Showing posts with label Amira Hass. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amira Hass. Show all posts
Monday, July 23, 2018
Israel's Day of Reckoning
"The day will come when Israel's Holocaust credit line with the world will run out. The day will come when the leaders of Judeo-Israeli colonialism will be put on trial. The day will come when those who today show shrinking tolerance toward us because of Auschwitz on the one hand, our war and intelligence industry on the other, and because of our relative whiteness on another, will become fed up. [...] The format doesn't matter. In the Hague, in an international forum that will be set up just for us, or maybe even in our country. The day will come when not only Israeli officials and military officials will be put on trial, but also jurists, military and civilian judges, architects and planners, everyone who enabled and enables the fashioning of this land into a penthouse for Jews and a basement - divided into separate cells - for Palestinians. May these words advance that day, even if only by a minute." - Amira Hass, Israel's Holocaust credit line is running out, haaretz.com, 18/6/18)
Saturday, April 25, 2015
My Problem with Amira Hass
I thought I'd tune in to Phillip Adams' Late Night Live program on 22/4/15 to hear visiting Israeli journalist Amira Hass, "the only Jewish journalist who has lived among the Palestinians, both in Gaza and now full-time in the West Bank." (Amira Hass: An Israeli journalist living in Palestine)
Adams was, of course, his usual blunt self - 'blunt', that is, in the sense that his interviewing style, particularly with Jewish Zionists, totally contradicts the program's claim to be about "razor-sharp analysis of current events [which] puts you firmly in the big picture."
But it's mainly Hass (unexpectedly I might add) that I have the bigger problem with this time around. While sound on the occupation of 1967, I found the following words more than a little problematic:
"In my lectures here in Australia, I'm speaking to you as one settler to another. This institutionalisation of colonial times I see it everywhere here in Australia. Everywhere. And I also say different things to different audiences. So for people who tell me the solution is to dissolve Israel, I say 'Why don't you dissolve Australia?' And just because you got away with most of the indigenous people... and luckily and happily Israel and Zionism did not decimate the Palestinians. So... it's an extension of London. So I see the whites here and your colonialism is still fresh and the thing is how we look at the future and not the past. We cannot undo the past, but the future has to be worked on..."
Now, to take up my razor...
What does she mean by 'dissolve Israel/dissolve Australia'? Typically Adams didn't ask her.
Was this in response to a questioner who had suggested that Israel's apartheid structure be dismantled? That Israel be de-Zionised? That it become a state of its citizens, with equal rights for all, regardless of ethno-religious affiliation, rather than continue to be reserved as the exclusive domain of those Jews who see themselves as belonging to that entity, 'the Jewish people'? That Israel's outrageous, biology-based, apartheid Law of Return be scrapped? That the indigenous people of Palestine, ethnically cleansed in 1948 and 1967, be allowed to return to their homes and land?
Was she seriously suggesting that there are no differences between Israel and Australia? Typically, Adams didn't ask her whether she saw Australia as an apartheid state (that is, a state based, like former apartheid South Africa and today's Israel, on a raft of discriminatory legislation), and if so, which discriminatory laws made it so. Nor did he ask her whether indigenous Australians were languishing in exile in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, denied the right of return to Australia.
Why was she using the old Zionist whataboutery: You dare criticise Israel? What about Australia?
And when she said, Israel and Zionism (that is, almost 100 years of Zionist colonisation, dispossession, expulsion and occupation of Palestinians) did not decimate the Palestinians, what the hell was she on about? Typically, there was no response, razor-sharp or otherwise, from Adams.
Finally, in saying that we cannot undo the past, was she implying that Israel was set in concrete in 1948 and must forever remain a Jewish state, and that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967 must therefore remain in exile?
Adams was, of course, his usual blunt self - 'blunt', that is, in the sense that his interviewing style, particularly with Jewish Zionists, totally contradicts the program's claim to be about "razor-sharp analysis of current events [which] puts you firmly in the big picture."
But it's mainly Hass (unexpectedly I might add) that I have the bigger problem with this time around. While sound on the occupation of 1967, I found the following words more than a little problematic:
"In my lectures here in Australia, I'm speaking to you as one settler to another. This institutionalisation of colonial times I see it everywhere here in Australia. Everywhere. And I also say different things to different audiences. So for people who tell me the solution is to dissolve Israel, I say 'Why don't you dissolve Australia?' And just because you got away with most of the indigenous people... and luckily and happily Israel and Zionism did not decimate the Palestinians. So... it's an extension of London. So I see the whites here and your colonialism is still fresh and the thing is how we look at the future and not the past. We cannot undo the past, but the future has to be worked on..."
Now, to take up my razor...
What does she mean by 'dissolve Israel/dissolve Australia'? Typically Adams didn't ask her.
Was this in response to a questioner who had suggested that Israel's apartheid structure be dismantled? That Israel be de-Zionised? That it become a state of its citizens, with equal rights for all, regardless of ethno-religious affiliation, rather than continue to be reserved as the exclusive domain of those Jews who see themselves as belonging to that entity, 'the Jewish people'? That Israel's outrageous, biology-based, apartheid Law of Return be scrapped? That the indigenous people of Palestine, ethnically cleansed in 1948 and 1967, be allowed to return to their homes and land?
Was she seriously suggesting that there are no differences between Israel and Australia? Typically, Adams didn't ask her whether she saw Australia as an apartheid state (that is, a state based, like former apartheid South Africa and today's Israel, on a raft of discriminatory legislation), and if so, which discriminatory laws made it so. Nor did he ask her whether indigenous Australians were languishing in exile in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, denied the right of return to Australia.
Why was she using the old Zionist whataboutery: You dare criticise Israel? What about Australia?
And when she said, Israel and Zionism (that is, almost 100 years of Zionist colonisation, dispossession, expulsion and occupation of Palestinians) did not decimate the Palestinians, what the hell was she on about? Typically, there was no response, razor-sharp or otherwise, from Adams.
Finally, in saying that we cannot undo the past, was she implying that Israel was set in concrete in 1948 and must forever remain a Jewish state, and that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967 must therefore remain in exile?
Saturday, February 28, 2015
An Anti-Semite's Dream Jews
Israeli journalist Amira Hass reports on the progress of the Israeli master plan for the ethnic cleansing of Hebron:
"The sickest imagination of present-day anti-Semites cannot compete with the handiwork of Israel and its emissaries the settlers in Hebron for the past 20 years. The demand for the Jewish return is broken down here into all its raw components: the expulsion of the Palestinians, the destruction of their homes and cultural legacy, destruction of the economy, extreme ethnic-spatial separation and deranged prohibitions regarding movement and housing, attacks in the name of the Torah, harassment and denial of the other. If gentile foes were to say that's how Jews behave, the institutes for the study of anti-Semitism would sound the alarm.
"Today, February 25, is the 21st anniversary of the massacre perpetrated by Dr Baruch Goldstein against worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque (the Cave of the Patriarchs). The prime minister and defence minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, could have dismantled the nuclear bombs stored by his colleagues from Mapai (the forerunner of Labor) in the late 1960s - Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan - when they allowed groups of messianic Jews to settle there and encouraged them by providing military protection and weapons. The evacuation of the settlers from Hebron would have been received with great understanding in 1994. But Rabin decided to continue with the traditional policy, which was natural for Mapai, of pampering the settlers, and instructed the army to punish the Palestinians for the massacre committed against them by a Jewish doctor - an immigrant from the United States - with a prolonged curfew, restrictions on movement, the closing of shops and marketplaces, and criminal forgiveness for the violence of the settlers. Since then Israel has continued with its policy of punishing those who are attacked.
"Twenty-one years after the massacre, the settlers in Hebron have many reasons for celebration. President Reuven Rivlin visited them and gave his approval for the evaporation of the Palestinian community from the center of Hebron. Last week a second representative of the Hebron settlers entered the Knesset, instead of the late Uri Orbach: Rabbi Hillel Horowitz of Habayit Hayehudi, who is joining his colleague and neighbour Orit Strock. And even if it's only symbolic and for a month or two, there's a chance that another of their neighbors, Baruch Mazel, who lives in the settlement of Tel Rumeida, will preserve the handsome quota in the next Knesset: two elected officials from a community of several hundred people who have orchestrated one of the most violent and racist realities.
"The Hebron settlers can be credited with several more accomplishments achieved in the past 3 years: another new promenade connecting Kiryat Arba and the Cave of the Patriarchs, an expanded Beit Romano, an archaeological park under construction, the Cave of the Patriarchs as a national heritage site, tours by school students, and the main thing - a first settlement site in Hebron in 30 years in 'Beit Hameriva' (the house of contention) in the heart of the ar-Ras neighborhood, after the Supreme Court confirmed that it was purchased legally.
"And among the achievements and festivities, the center of the city is deserted and in ruins. You have to visit there, repeatedly, in order to begin to understand not only how it looks when 120 blockades and checkpoints cut off abandoned streets in the middle, and how it is when young soldiers enforce the prohibition against visiting the family that insists on continuing to live in its home or walk in the street that's for Jews only, and how the elderly climb up the incline short of breath, because Palestinian cars are not allowed there. The visit is necessary in order to understand this all-Israeli creation: Active and conscious assistance of Labor governments, and conscious support, indifference and the emotional and intellectual laziness of elites and ordinary people, have implemented the most extremist settlement-oriented-messianic-right-wing master plan since 1948." (Israel's Hebron handiwork: Its most heinous endeavor since 1948, Haaretz, 25/2/15)
"The sickest imagination of present-day anti-Semites cannot compete with the handiwork of Israel and its emissaries the settlers in Hebron for the past 20 years. The demand for the Jewish return is broken down here into all its raw components: the expulsion of the Palestinians, the destruction of their homes and cultural legacy, destruction of the economy, extreme ethnic-spatial separation and deranged prohibitions regarding movement and housing, attacks in the name of the Torah, harassment and denial of the other. If gentile foes were to say that's how Jews behave, the institutes for the study of anti-Semitism would sound the alarm.
"Today, February 25, is the 21st anniversary of the massacre perpetrated by Dr Baruch Goldstein against worshipers in the Ibrahimi Mosque (the Cave of the Patriarchs). The prime minister and defence minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, could have dismantled the nuclear bombs stored by his colleagues from Mapai (the forerunner of Labor) in the late 1960s - Yigal Alon and Moshe Dayan - when they allowed groups of messianic Jews to settle there and encouraged them by providing military protection and weapons. The evacuation of the settlers from Hebron would have been received with great understanding in 1994. But Rabin decided to continue with the traditional policy, which was natural for Mapai, of pampering the settlers, and instructed the army to punish the Palestinians for the massacre committed against them by a Jewish doctor - an immigrant from the United States - with a prolonged curfew, restrictions on movement, the closing of shops and marketplaces, and criminal forgiveness for the violence of the settlers. Since then Israel has continued with its policy of punishing those who are attacked.
