Journalist Jonathan Cook, as usual, is bang on the mon(k)ey(s):
"The response from the US, UK and France to a briefing on Thursday at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague was perverse, to say the least. Russia had brought 17 witnesses from Douma who stated that there had been no chemical weapons attack there earlier this month - the pretext for an illegal air strike on Syria by the three western states.
"The witnesses, a mix of victims and the doctors who treated them, told accounts that confirmed a report provided last week from Douma by British reporter Robert Fisk - a report, it should be noted, that has been almost entirely blanked by the western media. According to the testimony provided at the OPCW, the victims shown in a video from the site of an alleged attack were actually suffering from the effects of inhaling dust after a bombing raid, not gas.
"The first strange thing to note is that the US, UK and France boycotted the meeting, denouncing Russia for producing the witnesses and calling the event 'an obscene masquerade' and 'theatre'. It suggests that this trio, behaving like the proverbial three monkeys, think the testimony will disappear if they simply ignore it. They have no interest in hearing from witnesses unless they confirm the western narrative used to justify the air strikes on Syria.
"Testimony from witnesses is surely a crucial part of determining what actually. The US, UK and France are surely obligated to listen to the witnesses first, and then seek to discredit the testimony afterwards if they think it implausible or coerced. The evidence cannot be tested and rebutted if it is not even considered.
"The second is that the media are echoing this misplaced scorn for evidence. They too seem to have prejudged whether the witnesses are credible before listening to what they have to say (similar to their treatment of Fisk). Tellingly, the Guardian described these witnesses as 'supposed witnesses', not a formulation that suggests that any degree of impartiality in its coverage. Notice that when the Guardian refers to witnesses who support the UK-UK-French line, often those living under the rule of violent jihadist groups, the paper does not designate them 'supposed witnesses' or assume their testimony is coerced. Why for the Guardian are some witnesses only professing to be witnesses, while others really are witnesses? The answer appears to depend on whether the testimony accords with the official western narrative. There is a word for that, and it is not 'journalism'.
"The third and biggest problem, however, is that neither the trio of western states nor the western media are actually contesting the claim that these 'supposed witnesses' were present in Douma, and that some of them were shown in the video. Rather, the line taken by the Guardian and others is that: 'The veracity [of] the statements by the Russian-selected witnesses at The Hague will be challenged, since their ability to speak truthfully is limited.' So the question is not whether they were there, but whether they are being coerced into telling a story that undermines the official western narrative, as well as the dubious rationale for attacking Syria.
"But that leaves us with another difficulty. No one, for example, appears to be doubting that Hassan Diab, a boy who testified at the hearing, is also the boy shown in the video who was supposedly gassed with a nerve agent three weeks ago. How then do we explain that he is now looking a picture of health? It is not as though the US, UK and French governments and the western media have had no time to investigate his case. He and his father have been saying for at least a week on Russian TV that there was no chemical attack.
"Instead, we are getting yet more revisions to a story that was originally presented as so cut-and-dried that it justified an act of military aggression by the US, UK and France against Syria, without authorisation from the UN Security Council - in short, a war crime of the highest order.
"It is worth noting the BBC's brief account. It has suggested that Diab was there, and that he is the boy shown in the video, but that he was not a victim of a gas attack. It implies that there were two kinds of victims shown in the video taken in Douma: those who were victims of a chemical attack, and those next to them who were victims of dust inhalation.
"That requires a great deal of back-peddling on the original narrative.
"It is conceivable, I suppose, that there was a chemical attack on that neighbourhood of Douma, in which people like Diab assumed they had been gassed when in fact they had not been, and that others close by were actually gassed. It is also conceivable that the effects of dust inhalation and gassing were so similar that the White Helmets staff filmed the 'wrong victims', highlighting those like Diab who had not been gassed. And it is also conceivable, I guess, that Diab and his family now feel the need to lie under Russian pressure about there not being a gas attack, even though their account would, according to this revised narrative, actually accord with their experience of what happened.
"But even if each of these scenarios is conceivable on its own, how plausible are they when taken together? Those of us who have preferred to avoid a rush to judgment until there was actual evidence of a chemical weapons attack have been invariably dismissed as 'conspiracy theorists'. But who is really proposing the more fanciful conspiracy here: those wanting evidence, or those creating an elaborate series of revisions to maintain the credibility of their original story?
