Lord Balfour Sabotages Britain's Labour Party

UK Labour cruising towards split over Israel-Palestine, George Galloway, rt.com, 1/8/18:

"Britain's Labour Party prepares to split; the Israel-Palestine issue breaks up the party after 100 years to the relief of Prime Minister Theresa May. At least that's the proximate cause of the rapidly approaching schism in the opposition Labour Party. Attempts to effectively outlaw existential criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel have foundered on the rocks of obduracy of the veteran Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn whose commitment to the Palestinian cause has been a leitmotif of his 40 years in left-wing politics.

"Support for the Palestinians and opposition to Israel has grown massively in recent decades in Britain and throughout the Western world. The recent decision after a passionate debate in the Irish Senate to ban the products of illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories was a high point for the BDS movement. And this decision preceded the new controversial National Law passed in the Israeli Knesset, which UN bodies and others have said makes Israel officially an apartheid state, giving a spur to the BDS cause. Widespread ostracism of apartheid South Africa was an important factor in the downfall of the system in South Africa.

"But Israel is far from taking these defeats lying down. The Israeli embassy in London is a vital center for counter-offensives, [with] ambassador Mark Regev a key operative in Netanyahu's machine. That Israel chose to send Regev to London was an early sign of the importance of the UK battleground.

"When I joined the Palestinian struggle in 1975, you could've fitted all British supporters of the PLO into a small hall, with room for elephants at the back. Now you couldn't fit us into Hyde Park. We are millions, literally. I know when the tide turned because I was there, literally. I left West Beirut in 1982, just ahead of the advancing Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Within hours they were at the gates. Their capture of President Arafat's fiefdom in the West of the city led to the departure of Arafat and his forces under an agreement brokered by the US plenipotentiary Philip Habib. Its terms included the protection of the families the fighters were leaving behind. They were promptly fallen upon by the Israeli-backed Lebanese Phalange militia and massacred.

"The UN and the Israeli Kahan Commission later held that former Israeli defence minister Ariel Sharon - present at the scene of the massacre in the Sabra-Shatila refugee camp - shared responsibility for the murder of thousands of unarmed civilians. Sharon was required to resign from the government of Menachem Begin but would later return as prime minister himself. The massacre marked the beginning of a long, slow but inexorable turn away from Israel by the British labour and trade union movement. I wrote the resolutions that passed that year in both the Labour Party Conference and the Trade Union Congress against fierce Israeli lobbying (I could show you my scars). The resolutions established policy for the first time in favour of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and for the recognition of the PLO as the 'sole legitimate representative' of the Palestinian people. In 1982, this was a heady brew, I assure you.

"Year by year, as Israeli governments became ever more right wing and as the plight of the Palestinians grew ever more grim, the giant tanker turned a little more. Although his lifelong fidelity to this cause was not the reason for Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader - the Iraq War and austerity were much more so - it certainly marked a high water mark in the growing movement against Netanyahu's Israel. And Mr Regev and the embassy were not slow to recognise the danger to their position in a Britain whose perfidy played such a key role for over a century in the Israel-Palestine question.

"The full might of the Israel lobby has been mobilized to first stop Corbyn winning the leadership, to depose him once he had won it, and above all to stop him becoming prime minister. They have had some success, particularly within the ranks of Corbyn's MPs - most of them products of the long reign of Tony Blair. Revolt after revolt from within against Corbyn has been mounted on everything from Brexit to arms sales to Saudi Arabia. But the most potent is the now-rampant virulent campaign against 'anti-Semitism' in Corbyn's Labour. What this boils down to is, of course, not anti-Semitism at all but opposition to Israel. The idea that the vegetarian left-wing bicycling peacenik and anti-racism fanatic Jeremy Corbyn hates Jews is as absurd as it is offensive.

"Having failed to dislodge him and failed to make him kneel, his enemies are planning to break away and form a new centrist bloc against Brexit, in favour of NATO and Trident nuclear weapons, and of course in defense of Israel. The last time this happened nearly 40 years ago it failed to prosper. But by dividing the anti-Conservative vote, it kept Mrs Thatcher in power for a whole decade. And thus the only person laughing in British politics today is the beleaguered Mrs May."

More Reel Bad Arabs

When was the last wild Western you saw at the movies? That's right, I can't remember either. But hey, Hollywood's still churning out wild Easterns.

The latest is called Beirut (directed by Brad Anderson), and Fairfax reviewer, Jake Wilson, weary of "youth-oriented blockbusters and Oscar-mongering prestige," has given this "human-scaled entertainment for adults" three-and-a-half stars.

First, the where and the when:

"Beirut... a period espionage thriller set against the background of Lebanon just before its 1982 war with Israel... " (Finally, a thriller for adults, The Sun-Herald, 29/7/18)

Hello? Lebanon's 1982 war with Israel?

Y'all remember that one, don't you? You know, when the Lebanese Army blitzkriegged its way to Tel Aviv, laid siege to the city, bombed and shelled it from land, sea and air for 3 long months, and then pulled back to northern Israel which it occupied until forced out by the heroic Israeli resistance in 2000?

Good one, Jake.

But no, seriously, Jake may not have his history the right way around, but he's still cool, OK, because he's (albeit dimly) aware that SOMETHING IS AMISS WITH THIS FILM:

"More shrewdly realistic than the average Hollywood political thriller, Beirut remains open to accusations of self-involvement, if not outright racism, in its privileging of an American of an American point of view. [Former American diplomat] Mason commands our sympathy throughout, while the 'foreign' characters are menacing or inscrutable. Ultimately, you might wonder if this is really a film about Middle Eastern politics at all, or if this is merely a pretext for exploring how one middle-aged white guy negotiates his midlife crisis."

But, hey, why let a little Arabophobia spoil your night out:

"Then again, is there any reason it can't be both?"

Foxtrot? Tommyrot!

How depressing are those book/film reviews in the msm which, inadvertently or otherwise, distort and cover up the reality of Israel's war crimes. (Of course, it goes without saying that Israeli books/films are virtually the only ones to make it into the msm.)

The latest specimen is Paul Byrnes' review of Israeli 'war' film Foxtrot for the Sydney Morning Herald. Herewith my gripes and grumblings:

"If a film makes war seem fun, you can pretty much know the director has never been near one. Samuel Maoz is an exception. He served in the Israeli Defence Force in 1982 during the Israeli occupation in Lebanon. It's clear that it was a shattering experience." (Painful portrait of war's deep scars, 21/6/18)

Yes, Paul, "a shattering experience" it was - particularly for the over 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians who got it in the neck (not to mention the more than 30,000 wounded) when Maoz and his mates blitzkriegged into Lebanon at the time. But we don't want to talk about the real victims here, do we, Paul?

"His first feature film, Lebanon, recreated the life of a tank crew on active duty. The whole film was set inside the tank, which was both technically daring and completely terrifying."

C'mon, Paul, seriously now, where else would you set an Israeli film? Except perhaps in a cockpit, or in the space immediately behind the sights of a rifle.

"Foxtrot is a different kind of movie, but just as scarifying. It steps back to dramatise what it's like for the family of an Israeli soldier when they receive news that he has been killed. That's the first act."

But emphatically not what's it's like for the family of a Palestinian blown away by an Israeli soldier.

"The second act takes place in the desert, where a group of young IDF soldiers man a lonely checkpoint."

Just a minute, Paul. You mean there's still some desert left in Israel - after over 100 years of making the desert bloom? Or are we talking about the Sahara or the Gobi here? Is that where Israel's borders are now? But seriously, the whole fucking point of your Israeli checkpoint is that it's set up with only one purpose in mind - to mess with the lives of occupied Palestinians (as in 'how many checkpoints does a Palestinian have to negotiate to get from occupied Bethlehem to occupied Jerusalem?'). Do you get my drift, Paul? Your Israeli checkpoint needs PEOPLE. Ergo, there is NO SUCH THING as "a lonely checkpoint," OK?

"A third act returns to the family, now in post-traumatic disarray."

Hey, Paul, was part of their "post-traumatic disarray" having their home demolished? Oh wait... that only happens to Palestinian families.

"Foxtrot has been hugely controversial in Israel... The right in Israel objected to the film's depiction of Israeli soldiers covering up evidence of a killing."

Noooo! The most moral army in world, lying? You're kidding me. I simply don't believe it.

"One of the soldiers is Jonathan... In one of the film's most surreal moments, Jonathan dances with his rifle as if it's a woman... making his comrades laugh... He's just a kid, horsing around, trying to entertain his pals and relieve some tension; he's also a bulwark, a defender of the nation."

Oh no, Paul. He's neither "bulwark," nor "defender of the nation." He's an OCCUPIER, pure and simple. Strewth, is it really that hard?

Apparently so. Paul Byrnes has given Tommyrot 4 stars.