"Twenty-one years after the massacre, the settlers in Hebron have many reasons for celebration. President Reuven Rivlin visited them and gave his approval for the evaporation of the Palestinian community from the center of Hebron. Last week a second representative of the Hebron settlers entered the Knesset, instead of the late Uri Orbach: Rabbi Hillel Horowitz of Habayit Hayehudi, who is joining his colleague and neighbour Orit Strock. And even if it's only symbolic and for a month or two, there's a chance that another of their neighbors, Baruch Mazel, who lives in the settlement of Tel Rumeida, will preserve the handsome quota in the next Knesset: two elected officials from a community of several hundred people who have orchestrated one of the most violent and racist realities.
"The Hebron settlers can be credited with several more accomplishments achieved in the past 3 years: another new promenade connecting Kiryat Arba and the Cave of the Patriarchs, an expanded Beit Romano, an archaeological park under construction, the Cave of the Patriarchs as a national heritage site, tours by school students, and the main thing - a first settlement site in Hebron in 30 years in 'Beit Hameriva' (the house of contention) in the heart of the ar-Ras neighborhood, after the Supreme Court confirmed that it was purchased legally.
"And among the achievements and festivities, the center of the city is deserted and in ruins. You have to visit there, repeatedly, in order to begin to understand not only how it looks when 120 blockades and checkpoints cut off abandoned streets in the middle, and how it is when young soldiers enforce the prohibition against visiting the family that insists on continuing to live in its home or walk in the street that's for Jews only, and how the elderly climb up the incline short of breath, because Palestinian cars are not allowed there. The visit is necessary in order to understand this all-Israeli creation: Active and conscious assistance of Labor governments, and conscious support, indifference and the emotional and intellectual laziness of elites and ordinary people, have implemented the most extremist settlement-oriented-messianic-right-wing master plan since 1948." (Israel's Hebron handiwork: Its most heinous endeavor since 1948, Haaretz, 25/2/15)
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Soft On Israel
"...Ms Gillard has rejected claims that she is soft on Israel. Former ambassador to Israel Ross Burns made the accusation in a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, the Fairfax press reported. Ms Gillard's partner Tim Mathieson works for prominent pro-Israel lobbyist Albert Dadon's real estate company Ubertas Group. 'I've seen that letter to the newspapers, that's not right', Ms Gillard said today. 'I've made up my own views about Israel and made them known publicly well before there was any suggestion that my partner would work in a property group associated with Mr Dadon'." (Gillard won't play religion card, ABC News, 29/6/10)
So what exactly are La Guillotine's views on Israel and how were they arrived at?
"We want what the Israeli people want - peace between Israel, Palestine and their neighbours. A peace based on: The signing of peace treaties, just as Egypt and Jordan have; The renunciation of terrorism; The end of nuclear proliferation; and recognition of the legitimacy of the State of Israel and its right to exist in safe and secure borders." (Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard addresses the JNF gala dinner, Melbourne, 4/6/08)
Sounds pretty soft on Israel to me. Let's take a closer look:
A peace treaty with the Palestinians?
But Israel doesn't want peace: "We don't want peace. It's as simple as that. It's good for us to wallow in the current situation. There are no terrorist attacks so there are no Arabs. Life is a bowl of cherries, so why change? Society is comatose. It doesn't object and doesn't even ask, led like a flock of sheep, not asking why we need a freeze if at the same time more and more of its funds will be allocated to the settlements in huge quantities. They don't ask why it's okay for the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba and not for Kiryat Shmona. They don't care at all what is happening in their backyard and don't wonder why the whole world disapproves of us. They just want to enjoy life, and who cares about two states or the end of the occupation." (Netanyahu should admit Israel doesn't want peace, Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 13/12/09)
And anyway, peace doesn't pay: "Successive Israeli governments since 1993 certainly must have known what they were doing, being in no hurry to make peace with the Palestinians. As representatives of Israeli society, these governments understood that peace would involve serious damage to national interests. The security industry is an important export branch - weapons, ammunition and refinements that are tested daily in Gaza and the West Bank... Maintaining the occupation and a state of non-peace employs hundreds of thousands of Israelis... A peace agreement would require equal distribution of water resources throughout the country (from the river to the sea) between Jews and Palestinians... As the past 30 years have shown, settlements flourish as the welfare state contracts. They offer ordinary people what their salaries would not allow them in sovereign Israel, within the borders of June 4, 1967: cheap land, large homes, subsidies, wide-open spaces, a superior road network and quality education... " (Israel knows that peace doesn't pay, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 11/5/09)
The renunciation of terrorism?
She means armed Palestinian resistance to occupation of course, not to the terrorist Israeli occupation itself.
The end of nuclear proliferation?
There's only one country in the Middle East with nukes. I think it's called Israel.
Recognition of the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its right to exist in safe and secure borders?
She means its right to exist on as much Palestinian land as it can snaffle up while the so-called peace process rolls on and on and on and... Its right to exist as a state for Australian Jews and American Jews and Canadian Jews and British Jews and... but not for the stateless Palestinians driven out in 1948 and 1967.
And not a word about Palestinian rights or 6 decades of Palestinian dispossession, occupation and statelessness.
Yes, La Guillotine's definitely soft on Israel.
Now where did she get her ideas about Israel from?
I mean "for someone who's regarded as having such a fierce intellect, her library hardly sounds like a heady trip through academia. Gillard laughs and turns her nose up at the suggestion of her bookshelves sighing with Marxist dialectic or political biographies. It's 'airport trash', page-turners and once a year the latest book from an Icelandic murder-mystery writer (Arnaldur Indridason) - a tip from frontbench colleague Laurie Ferguson." (Spotlight on the redhead, Mike Bruce, The Courier-Mail, 15/12/06)
Could they have come from her "brave friends Albert and Debbie Dadon" (JNF address) whose Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange (AICE) sponsored her first trip to Israel in 2005?
Evidently.
So what exactly are La Guillotine's views on Israel and how were they arrived at?
"We want what the Israeli people want - peace between Israel, Palestine and their neighbours. A peace based on: The signing of peace treaties, just as Egypt and Jordan have; The renunciation of terrorism; The end of nuclear proliferation; and recognition of the legitimacy of the State of Israel and its right to exist in safe and secure borders." (Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard addresses the JNF gala dinner, Melbourne, 4/6/08)
Sounds pretty soft on Israel to me. Let's take a closer look:
A peace treaty with the Palestinians?
But Israel doesn't want peace: "We don't want peace. It's as simple as that. It's good for us to wallow in the current situation. There are no terrorist attacks so there are no Arabs. Life is a bowl of cherries, so why change? Society is comatose. It doesn't object and doesn't even ask, led like a flock of sheep, not asking why we need a freeze if at the same time more and more of its funds will be allocated to the settlements in huge quantities. They don't ask why it's okay for the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba and not for Kiryat Shmona. They don't care at all what is happening in their backyard and don't wonder why the whole world disapproves of us. They just want to enjoy life, and who cares about two states or the end of the occupation." (Netanyahu should admit Israel doesn't want peace, Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 13/12/09)
And anyway, peace doesn't pay: "Successive Israeli governments since 1993 certainly must have known what they were doing, being in no hurry to make peace with the Palestinians. As representatives of Israeli society, these governments understood that peace would involve serious damage to national interests. The security industry is an important export branch - weapons, ammunition and refinements that are tested daily in Gaza and the West Bank... Maintaining the occupation and a state of non-peace employs hundreds of thousands of Israelis... A peace agreement would require equal distribution of water resources throughout the country (from the river to the sea) between Jews and Palestinians... As the past 30 years have shown, settlements flourish as the welfare state contracts. They offer ordinary people what their salaries would not allow them in sovereign Israel, within the borders of June 4, 1967: cheap land, large homes, subsidies, wide-open spaces, a superior road network and quality education... " (Israel knows that peace doesn't pay, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 11/5/09)
The renunciation of terrorism?
She means armed Palestinian resistance to occupation of course, not to the terrorist Israeli occupation itself.
The end of nuclear proliferation?
There's only one country in the Middle East with nukes. I think it's called Israel.
Recognition of the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its right to exist in safe and secure borders?
She means its right to exist on as much Palestinian land as it can snaffle up while the so-called peace process rolls on and on and on and... Its right to exist as a state for Australian Jews and American Jews and Canadian Jews and British Jews and... but not for the stateless Palestinians driven out in 1948 and 1967.
And not a word about Palestinian rights or 6 decades of Palestinian dispossession, occupation and statelessness.
Yes, La Guillotine's definitely soft on Israel.
Now where did she get her ideas about Israel from?
I mean "for someone who's regarded as having such a fierce intellect, her library hardly sounds like a heady trip through academia. Gillard laughs and turns her nose up at the suggestion of her bookshelves sighing with Marxist dialectic or political biographies. It's 'airport trash', page-turners and once a year the latest book from an Icelandic murder-mystery writer (Arnaldur Indridason) - a tip from frontbench colleague Laurie Ferguson." (Spotlight on the redhead, Mike Bruce, The Courier-Mail, 15/12/06)
Could they have come from her "brave friends Albert and Debbie Dadon" (JNF address) whose Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange (AICE) sponsored her first trip to Israel in 2005?
Evidently.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Who Done It?
The Australian's Middle East correspondent, John Lyons, asks the question on everyone's lips - everyone that is who lives in that mysterious up-is-down, white-is-black universe parallel to our own: "Life can be cruel inside the besieged Palestinian territory, but who is responsible? " (Running the Gaza blockade, 12/6/10)
To anyone from our own universe, the answer emerges as naturally from the question as the chicken from the egg: the besiegers of the Gaza Ghetto are responsible for the misery of the besieged.
However, in that other world, one of whose portals is the Murdoch press, it's actually the other way aound: the besieged are responsible for their own misery.
Sure, there's the odd, no doubt careless, reference to our own reality in Lyons' report, as in: "Gaza doesn't have any more prostaglandin. It can't get through Israel's and Egypt's blockade of the strip of land."
Israel's and Egypt's blockade? Ah, but that's soon lost in the fog: "Some blame Israel for the siege. Some blame Hamas. Some blame Egypt. The truth is, they are probably all culpable, one way or another."
Confusing, isn't it? Thought you knew who was responsible for Gaza's crippling blockade, but now that you've entered the world according to Rupert Murdoch, you're not so sure anymore, are you? Obviously, Israel's got something to do with it, right? I mean, Egypt only jumps when USrael tells it too, so surely, surely, the main suspect in this little who done it? is Israel, no?