"If there is one thing certain in all of this, it is that the video produced as cast-iron evidence of a chemical weapons attack has turned out to be nothing of the sort." (The west closes its ears to Douma testimony, jonathan-cook.net, 28/4/18)
Showing posts with label Robert Fisk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Fisk. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
Monday, December 27, 2010
Foreign Correspondents: Then & Now
That was then:
"I read my father's conservative Daily Telegraph from cover to cover, always the foreign reports, lying on the floor beside the fire as my mother pleaded with me to drink my cocoa and go to bed. At school I studied The Times each afternoon. I ploughed through Khrushchev's entire speech denouncing Stalin's reign of terror. I won the school Current Affairs prize and never - ever - could anyone shake me from my determination to be a foreign correspondent. When my father suggested I should study law or medicine, I walked from the room. When he asked a family friend what I should do, the friend asked me to imagine I was in a courtroom. Would I want to be the lawyer or the reporter on the press bench, he asked me. I said I would be the reporter and he told my father: 'Robert is going to be a journalist'. I wanted to be one of the 'soldiers of the press'." (The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk, 2005, p xix)
This is... *sigh* ... now:
"Ben Knight enjoyed a spectacularly unsuccessful academic career, spending several years working in bottle shops and supermarkets, before somehow landing a short-term job with the ABC in his hometown of Mildura as a radio producer. A few years later, he stopped worrying that someone was going to tap him on the shoulder and tell him there had been a horrible mistake, and moved to Melbourne to host the ABC's daily statewide morning show. Bouncing around jobs in radio current affairs, TV news, and The 7.30 Report - even presenting the weather in order to get his face on TV - he suddenly realised his long-repressed dream of a foreign correspondent's job might be within reach. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and two children, and is enjoying every minute of it." (Ben Knight, abc.net.au/profiles, 17/12/09)
Sometimes repression has a lot going for it.
"I read my father's conservative Daily Telegraph from cover to cover, always the foreign reports, lying on the floor beside the fire as my mother pleaded with me to drink my cocoa and go to bed. At school I studied The Times each afternoon. I ploughed through Khrushchev's entire speech denouncing Stalin's reign of terror. I won the school Current Affairs prize and never - ever - could anyone shake me from my determination to be a foreign correspondent. When my father suggested I should study law or medicine, I walked from the room. When he asked a family friend what I should do, the friend asked me to imagine I was in a courtroom. Would I want to be the lawyer or the reporter on the press bench, he asked me. I said I would be the reporter and he told my father: 'Robert is going to be a journalist'. I wanted to be one of the 'soldiers of the press'." (The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk, 2005, p xix)
This is... *sigh* ... now:
"Ben Knight enjoyed a spectacularly unsuccessful academic career, spending several years working in bottle shops and supermarkets, before somehow landing a short-term job with the ABC in his hometown of Mildura as a radio producer. A few years later, he stopped worrying that someone was going to tap him on the shoulder and tell him there had been a horrible mistake, and moved to Melbourne to host the ABC's daily statewide morning show. Bouncing around jobs in radio current affairs, TV news, and The 7.30 Report - even presenting the weather in order to get his face on TV - he suddenly realised his long-repressed dream of a foreign correspondent's job might be within reach. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and two children, and is enjoying every minute of it." (Ben Knight, abc.net.au/profiles, 17/12/09)
Sometimes repression has a lot going for it.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Robert Fisk vs Jason Koutsoukis
"I know how at least 80% of the clashes [on the Golan Heights] started. In my opinion, more than 80%, but let's talk about 80%. It went this way. We would send a tractor to plough someplace where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was." Moshe Dayan quoted in The Iron Wall, Avi Shlaim, 2001, pp 236-237)
On the subject of the latest flare up on the Israeli-Lebanese border, who are you going to believe, the UK Independent's Beirut-based veteran reporter, Robert Fisk, OR the Sydney Morning Herald's Jerusalem-based babe-in-the-woods, Jason Koutsoukis, channeling an anonymous, but obviously Israeli, senior diplomatic source?
I've taken the liberty below of punctuating Koutsoukis' report with relevant snippets of two (4 & 5/8/10) of Fisk's reports (plus my own comments) in square-bracketed bold.
