Israel promises troops legal backing over Gaza war

Print Story: Israel promises troops legal backing over Gaza war - Yahoo! News

** Fucking cowards!!


Israel promises troops legal backing over Gaza war
By Jeffrey Heller Jeffrey Heller

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – International calls to investigate Israel over alleged war crimes in the Gaza Strip prompted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday to promise military personnel state protection from foreign prosecution.

"The commanders and soldiers sent to Gaza should know they are safe from various tribunals and Israel will assist them on this front and defend them, just as they protected us with their bodies during the Gaza operation," Olmert said.

Last week, the military censor ordered local and foreign media in Israel to blur the faces of army commanders in photos and video footage of the Gaza war for fear they could be identified and arrested while traveling abroad.

Israeli media reports said the military had been advising its top brass to think twice about visiting Europe.

Speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting, Olmert said Israel's justice minister would consult with the country's top legal experts and find "answers to possible questions relating to the Israeli military's activities" during the 22-day war.

Some 1,300 Palestinians, including at least 700 civilians, were killed, medical officials said, in the offensive Israel launched in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with the declared aim of ending cross-border rocket attacks.

The civilian deaths sparked public outcry abroad and prompted senior U.N. officials to demand independent investigations into whether Israel committed war crimes.

Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians, hit by rocket salvoes, were killed in the conflict.

Israel said hundreds of militants were among the Palestinian dead and that it tried its best to avoid civilian casualties in densely populated areas where gunmen operated.

WHITE PHOSPHOROUS

Rights group Amnesty International has said that Israel's use of white phosphorus munitions -- which can cause extreme burns -- in built-up areas of the Gaza Strip was indiscriminate and therefore constituted a war crime.

Israel has said it used all weapons in Gaza within the limits of international law. Its military, however, has opened an investigation into white phosphorous use during the conflict.

Palestinians have long demanded international prosecution of Israel's military crackdowns. Yet legal frameworks are problematic.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has no jurisdiction to investigate in the Gaza Strip, as it is not a state. Though the Palestinian Authority has been functioning as an interim sovereign polity since 1993, it was forced out of Gaza last year by Hamas after the Islamists won an election.

And while Israel has not signed the Rome Statute that enshrined the ICC, it can still be investigated, but that would require a U.N. Security Council mandate. Any such proposal would probably be vetoed by Israel's ally, the United States.

Some European nations allow for war crimes lawsuits to be filed privately against members of Israel's security services.

In 2005, reserve Major-General Doron Almog, the former head of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, was warned by Israeli diplomats not to leave an El Al aircraft that landed in London after a tip-off British police were about to arrest him on war crimes charges.

A British Muslim group had won an arrest warrant alleging he breached the Fourth Geneva Convention in the demolition of Palestinian homes in 2002 in the southern Gaza Strip. Israel said the dwellings provided gave cover to gunmen.

Almog stayed on the plane and flew back to Israel.

Supreme Court Steps Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling

Supreme Court Steps Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling - NYTimes.com

Supreme Court Steps Closer to Repeal of Evidence Ruling
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — In 1983, a young lawyer in the Reagan White House was hard at work on what he called in a memorandum “the campaign to amend or abolish the exclusionary rule” — the principle that evidence obtained by police misconduct cannot be used against a defendant.

The Reagan administration’s attacks on the exclusionary rule — a barrage of speeches, opinion articles, litigation and proposed legislation — never gained much traction. But now that young lawyer, John G. Roberts Jr., is chief justice of the United States.

This month, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in Herring v. United States, a 5-to-4 decision, took a big step toward the goal he had discussed a quarter-century before. Taking aim at one of the towering legacies of the Warren Court, its landmark 1961 decision applying the exclusionary rule to the states, the chief justice’s majority opinion established for the first time that unlawful police conduct should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was isolated carelessness. That was a significant step in itself. More important yet, it suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk.

The Herring decision “jumped a firewall,” said Kent Scheidegger, the general counsel of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group. “I think Herring may be setting the stage for the Holy Grail,” he wrote on the group’s blog, referring to the overruling of Mapp v. Ohio, the 1961 Warren Court decision.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the Herring decision and has been a reliable vote for narrowing the protections afforded criminal defendants since he joined the court in 2006. In applying for a job in the Reagan Justice Department in 1985, he wrote that his interest in the law had been “motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure,” religious freedom and voting rights.

Justice Alito replaced Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was considered a moderate in criminal procedure cases.

“With Alito’s replacement of O’Connor,” said Craig M. Bradley, a law professor at Indiana University, “suddenly now they have four votes for sure and possibly five for the elimination of the exclusionary rule.”

The four certain votes, in the opinion of Professor Bradley and other legal scholars, are Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Alito, Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas, who is also an alumnus of the Reagan administration.

The fate of the rule seems to turn on the views of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who has sent mixed signals on the question. As in so many areas of the law, there are indications that the court’s liberal and conservative wings are eagerly courting him. They are also no doubt looking for the case that, with Justice Kennedy’s vote, will settle the issue once and for all.

The United States takes a distinctive approach to the exclusionary rule, requiring automatic suppression of physical evidence in some kinds of cases. That means, in theory at least, that relatively minor police misconduct can result in the suppression of conclusive evidence of terrible crimes.

Other nations balance the two interests case by case or rely on other ways to deter police wrongdoing directly, including professional discipline, civil lawsuits and criminal prosecution.

In Herring, Chief Justice Roberts seemed to be advocating those kinds of approaches. “To trigger the exclusionary rule,” he wrote, “police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system.”

That price, the chief justice wrote, “is, of course, letting guilty and possibly dangerous defendants go free.”

The Herring decision can be read broadly or narrowly, and its fate in the lower courts is unclear. The conduct at issue in the case — in which an Alabama man, Bennie D. Herring, was arrested on officers’ mistaken belief that he was subject to an outstanding arrest warrant — was sloppy recordkeeping in a police database rather than a mistake by an officer on the scene. Since the misconduct at issue in Herring was, in the legal jargon, “attenuated from the arrest,” the decision may apply only to a limited number of cases.

But the balance of the opinion is studded with sweeping suggestions that all sorts of police carelessness should not require, in Chief Justice Roberts’s words, that juries be barred from “considering all the evidence.”

A broad reading of the decision by the lower courts, Professor Bradley said, means “the death of the exclusionary rule as a practical matter.”

In one of the first trial court decisions to interpret Herring, a federal judge in New Jersey took the broader view, refusing to suppress evidence obtained from computer hard drives under a search warrant based on false information supplied by a Secret Service agent. The agent had told the judge that DVDs found during an earlier search contained child pornography.

This was false: other law enforcement officials had reviewed the DVDs and had found no child pornography. The agent, who was leading the investigation, testified that he did not know of that review when he made his statement.

“This conduct,” Judge Stanley R. Chesler wrote a week after Herring was decided, “while hardly qualifying as a model of efficient, careful and cooperative law enforcement, does not rise to the level of culpability that the Supreme Court held in Herring must be apparent for the exclusionary rule to serve its deterrent purpose and outweigh the cost of suppressing evidence.”

Constitutional adjudication is not a science experiment, and it is often hard to say for sure what difference a change in personnel makes. In the case of the exclusionary rule, though, you can get pretty close.

On Jan. 9, 2006, just months after Chief Justice Roberts joined the court, the justices heard arguments in Hudson v. Michigan. The police in Detroit had violated the constitutional requirement that they knock and announce themselves before storming the home of Booker T. Hudson, and the question in the case was whether the drugs they found should be suppressed under the exclusionary rule

Justice O’Connor, in her last weeks on the court while the Senate considered Justice Alito’s nomination, was almost certainly the swing vote, and she showed her cards.

“Is there no policy protecting the homeowner a little bit and the sanctity of the home from this immediate entry?” she asked a government lawyer, her tone sharp and flinty.

David A. Moran, who argued the case for Mr. Hudson, was feeling good after the argument. “I was pretty confident that I’d won,” he said in a recent interview. “O’Connor had pretty clearly spoken on my side.”

Three months later, the court called for reargument, signaling a 4-to-4 deadlock after Justice O’Connor’s departure. Justice Alito was on the court now, and the tenor of the second argument was entirely different.

Now Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who seemed to have been at work on a majority opinion in favor of Mr. Hudson, saw a looming catastrophe. The court, Justice Breyer said, was about to “let a kind of computer virus loose in the Fourth Amendment.”

Justice Breyer had reason to be wary. When the 5-to-4 decision was announced in June, the court not only ruled that violations of the knock-and-announce rule do not require the suppression of evidence but also called into question the exclusionary rule itself.

In a law review article later that year, Mr. Moran went even further. “My 5-4 loss in Hudson v. Michigan,” he wrote, “signals the end of the Fourth Amendment as we know it.”

Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, said that much had changed since the Mapp decision in 1961. People whose rights were violated may now sue police officers, and police departments are more professional. In light of these factors, he wrote, “resort to the massive remedy of suppressing evidence of guilt is unjustified.”

Justice Scalia cited the work of a criminologist, Samuel Walker, to support his point about increased police professionalism. Professor Walker responded with an opinion article in The Los Angeles Times saying that Justice Scalia had misrepresented his work. Better police work, Professor Walker said, was a consequence of the exclusionary rule rather than a reason to do away with it.