Wrong! Israel's really only a bit player: "Israel's blame surely must be for allowing so few medications and medical equipment into Gaza."
OK. So that's it then? The only blame attaching to Israel is for being stingy with band aids and aspirin? Correct!
Israel's certainly not to blame for ethnically cleansing southern Palestine in 1948 and swelling Gaza's population with tens of thousands of never-to-return refugees; or for invading, occupying and colonising it in 1967; or for decades of de-development and repression thereafter; or, from 2000-2005, filling its skies with deadly drones and helicopters, or turning whole swathes of its coastline into free-fire zones, or regularly bulldozing its houses, orchards and farmlands, or unleashing tanks on a defenceless, civilian population, or rocketing its unarmed demonstrators (19/5/04), or slowly closing it off from the West Bank behind walls and barriers, or launching military assaults such as operations Rainbow (2004) and Days of Penitence (2004); or, after 'disengaging' in September 2005, hermetically sealing it off by land, sea and air, or shattering its nights with sonic booms, or rocketing and shelling its defenders and civilians from the skies; or, following the January 2006 Palestinian elections, orchestrating an international boycott of its democratically-elected Hamas government, or withholding (ie stealing) its tax and customs revenues, or putting its people "on a diet" (Dov Weisglass, Olmert's advisor), or launching military operations Summer Rains (2006) and Autumn Clouds (2006), or orchestrating a failed USraeli-PA coup in June 2007, or launching military operations Hot Winter (2008) and, bloodiest and most destructive of all, Cast Lead (27 December 2008-18 January 2009).
OK, what about Hamas? "Hamas's blame must come from its prolonged period of firing of rockets into Israel, which led to the blockade almost 4 years ago."
Aha, rockets! That obviously makes Hamas a more serious suspect! Surely the blame for the siege of Gaza must lie squarely with Hamas and those Palestinians who elected it to power in January 2006, right?
Right! But only if you trust a journalist who can write, "Fatah was stunned when it lost the election of 2007..."
What might a journalist with a firmer grasp of current events, say Haaretz's Amira Hass, have to say:
"The siege of Gaza did not begin when Hamas seized control of the Strip's security organs, or when Gilad Shalit was taken captive, or when Hamas was elected in democratic elections. The siege began in 1991 - before the suicide bombings. And since then, it has only become more sophisticated, reaching its peak in 2005. The Israeli public relations machinery happily presented the disengagement as the end of the occupation, in brazen disregard of the facts. The isolation and closure were presented as military necessities. But we are big boys and girls, and we know that 'military necessities' and consistent lies serve state goals. Israel's goal was to thwart the two-state solution, which the world had expected to materialize once the Cold War ended in 1990. This was not a perfect solution, but the Palestinians were ready for it then. Gaza is not a military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost its land and its homeland in 1948. In 1993, Israel had a one-time golden opportunity to prove to the world that what people say about us is true - that it is not by nature a colonialist state. That the expulsion of a nation from its land, the expulsion of a people from their houses and the theft of Palestinian land for the sake of settling Jews are not the basis and essence of its existence. In the 1990s, Israel had a chance to prove that 1948 is not its paradigm. But it missed the opportunity. Instead, it merely perfected its techniques for robbing land and expelling people from their houses, and forced the Palestinians into isolated enclaves. And now, during these dark days, Israel is proving that 1948 never ended." (History did not begin with the Qassams, 14/1/09)
OK, assuming you're one of Amira's big boys or girls, and you found Lyons' 'In the Beginning was the Qassam...' line insufficient to explain a siege which clearly has Israeli paw prints all over it, then Lyons has lined up another culprit to divert you: the owners of Gaza's tunnels - which "Israel and Egypt" claim "are used not just for goods but to smuggle into Gaza weapons that are then used against Israel."
You see, "[t]he tunnel operators have a vested interest in maintaining the blockade; they stand to lose tens of millions of dollars should it end."
So how do these crafty devils manage to keep the blockade going? "A European official who knows Gaza as well as anyone tells me what he says is one of the great unwritten stories [In the Beginning were the Tunnel Barons... ?] about Gaza: that it is the tunnel operators firing the rockets."
Hm... You want proof? Here it is: "As news emerged last week of the 9 killed on the flotilla and international reaction called on Israel to lift the blockade, suddenly there were rockets fired from Gaza into Israel." Sounds pretty conclusive to me.
OK. To sum up. Who done it? Who is responsible for the siege of Gaza? Well, in the wonderful world of Murdoch, it's probably Hamas... or the Tunnel Barons... or maybe both, but it's definitely not Israel.
PS: Wicked! Here's Judith Rona of Bondi, NSW, taking the words right out of John Lyons' mouth in her letter to The Australian of 15/6/10: "The situation in Gaza always comes back to Hamas. Hamas sent thousands of rockets into Israel, and aided Muslim Brotherhood attacks in Egypt: hence the blockade and closure of Egypt's and Israel's borders with Gaza. Hamas prevents Gazan doctors from having direct contact with either Israel or the West Bank: hence the hold-up in the transfer of sick patients to Israeli hospitals and equipment to Gazan hospitals. Hamas continues to assassinate Fatah members and supposed collaboraters with Israel. Hamas refuses to guarantee Israel's security and thus have the embargo lifted. And it 'approves, monitors and taxes each tunnel' through which arms are smuggled and more rockets fired against Israel."
To anyone from our own universe, the answer emerges as naturally from the question as the chicken from the egg: the besiegers of the Gaza Ghetto are responsible for the misery of the besieged.
However, in that other world, one of whose portals is the Murdoch press, it's actually the other way aound: the besieged are responsible for their own misery.
Sure, there's the odd, no doubt careless, reference to our own reality in Lyons' report, as in: "Gaza doesn't have any more prostaglandin. It can't get through Israel's and Egypt's blockade of the strip of land."
Israel's and Egypt's blockade? Ah, but that's soon lost in the fog: "Some blame Israel for the siege. Some blame Hamas. Some blame Egypt. The truth is, they are probably all culpable, one way or another."
Confusing, isn't it? Thought you knew who was responsible for Gaza's crippling blockade, but now that you've entered the world according to Rupert Murdoch, you're not so sure anymore, are you? Obviously, Israel's got something to do with it, right? I mean, Egypt only jumps when USrael tells it too, so surely, surely, the main suspect in this little who done it? is Israel, no?
Wrong! Israel's really only a bit player: "Israel's blame surely must be for allowing so few medications and medical equipment into Gaza."
OK. So that's it then? The only blame attaching to Israel is for being stingy with band aids and aspirin? Correct!
Israel's certainly not to blame for ethnically cleansing southern Palestine in 1948 and swelling Gaza's population with tens of thousands of never-to-return refugees; or for invading, occupying and colonising it in 1967; or for decades of de-development and repression thereafter; or, from 2000-2005, filling its skies with deadly drones and helicopters, or turning whole swathes of its coastline into free-fire zones, or regularly bulldozing its houses, orchards and farmlands, or unleashing tanks on a defenceless, civilian population, or rocketing its unarmed demonstrators (19/5/04), or slowly closing it off from the West Bank behind walls and barriers, or launching military assaults such as operations Rainbow (2004) and Days of Penitence (2004); or, after 'disengaging' in September 2005, hermetically sealing it off by land, sea and air, or shattering its nights with sonic booms, or rocketing and shelling its defenders and civilians from the skies; or, following the January 2006 Palestinian elections, orchestrating an international boycott of its democratically-elected Hamas government, or withholding (ie stealing) its tax and customs revenues, or putting its people "on a diet" (Dov Weisglass, Olmert's advisor), or launching military operations Summer Rains (2006) and Autumn Clouds (2006), or orchestrating a failed USraeli-PA coup in June 2007, or launching military operations Hot Winter (2008) and, bloodiest and most destructive of all, Cast Lead (27 December 2008-18 January 2009).
OK, what about Hamas? "Hamas's blame must come from its prolonged period of firing of rockets into Israel, which led to the blockade almost 4 years ago."
Aha, rockets! That obviously makes Hamas a more serious suspect! Surely the blame for the siege of Gaza must lie squarely with Hamas and those Palestinians who elected it to power in January 2006, right?
Right! But only if you trust a journalist who can write, "Fatah was stunned when it lost the election of 2007..."
What might a journalist with a firmer grasp of current events, say Haaretz's Amira Hass, have to say:
"The siege of Gaza did not begin when Hamas seized control of the Strip's security organs, or when Gilad Shalit was taken captive, or when Hamas was elected in democratic elections. The siege began in 1991 - before the suicide bombings. And since then, it has only become more sophisticated, reaching its peak in 2005. The Israeli public relations machinery happily presented the disengagement as the end of the occupation, in brazen disregard of the facts. The isolation and closure were presented as military necessities. But we are big boys and girls, and we know that 'military necessities' and consistent lies serve state goals. Israel's goal was to thwart the two-state solution, which the world had expected to materialize once the Cold War ended in 1990. This was not a perfect solution, but the Palestinians were ready for it then. Gaza is not a military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost its land and its homeland in 1948. In 1993, Israel had a one-time golden opportunity to prove to the world that what people say about us is true - that it is not by nature a colonialist state. That the expulsion of a nation from its land, the expulsion of a people from their houses and the theft of Palestinian land for the sake of settling Jews are not the basis and essence of its existence. In the 1990s, Israel had a chance to prove that 1948 is not its paradigm. But it missed the opportunity. Instead, it merely perfected its techniques for robbing land and expelling people from their houses, and forced the Palestinians into isolated enclaves. And now, during these dark days, Israel is proving that 1948 never ended." (History did not begin with the Qassams, 14/1/09)
OK, assuming you're one of Amira's big boys or girls, and you found Lyons' 'In the Beginning was the Qassam...' line insufficient to explain a siege which clearly has Israeli paw prints all over it, then Lyons has lined up another culprit to divert you: the owners of Gaza's tunnels - which "Israel and Egypt" claim "are used not just for goods but to smuggle into Gaza weapons that are then used against Israel."
You see, "[t]he tunnel operators have a vested interest in maintaining the blockade; they stand to lose tens of millions of dollars should it end."
So how do these crafty devils manage to keep the blockade going? "A European official who knows Gaza as well as anyone tells me what he says is one of the great unwritten stories [In the Beginning were the Tunnel Barons... ?] about Gaza: that it is the tunnel operators firing the rockets."
Hm... You want proof? Here it is: "As news emerged last week of the 9 killed on the flotilla and international reaction called on Israel to lift the blockade, suddenly there were rockets fired from Gaza into Israel." Sounds pretty conclusive to me.
OK. To sum up. Who done it? Who is responsible for the siege of Gaza? Well, in the wonderful world of Murdoch, it's probably Hamas... or the Tunnel Barons... or maybe both, but it's definitely not Israel.
