Category: Palestine

Many vicious attacks have been reported.

On Friday, Oct. 23, a rabbi named Arik Ascherman was chased by a masked man trying to stab him near the Itamar Israeli settlement. On Oct.,22, a Jerusalem man named Simcha Hodedtov was shot and killed by police as a terrorist. On Oct. 18, a 29 year old named Haftom Zarhum was shot and then beaten to death by a mob in Beersheba. On Oct. 13, Uri Rezken was stabbed in the back while shopping. He screamed “I am a Jew, I am a Jew” to his attacker, but was stabbed four times anyway.

This list of incidents above is selective, though not exhaustive. It consists solely of attacks by Israelis against Israelis who were mistaken for (or in Ascherman’s case thought to be too close to) Palestinians. It does not include the vast majority of deaths and injuries in this latest round of violence, deaths and injuries of Palestinians attacked by Israeli security forces, accompanied by horror stories of children shot while seeking help; children imprisoned without trial; planted weapons after shootings. Nor does it include massive, organized attacks by mobs of settlers against Palestinian villages. It also does not include the deaths and injuries of Israelis killed by Palestinians in the knife attacks that are much more thoroughly covered in the Western media than the much larger numbers of Palestinians killed.

What started this round of violence? Israel’s armed settler movement is attempting to change the way that Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque is run. In fact, they want the mosque torn down, like the Babri Mosque was torn down in India in 1992. The Israeli government, which the settler movement has largely taken over, has a strategy that probably involves ultimately dividing the mosque site and banning Palestinians from it, as has been done in Hebron. As with the second intifada in 2000, Israel put pressure on the al-Aqsa site until Palestinians resisted. When Palestinians resisted, Israel escalated with lethal force, and now continues to escalate with no end in sight.

In the midst of this violence, Israel’s political leaders are attempting to suppress what a George W. Bush advisor called the “reality-based community” and replace it with a set of racist fantasies. The Israeli Justice Minister who last year brought you the genocidal comment that Palestinian children were “little snakes,” this month has said “there never will be a Palestinian state.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu topped this all off with a rehabilitation of Hitler. Offering a denialist version of history, Netanyahu made a speech claiming that Hitler didn’t want to kill the Jews until the Mufti of Jerusalem gave him the idea. German government spokespeople attempted to correct the record, emphasizing that Germany spends time and energy on Holocaust education and does not wish to see politically convenient revisionism undermining those efforts. Max Blumenthal, who has documented Israel’s descent into chaos in his book Goliath, writes about the effects of Netanyahu’s incitement:

“By blaming a Palestinian for the Final Solution, Netanyahu has helped his countrymen adjust to the macabre reality. He reassured them that they were not settler overlords or vigilante brutes, but Inglorious Bastards curb stomping SS officers in the woods outside Krakow. And he sent them the message that those Palestinians lurking behind concrete walls and under siege in ghettoes were not an occupied, dispossessed people, but a new breed of Nazis hellbent on Jewish extermination. Netanyahu’s comments about the Mufti were much more than a hysterical lie; they were an invitation to act out a blood soaked fantasy of righteous revenge.”

Israel was founded to be a refuge for Jews who were persecuted in Europe. Some of its founders had democratic and socialist aspirations that were contradicted by their militarist and colonizing plans and methods. After decades of failure to reconcile these, Israeli society has abandoned pretense, and embraced racism and violence from the highest levels of government to the settler masses celebrating attacks on social media.

It is obvious why such politics and such fantasies would be appealing to right-wing politicians and their constituencies in the West, like the outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the 5.6 million people who voted for him, or the Democrats and Republicans in the US who support Israel.

What is more difficult to understand is how those who espouse liberal politics can continue to hold on. Some no doubt see Israel as it was decades ago, in some kind of struggle between different kinds of Zionism, one of which sought a two-state solution. Having out-of-date information can be a problem, but refusing to update one’s information is a political decision.

