Rants in the Void

giving

2010-01-22T02:58:00.006-06:00

To give someone a gift and expect anything in return, even a 'thank you', is not truly giving. At best, it is exchanging; at worst, it's bartering.

One must always say 'thank you' when receiving a gift, no matter what it is. The gift is in the giving.

Dag Hammarskjold

2009-11-14T18:06:00.002-06:00

Rants in the Void

Our incurable instinct to acquire - to assimilate in the crudest sense of the word - provides the medium for much of our aesthetic experience….We pick the flower. We press body against body - bringing to naught that human beauty which is only physical in that the surfaces of the body are animated by a spirit inaccessible to physical touch.” - Dag Hammarskjold

Palin's Enemies List: Lashes Out At The Media, Bloggers, And SNL Writers

2009-11-14T17:46:00.003-06:00

During the months that she served as the Republican Party's vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin had what could best be described as an acrimonious relationship with the press. Thrust into the national spotlight from relative political obscurity, the former Alaska Governor saw her professional record and personal story come under a powerful microscope. And as controversy was exposed and questions were raised, the animosity that Palin felt for the fourth estate became nearly all-consuming.

In her upcoming book, "Going Rogue," the former governor spends ample time airing her grievances with the way she was and continues to be treated by the media. The cast of characters she disparages range from the famous to the obscure, the national to the local - all of whom are accused of either peddling scandal or playing out political vendettas.

At one point in the book, Palin recalls ridiculing Hillary Clinton for complaining about her treatment in the press. "I wasn't really accusing her of whining," Palin writes. "Still, before criticizing her on this point, I should have walked a mile in her shoes. I can see now that she had every right to call the media on biased treatment that ended up affecting her candidacy. In fact, I should have applauded her because she was right..."

The animosity wasn't always there, as Palin writes. As governor of Alaska she had what she described as a "fine relationship" with the media - even offering up her personal cell phone number to local reporters. But a move from the statehouse to the campaign trail brought with it more critical coverage and a much larger pool or reporters. From the onset, things were rocky.

Palin writes with disgust that the "tone some reporters (and many bloggers) seemed to want to set was one of 'hypocrisy.'" Calling those who questioned the circumstances of her daughter's pregnancy "Trig truthers," she scoffs at the bloggers who, if they "weren't busy pushing fairy tales, would post threatening stories about any number of looming scandals that would drive me out of office."

Mostly, she recoils at the fourth estate's supposed sanctimoniousness. "I was amazed at how many liberal pundits seemed floored by a pregnant teenager," she writes, "as if overnight they'd all snuck out and had traditional-values transplants."

From there, Palin accuses various outlets, including the Huffington Post, of mischaracterizing her appearance at the Wasilla Assembly of God church, in which she called the war in Iraq "a task from God."

She even bemoans the writers at Saturday Night Live for having bad taste.

"I looked at the script," she writes of the preparation for her appearance on the show. "It wasn't all that funny. SNL writers had taken the campaign's 'Drill, baby, drill' mantra and turned it into a risqué double entendre about Todd and me. I thought, Nah. C'mon, New York talent, we can do better than that."

The toughest words, in the end, are saved for Katie Couric, the CBS anchor whose interviews with Palin became a major embarrassment for the McCain campaign. As Palin writes:

"Though Katie edited out substantive answers, she dutifully kept in the moments where I wore my annoyance on my sleeve.... There was much Katie appeared not to know, or care to hear about."

[snip]

"But Katie wasn't interested in discussing these issues. And when I did, she didn't air them. Instead, when I tried to describe frequent Russian incursions by figuratively referring to Vladimir Putin entering our airspace, CBS researched the Russian leader's actual flight over the United States and called my statement inaccurate. And when I referenced Alaska's narrow maritime border to describe our close proximity to other nations, CBS reported that the Coast Guard monitored the border and not the governor."

[snip]

"But Katie's purpose - shared by most media types - seemed to be to frame a 'gotcha' moment. And it worked. Instead of my scoring points for John McCain, I knew that I had let the team down."

[snip]

"I don't think she really wanted to hear my answer because she interrupted me five times as I tried to give it. The badgering had begun. This is really annoying me, I thought. Then she asked me about abortion and the morning-after pill twelve times. Twelve different times."

[snip]

"I answered as graciously and as patiently as I could. Each time, I reiterated my pro-life, pro-woman, pro-adoption position. But no matter how many ways I tried to say it, Katie responded by asking her question again in a slightly different way. I began to feel like I was in the movie Groundhog Day."

Palin's anger towards Couric became so consuming that even when recounting a wholly different campaign controversy -- the $150,000 in clothes purchased for her by the RNC -- she felt compelled to go back and take a swipe at the CBS anchor.

Katie Couric even weighed in on the trumped-up 'controversy,' writing: 'There aren't a lot of Joe Six-packs out there who can drop six figures on a new wardrobe, so Gov. Sarah Palin's $150,000 shopping spree seems excessive to some people."

This is especially ironic coming from Katie, whose own stylists, the B Team was told, was part of the team the campaign hired to do the convention shopping before I even arrived.

The end of the campaign did not bring with it an end to the frosty relationship between Palin and the press. There was, for example, the interview she did with the local television station KTUU for a routine Thanksgiving Day story

The station, Palin writes in her book, "set up an odd camera angle to capture turkeys being decapitated behind me... The photographer couldn't post it to the Web fast enough. The video became an instant YouTube hit."

"Now, I'd be the first person to tell you where your Thanksgiving meal comes from," Palin adds. But this was a deliberate move to make some noise."

Then there was the coverage of the various ethics complaints filed against her. Palin writes of reporters from the "lower 48" essentially stalking her daughter Piper on her walk home from Harborview Elementary School. She claims journalists were camping out "at the end of our driveway in Wasilla and on the ice in front of our home," and "incessantly call[ing] and stop[ping] by my parents' and siblings' and in-laws' homes and businesses."

The relationship, of course, is a two-way street. And to this day, the former Alaska Governor has not given a public news conference since being tapped as the vice presidential candidate. Palin, in "Going Rogue," proclaims that it was McCain campaign operatives who restricted her availability. "It got so bad," she writes, "that a couple of times I had a friend in Anchorage track down phone numbers for me, and then I snuck in calls to folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto's producer."

But, even then, the disdain she felt for the media -- whose coverage she described as "pathetic and chilling" -- was entirely obsessive.

"Perhaps the national press outlets just don't have the resources anymore to devote to balanced coverage," she writes at one point. "Perhaps they've all just given up on themselves, so we've given up on them, too, except to treat their shoddy reporting like a car crash -- sometimes you just have to look."

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Emilie Autumn

2009-11-13T01:49:00.000-06:00

dancing leaves

2009-11-13T01:36:00.004-06:00

the deep forest green
leaves dancing with the raindrops
a soft grey misty light
dripping through my thoughts

the trees and I, in the rain
getting wet together
we are each a child of god
no one of us the better

a gentle breeze sighs through the trees
my mind is rested, clear and bright
I open up before my lord
small and humble in her sight

here within this hazy dew
boundaries tend to blur
the eye and I not seeing straight
but the murmur of the birds

we shall fly where chaos reigns
in harmony and light
where the universe is not and is
and all is simply right

beyond reason's mere feeble grasp
where insane and gifted play
where past and future, memory and dream
lie pregnant within the day

the stars look down bemused
in cold, eternal death
whilst we dance in shadows cast
by the light of our eternal quest

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

2009-11-13T01:21:00.001-06:00

Marcia Angell, M.D.: Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

Is the House Health Care Bill Better than Nothing?

Well, the House health reform bill -- known to Republicans as the Government Takeover -- finally passed after one of Congress's longer, less enlightening debates. Two stalwarts of the single-payer movement split their votes; John Conyers voted for it; Dennis Kucinich against. Kucinich was right.

Conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, the House bill is not a "government takeover." I wish it were. Instead, it enshrines and subsidizes the "takeover" by the investor-owned insurance industry that occurred after the failure of the Clinton reform effort in 1994. To be sure, the bill has a few good provisions (expansion of Medicaid, for example), but they are marginal. It also provides for some regulation of the industry (no denial of coverage because of pre-existing conditions, for example), but since it doesn't regulate premiums, the industry can respond to any regulation that threatens its profits by simply raising its rates. The bill also does very little to curb the perverse incentives that lead doctors to over-treat the well-insured. And quite apart from its content, the bill is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a staggering apparatus to administer it and try to enforce its regulations.

What does the insurance industry get out of it? Tens of millions of new customers, courtesy of the mandate and taxpayer subsidies. And not just any kind of customer, but the youngest, healthiest customers -- those least likely to use their insurance. The bill permits insurers to charge twice as much for older people as for younger ones. So older under-65's will be more likely to go without insurance, even if they have to pay fines. That's OK with the industry, since these would be among their sickest customers. (Shouldn't age be considered a pre-existing condition?)

Insurers also won't have to cover those younger people most likely to get sick, because they will tend to use the public option (which is not an "option" at all, but a program projected to cover only 6 million uninsured Americans). So instead of the public option providing competition for the insurance industry, as originally envisioned, it's been turned into a dumping ground for a small number of people whom private insurers would rather not have to cover anyway.

If a similar bill emerges from the Senate and the reconciliation process, and is ultimately passed, what will happen?

First, health costs will continue to skyrocket, even faster than they are now, as taxpayer dollars are pumped into the private sector. The response of payers -- government and employers -- will be to shrink benefits and increase deductibles and co-payments. Yes, more people will have insurance, but it will cover less and less, and be more expensive to use.

But, you say, the Congressional Budget Office has said the House bill will be a little better than budget-neutral over ten years. That may be, although the assumptions are arguable. Note, though, that the CBO is not concerned with total health costs, only with costs to the government. And it is particularly concerned with Medicare, the biggest contributor to federal deficits. The House bill would take money out of Medicare, and divert it to the private sector and, to some extent, to Medicaid. The remaining costs of the legislation would be paid for by taxes on the wealthy. But although the bill might pay for itself, it does nothing to solve the problem of runaway inflation in the system as a whole. It's a shell game in which money is moved from one part of our fragmented system to another.

Here is my program for real reform:

Recommendation #1: Drop the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55. This should be an expansion of traditional Medicare, not a new program. Gradually, over several years, drop the age decade by decade, until everyone is covered by Medicare. Costs: Obviously, this would increase Medicare costs, but it would help decrease costs to the health system as a whole, because Medicare is so much more efficient (overhead of about 3% vs. 20% for private insurance). And it's a better program, because it ensures that everyone has access to a uniform package of benefits.

Recommendation #2: Increase Medicare fees for primary care doctors and reduce them for procedure-oriented specialists. Specialists such as cardiologists and gastroenterologists are now excessively rewarded for doing tests and procedures, many of which, in the opinion of experts, are not medically indicated. Not surprisingly, we have too many specialists, and they perform too many tests and procedures. Costs: This would greatly reduce costs to Medicare, and the reform would almost certainly be adopted throughout the wider health system.

Recommendation #3: Medicare should monitor doctors' practice patterns for evidence of excess, and gradually reduce fees of doctors who habitually order significantly more tests and procedures than the average for the specialty. Costs: Again, this would greatly reduce costs, and probably be widely adopted.

Recommendation #4: Provide generous subsidies to medical students entering primary care, with higher subsidies for those who practice in underserved areas of the country for at least two years. Costs: This initial, rather modest investment in ending our shortage of primary care doctors would have long-term benefits, in terms of both costs and quality of care.

Recommendation #5: Repeal the provision of the Medicare drug benefit that prohibits Medicare from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices. (The House bill calls for this.) That prohibition has been a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry. For negotiations to be meaningful, there must be a list (formulary) of drugs deemed cost-effective. This is how the Veterans Affairs System obtains some of the lowest drug prices of any insurer in the country. Costs: If Medicare paid the same prices as the Veterans Affairs System, its expenditures on brand-name drugs would be a small fraction of what they are now.

Is the House bill better than nothing? I don't think so. It simply throws more money into a dysfunctional and unsustainable system, with only a few improvements at the edges, and it augments the central role of the investor-owned insurance industry. The danger is that as costs continue to rise and coverage becomes less comprehensive, people will conclude that we've tried health reform and it didn't work. But the real problem will be that we didn't really try it. I would rather see us do nothing now, and have a better chance of trying again later and then doing it right.

Seven Swans Cover by Sufjan Stevens (Kelsey)

2009-11-12T20:43:00.000-06:00

You say "trans-panic," I say "hate"

2009-04-19T13:46:00.000-05:00

Salon.com Life | You say "trans-panic," I say "hate"

You say "trans-panic," I say "hate"
Was the murder of a transgender woman sparked by bias, deception or both?

Tracy Clark-Flory

Apr. 18, 2009 |

In what is believed to be a historic first, a hate-crime statute is being used to prosecute the murder of a transgender person. Last summer in Greeley, Colo., 18-year-old Angie Zapata was allegedly beaten to death with a fire extinguisher after Allen R. Andrade discovered that she was transgender. The two had met online and hung out at Zapata's apartment for two days, during which she gave her 32-year-old companion a blow job. At one point, she left him alone in the apartment and he discovered photographs that raised his suspicions about her sex. When she returned, Andrade allegedly confronted her, grabbed her crotch and, discovering she had a penis, brutally murdered her.

During opening statements on Thursday, Andrade's attorney argued that his client simply "snapped" and "flew into an uncontrollable rage" after finding out that the beauty he had courted online was actually born male. Yes, it's that familiar trans-panic defense, a close relative to the gay-panic defense. In a lawyerly twist of logic, though, the defense team is rejecting the hate-crime charge, which would lengthen Andrade's sentence, and arguing that Zapata's sexual identity did not spark the defendant's murderous rage. Public defender Bradley Martin argued: "It's about a deception and the reaction to that deception." Which is kind of like saying: "It wasn't a reaction to finding out she was transgender, it was a reaction to finding out she was transgender." Well, in that case.

The prosecution, of course, sees things differently. In fact, they argue Andrade plotted to kill Zapata 36 hours after his discovery of the deception. Deputy District Attorney Brandi Nieto says statements he has made will support the fact that the murder was a hate crime. Indeed, the statements already made public paint a vivid picture of a hateful homophobe: He was recorded in a phone conversation saying "gay things need to die" and told police that he was pretty sure he had "killed it" after hitting Zapata in the head until she stopped breathing. Andrade was also recorded telling his girlfriend: "It is not like I went up to a schoolteacher and shot her in the head or killed a straight law-abiding citizen." (A law-abiding citizen! Says the man who admitted to bashing in someone's skull.)

It's been a while since trans-panic and gay-panic pleas have shown up on my radar, but this case -- as have many cases before -- serves as an enraging reminder that those defenses are so often only euphemisms and apologies for hate.

Revenge of the RINOs

2009-04-18T21:39:00.000-05:00

Revenge of the RINOs - The Daily Beast

Revenge of the RINOs
by Meghan McCain
April 18, 2009 | 8:14pm

Republican in Name Only? Try the future of the GOP. The following is Meghan McCain's address to the Log Cabin Republicans Convention—a group that promotes gay issues within the GOP—on April 18, 2009.

Thank you all for having me here tonight. I am thrilled to be able to speak to you this evening to share some of my experiences from the campaign and observations on where our party is today. And I’m proud to tell you there is a special role for the Log Cabin Republicans to play in our future.

The last two years of my life have been an amazing series of moments. Some sad, some thrilling and others mesmerizing. I want to tell you about some of those moments as well as the ones that are yet to come.

I have been humbled by the outpouring of support that I received during the campaign. The tumultuous ride of my father’s quest for the Presidency has been well chronicled. In October, 2007 I launched the site McCainBogette.com. I chose to do my part in telling the campaign’s story from my perspective for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, I realized my Dad would always have to deal with people perceiving him as “too old” to be President. I know what you’re all thinking: Why would anyone think that? As with many things, reality is sometimes so different from what people perceive.

I know my father better than anyone. And if he could have a 23 year old wiseass like me as a daughter, then that certainly doesn’t make him too old. Someone had to tell the nation that, and I was up to the challenge.

Second, I have been a child of politics since the day I was born.

As you can imagine and have seen, politics can be a nasty sport. And between you and me, many of the people in this business tend to take themselves entirely too seriously. I wanted to break out of that. I wanted people to see the normal aspects of political life. From the messy motel rooms to the steady diet of doughnuts and Red Bull. From the moments of endless energy to the quiet times you share with family and friends.

And from the times of incredible pride to the ones where the world around you seems like it’s unraveling in a storm of insanity. I wanted to give people a first hand look into an experience few ever have seen.

And finally, I wanted to be me. That perhaps was the most challenging reason of all. I have been fortunate to have been blessed with two amazing parents who have led lives motivated by helping others. But I am also my parents’ daughter. I have my mother’s grace under fire.

And I have my Dad’s “heartburn-inducing” ability to say what he thinks almost whenever he wants. The person who stands before you is not confined within the mold of what a daughter of a Republican Presidential candidate “should” be for some. And that’s OK. Our world is not confined by molds and neither should our nation.

That’s what I saw for fourteen months on the campaign trail. Of course it wasn’t all that you might expect. My hair stylist, Josh Rupley who is here tonight and a proud new member of the Log Cabin Republicans, joined us on the trail for the last few months of the campaign. I was not prepared for the uptick in date requests I received via email during that time. And I mean date requests for Josh, not me. His presence really seemed to cause quite a stir on the site and we still get a huge kick out of it.

That brings us to today. I honestly did not expect my personal journey in politics would become more interesting since election day. But that's exactly what has happened. It took months for the campaign highs and lows to subside. When 2009 began, I had a fresh outlook on life and decided to pursue writing. I still wanted to focused on that delicate blending of Republican politics and who I am and what I think. I was thrilled to be asked to write for Tina Brown’s website The Daily Beast. My most notorious article to date was entitled, “My Beef with Ann Coulter.” Ok, so much for being delicate.

I am concerned about the environment. I have a tattoo. I believe government should always be efficient and accountable. I have lots of gay friends. And yes, I am a Republican.

What’s happened since has been unexpected, humbling and motivating. I did not expect my frustration with what I perceive to be overly partisan and divisive Republicans to cause a national incident. And no, I’m not that engaged with myself to think it was even that much of an incident.

People in our country have much more important issues to deal with on a daily basis. But the experience did reinforce what I learned on the campaign trail in some major ways.

I’ll summarize them in three points:

1. Most of our nation wants our nation to succeed.
2. Most people are ready to move on to the future, not live in the past.
3. Most of the old school Republicans are scared shitless of that future.

You know the old problem: Political discussion just breaks down into bickering and fighting instead of solving. And Republicans have a tendency to get way too hung up on words. I’m not just talking about the occasional profanity. When someone says they “hope the President succeeds” they say it with the hope that the country gets better, the economy improves and people can feel safe, confident and free to live their lives as they choose. And may I add in full equality with each other.

I believe most people get that, and more people are getting it everyday.

I believe most of our nation wants our nation to succeed.

I feel too many Republicans want to cling to past successes. There are those who think we can win the White House and Congress back by being “more” conservative. Worse, there are those who think we can win by changing nothing at all about what our party has become. They just want to wait for the other side to be perceived as worse than us. I think we’re seeing a war brewing in the Republican party, but it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past. I believe most people are ready to move on to that future.

We know a party that was thriving at one point on a few singular issues cannot see long term success. Even worse, we’ve seen how it has contributed to some serious problems in our nation and world.

Let me blunt, you can’t assume you’re electing the right leaders to handle all the problems facing our nation when you make your choice based on one issue. More and more people are finally getting that.

Simply embracing technology isn’t going to fix our problem either. Republicans using Twitter and Facebook isn’t going to miraculously make people think we’re cool again. Breaking free from obsolete positions and providing real solutions that don’t divide our nation further will. That’s why some in our party are scared. They sense the world around them is changing and they are unable to take the risk to jump free of what’s keeping our party down.

What I am talking about tonight is what it means to be a new, progressive Republican. Now some will say I can’t do that. If you aren’t this and that, then you’re clearly a “Republican in Name Only,” also affectionately known as a RINO.

Suggesting the notion that one can be faithful to the original core values of the GOP while open to the realities of our changing world has really hit a chord with people. And it seems to be the next, natural stage of the journey I’ve been traveling.

It would be easy to say my generation views politics very differently from others. Maybe we’re more progressive, socially liberal or just hate arguing in lieu of actually solving the problems at hand. But what I’ve learned though my experiences is that these feelings are not contained to one age group. They’re the growing beliefs and desires of people of all ages, races, genders, faiths, persuasions and political parties.

So tonight, I am proud to join you in challenging the mold and the notions of what being a Republican means.

I am concerned about the environment. I love to wear black. I think government is best when it stays out of people’s lives and business as much as possible. I love punk rock. I believe in a strong national defense. I have a tattoo. I believe government should always be efficient and accountable. I have lots of gay friends. And yes, I am a Republican.

If there is one thing that gives me hope about the future of our party and the role you and the Log Cabin Republicans can play in it is this: there’s never been a better time to speak out. People are listening. And, they’re more open minded than ever before. Maybe it’s because they’re worried about the future. Maybe it’s because they’re so disenchanted with the past. It’s probably a little of both.

But know this: The moment to make a difference is now and I am proud to share it with you. America’s best days are ahead of us. And we will show our nation that we will get there together.

Thank you again for having me speak tonight. And thank you for all you are doing to help make a new Republican party a reality.

N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress

2009-04-15T23:46:00.000-05:00

N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress - NYTimes.com

N.S.A.’s Intercepts Exceed Limits Set by Congress
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic, although one official said it was believed to have been unintentional.

The legal and operational problems surrounding the N.S.A.’s surveillance activities have come under scrutiny from the Obama administration, Congressional intelligence committees and a secret national security court, said the intelligence officials, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because N.S.A. activities are classified. Classified government briefings have been held in recent weeks in response to a brewing controversy that some officials worry could damage the credibility of legitimate intelligence-gathering efforts.

The Justice Department, in response to inquiries from The New York Times, acknowledged Wednesday night that there had been problems with the N.S.A. surveillance operation, but said they had been resolved.

As part of a periodic review of the agency’s activities, the department “detected issues that raised concerns,” it said. Justice Department officials then “took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance” with the law and court orders, the statement said. It added that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. went to the national security court to seek a renewal of the surveillance program only after new safeguards were put in place.

In a statement on Wednesday night, the N.S.A. said that its “intelligence operations, including programs for collection and analysis, are in strict accordance with U.S. laws and regulations.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the intelligence community, did not address specific aspects of the surveillance problems but said in a statement that “when inadvertent mistakes are made, we take it very seriously and work immediately to correct them.”

The questions may not be settled yet. Intelligence officials say they are still examining the scope of the N.S.A. practices, and Congressional investigators say they hope to determine if any violations of Americans’ privacy occurred. It is not clear to what extent the agency may have actively listened in on conversations or read e-mail messages of Americans without proper court authority, rather than simply obtained access to them.

The intelligence officials said the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers, and the challenges posed by enacting a new framework for collecting intelligence on terrorism and spying suspects.

While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said.

After a contentious three-year debate that was set off by the disclosure in 2005 of the program of wiretapping without warrants that President George W. Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress gave the N.S.A. broad new authority to collect, without court-approved warrants, vast streams of international phone and e-mail traffic as it passed through American telecommunications gateways. The targets of the eavesdropping had to be “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. Under the new legislation, however, the N.S.A. still needed court approval to monitor the purely domestic communications of Americans who came under suspicion.

In recent weeks, the eavesdropping agency notified members of the Congressional intelligence committees that it had encountered operational and legal problems in complying with the new wiretapping law, Congressional officials said.

Officials would not discuss details of the overcollection problem because it involves classified intelligence-gathering techniques. But the issue appears focused in part on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages.

One official said that led the agency to inadvertently “target” groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred.

The overcollection problems appear to have been uncovered as part of a twice-annual certification that the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence are required to give to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on the protocols that the N.S.A. is using in wiretapping. That review, officials said, began in the waning days of the Bush administration and was continued by the Obama administration. It led intelligence officials to realize that the N.S.A. was improperly capturing information involving significant amounts of American traffic.

Notified of the problems by the N.S.A., officials with both the House and Senate intelligence committees said they had concerns that the agency had ignored civil liberties safeguards built into last year’s wiretapping law. “We have received notice of a serious issue involving the N.S.A., and we’ve begun inquiries into it,” a Congressional staff member said.

Separate from the new inquiries, the Justice Department has for more than two years been investigating aspects of the N.S.A.’s wiretapping program.

As part of that investigation, a senior F.B.I. agent recently came forward with what the inspector general’s office described as accusations of “significant misconduct” in the surveillance program, people with knowledge of the investigation said. Those accusations are said to involve whether the N.S.A. made Americans targets in eavesdropping operations based on insufficient evidence tying them to terrorism.

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

Leon Panetta Digs Deeper

2009-04-09T21:16:00.000-05:00

Leon Panetta Digs Deeper - The Daily Beast

Leon Panetta Digs Deeper
by John Sifton
April 9, 2009 | 10:02pm

A day after the release of a blockbuster Red Cross report on torture—and an article in The Daily Beast—the CIA director reiterated his stance that many agency employees who might have participated in torture shouldn’t be investigated or prosecuted.

The pressure seems to be getting to CIA Director Leon Panetta. On Monday night, a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross detailing CIA torture and detention practices during the Bush administration was published by the New York Review of Books. In an article for the Daily Beast on April 8, I wrote that Panetta’s position against the investigation and prosecution of those potentially guilty of criminal activity is compromised because a number of his top aides are implicated in the torture program. The following day, April 9, possibly in response to the growing furor, Panetta sent a letter to CIA employees, referring to the “continuing media and congressional interest in reviewing past rendition, detention, and interrogation activities that took place dating back to 2002,” including issues involving the involvement of private contractors in CIA activities.