Shoot the Medics & Bomb the Hospitals

Unfortunately, Israel's murder of Gaza nurse Razan an-Najjar is not a first. In fact, since the Gaza protests began on March 30, it has been open season for Israeli snipers on Palestinian medics:

"While Israel has drawn criticism over its 'excessive' and 'disproportionate' use of force that has killed at least 114 unarmed Palestinian protesters and wounded more than 13,000 since March 30, many have also drawn attention to the Israeli army's targeting of medical personnel. During mass demonstrations on May 14, 17 medical personnel were injured by Israeli live ammunition, and one paramedic [Musa Abuhassanin] was killed, according to Gaza's Ministry of Health. Seven ambulances were damaged that day... Since the start of the Great March of Return movement on March 30, 238 health personnel and 38 ambulances have been affected, according to the World Health Organization. According to a new report by Safeguarding Health in Conflict, a coalition of NGOs, among the countries experiencing the highest number of attacks on healthcare, the occupied Palestinian territories is second only to Syria." (Palestinian medics struggle to provide healthcare amid attacks, Mersiha Gadzo, aljazeera.com, 29/5/18)

This, of course, should surprise no one familiar with modern Palestinian history. Targeting Palestinian (and other) health workers, patients, and facilities has always been a Zionist specialty. Take Israel's bloody siege of West Beirut in July 1982, for example:

"In West Beirut an orphanage, a home for the disabled and a mental home were all bombed. The children's hospital at the Sabra camp was hit and patients were killed; the Gaza hospital at the Bourj al Barajneh camp was bombed, and so were the 'Akka Palestinian hospital, the American hospital near the American University of Beirut and a hospital in the foothills of Aley. In one day seventeen hospitals were hit. The scenes inside these hospitals - further scenes from Goya or the Inferno - were complete pandemonium as the bodies of the dead and wounded were brought in. Administrators and doctors protested that their hospitals were clearly marked with Red Cross or Red Crescent signs. According to the Lebanese Red Cross, the Israelis also attacked its ambulances, cars, and volunteers, preventing them from evacuating the wounded and bringing food and medical supplies." (The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands, Jeremy Salt, 2008, pp 257-58)

What Would Bin Laden Say?

One of the Guardian's stable of Israel apologists, Nick Cohen, returns to one of his favorite themes, the left's (Cohen is nothing if not broad brush) alleged embrace of 'Islamism' (he's equally broad brush when it comes to political Islam):

"The worst elements on the left once exploited Islamism in an identical manner. When jihadis attacked New York, London or Paris they, too, joined what I called the 'kill us, we deserve it' school of foreign policy analysis. In their case, it was not our tolerance of immigration that brought punishment. Rather, they explained away the crimes of an irrational religious totalitarianism as logical responses to western foreign policy, poverty or discrimination, which... they already opposed." (The lies of the right that debase civilised society, theguardian.com, 26/3/17)

Ah yes, 9/11. Cohen's telling us here that the terror attack on New York, presumably planned by Osama bin Laden, had everything to do with "irrational religious totalitarianism," and nothing whatever to do with "Western foreign policy."

Not according to bin Laden, however:

"People of America,

"I speak to you today about the best way to avoid another Manhattan, about the war, its causes, and its consequences. First of all, I tell you that security is one of the pillars of human life. Free men do not underestimate the value of their security, despite Bush's claim that we hate freedom. Perhaps he can tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example?

"It is well known that those who despise freedom do not possess proud souls, unlike the nineteen [the 9/11 hijackers], may God bless them. We have been fighting you because we are free men who cannot acquiesce in injustice. We want to restore security to our umma. Just as you violate our security, so we violate yours. Whoever encroaches upon the security of others and imagines that he will himself remain safe is but a foolish criminal. When disasters happen, intelligent people look for the reasons behind them, so that they can avoid them in the future.

"But I am amazed at you. Although we are now into the fourth year since the events of September 11, Bush is still practicing his deception, misleading you about the real reason behind it. As a result, there are still motives for a repeat [attack]. I will explain to you the real reasons behind these events, and I will tell you the truth about the moments when this decision was taken, so that you can reflect on it. God knows that the plan of striking the towers had not occurred to us, but the idea came to me when things went just too far with the American-Israeli alliance's oppression and atrocities against our people in Palestine and Lebanon.

"The events that made a direct impression on me were during and after 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon with the help of its third fleet. They started bombing, killing, and wounding many, while others fled in terror. I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred. All over the place, houses were being destroyed and tower blocks were collapsing, crushing their residents, while bombs rained down mercilessly on our homes. It was like a crocodile devouring a child, who could do nothing but scream. Does a crocodile understand anything other than weapons? The whole world heard and saw what happened, but did nothing. In those critical moments, many ideas raged inside me, ideas difficult to describe, but they unleashed a powerful urge to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the oppressors.

"As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the oppressor in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would have a taste of its own medicine and would be prevented from killing our women and children. On that day I became sure that the oppression and intentional murder of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. It seemed then that 'freedom' and 'democracy' are actually just terror, just as resistance is labelled 'terrorism' and 'reaction.' Imposing lethal sanctions on millions of people, as Bush Sr did, and carrying out the mass butchering of children, is the worst thing that humanity has ever known. So is dropping millions of pounds of bombs and explosives on millions of children in Iraq, as Bush Jr did, to remove a former collaborator, and install a new one who will help steal Iraq's oil, as well as commit other atrocities." (The Towers of Lebanon (29/10/04), from Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, Edited by Bruce Lawrence, 2004, pp 239-40)

Hey, but what would bin Laden know?

Tom Hayden, A Cautionary Tale

Tom Hayden (1939-2016) died on October 23. He was one of the leaders of the new Left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organisation in the United States in the 1960s. Despite the strength of pro-civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activism of the 60s and 70s, this did not translate into an understanding of, let alone an engagement with, the oppressed Palestinians, except to some extent by Black Panther radicals.

While SDS activists such as Hayden identified with (and even met with) the Viet Cong, there is only one reference in Kirkpatrick Sale's massive 700+ page book on SDS to the Middle East. This refers to a certain Sue Eanet visiting "leaders of Al Fatah in the spring of [1969]," and writing "an adulatory three-part account of the 'Palestinian liberation struggle' in [SDS's paper] New Left Notes." Sale records in a footnote that "This last position received a great deal of flak from Jewish SDSers, several of whom wrote to the paper with strangulating outrage. But as near as one can figure out, 'Jewish consciousness' was not high among SDSers or student activists generally, who were more likely simply to ignore their Jewish heritage or, if committed revolutionaries, discard it as 'bourgeois' baggage." (SDS, 1974, p 517)

Hayden, of course, would move on from 60s/70s Left radicalism to marry the actress Jane Fonda and carve out a career as a liberal Democrat politician in California. What interests us here, however, is that, in 1982, the pair turned up in Israel, in the immediate wake of Israel's invasion of Lebanon. The mainstream US press reported their appearance at the time as follows:

"Jane Fonda and her husband, Tom Hayden, arrived today for a weeklong visit here and said that the Palestine Liberation Organization's terrorist acts and refusal to recognize Israel had made the invasion of Lebanon inevitable. The visit was arranged by the Israeli Association for the Welfare of Soldiers, which has invited several American entertainers to Israel to improve morale." (Jane Fonda criticizes PLO, UPI, 3/7/82)

"Today Jane Fonda and her husband, Tom Hayden, briefly visited the Israeli position at St. Anthony's School and watched the shelling [of West Beirut]. The movie star and her husband have been visiting Israeli soldiers and Lebanese wounded in in the invasion. Israeli soldiers crowded around Miss Fonda to be photographed with her, but she looked distant and uncomfortable. Mr Swersky, the Israeli command spokesman, gave Miss Fonda and her husband a private briefing on the military situation. Mr Hayden, who was a leader of the opposition to the Vietnam War, has said that the Israeli invasion is justified because the PLO refused to recognize Israel." (Israelis keep reminding Beirut that siege is on, James M Markham, New York Times, 5/7/82)

So what possessed this doyen of 60s Leftist radicalism to become a running dog of the Israelis, to revive the old phrase, or, to put it in more Zionist terms, one of Israel's useful fools? Needless to say, it's a very American story, only prised out of him by another, much later Israeli onslaught on Lebanon, this time in 2006, in the form of a mea culpa with the title, I was Israel?s dupe (counterpunch.org, 20/7/06). Here is a slimmed-down version:

"Twenty-five years ago (in 1981) I stared into the eyes of Michael Berman, chief operative for his congressman-brother, Howard Berman. I was a neophyte running for the California Assembly in a district that the Bermans claimed belonged to them. 'I represent the Israeli defense forces,' Michael said. I thought he was joking. He wasn't. Michael seemed to imagine himself the gatekeeper protecting Los Angeles' Westside for Israel's political interests, and those of the famous Berman-Waxman machine. Since Jews represented one-third of the Democratic district's primary voters, Berman held a balance of power...