PS: Wicked! Here's Judith Rona of Bondi, NSW, taking the words right out of John Lyons' mouth in her letter to The Australian of 15/6/10: "The situation in Gaza always comes back to Hamas. Hamas sent thousands of rockets into Israel, and aided Muslim Brotherhood attacks in Egypt: hence the blockade and closure of Egypt's and Israel's borders with Gaza. Hamas prevents Gazan doctors from having direct contact with either Israel or the West Bank: hence the hold-up in the transfer of sick patients to Israeli hospitals and equipment to Gazan hospitals. Hamas continues to assassinate Fatah members and supposed collaboraters with Israel. Hamas refuses to guarantee Israel's security and thus have the embargo lifted. And it 'approves, monitors and taxes each tunnel' through which arms are smuggled and more rockets fired against Israel."
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
That Shitty Little Country 2
"An international spat has developed over disparaging comments about Israel allegedly made by the French ambassador to London at a private dinner party. During a conversation about the Middle East crisis with the owner of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, Conrad Black, ambassador Daniel Bernard is reported to have spoken about 'that shitty little country Israel'." ('Anti-Semitic' French envoy under fire, BBC News 20/12/01)
What follows is a companion piece to my 6/2/09 post That Shitty Little Country.
Whether it's Operation Peace for Galilee (1982), Operation Defensive Shield (2001), or Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), the Israeli terrorist seems to have a serious problem with his woos & poos:-
"After the Israelis left [Beirut/1982], we began to hear of the most extraordinary aspect of the occupation. Arrests, harassment, shootings, even the obligatory looting: these were what everyone expected, and indeed, they had occurred. But the thing that no one expected was what we, on hearing about it for the first time, greeted with hesitant laughs. Gradually, we discovered that what had seemed like a single incident had become, in fact, a trademark and taken on more serious dimensions. The Israeli soldiers, wherever they had been, had defecated in choice places. On books, furniture, clothes, and carpets; on bedroom floors; near toilet seats and in bathtubs; on school desks and in shop windows, people found rotting feces. Someone swore she knew of one house near the airport where the distraught housewife had discovered feces in her washing machine and dishwasher. One man, we heard, went to his office and saw on every single desk except his own the offensive, stinking pile. Triumphantly, he sat at his desk and gloated over his unhappy colleagues. Then he opened his drawer, and there, neatly lying among the files, was his bequest from the Israeli army. And so, after all the ruination and tragedy, the destruction and pain, the dead and the dying, the lacerated bodies and blinded eyes, the burned and disfigured faces, the widows and orphans - after all this there was left only a great heap of excrement. The fires had died, snuffed out in a mound of dung. A ghastly joke, symbol of an overrriding contempt, a cosmic stink had become the memorial to those months of agony." (Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, Jean Said Makdisi, 1999)
" No one deluded himself that the Palestinian Ministry of Culture [in El-Bireh]... would be spared the fate of other Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah and other cities - that is, the nearly total destruction of its contents and particularly its high-tech equipment. After all, the Israel Defense Forces troops were deployed in the building for about a month... On the evening of Wednesday, May 1 [2001], when the siege on Arafat's headquarters was lifted and the armoured vehicles and the tanks had rumbled out, the executives and officials of the ministry who had rushed to the site did not expect to find the building the way they had left it. Employees of the local radio and television station... also hastened to the scene... But what awaited them was beyond all their fears, and also shocked representatives and cultural attaches of foreign consulates, who toured the site the next day... all the high-tech and electronic equipment had been wrecked or had vanished - computers, photocopiers, cameras, scanners, hard disks, editing equipment worth thousands of dollars, television sets. The broadcast antenna on top of the building was destroyed. Telephone sets vanished. A collection of Palestinian art objects (mostly hand embroideries) disappeared... Furniture was dragged from place to place, broken by soldiers, piled up. Gas stoves for heating were overturned and thrown on heaps of scattered papers, discarded books, broken diskettes and discs and smashed windowpanes... In every room of the various departments - literature, film, culture for children and youth, books, discs, pamphlets and documents were piled up, soiled with urine and excrement. There are 2 toilets on every floor, but the soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere else in the building... They did their business on the floors, in emptied flowerpots, even in drawers they had pulled out of desks. They defecated into plastic bags, and these were scattered in several places. Some of them had burst. Someone even managed to defecate into a photocopier. The soldiers urinated into empty mineral water bottles. These were scattered by the dozen in all the rooms of the building, in cardboard boxes, among the piles of rubbish and rubble, on desks, under desks, next to the furniture the soldiers had smashed, among the children's books that had been thrown down. Some of the bottles had opened and the yellow liquid had spilled and left its stain. It was especially difficult to enter 2 floors of the building because of the pungent stench of feces and urine. Soiled toilet paper was also scattered everywhere." (Someone even managed to defecate into the photocopier, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 5/6/02)
"On January 18, when the [Israeli] forces pulled out, similar sights awaited people whose homes had become military bases in their absence. There were bullet-pocked walls, ripped-up sofas and armchairs, smashed televisions and computers, shards of glass and porcelain dishes and broken wooden thresholds. Clothing was ripped up. And there were mountains of very Israeli garbage - empty tin cans, cardboard boxes, empty bags of potato chips and chocolate, and full bags of sugar and raspberry-flavored drinking powder... There are houses where excrement was smeared on the walls, or where dry piles of it were found in corners. In many cases, the smells indicated that soldiers had urinated on piles of clothing or inside a washing machine. In all the houses the toilets were overflowing and clogged, and there was filth all around. When the Abu Eidas family returned to house No. 5 in Jabalya, they discovered pots of urine and excrement in the refrigerator." (Pots of urine, feces in the refrigerator - how IDF troops vandalized Gaza homes, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 6/3/09)
The crappy performance of Israeli terrorists in the field over decades suggests a deep-seated problem. One shudders to think what the lads in khaki get up to at home. Shitty little country indeed.
What follows is a companion piece to my 6/2/09 post That Shitty Little Country.
Whether it's Operation Peace for Galilee (1982), Operation Defensive Shield (2001), or Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), the Israeli terrorist seems to have a serious problem with his woos & poos:-
"After the Israelis left [Beirut/1982], we began to hear of the most extraordinary aspect of the occupation. Arrests, harassment, shootings, even the obligatory looting: these were what everyone expected, and indeed, they had occurred. But the thing that no one expected was what we, on hearing about it for the first time, greeted with hesitant laughs. Gradually, we discovered that what had seemed like a single incident had become, in fact, a trademark and taken on more serious dimensions. The Israeli soldiers, wherever they had been, had defecated in choice places. On books, furniture, clothes, and carpets; on bedroom floors; near toilet seats and in bathtubs; on school desks and in shop windows, people found rotting feces. Someone swore she knew of one house near the airport where the distraught housewife had discovered feces in her washing machine and dishwasher. One man, we heard, went to his office and saw on every single desk except his own the offensive, stinking pile. Triumphantly, he sat at his desk and gloated over his unhappy colleagues. Then he opened his drawer, and there, neatly lying among the files, was his bequest from the Israeli army. And so, after all the ruination and tragedy, the destruction and pain, the dead and the dying, the lacerated bodies and blinded eyes, the burned and disfigured faces, the widows and orphans - after all this there was left only a great heap of excrement. The fires had died, snuffed out in a mound of dung. A ghastly joke, symbol of an overrriding contempt, a cosmic stink had become the memorial to those months of agony." (Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir, Jean Said Makdisi, 1999)
" No one deluded himself that the Palestinian Ministry of Culture [in El-Bireh]... would be spared the fate of other Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah and other cities - that is, the nearly total destruction of its contents and particularly its high-tech equipment. After all, the Israel Defense Forces troops were deployed in the building for about a month... On the evening of Wednesday, May 1 [2001], when the siege on Arafat's headquarters was lifted and the armoured vehicles and the tanks had rumbled out, the executives and officials of the ministry who had rushed to the site did not expect to find the building the way they had left it. Employees of the local radio and television station... also hastened to the scene... But what awaited them was beyond all their fears, and also shocked representatives and cultural attaches of foreign consulates, who toured the site the next day... all the high-tech and electronic equipment had been wrecked or had vanished - computers, photocopiers, cameras, scanners, hard disks, editing equipment worth thousands of dollars, television sets. The broadcast antenna on top of the building was destroyed. Telephone sets vanished. A collection of Palestinian art objects (mostly hand embroideries) disappeared... Furniture was dragged from place to place, broken by soldiers, piled up. Gas stoves for heating were overturned and thrown on heaps of scattered papers, discarded books, broken diskettes and discs and smashed windowpanes... In every room of the various departments - literature, film, culture for children and youth, books, discs, pamphlets and documents were piled up, soiled with urine and excrement. There are 2 toilets on every floor, but the soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere else in the building... They did their business on the floors, in emptied flowerpots, even in drawers they had pulled out of desks. They defecated into plastic bags, and these were scattered in several places. Some of them had burst. Someone even managed to defecate into a photocopier. The soldiers urinated into empty mineral water bottles. These were scattered by the dozen in all the rooms of the building, in cardboard boxes, among the piles of rubbish and rubble, on desks, under desks, next to the furniture the soldiers had smashed, among the children's books that had been thrown down. Some of the bottles had opened and the yellow liquid had spilled and left its stain. It was especially difficult to enter 2 floors of the building because of the pungent stench of feces and urine. Soiled toilet paper was also scattered everywhere." (Someone even managed to defecate into the photocopier, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 5/6/02)
"On January 18, when the [Israeli] forces pulled out, similar sights awaited people whose homes had become military bases in their absence. There were bullet-pocked walls, ripped-up sofas and armchairs, smashed televisions and computers, shards of glass and porcelain dishes and broken wooden thresholds. Clothing was ripped up. And there were mountains of very Israeli garbage - empty tin cans, cardboard boxes, empty bags of potato chips and chocolate, and full bags of sugar and raspberry-flavored drinking powder... There are houses where excrement was smeared on the walls, or where dry piles of it were found in corners. In many cases, the smells indicated that soldiers had urinated on piles of clothing or inside a washing machine. In all the houses the toilets were overflowing and clogged, and there was filth all around. When the Abu Eidas family returned to house No. 5 in Jabalya, they discovered pots of urine and excrement in the refrigerator." (Pots of urine, feces in the refrigerator - how IDF troops vandalized Gaza homes, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 6/3/09)
The crappy performance of Israeli terrorists in the field over decades suggests a deep-seated problem. One shudders to think what the lads in khaki get up to at home. Shitty little country indeed.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Ubermenschen
"The Israelis are among the most disciplined troops in the world and go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties." Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan (See my 8/2/09 post On Planet Sheridan)
"The delegation recorded numerous accounts of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, in the head, chest, and stomach. Another common narrative described Israeli forces rounding civilians into a single location ie, homes or schools which Israeli tanks or warplanes then shelled. Israeli forces continued to shoot at civilians fleeing the targeted structures... We spoke to Ibtisam as-Sammouni, 31, a resident of Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza City. On January 4, the Israeli army forced approximately 110 of Zaytoun's residents into Ibtisam's home. At approximately 7 am on January 5, the Israeli military launched 2 tank shells at the house without warning killing 2 of Ibtisam's children: Rizka, 14 and Faris, 12. When the survivors attempted to flee, Israeli forces shot at them. Her son Abdullah, 7, was injured in the shelling and remained in the home among his deceased siblings for 4 days before Israeli forces permitted medical personnel into Zaytoun to rescue them. After medical personnel removed the injured persons, an Israeli warplane destroyed the house and it crumbled over the lifeless bodies. The dead remained beneath the rubble for 17 days before the Israeli army permitted medical personnel to remove their bodies for burial. We spoke to the family of Rouhiya an-Najjar, 47, who lived in Khoza'a, Khan Yunis. Israeli forces ordered her neighborhood's residents to march to the city center. Rouhiya led 20 women out of her home and into an alley. They all carried white scarves. Upon entering the alley, an Israeli sniper shot Rouhiya in her left temple killing her instantly. Israeli forces prevented medical personnel from reaching her body for 12 hours." (Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes, National Lawyers Guild, counterpunch.org, 9/2/09)
"Our findings overwhelmingly point to the use of conventional weapons in a prohibited manner, specifically, the use of battlefield weaponry in densely populated civilian areas. Customary international law forbids the use of weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering. We found evidence that Israel used white phosphorus extensively throughout its 3-week offensive in a manner that led to numerous deaths and injuries. For example, Sabah Abu Halima, 45, lived in Bait Lahiya with her husband, 7 boys and 1 girl. It was midday and she and her entire family was home. Within minutes she felt her home shaking and missiles fell through the rooftop. She fell to the ground upon impact. When she looked up, she saw her children burning." (ibid)
"The testimonies [of Israeli soldiers] include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her 2 children. 'There was a house with a family inside... We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof', the soldier said. 'The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her 2 children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was OK, and he should hold his fire and he... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders'. According to the squad leader: 'The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away... I don't think he felt too bad about it, because... as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general... I don't know how to describe it... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers...' Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered. The squad leader said he argued with his commander over the permissive rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, the squad leader's soldiers complained that 'we should kill everyone there [in the center of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist'. The squad leader said: 'You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most'." (IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, & lax rules of engagement, Amos Harel, Haaretz, 19/3/09)
"Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription, 'Better use Durex', next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, '1 shot, 2 kills'.' (Dead Palestinian babies & bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009, Uri Blau, Haaretz, 20/3/09)
"Rules of Engagement: Open fire also upon rescue', was handwritten in Hebrew on a sheet of paper found in one of the Palestinian homes the Israel Defense Forces took over during Operation Cast Lead." (IDF soldiers ordered to shoot at Gaza rescuers, note says, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 22/3/09)
Savages.