Justice Kennedy signed the majority decision, adopting Justice Scalia’s sweeping language. Oddly, though, he also wrote separately to say that “the continued operation of the exclusionary rule, as settled and defined by our precedents, is not in doubt.”

Another important Warren Court decision on criminal procedure, Miranda v. Arizona, appears to remain secure. Miranda, as anyone with a television set knows, protected a suspect’s right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer by requiring a warning not found in the Constitution. The decision, like Mapp, was the subject of much criticism in the Reagan years.

But in a pragmatic 7-to-2 decision in 2000, the Rehnquist Court refused to revisit the issue. Miranda warnings, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the majority, had “become embedded in routine police practice” and had “become part of the national culture.” Justices Scalia and Thomas dissented.

Defenders of the exclusionary rule breathed a sigh of relief in November

“From the point of view of a liberal concerned about criminal procedure,” said Yale Kamisar, a law professor at the University of San Diego, “we were saved by Barack Obama in the nick of time. If ever there was a court that was establishing the foundations for overthrowing the exclusionary rule, it was this one.”

For now, said Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, “they don’t have five votes to disavow the exclusionary rule by name.”

At the same time, Professor Karlan said, “you are not going to see any dimension along which there is going to be an expansion of defendants’ rights in this court.”

Video shows proof of phosphorus bombs in Gaza

Video shows proof of phosphorus bombs in Gaza | World news | guardian.co.uk

Gaza doctors detail burns to entire victims' bodies from chemical that is forbidden to be used as a weapon

Video showing injuries consistent with the use of white phosphorus shells has been filmed inside hospitals treating Palestinian wounded in Gaza City.

Contact with the shell remnants causes severe burns, sometimes burning the skin to the bone, consistent with descriptions by Ahmed Almi, an Egyptian doctor at the al-Nasser hospital in Khan Younis.

Almi said the entire body of one victim was burned within an hour. It was the first time he had seen the effects of what he called a "chemical weapon".

The Israeli military has denied using white phosphorus during the assault on Gaza, but aid agencies say they have no doubt it has been used.

"It is an absolute certainty," said Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch. He had seen Israeli artillery fire white phosphorus shells at Gaza City, Garlasco said.

The shells burst in the air, billowing white smoke before dropping the phosphorus shell.

Garlasco said each shell contains more than 100 incendiary rounds, which ignite and pump out smoke for about 10 minutes.

Severe respiratory problems can result in anyone exposed to the smoke and burning chemical particles that rain down over an area the size of a football pitch.

According to the International Solidarity Movement, many patients at the hospital near Khan Younis were suffering from serious breathing difficulties after inhaling smoke.

Human Rights Watch compares the use of white phosphorus shells over Gaza to the impact of cluster munitions, which scatter "bomblets" over a wide area. Children may kick and play with a lump of phosphorus, stirring up the embers and producing more fire and smoke.

The use of white phosphorus as a weapon – as opposed to its use as an obscurant and infrared blocking smoke screen – is banned by the UN's third convention on conventional weapons, which covers the use of incendiary devices. Though Israel is not a signatory to the convention, its military manuals reflect the convention's restrictions on using white phosphorus.

Israel initially claimed that it was not using white phosphorus. It later explained that shells being loaded for a howitzer, identified from photographs as phosphorus rounds, were empty "quiet" shells used for target marking. However, images of exploding shells and showering burning fragments are now acknowledged by independent observers as having been phosphorus.

At the centre of the controversy is the way white phosphorus air burst shells have been used in heavily built-up urban areas, with an overwhelmingly civilian population.

The M825A1 rounds, which are the kind identified as being fired by Israeli forces, are made primarily for use as a smokescreen in a way that limits their effect as an incendiary weapon, experts say.

Neil Gibson, a technical adviser to Jane's Missiles and Rockets magazine, said the shells did not produce high-velocity burning fragments like conventional white phosphorus weapons once did.

Instead, he said, they produced a "series of large slower burning wedges which fall from the sky". The wedges would then ignite spontaneously in the air and fall to the ground, burning for five or 10 minutes, he said.

Israel may face UN court ruling on legality of Gaza conflict

Israel may face UN court ruling on legality of Gaza conflict | World news | The Guardian

Israel faces the prospect of intervention by international courts amid growing calls that its actions in Gaza are a violation of world humanitarian and criminal law.

The UN general assembly, which is meeting this week to discuss the issue, will consider requesting an advisory opinion from the international court of justice, the Guardian has learned.

"There is a well-grounded view that both the initial attacks on Gaza and the tactics being used by Israel are serious violations of the UN charter, the Geneva conventions, international law and international humanitarian law," said Richard Falk, the UN's special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University.

"There is a consensus among independent legal experts that Israel is an occupying power and is therefore bound by the duties set out in the fourth Geneva convention," Falk added. "The arguments that Israel's blockade is a form of prohibited collective punishment, and that it is in breach of its duty to ensure the population has sufficient food and healthcare as the occupying power, are very strong."

A Foreign Office source confirmed the UK would consider backing calls for a reference to the ICJ. "It's definitely on the table," the source said. "We have already called for an investigation and are looking at all evidence and allegations."

An open letter to the prime minister signed by prominent international lawyers and published in today's Guardian states: "The United Kingdom government ... has a duty under international law to exert its influence to stop violations of international humanitarian law in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas."

The letter argues that Israel has violated principles of humanitarian law, including launching attacks directly aimed at civilians and failing to discriminate between civilians and combatants.

The letter follows condemnation earlier this week from leading QCs of Israel's action as a violation of international law, and a vote by the UN's human rights council on Monday on a resolution condemning the ongoing Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip.

"The blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as food and fuel are prima facie war crimes," a group of leading QCs and academics, including Michael Mansfield QC and Sir Geoffrey Bindman, wrote in a letter to the Sunday Times.

Israel has already been found to have violated its obligations in international law by a previous advisory opinion of the ICJ, and is likely to vigorously contest arguments that it is an occupying power. It previously stated that occupation ceased after disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

Its stance raises questions as to the utility of an advisory opinion by the ICJ after Israel rejected its finding in a previous case, which found the wall being constructed in the Palestinian territories to be a violation of Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law.

Questions are also being raised as to whether the international criminal court, which deals with war crimes and crimes against humanity, would have any jurisdiction to hear cases against perpetrators of the alleged crimes on both sides of the conflict. Neither Israel nor the Palestinian territories are signatories to the Rome statute, which brings states within the jurisdiction of the ICC.

More likely, experts say, is the establishment of ad-hoc tribunals of the kind created to deal with the war in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda.

"If there were the political will there could be an ad-hoc tribunal established to hear allegations of war crimes," Falk said. "This could be done by the general assembly acting under article 22 of the UN charter which gives them the authority to establish subsidiary bodies."

Israel's last surge before a Gaza cease-fire?

Print Story: Israel's last surge before a Gaza cease-fire? - Yahoo! News

Israel's last surge before a Gaza cease-fire?

By Ilene R. Prusher and Joshua Mitnick

JERUSALEM and Tel Aviv – The Israeli military on Thursday shelled the main United Nations aid compound in Gaza, struck a building that houses foreign news organizations, and caused a fire at a hospital. The attacks sparked global condemnation even as efforts to reach a cease-fire continued.

Later in the day, Hamas struck the Israeli city of Beersheba with a salvo of Qassam rockets, injuring five people, two of them seriously.

The Israeli strikes on what political officials said were unintended targets in the Gaza campaign underscore what some analysts see as a furious drive by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to achieve as many last-minute blows to Hamas as possible before a cease-fire is reached. And at this stage of the war, fissures are emerging within the Israeli civilian and military leadership.

"It's the final push to make Hamas understand, either they make a decision for a cease-fire, or it will be difficult to survive," says Shmuel Rosner, a leading opinion maker and journalist. "They need to show seriousness so Hamas doesn't interpret Israel's waiting of the last few days as reluctance to continue the operation."

While Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, apologized to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon for Israel's strike on their Gaza headquarters, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert took a different approach. He said the building had been used by Palestinian militants to strike Israeli forces.

Mr. Olmert, quoting a senior IDF officer, said Israel's troops opened fire on militants inside the compound shot antitank weapons and machine guns. "It is absolutely true that we were attacked from that place," he said.

Those two points provide a window into the differences that have developed at the top of the Israel political structure, run by an unlikely troika of Olmert, Mr. Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni – none of whom are allied.

With an election set for Feb. 10, the political rivals have become even more assertive in claiming their share of the credit for the war.

Ms. Livni, who is running to succeed Olmert, reportedly favors a unilateral pullback even without a cease-fire, according to media reports. A swift pullback would minimize risks to Israeli soldiers as well as the chances of a giving Hamas an opportunity to score any parting blows. A quick withdrawal would also improve Israel's position with its Western allies, which is progressively eroding as damage and death tolls mount.

"She is afraid of a mess up," says Gideon Doron, a political science professor at Tel Aviv University. "The longer you stay there, the higher the likelihood of a soldier getting hurt. That's bad for the ruling party."

