We’re watching — and we know
OK, so … with the same fervor that Dick Cheney shows in shooting captive birds that are provided for his sport — territory defined, wings clipped, diets and movement controlled — Israel is in its fourth day of slamming into Gaza going after Hamas … old folks, little kids and whoever is in between are dying.
No news there, is there? The ancient grievance still spilling blood into the sand; the same old men, old minds, old hatred perpetuating the death of youth and hope and innocence — of possibility.
Here’s the thing — we know. We all know. We all see how big and tough Israel is and how desperate Gaza is. We’ve read the reports about children in Gaza eating grass. We know what the word “siege” means.
We know that shots were fired on both sides, but there are a few inside moves we didn’t hear about … like the possibility that Israel broke the truce first, and how convenient this is to an Israeli election period. We won’t get much of that from Bush-compliant publications, but we’re the web — we know. And we know a bully when we see one.
We also know that there’s an enormous alignment of energy that was to bring us an event — and that event appears to be the collective roar of aggressive governments around the globe pushing out their chests like cheesy old war lords, bringing the same old answers to problems that cannot be solved by any of them; and in fact, making new ones, so they can perpetuate their power. If murder and conflict can become boring, then that’s what we’re looking at — the old fear factors, ratcheting up, taking us … where? Nowhere.
It’s too late. We’re inoculated against bullshit. We know. None of this will do more than help us die. We don’t need any of it.
Who will help us live? That’s who and what we need; and nothing the warmongers and power brokers can do or say will change our thirst for the end of international murdering.
Here’s a wrap up — the first reads are news, including Kucinich; the next, interesting op/ed’s including Norm Solomon. There are pictures, for you brave ones. The last piece is worth a look — see what happened to Cynthia McKinney when she tried to bring aide to Gaza.
We’re watching, all of us. And we refuse to play this tired, desperate, sick game any more.
Jude
Obama treads lightly on Gaza
DEB RIECHMANN, AP via Capital Hill Blue
December 29, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is choosing its words carefully in dealing with Israel’s assault on Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
The deaths of hundreds of Palestinians in Israel’s deadly air assault on the militant Islamic group will further complicate Obama’s challenge to achieve a Middle East peace - something that eluded both the Bush and Clinton administrations.
David Axelrod, senior adviser to Obama, said the president-elect would honor the “important bond” between the United States and Israel.
“He wants to be a constructive force in helping to bring about the peace and security that both the Israelis and the Palestinians want and deserve,” Axelrod said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks. As Hamas began its shelling, Israel responded. But it’s something that he’s committed to.”
Pressed about how much support Obama will offer Israel, Axelrod said: “He’s going to work closely with the Israelis. They’re a great ally of ours, the most important ally in the region. … But he will do so in a way that will promote the cause of peace, and work closely with the Israelis and the Palestinians on that - toward that objective.”
The Bush administration has blamed the renewed violence on the militant Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, saying it broke a cease-fire by firing rockets and mortars deep into Israeli territory. The Arab world, however, has reacted with rage to the aggressive Israeli counterattacks.
It’s unclear whether Obama will be as supportive of Israel as President George W. Bush has been.
Jon Alterman, head of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, speculated that Israeli leaders synchronized their retaliatory attacks to political calendars in both Israel and the U.S. More moderate politicians running in the Feb. 10 national election needed to appear strong against Hamas, and it was perhaps better to strike before Bush left office on Jan. 20 because they weren’t as sure about what Obama’s reaction would be.
“I think Obama will be supportive of Israel, but will bring a little more skepticism to it,” Alterman said. “I think Obama will start from premise that Israel is an ally, but that we have to look at this fresh.”
Bush, who is staying at his Texas ranch, spoke on the phone with national security adviser Stephen Hadley to receive an update on the situation and was being kept abreast of developments throughout the day, said Gordon Johndroe, a presidential spokesman. He said Bush would receive an intelligence briefing via a secured video hookup at the ranch early Monday morning and would be briefed then on any overnight developments.
