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roachboy 01-07-2009 04:33 AM

what i want, powerclown, is this barbarism to end.
what i want to believe is that it will end before the real slaughter starts--which is "phase 3"--which is being debated now.

if you'd like a sense of the stuff that generates a sense of outrage about this that i do not write about here, read this.
i put the key section in bold.


Quote:

Gaza's day of carnage - 40 dead as Israelis bomb two UN schools


* Chris McGreal in Jerusalem and Hazem Balousha in Gaza City


A wounded Palestinian is carried near United Nations school in Jabalya

A wounded Palestinian is carried near a United Nations school in Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip. Photograph: STR/Reuters

Israel's assault on Gaza has exacted the bloodiest toll of civilian lives yet, when the bombing of UN schools being used as refugee centres and of housing killed more than 50 people, including an entire family of seven young children.

The UN protested at a "complete absence of accountability" for the escalating number of civilian deaths in Gaza, saying "the rule of the gun" had taken over. Doctors in Gaza said more than 40 people died, including children, in what appears to be the biggest single loss of life of the campaign when Israeli bombs hit al-Fakhora school, in Jabaliya refugee camp, while it was packed with hundreds of people who had fled the fighting.

Most of those killed were in the school playground and in the street, and the dead and injured lay in pools of blood. Pictures on Palestinian TV showed walls heavily marked by shrapnel and bloodstains, and shoes and shredded clothes scattered on the ground. Windows were blown out.

Hours before, three young men who were cousins died when the Israelis bombed Asma elementary school in Gaza City. They were among 400 people who had sought shelter there after fleeing their homes in Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza.

Abed Sultan, 20, a student, and his cousins, Rawhi and Hussein Sultan, labourers aged 22, died. Abed Sultan's father, Samir, said the bodies were so mangled that he could not tell his son from the cousins. "We came to the school when the Israelis warned us to leave," he said. "We hoped it would be safe. We were 20 in one room. We had no electricity, no blankets, no food.

"Suddenly we heard a bomb that shook the school. Windows smashed. Children started to scream. A relative came and told me one of my sons was killed. I found my son's body with his two cousins. They were cut into pieces by the shell."

The UN was particularly incensed over targeting of the schools, because Israeli forces knew they were packed with families as they had ordered them to get out of their homes with leaflet drops and loudspeakers. It said it had identified the schools as refugee centres to the Israeli military and provided GPS coordinates.

Israel accused Hamas of using civilians as cover, and said the Islamist group could stop the assault on Gaza by ending its rocket attacks on Israel.

The Palestinian authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, last night delivered an impassioned plea to the UN security council to act immediately to stop the Israeli operation, which he described as a "catastrophe" for his people. Israel has agreed a "humanitarian corridor" to allow Palestinians to get essential goods.

The rising casualty toll, more than 640 Palestinians killed since the assault began 12 days ago, gave fresh impetus to diplomatic efforts. The White House offered its first hint of concern at Israel's actions by calling on it to avoid civilian deaths. The president-elect, Barack Obama, broke his silence by saying he was "deeply concerned" about civilian casualties on both sides. He said he would have "plenty to say" about the crisis after his swearing in.

Gordon Brown said the Middle East was facing its "darkest moment yet" but hoped a ceasefire could be arranged soon.

Explaining its attack on al-Fahora school, the Israeli military claimed that a mortar was fired from the playground, and it responded with a single shell whichkilled known Hamas fighters; the resulting explosion was compounded because Hamas "booby-trapped the school". Two Hamas militants were among the dead, both part of a rocket-launching cell.

The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency, John Ging, said three shells landed at the perimeter of the school. "It was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties," he said.

He said UN staff vetted those Palestinians who sought shelter at the school. "So far we've not had violations by militants of our facilities," he said, though responding to questions he accepted there had been clashes between Hamas and the Israeli army in the area.

Earlier in the day, Ging visited Gaza's hospital and was shocked at the scale of civilian casualties. "What you have in this hospital is the consequences of political failure and the complete absence of any accountability for actions that are being taken. It's the rule of the gun now, and it has to stop," he said.

At least 12 of one family, seven children aged from one to 12, three women and two men, were killed in an air strike on their house in Gaza City. Nine others were believed trapped.

Israel continues to insist most of those killed by its forces are Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters - although its assertion it is going to extraordinary lengths to target only "terrorists" has been undermined by a tank firing on a building used by Israeli troops, killing four of them, on Monday.

Another soldier was killed yesterday as Israeli forces continued their push into Gaza City. Tanks and troops also moved on the southern town of Khan Yunis.

The invasion has yet to achieve what Israel says is its goal of stopping rocket attacks. Hamas fired more than 30 into Israel yesterday, one to within 20 miles of Tel Aviv at Gadera, wounding a baby.

The de facto Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, issued a statement from hiding, saying that the Gazans would defeat Israel. "[Israel] has failed to force the population to surrender," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009...a-israel-obama

loquitur 01-07-2009 11:16 AM

Well, I'd like the barbarism to stop, too, but I think you have the wrong barbarians, roachboy. I could write for pages about this, but let's focus on the one incident you quoted the Guardian about. That precise incident has actually been reported differently in different sources. It's one of the reasons I never get my news from only one source. (You know the Guardian's well-documented views on the whole Israel-Palestine mess, I'm sure).

Let's start with the Associated Press, and I'll boldface the appropriate sections:
Quote:

Israel shells near UN school, killing at least 30

By IBRAHIM BARZAK and STEVE WEIZMAN – 19 hours ago

GAZA CITY, Gaza (AP) — Israeli mortar shells exploded Tuesday near a U.N. school in Gaza that was sheltering hundreds of people displaced by Israel's onslaught against Hamas militants, killing at least 30 Palestinians, tearing bodies apart and staining streets with blood.

Israel's military said its shelling — the deadliest single episode since Israeli ground forces invaded Gaza Saturday — was a response to mortar fire from within the school and said Hamas militants were using civilians as cover.

Two residents of the area who spoke by telephone said they saw a small group of militants firing mortar rounds from a street near the school, where 350 people had gathered to get away from the shelling. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Majed Hamdan, an AP photographer, rushed to the scene shortly after the attacks. At the hospital, he said, many children were among the dead.

"I saw women and men — parents — slapping their faces in grief, screaming, some of them collapsed to the floor. They knew their children were dead," he said. "In the morgue, most of the killed appeared to be children. In the hospital, there wasn't enough space for the wounded."

He said there appeared to be marks on the pavement of five separate explosions in area of the school.

An Israeli defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to make the information public, said it appeared that the military used 120mm shells, among the largest mortar rounds.

* * *

An Israeli military statement said it received intelligence that the dead at the girls school included Hamas operatives, among them members of a rocket launching cell. It identified two of them as Imad Abu Askar and Hassan Abu Askar.

Two residents who spoke to an AP reporter by phone said the two brothers were known to be low-level Hamas militants. They said a group of militants — one of them said four — were firing mortar shells from near the school.

An Israeli shell targeted the men, but missed and they fled, the witnesses said, refusing to allow their names to be published because they feared for their safety. Then another three shells landed nearby, exploding among civilians, they said.

Palestinian militants have frequently fired from residential areas in the past.

Ging said the U.N. agency's staff work to prevent militants from entering the schools it has opened to shelter those at risk.

"Unfortunately tonight's incident is just another example of how Hamas operates," said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev. "This is not the first time they have exploited a U.N. facility. This is not the first time that they have deliberately used innocent civilians as human shields."

A total of 71 Palestinians were killed Tuesday — with just two confirmed as militants, health officials in Gaza said.
OK, so the neighbors were afraid to be named (for obvious reasons - Hamas has been murdering people and breaking legs to intimidate opposition during this fight), but they told reporters that there were rockets fired from right by the school, and it turns out that Israel even could name the bad guys who it took out. You have a problem with schools getting fired on? So do I. Take it up with Hamas and tell them not to use schools as assault sites. Hamas's total disregard for Palestinian life is just horrifying - as far as they are concerned, a dead baby isn't a tragedy, it's a propaganda coup.

The Israeli military has a YouTube channel with films of its operations in the current fight. One of the things you might notice if you have a look there is the preponderance of secondary explosions - meaning that there was ordnance being bombed, which then exploded. If you bomb a mosque, and then there are a series of additonal explosions from within the mosque, what does that tell you? What it tells me is that the imam of that mosque wasn't too particular about the uses to which the mosque was put. But don't take my word for it, go have a look yourself.

You can get more detail if you want to see what the Israeli military is telling the Israeli press. Take it with a grain of salt, of course - the motivation of the speaker is evident - but this should alert you to the prospect that more is going on than the house organs of the British left are willing to report. So you might find this article in the Jerusalem Post interesting:
Quote:

Two residents of the area near UN school that was shelled by the IDF on Tuesday said that they had seen a small group of terrorists firing mortar rounds from a street close to the school. The two spoke with The Associated Press by telephone on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.

* * *

The army said the school grounds were being used by terrorists to fire mortar shells at troops stationed nearby, and the soldiers responded by firing back. According to the IDF, the dead included members of the Hamas rocket cell, including senior operatives Imad Abu Askhar and Hassan Abu Askhar.

Defense officials told The Associated Press that booby-trapped bombs in the school had triggered secondary explosions that killed additional Palestinians there.

The army noted that Tuesday was not the first time Hamas had attacked Israel from within a school. The IDF released a video taken by an unmanned aerial vehicle in late 2007 showing terrorists firing mortars from right outside a school.

"Hamas has in the past fired at Israel and at troops from inside schools, [exploiting] civilians, as is proven by UAV footage," the army said.
As far as I'm concerned, if a misogynistic, eliminationist, explicitly and proudly genocidal terror group like Hamas deliberately targets civilians as a tool of its own prestige and does the targeting from civilian areas, those who make apologies for them when retaliation finally comes are complicit in the slaughter.
-----Added 7/1/2009 at 02 : 27 : 06-----
Oh, one other thing. Israel apparently learned a lesson from the 2006 Lebanon War, and that is that no matter what precautions they take there will always be people who parrot the Hizbullah/Hamas propaganda use of civilian casualites and use it as a bludgeon. So Israel no longer pays attention. It does what is militarily necessary, and damn the critics. If you go back to the sources, you'll see that something on the order of 80% of the dead people in Gaza were Hamas fighters, which for urban warfare is extraordinarily precise. (I don't know what the ratio is now; I suspect it's somewhat lower but not drastically so). Those who focus on the 20% as a reason to discredit the entire operation are saying, in effect, that Israel has no right to protect its citizens, and that all Hamas needs to do to make sure it can attack Israel with impunity is to use the local population as human shields.

I really wish this sort of fight wasn't necessary, but those who proudly advertise their genocidal intentions have made it necessary. And frankly, I take this personally. I don't have the link now - I can dig it out - but Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas who is out of danger in Syria right now, has told the press that every Jew on the planet is now a legitimate target because of Israel's war on Hamas. (So much for any distinction between Anti-Zionism and Jew-hatred/anti-semitism). That's me and my family that are now "legitimate targets," roachboy. My family has withstood one genocide in the last century and I really don't feel like having to deal with another.

roachboy 01-07-2009 11:33 AM

loquitor--nice to see you again...

first, you shouldn't confuse the perspectives that i have been developing in the thread with support of hamas.
second, i had gathered more information about this than is in the guardian article--the idf's version, which is what you post above via ap, was floated not long after the story first broke and seems to me an exercise in damage control. while it's obviously impossible for any of us to *know* what happened, i don't think that this attack and the institution of the 3 hour cease fire for humanitarian assistance to reach the civilian population is a coincidence.

i'm in the middle of a dealine-driven thing at the moment, so will for the moment refer you back to the thread above for my view of this overall situation. the narrative is think central does not preclude yours exactly, but it does undercut it in some important ways. i'll check back tonight and see if there is stuff up for discussion... but for the moment, i gotta go.

loquitur 01-07-2009 11:59 AM

I'll stipulate that neither of us really knows what happened. Neither can any reporter, by the way. The "fog of war" is well known.

What I want is a clean result. Until now, outsiders kept mixing in to prevent Israel from having a clean victory. That allowed the Hizbullahs of the world to survive to rearm and fight another day. This time it looks like Israel isn't biting, and they really shouldn't.

The "human shields" strategy works only because Westerners let it:
Quote:

One more thing, speaking of pornography -- we've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I'll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.
That's from Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, here.

Willravel 01-07-2009 12:16 PM

I've had to stay quiet on this subject because it shook me a bit. I'm not interested in jumping in, guns blazing.

The bottom line:
We need a two-state solution immediately, before this conflict escalates beyond anyone's control. Oslo was a good start, but that's history now and it's clear that without outside interference Palestine will continue to become more radical and Israel will continue to escalate their level of force. Either Israel will finally wipe out Palestine or there will be a war between Israel and other Arab countries, again. Obviously neither of these can be allowed.

We need to stop arguing about unimportant points like who started the recent attacks or what kind of illegal weapons one side is using or what the other side is chanting, and we need to start talking about peacekeepers. We need to start talking about the end of Israel ignoring the UN. We need to start talking about Palestinians being satisfied with Israel remaining in the Middle East. Most of all, we need to start talking reasonable solutions for the Jerusalem conundrum.

It's time to use our soon-to-be Secretary of State. Send Sec. State Hillary Clinton to Israel and Palestine to explain that the US is going to stop protecting Israel in the UN and is going to stop the flow of arms into Palestine, and that the introduction of foreign troops on both lands are inevitable without a change. After she lays the groundwork, Obama and Hillary can "invite" (demand) Israeli and Palestinian leadership to talks. We need to get a solid cease-fire in place and get them talking asap.

I'm no longer interested in the "if you show an ounce of objectivity towards Israel, you hate Jews" type of response. We're so far beyond that it's not even funny. I'm more than willing to drag anti-Palestinian/Israel-is-perfect simpletons kicking and screaming into reality, and I hope everyone that reads this feels the same way, but it can't end there. We have to be solution-oriented whenever the issue can be brought up. We have to demand that our government not only stop being Israel's lap-dog, but to also be solution-oriented.

Can you imagine a world without Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad or Fatah? Can you imagine the devastating blow to "radical Islam" from both the US leaving Iraq and a real shot at peace between Israel and Palestine? It's too good not to do everything we can.

loquitur 01-07-2009 12:38 PM

If I thought a two-state solution could work I'd be in favor of it. I don't think it can because I don't think the Palis want it to. Israel has already traded away or just walked away from lots of land and you see what it got for its efforts. The only solution that can work is for Egypt to take Gaza and Jordan to take the West Bank. Unfortunately, neither of them wants either misbegotten piece of land, and I can't say I blame them.
-----Added 7/1/2009 at 03 : 46 : 48-----
Will, you're a nice person who grew up in a basically nice country. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that other people's thought processes are much like yours and that we all want basically the same things. It just ain't so. What you're saying would make sense if your premise was correct but it's not. Have enough respect for the Palestinians to take them at their word. They elected Hamas as their govt knowing full well what they were getting. They consistently approve of attacks on Israeli civilians (yes, I know, the polls vary depending on how questions are worded, but ask yourself whether you would ever answer yes to a question like that, irrespective of wording). When I say that I wish the two state solution would work but I don't think it can, that's what I mean. There won't be peace when one side wants peace and the other wants victory.

roachboy 01-07-2009 01:08 PM

gee. loquitor, what gives you an inside track into what all palestinians are thinking?

among the patterns of thinking that seem to be reaching the end of their road---i hope---is this essentialist take on the israel-palestine matter. you know, there are two sides defined as identical to themselves internally--there are the israelis who all think one way---which is entirely, completely false---and then there are the palestinians who all think in exactly the opposite way---again entirely, completely false. what this does is to enable you to dodge thinking about this as political, dodge thinking about concrete policy choices and their implications.

there is an obvious, concrete, empirical historical and political trajectory that opened the space for hamas to win the elections in gaza, and another that led the israelis and bush people to refuse to recognize that election result---all of it is to blame for the resulting siege--that siege has failed to weaken hamas. what that siege has done is brutalize the civilian population in gaza. you may substitute a Hamas Bogeyman for this reality if you want, but i don't nor do i see the point of it. hamas chose to play a dangerous game with israel at the end of the last cease fire and in that they fucked up--but the reasons for that, too, are political. you know, actual choices made by discrete agents that have consequences in the world. the israelis made their choice based on a political calculation that was only secondarily about the famnous rockets you hear so much about so so much about. kadima faces elections, finds itself weakened politically and sees the end of the bush period of unconditional support for the brutal and self-defeating policies of the right rushing up against them. hamas knew it too, no doubt.

there are no heros here. there is nothing but idiocy amongst the political agents involved--the bush people, the israeli right, hamas.

but nothing---and i mean nothing---justifies what the israelis are not doing to the civilians in gaza, just as nothing---absolutely nothing---justifies the disastrous POLITICAL choice to refuse recognition of the jan 06 elections.

i think this has to be internationalized and quickly.
even the israeli right must see that everything about thier brutalize the palestinian people as a way to keep the political order weak has not worked.

i think everybody sees the endgame of this entire way of thinking except perhaps for the american supporters of the israeli right, who sit far away playing tedious little image subsitution games---o look at this anecdote about how horrible hamas is.

but that's a noin-sequitor. here, no-one is supporting hamas. but israel's approach of brutalizing the palestinians is no different and no better--except that there is an enormous assymetry of means---so to my mind, if anything it is worse. a military superpower pulverizing people who make rockets and throw fucking rocks.

it is obvious that the logic in place leads to nothing but carnage. internationalize the situation and move quickly toward a two-state solution. force israel to dismantle the existing settlements in the west bank. do it now. stop building new ones. create an international status for jerusalem. it's time to end this lunacy.

Willravel 01-07-2009 01:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580731)
If I thought a two-state solution could work I'd be in favor of it. I don't think it can because I don't think the Palis want it to. Israel has already traded away or just walked away from lots of land and you see what it got for its efforts. The only solution that can work is for Egypt to take Gaza and Jordan to take the West Bank. Unfortunately, neither of them wants either misbegotten piece of land, and I can't say I blame them.

A two-state solution is the only peaceful solution, and regardless of being bombed, invaded, and otherwise attacked for decades and decades, I know that the average Palestinian wants peace. Sure, many have become radical, wanting the end of Israel, but I honestly do not believe that this constitutes the majority of Palestinians AND I believe that this attitude would decrease substantially during a cease-fire when leadership from each government is talking peace.

We both know that radical elements thrive when conditions are bad. It stands to reason that with improved conditions and "hope" radical elements would lose at least some of their clout. Will that make them more desperate? Sure. We saw that in Lebanon in 2006 with Hezbollah. But that doesn't have to mean that they will succeed in their crusade.
Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580731)
Will, you're a nice person

:)
Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580731)
who grew up in a basically nice country. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that other people's thought processes are much like yours and that we all want basically the same things. It just ain't so. What you're saying would make sense if your premise was correct but it's not. Have enough respect for the Palestinians to take them at their word. They elected Hamas as their govt knowing full well what they were getting. They consistently approve of attacks on Israeli civilians (yes, I know, the polls vary depending on how questions are worded, but ask yourself whether you would ever answer yes to a question like that, irrespective of wording). When I say that I wish the two state solution would work but I don't think it can, that's what I mean. There won't be peace when one side wants peace and the other wants victory.