Barak, who has got a boost from the polls for leading the war effort, reportedly supports a swift "humanitarian" cease-fire and the Egyptian efforts to reach a truce with Hamas. He would also like to wrap up the fighting and show a willingness to pursue peace to bolster his position among in his pro-peace Labor Party.

Olmert, who reportedly supports continuing the operation, is a lame duck prime minister and is free of his colleagues' political calculations. Mr. Doron says he's concerned about his legacy and would like to be remembered as the leader who squashed Hamas.

But meanwhile in Gaza, the war moved into one of its most deadly days amid some of the heaviest Israeli shelling on Thursday. Israel's military chief of staff told a parliamentary committee Tuesday that although Hamas has been dealt a serious blow, "we still have work to do."

In the crosshairs are senior Hamas figures who have gone underground, including Mahmoud az-Zahar – whose home was hit by the Israeli air force late Wednesday night. Hamas Interior Minister Saeed Seyyam was also killed Thursday. Mr. Seyyam controlled Hamas police and security forces of about 13,000 men, many of whom were directly involved with fighting.

Many observers say that IDF strategists have a short-list of targets they want to strike before a cease-fire. The Israel defense establishment, they say, is loath to slow down and give the impression that it's tired or is lacking in the will to continuing fighting Hamas.

But Israel missile strikes drew even sharper international condemnation on Thursday, in particular from the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki Moon, who is in Israel trying to bring about a cease-fire that would end Israel's attacks on Gaza and the continued launch of rockets at Israel by Hamas militants.

Into the afternoon Thursday, the UN headquarters in Gaza, where some 700 Palestinian civilian had sought shelter, was still burning out of control, several hours after it was hit, forcing the suspension of major aid operations in the coastal territory. The chief of operations there said there wasn't enough water to douse the flames, a result of Gaza's battered infrastructure in the 20-day war with Israel.

"The warehouses are burning down, the fire is spreading, and we're very concerned," says John Ging, the director of operations in Gaza for UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN's main arm for aid to Palestinians.

"There's a shortage of water and that's why it's spreading. All the food, medicine, and humanitarian aid we have to distribute in Gaza are stored here," Ging adds.

The solution is to "stop the shooting, respect the UN, and then we can start to rebuild. Our compound is falling apart before my eyes! There are a million-and-half people depending on aid from us, and an attack on our compound is another challenge that we can do without."

Mr. Ban, a diplomat who usually speaks in carefully crafted statements, issued his strongest statement to date on the conflict, which mushroomed on Dec. 27 after a six-month cease-fire expired and Hamas resumed rocket fire at Israel.

"I conveyed my strong protest and outrage to the defense minister and the foreign minister and demanded a full explanation," said Ban, who had met Ms. Livni earlier Thursday as part of a multi-national effort to bring the devastating 20-day-old war to an end.

Ban said in a press conference that he spoken to Barak. "The defense minister said to me it was a grave mistake and he took it very seriously," Ban said. "He assured me that extra attention will be paid to UN facilities and staff and this will not be repeated."

In Gaza, flames from the bombings Thursday also engulfed the al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City, though it was unclear whether this was from a direct hit or from a fire resulting from a nearby attack.

A UN spokesman said that the headquarters was hit by what was believed to be three white phosphorous shells, which burn at higher-than-usual temperatures, and that UN workers were unable to douse the flames with standard fire extinguishers.

Thursday marked the second time since the war began that a UN facility took a direct hit from Israel.

Last week, Israeli forces bombed a UN-run school in Jabalya, in northern Gaza, killing 39 Palestinians sheltering there. The Israeli army says it hit the school because it was the source of mortar fire, but the UN says that no militants were found at the site.

At press time, emergency services in Beersheba, Israel, were dealing with the aftermath rocket attack there.

One of the Qassams launched by Hamas made a direct hit on a car. In all, Gaza militants fired at least 24 rockets at Israel Thursday, hitting cities such as Gedera, Ofakim, and Sderot. The wail of sirens, sending people in and out of bomb shelters, was heard throughout the day.

Bill Moyers interviews Simon Schama

Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS

BILL MOYERS: We're hearing the word "historic" over and over again as we near the inauguration of our first African American president. But there is something else historic as well about this moment, and that's the convergence of issues our country faces. Our economy is in freefall. Our government is in shambles. We're at war in two other countries. And our foreign policy has produced one fiasco after another.

Some people even say Obama should actually consider himself fortunate to be taking over at a time like this, because there's nowhere to go but up. Maybe, but as we used to say in East Texas, no situation is so bad, it can't get worse. The truth is there's nothing new about freshly inaugurated presidents inheriting a mess.

When George Washington took the oath of office at Federal Hall here in New York he was taking over a newly independent collection of squabbling states so penniless that Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton had to negotiate a bailout just to cover the salaries of the president and Congress.

And Lincoln. When Abraham Lincoln was sworn in on March 4, 1861, his hand on the same Bible Barack Obama will be using, the Union was dissolving into Civil War. Jefferson Davis had already been inaugurated as President of the Confederacy two weeks earlier.

Lincoln's bumbling predecessor, James Buchanan, told him, "If you are as happy on entering the White House as I am on leaving, you are a very happy man indeed."

CHIEF JUSTICE CHARLES EVANS HUGHES: You, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do solemnly swear...

BILL MOYERS: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of course, became president as the country was shivering and starving through the fourth winter of the Great Depression. Twenty-five percent of us were unemployed, stocks had plunged seventy-five percent after the Crash of '29 and new investment and industrial production were non-existent.

So it has been throughout America's stormy past: two steps back for every three forward, periods of boundless optimism countered by times of fear and desperation.

That's the background that prompted me to want to talk to our guest on this broadcast.

Historian Simon Schama has spent eight months traveling across America to take stock of our nation's character. Exploring our experience with war, religion, prosperity, and race.

MAN: I don't think any white person can really understand what it is to be a Negro in America.

BILL MOYERS: This legacy now awaits Obama on the doorstep of the White House.

The result of his travels is a television series premiering on BBC America next week, during the inauguration, and this upcoming book, THE AMERICAN FUTURE: A HISTORY.

Simon Schama is an art and literary critic who since 1990 has written and presented more than 30 documentaries as well as such best-sellers as THE POWER OF ART and the three-volume A HISTORY OF BRITAIN. He teaches history and Art History at Columbia University here in New York, and he still looks at America with the eye of the curious and intrigued visitor - the traveler who helps us see ourselves as others see us - and as, perhaps, we really are.

Welcome to you.

SIMON SCHAMA: Thank you for having me.

BILL MOYERS: Some time ago when we talked, oh, I think it was '05 or '06, you said to a group of us you thought the election in 2008, in that election we would finally confront our demons. Did we?

SIMON SCHAMA: Oh, I think we did actually. I think, or maybe even if we were demurring about taking stock of the magnitude of the many disasters besetting the United States, history in the shape of massive economic trouble happening at the time of a difficult and indeterminate war, made sure that we would. It's not just a question, Bill, I think of a number of policies that went wrong or even a question of a government that really, put it mildly, hadn't lived up to its billing.

It's been this extraordinary sense of a sinkhole at the center of our authority. That somehow all the nostrums and wisdoms and optimistic clichés, if you like, that have sustained us really since Ronald Reagan's Morning in America could not cope with trouble in manufacturing, could not cope with a sense of loss of grip about why our sons and daughters were dying abroad. Because America, you know, it's the reason I did this, both the series and the book. America is not impervious to these great moments of philosophical self-examination. We think of it all as sort of TV slogans and spin, the creatures of opinion management. But there have been moments over and over again, Watergate and the aftermath of Kennedy, when we've said we are a great democratic experiment. What has become of us? And I did think this would be another of those moments.

BILL MOYERS: Obama himself said last week in a speech on the economy that, you know, it's very late in the game. He didn't sound as certain as he might have about what can be done.

SIMON SCHAMA: No. He better sound a bit more certain in the weeks and months that are coming. What was actually a little disappointing about the end stages of his campaign is having promised us, really, a debate about a return to mutual purpose. He was really playing, as one must, I suppose, pragmatic politics and didn't exactly make the speech for me that I was hungering for, saying times are tough, but we're in this together. There were little whispers of that because of the nervousness really about rocking the boat too much before the election itself came along.

Now he has a really different task. He does indeed have the kind of Franklin Rooseveltian task of making Americans face up to the magnitudes of disaster. Maybe they don't need to be educated about this without utterly demoralizing us collectively, sapping our energy. It's a tough thing. So the catch-up is to say, for Timothy Geitner and all the rest of them, how much state power ought we be using without actually killing the animal we're supposed to be bringing back from sickness; namely, American capitalism? It's a tricky one. You can only feel your way day by day, week by week, I suspect.

BILL MOYERS: My sense is that the movement that was out there, that the longing for a new American story after the last eight years found Obama in one very strong sense. If you-

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes, but it takes a guy with really shrewd nostrils to smell the way the wind is going.

BILL MOYERS: And you were writing in September of last fall, two months before the election, that the next president would be the most compelling storyteller.