In his letter, Panetta outlines the Agency’s “current policy regarding interrogation of captured terrorists,” stating: “Under the Executive Order, the CIA does not employ any of the enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized by the Department of Justice from 2002 to 2009.” He also declares: “CIA officers do not tolerate, and will continue to promptly report, any inappropriate behavior or allegations of abuse.” He seems defensive.

Panetta also makes the following interesting statement: “CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites. I have directed our Agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated. It is estimated that our taking over site security will result in savings of up to $4 million.”

This is a strange set of claims and it is difficult to know how to parse them. Panetta seems to be saying that “there are no sites,” that “we’ve submitted a plan to close the sites,” and that “we’re closing the sites” all at the same time. But then he also makes it sound as though the CIA is “taking charge” of the sites from contractors, and that “taking over” the sites will save $4 million, suggesting they’re being kept open for the time being. (From where comes the $4 million in savings? If the sites are being closed, isn’t the money saved anyway?) Each of his statements seems to contradict the last. At a later point in the note, Panetta writes, “CIA retains the authority to detain individuals on a short-term transitory basis.” But where is the agency going to hold them, if the sites are closed? Panetta does not explain.

In short, Panetta’s note simply doesn’t make sense. In the end, his point seems to be that the sites exist, but are not being used currently, and may be closed in the future—except that they won’t, because the CIA retains the power to detain. Is Panetta really aware of what is actually going on?

Perhaps he’s discombobulated. Panetta has increasingly been in the hot seat because of his remarks indicating that he believes no CIA personnel should be investigated for abuse if their actions relied on legal assurances from the Department of Justice—a reference to memos written during the Bush administration by the Office of Legal Counsel, which, through deeply flawed and now repudiated legal analysis, attempted to offer legal justifications for the CIA’s various torture techniques from 2002-2006. (These methods include sleep deprivation, forced standing, and prolonged isolation—methods used by the Soviets and North Koreans—to outright physical assaults, binding or confining prisoners into painful positions, and waterboarding.)

Panetta reiterated the claim on Wednesday in his letter to CIA employees, writing, “Officers who act on guidance from the Department of Justice—or acted on such guidance previously—should not be investigated, let alone punished. This is what fairness and wisdom require.”

But as I discussed in my Daily Beast article, Panetta’s arguments about “legal reliance” are misplaced and inaccurate as a matter of criminal law. And as a general matter, it increasingly appears as though he’s more interested in protecting various CIA officials beneath him—holdovers from the Bush era—than in cleaning up the CIA.

It is important to note, however, that “cleaning up the CIA” doesn’t mean a purge. The agency has thousands of officers and directors, and only a few are implicated in the past crimes. In any case, many of the most tainted directors have already left.

Moreover, investigations of existing staff shouldn’t focus on lower level officers. Accountability, if it ever occurs, should focus primarily on executive level directors, like the current CIA Deputy Director, Stephen Kappes, and the Director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Michael Sulick—both high-level officials in the CIA’s operations directorate when the worst detainee abuses were committed.

Investigations should focus also on high-level executive officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) who are still at the agency, for example, G— —, a former deputy to Jose Rodriquez, the chief of CTC back in 2002-2004 and who now enjoys a prestigious CIA chief of station posting in Europe. (I can’t reveal her name or posting here; it remains covert. It should also be noted that the former CTC chief of operations also remains at the agency.)

Yet it is inappropriate to place this whole mess on Panetta’s shoulders. Attorney General Eric Holder is also a central actor in these matters. It is the Department of Justice’s responsibility to investigate and if possible prosecute alleged cases of torture and other violations of criminal law. Members of Congress, too—especially senior leaders on the Senate and House intelligence committees—have an obligation to insist on accountability from the administration.

Ultimately, of course, the failure of the Obama administration to address the Bush administration’s crimes lies with President Obama himself. So far he is sending the wrong message to both CIA and the Department of Justice. And yet the furor continues to grow. President Obama will only lose more credibility if he tries to ignore it.

The CIA Torture Coverup

2009-04-07T21:33:00.000-05:00

The CIA Torture Coverup - The Daily Beast

The CIA Torture Coverup
by John Sifton
April 7, 2009 | 9:34pm

Why doesn’t Leon Panetta want the agency investigated or prosecuted for torture allegations? Maybe because some of the men implicated, John Sifton reports, are the ones advising him.

On Monday night, the confidential report of the International Committee of the Red Cross on the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program was published on the Web site of the New York Review of Books. The report confirms previous allegations about CIA abuses against detainees. Unlike earlier reporting, however, the document is based on irrefutable first-hand information: interviews with detainees and U.S. officials. The document describes in stark detail the CIA’s use of forced standing, sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, assaults, and waterboarding. It also discloses the participation of CIA medical personnel in torture.

Because the basic facts about their involvement in the CIA interrogation program are now known, Panetta’s actions are increasingly looking like a coverup.

Some revelations in the ICRC report have already become known through the reporting of journalists Mark Danner and Jane Mayer. As a result, press accounts have focused on the fresh news of medical personnel supervising and overseeing abuse. But other important facts about the report have been overlooked that make the question of torture not simply a matter of the past.

The New York Times reported that Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, has taken the position that “no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.” Yet a number of CIA officials implicated in the torture program not only remain at the highest levels of the agency, but are also advising Panetta. Panetta’s attempt to suppress the issue is making Bush’s policy into the Obama administration’s dirty laundry.

Take Stephen Kappes. At the time of the worst torture sessions outlined in the ICRC report, Kappes served as a senior official in the Directorate of Operations—the operational part of the CIA that oversees paramilitary operations as well as the high-value detention program. (The directorate of operations is now known as the National Clandestine Service.) Panetta has kept Kappes as deputy director of the CIA—the No. 2 official in the agency. One of Kappes’ deputies from 2002-2004, Michael Sulick, is now director of the National Clandestine Service—the de facto No. 3 in the agency. Panetta’s refusal to investigate may be intended to protect his deputies. Because the basic facts about their involvement in the CIA interrogation program are now known, Panetta’s actions are increasingly looking like a coverup.

Another overlooked fact is this: The ICRC report is an important legal document that contains well-sustained allegations of criminal conduct with legal significance. Unlike earlier claims in books, magazines, and newspapers, the ICRC’s allegations are official notices from a legally recognized entity. The ICRC, after all, is not Human Rights Watch, the Washington Post, or the New Yorker, all of which have reported on the CIA’s secret prison program. The ICRC is an official entity recognized under the Geneva Conventions and various other earlier international treaties relating to armed conflict and prisoners of war. The ICRC is specifically tasked under the Geneva Conventions to visit prisoners and communicate with detaining powers to uphold the conventions’ spirit and purpose. Its interpretations and statements on matters of international law are held as legally authoritative. As such, the ICRC’s allegations have legal significance beyond previous disclosures. In effect, the document itself is evidence in a criminal case.

Note in particular the report’s date, February 14, 2007—Valentine’s Day. On that date, the U.S. government was put on notice about the allegations of CIA torture. (The ICRC also wrote to the U.S. governments about the issue of disappearances at several points in 2003-2006.)

Under international law—the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, and basic precepts of customary international law—the United States has a positive obligation to investigate and prosecute persons alleged to have committed torture and other violations of the laws of war. As of Valentine’s Day 2007, and possibly earlier, the U.S. government was obligated to investigate and prosecute the abuses detailed in the report. The United States’ failure to do so is a recurring breach of international law. If the Spanish case against six high-level Bush administration officials accused of authorizing torture proceeds, the Red Cross report—among other documents—may be entered as evidence. Further international prosecutions that the U.S. is obligated to respect may go down the chain of command to Panetta’s deputies.

The ICRC report does not contain information about the identities of CIA personnel involved in the program, although there are descriptions of some individual interrogators; nor does it discuss the involvement of senior government officials in the program.

Nonetheless, footnote 9 reveals that the ICRC was informed by the then-director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, that interrogation plans for detainees were submitted to the “CIA headquarters” for approval and as of 2007 were approved by “the director or deputy director of the CIA.” It is likely that this approval process existed at earlier points in 2002-2006.

This is more than an interesting detail. In fact, it could implicate several high-level CIA officials in torture, including previous CIA directors George Tenet (resigned 2004) and Porter Goss (resigned 2006), as well as deputy directors John McLaughlin (resigned 2004) and Albert Calland (resigned 2006). These CIA officials are no longer serving. Kappes, Sulick, and others are still there.

Panetta’s refusal to endorse investigations and prosecution is based in part on opinions issued in memos in 2002 to 2003 from the Bush administration’s Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel to the effect that the CIA’s interrogation tactics were legal.

The OLC memoranda, however, were highly controversial even within the Bush administration, and today there are almost no lawyers or academics in the United States who defend their reasoning. Parts of the memoranda were withdrawn in 2005 and the Obama administration has repudiated their contents. But the memos were on the books for a time and conventional wisdom among academics as well as some Obama officials is that it would be difficult to prosecute a CIA officer who relied on legal assurances contained in them. In criminal law, there are legal defenses to prosecution when a government agent, in good faith, relies on an official legal interpretation as to what is or is not legal and then commits otherwise illegal activity. (To take an example: It would not be appropriate to prosecute an undercover DEA agent if he smoked marijuana with drug dealers as part of efforts to gain their trust, especially if the agent were told by a Department of Justice lawyer that it was legal to do so.)

But Panetta’s “reliance on counsel” argument is off base. First, some of the worst torture that occurred as part of the CIA program occurred in the case of Abu Zubaydah—and most of that abuse occurred before the relevant OLC memoranda were even written.

Second, the reliance defense is not an absolute shield to prosecutions: it is a defense available to individual defendants on a case-by-case basis. A court must decide, from case to case, whether the defense applies.

And, ultimately, the reliance in question must be in good faith. Prosecutors may be able to show in higher-level cases that officers like Tenet, Goss, and others believed that the memoranda were flawed and therefore were not acting in good faith. Moreover, if prosecutors can show that a reasonable attorney would or should have known the memoranda were incorrect as a matter of law, they might be able to prosecute attorneys within the White House and CIA—such as former OLC attorney John Yoo and CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo—on grounds that by writing or promulgating the memoranda they participated in a criminal enterprise aimed at allowing the president and his staff, and the CIA, to evade federal criminal law.

Of course, such investigations are politically tricky. In order to avoid being tainted, President Obama might appoint a special prosecutor, fire implicated CIA officials (there are plenty of CIA rank and file who would be glad to see them go), and wash his hands of political fallout. In any case, he has to do something. Even if Panetta wishes it, the torture scandal is not going away.

John Sifton is a private investigator and attorney based in New York City. His firm, One World Research, carries out research for law firms and human-rights groups, including in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. He has conducted extensive investigations into the CIA interrogation and detention program.

Newsweek's unintentionally revealed, central truth

2009-03-29T15:23:00.000-05:00

Newsweek's unintentionally revealed, central truth - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Newsweek's unintentionally revealed, central truth

In his just-released cover story on Paul Krugman's status as Obama critic, Newsweek's Evan Thomas includes these observations:

By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.

Thomas then acknowledges what is glaringly obvious not only about himself but also most of his media-star colleagues: "If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am) . . ."

One day in the near future, Thomas should have a luncheon or perhaps a nice Sunday brunch at his home, invite over all of his journalist friends who work in the media divisions of our largest corporations, and they should spend 15 minutes or so assembling these sentences together, and then examine what these facts mean for the actual role played by establishment journalists, the functions they fulfill, whose interests they serve, and the vast, vast disparities between (a) those answers and (b) the pretenses about their profession and themselves which they continue, ludicrously, to maintain. To make the discussion less strenuous on the guests' brains, Thomas, as a good host, could provide visual illustrations such as this and this.

Also, in the name of consumer protection, television news shows and the largest newspapers ought to place that above-excerpted paragraph by Thomas as a warning at the top of every product they produce.

bridges...

2009-03-27T15:45:00.001-05:00

Someone asked me this question:
What is life?

Spontaneously I answered:
A collection of moments...

these moments could be a few minutes,
or a few days,
or a few months at a stretch...
in other words, these moments could be a phase...

these moments are when we feel light and happy,
more alive and happy to be alive...
when we become free of the chain of moment-to-moment memories,
when two or three or ten hours pass by without us feeling it,
when a week or two pass by and it all feels like just yesterday...

it is in these times when we feel free of our thoughts, plans, worries, or inhibitions.
it is when we live intense,
it is when we live the moment.

the ecstasy of the moment lived fully!
how brief, how fast...
like an orgasm!

and then, the moment fades,
somehow forgotten,
swallowed by the waves of daily surprises and anxieties.

assume that these moments are like train stations,
from which our train of thoughts departs onto bridges,
these bridges cross through the landscapes of our lives,
and these landscapes are our own ideas,
terrains in the mind,
virtual terrains...

these bridges are the days we don't count,
days we have not lived fully,
days we can easily tear away from the calendar of our years,
days erased, days skipped, days left blank...

these are the days which we consider as insignificant,
as days leading us to better times (the stations, the moments)
and so, these insignificant days become our bridges.

these bridges,
they cross through deserts when we feel dry and empty,
over oceans when we feel lost and thirsty,
over mountains when we conquer, explore and achieve,
over valleys and rivers when we feel relaxed and at peace...
over volcanoes when our minds become like battlefields, war zones and minefields,
over black murky wastelands when we feel remorse, regret and fear...

these bridges,
they take us far and near,
in every direction they please,
up and down and sideways too,
inside out, upside down and in reverse,
like a magic mountain, they twist and turn,
they go in circles and loop around...

days passed on bridges,
days wasted,
days like roads and bridges, taking us places,
days spent in waiting for better days to come,
bridges to stations...

(Hady B)

Israel promises troops legal backing over Gaza war

2009-01-31T02:42:00.002-06:00

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

2009-01-31T02:42:00.001-06:00

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

2009-01-17T05:18:00.000-06:00

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

2009-01-17T05:17:00.001-06:00

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?

2009-01-17T05:15:00.001-06:00

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

2009-01-17T01:31:00.001-06:00

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

2009-01-09T19:21:00.001-06:00

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

2009-01-09T17:13:00.001-06:00

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.

Obama camp 'prepared to talk to Hamas'

2009-01-08T14:44:00.001-06:00

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

2009-01-08T02:01:00.001-06:00

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

2009-01-08T01:51:00.001-06:00

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."

UN: Israel Admits Claims About Attacked School Baseless

2009-01-07T21:01:00.001-06:00

UN: Israel Admits Claims About Attacked School Baseless | News From Antiwar.com

UN: Israel Admits Claims About Attacked School Baseless
International Outrage Can Safely Resume as Israel Backs off Allegations

Posted January 7, 2009

UN Relief and Works Agency spokesman Chris Gunness reported this evening that the Israeli army is privately briefing diplomats on the fact that its previous claims about their attack on a UN-run girls’ school in the Gaza Strip, which caused over 100 civilian casualties, were baseless.

The attack occurred yesterday, when Israeli mortars deliberately fired three shells at the school, which was filled with hundreds of displaced civilians at the time, killing at least 46 and wounding 55 others. As international outrage began to well over the enormous civilian toll of the attack, Israel declared the killings “according to procedures” and claimed Hamas had fired rockets from the school’s courtyard, making the attack on hundreds of innocent civilians self-defense.

Much was made of the claim, including reports that Israel was mulling filing a formal complaint to the United Nations about Hamas’ use of the facility. But as the United Nations poked holes in the official story, Israel is now backing off those claims.

And while Israel had previously claimed to have had proof to back up its story, Gunness says the military is now conceding that the mortar fire they previously claimed came from the school came from elsewhere in the refugee camp. Though Israel is trying to keep its admission of guilt relatively quiet (far more quiet than its allegations that the killings were justified) it will doubtless pay a further price in the court of international public opinion for having once again deliberately targeted a building full of innocent civilians.

Israel ground war drives up civilian casualties

2009-01-07T03:50:00.001-06:00

Print Story: Israel ground war drives up civilian casualties - Yahoo! News

Israel ground war drives up civilian casualties
By Karin Laub, Associated Press Writer 23 mins ago

JERUSALEM – The rising civilian death toll in Israel's campaign in Gaza highlights the pitfalls of Israel's powerful army using lethal force against often invisible Hamas guerrillas taking cover among civilians.

On Tuesday, only five of 75 people killed were confirmed militants and the United Nations called for an investigation into the growing civilian casualties.

An Israeli defense official confirmed that the military has adopted tougher tactics to prevent the killing or capture of soldiers. One concern is that troops could be lured toward booby-trapped houses, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss military strategy.

However, the images of maimed or bloodied Palestinian civilians, including children, is likely heighten international pressure on Israel to abort the offensive before it has obtained its main objective — hitting Hamas hard so it will halt rocket fire on Israeli border towns.

About 300 of the more than 670 Palestinians killed so far are civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. figures. Of those killed, at least 130 are children age 16 and under, says the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which tracks casualties.

In Israel's campaign against Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas in 1996, errant Israeli artillery shells killed 91 Lebanese civilians at a U.N. base near the village of Qana, turning initial international support for the operation into harsh criticism. In 2006, Israeli shells killed 18 Palestinians in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.

In the single deadliest strike of the current Gaza offensive, at least 39 Palestinians were killed and 55 wounded Tuesday when Israeli mortar shells hit near a U.N. school where hundreds of civilians had sought refuge from the fighting. Israel said Hamas militants had fired mortar shells from outside the school, drawing return fire.

Palestinian residents speaking on condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution said that several militants ran toward the crowd, trying to use it as cover, when the first Israeli mortar shell missed them.

Israel said Hamas militants were among the casualties, but many of the dead appeared to be civilians, including boys and teenagers. In hospital footage shown on Hamas' Al Aqsa TV, frantic medics unloaded men who had been stacked in the back of an ambulance, three high, and were dragged without stretchers.

Gaza militants used to wear black or khaki uniforms, but since the start of the Israeli offensive have been operating in civilian clothing, blending into crowds.

Israeli military officials complain that Hamas is hiding behind civilians. "The civilians are unfortunately being hurt, not because we are targeting them but because of the Hamas policy to have all of its facilities in densely populated areas," said an Israeli military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ilan Tal.

Ostensibly, Hamas' ragtag force of about 20,000 fighters, armed mainly with assault rifles, mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades, is no match for Israel's high-tech army.

If the two were facing each other on open ground, "it would be over in two minutes," said Bob Ayers, a London-based security analyst and former U.S. intelligence official.

However, with Israeli forces moving deeper into Hamas' home turf after a week of aerial assaults, the Islamic militants are improving their odds. Hamas has boasted that it prepared deadly surprises for Israeli forces and Tal said that includes booby-traps and tunnels.

Israel has more than two decades of experience fighting Arab guerrillas in urban settings, particularly in Lebanon and to a lesser extent in the Palestinian territories. Israel has learned from previous rounds in Gaza and the 2006 war against Hezbollah, said Shlomo Brom, a former senior Israeli military official.

The underbelly of Israel's Merkava tank has been strengthened, he said, after Gaza militants succeeded several times in recent years to detonate bombs under tanks, destroying them.

In 2006, Hezbollah surprised Israeli forces by firing large numbers of anti-tank missiles with deadly results, but Hamas is believed to have far fewer, said Brom and other experts. Hamas also has heavy machine guns and has tried, but so far failed, to shoot down Israeli attack helicopters.

Despite its clear military superiority, Israel has been wary to launch the ground offensive, for fear of getting bogged down in the alleys of Gaza, with many casualties among Israeli forces. The order to move in came only after a week of massive air strikes failed to halt Hamas rocket fire on towns in southern Israel.

For now, Israeli tanks are still several hundred yards away from densely populated areas, targeting militants from a distance. Using optical sightings, tank shells are generally accurate, but are also very lethal or could hit the wrong target, said Ayers.

On Monday, three Israeli soldiers were killed by friendly fire when a tank crew took aim at the wrong house. In a separate incident, another soldier was killed by an errant tank shell.

"With tanks in an urban environment, the opportunity for miscalculation is magnified significantly," said David Hartwell, Middle East and North Africa editor for Jane's Country Risk.

Since the start of the ground offensive Saturday, more than 120 Palestinian civilians have been killed — out of a total of more than 600 deaths overall in 11 days of fighting.

Most of the civilians killed in recent days were hit by tank and artillery fire, according to Palestinian medics. The dead include parents and five children killed when a tank shell hit their home, and three men struck by a shell on their way to a condolence visit.

The U.N. has called for an investigation of the rising toll among civilians, after several of its installations were hit. U.N. officials noted that Israel's military had been given the exact locations of U.N. buildings.

Israel insists its doing its best to minimize civilian casualties. However, Chris Gunness, a spokesman for Gaza's main U.N. aid agency, said "it would have to be known to any military planner as a matter of certainty that such an overwhelming and disproportionate use of force would inevitably lead to civilian casualties."

Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza

2009-01-06T14:08:00.001-06:00

Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza - NYTimes.com

January 7, 2009
Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The reporters were to be permitted in to cover first-hand the Israeli war on Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.

Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers and foreign nationals were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday the reporters were told not even to bother coming.

And so for an 11th day of Israel’s war in Gaza, the several hundred journalists here to cover it wait in clusters away from direct contact with any fighting or Palestinian suffering but with full access to Israeli political and military commentators eager to show them around southern Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press around Israel.

Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war in Israel’s history, in this one, the government is seeking to control entirely the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military strategy.

“This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon War against Hezbollah,” noted Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a doctoral dissertation on Israel’s public diplomacy. “Then, the media were everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and confused and destabilized the home front. Today Israel is trying to control the information much more closely.”

He and others, including the post-Lebanon war investigation commissioned by the government, said that the army found that when reporters were allowed onto the battlefield in Lebanon, they got in the way of military operations by posing risks and asking questions.

As Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said, “If a journalist gets injured or killed, then it is Central Command’s responsibility.” She said they are trying to protect Israel from rocket fire and “not deal with the media.”

Beyond such tactical considerations, there is a political one. Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s Government Press Office, said that “any journalist who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror organization, and I see no reason why we should help that.”

Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas censorship or control. It seems that many Israelis accept Mr. Seaman’s assessment and shed no tears over the lack of media access to the conflict, despite repeated Foreign Press Association protests, including again on Tuesday.

A headline in Tuesday’s Yediot Aharonot, the country’s largest selling daily newspaper, expressed well the popular view of the issue. Over a news article describing the generally negative coverage so far, especially in the European media, an intentional misspelling turned the headline “World Media” into “World Liars.”

This attitude has been helped by supportive Israeli media whose articles have been filled with “feelings of self-righteousness and a sense of catharsis following what was felt to be undue restraint in the face of attacks by the enemy,” according to a study of the first days of media coverage of the war by a liberal but non-partisan group called Keshev, the Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel.

The Foreign Press Association of Israel has been fighting for weeks to get its members into Gaza, first appealing to senior government officials and ultimately taking its case to the country’s highest court. On Wednesday, the justices worked out an arrangement with the organization whereby small groups would be permitted in to Gaza when it was deemed safe enough for the crossings to be opened for other reasons.

So far, every time the border has been opened, journalists have not been permitted to go in.

On Tuesday, the press association released a statement saying, “The unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world’s media amounts to a severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep journalists from doing their jobs.”

At the same time that reporters have been given less access to the conflict, the government has created a new structure for shaping its public message, ensuring that spokesmen of the major branches meet daily to make sure all are singing from the same sheet.

“We are trying to coordinate everything that has to do with the image and content of what we are doing and to make sure that whoever goes on the air, whether a minister or professor or ex- ambassador, knows what he is saying,” said Aviv Shir-On, deputy director general for media in the foreign ministry. “We have talking points and we try to disseminate our ideas and message.”

Israelis say the war is being reduced on television screens around the world to a simplistic story; American-backed country with awesome military machine fighting a third-world guerrilla force leading to a handful of Israelis dead versus 600 Gazans dead.

Israel and its supporters feel that such quick descriptions fail to explain the vital context of what has been happening — years of terrorist rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered and a message had to be sent to Israel’s enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.

There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict of course. But no matter what, Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to keep the media far away from the death.

John Ging, an Irishman who directs operations in Gaza for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and entered on Monday as journalists were kept out, told Palestinian reporters in Gaza that the policy is a problem.

“For the truth to get out, journalists have to get in,” he said.

Death Toll Mounts as Gaza Offensive Expands

2009-01-06T06:17:00.000-06:00

Death Toll Mounts as Gaza Offensive Expands - NYTimes.com

January 7, 2009
Death Toll Mounts as Gaza Offensive Expands
By ETHAN BRONNER and ISABEL KERSHNER

ON THE ISRAEL-GAZA BORDER — Israel’s war on the Islamist rulers of Gaza entered its 11th day on Tuesday after Israeli troops commandeered high-rise buildings in three eastern districts of Gaza City, expelled residents and shot militants in the streets in their furious effort to break Hamas’s fighting ability.

For the first time, the Israeli military said its own troops suffered casualties from so-called “friendly fire” when three Israeli soldiers were killed in tank-fire directed at a building they had occupied in northern Gaza, and a fourth soldier was killed in a separate incident, apparently also caused by a shell from a tank.

Hamas has killed five Israelis by rocket fire and in military encounters since the conflict began.

Hamas militants said on Tuesday they had fired more rockets into Israel overnight, defying Israeli attempts to bring the attacks to a halt.

The Israeli Army said one missile fell in the town of Gadera, about 20 miles south of Tel Aviv and the furthest north of any of the hundreds of missiles fired from Gaza since the Israeli offensive began. Shrapnel from the attack slightly injured a three-month-old baby, the army said.