"I had traveled to Israel in a generally supportive capacity, meeting officials from all parties... befriending peace advocates like the writer Amos Oz. I also met with Palestinians and commented favorably on the works of Edward Said. As a result, a Berman ally prepared an anti-Hayden dossier in an attempt to discredit my candidacy with the Democratic leadership in the California state capital. This led to the deli lunch with Michael Berman. He and his brother were privately leaning toward an upcoming young prosecutor named Adam Schiff... But they calculated that Schiff couldn't win without name recognition, so they were considering 'renting' me the Assembly seat, Berman said. But there was one condition: that I always be a 'good friend of Israel.'

"That wasn't a particular problem at the time. Since the 1970s I had favored some sort of two-state solution. I felt close to the local Jewish activists who descended from the labor movement and participated in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements... While I believed the Palestinians had a right to self-determination, I didn't share the animus of some on the American left who questioned Israel's very legitimacy...

"I can offer my real-life experience to the present discussion about the existence and power of an 'Israel lobby.' It is not as monolithic as some argue, but it is far more than just another interest group in a pluralist political world... During my ultimate 18 years in office, I received most of my Jewish support from the ranks of the liberal and less observant voters. But I also received support from conservative Jews who saw themselves as excluded by a Jewish (and democratic) establishment. However, all these rank-and-file constituencies were attuned to the question of Israel, even in local and state elections, and would never vote for a candidate perceived as anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian. I had to be certified 'kosher', not once but over and over again.

"The certifiers were the elites, beginning with rabbis and heads of the multiple mainstream Jewish organizations... An important vetting role was held as well by the American-Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), a group closely associated with official parties in Israel. When necessary, Israeli ambassadors, counsels-general and other officials would intervene with statements declaring someone a 'friend of Israel.'...

"I won the hard-fought primary by 51% to 45%. The Bermans stayed neutral... But that summer I made the mistake of my political career. The Israel Defense Forces invaded Lebanon, and [Israeli counsel-general in Los Angeles] Benny Navon wanted Jane and me to be supportive... Ever curious, and aware of my district's politics, I decided we should go to the Middle East. But only as long as the Israeli 'incursion,' as it was delicately called, was limited to the 10-kilometer space near the Lebanese border, as a cushion against rocket fire. Benny Navon assured me that the 'incursion' was limited... I also made clear our opposition to the use of any fragmentation bombs in the area, and my ultimate political identification with what Israel's Peace Now would say.

"There followed a descent into moral ambiguity and realpolitik that still haunts me today. When we arrived at the Israel-Lebanon border, the game plan promised by Benny Navon had changed utterly. Instead of a localized border conflict, Israel was invading and occupying all of Lebanon - with us in tow. Its purpose was to destroy militarily the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) haven in Lebanon. This had been Gen. Ariel Sharon's secret plan all along."

You can access the full text at Counterpunch. Suffice it to say that copies of it should be compulsory reading for all Young Labor activists aspiring to climb the greasy pole, because sure enough, sooner or later, in one form or another, they will find themselves being approached by a Michael Berman figure, proposing that they become 'a friend of Israel,' and advising them that an all-expenses-paid 'study tour' of Israel would be the-mother-of-all career-enhancing moves.

Learn from Tom Hayden...

The Awakening of Dr Swee

One of the best personal accounts I have ever read of the journey from (Palestine) ignorance to (Palestine) awareness may be found in the memoir From Beirut to Jerusalem: A Woman Surgeon with the Palestinians (1989) by the remarkable and saintly British-Singaporean doctor, Swee Chai Ang.*

Her awakening came in 1982, in the context of Israel's brutal invasion and occupation of Lebanon. Here she is at the beginning of her journey:

"Lebanon and Beirut were were unfamiliar names to me, but Israel was not: my church had taught me that the children of Israel had were the chosen people of God. Many of my Christian friends held that the gathering of the Jews from all over the world into the State of Israel was the fulfilment of scriptural prophecies.

"Israel had my support for other reasons. In London, I had spent hours watching television programmes which showed how appallingly the Jewish people had suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Both of my parents had suffered at the hands of the Nazis' allies, the Japanese Imperial Army. As a refugee in a foreign country, I understood what it meant to be stateless. The creation of the State of Israel, giving the Jews a home free from persecution, seemed to me to be an act of justice - even one of divine justice.

"The newspapers said that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon had made a hundred thousand people homeless and had killed fourteen thousand, and this upset me terribly. I could not understand why Israel had done this. There had to be a good reason for it. Most of the news stories in Britain depicted the invasion as an attempt by Israel to flush out the Palestine Liberation Organisation - or PLO - from its bases in Lebanon. All I knew about the PLO was that it was an Arab group which hijacked passenger jets, planted bombs and hated Jews.

"Some of my Christian elders told me that the Palestinians were the descendants of the Philistines of the Old Testament, and everyone knew that the giant Goliath was a conquering Philistine who terrorised his opponents. The tale of David and Goliath had been one of my favourites when I was a Sunday school teacher: I loved telling my kids how little David brought down the mighty Goliath. (I am a couple of inches under five foot tall myself.)

"From the news coverage, however, it looked as though Israel had turned into Goliath: a swaggering giant bringing destruction, terror and death to neighbouring Lebanon. An Israeli leader told the press that much as he regretted the casualties, to make an omelette one first had to crack eggs.

"Crack eggs? That remark shocked me. What kind of 'omelette' was Israel trying to make, and were the people of Lebanon eggs to be cracked? It was clear from the news reports that nearly all of the people who had been killed, wounded or made homeless were civilians, many of them women or children. Bombing civilians is a disgraceful way to make war. The bombs fell for days: on playgrounds, cemeteries, houses, hospitals, schools and factories. Even International Red Cross ships bringing food and medical supplies to Beirut were targets." (pp 1-3)

Now here she is at the end of her journey of discovery:

"The Palestinian-Israeli conflict exists because Israel could only be created over the destruction of Palestine and the expulsion of its people. In 1988, the State of Israel celebrated forty years of existence; while the Palestinian exiles remembered the loss of their homeland. For Israel to flourish, all traces of Palestine had to be obliterated. The wounds inflicted by Israel go on festering; Israeli bombs cause death and destruction; torture and mutilation in Israeli detention camps, such as the Ansar camps, will take more than a lifetime to fade from the memory. And Israelis complain that the Palestinians refuse to 'recognise' the State of Israel. After being forced to give up their country, their homes - even their lives - the Palestinians are being asked to surrender their souls to the victors." (p 246)

[*See Dr Swee in action in one of the most moving talks I have ever heard: Making a Small Difference: TEDxUCLWoman, https:www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9oH7HoxmLk]

The Unprecedented Ignorance of Julie Bishop

"The violence and the atrocities going on in Aleppo are unprecedented... like nothing we've seen in our lifetime." (Julie Bishop, in Bishop calls for Syria arms ban, David Wroe, Sydney Morning Herald, 3/10/16)

Especially the bombing of that hospital, eh Jules? Curse that butcher Asad! And yet, which country is usually singled out for blame whenever there's a blue on in the Middle East? That's right, Israel! Our very bestie over in that neck of the woods. Bloody anti-Semitism if you ask me!

Now you and I know Israel has been involved in some pretty nasty punch-ups over the years, strictly in self-defence, of course. After all, it's a pretty tough neighborhood over there, hey? In any case, I think it's safe to say that there's one thing at least our Israeli friends have never ever done, and that's target hospitals, right, Jules? Not like that butcher, Asad, and his Russki mates.

Oh, wait...

"It was at Akka Hospital [in West Beirut in 1982*] that I learnt my first word in Arabic: 'halas' - 'finished.' The school of nursing and the Arab centre for research and specialist treatment of injuries were both 'halas'. And the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) had not lost just one hospital: thirteen clinics and nine hospitals all over Lebanon had been destroyed in this way. Only Gaza Hospital, for a reason I was to discover three years later, was still standing. At the height of the air raids, when the Palestinians found out that every single PRCS hospital and clinic was a bomb target, they put three Israeli soldiers captured in south Lebanon on the upper floors of Gaza Hospital, and radioed a message to the Israeli Army saying that any further military action on Gaza Hospital would result in Israeli lives being lost. That saved Gaza Hospital from further destruction. One of the staff who spoke English told us that Akka Hospital had been a five-storey building before the Israeli air raids." (From Beirut to Jerusalem: A Woman Surgeon with the Palestinians, Dr Swee Chai Ang, 1989, pp 22-23)

[*Bishop, 60, was a partner in the Adelaide law firm Mangan, Ey & Bishop in 1982.]

Remembering Beirut's Sabra & Shatila Massacre, 34-Years On

The Israeli army invaded Lebanon in June 1982, laying siege to a resistant West Beirut.

A US-negotiated ceasefire led to an agreement allowing for the evacuation of PLO forces from West Beirut to Tunis. The agreement also guaranteed the protection of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in West Beirut once the evacuation had been completed. Following the further withdrawal of a US-French-Italian multinational peacekeeping force from the area, and in violation of the ceasefire, Israeli forces entered West Beirut, blockaded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra & Shatila, and, from 16-18 September, unleashed their ally, the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia on the defenceless, war-weary residents of the camps. Up to 3,500 were massacred.

