recipient of US aid, at over three billion dollars a year and huge amounts of lethal weaponry such as attack helicopters and white phosphorous chemical explosives.
To reiterate, Obama requested more military aid for Israel than any president ever. This is not because Obama and the USA love Jewish people. Obama was recently an accomplice in a literal neo-Nazi-led coup dâetat in Ukraine, and is currently fully supporting the junta-integrated Ukrainian government, which is staffed with several neo-Nazis in high ministries, and which uses neo-Nazi paramilitaries to carry out massacres (and possibly genocide) against people resistant to the junta. The actual reason the US supports Israel is discussed below.
As Amnesty International has noted, all aid to Israel is illegal under international (and US) law, because Israel is a consistent violator of human rights.
Amnesty International also noted that Israelâs 2009 massacre of Gaza would not have been possible without the illegal funding (money and weapons) and support Israel gets from the USA.
This is also true of the current massacre Israel is committing in Gaza.
However, in a way, that is good news.
That means US citizens can STOP the massacres.
MSM Refuses to Cover Anti-Israel War Crime Protests
If we stop our money and weapons-flow to Israel, which is illegal anyway, we stop Israeli terrorism! All we have to do is stop committing a crime, and we will stop more crimes! Thatâs great news.
Here is a previous example of how this has worked: When the USA cut its funding for Indonesiaâs genocide against East Timor, which the USA was funding almost exclusively, Indonesia was forced to stop and withdraw. All it took was cutting off our illegal flow of money and weapons to the criminals.
The same thing would happen if we cut our illegal funding for Israelâs genocides and acts of terrorism, ethnic cleansing, colonization, and annexation against Palestine.
But since the USA is an anti-democratic country, the only way to stop US plutocrats from using our money to fund Israeli terrorism is to force it through massive, non-violent pressure.
One way it happens is when it becomes too politically costly for the plutocracy to keep funding genocide and terror, meaning the costs of their illegal support outweigh the benefits, as in Indonesia. In that case, massive publicity and indigenous resistance accomplished the goal.
But Israel is the USAâs main imperial â and nuclear â base for controlling the Middle East, which US planners, in 1945, called the greatest material prize in world history, due to the oil and gas. Thus, it might require more, as in non-violently making our country into a democracy so that people control their own institutions and money, and thus the way we operate as a society and interact with the world.
Last note: To be clear, Israel is a legal state, but only within the borders allotted to it by the United Nations â the Pre-1967 borders, which existed before Israel started eating away, through terror, ethnic cleansing, colonization, and annexation, at the areas reserved by the United Nations for Palestinians, as well as areas of other countries, such as Syria (the Golan Heights).
Per international law, US domestic law, and common sense, Israel doesnât deserve any support until it abandons isolationism and accepts that it canât steal other peopleâs countries, and stops blockading and withdraws its soldiers and settlers, all there illegally, from those countries.
Israel is, militarily, the most powerful country in the Middle East, by far. Removing our support for the Israeli government (which we are legally required to do) will not put Israelis in danger. It will pressure the Israeli government to stop doing what endangers Israelis, which is committing aggressive acts against Israelâs neighbors.
If Israel ends its status as a consistent violator of human rights, decolonizes Palestine, and respects its neighbors, it could be a pleasure â and legal â to work with and support Israel.
Germany, Japan, and South Africa went from being the most reviled countries on Earth to being some of the most admired. Maybe Israel could undergo the same transformation, but not unless we, US citizens, help by ceasing to enable Israeli terrorism and war crimes by illegally supporting them.
Today Israel carried out aerial strikes in Gaza targeting a mosque it claims was hosting rockets, a disabled care center and a geriatric urgent care hospital, where international volunteers have since rushed to shield patients.
In the deadliest strike yet, the home of Gazaâs police chief was also bombed, killing 18 members of his family.
These horrors are just the latest examples of death and destruction being wreaked amidst Israelâs five day long bombing campaign dubbed âOperation Protective Edgeâ.
Since the beginning of the offensive, at least 150 Palestinians have been killed and over 1,000 more injured. Thousands of homes have been utterly destroyed. No Israelis have yet died from a Hamas launched rocket.
Yet despite the disproportionality of the brutality, the establishment media continues to distort the truth by painting Hamas as the sole aggressor.
From FOXâs âGaza Rockets Aimed at Israel: What Would you Do with Just 15 Seconds?â to liberal alt-news site VOXâs âThe Tragedy Never Ends, Palestinian Rockets Force Israeli Peace Conference to Evacuateâ to even Human Rights Watch, a human rights organization that is supposed to be unbiased in its criticism of atrocities, which leads with âIndiscriminate Palestinian Rocket Attacksâ.