The location was significant to many Israelis since Gadera, about 25 miles north of Gaza, is perceived as linked to Tel Aviv, meaning that central Israel may now be a target along with the southern cities that have borne the brunt of the missile fire.

In the latest phase of the fighting, Israel Radio quoted witnesses as saying Israeli forces were pushing toward the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis. Israel also claimed to have killed 130 Hamas fighters since launching the ground offensive into Gaza on Saturday. News reports said at least one school run by the United Nations in Gaza — and closed because of the fighting — was hit by Israeli fire, killing three Palestinians sheltering there.

More Palestinian civilians, including about 12 children, were killed on Monday and fuel and water supplies were severely strained for hundreds of thousands. The humanitarian relief systems functioned poorly because of the inability of suppliers and ambulances to move around despite Israeli efforts to facilitate truck deliveries across the border.

Israeli planes destroyed dozens of smuggler tunnels in the south, and Hamas fired some 25 rockets into Israel, one of which crashed into an empty kindergarten in the city of Ashdod, littering the floor with dolls and shrapnel.

As European diplomats poured into the region seeking a cease-fire, Israel and Hamas spoke defiantly of victory. Phones in Gaza homes rang repeatedly with recorded Israeli military messages saying, “We are getting rid of Hamas.” That goes beyond the stated goals of Israel’s top leaders, who have emphasized that the operation is intended to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israel.

The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, said after a meeting with officials from the Czech Republic, Sweden and France that Israel would “change the equation” in the region. She added that in other conflicts, “countries send in forces in order to battle terrorism, but we are not asking the world to take part in the battle and send their forces in — we are only asking them to allow us to carry it out until we reach a point in which we decide our goals have been reached for this point.”

The Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar, speaking from a hiding place in a recorded speech on Hamas television, said: “The Israeli enemy in its aggression has written its next chapter in the world, which will have no place for them. They shelled everyone in Gaza. They shelled children and hospitals and mosques, and in doing so, they gave us legitimacy to strike them in the same way.”

Palestinian medical officials estimated that the death toll during the war reached 550 on Monday. The United Nations estimated that about a quarter of those killed were civilians.

Israel said it had hit some civilian targets because they housed rockets, launchers or militants. It offered limited evidence of its claim.

Toward night on Monday, northern Gaza was the site of heavy fighting, including artillery, helicopter and tank fire, witnesses said. Plumes of smoke were visible in the night sky.

Inside Gaza City, windows are blown out, electricity is cut and drinking water scarce. While phones rang with the recorded threats against Hamas, leaflets dropped from airplanes littered the streets, saying: “Hamas is getting a taste of the power of the Israeli military after more than a week and we have other methods that are still harsher to deal with Hamas. They will prove very painful. For your safety, please evacuate your neighborhood.”

But many in Gaza said they had no place to go because many neighborhoods received the same message.

Israel has long argued that Hamas exploits civilians by operating among them. Hamas has responded that it is a people’s movement.

Maxwell Gaylard, United Nations humanitarian affairs coordinator, said at a Jerusalem news briefing that because of the attacks, people could not reach available food.

Children are hungry, cold, without electricity and running water, he said, “and above all, they’re terrified. That by any measure is a humanitarian crisis.”

Haitham Dababish, emergency chief at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, said that seven members of the Abu Aeisha family were killed earlier Monday after an Israeli naval shell hit their house in the Beach refugee camp in western Gaza City. The father, mother and five of their children died.

Eleven civilians belonging to an extended family, the Samounis, were also killed when a missile fired by an Israeli warplane struck the relatives’ house in which they had sought shelter in the Zeitoun neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, witnesses and hospital officials said.

In addition to Zeitoun, the neighborhoods where the Israeli military has been most active are Toufah and Shajaiah. All are poor areas where Hamas has strong political support. Residents said bodies of shot militants remained in the street.

Efforts at a diplomatic end were just at their initial stages as many governments called for a cease-fire. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France arrived in Israel on Monday after visiting Cairo and began talks with Israeli and Palestinian officials in the West Bank.

Mr. Sarkozy met in Damascus on Tuesday with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, a key supporter of Hamas who told a news conference that Israeli leaders “have not learned the lessons of the war in Lebanon” in 2006 when the Islamic group Hezbollah emerged politically strengthened from its bruising battles with Israel.

“Israel is falling to the same trap again and the Israelis will pay the highest price,” Mr. Assad said, calling the Israeli offensive a “war crime.”

Mr. Sarkozy said the violence “must stop immediately, as soon as possible.” He described the fighting as “unbearable.”

Israeli officials said the French had originally pushed for a 48-hour or 72-hour cease-fire by Israel, an attempt as they saw it to provide substantial humanitarian aid and to see if Hamas would stop its rocket fire for that period. But the Israelis believe they convinced their French colleagues that the idea had little strategic merit because Hamas was unlikely to stop firing, and if it did, it was unclear what was supposed to happen afterward.

Israeli officials said they were not ready to accept any cease-fire proposal that did not guarantee a permanent stop of rocket attacks as well as smuggling of weapons through tunnels under Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Since the operation began, Israeli officials in Washington said, the number of rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza has fallen to about 20 a day from a peak of 80 on Christmas Day. “The situation has obliged them to contract and pull back the rockets,” said Jeremy Issacharoff, the Israeli deputy chief of mission in Washington. “The rate of attrition is important,” he said, noting that Hamas was now launching fewer rockets than Israeli forces had expected.

In Israel, politicians and intellectuals on the left, many of whom supported the initial attack on Gaza as a means to send a message to Hamas regarding rocket fire, began calling for an end to the operation and for intensive work on a truce, so as to avoid further movement of Israeli ground troops into Gaza and further civilian suffering there.

Israeli officials hope an eventual deal will be struck without engaging directly with Hamas, but Mark Regev, the spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Israel would not exclude a tacit understanding with Hamas.

“The endgame for us is threefold: that Hamas’s military machine would be substantially destroyed; two, Hamas understands that shooting rockets means paying a price they don’t want to pay; and three, there are mechanisms in place to prevent Hamas from rearming,” Mr. Regev said.

The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

2009-01-06T01:37:00.000-06:00

ei: The Gaza Ghetto Uprising

The Gaza Ghetto Uprising
Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 4 January 2009

One is often baffled by the ironies of international relations and the alliances they foster. Take for example the Israeli colonial settlement that had declared war on the Palestinian people and several Arab countries since its inception while at the same time it built alliances with many Arab regimes and with Palestinian leaders.

While Hashemite-Zionist relations and Maronite Church-Zionist relations have always been known and documented, there has been less documentation of the services that Israel has provided and continues to provide to Arab regimes over the decades. It is now recognized that Israel's 1967 invasion of Egypt aimed successfully to destroy Gamal Abdul-Nasser, the enemy of all US dictatorial allies among the Arab regimes, whom the US and before it Britain and France had tried to topple since the 1950s but failed. Israel thus rendered a great service to Arab monarchies (and a few republics) from "the ocean to the Gulf," whose survival was threatened by Nasser and Nasserism. Israel's subsequent intervention in Jordan in 1970 to help the Jordanian army destroy Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) guerrillas and its final crushing of that organization in its massive invasions of Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 were also important services it rendered to these same regimes threatened by the PLO's "revolutionary" potential and its sometimes recalcitrant positions. Israeli intelligence has also provided over the decades crucial information to several Arab regimes enabling them to crush their political opposition and strengthen their dictatorial rule. Prominent examples among recipients of Israeli intelligence largesse include the Moroccan and the Omani dictatorships.

Israel's services to Arab regimes continue apace. Its 2006 invasion of Lebanon, engineered to destroy Hizballah, was cheered by Arab regimes and neoliberal Arab intellectuals hostile to Hizballah and employed exclusively by Saudi media outlets. Though the massive Israeli destruction of southern Lebanon and south Beirut and the massacres of more than a thousand Lebanese strengthened Hizballah and weakened Israel's military standing, the invasion was much appreciated by Israel's Arab allies. Indeed since 2006, Israel's Arab regime allies as well as neoliberal Arab intellectuals have been openly calling on it to neutralize the so-called Iranian "threat" for its own sake and at their behest as well. The US has seen this as an opportune moment to fully integrate Israel in the region, so much so that it signaled to its Gulf allies to make proposals for a new regional alliance that includes Israel in its midst. The Bahraini foreign minister suggested a few weeks ago that Israel join the Arab League. Many such proposals have already been made in the past few months welcoming the colonial settlement to the regional alliance against Iran.

Since 2006, Arab regimes, neoliberal Arab intellectuals, as well as the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority (PCA) in Ramallah have reached an understanding that only Israel will be able to save them from Hizballah and Hamas, both organizations constituting a threat to the open alliance Arab regimes have with the US and Israel against Iran and all progressive forces in the region. These were not closely guarded secret hopes, but strategies that were openly discussed in private meetings, which often spilled into the public realm. The discussions in the Arab media and the declarations made by Israeli officials in the context of the ongoing Israeli massacres of the one and a half million Palestinians in Gaza in the last 10 days have left little to the imagination. A veritable open alliance now exists between the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority, Arab regimes, and Israel with the support of neoliberal Arab intellectuals, wherein Israel is subcontracted to decimate the Hamas government -- the only democratically elected government in the entire Arab world.

Here let us remember that Hamas was democratically elected in free elections and that its elected officials and members of parliament were kidnapped by the Israeli occupation and have been languishing in Israeli jails for years, and that the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority set their offices on fire, staged strikes against them, and signaled the PCA bureaucracy not to follow their orders. It was after all this failed to dislodge Hamas from power that the US, Israel, and the PCA staged a coup to massacre Hamas leaders in Gaza that backfired on them. The carnage unleashed by Israel in the last 10 days is the latest attempt by Israel to ensure that all Arabs and all Palestinians are ruled by dictators and never by democratically elected officials.

Many are wondering how the Arab regimes and the PCA can be so brazen in their "treachery" of the Palestinians. "Don't they fear being overthrown by the people?" is an oft-repeated question. The answer of course is a resounding "no." It is true that collaboration with Israel by Arab regimes is not new, and that what is new is merely their openness about it, but there is a perfectly good reason for this. In the 1940s and the 1950s, these regimes could not declare openly their alliance with Israel, as there were popular and international forces that would have removed them from power had they done so. Indeed, some at the time flirted with alliances that unofficially included Israel, like the Baghdad Pact, but they paid a heavy price for such collaboration. The Cold War, Third World revolutionism, Arab nationalism, the Soviet Union, China, Nasser, were all factors to be considered. While a few of these factors had remained when Egypt's Sadat declared his open alliance with the US and Israel in the late 1970s, none of these factors remains today. The US, Israel, and their major Arab allies have neutralized these forces one by one since 1967, opening the way for this brazen alliance between Israel and the Arab dictatorships, all of which are in the service of US interests in the region. These Arab regimes rule by terror and fear and have at their disposal the best secret police and repressive security apparatus that the US can train and equip and which oil money and US aid can buy.

When Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was asked point blank by al-Jazeera's anchorman if Israel had an arrangement with Arab regimes to commit the Gaza massacres, she refused to answer and finally denied such an arrangement existed but could not help but affirm that there are those in the Arab world who "think" as Israel does and that Hamas is their enemy as it is the enemy of Israel. This is, incidentally, the same Tzipi Livni, who only a few weeks ago informed Palestinian citizens of Israel that she has slated them for denationalization and deportation to the Palestinian Bantustans once Israel and the international community grants these West Bank prisons the status of an independent Palestinian state enclosed within the apartheid wall. After her war on Palestinians in Gaza started last week, Livni declared that her war against the Palestinian people is not only about security but also about Israel's "values" which non-collaborator Palestinians (unlike the PCA) do not share. Livni is of course right. Unlike Livni and the Israeli leadership, whose ethnic-cleansing ideals and plans are to make Israel a purely Jewish state that is Palästinenser-rein, most Palestinians believe that they should remain present on their lands even and especially if this sullies the purity of a Jewish Israel.

Livni has also asserted that Israel's values are shared by the "free world" and by unfree Arab regimes that are allies of the "free world." We can add, that her values are also shared by Saudi-funded neoliberal Arab intellectuals and by the leadership of the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority ensconced in the Green Zone of Ramallah. The civilized values of Israel are not unlike those espoused by the US in its ongoing wars against Arabs and Muslims, and are very much like European colonial values during the high age of colonialism and beyond. Livni and the Israeli leadership speak of human rights, democracy, peace, and justice as universal while applying them only to Jews and denying them especially to Palestinians. This is hardly an Israeli ruse. Let us remember the undying words of Frantz Fanon in this regard: "leave this Europe where they never tire of talking of man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe."

On the Palestinian front, the term of chief Palestinian collaborator and coup leader Mahmoud Abbas ends on 9 January. Israel hopes to extend his collaborationist rule as head of the PCA it set up through the Oslo agreement in 1993. As Palestinians are murdered and injured in the thousands, world powers are cheering on. This is hardly a new development. It happens often in the context of other populations being murdered by allies of the US and Europe, and it even happened during World War II as the Nazi genocide was proceeding. On 19 April 1943, Britain and the US met in Bermuda, presumably to discuss the situation of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. That was also the day when the Nazis had launched their war against the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto but were met with unexpected courageous resistance. Little came out of the Bermuda Conference and the ongoing war against the Warsaw Ghetto proceeded uninterrupted. The Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto executed Jewish collaborators with the Nazis and bravely faced up to the Nazi army with what little weapons it had before being massacred. Their uprising was always inspirational to the Palestinians. In the heyday of the PLO as a symbol of Palestinian liberation, the organization would lay flower wreathes at the Warsaw Ghetto monument to honor these fallen Jewish heroes.

Szmul Zygielbojm was the leader of the Jewish socialist party, the Bund, in Poland and was part of the resistance against the Nazi invasion in 1939. He would later become a hostage held by the Nazis but would later be released and made a member of the Jewish council or judenrat, the Nazi equivalent of the Israeli-created Palestinian Collaborationist Authority, and which was charged with building a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Zygielbojm opposed the Nazi order and fled to Belgium, France, the US, and in 1942 ended up in London where he joined the Polish government in exile. On 12 May 1943, after he received word that the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto was finally crushed and many of its fighters killed, Zygielbojm turned on the gas in his London flat and committed suicide in protest against the indifference and inaction of the Allies to the plight of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. He also felt that he had no right to live after his comrades were killed resisting the Nazis. In his suicide letter, Zygielbojm insisted that while the Nazis were responsible for the murder of the Polish Jews, the Allies, through their inaction, were also guilty:

The latest news that has reached us from Poland makes it clear beyond any doubt that the Germans are now murdering the last remnants of the Jews in Poland with unbridled cruelty. Behind the walls of the ghetto the last act of this tragedy is now being played out.

The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. By looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions, tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility ...

I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave.

By my death, I wish to give expression to my most profound protest against the inaction in which the world watches and permits the destruction of the Jewish people ...

The Palestinian Collaborationist Authority that runs the judenrat set up by Oslo has never even attempted to resist Israeli orders. Not one member of the top leadership decided to resign and not serve. Mahmoud Abbas, having provided so many dishonorable services to Israel, lacks Zygielbojm's integrity and noble principles and would never follow in Zygielbojm's footsteps.

Meanwhile, the Palestinian people will resist the invading Israelis with all their might and against astronomical odds. The Palestinian people, like Zygielbojm before them, understand very well that Abbas, his clique, the Arab regimes, the US and Europe are all culpable in their slaughter as much as Israel is. In the case of Zygielbojm, he blamed world powers for their indifference and inaction, in the Palestinian case, world and regional powers are co-conspirators and active partners in crime.

The crushing of the Gaza Ghetto Uprising and the slaughter of its defenseless population will be relatively an easy task for the giant Israeli military machine and Israel's sadistic political leadership. It is dealing with the aftermath of a strengthened Palestinian determination to continue to resist Israel that will prove much more difficult for Israel and its Arab allies to deal with. While the thousands of dead and injured Palestinians are the main victims of this latest Israeli terrorist war, the major political loser in all this will be Abbas and his clique of collaborators. The test for Palestinian resistance now is to continue to refuse to grant Israel the right to conquer populations, to steal their land, to destroy their livelihoods, to imprison them in ghettos, and to starve them without being resisted.

The only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century of Zionist atrocities has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing them from the face of the earth. While Zionism sought and recruited Arab and Palestinian collaborators since its inception in the hope of crushing Palestinian resistance, neither Israel nor any of its collaborators has been able to stop it. The lesson that Zionism has refused to learn, and still refuses to learn, is that the Palestinian yearning for freedom from the Zionist yoke cannot be extinguished no matter how barbaric Israel's crimes become. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising will mark both the latest chapter in Palestinian resistance to colonialism and the latest Israeli colonial brutality in a region whose peoples will never accept the legitimacy of a racist European colonial settlement in their midst.

Joseph Massad is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York.

Israel is Immune From Criticism

2009-01-06T01:34:00.000-06:00

MySpace.com: Read Bulletin

January 5, 2009
A Galaxy of Partisan Propagandists
Israel is Immune From Criticism

By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

The state of Israel has descended – plummeted – to one of the lowest levels of conscious barbarity that is currently evident in this horrible world.

Any nation that has behaved towards a subject people, as Israel has to Palestinians, is worthy only of utter contempt. On Sunday January 4 I heard a rabbi on the BBC's morning religious program saying that he supported Israel's air strikes on Gaza. A man of God actually endorsed the killing of hundreds of people. To say that I was – and am – aghast at the sentiment expressed is to put it very mildly. This religious leader, a person supposed to spread and preach tolerance, patience, charity and peace, was supporting war crimes of immense gravity. His approval of the killing of Arabs was blood-chilling.

And this rabbi was British. Here we have a British citizen supporting hatred and bigotry on a BBC religious program. But of course he isn't really British. He is an Israeli religious propagandist of British citizenship whose main allegiance is to Israel. There are thousands like him in the UK and the US. They unconditionally promote Tel Aviv's plans and policy and wield amazing influence over politicians and businesses. Killing Palestinians is Israeli policy, and these people spare no effort to justify it.

Here's a resident of Gaza talking to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the horrors experienced by Palestinians (and congratulations to Haaretz for having the courage to print it): "I keep the children away from the windows because the F-16s are in the air; I forbid them to play below because it's dangerous. They're bombing us from the sea and from the east, they're bombing us from the air. When the telephone works, people tell us about relatives or friends who were killed. My wife cries all the time. At night she hugs the children and cries. It's cold and the windows are open; there's fire and smoke in open areas; at home there's no water, no electricity, no heating gas. And you [the Israelis] say there's no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Tell me, are you normal?"

No, they're not, is the short answer, and the ruthlessness is epitomised by the evil Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, who is using the Gaza war to establish her credentials as a reliably hard-nosed barbarian. She declares "there is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce.
"

It was reported on January 5 that Israeli troops are using white phosphorus (WP) artillery shells in Gaza, supposedly to create smoke screens to conceal their advance.

American troops used WP – fondly known as Willy Pete – in their destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, and the US tried to lie its way out of the war crime, but junior officers unintentionally blew the lies apart by writing in the magazine Field Artillery that "WP proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions . . . and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against insurgents in trench lines and spider holes . . . We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents using WP to flush them out and high explosive shells (HE) to take them out." In fact WP is an effective killer, and anyone who inhales particles will suffer a particularly hideous and painful death. As recorded by The Independent newspaper in Britain "In the aftermath of the battle [at Fallujah], the State Department's Counter Misinformation Office issued a statement saying that WP was only "used very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night [which isn't the propose of a smoke-shell], not at enemy fighters." When The Independent confronted the State Department with the first-hand accounts of soldiers who participated, an official accepted the mistake and undertook to correct its website." Big deal. Lie, lie and lie again, until you're found out and it's impossible to deny the facts. And the Israelis seem to be taking the example, as usual, and are stoutly denying what has been seen by independent witnesses.

Article two, Protocol III of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons states: "It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects, the object of attack by incendiary weapons." But Israel is only following the US example. "Shake and bake" is such an attractive military option that it would be a shame to spoil their fun, especially when it has rabbinical approval.

Here is part of what is laid out in Protocol 1, Additional to the Geneva Conventions, 1977 . . . General Protection Against Effects of Hostilities: "Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate: An attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
"

Israel, supported energetically by Washington (and using US-supplied aircraft, bombs and rockets), has caused "incidental loss of life" and general civilian casualties on an enormous scale. The Israeli military and the Israeli people knew full well that their genocidal attack on Gaza would kill civilians. The use of white phosphorous in built-up areas is worthy of the Nazis at their most brutal. Stalin and Mao would nod approvingly. It wasn't considered important that there would be countless civilian deaths. Nobody cares, and least of all American politicians. The next secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, refuses to comment on the atrocities. The incoming vice-president has been silent. President-elect Obama? As Reuters reported : "Obama . . . has not commented on the Middle East crisis since Israel launched attacks on Gaza nine days ago. His advisers insist that only President George W Bush can speak for America until then." But it was noted that "The president-elect has commented on the global economic crisis and his plans to try to pull the US economy out of recession.
"

Of course he has. And were it not for the power of Israel in America he would no doubt comment adversely on the slaughter in Gaza, because he is a decent man.

But Mr Obama dare not criticize Israel, even for its use of chemical shells. Nor can any American who wishes to enter or remain engaged in politics. The kiss of political death in the United States of America is to censure Israel. It can't be done.

And that is why apartheid is permitted in Israel; it's why the mass-punishment blockade was enforced months before the attack went in; and it's why the near-genocide in Gaza is allowed to continue.

Does anyone remember the hearing on the so-called Israeli-Palestine peace process in the US House of Representatives in February 2007? Of course not. It was a farce. And why was it such a revolting and hideous charade? – Because it was a three card trick.

The main witness, of the three cards who were called, was one Martin Indyk, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which is the richest and most powerful lobby group in the country (two of whose members are currently under a mysteriously delayed investigation for spying for Israel). From there, inevitably, he went to be US ambassador in Tel Aviv. (And, incidentally, whose book on the Middle East was the subject of a glowing review in last week's Economist.) Another witness was David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (founded by Indyk; it's all very chummy in pro-Israel sewers), which is funded extensively by American interests that support Zionism. (Among other connections, it is closely associated with the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.
) And was the third witness a counter-balance to two energetic supporters of Zion? Could he or she present a rather less biased view of the Middle East? Perhaps a person who would make the point that Israel has contemptuously ignored UN Security Council resolutions concerning illegal occupation of Palestinian lands?

Not a bit. The third member was a comic quasi-intellectual character called Daniel Pipes who once declared that Muslim immigrants to the US were "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene." (Germanic? – How quaint.) Pipes founded the Middle East Forum (MEF) which encourages university students in America to report lecturers and professors who they consider to be anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian. (In Hitler's Germany there were awards given to young people who identified and reported those they thought to be pro-Jewish; I know a very elderly German lady who did this when she was 15. She is now terribly ashamed at the memory, because she actually informed on her own father. How times change. Or don't, of course.
)

In 2006 Pipes was given the 'Guardian of Zion' award, an annual prize to a prominent supporter of Israel, by the Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

With a galaxy of partisan propagandists like Indyk, Makovsky and Pipes being the only people selected to give evidence on Israel-Palestine to the nation's legislators in Washington, there was no chance whatever that the Congressional Sub-Committee would be presented with a balanced view of the Israel-Palestine problem. The deck was stacked, and the legislators listened. They had no choice, because of the power of the Israel lobby. They've been shaken and baked.

There is little doubt that the bias towards Israel will continue in the legislature and administration of the United States of America, no matter what Obama might really think, and no matter how many Palestinian children the Zionists have slaughtered. The Israelis are behaving like genocidal filth, but those who stay silent about their atrocities are not far behind in the gutter stakes.

Brian Cloughley's book about the Pakistan army, War, Coups and Terror, has just been published by Pen & Sword Books (UK) and will be published in the US in May by Skyhorse (New York).

Obama is losing a battle he doesn't know he's in

2009-01-05T14:25:00.001-06:00

Simon Tisdall: Barack Obama's silence on Gaza is damaging his reputation | World news | guardian.co.uk

Obama is losing a battle he doesn't know he's in

The president-elect's silence on the Gaza crisis is undermining his reputation in the Middle East

Barack Obama's chances of making a fresh start in US relations with the Muslim world, and the Middle East in particular, appear to diminish with each new wave of Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Gaza. That seems hardly fair, given the president-elect does not take office until January 20. But foreign wars don't wait for Washington inaugurations.

Obama has remained wholly silent during the Gaza crisis. His aides say he is following established protocol that the US has only one president at a time. Hillary Clinton, his designated secretary of state, and Joe Biden, the vice-president-elect and foreign policy expert, have also been uncharacteristically taciturn on the subject.

But evidence is mounting that Obama is already losing ground among key Arab and Muslim audiences that cannot understand why, given his promise of change, he has not spoken out. Arab commentators and editorialists say there is growing disappointment at Obama's detachment - and that his failure to distance himself from George Bush's strongly pro-Israeli stance is encouraging the belief that he either shares Bush's bias or simply does not care.

The Al-Jazeera satellite television station recently broadcast footage of Obama on holiday in Hawaii, wearing shorts and playing golf, juxtaposed with scenes of bloodshed and mayhem in Gaza. Its report criticising "the deafening silence from the Obama team" suggested Obama is losing a battle of perceptions among Muslims that he may not realise has even begun.

"People recall his campaign slogan of change and hoped that it would apply to the Palestinian situation," Jordanian analyst Labib Kamhawi told Liz Sly of the Chicago Tribune. "So they look at his silence as a negative sign. They think he is condoning what happened in Gaza because he's not expressing any opinion."