A Singaporean orthopaedic surgeon, Dr Swee Chai Ang, working for the Palestinian Red Crescent in Sabra's Gaza Hospital, graphically recorded her dawning horror at the sheer scale and brutality of the massacre in a memoir, From Beirut to Jerusalem: A Woman Surgeon With the Palestinians (1989):

"The Israelis dropped us at the compound of the American Embassy in West Beirut. I did not want to go into the embassy: I wanted to go back to the camps. But I knew that I could not. While the rest of the team went into the embassy, I decided I would walk to the Commodore Hotel to talk to the journalists there, to see if I could find out more about what had happened. Paul Morris came with me.

"It was early in the afternoon when we got to the Commodore Hotel. We went to the press room, where TV crews had just returned from the camps and were reviewing what they had just videoed in Sabra and Shatila.

"First there were shots of the main road of the camp, the road we had been marched down earlier that morning. Heaps of corpses on both sides of the road. The people rounded up by the gunmen had been shot after we left. Then close-ups of the bodies filmed in the side allies of the camps. Bodies piled on top of each other - mutilated bodies, with arms chopped off - bloated decaying bodies that had obviously died a day or two before. Bodies whose limbs were still tied to bits of wires and bodies which bore marks of having been beaten up before their murder. Bodies of children - little girls and boys - and women and old men. Some bodies lay in blood that was still red, others in pools of brownish black fluid. Bodies of women with clothes removed but too mutilated to tell whether they were sexually assaulted or just tortured to death.

"I started to cry. For the first time I grasped the scale of what had happened. The truth hit me painfully. I had been so busy that I had no time to think. But now, I knew that while we had been trying to save a handful of people in the operating theatres of Gaza Hospital, the camp folks had been dying by the thousands outside. Besides being shot dead, people were tortured before being killed. They were beaten brutally, electric wires were tied round limbs, eyes were dug out, women were raped, often more than once, children were dynamited alive. Looking at all the broken bodies, I began to think that those who had died quickly were the lucky ones.

"The machine-gun rattle that we had heard from the hospital was not fighting between PLO terrorists and Israelis as I had vaguely assumed, but had been the sound of whole families being shot dead in cold blood. The heavy explosive noises we had heard had been the shelling of camp homes. The camps were completely sealed in by Israeli tanks and not even a child could sneak out past them. When we asked the two thousand people hiding in the Gaza Hospital to run away, they had nowhere to go. So they were all captured when they left the hospital, and indeed, many of them were murdered later that morning. People full of hope and life were now just mutilated corpses. These were the folks who after months of bombardment had come back from the bomb shelters to live in the camps. They had been so optimistic just a few days ago. They had believed the promises of the USA and other powerful nations that they would be left in peace, if the PLO left. They all thought they were being promised a chance of life.

"I had watched them rebuilding their shattered lives and homes just a few days before. I had spoken to women who had watched their sons, brothers and husbands being evacuated with the PLO under the peace agreement and then had taken the guns left behind to surrender them to the Lebanese Army or throw them away on the rubbish dump. I had eaten in their homes and had drunk Arabic coffee with them. My surgical skills had enabled me to treat a few people, to save them so that they could be sent out into the streets, unarmed, to be shot down again, this time successfully. I hated my own ignorance which had deceived me into believing that we all had a real hope of peace in Sabra and Shatila, a real chance of a new life. Like everyone else from the West, I thought things would be alright once the PLO left. I thought they were the ones whose presence caused all the attacks on the camps.

"I had thought the old people could retire when the PLO went, and the children could grow up - instead of having bullets put through their heads, and having their throats slit. I was a fool, a real fool. It had never occurred to me that this would happen. It was a grim moment. I felt forsaken by God, by men, by a world without conscience. How could little children suffer the agony and the terror of watching scenes of torture, of their loved ones being killed, of their homes being blown up and bulldozed over. For these children, the mental scars, the psychological wounds would probably never heal. It was one thing to die suddenly. It was entirely different to watch loved ones being tortured and killed while awaiting ones own turn." (pp 66-68)

It's Not Just Alan Jones 2

Sometimes I feel like I'm playing whack-a-mole here. One minute up pops Paul Sheehan at Fairfax. Then, no sooner have I whacked him, than up pops Greg Sheridan at News Ltd. Here's the latter writing over a week ago about those bloody Muslims and their crazeee "innate anti-American hatred":

"Here is a hard truth. Islamist extremists didn't hate America because of Bush. They hated Bush because of America. And now they hate Obama, because of America." (Soft power reaps only a hard fall, The Australian, 22/9/12)

According to Sheridan, it doesn't matter what Obama does, there's just no pleasing these buggers:

"[Obama] beat up on Israel, even at one point refusing to be seen in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu... But none of it won anything from the Middle East."

Obama beat up on Israel?! What, by withholding the super-brat's pocket money? No, by avoiding its leader (for a nanosecond).

Pakistan's "moderate" Benazir Bhutto, Sheridan asserts, was killed because she got too close to the US. By Muslim extremists, of course! "Something similar happened with Bashir Gemayel in Lebanon some 3 decades ago." And then the moral:

"In many of these Muslim countries it can be dangerous to be an enemy of America but absolutely fatal to be America's friend."

IOW, no matter the historical context, Muslims are not only a menace to themselves, but those who side with the Americans are practically signing their own death warrants. Except that this doesn't seem to apply to America's man in Ramallah, Mahmoud Abbas, or America's man in Beirut, Saad Hariri, or America's man in Amman or Riyadh or... need I go on?

But it's not Sheridan's patent nonsense about the anti-American DNA swirling through Muslim veins that concerns me here. It's his reference to the 1982 assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel that's got me going.

Gemayel, a Christian, was assassinated by Charles Chartouni, a Christian. The assassination was planned by Gemayel's right-hand man, Elie Hobeika, another Christian, in co-ordination with atheist Russians and the secular Ba'athist Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad. It had nothing whatever to do with Muslims, extremist or otherwise. And that's according to veteran US journalist Barbara Newman who claimed, in her latest (2005) book, Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil, that Hezbollah was more dangerous than al-Qaida, a view that should warm the cockles of Sheridan's heart.

Apparently, Sheridan hasn't read Newman's earlier (1989) book about Gemayel, The Covenant: Love & Death in Beirut. Why, Zionist Barbie's even thanked a much younger Benjamin Netanyahu in its pages for "telling me that if I did not tell the truth about Bashir, then no one would."

Greg?

Israel's Similes & Ours

In enumerating the reasons for the latest Israeli wilding in the Gaza Strip, which has to date resulted in the death of 25* and the wounding of 80, Jerusalem Post journalist, Yaakov Katz, has written matter-of-factly that "lastly, the IDF is using this as an opportunity to do some 'maintenance work' in Gaza and to mow the lawn, so to speak, with regard to terrorism, with the main goal of boosting its deterrence and postponing the next round of violence for as long as possible." (Analysis: Easy to start, hard to end, 10/3/12)

[*As of 12/3/12]

Maintenance? Mowing the lawn? Oh what a beautiful morning! Oh what a beautiful day! I've got a wonderful feeling. Everything's going my way. Hm, I think I'll go out and mow the lawn before it gets away on me. Gotta keep those nasty weeds in check, eh? For example, there's Mohammed Mustafa al-Hassumi, 65, and his daughter Faiza, 30. And there's Nayif Qarmout, 14, and Ayoub Assaliya, 13. Oh, and his 7-year old cousin too. Too damn many to mention, if you must know. OK, what'll it be? I've got so many damn new-fangled American mowers, snippers, trimmers and other whizzbangs in the garage I can hardly keep up with them all. Then there's the weedicides... but don't get me started on those. Maybe I'll just make do this time with the Apache helicopter, and the F16 and V-58 fighter jets. Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work I go...

Oh well, I suppose horticultural similes come naturally to the kind of folk who, legend has it, made the desert bloom, but for the rest of us mere mortals, whenever we see Israelis in action, somewhat different, darker similes generally spring to mind. Similes like these, for example, from Australian journalist Tony Clifton, who witnessed Israeli industry and whizzbangery like you wouldn't believe in Lebanon in 1982:

"Israeli attempts to get into [Beirut] were like the efforts of a madman trying to smash down the door of a house with an axe. He flails away in a crazed frenzy, then he tires and his battering slackens; but then the rage grips him again and he hacks away with greater vigour." (God Cried*, p 23)

"Watching the Israeli air force smashing Beirut to pieces yesterday was like having to stand and watch a man slowly beat a sick dog to death with an axe handle." (ibid, p 24)

"[Israeli Prime Minister] Begin was not stopped by a phone call from President Reagan... he ended the war because he had got what he wanted, just as a rapist stops humping after he has had his orgasm." (ibid, p 13)

[*One of the finest pieces of engaged journalism/photojournalism ever written. For excerpts, click on the Tony Clifton tab below. Better still, do yourself a favour and pick it up on Amazon; See also my 13/2/09 post Backburning the Palestinians?]

Doing the Time Warp Again

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference on Monday, March 5.