But perhaps most disturbing is the initial headline crafted by The New York Timesdescribing an Israeli missile bombing a cafe in Gaza packed with Palestinians watching the World Cup:
Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons Poised for World Cup http://t.co/t1N3tag2rf
As journalist Rania Khalek explains in an article dissecting the egregious error:
âSawyers bald misreporting reflects either a deliberate lie by ABC news or willful ignorance so severe that Palestinian death and misery is invisible even when itâs staring ABC producers right in the face.â
The Western media routinely devalues Palestinian lives, and the dead bodies that stack up every time Israel goes on the offense remain an inconvenient truth for its narrative.
What Israel is actually doing in Gaza – MURDER
Another common misconception thanks to the mediaâs false depiction of Palestine is that Hamas is a rogue terrorist group, when in reality it is the democratically elected leadership of Gaza. When the IDF claims it only targets Hamas, it could mean any building affiliated with the government or social services provided to Palestinians.
As Noam Chomsky said, this isnât war, itâs murder:
âWhen Israelis in the occupied territories now claim that they have to defend themselves, they are defending themselves in the sense that any military occupier has to defend itself against the population they are crushing.â
According to the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is acting âresponsibleâ in his defense of the rocket attacks. Yet the collective punishment of over a million people living in an open-air prison hardly seems as such.
I made a statement recently addressing Israelâs irresponsible barbarism:
Why Doesnât the Media Care About Dead Palestinians?
Since posting this video, I have been overwhelmed at the feedback and support from thousands of Palestinians around the world. Itâs already been featured on one of Turkeyâs most popular news websites En Son Haber, Indonesian newspaper Liputan, translated in French on DailyMotion, posted on Arabic newspaper Alwatan Voice and has gone viral on Palestinian TV station Raya FM.
I strongly denounce deadly force on both sides, but itâs important to not frame this as a cycle of violence. One is the colonizer oppressor, the other the colonized oppressed. As IDF Generalâs son Miko Peled said, Palestinians living in occupied territories have two choices: the completely surrender, or resist â and resistance is what weâre seeing now.
**
Donât miss Max Blumenthal talking about how the Israeli government hid information on the three murdered teensâ deaths in order to incite violence, racial tensions and justify a military rampage.
Why Gaza is Burning: What the Corporate Media Isnât Telling You
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IDF Generalâs son Miko Peled talks about the latest siege on Gaza and why Israel should decolonize Palestine and end the apartheid regime if it doesnât like getting shot at with rockets.
IDF Generalâs Son: If Israel Doesnât Like Rockets, Decolonize Palestine
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Earlier this year, Secretary of State John Kerry came under fire for saying that Israel could turn into an apartheid state if reforms arenât made. I outline five reason why it already is one.
5 Reasons Why Israel is an Apartheid State
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When Israel launched its 2012 military offensive dubbed âOperation Pillar of Defenseâ, the IDF knowingly bombed a journalist tower in Gaza that housed RT among other foreign news networks. I responded to the war crime on Breaking the Set.
Many Americans think the clock starts with Hamas rockets every time Israel carries out a military operation, without realizing the history of the occupation and roots of the conflict. Hereâs a brief breakdown.
Max Interviews guest Eric Jon Phelps on the Jesuits Part III
Topics Covered:
Jesuit Coadjutors- Alex Jones, Jesse Ventura, George Noory, Ron Paul
Iran, Palestine/Gaza Conflict & History, Jews vs Muslims, Civil Rights Movement, Malcom X, Ku Klux Klan, Muslim Immigration to Western Europe, Islam: Sunni vs Shia, ‘RECONSTRUCTION’, JFK, Jesuit control of Detroit, Demonic Fallen Angels, and more!
A short interview broadcast by CNN late last week featuring two participants â a Palestinian in Gaza and an Israeli within range of the rocket attacks â did not follow the usual script.
For once, a media outlet dropped its role as gatekeeper, there to mediate and therefore impair our understanding of what is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians, and inadvertently became a simple window on real events.
The usual aim of such âbalanceâ interviews relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is twofold: to reassure the audience that both sides of the story are being presented fairly; and to dissipate potential outrage at the deaths of Palestinian civilians by giving equal time to the suffering of Israelis.
But the deeper function of such coverage in relation to Gaza, given the mediaâs assumption that Israeli bombs are simply a reaction to Hamas terror, is to redirect the audienceâs anger exclusively towards Hamas. In this way, Hamas is made implicitly responsible for the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians.
The dramatic conclusion to CNNâs interview appears, however, to have otherwise trumped normal journalistic considerations.
The pre-recorded interview via Skype opened with Mohammed Sulaiman in Gaza. From what looked like a cramped room, presumably serving as a bomb shelter, he spoke of how he was too afraid to step outside his home. Throughout the interview, we could hear the muffled sound of bombs exploding in the near-distance. Mohammed occasionally glanced nervously to his side.
The other interviewee, Nissim Nahoom, an Israeli official in Ashkelon, also spoke of his familyâs terror, arguing that it was no different from that of Gazans. Except in one respect, he hastened to add: things were worse for Israelis because they had to live with the knowledge that Hamas rockets were intended to harm civilians, unlike the precision missiles and bombs Israel dropped on Gaza.