"The delegation recorded numerous accounts of Israeli soldiers shooting civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, in the head, chest, and stomach. Another common narrative described Israeli forces rounding civilians into a single location ie, homes or schools which Israeli tanks or warplanes then shelled. Israeli forces continued to shoot at civilians fleeing the targeted structures... We spoke to Ibtisam as-Sammouni, 31, a resident of Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza City. On January 4, the Israeli army forced approximately 110 of Zaytoun's residents into Ibtisam's home. At approximately 7 am on January 5, the Israeli military launched 2 tank shells at the house without warning killing 2 of Ibtisam's children: Rizka, 14 and Faris, 12. When the survivors attempted to flee, Israeli forces shot at them. Her son Abdullah, 7, was injured in the shelling and remained in the home among his deceased siblings for 4 days before Israeli forces permitted medical personnel into Zaytoun to rescue them. After medical personnel removed the injured persons, an Israeli warplane destroyed the house and it crumbled over the lifeless bodies. The dead remained beneath the rubble for 17 days before the Israeli army permitted medical personnel to remove their bodies for burial. We spoke to the family of Rouhiya an-Najjar, 47, who lived in Khoza'a, Khan Yunis. Israeli forces ordered her neighborhood's residents to march to the city center. Rouhiya led 20 women out of her home and into an alley. They all carried white scarves. Upon entering the alley, an Israeli sniper shot Rouhiya in her left temple killing her instantly. Israeli forces prevented medical personnel from reaching her body for 12 hours." (Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes, National Lawyers Guild, counterpunch.org, 9/2/09)
"Our findings overwhelmingly point to the use of conventional weapons in a prohibited manner, specifically, the use of battlefield weaponry in densely populated civilian areas. Customary international law forbids the use of weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering. We found evidence that Israel used white phosphorus extensively throughout its 3-week offensive in a manner that led to numerous deaths and injuries. For example, Sabah Abu Halima, 45, lived in Bait Lahiya with her husband, 7 boys and 1 girl. It was midday and she and her entire family was home. Within minutes she felt her home shaking and missiles fell through the rooftop. She fell to the ground upon impact. When she looked up, she saw her children burning." (ibid)
"The testimonies [of Israeli soldiers] include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her 2 children. 'There was a house with a family inside... We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof', the soldier said. 'The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her 2 children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was OK, and he should hold his fire and he... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders'. According to the squad leader: 'The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away... I don't think he felt too bad about it, because... as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general... I don't know how to describe it... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers...' Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered. The squad leader said he argued with his commander over the permissive rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, the squad leader's soldiers complained that 'we should kill everyone there [in the center of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist'. The squad leader said: 'You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most'." (IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, & lax rules of engagement, Amos Harel, Haaretz, 19/3/09)
"Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription, 'Better use Durex', next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, '1 shot, 2 kills'.' (Dead Palestinian babies & bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009, Uri Blau, Haaretz, 20/3/09)
"Rules of Engagement: Open fire also upon rescue', was handwritten in Hebrew on a sheet of paper found in one of the Palestinian homes the Israel Defense Forces took over during Operation Cast Lead." (IDF soldiers ordered to shoot at Gaza rescuers, note says, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 22/3/09)
Savages.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Oriana Fallaci Meets Israeli PR at the SMH
Sydney Morning Herald columnist Paul Sheehan has predictably weighed in on the Gaza genocide (It's too easy just to blame Jews, 12/1/09), telling his readers that he "just happened to be in Israel" last November. He's being disingenuous. There was of course nothing happenstance about his trip - it was sponsored by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBOD) and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (see my 17/11/08 post Rambam Alert!) , part of a process I call rambamming - defined elsewhere in this blog as "being sponsored by smooth-talking Israel lobbyists in Australia on a grooming session by tough-talking PR people in Israel with a view to the sponsored adopting the missionary position for Israel when required in Australia." To my knowledge, no disclosure that a rambamming has taken place has ever accompanied an article on Israel and the Palestinians by a rambammed Herald journalist. Just click on the rambamming tag at the end of this post for a fuller picture of this below-the-radar activity.
Sheehan's November 2008 rambamming didn't take long to bear fruit (See my 27/11/08 post His Master's Voice), and now that the Israel's army is cutting a bloody swathe through Gaza, and Israel's PR machine is working overtime defending the indefensible, Sheehan's putting pen to paper in defence of Israel's actions should come as no surprise.
There are, of course, the usual factual stuff-ups (a sure give-away that the generalist pundit has only the shakiest grasp of the subject at hand), and I shall deal with these first: 1) Sheehan refers to the group of Israeli settler fanatics illegally occupying a Palestinian house in the Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron as occupying a "settlement." 2) In a reference to Jordan's administration of the West Bank from 1948-1967, he hilariously describes the West Bank Palestinians as an "ethnic majority" and their Jordanian Hashemite rulers as an "ethnic minority." Sheehan is labouring under the illusion that the Hashemites are an ethnic grouping rather than a dynasty. To add to the hilarity, he even has these 'ethnic' Hashemites simultaneously ruling the Gaza Palestinians! 3) Finally, his figure of "6,000 Hamas rocket attacks" on Israel from Gaza (repeated twice) is the same nonsense I've refuted elsewhere (See my 5/1/09 post Go Figure 1). Moreover, assigning all such rockets to Hamas alone is simply incorrect.
Then there's Sheehan's retailing of the contemptible Israeli propaganda line about the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA) 'warehousing' "displaced Palestinians for decades because it has been in the interests of the Arab world for this problem not to be solved." He would have us believe that the issue of the Palestinian refugees arises not from Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1948 (glossed over with the neutral-sounding "displaced"), but from a deliberate failure of the UN to disperse them around the Arab world!* Sheehan thus attempts to shift responsibility for the Palestine refugee problem from the Israelis, who created it, to the UN, which set up UNRWA to manage it.
[* Nor was this for want of trying. Consider the following story from the time of the Egyptian military administration of Gaza: "Nasser feared the consequences of provoking the Israelis... He understood that the situation in Gaza was potentially explosive; thousands of refugees crowded into a tiny area with nothing to occupy their minds except the memory of what they'd left behind and how they were going to return. Already some Palestinians were crossing the Armistice lines, usually to collect possessions from the villages which hadn't yet been destroyed by the Israelis, but sometimes also to raid Israeli settlements bordering the Strip. As it was, Israeli reprisals for these incidents were becoming increasingly severe and in Nasser's mind they could easily provide the Israelis with the excuse to launch a full-scale war, which he knew Egypt was unprepared to fight. Nasser's way of defusing the situation, or so he thought, was to draw up a plan in 1954, in conjunction with the United States and UNRWA, to resettle the refugees in the Sinai. By any standards the conditions in the refugee camps were bad but the refugees vehemently opposed any move which either suggested their stay was permanent or that if they were to leave it would be anywhere but back to Palestine. For example when UNRWA had attempted to plant trees in Gaza's camps they were immediately uprooted by enraged residents who berated the Agency for wasting money on something which no one would be around long enough to see grow. Gaza's response to the leaking of the plan was therefore quite predictable. For two days, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, besieging Egyptian personnel in government buildings and burning vehicles and installations." (Stateless in Gaza, Cossali & Robson, 1986, pp 13-14)]
Sheehan also reflects the routine tendency of Zionist propagandists to blur the fundamental distinction between Jews/Judaism, on the one hand, and Zionists/Zionism, on the other. The result is that Melbourne demonstrators, whom he alleges were waving placards which read "Clean the Earth from the dirty Zionists" (photographs anyone?) and "Stop the sub-human Zionist landgrabbing barbarian mass murderers in occupied Palestine," are described as "anti-Jewish." Hyperbole aside (and assuming of course that such placards actually existed), these slogans, prima facie, are clearly directed against the ideology of political Zionism (ie the idea - following the definition of Israeli scholar Uri Davis - that it is a good idea to establish and consolidate in the country of Palestine a sovereign, Jewish state that attempts to guarantee in law and in practice a demographic majority of the Jewish tribes in the territories under its control) and its followers, not Jews or the faith of Judaism as such. In essence, for example, the first is little different to say 'Cleanse the Earth of Communists'. As for the second, I would really only quibble with the inclusion of "sub-human," on the grounds that ideological blindness, whether of the Zionist or any other variety, is, alas, all too human. Moreover, Sheehan might like to take a look at the photograph of the baseball-hatted Zionist at San Francisco's 10/1/09 promassacre rally holding a placard which reads, "Until all of Gaza is destroyed, the job is not done" (indyby.org), or maybe check out some of the racist anti-Arab filth currently flooding cyberspace from Zionist blogs and websites.