Although beginning with a funny ("I'd like to talk to you about a subject no one has been talking about recently... Iran"), towards the end of his speech a strange thing happened.

The lights suddenly dimmed, flickered and went out for the briefest of moments, and before the assembled AIPACers (who included more than two-thirds of the US Congress!) knew what was happening they had been transported, by some mysterious magic, from Washington DC, 2012 to Auschwitz, 1944!

But stranger still, Netanyahu didn't so much as bat an eyelid! It was as though time travel of this kind was somehow normal for him. No, he just carried on as though nothing had happened:

"As Prime Minister of Israel, I will never let my people live under the shadow of annihilation. Some commentators would have you believe that stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb. They say that a military confrontation with Iran would undermine the efforts already underway, that it would be ineffective, and that it would provoke even more vindictive action by Iran. I've heard these arguments before. In fact, I've read them before. In my desk, I have copies of an exchange of letters between the World Jewish Congress and the US War Department. The year was 1944. The World Jewish Congress implored the American government to bomb Auschwitz. The reply came 5 days later. I want to read it to you: 'Such an operation could be executed only by diverting considerable air support essential to the success of our forces elsewhere... and in any case would be of such doubtful efficacy that it would not warrant the use of our resources...' And here's the most remarkable sentence of all. And I quote: 'Such an effort might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans'. Think about that - 'even more vindictive action' - than the Holocaust."

Seriously now, the man's mad. Bonkers. Loopy as. And yet did this realisation occur to any US congresscreature or government official within earshot?

Back in 1982, after the Israel Offence Forces, under the direction of then Likud prime minister Menachem Begin, had reduced large parts of West Beirut to what one Western diplomat described at the time as "truly a scene from Dante's Inferno," American, and even some Israeli, officials began to question the man's sanity.

Mind you, incredibly, it wasn't so much what the maniac had done, as his justification for it that caused the penny to drop:

"Contemplating the destruction of Beirut, Israel's prime minister sees a historical parallel. In his response to Reagan's birthday cable, Menachem Begin talked about Berlin. 'I did feel as a prime minister empowered to instruct a valiant army facing Berlin where, amongst innocent civilians, Hitler and his henchmen hide in a bunker deep beneath the surface'. A couple of days after the 'Berlin' message reached Washington, some senior US government officials genuinely seemed to question Begin's mental health. Even in Jerusalem, the disturbing thought has occurred to some Israelis that their prime minister is gripped by a 'dark and macabre fantasy'. 'He is now living in a surreal world', said a professor from the Hebrew University. 'Sometimes I think he is fighting the Warsaw ghetto all over again. He sees the PLO as Nazis and Arafat as Hitler in his bunker'. Ze'ev Mankowitz, teacher of holocaust studies in Jerusalem, described the prime minister's message to Reagan as 'a dangerous and delusional analogy'." (Beirut: The liquidation of a city, Robin Wright et al, The Sunday Times, 8/8/82)

Dangerous and delusional?

Yet who in authority today, in the US, in Israel, anywhere, dares say this of Netanyahu? Must Tehran become a scene from Dante's Inferno before anyone speaks out?

If ever proof were needed that we do indeed live in strange times, one need go no further than this month's AIPAC conference, with its preponderance of congressional sycophants, Obama's obscene grovelling and Netanyahu's hysterical rant.

Bobby Dazzler

US folk-rock icon Bob Dylan will soon be visiting Australia, following concerts in China and Vietnam. Acerbic New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd had this to say about his Beijing gig:

"Bob Dylan may have done the impossible: broken creative new ground in selling out. The idea that the raspy troubadour of '60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sell-out - even worse than Beyonce, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Muammar Gaddafi's family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at US shock jock Rush Limbaugh's wedding. Before Dylan was allowed to have his first concert in China... he let the government pre-approve his set. Iconic songs of revolution like 'The Times They Are a-Changin'' and 'Blowin' in the Wind' wouldn't have been an appropriate soundtrack for the 2000 Chinese apparatchiks in the audience taking a relaxing break from repression." For Dylan, the times they are not a-changin', Sydney Morning Herald, 11/4/11)

It's fascinating, isn't it? While Dowd can cane Dylan and the rest for entertaining all sorts of shady characters in all sorts of shady places, there's one exceedingly shady place on earth they can go to and perform in without a word of criticism from Dowd or her mates in the ms media. Speaking of which , Dylan's doing Israel in June, having already performed there in 1987 and 1993.

One song I imagine his Israeli fans would really warm to is his little known 1983 number The Neighborhood Bully, his only song about Israel.

Don't be misled by the title. This is a deeply Zionist* song which portrays Israel, not long after its murderous 1982 invasion and occupation of Lebanon, as a guy with a tragic past that no one really understands - or wants to understand:

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,/ He's wandered the earth an exiled man./ Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,/ He's always on trial for just being born./ He's the neighborhood bully.

And if this deeply misunderstood character should go bezerk, as is his wont, why there's a bloody good reason:

Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim/ That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him,/ 'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back/ And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac. He's the neighborhood bully.

If only the poor thing had a friend or two:

He got no allies to really speak of./ What he gets he must pay for, he don't get it out of love./ He buys obsolete weapons and he won't be denied/ But no one sends flesh and blood to fight by his side./ He's the neighborhood bully.

Love that one (there are 11 such gems). He got no allies to really speak of!

OK, enough already! In the absence of a statement repudiating the entire dreadful dirge, I'm forced to conclude that despite (because of?) having lived in the Benighted States of America for nigh on 6 decades (the bugger's 69), Dylan's either blissfully unaware that the neighborhood bully has a filthy rich sugar daddy who caters to his every whim or else it's all down to he who pays the piper calls the tune.

[* You might like to read Bob Dylan's racist song, ellissharp.blogspot.com, 25/9/05]

Sixteen Angry Men 1

In my last post, I touched on one of life's little mysteries: the designation, in such fond and foolish places as Australia, of Israel's global, quasi-governmental fundraising agencies (such as the United Israel Appeal) as charities and, hence, deserving of tax-exempt status. Predictably, this lurk has not gone legally unchallenged.

While researching the subject, I happened on the compelling story of one such challenge. With its cast of Palestinian victims of Zionist terror and dispossession, an Israeli dissident politician, an anti-Zionist rabbi, a Zionist defector and others, and the strength of its challenge to a clear and present injustice, the case of Kareem Khalaf et al. v. Donald Reagan et al. would have had all the ingredients for a rivetting courtroom drama - but for its wimpish denouement, yet another example of the law's capacity to be a total ass.

What follows is taken from an article dealing with the genesis of the challenge by Rex Wingerter, US Zionist Organizations: Their Tax-Exempt Status Challenged. It comes from the Fall 1984 edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Given the length of the article, I've decided to break it into two separate posts, with a third on the judgment itself from a later article by the same author. I've also abridged it, and added some data and comments of my own in square brackets. The headings and highlightings are mine:

The Background

"In October 1983, 10 Palestinians, 1 Israeli and 5 American citizens brought suit in the US Federal Court in Washington, DC calling on the Secretary of the US Departnent of the Treasury and the Commissioner of Internal Revenue to revoke the tax-exempt status of 6 Zionist organizations based in the US. The organizations are the World Zionist Organization American Section, Inc., also known as the Jewish Agency; the Jewish Agency American Section; the United Israel Appeal; the United Jewish Appeal; the Jewish National Fund; and Americans for a Safe Israel. If the plaintiffs succeed, their action could stop the flow of the millions of dollars that are transferred yearly to the state of Israel by American Zionists. The US government is the defendant in the suit, not the Zionist organizations, because it was the decision of the US Department of the Treasury to grant tax-exempt status to the organizations. Being granted tax-exempt status by the Treasury Department... can be the financial life line for many organizations. It permits individuals who donate money to a tax-exempt organizations to deduct the same amount from their yearly income taxes paid to the US government. Many, if not most donors, would not contribute to organizations if they could not 'write off' the contribution in their income taxes. Indeed, because of the way US tax laws are currently written, individuals with high incomes find their yearly tax burden reduced if they make substantial contributions to charitable, tax-exempt organizations. For many American Zionists, this tax deduction increases their willingness to give millions of dollars yearly to pro-Israeli organizations... Total charitable transfers from the US to Israel have been estimated at between $950 million and $1 billion for the last several years...