Two months ago when the Canadian election had just begun and the New Democrats were purging pro-Palestine candidates, I argued that they were playing a game they were guaranteed to lose. I strive to stay in the reality-based community: I do not think that being pro-Israel cost them the election. But backing down in the face of right-wing bullying, and declaring unconditional support for a society that is sliding into fascism, form political habits. They broadcast either a lack of courage or the support of a racist and violent project. Julian Assange wrote that “every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.” Could it be that people so trained make uncompelling candidates for progressive voters?

One reason Westerners find themselves with an out-of-date idea of Israel’s society and its trajectory is that we are not allowed to talk about it anywhere, including university campuses. A report called The Palestine Exception, by Palestine Legal, documents 292 incidents of the suppression of free speech on campuses, used against advocates of human rights for Palestinians. The report groups the incidents into nine categories of tactics: 1. False accusations of antisemitism and terrorism; 2. Official denunciations; 3. Bureaucratic barriers; 4. Administrative sanctions; 5. Cancellations and alterations of events; 6. Threats to academic freedom; 7. Lawsuits and legal threats; 8. Legislation; 9. Criminal investigations and prosecutions. The report is important, especially for student activists who are starting out and should know what to expect. The Palestine Exception reveals many things. One of them: the unconditional defense of Israel regardless of what it does and what it becomes, has political consequences. The more indefensible Israel’s behaviour, the more debate has to be avoided, the more taboos have to be established, and the more those who speak about it have to be punished. This is true on campuses, where the freest possible research is supposed to take place and where students are supposed to be taught to think critically and contribute their knowledge to society. It is also true in the media, which is supposed to inform our decisions about what to do in the world. It is true in democratic politics, in which we are supposed to be able to deliberate with the widest possible range of discussion in order to make decisions. The farther Israel slides down its current path, the more unfree we will all have to be, the more disconnected from reality we will have to become, in order to continue to accept it.

First published TeleSUR English: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Silent-Compromises-20151028-0025.html

by Justin Podur and Dan Freeman-Maloy

Imagine an anti-racist with decades of work in the struggle writing the following about the popular upheaval and police attacks witnessed this month in Ferguson, Missouri:

Half a century after summer 1964 (when major US ghettos famously erupted in rebellion), we are once again being shown the nature of blacks and whites in the United States. The “wretched blacks,” along with the police attacking them and the whites who cheer, remain trapped in “a classic tragedy where characters cannot escape their nature.” But this is just how conflicts based on “visceral antagonism” go. The basic nature of the peoples involved is to blame, and this can’t be escaped. So why bother to think, say, or do anything about it? Whatever it is, “none of it makes the slightest difference”.

Or, imagine someone who has stood up against extractive industry for decades writing the following about climate change:

“Two hundred years into the industrial era, it is clear that the institutions propelling climate change are too strong, the imperative of extraction and profit too pervasive, for meaningful action on the climate. For thriving corporations, whose minds are full of indifference, it means waiting for a day when the ocean level rises up to the windows of their skyscrapers. For wretched peoples, whose minds are full of nonsense, it means starvation, thirst, and death.”

Or, imagine someone like Gerald Caplan, who has been a rare Canadian voice for decency on the Israel/Palestine conflict, reflecting on this summer’s Gaza massacre in precisely the words used above about Ferguson. In an article this week written for the Globe and Mail and reproduced by Rabble.ca, Caplan writes that, in the words of Rabble’s headline, “War between Israel and Palestine” is our “endless, inevitable future”.

Caplan’s article quotes an Israeli scholar making a wild guess that “about 25 per cent of each people held genocidal attitudes towards the other”, as if it is these mutual feelings that are propelling the conflict and not monstrous disproportion. With total Israeli control over every detail of Palestinian life and death, Israel/Palestine is not a battle scene. It is a torture scene. Faced with the torturer and the victim, faced with the elaborate instruments for torture and excuses for torture, Caplan’s article would have us think, not about how to stop the torture, but about how the torturer and the victim feel about each other.

The article concludes: “For thriving Israelis, filled with hate, it means waiting for the inevitable day when their enemies finally get weapons that can’t be thwarted so easily. For wretched Palestinians, filled with hate, it means continuing oppression and humiliation, and in Gaza, more death and suffering for the innocent. This is the future and it cannot be otherwise.”