Regional critics claim Obama is happy to break his pre-inauguration "no comment" rule on international issues when it suits him. They note his swift condemnation of November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Obama has also made frequent policy statements on mitigating the impact of the global credit crunch.

Obama's absence from the fray is also allowing hostile voices to exploit the vacuum. "It would appear that the president-elect has no intention of getting involved in the Gaza crisis," Iran's Resalat newspaper commented sourly. "His stances and viewpoints suggest he will follow the path taken by previous American presidents... Obama, too, will pursue policies that support the Zionist aggressions."

Whether Obama, when he does eventually engage, can successfully elucidate an Israel-Palestine policy that is substantively different from that of Bush-Cheney is wholly uncertain at present.

To maintain the hardline US posture of placing the blame for all current troubles squarely on Hamas, to the extent of repeatedly blocking limited UN security council ceasefire moves, would be to end all realistic hopes of winning back Arab opinion - and could have negative, knock-on consequences for US interests in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gulf.

Yet if Obama were to take a tougher (some would say more balanced) line with Israel, for example by demanding a permanent end to its blockade of Gaza, or by opening a path to talks with Hamas, he risks provoking a rightwing backlash in Israel, giving encouragement to Israel's enemies, and losing support at home for little political advantage.

A recent Pew Research Centre survey, for example, showed how different are US perspectives to those of Europe and the Middle East. Americans placed "finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict" at the bottom of a 12-issue list of foreign policy concerns, the poll found. And foreign policy is in any case of scant consequence to a large majority of US voters primarily worried about the economy, jobs and savings.

On the campaign trail, Obama (like Clinton) was broadly supportive of Israel and specifically condemnatory of Hamas. But at the same time, he held out the prospect of radical change in western relations with Muslims everywhere, promising to make a definitive policy speech in a "major Islamic forum" within 100 days of taking office.

"I will make clear that we are not at war with Islam, that we will stand with those who are willing to stand up for their future, and that we need their effort to defeat the prophets of hate and violence," he said.

As the Gaza casualty headcount goes up and Obama keeps his head down, those sentiments are beginning to sound a little hollow. The danger is that when he finally peers over the parapet on January 21, the battle of perceptions may already be half-lost.

Voices from the frontline

2009-01-05T01:52:00.000-06:00

Voices from the frontline | World news | The Guardian

Voices from the frontline
'It's a living hell and my children are petrified'

Faysal Shawal, businessman in Gaza City

We haven't been outside in a week. We have no electricity, we have no water. There is shelling and air raids and they don't stop, especially last night. There were raids everywhere - from the sea, air and ground. They destroyed the school that my kids go to, the American school. What did this school do to the Israeli army? They are bombing everything. It's a living hell. My children are petrified. I feel responsible for them, they are innocent but I can't help them.

The five of us sleep together but we don't sleep. The noise is terrifying. I feel like a 100-year-old man. My business has been shut down now for 20 months because of the siege. We don't know where we are going. There's no justice in this world.
Narnin Serraj, works for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and lives in Gaza city with her three children and husband

For eight days we've lived in fear. No place in Gaza is safe. My kids are scared. I have three children. Adam, who is nine, has asthma. We don't have electricity so whenever he has an asthma attack we have to put the generator on so he can use the ventilator. Then we turn the generator off again because there's very little fuel.

We sleep in the hallway where it's a bit safer because when the bombs drop, the whole building shakes. If anything happens, I hope it happens to me. I feel guilty for having children here.

Gaza has never been safe or healthy, and now I have three children whom I cannot protect. My youngest son is three and all the time he's telling stories about bombing. It's hard for my children to see me falling to pieces. I have lost all attachment to this place.

What you see on the television is the physical devastation but you don't see what it's doing to our emotions. The only thing I think about is where they are going to bomb again.
Ahmed Al Dabba, 26, lives in eastern Gaza

Last night about 9pm we heard the tanks starting to cross into Gaza. I jumped up on to the roof, I saw them entering through Karni crossing. They started firing artillery shells, it was very heavy, hundreds of shells. Eight landed on my uncle's house nearby. A neighbour's house was burnt. They called the fire service but no one came because the trucks were destroyed in raids. I spent most of the night counting the shells. In one hour I counted 200 shells. There was shooting but I don't know where. Now there are two tanks stationed at the end my street. From 9pm till 5am I was unable to sleep. I'm tired and exhausted.
Majeda Al Saqqa, community worker at the Culture and Free Thought Association, in Khan Yunis

Every single night we hear explosions everywhere then all of a sudden the town goes quiet and you don't know what's happening. We don't have electricity most of the time and the phones often don't work.

My brother lives in Gaza City in front of the port where there's a lot of action. It's very hard to call him. I manage to call him every 12 hours, sometimes every 24 hours. We watch the television to see what's going on.

[The children] don't sleep at all and they are scared all the time. They ask us questions and we really don't know what to say. The smallest boy keeps asking why the birds keep flying away and why the planes are targeting them. They ask why the planes bomb our neighbours and why they bomb the mosque. They've never seen Israelis, they don't know who they are. We don't want them to grow up with hatred. It's very, very difficult and we are really tired of this.
Asma Al Ghoul, a journalist, working for the Palestinian paper Al Ayyam which Hamas banned from Gaza

The planes attack everything that moves in the streets, nothing is safe in Gaza. When I see the children in the hospitals I start crying. The children lie there without arms, without legs, without speaking, they don't even cry.

In my work as a journalist everything is happening too quickly, we don't have time to write about it. It's all crazy. Hamas keeps spreading rumours, that it has kidnapped soldiers, to lift the people's spirits like Hezbollah did during the Lebanon war.

The victim here isn't Hamas or Israel. Hamas has become more popular. The victims here are the civilians, the ordinary men, women and children.

At night I try to sing to my son and to create new stories for him to distract him from the bombs. Yesterday he told me that he didn't want to hear the stories any more. He's just four years old.

Israel's fait accompli in Gaza

2009-01-05T00:02:00.000-06:00

Israel's fait accompli in Gaza
By Eric S. Margolis

There are two completely different versions of what is currently happening in Gaza.

In the Israeli and North American press version, Hamas - 'Islamic terrorists' backed by Iran - have in an unprovoked attack fired deadly rockets on innocent Israel with the intent of destroying the Jewish state.

North American politicians and the media say Israel "has the right to defend itself".

True enough. No Israeli government can tolerate rockets hitting its towns, even though the casualty totals have been less than the car crash fatalities registered during a single holiday weekend on Israel's roads.

The firing of the feeble, home-made al-Qassam rockets by Palestinians is both useless and counter-productive.

It damages their image as an oppressed people and gives right-wing Israeli extremists a perfect reason to launch more attacks on the Arabs and refuse to discuss peace.

Israel's supporters insist it has the absolute right to drop hundreds of tonnes of bombs on 'Hamas targets' inside the 360sq km Gaza Strip to 'take out the terrorists'.

Civilians suffer, says Israel, because the cowardly Hamas hide among them.

Actually, it is more like shooting fish in a barrel.

Omitting facts

As usual, this cartoon-like version of events omits a great deal of nuance and background.

While firing rockets at civilians is a crime so, too, is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, which is an egregious violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions.

According to the UN, most of Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinian refugees subsist near the edge of hunger. Seventy per cent of Palestinian children in Gaza suffer from severe malnutrition and psychological trauma.

Medical facilities are critically short of doctors, personnel, equipment, and drugs. Gaza has quite literally become a human garbage dump for all the Arabs that Israel does not want.

Gaza is one of the world's most-densely populated places, a vast outdoor prison camp filled with desperate people. In the past, they threw stones at their Israeli occupiers; now they launch home-made rockets.

Call it a prison riot, writ large.

Eyeing the elections

When the so-called truce between Tel Aviv and Hamas expired on December 19, Israeli politicians were in the throes of preparing for the February 10 national elections.

Israeli politics are playing a key role in this crisis.

Ehud Barak, the defence minister and leader of the Labour party, and Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and leader of the Kadima party, are trying to prove themselves tougher than Benjamin Netanyahu's hard-line Likud party - and one another.

Israel's elections are only six weeks away, and Likud was leading until the air raids on Gaza began. Kadima and Labour are now up in the polls.

The heavy attacks on Gaza are also designed to intimidate Israel's Arab neighbours, and make up for Israel's humiliating 2006 defeat in Lebanon, which still haunts the country's politicians and generals.

A fait accompli

When the air raids on Gaza began, Barak said: "We have totally changed the rules of the game."

He was right. By blitzing Hamas-run Gaza, Barak presented the incoming US administration with a fait accompli, and neatly checkmated the newest player in the Middle East Great Game - Barack Obama, the US president-elect - before he could even take a seat at the table.

The Israeli offensive into Gaza now looks likely to short-circuit any plans Obama might have had to press Israel into withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders and sharing Jerusalem.

This has pleased Israel's supporters in North America who have been cheering the war in Gaza and have been backing away from their earlier tentative support for a land-for-peace deal.

Israel's successes in having Western media portray the Gaza offensive as an 'anti-terrorist operation' will also diminish hopes of peace talks any time soon.

Obama inherits this mess in a few weeks. During the elections, Obama bowed to the Israel lobby, offering a new US carte blanche to Israel and even accepting Israel's permanent monopoly of all of Jerusalem.

As he concludes forming his cabinet, his Middle East team looks like it may be top-heavy with friends of Israel's Labour party.

Obama keeps saying he must remain silent on policy issues until George Bush, the outgoing US president, leaves office, but his staff appear happy to avoid having to make statements about Gaza that would antagonise Israel's American supporters.

Obama will take office facing a Middle East up in arms over Gaza and the entire Muslim world blaming the US for the carnage in Gaza.

Unless he moves swiftly to distance himself from the policies of the Bush administration, he will soon find himself facing the same problems and anger as the Bush White House.

Arab deal killed

Israel's Gaza offensive is also likely to torpedo the current Saudi-sponsored peace plan, which had been backed by all members of the Arab League.

The plan, now likely defunct, had called for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders and share Jerusalem in exchange for full recognition and normalised relations with the Muslim world.

Arab governments will now be unable to sell the deal as they face a storm of criticism from their own people over their powerlessness to help the Palestinians of Gaza.

Egypt, in particular, is being widely accused of collaborating with Israel in further sealing off and isolating Gaza. It seems highly unlikely they will be able to advance a peace plan with Israel for now.

This is a bonus for right-wing Israelis, who have always been dead set against any withdrawal and strongly supported the attack on Gaza.

Other Israeli factions who were always lukewarm about the Saudi peace plan are now unlikely to reconsider it.

Israel's security establishment is committed to preventing the creation of a viable Palestinian state, and refuses to negotiate with Hamas. Unable to kill all of Hamas' men, Israel is slowly destroying Gaza's infrastructure around them, as it did to Yasser Arafat's PLO.

Israel's hardliners point to Gaza and claim that any Palestinian state on the West Bank would threaten their nation's security by firing rockets into Israel's heartland.

Mighty information machine

Israel is confident that its mighty information machine will allow it to weather the storm of worldwide outrage over its Biblical punishment of Gaza. Who remembers Israel's flattening of parts of the Palestinian city of Jenin, or the US destruction in Falluja, Iraq, or the Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Beirut?

Though the torment of Gaza is seen across the horrified Muslim world as a modern version of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising by Jews against the Nazis during World War Two, Western governments still appear bent on taking no action.

Though Israel's use of American weapons against Gaza violates the US Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts, the docile US Congress will remain mute.

Israel's assault on Gaza was clearly timed for America's interregnum between administrations and the year-end holidays, a well-used Israeli tactic.

Hamas refuses to recognise Israel as long as Israel refuses to recognise Hamas and the rights of millions of homeless Palestinian refugees.

It calls for a non-religious state to be created in Palestine, meaning an end to Zionism. Ironically, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and late leader of Hamas, had spoken of a compromise with Tel Aviv shortly before he was assassinated by Israel in 2004.

An inherited mess

Israel's hopes that it can bomb Gazans into rejecting Hamas are as ill-conceived as its failed attempt in 2006 to blast Lebanon into rejecting Hezbollah.

The Fatah regime on the West Bank installed by the US and Israel after Yasser Arafat's suspicious death will be further discredited, leaving the militants of Hamas as the sole authentic voice of Palestinian nationalism.

Hamas, the militant but still democratically elected government of Gaza, is even less likely to compromise.

The Muslim world is in a rage. But so what? Stalin liked to say "the dogs bark, and the caravan moves on," and as long as the US gives Israel carte blanche, it can do just about anything it wants.

The tragedy of Palestine will thus continue to poison US relations with the Muslim world.

Those Americans who still do not understand why their nation was attacked on 9/11 need only look to Gaza, for which the US is now being blamed as much as Israel.

Unless Israel can make 5 to 7 million Palestinians disappear, it must find some way to co-exist with them. Israeli leaders on the centre and right continue to avoid facing this fact.

The brutal collective punishment inflicted on Gaza will likely strengthen Hamas and reverse any hopes of a Middle East peace in the coming years.

Eric S. Margolis is an author, syndicated foreign affairs columnist, broadcaster, and veteran war correspondent. His latest book is American Raj: America and the Muslim world.

Oh Is-ra-Hell - what’s happened to "gods" chosen?

2009-01-04T21:06:00.001-06:00

Myspace.com Blogs - Oh Is-ra-Hell - what’s happened to "gods" chosen? - Meria MySpace Blog

As Israel (or Is-ra-hell) rains fire and brimstone down upon the Gaza strip many feel hopeless and helpless here at home. Many have written me of their pain and feelings of impotence as the criminal Olmert comes in for the final slaughter of the true Semites, the Palestinians. All with the foreknowledge and blessing of our pathetic "leaders".

For Israel who has made themselves "heroes" for their "sacred" holocaust, it's unimaginable that they would do the same today to the Palestinians that they claim was done to them. History indeed repeats itself, and I question "who are the nazi's now?"

As an American I am ashamed of my country's support for Israel which costs each American $500 a year. I am ashamed that our weapons are being used against people who have no food, water, electricity, homes, weapons. The world opinion is against us for being the United States of Israel.

Obama is silent. He has picked an Israeli with dual citizenship with Israel to be his chief of staff. Joe Biden, a self admitted Christian Zionist. Hillary, a Jew who tries to hide it. Congress? All on Israel's side, except for Dennis Kucinich.
Here we have a people that claim to be "god's chosen people". What kind of god do they follow? Surely not the god of the Old Testament. They are proof to me that man created god in his image - violent, greedy and destructive.

If one looks at the Old Testament, they would read the scriptures on treating your enemy as you would like to be treated; never destroying food supplies or trees during a war; and no promise of them EVER having their own land. There is no mention at all in the Bible (buy bull) of a land of Israel.

The Rothschilds and their Balfour Declaration basically created a nation state called Israel, and imported converted Russian jews to "Israel". No bloodline of the Israeli's.They began their war on the true Semites, the Palestinians (who can prove their bloodline) and now aim to finish them off for geo-political gain.
Here in the USA I have read the message boards filled with hatred by so-called Christians. Obviously they learned nothing from their Jesus either.
When you feel alone, helpless there are things you can do.

For one, stop supporting Israeli businesses and corporations. Start picketing the local synagogues around your neighborhood. Make the Rabbi's (teachers) know that they are going against their own god by their actions. As I recall, their god is a god of severe punishment for not following his rules - perhaps they need to be reminded of it.

Write your congressman even though he has blood on his hands from accepting AIPAC contributions and directives. Sign every petition you see to stop the slaughter.
Learn the real history of "Israel" and the Zionist movement. Realize that there are more Christian Zionists than Jewish Zionists.

Pray for all living things. Write complaint letters to accompany your tax returns. Let the IRS know you abhor your taxes being used for the war machine.
Doing nothing is a decision and in the end, we all pay for our decisions.
Israel isn't doing anything that we, the USA isn't doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are guilty of the same crimes against humanity. Picking on two countries that couldn't defend themselves, for a crime they never committed.

Remember, you can love your country and hate your leaders. Let them hear from you one way or the other. Too many have been killed while the masses remained silent.

Depleted uranium found in Gaza victims

2009-01-04T20:33:00.001-06:00

Press TV Print

Depleted uranium found in Gaza victims
Sun, 04 Jan 2009 13:16:21 GMT

Medics tell Press TV they have found traces of depleted uranium in some Gaza residents wounded in Israel's ground offensive on the strip.

Norwegian medics told Press TV correspondent Akram al-Sattari that some of the victims who have been wounded since Israel began its attacks on the Gaza Strip on December 27 have traces of depleted uranium in their bodies.

The report comes after Israeli tanks and troops swept across the border into Gaza on Saturday night, opening a ground operation after eight days of intensive attacks by Israeli air and naval forces on the impoverished region.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak warned on Sunday that the wide-ranging ground offensive in the Gaza Strip would be "full of surprises."

A ground offensive in the densely-populated Gaza is expected to drastically increase the death toll of the civilian population.

The latest assaults bring the number of Palestinians killed to over 488 with 2790 others wounded. The UN says that about 25 percent of the casualties were civilian deaths - including at least 34 children.

According to Israeli army officials, at least 30 of its soldiers have been wounded since the start of the ground campaign.

Amid global condemnation of the ongoing violence in the region, the UN Security Council failed to agree on a united approach to resolve the crisis.

"Once again, the world is watching in dismay the dysfunctionality of the Security Council," UN General Assembly chief Miguel d'Escoto said Sunday.

According to diplomatic sources, the US blocked a Security Council resolution, with US Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff arguing that an official statement that criticizes both Israel and Hamas would not be helpful.

The White House has so far declined to comment on whether an Israeli ground incursion into Gaza is a justified measure.

Israeli forces bisect Gaza, surround biggest city

2009-01-04T05:34:00.001-06:00

Print Story: Israeli forces bisect Gaza, surround biggest city - Yahoo! News

Israeli forces bisect Gaza, surround biggest city
By Ibrahim Barzak And Matti Friedman, Associated Press Writers

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israeli ground troops and tanks cut swaths through the Gaza Strip early Sunday, bisecting the coastal territory and surrounding its biggest city as the new phase of a devastating offensive against Hamas gained momentum.

Thousands of soldiers in three brigade-size formations pushed into Gaza after nightfall Saturday, beginning a long-awaited ground offensive after a week of intense aerial bombardment. Black smoke billowed over Gaza City at first light and bursts of machine gun fire rang out.

TV footage showed Israeli troops with night-vision goggles and camouflage face paint marching in single file. Artillery barrages preceded their advance, and they moved through fields and orchards following bomb-sniffing dogs ensuring their routes had not been booby-trapped.

The military said troops killed or wounded dozens of militant fighters. Palestinian medics and doctors said 23 Palestinians have been killed — three Hamas fighters and the rest civilians. Many of the casualties were in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting, the said.

Army ambulances were seen bringing Israeli wounded to a hospital in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba. The military reported 30 Israeli troops were wounded, two seriously, in the opening hours of the offensive.

In his first public comments since the ground operation was launched, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that the invasion was unavoidable and that his government exhausted all other options before approving the operation.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak predicted a long and difficult campaign in Gaza, a densely populated territory of 1.4 million where militants operate and easily hide among the crowded urban landscape.

Hamas threatened to turn Gaza into a "graveyard" for Israeli forces.

"You entered like rats," Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan told Israeli soldiers in a statement on Hamas' Al Aqsa TV. "Gaza will be a graveyard for you, God willing."

The ground operation is the second phase in an offensive that began as a weeklong aerial onslaught aimed at halting Hamas rocket fire that has reached deeper and deeper into Israel, threatening major cities and one-eighth of Israel's population. Palestinian officials say nearly 480 people, including dozens of civilians, were killed in the air offensive.

Rocket fire has persisted, however, and several rockets fell in Israel on Sunday morning, causing no casualties. In much of southern Israel school has been canceled and life has been largely paralyzed.

While the air offensive presented little risk for Israel's army, sending in ground troops is a much more dangerous proposition. Hamas is believed to have some 20,000 gunman who know the dense urban landscape intimately. For months, Israeli leaders had resisted a ground invasion, fearing heavy casualties.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he decided that the government had no more choice.

"I want to be able to go to the Israeli public and all the mothers and say, 'We did everything in a responsible manner,'" Olmert said in a statement released by his office. "In the end, we reached the moment where I had to decide to send out soldiers."

He stressed the campaign's objective is to restore quiet to Israel's south, not to topple Hamas or reoccupy Gaza. Israel considers Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since June 2007 and is sworn to Israel's destruction, a terrorist group.

Israel has launched at least two other large ground offensives in Gaza since withdrawing its troops from the area in 2005. But the size of this latest operation dwarfs those, with at least three times the firepower.

Israel also has called up tens of thousands of reserve soldiers, which defense officials said could enable a far broader ground offensive as the operation's third phase. The troops could also be used in the event Palestinian militants in the West Bank or Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon decide to launch attacks. Hezbollah opened a war against Israel in 2006 when it was in the midst of a large operation in Gaza.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the military's preparations are classified.

An armored force south of Gaza City penetrated as deep as the abandoned settlement of Netzarim, which Israel left along with other Israeli communities when it pulled out of Gaza in 2005, both military officials and Palestinian witnesses said.

That move effectively cut off Gaza City, the territory's largest population center with about 400,000 people, from the rest of Gaza to the south.

The offensive focused on northern Gaza, where most of the rockets are fired into Israel, but at least one incursion was reported in the southern part of the strip. Hamas uses smuggling tunnels along the southern border with Egypt to bring in weapons.

Warplanes struck about four dozen targets overnight, including tunnels, weapons storage facilities, areas used to launch mortars and squads of Hamas fighters, the military said.

Gunboats backed up the ground forces, attacking Hamas intelligence headquarters in Gaza City, rocket-launching areas and positions of Hamas marine forces.

Hamas was responding with mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades. Field commanders communicated over walkie talkie, updating gunmen on the location of Israeli forces. Commanders told gunmen in the streets not to gather in big groups and not to use cell phones. Hamas' TV and radio stations, broadcasting from secret locations after their offices were destroyed, remained on the air, broadcasting live coverage.

Ground forces had not entered major Gaza towns and cities by early Sunday morning, instead fighting in rural communities and open areas militants often use to launch rockets and mortar rounds. Militants also fire from heavily populated neighborhoods.

Residents of the small northern Gaza community of al-Attatra said soldiers moved from house to house by blowing holes through walls. Most of the houses were unoccupied, their residents already having fled.

Israel launched the air campaign against Gaza on Dec. 27. Gaza health officials say more than 480 Palestinians were killed in the first eight days of the operation. The breakdown of combatants and civilians remains unclear, but the U.N. says at least 100 civilians were killed in the initial, aerial phase of the war.

Hundreds of rockets have hit Israel so far, and four Israelis have been killed.

The decision to send ground troops into Gaza was taken after Hamas kept up its rocket fire despite the aerial assault, government officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because discussions leading up to wartime decisions are confidential.

The ballooning death toll in Gaza — along with concerns of a looming humanitarian crisis — has aroused mounting world outrage, as evidenced by protests that drew tens of thousands of demonstrators in European capitals on Saturday.

"There is a humanitarian crisis. It's impossible to say how many innocent women, innocent children and innocent babies are being caught up in this conflict, who are being maimed and killed," said Chris Gunness, a United Nations spokesman. "This offensive must stop."

Denunciations also came from the French government, which unsuccessfully proposed a two-day truce earlier this week, and from Egypt, which brokered the six-month truce whose breakdown preceded the Israeli offensive.

But the U.S. has put the blame squarely on Hamas. White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said U.S. officials have been in regular contact with the Israelis as well as officials from countries in the region and Europe.

"We continue to make clear to them our concerns for civilians, as well as the humanitarian situation," he said.

At an emergency consultation of the U.N. Security Council on Saturday night, the U.S. blocked approval of a statement demanded by Arab countries that would have called for an immediate cease-fire. U.S. deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff said the U.S. believed that such a statement "would not be adhered to and would have no underpinning for success, (and) would not do credit to the council."

Hamas began to emerge as Gaza's main power broker when it won Palestinian parliamentary elections three years ago. It has ruled the impoverished territory since seizing control from forces loyal to moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in June 2007.

Hamas in the eyes of an expert

2009-01-04T01:09:00.000-06:00

MySpace.com: Read Bulletin

Hamas in the eyes of an expert

01.04.2009 | Al Jazeera English

Khaled Hroub, author of several books on Hamas, including Hamas: A Beginner's Guide, talks to Al Jazeera about the organisation's social and political strengths and explains why he believes Hamas is looking forward to an Israeli ground incursion into the Gaza Strip.

Al Jazeera: Two senior Hamas leaders were recently killed in Israeli air strikes.
How will this impact the organisation's leadership?

Khaled Hroub: Hamas' leaders are very used to hiding and escaping Israeli attacks. I can't see this affecting Hamas much. Israel succeeded in assassinating very senior Hamas leaders including Sheikh [Ahmed] Yasin himself, the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas, then followed by Abdel Aziz Al-Rantissi who was the main figure in the Gaza Strip.

And yet Hamas continued to rise and succeeded in winning the elections. So I can't see Hamas being weakened by killing one or two or three or even more leaders in the Gaza Strip.

How does the Hamas leadership work, given that Hamas is not so much an organisation but a deeply rooted ideology amongst the Palestinians in Gaza?

Hamas's strength is based on the very broad social and political base that it has in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, so what we are seeing as the leadership is only the tip of the iceberg.

Hamas's leadership is decentralised between the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Israeli jails and the leadership outside of Palestine.