Did I say racist anti-Arab filth? Forget cyberspace/blogosphere. Look no further than Sheehan's own opinion piece: "Gaza has become a giant warehouse of misery. It has no economic growth, no prospects, almost no civil order, yet about half the population is under the age of 17. The population has exploded amid economic privation. Women, living under sharia law, are used primarily as breeding stock. When Nizar Rayan, the most senior member of Hamas, was killed in the latest Israeli attacks, he had 4 wives and 14 children." This surely has to be a new low for the Herald: the Palestinian family, currently being hammered mercilessly by Israel's "iron fist," is caricatured by Sheehan, from the comfort of his air-conditioned Fairfax office, as a fanatical, Jew-hating, jihadi husband wielding the sword of sharia law over a supine, bovine wife, who has little option but to keep on flooding the grim and grimy streets of Gaza with babies. And how terribly, terribly inconvenient for the poor Israelis who have to listen to the constant ticking of this demographic time-bomb! Why, it must surely drive them mad, mad enough to...
If Sheehan is seriously concerned about the plight of women, I'd suggest he first look in his own backyard - say in the troubled Sydney suburb of Rosemeadow where almost one quarter of all families are headed by single mothers "totally dependent on welfare," and where "most teenage girls are either pregnant or carrying a child on their hip." (Violence begins where hope ends on Rosemeadow housing estate, John Stapleton, The Australian, 10/1/09)
In addition to its standout racism, Sheehan's paragraph is riddled with falsehoods. If Gazans live in misery and economic deprivation, one need look no further than the decades of de-development the Strip was subjected to under Israeli occupation and the crippling effects of the post 2005 Israeli blockade. And that nonsense about "no civil order" (I assume Sheehan means prior to Israel's bombardment and invasion) has been flatly contradicted by courageous Haaretz journalist Amira Hass who, unlike Sheehan, was actually in Gaza not long after his rambamming. In This is Gaza (27/11/08) she wrote," Gaza is the ability to tell jokes in any situation, and the burning insult of having no running water for 3 or 4 days. And yet, the children go clean and neat to school... Gaza is also parents leaving their children alone at home, without fear, or letting them go to a playground far from home, or go by themselves to their grandmother in the Jabaliya refugee camp... Gaza is people's constant attempt to cling to a normal life, although Israel foists on them abnormal terms of imprisonment, isolation from the rest of the world and deterioration to a state of humiliating dependence on international charity programs."
In melding the febrile Islamophobic fantasies of the late Oriana Fallaci* with the current requirements of Israeli PR, Sheehan's latest propaganda piece plumbs new depths.
[* Sheehan actually reviewed the demented Fallaci's The Force of Reason on 15/5/06. There is not a hint of criticism throughout. His final sentence can only be described as admiring: "The history Oriana Fallaci has felt and seen has filled her final years with a lucid, fearless rage."]
Sheehan's November 2008 rambamming didn't take long to bear fruit (See my 27/11/08 post His Master's Voice), and now that the Israel's army is cutting a bloody swathe through Gaza, and Israel's PR machine is working overtime defending the indefensible, Sheehan's putting pen to paper in defence of Israel's actions should come as no surprise.
There are, of course, the usual factual stuff-ups (a sure give-away that the generalist pundit has only the shakiest grasp of the subject at hand), and I shall deal with these first: 1) Sheehan refers to the group of Israeli settler fanatics illegally occupying a Palestinian house in the Palestinian West Bank city of Hebron as occupying a "settlement." 2) In a reference to Jordan's administration of the West Bank from 1948-1967, he hilariously describes the West Bank Palestinians as an "ethnic majority" and their Jordanian Hashemite rulers as an "ethnic minority." Sheehan is labouring under the illusion that the Hashemites are an ethnic grouping rather than a dynasty. To add to the hilarity, he even has these 'ethnic' Hashemites simultaneously ruling the Gaza Palestinians! 3) Finally, his figure of "6,000 Hamas rocket attacks" on Israel from Gaza (repeated twice) is the same nonsense I've refuted elsewhere (See my 5/1/09 post Go Figure 1). Moreover, assigning all such rockets to Hamas alone is simply incorrect.
Then there's Sheehan's retailing of the contemptible Israeli propaganda line about the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA) 'warehousing' "displaced Palestinians for decades because it has been in the interests of the Arab world for this problem not to be solved." He would have us believe that the issue of the Palestinian refugees arises not from Zionist ethnic cleansing in 1948 (glossed over with the neutral-sounding "displaced"), but from a deliberate failure of the UN to disperse them around the Arab world!* Sheehan thus attempts to shift responsibility for the Palestine refugee problem from the Israelis, who created it, to the UN, which set up UNRWA to manage it.
[* Nor was this for want of trying. Consider the following story from the time of the Egyptian military administration of Gaza: "Nasser feared the consequences of provoking the Israelis... He understood that the situation in Gaza was potentially explosive; thousands of refugees crowded into a tiny area with nothing to occupy their minds except the memory of what they'd left behind and how they were going to return. Already some Palestinians were crossing the Armistice lines, usually to collect possessions from the villages which hadn't yet been destroyed by the Israelis, but sometimes also to raid Israeli settlements bordering the Strip. As it was, Israeli reprisals for these incidents were becoming increasingly severe and in Nasser's mind they could easily provide the Israelis with the excuse to launch a full-scale war, which he knew Egypt was unprepared to fight. Nasser's way of defusing the situation, or so he thought, was to draw up a plan in 1954, in conjunction with the United States and UNRWA, to resettle the refugees in the Sinai. By any standards the conditions in the refugee camps were bad but the refugees vehemently opposed any move which either suggested their stay was permanent or that if they were to leave it would be anywhere but back to Palestine. For example when UNRWA had attempted to plant trees in Gaza's camps they were immediately uprooted by enraged residents who berated the Agency for wasting money on something which no one would be around long enough to see grow. Gaza's response to the leaking of the plan was therefore quite predictable. For two days, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, besieging Egyptian personnel in government buildings and burning vehicles and installations." (Stateless in Gaza, Cossali & Robson, 1986, pp 13-14)]
Sheehan also reflects the routine tendency of Zionist propagandists to blur the fundamental distinction between Jews/Judaism, on the one hand, and Zionists/Zionism, on the other. The result is that Melbourne demonstrators, whom he alleges were waving placards which read "Clean the Earth from the dirty Zionists" (photographs anyone?) and "Stop the sub-human Zionist landgrabbing barbarian mass murderers in occupied Palestine," are described as "anti-Jewish." Hyperbole aside (and assuming of course that such placards actually existed), these slogans, prima facie, are clearly directed against the ideology of political Zionism (ie the idea - following the definition of Israeli scholar Uri Davis - that it is a good idea to establish and consolidate in the country of Palestine a sovereign, Jewish state that attempts to guarantee in law and in practice a demographic majority of the Jewish tribes in the territories under its control) and its followers, not Jews or the faith of Judaism as such. In essence, for example, the first is little different to say 'Cleanse the Earth of Communists'. As for the second, I would really only quibble with the inclusion of "sub-human," on the grounds that ideological blindness, whether of the Zionist or any other variety, is, alas, all too human. Moreover, Sheehan might like to take a look at the photograph of the baseball-hatted Zionist at San Francisco's 10/1/09 promassacre rally holding a placard which reads, "Until all of Gaza is destroyed, the job is not done" (indyby.org), or maybe check out some of the racist anti-Arab filth currently flooding cyberspace from Zionist blogs and websites.
Did I say racist anti-Arab filth? Forget cyberspace/blogosphere. Look no further than Sheehan's own opinion piece: "Gaza has become a giant warehouse of misery. It has no economic growth, no prospects, almost no civil order, yet about half the population is under the age of 17. The population has exploded amid economic privation. Women, living under sharia law, are used primarily as breeding stock. When Nizar Rayan, the most senior member of Hamas, was killed in the latest Israeli attacks, he had 4 wives and 14 children." This surely has to be a new low for the Herald: the Palestinian family, currently being hammered mercilessly by Israel's "iron fist," is caricatured by Sheehan, from the comfort of his air-conditioned Fairfax office, as a fanatical, Jew-hating, jihadi husband wielding the sword of sharia law over a supine, bovine wife, who has little option but to keep on flooding the grim and grimy streets of Gaza with babies. And how terribly, terribly inconvenient for the poor Israelis who have to listen to the constant ticking of this demographic time-bomb! Why, it must surely drive them mad, mad enough to...
If Sheehan is seriously concerned about the plight of women, I'd suggest he first look in his own backyard - say in the troubled Sydney suburb of Rosemeadow where almost one quarter of all families are headed by single mothers "totally dependent on welfare," and where "most teenage girls are either pregnant or carrying a child on their hip." (Violence begins where hope ends on Rosemeadow housing estate, John Stapleton, The Australian, 10/1/09)
In addition to its standout racism, Sheehan's paragraph is riddled with falsehoods. If Gazans live in misery and economic deprivation, one need look no further than the decades of de-development the Strip was subjected to under Israeli occupation and the crippling effects of the post 2005 Israeli blockade. And that nonsense about "no civil order" (I assume Sheehan means prior to Israel's bombardment and invasion) has been flatly contradicted by courageous Haaretz journalist Amira Hass who, unlike Sheehan, was actually in Gaza not long after his rambamming. In This is Gaza (27/11/08) she wrote," Gaza is the ability to tell jokes in any situation, and the burning insult of having no running water for 3 or 4 days. And yet, the children go clean and neat to school... Gaza is also parents leaving their children alone at home, without fear, or letting them go to a playground far from home, or go by themselves to their grandmother in the Jabaliya refugee camp... Gaza is people's constant attempt to cling to a normal life, although Israel foists on them abnormal terms of imprisonment, isolation from the rest of the world and deterioration to a state of humiliating dependence on international charity programs."