The interview returned to Mohammed. As he started to speak, the bombing grew much louder. He pressed on, saying he would not be silenced by what was taking place outside. The interviewer, Isha Sesay, interrupted â seemingly unsure of what she was hearing â to inquire about the noise.
Then, with an irony that Mohammed could not have appreciated as he spoke, he began to say he refused to be drawn into a comparison about whose suffering was worse when an enormous explosion threw him from his chair and severed the internet connection. Switching back to the studio, Sesay reassured viewers that Mohammed had not been hurt.
The bombs, however, spoke more eloquently than either Mohammed or Nissim.
If Mohammed had had more time, he might have been able to challenge Nissimâs point about Israelisâ greater fears as well as pointing to another important difference between his and his Israeli interlocutorâs respective plights.
The far greater accuracy of Israelâs weaponry in no way confers peace of mind. The fact is that a Palestinian civilian in Gaza is in far more danger of being killed or injured by one of Israelâs precision armaments than an Israeli is by one of the more primitive rockets being launched out of Gaza.
In Operation Cast Lead, Israelâs attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09, three Israelis were killed by rocket attacks, and six soldiers died in fighting. In Gaza, meanwhile, nearly 1,400 Palestinians were killed, of whom at least 1,000 were not involved in hostilities, according to the Israeli group BâTselem. Many, if not most, of those civilians were killed by so-called precision bombs and missiles.
If Israelis like Nissim really believe they have to endure greater suffering because the Palestinians lack accurate weapons, then maybe they should start lobbying Washington to distribute its military hardware more equitably, so that the Palestinians can receive the same allocations of military aid and armaments as Israel.
Or alternatively, they could lobby their own government to allow Iran and Hizbullah to bring into Gaza more sophisticated technology than can currently be smuggled in via the tunnels.
The other difference is that, unlike Nissim and his family, most people in Gaza have nowhere else to flee. And the reason that they must live under the rain of bombs in one of the most densely populated areas on earth is because Israel â and to a lesser extent Egypt â has sealed the borders to create a prison for them.
Israel has denied Gaza a port, control of its airspace and the right of its inhabitants to move to the other Palestinian territory recognised by the Oslo accords, the West Bank. It is not, as Israelâs supporters allege, that Hamas is hiding among Palestinian civilians; rather, Israel has forced Palestinian civilians to live in a tiny strip of land that Israel turned into a war zone.
So who is chiefly to blame for the escalation that currently threatens the nearly two million inhabitants of Gaza? Though Hamasâ hands are not entirely clean, there are culprits far more responsible than the Palestinian militants.
First culprit: The state of Israel
The inciting cause of the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas has little to do with the firing of rockets, whether by Hamas or the other Palestinian factions.
The conflict predates the rockets â and even the creation of Hamas â by decades. It is the legacy of Israelâs dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, forcing many of them from their homes in what is now Israel into the tiny Gaza Strip. That original injustice has been compounded by the occupation Israel has not only failed to end but has actually intensified in recent years with its relentless siege of the small strip of territory.
Israel has been progressively choking the life out of Gaza, destroying its economy, periodically wrecking its infrastructure, denying its inhabitants freedom of movement and leaving its population immiserated.
One only needs to look at the restrictions on Gazansâ access to their own sea. Here we are not considering their right to use their own coast to leave and enter their territory, simply their right to use their own waters to feed themselves. According to one provision of the Oslo accords, Gaza was given fishing rights up to 20 miles off its shore. Israel has slowly whittled that down to just three miles, with Israeli navy vessels firing on fishing boats even inside that paltry limit.
Palestinians in Gaza are entitled to struggle for their right to live and prosper. That struggle is a form of self-defence â not aggression â against occupation, oppression, colonialism and imperialism.
Second culprit: Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak
The Israeli prime minister and defence minister have taken a direct and personal hand, above and beyond Israelâs wider role in enforcing the occupation, in escalating the violence.
Israel and its supporters always make it their first priority when Israel launches a new war of aggression to obscure the timeline of events as a way to cloud responsibility. The media willingly regurgitates such efforts at misdirection.
In reality, Israel engineered a confrontation to provide the pretext for a âretaliatoryâ attack, just as it did four years earlier in Operation Cast Lead. Then Israel broke a six-month ceasefire agreed with Hamas by staging a raid into Gaza that killed six Hamas members.
This time, on 8 November, Israel achieved the same end by invading Gaza again, on this occasion following a two-week lull in tensions. A 13-year-old boy out playing football was killed by an Israeli bullet.
Tit-for-tat violence over the following days resulted in the injury of eight Israelis, including four soldiers, and the deaths of five Palestinian civilians, and the wounding of dozens more in Gaza.
On November 12, as part of efforts to calm things down, the Palestinian militant factions agreed a truce that held two days â until Israel broke it by assassinating Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari. The rockets out of Gaza that followed these various Israeli provocations have been misrepresented as the casus belli.