Cannot be otherwise? An appropriate response, especially from people who respect the writer, might be confusion, or even bewilderment, or sadness that a lifelong fighter seems to have finally given up. Is racism, or climate change, more hopeless than the Israel/Palestine conflict? Did the end of slavery, South African racial apartheid, or colonial rule in most of the world not take decades, or even centuries, to achieve? What kind of activist accepts the idea of eternal conflict, equates oppressor and oppressed, accepts that “hatred” is a cause and not an effect?

Perhaps a strong and inspiring example might be found for Caplan to look to, to help boost his morale and prevent him from giving up. A quarter of a century ago, a rare thing happened: a Canadian public figure with upper-level experience in a major federal party wrote something decent on Palestine. The article appeared in the Toronto Star on May 13, 1990, under the headline “Mindless cheerleaders for Israel? It’s time Canada’s Jewish leaders stopped justifying heinous acts”.

Beginning in 1987, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank had taken centre stage in the struggle over their future. Their popular uprising against Israeli occupation endured for years despite heavy repression and many broken bones.

In the Toronto Star, the author explained that those like him who criticized Israeli abuses were being “rewarded with menacing and abusive midnight phone calls. Why pick on us?” It was the Canadian Jewish leadership that had sided with Israeli land theft and settlement, and with the racism that goes along with it. The author asked, “Is there no limit to what Canadian Jewish leaders will tolerate from Israel? … Is there any level of iniquity they’ll fail to celebrate? Is there a more monstrous Israeli figure than Ari Sharon, chauvinist, authoritarian, ultra-hawk, architect of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon who failed, an Israeli commission of enquiry found, to prevent the bloody massacre by Israel’s Lebanese allies of more than 700 helpless Palestinians in the Shatilla and Sabra refugee camps?”

The writer was someone named Gerald Caplan.

That Gerald Caplan would not have settled for vague, sweeping commentary about Gaza and the “nature” of Arabs, calling Israel’s 2014 massacres “just another in the endless violent conflicts between Israelis and Arabs that began when Israel was first created as a nation 66 years ago and has never stopped: 1947-49, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 1991, 2006, 2008-9, 2012, 2014.”

That Gerald Caplan would not have conflated “Palestinians” with “Arabs”. He would not have generalized about Palestinians based on a seemingly random list of years marking military conflicts: a list that, for example, somehow includes “1991” – when as a sidebar to the Gulf War, a few Iraqi missiles were fired at Tel Aviv, killing a grand total of zero people – while skipping both Palestinian intifadas (the first beginning in 1987, the second in 2000).

That Gerald Caplan would never have written an article that absolves Western governments and leaders of any responsibility for a conflict supposedly rooted entirely in local hatreds. He would surely have understood that even if he were keen to depict Western support for Israel as irrelevant, the West was probably relevant to the Anglo-French assault on Egypt alongside which Israel operated in his “1956”; that the West might have played a role in the Iraq war that framed his “1991”.

That Gerald Caplan would have recognized that it’s not for activists or serious commentators to predict endless, inevitable conflicts, diagnosed based on supposed eternal hatreds, but instead, that people have to look for possibilities even in dire situations; that it’s relations of power that are important, not the unchanging “nature” of peoples playing out their roles, tragic or otherwise.

A few months ago (May 23), Gerald Caplan wrote an open letter to Andrea Horvath, Ontario’s NDP leader, expressing concern about the party’s rightward shift. The letter led to some ugly attacks on Caplan and other stalwart progressives, accusations that they were “out of touch” with the party’s “new” values – “new” values which are not “new” at all, just old, emptied-of-principle, politically bankrupt positions already taken up by parties to the right of the NDP. The attacks on Caplan were unfair. He wasn’t “out of touch” with any values worth being in touch with – he was trying to say that the NDP should look to decent principles, that competition for the structural-adjustment-Ford-Nation vote is best left to others.