In melding the febrile Islamophobic fantasies of the late Oriana Fallaci* with the current requirements of Israeli PR, Sheehan's latest propaganda piece plumbs new depths.
[* Sheehan actually reviewed the demented Fallaci's The Force of Reason on 15/5/06. There is not a hint of criticism throughout. His final sentence can only be described as admiring: "The history Oriana Fallaci has felt and seen has filled her final years with a lucid, fearless rage."]
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
No Laughing Matter
The Nazis were humourless bastards:
"For, as [Reich commissioner for the Ukraine Erich] Koch knew, the food situation inside Germany was much on [Reichsmarschall] Goring's mind. In early 1941, planners were predicting problems as a result of the poor harvest and threatening cuts in rations. The German population was complaining about shortages and high prices, and this increased the determination of the Reich authorities to make the invasion of the USSR pay off fast. Herbert Backe, the state secretary in the Ministry for Food & Agriculture, actually told Hitler that 'the occupation of the Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry'. He did also remind him that, apart from the Ukraine, the rest of European Russia was not a food surplus area. But the regime was perfectly ready to see famine spread among the civilian population in the occupied territories so long as Germans were nourished. On 2 May, it was agreed that the successful continuation of the war would require the Wehrmacht to 'be fed at the expense of Russia', even if the consequence was that 'thereby tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve to death'. 'Support of the war economy' was 'the highest law', while the newly occupied territories were to be regarded 'from a colonial viewpoint and exploited economically with colonial methods'. Goring predicted 'the biggest mass death in Europe since the Thirty Years' War'. Backe even drafted a set of 'Twelve Commandments' for future administrators in the East. 'We wish not to convert the Russians to National Socialism but to make them our tools', he wrote. 'The Russian has stood poverty, hunger and austerity for centuries. His stomach is flexible; hence no false pity!' " (Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, Mark Mazower, 2008, p 147)
Not so, the Zionists:
"The Hamas team had not laughed so much in a long time. The team, headed by the prime minister [Ariel Sharon]'s advisor Dov Weisglass and including the Israel Defence Forces Chief of Staff, the director of the Shin Bet and senior generals and officials, convened for a discussion with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on ways to respond to the [1/06 Hamas] election victory. Everyone agreed on the need to impose an economic siege on the Palestinian Authority, and Weisglass, as usual, provided the punch line: 'It's like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die', the advocate joked, and the participants reportedly rolled with laughter." (As the Hamas Team laughs, Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 22/2/06)
Meanwhile, three years later, for dieting Palestinians in the Gaza Ghetto, it's a laugh a minute...
"Donkeys loaded with dry branches are becoming a common sight as bakeries in Gaza City... turn to firewood, having run out of bottled propane gas... But millers say they have run out of regular grain, and some bakeries have started using cereals usually fed to livestock. 'What is left for us is to grow our nails and eat rats', said one man bitterly, as he queued for bread... Fuel shortages have almost paralysed the work of 3,000 Gaza fishermen, whose boats now mostly lie idle. 'Even when we catch some fish, people do not buy because they do not have gas to cook it with', said Zuhair Abu Reyala, a fisherman who supports a family of 17." (Life runs backwards in Gaza as blockade bites, Nidal al-Mughrabi, wiredispatch.com, 25/11/08)
"As a convoy of blue-&-white United Nations trucks loaded with food waited last night for Israeli permission to enter Gaza, Jindiya Abu Amra and her 12-year old daughter went scrounging for the wild grass their family now lives on. 'We had one meal today - khobbeizah', said Abu Amra, 43, showing the leaves of a plant that grows along the streets of Gaza. 'Every day, I wake up and start looking for wood and plastic to burn for fuel and I beg. When I find nothing, we eat this grass'. Abu Amra and her unemployed husband have 7 daughters and a son. Their tiny breeze-block house has had no furniture since they burnt the last cupboard for heat. 'I can't remember seeing a fruit', said Rabab, 12, who goes with her mother most mornings to scavenge. She is dressed in a tracksuit top and holed jeans, and her feet are bare." (Gaza families eat grass as Israel locks border, Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times, 14/12/08)
"Growing numbers of Gazans have begun using the drug [tramadol, a painkiller] over the past year and a half to take the edge off life in the impoverished seaside strip, pharmacists and residents say." (Gazans increasingly rely on painkiller, ynetnews.com, 14/12/08)
"A Palestinian poll released on Thursday showed that 40% of the residents of the Hamas-ruled gaza Strip wish to emigrate..." (Palestinian poll: 40% 0f Gaza residents wish to emigrate, Haaretz, 14/12/08)
"Gaza is people's constant attempt to cling to a normal life, although Israel foists on them abnormal terms of imprisonment, isolation from the rest of the world and deterioration to a state of humiliating dependence on international charity programs." (This is Gaza, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 27/11/08)
"For, as [Reich commissioner for the Ukraine Erich] Koch knew, the food situation inside Germany was much on [Reichsmarschall] Goring's mind. In early 1941, planners were predicting problems as a result of the poor harvest and threatening cuts in rations. The German population was complaining about shortages and high prices, and this increased the determination of the Reich authorities to make the invasion of the USSR pay off fast. Herbert Backe, the state secretary in the Ministry for Food & Agriculture, actually told Hitler that 'the occupation of the Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry'. He did also remind him that, apart from the Ukraine, the rest of European Russia was not a food surplus area. But the regime was perfectly ready to see famine spread among the civilian population in the occupied territories so long as Germans were nourished. On 2 May, it was agreed that the successful continuation of the war would require the Wehrmacht to 'be fed at the expense of Russia', even if the consequence was that 'thereby tens of millions of men will undoubtedly starve to death'. 'Support of the war economy' was 'the highest law', while the newly occupied territories were to be regarded 'from a colonial viewpoint and exploited economically with colonial methods'. Goring predicted 'the biggest mass death in Europe since the Thirty Years' War'. Backe even drafted a set of 'Twelve Commandments' for future administrators in the East. 'We wish not to convert the Russians to National Socialism but to make them our tools', he wrote. 'The Russian has stood poverty, hunger and austerity for centuries. His stomach is flexible; hence no false pity!' " (Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, Mark Mazower, 2008, p 147)
Not so, the Zionists:
"The Hamas team had not laughed so much in a long time. The team, headed by the prime minister [Ariel Sharon]'s advisor Dov Weisglass and including the Israel Defence Forces Chief of Staff, the director of the Shin Bet and senior generals and officials, convened for a discussion with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on ways to respond to the [1/06 Hamas] election victory. Everyone agreed on the need to impose an economic siege on the Palestinian Authority, and Weisglass, as usual, provided the punch line: 'It's like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die', the advocate joked, and the participants reportedly rolled with laughter." (As the Hamas Team laughs, Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 22/2/06)
Meanwhile, three years later, for dieting Palestinians in the Gaza Ghetto, it's a laugh a minute...
"Donkeys loaded with dry branches are becoming a common sight as bakeries in Gaza City... turn to firewood, having run out of bottled propane gas... But millers say they have run out of regular grain, and some bakeries have started using cereals usually fed to livestock. 'What is left for us is to grow our nails and eat rats', said one man bitterly, as he queued for bread... Fuel shortages have almost paralysed the work of 3,000 Gaza fishermen, whose boats now mostly lie idle. 'Even when we catch some fish, people do not buy because they do not have gas to cook it with', said Zuhair Abu Reyala, a fisherman who supports a family of 17." (Life runs backwards in Gaza as blockade bites, Nidal al-Mughrabi, wiredispatch.com, 25/11/08)
"As a convoy of blue-&-white United Nations trucks loaded with food waited last night for Israeli permission to enter Gaza, Jindiya Abu Amra and her 12-year old daughter went scrounging for the wild grass their family now lives on. 'We had one meal today - khobbeizah', said Abu Amra, 43, showing the leaves of a plant that grows along the streets of Gaza. 'Every day, I wake up and start looking for wood and plastic to burn for fuel and I beg. When I find nothing, we eat this grass'. Abu Amra and her unemployed husband have 7 daughters and a son. Their tiny breeze-block house has had no furniture since they burnt the last cupboard for heat. 'I can't remember seeing a fruit', said Rabab, 12, who goes with her mother most mornings to scavenge. She is dressed in a tracksuit top and holed jeans, and her feet are bare." (Gaza families eat grass as Israel locks border, Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times, 14/12/08)
"Growing numbers of Gazans have begun using the drug [tramadol, a painkiller] over the past year and a half to take the edge off life in the impoverished seaside strip, pharmacists and residents say." (Gazans increasingly rely on painkiller, ynetnews.com, 14/12/08)
"A Palestinian poll released on Thursday showed that 40% of the residents of the Hamas-ruled gaza Strip wish to emigrate..." (Palestinian poll: 40% 0f Gaza residents wish to emigrate, Haaretz, 14/12/08)
"Gaza is people's constant attempt to cling to a normal life, although Israel foists on them abnormal terms of imprisonment, isolation from the rest of the world and deterioration to a state of humiliating dependence on international charity programs." (This is Gaza, Amira Hass, Haaretz, 27/11/08)
Thursday, January 24, 2008
We Remember Warsaw
On 22/1/08 the following letter appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald:-
"Nearly 70 years ago, in a small European city, an oppressed and occupied people were under siege, living under atrocious and brutal conditions, lacking food, medicine, electricity, water, and slowly being strangled in the hope they would just disappear. Warsaw Ghetto 1941 - Gaza 2008. Israel, you are a disgrace." Zaid Khan, Blakehurst
This was followed, on 23/1/08, as befits the Israel lobby's insistence (except when their own spokespeople are crowding out dissenting voices) on a policy of faux balance whenever Palestine-Israel comes up on the opinion pages, by:-
"I am not as familiar as Zaid Khan with Europe 70 years ago but, to the best of my knowledge the oppressed minority in Warsaw were not firing Katyusha rockets indiscriminately into the surrounding area and neither were their kids being wrapped in explosives and sent out to blow up the neighbours." David Calvey, Vaucluse
So far, so predictable. The prospect of pursuit by a snarling, snapping pack of pro-Israel media hounds is usually enough to deter the Bambi responsible for the letters page from publishing letters in support of Palestine. Had Bambi realised he/she'd let his/her guard down with Zaid Khan's timely letter and sought to ward off the hounds by publishing Calvey's too-clever-by-half riposte from, of all places, Vaucluse?