You know they elected Hamas out of desperation, though. It wasn't some calm, rational decision. It was an emotional reaction. The plan with Palestine should be to attempt to improve conditions to lessen the anger, hatred, and resentment. How do you think the Palestinians would respond to news that Israel put returning to the boundaries of 1967 on the table? And how do you think they'd respond to removing all Israeli settlements from Palestinian land? How about taking down the walls?

And let's not pretend for even a fraction of a second that Palestine wants victory and Israel wants peace. That's below a man of your intellect. If Israel wanted peace, they wouldn't use such asymmetric military responses every chance they get (compare t he death tolls, compare the death tolls of civilians). They wouldn't ignore the UN all the time (35 resolutions violated at last count). Please, please do not pretend that Israel is the innocent superpower and the Palestine is the evil terrorist aggressor. The longer people cling to that myth, the longer it will take to solve this.

mixedmedia 01-07-2009 02:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2580741)
gee. loquitor, what gives you an inside track into what all palestinians are thinking?

among the patterns of thinking that seem to be reaching the end of their road---i hope---is this essentialist take on the israel-palestine matter. you know, there are two sides defined as identical to themselves internally--there are the israelis who all think one way---which is entirely, completely false---and then there are the palestinians who all think in exactly the opposite way---again entirely, completely false. what this does is to enable you to dodge thinking about this as political, dodge thinking about concrete policy choices and their implications.

there is an obvious, concrete, empirical historical and political trajectory that opened the space for hamas to win the elections in gaza, and another that led the israelis and bush people to refuse to recognize that election result---all of it is to blame for the resulting siege--that siege has failed to weaken hamas. what that siege has done is brutalize the civilian population in gaza. you may substitute a Hamas Bogeyman for this reality if you want, but i don't nor do i see the point of it. hamas chose to play a dangerous game with israel at the end of the last cease fire and in that they fucked up--but the reasons for that, too, are political. you know, actual choices made by discrete agents that have consequences in the world. the israelis made their choice based on a political calculation that was only secondarily about the famnous rockets you hear so much about so so much about. kadima faces elections, finds itself weakened politically and sees the end of the bush period of unconditional support for the brutal and self-defeating policies of the right rushing up against them. hamas knew it too, no doubt.

there are no heros here. there is nothing but idiocy amongst the political agents involved--the bush people, the israeli right, hamas.

but nothing---and i mean nothing---justifies what the israelis are not doing to the civilians in gaza, just as nothing---absolutely nothing---justifies the disastrous POLITICAL choice to refuse recognition of the jan 06 elections.

i think this has to be internationalized and quickly.
even the israeli right must see that everything about thier brutalize the palestinian people as a way to keep the political order weak has not worked.

i think everybody sees the endgame of this entire way of thinking except perhaps for the american supporters of the israeli right, who sit far away playing tedious little image subsitution games---o look at this anecdote about how horrible hamas is.

but that's a noin-sequitor. here, no-one is supporting hamas. but israel's approach of brutalizing the palestinians is no different and no better--except that there is an enormous assymetry of means---so to my mind, if anything it is worse. a military superpower pulverizing people who make rockets and throw fucking rocks.

it is obvious that the logic in place leads to nothing but carnage. internationalize the situation and move quickly toward a two-state solution. force israel to dismantle the existing settlements in the west bank. do it now. stop building new ones. create an international status for jerusalem. it's time to end this lunacy.

I don't see how anyone can find it in themselves to see this in any other way. Any support of Israel's actions at this time I find to be reprehensible. And yes, I find the actions of all murderers to be damnable including those who murder Israelis. But any justification of what has been happening in the streets of the Gaza Strip for the last year and most particularly the last 12 days is beyond my comprehension, and is almost as distressing as the siege itself.

Slims 01-07-2009 02:23 PM

Do you guys REALLY believe Israel targeted a school just to kill civilians? Or do you think maybe they ate a few rounds and when they returned fire they hit a nearby school?

If Israel were simply trying to gun down civilians the death toll would be a couple orders of magnitude higher by now.

With regard to the school fiasco, it sounds like they were using a radar counter-battery and lobbed a few rounds at the calculated point of origin of some incoming mortars/rockets. That sort of thing isn't pinpoint accurate, and if someone was lobbing mortars from 'near' a school, they likely returned fire without the artillery crew realizing how close to a school it was.

roachboy 01-07-2009 02:32 PM

actually, slims, maybe i should have made this point more forcefully--through the fog of disinformation---i do not think it was intentional, no. when i posted the guardian article this morning, i prefaced it by saying that i thought the israelis had made a mistake--but it's the kind of mistake that's inevitable in this situation. it's just a question of time. the problem is the situation itself.

so no, i don't imagine anyone on the idf do be willing to or intentionally able to shell a school full of refugees.
mistakes happen.

but the fact is that the civilian population of gaza is trapped there. and THAT is a choice that israel made 18 months ago. and THAT is the level at which direct responsibility rebounds back to them.

the individuals of the idf are just as trapped by the idiotic logic of the politics around gaza as anyone else is.

i don't see anywhere in this thread such simplistic views of this situation that'd lead you to think anyone imagines the idf to be composed of sociopaths. they're charged with carrying out the directives of the political leadership of israel. they are responsible--along with hamas---along with the united states--directly--for this. the policies are to blame. period.

loquitur 01-07-2009 03:02 PM

roachboy, I don't claim to know what every Palestinian is thinking. All I can go by is the evidence of what the conduct of their polity has been. I also read the public opinion polls, which of course are flawed, but it's what we have.

Which leads me to ask Will how he knows the Palis elected Hamas out of desperation. It's not like radical Islamism is exactly unknown in the muslim world the past decade. It's not a fringe phenomenon. Probably not a majority or plurality one, but not fringe by any means. You are assigning motives by projection or inference, which I do understand, but that comes back to assuming that others think the way you do. They don't. Different cultures, different background, different assumptions. In the end you have to evaluate people based on their own words and actions.

I have been having some real difficulty here understanding how nice, educated, enlightened people can possibly think it's ok for the self-proclaimed genocidal murderers of Hamas to lob rockets at civilians and hide behind their own children as human shields -- but be outraged when Israel takes steps to stop it. Or if you don't think it's ok, you are silent about it when the rockets are being lobbed but vocal when Israel finally says "enough." As I said before, my family has managed to survive one genocide in the last century, and I don't want it to have to survive another one in this century, which is what is going to happen if Hamas isn't stopped.

And the Palis will be better off when Hamas is overthrown too. Or did you just gloss over the murders and leg-breaking that Hamas has been doing over the last couple of weeks to intimidate its own population? I guess that doesn't count, it's just Arabs killing and maiming other Arabs. The best thing that can happen to the Palestinians is to have the back of the Hamas monster broken for good. If, as I hope, the people here on this site are right, and the Palestinians really do want nothing more than peace, that will be their chance.

Jeffrey Goldberg had it exactly right:
Quote:

we've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I'll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people.
And so was Golda Meir exactly right:
We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.

"We can forgive you [the Arabs] for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours."

mixedmedia 01-07-2009 03:20 PM

My comments were not meant to indict the Israeli military with targeting civilians, either, but there is no doubt that there are measures being taken by the Israeli government that show an indifference to the security of Palestinian civilians. I find this to be inhumane and as a logical extension, according to my brand of logic, murderous. But I understand that such is the way of warfare, regardless of the colors that are waging it and I don't mean to sound overly critical of the Israeli government in a particular way.

roachboy 01-07-2009 03:21 PM

loquitor---if you look at the history of the occupation, hamas is a direct result of earlier israeli efforts to fragment the plo/fatah so they could then not negociate about settlements etc. by claiming that there is no-one to negociate with. the assumption was the same as informed the siege---if you prevent a political organization from governing, the people will turn against it. except that everyone knows they main reason these organizations can't govern is the colonial occupation. hamas represents a rejection of conventional politics because the occupation has been such that conventional politics don't function. what's stupid--and i put this up before---is that such a organizations are typically not prepared to actually win something like an election and would have found itself moderating in all probability had israel and the united states recognized the results of the jan 06 elections. remember hamas is also located in syria and the syrian hamas is FAR more moderate than is it's--o what do you call it exactly--not a branch--it's namesake in gaza. to my mind, that refusal is the policy blunder that set up all of this. you can post all the anecdotal stuff you want to demonstrate that you personally prefer to bracket all this and focus on what nasty fellows hamas is comprised of in gaza--but the fact remains that while i do not doubt that some of it is true even, the problem was that the israelis--again--used the discourse of terrorism to refer to hamas and that boxed in the idiots in the bush administration, who in turn supported unconditionally, as a function of their wholesale abdication of any pretense to being even interested in brokering peace in the region, the genuinely awful idea of refusing to acknowledge the elections and imposing the siege instead.

this siege has *strengthened* hamas' position and has imposed no significant challenge to it organizationally.

the pattern of oppositional groups finding themselves in a quandry if they actually win in conventional political elections (or some other process) is well known and has repeated over and over and over. just as the pattern of failure of the israeli "idea" that you can brutalize the palestinians with the result that they'll turn against their own organizations has been repeated over and over and over.

i don't understand what your motivation is in avoiding the political reality of the situation and instead imposing this simplistic overlay on it. i really don't. it doesn't enable you to do anything except rationalize away what's happening now to the civilian population of gaza. i can't seem to find it within myself to pretend it's not happening. i find doing so to be an analytic and ethical problem.

Willravel 01-07-2009 03:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580780)
Which leads me to ask Will how he knows the Palis elected Hamas out of desperation.

Palestinian media, mainly. You'd be surprised how much information is coming out of Gaza and the West Bank from independent journalists.
Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580780)
It's not like radical Islamism is exactly unknown in the muslim world the past decade. It's not a fringe phenomenon.

I'm well aware and even posted that there are radical elements within Palestine. My point was simply that the level of radicalism is directly proportional to the suffering of the common Palestinian and that your average Palestinian, if given the choice, would prefer peace.
Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580780)
Probably not a majority or plurality one, but not fringe by any means. You are assigning motives by projection or inference, which I do understand, but that comes back to assuming that others think the way you do. They don't. Different cultures, different background, different assumptions. In the end you have to evaluate people based on their own words and actions.

Aren't we both assigning intent? You seem to be suggesting that based on the evidence the motive is victory, whereas I believe, probably looking at a lot of the same evidence, that their goal is peace but that goal is colored by the fact that there is so much suffering. A fight for independence can turn into a fight to destroy when the insurgents are desperate enough. Remove the desperation, and, well you get the point.
Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580780)
I have been having some real difficulty here understanding how nice, educated, enlightened people can possibly think it's ok for the self-proclaimed genocidal murderers of Hamas to lob rockets at civilians and hide behind their own children as human shields -- but be outraged when Israel takes steps to stop it.

Hamas is a democratically elected violent extremist organization. It's not as simple as "Bad hamas! Bad!" Actually, it's not as simple as "Bad Israel! Bad!" either. I can't think of a time in my lifetime when a rocket attack has occurred that I agreed with. Palestinian militants are absolutely, positively wrong to fire missiles into Israel. No question. The Israeli government is absolutely, positively wrong to not take more effective steps to reduce collateral damage and they're absolutely, positively wrong to respond so asymmetrically. Why is it that when one is equally outraged at both Palestine and Israel, they are anti-Israel and pro-Palestine?
Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580780)
Or if you don't think it's ok, you are silent about it when the rockets are being lobbed but vocal when Israel finally says "enough." As I said before, my family has managed to survive one genocide in the last century, and I don't want it to have to survive another one in this century, which is what is going to happen if Hamas isn't stopped.

That's not what happened this time. Israel broke the cease fire on actionable intelligence in order to kill high priority targets and Palestine responded. But that's not important. Both sides have "started it" time and again. We should be concentrating on how to prevent the next "who started it" game.
Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580780)
And the Palis will be better off when Hamas is overthrown too. Or did you just gloss over the murders and leg-breaking that Hamas has been doing over the last couple of weeks to intimidate its own population? I guess that doesn't count, it's just Arabs killing and maiming other Arabs. The best thing that can happen to the Palestinians is to have the back of the Hamas monster broken for good. If, as I hope, the people here on this site are right, and the Palestinians really do want nothing more than peace, that will be their chance.

Again, I don't see anyone here with an I (heart) Hamas t-shirt on. I can't wait until Hamas is one. I also can't wait until Israel is no longer dropping 1 ton bombs that level three city blocks in a populated refugee camp just to get one man. Why ignore that half of the equation, Loq? You've certainly been clear about me ignoring Hamas, what about Israel? Surly you see that Israel is not an innocent victim. Please tell me you're not one of these people that thinks Israel can do no harm.

loquitur 01-07-2009 03:31 PM

RB: I'm well aware of the history. It's also irrelevant for current purposes. Why thugs act like thugs is not pertinent when the issue is whether someone has the right to stop the thugs from acting like thugs. The reasons for the thuggery might be relevant to what sorts of treatment the thug should get once he is immobilized, but the justice of the immobilization doesn't turn on that. I submit, respectfully, that it's your position that has the ethical issues, if the purpose is to justify thuggery. I understand explaining bad behavior. I understand attempts to understand bad behavior. Those are good things to do; they are responsible things to do. What I don't get is attempts to justify bad behavior, and complain about the efforts to stop it.

Will: I think Israel acts incredibly stupidly at times. Its governmental system is a travesty and many of its politicians are repellent. That has precisely zero to do with whether Israel has the right to shut down self-proclaimed genocidal murderers who hide behind children and seek to exterminate Israel's population. It does. When you ask whether I'm ignoring the half of the equation about whether the bombs Israel is using are too big for the objectives, what's your point? I'm not a military expert and neither are you - neither of us has even a tiny clue what is or is not a weapon big enough to effectively achieve a military goal. You're just assuming that if there is collateral damage that means the bomb was too big, which is self-evidently false. What I do know is that there have been instances in the past where Israel used smaller bombs for the precise purpose of avoiding civilian casualties, and the result was that the bad guys (the leadership of Hamas, as it happens) got away. I can try to dig up a link for that if you want; it's pretty well documented.

pig 01-07-2009 03:49 PM

This is one of the situations that brings the following to mind:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cormac McCarthy
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

As stated previously, by myself and others, I don't think it's useful to take the extreme viewpoints of a population and project that onto the entire population. I'm sure at this point the "Death to Israel" mantra is growing stronger and stronger in Palestine. I also feel fairly confident that this current action is doing nothing to decrease that sentiment, and is in fact fomenting it. If the endgame is to control the violence on behalf of the extreme Palestinian elements, I can not see that this will accomplish much. I agree with the sentiments that loquitur posted above from Golda Meir; just as I did when a similar situation obtained in Northern and Southern Ireland. I can't pretend that I know precisely how a peace can be constructed in the Jerusalem/Israel/Palestine area - and I don't mean to armchair quarterback this - but I can't see this as being productive. I can see this as an action carried about for election demographics in Israel, with tacit approval by some in Israel as a result of understandable frustration. I see a huge clusterfuck being carried out by both sides, with a problematic history. It would seem obvious that both sides would need for peaceful minds to gain strength on both sides; I do not current political strategy as empowering those elements in either society. In fact, I would guess they are being marginalized. Particularly within the Palestinian population because at the end of the day, they are without a doubt the weaker of the two groups directly involved here. At present, the best I can see is that they will continue to fight from the underdog position and the best thing Israel could do would be to deflate that position of strength for the extremist factions in Palestine. I don't see that happening here. As far as I can see, the only way the current strategy is coherent on behalf of Israel and the US is if Israel eradicates the Palestinian population, leaving behind any humanitarian or ethical considerations. If that isn't the endgame Israel is aiming for, I don't see how this will bring peace any closer. I hope I am wrong, but I can't see the strategy that ends in anything other than simply rewinding the clocks to a perpetual stasis of conflict, or decimation of the Palestinians. Am I missing something?

loquitur 01-07-2009 04:09 PM

you're not missing anything. If Israel "wins" it gets a respite at best. It's not willing to exterminate the population of Gaza.

Willravel 01-07-2009 04:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580789)
Will: I think Israel acts incredibly stupidly at times. Its governmental system is a travesty and many of its politicians are repellent. That has precisely zero to do with whether Israel has the right to shut down self-proclaimed genocidal murderers who hide behind children and seek to exterminate Israel's population. It does.

You think Israel making serious mistakes doesn't have any bearing on a conversation about peace between Israel and Palestine?
Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580789)
When you ask whether I'm ignoring the half of the equation about whether the bombs Israel is using are too big for the objectives, what's your point? I'm not a military expert and neither are you - neither of us has even a tiny clue what is or is not a weapon big enough to effectively achieve a military goal. You're just assuming that if there is collateral damage that means the bomb was too big, which is self-evidently false. What I do know is that there have been instances in the past where Israel used smaller bombs for the precise purpose of avoiding civilian casualties, and the result was that the bad guys (the leadership of Hamas, as it happens) got away. I can try to dig up a link for that if you want; it's pretty well documented.

You don't need to be a military expert to understand that each attack being a response to a previous attack is an unending cycle. You don't need to be a military expert to know that Israel has one of the most high tech militaries on the planet, mostly due to backing by the US. You certainly don't need to be a military expert to know that killing dozens of innocent people in a refugee camp to kill one man is going to earn you animosity. I've seen a missile hit one building and level just that building doing essentially no damage to any of the buildings around it. That missile was launched by Israel into Palestine. That tells me that they can reduce collateral damage, but choose not to. If the target got away, that's because the intelligence was bad, not because the attack didn't blow up enough buildings.

That particular case was just a recent example, though. The best example in recent years was the invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Hezbollah kidnaps two Israeli soldiers with the intent of trading them for Hezbollah prisoners. A symmetrical response might be to hit a Hezbollah training camp, which Israel has been known to do. Israel launched a rescue attempt which failed. What did they do next? They essentially declared war on Lebanon. There were massive air strikes on civilian targets, intentionally crippling the infrastructure of the country, a ground invasion, and a naval blockade. Over two soldiers. In response, Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel. Fatalities? Over a thousand Lebanese civilians. 44 Israeli civilians that were only fired upon after Israels air strikes and invasion. Hezbollah was wrong to kidnap the soldiers, Israel was wrong to murder over a thousand civilians and send an entire country back into the stone age. The worst part is that Israel galvanized Hezbollah support, which was dwindling before the 2006 war. Now? Hezbollah is gaining positions in government again and Lebanon is becoming more radical, which is opposite to the path they were on 3 years ago.

The insane thing is that Israel were to give up Shebaa Farms, Hezbollah would no longer have a cause.

Do you have any opinions about the settlements in the West Bank? Bulldozing Palestinian homes? How are these acts of self-defense? How are these not essentially goading Palestinians to respond?

ASU2003 01-07-2009 09:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by loquitur (Post 2580795)
you're not missing anything. If Israel "wins" it gets a respite at best. It's not willing to exterminate the population of Gaza.