This kind of power of decentralisation of Hamas makes the whole movement stronger in terms of not caging the leadership in one single area, and because of this they keep producing leaders from the third and second rankings to the highest echelons of the movement.

Hamas doesn't have the military resources to match Israel.
If the ground incursion does happen, how do you see Hamas operating?

I can't see any success, strategically speaking, on the side of the Israeli aggression. That is because Israel declared that their one main objective is to disarm Hamas and stop rockets from being launched from the Gaza Strip. Even after one month of this aggression, if one single rocket was launched from the Gaza Strip this means the whole Israeli strategy has failed.

If any land incursion takes place into the Gaza Strip, I think this makes the whole Israeli strategy even more difficult. Everybody knows that Hamas is well-entrenched now in the Gaza Strip because they have a network of tunnels - they hide very well. And maybe even they hope that at one point this Israeli land invasion takes place so that they can deal the Israeli army some strong defensive attacks.

Would Hamas have learned lessons from Hezbollah's war against Israel in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006?

One can tell of so many lessons Hamas has learned from the experience of Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. First of all, this tunnel strategy that has taken place in the Gaza Strip, secondly even the sloganeering and rhetoric - rather than producing threats that they can't match, what they are doing and what they are saying is something they can achieve.

The Israeli side knows very well that Hamas has unseen and unknown capabilities within the Gaza Strip and this is why they are still reluctant to do the invasion.

Is the war likely to galvanise support behind Hamas?

In my view, Hamas will most likely emerge victorious out of this because on the one hand, it's akin to impossible to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

I can't imagine any way of finishing this movement in the Gaza Strip. Even if it was finished, what we'd end up with is a more radical Palestinian organisation, an al-Qaeda-like organisation coming out of the rubble of Hamas's destruction.

Politically speaking, Hamas is now gaining more popularity, not only amongst Palestinians but across the Arab and Muslim world. They are seen as the only party that can face Israel.

What Israel wants from the Gaza Strip is basically a clean and quiet occupation like they achieved in the West Bank.

In the West Bank there are no rockets launched against Israel and yet we have Palestinians killed, arrested, their homes demolished on a daily and weekly basis. We have this thing happening in the West Bank but not complaining, no moaning. Hamas is doing this complaining, doing this resistance.

So it's a war of image on the side of the Israeli army, their image was destroyed in summer 2006 and now they want to restore that image and that name.

Living on Borrowed Time in a Stolen Land

2009-01-04T01:04:00.000-06:00

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Living on Borrowed Time in a Stolen Land
Gilad Atzmon, Palestine Think Tank

Jan 3, 2008

Communicating with Israelis may leave one bewildered. Even now when the Israeli Air Force is practicing murder in broad daylight of hundreds of civilians, elderly persons, women and children, the Israeli people manage to convince themselves that they are the real victims in this violent saga.

Those who are familiar intimately with Israeli people realise that they are completely uninformed about the roots of the conflict that dominates their lives. Rather often Israelis manage to come up with some bizarre arguments that may make a lot of sense within the Israeli discourse, yet make no sense whatsoever outside of the Jewish street. Such an argument goes as follows: 'those Palestinians, why do they insist upon living on our land (Israel), why can’t they just settle in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon or any other Arab country?’ Another Hebraic pearl of wisdom sounds like this: 'what is wrong with these Palestinians? We gave them water, electricity, education and all they do is try to throw us to the sea’.

Astonishingly enough, the Israelis even within the so-called 'left’ and even the educated 'left’ fail to understand who the Palestinians are, where they come from and what they stand for. They fail to grasp that for the Palestinians, Palestine is home. Miraculously, the Israelis manage to fail to grasp that Israel had been erected at the expense of the Palestinian people, on Palestinian land, on Palestinian villages, towns, fields and orchards. The Israelis do not realise that Palestinians in Gaza and in refugee camps in the region are actually dispossessed people from Ber Shive, Yafo, Tel Kabir, Shekh Munis, Lod, Haifa, Jerusalem and many more towns and villages. If you wonder how come the Israelis don’t know their history, the answer is pretty simple, they have never been told. The circumstances that led to the Israeli Palestinian conflict are well hidden within their culture. Traces of pre-1948 Palestinian civilisation on the land had been wiped out. Not only the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians, is not part of the Israeli curriculum, it is not even mentioned or discussed in any Israeli official or academic forum.

In the very centre of almost every Israeli town one can a find a 1948 memorial statue displaying a very bizarre, almost abstract, pipe work. The plumbing feature is called Davidka and it is actually a 1948 Israeli mortar cannon. Interestingly enough, the Davidka was an extremely ineffective weapon. Its shells wouldn’t reach more than 300 meters and would cause very limited damage. Though the Davidika would cause just minimal harm, it produced a lot of noise. According to the Israeli official historical narrative, the Arabs i.e., Palestinians, simply ran away for their lives once they heard the Davidka from afar. According to the Israeli narrative, the Jews i.e., 'new Israelis’ did a bit of fireworks and the 'Arab cowards’ just ran off like idiots. In the Israeli official narrative there is no mention of the many orchestrated massacres conducted by the young IDF and the paramilitary units that preceded it. There is no mention also of the racist laws that stop Palestinians[1][1] from returning to their homes and lands.

The meaning of the above is pretty simple. Israelis are totally unfamiliar with the Palestinian cause. Hence, they can only interpret the Palestinian struggle as a murderous irrational lunacy. Within the Israeli Judeo- centric solipsistic universe, the Israeli is an innocent victim and the Palestinian is no less than a savage murderer.

This grave situation that leaves the Israeli in the dark regarding his past demolishes any possibility of future reconciliation. Since the Israeli lacks the minimal comprehension of the conflict, he cannot contemplate any possible resolution except extermination or cleansing of the 'enemy’. All the Israeli is entitled to know are various phantasmic narratives of Jewish suffering. Palestinian pain is completely foreign to his ears. 'Palestinian right of return’ sounds to him like an amusing idea. Even the most advanced 'Israeli humanists’ are not ready to share the land with its indigenous inhabitants. This doesn’t leave the Palestinians with many options but to liberate themselves against all odds. Clearly, there is no partner for peace on the Israel side.

This week we all learned more about the ballistic capability of Hamas. Evidently, Hamas was rather restrained with Israel for more than a long while. It refrained from escalating the conflict to the whole of southern Israel. It occurred to me that the barrages of Qassams that have been landing sporadically on Sderot and Ashkelon were actually nothing but a message from the imprisoned Palestinians. First it was a message to the stolen land, homes fields and orchards: 'Our beloved soil, we didn’t forget, we are still here fighting for you, sooner rather than later, we will come back, we will start again where we had stopped’. But it was also a clear message to the Israelis. 'You out there, in Sderot, Beer Sheva, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Tel Aviv and Haifa, whether you realise it or not, you are actually living on our stolen land. You better start to pack because your time is running out, you have exhausted our patience. We, the Palestinian people, have nothing to lose anymore’.

Let’s face it, realistically the situation in Israel is rather grave. Two years ago it was Hezbollah rockets that pounded northern Israel. This week the Hamas proved beyond doubt that it is capable of serving the South of Israel with some cocktail of ballistic vengeance. Both in the case of the Hezbollah and the case of the Hamas, Israel was left with no military answer. It can no doubt kill civilians but it fails to stop the rocket barrage. The IDF lacks the means of protecting Israel unless covering Israel with a solid concrete roof is a viable solution. At the end of the day, they might be planning just that (link).

But this is far from the end of the story. In fact it is just the beginning. Every Middle East expert knows that Hamas can seize control of the West Bank within hours. In fact, PA and Fatah control in the West Bank is maintained by the IDF. Once Hamas takes the West Bank, the biggest Israeli population centre will be left to the mercy of Hamas. For those who fail to see, this would be the end of Jewish Israel. It may happen later today, it may happen in three months or in five years, it isn’t matter of 'if’ but rather matter of 'when’. By that time, the whole of Israel will be within firing range of Hamas and Hezbollah, Israeli society will collapse, its economy will be ruined. The price of a detached villa in Northern Tel Aviv would equal a shed in Kiryat Shmone or Sderot. By the time a single rocket hits Tel Aviv, the Zionist dream will be over.

The IDF generals know it, the Israeli leaders know it. This is why they stepped up the war against the Palestinian into extermination. The Israelis do not plan upon invading Gaza. They have lost nothing there. All they want is to finish the Nakba. They drop bombs on Palestinians in order to wipe them out. They want the Palestinians out of the region. It is obviously not going to work, Palestinians will stay. Not only they will they stay, their day of return to their land is coming closer as Israel has been exploiting its deadliest tactics.

This is exactly where Israeli escapism comes into play. Israel has passed the 'point of no return’. Its doomed fate is deeply engraved in each bomb it drops on Palestinian civilians. There is nothing Israel can do to save itself. There is no exit strategy. It can’t negotiate its way out because neither the Israelis nor their leadership understand the elementary parameters involved in the conflict. Israel lacks the military power to conclude the battle. It may manage to kill Palestinian grassroots leaders, it has been doing it for years, yet Palestinian resistance and persistence is growing fierce rather than weakening. As an IDF intelligence general predicted already at the first Intifada. 'In order to win, all Palestinians have to do is to survive’. They survive and they are indeed winning.

Israeli leaders understand it all. Israel has already tried everything, unilateral withdrawal, starvation and now extermination. It thought to evade the demographic danger by shrinking into an intimate cosy Jewish ghetto. Nothing worked. It is Palestinian persistence in the shape of Hamas politics that defines the future of the region.

All that is left to Israelis is to cling to their blindness and escapism to evade their devastating grave fate that has become immanent already. All along their way down, the Israelis will sing their familiar various victim anthems. Being imbued in a self-centred supremacist reality, they will be utterly involved in their own pain yet completely blind to the pain they inflict on others. Uniquely enough, the Israelis are operating as a unified collective when dropping bombs on others, yet, once being slightly hurt, they all manage to become monads of vulnerable innocence. It is this discrepancy between the self-image and the way they are seen by the rest of us which turns the Israeli into a monstrous exterminator. It is this discrepancy that stops Israelis from grasping their own history, it is that discrepancy that stops them from comprehending the repeated numerous attempts to destroy their State. It is that discrepancy that stops Israelis from understanding the meaning of the Shoah so can they prevent the next one. It is this discrepancy that stops Israelis from being part of humanity.

Once again Jews will have to wander into an unknown fate. To a certain extent, I myself have started my journey a while ago.

[1][1] Jews only law of return- http://www. mfa. gov. il/MFA/MFAArchive/1950_1959/Law of Return 5710-1950

read more- http://www. australiansforpalestine. com/press_room/briefing/papers/BriefingPaperNo35_17Aug07_TheLawofReturncopy. pdf

Israeli tanks, soldiers invade Gaza Strip

2009-01-04T00:28:00.000-06:00

Print Story: Israeli tanks, soldiers invade Gaza Strip - Yahoo! News

Israeli tanks, soldiers invade Gaza Strip
By Nidal al-Mughrabi Nidal Al-mughrabi 1 hr 17 mins ago

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli tanks and infantry battled Hamas fighters in the Gaza Strip on Sunday in a ground offensive launched after eight days of deadly air strikes failed to halt the Islamist group's rocket attacks on Israel.

Wearing night-vision goggles on their helmets and camouflage paint on their faces, Israeli soldiers entered the densely populated enclave on Saturday evening with tank columns sweeping in from four points and combat helicopters flying overhead.

In initial fighting, Israeli ground forces killed eight Gazans, five of them gunmen, bringing the Palestinian death toll since the start of an air campaign on December 27 to more than 450, Palestinian medical officials said.

Israel said 30 of its soldiers were wounded, two seriously, since the start of the ground assault and that Israeli aircraft struck more than 45 targets, including arms smuggling tunnels, weapons depots and mortar squads.

"During exchanges of fire overnight, dozens of armed Hamas operatives were hit," an Israeli military communique said.

At the United Nations, the United States thwarted an effort by Libya to persuade the Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire, diplomats said.

Israel said it called up tens of thousands of reservists and the military's chief spokesman estimated the operation in the Hamas-run territory could take "many long days."

Heavy casualties are likely to increase international pressure on Israel to halt its biggest operation in the Gaza Strip in four decades, fighting that holds significant political risks for Israeli leaders ahead of a February 10 national election.

The plight of the 1.5 million Palestinians crammed into the Gaza Strip was growing more desperate. People have taken shelter in their homes for days and humanitarian agencies warned that water, food and medical supplies were running short.

WIDESCALE OPERATION

The Israeli military said "large infantry, tank, engineering, artillery and intelligence forces" were operating throughout the Gaza Strip, backed by attacks by aircraft and warships off the Mediterranean coast.

A spokesman for Hamas's armed wing, the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, said Israeli troops faced certain death or capture. "The Zionist enemy must know his battle in Gaza is a losing one," said the spokesman, Abu Ubaida.

At least a quarter of the 453 Palestinians killed in the current conflict have been civilians, a U.N. agency said. Another 2,050 Palestinians have been wounded. A leading Palestinian rights group put the number at 40 percent.

Four Israelis have been killed by rockets that continue to pound southern Israel.

In New York, the U.N. Security Council held a special meeting to discuss the latest developments. Several council diplomats said the U.S. refusal to back the Libyan-drafted demand for an immediate truce had killed the initiative, since council statements must be passed unanimously.

The U.S. State Department said a ceasefire should take place "as soon as possible," in a statement that urged Israel to be "mindful of the potential consequences to civilians" but did not refer directly to the invasion or call for an immediate truce.

Washington, the statement said, was working toward a ceasefire that would not allow for a re-establishment of the status quo, "where Hamas can continue to launch rockets out of Gaza and to condemn the people of Gaza to a life of misery."

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the Israeli attack as "a vicious aggression."

HOME FRONT

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the aim of the ground push was to "protect the home front" from rocket attacks. He refrained in a televised address from making any threat to try to topple Gaza's Hamas government.

"It won't be easy. It won't be short," said Barak, leader of the center-left Labour party and a candidate for prime minister in an election that opinion polls predict will return right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu to power.

Major Avital Leibovich, an Israeli army spokeswoman, said the objective "is to destroy the Hamas terror infrastructure in the area of operations." Israeli commentators said the offensive was also aimed at boosting Israel's deterrence power.

Israeli troops face Hamas fighters whom the United States and Israel say have received arms and training from Iran. Hamas is believed to have about 25,000 fighters and has placed landmines and other traps in anticipation of an invasion.

An Egyptian-brokered six-month truce expired on December 19 but it had been strained by Hamas rocket strikes and Israeli military operations against the group.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, representing major powers sponsoring Middle East peace talks, planned to begin shuttling on Sunday between Israeli leaders and Palestinian leaders -- Hamas's rivals -- in the occupied West Bank.

But divisions within the European Union over the Israeli assault could buy Israel more time. France condemned the Israeli ground assault, as well as Hamas rocket fire. On Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is scheduled to go to Jerusalem.

Why Israel went to war in Gaza

2009-01-03T23:15:00.000-06:00

Why Israel went to war in Gaza | World news | The Observer

Why Israel went to war in Gaza
'Are you a target if you voted for Hamas?' Last night Israel sent its ground forces across the border into Gaza as it escalated its brutal assault on Hamas. As a large-scale invasion of the Palestinian territory appears to be getting under way, Chris McGreal reports from Jerusalem on Israel's hidden strategy to persuade the world of the justice of its cause in its battle with a bitter ideological foe

It is a war on two fronts. Months ago, as Israel prepared to unleash its latest wave of desolation against Gaza, it recognised that blasting Hamas and "the infrastructure of terror", which includes police stations, homes and mosques, was a straightforward task.

Israel also understood that a parallel operation would be required to persuade the rest of the world of the justice of its cause, even as the bodies of Palestinian women and children filled the mortuaries, and to ensure that its war was seen not in terms of occupation but of the west's struggle against terror and confrontation with Iran.

After the debacle of its 2006 invasion of Lebanon - not only a military disaster for Israel, but also a political and diplomatic one - the government in Tel Aviv spent months laying the groundwork at home and abroad for the assault on Gaza with quiet but energetic lobbying of foreign administrations and diplomats, particularly in Europe and parts of the Arab world.

A new information directorate was established to influence the media, with some success. And when the attack began just over a week ago, a tide of diplomats, lobby groups, bloggers and other supporters of Israel were unleashed to hammer home a handful of carefully crafted core messages intended to ensure that Israel was seen as the victim, even as its bombardment killed more than 430 Palestinians over the past week, at least a third of them civilians or policemen.

The unrelenting attack on Gaza, with an air strike every 20 minutes on average, has not stopped Hamas firing rockets that have killed four Israelis since the assault began, reaching deeper into the Jewish state than ever before and sending tens of thousands of people fleeing. Last night Israel escalated its action further, as its troops poured across Gaza's border, part of what appeared to be a significant ground invasion. And a diplomatic operation is already in full swing to justify the further cost in innocent lives that would almost certainly result.

Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the UN until a few months ago, was brought in by the Foreign Ministry to help lead the diplomatic and PR campaign. He said that the diplomatic and political groundwork has been under way for months.

"This was something that was planned long ahead," he said. "I was recruited by the foreign minister to coordinate Israel's efforts and I have never seen all parts of a very complex machinery - whether it is the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry, the prime minister's office, the police or the army - work in such co-ordination, being effective in sending out the message."

In briefings in Jerusalem and London, Brussels and New York, the same core messages were repeated: that Israel had no choice but to attack in response to the barrage of Hamas rockets; that the coming attack would be on "the infrastructure of terror" in Gaza and the targets principally Hamas fighters; that civilians would die, but it was because Hamas hides its fighters and weapons factories among ordinary people.

Hand in hand went a strategy to remove the issue of occupation from discussion. Gaza was freed in 2005 when the Jewish settlers and army were pulled out, the Israelis said. It could have flourished as the basis of a Palestinian state, but its inhabitants chose conflict.

Israel portrayed Hamas as part of an axis of Islamist fundamentalist evil with Iran and Hezbollah. Its actions, the Israelis said, are nothing to do with continued occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza or the Israeli military's continued killing of large numbers of Palestinians since the pullout. "Israel is part of the free world and fights extremism and terrorism. Hamas is not," the foreign minister and Kadima party leader, Tzipi Livni, said on arriving in France as part of the diplomatic offensive last week.

Earlier in the week Livni deployed the "with us or against us" rhetoric of George W Bush's war on terror. "These are the days when every individual in the region and in the world has to choose a side. And the sides have changed. No longer is it Israel on one side and the Arab world on the other," she said. "Israel chose its side the day it was established; the Jewish people chose its side during its thousands of years of existence; and the prayer for peace is the voice sounded in the synagogues."

It was a message pumped home with receptive Arab governments, such as Egypt and Jordan, which view Hamas with hostility. "Large parts of the Muslim and Arab world realise that Hamas represents a greater danger to them even than it does to Israel. Its extremism, its fundamentalism, is a great danger to them as well," said Gillerman. "We've seen the effect of that in numerous responses, in the public statements made by [Egypt's] President Mubarak and even by [Palestinian president] Mahmoud Abbas and other Arabs. This is totally unprecedented."

Indeed, the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said his government knew exactly what was coming: "The signs that Israel was determined to strike Hamas in Gaza for the past three months were clear. They practically wrote it in the sky. Unfortunately they [Hamas] served Israel the opportunity on a golden platter."

Also crucial was what was not said. Just a few months ago Livni was talking of wiping out Hamas, but that would be unpalatable to much of the outside world as a justification for the assault. So now the talk is of pressing Gaza's government to agree to a new ceasefire. Occasionally someone has got off-message. A couple of days into the assault on Gaza, Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gabriela Shalev, said it would continue for "as long as it takes to dismantle Hamas completely". Infuriated Israeli officials in Jerusalem warned her that such statements could set back the diplomatic offensive.

In the first hours of the attack, Israel repeated the same messages to the wider world. Livni and the Labour defence minister, Ehud Barak, were widely quoted on international TV. The government's national information directorate sought to focus foreign media attention on the 8,500 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel over the past eight years and the 20 civilians they have killed, rather than the punishing blockade of Gaza and the 1,700 Palestinians killed in Israeli military attacks since Jewish settlers were pulled out of Gaza three years ago.

Lobby groups, such as the British Israel Communications and Research Centre (Bicom) in London and the Israel Project in America, were mobilised. They arranged briefings, conference calls and interviews. The Israeli military posted video footage on YouTube. Israeli diplomats in New York arranged a two-hour "citizens' press conference" on Twitter for thousands of people. At the same time, Israel in effect barred foreign journalists from witnessing the results of its strategy.

Livni has suggested that Israel's assault is good for the Palestinians by helping to free them from the grip of Hamas. "She's basically trying to convince me that they're doing this for my own good," said Diana Buttu, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's legal counsel and negotiator with the Israelis over the 2005 pullout from Gaza. "I've had some Israeli friends reiterate the same thing: 'You should be happy that we're rooting out Hamas. They're a problem for you, too.' I don't need her to tell me what's good for me and what's bad for me, and I don't think carrying out a massacre is good for anybody."

And when the killing started, Israel claimed that the overwhelming majority of the 400-plus killed were Hamas fighters and the buildings destroyed part of the infrastructure of terror. But about a third of the dead were policemen. Although the police force in Gaza is run by Hamas, Buttu said Israel is misrepresenting it as a terrorist organisation.

"The police force is largely used for internal law and order, traffic, the drug trade. They weren't fighters. They hit them at a graduation ceremony. Israel wants to kill anyone associated with Hamas, but where does it stop? Are you a legitimate target if you work in the civil service? Are you a legitimate target if you voted for Hamas?" she said.

Similarly, while Israel accuses Hamas of risking civilian lives by hiding the infrastructure of terror in ordinary neighbourhoods, many of the Israeli missile targets are police stations and other public buildings that are unlikely to be built anywhere else.

Israel argues that Hamas abandoned the June ceasefire that Tel Aviv was prepared to continue. "Israel is the first one who wants the violence to end. We were not looking for this. There was no other option. The truce was violated by Hamas," said Livni.

However, others say that the truce was thrown into jeopardy in November when the Israeli military killed six Hamas gunmen in a raid on Gaza. The Palestinians noted that it was election day in the US, so most of the rest of the world did not notice what happened. Hamas responded by firing a wave of rockets into Israel. Six more Palestinians died in two other Israeli attacks in the following week.

"They were assaulting Gaza militarily, by sea and by air, all through the ceasefire," said Buttu. Neither did the killing of Palestinians stop. In the nearly three years since Hamas came to power, and before the latest assault on Gaza, Israel forces had killed about 1,300 people in Gaza and the West Bank. While a significant number of them were Hamas activists - and while hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by other Palestinians in fighting between Hamas and Fatah - there has been a disturbing number of civilian deaths.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says that one in four of the victims is aged under 18. Between June 2007 and June 2008, Israeli attacks killed 68 Palestinian children and young people in Gaza. Another dozen were killed in the West Bank.

In February, an Israeli missile killed four boys, aged eight to 14, playing football in the street in Jabalia. In April, Meyasar Abu-Me'tiq and her four children, aged one to five years old, were killed when an Israeli missile hit their house as they were having breakfast. Even during the ceasefire, Israel killed 22 people in Gaza, including two children and a woman.

Perhaps crucial to the ceasefire's collapse were the differing views of what it was supposed to achieve. Israel regarded the truce as calm in return for calm. Hamas expected Israel to lift the blockade of Gaza that the latter said was a security response to the firing of Qassam rockets.

But Israel did not end the siege that was wrecking the economy and causing desperate shortages of food, fuel and medicine. Gazans concluded that the blockade was not so much about rocket attacks as punishment for voting for Hamas.

Central to the Israeli message has been that, when it pulled out its military and Jewish settlers three years ago, Gaza was offered the opportunity to prosper. "In order to create a vision of hope, we took out our forces and settlements, but instead of Gaza being the beginning of a Palestinian state, Hamas established an extreme Islamic rule," said Livni. Israeli officials argue that Hamas, and by extension the people who elected it, was more interested in hating and killing Jews than building a country.

Palestinians see it differently. Buttu says that from the day the Israelis withdrew from Gaza, they set about ensuring that it would fail economically. "When the Israelis pulled out, we expected that the Palestinians in Gaza would at least be able to lead some sort of free life. We expected that the crossing points would be open. We didn't expect that we would have to beg to allow food in," she said.

Buttu notes that even before Hamas was elected three years ago, the Israelis were already blockading Gaza. The Palestinians had to appeal to US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, to pressure Israel to allow even a few score of trucks into Gaza each day. Israel agreed, then reneged. "This was before Hamas won the election. The whole Israeli claim is one big myth. If there wasn't already a closure policy, why did we need Rice and Wolfensohn to try to broker an agreement?" asked Buttu.

Yossi Alpher, a former official in the Mossad intelligence service and an ex-adviser on peace negotiations to the then prime minister, Ehud Barak, said the blockade of Gaza is a failed strategy that might have strengthened Hamas. "I don't think anyone can produce clear evidence that the blockade has been counterproductive, but it certainly hasn't been productive. It's very possible it's been counterproductive. It's collective punishment, humanitarian suffering. It has not caused Palestinians in Gaza to behave the way we want them to, so why do it?" he said. "I think people really believed that, if you starved Gazans, they will get Hamas to stop the attacks. It's repeating a failed policy, mindlessly."

Israel must withdraw from Gaza

2009-01-03T23:13:00.000-06:00

Editorial: Israel must withdraw from Gaza | Comment is free | The Observer

After eight days of bombing, Israeli troops have entered Gaza. The operation, which is aimed at dealing a critical blow to Hamas, has little prospect of achieving anything meaningful militarily or politically. More than 420 Palestinians and half-a-dozen Israelis have died so far. More are sure to follow.