I will say nothing of Calvey's cheap shot, other than to point out that the resistance in Gaza does not fire Katyushas and wonder, along with Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, just why, given the anger and desperation in the ghetto, there aren't in fact more suicide bombers: "The truth is that nearly every Palestinian has many reasons to be fed up with life to the point of suicide and thoughts of revenge, and those thoughts are not only linked to military attacks. Even without killing, the Israeli occupation regime kills hope, plans, relationships, ways of life. Living among Palestinians brings daily examples of the thousands of shades that despair has, just as the regime of occupation and colonization brings with it thousands of variants of material and mental abuse. Every moment, people mourn for the lives they could have had and which they are not experiencing. How explosive is the daily insult which people experience under a foreign rule that decides who will live in their own house and who will not, who will have access to their lands and who will not, when the bulldozer will tear up your grandparents' land in order to attach it to a highway and a green settlement, who will waste several hours every day at a checkpoint, who will send their children to the university and who will send them to beg, who will lose their source of livelihood, who will see their family and when, and who will not." [Where are the suicide bombers? 12/07].
Next day something interesting happened. Readers, it seems, had had enough. They could see right through Calvay, the invisible man, directly into the heart of darkness that is the Warsaw/Gaza Ghetto:-
"What we can never know, David Calvey, is whether the oppressed in Warsaw would have retaliated had they been given the means with which to do so." Rachel Merhabi, Turramurra
"You're right, David Calvey, the oppressed minority in Warsaw did not protest with rockets and suicide bombs. But I believe most of them ended up in the Nazi gas chambers." Paul Sadler, Newtown
"The reason, David Calvey, that the oppressed minority were not fighting back with weapons and explosives is that they didn't have them. I am sure Polish Jews would have used anything available and done anything possible to disrupt the German war machine. I am sure what Zaid Khan was getting at is the massive hypocrisy of Israel: it was oppression back then when done to them, but it is somehow OK to do it to someone else now." David Gardiner Camperdown
"Maybe I'm not as familiar as David Calvey with Europe 70 years ago but, if the oppressed minority suffering in Warsaw was subjected to the same oppression for 50 continuos years or more, they too would take more extreme measures, Also, to the best of my knowledge, like the people in the occupied territories, the oppressed in Warsaw did eventually revolt against the oppression, and justifiably so." Brad Spencer Ljubljana, Slovenia
"I don't need to visit Gaza to tell David Calvey that 99% of its population don't have rockets in the back shed and bomb vests in the bedroom. Like the Jews in Warsaw, most Palestinians in Gaza are being held captive with the barest of essentials, purely on the basis that they were 'accidentally' born of the wrong blood in the wrong place. How can the average Palestinian Joe hope to stop the actions of a few mad militants? And why should the Israelis expect them to do so? The current Israeli policy holds every man, woman and child responsible for any act of terrorism. Last thing I heard, there were quite a few unsolved murders in Sydney. I say we lock the whole place down until people there realise that the rest of the country won't tolerate it. After all, if they are prepared to murder their fellow Sydneysiders, they might come after the rest of us." Anura Samara Geneva, Switzerland
What on Earthwas Bambi thinking when he/she let this lot in? Had Bambi also had enough? Will he/she now be torn to pieces by the pro-Israel pack? Will there be a mea culpa in the next issue? Think I'm joking? Let's go back a few years and look at the brouhaha which followed Herald cartoonist, Moir's cartoon of 12/8/03, in which he dared to associate Israel's West Bank wall of 2003 with the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943. The Herald was inundated with outraged letters, 9 of which were published over the next 2 days.
To top it off, in the issue of 16/8/03, the following grovel from Herald editor, Robert Whitehead appeared: "It is as important for the Herald to be accurate and fair as it is to admit when we do not live up to its own high standards. That is why we began inviting people earlier this year to help us correct the record whenever they saw a material error. An honesty about mistakes and a willingness to fix them is important to us and our readers. The same is true of errors of judgement. Finding ways to redress these, however, can be less straightforward. An example this week was the Moir cartoon published on Tuesday. It likened the Nazis' building of the Warsaw ghetto with the Israeli Government's building of a security fence on the West Bank. To publish it was a lapse of judgement and I apologise to the many readers who, understandably, took great offence. As Moir said in a note in the aftermath, he was intending to be provocative 'but I should have used a less sensitive metaphor to make the point about historic irony'."
Pathetic! But funny how the comparison comes naturally to Palestinians - as an inmate of the virtually encircled West Bank town of Qalqilya commented at the time to a journalist from the UK Observer: "It feels like a concentration camp...with the difference that there the people were waiting for death. Here they are just waiting for us to leave."
The Herald's grovel back then reminds us of the need to stand up to the lobby. In the words of Mearsheimer & Walt : "As the primary source of independent thinking in democratic societies, scholars and journalists should be encouraged to resist the lobby's efforts to shape public discourse and to encourage more open discussion of these important issues." [The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy p 351]
What will tomorrow bring?
"Nearly 70 years ago, in a small European city, an oppressed and occupied people were under siege, living under atrocious and brutal conditions, lacking food, medicine, electricity, water, and slowly being strangled in the hope they would just disappear. Warsaw Ghetto 1941 - Gaza 2008. Israel, you are a disgrace." Zaid Khan, Blakehurst
This was followed, on 23/1/08, as befits the Israel lobby's insistence (except when their own spokespeople are crowding out dissenting voices) on a policy of faux balance whenever Palestine-Israel comes up on the opinion pages, by:-
"I am not as familiar as Zaid Khan with Europe 70 years ago but, to the best of my knowledge the oppressed minority in Warsaw were not firing Katyusha rockets indiscriminately into the surrounding area and neither were their kids being wrapped in explosives and sent out to blow up the neighbours." David Calvey, Vaucluse
So far, so predictable. The prospect of pursuit by a snarling, snapping pack of pro-Israel media hounds is usually enough to deter the Bambi responsible for the letters page from publishing letters in support of Palestine. Had Bambi realised he/she'd let his/her guard down with Zaid Khan's timely letter and sought to ward off the hounds by publishing Calvey's too-clever-by-half riposte from, of all places, Vaucluse?
I will say nothing of Calvey's cheap shot, other than to point out that the resistance in Gaza does not fire Katyushas and wonder, along with Israeli journalist, Amira Hass, just why, given the anger and desperation in the ghetto, there aren't in fact more suicide bombers: "The truth is that nearly every Palestinian has many reasons to be fed up with life to the point of suicide and thoughts of revenge, and those thoughts are not only linked to military attacks. Even without killing, the Israeli occupation regime kills hope, plans, relationships, ways of life. Living among Palestinians brings daily examples of the thousands of shades that despair has, just as the regime of occupation and colonization brings with it thousands of variants of material and mental abuse. Every moment, people mourn for the lives they could have had and which they are not experiencing. How explosive is the daily insult which people experience under a foreign rule that decides who will live in their own house and who will not, who will have access to their lands and who will not, when the bulldozer will tear up your grandparents' land in order to attach it to a highway and a green settlement, who will waste several hours every day at a checkpoint, who will send their children to the university and who will send them to beg, who will lose their source of livelihood, who will see their family and when, and who will not." [Where are the suicide bombers? 12/07].
Next day something interesting happened. Readers, it seems, had had enough. They could see right through Calvay, the invisible man, directly into the heart of darkness that is the Warsaw/Gaza Ghetto:-
"What we can never know, David Calvey, is whether the oppressed in Warsaw would have retaliated had they been given the means with which to do so." Rachel Merhabi, Turramurra
"You're right, David Calvey, the oppressed minority in Warsaw did not protest with rockets and suicide bombs. But I believe most of them ended up in the Nazi gas chambers." Paul Sadler, Newtown
"The reason, David Calvey, that the oppressed minority were not fighting back with weapons and explosives is that they didn't have them. I am sure Polish Jews would have used anything available and done anything possible to disrupt the German war machine. I am sure what Zaid Khan was getting at is the massive hypocrisy of Israel: it was oppression back then when done to them, but it is somehow OK to do it to someone else now." David Gardiner Camperdown
"Maybe I'm not as familiar as David Calvey with Europe 70 years ago but, if the oppressed minority suffering in Warsaw was subjected to the same oppression for 50 continuos years or more, they too would take more extreme measures, Also, to the best of my knowledge, like the people in the occupied territories, the oppressed in Warsaw did eventually revolt against the oppression, and justifiably so." Brad Spencer Ljubljana, Slovenia
"I don't need to visit Gaza to tell David Calvey that 99% of its population don't have rockets in the back shed and bomb vests in the bedroom. Like the Jews in Warsaw, most Palestinians in Gaza are being held captive with the barest of essentials, purely on the basis that they were 'accidentally' born of the wrong blood in the wrong place. How can the average Palestinian Joe hope to stop the actions of a few mad militants? And why should the Israelis expect them to do so? The current Israeli policy holds every man, woman and child responsible for any act of terrorism. Last thing I heard, there were quite a few unsolved murders in Sydney. I say we lock the whole place down until people there realise that the rest of the country won't tolerate it. After all, if they are prepared to murder their fellow Sydneysiders, they might come after the rest of us." Anura Samara Geneva, Switzerland
What on Earthwas Bambi thinking when he/she let this lot in? Had Bambi also had enough? Will he/she now be torn to pieces by the pro-Israel pack? Will there be a mea culpa in the next issue? Think I'm joking? Let's go back a few years and look at the brouhaha which followed Herald cartoonist, Moir's cartoon of 12/8/03, in which he dared to associate Israel's West Bank wall of 2003 with the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943. The Herald was inundated with outraged letters, 9 of which were published over the next 2 days.
To top it off, in the issue of 16/8/03, the following grovel from Herald editor, Robert Whitehead appeared: "It is as important for the Herald to be accurate and fair as it is to admit when we do not live up to its own high standards. That is why we began inviting people earlier this year to help us correct the record whenever they saw a material error. An honesty about mistakes and a willingness to fix them is important to us and our readers. The same is true of errors of judgement. Finding ways to redress these, however, can be less straightforward. An example this week was the Moir cartoon published on Tuesday. It likened the Nazis' building of the Warsaw ghetto with the Israeli Government's building of a security fence on the West Bank. To publish it was a lapse of judgement and I apologise to the many readers who, understandably, took great offence. As Moir said in a note in the aftermath, he was intending to be provocative 'but I should have used a less sensitive metaphor to make the point about historic irony'."
Pathetic! But funny how the comparison comes naturally to Palestinians - as an inmate of the virtually encircled West Bank town of Qalqilya commented at the time to a journalist from the UK Observer: "It feels like a concentration camp...with the difference that there the people were waiting for death. Here they are just waiting for us to leave."
The Herald's grovel back then reminds us of the need to stand up to the lobby. In the words of Mearsheimer & Walt : "As the primary source of independent thinking in democratic societies, scholars and journalists should be encouraged to resist the lobby's efforts to shape public discourse and to encourage more open discussion of these important issues." [The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy p 351]
What will tomorrow bring?
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