I'm wondering is Israel knows that they can never win this battle? What exit strategy do they have? I read somewhere that their plan is to get Fatah back in power. But there will still be plenty of people who will want revenge for killing a family member, even if they are a militant.

powerclown 01-07-2009 11:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru (Post 2580551)
You didn't mention that the video you posted is from 2007 and is ostensibly of a school in the south of Gaza, whereas the school recently hit (the U.N. one for refugees) is in the north.

Please refrain from issuing misinformation. It isn't helpful. If you have evidence that there was indeed mortar fire coming from the school in question, then please present that instead.

Maybe start with this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/wo...07mideast.html It's a little more two-thousand-and-niney and far more geographically relevant as well.

Spectacular video, by the way. What's the source?

I was responding to a claim that the idf was lying about hamas goons launching mortars from schools. I think this video proves they weren't lying.

Mojo_PeiPei 01-07-2009 11:40 PM

Well maybe they should just do nothing then since they cannot win. Perhaps then Hamas will stop.

tisonlyi 01-08-2009 01:18 AM

Very long running, low intensity war in highly-concentrated population areas. Terrorists/freedom fighters vs State. Terrorists bomb and terrorise continuously for 30+ years.

Should the state intervene to slaughter 600+ and injure thousands in a few fleeting days?

Should you stand behind the obvious need of the state to defend its citizens?

I'm truly glad you were 100% behind the UK in its actions in Northern Ireland.

Bloody Sunday anyone? 27 deaths, a stain on the UK in perpetuity and caused one thing only: Escalation.

Terrorism IS a state-scale nuisance, you deal with it in law enforcement and political/diplomatic arenas. Always.

If you want something comparable, look at road deaths... they're so much higher per year, every year, it's not funny.

To respond to state-scale nuisance with state-scale slaughter is disgusting. To do it 6 weeks before an election in a state were the ruling parties are trailing... that's criminal.

asaris 01-08-2009 04:02 AM

Dealing with law enforcement is fine, and what I would argue for myself, when the terrorists are operating from your own territory. But whatever its reasons may have been, Israel withdrew from Gaza; it's Hamas' territory, not Israel's. So when Hamas is unable or unwilling to stop the attacks on Israel, or complicit in the attacks, law enforcement isn't really an option for Israel. The UKs problem was one in its own territory, Northern Ireland.

(And yes Roachboy, nation states are becoming obsolete. But I don't think they're obsolete yet, or will ever become entirely such as long as people tend to think through that lens. So it's not a mistake to analyze a solution in terms of nation-states; the perception of the participants that they are part of such objects makes them real.)

tisonlyi 01-08-2009 04:32 AM

Sorry, Israel bares responsibility for the governance of the territories.

Even when the _ground based_ military moved out, Israel still held sway in the air and the sea... Keeping functions like the population registry for itself. It is the dominant power, it bares responsibility in very much the same way as the UK.

Israel, to all intents and purposes, 'owns' the territories - whether they should or not is another matter - and systematically escalates 'The Troubles' rather than dealing with them in a semi-rational manner.
-----Added 8/1/2009 at 07 : 32 : 50-----
B'Tselem - Israel's responsibility toward residents of the Gaza Strip

pig 01-08-2009 04:49 AM

Hmmm...this is interesting

"Gaza War Role Is Political Lift for Ex-Premier"...

NYT on Election Implications   click to show 

roachboy 01-08-2009 05:12 AM

asaris---agreed on the nation-state matter--i haven't brought that question into this thread, though, because it is shaped by other dynamics. this is a nationalist conflict. this is a demonstration of why nationalism is a pathology.

where it impacts on this situation in gaza is at a remove--i disagree entirely with loquitor's statement above that the past does not matter. this present is entirely a function of the past, it is a result of thinking in terms shaped by it and represents the extreme difficulty of breaking with the past. i don't see the logic of winning and losing as relevant here--but the logic of the past is built around that. i don't see anyone winning anything here.

what i do see from the folk who support the israeli action is a whole lot of denial: denial of the post 67 reality, which you can see in the analogies to individuals (if someone attacked my sister...)----which erases both the fact of occupation, it's trajectories, it's implications AND the radical asymtery of the conflict itself--a regional military superpower uses its military capabilities against a non-state paramilitary the edges of which blur into a civilian population that is trapped in place by a siege---in a broader context shaped by 40 years of colonial occupation in the context of which the primary strategy has been to keep the palestinian population fragmented politically and subject more generally. none of the logics internal to occupation ave produced the stated objectives---pulverizing the plo did not produce more peace--it produced hamas---claims to want peace have been undermined by the settlement program, which continues in the west bank to be expanded, despite, well, everything. the logic of this history is such that even gestures that could and should have opened onto something else like the pullout from gaza have produced nothing like the stated objectives.

the problem is the entire logic of occupation.

within that, you have the ideological limitations that follow from viewing this history through the viewpoint of the israeli right--and in this thread every last one of the posts which support israel's action in gaza reproduce that logic---without even qualifying it, without situating it--as if the right and israel as a whole are identical--which is nonsense---as if the right represents therefore the only perspective---so you are either for israel so defined or you are for hamas---the ideology itself prevents more complicated thinking, prevents consideration of any alternative but the existing alternative. us/them, win/lose---40 years of this have produced nothing but death, suffering, instability--and more death, more suffering, more instability is being produced now---the effect of conflating the viewpoint of the israeli right with israel as a whole is, even in this thread is to generate the illusion that nothing else is possible. what's startling is that this logic is not understood as replicating the problem that has resulted in decisions like the 06 refusal to recognize the gaza election results. it is that logic itself which has created this situation, which is shaping it, which will do nothing but create more such situations.

the americans have long hung their hat on this same logic, for the same reasons---i think the calculation was that israel could "win" following on the rightwing way of viewing the situation--and policy has been framed by this same conflation--that the logic espoused by likud, particularly when in coalition with the extreme right, that represents israel as a whole. this cold war relic has made it difficult for the americans to actually change course: it has compromised their relation to any peace process. the americans threw the dice in this respect and will find themselves losing face if the situation between israel and palestine is internationalized---which i think it must be at this point. so an internationalization of this conflict will be a first, obvious indication of the decline of american hegemony, such as it has been---and so i would not be surprised to find the next administration opposed to this direction---but i see no way out.

there are alternative logics within israel--thousands upon thousands of folk have worked to build other types of community, to link palestinians and israelis through local programs--the political viewpoint of the israeli left offers another way of thinking about the conflict, one relatively devoid of racism, one relatively devoid of this asinine idea that this is a conflict between religions or that concessions in the context of colonialism represent a threat to israel as a state.

the existence of israel is not at stake. israel is a fact. that is why thinking about gaza in the longer-term context of post 67 history is far more useful than is thinking about it in terms of a history that runs back to 1947--it is the paranoid and useless claim that israel's existence is threatened that drops out, and it is that paranoid and useless claim that underpins the marketing of rightwing israeli political views in the united states as if they represented the whole of israel, the only option, the only way. if you assume that rightwing politics are the only option, and buy the line that the existence of israel is at stake, to abandon or question rightwing policies is then to place the existence of israel at peril. this circular thinking benefits only the right. no-one else, anywhere.

even in the states, there are alternatives--it is entirely possible to gather information about what has been happening on the ground in the west bank and gaza. it is entirely possible to read descriptions from israelis and palestinians of the facts about occupation, the facts about settlements, the facts about responsibility. it has been entirely possible to find out quite alot about what 18 months of siege has meant for gaza.

the fundamental choice that separates folk who support this action and those who do not is that the folk who support it seem unable or unwilling to look at this reality on the ground. the reason i keep pointing to the democracy now transcript i posted earlier is that this distinction--knowing what's been happening as over against operating with a reductive counter-narrative that references the same place names without knowing anything about them, that substitutes rightwing mythology for the grain of information--that relation repeats in it.



there should be an immediate cease fire in gaza monitored by an international peacekeeping force. while the quartet is far from perfect, it's initiatives should be placed at the center of a new peace process--which presupposes that the americans get out of the fucking way and start acting in good faith--which they have not done. by that i mean the obama administration is in a position to see the non-policies toward the israli right enacted (if that's the word) by the bush people as yet another dimension of conservative failure and to abandon them--and those policies are the logical extension of american policy toward israel since 1967, so in abandoning them, it would break with this horrific logic that has lead to nothing but violence and death on all sides.

===========================

today's gaza casualty count:

edit: 707 killed, over 3100 injured.

there are conflicting reports about the adequacy of medial supplies, the consistency of electricity etc,.
the situation remains most dire for the population of gaza.

percy 01-08-2009 10:44 AM

The UN is now pulling out it's humanitarian aid since the IDF fired on a UN convey twice killing 2 UN workers. The UN gave their co-ordinates but were fired on anyway. I guess the big UN letters on their conveys translates into human shield or Palestinian sympathizer in Hebrew.

roachboy 01-08-2009 12:34 PM

i put this up to reflect something of the day's devolution in gaza.
i don't have time to say much at the moment, but will come back to this later.
feel free to develop your own interpretation.

Quote:

Red Cross criticises Israel for blocking access to Gaza injured
• Israeli officials in Egypt for talks as Gaza death toll tops 700
• UN suspends aid shipments after truck driver is killed

* Mark Tran


Israel today came under fierce criticism from humanitarian groups for delaying access to the injured during its offensive in Gaza as fresh fighting killed at least 11 people, taking the death toll over 700.

The unusually strong condemnation coincided with a UN announcement that it was suspending its operations in the territory in response to what it said were Israeli attacks.

The International Committee of the Red Cross accused Israel of "unacceptable" delays in letting rescue workers reach three homes in Gaza City that had been hit by shelling.

The group said the Israeli army refused rescuers permission to reach the site in the Zaytun neighbourhood for four days. Once Red Cross teams reached the area yesterday, they found four small children next to their dead mothers at one home. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all, there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses.

In another house, a rescue team found 15 survivors, including several wounded. In yet another home, rescuers found three bodies. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position nearby ordered the rescue team to leave the area, which it refused to do.

"This is a shocking incident," said Pierre Wettach, the Red Cross's head for the region. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded."

The ICRC said the children and wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart because Israeli forces had erected large earth walls, making it impossible to bring ambulances into the neighbourhood. The Red Cross said it brought out 18 wounded and 12 others who were extremely exhausted, as well as two bodies.

Diplomatic efforts continued yesterday, with senior Israeli officials travelling to Cairo for Egyptian-brokered talks on a proposed ceasefire, but Hamas spokesmen reiterated that they have major reservations about the plan.

Since yesterday , Israel has observed a daily, three-hour halt in operations to allow humanitarian evacuations and aid deliveries throughout Gaza, but aid groups said such lulls were insufficient to alleviate the suffering of civilians trapped by almost two weeks of fighting.

In its statement, the ICRC demanded that the Israeli military grant it and ambulances safe passage and access immediately to search for any other wounded. The ICRC has still not received confirmation from the Israeli authorities that this will be allowed.

Other groups such as Médecins Sans Frontières have also criticised Israel for blocking access to people injured during the crisis. Jessica Pourraz, a field coordinator for the group, yesterday urged Israel to respect the "humanitarian space" and allow access to those in need of medical help.

Israel has also come under strong criticism from the UN, which said it was halting all aid shipments into Gaza, citing attacks on UN staff and buildings.

The announcement came shortly after the driver of a UN truck was shot and killed by tank fire near an Israeli border as he was about to pick up an aid shipment. The UN said the delivery had been coordinated with Israel and that the vehicle carried a UN flag and insignia. Earlier this week, at least 40 people were killed when two UN schools were hit by Israeli gunfire.

As the conflct continued, Israel today for the first time came under rocket fire from Lebanon on its northern border. At least three Katyusha rockets were fired from southern Lebanon, landing near the town of Nahariya and injuring two people. The Israeli military fired back at the point from which the rockets were launched.

A minister in the Lebanese cabinet denied that Hezbollah was responsible, amid fears that the conflict in Gaza could spread. Two years ago, Israel fought a month-long war in Lebanon that claimed hundreds of lives.

The Lebanese president, Fuad Saniora, condemned the rocket fire, saying it did not serve Lebanese, Palestinian or Arab interests and that Lebanese authorities were cooperating with UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon in investigating the incident.

Radical Palestinian factions have a presence in Lebanon, and the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine previously warned it could open other fronts against Israel if the attack on Gaza continued.

The exchanges came as Israeli air strikes destroyed several houses in the town of Rafah, on Gaza's southern border, today after what Palestinians said was one of the heaviest nights of bombing since the conflict began 13 days ago.

Intense artillery strikes and waves of aerial bombardment were reported across the Gaza Strip. Israeli tanks were seen moving in southern Gaza and leaflets were dropped near the border with Egypt, warning residents to leave the area "because Hamas uses your houses to hide and smuggle military weapons". Around 5,000 Palestinians fled their homes and took refuge in two UN schools that had been set up as shelters.

Unwra, the UN relief agency that works with Palestinian refugees, said it had suspended operations in Gaza because of the growing risk. "Unwra decided to suspend all its operations in the Gaza Strip because of the increasing hostile actions against its premises and personnel," said Adnan Abu Hasna, a Gaza-based spokesman for the organisation. He did not say how long the suspension would last. About 40 people died when Israeli shells hit a UN school in Jabaliya, Gaza, on Tuesday.

As the negotiations continued, the death toll among Palestinians rose to around 700, with around 3,000 injured. Palestinian health officials were reported as saying that around one-third of the dead were civilians, with 219 children and 89 women killed. Ten Israelis, three of them civilians, have died.

Heavy fighting was reported near Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza, and in Jabaliya, to the north, earlier today . At least one person was killed and 10 injured.

Despite days of intensive Israeli attacks, Palestinian militants were still able to fire rockets, hitting the city of Be'er Sheva overnight on Wednesday and Ashkelon and Ashdod this morning .

The Israeli military said today it had captured 120 suspected Hamas fighters and had bombed the houses of two Hamas militants, in Rafah and Khan Yunis, overnight.

A total of around 60 sites were hit in the strikes, including what the military said was a mosque used to store weapons, 15 smuggling tunnels in the south, several rocket-launching areas and other buildings storing weapons. It said several gunmen were also hit.

The UN security council has yet to reach an agreement on a ceasefire resolution, although the US has supported an initial deal outlined by France and Egypt.

Although the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said both Israel and the Palestinian Authority – which is based in the occupied West Bank and is run by Hamas's rival, Fatah – had accepted the deal, Israel said there was agreement on broad principles but there had yet to be an agreed plan for practical action.

Israel wants Hamas to stop all rockets being fired into southern Israel and has called for an international arms embargo on the Islamist movement. Hamas, which did not seem to be part of the French deal, wants an end to Israel's months-long economic blockade of Gaza.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, who was at the UN in New York, said: "I have seen the first glimmerings of the possibility of a ceasefire … it's far too early to say we can get a breakthrough."

Yesterday the Israeli cabinet agreed to continue with the fighting at the same time as it considered the ceasefire proposals.

Military planners have prepared for even more intense operations in Gaza in which Israeli soldiers would push deep into the crowded urban areas of the Strip to attack Hamas gunmen.

Thousands of Israeli reservists had been called up and would be ready by Friday, Israeli defence officials said.
Red Cross criticises Israel for blocking access to Gaza injured | World news | guardian.co.uk

Sun Tzu 01-08-2009 01:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown (Post 2580523)



Is it really a lie, or do you just want to believe everything you read critical of Israel?


They obviously had the sites on them, I wonder why they watched them launch 3 rounds and didnt fire on them. It even looks as though they let them go. Hmm. . .

roachboy 01-08-2009 05:09 PM

on tuesday, antonio guterres from the un high commission on refugees pointed out that gaza is the only conflict that is happening anywhere on earth from which the civilian population is not allowed to flee.

the text of the statement is here, in french:
UNHCR | Gaza : « Le seul conflit au monde où les personnes n'ont même pas la possibilité de fuir », a déclaré António Guterres

he demanded, in the way that one does in such situations, that the borders to gaza be opened on all sides to allow the civilian population to escape from it.

strangely, this did not seem to get a whole lot of press.
maybe because the fact that not only has this not happened, but also that the unrwa suspended aid work in gaza after drivers of un trucks were killed provides more perspective on what is actually going on here than anything else.

what's more the red cross has claimed that their ability to deliver basic first aid is being obstructed by the idf.

if the israelis wanted only to crush hamas militarily, they could easily have allowed the civilians to flee--but in the twisted logic that dominates this horrific situation, if they opened the borders, hamas would be understood as having won something. so they keep it closed--and egypt, which also wants to see something bad happen to hamas, also keeps its border closed.

if you look at what's happening here, all the justifications turn to ash. to nothing. not even worth the breath to say them.
there is no justification.
none.

Baraka_Guru 01-08-2009 07:42 PM

rb:

And Israel will blame Hamas for everything that happens, of course.

And Hamas, Israel.

The international community needs to step the fuck up.

All PM Harper has done thusfar is blame Hamas. Way to go, brave leader.

Here is one NDP MP's response to just that:

Quote:

Libby Davies pens open letter to Stephen Harper on Gaza
By Staff
Publish Date: January 7, 2009

Libby Davies, the NDP MP for Vancouver East, has written the following open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

January 6, 2009

Right Honourable Stephen Harper
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6

Dear Prime Minister,

The top UN official in Gaza has reported that "nowhere is safe in Gaza." With a mounting death toll of over 600 Palestinians; over 2,700 wounded; and an unfolding humanitarian crisis of no running water, no electricity, no adequate medical help, and 13,000 refugees who have fled the front lines, the assault on Gaza by Israel will not in any way improve conditions for peace and security. Indeed it will only create greater instability and violence in the area.

An immediate ceasefire is imperative, to prevent an even greater disaster of human suffering and destruction. Such a ceasefire must include an end to the firing of rockets from Hamas into Israel.

The lack of leadership from the Canadian government is shameful in the face of such events.

Canada should be using all its efforts to work at the UN and in the international community, to bring about a ceasefire, to end the blockade, and to focus efforts on humanitarian aid and reconstruction in Gaza, plus a just peace process, as per previous UN resolutions.

I have received many messages from constituents who are outraged that Canada has done nothing.

We expect our government to uphold international law and work to stop this aggression by one state upon another. We must condemn all acts of violence, and use every available means for political, diplomatic, and peaceful resolutions.

I urge the Canadian government to speak out and no longer be apologetic for what is taking place.

Yours sincerely,

Libby Davies, MP (Vancouver East)

Cc:
Jack Layton, Leader, NDP
Paul Dewar, MP (Ottawa Centre), NDP Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs

http://www.straight.com/article-1791...en-harper-gaza

asaris 01-08-2009 07:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2581019)
there should be an immediate cease fire in gaza monitored by an international peacekeeping force.

I tend to agree with you; I'm not sure Hamas would agree to this. Hell, I'm not sure Israel would either, but I think Israel is more likely to. The history here is very complex, and it's as much a mistake to make Israel into a monolith as it is to make Palestine into a monolith. My understanding is that Israeli politicians have some difficulty in dealing with the settlers; the moderates in the Knesset would like to remove them, but there's a lot of political difficulty in actually accomplishing this. And Israel has done far more to dismantle the settlements than I would have predicted five years ago.