In the last eight days, Israeli missiles have destroyed tunnels on which militants rely. They have razed police stations, homes, mosques and government buildings. They have killed Hamas leaders. But they have also brought fear and misery to a population that has suffered months of economic siege. That fear and misery will worsen.

The assault may well stop Hamas rockets flying into Ashkelon and Sderot. In exchange, Hamas will grab the opportunity of killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers. Gaza's Palestinians are clearly the bigger losers, but, tragically, Israel may also come to regret this operation.

While Hamas's offensive capacities will be blunted for a while, the likelihood, as with Hezbollah after Lebanon in 2006, is that it will quickly rebuild its military strength. Indeed, the assassinations of its leaders by Israel over the years - and the raids on its weapons workshops - did little to limit its rise to power.

Now there is the horrifying opportunity for Hamas to take hostages and use them as part of its resistance. More serious for Israel is the damage that pursuing this strategy is likely to do to its long-term international standing. Since Gordon Brown became prime minister, the British tone over Israel has shifted. Now that a ground assault has begun, opinion will harden still more.

President-elect Obama is unlikely to be pleased to be handed this toxic foreign policy crisis on his first day in office. He has enough domestic issues to deal with.

Israel must withdraw and the Arab nations in the region that must persuade Hamas to end its murderous missile attacks and observe the ceasefire. Instead of attacking and putting its citizens at risk, Israel could make this happen by lifting the siege that has only served to strengthen the Islamist group.

But the reality on the ground is that Israel has sent in troops and returned to the failed strategies of the past. A deeper and more terrible tragedy is beckoning.

Do Israel pilots feel happy killing innocent women and children?

2009-01-03T12:30:00.000-06:00

Gaza diary: Do Israel pilots feel happy killing innocent women and children? | World news | guardian.co.uk

Do Israel pilots feel happy killing innocent women and children?

A Palestinian in Gaza chronicles life under Israeli bombardment
Saturday 27 December

I go to visit friends in the Block J neighbourhood in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip. While I am in a friend's house, my phone rings. It's a friend from Gaza City, calling for a chat. Suddenly I hear the sound of an explosion at his end. At the same time I hear an explosion in Rafah too. Just outside, somewhere near. My friend says: "Fida, they are attacking nearby." I say: "They are attacking here too."

I run into the street and everybody is running, children and grown-ups, all looking to see if their relatives and friends are alive. It is the time for children to go to school for the second shift, after the first shift finishes at 11.30am.Naama is aged 13. This is what she tells me: "I was sitting in the classroom with my friends when the attack happened. We were scared and we ran out of our school. Our headmaster asked us to go home. We saw fire everywhere."

People are looking at the remains of a police station. There are still bodies under the wreckage. It is scary because the attack isn't over, and from where we are we can see an Israeli airplane attacking another police station.

At the hospital, I speak to a wounded police officer, aged 39. "We were at the police station," he said. "The Israeli planes came and suddenly the building collapsed on us. I saw four dead bodies near me. They were in pieces. Outside there were more bodies. Everyone was shouting. I lost consciousness and then found myself in hospital."

Later I am at home with my family. We've just received a phone call on our land line. It's the Israeli defence ministry, and they say that any house that has guns or weapons will be targeted next, without warning and without any announcement. Just to let you know, we don't have any weapons in our house. If we die please defend my family.

Sunday 28 December

I wake up at 7am after an Israeli F-16 attack. Our house is shaking. We all try to imagine what has happened, but we want to at least know where the attack was. It is so scary. We try to open the main door to our flat, but it's stuck shut after the attack. I have to climb out of the window to leave the house. I am shocked when I find out our neighbour's pharmacy was the target. It is just 60 metres from our house. They targeted a pharmacy. I still can't believe it.

Om Mohammed says: "They [Israeli forces] attack everywhere. They have gone crazy. The Gaza Strip is just going to die ... it's going to die. We were sleeping. Suddenly we heard a bomb. We woke up and we didn't know where to go. We couldn't see through the dust. We called to each other. We thought our house had been hit, not the street. What can I say? You saw it with your own eyes. What is our guilt? Are we terrorists? I don't carry a gun, neither does my girl.

"There's no medicine. No drinks, no water, no gas. We are suffering from hunger. They attack us. What does Israel want? Can it be worse than this? I don't think so. Would they accept this for themselves?

"Look at the children. What are they guilty of? They were sleeping at 7am. All the night they didn't sleep. This child was traumatised during the attack. Do they have rockets to attack with?"

Monday 29 December

The Israeli army is destroying the tunnels that go from Rafah into Egypt. For the past year and a half the Israeli government has intensified the economic blockade of Gaza by closing all the border crossings that allow aid and essential supplies to reach Palestinians in Gaza. This forced Palestinians to dig tunnels to Egypt to survive. From our house we can hear the explosions and the house is shaking.At night we can't go out. No one goes out. If you go out you will risk your life. You don't know where the bombs will fall. My mother is so sad. She watches me writing my reports and says: "Fida, will it make any difference?"

Before the attack started we got some food aid from the EU. It's not much, but it's enough, we're not starving. But some of our friends have nothing. My mum warns me: "Fida, don't leave the house, it's too dangerous outside." Then she goes out to share our food with the neighbours who have nothing.

Wednesday 31 December

11.40pm: a powerful air strike somewhere nearby. I was sleeping but the blast wakes me up. I see my mum looking from the window. She points at one of the refugee camps. "The attack was there," she said.

I went back to sleep – not because I don't care, but because I can't deal with it. If the attack was really aimed at one of the camps that means hundreds are going to be injured or even killed, the houses destroyed. I really can't imagine it.

Thursday 1 January

In the morning I get up early and call a friend who lives in Alshabora camp. He confirms the attack had hit there and I go to meet him.

It looks like an earthquake. Many houses have been damaged, and many people have been wounded. The people who had escaped injury were trying to clean the place up – they have nowhere else to go. But the biggest shock is when I ask about the target. It was the children's playground.

"We heard a strong explosion happen, but with all the smoke and the dust we couldn't see well, and the electricity was off," I am told by a small child.

"We saw everything fall down – the window broke on us. We went downstairs, and people were saying that the playground's been targeted. This park is not a member of Hamas, it's a park for playing. It's for civilians – so why did they attack it?," asks one 12-year-old girl who lives nearby.

The target was a civilian area – but there was no warning, not one phone call from the Israeli army to tell civilians to beware.

I visit the main hospital in Rafah. There are so many injured people, most of them children. In one ward, I meet four children aged five or six. They are in deep shock. They can't speak, they just look at you.

Only one child could say his name: "Abdel Rahman". That's all he can say. Otherwise, he just stares. He's five. His ear was wounded by shrapnel, his head is covered by bandages.

There is a 16-year-old girl also suffering from shrapnel injuries. Three of her brothers were killed; all her family were injured. She looks like a zombie and says nothing at all. Her mother is dying in the intensive care unit.

The hospital manger, Abu Youssef Alnajar, gives the statistics for 1 January: two dead – a young man aged 22 and a woman aged 33; 59 injured – 16 children, 18 women and the rest old people. Most of them had been sleeping when the bombs dropped.

I go back home and the first thing I do is take a shower. I feel really upset after what I have seen. As always I am trying to cope with the situation but sometimes it is too much to deal with.

A short message to the pilots in the Israeli F-16s: does it make you feel happy to kill Palestinian children and women? Do you feel it's your duty? Killing every child and woman, man and teenager in Gaza? I don't know what exactly you feel, what exactly you think, but please think of your mother and sister, your son and daughter.

Friday 2 January

I am in the hospital again. An ambulance crew has been called out to help an injured man somewhere near the ruins of the old Gaza airport. He's a civilian, one of the bedouin who tend their sheep in that area. Four shepherds saw an explosion and went to investigate – when they arrived at the scene there was a second bomb and they were injured. An ambulance managed to rescue three of the men. But one of their friends is still there, bleeding.

The ambulance crew are afraid to go back for him. The wounded man is just 50 metres away from the green line so they are afraid the Israeli soldiers will target them.Outside there are still planes in the air. I have just heard a big explosion on the border area.

• Fida Qishta is a freelance Palestinian television producer and writer based in Gaza's southern township of Rafah

'Critical emergency' after air strike every 20 minutes

2009-01-03T04:22:00.000-06:00

'Critical emergency' in Gaza after air strike every 20 minutes | World news | The Guardian

Much of Gaza's public infrastructure has been destroyed and the territory is in a "critical emergency" after seven days of devastating bombing with air strikes averaging one every 20 minutes, the UN said yesterday.

Israel yesterday targeted the homes of more than a dozen Hamas figures and destroyed a mosque in Gaza. A young boy was killed by an Israeli bomb east of Gaza City and three children died in the southern town of Khan Yunis. The military said it hit 35 targets, including homes, smuggling tunnels and buildings storing weapons.

Despite Israel's insistence that there was no humanitarian crisis, senior UN officials in Jerusalem said there were shortages of food, water, medical supplies and even cash.

"By any definition this is a humanitarian crisis and more," said Max Gaylard, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for the Palestinians. He said there had been on average one air strike every 20 minutes since the bombing began, intensifying at night and covering the whole Gaza Strip.

The death toll in Gaza climbed to more than 400 dead and at least 1,700 injured. The UN said it believed a quarter of the dead were civilians. Palestinian militants in Gaza continued to fire rockets into southern Israel, where four people have been killed in the week since Israel's bombing began.

Israeli officials briefly opened the Erez border crossing to allow out from Gaza about 300 Palestinians with foreign passports. Foreign journalists were still banned from entry.

Israeli tanks, troops and armoured vehicles remain in position on the border ready for a possible ground offensive, although there was no indication when that might start or how large it might be.

Robert Serry, the UN special co-ordinator for the Middle East, blamed the conflict on "the irresponsibility of Hamas rocket attacks and the excessiveness of Israel's response".

He said a ceasefire was needed to halt the violence but added: "We must create new conditions on the ground to ensure this does not happen again."

Serry said the Palestinian Authority, now run by Fatah, would have to take control of the crossings in Gaza, even though the strip is under the control of Hamas and the factions are bitter rivals. Asked if there would in future be international peacekeepers or monitors in Gaza, he said: "We have to look into possibilities like an international presence."

Gaza's sole power plant has not worked since Monday because Israel has halted deliveries of industrial diesel. Hospitals are overwhelmed and there is not enough wheat grain for UN food deliveries, UN officials said.

A cash shortage in Gaza meant the UN could not continue cash assistance to 95,000 of the very poor. It could only meet half its December staff salary payments and was reduced to bartering with flour in some instances.

[These next two paragraphs may explain much of the reason behind this massacre]

In Israel, the conflict has improved the political fortunes of Ehud Barak, the defence minister, whose Labour party has climbed in opinion polls this week to a stronger third position.

The foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, of the Kadima party, has now drawn level in the polls with Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud opposition leader, who had been a clear favourite to win February's general elections.

Israel blasts Hamas targets, diplomacy gains steam

2009-01-03T04:17:00.000-06:00

Print Story: Israel blasts Hamas targets, diplomacy gains steam - Yahoo! News

Israel blasts Hamas targets, diplomacy gains steam
By Ibrahim Barzak And Josef Federman, Associated Press Writers 43 mins ago

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israeli warplanes and gunboats blasted more than two dozen Hamas targets Saturday, including weapons storage facilities, training centers and leaders' homes as Israel's offensive against Gaza's Islamic militant rulers entered a second week.

There were tentative signs that the current phase of fighting may be nearing an end. Most of the airstrikes targeted empty buildings and abandoned sites, suggesting Israel may be running out of targets.

Ground troops massed on the border, waiting for a signal to invade Gaza, but international cease-fire efforts were also gaining momentum.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is visiting the region next week, and President George W. Bush and U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon both spoke in favor of an internationally monitored truce.

Israel launched the offensive on Dec. 27 in response to intensifying rocket fire by Hamas militants in Gaza. The operation has killed more than 430 Palestinians, including dozens of civilians, according to Palestinian and U.N. counts. Four Israelis have also been killed, and rocket attacks on southern Israel persist.

In the latest attacks, the Israeli army struck the homes of two Hamas operatives, saying the buildings were used to store weapons and plan attacks. Hamas outposts, training camps and rocket launching sites also were targeted, it said.

Early Saturday, it dropped leaflets in downtown Gaza City ordering people off the streets.

Later in the day, several airstrikes struck the city, killing a night watchman at a Gaza City school. Four people, including a midlevel Hamas commander, died of wounds sustained earlier, Gaza health officials said.

Palestinian militants fired three rockets into southern Israel, causing no injuries.

The Israeli airstrikes have badly damaged Gaza's infrastructure, knocking out power and water in many areas and raising concerns of a looming humanitarian disaster.

Israel briefly opened its border Friday to allow nearly 300 Palestinians with foreign passports to flee the besieged area. The evacuees told of crippling shortages of water, electricity and medicine.

Maxwell Gaylard, U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinians Territories, said some 2,000 people have been wounded in the past week and a "significant number" of the dead were women and children. "There is a critical emergency right now in the Gaza Strip," he said.

Israel denies there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and has increased its shipments of goods into Gaza. It says it has confined its attacks to militants while trying to prevent civilian casualties.

While ground troops remained poised to enter Gaza, Israel also has left the door open to a diplomatic solution, saying it would accept a cease-fire if it is enforced by international monitors.

This latest round of violence erupted after the expiration of a six-month cease-fire that was repeatedly marred by sporadic rocket attacks on Israel.

A call for international monitors appeared to be gaining steam.

At the United Nations, Ban urged world leaders to intensify efforts to achieve an immediate cease-fire that includes monitors to enforce the truce and possibly protect Palestinian civilians.

In Washington, Bush on Friday branded the rocket fire an "act of terror" and outlined his own condition for a cease-fire in Gaza, saying no peace deal would be acceptable without monitoring to halt the flow of smuggled weapons to terrorist groups.

"The United States is leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful cease-fire that is fully respected," Bush said in his weekly radio address.

But with time running out on the Bush presidency, the crisis in Gaza is likely to carry over to President-elect Barack Obama. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued telephone diplomacy to arrange a truce, but said she had no plans to make an emergency visit to the region.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and several Arab foreign ministers were flying to New York over the weekend to urge the U.N. Security Council to adopt an Arab draft resolution that would condemn Israel and demand a halt to its bombing campaign in Gaza.

Abbas, whose forces in Gaza were ousted by Hamas in June 2007, still claims authority over the area.

The council is expected to discuss the draft resolution on Monday. But the United States said the draft is "unacceptable" and "unbalanced" because it makes no mention of halting the Hamas rocket attacks.

US ok's Israeli Gaza ground attack

2009-01-02T18:33:00.000-06:00

Press TV Print

US ok's Israeli Gaza ground attack
Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:54:21 GMT

The US has given Israel free reign to send troops into the Gaza, insisting that a ceasefire is based on Israeli's demand for Hamas to halt rockets.

White House deputy press secretary Gordon Johndroe told reporters on Friday that they are in contact with Israeli officials and the US has asked to Israel to minimize the civilian casualties.

However, Johndroe said that "So I think any steps they are taking, whether it's from the air or on the ground or anything of that nature, are part and parcel of the same operation, those will be decisions made by the Israelis."

"Israel has a right to defend itself from these rocket attacks, and so we'll see," Johndroe said when asked about progress toward a ceasefire.

Also on Friday Amnesty International berated the US government over its "lopsided" support for Israeli attacks on Gaza and urged Washington to suspend weapons deliveries to Israel.

"Amnesty International USA is particularly dismayed at the lopsided response by the US government to the recent violence and its lackadaisical efforts to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza," the rights group said in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Since Israel unleashed its air and sea campaign six days ago, at least 65 children are among the 430 Palestinians killed, the overwhelming majority of whom are ordinary civilians and not Hamas combatants or group members and 2,250 others wounded, according to Gaza medics.

Bush: Hamas attacks on Israel an 'act of terror'

2009-01-02T17:46:00.001-06:00

Print Story: Bush: Hamas attacks on Israel an 'act of terror' - Yahoo! News

Bush: Hamas attacks on Israel an 'act of terror'
By Ben Feller, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush on Friday branded the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel an "act of terror" and outlined his own condition for a cease-fire in Gaza, saying no peace deal would be acceptable without monitoring to halt the flow of smuggled weapons to terrorist groups.

Bush chose his taped, weekly radio address to speak for the first time about one of the bloodiest Mideast clashes in decades. It began a week ago. Israeli warplanes have rained bombs on Gaza, targeting the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has traumatized southern Israel with intensifying rocket attacks.

"The United States is leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful cease-fire that is fully respected," Bush said. "Another one-way cease-fire that leads to rocket attacks on Israel is not acceptable. And promises from Hamas will not suffice — there must be monitoring mechanisms [like those that told us their were no WMDs in Iraq?!] in place to help ensure that smuggling of weapons to terrorist groups in Gaza comes to an end."

The White House released Bush's radio address a day early. It airs on Saturday morning.

More than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed in the latest offensive. The U.N. estimated Friday that a quarter of the Palestinians killed were civilians. In their waning days in power, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been working the phones with world allies to try organize a truce.

Bush offered no criticism of Israel, depicting the country's air assaults as a response to the attacks on its people. The White House will not comment on whether it views the Israeli response as proportionate or not to the scope of rockets attacks on Israel. [spineless fucks!!]

"This recent outburst of violence was instigated by Hamas — a Palestinian terrorist group supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel's destruction," Bush said. "Eighteen months ago, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a coup [is that what we're calling free elections now?!? like the Florida recount wasn't a coup?!], and since then has imported thousands of guns and rockets and mortars. Egypt brokered a cease-fire between Hamas and Israel, but Hamas routinely violated that cease-fire by launching rockets into Israel."

The president said Hamas ultimately ended the cease-fire altogether on Dec. 19 and "soon unleashed a barrage of rockets and mortars that deliberately targeted innocent Israelis — an act of terror that is opposed by the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, President (Mahmoud) Abbas."

Hamas-run Gaza has been largely isolated from the rest of the world since the Islamic militants won parliamentary elections in 2006. Then Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, expelling forces loyal to the moderate Abbas — the "coup" to which Bush referred.

Bush expressed deep concern about the humanitarian suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. U.N. officials say Gaza's 1.5 million residents face an alarming situation under constant Israeli bombardment, with hospitals overcrowded and both fuel and food supplies growing scarce.

Bush blamed Hamas.

"By spending its resources on rocket launchers instead of roads and schools, Hamas has demonstrated that it has no intention of serving the Palestinian people," Bush said. "America has helped by providing tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, and this week we contributed an additional $85 million through the United Nations [as opposed to the $3B we send to Israel]. We have consistently called on all in the region to ensure that assistance reaches those in need."

The White House has cautiously said Israel must be mindful of the toll its military strikes will have on civilians. Here, too, Bush blamed Hamas for hiding within the civilian population. "Regrettably [I think you mean 'criminally'], Palestinian civilians have been killed in recent days," he said.

International calls for a cease-fire have been growing. Increasingly, the conflict appears to be another one that President-elect Barack Obama will inherit. Rice on Friday briefed Bush on developments in Gaza but said she had no plans to make an emergency visit to the region.

Bush promised to stay engaged with U.S. partners in the Middle East and Europe and to keep Obama updated.

Inheriting Bush's blinkers

2009-01-02T14:29:00.001-06:00

Ali Abunimah: Inheriting Bush's blinkers over Gaza | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Inheriting Bush's blinkers
Obama and American liberals readily adopt positions on Israel that they would deem extremist and racist in any other context

Ali Abunimah
guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 January 2009 11.30 GMT

"I would like to ask President-elect Obama to say something please about the humanitarian crisis that is being experienced right now by the people of Gaza." Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney made her plea after disembarking from the badly damaged SS Dignity that had limped to the Lebanese port of Tyre while taking on water.

The small boat, carrying McKinney, the Green Party's recent presidential candidate, other volunteers, and several tons of donated medical supplies, had been trying to reach the coast of Gaza when it was rammed by an Israeli gunboat in international waters.

But as more than 2,400 Palestinians have been killed or injured – the majority civilians – since Israel began its savage bombardment of Gaza on 27 December, Obama has maintained his silence. "There is only one president at a time," his spokesmen tell the media. This convenient excuse has not applied, say, to Obama's detailed interventions on the economy, or his condemnation of the "coordinated attacks on innocent civilians" in Mumbai in November.

The Mumbai attacks were a clear-cut case of innocent people being slaughtered. The situation in the Middle East however is seen as more "complicated" and so polite opinion accepts Obama's silence not as the approval for Israel's actions that it certainly is, but as responsible statesmanship.

It ought not to be difficult to condemn Israel's murder of civilians and bombing of civilian infrastructure including hundreds of private homes, universities, schools, mosques, civil police stations and ministries, and the building housing the only freely-elected Arab parliament.

It ought not to be risky or disruptive to US foreign policy to say that Israel has an unconditional obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention to lift its lethal, months-old blockade preventing adequate food, fuel, surgical supplies, medications and other basic necessities from reaching Gaza.

But in the looking-glass world of American politics, Israel, with its powerful first-world army, is the victim, and Gaza – the besieged and blockaded home to 1.5 million immiserated people, half of them children and eighty percent refugees – is the aggressor against whom no cruelty is apparently too extreme.

While feigning restraint, Obama has telegraphed where he really stands; senior adviser David Axelrod told CBS on 28 December that Obama understood Israel's urge to "respond" to attacks on its citizens. Axelrod claimed that "this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks as Hamas began its shelling [and] Israel responded".

The truce Hamas had meticulously upheld was shattered when Israel attacked Gaza, killing six Palestinians, as The Guardian itself reported on 5 November. A blatant disregard for the facts, it seems, will not leave the White House with George Bush on 20 January.

Axelrod also recalled Obama's visit to Israel last July when he ignored Palestinians and visited the Israeli town of Sderot. There, Obama declared: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

This should not surprise anyone. Despite pervasive wishful thinking that Obama would abandon America's pro-Israel bias, his approach has been almost indistinguishable from the Bush administration's (as I showed in a longer analysis.

Along with Tony Blair and George Bush, Obama staunchly supported Israel's war against Lebanon in July-August 2006, where it used cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing more than 1,000 people.

Obama's comments in Sderot echoed what he said in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, in March 2007. He recalled an earlier visit to the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona near the border with Lebanon which he said reminded him of an American suburb. There, he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children at "joyful play just like my own daughters". He saw a home the Israelis told him was damaged by a Hizbullah rocket (no one had been hurt in the incident).

Obama has identified his daughters repeatedly with Israeli children, while never having uttered a word about the thousands – thousands – of Palestinian and Lebanese children killed and permanently maimed by Israeli attacks just since 2006. This allegedly post-racial president appears fully invested in the racist worldview that considers Arab lives to be worth less than those of Israelis and in which Arabs are always "terrorists".

The problem is much wider than Obama: American liberals in general see no contradiction in espousing positions supporting Israel that they would deem extremist and racist in any other context. The cream of America's allegedly "progressive" Democratic party vanguard – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Howard Berman, New York Senator Charles Schumer, among others – have all offered unequivocal support for Israel's massacres in Gaza, describing them as "self-defence".

And then there's Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state and self-styled champion of women and the working classes, who won't let anyone outbid her anti-Palestinian positions.

Democrats are not simply indifferent to Palestinians. In the recent presidential election, their efforts to win swing states like Florida often involved espousing positions dehumanising to Palestinians in particular and Arabs and Muslims in general. Many liberals know this is wrong but tolerate it silently as a price worth paying (though not to be paid by them) to see a Democrat in office.

Even those further to the left implicitly accept Israel's logic. Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, criticised Israel's attacks on Gaza as a "reckless" and "disproportionate response" to Hamas rocket attacks that he deemed "immoral". There are many others who do nothing to support nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation and colonisation, such as boycott, divestment and sanctions but who are quick to condemn any desperate Palestinian effort – no matter how ineffectual and symbolic – to resist Israel's relentless aggression.

Similarly, we can expect that the American university professors who have publicly opposed the academic boycott of Israel on grounds of protecting "academic freedom" will remain just as silent about Israel's bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza as they have about Israel's other attacks on Palestinian academic institutions.

There is no silver lining to Israel's slaughter in Gaza, but the reactions to it should at least serve as a wake-up call: when it comes to the struggle for peace and justice in Palestine, the American liberal elites who are about to assume power present as formidable an obstacle as the outgoing Bush administration and its neoconservative backers.

Civilians take brunt of 7th day of Gaza offensive

2009-01-02T14:19:00.001-06:00

Print Story: Civilians take brunt of 7th day of Gaza offensive - Yahoo! News

Civilians take brunt of 7th day of Gaza offensive
By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – The civilian death toll climbed in Israel's air offensive against the Gaza Strip on Friday and Palestinian Islamists vowed revenge for the killing of a senior Hamas leader and his family.

There was no sign of a ceasefire on the seventh day of the conflict, in which at least 425 Palestinians have been killed and 2,000 wounded, but a Palestinian official told Reuters that Egypt had begun exploratory talks with Hamas to halt the bloodshed.

The senior Palestinian official, who declined to be named and who has been close to previous talks between Egypt and Hamas, said the aim of the talks included promoting ideas that would culminate in a new truce.

Four Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinian rockets fired from Gaza, which strike southern cities and towns at random and cause property damage and panic among the local population.

A United Nations agency said the civilian death toll in Gaza was over 25 percent of the total killed in the violence. A leading Palestinian human rights group put it at 40 percent.

Of six Palestinians reported killed on Friday in more than 30 Israeli air strikes, five were civilians, local medics said.

