Category: Palestine

Gaza (or is it Fallujah?): The massacre has begun

This morning wire services were reporting 200 tanks, armoured personnel carriers, and bulldozers were massed on the Gaza border. “Troops were setting up makeshift camps, apparently in preparation for an extended operation.”

Keep in mind this was after 28 Palestinians had already been killed, and 139 wounded, the day before. That was before the “major operation” that is already underway. 10 more have been killed since.

The first killings were in the refugee camp of Jabaliya, with aircraft firing into a crowd. Two Israeli soldiers were wounded in fighting.

Haaretz is making the obvious comparison to March/April 2002, when Israel slaughtered its way through Jenin and Nablus:

“Thursday’s deaths marked the highest one-day Palestinian toll since April 2002 when 35 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, during Operation Defensive Shield.”

It can only be coincidence that as Israel is mounting major offensive operations in Gaza, that the US is mounting major offensive operations in Fallujah and Samarra in Iraq? That these occupying armies are smashing through civilian neighbourhoods and camps with ultra modern high-tech weaponry? That the media is rationalizing all these actions as ‘self-defence’?

As happens often when Israel and the US compete for atrocities, the US is winning hands down: it has killed over 100 already.

Beating Peacemakers Senseless in Palestine — and much worse to come

On September 29, Christian Peacemaker Teams volunteers Kim Lamberty and Christopher Brown were attacked by Israeli settlers in the Palestinian West Bank town of Hebron and beaten senseless. Lamberty ended up with a broken arm and knee, Brown with broken ribs and a contusion on his head and temple.

They were escorting Palestinian children to school. The settlers (unlike today’s bombers in Iraq and US and Israeli bombers in Iraq and Palestine in recent days) spared the children a beating today, focusing strictly on the peacemakers.

But Israeli missiles did not spare anyone in their path in Gaza. Israel launched tank shells into the densely populated refugee camp of Jabaliya, killing at least 7 and wounding at least 20, including several children. Israeli troops stormed the place, firing weapons and killing 14 and wounding 85. Three Israelis — a soldier and two settlers — were killed in Gaza by Palestinian fighters. Israeli soldiers returned fire and killed one or more gunmen. Israeli forces targeted power lines, leaving the camp of 120,000 without electricity. This invasion followed a rocket attack that killed two Israeli children on Wednesday. Israeli soldiers killed six Palestinians in one raid, and a single Palestinian child in another attack.

And Sharon’s plans for Gaza make today’s massacre seem like a picnic. It’s to be called “Operation Penitence” and its intent is to “exact a price”, according to Ha’aretz’s quotation of Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. “Exacting a price” from a population for an attack by a specific group is mass reprisal, illegal, immoral, terrorism — and already underway.

Perhaps the weirdest justification for it came from The chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud), who, according to Ha’aretz:

called for an IDF takeover of the entire Gaza Strip, saying, “Israel should wage operation Defensive Shield number two in Gaza, take control of the entire Strip in a wide-spread operation over a period of a few weeks to gather information, destroy the terrorist organizations’ infrastructure and wipe out any slicks of arms as well as the foundations for manufacturing Qassam rockets.”

Steinitz added that he would bring these issues up in planned meetings with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. “Since the technology for laser interception of missiles has yet to be realized, We must significantly damage terrorist infrastructures – it is our only option to ease the situation.”

I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I think he is saying that because Bush’s weaponization of space program isn’t yet implemented, Israel has to invade Gaza and smash civilians. Any reader who can make sense of this, feel free to email me.

Jenin was re-invaded days ago. Israel is promising something terrible and huge in Gaza. Are we helplessly watching the unfolding of another massive atrocity like ‘Defensive Shield’ of 2002?

Four Years of Intifada – Statistics

September 28, 2000 was the beginning of the Second Intifada in Israel/Palestine. So we are at the 4-year anniversary of the day Sharon went to the Al-Aqsa mosque to provoke Palestinian demonstrators so that those demonstrators could then be shot, dozens killed. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and Israel proceeded to re-occupy and devastate the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Four years later, most of the hopes entertained in the previous years about peace, reconciliation, and a just settlement are dashed. Instead, we have starvation, murder, massacre, assassination, humiliation, checkpoints, closures, sieges, and a total disruption of every aspect of life. And the US cheering it on and paying for it.

Some statistics from the Palestine Monitor.

Egypt and Gaza

An interesting story from swissinfo, again via Newsinsider. Apparently Egypt and Israel are working on a border deal for Gaza. The idea is that Egyptian police would take over the policing of the border. The article discusses it in terms of two things — first, Egyptians would stop ‘smugglers’ of weapons… must be all those ‘tunnels’ the Israelis uncover every time they bulldoze a neighbourhood and slaughter the inhabitants. Second, the deal would give “the Palestinians unrestricted access to an Arab country for the first time since Israel captured Gaza in 1967.”