I think that a large part of the immediate problem is that Hamas has always remained committed to the destruction of Israel. I think that if upon election, Hamas had stopped calling for the annihilation of Israel, Israel would not have monitored the borders in a (perhaps misguided) attempt to keep arms out of Gaza. Perhaps this is politically naive of me, but I prefer to be overly naive than overly cynical. And the fact remains that Hamas has always remained committed to the removal of Israel as a political entity. This makes it hard to see how any diplomatic solution could possibly have worked.

roachboy 01-08-2009 08:03 PM

israel is a regional military superpower.
it's existence is not in question.
this is self-evident.
i really wish that entire line of thinking would disappear. it is unhinged from the world. maybe it explains something of the rationale behind trapping the civilians in gaza in place during this military operation.
that too is unhinged, but in a different sense of the term

(this is not directed at you personally in any way asaris---you explain the consequences of this line of thinking---that line of thinking enables what is happening---but...well, i hope it's clear what i am trying to say)

bg: look at it this way--at least the harper government is not directly responsible for what's happening. the bush administration is, to a signficant extent.
the sidelines suck, but there's a worse place to be.

this whole thing makes me sick.

mixedmedia 01-08-2009 08:06 PM

I don't disagree with you entirely, asaris, but there is nothing to indicate that what the Israelis are doing is expedient in any way other than politically. Meanwhile, 700+ people who were walking around less than two weeks ago are now dead. And there is no reason to think that they died for anything other than a blanket enterprise in revenge upon a million people.

Baraka_Guru 01-08-2009 08:09 PM

Yes, it's not like it will stop the rocket attacks. I posted this earlier in this thread: there is no military solution in Gaza.

asaris 01-09-2009 03:56 AM

Right now, a military solution seems as likely to succeed as a diplomatic solution.

mixedmedia 01-09-2009 04:00 AM

so the people that are dead and dying are inconsequential?

Baraka_Guru 01-09-2009 04:30 AM

To succeed at what, exactly?

roachboy 01-09-2009 04:47 AM

overnight, israel rejected a un security council resolution calling for an immediate cease fire. for that to have passed, the americans would have had to at least abstain. the response from livni was an exact mirror of the bush administration's responses to the un over iraq.

but this is not a "solution" to anything, what is going on.
if the objective is to change the political context so that rocket attacks on israel will stop, this will have precisely the opposite effect.

i've been trying to figure this out, make it seem coherent somehow--what i think is playing out here is a consequence of the discourse of terrorism---i think it operates in a self-reinforcing cycle with the illusion of national survival---and that dyad seems to legitimate *anything*...to my mind, what israel is doing in gaza goes way beyond the bushwar in iraq and all the attendant problems...it is the same logic that enabled the administration to justify torture. it seems to me that once a state apparatus begins operating through the discourse of terrorism, it becomes what it claims to be opposing, and uses the illusion of survival begin at stake to rationalize its actions and repress what is dissonant with them. the discourse of terrorism operationalized results in a bureaucratic psychosis.

if this is accurate, then it seems to me clear that this dynamic runs nation-states to the very limits of their legitimacy and requires a rethinking of the relation of international institutions and law to nation states---it seems to me that this points to the requirement that limits be placed on national sovereignty as a check on the possibility of entry into a space of collective psychosis. this in principle, across the board. further it points to the need for a different type of international community, not the default version that presently exists, but a serious organization, something with the capacity to force nation-states into compliance.

this points to an obvious flaw with the entire international system that was set up after world war 2 in order to prevent repetitions of the worst aspects of world war 2. the difference is that the post world war 2 order was set up to provide a system of buffers that would kick in to limit the effects of economic crisis, which was understood as a generator of fascism, which was in turn understood as a playing out of the effects of economic crisis. one of the main limitations to this understanding was that it bracketed the problem of nationalism, of nation-states themselves---the discourse of terror and its consequences---which are not new, which have surfaced repeatedly since the algerian war---demonstrates that a discursive and political space exists where a relatively stable nation-state can come unhinged and move with a sense of justification entirely outside the legal and ethical order that allegedly holds the international community together---because the range of agreements that comprises that community has to do with norms even as its function has to do with resource transfers (which is another register at which the post world war 2 order has been shown to be obsolete).

in this kind of context, it is absurd to talk about military solutions. there can be no solution if, for example, the idf finds itself acting as if it were justified in gaza on hamas while the entire civilian population is trapped in place.
the idea of a solution in such a context is lunacy.
solutions to problems should not involve the murder of civilians.
and the murder of civilians is inevitable if they are trapped in place.
so the situation is itself psychotic and cannot be otherwise.
in this situation, the idf has no rational options---it can pursue what appear to be rational objectives, but because of the siege, that appearance is nothing more than that.
any error results in more civilian deaths.
and war is chaos. it is mostly error.


there is no solution within a logic conditioned by this. the solution is to change the situation itself and treat the disease. to my mind, things have reached that point.

internationalize this conflict---force a cease fire--put mechanisms into place that will bring israel to its knees economically if it does not comply---mechanisms that would undercut the rationale for hamas by instituting a process that would lead toward a meaningful two-state situation in the region regardless of what the israeli right thinks, wants or says. controls clamped on hamas itself. none of these mechanisms exist.

this is the theater of the impotence and obsolence of the post-1945 world--first at the economic level, now at the level of human rights.

Xazy 01-09-2009 04:55 AM

A call for ceasefire does not stop Hamas. Where is your comments about Hamas ignoring the resolution, oh wait sorry that does not seem to be an issue. Israel has always been blamed and never have there been meetings and screaming over the thousands of rockets being fired in to Israel from Gaza, no international outcry then, they have a right to use their intel and defend themselves as long as rockets are going and the potential of it including the weapon supply tunnels.

It is amazing hearing the propaganda begin spouted here, oh no the school the school until someone posts a video showing the fire coming from the school. A nation can only take so much before they have to fight back. And there is no rule of defense saying if they use a bow and arrow you have to use the same.

If you want to hear the terrorists thoughts on their care for Gaza just read this times article. Roachboy already hinted we will never see in views, and I just disliked how he suggested I modify my views just to open up dialogue, so I am avoiding this conversation, but still hard to watch it be one sided without even looking to see the other side (like the school).


Quote:

Fighter Sees His Paradise in Gaza’s Pain
By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY

GAZA CITY — The emergency room in Shifa Hospital is often a place of gore and despair. On Thursday, it was also a lesson in the way ordinary people are squeezed between suicidal fighters and a military behemoth.

Dr. Awni al-Jaru, 37, a surgeon at the hospital, rushed in from his home here, dressed in his scrubs. But he came not to work. His head was bleeding, and his daughter’s jaw was broken.

He said Hamas militants next to his apartment building had fired mortar and rocket rounds. Israel fired back with force, and his apartment was hit. His wife, Albina, originally from Ukraine, and his 1-year-old son were killed.

“My son has been turned into pieces,” he cried. “My wife was cut in half. I had to leave her body at home.” Because Albina was a foreigner, she could have left Gaza with her children. But, Dr. Jaru lamented, she would not leave him behind.

A car arrived with more patients. One was a 21-year-old man with shrapnel in his left leg who demanded quick treatment. He turned out to be a militant with Islamic Jihad. He was smiling a big smile.

“Hurry, I must get back so I can keep fighting,” he told the doctors.

He was told that there were more serious cases than his, that he needed to wait. But he insisted. “We are fighting the Israelis,” he said. “When we fire we run, but they hit back so fast. We run into the houses to get away.” He continued smiling.

“Why are you so happy?” this reporter asked. “Look around you.”

A girl who looked about 18 screamed as a surgeon removed shrapnel from her leg. An elderly man was soaked in blood. A baby a few weeks old and slightly wounded looked around helplessly. A man lay with parts of his brain coming out. His family wailed at his side.

“Don’t you see that these people are hurting?” the militant was asked.

“But I am from the people, too,” he said, his smile incandescent. “They lost their loved ones as martyrs. They should be happy. I want to be a martyr, too.”
another article about the double standard of the UN.

Quote:

The Jews Face a Double Standard
Why doesn't Israel have the same right to self-defense as other nations?

* Article


By MARVIN HIER

The world-wide protests against Israel's ground incursion into Gaza are so full of hatred that they leave me with the terrible feeling that these protests have little to do with the so-called disproportionality of the Israeli response to Hamas rockets, or the resulting civilian casualties.

My fear is that the rage we see in the protesters marching in the streets is far more profound and dangerous than we would like to believe. There are a great many people in the world who, even after Auschwitz, just can't bear the Jewish state having the same rights they so readily grant to other nations. These voices insist Israel must take risks they would never dare ask of any other nation-state -- risks that threaten its very survival -- because they don't believe Israel should exist in the first place.

Just look at the spate of attacks this week on Jews and Jewish institutions around the world: a car ramming into a synagogue in France; a Chabad menorah and Jewish-owned shops sprayed with swastikas in Belgium; a banner at an Australian rally demanding "clean the earth from dirty Zionists!"; demonstrators in the Netherlands chanting "Gas the Jews"; and in Florida, protestors demanding Jews "Go back to the ovens!"
The Opinion Journal Widget

Download Opinion Journal's widget and link to the most important editorials and op-eds of the day from your blog or Web page.

How else can we explain the double-standard that is applied to the Gaza conflict, if not for a more insidious bias against the Jewish state?

At the U.N., no surprise, this double-standard is in full force. In response to Israel's attack on Hamas, the Security Council immediately pulled an all-night emergency meeting to consider yet another resolution condemning Israel. Have there been any all-night Security Council sessions held during the seven months when Hamas fired 3,000 rockets at half a million innocent civilians in southern Israel? You can be certain that during those seven months, no midnight oil was burning at the U.N. headquarters over resolutions condemning terrorist organizations like Hamas. But put condemnation of Israel on the agenda and, rain or shine, it's sure to be a full house.

Red Cross officials are all over the Gaza crisis, describing it as a full-blown humanitarian nightmare. Where were they during the seven months when tens of thousands of Israeli families could not sleep for fear of a rocket attack? Where were their trauma experts to decry that humanitarian crisis?

There have been hundreds of articles and reports written from the Erez border crossing falsely accusing Israel of blocking humanitarian supplies from reaching beleaguered Palestinians in Gaza. (In fact, over 520 truck loads of humanitarian aid have been delivered through Israeli crossings since the beginning of the Israeli counterattack.) But how many news articles, NGO reports and special U.N. commissions have investigated Hamas's policy of deliberately placing rocket launchers near schools, mosques and homes in order to use innocent Palestinians as human shields?

Many people ask why there are so few Israeli casualties in comparison with the Palestinian death toll. It's because Israel's first priority is the safety of its citizens, which is why there are shelters and warning systems in Israeli towns. If Hamas can dig tunnels, it can certainly build shelters. Instead, it prefers to use women and children as human shields while its leaders rush into hiding.
In Today's Opinion Journal



And then there are the clarion calls for a cease-fire. These words, which come so easily, have proven to be a recipe for disaster. Hamas uses the cease-fire as a time-out to rearm and smuggle even more deadly weapons so the next time, instead of hitting Sderot and Ashkelon, they can target Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The pattern is always the same. Following a cease-fire brought on by international pressure, there will be a call for a massive infusion of funds to help Palestinians recover from the devastation of the Israeli attack. The world will respond eagerly, handing over hundreds of millions of dollars. To whom does this money go? To Hamas, the same terrorist group that brought disaster to the Palestinians in the first place.

The world seems to have forgotten that at the end of World War II, President Harry Truman initiated the Marshall Plan, investing vast sums to rebuild Germany. But he did so only with the clear understanding that the money would build a new kind of Germany -- not a Fourth Reich that would continue the policies of Adolf Hitler. Yet that is precisely what the world will be doing if we once again entrust funds to Hamas terrorists and their Iranian puppet masters.

In less than two weeks, Barack Obama will be sworn in as president of the United States. But there is no "change we can believe in" in the Middle East -- not where Israel is concerned. The double-standard continuously applied to the Jewish state proves that, for much of the world, the real lessons of World War II have yet to be learned.

roachboy 01-09-2009 05:17 AM

xazy--what i don't see in your position is any sense that hamas comes out of a dynamic, a history, and that what is happening in gaza now is an extreme expression of that same dynamic. you seem to think that the only way to consider this fiasco in gaza is to separate it from the past, to pretend that there is a symmetry between the actors involved--i don't think that leads to anything at all except a continuation of the same. it is an expression of the lunatic viewpoint that enables a military operation to be launched against hamas with the civilian population of gaza unable to flee.

what i've been trying to do is put the civilians of gaza at the center of this situation--which they are, like it or not. hamas is a bunch of idiots who i think expressed their idiocy in playing chicken with israel after the cease fire ended. but i see them as in a position to do that **because** of the decision to not recognize the 06 elections, which has strengthened their position--and if this were not the case, they would not have felt they were in a position to play chicken.

the dynamic itself is fucked up, and that dynamic is expressed in the actual history of the entire context.

if the civilians of gaza had been allowed to flee, i think i would have been far more neutral about this action. but the fact is, no matter what you think of it, they weren't. THAT is the problem.

i am not concerned with or about viewpoints that treat the situation in gaza as if the civlians were not there. there is NO justification for this. and this position can easily be maintained while NOT approving of hamas itself or of its use of rockets.

there is no way around context.
there is no way around the fact of siege.
there is no way around the consequences of that siege.

Xazy 01-09-2009 05:32 AM

Hitler was democratically elected. You also do not mention that Israel has called buildings telling civilians that the building will be bombed in 30 minutes. Hamas targets civilians buy fires from within civilian areas, and as mentioned above article, they are proud and have no qualms in running in to civilian homes. This is an ugly fight, and I care and worry about the civilians, but after 3,000 rockets in the past years there is no choice but to defend ones country. And yes Hamas was democratically elected, the people do to some point bare a responsibility to that. By the way Hitler was elected also.

roachboy 01-09-2009 06:23 AM

so wait---you're arguing that israel has the "right" to decide which results of an election are and are not legitimate?
after this debacle in gaza, maybe the international community could decide that electing the israeli right to power is simply too irresponsible to be acceptable and that could be vetoed as well.

the analogy between hamas and hitler has more to do with the fact that both words start with the same letter than anything else.
it is a wildly false analogy---except maybe in the self-confirming context of total justification for any and all actions on grounds particular to the logic of "terrorism"

i've argued this repeatedly in this thread, but i'll say it again: THE error, the structuring political error, that opened the way to this disaster in gaza, was the israeli right's decision to refuse to recognize the jan 06 elections and impose a state of siege on gaza instead.

i see no way around this--and it is possible to be critical of choices and still be in general terms a supporter of things israeli. it really is. you need not operate in complete, continuous approval mode to be so--in fact one could argue that if you give up the right to be critical, you undermine the basis for your own support because it stops being a rational matter. i don't see what good that does anyone, including israel. particularly when the israel that is being supported is one dominated by the right.

i support israel as well, but it is the israel of groups like peace now. so i entirely reject the idea that there is a single way to think about what israel is, what it's interests are etc. i think the consequences of the collapse of the whole of israel onto the viewpoint of the right--which is central to the imaginary israel in the united states---does no-one anywhere any good. i could point to the politics of the settlements in the west bank as demonstration, but that'd take us afield.

gaza is enough to deal with for now.

hiredgun 01-09-2009 06:48 AM

I don't really know how to proceed in this thread when it seems as though the world has gone mad, as though the slaughter of hundreds of people, mainly civilians, can somehow be coolly justified as any kind of legitimate response to a handful of crude rockets, landing mostly in empty fields, launched from a tiny, besieged strip of land populated largely by desperate refugees, choked off from supplies for over a year, during which, y the way, Israel was the first to break the ceasefire (in November), a ceasefire whose terms Israel never fulfilled because it never lifted the blockade of supplies. I don't know how else to get at this, or what else to say.

For those of you who might care, there are a number of good recent pieces by some permanent fixtures on the Middle East stage. Aaron Miller, by the way, was a high-ranking American diplomat during the Oslo/Camp David process (deputy to Ambassador Ross).

Aaron Miller: Obama should get tough with Israel.
Obama Must Get Tough With Israel to Achieve Peace | Newsweek International | Newsweek.com

Robert Fisk: Why do they hate us, we will ask
Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent

Rashid Khalidi: What you don’t know about Gaza
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/op...khalidi&st=cse

Avi Shlaim: How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Avi Shlaim: How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe | World news | The Guardian

Baraka_Guru 01-09-2009 07:06 AM

Thanks for the links, hiredgun.

Here's another recent Fisk article:
Robert Fisk: Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored - Robert Fisk, Commentators - The Independent

percy 01-09-2009 06:49 PM

Hamas firing missiles at Israeli civilians is unobjectionable. But Israel giving notice before they fire a rocket into civilian areas or bulldoze a house isn't? Wow, how thoughtful of them. Anyone who thinks the IDF isn't the master of collective punishment, just ask the 10 year old boys who, while throwing stones at tanks get shot in the shoulder, the elbow, the knees, the ankles. Not enough to kill them. Just enough to handicap them for life though.

Interesting hypotheses on the living with terror, adopt terror standpoint rb. Don't hear that angle to often.

I wouldn't guess it was as easy as clearing out the old stock of ammo before restocking courtesy of the new president.

Maybe the USA should stop treating Israel like a welfare state and instead of billions given, all the while Israel wipes her butt with the Geneva Convention as well as the UN, the USA could pass out homemade rockets and bags of stones to the Israeli's, to somewhat illustrate a fair fight. My guess would be that a peace plan wouldn't be to far behind.

roachboy 01-10-2009 07:50 AM

the un reports this morning that there are about 15,000 displaced people inside of gaza.
so 15,000 civilians wandering around a battle zone.
this morning, the idf was dropping pamphlets warning people to stay in their homes.

a doctor from the shifa hospital in gaza reports via al jazeera that 165 children have been killed and over 1,200 injured.

meanwhile, the us house passed a resolution condemning hamas, while the rest of the planet is calling for an immediate cease fire on humanitarian grounds. the united states is fully complicit with the humanitarian crisis that preceded this and with the situation that military action has produced, which amplifies the previous crisis exponentially.

this clip is not meant as a direct metaphor, but it expresses better than any other i could think of what's going on in my head as i read about this disaster:


Baraka_Guru 01-10-2009 09:19 AM

After ignoring the calls for a ceasefire from the U.N. and others, Israel prepares its next phase: an intensive ground operation. They've been sending communications to "the residents of Gaza," asking them to stay away from terrorists and to evacuate Rafah due to an "imminent operation." Where are there no terrorists, and to where should they evacuate? I'm not sure they were told. You'd think an organization with the budget of the IDF, they'd have a better handle on logistics.

Quote:

NY Times
January 11, 2009
As Talks Falter, Israel Warns Gazans of More Extensive Attacks
By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — Israel warned Gaza residents on Saturday that it was preparing the next phase of its war against Hamas — a deeper ground force operation — as diplomatic efforts to end the 15-day assault and Hamas rocket fire into Israel faltered.

Tank and artillery fire pounded Gaza all night and day with plumes of black smoke visible especially in the eastern part of Gaza City. A tank shell landed outside the home of a family in Jabaliya, northeast of the city, killing eight members of the same family who were sitting outside, hospital officials said, bringing the death toll to more than 820. Nearly half of them were reported to be civilians.