To begin with, however, here's Fisk on the subject of that elusive Israeli-Lebanese border:
"No one is exactly sure where the Israeli-Lebanese border is. In 2000, the UN drew a 'Blue Line' along what was... the frontier between the French mandate of Lebanon and the British mandate of Palestine. Behind it, from the Lebanese point of view, stands the Israeli 'technical fence', a mass of barbed wire, electrified wires and sandy roads (to look for footprints)." (Israel-Lebanon tensions flare after skirmish leaves 4 dead, 4/8/10) "The 'Blue Line' was inadvisedly drawn on the orders of an ambitious UN civil servant who would one day like to be UN Secretary General. In his haste to draw an 'accurate' border, for example, he put the entire area of Shebaa farms - which was Lebanese during the post-First World War French mandate - south and east of the line, effectively putting it under Israeli occupation (which had in military terms been the case since the 1967 Middle East war. But political errors of this kind sapped the belief of Lebanese authorities in the UN's maps." (UN: Israel was on its own side before border clash, 5/8/10)
Now for Koutsoukis/Fisk:
"A senior diplomatic source, who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity, said preliminary investigations by UN personnel monitoring the border... indicated the Lebanese army planned the attack. ["Now for the Lebanese army to take on the Israelis, with their 264 nuclear missiles, was a tall order. But for the Israeli army to take on the army of one of the smallest countries in the world was surely preposterous, not least because Army Day had been attended by the president of Lebanon, Michel Sleiman, in Beirut only 2 days earlier - when he ordered his soldiers to defend their frontier." 4/8] The source said the UN Interim Force in Lebanon advised Lebanese army commanders early on Tuesday morning that the Israelis would be removing a tree on their side of the border early in the afternoon. ["Israel had apparently not co-ordinated its gardening expedition with the Lebanese via the UN." 5/8] Several hours before the Israelis moved in to begin that work, a senior Lebanese army unit arrived at the Lebanese village of al-Adeisa, which overlooks the site where the tree was to be removed, and took control of the area. They were accompanied by several journalists linked to media outlets controlled by the radical Shiite movement Hezbollah ["At about this time, Al-Akhbar newspaper's local correspondent Assaf Abu Rahal turned up in Addaiseh to cover the story." 4/8. MERC: Al-Akhbar has nothing to do with Hezbollah & Assaf Abu Rahal was a Christian - as, btw, was one of the slain Lebanese soldiers.]... Shortly after 12:15pm, when the Israelis moved a crane close to the border fence to begin removing the tree, a Lebanese army sniper took aim at the the commanders who were supervising the operation from a hill on the Israeli side of the border. 'The sniper was aiming for the most senior IDF officers present, not the person operating the crane where the alleged border infringement took place', the source told the Herald. 'These were not warning shots fired towards the area of the crane. ["The moment the crane's arm crossed the 'technical fence'... Lebanese soldiers opened fire into the air. The Israelis, according to the Lebanese... shot at the Lebanese soldiers." 4/8] Someone took careful aim at the Israeli commanders who were standing several hundred metres away'. One shot hit Colonel Dov Harari in the head, killing him instantly. Another shot caused shrapnel wounds to the chest of a captain, who is in hospital in a serious condition ["And a little time later, an Israeli helicopter - apparently firing from the Israeli side of the border (though that has yet to be confirmed) - fired a rocket at a Lebanese armoured vehicle, killing 3 soldiers and the journalist. Lebanese troops, on orders from Beirut, fired back and killed an Israeli lieutenant." 4/8]... In the clash that followed the sniper's shots, two Lebanese soldiers were killed, and a journalist from the Hezbollah-owned Al Manar television network [MERC: ???] ... Guy Bechor, a senior analyst of Israeli-Arab affairs at the Interdisciplinary Centre at Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, said the entire affair appeared to have been fully planned by the Lebanese army... 'The immediate purpose was to create deterrence with Israel. The Lebanese army has become fed up standing idly by while the IDF operates almost as freely in Lebanese territory as it does in its own territory'." (Lebanese commander ordered sniper attack, 6/8/10) [MERC: Well exactly! Let's here it again: "The Lebanese army has become fed up standing idly by while the IDF operates almost as freely in Lebanese territory as it does in its own territory." ]
PS: "Israeli warplanes have been executing mock intensive air raids in Nabatieh, Iqlim al-Toufah, Marjayoun and Khiam airspace since Friday morning', the [Lebanese] National News Agency said. In addition, the southern towns of Tyre, Hasbya and Bint Jbeil are also experiencing flyovers and dummy attacks." (Israel rattles sabre in south Lebanon, Patrick Galey, Daily Star, 7/8/10)
On the subject of the latest flare up on the Israeli-Lebanese border, who are you going to believe, the UK Independent's Beirut-based veteran reporter, Robert Fisk, OR the Sydney Morning Herald's Jerusalem-based babe-in-the-woods, Jason Koutsoukis, channeling an anonymous, but obviously Israeli, senior diplomatic source?