According to an aide on Obama’s transition team, the president-elect, who is in Hawaii, continues to closely monitor global events, including the situation in Gaza. He had an intelligence briefing Sunday and plans to talk with his incoming national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his nominee for secretary of state.
The aide said Obama appreciates the information the Bush administration is sharing with him. The aide requested anonymity because the Obama team is refraining from comment, saying the U.S. has only one president at a time. ++
Associated Press writers Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel in Gaza City and Philip Elliott in Honolulu contributed to this report.
Attack on Gaza: As Usual, U.S. Media (And Most Liberals) Silent — As Israeli Newspaper Raises Doubts
Greg Mitchell, Editor of ‘Editor & Publisher’
December 28, 2008
In the usual process, the U.S. government, media here — and most of the leading liberal bloggers — are silent or playing down questions about whether Israel overreacted in its massive air strikes on Gaza, while the foreign press, and even Haaretz in Israel, carries more balanced accounts.
Anyone who cares should consult the respected Haaretz site often, if for no other reason than to learn that criticism of Israeli military actions are usually more heated inside that country than in the USA. The New York Times, for example, as of today (Monday), has not yet editorialized on the air assault. You may recall the lockstep support in the U.S. for Israeli’s invasion of southern Lebanon, which included the use of U.S.-made cluster bombs. That invasion turned out to be a genuine fiasco.
One Sunday analysis at Haaretz: “A million and a half human beings, most of them downcast and desperate refugees, live in the conditions of a giant jail, fertile ground for another round of bloodletting. The fact that Hamas may have gone too far with its rockets is not the justification of the Israeli policy for the past few decades, for which it justly merits an Iraqi shoe to the face.”
Another opinion piece in Haaretz — titled, “Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again” — by Gideon Levy: “Israel embarked yesterday on yet another unnecessary, ill-fated war. On July 16, 2006, four days after the start of the Second Lebanon War, I wrote: ‘Every neighborhood has one, a loud-mouthed bully who shouldn’t be provoked into anger… Not that the bully’s not right - someone did harm him. But the reaction, what a reaction!’ Two and a half years later, these words repeat themselves, to our horror, with chilling precision. Within the span of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, the IDF sowed death and destruction on a scale that the Qassam rockets never approached in all their years, and Operation ‘Cast Lead’ is only in its infancy.”
Also from Haaretz, Zvi Barel writes: “Six months ago Israel asked and received a cease-fire from Hamas. It unilaterally violated it when it blew up a tunnel, while still asking Egypt to get the Islamic group to hold its fire.” Yet the U.S. media refers that only Hamas violated the ceasefire.
Another columnist there, Yossi Sarid, writes: “I can only hope that this time, for a change, we will know when to stop. This war must be described from the get-go as a war ‘to be on the safe side,’ rather than of necessity, and it is still unclear whether the last missile fired will be fired by us or by them.”
Amira Hass, the paper’s correspondent in Gaza, reports: “There are many corpses and wounded, every moment another casualty is added to the list of the dead, and there is no more room in the morgue. Relatives search among the bodies and the wounded in order to bring the dead quickly to burial. A mother whose three school-age children were killed, and are piled one on top of the other in the morgue, screams and then cries, screams again and then is silent.”
From the lead Haaretz editorial: “[T]he inherent desire for retribution does not necessarily have to blind us to the view from the day after….Israel’s violation of the lull in November expedited the deterioration that gave birth to the war of yesterday. But even if this continues for many days and even weeks, it will end in an agreement, or at least an understanding similar to that reached last June.”
UPDATE: A McClatchy dispatch quotes Daniel Levy, a political analyst in Israel who once served as an adviser to Ehud Barak, who is leading the military campaign against Hamas: “I don’t see how this ends well, even if, in two weeks time, it looks like it ends well.”
Haaretz has just posted this from another columnist, Tom Segev: “[T]he assault on Gaza does not first and foremost demand moral condemnation - it demands a few historical reminders. Both the justification given for it and the chosen targets are a replay of the same basic assumptions that have proven wrong time after time. Yet Israel still pulls them out of its hat again and again, in one war after another.”