United Nations relief operations resumed after a daylong suspension prompted by fears for the safety of the drivers. On Thursday, a United Nations driver was killed and two others were wounded from what the agency said was Israeli fire. Israel issued a statement on Saturday saying it was certain that the shooting had not come from its forces, adding that the drivers were treated in an Israeli hospital. It also redoubled its assurances to the United Nations on holding its fire around aid convoys.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah Party opposes Hamas, was in Cairo pressing a call for a cease-fire, and he discussed with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt the idea of international troops along the Gaza-Egypt border. Hamas representatives were also there, but the plan, also urged by the French, seemed to be losing steam. Egypt is unenthusiastic about the presence of foreign troops on its soil, while Hamas is unwilling to have the troops inside Gaza.

More focus was being placed on technical assistance to the Egyptians to help them block and destroy the smuggler tunnels that help Hamas stay lethal.

Both Israel and Hamas rejected a United Nations Security Council Resolution on Friday calling for a cease-fire. And the actions of both on Saturday made their resolve to keep fighting manifest.

More long-range rockets hit Israel, including two in open areas in Ashdod, a city of 200,000 on the way to Tel Aviv.

Israel said its aircraft attacked more than 40 targets throughout Gaza, striking 10 rocket-launching sites and weapons-storage facilities. It also rounded up people in the north of Gaza, questioning them and telling them to deliver warnings to Hamas activists. It said it killed the man in charge of Hamas’s rocket launchers and another 15 militants.

In Gaza City as well, residents reported getting phone calls that said, “We are going to intensify the military strike against Hamas. Our intention is not to harm civilians. If you live near Hamas, evacuate.”

Leaflets were dropped addressed to “the residents of Gaza,” saying that the Israeli military had in recent days warned residents of the southern city of Rafah of “an imminent operation” and asking them to evacuate their homes for their safety.

“The fact that the residents of Rafah abided by the orders,” the leaflets continued, “has protected those who had nothing to do with the fight. The Israel Defense Forces will intensify shortly its directed operation against tunnels, weapon storehouses and members of terrorist groups all over Gaza. For your safety and that of your family you are asked to stay away from terrorist elements and from places where terrorist operations occur. Please continue abiding by our orders.”

Red Cross workers said their telephones were flooded with calls from residents of the Beach refugee camp who had received large numbers of the calls and leaflets. The callers wanted to know if they should evacuate their homes and if so to where.

A Beach camp car mechanic named Hamdi Eki, 47, was asked why he did not leave after receiving such a call. “I have nine children,” he said. “Where can I go? I prefer to die at my own house.”

Some Beach camp residents did leave but ended up in other neighborhoods or camps that had received similar warnings.

Israel has come under increasing international criticism for the growing number of civilian casualties of this war and for complicating efforts by aid and rights groups to help those caught in the cross-fire. Israel says Hamas fighters hide consciously among civilians, in mosques and schools and under clinics.

Fred Abrahams, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, who has studied both the Kosovo and Lebanon conflicts, said he was concerned that Israel was not paying enough attention to international legal requirements for “distinction and proportionality — first, to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and second, whether an attack will have a disproportionate effect on the civilians in the area.”

Even if a target is legitimate, he said, “you can’t drop a 500-pound bomb in an area crowded with civilians.”

This was also the first conflict he could remember when civilians could not flee the war zone — Gaza’s borders are shut both to Israel and to Egypt, and civilians, he said, “are fish in a barrel.”

“Our conclusions are preliminary but evidence is suggesting serious violations of the laws of war, which require investigation,” Mr. Abrahams said.

That is also true of Hamas, he said. “We need to know more about what Hamas is doing on the ground,” he said. “For example, we know Hamas has stored weapons in mosques, so when Israel targets a mosque, we don’t scream war crime.”

Regarding force protection, he said it “must be balanced by distinction and proportion. A violation by Hamas shooting from a mosque or school doesn’t give the Israeli Army carte blanche to return fire in the name of force protection with everything and anything it has.”

Groups like his are also concerned about the Israeli use of white phosphorous, which creates smoke on a battlefield, at low altitudes or crowded areas, because it can burn like a kind of napalm.

Taghreed El-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza, and Steven Erlanger from Jerusalem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/wo...ideast.html?hp

Slims 01-10-2009 09:59 AM

Did you notice the part where Hamas also rejected the call for a cease fire?

That whole two sides to every story thing is a real bitch.

Oh, and the '500 pound bombs' mentioned in the article are mostly full of concrete rather than explosives to reduce collateral damage...if you look at many of the pics from the conflict you will see that houses adjacent to targets still have glass in their windows which wouldn't be the case had 500lbs of explosives been used.

If you want an honest discussion then point out when people on your side make absurd inflammatory statements in addition to just hacking away at everything Israel does.

roachboy 01-10-2009 10:10 AM

i'm not sure why this keeps happening, the assumption that if you are critical of the israeli operation you are somehow for hamas. speaking for myself, that's entirely false and i've found myself having to write the same thing over and over in the thread. it's strange, like there's the automatic dimension to how folk think about this that overrides dissonant information.

but i'll put it in again---israel and hamas are both responsible for this debacle--but the onus really is on the israelis and, because of their idiotic policy logic, the bush administration.

obama has already indicated a saner approach in that he's willing to talk to hamas. that's as far as he's gone, but even that is a *Vast* improvement over the current situation.

again, my disbelief concerning the gaza situation centers on the civilian population being pinned in place. this makes the situation go beyond the routine "a pox on all their houses" in terms of co-dependent insanity of conservative political organizations and their mirror image, almost a requirement it seems at times, in organizations like hamas. that the civilian population is trapped there, particularly under such horrific conditions, short-circuits any possible justification for this action.

and i haven't forgotten about those fine fellows in the mubarak government who are keeping one of the 7 main exit points closed while israel keeps the other 6 closed.


what's more if you are inclined to support israel, to think well of it, i don't see how you can not be appalled at this. i can't see how this serves any rational interest on the israeli side.

Baraka_Guru 01-10-2009 10:13 AM

Slims, are you talking about those laser-guided 100% accurate mythical bombs? What part of "crowded" don't you understand?

And people on my side? What are you talking about? This isn't a football game.

And your use of absurd and inflammatory is blatantly inaccurate, as is hacking. I take most issue with this. Do you disagree that many civilians are dying here?

Slims 01-10-2009 10:21 AM

I'm sorry, but I simply fail to see how the 'policy logic' of the bush administration to support our ally is stupid when the enemies our ally have sworn to kill every Israeli.

The saber rattling on both sides is pathetic, but at least Israel has the ability to back up their rhetoric.

If Hamas were willing to simply agree to stop shooting rockets Israel would back off. The onus is not on Israel because every time they have backed off Hamas has capitalized on the situation (albeit in an incompetent sort of way) and lobbed a shit ton of rockets intended to kill Israeli civilians.

That Hamas continues to fire rockets, and the fact that those living in Gaza are allowing them to continue to do so speaks volumes. They obviously still have the ability and the will to fight, until at least one of those is removed, Israel should continue to push forward.

And Israel is, IMHO entirely in the right by keeping their border closed. Every time they open it suicide bombers start blowing up schools, etc. After a while even the most dense of individuals can see the correlation. Hamas is asking for open borders and at the same time swearing to kill Israelis by any means possible.

Baraka_Guru 01-10-2009 10:26 AM

Do you know that only 30% of Gazans support Hamas? (Actually, since the invasion, it's now at around 40%).

If an election were to be held today, Fatah would probably win.

Hamas is not Gaza.

Palestinian poll says Gaza border breach boosted Hamas' popularity - Haaretz - Israel News

Willravel 01-10-2009 10:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru (Post 2581935)
Do you know that only 30% of Gazans support Hamas? (Actually, since the invasion, it's now at around 40%).

If an election were to be held today, Fatah would probably win.

Hamas is not Gaza.

Palestinian poll says Gaza border breach boosted Hamas' popularity - Haaretz - Israel News

Ah, that's good information! Thanks for posting it.

powerclown 01-10-2009 01:19 PM

In the 1940s and 1950s Arab governments and civilians emulated German policies from 1930s. Rioting Muslims killed enough of their Jewish neighbors that the remainder fled. Arab governments required that the Jews leave any wealth or property behind (between $15-30 billion in 1950 dollars). Approximately 870,000 Jews from Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt, and other Arab countries sought asylum in the State of Israel. These folks spoke no English, had no money, lacked a modern education, and had no experience of participating in a democracy. Most Americans would not have wanted them as neighbors. You could say the same for the more than 1 million Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel between 1989 and 2002. Between the founding of Israel in 1948 and 2007, Israel absorbed a total of 3.23 million Jews from other countries (source: The Jewish Agency For Israel Homepage).

In the Web age it isn't necessary to speculate on why the Arabs reject Israel. We can simply read what they've written on the subject. Not all Arab nations call for the destruction of Israel in their constitutions and yet most Arab countries have maintained a continuous declared state of war with Israel since 1948. To understand this 55-year-long war it therefore becomes necessary to engage in a bit of analysis.

Israel occupies 20,330 square kilometers of land or roughly 0.23 percent of nearby Arab territory. This percentage would be slightly larger if we excluded Iran, which is technically non-Arab but which has been at the forefront of the fight against Israel by training, financing, and arming Palestinians. This percentage would be much lower if we included the Arab states of North Africa such as Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc. To put this into perspective, 0.23 percent of the Lower 48 United States is roughly equal to the southeastern corner of Florida.

In some sense the State of Israel represents a tremendous achievement for the Arab countries. In exchange for a fraction of one percent of their territory they managed to expropriate the property of their Jewish citizens (estimated at between $13 and $30 billion in 1950 dollars) and expel 870,000 Jews from their territories. Without incurring any of the bad publicity that afflicted Hitler, the Arabs managed to accomplish one of Nazi Germany's primary goals: creating a vast empire that was free of Jews. For the first time in 2500 years an Arab could walk down the streets of Baghdad without encountering a Jew. Morocco and Algeria rid themselves of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

As impressive an achievement as concentrating the Jews from all the Arab countries into a tiny corner of the Arab world is, it would be yet more impressive to dump the Jews off somewhere in Christian territory, or perhaps to kill them all. This then becomes the challenge facing the modern Arab political leader.

If the Arabs of the middle east were to conquer Israel and fail to kill all of its citizens, there is a high probability that the Jewish survivors of that war would wash up on American shores. How happy would the the average American gentile be to live alongside Russian and Middle Eastern Jews who don't share his culture, language, and values? A 2006 Anti-Defamation League study found that 17 percent of Americans agreed with a long list of classical anti-Jewish statements and an additional 35 percent agreed with "Jews have too much power in the business world" or "Jews have too much control and influence on Wall Street". Slightly more than 50 percent of Americans therefore are uncomfortable with the Jews that are already here. Rather than get into a national debate on whether more Jews can be tolerated on our shores, we send money and weapons to the Israelis. Imagine that you had a fat drunk cousin named Earl living in a trailer park in Louisiana. Would you rather send $250 every month to keep him in beer and pork rinds down there or let him come up and move into your guest room?

roachboy 01-10-2009 02:26 PM

gee, powerclown...what you're basically arguing is that to be arab is to be fascist.
nice. but it kinda makes you wonder how, for example, the moroccan sephardic community managed to survive from around 1492, when they were exiled from pain, until 1947.
it must have been an oversight.

or maybe your story is so riddled with holes to the point of being more or less meaningless as a history.

if one grants that the factoids you base it on are correct, it is still the case that your story explains nothing--at all---about the action in gaza. what it does do is provide a justification for it that has the convenient side effect of enabling you to sidestep everything about the actual empirical reality of the past 2 years.

but maybe that's the point.

your narrative is a demonstration of why i lost patience with trying to frame israeli actions in gaza in terms of a history that goes back to 1947 and the, with increasing arbitrariness in your particular case, beyond that.

by no rational standard is post -67 israel the same as pre-67 israel in terms of military capabilities, in terms of actions, even in terms of the ethico-historical arguments that you run out above. post-67 israel is a military superpower. post-67 israel has indulged the occupation. post-67 israel has undermined it's own connection to it's past as beleagured.

the problems with thinking about israeli military and/or colonial actions since 1967 based on your narrative are obvious--you don't and you can't.
instead, you erase it.
all of it.


=======================================

slims---i've said this repeatedly, but again the main fuck-up i attribute to the bush administration is their participation in and support of the decision regarding the jan 06 elections. both are simple matters of record. there's no debate about them. we can discuss the question of whether this was in fact as catastrophically bad a decision as i think it was---and i would argue that the situation that is happening now demonstrates just what a bad idea it was---but if we do, at least we'll be on the same page.

supporting an ally does not preclude making horrible choices.
rigid, unthinking support is characterized by the inability to recognize horrible choices and allowing yourself, and your ally, to be boxed in by those horrible choices.

that is a Problem. that is a Problem visited upon the civilian population because of the bush people. and i think that this Problem is more determing of the fiasco in gaza than are the actions of hamas---and this without in any way saying that hamas plays no role. they do, they have. this is self-evident.

=======
baraka--thanks for that information. it's really interesting.

powerclown 01-10-2009 03:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2582002)
post-67 israel is a military superpower.

Non sequitur.

Israel is allowed one lost war, while the Arabs and Persians can wage war against Israel forever.

The Palestinians are a lucky people, because their enemies are Jews.

Any other foe, especially other Arabs, would have wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago.

Slims 01-10-2009 03:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2582002)

slims---i've said this repeatedly, but again the main fuck-up i attribute to the bush administration is their participation in and support of the decision regarding the jan 06 elections. both are simple matters of record. there's no debate about them. we can discuss the question of whether this was in fact as catastrophically bad a decision as i think it was---and i would argue that the situation that is happening now demonstrates just what a bad idea it was---but if we do, at least we'll be on the same page.

supporting an ally does not preclude making horrible choices.
rigid, unthinking support is characterized by the inability to recognize horrible choices and allowing yourself, and your ally, to be boxed in by those horrible choices.

that is a Problem. that is a Problem visited upon the civilian population because of the bush people. and i think that this Problem is more determing of the fiasco in gaza than are the actions of hamas---and this without in any way saying that hamas plays no role. they do, they have. this is self-evident.

=======
baraka--thanks for that information. it's really interesting.

I have to make this quick because I have a dinner date. I agree it was monumentally stupid for us (and the rest of the world) to support elections in Gaza when the only two choices were between an inept government and a terrorist group. By allowing those elections to take place we were rolling the dice with regards to legitimizing Hamas with very little potential gain if things went our way.

Baraka_Guru 01-10-2009 09:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown (Post 2582016)
Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy
post-67 israel is a military superpower.

Non sequitur.

I don't think so. You might want to re-read the OP.

Quote:

Israel is allowed one lost war, while the Arabs and Persians can wage war against Israel forever.
You can barely call what's going on a war. Israel cannot lose against Hamas to a degree that would have any consequences resembling what would happen if Hamas loses. There is little to be said about winning and losing at this point because I doubt anyone knows what would be required to achieve such designations.

Quote:

The Palestinians are a lucky people, because their enemies are Jews.
I'm sure they're counting their lucky stars and blessings at this very moment. And once they rebuild their homes and families, they will probably decorate them with the horseshoes that fall intermittently out of their collective asses.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Slims
I agree it was monumentally stupid for us (and the rest of the world) to support elections in Gaza when the only two choices were between an inept government and a terrorist group. By allowing those elections to take place we were rolling the dice with regards to legitimizing Hamas with very little potential gain if things went our way.

So you'd rather the U.S. and Israel install a dictator? That's worked out well in other areas of the world. Would the alternative be to have Israel govern Gaza? How do you see that working out?

Slims 01-11-2009 08:29 AM

No, I don't think the US should have installed a dictator. But I do think that hosting elections when the only two choices are between Bad and Horrible was a stupid thing to do. It backfired.

We should have either stayed away and let Gaza sort itself out a little more prior to the elections, provided support for Fatah to re-legitimize them prior to elections, or convinced the arab countries involved to prop up a completely different party that was more interested in peace than killing jews.

Of course hindsight is 20/20 and now that it is done Israel is dealing with the consequences, for better or worse.

roachboy 01-11-2009 08:51 AM

Quote:

We should have either stayed away and let Gaza sort itself out a little more prior to the elections, provided support for Fatah to re-legitimize them prior to elections, or convinced the arab countries involved to prop up a completely different party that was more interested in peace than killing jews
here it is again, that shift which moves one from thinking about gaza in concrete terms and instead maps it onto some fictional eternal conflict, insoluble, in the context of which poor israel, which is just struggling to get by, is justified in doing absolutely anything, including using white phosphorus ordinance in civilian-populated areas. it's a move--in bold---that enables the intertwining of fiction and reality. it is a nice synopsis of the marketing undertaken by the israeli right, particularly in the united states.

leaving that tic aside, and the mostly fictional framework it sets up around the gaza elections, the place where i agree with you slims is an assumption in your post--that once the election process was in motion, there was no rational choice for the israelis but to accept the results.

if you want an idea of just how great the damage the israeli right is doing to israel itself in the longer run by way of this lunatic adventure in gaza, read this from naomi klein:


Quote:

Enough. It's time for a boycott
The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa


It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on "people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era". The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause - even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for "the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions" and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. "The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves ... This international backing must stop."

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can't go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren't good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.

The world has tried what used to be called "constructive engagement". It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures - quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel's exports of processed food. And in December European ministers "upgraded" the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange's flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don't work, sticks are needed.

Israel is not South Africa.

Of course it isn't. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid". That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.

This one I'll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don't I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel's Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: "As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company."

Ramsey says his decision wasn't political; he just didn't want to lose customers. "We can't afford to lose any of our clients," he explains, "so it was purely commercially defensive."

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it's precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)

naomiklein.org
Naomi Klein: Enough. It's time for a boycott of Israel | Comment is free | The Guardian

this link takes you to the original along with the first page of often very testy comments, as you can imagine.

i post this because i think that like it or not you're going to see more of this--what i think a result of the gaza action is is that the israeli right's framing of its action and of the historical narrative that makes it appear rational is rapidly losing traction, and that along with this loss of traction you're starting to see a counter-discourse taking shape.

in place of the romantic post-47 historical narrative, a more accurate post-67 narrative is being established---instead of the story of a heroic nation of jewish folk who are just trying to make a homeland for themselves after the shocking, horrific experience of world war 2 you have a post-67 narrative of colonialism and apartheid. the narrative of return to a homeland is being replaced with parallels to south africa. the question of racism is becoming central. israel is being recoded as a modern nation-state and is being inserted in a narrative that links it to other modern nation-states, and the standards for evaluating its actions are shifting along with this.

i post this because it seems to me that this position expresses something that is far more abroad in the world that american supporters of the israeli right would like to think it is. and because the action in gaza is giving this narrative increasing traction.

so from a strategic viewpoint--and the framing of narratives is a central element in strategy because it enables action to be coherent and to be marketed as coherent---i see nothing but self-defeating lunacy in what the idf is doing in gaza.

time will tell whether my interpretation of the above is correct or not.


