Archive for January, 2009

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How Israel’s Propaganda Machine Works

January 12, 2009
James Zogby

James Zogby

Founder and president of the Arab American Institute

The Huffington Post

Posted January 9, 2009

As in past Mideast conflicts, both the media story line and political commentary here in the U.S. has closely followed Israel’s talking points on the war. This has been an essential component in Israel’s early success and in its ability to prolong fighting without U.S. pushback. Because it recognizes the importance of the propaganda war, Israel fights on this front as vigorously and disproportionately as it engages on the battlefield.

Here’s how they have done it:

1) Define the terms of debate, and you win the debate. Early on, the Israelis work to define the context, the starting point, and the story line that will shape understanding of the war. In this instance, for example, they succeeded by constant repetition, in establishing the notion that the starting point of the conflict was December 19th, the end of the six-month ceasefire (which Israel described as “unilaterally ended by Hamas”). In doing so, they ignored, of course, their own early November violations, and their failure to honor their commitment in the ceasefire to open Gaza’s borders. They also ignored their having reduced Gaza into a dependency, a process which began long before and continued after their withdrawal in 2005. Because they know that most Americans do not closely follow the conflict and are inclined to believe, as the line goes, “what they hear over and over again,” this tactic of preemptive definition and repetition succeeds.

2) Recognize that stereotypes work. Because, for generations, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been defined with positive cultural images of Israel and negative stereotypes of Palestinians, Israel’s propagandists have an advantage here that is easy to exploit. Because the story has long been seen as “Israeli humanity confronting the Palestinian problem,” media coverage of any conflict begins with how “the problem” is affecting the Israeli people. As Golda Meir once put it, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, but we can never forgive them for making us kill their children.” And so, it was not surprising that, despite the disproportionate suffering of the Palestinians, media coverage attempted to “balance” the story, giving an extensive treatment, with photos, of anguished and fearful Israelis and the impact the war was having on them. Early on, when media treatment mattered most, Palestinians were reduced, as always, to mere numbers or objectified as “collateral damage.”

3) Anticipate and count on your opponent’s blunders. Hamas’ stupidity played into Israel’s strategy. From the outset, Israel could count on the fact that Hamas would launch rockets and issue the kind of threats that Israel could then parley into sympathy in the West. Knowing that these would most certainly come, and could be exploited, was an advantage in their propaganda war.

4) Be everywhere, and say the same thing — and make sure your opponents remain as invisible as possible. Israel begins each war with a host of English-speaking spokespersons (many born in the West) available at any time for every media outlet (it’s no accident, for example, that Israel has an “Arab” Consul General in Atlanta – that’s where CNN is). The work of their propaganda operation, which spreads multiple spokespersons in venues across the United States with consistent talking points, guarantees success. At the same time, they are able to deny media access to Gaza, only allowing the Western reporters to operate near the war zone under IDF supervision, guaranteeing Israel the opportunity to shape every aspect of the story while removing the possibility of independent verification of the horror unfolding in Gaza.

5) Give no ground. Since half of the story will be determined by what political leaders say and do, the political apparatus in Washington is also pressed into service, ensuring that White House and Congressional leadership will “toe the line.” Statements issued by Congress, therefore, reflect the talking points and, together, the Israeli spokespersons, the political commentators, and the Congressional statements serve as echoes of one another.

6) Deny, deny, deny. When events and reality break through, contradicting the Israeli-established narrative, creating stories that run counter to the imposed story line, the propaganda machine works overtime to deny, deny, deny (saying quite boldly, “Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?”), and/or concoct a counter-narrative that shifts the blame (“We didn’t do it, they made us”). In this instance, that means asserting that the death of Palestinian civilians is always the fault of someone else, or that reporters or their opponents are staging the photos of grief (as if to say, “Arabs don’t really grieve like we do”).

7) The last refuge…. When all else fails, point to a few examples of outrageous anti-Semitism, generalize them, suggesting that that is what motivates critics. It stings, and may be over-used, but it can silence or put critics on the defensive.