And this from another columnist, Akiva Eldar: “The tremendous population density in the Gaza Strip does not allow a “surgical operation” over an extended period that would minimize damage to civilian populations. The difficult images from the Strip will soon replace those of the damage inflicted by Qassam rockets in the western Negev. The scale of losses, which works in ‘favor’ of the Palestinians, will return Israel to the role of Goliath.”
The New York Times late Sunday reported, “At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, women wailed as they searched for relatives among bodies that lay strewn on the hospital floor. One doctor said that given the dearth of facilities, not much could be done for the seriously wounded, and that it was ‘better to be brought in dead.’”
The Washington Post’s update: “By late Sunday night, the toll had reached 290 dead and as many as 1,300 wounded, Moawia Hassanain, a senior Palestinian Health Ministry official, said in an interview. The fatalities included 22 children younger than 16; more than 235 children were wounded, he said.” ++
Greg Mitchell is editor of Editor & Publisher. His latest book, on Iraq and the media, is “So Wrong for So Long.”
Kucinich: UN should investigate Israeli Gaza strikes
Nick Juliano, Raw Story
Monday December 29, 2008
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called for an independent investigation to be led by the United Nations into the recent eruption of violence between Israel and Hamas along the Gaza strip that has killed scores of innocent civilians.
Monday brought a third day of Israeli bombing Gaza in what the state is calling its “all-out” war on Hamas. So far, 345 people have been killed by the bombs. At least 57 of the dead are civilians, including 21 children, according to the UN.
Kucinich said he wrote to UN General Secretary Ban ki-Moon urging an “independent inquiry of Israel’s war against Gaza.” The Democratic lawmaker said Israel’s attacks are an example of “collective punishment,” which violates the Geneva Conventions.
“The perpetrators of attacks against Israel must also be brought to justice, but Israel cannot create a war against an entire people in order to attempt to bring to justice the few who are responsible. The Israeli leaders know better,” Kucinich said in a news release Monday. “The world community, which has been very supportive of Israel’s right to security and its right to survive, also has a right to expect Israel to conduct itself in adherence to the very laws which support the survival of Israel and every other nation.”
Kucinich compared the latest bombing campaign to Isreal’s earlier strikes at southern Lebanon targeted at Hezbollah. Then too, he said, civilians were killed, infrastructure was destroyed and lawlessness took hold in the country.
“All this was, and is, disproportionate, indiscriminate mass violence in violation of international law. Israel is not exempt from international law and must be held accountable,” he said. “It is time for the UN to not just call for a cease-fire, but for an inquiry as to Israel’s actions.”
President Bush, on the other hand, has signaled a continuation of his firm support for Israel.
“In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable ceasefire,” White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.
Congressional leaders likewise signaled support for Israel.
“I strongly support Israel’s right to defend its citizens against rocket and mortar attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza, which have killed and injured Israeli citizens, and to restore security to its residents,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said Monday. “Hamas’ failure to stop these attacks only exacerbates the humanitarian situation for the residents of Gaza and undermines efforts to attain peace and security in the region.”
President-elect Barack Obama, vacationing in Hawaii, has tread lightly regarding the conflict. His transition team will only say that he continues to “monitor global events” noting, “There is one president at a time.”
Israel has declared some areas around Gaza “closed military zones” and is beginning to amass tanks there saying it is prepared to continue operations as long as necessary.
“The goal of the operation is to topple Hamas,” Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon said on Monday in televised comments. ++
Security Council Calls On Israel, Palestinians To End Violence Immediately
Scoop, NZ
Monday, 29 December 2008
The Security Council on Sunday called on Israel and the Palestinians to immediately end all violence, as Israeli airstrikes in response to rocket attacks by militants in Gaza reportedly killed 270 people and wounded more than 600 in the Strip.