I've taken the liberty below of punctuating Koutsoukis' report with relevant snippets of two (4 & 5/8/10) of Fisk's reports (plus my own comments) in square-bracketed bold.
To begin with, however, here's Fisk on the subject of that elusive Israeli-Lebanese border:
"No one is exactly sure where the Israeli-Lebanese border is. In 2000, the UN drew a 'Blue Line' along what was... the frontier between the French mandate of Lebanon and the British mandate of Palestine. Behind it, from the Lebanese point of view, stands the Israeli 'technical fence', a mass of barbed wire, electrified wires and sandy roads (to look for footprints)." (Israel-Lebanon tensions flare after skirmish leaves 4 dead, 4/8/10) "The 'Blue Line' was inadvisedly drawn on the orders of an ambitious UN civil servant who would one day like to be UN Secretary General. In his haste to draw an 'accurate' border, for example, he put the entire area of Shebaa farms - which was Lebanese during the post-First World War French mandate - south and east of the line, effectively putting it under Israeli occupation (which had in military terms been the case since the 1967 Middle East war. But political errors of this kind sapped the belief of Lebanese authorities in the UN's maps." (UN: Israel was on its own side before border clash, 5/8/10)
Now for Koutsoukis/Fisk:
"A senior diplomatic source, who spoke to the Herald on condition of anonymity, said preliminary investigations by UN personnel monitoring the border... indicated the Lebanese army planned the attack. ["Now for the Lebanese army to take on the Israelis, with their 264 nuclear missiles, was a tall order. But for the Israeli army to take on the army of one of the smallest countries in the world was surely preposterous, not least because Army Day had been attended by the president of Lebanon, Michel Sleiman, in Beirut only 2 days earlier - when he ordered his soldiers to defend their frontier." 4/8] The source said the UN Interim Force in Lebanon advised Lebanese army commanders early on Tuesday morning that the Israelis would be removing a tree on their side of the border early in the afternoon. ["Israel had apparently not co-ordinated its gardening expedition with the Lebanese via the UN." 5/8] Several hours before the Israelis moved in to begin that work, a senior Lebanese army unit arrived at the Lebanese village of al-Adeisa, which overlooks the site where the tree was to be removed, and took control of the area. They were accompanied by several journalists linked to media outlets controlled by the radical Shiite movement Hezbollah ["At about this time, Al-Akhbar newspaper's local correspondent Assaf Abu Rahal turned up in Addaiseh to cover the story." 4/8. MERC: Al-Akhbar has nothing to do with Hezbollah & Assaf Abu Rahal was a Christian - as, btw, was one of the slain Lebanese soldiers.]... Shortly after 12:15pm, when the Israelis moved a crane close to the border fence to begin removing the tree, a Lebanese army sniper took aim at the the commanders who were supervising the operation from a hill on the Israeli side of the border. 'The sniper was aiming for the most senior IDF officers present, not the person operating the crane where the alleged border infringement took place', the source told the Herald. 'These were not warning shots fired towards the area of the crane. ["The moment the crane's arm crossed the 'technical fence'... Lebanese soldiers opened fire into the air. The Israelis, according to the Lebanese... shot at the Lebanese soldiers." 4/8] Someone took careful aim at the Israeli commanders who were standing several hundred metres away'. One shot hit Colonel Dov Harari in the head, killing him instantly. Another shot caused shrapnel wounds to the chest of a captain, who is in hospital in a serious condition ["And a little time later, an Israeli helicopter - apparently firing from the Israeli side of the border (though that has yet to be confirmed) - fired a rocket at a Lebanese armoured vehicle, killing 3 soldiers and the journalist. Lebanese troops, on orders from Beirut, fired back and killed an Israeli lieutenant." 4/8]... In the clash that followed the sniper's shots, two Lebanese soldiers were killed, and a journalist from the Hezbollah-owned Al Manar television network [MERC: ???] ... Guy Bechor, a senior analyst of Israeli-Arab affairs at the Interdisciplinary Centre at Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, said the entire affair appeared to have been fully planned by the Lebanese army... 'The immediate purpose was to create deterrence with Israel. The Lebanese army has become fed up standing idly by while the IDF operates almost as freely in Lebanese territory as it does in its own territory'." (Lebanese commander ordered sniper attack, 6/8/10) [MERC: Well exactly! Let's here it again: "The Lebanese army has become fed up standing idly by while the IDF operates almost as freely in Lebanese territory as it does in its own territory." ]