One missile killed three Palestinian children aged between eight and 12 as they played on a street near the town of Khan Yunis in the south of the strip. One was decapitated.

"These injuries are not survivable injuries," said Madth Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor at Gaza's Shifa hospital who could not save a boy who had both feet blown off. "This is a murder. This is a child," he said.

Islamist fighters earlier fired rockets at Israel's ancient port of Ashkelon, one of which blew out windows in an apartment building. Another house took a direct hit from a long-range missile later in the day, and cars were set ablaze.

Gaza militants mourning a hardline cleric Hamas leader killed by an air strike on Thursday along with his four wives and 11 children said all options including suicide bombings were now open to "strike at Zionist interests everywhere."

A FEW ESCAPE

Israel's armored forces remained massed on the Gaza frontier in preparation for a possible ground invasion, despite international calls for a halt to the conflict. An Israeli naval vessel lying offshore fired at a greenhouse in southern Gaza.

Israeli leaders were in conference on Friday evening and media reports said they were discussing an "imminent" incursion.

The White House said on Friday that Israel must decide for itself whether to go into the Gaza Strip with ground forces, but it cautioned any actions should avoid civilian casualties and ensure the flow of humanitarian goods.

In Gaza City, a few hundred foreign passport holders boarded buses in the pre-dawn murk to quit the Strip, with the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross, their governments and Israeli compliance.

"The situation is very bad. We are afraid for our children," said Ilona Hamdiya, a woman from Moldova married to a Palestinian. "We are very grateful to our embassy."

They left behind 1.5 million Palestinians unable to escape the conflict, a city facing another day of bombs, missiles, flickering electricity, queues for bread, taped-up windows and streets littered with broken glass and debris.

"We will not rest until we destroy the Zionist entity," said Hamas leader Fathi Hammad at the funeral of Nizar Rayyan, the cleric who was killed along with his family.

The bearded Rayyan, who mentored suicide bombers and sent one of his sons on a "martyrdom" mission, was the highest ranking Hamas official to be killed in the current offensive. He had called loudly for bombings in Israeli cities.

Hamas spokesman Ismail Rudwan said that "following this crime, all options are now open including martyrdom operations to deter the aggression and to strike Zionist interests everywhere ... killing begets killing and destruction begets destruction."

PROTESTS AND CLASHES

Bracing for protests and retaliatory violence, Israel sealed off the occupied West Bank to deny entry to most Palestinians and beefed up security at checkpoints.

There were protests by Palestinians in West Bank cities. In Ramallah, Hamas supporters scuffled with the Fatah faction of Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, taunting them as collaborators. Elsewhere, protesters stoned soldiers at checkpoints and some were wounded by rubber bullets.

In the Jordanian capital, Amman, riot police fired teargas to disperse hundreds of protesters marching on the Israeli embassy, chanting: "No Jewish embassy on Arab land."

Late on Thursday, Israeli warplanes bombed the Jabalya mosque. Israeli security officials said it was a meeting place and command post for Hamas militants. It said the large number of secondary explosions after the strike indicated that rockets, missiles and other weapons had been stored there.

Nine mosques have had been hit since last Saturday.

"I will pray at home. You never know, they may bomb the mosque and destroy it on our heads," said one man buying humus from a street stand. Another was defiant: "What better than to die while kneeling before God?" he said.

Killing the Messenger: Targeting the Press in Gaza

2009-01-02T03:42:00.000-06:00

Jennifer Utz: Killing the Messenger: Targeting the Press in Gaza

Watch the broadcast media's live coverage of the current conflict in the Middle East, and you'll see correspondents doing stand-ups in Israeli cities like Jerusalem and Ashkelon. But virtually no reporters are actually on the front lines in Gaza.

That's because for nearly two months, the Israeli government has prevented foreign journalists from entering the territory.

In an open letter filed on behalf of 400 international reporters, the Tel-Aviv-based Foreign Press Association said:

"In an unprecedented restriction of press freedom, the Gaza Strip has been closed to the foreign press. As a result the world's media is unable to accurately report on events inside Gaza at this critical time."

In a reassuring turn of events, the Israeli Supreme Court today ordered the government to allow the international media into Gaza.

As a result, Israel must now allow up to 12 journalists to enter Gaza whenever it opens the Erez Crossing, the only passenger gateway into the territory.

Still, recent press freedom within Gaza is restricted and dangerous.

Parts of the strip have been declared "closed military zones," most notably of which is the Gaza strip's northern boundary with Israel, which extends two miles into Israeli territory. As a result, journalists are restricted from entering the area to report on what's happening.

A more frightening assault on press freedom is repeat behavior from Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon; Israel is once again using air strikes to target journalists.

On Sunday, the Gaza City headquarters of the Hamas-operated Al-Aqsa TV were bombed by Israeli Defense Forces.

In response, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a statement:

"Under international humanitarian law, journalists are entitled to the same protections as all civilians. We are alarmed...by the military's targeting of a media outlet. It is not permissible to target journalists even if their coverage is openly partisan."

Similarly, in the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israeli jets destroyed the five-story headquarters of Hezbollah's Al-Manar television.

During that war, Israeli forces also singled out other media infrastructure; aerial attacks on telecommunications devices killed and injured people working for the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation and Tele-Liban.

On July 22, 2006, Israeli fighter aircraft chased a convoy of Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya, and Al-Manar vehicles, and fired missiles on the road behind them, even though their cars were clearly marked 'Press' and 'TV."

As is with the current situation with Gaza, when Israel is performing air strikes, everyone is vulnerable - militants, civilians, and journalists alike.

I spoke with Ewa Jasiewicz, human rights activist and writer, and coordinator of the Free Gaza Movement, who's been in Gaza for two and a half weeks. Because of the ban on foreign journalists, she's given nearly thirty interviews in past few days, and has been asked to write stories for a number of news organizations, including the Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.

She says local journalists feel they're being targeted. She spent last night at the headquarters of the Palestinian news agency, Ramattan. Fearing the worst, they'd taken out all their windows, and shortly thereafter, a number of bomb blasts shook the building.

Jasiewicz says of Ramattan,

"They are not moving around at night. They don't have flak jackets, they don't have helmets. They're not like Reuters, CNN, or BBC. They're low-budget, but they get the best pictures, and they've been on the front lines."

With sporadic electricity, local media are having a difficult time operating to begin with. Fearing targeted air strikes, a number of local radio stations have chosen to cease operations.

Says Jasiewicz, "Journalists have said to me 'It doesn't matter if you're a journalist, paramedic...foreigner, or Palestinian. They don't care."

Rules of Engagement from Baghdad to Gaza

2009-01-02T03:31:00.000-06:00

David Bromwich: Rules of Engagement from Baghdad to Gaza

In the days before Israel's overwhelming retaliation, Hamas -- the anti-Israel terrorist sect and democratically elected majority party in Gaza -- harassed the towns bordering Gaza with missile attacks that made ordinary life impossible. It was a matter of chance that not one Israeli was killed by the missiles. Six days ago Israel launched its response: the first stage of a collective punishment which was six months in the making. Round-the-clock attacks by American-built F-16s and Apache helicopters targeted Hamas militants, and also hit the civic institutions of Gaza: a police school, an interior ministry, a president's guest house, a university. AFG Global Edition reported on December 30 that the first three days of the Israeli attacks saw 373 Palestinians killed (including 39 children) and 1720 wounded. Hamas fired into Israel more than 250 rockets and mortar shells. Four persons in Israel were killed and about two dozen wounded.

As American politicians have been careful to say, Hamas provoked the attack. But go back to the blockade of Gaza by air, land, and sea -- trace all the oppressions of the siege that after January 2006 turned this arid strip of land into a prison where fuel and electricity are non-existent and most ambulances do not run -- and cause and consequence become more complex. "Disproportion" hardly suggests the dimensions of the slaughter apparent in the unevenness of the two sets of figures above.

There is a word for the straightforward killing of enemies by a superior force where the victims are sparsely equipped and the odds one-sided. Much of the world is calling Israel's actions in Gaza a massacre. By contrast the American press has been cleansed and euphemized. "3rd Day of Bombings," said the New York Times headline on December 30, "Takes Out Interior Ministry." Takes out. The Times paid an involuntary homage to George W. Bush: "I think it's a good thing for the world that we took out Saddam Hussein." Under that phrase are half a million Iraqis killed and a country destroyed. And for Israel in Gaza?

The U.S. and Israel share many things. A form of government, it is sometimes said; a set of ideals. But much more in the past ten years the U.S. and Israel have shared a fantasy. The fantasy says that the Arabs understand only force. It says we can end terrorism by killing all the terrorists. The neighbors of the terrorists will be overawed. No new terrorists will be created. Finally, when every face on the president's fifty-two card deck is crossed out and the known composition of Hamas is dead, we can "address the social conditions" that foster terrorism. But perhaps there are no such conditions. Do the terrorists not hate for hate's sake?

You can see the shape of the fantasy most distinctly in the writings of those journalistic enablers who move into position as soon as either country starts a war that needs interpreting. "It was Israel at its best," writes Yossi Klein Halevy, a typical war broker, in a New Republic column posted on December 29. "In response to random attacks aimed at civilians, Israel launched precise attacks aimed at terrorists." Halevy does not add that the precise attacks killed almost 400 persons and that one death in every four was civilian.

Another war broker on Gaza has been David Brooks. In a column of January 29, 2006 entitled "The Long Transition," Brooks pointed out that democracy often leads to "bad choices." The people of Gaza, said Brooks, in electing the Hamas government had made a bad choice. This error he attributed to the "traumatic phase" in the gradual maturing of "a romantic, revolutionary people." It was the duty of America and Europe to teach the Palestinians to choose again until they choose right. The task was "to isolate Hamas" and devote our energies to "finding and fostering" an opposition to Hamas. The siege of Gaza, the rejection by Europe and America of the Palestine Unity Government, and the attempted insurrection in Gaza by Fatah thugs bankrolled by the same powers, might all be said to be pardoned in advance by such a salutary intent.

But a fantasy is no wilder than methods it answers for; and Israel and the U.S. now hold as common property a whole school of counterinsurgency tactics. The citizen of Baghdad who said of the walls General Petraeus built to separate the good from the bad, "This reminds me of another wall," was only saying what many Arabs must have thought when they reflected on the "surge" in Iraq and its precursor in the West Bank. Israel has most often, these past few years, been the teacher and the United States the pupil. An article by Dexter Filkins in the New York Times on December 7, 2003 reported that the rules of engagement used by the U.S. in Iraq were modeled on the Israeli rules for Gaza and the West Bank. On the other hand, what is happening now in Gaza is plainly modeled on the American "shock and awe" in Iraq; it derives indirect permission from the fact that Americans never regretted that first stage of what we did to Iraq. Also, somewhere in back of the Israeli methods are usually American equipment and an American brand name. Apache helicopters and F-16s for the missiles and the bombs, and a Caterpillar bulldozer to reduce the house to rubble.

There is one art of peace that Israel might have learned from the United States: equal rights and citizenship for all the people of the country. But this, Israel has not learned, and in the nature of its constitution it cannot learn without a radical change of self-definition. The difference ought to be a fact of some interest to the first non-white president-elect of the United States; but the response of Barack Obama to the slaughter in Gaza has been a nerveless silence. "If somebody," he said last summer, "was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that, and I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." He has left it at that, for now, and made no comment on Israel's showing this week of the scale of obliteration that lies in its power.

Obama would not in fact do everything, he would not destroy a city of innocent people. But one may note the resonance of "everything," a word that had come into his usage once before and revealingly in his AIPAC speech. There Obama said three times that he would do everything to assist Israel against a threat from a nuclear Iran. When Israel is on the minds and the Israel Lobby script is in the mouths of American politicians, every statement takes on a quality at once categorical and unreal.

We have stopped thinking for long enough. We might start again with a definition. A terrorist is not a function X, the compacted essence of evil. A terrorist is someone who kills and approves the killing of undefended civilians to achieve political ends. Thus the Israeli commander who ordered the attack on the university in Gaza was an agent of state terror. The Hamas soldier who fired the missile that killed an Israeli woman yesterday was an agent of guerrilla terror. But terrorists, too, act from motives. To suppose their only instinct is a fevered hatred of everything we are is to yield to madness. Kill them all becomes the only imaginable policy then. Kill them, or else install a dependency so sweeping and abject that not a man in Gaza mounts a bicycle, not a woman crosses a street, not a child eats a morsel of food but by permission of the Israel Defense Forces. It is hard to see what else the current actions of Israel are looking toward.

The Democratic party grandee Ann Lewis said recently (as quoted in an excellent Salon column by Glenn Greenwald): "The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel." The statement is absurd. No country ever gave another country so blind a endorsement. Such a pure identification of interests would amount to the signing away of the conscience of the nation that granted it. We cannot make our fidelity a pawn for another's injustice; and more than conscience forbids it. Prudence also does. Even in the depths of the Second World War the U.S. never said it would support every decision made by the people of Britain, nor did it say in the Cold War that it would do whatever the people of Formosa wanted, or what the people of West Germany wanted. Such a surrender of judgment, even if it were practicable, would be a curse that harms the receiver as much as the giver. To support without question the decisions of any person or any people, is to accept a standard of friendship or fealty above the standard of right and wrong. Do that, and you resign yourself to a world of injustice.

The eighteenth-century moral thinker Joseph Butler once gave us one of those sentences that are so true they earn a separate life for themselves. "Every thing," said Butler, "is what it is, and not another thing." Gaza is not Iraq then. Mumbai is not New York, and the contests against terrorists are not the War on Terror. Butler also asked once in passing: "Why might not whole communities and public bodies be seized with fits of insanity, as well as individuals?" We have seen it happen in our time. This surmise received vivid confirmation from the head of an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon who told the Haaretz reporter Meron Rappaport in a story published on December 9, 2006: "What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs."

Israel and the United States have evolved, almost behind our backs, from the countries we read about in histories to militaristic societies widely seen as oppressors by those on the wrong end of our adventures abroad. Israel has the better excuse, driven half mad by threats and wars and the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada; but a series of queasy concessions to the fanatical colonists who are sometimes miscalled "settlers" have deformed its politics from within. The U.S. may now be the country with the stronger hope, and therefore the stronger partner. Anyway one thing is sure. When an allied nation goes out of itself, in the same sense in which a person may be out of himself, the work of a friend is to say no and no again and refuse to give the self-destruction our blessing.

Special spin body gets media on message, says Israel

2009-01-02T00:29:00.000-06:00

Special spin body gets media on message, says Israel | World news | The Guardian

Israel believes its has won broad international support in the media for its actions in Gaza thanks to its PR strategy, which through a new body has for months been concerned with formulating plans and role-playing to ensure that government officials deliver a clear, unified message to the world's press.

The body, known as the National Information Directorate, was set up eight months ago following recommendations from an Israeli inquiry into the 2006 Lebanon war. Its role is to deal with hasbara - meaning, in Hebrew, "explanation", and referring variously to information, spin, and propaganda.

The directorate's chief, Yarden Vatikai, said: "The hasbara apparatus needed a body that would co-ordinate its agencies, coordinate the messages and become a platform for co-operation between all the agencies that deal with communication relations and public diplomacy."

The directorate acts across ministries and decides key messages on a daily basis. Of its core messages for the media, there has been the advice that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements with Israel; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Hamas is a terror organisation targeting Israeli civilians. "In general, we think we are succeeding in getting the message across," said Vatikai.

Israeli officials have also enjoyed a clear edge with coverage. An Israeli foreign ministry assessment of eight hours of coverage across international broadcast media reported that Israeli representatives got 58 minutes of airtime while the Palestinians got only 19 minutes. Speaking for the Israeli military, Major Avital Leibovich said: "Quite a few outlets are very favourable to Israel, namely by showing [it] suffering ... I am sure it is a result of the new co-ordination."

Speaking to the Jerusalem Post, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Gillerman said: "I don't know how long it will last but at this moment Israel has no small measure of understanding and support, and even approval, from many countries."

One of the challenges of Israel's media offensive has been to counter the disturbing images of Gaza in the conflict. "In the war of the pictures we lose, so you need to correct, explain or balance it in other ways," said Aviv Shir-On, foreign ministry deputy director-general for public affairs. "Support doesn't mean the world is standing behind us, but it does mean people understand what we are doing and why."

The hasbara directive also liaises over core messages with bodies such as friendship leagues, Jewish communities, bloggers and backers using online networks. Last week the directorate started a YouTube channel showing Israeli bombings in the Gaza strip. "New media is a new war zone within the media - we are planning to be relevant there," said Leibovich.

Finkelstein: Israel seeking Arab obeisance

2009-01-01T21:48:00.000-06:00

Press TV Print

Finkelstein: Israel seeking Arab obeisance
Fri, 02 Jan 2009 03:25:10 GMT

The following is full text interview with lecturer, author and renowned Palestine-Israel scholar Gary Norman Finkelstein in New York.

Press TV: Nearly a week of violence in Gaza. What do you make of the situation there?

Finkelstein: It is hard to make any definite judgments about the military situation. The goals of the Israeli government it seems to me are pretty clear. Number one Israel wants to reestablish what it calls its deterrence capacity. That is a technical term that the Israelis use. It basically means to restore the fear of Israel among the Arab states in the region.

After the defeat inflicted by Hezbollah and the inability of Israel to launch an attack on Iran it was almost inevitable that they would attack Hamas, because Hamas is defying the Israeli will. According to the Israeli papers, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak was planning the attack before the last ceasefire and they were just waiting for a provocation from the Palestinians.

On November 4, the Israelis broke the ceasefire with Hamas knowing full well--and if you review the Israeli papers, they say so knowing full well that when they killed six militants in Gaza the Palestinians would retaliate and then Israel would have the pretext to invade. Therefore, the first goal was to restore the fear of Israel among Arabs by inflicting a bloodbath in Gaza.

Press TV: Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that Israel has affected almost what it called the infrastructure of terrorism presumably meaning Hamas. This while apparently heavy civilian casualties have been incurred inside Gaza. How do you see the imbalance in the loss of life in Gaza? How successful do you think that Israel has been in wiping out Hamas or the resistance if you will?

Finkelstein: Well the purpose was to inflict massive casualties immediately. The Israelis, after their attack on Lebanon in 2006, realized that their error was that they did not unleash the full might of their air force in the first few days. In in the first two days of Lebanon war, they killed about 55 Lebanese and then they targeted the Dahia suburb of Beirut. After the war, they began talking about the Dahia strategy which meant to obliterate anything which went against their rule. And what you saw in the first couple of days in Gaza was the application of the Dahia strategy to commit a bloodbath and slaughter of such huge dimensions that they thought it would deter the Arabs in the future from defying Israeli rule.

Press TV: Speaking of deterrence, Hamas said that it would retaliate. How great a response do you thinK Hamas can give Israel? Could one expect something like the one Israel received from Hezbollah in 2006?

Finkelstein: I think it is impossible to predict those things. But, it is clear that Israel is faced with a dilemma. In the case of Lebanon during the first few days they apparently destroyed (Hezbollah's) long-range and medium-range missiles, but they couldn't destroy the short-range rockets being used against the Israel unless they invaded. They tried to invade, but they couldn't and the rocket attacks continued. And now they have the same problem in Gaza.

In order to end the rocket attacks they have to invade and clear all the areas where the rocket launchers are located one by one. But, if they invade there is the possibility of them being caught in a guerrilla war which they plainly cannot win in Gaza. So they are not sure at this moment how to proceed.

Press TV: Israeli foreign minister (Tzipi LIvni) also says that Israel wants to negotiate peace with what she calls moderate Palestinians. On the other hand, we see Mahmoud Abbas saying that peace talks are meaningless under the current situation wherein Israel is targeting all Palestinians, so where does that leave Israel?

Finkelstein: Well we have to be clear what Israel means by moderate Palestinians. The Hamas leadership in recent years has signaled that it is willing to negotiate a two-state settlement according to the June 1967 border and also the resolution of the refugee question. That means that Hamas has signaled to do what the international community has wanted Israel to do over the past 30 years.

Israel rejects such a two-state settlement because it wants to continue its control of the West Bank. So for Israel a moderate Palestinian means the one who rejects all the terms proposed by the international community, a Palestinian who rejects the position of Hamas. For Israel a moderate Palestinian is a Palestinian who is willing to do whatever Israel wants: is a Palestinian who is willing follow Israeli orders.

Press TV: Observers say that avceasefire is the best Israel can achieve from this. How is the war affecting Israel?

Finkelstein: It is hard to say that whether Israel is in a position for a ceasefire. If Israel accepts the ceasefire I don't think Hamas would accept it if the Gaza blockage continues. It was due to the continuation of the Gaza blockade that Hamas rejected renewal of the truce with Israel. If the blockade is not lifted it is just a slow death for the Palestinians. If Israel agrees to lift this blockade along with a ceasefire then it will in effect have given in to the conditions that it refused last week. So it's really unclear that Israel would propose a ceasefire that Hamas would accept and vice versa.

Press TV: Israel says that its war is with Hamas, but it has prevented the flow of international aid into Gaza and prevented journalists from covering what is going on there. There is a saying Persian if you cannot help then don't prevent help from others.

Finkelstein: Well we have to be clear that Israel's war is not with Hamas but with the international community, including Iran. Israel is defying the international community, including Iran on the two-state settlement.

The truth about those Hamas rockets

2009-01-01T21:04:00.000-06:00

The truth about those Hamas rockets

The truth about those Hamas rockets
By Dennis Rahkonen
Online Journal Contributing Writer

Jan 1, 2009, 01:24

Five years ago, the Bush administration lied about weapons of mass destruction to dupe us into supporting an illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq.

A few days ago, Israel trotted out only an infinitesimally more credible excuse -- the Hamas rockets case -- as justification for its own murderous shock and awe in Gaza, a long-planned campaign perniciously aimed at ousting a “regime” that came to power via popular, democratic vote.

Yes, such rockets exist, but they’re little more than slingshots against Israel’s incredible military might, and they’re used out of desperation by Palestinians who’ve never been accorded the democratic space within which to gain redress of their eminently just grievances.

Israeli apologists have presented absurd propaganda about those devices.

We’ve been asked, for instance, what would we do if rockets were being launched on our homes in New York or Texas, from Canada or Mexico?

The proper answer is that, if those two nations had been unlawfully occupied or embargoed by the United States for 60 years of relentless oppression and repression, and if all attempts at peaceful change had been forcefully prevented or scuttled by the U.S., then such attacks would be an understandable, indeed a justifiable attempt at gaining intolerably deferred liberty.

Our appropriate response wouldn’t be to bomb the hell out of the nearest Canadian or Mexican city, but to collectively look into mirrors and earnestly ask ourselves, “What have we done wrong to incur their wrath?”

And then act to correct the situation.

Conscientious Israelis acknowledge that the Hamas rockets rationale is fraudulent. For instance, Jerusalem Post writer Larry Derfner has noted, “We don’t want to see how people in Gaza are living, we block it out of our minds -- which, I suppose, is natural for a society at war, but which also keeps that war going longer than it might if we would recognize that Gaza is getting so much the worst of it.

“The [Palestinian] Kassam [rockets] have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them . . .

“This is crazy. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East, but because we still think we’re the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, or the Israelites under Pharaoh, we spend a lot more time fighting our enemies than we might if we looked at the whole picture, not just our half of it . . .”

As Gazan hospitals and morgues fill beyond capacity because of an ongoing air assault that cruelly began at precisely the hour when countless children were heading home from school, we’re expected to believe that small craters mostly in empty Israeli fields constitute this terrible episode’s chief sin.

Bugs bothered by sporadically impacting, glorified fireworks cobbled together in backyard garages are ludicrously supposed to be the primary problem, not human limbs and lives shattered by the most destructive weapons that military science can produce!

At any point during the past six decades, Israel could have had peace, simply by assenting to the great moral imperative of our time, namely the Palestinians’ right to their own, unitary, sovereign homeland.

Something which Israel continues to resist tooth and nail.

Two years ago, in Southern Lebanon, Israel engaged in similar bombings in civilian areas. Then, too, it maintained that only “terrorist” targets were being hit. As impartial observers finally ascertained the truth, clear evidence of enormous civilian carnage surfaced.

The Israeli leadership lied then, and it’s lying now.

There’s a veritable holocaust occurring in densely packed Gaza. Think Guernica, or the Warsaw Ghetto, with all the searing irony that comparison involves.

Apart from being an ethical travesty offending all decent hearts, it’s an unpardonable outrage to especially Arab/Islamic peoples around the world.

Witness the angry demonstrations in cities across the planet.

It takes no extraordinary analytical prowess to appreciate that, when the White House ridiculously blames what’s currently happening on “thugs” in Gaza, and when moderate Arab states adopt an accommodationist position pleasing the U.S. and Israel, a profound Arab/Islamic radicalization billows and swells.

New Osama bin Ladens are being born as innocents in Gaza are getting ripped to death by American-made Hellfire missiles, dispatched toward fleshly targets by Israeli pilots.

In fact, the almost certain, counterproductive outcome of Israel’s action makes us necessarily suspect that secret motives mistakenly judged by Tel Aviv to be worth the risk are actually at play.

Three possibilities spring immediately to mind:

1) Obscenely using de facto genocide to give the present Israeli government a “tough” image before upcoming national elections.

2) Roping Barack Obama into a harder pro-Israeli stance than Tel Aviv fears he’d otherwise take.

3) Creating a manipulated, intensely propagandized situation that would enable a desired Israeli attack on Iran.

Whatever the most deeply hidden reality, Israel’s gargantuan crime must be universally condemned in the strongest possible terms . . . and halted at once!