“The Members of the Security Council expressed serious concern at the escalation of the situation in Gaza and called for an immediate halt to all violence,” according to a statement issued to the press following emergency closed-door talks late last night.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made a similar call yesterday in a statement in which he voiced his deep alarm at the “heavy violence and bloodshed in Gaza, and the continuation of violence in southern Israel.”
In its statement, the Council called on the parties to “stop immediately all military activities,” and stressed the need for the restoration of calm “which will open the way for finding a political solution to the problems existing in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli settlement.”
The 15-member body also called for all parties to address the serious humanitarian and economic needs in Gaza and to take necessary measures, including opening of border crossings, to ensure that the 1.5 million Palestinians living there can get the food, fuel, medicine and other critical supplies that they need.
Some supplies did manage to get into Gaza on Friday, for the first time in almost ten days, after Israel opened a few of the crossings which it had kept closed citing rocket and other attacks by militants from Gaza.
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay also called on Israel to lift the air, sea and ground blockade imposed on Gaza, while voicing her grave concern about the escalating violence there and the enormous loss of life.
“While condemning the rocket attacks by Hamas that led to the death of one Israeli civilian, she a lso strongly condemned Israel’s disproportionate use of force resulting in the reported death of more than 270, a large number of which were civilians, and the wounding of over 600 persons,” according to a news release ssued today by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Ms. Pillay called on Israel’s leaders to uphold the principles of international humanitarian law, especially those relating to proportionality in the use of military force and the prevention of collective punishment and the targeting of civilians.
Likewise, UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories Richard Falk said the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza represent “severe and massive violations” of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions.
“Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful,” he noted in a statement. “But that illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign State, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response.”
General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto, in a statement issued last night, said that “the behaviour by Israel in bombarding Gaza is simply the commission of wanton aggression by a very powerful State against a territory that [it] illegally occupies.”
He stated that “the time has come to take firm action if the UN does not want to be rightly accused of complicity by omission.” ++
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye
Norman Solomon, Smirking Chimp
December 29, 2008
Israelis and Arabs “feel that only force can assure justice,” I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six Day War in 1967. And he wrote: “A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them.”
The closing days of 2008 have heightened the Israeli government’s stature as a mighty practitioner of the moral imbecility that Stone described.
Israel’s airstrikes “have killed at least 270 people so far, injured more than 1,000, many of them seriously, and many remain buried under the rubble so the death toll will likely rise,” Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies pointed out on Sunday (Dec. 28), two days into Israel’s attack. “This catastrophic impact was known and inevitable, and far outweighs any claim of self-defense or protection of Israeli civilians.” She mentioned that “the one Israeli killed by a Palestinian rocket attack on Saturday after the Israeli assault began was the first such casualty in more than a year.”
Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel’s violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” Gandhi said.
What about a hundred eyes for an eye?
It makes some of the world ill with rage. And it turns much of the United States numb with silence. Routinely, the politicians and pundits of Washington can’t summon minimal decency in themselves or each other on the subject of Israel and Palestinians.
While officialdom inside the Beltway seems frozen in fear of risking “anti-Semitism” charges by actually standing up for the human rights of Palestinian people, some progress at the grassroots has been noticeable. It includes the growth of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Tikkun, and The Shalom Center, where activists have worked to refute the false claims that American Jews are united behind Israeli policies.
At the epicenters of the conflict — where the belief that “only force can assure justice” seems to be even stronger than when I. F. Stone wrote about it 41 years ago — the conclusion has been drawn and redrawn so many times that deadly repetition has become paralytic. While some Palestinian “militants” have terrorized and murdered, the Israeli government has terrorized and murdered on a much bigger scale, using a vast arsenal largely financed by U.S. taxpayers.
From afar, in the United States, it’s too easy to shake our heads at the lethal loss of moral vision. Don’t they know that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind”? But the cycle of violence is extremely asymmetrical — while the U.S. government provides Israel with billions of dollars and invaluable “diplomatic” support.
What’s going on in Gaza right now is not just an eye for an eye. It’s a hundred eyes for an eye. And the current slaughter is not only an ongoing Israeli war crime. It has an accomplice named Uncle Sam. ++
Israel, Stop! Just. Stop.