PS: "Israeli warplanes have been executing mock intensive air raids in Nabatieh, Iqlim al-Toufah, Marjayoun and Khiam airspace since Friday morning', the [Lebanese] National News Agency said. In addition, the southern towns of Tyre, Hasbya and Bint Jbeil are also experiencing flyovers and dummy attacks." (Israel rattles sabre in south Lebanon, Patrick Galey, Daily Star, 7/8/10)
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Junk Journalism
Where are you when we need you, Ed O'Loughlin? In his feature on Gaza for today's Sydney Morning Herald, All bets are off, Fairfax's Middle East correspondent Jason Koutsoukis reveals a clear inabilty to fill his predecessor's shoes.
Take this thumbnail sketch of Gaza's history, for example: "Gaza first hit the headlines in the time of Samson who, before falling in love with Delilah, apparently destroyed a Philistine temple there in a powerful fit of pique. In the middle ages, Gaza was famous for linen, so fine that it gave its name to the English word gauze. Gaza has fallen to Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Arab warrior Saladin, Napoleon, the Ottomans and Britain. For each conqueror, the coastal strip was a coveted gem in their imperial crowns. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Gaza was occupied by Egypt, but in 1967 Israel conquered the strip in the Six Day War. At first a spoil of victory, it wasn't long before Israel came to regard Gaza as a burden. The Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to give it back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords, but his counterpart, Anwar Sadat, refused it because he regarded Gaza as a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism that had threatened regimes in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. By 2005 Israel's then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, elected on a right-wing platform, decided to uproot all Israeli settlements in Gaza and withdraw, leaving the strip dangling, as it were, between an Egypt that feared Gaza, and an Israel that wished it would go away. Home to 1.5 million Palestinians - nearly a million of them registered by the UN as refugees - Gaza was an orphaned strip 40 kilometres long and 12 kilometres wide."
Just pathetic! If Koutsoukis (and/or his editor) think that that is an adequate backgrounder for a feature on what is possibly the worst act of external armed aggression - and we're only half way there yet - ever perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza, then he has no right masquerading as an investigative journalist. Samson & Delilah, gauze, and an assortment of historical conquerors are in, but the key event in Gaza's modern history, without which we cannot understand the present juncture, is out. True, there's a mention of the "Arab-Israeli war of 1948," and an acknowledgment that most Gazans are "refugees," but that's it. So, what has he left out? This: the vast bulk of Gaza's population are the descendents of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from southern Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948 and caged up there ever since (except for a period of Egyptian rule - 1948-67) under a brutal Israeli military occupation. For 60 years now, these people, part of the Palestinian refugee diaspora, have clung to their internationally-recognised right of return to their homes and lands in Israel (im)proper, a key Palestinian right largely ignored by Arafat and his successors, but still upheld by Hamas. For Koutsoukis, however, a pair of Biblical lovers is more relevant to the matter under discussion than the Great Ethnic Cleansing - or Nakba - of 1948, and its ongoing relevance to the lives of Palestinian refugees in Gaza today.