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Pilger: Silence when Israel burns Gaza and the Gazans

January 12, 2009

John Pilger | New Statesman, January 8, 2009

By refusing to condemn Israeli atrocities, intellectuals in the West are complicit in its crimes, argues JOHN PILGER.

“WHEN the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.”

It may appear that the silence on Gaza is broken. The small cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents, and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea can be witnessed on Al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC.

But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemera we call news. He was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it.

Among the Anglo-US intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge – the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist.”

They know the opposite to be true – that Palestine’s right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and that the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel.

They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” of 1947-8 resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Israeli army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing.”

Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon: “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said: ‘Expel them’.”

The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker.

The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapam party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the road with them because such is the imperative of strategy. And this we say … who remember who used this means against our people during the (second world) war … I am appalled.”

Every subsequent “war” that Israel has waged has had the same objective – the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first against Israel.

Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein have undermined this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism.

“It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Pappé on January 2, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them.

“The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern (of genocide).”

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, fall within the international standard of the Genocide Convention.

“Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

In describing a “holocaust-in-the making,” Falk was alluding to the nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland.

For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews, led by Mordechaj Anielewicz, fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew.

Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project.

The F-16 jet fighters, the 250lb “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza having been approved by a congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making “aid,” give Washington de facto control.

‘The unreported news is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.’

It beggars belief that president-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken about Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama has maintained a silence on Palestine that marks his approval, which is to be expected given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of zionists as his secretary of state and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings Think, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on January 20, I trust that someone with the brave heart of Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”

The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now Operation Cast Lead, which is the unfinished Operation Justified Vengeance.

This was launched by prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with George W Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time.

In that same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of new Labour’s enduring complicity in Palestine’s agony.

However, the Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries (because) the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial.” This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians.”

What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, then Israeli chief of staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks.

On November 23 2001, Israeli agents assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud and got their “trigger.” The suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.

Something uncannily similar happened on November 4 last year when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people.

Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger,” a ceasefire sustained by the Hamas government, which had imprisoned its violators, was shattered as a result of the Israeli attacks and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be called Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed.”

On December 23, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Behind this sordid game is the Dagan Plan, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon during his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Now head of the Israeli intelligence organisation Mossad, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has brought about the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, now effectively a concentration camp.

The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mahmoud Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through mostly supine, if intimidated Western media, notably in the US, which says that Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and is to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, since long before its creation.

“We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.”

In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor.

This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the Western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power.”

Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic.

Neither is its proposal of a 10-year truce reported as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition – that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders.

As every annual vote in the UN general assembly demonstrates, most states agree. On January 4, the president of the general assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity.”

When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority, followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and, perhaps, finally into Jordan.

This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote British-based Palestinian exile Karma Nabulsi, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed … Look to the Iraq of today: that is what (Sharon) had in store for us and he has nearly achieved it.”

Dr Dahlia Wasfi is a US writer on Iraq and Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-semitic,” she wrote on December 31.

“But I’m not talking about the World War II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years … Since Arabs are semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-semitic than this.”

She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young US citizen who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer.

“I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.”

Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility.”

Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform.

With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable, invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-semitism.

The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.

Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plead for help?

Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries?”

Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third American Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure that the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 2,500 jammed the auditorium.

Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete. The literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance. False symbolism is all.

As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”

If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised people. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants war criminals impunity and immunity through our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or it gives us the power to speak out.

For the moment, I prefer my own memory of Gaza – of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity,” as Nabulsi put it.

On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No-one had told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and a few of them climbed onto a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, in the belief that the world will not forget them.

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Paul Craig Roberts: America’s Shame

January 12, 2009


By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, January 8, 2009

Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine doesn’t?

This is the question of our time.

For sixty years Israelis have been stealing Palestine from Palestinians. There are maps available on the Internet and in Israeli publications showing the shrinkage over time of what was once Palestine into what Palestine is today–a small number of unconnected ghettos or bantustans.

Palestine became “the occupied territory” from which Palestinians were ejected and Israeli settlements built for “settlers.” Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are full of refugee camps in which Palestinians driven off their lands by Israeli force have been living for decades.