Gaza and the rise of the Fourth Reich

2009-01-01T15:51:00.000-06:00

Press TV Print

Gaza and the rise of the Fourth Reich
Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:59:01 GMT
By Hedieh Ghavidel, Press TV, Tehran

One would think that a people who have historically been on the receiving end of heartless treatment would have chosen to shun such techniques rather than to embrace them.

Ironically, Israel has become the Fourth Reich, dealing with basic human rights and dignity in a brutal and arrogant manner, much as their unexpected mentors taught.

The Nazis would be proud and yet horrified that the evil torch of their methods is being carried onward by some of the very people they sought to repress.

What happened to the Jewish people was unarguably hideous and despicable, but not less than what they are perpetrating upon the long-suffering Palestinians.

For many, the word 'Palestinian' has come to be equated with 'terrorist'. What the world forgets is that for decades after the creation of Israel, the Palestinians patiently and non-violently awaited the world to recognize them in the same manner.

A people who have virtually claimed World War II as theirs have conveniently forgotten that other countless millions died in that inhumane conflict that ultimately aimed to conquer and subjugate the entire world, to eliminate free-thinking and the right of dissent, and to slaughter like animals any individual not meeting Aryan ideals.

Many cultural atrocities and massacres have happened throughout history, and are indeed happening at this moment, but none have been given a title or have been used as a breast-beating excuse to commit the very same crimes against decency.

Excluding Israel's few but powerful allies, many countries in the world view Zionists as bullies, murderers and land-thieves.

The title of 'settlers' given to Israeli land-thieves is a very appropriate one. It is the same designation given to those in America in the 1800s who progressively murdered their way across stolen native land while claiming a manifest destiny from God in doing so.

The German philosopher Hegel once said that history teaches that history teaches us nothing. While the Berlin wall has come down, Israel puts one up, and the hypocritical governments who purport to be democracies and to advocate human rights make mild and symbolic protests while allowing crimes against humanity to continue.

When some Israeli students of conscience were conducting a protest at the illegally fenced-off road in a show of support for Palestinian rights, fully-armed Israeli soldiers stood ready at the other side of the fence with their weapons trained on protestors.

Some student hotheads, not content with a peaceful demonstration, shook the fence and threw some rocks. The soldiers responded by opening fire on them. Despite being reported and televised, this incident has somehow disappeared from the media.

When a government is willing to have its own children shot for daring to question its illegal acts, it is no longer a mystery why this government would not give a second thought to cutting off Gaza from the rest of the world, why it has no qualms about starving its inhabitants and depriving them of the basic necessities of life, why it does not flinch at massacring thousands of Palestinian innocents.

It is the cause of wonder how a tiny strip of land considered holy by many faiths can become the site of such unholiness.

Polls show that the Israeli public demands harsher military measures against Gaza and there is increased support for political parties determined to level the coastal sliver and wipe out any traces of life there.

When even the many Jewish voices raised in protest against this crime are drowned out by the roar of the less compassionate and more powerful, one cannot expect to ever see compassion from the Fourth Reich for the plight of the Palestinian nation.

Israel ordered to let international media into Gaza

2009-01-01T02:57:00.000-06:00

Israel ordered to allow international media into Gaza | World news | guardian.co.uk

Israel's supreme court today ordered the government to allow the international media into Gaza to report on the effect of the air strikes on Palestinians.

Over the past two months, foreign journalists and representatives have increasingly been restricted from entering Gaza.

Israel has closed the border completely since it began bombing the besieged Palestinian territory on Saturday.

However, the supreme court told the government it must allow up to 12 journalists to enter whenever it opens the Erez crossing, a passenger gateway, for humanitarian reasons.

The Foreign Press Association (FPA), which represents foreign journalists and began a legal battle to open the crossing to the media last month, said it had been "left with no other choice" than to accept what is a limited victory.

"The state's prohibition on journalists violates two fundamental rights – the freedom of expression and the freedom of the press," the FPA's lawyer, Gilead Sher, said.

"There are several countries in this world, such as North Korea, Zimbabwe and Burma, that ban press coverage in conflict zones. Israel is a democracy with a free liberal press and it should stay so, even in times of crisis and danger."

The government has until 10am tomorrow to respond to the court ruling as it faces growing pressure to open the crossing with increasing numbers of journalists flying in to cover the conflict.

"We want to be able to see foreign correspondents enter Gaza to report," Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said.

"It would facilitate better coverage of what's going on in Gaza. Hamas, due to its control over civil society, is able to manipulate and exploit the situation to its own benefit." For the past 18 months, Israel has imposed an increasingly tough blockade on Gaza with the stated aim of weakening Hamas's control on the territory.

In early November, it again tightened the closure, banning the international media for several days at a time.

Israel began closing the Erez crossing – through which journalists, foreign dignitaries and humanitarian aid workers walk into Gaza – when its six-month ceasefire with Hamas began unravelling after November 4.

For the first four months, each side turned a blind eye to the other's transgressions, but on November 4 Israel destroyed a tunnel, claiming Hamas was in the process of launching an attempt to kidnap a soldier.

Hamas retaliated, firing 46 rockets at neighbouring Israeli towns the following day and six more on November 6, the day Israel shut Erez to journalists, saying the rocket fire was too dangerous.

Nevertheless, it opened the crossing to journalists for several hours last Friday, the day before it began bombing Gaza.

Human Rights Investigator Richard Falk Detained, Expelled from Israel

2009-01-01T02:02:00.000-06:00

Democracy Now! | Days After Calling Israeli Blockade of Gaza "A Crime Against Humanity," UN Human Rights Investigator Richard Falk Detained, Expelled from Israel

Days After Calling Israeli Blockade of Gaza “A
Crime Against Humanity,” UN Human Rights Investigator Richard Falk
Detained, Expelled from Israel
The United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay has accused Israel of “unprecedented and deeply regrettable” treatment of UN human rights investigator Richard Falk. Falk was deported from Israel Monday after being detained at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport for twenty hours. Falk’s detention and expulsion came days after he condemned Israel’s blockade of Gaza as a “flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law” and “Crime Against Humanity.” We speak to Falk about his detention and expulsion from Israel.

Guest: Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories. He is professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University and the author of more than fifty books on war, human rights and international law, including Achieving Human Rights; Crimes of War: Iraq, with Irene Gendzier; and Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East, with Howard Friel.

AMY GOODMAN: The United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay accused Israel Tuesday of “unprecedented and deeply regrettable” treatment of UN human rights investigator Richard Falk. Falk was deported from Israel Monday after being detained at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport for twenty hours. He was appointed the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories earlier this year but was denied entry because of what Israel called his “highly politicized views.”

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yigal Palmor said Falk “does not try to advance human rights, but instead comes with his conclusions ready and those conclusions are of course extreme methodic criticism of Israel and only of Israel,” he said. Israel’s Foreign Ministry also accused Falk of “legitimizing Hamas terrorism and drawing shameful comparisons to the Holocaust.”

The professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Richard Falk, issued a statement last week titled “Gaza: Silence is not an option” that condemned Israel’s blockade of Gaza as a “flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law.” He urged the UN to invoke “the agreed norm of a responsibility to protect a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity." Falk also called for an International Criminal Court investigation of Israeli military and civilian officials for potential prosecution.

Richard Falk is now back at home in California. He joins me now on the telephone.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Falk. Talk about what happened. When did you try to get into Israel and Gaza?

RICHARD FALK: Amy, it was about three days ago, and I came with a security person and an assistant from Geneva. They had received visas ensuring them entry, which were honored when we arrived at Ben Gurion Airport, and because they received visas and knew that I was coming, we assumed there’d be no problem with my entry, because they had ample indication—in fact, formal notification—of my itinerary. So it remains strange why they didn’t either inform Geneva, where the Human Rights Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is located, or just deny them visas, which would have been a signal of their intention. So, somehow or other, it appears that they wanted this incident to occur.

And when I arrived, they questioned me first in the passport area and then led me, after long delays, from one place to another until the representative of the Ministry of Interior denied me entry and placed me in this detention facility prior to being expelled on the plane that took me back here to California.

AMY GOODMAN: And in that twenty-hour period, were they questioning you?

RICHARD FALK: No, they didn’t—oddly, again, they didn’t seem particularly interested in either exploring my views or objecting to them or doing anything substantive. They just put me in this detention facility, which is located, I think, on the periphery of the airport area and is a very coercive little experience, because I was in with five other people in a tiny room where there was barely space to stand, and it was—we were locked in this room and treated not terribly, but unpleasantly. I would put it that way. The others were there for technical infractions of immigration law of one reason or another, and most of them were waiting for lawyers. Actually, we had good camaraderie, so that was one of the sort of pleasant aspects of a generally unpleasant experience.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what your plan was in getting into Gaza and your response to the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Yigal Palmor, saying that you don’t “try to advance human rights, but instead comes with his conclusions ready and those conclusions are of course extreme methodic criticism of Israel and only of Israel" and the Israel Foreign Ministry also accusing you of “legitimizing Hamas terrorism and drawing shameful comparisons to the Holocaust.”

RICHARD FALK: Well, I think they’re all, first of all, distortions of my real views and, secondly, part of a much wider and what I would regard as insidious pattern of trying to shift the attention from their objections to the person, rather than their argument with the facts that are the basis of mine or other people’s assessment of the situation. I think I could stand very well behind the views that are contained in my report and would gladly engage in any kind of discussion of those views. But Israel has been pursuing what I call a politics of opaqueness, trying to make the realities of the occupation as obscure as possible and as speculative as possible. They’ve kept those who are knowledgeable inside Gaza from leaving to attend international conferences—Raji Sourani, for instance, the head of the Human Rights Centre, who had previously been allowed to attend international conferences and is a distinguished recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Human Rights Award. So they’ve tried to keep people in who know something about the reality of the occupation and then try to keep people out, such as myself, who could report credibly on what is happening inside, and shifting that argument then to my qualifications.

Let me come to these issues that you appropriately raised. First of all, I never compared the reality of what is going on in Gaza to the Holocaust. What I did say was that the kinds of collective punishment that are being imposed on the entire people of Gaza have a resemblance to collective punishment that was imposed by the Nazis in Germany and that if this kind of circumstance is allowed to persist, it could produce a holocaust. I never suggested that what was happening was a holocaust. Same thing with the existence of crimes against humanity. I merely tried to characterize the facts as I understood them to involve this kind of massive collective punishment of every man, woman and child, regardless of their activities, as being victimized by a set of policies summarized as a siege or blockade, where some of the effects are now very well established, such as 46 percent of Gazan children are suffering from acute anemia. Very stark reality. More than 80 percent are living under the level of poverty.

So I return to the main point. I think that my whole life has been devoted, I think, to trying to tell the truth about facts that are often unpleasant, unpleasant for me to address. I really have sought, in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict, peace and justice for both peoples and have always had that view that it was possible, desirable and necessary. And that’s the basis on which I’ve acted throughout this period as special rapporteur for the UN.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Falk, the New York Times had a piece called “UN Rights Investigator Expelled by Israel,” not exactly what I would call sympathetic to you. I just wanted to read one quote from that article. It says, Richard Falk “has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies between the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that ‘only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book.’” Your response?

RICHARD FALK: Yeah. Well, that’s part of this whole effort to shift the focus to me and away from the reality and, at the same time, to somehow paint me as some kind of conspiracy person or theorist, which is absolutely untrue. What is true is that I wrote the forward to the original book of David Griffin, a longtime friend of mine, which is the most prominent challenge to the validity of the official version of 9/11, and I continue to hold the view that the 9/11 Commission did not adequately address the difficult questions about what happened on 9/11 that he raised. But I haven’t ever and do not now endorse any kind of conspiracy theory. All I think that is true is that the American people and the world deserve a fuller and more credible investigation of those events.

AMY GOODMAN: In December of 2006, Israel blocked the South African Archbishop and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu from investigating the killing of nineteen Palestinians in Gaza. He had a UN mandate to head a fact-finding mission to Gaza, like you did, but Israeli officials failed to grant him the necessary travel visas, saying the mission, quote, “advances a biased anti-Israel agenda.”

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: We find the lack of cooperation by the Israeli government very distressing, as well as its failure to allow the mission timely passage to Israel. This is a time in our history that neither allows for indifference to the plight of those suffering nor a refusal to search for a solution to the present crisis in the region.

AMY GOODMAN: I asked the Archbishop, Archbishop Tutu, about this when I interviewed him a few weeks ago.

AMY GOODMAN: You were blocked from going into Gaza in 2006, leading a UN delegation there after the killing of a number of Palestinians.

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to be done now with the Middle East specifically, with Israel and the occupation?

ARCHBISHOP DESMOND TUTU: There’s been some very interesting moves with the outgoing prime minister suggesting that Israel has to consider very seriously the proposal of going back to the boundaries of 1967. That’s a very important initiative, if that was taken.

I think that we would have to move very quickly to lifting the embargo. The suffering is unacceptable. It’s totally unacceptable. It doesn’t promote the security of Israel or any other part of that very volatile region.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa just a few weeks ago here in New York. Of course, it was not only Tutu, not only you, Professor Falk, but news organizations writing a letter of protest to the Israeli prime minister—CNN, BBC, Reuters, New York Times, AP—for not being allowed into Gaza. What are you calling for right now, as you return home having been deported from Israel?

RICHARD FALK: Well, mainly, access for myself. I think my resignation would be giving in to Israel’s unreasonable behavior and, as I say, part of this broader pattern that Archbishop Tutu’s exclusion further confirms.

And, incidentally, I didn’t respond to your question about Hamas. That is an absolutely untrue statement. I’ve condemned the firing of rockets at civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Falk, we just have five seconds, so your final comment?

RICHARD FALK: My final comment is that it’s important for the peace of the region that the facts of this occupation are widely known.

AMY GOODMAN: We leave it there. Thank you for joining us.

Israel's onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed

2009-01-01T01:48:00.000-06:00

Israel's onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed

The US-backed attempt to bring Hamas to heel by overwhelming force is in fact more likely to boost the movement's appeal

Israel's decision to launch its devastating attack on Gaza on a Saturday was a "stroke of brilliance", the country's biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot crowed: "the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed". The daily Ma'ariv agreed: "We left them in shock and awe".

Of the ferocity of the assault on one of the most overcrowded and destitute corners of the earth, there is at least no question. In the bloodiest onslaught on blockaded Gaza since it was captured and occupied by Israel 41 years ago, at least 310 people were killed and more than a thousand reported injured in the first 48 hours alone.

As well as scores of ordinary police officers incinerated in a passing-out parade, at least 56 civilians were said by the UN to have died as Israel used American-supplied F-16s and Apache helicopters to attack a string of civilian targets it linked to Hamas, including a mosque, private homes and the Islamic university. Hamas military and political facilities were mostly deserted, while police stations in residential areas were teeming as they were pulverised.

As Israeli journalist Amos Harel wrote in Ha'aretz at the weekend, "little or no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians", as in US operations in Iraq. Among those killed in the first wave of strikes were eight teenage students waiting for a bus and four girls from the same family in Jabaliya, aged one to 12 years old.

Anyone who doubts the impact of these atrocities among Arabs and Muslims worldwide should switch on the satellite television stations that are watched avidly across the Middle East and which - unlike their western counterparts - do not habitually sanitise the barbarity meted out in the name of multiple wars on terror.

Then, having seen a child dying in her parent's arms live on TV, consider what sort of western response there would have been to an attack on Israel, or the US or Britain for that matter, which left more than 300 dead in a couple of days.

You can be certain it would be met with the most sweeping condemnation, that the US president-elect would do a great deal more than "monitor" the situation and the British prime minister go much further than simply call for "restraint" on both sides.

But that is in fact all they did do, though the British government has since joined the call for a ceasefire. There has, of course, been no western denunciation of the Israeli slaughter - such aerial destruction is, after all, routinely called in by the US and Britain in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead, Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza are held responsible for what has been visited upon them. How could any government not respond with overwhelming force to the constant firing of rockets into its territory, the Israelis demand, echoed by western governments and media.

But that is to turn reality on its head. Like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip has been - and continues to be - illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Despite the withdrawal of troops and settlements three years ago, Israel maintains complete control of the territory by sea, air and land. And since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel has punished its 1.5 million people with an inhuman blockade of essential supplies, backed by the US and the European Union.

Like any occupied people, the Palestinians have the right to resist, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But there is no right of defence for an illegal occupation - there is an obligation to withdraw comprehensively. During the last seven years, 14 Israelis have been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, while more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel with some of the most advanced US-supplied armaments in the world. And while no rockets are fired from the West Bank, 45 Palestinians have died there at Israel's hands this year alone. The issue is of course not just the vast disparity in weapons and power, but that one side is the occupier, the other the occupied.

Hamas is likewise blamed for last month's breakdown of the six-month tahdi'a, or lull. But, in a weary reprise of past ceasefires, it was in fact sunk by Israel's assassination of six Hamas fighters in Gaza on 5 November and its refusal to lift its siege of the embattled territory as expected under an Egyptian-brokered deal. The truth is that Israel and its western sponsors have set their face against an accommodation with the Palestinians' democratic choice and have instead thrown their political weight, cash and arms behind a sustained attempt to overthrow it.

The complete failure of that approach has brought us to this week's horrific pass. Israeli leaders believe they can bomb Hamas into submission with a "decisive blow" that will establish a "new security environment" - and boost their electoral fortunes in the process before Barack Obama comes to office.

But as with Israel's disastrous assault on Lebanon two years ago - or its earlier siege of Yasser Arafat's PLO in Beirut in 1982 - it is a strategy that cannot succeed. Even more than Hezbollah, Hamas's appeal among Palestinians and beyond doesn't derive from its puny infrastructure, or even its Islamist ideology, but its spirit of resistance to decades of injustice. So long as it remains standing in the face of this onslaught, its influence will only be strengthened. And if it is not with rockets, its retaliation is bound to take other forms, as Hamas's leader Khalid Mish'al made clear at the weekend.

Meanwhile, the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has been further diminished by being seen as having colluded in the Israeli assault on his own people - as has the already rock-bottom credibility of the Egyptian regime. What is now taking place in the Palestinian territories is a futile crime in which the US and its allies are deeply complicit - and unless Obama is prepared to change course, it is likely to have bitter consequences that will touch us all.

Israel accused of ramming Free Gaza Movement aid boat

2009-01-01T01:47:00.000-06:00

Israel accused of ramming Free Gaza Movement aid boat | World news | guardian.co.uk

Activists trying to bring aid to Gaza today claimed their boat had been rammed by Israeli gunboats in a "criminal attack" in international waters.

The Free Gaza Movement said its vessel, the Dignity, was intercepted by several Israeli ships as it headed to the Gaza Strip, which has been under Israeli aerial bombardment since Saturday.

One gunboat rammed the Dignity on the port bow side, causing heavy damage, although no one was hurt, the group said.

"When attacked, the Dignity was clearly in international waters, 90 miles off the coast of Gaza," the group said on its website. "The gunboats also fired their machine guns into the water in an attempt to stop the mercy ship from getting to Gaza.

"Israel thumbs its nose in the face of maritime law by attacking a human rights boat in international waters and has put all of these human rights observers at risk.

"At no time was the Dignity ever close to Israeli waters. They clearly identified themselves, and the Israeli attack was wilful and criminal."

The group said the attack took place as the Dignity carried 16 passengers and three tonnes of medical supplies at the request of doctors in Gaza.

The crew and passengers had hoped to treat some of those injured in four days of the Israeli air strikes, with hospitals in the territory overwhelmed.

The Dignity later arrived in the Lebanese port of Tyre, where it was met by cheering crowds.

Lubna Masarwa, a Free Gaza spokeswoman, said the boat had gone to Lebanon – despite Israeli navy orders that it sail to Cyprus – because of a lack of fuel.

Masarwa said the ship was "in bad shape" due to damage sustained in the collision and was taking on small amounts of water.

The Lebanese president, Michel Suleiman, ordered that the Dignity be "rescued" and welcomed back in Lebanon.

Markos Kyprianou, the Cypriot foreign minister, told public radio his country would lodge a formal protest over the incident.

He said that although the boat was neither Cypriot-owned nor Cypriot-registered, the fact that it left Cyprus and had Cypriot nationals on board accorded the government "the right to be informed and to protest".

Kyprianou said he had instructed the Cyprus embassy in Israel to lodge the protest.

The Dignity flies the flag of Gibraltar and is piloted by an English captain. Its 16 passengers include Cynthia McKinney, a former US congresswoman.

It left for Gaza from Lanarca in Cyprus yesterday. The group said journalists on board filmed the attack.

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, told Reuters there had been no shooting, although two ships had made "physical contact".

Palmor said the boat had failed to respond to Israeli naval radio contact and an Israeli vessel had "clashed with the ship". He said nobody was hurt, and the Israeli ship escorted the aid boat back to Cypriot territorial waters.

Israel declared the coastal territory a closed military zone after it launched air attacks on Hamas targets in Gaza on Saturday in response to Hamas firing rockets into Israel. Israel said the Free Gaza movement boat would not be permitted to dock in the Gaza Strip.

The Free Gaza group has made five boat deliveries of aid to Gaza since August, defying a blockade imposed by Israel when Hamas won control of the territory in June 2006.

Aid ships for the Palestinian coastal territory often stop at Cyprus before heading to Gaza, opting for the indirect route to deprive Israel of any excuse not to allow them in.

The last boat to make the trip on December 20 carried a Qatari delegation, Lebanese activists and journalists from Israel and Lebanon. Qatar has good relations with both Israel and Hamas.

More than 360 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli attacks on Gaza since Saturday. In the same period, four Israelis have died in rocket strikes from Gaza.

The UN relief and works agency, which supports Palestinian refugees and has large programmes in Gaza, said 62 civilians were dead at a conservative estimate.

The overall number of injured is thought to be as high as 1,400 although Gazan hospitals are so overcrowded and short of medicine and equipment that they are turning away all but the most seriously wounded.

Israel's 'Crime Against Humanity'

2009-01-01T01:46:00.000-06:00

Israel's 'Crime Against Humanity'
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted December 16, 2008.

Israel's siege of Gaza rivals the worst crimes carried out at the height of South African apartheid.

Israel's siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Israel's refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.

"This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality," I was told by Richard N. Veits, the former U.S. ambassador to Jordan who led a delegation from the U.S. council for the National Interest Foundation to Gaza to meet Hamas leaders this past summer. "I am almost breathless discussing this subject. It is so myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all this. The Israeli manipulation of a population in this manner is comparable to some of the crimes that took place against civilian populations fifty years ago."

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza "a crime against humanity," Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as "a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention." He has asked for "the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law."

Falk, while condemning the rocket attacks by the militant group Hamas, which he points out are also criminal violations of international law, goes on to say that "such Palestinian behavior does not legalize Israel's imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and health-threatening character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract the U.N. or international society from discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people."

"It is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that each day poses the entire 1.5 million Gazans to an unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to survive in terms of their health," Falk said when I reached him by phone in California shortly before he left for Israel. "This is an increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live." Gaza now spends 12 hours a day without power, which can be a death sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. There are few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer or cystic fibrosis medication. Hospitals have generators but often lack fuel. Medical equipment, including one of Gaza's three CT scanners, has been destroyed by power surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit visas, meaning some of those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, have died. Of the 230 Gazans estimated to have died last year because they were denied proper medical care, several spent their final hours at Israeli crossing points where they were refused entry into Israel. The statistics gathered on children—half of Gaza's population is under the age of 17—are increasingly grim. About 45 percent of children in Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit and vegetables, and 18 percent have stunted growth.

"It is macabre," Falk said. "I don't know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times." "There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances," the rapporteur added. "The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable."

The point of this Israeli siege, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel. Palestinians have launched more than 200 rockets on Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no Israeli casualties.

"This is a crime of survival," Falk said of the rocket attacks. "Israel has put the Gazans in a set of circumstances where they either have to accept whatever is imposed on them or resist in any way available to them. That is a horrible dilemma to impose upon a people. This does not alleviate the Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, for accountability for doing these acts involving rocket fire, but it also imposes some responsibility on Israel for creating these circumstances."

Israel seeks to break the will of the Palestinians to resist. The Israeli government has demonstrated little interest in diplomacy or a peaceful solution. The rapid expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank is an effort to thwart the possibility of a two-state solution by gobbling up vast tracts of Palestinian real estate. Israel also appears to want to thrust the impoverished Gaza Strip onto Egypt. There are now dozens of tunnels, the principal means for food and goods, connecting Gaza to Egypt. Israel permits the tunnels to operate, most likely as part of an effort to further cut Gaza off from Israel.

"Israel, all along, has not been prepared to enter into diplomatic process that gives the Palestinians a viable state," Falk said. "They [the Israelis] feel time is on their side. They feel they can create enough facts on the ground so people will come to the conclusion a viable state cannot emerge." The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population is one of the oldest forms of warfare. I watched the Bosnian Serbs employ the same tactic in Sarajevo. Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an Israel checkpoint does not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of family members do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who, eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a "martyr"?

The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are foolishly breeding the next generation of militants and Islamic radicals. Jihadists, enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the United States, seek to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery, even at the cost of their own lives. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel.

Update from my friend Assil:

Days After Calling Israeli Blockade of Gaza "A Crime Against Humanity," UN Human Rights Investigator Richard Falk Detained, Expelled from Israel The United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay has accused Israel of "unprecedented and deeply regrettable" treatment of UN human rights investigator Richard Falk. Falk was deported from Israel Monday after being detained at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport for twenty hours. Falk's detention and expulsion came days after he condemned Israel's blockade of Gaza as a "flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law" and "Crime Against Humanity." http://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/17/days_after_calling_israeli_blockade_of

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