But if Netanyahu and Barak are responsible for creating the immediate pretext for an attack on Gaza, they are also criminally negligent for failing to pursue an opportunity to secure a much longer truce with Hamas.
We now know, thanks to Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, that in the period leading up to Jabariâs execution Egypt had been working to secure a long-term truce between Israel and Hamas. Jabari was apparently eager to agree to it.
Baskin, who was intimately involved in the talks, was a credible conduit between Israel and Hamas because he had played a key role last year in getting Jabari to sign off on a prisoner exchange that led to the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Baskin noted in the Haaretz newspaper that Jabariâs assassination âkilled the possibility of achieving a truce and also the Egyptian mediatorsâ ability to function.â
The peace activist had already met Barak to alert him to the truce, but it seems the defence minister and Netanyahu had more pressing concerns than ending the tensions between Israel and Hamas.
What could have been more important than finding a mechanism for saving lives, on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides. Baskin offers a clue: âThose who made the decision must be judged by the voters, but to my regret they will get more votes because of this.â
It seems Israelâs general election, due in January, was uppermost in the minds of Netanyahu and Barak.
A lesson learnt by Israeli leaders over recent years, as Baskin notes, is that wars are vote-winners solely for the right wing. That should be clear to no one more than Netanyahu. He has twice before become prime minister on the back of wars waged by his more âmoderateâ political opponents as they faced elections.
Shimon Peres, a dove by no standard except a peculiar Israeli one, launched an attack on Lebanon, Operation Grapes of Wrath, that cost him the election in 1996. And centrists Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni again helped Netanyahu to victory by attacking Gaza in late 2008.
Israelis, it seems, prefer a leader who does not bother to wrap a velvet glove around his iron fist.
Netanyahu was already forging ahead in the polls before he minted Operation Pillar of Defence. But the electoral fortunes of Ehud Barak, sometimes described as Netanyahuâs political Siamese twin and a military mentor to Netanyahu from their commando days together, have been looking grim indeed.
Barak desperately needed a military rather than a political campaign to boost his standing and get his renegade Independence party across the electoral threshold and into the Israeli parliament. It seems Netanyahu, thinking he had little to lose himself from an operation in Gaza, may have been willing to oblige.
Third culprit: The Israeli army
Israelâs army has become addicted to two doctrines it calls the âdeterrence principleâ and its âqualitative military edgeâ. Both are fancy ways of saying that, like some mafia heavy, the Israeli army wants to be sure it alone can âwhackâ its enemies. Deterrence, in Israeli parlance, does not refer to a balance of fear but Israelâs exclusive right to use terror.
The amassing of rockets by Hamas, therefore, violates the Israeli armyâs own sense of propriety, just as Hizbullahâs stockpiling does further north. Israel wants its neighbouring enemies to have no ability to resist its dictates.
Doubtless the army was only too ready to back Netanyahu and Barakâs electioneering if it also provided an opportunity to clean out some of Hamasâ rocket arsenal.
But there is another strategic reason why the Israeli army has been chomping at the bit to crack down on Hamas again.
Haaretzâs two chief military correspondents explained the logic of the armyâs position last week, shortly after Israel killed Jabari. They reported: âFor a long time now Israel has been pursuing a policy of containment in the Gaza Strip, limiting its response to the prolonged effort on the part of Hamas to dictate new rules of the game surrounding the fence, mainly in its attempt to prevent the entry of the IDF into the âperimeter,â the strip of a few hundred meters wide to the west of the fence.â
In short, Hamas has angered Israeli commanders by refusing to sit quietly while the army treats large areas of Gaza as its playground and enters at will.
Israel has created what it terms a âbuffer zoneâ inside the fence around Gaza, often up to a kilometre wide, that Palestinians cannot enter but the Israeli army can use as a gateway for launching its âincursionsâ. Remote-controlled guns mounted on Israeli watch-towers around Gaza can open fire on any Palestinian who is considered to have approached too close.
Three incidents shortly before Jabariâs extra-judicial execution illustrate the struggle for control over Gazaâs interior.
On November 4, the Israeli army shot dead a young Palestinian man inside Gaza as he was reported to have approached the fence. Palestinians say he was mentally unfit and that he could have been saved by medics had ambulances not been prevented from reaching him for several hours.
On November 8, as already noted, the Israeli army made an incursion into Gaza to attack Palestinian militants and in the process shot dead a boy playing football.
And on November 10, two days later, Palestinian fighters fired an anti-tank missile that destroyed a Jeep patrolling the perimeter fence around Gaza, wounding four soldiers.
As the Haaretz reporters note, Hamas appears to be trying to demonstrate that it has as much right to defend its side of the âborder fenceâ as Israel does on the other side.
The armyâs response to this display of native impertinence has been to inflict a savage form of collective punishment on Gaza to remind Hamas who is boss.