What Horvath’s campaign was domestically, Mulcair’s position on Gaza has been for foreign policy. The NDP’s federal leadership under Thomas Mulcair effectively sided with Israel in these massacres, to mixed response. The National Post praised Mulcair’s stewardship of the NDP, under which “pro-Palestinian voices have been remarkably restrained,” a sign of what the CanWest pamphlet deemed improving NDP “maturity”; Le Devoir, under a graphic photo of a die-in in front of Mulcair’s Montreal constituency office, described the public ripping up of an NDP membership card and the broader backlash to the Mulcair government’s perceived complicity with the campaign against Gaza.

With this article, Caplan has positioned himself against the Caplan of the May 1990 article, against a fine column he wrote the week before, and, indeed, of the May 2014 letter. Absolving Western political leaders of responsibility on Palestine is as implausible a ploy as it may be a convenient one. It’s no more credible than the crude psychologizing of Palestinian politics.

Moreover, bluster aside, any credible look at Israeli politics reveals that Israeli decision-makers absolutely are constrained by Western official reactions, and to some extent by Western public opinion. These impose some actual and more potential checks on the scale of Israeli violence; to the extent that these checks are removed, things can be expected to get worse. Public calls for resigned acceptance of Israeli power amount to an aggravating factor in this crisis, not serious analysis.

The hand-wringing, psychologizing, “both-sides” tropes and “eternal hatred” Caplan is a kind of figure depressingly common across the Canadian political spectrum. The old Caplan was much more rare, much more valuable, and much more serious. He should come back.

* * *

“Mindless cheerleaders for Israel? It’s time Canada’s Jewish leaders stopped justifying heinous acts”
by Gerald Caplan
13 May 1990
The Toronto Star

Never mind the routine beatings, torture, killings and harassment of Palestinians by Jews. Take the recent move of 150 Israeli fundamentalists, surreptitiously subsidized by the Shamir government, into the old Christian quarter of Jerusalem. The mayor of Jerusalem, a Jew, calls it “stupid and ignorant.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the principal pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., warns that American Jews may now cut back their financial support of Israel. The director of the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai Brith in the U.S. calls the settlement “provocative and insensitive,” while the president of the American Jewish Congress is “appalled” by the move.

Then, there’s Canada. The Canadian Jewish Congress issues a statement reaffirming its belief that Jews have a right to live in any part of Israel. The Canada-Israel Committee affirms this same right but with the mealy-mouthed qualification that “the manner in which recent events have unfolded is disquieting.”
And worst of all: The Canadian B’nai Brith. A B’nai Brith delegation of 20 Jewish leaders from across Canada, in Israel when the Jerusalem issue explodes, are ready, aye ready, to perform as mindless cheerleaders. “We support,” a spokesperson says, “what the duly elected government of Israel does” – a peculiarly witless and uninformed principle.

And to demonstrate the boundless nature of their irresponsibility, the delegation then visits and pays homage at a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank that had been founded by Rabbi Moshe Levinger. Levinger, a fanatical leader of Israel’s Jewish settler movement and a bigot who calls Arabs “dogs,” was just convicted of killing an unarmed, unthreatening Palestinian shopkeeper.
Is there no limit to what Canadian Jewish leaders will tolerate from Israel? Wrong question. Is there any level of iniquity they’ll fail to celebrate? Is there a more monstrous Israeli figure than Ari Sharon, chauvinist, authoritarian, ultra-hawk, architect of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon who failed, an Israeli commission of enquiry found, to prevent the bloody massacre by Israel’s Lebanese allies of more than 700 helpless Palestinians in the Shatilla and Sabra refugee camps?

Not ghastly enough, it seems, for the Canadian Friends of the Jerusalem College of Technology, whose board has chosen to invite Sharon to speak at a Toronto fund raising event. What kind of message does this invitation send to Canadians, I asked their official spokesperson. “We’re not politically naive or stupid,” he replied. “The board weighed all the considerations before deciding. There were lots of considerations involved here.”

So the question remains: Is there any act of “the duly elected government of Israel” that will shame the leaders of Canadian Jewry into saying, with Jewish leaders in America and in Israel itself: “Enough is enough. You are despoiling every great historic tradition of Judaisim?”