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes, I did.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, I'd read "Dreams from My Father." That is a book about his own life, but it is also a book about the possibilities of American life, be it from the Great Plains, from Kansas, or his father's rather hapless, tragic story of the Kenyan who comes to Hawaii and then leaves his family to go to Harvard. It was almost like reading Steinbeck actually. The moment in that first book of his where I thought, this is an American story, is when his mother, in Indonesia, wakes the little boy, Barry, up at four o'clock in the morning to get extra lessons which he barely understands because she's worried about him getting not enough education in Jakarta or wherever it was. And we were threatened with losing a sense really, especially, you know, in the minority community he became aware of in South Chicago-

BILL MOYERS: Right.

SIMON SCHAMA: -that education above all is empowerment. That's such an American story. That's why I came to America, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: That's why you make the case that his story, the story he tells about himself, is implanted in the American DNA.

SIMON SCHAMA: I think he's so good because he's actually very honest. When he gets to Chicago after a very moody, alienated, odd period, after he graduated from Columbia as an undergraduate, he wandered around, did some work as a consultant for a business corporation. Led a lonely life way over in East Harlem. And then just was hungry for some sort of connection. This is someone whose mother had left him with his grandparents in Hawaii, whose father had disappeared, someone whose whole life has been about reconnecting with some larger group.

And actually what was very odd, was when he was accused by Sarah Palin in particular of never running anything, that he didn't say it was no picnic going to Altgeld Gardens and Roseland in South Chicago, we're talking about asbestos removal. We're talking about fundamental, you know, making sure sewage doesn't back up, making sure electricity isn't cut off. He had early contact with a very hard education, all those empty damp church halls where he tried to get four or five people to come, twenty-five people to come, fifty people. That's what community organizing means. It doesn't mean some kind of lofty piece of editorializing. It means getting rid of the asbestos.

BILL MOYERS: So you think he appreciates or at least understands what you write about in the book, this dark underside of the American DNA, the American Dream, where for every Barack Obama, there are legions of young black men still experiencing racism, violence, and alienation, as you describe this?

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes. He is-

BILL MOYERS: You think he really appreciates-

SIMON SCHAMA: His strengths and his weakness is that he does. Precisely because he is the skinny intellectual with a kind of, oh, so-so jump shot, jumped into the rough life of South Chicago. As I say, he's very wry about his unpreparedness for that. But there's no question. There's another passage he's written that he was headed for drugs. He liked to kind of cultivate this sort of cool attitude. His great strength is that he does know all these worlds. The question, really, was whether he knows too much. Whether he has too much experience of all these worlds to be able to say enough of input really. Time for a decision. We have no idea if he's any good at that. We're about to find out.

BILL MOYERS: Do you have an intuition about that, looking at both his story and America's story?

SIMON SCHAMA: I think-

BILL MOYERS: -for the moment?

SIMON SCHAMA: I think he's going to start by kissing up to too many people. And then I think there'll be a moment maybe about two months down the line and the kissing's going to stop. I rather hope so.

BILL MOYERS: So here Obama with this story is coming to take the Oath of Office next week. If he reads your book - which I most certainly hope he does, quite frankly - if he reads your book, he will find that he's standing at the convergence of four powerful forces in American life that you have identified and organized your work around. War, religion - what you call American fervor, I love that term, fervor - immigration, and abundance, or plenty. Tell me briefly why those four themes commanded your attention.

SIMON SCHAMA: The views that America's had historically about those seem to me to gather together into the exceptional American character. For example, it was really only in America that an intense debate was played out, about what the place of the military was going to be in American life.

BILL MOYERS: We have an excerpt from your series, let's take a look at it.

SIMON SCHAMA: And like the soldiers of Gettysburg, the veterans of World War II have become an emblem of the good American war. Like thousands of young men, Epifanio Salazar signed up after Pearl Harbor. At seventeen, he was too young, but he lied about his age. Salazar trained as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division. Two days after D-day, he made his first jump, behind German lines in Normandy. No one doubts that if ordinary Americans like Salazar had not made that jump into the fire, the world might now be a very different place.

EPIFANIO SALAZAR: We landed in some fields, they were waiting for us. They had machine guns and everything. I got shot by a German in the knee, and here, in the shoulder. It was awful.

SIMON SCHAMA: You had one hell of a tough war.

EPIFANIO SALAZAR: Oh, it's to hell and back.

SIMON SCHAMA: What do you think, do you think about the wars that America is in now, and compare?

EPIFANIO SALAZAR: I think the war in Iraq is not so good. It's a political war, is what I think. Because in World War II it took us five years to win, completely win. And now it's five years, we haven't done anything.

SIMON SCHAMA: Salazar had invited me to join him at a gala to honor him and his fellow veterans. I guess I'd assumed that the atmosphere of shared ordeals, remembered wounds and deaths would preclude any hint of debate. But I was wrong. General Ricardo Sanchez, who had served as commander of American forces in Iraq, gave a speech. I was expecting him to deliver a call to arms. Instead, we got something more authentically American - a call to vote.

GENERAL RICARDO SANCHEZ: We are now into year six of Iraq, and if we disagree with the policies, then there are mechanisms for us to express that. When you're in a time of leadership crises, what better time for you to mobilize yourselves and make a statement than during a presidential election year? Whether you support a Republican or Democratic candidate is irrelevant. The point that I'd like to leave with you, is that the entire American community must mobilize itself, get involved in this tremendously critical year and make a statement. We have to send a message to Washington, because the future of our country is at stake.

BILL MOYERS: What were you thinking, sitting there?

SIMON SCHAMA: How wonderfully American a moment that was. I was completely dewy-eyed. I was thinking of all those men with medals organizing the destruction of democracy in some South American republic or the military junta in Burma or places where the authority of the uniform has given you permission to kill democracy because it's such an inconvenience. Pervez Musharraf, for example.

I was thinking there is Sanchez who had every reason to represent himself as the wronged general, wronged by civilian command of the war. And, in fact, he bared his heart to me about, actually, what a disaster he thought the immediate post-invasion administration had been. But the message he wanted in public about that supremely military occasion, when military sentiment was the kind of communal bond, was the first thing we are is a democracy. That's only in America, you find.

BILL MOYERS: You open one chapter with a quotation from Vice President Dick Cheney. "America has never been a warrior culture." When you heard that, what went through your mind?

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, the next sentence is, "Just because Dick Cheney said it doesn't necessarily make it untrue." I thought this is rich coming fro- but then my second thought was, you're right. That's absolutely true. Of course you and I agree that the temptation to bullying - Theodore Roosevelt was high on the sound of a bugle, as we all know - has always been there, and it's often been succumbed to. We've gotten into all sorts of wars in American history, not to mention genocide of Native Americans, the Mexican War, certainly a war of choice. Nonetheless, there is some sense that the founding fathers would have been proud of Ricardo Sanchez in saying that there was an exceptionally strong element inside American life which is about the only decent war, the war worth spilling the blood of our sons and daughters is the war of last resort.

BILL MOYERS: I wonder if Obama understands the extent to which that early movement that we have talked about was inspired by the desire to end war, the war in Iraq and whether he knows today that he could betray the kind of trust and inspiration that we're invested in him because people were opposed to the war?

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, it'd be a shocking thing if he didn't. He went out on a limb when nobody else, you know, was actually prepared to deny the government's view about weapons of mass destruction, called it the dumb war, and so on. The danger is, of course, actually there was an incoming president, especially at 47 - or was it 48-year-old President - however smart, will succumb to those who say, "You're very bright but you must understand the art of state power. Enough with the soft, sentimental, sappy stuff. It's a hard world out there." Whether he goes, you might say, grimly Hamiltonian. And that will indeed be a betrayal.

If you ask me a prediction, Bill, I think he won't. I think actually he brings us to, you know, fervor. I think he is very invested on America's right to flourish being conditional on its survival of the moral community. I think that's a very important part of what America means to him.

BILL MOYERS: The Founding Fathers, as you point out, struggled with the moral underpinnings of military force. Do you think those moral underpinnings are still in place today after Iraq?

SIMON SCHAMA: Well, I think actually the difficulties in Iraq and our terrible overextension and years of chaos and violence and the worry about whether after we leave it'll descend into sectarian violence again, make the case that if you actually don't fight a war, as in the Second World War in which you're completely morally invested, it does you no good in terms of your own national security. The rest of the world whom ultimately you need to help you in this campaign, especially against global terrorism, will desert you, will treat you as someone who's caught the infection of military enthusiasm to a shocking degree. And they will not be there, especially when economic times are hard. So it's sort of in your interests to actually fulfill America's original mandate to fight wars in which you're morally un-occluded about.

BILL MOYERS: You were also in Texas to explore the second great theme in your book that you say converges at the time of Obama's inauguration and that is immigration. Let look at this excerpt from your visit to Houston, Texas.

SIMON SCHAMA: Texas, where a third of the city is Hispanic, and where some white Texans get hot and bothered about being swamped by a Latino tide.

VOLUNTEER BORDER PATROLMEN: Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

SIMON SCHAMA: These volunteers gather every week to protect the kind of America they want to live in. The group is run by Curtis Collier, a pest exterminator.