880 killed according to the latest information from medical sources within gaza. no update on the number of wounded, nor is there a new breakdown by category.
the new phase of the israeli action is taking the military toward heavily populated areas.

unless this is stopped, things are only going to get worse.

Pacifier 01-11-2009 09:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown (Post 2580978)
I was responding to a claim that the idf was lying about hamas goons launching mortars from schools. I think this video proves they weren't lying.

IDF officers admitted there was no gunfire from Gaza school which was shelled :

Quote:

The United Nations is claiming Israeli military officers have admitted there was no Palestinian gunfire emanating from inside an UNRWA school in Gaza which was shelled by an IDF tank.

Dozens of Palestinians were killed in the shelling.

In addition, UNRWA Thursday announced it will cease activities in the Strip due to the death of an UNRWA staffer in an IDF shelling during Thursday morning's humanitarian hiatus.
Advertisement
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness told Haaretz yesterday that the army had conceded wrongdoing.

"In briefings senior [Israel Defense Forces] officers conducted for foreign diplomats, they admitted the shelling to which IDF forces in Jabalya were responding did not originate from the school," Gunness said. "The IDF admitted in that briefing that the attack on the UN site was unintentional."

He noted that all the footage released by the IDF of militants firing from inside the school was from 2007 and not from the incident itself.

"There are no up-to-date photos," Gunness said. "In 2007, we abandoned the site and only then did the militants take it over."

The UNRWA is now demanding an objective investigation into whether the school shelling constituted a violation of international humanitarian law, and if so, that those responsible stand trial.

The UN reported Thursday that a Palestinian working for the UNRWA was killed by an IDF tank shell while driving an aid truck at the Erez border crossing. The organization claims the UN truck was well-marked and the incident took place during the humanitarian hiatus slated to allow Gaza residents to acquire supplies

TheNasty 01-11-2009 12:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown (Post 2582016)
Non sequitur.

Israel is allowed one lost war, while the Arabs and Persians can wage war against Israel forever.

The Palestinians are a lucky people, because their enemies are Jews.

Any other foe, especially other Arabs, would have wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago.

One of the best posts on this thread.

700 casualties are 700 to many.

However, with a population of 3.3 million crammed into a small area, casualties could be much worse if a semblance of caution wasn't being used.

roachboy 01-11-2009 12:28 PM

that post is surreal in its wholesale inaccuracy, in its bad faith. it is nothing more and nothing less than a repeat of the extreme rightwing's justifications for killing palestinians in great number and then congratulating themselves for being such humanitarians. the place you see this nonsense repeated almost verbatim is amongst the fringe rightwing settler parties. you know, the folk who embarrass most israelis.

i post the following because it provides a sense of the marketing bubble inside israel with respect to the horror in gaza and indicates that the source of it is a *particular* politica viewpoint that speaks neither for judiaism nor for israel as a whole.

Quote:

Why Israel's war is driven by fear
Outrage at Israeli actions has mounted across the world as the Gaza conflict goes on. But as Israel expands its military action, support for the aggressive strategy is growing, while sympathy for Palestinians is receding. And, with an election looming, political attitudes are hardening

* Chris McGreal at the Gaza border
* The Observer, Sunday 11 January 2009
-------------

Yeela Raanan says she would prefer not to know about the war in Gaza. She doesn't want to see the pictures of dead children cut down by Israeli shells or read of the allegations of war crimes by her country's army as it kills Palestinians by the hundreds.

But there is no escape. Raanan can hear the relentless Israeli bombardment by air, sea and land from her home, just three miles from the Gaza border. Hamas rockets keep hitting her community. And somewhere in the maelstrom of Gaza, her 20-year-old son is serving as an Israeli soldier.

"I'd rather not know. I can't do anything about it. We didn't see the pictures of the Palestinian kids who were killed. It's easier not to feel," she said. "I just turn on the news for five minutes a day and that's it, just to see if anybody says anything about my kid."

But when Raanan thinks about her son - whom she prefers not to name - she also thinks about Palestinian mothers and their sons in Gaza. And that's when she finds her herself out of sync with the neighbours. "I don't talk to the neighbours about it any more," she said. "Hamas is violent. Hamas is stupid. I don't like what they are. But I don't feel angry towards them. I understand why they were elected, I understand why they act as they do."

Attempting to understand has earned Raanan, a former operations officer in the Israeli air force, denunciations as a traitor and accusations of "selling her nation to the devil". Doesn't she love her son?, they ask.

The world has reeled in horror at revelations of Israeli atrocities as the Palestinian death toll has climbed toward 800. The International Red Cross was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.

Israel's shelling of a UN school that had been turned into a refugee centre near Gaza city, killing 42 people who had fled the fighting, drew further accusations of indifference to civilian lives. And Israel has struggled to justify the eradication of entire families, including small children, in pursuit of Hamas officials.

But ordinary Israelis have been told little about this and when they are they generally brush it aside with assertions that it is sad but Hamas has brought it on the Palestinian people. Israel is the real victim, they say. The mainstream Israeli press has stuck firmly to the official line that it is a war of defence, a moral conflict forced on Israel by Hamas rocket fire.

The scale of Palestinian civilian casualties is played down. The dead are overwhelmingly described as terrorists. The accounts of entire Palestinian families being wiped out are buried beneath stories of the Israeli trauma at Hamas attacks.

"The news said the Israeli army had killed 100 'terrorists' and also a bomb fell and 40 lost their lives," said Raanan about the shelling of the UN school. "That was more or less the rhetoric that was used, so the focus was on the fact that we had managed to kill terrorists rather than we had also killed 40 other people. We weren't told who they were." There are alternative voices in the press, but they are mostly dismissed or shouted down. Israeli Arabs who protested against the war have been arrested for undermining national morale. Television anchormen berate critics of the onslaught on Gaza, questioning their patriotism.

The paradox of Israel is that most of its citizens tell the pollsters they agree with Raanan and the peace lobby that there should be a negotiated agreement of the establishment of a Palestinian state. But a significant number of Israelis now question whether this is possible. They view the continued conflict after Ariel Sharon pulled Jewish settlers and the military out of Gaza in 2005 as evidence that Arabs don't want peace; that giving up territory does not bring security.

Support for the vague notion of peace has been further buried under the rhetoric of the looming Israeli election, where the right in particular, led by a former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is playing on fear of a nuclear Iran in league with Hamas. Netanyahu, who is likely to win the 10 February ballot, has no intention of dismantling settlements or relinquishing the control that Israel exercises over the lives of Palestinians on the West Bank. He dances around the issue of a Palestinian state and has made clear in the past that what he wants to see amounts to a canton or bantustan (homeland) surrounded by Israeli control.

And so the vast number of mainstream Israelis, while saying they support peace, once again find themselves in bed with the settlers and on the side of oppression. "I hate to say we told you so," said Yisrael Medad, a prominent Jewish settler from Shilo, deep inside the West Bank. "Now you hear all the time that it was a mistake to pull out of Gaza. You hear it on the television when it was never discussed before. More of the anchors are willing to ask that question. They would never ask that a year or two ago. They used to say ours was the extreme view. Now I would say that it's the mainstream, that no matter what we have done territorially speaking it's not going to satisfy them [the Palestinians]. They are always going to attack us."

The settlers might be an extreme minority, but their views as to why Israeli soldiers are fighting in Gaza are not exceptional. Raanan lives in Ein Habsor, a moshav or cooperative agricultural community of about 1,000 people. It suffers regular hits from Hamas rockets. "In the last few days we've had two a day. In the vicinity. A couple inside. Close enough that it could have been your house," she said. No one was hurt but a student at the nearby Sapir college, where Raanan teaches public policy and administration, was killed by a Hamas rocket in February. Roni Yechiah, a 47-year-old father of four, died after the missile hit the car park.

About a quarter of the families in Ein Habsor have left. "They didn't so much go because of the rockets. It was because of the war and being really scared. They closed the schools. Those with little kids have mostly gone," said Raanan. It's not an atmosphere in which to question whether Israeli troops should be in Gaza. Most of the residents of Ein Habsor see the assault as a straightforward and necessary response to Hamas rockets, uncomplicated by issues such as occupation or the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

But Raanan does question. She wants to see a government willing to negotiate seriously with the Palestinians, and she takes the view that just because Israel is strong enough to get one over on the Palestinians, that does not mean that it is in its interests to do so. Raanan also wants other Israelis to understand what the Palestinians are suffering. "My moshav is quite right-wing," she said. "They believe in using power and they don't particularly like Arabs. I don't talk to my neighbours much about these things.

"If you do open your heart to the fact that 40 completely innocent people in a United Nations school were killed you have a very hard time. It's difficult to open your heart to that place and also hold on to wanting the soldiers to succeed. It's a very hard split in personality. I think it's necessary but it's a difficult thing to do." Raanan says Israelis have dehumanised Palestinians to such an extent that they are no longer sensitive about who they kill. "It's so difficult for them to put themselves in the place of someone who lives in Gaza. I guess you have to be able to dehumanise to be able to accept this type of war," she said.

"Israelis think of Hamas as a terrorist group and therefore anything we do to Hamas is OK. But the question is, why do we think it's OK also to kill civilians while we're killing or destroying Hamas? We rationalise; they do it to their own people. That's the rhetoric in Israel. It makes it OK to do what we're doing. In Israel we're brought up to be afraid of Arabs. It's a short step to hating them. It's unusual for people not to have hostile feelings toward Arabs, and it's racist feelings because it's a whole group."

In Shilo, Medad finds himself in agreement with Raanan on one thing. He sees Israeli public opinion as increasingly indifferent to Palestinian suffering. But he says it is because of foreign criticism of Israel's actions. "With the harshness of the criticism, they're slowly but surely turning off more Israelis to elements of humanity, consideration, so eventually they say: who the hell cares?" he said. "We don't see the human face. In that situation we can do anything we want. There's a lack of identity of who the enemy is. He's not human any more."

You might not know there was a war on while visiting Jerusalem's restaurants, Tel Aviv's frantic bars or the Azrieli shopping centre. The mall is one of the largest in Israel. Next door is the Kirya military headquarters, which houses Israel's defence ministry and the country's top military officers. The two buildings are linked by a bridge.

Through the Gaza war, Israel has accused Hamas of endangering civilians by establishing military installations in populated areas. It has been a central justification by the army for the killing of Palestinian civilians. The shoppers at the Azrieli mall see no contradiction between that claim and Israel building its defence headquarters next door to a shopping centre. "They might have a point if they attacked it," said Yoni Ahren, a computer engineer sipping coffee. "But they don't. Instead they send suicide bombers to blow us up in the mall. The Palestinians set out to kill any Jew. The Israeli army sets out to kill Hamas and, yes, innocent Palestinians get killed. But that is not why the army is in Gaza."

A soldier with Ahren, who declined to be identified because he was in uniform, said the Palestinians brought it on themselves. "They voted for Hamas and then Hamas attacked Israel so it's their problem," he said. "I don't know if this [attack on Gaza] will solve anything. Probably not. We cannot get rid of Hamas. But the lesson we've learnt is that we can't trust the Palestinians. We knew that with Arafat. Now we know it again."

That is the upside of the conflict in Gaza for Medad. He believes it could help assure the future of the West Bank settlements by reminding Israelis that control over what Israelis call Judea and Samaria is what keeps Hamas rockets from falling on Tel Aviv. "Things are changing. It's Gaza that's changed things," he said.

Shilo sits alongside the main road from Ramallah to Nablus, a long way from the "security barrier" Israel has built through the West Bank and Jerusalem. Shilo's residents are religious and mostly assert Israel's claim to all of the territory west of the Jordan river. A Palestinian presence is tolerated at best.

When Ariel Sharon pulled Jewish settlers out of Gaza in 2005, he called it a painful sacrifice for peace. Another view was that he had run out of political options and the pull-out was a way to stave off international pressure to talk to the Palestinians. What the dismantling of the Gaza settlements did not do was end the expansion of colonies on the West Bank. Shilo has grown by about 25% since 2005. The "outposts" around it, which are illegal even under Israeli law, have been expanding so fast that the "Shilo block", with about 10,000 residents, is now as large as the main settlement that was dismantled in Gaza.

Most Israelis tell the pollsters they would sacrifice Shilo for peace. But influential voices are against it, among them the man tipped to be Netanyahu's defence minister. Moshe "Bogie" Yaalon, the former military commander in the West Bank, pressed the government for months to attack Gaza, and is against a withdrawal from the West Bank.

Medad is confident that Yaalon's views will prevail. "If you don't have control over a population, you suffer. You want to call it occupation... fine. But there has to be some sort of control, supervision," he said. Yaalon recently asked: "What is the big difference between Gaza and Judea and Samaria - Judea and Samaria we can go in at night, we know where they are, and pick them up. In Gaza we can't do that."

It is a view largely shared by Netanyahu, who has called for the assault on Gaza to be carried through until it forces Hamas from power. Most Israelis may not want to go as far as Netanyahu, but he remains ahead in the polls. Even on the left, attitudes have hardened. Support for Ehud Barak, the Labour party leader and defence minister, has risen sharply because of the assault on Gaza.

Jeff Halper, a veteran peace campaigner, says this is further evidence that Israeli public opinion is principally shaped by fear. "The Israeli public is being held hostage by its own leadership," he said. "This whole idea there's no partner for peace has been internalised by Israelis. Everything has been reduced in Israel to terrorism because Israel has eliminated the political context of occupation and claims it only wants peace and has made generous offers and the Arabs always reject them."

"Seventy per cent of Israeli Jews say they don't want the occupation. They would be happy with the two-state solution. But what they say to us is: 'You don't have to talk to me about peace, I want peace. The Arabs won't let us because the Arabs are just terrorists.' There is in Israel a deeply held assumption that Arabs are our permanent enemies."

Raanan hopes not. She is counting the days until the Gaza assault is over and her son is pulled out. But the personal trauma will not be over if and when that happens. Her second son is due to be called up in six months. The way things are, he could be following his brother into Gaza.
Why Israel's war is driven by fear | World news | The Observer

sometimes you have more to say but find it so difficult to remain civil in saying it that it's better to hit not do it. this is one of them.

raeanna74 01-11-2009 12:31 PM

One thing that I'm not seeing in the news or anywhere is the number of Israelies that have been killed by this constant almost weekly bombing coming from the Hamas. The Palastinians in Gaza knew it was happening but I haven't heard of them doing anything to stop it. Doing nothing doesn't make you innocent, it actually implies guilt.
I feel that if you let something like that continue to happen in you own back yard and you do nothing to stop it, then I don't want to hear you crying about getting penalized for letting it happen.

If I had a rabid dog in my back yard, knew about it and did nothing to get rid of it (not even calling to report it) and it constantly attacks passersby. I have a feeling that I might be held liable when he attacks the wrong person.

So far I don't feel sorry for those who have drawn the ire of Israel. If you don't want to get hit, get out of the way. Quit allowing yourself to be a shield.

Willravel 01-11-2009 12:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raeanna74 (Post 2582268)
One thing that I'm not seeing in the news or anywhere is the number of Israelies that have been killed by this constant almost weekly bombing coming from the Hamas.

Israelis and Palestinians Killed since 9/29/2000

roachboy 01-11-2009 12:38 PM

there have been very few casualties in the period running up to the israeli ground action. li do not remember the numbers. since then, i have not seen that there have been any casualties from them, but i could be wrong.

[[edit---the stats that will posted are useful, but they count casualties since 2000. i was specifically talking about the casualties that accompanied the breakdown of the cease fire after 15 december. just to be clear.]]

but there is something deeply offensive about comparing the palestinian population of gaza to rabid dogs.
you might join most people in seeing hamas as a Problem in many ways, but to go from that to saying that palestianians as a whole are dogs is moving straight into kahane-type racist terrain.

translated into policy, it's a logic of extermination, not negociation. why negociate with people that you think of as rabid dogs?

geez. get a grip.

Willravel 01-11-2009 01:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2582270)
edit---the stats that will posted are useful, but they count casualties since 2000. i was specifically talking about the casualties that accompanied the breakdown of the cease fire after 15 december. just to be clear.

Oh. I believe it's maybe a dozen or so, but I can't find a complete list. Here's what I've found:
Quote:

Dec 27, 2008 - Beber Vaknin, 58, of Netivot was killed when a rocket fired from Gaza hit an apartment building in Netivot.

Dec 29, 2008 - Hani al-Mahdi, 27, of Aroar, a Beduin settlement in the Negev was killed when a Grad-type missile fired from Gaza exploded at a construction site in Ashkelon; 16 other workers were wounded. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

Dec 29, 2008 - Irit Sheetrit, 39, of Ashdod was killed and several wounded when a Grad rocket exploded in the center of Ashdod. Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack.

Dec 29, 2008 - Warrant Officer Lutfi Nasraladin, 38, of the Druze town of Daliat el-Carmel was killed by a mortar attack on a military base near Nahal Oz.
Victims of Palestinian Terror since Sept 2000

Quote:

Two Israelis were killed Monday evening as Gaza militants pelted southern Israel with rockets and mortar shells, as Israel concluded its third day of aerial assaults on the Gaza Strip.
Rockets fired from Gaza kill 2 Israelis within hour - Haaretz - Israel News

Quote:

On Day 3 of Israel's Gaza operation, Dec. 29, Hamas hit back hard with volleys of rockets and missiles at points closer to central Israel than ever before. The three Israelis killed were IDF career officer, Sgt. Maj. Lutfi Nasr e-Din, 38, from Daliat Hacarmel, at Nahal Oz, a woman motorist, Irit Sheetrit, 39, mother of four, who sought shelter in the Ashdod bus terminus, 30 km from Gaza; and earlier in Ashkelon, Hani al-Mahdi, 27, a construction worker from the Bedouin Negev village of Ar'ur.
DEBKAfile - Three Israelis killed, 32 injured in 100 Hamas missile attacks Monday

Quote:

South under heavy fire: Mother of four killed on way back from gym as Gaza terrorists fire long-range rockets at city of Ashdod; victim's sister wounded in strike. Meanwhile, mortar shells fired by Palestinians kill IDF career officer near Gaza
South under fire; 2 Israelis killed - Israel News, Ynetnews
-----Added 11/1/2009 at 04 : 06 : 33-----
Quote:

Originally Posted by raeanna74 (Post 2582268)
The Palastinians in Gaza knew it was happening but I haven't heard of them doing anything to stop it. Doing nothing doesn't make you innocent, it actually implies guilt.

What are you doing to stop the war in Iraq? If you're doing nothing, you're clearly guilty.
Quote:

Originally Posted by raeanna74 (Post 2582268)
If I had a rabid dog in my back yard, knew about it and did nothing to get rid of it (not even calling to report it) and it constantly attacks passersby. I have a feeling that I might be held liable when he attacks the wrong person.

This is not appropriate. :no:

TheNasty 01-11-2009 01:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2582267)
that post is surreal in its wholesale inaccuracy, in its bad faith. it is nothing more and nothing less than a repeat of the extreme rightwing's justifications for killing palestinians in great number and then congratulating themselves for being such humanitarians. the place you see this nonsense repeated almost verbatim is amongst the fringe rightwing settler parties. you know, the folk who embarrass most israelis.