When Israel renewed diplomatic relations with Ethiopia earlier this year, it was revealed they would also be sending military advisers and arms, including cluster bombs, to Menghistu’s demented, murderous regime. Was there a peep of concern, let alone dissent, from the Canadian Jewish establishment for this heinous act? Has there been even an eyebrow raised at the intimate 15-year collaboration between Israel and South Africa, actively promoted by the leaders of both major Israeli parties, involving not only commercial trade but weapons development, military co-operation and joint nuclear research, very possibly including the joint testing of a nuclear bomb.

“Because of their historic experience,” writes Irving Abella in A Coat Of Many Colors, his new history of Canadian Jewry, “Jews have tended to be sensitive to oppression and to threats to religious and political freedom.” Except, it appears, in Canada and Israel.

Yet, those of us who dare speak out for traditional Jewish values are rewarded with menacing and abusive midnight phone calls. Why pick on us? Why not harass instead those 780 American Jewish leaders who, according to a recent poll by the Israel-Diaspora Institute, are overwhelmingly opposed to the most fundamental Israeli policies of recent years?

* Gerald Caplan is a former national secretary of the New Democratic Party and a public affairs consultant.

Written for teleSUR English, which will launch on July 24

Q: Didn’t Hamas start this fighting by provoking Israel?

A: According to this interpretation of events: 1. Palestinians killed Israeli teens -> 2. Israel responded -> 3. Hamas began rocket fire -> 4. Israel attacked Gaza.

A longer cycle. The first problem with this sequence is that if you go a little further back, you find further provocations and attacks by Israel, further responses by Palestinians, and so on, going back decades. For example, on May 15, 2014, Israeli soldiers murdered two Palestinian teens in Beitunia, for no apparent reason (see: http://electronicintifada.net/tags/beitunia-killings). Even if you see the conflict as a ‘cycle of violence’, the primary responsibility lies with the more powerful party, since it is the more powerful party that will determine the course of both war and peace in any ‘cycle’. Israel is by far the more powerful party. The question of ‘who started it’ is really a question about who is responsible. Israel can stop this massacre at any moment.

Ilan Pappe wrote recently that “The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.”

Revenge does not apply to innocents. But the second problem is more important. It is immoral to see the killings of the Israeli teens as a ‘response’ to, or ‘revenge’ for, the killings of the Palestinian teens in May. It is also immoral to see the torture and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager by Israeli settlers as a ‘response’ to the killings of the teens. The only acceptable moral response to crimes like murder is to bring the individuals responsible to justice. Justice, according to the law, does not allow revenge against other people.

An offshore prize? There may be yet another reason for these constant assaults on Gaza: offshore gas deposits that Israel wants to access, but without having to deal with a Palestinian government that could negotiate some benefit for it. Nafeez Ahmad wrote about this in the Guardian on July 9/14 (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jul/09/israel-war-gaza-palestine-natural-gas-energy-crisis). He quotes Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon, who in 2007, as Israeli army chief of staff, said:

“A gas transaction with the Palestinian Authority [PA] will, by definition, involve Hamas. Hamas will either benefit from the royalties or it will sabotage the project and launch attacks against Fatah, the gas installations, Israel – or all three… It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.”

Substitute the word “Palestinians” for “the radical Islamic movement”, and you have a more honest statement of what these attacks may be about: “drilling without consent”.

The unity government. The real target of Israel’s current attack is more likely the unity government agreement between Hamas and Fatah, which was recognized even by the US. Ilan Pappe (http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-incremental-genocide-gaza-ghetto/13562) wrote:

“The present genocidal wave has, like all the previous ones, also a more immediate background. It has been born out of an attempt to foil the Palestinian decision to form a unity government that even the United States could not object to.

“The collapse of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s desperate “peace” initiative legitimized the Palestinian appeal to international organizations to stop the occupation. At the same time, Palestinians gained wide international blessing for the cautious attempt represented by the unity government to strategize once again a coordinated policy among the various Palestinian groups and agendas.”

Q: Wait, what is the unity government?