CURTIS COLLIER: There's an estimated thirty to forty million people in our country illegally. And when you start multiplying that by just a few dollars, if forty million people only cost you just one dollar, it'd be costing you forty million. But it is estimated that a single illegal alien costs taxpayers somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand dollars a year. As far as America needing the laborers to do the work that people here won't do, what happens is, these people coming to this country actually keep wages down.

SIMON SCHAMA: Their targets are the Mexican migrant workers who stand at the roadside waiting to be offered a day's work.

WORKER: I don't mind "One Nation, One Flag, One Language," that's right, I think that's right. But over there, they got cardboard with the words, "Nail 'Em and Jail 'Em." But these guys, all of us, we are just feeding our families.

PATROLMAN: You're all very illegal.

WORKER: No, everybody legal.

PATROLMAN: Show us papers and we'll help you get work

WORKER: You have no authority to-

PATROLMAN: We got authority, we're citizens.

WORKER: Why? I'm citizen too.

WORKER: A lot of guys, we have family here, born here, many of us are citizens.

PATROLMAN: What about the ones that aren't citizens? What about the ones standing here that are invaders? What do you want to do with them?

WORKER: I - I - I guess that's right.

PATROLMAN: "I - I - I" - you need to get the invaders to go home.

WORKER: But jail 'em? I don't think that's fair. We're humans.

PATROLMAN: Illegal invasion is illegal.

WORKER: Right, but we're humans.

PATROLMAN: I don't give a care what you are, if you're not an American citizen you ain't got the right to be in America, get the hell out.

PATROL WOMAN: They're not in our country legally, they're not paying taxes. They're bringing in numerous diseases, they're raping and killing people. If they don't find a job, they go out and steal and rob. They even say that Texas belongs to them. They said that we stole it from them. And I know, I had relatives that came down from Tennessee and fought for the Republic of Texas and won it, fairly and squarely. And now they're saying, this is our country, y'all stole it from us, which is not true.

BILL MOYERS: You quote a woman in your book from 1854, "She regarded the Mexicans 'not as heretics or heathens to be converted...but rather as vermin to be exterminated.'" And I thought what an old story you're telling here. What explains this paradox that we, as you say, call ourselves a nation of immigrants but we resist all the newcomers when they arrive here? And that's an old strain. What is it that accounts for that, Simon? Is it that those of us who are here fear losing our identity in the bubbling melting pot?

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes. How does one put it without sounding too highfaluting? But I'd say an anthropological neurosis, oddly enough. Franklin, who I quote in the book actually-

BILL MOYERS: Benjamin Franklin-

SIMON SCHAMA: Benjamin Franklin, 1750, is terrified about the Germans in Pennsylvania. For Franklin, this was going to be an empire of the free but only if you're maybe Scots, maybe Irish or English. He wrote, of course actually, he was aware of German journalism and so on. But he fought bitterly against the possibility that the Germans would overrun Pennsylvania. The notion is: there's always the next wave. They're not going to be ready or right or, in some peculiar biological way, compatible with democracy. The Irish weren't going to be compatible. The Italians weren't going to, but time takes its own. We were talking earlier about the amazing power of education. And, you know, that has the capacity somehow magically over the generations to make all these people just fine as Americans.

The jump which we're seeing now, however, is what Chuck Alaman in Dearborn, Michigan, says at the end of that film, talks about with great pride, says, "I'm not an Arab American. I'm an American who happens to be a Muslim. I'm as American as apple pie." And we are seeing, if Obama's elected, the coloring of America. And you gave me an article to read in the "Atlantic Monthly" which was sort of about how white America is ending. And I thought, yes. But am I missing something here? But what exactly is the problem?

BILL MOYERS: Well, the problem is this historical memory that you write. I mean, if Benjamin Franklin, as you say, you call him the founding father of American paranoia.

SIMON SCHAMA: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And he anticipated the day that-

SIMON SCHAMA: Andrew Jackson, whose praises we are singing far too much in my view actually.

BILL MOYERS: Because? Because?

SIMON SCHAMA: Because Andrew Jackson was responsible for the first great exercise in ethnic cleansing, actually, who removed the Cherokee over the Mississippi in an act of absolutely horrifying cruelty and brutality.

BILL MOYERS: You call what Andrew Jackson did in removing the Cherokee the most morally repugnant moment in American history.

SIMON SCHAMA: Jefferson actually had been the first to make this deal. He said, look, Cherokee, if you can become American - in other words, if you learn English, you open schools, maybe you'll become Christian, if you accept our laws, if you turn the Cherokee Nation into a little New Hampshire or something, of course you could stay. You'll be thrifty farmers.

They do that. Their chief is called John Ross, you know, it's part Scottish but mostly Cherokee. They do that. And it's when they've actually accepted the American deal that Jackson says, "Uh-oh, they've actually fulfilled their side of the bargain only too well. But we need Georgia because gold has been discovered in Georgia. Get rid of them. We want them to vanish."

But what I wanted to say, Bill, was that this election is an astonishing moment in that respect because Americans were asked to vote on who they thought would be the more authentically, patriotically competent commander-in-chief between a decent, decorated, genuine American white hero and someone who looked and sounded like Barack Obama. You can't make the case that an African American somehow is incapable of embodying American values when every word that falls out of that man's mouth sounds as though he'd written the Constitution. I'm being a little too nice to Obama now.

BILL MOYERS: There's something else, too. Immigration, which has been a fierce strain in American nativism and opposition to the newcomer, fierce strain, did not cut as deeply, was not as hot an issue last November as most people expected it would be. Have we, in effect, with Obama's election, settled the issue?

SIMON SCHAMA: I suspect not. The credit belongs both to actually the president, to George Bush, and to John McCain. Their view, which puts them firmly on the left of the Republican Party, was that there ought to be a way for illegal immigrants to become citizens actually. And so John McCain started to make tremendous noises about the security fence and so on. But it's true, it sort of fizzled and disappeared. Simply there seems to be more urgent things on people's scanner I believe.

BILL MOYERS: Does Obama's election mean we can finally put race behind us?

SIMON SCHAMA: The race problem will not go away, not least because when times are tough actually those who are, in any case, economically disadvantaged, who have less schooling, are likely to be those who are most, alas, disposable in terms of the possibility of unemployment. So we're going to expect I think trouble in the cities. Not I think trouble like 1960s.

But you asked, of course, the historical question. That is profound. America begins with an act - and you know, I'm deeply sentimental in my enthusiasm about the beginning of the American experiment. But it begins with an act of profound bad faith. Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence in which liberty and equality are offered as the defining principles that make you American, while he is himself a slave owner. And then the Constitution is made at the moment in which African Americans are defined as three-fifths of a human in order to give the South enough clout to perpetuate slavery.

And, you know, Lincoln's conversion coming up to the Civil War and then during the Civil War, from someone who found it morally loathsome but pragmatically had to be kept that way, to someone who, for whatever reasons, to win the war or not, was responsible for the Emancipation Proclamation, was an enormous change.

Lincoln, simply in the end, found it unbearable to hold up his head as an American and keep that act of bad faith going. But then we had a hundred years of Jim Crow and we had the civil rights movement. So this moment, it does seem to me to finally wipe clean that original sin, that profoundly repellent act of bad faith at the very beginning.

BILL MOYERS: You give valuable time in this series and in the book to religion. How come?

SIMON SCHAMA: I thought particularly religion is especially outside America misunderstood as a kind of captive of the conservative right. So that it's become almost a synonym for wanting to kind of rant and rave about what is right and what is wrong about the abortion debates and when life begins and so on. And there seems to be a much older and grander and nobler tradition.

I was particularly taken with Roger Williams, who's extremely undisciplined, sort of unorthodox Protestant for whom the regime in Massachusetts was a form of theocratic tyranny. Well, we're back in the 1600s now and he founds Providence Plantation that becomes Rhode Island in order that anybody of any kind of faith could practice without being persecuted by the other. The American bet was taken that belief would flourish exactly to the degree in which you could never be prosecuted. You could never be turned into a criminal for believing or praying to the wrong god. And that was a bet that's paid off. So in some sense, the religiosity of America has been tied up with tolerance and freedom always.

I mean, Jefferson, that old deist. Can you imagine? Jefferson did not believe that Jesus was son of God. Do we imagine someone actually running for higher office is prepared to say, "Fine school teacher. But, you know, virgin birth, give me a break." Really, I mean, that's unlikely to happen. But Jefferson, that sort of skeptical deist who believed in the creator, he did believe in a creator but thought the New Testament was essentially a kind of a nice fairy tale about a good, moral teacher. Jefferson gave America a great gift in saying that we cease to be Americans once we start to institute religious injunction in our laws.

BILL MOYERS: Your travels took you to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Let me show the audience what happened there.

SIMON SCHAMA: It's Easter Sunday in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King preached his gospel of liberation.

REVEREND RAPHAEL WARNOCK: People dare to ask, why we ain't. Two hundred and forty-four years of slavery, and you dare to ask me, why in the world are black people so angry?

SIMON SCHAMA: Like most black congregations in the country, Ebenezer has a new hero, Barack Obama. They consider him one of them, a man whose political convictions owe an enormous debt to his faith.

Obama's background in the black church, the church of slave rebellions, comes with political risks. The sermons of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, dominated the talk that Easter weekend. He made some incendiary remarks that were instantly picked up by the American media. But here, the media attacks on Wright were seen as an attack on all of them.