The Palestinian Plaintiffs

"The Palestinian plaintiffs include Karim Khalaf, Bassam Shaka'a, Ibrahim Tawil, Fahd Qawasmeh, Wahid Hamdallah and Ahmad Mustafa Sbeih. The first 5 were the elected mayors of Ramallah, Nablus, al-Bireh, Hebron and Anabta, respectively, located on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, who were dismissed from their positions by the Israel authorities. Mustafa Sbeih is the mukhtar of the village of Aqraba on the West Bank. The mayors bring suit, on behalf of themselves and their constituents, complaining that they suffered physical injury*, the denial of their basic human rights because they sought adequately to represent their constituents, the loss of their land and the diversion of water due to the oppressive actions of the Israeli forces. These were supported in substantial part by contributions, for which deductions have been claimed by US donors made to the [above] US-based Zionist organizations... Ahmed Mustafa Sbeih brings suit, on behalf of himself and as the representative of the 7,000 residents of Aqraba, complaining that tax-exempt US-based Zionist organizations have deprived him and his fellow villagers of their land... Altogether, some 80,000 dunums of [Aqraba's land] have been seized by the Israeli authorities for acquisition by the Jewish National Fund (JNF)... The four remaining Palestinians bringing suit are landowners in the West Bank... They have suffered the illegal confiscation of their land, and the destruction of their orange groves, olive trees, and wheat fields by the Israeli occupying forces for the purpose of establishing settlements... for the exclusive use of Israeli Jews... [*Karim Khalaf and Bassam Shaka'a were maimed by a car bomb rigged by Israeli settlers in 1980.]

The Israeli Plaintiff

"The one Israeli plaintiff is Charlie Biton, an elected member of the Knesset and a member of a minority political coalition, the Democratic Front for Peace & Equality. He argues that funds contributed through the tax-exempt Zionist oeganizations in the US go to their Israeli counterparts which are, in fact, departments of the Israeli government, and are utilized to support the policies and persons of the ruling Likud Party. This outside interference with the political process in Israel works to deny him and his colleagues an equal opportunity in the Israeli political arena and thwarts efforts for the establishment of a democratic structure and practice in Israel.

The American Plaintiffs

"The 5 American plaintiffs include include Moshe Hirsch, John Davis, Edward Keenan, Subhi Widdi, and Charles Fischbein.

"Rabbi Hirsch complains that the religious community to which he belongs has lived in Jerusalem for more than 200 years in peace with its neighbors, until the establishment of the state of Israel, which Rabbi Hirsch and his community, the Neturei Karta, believe to be an anti-Jewish state. Contributions raised by the tax-exempt American Zionist organizations are forwarded to the state of Israel and are used in part to oppress the Neturei Karta to the detriment of Hirsch and his family. The claimed damage to Hirsch and his family includes the arrest of his son for refusal to serve in the Israel armed forces.

"John Davis is the former Commissioner General of the United Nations Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). He has served as the Assistant Secretary for Agriculture of the United States, as the Vice-Chairman and Director of the New York office for the American University of Beirut, and is the founder and past chairman of the board of American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), an organization which he presently serves as Chairman of the Board Emeritus. Dr Davis is also the author of The Evasive Peace: A Study of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. For the past 15 years, Dr Davis has labored in the private sector, through ANERA and in concert with other organizations and individuals, to create employment opportunities on the West Bank for Palestinians through economic development of the area, as well as to provide educational opportunities and vocational training for the young Palestinians who live there. The Israeli government has adopted a consistent and systematic policy to deny education and employment opportunities to residents of the West Bank because of their religion and national origin, and in order to coerce them to emigrate from the West Bank. These educational and charitable efforts made by Dr Davis... have been undermined, and to a large extent nullified, as a result of the funds contributed through the tax-exempt US-based organizations which go to their counterparts in Israel and are utilized to support policies which deny employment and educational opportunities and vocational training to residents of the West Bank due to their religion and national origin.

"Edward L Keenan is a full professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA)... Professor Keenan is presently president of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of Palestine (CSPP), an organization founded and registered as an independent campus organization at UCLA for the purpose of bringing to the attention of the American people the injustices done to the Palestinian people and the role the US has assumed in supporting these injustices... The CSPP prevents a viewpoint different from, and in many respects entirely contradictory to, the viewpoints expressed by the US tax-exempt Zionist organizations. The CSPP has not filed for recognition of tax-exempt status since it seeks to influence legislation and public opinion - as do the Zionist organizations named above - and seeks to work not merely in a charitable and educational framework but to function politically as well - as do the Zionist organizations named above - and is not therefore entitled to recognition as a tax-exempt organization, in the same way that the above-mentioned Zionist organizations are not entitled to such status.

"Subhi Widdi, a resident of Brooklyn, New York, is a naturalised citizen of the US and a native of Palestine from the village of Beit Hanina, a short distance north and west of Jerusalem. He owns land at Beit Hanina which has been in his family for at least 300 years... In 1970, after he had become an American citizen, approximately 10 acres of Widdi's land in Beit Hanina were confiscated by the Israeli authorities, over his objection and the objection of his family. Because of the proximity of Widdi's land to Jerusalem, it is worth approximately $100,000 per acre. The Israeli authorities have offered $16 per acre as compensation, but have not paid even that amount to the plaintiff or the members of his family. The seizure of his land and the construction of Ramot were substantially supported by funds raised through contributions - for which charitable deductions have been claimed by US donors - made to the US-based organizations, named herein.

"Charles Fischbein, until his resignation in March 1984, was the Executive Director of the Washington regional office of the JNF... where his official duties included fundraising. [And thereby, as they say, hangs a tale!] After his resignation, Fischbein founded the Institute for Middle East Conflict Resolution (IMECR), which has as its purposes the promotion of a dialogue and understanding among Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, and advocacy of a just and peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As a result of the continued and improper recognition by the US government of the tax-exempt status of the JNF, despite its status as a foreign conduit, Fischbein claims to have suffered harm to his professional reputation as a fundraiser and therefore to his ability to earn a living... Fischbein swore in a signed affidavit that he had resigned his position as a fundraiser and executive for the JNF because he could no longer close his eyes to the legal and moral violations committed by these organizations. He described how he had chosen from a JNF Projects Manual the task of raising funds for the construction of a sheltered playground for children at the kibbutz of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel, close to the Lebanese border, with a projected budget of $500,000. He obtained a number of gifts and pledges in the total amount of $275,000 in the first year. A husband and wife, prominent members of the Washington DC Jewish community, pledged $75,000, with approximately $20,000 donated immediately in cash. Because of the size of the pledge, it was arranged that the playground would be named after this couple... After 18 months, Fischbein had transmitted $270,000 in funds specifically earmarked for this project to the JNF national office in New York for transmittal to Israel. In the spring of 1982, the couple who had pledged the $75,000 told Fischbein that they planned to visit Israel that summer and they wished to visit 'their playground'. The previous winter, the JNF had given a dinner in their honor at which the playground project was officially dedicated to them. The couple did travel to Israel and to the site of the playground. Upon their return, they told Fischbein that when they arrived at Kiryat Shmona, they found no playground and no construction underway. Instead, at the supposed site of the playground, they found an Israel Defense Force staging area littered with garbage and beer cans. They told him that they were furious, and that the JNF had raised money under false pretenses. Also as a result of this, another contributor, the person who had pledged $50,000 and contributed $20,000 in cash, told Fischbein that he would not see him again and that he did not deal with people who do not keep their word. Fischbein subsequently learned that the money for the playground had gone into the general funds of Israel, and that there are no US controls with regard to the use of funds raised in the US for special projects. Because the couple has threatened publicly to expose the misuse of their contribution, Fischbein understands that the JNF in Israel plans to commence construction of the playground with other funds. Fischbein's disillusionment with the JNF deepened, he stated in his affidavit, when he took a trip to southern Lebanon in the summer of 1982 with other leaders of the JNF. The trip was arranged in order to bolster support in the US for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Immediately upon their arrival at Tel Aviv Airport, the group boarded buses and were taken to northern Israel and then into Lebanon to the area occupied by the Israel Defense Forces. Accompanying them were Moshe Rivlin, director of the JNF in Israel, and Dr Samuel I Cohen, Executive Vice-President of the JNF in the US. During the bus ride, Dr Cohen announced that JNF bulldozers were an integral part of the military effort since they had preceded the troops in forging the path of the invasion. Further, he boasted that the JNF was 'up to its ears' in the development of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. When the group arrived in southern Lebanon, they saw the devastation caused by the Israeli bombing. When some persons expressed dismay and horror at the destruction, Dr Rivlin stated that no-one must express any doubt or misgivings about the invasion when they returned to the US, or they would immediately be fired from their positions with the US-based JNF offices. Fischbein further swore that he had been deceived by the JNF, and misled as well by the US government, into believing that the JNF was a charitable organization. He now understands that the funds raised by the JNF in the US were not controlled by the JNF in the US; the JNF instead served as a conduit for a foreign state and thus became a foreign agent. In addition, the funds raised by the JNF in the US were not all used in Israel; indeed, much of the money was diverted instead into the West Bank and Lebanon for purely military purposes and for the continuation of the occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, and were used in a discriminatory fashion exclusively on behalf of some Israeli Jews, and specifically to the detriment of the Palestinian residents of these areas."
To be continued...

Sabra-Shatila, September 1982

The Israeli-engineered massacre of the Palestinian inhabitants of Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps followed the evacuation of the armed Palestinian resistance from the Lebanese capital in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Marking one of the most horrific chapters in the contemporary history of the Palestinian people, the massacre took place 28 years ago this month, on 16-18 September, 1982. Approximately 3,500 defenceless men, women and children were murdered over that 3-day period.