Fourth culprit: the White House
It is near-impossible to believe that Netanyahu decided to revive Israelâs policy of extra-judicial executions of Hamas leaders â and bystanders â without at least consulting the White House. Israel clearly also held off from beginning its escalation until after the US elections, restricting itself, as it did in Cast Lead, to the âdowntimeâ in US politics between the elections and the presidential inauguration.
That was designed to avoid overly embarrassing the US president. A fair assumption must be that Barack Obama approved Israelâs operation in advance. Certainly he has provided unstinting backing since, despite the wildly optimistic scenarios painted by some analysts that he was likely to seek revenge on Netanyahu in his second term.
Also, it should be remembered that Israelâs belligerence towards Gaza, and the easing of domestic pressure on Israel to negotiate with Hamas or reach a ceasefire, has largely been made possible because Obama forced US taxpayers to massively subsidise Israelâs rocket interception system, Iron Dome, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Iron Dome is being used to shoot down rockets out of Gaza that might otherwise have landed in built-up areas of Israel. Israel and the White House have therefore been able to sell US munificence on the interception of rockets as a humanitarian gesture.
But the reality is that Iron Dome has swung Israelâs cost-benefit calculus sharply in favour of greater aggression because it is has increased Israelâs sense of impunity. Whatever Hamasâ ability to smuggle into Gaza more sophisticated weaponry, Israel believes it can neutralise that threat using interception systems.
Far from being a humanitarian measure, Iron Dome has simply served to ensure that Gaza will continue to suffer a far larger burden of deaths and injuries in confrontations with Israel and that such confrontations will continue to occur regularly.
Here are the four main culprits. They should be held responsible for the deaths of Palestinians and Israelis in the days and, if Israel expands its operation, weeks ahead.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are âIsrael and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle Eastâ (Pluto Press) and âDisappearing Palestine: Israelâs Experiments in Human Despairâ (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
âDisturbing, powerful and emotionally devastating, Tears of Gaza is less a conventional documentary than a record â presented with minimal gloss â of the 2008 to 2009 bombing of Gaza (dubbed âOperation Cast Leadâ) by the Israeli military. Filmed by several Palestinian cameramen both during and after the offensive, this powerful film by director Vibeke Løkkeberg focuses on the impact of the attacks on the civilian population.
Tears of Gaza makes no overriding speeches or analyses. The situation leading up to the incursion (in which the Jewish state broke a truce unprovoked) is never mentioned. Similar events certainly occurred in Dresden, Tokyo, Baghdad and Sarajevo, but of course Gaza isnât those places. Tears of Gaza demands that we examine the costs of war on a civilian populace.â
(Excerpt from Steve Gravestock, 2011 Toronto International Film Festival) http://tearsofgazamovie.com/
Palestinian workers line up to get checked by a Palestinian security officer before entering the Israeli controlled industrial zone in Erez area between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
A look at life under occupation.
Gaza has the look of a Third World country, with pockets of wealth surrounded by hideous poverty. It is not, however, undeveloped. Rather it is “de-developed,” and very systematically so, to borrow the term from Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza.
Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force.
And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where some 1.5 million people on a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land are subject to random terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade.
Such cruelty is to ensure that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed, and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement granting basic human rights will be nullified. The Israeli political leadership has dramatically illustrated this commitment in the past few days, warning that they will âgo crazyâ if Palestinian rights are given even limited recognition by the U.N.
This threat to âgo crazyâ (ânishtageaâ)âthat is, launch a tough responseâis deeply rooted, stretching back to the Labor governments of the 1950s, along with the related âSamson Complexâ: If crossed, we will bring down the Temple walls around us.
Thirty years ago, Israeli political leaders, including some noted hawks, submitted to Prime Minister Menachem Begin a shocking report on how settlers on the West Bank regularly committed âterrorist actsâ against Arabs there, with total impunity.
Disgusted, the prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri wrote that the Israeli army’s task, it seemed, was not to defend the state, but âto demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim (a harsh racial epithet) living in territories that God promised to us.â
Gazans have been singled out for particularly cruel punishment. Thirty years ago, in his memoir âThe Third Way,â Raja Shehadeh, a lawyer, described the hopeless task of trying to protect fundamental human rights within a legal system designed to ensure failure, and his personal experience as a Samid, âa steadfast one,â who watched his home turned into a prison by brutal occupiers and could do nothing but somehow âendure.â
Since then, the situation has become much worse. The Oslo Accords, celebrated with much pomp in 1993, determined that Gaza and the West Bank are a single territorial entity. By that time, the U.S. and Israel had already initiated their program to separate Gaza and the West Bank, so as to block a diplomatic settlement and punish the Araboushim in both territories.
Punishment of Gazans became still more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: They voted the âwrong wayâ in the first free election in the Arab world, electing Hamas.
Displaying their âyearning for democracy,â the U.S. and Israel, backed by the timid European Union, immediately imposed a brutal siege, along with military attacks. The U.S. turned at once to its standard operating procedure when a disobedient population elects the wrong government: Prepare a military coup to restore order.