A: Beginning last July (2013), there was another “peace process” that was initiated by US Secretary of State John Kerry, involving Netanyahu on the Israeli side and Mahmoud Abbas, from Fatah, whose electoral mandate expired in 2009 (a point I’ll return to). The deadline set for an agreement was April 2014. Over the course of this “peace process”, Israel continued to build settlements in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory Israel is militarily occupying.

When the April 2014 deadline arrived, Abbas had no agreement from Israel to show, only new settlements and new preconditions for talks. At that point, Abbas agreed to join Hamas in a unity government and prepare for new elections, which would be the first since 2005/6, when Abbas won the presidential election (2005) and Hamas won the legislative elections (2006).

Even though Israel had offered Abbas nothing, when the unity government proposal arose, Netanyahu said that Abbas could have peace with Israel or with Hamas, but not both – but he had already shown that Israel had no interest in peace, regardless of what Abbas did.

It is worth noting just how favorable the unity government agreement was, to both Abbas and, potentially, to Israel, as Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group (ICG) wrote in the July 17/14 NYT: Hamas transferred formal authority to Ramallah, giving up official control of Gaza. But “Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt that bar most Gazans’ passage to the outside world.” Qatar offered to pay the salaries. The UN offered to deliver the salaries. But the US allowed Israel to block both efforts.

Q: But why did Hamas reject the ceasefire offers?

A: A frequently used negotiating tactic is to make demands that the other side cannot meet. Israel’s ceasefire terms are to temporarily cease the shelling, bombing, and killing until the next time they decide to resume it, while Gaza’s borders remain closed, its water, electricity, and its people’s freedom of movement remain completely under Israeli control. Hamas’s conditions have been published in English on the Electronic Intifada and elsewhere (http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/palestinian-factions-reportedly-set-10-conditions-10-year-truce-israel). Sometimes they are presented as 10 conditions, sometimes as 5 conditions, but they boil down to one: the siege of Gaza must end. The siege has driven the Palestinian economy into tunnels – tunnels that Israel is now invading Gaza to destroy. The siege is killing the society, and each round of Israeli attack further destroys the infrastructure that enables people to survive, infrastructure that cannot be rebuilt – because of the siege. Returning to Nathan Thrall in the NYT: “For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it’s worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. A cease-fire that fails to resolve the salary crisis and open Gaza’s border with Egypt will not last. It is unsustainable for Gaza to remain cut off from the world and administered by employees working without pay.”

Q: Civilian deaths have been kept to a minimum by Israeli doctrine, haven’t they?

A: Israel’s doctrine is to inflict punishment on the population in order to get them to turn on their leaders. In Rania Khalek’s words (http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israel-deliberately-targeting-civilians-gaza)

“The Dahiya doctrine (which refers to the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut that Israel purposely decimated in its 2006 assault on Lebanon) is Israel’s preferred method of warfare. Under this doctrine, the Israeli army deploys overwhelmingly disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure to restore Israel’s deterrence and turn the local population against its enemy, i.e. Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

“In the lead up to Operation Cast Lead, senior Israeli army General Gadi Eisenkot disclosed Israel’s plans to expand the Dahiya doctrine, telling an Israeli newspaper, “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases.” He added, “This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.”

“Two months later Israel pulverized the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,400 people, including almost 400 children, some of whom were deliberately murdered while raising white flags.”

Q: Even if 80% of deaths have been civilians, 20% have been militants, right?

A: Israel defines militants in an expansive way. Civilian police are defined as militants. Rania Khalek again:

“Using precision guided missiles, the Israeli army claims it is only bombing people and infrastructure “affiliated with Hamas terrorism” — and the international community is buying it.

“What is not being discussed, however, is who and what constitutes a Hamas affiliate.

“Hamas is more than just a militant organization, it is the political party that was democratically elected in 2006 to govern the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Hamas’s control means that almost everyone and everything in Gaza can be considered a Hamas affiliate. This unchallenged loose definition has enabled Israel’s war architects to widen the definition of legitimate targets to include civilians and civilian infrastructure, including mosques, schools, hospitals, banks, electricity lines and residential homes, all of which have been targeted.