Since the smuggling weapons business is just a pretext for the Israeli raids, we can turn to the ‘unrestricted access’. I doubt it. That would conflict with the US/Israel’s vision of the Palestinian future, being one of life in open-air prisons, where people starve and die and are periodically killed by remote control if they try to revolt, but for which the US/Israel take no responsibility. I suppose all things being equal Israel would rather Egyptians be the prison guards. But I doubt that’s a foregone conclusion either, and I doubt that’s the role Egypt sees itself playing. I also doubt that, should Palestinians revolt against their future Egyptian prison guards, the whole thing could be kept up for very long — how long would the Iraqi army, or the rest of the ‘Coalition’, last against the insurgency without the US presence there. If it’s true that Israel wants out of Gaza, getting the Egyptians to take over might seem like a good plan. But I don’t see it working out the way Israel hopes. And in any case, Uri Avnery argues pretty persuasively here that Sharon really doesn’t plan to leave Gaza at all.

The York University Drama continues

Toronto’s York University’s suspension of student Daniel Freeman-Maloy for his ‘crime of megaphone’ continues to provide comic relief for those who still believe in freedom of speech. The York University student paper provided some amusing graphics, since he was supposed to be their opinions editor, a position he will have difficulty accepting since he’s not allowed to set foot on campus. Graphics and letters of support can be found at the website established for this strange case. Naomi Klein wrote a very nice letter to York University’s Presidnt (most universities have a president, but york university has a presidnt — her email is presidnt@yorku.ca) about it, included below. The letters have actually been overwhelming — and coupled with the legal and political pressure being applied could result in York having to back off.

Below is the letter from Naomi.

Dear President Marsden (presidnt@yorku.ca),

I realize you are receiving many letters and calls about the outrageous summary suspension of respected student journalist and activist Daniel Freeman-Maloy. Let me add a slightly different perspective. As you may recall, my last dealings with your office were when you initiated legal proceedings against me and my publisher on the publication of my book, No Logo. You took exception to a passage that alleged that York University had banned students from protesting against the DuMaurier Tennis Open. You denied this and claimed that the idea that York would ban students from protesting on their own campus badly damaged the good reputation of York of University.

So it is with a particularly keen sense of outrage that I have followed the controversy surrounding Freeman-Maloy’s suspension: you are doing exactly what you then claimed York University would never do, banning students from peacefully expressing their political views on campus. Particularly alarming is the way this has been done: without giving the student the slightest opportunity to plead his case. You would never know that York University was once a hotbed of the campus democratization movement.

There is another reason why I am following this issue closely: the Israeli state is acting with greater and greater brutality and impunity with each passing day. The conflict in the Middle East poses a deep moral challenge to all of us: what are we willing to do when deep injustices are being committed and the world community fails to stop them? Will we watch silently, or will we act in our sphere- our workplace, our school? For many Jews, this moral challenge is particularly wrenching because the escalating attacks on Palestinians are being carried in our name. Many of us feel like we must act, we must speak out, or else we are silently complicit.

By suspending Daniel Freeman-Maloy and preventing him from taking his post at the Excalibur, you are punishing a student for peacefully acting on his conscience in the face of tremendous suffering. This is profoundly shameful and will damage not just York University, but the spirit of bold dissent that is so badly needed in this country and the world.

Activism is disruptive. We do it because we believe that there are times when disruption is necessary for needed change to occur. I hope that you will make a decision that is not based on fear of disruption, but on hope in the change that can happen when people are free to speak, and even yell, their minds.

Sincerely,

Naomi Klein

More Symmetries

I don’t have anything to say about Reagan. This is one of those things that is covered ad nauseam in the mainstream and as a result there will be ample coverage in the alternative media as well. Paul Street’s blog has a comparison of Reagan and Bush II, for example.

A couple days ago I blogged about the symmetry between Colombia and Venezuela — Venezuela’s elite attempting to halve Chavez’s term, Colombia’s elite attempting to double Uribe’s term.

Today’s symmetry is from Israel/Palestine.

Marwan Barghouti, one of the most respected Palestinian leaders and political prisoners, has been sentenced to life in prison (five life terms plus forty years) by an Israeli kangaroo court. The interesting part is that he was convicted not for any direct role in violence, but because — and this is a quote from the judges decision — “He did not have direct control over the militants, but did wield influence”.

Coupled with the fact that Israel doesn’t really have jurisdiction over Palestinians in a legal sense (a point raised by Barghouti himself and a Palestinian spokesperson — Barghouti said “The Israeli courts are a partner to the Israeli occupation … the judges are just like pilots who fly planes and drop bombs.”) this means that the Israelis should be rounding up, at the very least, the entire leadership of the United States, including Congress and much of the media — they don’t have direct control over US terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere, but they do wield influence.” They should also round up Sharon and his cabinet. There would be at least one difference between Barghouti and these arrests: they are much more demonstrably guilty than Barghouti was.