Gazans committed a still greater crime a year later by blocking the coup attempt, leading to a sharp escalation of the siege and attacks. These culminated in winter 2008-09, with Operation Cast Lead, one of the most cowardly and vicious exercises of military force in recent memory: A defenseless civilian population, trapped, was subjected to relentless attack by one of the world’s most advanced military systems, reliant on U.S. arms and protected by U.S. diplomacy.
Of course, there were pretextsâthere always are. The usual one, trotted out when needed, is âsecurityâ: in this case, against homemade rockets from Gaza.
In 2008, a truce was established between Israel and Hamas. Not a single Hamas rocket was fired until Israel broke the truce under cover of the U.S. election on Nov. 4, invading Gaza for no good reason and killing half a dozen Hamas members.
The Israeli government was advised by its highest intelligence officials that the truce could be renewed by easing the criminal blockade and ending military attacks. But the government of Ehud Olmertâhimself reputedly a doveârejected these options, resorting to its huge advantage in violence: Operation Cast Lead.
The internationally respected Gazan human-rights advocate Raji Sourani analyzed the pattern of attack under Cast Lead. The bombing was concentrated in the north, targeting defenseless civilians in the most densely populated areas, with no possible military basis. The goal, Sourani suggests, may have been to drive the intimidated population to the south, near the Egyptian border. But the Samidin stayed put.
A further goal might have been to drive them beyond the border. From the earliest days of the Zionist colonization it was argued that Arabs have no real reason to be in Palestine: They can be just as happy somewhere else, and should leaveâpolitely âtransferred,â the doves suggested.
This is surely no small concern in Egypt, and perhaps a reason why Egypt doesn’t open the border freely to civilians or even to desperately needed supplies.
Sourani and other knowledgeable sources have observed that the discipline of the Samidin conceals a powder keg that might explode at any time, unexpectedly, like the first Intifada in Gaza in 1987, after years of repression.
A necessarily superficial impression after spending several days in Gaza is amazement, not only at Gazans’ ability to go on with life but also at the vibrancy and vitality among young people, particularly at the university, where I attended an international conference.
But one can detect signs that the pressure may become too hard to bear. Reports indicate that there is simmering frustration among young peopleâa recognition that under the U.S.-Israeli occupation the future holds nothing for them.
Gaza has the look of a Third World country, with pockets of wealth surrounded by hideous poverty. It is not, however, undeveloped. Rather it is âde-developed,â and very systematically so, to borrow the term from Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza.
The Gaza Strip could have become a prosperous Mediterranean region, with rich agriculture and a flourishing fishing industry, marvelous beaches and, as discovered a decade ago, good prospects for extensive natural gas supplies within its territorial waters. By coincidence or not, that’s when Israel intensified its naval blockade. The favorable prospects were aborted in 1948, when the Strip had to absorb a flood of Palestinian refugees who fled in terror or were forcefully expelled from what became Israel â in some cases months after the formal cease-fire. Israel’s 1967 conquests and their aftermath administered further blows, with terrible crimes continuing to the present day.
The signs are easy to see, even on a brief visit. Sitting in a hotel near the shore, one can hear the machine-gun fire of Israeli gunboats driving fishermen out of Gaza’s territorial waters and toward land, forcing them to fish in waters that are heavily polluted because of U.S.-Israeli refusal to allow reconstruction of the sewage and power systems they destroyed.
The Oslo Accords laid plans for two desalination plants, a necessity in this arid region. One, an advanced facility, was built: in Israel. The second one is in Khan Yunis, in the south of Gaza. The engineer in charge at Khan Yunis explained that this plant was designed so that it can’t use seawater, but must rely on underground water, a cheaper process that further degrades the meager aquifer, guaranteeing severe problems in the future.
The water supply is still severely limited. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which cares for refugees but not other Gazans, recently released a report warning that damage to the aquifer may soon become âirreversible,â and that without quick remedial action, Gaza may cease to be a âlivable placeâ by 2020.
Israel permits concrete to enter for UNRWA projects, but not for Gazans engaged in the huge reconstruction efforts. The limited heavy equipment mostly lies idle, since Israel does not permit materials for repair.
All this is part of the general program that Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Prime Minister Olmert, described after Palestinians failed to follow orders in the 2006 elections: âThe idea,â he said, âis to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.â
Recently, after several years of effort, the Israeli human rights organization Gisha succeeded in obtaining a court order for the government to release its records detailing plans for the âdiet.â Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Israel, summarizes them: âHealth officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day ⌠an average of only 67 trucksâmuch less than half of the minimum requirementâentered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.â
The result of imposing the diet, Middle East scholar Juan Cole observes, is that âabout 10 percent of Palestinian children in Gaza under age 5 have had their growth stunted by malnutrition. ⌠In addition, anemia is widespread, affecting over two-thirds of infants, 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, and over a third of pregnant mothers.â
Sourani, the human-rights advocate, observes that âwhat has to be kept in mind is that the occupation and the absolute closure is an ongoing attack on the human dignity of the people in Gaza in particular and all Palestinians generally. It is systematic degradation, humiliation, isolation and fragmentation of the Palestinian people.â
This conclusion has been confirmed by many other sources. In The Lancet, a leading medical journal, Rajaie Batniji, a visiting Stanford physician, describes Gaza as âsomething of a laboratory for observing an absence of dignity,â a condition that has âdevastatingâ effects on physical, mental and social well-being.