The following paragraphs, from the memoir of Singaporean-born British doctor Swee Chai Ang - From Beirut to Jerusalem: A Woman Surgeon With the Palestinians (1989) - recall this appalling atrocity:

"It was early in the afternoon when we got to the Commodore Hotel. We went to the press room, where TV crews had just returned from the camps, and were reviewing what they had just videoed in Saba and Shatila.

"First there were shots of the main road of the camp, the road we had marched down earlier that morning. Heaps of corpses on both sides of the road. The people rounded up by the gunmen had been shot after we had left. Then close-ups of the bodies filmed in the side-alleys of the camp. Bodies pilled on top of each other - mutilated bodies, with arms chopped off - bloated, decaying bodies that had obviously died a day or two before. Bodies whose limbs were still tied to bits of wires and bodies which bore marks of having been beaten up before their murder. Bodies of children - little girls and boys - and women and old men. Some bodies lay in blood that was still red, others in pools of brownish black fluid. Bodies of women with clothes removed, but too mutilated to tell whether they were sexually assaulted or just tortured to death.

"I started to cry. For the first time I grasped the scale of what had happened. The truth hit me painfully. I had been so busy that I had no time to think. But now, I knew that while we had been trying to save a handful of people in the operating theatres of Gaza Hospital [in Sabra camp], the camp folks had been dying by the thousands outside. Besides being shot dead, people were tortured before being killed. They were beaten brutally, electric wires were tied around limbs, eyes were dug out, women were raped, often more than once, children were dynamited alive. Looking at all the broken bodies, I began to think that those who had died quickly were the lucky ones.

"The machine-gun rattle that we had heard from the hospital was not fighting between PLO 'terrorists' and Israelis as I had vaguely assumed, but had been the sound of whole families being shot dead in cold blood. The heavy explosive noises we heard had been the shelling of the camp homes. The camps were completely sealed in by Israeli tanks, and not even a child could sneak out past them. When we asked the 2,000 people hiding in Gaza Hospital to run away, they had nowhere to go. So they were all captured when they left the hospital, and indeed, many of them were murdered later that morning. People full of hope and life were now just mutilated corpses. These were the folks who after months of bombardment had come back from the bomb shelters to live in the camps. They had been so optimistic just a few days ago. They had believed the promises of the USA and other powerful nations that they would be left in peace if the PLO left. They all thought they were being promised a chance at life.

"I had watched them rebuilding their shattered lives and homes just a few days before. I had spoken to women who had watched their sons, brothers and husbands being evacuated with the PLO under the peace agreement and then had taken the guns they left behind to surrender them to the Lebanese Army or throw them away on the rubbish dump. I had eaten in their homes and had drunk Arabic coffee with them. My surgical skills had enabled me to treat a few people, to save them so that they could be sent out into the streets, unarmed, to be shot down again, this time successfully. I hated my own ignorance which had deceived me into believing that we all had a real hope of peace in Sabra and Shatila, a real chance of a new life. Like everyone else from the West, I thought things would be all right once the PLO left.

"I had thought the old people could retire when the PLO went, and the children could grow up - instead of having bullets put through their heads, and having their throats slit. I was a fool, a real fool. It had never occurred to me that this would happen. It was a grim moment. I felt forsaken by God, by men, by a world without conscience. How could little children suffer the agony and the terror of watching scenes of torture, of their loved ones being killed, of their homes being blown up and bulldozed over. For these chidren, the mental scars, the psychological wounds, would probably never heal. It was one thing to die suddenly. It was entirely different to watch loved ones being tortured and killed, while awaiting one's own turn." (pp 66-68)

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.

Waltz with Bashir

"Why the Zionist focus on the Sabra and Shatila massacre and not all the other massacres committed by the Zionist aggressor in 1982 when it killed close to 20,000 civilians? The reason is clear, and it has no connection with the atrocities committed by the Lebanese Forces which fill any history of the Lebanese civil war. In its propaganda focus on Sabra and Shatila to the exclusion of others, Israel wants to evade - not to assume - responsibility." (The Angry Arab News Service, 2/3/09)

The above analysis (in its entirety of course) of Ari Folman's film Waltz with Bashir should be supplemented by Gideon Levy's 'Antiwar' film Waltz with Bashir is nothing but charade (Haaretz, 21/2/09), and this, written over 25 years ago:-

"'I was one of the Christian gunmen on that Palestinian shoot down Sabra and Chatila way in September last year [1982], and all I can say is, I cannot imagine what all the uproar is about. As these hunts go, it was nothing out of the ordinary at all, very much like the drive in Karantina in 1976 when we got a very good bag of Kurds. The camps were like Karantina because they were very much of a fun thing: a few days out in the open air and a good bag to show at the end of it. Nothing at all like Tal Zaatar, I can tell you, because Tal Zaatar took for ever, and it was bloody dangerous as well. If you like comparisons, Sabra and Chatila were like a pheasant shoot; Tal Zaatar was like a tiger hunt, much more exhausting and dangerous, but more rewarding. Not that Sabra and Chatila didn't bring you out in a healthy sweat of course, because you have to run like hell to catch those ten year olds - they move like rabbits when they see old grannie with her head half off. All in all, an entertaining few days after sitting around for two months doing nothing while the Israelis had all the fun; I'd forgotten how much enjoyment you can have, picking off a nippy teenager on the run. And easy for the Palestinians as well - I doubt if one in ten felt a thing.

"'But the fuss, the uproar, the breast-beating! If we'd shot a load of human beings, it couldn't have been any worse. Television cameras all over the place, reporters saying it was the worst thing to happen in the Middle East since the fall of Byzantium, and those bloody Israelis leaping up and down in a frenzy, saying they had nothing to do with it, and it was all so unexpected, and deary me, how could people do such dreadful things to innocent civilians.

"'Well, bugger me with the rough end of a pineapple, the Israelis of all people asking how we could do it! We do a little bit of tidying up at the end of their season, clean up the ground after they've had their fun on it... and they start doing their nuts. Can you imagine they could have the gall to ask how we could do what we did! They spent two months bombing and shelling those camps every day; they used cluster bombs and incendiaries and phosphorus shells; they leave kids with their guts split open and their legs sliced off; they burn old men and women to death; they leave people in the ruins of their houses, watching the smoke rise from their chests as the phosphorus burns through to their lungs; they can't understand why we wanted a share in the fun. That murderous oaf Sharon, up to his guts in blood, has the outstanding nerve to stand in front of his own commission of inquiry and say, perfectly straight-faced, "These atrocities stand in contradiction not only to the values towards which we were educated and which we teach... we were surprised, astounded and shocked by the massacre that took place in those neighbourhoods in Beirut'.

"I wrote the last lines in a fine rage, thinking that irony was the only way to express what I feel about what the Israelis did in Beirut in 1982. The fury was on me because the buggers were going to get away with what they did, and the reason they will is that the massacre at the finish completely wiped out the memories and indignation about what had gone on before the killings in the camps. If I'd been doing public relations for the Israeli army I couldn't have thought of a more brilliant scheme to get them off the hook than having those last few hundred people killed in the camps. As soon as the news leaked out, the whole of the world's attention was focused on Sabra and Chatila and away from the butchers of Beirut. Suddenly the villains were Christian militiamen; and attention was distracted even more by the question whether it was Haddad's people or Gemayel's Phalangists. The Israelis got a little mud splashed on them through guilt by association, because whoever did the killings couldn't have done them without the Israelis opening the way. But compared with the real weight of condemnation they deserved for what they had done to Beirut, the confused and bewildered indignation over the camp killings was easy to deal with.

"The fact is that the Israelis are as responsible for the deaths in the camps as they were for the deaths in the war, just as a Nazi commander would be judged guilty of mass murder, even if he had just stood by while his Ukrainian Einsatzgruppe slaughtered the Jewish peasants in the town his troops had first broken open. In the two months of the siege the Israelis established that everyone in west Beirut was a legitimate target; they hit every part of the city, using the vilest of modern weapons and showing absolutely no concern for the lives of civilians; more than anything, their obsessive shelling of camps like Sabra and Chatila showed they considered the people who lived in these areas had even less right to live than the other citizens of the city.

"Whatever you might say of them, the Christian militiamen are not ignorant, unthinking peasants. They read the reports coming out of west Beirut every day, they heard the Palestinian and Muslim militiamen's radio broadcasts about what was happening in west Beirut. They knew it was open season on purely civilian areas; they knew the Israelis were deliberately terrorizing west Beirut. The Israelis were responsible for the climate of mindless violence and the downgrading of human life to less than nothing in west Beirut. Nothing the Christians did in the camps was in any way more reprehensible than what the Israeli armed forces had done for two months preceding the final massacres.