REVEREND RAPHAEL WARNOCK: For two weeks now, the talking heads have been engaged in a yellow journalistic prosecution of the black church. Jeremiah Wright may be the subject, and Barack Obama may have been called to testify, but in a real sense, the black church is on trial.

SIMON SCHAMA: Reverend Warnock was not shy about taking his fervor right into the political fray.

REVEREND RAPHAEL WARNOCK: The truth may get you killed, the truth will get you crucified. Sometimes on a cross, sometimes on CNN.

SIMON SCHAMA: So much for Jefferson's hope that politics and religion might be kept apart.

REVEREND RAPHAEL WARNOCK: For me it's a question of social justice. And justice is not simply a political issue, it's a theological issue. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke about the God of justice. They said, "Woe unto you who crush the poor." So when I speak to public policy issues, I am being faithful to the Gospel.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said the judgment of God is upon America.

I would argue that the black church was born fighting for freedom. The freedom struggle is the black church's very raison d'etre, its reason for being. It is the one thing that really makes the witness of the black church distinctive in America, and it has been part of the black church's gift to America.

BILL MOYERS: What did you think, the son of Jewish refugees, sitting there in Ebenezer Baptist Church?

SIMON SCHAMA: I thought it was just grand, really. There's no doubt that as an historical statement, the Reverend Warnock was saying exactly how it is. That's to say the moment really when slaves were able to form a community out of sight and out of control of the overseer and the plantation owners were in the so-called steal-away churches or the hush harbors. The slave owners had a decision to make. Is life going to be more difficult for us in keeping our population of slaves docile with or without Christianity? So they decided that was the answer.

But that involved teaching slaves often to read or write so they could read the Bible, bringing their own white preachers in. Once they got the bard of the gospels, they decided to do something about it themselves. And the film and the chapter in the book really traces this one extraordinary place of freedom before the Civil War, especially among your lot, among the Baptists where blacks could really have their own government. By the 1870s and '80s, deep into Jim Crow years, W.E.B. DuBois, who himself is not a particularly religious person, is awed by this extraordinary establishment of what he calls the temple of African American life. So it's so important. And it was something that did not come naturally to Obama, of course.

BILL MOYERS: You were reporting and writing this at the time of the controversy-

SIMON SCHAMA: Right.

BILL MOYERS: -over Jeremiah Wright-

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: -of which Pastor Warnock talked.

SIMON SCHAMA: When Obama decided on March the 18th, I'm sure it was actually, to give that great speech, the greatest speech he gave in the entire campaign, in Philadelphia. And he said, "I want to explain to you the relationship between religion and being an African American in America. "I want to explain to you, however much you like or dislike it, the nature of black anger. And then you'll understand why Jeremiah spoke as extremely as he did."

BARACK OBAMA: For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or the beauty shop or around the kitchen table.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning,

SIMON SCHAMA: I thought, he has gone down in flames. I thought that day when I read it, I thought this is a noble speech which has destroyed his candidacy. He's decided to grasp two violently struggling snakes with his hands. And he's had it, really. But he will know when he loses the nomination, I thought, my power of clairvoyance deserting me, that he went down for a good cause. But, of course, it was that moment where actually engaging an issue of morality in American life only did him good. It only did him good.

BILL MOYERS: You describe America as a place of everlasting optimism. And yet one of the most haunting scenes in your work is of you walking into an abandoned house in the Great Plains and find yourself standing "inside the dead and broken body of the dream." What are you experiencing there?

SIMON SCHAMA: Oh, it was the death, as I said, of the little house on the prairie. That was a house that had been abandoned during the Dust Bowl and somehow miraculously had actually sort of stayed that way. And it America, was the sort of spirit of can-do America, is balanced by tragic illuminations like that.

There was a wonderful man we talk about in the film called Hugh Bennett, who became Roosevelt's sort of conservation person. And it's an extraordinary scene really where he stands talking about what's the desire for immediate greed by churning up the short grass prairie which gave you two generations maximum of high-yield crops, what we did was destroy the entire ecosystem of the grass that bound together the soil surface. So when the winds blew and there was a drought for many years, lo and behold, the dust storms. And he's standing there on the floor of the Senate. And the dust storm, the one dust storm that was horrifying, I believe it's 1935, that actually darkened the skies over Washington, that had blown east. And Bennett says, "This is what I mean. There goes Oklahoma." And he was listened to. He was listened to by the government and he was listened to by Congress. So America is this for me it will always be this most moving poetic place - does that surprise you, Bill? - in the world to be. Because it is actually about innocent ebullience followed by tragic illumination. And it's a change of course. I do still believe we'll change course. But we'll change course and still be America.

BILL MOYERS: You have said that no one is ever elected president in this country by talking about limits.

SIMON SCHAMA: Right.

BILL MOYERS: And yet we're entering a period in which Obama has to cope with limits, right?

SIMON SCHAMA: He does. But he's been smart and I think true about this. I don't want to give him a pass on everything. But actually talking about renewable sources of power, by talking about new technology, wind power, solar power, and so on, it does sound a bit like a kind of green sermon. But he's right. Investment in those enables him to deploy the one thing that we're not running out of in my view and that's American technological ingenuity. That little piece of Benjamin Franklin's legacy and alive and well. We see it every day on the web. If you could somehow actually translate that deep well of ingenuity then you feel, indeed, that what you're talking about when you talk about limits is different. You can't have Hummers the size of Rhode Island anymore barreling on the freeway. But you can have a new way, cars will go on. They'll just be different kinds of cars.

BILL MOYERS: But one reviewer says, "I was left feeling rather chilled by Schama's take on the U.S. and its prospects. This may be the end of an empire as we knew it. And one can only wonder what it will mean for someone like Obama to preside," and here's where your historical convergence arrives on the scene, "to preside over its dismantling or its transformation."

SIMON SCHAMA: That's the challenge. That's typically dark European view. But it's the challenge. You can either be - it's an extraordinary thing, this convergence of catastrophe and euphoria. Euphoria at the president we have and the heap of trouble we're in. Either the heap of trouble will do him in and there'll be a terrible dark backlash of disappointed expectations, or he'll flip it. It won't be easy. The flipping won't happen overnight. But he can actually turn it to an extraordinary vindication of the American experiment. I rather hope he will.

BILL MOYERS: Have you learned something about the American character that surprised you, that enables you to project where we are going as a people, the soul of America?

SIMON SCHAMA: There are moments in our history, some of the ordeals of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, that Americans were called on to sacrifice, during the New Deal and during the Second World War. We are indeed going to go through a kind of test of that order. But in each occasion really America has emerged with an essential characteristics altered, but intact.

BILL MOYERS: And that is?

SIMON SCHAMA: I think freedom, ingenuity, and justice.

BILL MOYERS: Those you think are the bedrock of American character?

SIMON SCHAMA: I do. I do. And as I say, I think actually equality and justice were a dark joke so long as racism remained embedded in the institutional fabric of the United States. That's changed.

BILL MOYERS: So we're a country of great paradox.

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: But you find us also a resilient people.

SIMON SCHAMA: Yes, absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: Simon Schama, thank you very much.

SIMON SCHAMA: You're welcome.

BILL MOYERS: There's more information about THE AMERICAN FUTURE, the series, the book and DVD, on our web site on pbs.org.

Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Jonathan Cook: Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth.

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

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

There is also growing evidence that Israeli forces have been firing phosphorus shells over densely populated areas in a move that risks violating international law by inflicting burns on civilians.

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, meanwhile, called the events in Gaza a “new Nakba”, referring to the catastrophe that dispossessed the Palestinians in 1948. The Palestinian Authority revealed that it was planning to seek the prosecution of Israel’s leaders for war crimes in the international courts.

The legal challenges follow a wave of Israeli attacks on schools, universities, mosques, hospitals and ambulances in the past few days. The army claims the attacks are justified because the sites are being used by Hamas fighters.

A petition to the Israeli courts was announced on Wednesday by Taleb al Sanaa, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament, over the shelling on Tuesday of a UN school in the Jabaliya refugee camp that killed at least 40 Palestinians sheltering there.

UN officials, noting that they had passed on the school’s GPS co-ordinates to Israel and that it was clearly marked with a UN flag, insisted that only civilians had sought refuge at the school. The UN has demanded an investigation.

Mr al Sanaa said the petition would name the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, and Ehud Barak, the defence minister, as the responsible parties. “Israel needs to decide whether it wants to be a terrorist organisation like Hamas or respect international law,” he said.

A further petition has been launched by eight Israeli human rights groups, demanding that Israel’s Supreme Court ban the army from targeting ambulances and medical personnel.

The petition cites a large number of cases in which Israel has fired on ambulances, arguing that as a result medics have been unable to treat the wounded or transport them to hospital.

Palestinian medics said 21 of their staff have been killed by Israeli fire and many more wounded, according to reports on Al Jazeera TV. The Al Durra hospital in Gaza City was hit on Tuesday, and a day later three mobile clinics run by a Danish charity, DanChurchAid, were destroyed.