âThe constant surveillance from the sky, collective punishment through blockade and isolation, the intrusion into homes and communications, and restrictions on those trying to travel, or marry, or work make it difficult to live a dignified life in Gaza,â Batniji writes. The Araboushim must be taught not to raise their heads.
There were hopes that Mohammed Morsi’s new government in Egypt, which is less in thrall to Israel than the western-backed Hosni Mubarak dictatorship was, might open the Rafah Crossing, Gaza’s sole access to the outside that is not subject to direct Israeli control. There has been a slight opening, but not much.
The journalist Laila el-Haddad writes that the reopening under Morsi âis simply a return to status quo of years past: Only Palestinians carrying an Israeli-approved Gaza ID card can use Rafah Crossing.â This excludes a great many Palestinians, including el-Haddad’s own family, where only one spouse has a card.
Furthermore, she continues, âthe crossing does not lead to the West Bank, nor does it allow for the passage of goods, which are restricted to the Israeli-controlled crossings and subject to prohibitions on construction materials and export.â
The restricted Rafah Crossing doesn’t change the fact that âGaza remains under tight maritime and aerial siege, and continues to be closed off to the Palestinians’ cultural, economic and academic capitals in the rest of the (Israeli-occupied territories), in violation of U.S.-Israeli obligations under the Oslo Accords.â
The effects are painfully evident. The director of the Khan Yunis hospital, who is also chief of surgery, describes with anger and passion how even medicines are lacking, which leaves doctors helpless and patients in agony.
One young woman reports on her late father’s illness. Though he would have been proud that she was the first woman in the refugee camp to gain an advanced degree, she says, he âpassed away after six months of fighting cancer, aged 60 years.
âIsraeli occupation denied him a permit to go to Israeli hospitals for treatment. I had to suspend my study, work and life and go to sit next to his bed. We all sat, including my brother the physician and my sister the pharmacist, all powerless and hopeless, watching his suffering. He died during the inhumane blockade of Gaza in summer 2006 with very little access to health service.
âI think feeling powerless and hopeless is the most killing feeling that a human can ever have. It kills the spirit and breaks the heart. You can fight occupation but you cannot fight your feeling of being powerless. You can’t even ever dissolve that feeling.â
A visitor to Gaza can’t help feeling disgust at the obscenity of the occupation, compounded with guilt, because it is within our power to bring the suffering to an end and allow the Samidin to enjoy the lives of peace and dignity that they deserve.
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service/Syndicate.
This is the official video for Lowkey’s single Tears to Laughter which has been supported by Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, Viva Palestine and others. The song has been a huge hit amongst supporters of the Palestinian cause and Lowkey has toured extensively through Europe, Israel and Palestine to promote the song and its message.
You can now buy Lowkey’s album Soundtrack To The Struggle on double disc from www.soundtracktothestruggle.com! All profits made from the single are being donated to the DEC Gaza Appeal.
Most of the soldiers have given testimonies anonymously. One, who spoke to the Guardian, said that he had been given no guidance during his training for military service on how to deal with minors. He said children were sometimes arrested and interrogated, not because they were suspected of an offense, but to try to elicit information about older family members or neighbors.
He had given a witness statement to Breaking the Silence because: “I thought that people who don’t see this on an everyday basis should know what’s going on.” He said many Israelis were unwilling to acknowledge the reality of the military occupation in the West Bank. “It’s very easy [for the Israeli public] to be completely detached. It’s a hard thing to handle — stuff like that being done in your name.”
According to Gerard Horton, of Defense for Children International — Palestine (DCI), the testimonies reflect and confirm a pattern of behavior uncovered by his organization’s extensive research into the treatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli security forces.
DCI and other human rights organizations say Palestinian children are routinely arrested at night, handcuffed, blindfolded, mistreated and denied access to their parents or a lawyer.
He had given a witness statement to Breaking the Silence because: “I thought that people who don’t see this on an everyday basis should know what’s going on.” He said many Israelis were unwilling to acknowledge the reality of the military occupation in the West Bank. “It’s very easy [for the Israeli public] to be completely detached. It’s a hard thing to handle — stuff like that being done in your name.”
According to Gerard Horton, of Defence for Children International — Palestine (DCI), the testimonies reflect and confirm a pattern of behaviour uncovered by his organisation’s extensive research into the treatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli security forces.
A clip from the documentary “Occupation 101“, a film which details the Israeli invasion and occupation of the Palestinian lands. If this story of Rachel Corrie, and activist killed while trying to prevent Palestinian homes from being demolished by Israelis, doesn’t touch your heart, you’re just not human.