It would be a miracle if you replied to a post without developing a straw man.
-----Added 11/1/2009 at 04 : 44 : 14-----
Quote:

Originally Posted by Willravel (Post 2582276)
Oh. I believe it's maybe a dozen or so, but I can't find a
What are you doing to stop the war in Iraq? If you're doing nothing, you're clearly guilty.

If people in my community were firing rockets at the community 5 miles down the road, I certainly would do more than sit in my house, especially if I knew the community 5 miles away wouldn't do what many in this forum suggest and just ignore the rocket fire.

Willravel 01-11-2009 01:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582284)
It would be a miracle if you replied to a post without developing a straw man.

Followed by:
Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582284)
If people in my community were firing rockets at the community 5 miles down the road, I certainly would do more than sit in my house, especially if I knew the community 5 miles away wouldn't do what many in this forum suggest and just ignore the rocket fire.

No one has said to ignore rocket fire. That's called a strawman.

Baraka_Guru 01-11-2009 01:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582284)
If people in my community were firing rockets at the community 5 miles down the road, I certainly would do more than sit in my house, especially if I knew the community 5 miles away wouldn't do what many in this forum suggest and just ignore the rocket fire.

Easier said than done. I imagine you'd normally have to do more than just sit in your house if you had a family and only made $10/day, especially during a blockade.

Also, I don't think the militants conducting the rocket attacks are open to suggestion. How would you go about doing "more than sit in your house"?

roachboy 01-11-2009 03:01 PM

all i did was to position your viewpoint in the space it belongs--the far right of the israeli political spectrum. and then, because i was inclined to actually take you a bit seriously in the context of this debate, i posted an article that demonstrated what i was saying.
which i do not expect you actually read. notnasty.
your position requires no actual information, so it's not surprising, somehow, that there is no particular need to acquire any.


one of the most tiresome tasks that has come up over and over in this thread, and in nearly every other debate involving palestine and israel, it pushing back at this tendency on the part mostly of american supporters of israel who seem imagine that because they only know one political line on the topic that there is only one political line. over and over the same thing.

it is ultimately not my problem that you appear to know nothing about the political spectrum in israel, that you appear to know nothing about the diversity of views in israel. if you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't be so quick to buy into this one-dimensional narratives that are free of any context and so are free of any danger of actually addressing what's happening.

over and over, the reverse side of this one-dimensional view of gaza is another--that somehow if you are critical of the patent lunacy of the israeli action that you support hamas, that if you focus on the civilian population of gaza which is trapped in place BECAUSE of the israeli blockade that you are somehow excusing rocket attacks.

sometimes, in particularly delightful examples of one-dimensional thinking on this, you get these quaint little scenarios involving abstract house number one and abstract house number two, in which one house is full of people who just decided one fine day to start lobbing rockets at the other. no context, no information, no nothing.

every last bit of these arguments is made up of nothing but strawmen, lined up one after another.

things get complicated when you start actually look at and thinking about a world that is not locked into moralizing fables the sole function of which is to justify the occupation in general, the actions within the occupation, the demonization of palestinians and by extension to rationalize away what is by any rational standard a sequence of atrocities interspersed with an all-considered, self-defeating military action.

hiredgun 01-12-2009 06:12 PM

Israel bans Arab parties from running in upcoming elections - Haaretz - Israel News
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel disqualifies Arab parties

Israel has disqualified two Arab parties from running in upcoming parliamentary elections.

Willravel 01-12-2009 06:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hiredgun (Post 2582752)

Taxation without representation seems to rear it's head pretty often.

Maybe it's time for a Mediterranean tea party?

Baraka_Guru 01-12-2009 06:23 PM

It's interesting how the parties that filed for the ban are on the far right, while the parties that were banned are progressive (ostensibly...I'm open to being enlightened otherwise).

Don't disqualify the Arab lists - Haaretz - Israel News

roachboy 01-12-2009 07:22 PM

this is a digression-->if i were to blame the poisoning of the political atomosphere after 67 on one thing--and this includes the modalities of occupation--it would be the settlements in general and the far right politics that has taken hold amongst the settlements in particular. because the israeli parliament was so fractured---WHICH WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE WERE THE RIGHT'S THE ONLY VIEWPOINT HELD BY ISRAELIS--likud entered a period of coalitions with the far right: to my mind, things were not great before that, but this is the point at which things started to really turn to shit. it caused an ideological shift within the right. and that was not good. not good at all.<----this is the end of the digression.

yeah, see, this is the kind of thing that raises the memory of apartheid pretty explicitly.

TheNasty 01-12-2009 08:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Willravel (Post 2582289)
Followed by:

No one has said to ignore rocket fire. That's called a strawman.

Roachboy's position, as I understand it, is that Israel's treatment toward the Palestinians is what causes the rocket attacks, so really it's Israel's fault they are getting rocketed.

If I'm not understanding the position correctly, that's my fault, but it sounds really close to "ignore the rocket attacks" to me.

At this point in my view it's pretty clear that a political solution isn't going to work as long as the ability to produce home made rockets exists.

There might be a large segment of the Palestinian population that might want to live in peace with Israel. For whatever reasons, that segment of the population is unable to prevent their government from launching rockets and conducting suicide bombings inside of Israel.

With around 700 casualties in an area crammed with 3.1 million people, Israel has to be using some semblance of caution while executing this military engagement. Maybe they really are just trying to go after Hamas's ability to make and launch home made rockets, and aren't really embarking on wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people.

raeanna74 01-12-2009 08:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy (Post 2582270)
...but there is something deeply offensive about comparing the palestinian population of gaza to rabid dogs.
you might join most people in seeing hamas as a Problem in many ways, but to go from that to saying that palestianians as a whole are dogs is moving straight into kahane-type racist terrain.

translated into policy, it's a logic of extermination, not negociation. why negociate with people that you think of as rabid dogs?

geez. get a grip.

FINE Aggressive people who like to throw rocks at bypassers. I was only trying to get the point across that if you ALLOW something that is harmful to someone else YOU are guilty as well. Get a grip yourself. Geez why does it seem like you are taking this personally. Have you joined the Hamas??

Willravel 01-12-2009 08:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582809)
Roachboy's position, as I understand it, is that Israel's treatment toward the Palestinians is what causes the rocket attacks, so really it's Israel's fault they are getting rocketed.

If I'm not understanding the position correctly, that's my fault, but it sounds really close to "ignore the rocket attacks" to me.

You're assuming a false dichotomy. It's not just either:
1) Respond with extreme force or
2) Sit there and twiddle your thumbs
There are a lot of options.

roachboy 01-12-2009 08:20 PM

Quote:

Have you joined the Hamas??

TheNasty 01-12-2009 08:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru (Post 2582291)
Easier said than done. I imagine you'd normally have to do more than just sit in your house if you had a family and only made $10/day, especially during a blockade.

I agree, I should have been clearer.

It is my opinion that those in Palestine that want peace with Israel aren't doing much to ensure that happens.

Quote:

Also, I don't think the militants conducting the rocket attacks are open to suggestion. How would you go about doing "more than sit in your house"?
What could you do if Agents of your own government were launching rockets into a neighboring country?

Quite the Catch 22, on one hand you could try to change your own government and likely be tortured and killed. On the other, your government continues to launch missles and conduct suicide bombings within Israel and you get to deal with the IAF.

The difference, the later gets forum warriors the world around in an uproar.

:)

To be serious though, I honestly don't know what could be done, but I can't help but think not much is being done by the segment of the population that wants peace with Israel.

The whole situation has been circular for a long, long time. Political cease fires aren't going to work, Hamas and other organizations won't follow them, but the only real answer is for them TO follow them.

If Israel, tomorrow, would remove all blockades and Israeli nationals out of the Palestinian territories, suicide bombings and rocket fire wouldn't stop, for multiple reasons already brought up in this thread. A cease-fire continues the circular nature of this confrontation that has been on going for longer than most of us have been alive.

In essence I think that everything over the past 40-50-60 years has created a situation where these guys just have to fight it out. Not every situation in this world has an ending that is fair, or logical, or just. I really think this is one of them.

The question becomes, what happens next? At some point we've got to accept an all out offensive from Israel into Palestine is inevitable, once we create the baseline we can then try to control future moves in the chess game to minimize the global implications of any war.

Earlier in this thread, on the first page, Roachboy discussed what has Israel's policy got them so far? My question is what has Palestine's policy got them so far? Surely the people of Palestine knew what Hamas stood for, I know that Hamas built schools and roads and what not for the people of Palestine, but surely they realized that if elected they would be legitimizing Hamas's effort against Israel.

The only legitimate ending for this centuries old conflict is for one side to stop throwing stones (or bombs.) One side of the fight believes, justly or not, that if they stay strong that they will be eliminated. If Hamas/Palestine/whoever would, starting tomorrow, leave Israel alone I believe everything would be over. I don't believe that would apply if the roles were reversed.

The only ending is for Hamas, and other organizations that terrorize Israel and her people, to stop. Or be forced to stop.

Just my opinion, if the 10 or so months I've been reading and not participating on these forums have taught me anything the majority will likely disagree. :)

Willravel 01-12-2009 08:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raeanna74 (Post 2582813)
FINE Aggressive people who like to throw rocks at bypassers. I was only trying to get the point across that if you ALLOW something that is harmful to someone else YOU are guilty as well.

You're putting fourth this line of logic without supporting it. If all Palestinians are responsible for the actions of Hamas (except for those few that speak out against them), can't that same logic be applied to you? What are you doing to reduce violent crime in your city or town? If nothing, based on your logic, aren't you guilty of violent crime?
Quote:

Originally Posted by raeanna74 (Post 2582813)
Have you joined the Hamas??

Even if rb wasn't a member of the staff, I can't imagine this being appropriate.

TheNasty 01-12-2009 08:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Willravel (Post 2582814)
You're assuming a false dichotomy. It's not just either:
1) Respond with extreme force or
2) Sit there and twiddle your thumbs
There are a lot of options.

At some point it does become that dichotomy. A political solution has been tried for how long?

Peace process in the Israeli?Palestinian conflict - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Again, this isn't advocating either side, but with so many peace treaties/agreements/talks/whatever failing, it does beg the question of how long can the circular nature of this conflict continue?

We're quickly approaching the point where it is either Respond with force or twiddle your thumbs.

For a crude analogy, that isn't painting one side or the other as the victim or the bully.

A bully picks on you and you try to solve it by asking him to stop, by talking with your parents, by talking with the teacher, by talking with the principal, and by trying to avoid him. Eventually the only solution is to punch the bully in the nose.

I think we're to option (F) in the Israel/Palestinian conflict. Israel's punch is bombs and tanks. Palestine's is crude home made rockets.

Willravel 01-12-2009 09:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582831)
At some point it does become that dichotomy.

Very few things in life are black and white, especially when it comes to war.
Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582831)
A political solution has been tried for how long?

Okay, there's a third option. We have blow them up, do nothing, or political solution, and it's in the latter that I suspect we'll find an answer.

And I know it's not worked perfectly in the past, but you have to admit that Oslo demonstrated that it's possible. There can be a peaceful solution.

roachboy 01-13-2009 05:15 AM

thenasty---i haven't necessarily been arguing a clear and simple line in this thread in part because there isn't one, not that makes sense anyway. i don't buy your bully analogy for example--the palestinians have been under occupation since 1867, there has been a substantial official/unofficial policy of settlements---israel is a militarily by far the most powerful country in the region--on and on. within this, there has been a political dynamic in which all parties have played their part in the cycle of deterioration--but i see israeli policy choices as in some cases reacting to problems, but in many cases driving them. there's alot of information in the thread, so i'll just refer back to it from here.

i've linked the horror in gaza to a specific set of political choices made by israel and the united states in jan 06. i've linked that in turn the the logic that has been driving that deterioration, which is the same logic that informed the imposition of a seige---that a military substitute for good-faith peace negociations and ultimately an independen viable palestine makes sense, will work---it doesn't, it hasn't, it won't. i see gaza as a kind of psychotic demonstration of the impotence of the logic of force.

where does this logic of force come from? what enables it politically and ideologically? the israel right.
does this mean i think the palestinian population has been well-served politically by the organizations there? hell no.
does that mean i think there is no responsibility for, in this case, hamas?
i don't know how many times i have to say that i hold hamas in part accountable for this wreckage--but the cause of the incursion, really, is the policy choices that the israeli right made from january 06 onward.

as for the idea that the palestinians are "bullies"--consider today's casualty counts.
as of this morning, medical sources in gaza say that 935 palestinians have been killed and 4,300 injured. in the context of a siege, in the context of reduced medical supplies, erratic water and electricity.
there have been 13 israeli casualties. 10 of them are soldiers.

then there's the following:

Quote:

Demands grow for Gaza war crimes investigation

Israel is facing growing demands from senior UN officials and human rights groups for an international war crimes investigation in Gaza over allegations such as the "reckless and indiscriminate" shelling of residential areas and use of Palestinian families as human shields by soldiers.

With the death toll from the 17-day Israeli assault on Gaza climbing above 900, pressure is increasing for an independent inquiry into specific incidents, such as the shelling of a UN school turned refugee centre where about 40 people died, as well as the question of whether the military tactics used by Israel systematically breached humanitarian law.

The UN's senior human rights body approved a resolution yesterday condemning the Israeli offensive for "massive violations of human rights". A senior UN source said the body's humanitarian agencies were compiling evidence of war crimes and passing it on to the "highest levels" to be used as seen fit.

Some human rights activists allege that the Israeli leadership gave an order to keep military casualties low no matter what cost to civilians. That strategy has directly contributed to one of the bloodiest Israeli assaults on the Palestinian territories, they say.

John Ging, head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency in Gaza, said: "It's about accountability [over] the issue of the appropriateness of the force used, the proportionality of the force used and the whole issue of duty of care of civilians.

"We don't want to join any chorus of passing judgment but there should be an investigation of any and every incident where there are concerns there might have been violations in international law."

The Israeli military are accused of:

• Using powerful shells in civilian areas which the army knew would cause large numbers of innocent casualties;

• Using banned weapons such as phosphorus bombs;

• Holding Palestinian families as human shields;

• Attacking medical facilities, including the killing of 12 ambulance men in marked vehicles;

• Killing large numbers of police who had no military role.

Israeli military actions prompted an unusual public rebuke from the International Red Cross after the army moved a Palestinian family into a building and shelled it, killing 30. The surviving children clung to the bodies of their dead mothers for four days while the army blocked rescuers from reaching the wounded.

Human Rights Watch has called on the UN security council to set up a commission of inquiry into alleged war crimes.

Two leading Israeli human rights organisations have separately written to the country's attorney general demanding he investigate the allegations.

But critics remain sceptical that any such inquiry will take place, given that Israel has previously blocked similar attempts with the backing of the US.

Amnesty International says hitting residential streets with shells that send blast and shrapnel over a wide area constitutes "prima facie evidence of war crimes".

"There has been reckless and disproportionate and in some cases indiscriminate use of force," said Donatella Rovera, an Amnesty investigator in Israel. "There has been the use of weaponry that shouldn't be used in densely populated areas because it's known that it will cause civilian fatalities and casualties.

"They have extremely sophisticated missiles that can be guided to a moving car and they choose to use other weapons or decide to drop a bomb on a house knowing that there were women and children inside. These are very, very clear breaches of international law."

Israel's most prominent human rights organisation, B'Tselem, has written to the attorney general in Jerusalem, Meni Mazuz, asking him to investigate suspected crimes including how the military selects its targets and the killing of scores of policemen at a passing out parade.

"Many of the targets seem not to have been legitimate military targets as specified by international humanitarian law," said Sarit Michaeli of B'Tselem.

Rovera has also collected evidence that the Israeli army holds Palestinian families prisoner in their own homes as human shields. "It's standard practice for Israeli soldiers to go into a house, lock up the family in a room on the ground floor and use the rest of the house as a military base, as a sniper's position. That is the absolute textbook case of human shields.

"It has been practised by the Israeli army for many years and they are doing it again in Gaza now," she said.

While there are growing calls for an international investigation, the form it would take is less clear. The UN's human rights council has the authority to investigate allegations of war crimes but Israel has blocked its previous attempts to do so. The UN security council could order an investigation, and even set up a war crimes tribunal, but that is likely to be vetoed by the US and probably Britain.

The international criminal court has no jurisdiction because Israel is not a signatory. The UN security council could refer the matter to the court but is unlikely to.

Benjamin Rutland, a spokesman for the Israeli military, said an international investigation of the army's actions was not justified. "We have international lawyers at every level of the command whose job it is to authorise targeting decisions, rules of engagement ... We don't think we have breached international law in any of these instances," he said.
Israel faces calls for Gaza war crimes investigation | World news | The Guardian

are these charges true?
some are entirely consistent with information that's been coming out of gaza. some it's impossible to know about.

but the palestinians are the "bullies"?
what on earth are you talking about?

i maintain a few shreds of optimism about this situation.
i would hope that the israeli right would implode as a function of information concerning the needlessness of this entire situation, the brutality of the siege itself, the ill-advised ground incursion, the appalling consequences of launching in it in a situation where the civilian population is trapped in place.
but that may be naive.
conservatives seem to benefit from panic and to be able to conflate irrational responses to panic with forcefulness.

i would hope that this relation between israel and palestine is internationalized, and the sooner the better. this because it seem to me so long as the framework that has been in place remains in place, there will be nothing but carnage---inflicted on both sides---but disproportionate bourne by palestinians.

the american position has to change. getting rid of george w bush is a positive step, but i am not yet convinced that obama's administration will be particularly radical in their break with the nitwit policies of the past 8 years. but so far, he has said little. so we wait, like everyone else does, for the end of the bush administration and hope that no more damage comes while their ghosts trail about the house.

and to be clear, israel is a fact. it's existence is in no danger. it is given, it isn't going anywhere. it's well past time for israel to be understood as a nation-state like any other, obliged to act like a part of the international community which is bound by the same rules. on the other hand, there are fundamental, seemingly intractable problems--like the settlements in the west bank and ESPECIALLY the disproportionate ideological influence of the extreme right---that could be addressed but not in the context of the nation-state based approach that's been the only game in town so far.

internationalize the conflict.
remove the settlements. all of them.
move toward a two-state solution.

my underlying assumption is that the cycle of colonial domination and resistance to it leads to nothing but excuses for continuing the domination which leads to nothing but reasons to try to fight back against it. all sides are trapped in this, and nothing will change until the logic itself is undermined. and on this, i hope i'm right. it seems reasonable as a way of looking at post 67 reality, but no-one knows for sure whether things are in fact as simple as they seem when you project an idea forward in time.

but it seems worth a try. this sure as hell hasn't worked.

i've made this as clear as i can in this thread.

i'd prefer to think folk read the thread before they post.

even raeanna, who obviously did not.

tisonlyi 01-13-2009 07:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582831)
At some point it does become that dichotomy. A political solution has been tried for how long?

Peace process in the Israeli?Palestinian conflict - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Again, this isn't advocating either side, but with so many peace treaties/agreements/talks/whatever failing, it does beg the question of how long can the circular nature of this conflict continue?

We're quickly approaching the point where it is either Respond with force or twiddle your thumbs.