Driving people off their land is strictly illegal under international law, but Israel has been getting away with it for decades.

Gaza is a concentration camp of 1.5 million Palestinians who were driven from their homes and villages and collected in the Gaza Ghetto.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created 60 years ago in
1949 to administer refugee camps for Palestinians driven from their lands by Israel. As of 2002, the registered Palestinian refugee population was 3.9 million.

Caterpillar Tractor makes a special bulldozer for Israel that is designed to knock down Palestinian homes and to uproot their orchards. In 2003 an American protester, Rachel Corrie, stood in front of one of these Caterpillars and was run over and crushed.

Nothing happened. The Israelis can kill whomever they want whenever they want.

They have been doing so for 60 years, and they show no sign of stopping.

Currently they are murdering women and children in the ghetto that they have created for Palestinians in Gaza. The entire world knows this. The Red Cross protests it. But the Israelis brazenly claim that they are killing “Hamas terrorists who are a threat to Israel’s existence.”

The American media knows that this is a lie, but does not say so.

Israel has been able to slowly exterminate a people for sixty years without provoking sufficient outrage to stop it.

The United States, “Christian America,” has been Israel’s greatest enabler in its long-term murder of the Palestinian people. Millions of “evangelical Christians” endorse Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The rest of the world condemns the Israeli military attack on the Gaza Ghetto. Last week the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution requiring a ceasefire and the withdrawal of the Israeli SS from Gaza.

The United States abstained.

While the rest of the world condemns Israel’s inhumanity, the US Congress–I should say the US Knesset–rushed to endorse the Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza.

The US Senate endorsed Israel’s massacre of Palestinians with a vote of 100-0.

The US House of Representatives voted 430-5 to endorse Israel’s massacre of Palestinians.

The resolutions endorsed by 100% of the US Senate and 99% of the House were written by AIPAC, as were the speeches praising Israel for its inhumanity.

The US Congress was proud to show that it is Israel’s puppet even when it comes to murdering women and children.

The President of the United States was proud to block effective action by the UN Security Council by ordering the Secretary of State to abstain.

Be a Proud American. Swagger and strut. Pretend that you are not besmirched by the shame that your government has heaped upon you. Take refuge in your ignorance, fostered by 60 years of Israeli lies, that the murder of Palestinians and the theft of their lands is “Israel’s right of self-defense.”

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Posted in Commentary, Human rights, imperialism, Palestine, Peace Movement, Uncategorized, US policy, Zionist Israel | 1 Comment »

Israel’s partner in war crimes

January 12, 2009

American politicians aren’t reflecting the will of the American people, who aren’t nearly as pro-Israel as their political leaders.

Socialist Worker | January 9, 2009

WITH ISRAEL’S invasion into Gaza killing and injuring thousands, and turning the area into a humanitarian catastrophe, a tide of criticism and denunciation has risen against it around the world.

Columnist: Lance Selfa

Lance Selfa Lance Selfa is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, a socialist analysis of the Democratic Party, and editor of The Struggle for Palestine, a collection of essays by leading solidarity activists. He is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review.

But there are a few places where Israel won’t hear a peep of criticism–on the contrary, it gets words of encouragement and statements of solidarity. Among them are the halls of the U.S. Congress, the Oval Office of the White House, and the offices of the U.S. president-elect.

Compared even to the level of criticism of the government in Israel itself, the one-sidedness of the pro-Israel cheerleading among members of the U.S. political establishment is astounding. Even expressions of concern for the humanitarian crisis facing Gaza are remarkably few among U.S. politicians.

As the respected Middle East expert Juan Cole put it in his Informed Comment blog:

If the U.S. legislators voted on the Gaza operation, they would support Israel except for the same 10 who objected to the war on Lebanon (the 10 are mostly from congressional districts with a lot of Arab-Americans). Israel will suffer no practical sanctions from any government.

President-elect Obama has remained largely silent on Gaza, claiming that because “American has only one president at a time,” he cannot issue statements that might contradict the current lame duck government’s policies.

U.S.-Israel flag pin

But Obama is holding press conferences and giving YouTube addresses that are nothing if not critiques of the current administration’s policies on every other issue. And he was quick to rush out a denunciation of the terror attacks in Mumbai last month.