"I find it much easier to understand what the Christians did in the camps than what the Israelis did to west Beirut. I was in Beirut during the civil war and although I was not in Damour, I know how Christian families were butchered there. Both sides committed atrocities, although, in terms of the mathematics of horror, the Christians have more to answer for: Karantina, Tal Zaatar, Jisr al-Basha and now Sabra and Chatila, as against Damour and Jiyeh. I name these alone, because nobody has ever tallied the individual acts of brutality that left the eyeless corpses under the Fuad Chehab flyover, the burnt bodies on either side of the crossing-points between east and west. However, because of the civil war there is hardly a family on either side in Lebanon that does not remember the violent death of a relative or friend. The Christian gunman carefully lining up the six-year-old girl in his sights in Sabra may have remembered a tragedy of his own as he created another. I would feel much more comfortable with such a man - as I would with a Palestinian who throws a grenade into a school in a kibbutz - than I ever would with an Israeli bomber-pilot or commander of an artillery crew... This is not to say that I support what any of them are doing; but the man who stares down the barrel or pulls the pin has to make the decision to kill someone, he must watch them die, he has to live with that vision for the rest of his life and almost invariably with the Palestinian, he knows he will soon die because of what he has done. The pilot or the soldier pulling the lanyard on a howitzer performs an action no more stressful than ringing a doorbell; if his co-ordinates are anywhere near right he has done ten times the damage and causes fifty times the misery of any half-baked little 'terrorist', yet he never hears a scream or sees a tear or has to watch blood spurt. He will sleep peacefully every night of his life because there is no raw material for his conscience to weave into nightmares." (God Cried, Tony Clifton, 1983, pp 135-136)

The Banality of Evil

"'Well, son, you've graduated, you've got a good chemistry degree, you're a fine worker with a great future - what do you think you're going to do with your life?' Old Jack Mathews looked proudly at his son. He had worked hard for the boy and put in long hours of overtime in the steel mills so his son could have the best education money could buy; now here was John Jr, fresh from the graduation ceremony, still in his gown, holding mortar and graduation scroll awkwardly in one hand, clinging to his mother's hand with the other. It was a high point in all their lives the old man thought, as they stood among the crowds of excited students and proudly smiling parents.

"The boy hesitated, wondering how to express himself. It was something he had thought about for these past two years, the years when he realized he had the talents to become a really great scientist - not just a glorified bottle-washer and lab assistant, but an innovator, a man who could transmute ideas into reality. He had an honours degree of such quality that recruiters from industry were besieging him like scouts from the major leagues trying to sign the school's ace pitcher. 'Well, Dad', he said hesitantly, almost shyly. 'I've given it a lot of thought. I've looked at the prospectuses, I've talked to the dean of the chemistry school. I've talked it over with all my friends. Dad', he burst out excitedly, unable to hold back the secret any longer, 'I'm going into ordnance'.

"Seeing the puzzled looks on the old people's faces, he felt he had to explain, the words tumbling over themselves as his innermost thoughts jostled for expression. 'See, I've been reading a lot about high-explosive shells, about mines and bombs and rockets, and I feel there's a lot I can contribute there. It's a field with real problems and challenges, Dad. I mean - well, how do you get white phosphorus liquid enough so that it will really splash when the shells explode - not just in lumps, but soft so that it will spread all over a person's body? And how do you develop the sort of alloys that fracture into razor blades, so they really slash through kids' arms and legs? And bombs - Dad, I could think about bombs all day. Someone, and it could just be me, is going to work out one day how you get a bomb that will bore through 8 floors of an apartment block and then explode, so the whole thing crunches up like a deck of cards. And cluster bombs - they're so primitive now - I mean, half of those bomblets don't go off at all, and the rest of them are so under-powered they'll barely take a hand or a foot off. Dad, I tell you, there's a whole new world out there, and I mean to be part of it. It's my future, Dad!' Well, somebody must have thought like that you reflect, as you stand in the Gaza Hospital and look at what, on a backyard barbecue, would be a marvellous piece of T-bone. Dark brown and crackly on the surface, the deeper cracks showing the rare red meat underneath, the juices trickling down on the crisp sesame roll - sorry, on to the pillow - and in the middle of that juicy piece of protein a pair of eyes - pure Magritte, my dear. I do wish you could have seen it, complete with that little blue plug at the bottom to let the air get to the centre of the meat, but it went off, unfortunately, and just had to be thrown away after a couple of hours... such a waste. Plenty more, of course, but that one - just a touch of tabasco, maybe a little mayonnaise, and Graig Claiborne would have had it in colour in The New York Times magazine.

"Some little Arthur or Carl-Heinz or Nathan or Kenzo or whoever probably spent a year or more working on that phosphorus problem. From my days at school, I seem to remember that it came in big hard yellow lumps and didn't spread at all. Someone with a Ph.D. in chemistry sat up all night worrying about Willie Pete and how you get it to spread like jello. No point in having a shell that explodes and just gives someone a headache when he gets whacked by a great hard lump of phosphorus - you've got to thin it out so it spreads like something Helena Rubenstein dreamed about: dragon-licks on your face and your arms and your tits and your balls, fizzing through your skin... the ultimate wrinkle-remover. Great thing about it, ordnance-wise, is that the bugger doesn't stop burning if you bandage it or throw water on it, or even so forget your dignity as to writhe in the dust: it just keeps burning and smoking away.

"Not that you absolutely had to be barbecued - the nice thing about Beirut this time was that everyone was given a wide variety of choices: everyday, something different. If you wanted a body that would have looked good as a rib joint, you stayed in your seaside apartment and waited for the navy to pump phosphorus shells in to the living-room - somehow, the navy more than anyone else seemed to have a real affection for the stuff. But if you wanted something a bit cleaner - more surgical, really - then it was better to hang around in the camps and wait for tank rounds and the 155s to open up. Lots of shrapnel flying around to slit you open, rip your guts out, cut your throat - and you hardly felt it until you saw the looks on the faces of the ambulance guys picking you up: first a foot, then your body, put that leg in the plastic bag, maybe they can sew that chest up. There was even something for the kids: cluster-bombs, such fun things. Big grey-white bean-pods that opened up and then these cute little golf balls all over the place. Kids just love playing with things like that . . . and they weren't all that harmful. I mean, they'll take your hands off and split your forearms open so they look like red orchids, and maybe little Abdul will come home slightly blinded, and there's always some klutz who will kick one in the dark and ruin his chances of playing for Spurs; but basically those little balls gave kids a chance to participate, actually participate in a war, and still be around afterwards to tell their kids about what fun it all was. Looking back on it, that was the nice thing about the Beirut siege: the Israelis made it everyone's siege; they spread the fun around so that, at the end of it, nobody in west Beirut could complain that he'd been left out of the action." (God Cried, Tony Clifton, 1983 pp 69-70)

"The Times has identified stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells from high-resolution images taken of Israel Defence Forces (IDF) artillery units on the Israel-Gaza border this week. The pale blue 155mm rounds are clearly marked with the designation M825A1, an American-made WP munition... The rounds, which explode in a shower of burning white streaks, were first identified by The Times... when they were fired over Gaza at the start of Israel's ground offensive. Artillery experts said the Israelis would be in trouble if they were banned from using WP because it is the simplest way of creating smoke to protect them from enemy fire. There were indications last night that Palestinian civilians have been injured by the bombs, which burn intensely. Hassan Khalass, a doctor at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, told The Times that he had been dealing with patients who he suspected had been burnt by white phosphorus. Muhammad Azayzeh, 28, an emergency medical technician in the city, said: 'The burns are very unusual. They don't look like burns we have normally seen. They are third-level burns that we can't seem to control'." (Gaza victims' burns increase concern over phosphorus, Michael Evans, 8/1/09)

"Erik Fosse, a Norwegian doctor who worked in Gaza's hospitals during the conflict, said that Israel was using so-called DIME (dense inert metal explosive) bombs designed to produce an intense explosion in a small place. The bombs are packed with tungsten powder, which has the effect of shrapnel but often dissolves in human tissue, making it difficult to discover the cause of injuries. Dr Fosse said he had seen a number of patients with extensive injuries to their lower bodies. 'It was as if they had stepped on a mine, but there was no shrapnel in the wounds', he said. 'Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been in war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before'. However, the injuries matched photographs and descriptions in medical literature of the effects of DIME bombs." ('Tungsten bombs' leave Israel's victims with mystery wounds, Raymond Whitaker, The Independent, 18/1/09)

"... other foreign doctors working in Gaza have reported injuries they cannot explain. Professor Mohammed Sayed Khalifa, a cardiac consultant from Sudan, said that 2 of his patients had had uncontrollable bleeding. 'One had a chest operation, and continued bleeding even after having been given large quantities of plasma', he said. 'The other had what seemed to be a minor leg injury, but collapsed with profuse bleeding. Something was interfering with the clotting process. I have never seen such a thing before'. Dr Ahmed Almi, an Egyptian cardio-thoracic consultant at al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, said he had seen a number of patients with inexplicable injuries. A boy of 14 had a small puncture wound in his head, but extensive damage to his brain, making it impossible to save his life. 'I don't know the nature or type of these weapons that make a very small [entry wound] and go on and make massive destruction in the tissues', he said." (ibid)