For a crude analogy, that isn't painting one side or the other as the victim or the bully.

A bully picks on you and you try to solve it by asking him to stop, by talking with your parents, by talking with the teacher, by talking with the principal, and by trying to avoid him. Eventually the only solution is to punch the bully in the nose.

I think we're to option (F) in the Israel/Palestinian conflict. Israel's punch is bombs and tanks. Palestine's is crude home made rockets.

Just out of interest, should the British have carpet bombed, oh sorry, my bad... precision-stroked-that-just-happen-to-slaughter-untold-numbers-of-civilians-men/women/children-...-every-time-including-UN-schools, the Republican/Catholic areas of Northern Ireland?

I mean, they were bombing both N.I. and the mainland - with American dollars! (mostly)

powerclown 01-13-2009 09:27 AM

Most of the nations within the Middle East contain conquered people and conquerors. For an example right next door to the Palestinians, consider that the rulers and bulk of the population in Egypt are Arab conquerors who swept in from the southeast. The conquered indigenous people are the Copts, the descendants of the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids and temples so familiar to tourists. The Copts converted to Christianity during the Roman Empire and have suffered from religious, political, and economic oppression for 1300 years, ever since the Arab conquest. Copts are periodically murdered by Arab-Muslim mobs and generally the Arabs are not prosecuted for the killings. You could read about this in U.S. Copts Association but you probably won't because the Copts are not violent.

At the Potsdam Conference the Allies granted Eastern European nations the right to expel their ethnic German citizens, i.e., people who had been living in these areas for generations but whose forebears were German and who spoke the German language. Roughly 12 million of these volksdeutsche were in fact expelled, their property confiscated, and as many as two million may have been killed in the process. The surviving volksdeutsche settled in crummy houses in Germany and Austria and integrated themselves with those societies. If there were a Volksdeutsche Liberation Army murdering Czech, Polish, and Hungarian civilians the world might pay some attention to the injustices suffered by this group.

The 870,000 Jews expelled from Arabs countries in the 1940s and 1950s similarly settled quietly in the U.S., Europe, and Israel. They aren't out there blowing up Iraqi, Moroccan, and Algerian embassies or airplanes, which is why you probably never think about them.

The list of people who were displaced by the events of World War II and decolonialization is endless. The only group that anyone pays attention to is the Palestinians. If the Palestinians were to stop blowing up airplanes and pizza shops people would stop paying attention.

Arab leaders don't care about non-violent Palestinians. If you were an Arab leader there is no reason to care about your own subjects, much less members of very distant tribes. The only Arab nation that has ever offered Palestinians citizenship is Jordan; a Palestinian family that has lived in Egypt or Saudi Arabia for several generations will still be aliens with no right to permanent residence. Thus there are more than 4 million people officially classified as Palestinian refugees despite the fact that the final British census before the 1948 war found only about 1 million people of all religions living in Palestine. The primary agency for these stateless souls is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). If you visit their Web site, UNRWA Official Homepage (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), you'll see that the U.S. and European nations provide almost all of the funding. Historically in fact the Western nations provided 100 percent of the funding for UNRWA but in recent years Saudi Arabia has been shamed into chipping in. For 2006 the Saudis contributed $5.8 million, compared to a U.S. contribution of $120 million and Britain's $30 million. Most Arab countries contribute less than the cost of a new Mercedes automobile.

Violent Palestinians, by contrast, have no trouble getting support from fellow Arabs. In April 2002 the Saudi state television network ran a telethon that raised more than $100 million to aid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers (Associated Press, April 13, 2002). Iraq, which contributes nothing to UNRWA, had been donating roughly $10 million per year to the families of suicide bombers. Iran, another state that contributes nothing to UNRWA, sends weapons and money to anti-Israel groups such as Hezbollah and Hmas and the ex-PLO, most notably a 50-ton shipment of rockets and plastic explosives in January 2002 (notable because it was in violation of the agreements that Arafat had signed and because it was discovered and intercepted by the Israeli Navy).

The only way that a Palestinian can get his or her hands on a share of Arab oil wealth is by becoming a suicide bomber. "[Izzidene al Masri] lived with his 12 brothers and sisters and his parents in a neat, tile-floored house" (Knight Ridder, April 1, 2002, on the Sbarro pizza shop bomber). If you lived in poverty it might make sense to trade your life for the knowledge that Saudi Arabians would support your parents, grandparents, and 11 siblings in comfort for the rest of their lives.

This kind of poverty is likely to endure because Palestinians combine a low level of education and a high level of illiteracy (30 percent) with perhaps the highest birthrate of any world population, estimated for 2007 at 5 percent per annum by passia.org. This means that Palestinians need to generate economic growth of 5 percent per year, and preserve that growth from kleptocratic politicians, merely to maintain their standard of living. For comparison, the most rapidly growing population with which most Americans are familiar is Mexico; its population is growing at an annual rate of 1.47 percent (CIA Factbook 2007). In the 1990s, according to the World Bank, the average country enjoyed a 2.5 percent annual growth rate. Even if they succeeded in liberating all of Palestine, the Palestinians would have a difficult time growing at any rate close to 5 percent per year. They'd have one of the most densely populated countries in the world, one of the poorest in natural resources, especially water, and a complete lack of industry.

It may be a mistake to look too deep into Palestinian poverty for the roots of Palestinian violence. For most violent Palestinians we need not conjecture as to the motivation for their violence because they've explained it in their own words.

Here is an except from The Palestinian National Charter, July 1-17, 1968:

Quote:

Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit. [Note that this would include the present-day country of Jordan, 70 percent of the land of the original British Palestine, split off and handed to Emir Abdullah in 1923.]

Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.

Commando action constitutes the nucleus of the Palestinian popular liberation war.

The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal, regardless of the passage of time, because they were contrary to the will of the Palestinian people and to their natural right in their homeland, and inconsistent with the principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations; particularly the right to self-determination.

Source: The Avalon Project : Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy
Hamas has a Web site where they explain their goals:

Quote:

Hamas is a Jihadi (fighting for a holy purpose) movement in the broad sense of the word Jihad. It is part of the Islamic awakening movement and upholds that this awakening is the road which will lead to the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea.

... [settlement with the State of Israel] should not be allowed to happen because the land of Palestine is a blessed Islamic land that has been usurped by the Zionists; and Jihad has become a duty for Muslims to restore it and expel their occupiers out of their land.
Hezbollah also has a Web site (www.hizbollah.org) where they explain their objectives:

Quote:

Because Hezbollah's ideological ideals sees no legitimacy for the existence of "Israel" a matter that elevates the contradictions to the level of existence. And the conflict becomes one of legitimacy that is based on religious ideals. ... And that is why we also find the slogan of the liberation of Jerusalem rooted deeply in the ideals of Hezbollah. Another of its ideals is the establishment of an Islamic Government.

Hezbollah also used one of its own special types of resistance against the Zionist enemy that is the suicide attacks. These attacks dealt great losses to the enemy on all thinkable levels such as militarily and mentally. The attacks also raised the moral across the whole Islamic nation.

Hezbollah also sees itself committed in introducing the true picture of Islam, the Islam that is logical. Committed to introduce the civilized Islam to humanity.
Note that if we take seriously the words of the Palestinian fighters we can ignore 99 percent of the journalism and punditry to which we are exposed. The guys with the guns have explained very clearly why they are fighting and under what conditions they will lay down their arms. Their reasons for fighting and their conditions for peace have nothing to do with day-to-day events.

hiredgun 01-13-2009 09:52 AM

Jeremy Bowen from his journal in the BBC today:

Quote:

I have never liked comparisons between Northern Ireland and the conflict here. Apart from the fact that they are not always helpful, writing and broadcasting about the Middle East is a good enough way to make enemies. I don't need another set.

But think about this. For many years Britain faced an insurgency and at times a low-level civil war in Northern Ireland. Those sorts of terms weren't used all that much but that's what it was.

At different times the IRA planted bombs on the British mainland that killed people and did a lot of damage. The actions of the British security forces during three decades of the Troubles were very controversial, and still are today. Sometimes the British army killed innocent people.

But Britain never used heavy weapons, fast jets, air strikes and attack helicopters. Tracked armoured vehicles were very rarely seen.

And it has emerged that there were many secret contacts over the years with the paramilitaries. In the end, there were years of negotiations. Prisoners who were serving long sentences were released as part of the price of peace, even, in the phrase used in this part of the world, if they had "blood on their hands".

There is no doubt about the extreme suffering that Israel is inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza to protect, in its view, its own citizens. It is deepening the hatred for Israel that many people in Gaza felt anyway.

Israel has used what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert calls the iron fist many times before. And its citizens still feel insecure.

Will they feel any different when this latest episode is over?
I think that what he begins to say at the end is key (or a key, at any rate): What is the point of Israel, as a project and a society, if it never is allowed to become a normal state? If its citizens continue to live in dread and know only war? Some have a messianic belief that it has always, and will always be this way for 'The Jews' as a historic people. I don't share that belief, and it is not borne out by the history of the region, in which major strife between Jewish and non-Jewish populations is a twentieth century phenomenon. And if we then properly treat this as a political issue - not a messianic one - it's clear that this war isn't taking us anywhere good, isn't bringing us closer to peace. The only possible way that the present Gaza war might lead us to long-term peace is if Israelis really and truly believe they can break the Palestinians as a people, to completely and totally destroy their national will, to disperse them beyond repair. To do that would be abhorrent, I think, to Israelis' sense of their own morality (to say nothing of the world). To pursue this war and do any less than that, however, will simply deepen wounds, entrench hard-liners, and inflict an appalling human cost. Where is the endgame, here? Even in a best-case scenario for Israel, if Hamas utterly collapses, do they believe that whatever power structure takes its place will make lesser demands on the Israeli military/security apparatus, or make lesser demands for a contiguous and viable state? Do they believe they can empower Fatah by doing this, or are they tying its hands?

TheNasty 01-13-2009 09:58 AM

Powerclown summarized the situation better than I could have ever hoped to.

Very nice job.

Every day Joe Palestinian is stuck between a rock and a hard place, any decent person would feel for them.

That being said, this problem won't ever be solved if the answer is Political. Hamas/Hezbollah/militant arabs aren't seeking a political answer.

tisonlyi 01-13-2009 10:05 AM

The IRA clearly stated they would not lay down their arms until the island of Ireland was one nation. What people say and write down to convince other people that they're really, really committed isn't necessarily what they'll agree to in genuine efforts at negotiation.

With the notable exception of the Copts, whose plight I know nothing about, the others were not and are not the subjects of 40 years up to the present day of ongoing oppression, humiliation, torture, siege (which i'm pretty sure counts as collective punishment...), assassinations(some carried out in person by the current defence minister, that lefty labor peacenik man), killings (ditto) and massacres (take your pick of all the Zionist revisionists on the Israeli political scene) at the hands of an organised, modern state funded by the hegemonic superpower of the world.

History is bloody, everyone knows it. History is not an excuse for the knowing slaughter of innocents NOW, and it really doesn't matter that they're 'not deliberately targeted' which is as disingenuous a phrase as you'll find (and very much reminds me of Catch 22, with others telling Yossarian to calm down, because they're not really trying to kill him, they're trying to kill everyone!).

Hopefully, after another couple of weeks of this mindless barbarity, the Israeli people themselves might cry out for a halt to the insanity... It's a long shot, but stranger things have happened. Eventually people will start finding videos on the net... Maybe there's a possibility of some sort of sane political party emerging in Israel.

I think it was Machiavelli who said that you either treat an opponent well, or wipe them out completely. People have the strange habit of seeking revenge for past, non-genocidal crimes against them.

TheNasty 01-13-2009 10:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tisonlyi (Post 2582975)
The IRA clearly stated they would not lay down their arms until the island of Ireland was one nation. What people say and write down to convince other people that they're really, really committed isn't necessarily what they'll agree to in genuine efforts at negotiation.

So they really wanted peace, they just talked a big game and carried out bombings to keep up their street cred?


Quote:

Hopefully, after another couple of weeks of this mindless barbarity, the Israeli people themselves might cry out for a halt to the insanity... It's a long shot, but stranger things have happened. Eventually people will start finding videos on the net... Maybe there's a possibility of some sort of sane political party emerging in Israel.
What would that sane political party look like? One that ignores attacks from Palestine for as long as it takes? Or do you think Hamas just talks a big game and would stop attacking Israel tomorrow if they would remove blockades and wholesale leave the Palestinian territory, including Israeli civilians/citizens?

tisonlyi 01-13-2009 10:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582970)
Powerclown summarized the situation better than I could have ever hoped to.

Very nice job.

Every day Joe Palestinian is stuck between a rock and a hard place, any decent person would feel for them.

That being said, this problem won't ever be solved if the answer is Political. Hamas/Hezbollah/militant arabs aren't seeking a political answer.

If the Israelis went over all the heads of those seeking to destroy them, and laid out a solution that went back to the 67 borders, with rights of return and a modicum of reparation, directly offering a referendum on that to the Palestinian people... then i think you'd find this problem could and would be solved. Imperfectly, with a lot of setbacks, but it would be solved.

And if the answer isn't political, then it's time to stop pussy-footing around and get busy with the extermination camps, forced evacuations and ethnic cleansing in an honest fashion.

Willravel 01-13-2009 10:22 AM

No one is saying to ignore attacks. What I think most are saying, though, is that this asymmetrical military response that Israel adores so much is clearly causing more problems than it's solving. Israel is killing a lot of innocent people along with the few guilty ones, and that's fuel on the fire of hatred towards Israel. And this isn't some kind of secret, a child could figure this out. If Israel wanted peace, they wouldn't be trying to exterminate the Palestinians, which leads us to...
Quote:

Originally Posted by tisonlyi (Post 2582980)
And if the answer isn't political, then it's time to stop pussy-footing around and get busy with the extermination camps, forced evacuations and ethnic cleansing in an honest fashion.

Oh. Snap.

tisonlyi 01-13-2009 10:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582976)
So they really wanted peace, they just talked a big game and carried out bombings to keep up their street cred?

The island of Ireland is not one nation. The IRA have and are laying down their arms. The armed conflict is over. Your mini-narrative is ridiculous.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582976)
What would that sane political party look like? One that ignores attacks from Palestine for as long as it takes? Or do you think Hamas just talks a big game and would stop attacking Israel tomorrow if they would remove blockades and wholesale leave the Palestinian territory, including Israeli civilians/citizens?

Color-and-shade-blindness much?

There aren't just 2 options. Either you set out on a policy of massacre or you ignore the rockets fired at you... Can't you think of any other potential lines of progress from here?

The big stick doesn't work... the more Israel uses the iron fist, the more money will flow to the extremists, which they won't be using for flower arranging classes and pilates sessions.

TheNasty 01-13-2009 10:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tisonlyi (Post 2582980)
If the Israelis went over all the heads of those seeking to destroy them, and laid out a solution that went back to the 67 borders, with rights of return and a modicum of reparation, directly offering a referendum on that to the Palestinian people... then i think you'd find this problem could and would be solved. Imperfectly, with a lot of setbacks, but it would be solved.

What sort of setbacks? Suicide Bombings? More Rocket Attacks? Israel should just ignore those setbacks in the name of peace, right?

Quote:

And if the answer isn't political, then it's time to stop pussy-footing around and get busy with the extermination camps, forced evacuations and ethnic cleansing in an honest fashion.
What, they aren't doing this already? :rolleyes:

Israel doesn't want that, and they've shown they haven't wanted that continually through their actions.

Willravel 01-13-2009 10:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582986)
Israel doesn't want that, and they've shown they haven't wanted that continually through their actions.

When have they shown restraint?

roachboy 01-13-2009 10:34 AM

powerclown's narrative manages somehow to erase the fact of occupation. so the claims concerning poverty and their correlate in some strange essentialist distinction between the violent and non-violent end up being cast as eternal conditions.

if one integrates empirical and/or historical reality into this circular, self-justifying narrative, the sole function of which is to justify anything and everything the israeli right does--you'd end up in a position quite far from where powerclown himself does.

if you're going to tell "historical" narratives, there are rules. including factors that have for over 40 years now fundamentally conditioned the cycle within which the factoids you adduce have happened is a rule. if you don't do it, you're making fables and that's all you're doing.

similarly, it is self-evident that what an organization's official line is and what it's unofficial lines might be in negociation can be entirely different, and that it is somewhere between amateruish and disengenuous to pretend the contrary,

the sole reason for including the bit about saudi money going to unrwa is to delegitimate information coming from that organization about what israel is doing on the ground. i call bullshit on the move.

there's 40 years of debacle to show that the dominant approaches to this situation have produced nothing but suffering on both sides, violence on both sides. the logic itself is the problem---the logic that has shaped these approaches.

i see nothing but repetitions of that same logic from the folk who support anything and everything the israeli right puts into motion, who can excuse what's happening in gaza because they prefer to look at some pseudo-historical story that departs from and leads back to "kill em all and let god sort em out"

971 dead.
4,418 injured.

every once in a while through the fog of disinformation, these numbers are broken down into plausible fighter vs children, women, and (only sometimes) the elderly.

tisonlyi 01-13-2009 10:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582986)
What sort of setbacks? Suicide Bombings? More Rocket Attacks? Israel should just ignore those setbacks in the name of peace, right?

Yes. It happened in Northern Ireland. More than a few times. People were still being kneecapped and such in many areas long into the times of the stormont assemblies, etc... The end to a protracted, low intensity war is not only with a few scratchings at a piece of paper.

Time. Patience. Tolerance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheNasty (Post 2582986)
What, they aren't doing this already? :rolleyes:

Israel doesn't want that, and they've shown they haven't wanted that continually through their actions.

You do know that Israel is massacring civilians on a daily basis at the moment, right? Flick on the TV, it's all over the news! Really!

TheNasty 01-13-2009 10:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tisonlyi (Post 2582985)
The island of Ireland is not one nation. The IRA have and are laying down their arms. The armed conflict is over. Your mini-narrative is ridiculous.

Much like your assertion that if only Israel *really* wanted peace than Hamas would stop attacking them.



Quote:

Color-and-shade-blindness much?

There aren't just 2 options. Either you set out on a policy of massacre or you ignore the rockets fired at you... Can't you think of any other potential lines of progress from here?
Policy of Massacre!!!


This goes back to my original statement of, with around 700 casualties so far in this conflict there has to be some semblance of caution being used in this fight. I lean toward Israel is actually trying to remove Hamas' ability to attack them.

I understand that when you read that you roll your eyes.


Quote:

The big stick doesn't work... the more Israel uses the iron fist, the more money will flow to the extremists, which they won't be using for flower arranging classes and pilates sessions.
What other option does Israel have? You'll reply with "agree to peace, move out of settlement, etc etc etc", what happens when Israel does all that and Hamas still attacks?
-----Added 13/1/2009 at 01 : 38 : 13-----
Quote:

Originally Posted by tisonlyi (Post 2582992)

You do know that Israel is massacring civilians on a daily basis at the moment, right? Flick on the TV, it's all over the news! Really!

No, I had no idea of what's currently going on, Thanks for pointing that out Tis!!

.....

I don't paint situations with words as dramatic as possible to imply one side as bad and the other as victims.


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