The International Committee of the Red Cross dropped its usual diplomatic language this week in denouncing Israel’s refusal to allow medical teams to tend the wounded.

During a three-hour pause in the fighting on Wednesday rescuers managed to reach the Zaytoun neighbourhood, south-east of Gaza City, that was extensively bombed at the start of the week.

Four children were found close to starvation alongside 15 bodies, including those of their mothers. Many other civilians were found dead in the area, and others are believed still to be in hiding. Israeli tanks were stationed nearby the destroyed buildings during the whole period.

Pierre Wettach, a Red Cross spokesman, called Israel’s delay in allowing a medical evacuation “shocking” and “unacceptable”. He added: “The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded.”

Physicians for Human Rights in Israel added its voice, criticising the Israeli authorities for repeatedly ignoring requests to move seriously wounded civilians.

The UN suspended its aid operations on Thursday after two of its drivers were killed and others wounded by Israeli fire directed at one of its relief convoys during another three-hour ceasefire.

John Ging, head of the UN relief agency in Gaza, said: “They were co-ordinating their movements with the Israelis, as they always do, only to find themselves being fired at from the ground troops.”

Palestinian sources and international observers warned that the death toll among civilians is rising rapidly as Israel’s ground invasion pushes deeper into Gaza.

Al Haq, a Palestinian legal rights group, warned that 80 per cent of the more than 750 Palestinians killed in the fighting so far have been civilians. According to figures cited by the World Health Organisation, at least 40 per cent have been children. Another 3,000 Gazans have been wounded.

Israeli commanders were reported in the Israeli media to be unsurprised by the heavy toll on civilians of their latest actions, saying their priority was to protect soldiers.

“For us, being cautious means being aggressive,” one told the Haaretz newspaper. “From the minute we entered, we’ve acted like we’re at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground.”

The newspaper said the government had taken into account the likely high number of Palestinian civilian casualties when it approved the ground operation a week ago.

Another soldier, identified as Lt Col Amir, told Israeli TV on Wednesday: “We are very violent. We are not shying away from any method of preventing casualties among our troops.”

Among the dubious tactics the army appears to be resorting to is use of white phosphorus shells, which burn intensely on exposure to air creating the firework-type explosions characteristic of Israel’s shelling of Gaza.

Although the shells produce dense clouds of smoke to cover military operations, they also cause severe burns on contact with skin.

Photographs of pale blue artillery shells lined up by tanks stationed on the edge of Gaza have been identified as American-made phosphorus munitions. Neil Gibson, a missiles expert for Jane’s, told the London Times that the shells were an “improved model” that burned for up to 10 minutes.

Although such shells are allowed when used solely as a smoke screen, they are banned as a chemical weapon if used as an anti-personnel munition. Palestinian and international medics in Gaza have reported large numbers of burns victims with injuries difficult to treat.

Yesterday, Amnesty International also accused Israeli soldiers of using Palestinian civilians as human shields – a charge Israel has repeatedly levelled against Hamas.

Malcolm Smart, a spokesman, said: “Israeli soldiers have entered and taken up positions in a number of Palestinian homes, forcing families to stay in a ground-floor room while they use the rest of their house as a military base and sniper position.”

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

UN levels war crimes warning at Israel over shelling of evacuee house in Zeitoun | World news | guardian.co.uk

UN levels war crimes warning at Israel

Killing of 30 people in Gaza when army shelled house full of evacuees 'has all
hallmarks of war crime', says high commissioner for human rights

The Israeli military may have committed war crimes in Gaza, the UN's most senior human rights official said tonight, as Israeli troops pressed on with their increasingly deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution demanding a ceasefire.

Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, singled out the killing this week of up to 30 Palestinians in Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, when Israel shelled a house where its troops had told about 110 civilians to take shelter.

Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told the BBC the incident "appears to have all the elements of war crimes". She called for "credible, independent and transparent" investigations into possible violations of humanitarian law.

The accusation came as Israel kept up its two-week-old air and ground offensive in Gaza and dismissed as "unworkable" the UN security council resolution calling for "an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire". Protests against the offensive were held across the world today as diplomacy to halt the conflict appeared to falter.

With the Palestinian casualty toll rising to around 780 dead and more than 3,100 injured, fresh evidence emerged today of the Zeitoun killings.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said in a report it was "one of the gravest incidents since the beginning of operations" against Hamas militants in Gaza by the Israeli military on 27 December.

OCHA said the incident took place on 4 January, a day after Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza. According to testimonies gathered by the UN, Israeli soldiers evacuated about 110 Palestinians to a single-storey house in Zeitoun. The evacuees were instructed to stay indoors for their safety but 24 hours later the Israeli army shelled the house. About half the Palestinians sheltering in the house were children, OCHA said. The report also complains that the Israeli Defence Force prevented medical teams from entering the area to evacuate the wounded.

The OCHA report does not accuse Israel of a deliberate act but calls for an investigation. Responding to the report, an Israeli military spokeswoman, Avital Leibovich, told AFP news agency: "From initial checking, we don't have knowledge of this incident. We started an inquiry but we still don't know about it."

Among the dead were nine members of the Samouni family; a picture of three of the family's children in blood-stained clothing laid on a morgue floor and in front of their grieving father was shown in the Guardian on Tuesday. The father, Wael Samouni, said dozens of people had been sheltering in the house after Israeli troops ordered them and neighbours to stay inside.

"Those who survived, and were able, walked two kilometres to Salah Ed Din road before being transported to the hospital in civilian vehicles," the UN said.

Rescuers from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society said they were able to reach the area on Wednesday only after being allowed safe passage by Israel.

The ICRC issued a statement on the incident yesterday, accusing the Israeli military of "unacceptable" delays in allowing medics safe access to injured Gazans.

More than 40 Palestinians were killed in another incident on Tuesday after missiles exploded outside a UN school that had been sheltering hundreds of people in the Jabaliya refugee camp, despite the UN saying the school was clearly marked with a UN flag and its position reported to Israeli military.

More than 750 Palestinians have died since the start of the Israeli military operation. More than half of Gaza's population are children, and the Palestinian ministry of health said about 42% of the casualties have been children.

Unicef said at least 100 children and minors were killed in the first 10 days of fighting. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which posts staff at hospitals to track casualties, put this number at more than 160.

Abdel-Rahman Ghandour, the Jordan-based spokesman for Unicef in the Middle East and North Africa, said: "We are talking about urban war. The density of the population is so high, it's bound to hurt children … This is a unique conflict, where there is nowhere to go."

Israel has accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields and has said militants have fired rockets from rooftops of homes and mosques.

Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman, said: "Israel wants to see no harm to the children of Gaza. On the contrary, we would like to see their children and our children grow up without the fear of violence. Until now, Hamas has deliberately prevented that from becoming reality."

Fighting in Gaza has continued despite yesterday's UN security council resolution calling for an "immediate" and "durable" ceasefire and the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza. The resolution was passed with 14 out of 15 members in support of the resolution. The US abstained from the vote.

Barack Obama administration 'prepared to talk to Hamas' | World news | guardian.co.uk

Obama camp 'prepared to talk to Hamas'

Incoming administration will abandon Bush's isolation of Islamist group to initiate low-level diplomacy, say transition sources

The incoming Obama administration is prepared to abandon President Bush's doctrine of isolating Hamas by establishing a channel to the Islamist organisation, sources close to the transition team say.

The move to open contacts with Hamas - which could be initiated through the US intelligence services - would represent a definitive break with the Bush presidency's ostracising of the group.

The Guardian has spoken to three people with knowledge of the discussions in the Obama camp.

There is no talk of Obama approving direct diplomatic negotiations with Hamas early on in his administration, but he is being urged by advisers to initiate low-level or clandestine approaches, and there is growing recognition in Washington that the policy of ostracising Hamas is counter-productive.

A tested course would be to start contacts through Hamas and the US intelligence services - similar to the secret process through which the US engaged with the PLO in the 1970s. Israel did not become aware of the contacts until much later.

Richard Haass, a diplomat under both presidents Bush who was named by a number of news organisations this week as Obama's choice for Middle East envoy, supports low level contacts with Hamas provided there is a ceasefire in place and a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation emerges.

Another potential contender for a foreign policy role in the Obama administration suggested the president-elect would not be bound by the Bush doctrine of isolating Hamas. "This is going to be an administration that is committed to negotiating with critical parties on critical issues," they said.

There are a number of options that would avoid a politically toxic scenario for Obama of seeming to give legitimacy to Hamas.

"Secret envoys, multilateral six-party talk-like approaches. The total isolation of Hamas that we promulgated under Bush is going to end," said Steve Clemons, the director of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation.

"You could do something through the Europeans. You could invent a structure that is multilateral. It is going to be hard for the Neocons to swallow," he said. "I think it is going to happen.

However, one Middle East expert close to the transition team warned: "It is highly unlikely that they will be public about it."

The two weeks since Israel launched its military campaign against Gaza have heightened anticipation about how Obama intends to deal with the Middle East. He adopted a strongly pro-Israel position during the election campaign, as did his erstwhile opponent and choice for secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. However, it is widely thought Obama will adopt a more even-handed approach once he is president.