“Aside from a weak condemnation issued by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, the international community has largely accepted Israel’s methodology, completely abandoning defenseless Palestinian civilians as they’re being maimed and slaughtered by one of the world’s most powerful armies.”

Q: Such civilian deaths as have occurred have occurred because militants hide among civilians, right?

A: There is nowhere for anyone to hide in Gaza. Gaza is one of the most densely populated 360 sq km strips of land on earth. Israel defines everyone in Gaza as a militant. Israel and Egypt have ensured that no one can leave Gaza. Israel is now shelling and bombing Gaza. Civilians have no place to hide from Israeli bombs and shells. There is nowhere civilians can go to prevent Israel from defining them as militants, and there is nowhere anyone can go in Gaza to be safe from bombs – Israel bombs houses, apartments, UNRWA compounds, hospitals – the story of ‘militants hiding among civilians’ is simply an Israeli excuse for bombing and killing civilians freely.

Q: Surely you cannot expect Israel to stand by while the rockets continue to terrorize them?

A: As a moral and legal question, occupying powers do not have a right to defend themselves, except by leaving. As a practical question, is Israel behaving in a way that will stop rocket attacks? Brian Dominick has answered this question, in response to a blog post by Juan Cole (http://radicalreboot.tumblr.com/post/91670379821/israels-real-motives-in-operation-gazaunderattack):

“…there are obvious ways to thwart rocket attacks that put Palestinian noncombatants at no or far less risk, all of which Israel ignores in favor of a widespread campaign of death dealing. These alternatives have the downside, from the Israeli hardline viewpoint, of failing to terrorize and traumatize Palestinians. These ways include but are likely not limited to:

“Opening Gaza borders to (inspected) trade so the commercial viability of the Gaza tunnel system is undermined and factions must make their own tunnels just for smuggling weapons. This reduction would likely be dramatic, and it would also bring Israel into compliance with international law that bans the collective punishment of civilians. It would also mean an end to Israel’s murdering of commercial smugglers.

“Help the Hamas government suppress rocket fire from factions not beholden to or remotely respectful of ceasefires between Hamas and Israel—the ones doing most of the rocket attacks between periodic uber-crises. (I don’t personally love the idea of Israel choosing factions, but this would be an indication of Israel actually wanting rocket attacks to end.)

“Israel could actually pursue peace and a solution to the overall crisis that actually respects Palestinian demands. That is, stop giving their enemies reasons to actively fight them, and watch support for the remaining fighters all but evaporate. I can’t guarantee this would work, but it has never been tried.

“Stop targeting Hamas’s civilian, non-operational leadership for assassination, which draws profound resentment from the Palestinian people and consistently, as Juan Cole notes, strengthens Hamas’s hand in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“The… way we know rocket suppression is nowhere on Israeli hawks’ agenda is that each such operation in the past six or more years has resulted in a tremendous spike in the number of rockets fired, often resulting in more rockets than would be launched during relative calm for months at a time. This is a predictable result of air strikes and incursions, which won’t after all restrict the rocket fire nearly as effectively as ceasefires historically have.”

Q: The civil wars in Iraq and Syria, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the conflicts in Sudan and Congo and Nigeria have claimed many more lives than this conflict. Isn’t it hypocrisy for people in the world be so upset over a few hundred dead Palestinians in the face of these much larger death tolls?

A: This question is a major logical failure. If a murder of a complete innocent cannot be a moral response to another murder, as above, then a big mass murder in an unrelated conflict cannot excuse a smaller mass murder here. The deaths caused by the Syrian regime in the Syrian civil war, or by the rebels there, or by ISIS in Iraq, or the Iraqi government, cannot be used as an excuse for Israel’s killings in Palestine. In Ilan Pappe’s words (http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-incremental-genocide-gaza-ghetto/13562):

“I will concede that all over the Middle East there are now horrific cases where dehumanization has reaped unimaginable horrors as it does in Gaza today. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the EU and Israel’s other friends in the world…

“Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else.

“It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.

“A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.”