Lorelei Kelly, HuffPo
December 30, 2008
A behavior is strategic if it influences others by affecting their expectations. This principle of conflict resolution is one that is particularly relevant to the threats in today’s world. Neatly defined and bounded states like the ones on political maps don’t matter so much anymore. It’s people that count. The safety of people across borders is as important as the safety of people within borders. This means that if you want ultimate victory, persuasion deserves as much firepower as coercion.
American counterinsurgency doctrine enshrines civilian protection for Iraq and Afghanistan — but this responsibility to protect people has huge implications for our general situation in today’s world: Killing lots of people on the other side is not only ineffective, it is counterproductive. It hurts your cause. It gets more of your own people killed in the long run. Like Israel — whose overwhelmingly violent response to Hamas rocket attacks seems to lack the most basic strategic or political meaning — and where language such as “self-defense” — words from the disconnected and bygone era of nation states — seems quaint and almost entirely inaccurate.
“Defense” doesn’t mean the same thing when one antagonist is a state and the other a networked organization. It’s like the US Army fighting the Salvation Army. It’s like Bin Laden versus the USA. The same sets of policies and tools don’t work anymore. They make things worse. So political leaders (including our own) need to stop framing this deadly mayhem as some sort of justified or normal behavior. If we don’t start with our best friend, when will we ever understand how the nature of danger has changed for good?
Yes the Hamas leaders are crappy and pathetic. Yes they risk their own civilians. That is not at issue. But these Israeli leaders are pathetic, too, so desperate to look tough. So concerted in their effort to spin the news-cycles of the world to their script. “Airpower” is another one of those words that needs to go on the vocabulary scrap heap. Why any of us ever believed that bombing terrified civilians would somehow inspire them to overthrow their horrid leaders is beyond me. And why any government thinks that killing lots of civilians on the side where the leaders use civilians as human shields will somehow be a dealbreaker has got to be the new definition of insanity. If the leaders are insufferable, work with others, like these folks.
It rings pretty hollow when those of us viewing can not only see who is doing the killing, but who is doing the dying. Policemen? Shoppers? University personnel? United Nations employees? Little kids? 3 Israelis vs. 300 Palestinians?
Israel, you are so better than this.
There are so many of us out here who want you to be successful, who admire the Jewish faith for its love of humanity and knowledge. We want you to prosper and to survive — many of us have no personal dog in this fight. I’ve been in the Middle East once — on a completely tourist trap trip down the Nile. I’ve never been to Israel — but I identify with you like most Americans do.
You are draining your reservoir of goodwill — Stop it.
Like many Americans who grew up in the ’70s, I became fascinated by Israel after seeing “Holocaust” on television. In fact, I lived in Germany and traveled Europe for years trying to understand how the Holocaust could have happened. I am no scholar of history. But from Vilnius to East Berlin, I’ve found the old synagogues. I’ve sat outside in the rain on dark cobbled streets listening to ceremonies through open windows, I’ve seen where they used your ancestors’ headstones as pavement to walk upon. I’ve beheld the stolen art. I’m sitting here now looking at a black and white photo of the Jewish cemetery in Prague that I snapped before the end of the Cold War. The sadness there seemed to me to reflect the entire continent. For years, I felt compelled to seek out these places — I suppose partly out of curiosity, but also out of horror and shame that — for whatever goddamned excuse — we did not save the victims of the Nazis. That the rest of us did not protect your families. I apologized for this at every stop. I still do. I wept.
Israeli newspapers offer fine alternatives. Here’s an example:
- The line of self-control and the awareness of the obligation to protect the lives of the innocent in Gaza must be toed even now, precisely because Israel’s strength is almost limitless. Israel must constantly check to see when its force has crossed the line of legitimate and effective response, whose goal is deterrence and a restoration of the cease-fire, and from what point it is once again trapped in the usual spiral of violence.