Obama's main priority now, in the remaining days before his inauguration, is to ensure the crisis does not rob him of the chance to set his own foreign policy agenda, rather than merely react to events.

"We will be perceived to be weak and feckless if we are perceived to be on the margins, unable to persuade the Israelis, unable to work with the international community to end this," said Aaron David Miller, a former state department adviser on the Middle East.

"Unless he is prepared to adopt a policy that is tougher, fairer and smarter than both of his predecessors you might as well hang a closed-for-the-season sign on any chance of America playing an effective role in defusing the current crisis or the broader crisis," he said.

Obama has defined himself in part by his willingness to talk to America's enemies. But the president-elect would be wary of being seen to give legitimacy to Hamas as a consequence of the war in Gaza.

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at the Georgetown school of foreign service, said it was unlikely Obama would move to initiate contacts with Hamas unless the radical faction in Damascus was crippled by the conflict in Gaza. "This would really be dependent on Hamas's military wing having suffered a real, almost decisive, drubbing."

Even with such caveats, there is growing agreement, among Republicans as well as Democrats, on the need to engage Hamas to achieve a sustainable peace in the Middle East - even among Obama's close advisers.

In an article published on Wednesday on the website of Foreign Affairs, but apparently written before the fighting in Gaza, Haass, who is president of the Council on Foreign Relations writes: "If the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas continues to hold and a Hamas-PA reconciliation emerges, the Obama administration should deal with the joint Palestinian leadership and authorise low-level contact between US officials and Hamas in Gaza."

The article was written with Martin Indyk, a former US ambassador to Israel and an adviser to the incoming secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.

"The change of perceptions is underway," said Alistair Crooke, director of the Conflicts Forum who was a former security adviser to the EU's Middle East envoy. "However, it hasn't translated yet into something substantive."

Last month, General Anthony Zinni, who was Bush's envoy to the Middle East, called on Obama to enage Hamas and move quickly to reach a peace deal.

The willingness for conditional engagement with Hamas marks a sharp break with the world view of the Bush administration.

Obama has said repeatedly that restoring America's image in the world would rank among the top priorities of his administration, and there has been widespread praise for his choice of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and Jim Jones, the former Marine Corps commandant, as his national security adviser.

He is expected to demonstrate that commitment to charting a new foreign policy within days when the president-elect is expected to name a roster of envoys who will take charge of key foreign policy areas: Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, India-Pakistan, and North Korea.

Both Obama and Clinton adopted solidly pro-Israel positions during the election campaign. Last May, Obama sacked an adviser, Rob Malley, after it emerged he had met Hamas officials while working for the International Crisis Group.

In June, Obama told the Israeli lobbying group Aipac he supported Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. That runs contrary to longstanding policy that the future of Jerusalem be decided through negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians.

In a visit to Israel one month later, Obama said he identified with efforts to protect Israeli cities from Hamas rockets.

Obama has further frustrated and confused those who had been looking to the incoming administration for a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by his refusal to make any substantive comment on Israel's military campaign on Gaza, nearly two weeks on.

He told a press conference on Wednesday: "We cannot be sending a message to the world that there are two different administrations conducting foreign policy. Until I take office, it would be imprudent of me to start sending out signals that somehow we are running foreign policy when I am not legally authorised to do so."

He added: "This silence is not as a consequence of a lack of concern."

Gaza conflict fuelling anger in UK, Muslims warn Brown

Gaza conflict fuelling anger in UK, Muslims warn Brown | World news | The Guardian

Gaza conflict fuelling anger in UK, Muslims warn Brown


Anger within Britain's Muslim communities over the Gaza conflict has reached "acute levels of intensity" that could have repercussions for national security, leading Muslims will warn Gordon Brown today.

In a letter to the prime minister, representatives of Muslim organisations will say the Israeli government's use of "disproportionate force" to combat threats to its security has "revived extremist groups" and "empowered their message of violence and perennial conflict".

The letter, a copy of which can be read on the Guardian's Comment is Free website, also says that the "current, partisan and simplified narrative" emanating from the White House is of "serious and direct harm" to relations between the UK, North America and Arab countries.

Among the signatories are Dr Usama Hasan, imam of Al-Tawhid mosque, London, Dilwar Hussain, head of the policy research centre at the Islamic Foundation, Zareen Roohi Ahmed from the British Muslim Forum and Ed Husain, co-director of the anti-extremism thinktank the Quilliam Foundation. All are active in tackling extremism in the UK and overseas.

They say it is imperative for the UK to distance itself from the Bush government. The letter goes on: "We urge you to make concerted and successful efforts to convince the US administration of the dangers of its approach and to ensure the incoming Obama administration forges a more enlightened direction. We also believe the UK - bilaterally and as part of the EU - has an important role to demonstrate to Israel that the threshold of acceptable behaviour has been perilously transgressed."

The letter adds: "As you are aware, the anger within UK Muslim communities has reached acute levels of intensity. The Israeli government's use of disproportionate force ... has revived extremist groups and empowered their message of violence and perennial conflict. For Muslims in the UK and abroad, we run the risk of potentially creating a loss of faith in the political process."

Their intervention follows a meeting on Tuesday between Bill Rammell, foreign and commonwealth affairs minister, and 30 people drawn from Muslim organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Islamic Society of Britain.

In what was said to be a testy meeting, representatives told Rammell the government's position on Gaza could provoke UK terrorist attacks. One of those present was Dr Hany el-Banna, youth worker and co-founder and president of the charity Islamic Relief.

He told the Guardian: "We are all working tirelessly to try and cool them down. I am telling them to change and bring something positive, but they see these images and they trigger extremist thoughts in the simplest individuals. Many millions of people will see these images in the media, what do you think the affect will be?

"The government is responsible for the country and its foreign policy. I don't want something to happen here."

Another participant in the discussion, Khurshid Drabu, said there was widespread concern about radicalisation. "What we are looking for is equality of treatment when international law is breached. When a Muslim country does that the weight of the world is on them, why does Israel have such impunity?"

A perceived double standard has alarmed the Young Muslims Advisory Group (YMAG), which the government launched last October to help prevent violent extremism. The group sent a letter to Brown this week saying government failure to condemn Israeli action against Palestinians was undermining efforts to reduce homegrown radicalisation.

The letter, first published in Muslim Youth, said: "We are in grave danger of sending a message to youth today that the mass murder of civilians can be justified if the right grievances are cited. In the current climate there is a real danger young people who witness the impotence of institutions that are supposed to be protecting innocent life will turn to other organisations in an effort to make their voices heard and the violence stop."

Rockets from Lebanon hit Israel

Rockets from Lebanon hit Israel


Several rockets have been fired into northern Israel from neighbouring Lebanon, Israeli police say.

Micky Rosenfeld, an Israeli police spokesman, said the Katyusha rockets fell around the town of Nahariya, about 8km south of the Lebanese border, early on Thursday.

The Israeli military fired mortars into southern Lebanon in response to the missile barrage.

Al Jazeera's Rula Amin, reporting from Beirut, said there had been no immediate claim of responsibility, but Lebanese security forces were confirming that "one or two rockets" had been fired across the border.

At least one Israeli was slightly injured in the attacks, media reports said.

Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera's correspondent southern Israel, said analysts were suggesting that the rocket attack could have been carried out by Palestinians in southern Lebanon.

She said the firing of rockets from Lebanon "could mean the opening of a second front" in the war on Gaza.

The Israeli military has been on alert in the north since it intensified the Gaza offensive, which it says is aimed at stopping rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip.

Lebanon is home to more than 400,000 Palestinian refugees, according to UN figures.

The Palestinian Hamas group, which has been targeted by the ongoing aerial and ground assault, denied it carried out the attack from southern Lebanon.

Nasrallah speech

On Wednesday, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah, warned that "all possibilities" were open against Israel as he gave a speech condemning Israel's offensive in Gaza and voicing support for Hamas.

The Shia Muslim Hezbollah movement fought a month-long war with Israel in 2006 in which about 1,200 mostly Lebanese civilians were killed.

"We are ready to sacrifice our souls, our brothers and sisters, our children, our loved ones for what we believe in"
Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader

Addressing tens of thousands of supporters via video link at his stronghold in Beirut's suburbs, Nasrallah said: "I say to [Ehud] Olmert [Israel's prime minister], the loser, the vanquished in Lebanon that 'you cannot overcome Hamas or Hezbollah'."

The comments marked the first time he has spoken so openly on the possibility of a renewed conflict with Israel since the war in Gaza began on December 27.

Nasrallah warned that the 2006 conflict would be "but a walk in the park" compared to what awaits Israel if it launches a new offensive on Lebanon.

"We have to act as though all possibilities are real and open [against Israel] and we must always be ready for any eventuality.

"We are ready to sacrifice our souls, our brothers and sisters, our children, our loved ones for what we believe in."

The Hezbollah leader also reiterated past criticism of Egypt for failing to open its border with Gaza and condemned the United Nation Security Council for not acting to denounce the Israeli offensive that has left more than 700 Palestinians dead.

"Does the government in Egypt need more than 650 victims and 2,500 wounded to open the Rafah crossing once and for all to help the people of Gaza toward victory?" Nasrallah said.

"I am simply asking for the opening of a crossing and not another front."