Needless to say, the link between Gaza 2008 and Palestine 1948 is seldom made in the Zionised corporate media. The overcrowded Gaza Strip is always a given, it just is. The why and wherefore of its refugee population is almost never explored. Except, on rare ocassions, by serious and informed investigative jornalists such as Britain's Robert Fisk: "How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians," he writes, "to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which - in any other conflict - journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza. That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who live in Ashkelon and the fields around it... were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They - or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren - are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80% of whose families once lived in what is today Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of its people don't come from Gaza. But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza - a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin - and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the 5 sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story." (Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony, The Independent, 30/12/08)
In addition to Koutsoukis' first and major failing, he also misrepresents the historical record when he claims that "Israel came to regard Gaza as a burden" and "the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to give it back to Egypt as part of the 1979 [Camp David] peace accords..." In 1977 when Begin became prime minister and announced his intention to negotiate peace treaties with Arab leaders, he was asked by a journalist about the fate of the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. HIs response? "What occupied territories? If you mean Judaea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, they are liberated territories. They are part, an integral part, of the land of Israel." (quoted in Imperial Israel: The History of the Occupation of the West Bank & Gaza, Michael Palumbo, 1990, p 132) At the time, Begin ruled out both the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories and a freeze on settlement construction, a position he maintained during the Reagan administration's push for a settlement freeze in 1982. (See Palumbo, Chapter 5, Camp David) So much for the Israelis wanting to lay their "burden" down!
Then there's the bit about Sadat "refusing [Gaza] because he regarded [it] as a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism that had threatened regimes in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon." Certainly, the Palestinian resistance in Jordan had been attacked and driven out by the Jordanian army(1970-71), and, during the initial phase of the Lebanese civil war (1975-82), had sided with Lebanese national and progressive forces in their bid to break the monopoly on power exercised by right-wing Maronite forces. However, baldly asserting that "regimes in Jordan and Lebanon" were "threatened" by the Palestinians is a gross oversimplification at best and completely false at worst. But there's more: to suggest, as Koutsoukis does, that "Palestinian nationalism" in any way, shape or form "threatened" the Asad regime in Syria is a complete and utter nonsense from a 'journalist' who simply hasn't done his homework.
And speaking of failure to do one's homework, cop a load of this: "Israel's other key concern was to put an end to the use of Qassam rockets, more than 10,000 of which have landed in the farmlands and cities that surround Gaza over the past 6 years, killing about 20 people." Ten thousand rockets? Did Koutsoukis simply pluck this out of the air? According to a 12/07 study by the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence, Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), available at mfa.gov.il, "[a]s of the end of November 2007, there has been a total of 2,383 identified rocket hits in and around the western Negev settlements, with the southern city of Sderot as a priority..."
Something Koutzoukis does get right, however, is how the current hostilities began, an account that runs counter to current USraeli propaganda, which pins the blame squarely on Hamas :"The situation began to deteriorate rapidly on November 4 when Israeli troops entered Gaza to prevent what it claimed was a planned abduction of Israeli soldiers by Hamas using a tunnel it had dug under the security wall. Seven Hamas members were killed prompting immediate retaliation. Over the next 6 weeks Hamas fired more than 300 rockets and mortar shells at Israel, which again sealed its borders. By December 19 - the expiry date of the truce - Hamas, hoping to force Israel into opening the borders, announced it would renew aggression. By Christmas Eve, when Hamas militants fired 70 rockets into Israel, Israel had had enough." Thank God for small mercies.
Take this thumbnail sketch of Gaza's history, for example: "Gaza first hit the headlines in the time of Samson who, before falling in love with Delilah, apparently destroyed a Philistine temple there in a powerful fit of pique. In the middle ages, Gaza was famous for linen, so fine that it gave its name to the English word gauze. Gaza has fallen to Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Arab warrior Saladin, Napoleon, the Ottomans and Britain. For each conqueror, the coastal strip was a coveted gem in their imperial crowns. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Gaza was occupied by Egypt, but in 1967 Israel conquered the strip in the Six Day War. At first a spoil of victory, it wasn't long before Israel came to regard Gaza as a burden. The Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to give it back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords, but his counterpart, Anwar Sadat, refused it because he regarded Gaza as a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism that had threatened regimes in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. By 2005 Israel's then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, elected on a right-wing platform, decided to uproot all Israeli settlements in Gaza and withdraw, leaving the strip dangling, as it were, between an Egypt that feared Gaza, and an Israel that wished it would go away. Home to 1.5 million Palestinians - nearly a million of them registered by the UN as refugees - Gaza was an orphaned strip 40 kilometres long and 12 kilometres wide."