In less than two decades, the measures of national security have gone from being rational, linear and technological, to random, chaotic and very human. Those who want to survive need to modernize their toolkit accordingly: More persuasion, less coercion. More prevention, less reaction. More participation, less exclusion. More people, less machines, More life strategies, less death strategies.
Israel, you are better than this. You are not just typical. You have the wisdom of the universe in your borders. You have profound knowledge of why death doesn’t fix a problem. You have the USA to help you.
Please, put the gun down. Move away from the gun.
Just. Stop. ++
The Lesson Israel Should Have Never Learned
Nathan Gonzalez, HuffPo
December 29, 2008
On August 12, 1982, Israel launched a massive bombing campaign over Beirut that came to be known as “Black Thursday.” In the conflagration’s aftermath, over five hundred Lebanese and Palestinian civilians lay dead, countless were displaced, and widespread hunger and infestation took hold in the absence of running water and food.
Yet beyond the immediate human suffering, the biggest tragedy of that campaign was that it actually worked. On the heels of the bombing, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) finally agreed to leave Lebanon. It seems Israel had learned an important lesson: that massive, indiscriminate bombardment can lead to the defeat of a non-state organization.
But what does “defeat” really mean? For the PLO, a foreign and largely unwelcome entity inside Lebanon, defeat meant packing up and finding someplace else to establish a headquarters; in its case, Tunisia. For the Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas, however, two groups that have faced the full wrath of Israeli warplanes, defeat of this kind has never been an option. As homegrown organizations that are fully entrenched within their constituencies, where could they possibly go?
During the July 2006 War, a 33-day bombing campaign launched in retaliation for Hezbollah’s small-scale incursion into Israeli territory, Israel thought it could have an encore of 1982. Hezbollah’s incursion ultimately resulted in five Israeli military fatalities, but the subsequent bombing and Hezbollah counter-strikes left over 1,000 Lebanese and over 40 Israeli civilians dead.
At the time, there was open talk of Israel destroying Hezbollah, an organization that is part militia, part political party and part country. But what exactly would it mean to destroy an ideology of people who keep assault rifles under their mattresses, women who teach their children to be prideful Shias and resist, and poverty-stricken men holding on to the only thing they have left on this Earth: their pride.
On a recent trip to Lebanon, I found that even secular-minded Sunnis and Christians had developed a soft spot for the Iranian-backed organization, if only because it had taught them that as Lebanese, and as Arabs, there was more glory in fighting Israel than in fighting one another.
The impact of Israel’s current attack on the Gaza Strip may very well mirror what happened in Lebanon in 2006. In just three days, Israel has killed over 300 Palestinians, but at best the Jewish state can only hope that Hamas becomes so weak, and the current PLO so strong, so as to tilt the balance of power in Gaza toward more moderate forces.
At worst, the opposite will happen: the PLO will be unable to capitalize from the collective suffering in Gaza, and Hamas will benefit from the kind of Palestinian solidarity it has never enjoyed before.
(Yes, we are talking about the same “godless,” Soviet-backed PLO that Israel countered in the 1980s by financially supporting Hamas: Israel’s own mujahideen.)
There are many lessons that we should learn from history, and some, like Israel’s bombing of Lebanon in 1982, that we should seek to forget. After all, massive, disproportionate military responses are bound to invite unintended, long-term consequences. And when accompanied by unrealistic ideas of victory and defeat, the tragedies are only destined to multiply.
Israel, torn in anger and exaggerated feelings of vulnerability, is unlikely to stop bombing until it realizes that is has once again shot itself in the foot. By then, the next big conflict will be looming on the horizon, and hundreds of innocents will have lost their lives for nothing. ++
Nathan Gonzalez is author of Engaging Iran (2007) and the upcoming The Sunni-Shia Conflict and the Iraq War: Understanding Sectarian Violence in the Middle East (2009)
In Pictures: Firestorm over Gaza
Day Four: Gaza War Postings
Jamal Dajani, HuffPo
December 30, 2008
Near Nahal Oz, Israel — The Israeli “all-out war” on Gaza has entered its fourth day leaving more than 363 dead and 1,800 wounded. Israeli troop movements on the Gaza border point to an imminent ground battle in the upcoming few days. On Monday, the Israeli military declared the Gaza border, where tanks, artillery and troops are massing for a possible ground offensive, a closed military zone.