Yasser Arafat died on November 11, 2004, of a mysterious ailment. His enemies spread the rumor he had AIDS: David Frum, with typical classiness, claimed he had contracted AIDS as a consequence of having sex with his bodyguards. Now, however, it has been revealed Arafat was poisoned: the cause of his death was exposure to very high levels of polonium-210 [pdf], a rare radioactive substance. An investigation conducted by Al Jazeera showed Arafatâs personal items, released to the media organization by his widow, contained several times the normal level of polonium that would normally be detected on such items. The Palestinian leaderâs terminal symptoms were similar to those experienced by victims of polonium poisoning: the substance targets the gastrointestinal tract and the subject wastes away.
Arafatâs Ramallah compound had been bombed several times by the Israelis, and they had the place surrounded â yet still he persisted. They couldnât get him out. Worse, his plight was becoming a metaphor for the condition of his people, who were â and still are â prisoners in their own land. A former adviser claimed he was poisoned by the Israelis, who detained the Palestinian ambulance used to deliver Arafatâs medications to the Ramallah compound. At the time, one tended to write this off as a purely polemical exercise: in light of the new evidence, however, the question has to be asked.
Simply by continuing to exist in the face of such a sustained assault, Arafat was defeating the Israelis every day. They had to get rid of him. Did they? Weâll never know for sure, but it is worth noting that Israeli threats to kill him preceded his untimely death by less than a year. As is well-known, Israeli intelligence has carried out numerous assassinations: it is simply another tool in their international operations, one they have never hesitated to utilize. A passport-falsification scheme involving New Zealand, Britain, France, Spain, and a number of other countries was widely believed to have been meant to equip the Mossadâs crack team of assassins, who could slip into â and out of â target areas at will.
The Israelis hated Arafat with a particular passion, for two reasons:
1) His longevity â The Palestinian movement is thick [pdf] with factions, but thin when it comes to recognizable leaders. Arafat was the principal leader, and no one since his death has achieved his stature. He was a political survivor, having lived through numerous assassination attempts, and deflected the schemes of internal enemies to displace him. Simply by sticking around for so long, he became a living symbol of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination â and that is one big reason why the Israelis got rid of him.
2) His secularism â The Israelis encouraged the growth of groups such as Hamas in the beginning, in order to split away the more religious elements from the decidedly secular Palestine Liberation Organization/Fatah, which Arafat headed. It is easy to sell the Palestinians as crazed jihadists when a group like Hamas or Islamic Jihad is the most visible champion of their cause: the secular PLO presented the Israelis with a public relations problem. Thereâs another reason for the Israelis to have knocked him off.
One aspect of this case is extremely odd: polonium-210 is the same poison Alexander Litvinenko was dosed with. Litvinenko, a former KGB official, converted to Islam, joined the Chechen rebels, and became an associate of Boris Berezovsky, the notorious Russian oligarch wanted on charges of embezzlement in his home country. Litvinenko and Berezovsky are the Russian version of 9/11 Truthers: they believe practically every terrorist attack on Russian cities has been âstagedâ by Vladimir Putin in order to keep him in power. When he became ill, Litvinenko charged the Russian spy agency with poisoning him â although that seemshighlyunlikely.
Polonium-210 isnât something you can buy off the shelf at your local Walmart. It isnât even something a mad scientist might cook up in his home lab. About 100 grams are produced each year for specialized technical uses. The only entities with access to this sort of thing are state actors, or, at least, a private organization with very substantial resources at its disposal.
Whatâs interesting is that a diplomatic cable, dated Dec. 26, 2006 and published by WikiLeaks, details the conversation of a US diplomat with Russian spook Anatoly Safonov in which Safonov claims the Russians told the British about the importation of ânuclear materialsâ into London during the Litvinenko affair â and were told that the whole thing was âunder control before the poisoning took place.â In the course of the same conversation, Safonov â Putinâs chief representative on terrorism-related matters â went on to describe a number of threats and their possible sources:
âSafonov noted the daunting number of countries that posed particular terrorism threats, mentioning North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa, Libya, Iran, India, and Israel (sic?). He described a range of dangers, stressing the more immediate threats posed by nuclear and biological terrorism, but also acknowledging the risks of chemical terrorism.â
While the use of âsicâ is meant to indicate our diplomatâs incredulity at the inclusion of Israel in this list, what we now know about how Arafat died should tear away the blinders from several sets of eyes â yes, even at the US State Department.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
I note with sadness and a real sense of loss the departure of Scott Horton, the host of Antiwar.com Radio, from our staff. We wanted to keep him on, but we just couldnât afford him anymore. Times are tough, but this is a big blow: Scottâs interviews with the Big Names in the foreign policy universe are always informed, and in his inimitable style he always laced his programs with humor and a keen intelligence. I canât even begin to tell you how much he will be missed, Â but thatâs life these days, unfortunately.