Just pathetic! If Koutsoukis (and/or his editor) think that that is an adequate backgrounder for a feature on what is possibly the worst act of external armed aggression - and we're only half way there yet - ever perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza, then he has no right masquerading as an investigative journalist. Samson & Delilah, gauze, and an assortment of historical conquerors are in, but the key event in Gaza's modern history, without which we cannot understand the present juncture, is out. True, there's a mention of the "Arab-Israeli war of 1948," and an acknowledgment that most Gazans are "refugees," but that's it. So, what has he left out? This: the vast bulk of Gaza's population are the descendents of Palestinians ethnically cleansed from southern Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948 and caged up there ever since (except for a period of Egyptian rule - 1948-67) under a brutal Israeli military occupation. For 60 years now, these people, part of the Palestinian refugee diaspora, have clung to their internationally-recognised right of return to their homes and lands in Israel (im)proper, a key Palestinian right largely ignored by Arafat and his successors, but still upheld by Hamas. For Koutsoukis, however, a pair of Biblical lovers is more relevant to the matter under discussion than the Great Ethnic Cleansing - or Nakba - of 1948, and its ongoing relevance to the lives of Palestinian refugees in Gaza today.
Needless to say, the link between Gaza 2008 and Palestine 1948 is seldom made in the Zionised corporate media. The overcrowded Gaza Strip is always a given, it just is. The why and wherefore of its refugee population is almost never explored. Except, on rare ocassions, by serious and informed investigative jornalists such as Britain's Robert Fisk: "How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians," he writes, "to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which - in any other conflict - journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza. That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who live in Ashkelon and the fields around it... were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They - or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren - are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80% of whose families once lived in what is today Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of its people don't come from Gaza. But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza - a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin - and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the 5 sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story." (Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony, The Independent, 30/12/08)
In addition to Koutsoukis' first and major failing, he also misrepresents the historical record when he claims that "Israel came to regard Gaza as a burden" and "the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin wanted to give it back to Egypt as part of the 1979 [Camp David] peace accords..." In 1977 when Begin became prime minister and announced his intention to negotiate peace treaties with Arab leaders, he was asked by a journalist about the fate of the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. HIs response? "What occupied territories? If you mean Judaea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, they are liberated territories. They are part, an integral part, of the land of Israel." (quoted in Imperial Israel: The History of the Occupation of the West Bank & Gaza, Michael Palumbo, 1990, p 132) At the time, Begin ruled out both the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories and a freeze on settlement construction, a position he maintained during the Reagan administration's push for a settlement freeze in 1982. (See Palumbo, Chapter 5, Camp David) So much for the Israelis wanting to lay their "burden" down!
Then there's the bit about Sadat "refusing [Gaza] because he regarded [it] as a hotbed of Palestinian nationalism that had threatened regimes in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon." Certainly, the Palestinian resistance in Jordan had been attacked and driven out by the Jordanian army(1970-71), and, during the initial phase of the Lebanese civil war (1975-82), had sided with Lebanese national and progressive forces in their bid to break the monopoly on power exercised by right-wing Maronite forces. However, baldly asserting that "regimes in Jordan and Lebanon" were "threatened" by the Palestinians is a gross oversimplification at best and completely false at worst. But there's more: to suggest, as Koutsoukis does, that "Palestinian nationalism" in any way, shape or form "threatened" the Asad regime in Syria is a complete and utter nonsense from a 'journalist' who simply hasn't done his homework.
And speaking of failure to do one's homework, cop a load of this: "Israel's other key concern was to put an end to the use of Qassam rockets, more than 10,000 of which have landed in the farmlands and cities that surround Gaza over the past 6 years, killing about 20 people." Ten thousand rockets? Did Koutsoukis simply pluck this out of the air? According to a 12/07 study by the Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence, Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), available at mfa.gov.il, "[a]s of the end of November 2007, there has been a total of 2,383 identified rocket hits in and around the western Negev settlements, with the southern city of Sderot as a priority..."
Something Koutzoukis does get right, however, is how the current hostilities began, an account that runs counter to current USraeli propaganda, which pins the blame squarely on Hamas :"The situation began to deteriorate rapidly on November 4 when Israeli troops entered Gaza to prevent what it claimed was a planned abduction of Israeli soldiers by Hamas using a tunnel it had dug under the security wall. Seven Hamas members were killed prompting immediate retaliation. Over the next 6 weeks Hamas fired more than 300 rockets and mortar shells at Israel, which again sealed its borders. By December 19 - the expiry date of the truce - Hamas, hoping to force Israel into opening the borders, announced it would renew aggression. By Christmas Eve, when Hamas militants fired 70 rockets into Israel, Israel had had enough." Thank God for small mercies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)