Q: Palestine was never a country. The Arabs attacked Israel in 1967…

A: The problem with this question is that it misunderstands the parties to the conflict. The questioner has slipped from “Israel and the Palestinians” to “Israel and the Arabs”. “The Arabs” are not a party to this conflict – Arab-speaking countries of the Gulf, North Africa, and the rest of the Middle East are not under Israel’s occupation, nor are they refugees from Israel’s founding in 1948. The Palestinians are. The Palestinians are the victims of the current Israeli operations, not “the Arabs”.

The most succinct summary of how the situation has developed, and the relative power of the parties to this conflict, can be viewed in the Disappearing Palestine map:

http://www.juancole.com/images-ext/2010/03/map-story-of-palestinian-nationhood.jpg

Juan Cole, who recently posted about the map, describes some of the background and the accuracy of the map here: http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/map-story-of-palestinian-nationhood.html

For other questions about the background of Israel/Palestine, please see Stephen Shalom’s Q/A on the background of the Israel/Palestine conflict. http://www.peacenowar.net/Palestine/News/Q&A.htm

Q: Who is winning?

A: Writing in the NYT on July 18/14, Jodi Rudoren, like many others, makes much of the difference between this Israeli attack on besieged Gaza and previous attacks, like 2009 and 2012. In 2009, Rudoren writes, “Israel quickly bisected the tiny coastal enclave and blockaded Gaza City, where they engaged in gun battles with Hamas fighters. On Friday, the troops operated mainly in farmland within about a mile of Gaza’s northern, southern and eastern edges, and quickly announced they had uncovered more than 20 tunnel exit points. Setting the bar relatively low helps hold back public expectations, provide the military with achievable goals, and build international legitimacy.” In this analysis, Hamas is isolated and weaker because in previous rounds, Hamas could count on more support from Syria’s government (right now in the middle of a civil war) and a friendly government in Egypt (which was never that friendly, but which has now, under Sisi, returned to the traditional pattern of working for Israel and isolating the Palestinians since the 2013 coup). Israel, and consequently, the Western media, are focused on “the tunnels” – into which much of Palestinian life has been driven because of the siege – as the enemy. Israel claims that Hamas’s fighters are a threat because of these tunnels.

While these differences do exist, the main elements are exactly the same. Israel is unlikely to send soldiers into tunnels to fight in close quarters with Palestinians. There are too many risks for that, and very little cost to Israel to continuing its high-tech, indiscriminate killing from a distance. This has been referred to by an analyst (Roni Bart) as “a kind of rolling-fire induced smokescreen”, a “new policy” as of 2009 which “caused a large number of casualties among the civilian Palestinian population”, because “most of the fighting took place in built up and populated areas”. (Roni Bart, “Warfare-Morality-Public Relations: Proposals for Improvement”, Strategic Assessment, June 2009 Vol. 12, No. 1)

Israel’s ability to keep this up depends on several factors. One is the regional factor, which is now providing few restraints (civil war in Iraq and Syria, a pro-Israel regime in Egypt). Another factor is how difficult it is for Western leaders to sell the war to Western civil society. In this attack, a gap may have opened up between the Israeli public and the Western public at large, as the picnics, outrageous comments, trophy photos and the like that are being shared in social media and collected in Western media show – see for example (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/middleeast/israelis-watch-bombs-drop-on-gaza-from-front-row-seats.html). At some point, the atrocities will reach a level that will trigger Western leaders to get Israel to stop.

Q: Is there anything to do?

A: Israel is a part of the West. Its economy and politics are fully integrated with the West. It simply cannot do this without support from the US, Canada, and Europe. If you go to demonstrations against Israel’s attacks, whether this one or the next ones, join the BDS Movement (bdsmovement.net), write letters to politicians or to media outlets, you will be up against an organized an organized, extensive, pro-Israel effort. You will have to do your homework and realize there are people preparing professional talking points about every historical fact and argument you come across. It may be years before anything improves, and things may get still worse. But Israel depends on international support, including from the public, more than most – that is why they devote so much energy and effort to politicians and the media in the West. This is a conflict where activists can make a difference.

Justin Podur is a writer and activist based in Toronto.