And now for the symmetry part. So, around the same time Barghouti’s sentence is coming down, Israelis were killing a 19-year old Palestinian, Omar Farah, in the West Bank, a 17-year old Palestinian, Mohammad Nabahan, in Gaza, and a man in a wheelchair at Qalandya, in the West Bank.

His name was Arafat Ibrahim Yakub, and he was in a wheelchair because he had been injured in the first intifada, in 1987.

An Israeli tank also ran over a man in a wheelchair in Jenin during the 2002 massacre there.

No one is serving a life sentence for any of these murders. Nor will the people who “influenced them” serve life sentences, any more than Reagan was punished for his crimes.

Israel/Palestine

Yitzhak Laor wrote this article during the recent re-destruction of Rafah for the London Review of Books (published May 20). Laor is a novelist and poet who lives in Tel Aviv. I really like the last paragraph:

Hebron is hidden. Rafah is entirely cut off. The Israeli army didn’t kill the children in Rafah intentionally, it will be said. Who will remind us that for three months now, the army has been killing unarmed Palestinians demonstrating peacefully along the Wall that’s going up in the West Bank?

Israeli families of dead soldiers or dead civilians get a follow-up, even on foreign TV, for they had a future ahead of them before they died. Did the Palestinian children who died in Rafah have any future? No. So they are dead, and it will be over in a few days. Palestinians don’t get a follow-up, not even on foreign TV. Maybe there’ll be a documentary movie, followed by some public discussion about whether to allow the movie to be publicly screened, or whether it’s another sign of ‘the new anti-semitism’. Nothing will be followed up. The Israeli army is secure. It calls itself the Israel Defence Force.

The LRB seems to have published some good stuff lately (It published Paul Farmer’s important article, “Who Removed Aristide“). Laor’s article touches on a very important point about media, I think.

If you look at a site like ‘News Insider’, you realize that a dedicated person (in this case group of people) can learn a tremendous amount from reading the mainstream media. You have to read carefully and critically, you have to have a good memory, be able to compare one set of lies to another, and above all I think you have to know what you’re looking for. That is, you have to understand how the media works, what they are trying to present and what they are trying to obscure. In a way, you already have to know the story before you can interpret what the media provides.

The question is then, if the media provides so much of this information, why are we so misinformed? I spoke at a media conference once, presenting figures and analyses from groups like FAIR on media bias. Someone got up at the end and said: “I read the papers and know everything you said. So maybe the papers aren’t so bad, and you’re trying to make them sound bad because you have an agenda.”

I do have an agenda, it’s true. I have no desire to hide it. But my agenda doesn’t include distorting the facts. In a sense, the gentleman was right: the papers aren’t that bad. One reporter at the conference, from USA Today, said the problem was simply that no one reads. Her paper, the biggest in the country, has a circulation of a few million (in a country of a few hundred milion). The NYT has a circulation of about a million. Those of us who spew out thousands of words on the internet are in some cases trying to reach a subset of those who read.

But whether you read or watch TV or listen to the radio for information, the problem is not usually that things never come up. It is, as Laor identifies in his article, a question of ‘follow-up’. And for follow-up, it has to be the alternative media…

(links should be opening in a new window, thanks to the suggestion of a certain person who maintains fromoccupiedpalestine.org, a very important site in case you haven’t seen it)

On abuse

Thanks to the News Insider I saw this story about how Israel is ‘stunned’ by the abuse of Palestinians by its police. An example:

… three [police] confessed to ordering the 17-year-olds into their jeeps and driving them off to a nearby forest, where they were beaten with sticks, punched, had milk poured over them and were forced to kiss the policemen’s boots and chew sand and stones.

This is appalling. But to me, it is only a part of something much bigger and hence, more appalling. None of this ‘abuse’ (don’t say the word ‘torture’, it’s impolite) would take place if Israel wasn’t occupying Palestine. It wouldn’t take place if Israelis, Americans, and the rest of the world were not willing to accept the idea that entire peoples have to be subjugated, humiliated, starved, and killed so that other people can enjoy some notion of ‘security’ (when in fact even that ‘security’ is endangered by the occupation itself). It is similar to the way people were appalled by the photos at Abu Ghraib. Of course what happened there is appalling. But something the world seemed to have understood after WWII, that international aggression was the ultimate crime that made every other crime possible, seems to have been lost here. It is not just that American or Israeli soldiers shouldn’t have tortured Iraqis or Palestinians. It is that American or Israeli soldiers shouldn’t be there at all. It feels odd to even have to say this. This is always a problem in trying to relate things that should be obvious — sometimes obvious things are obvious to everyone. Other times they are not, so they have to be said, even at the risk of saying something that might be obvious.

Other West Asia news. Sharon has dumped some people from his cabinet so he can try to push through what I will continue to call the Gaza starvation plan.