Reporters are being barred by Israel from going into Gaza to cover the carnage. Many have been relegated to reporting from behind Israel’s declared military zone, some report from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv and rely on phone dispatches by stringers in the Gaza Strip. The best television coverage I’ve seen so far comes from Al Jazeera; the most provocative comes from Hezbollah’s Al Manar. The Israeli coverage on IBA TV and Ch 10 reminds me of FOX News during the Iraq War with a focus on military strategies, graphics and interviews, with Israeli government spokesmen and generals.
At Beit Agron, the Israeli Government Press Office has not yet issued my “visiting journalist credentials.” I went there in person three days ago, thinking they would be processed and delivered to me the same day. As I waited, a steady stream of international reporters applied for and received theirs. The press office liaison hands a British journalist his credentials and smiles, “don’t forget to report that we were first attacked by Qassam rockets; they’re hitting us we’re not hitting them.”
The office wall is adorned with rockets fired by Hamas on the Israeli town of Sderot. A Korean journalist poses in front of them and does a “stand-up.” The polite but evasive liaison keeps making excuses for the delay in issuing my press card. He keeps uncovering additional material that is missing in order to complete my application. He finally tells me that he won’t have an answer for me until the next day… I won’t bore you with the details, but I am Palestinian American.
I’ve been zigzagging my way between Israel and the West Bank to avoid IDF checkpoints. When we enter the Palestinian territories where emotions ran high, my Palestinian driver almost has a fit when he finds out that my cameraman is an Israeli. The Israeli strikes on Gaza are being broadcast in grisly detail almost continually on Arab satellite networks. In Bethlehem, an angry mob attacks the fortified Rachel Tomb Compound with stones and set tires on fire, but they are quickly dispersed by the Palestinian Authority riot police. Most West Bank towns have demonstrations and riots, and the Palestinian Authority forces keep them under control while Israeli soldiers watch and fire tear gas from a distance.
“Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is a Zionist dog,” screams a demonstrator in Hebron.
Many demonstrators are angry with Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas. They are blaming him of collusion with Israel. They are also angry with Egypt for not opening Rafah’s border crossing to let in desperately needed medical supplies and food, which have been all but depleted by the ongoing siege on Gaza.
Two miles away from the Gaza border is the Israeli soldiers’ staging area, and foreign journalists gather in anticipation as if it is minutes before the start of the Super Bowl or the start of the Olympics. No one talks about the death and destruction that will follow. IDF spokesmen keep saying that a ground force invasion was a distinct possibility but had not yet been decided upon. As I write helicopters hover overhead, their sound reminds me of a scene from Apocalypse Now. ++
Jamal Dajani produces the Mosaic Intelligence Report on Link TV
Cynthia McKinney: Boat Attacked By Israeli Forces
Rachel Weiner, The Huffington Post
December 30, 2008
Ha’aretz reports that a boat carrying aid to Gaza clashed with Israel’s navy. The activists on board the boat say they were shot at; an Israeli spokesman denies this account.
- An Israel Navy ship clashed on Tuesday with a small boat carrying international activists with aid destined for Gaza, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
There were no reported casualties from the incident involving the small cabin cruiser “Dignity” that sailed from Cyprus late on Monday.
One of the boat’s passengers was former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney.
- The 66-foot yacht Dignity, flying the flag of Gibraltar, left Larnaca Monday with almost 4 tons of Cypriot-donated supplies and 16 passengers, including former US Representative Cynthia McKinney, Cypriot lawmaker Eleni Theocharous and activists from Britain, Australia, Ireland and Tunisia, organizers said.
“Our boat was rammed three times, twice in the front and one on the side,” McKinney told CNN Tuesday morning. “Our mission was a peaceful mission. Our mission was thwarted by the aggressiveness of the Israeli military.” ++
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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