Behind this seeming reticence to comment on Gaza, we have good evidence that Israel has nothing to fear from an Obama administration.

Last January, Obama issued a letter to UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, urging him to oppose any resolution criticizing Israel’s siege of Gaza. “We have to understand why Israel is forced to do this,” the letter argued. “Israel has the right to respond while seeking to minimize any impact on civilians.”

During his campaign tour of the Middle East and Europe this summer, he visited Sderot, Israel, to express his support for Israelis targeted by rockets from Gaza. His comment at the time: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

In other words, we should have little doubt about what Obama would say if he were regularly issuing statements on Gaza. Although the press forced him to issue a bland statement of concern for civilian casualties in both Gaza and Israel on January 6, he has preferred to remain mum.

Obama’s silence is similar to the Bush administration’s “disengagement” (to use the favored word of foreign policy wonks) from the Israel-Palestine conflict–an assurance that Israel can do whatever it wants without any interference from Washington.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

WHAT EXPLAINS the bipartisan lockstep march behind the Israel Defense Forces?

It certainly isn’t because American politicians are reflecting the will of the American people, who are not nearly as pro-Israel as their political leaders are. Writing for Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald pointed to evidence from a Rasmussen Reports poll that:

strongly bolsters the severe disconnect I documented the other day between (a) American public opinion on U.S. policy towards Israel and (b) the consensus views expressed by America’s political leadership.

Not only does Rasmussen find that Americans generally “are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza Strip” (44-41 percent, with 15 percent undecided), but Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive–by a 24-point margin (31-55 percent). By stark contrast, Republicans, as one would expect (in light of their history of supporting virtually any proposed attack on Arabs and Muslims), overwhelmingly support the Israeli bombing campaign (62-27 percent).

The most popular explanation usually given for the American elite’s pro-Israel bias is that it fears the wrath of the “Israel lobby.”

There is a powerful network of Zionist organizations–led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)–that donates money to pro-Israel candidates and lobbies the U.S. government on behalf of Israel. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about pointing this out. These groups are quite open about their activities, and they aren’t shy about touting their own influence.

But are these organizations and their lobbying efforts the reason why the U.S. supports Israel?

From a socialist point of view, the answer is no. Israel annually receives more than $3 billion in U.S. aid. Egypt runs second at around $2 billion. Yet no one would seriously claim that the aid Egypt receives is the result of an “Egyptian lobby.”

It’s no coincidence that Israel and Egypt are the two top recipients of U.S. aid. Both are important U.S. allies in the region where the lion’s share of the world’s oil is located.

Since the end of the Second World War, the U.S. has tied its “national security” to its access to and control of the flow of oil. That’s why the U.S. has given military and economic aid to prop up “friendly” states in the region–not only Israel, but Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf monarchies, too.

The U.S. puts Israel at the top of the list because its government and population form the only uniformly pro-U.S. state in the region. In countries like Egypt, pro-Western governments rule over restive populations that hate the U.S. government’s support for Israel and for their own oppressive regimes. Even the quisling government of U.S.-occupied Iraq isn’t completely reliable.

In the 1990s, the Bush I and Clinton governments pursued various “peace” initiatives with Israel and the Palestinians–most of them aimed at getting Palestinians to accept their own “bantustans” (the term for the fake Black homelands in South Africa under apartheid) as a means to the end of stability for the U.S. and Israel in the region. Those efforts ran their course, and the Bush II regime, operating under the rubric of its “war on terror,” simply let the Israeli government run amok.

These shifts in U.S. policy had nothing to do with the strength of the Israel lobby. They stemmed from changes inside the U.S. government’s foreign policy establishment. The U.S. government decides how much leeway Israel has, and this leeway defines how successful the “Israel lobby” will be.

As long as Israel remains central to U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, Israel will continue to receive U.S. backing and aid. That’s why Israel’s ace in the hole in Washington isn’t AIPAC, but the Pentagon, the CIA and the military-industrial complex. And as long as the national security establishment remains committed to Israel, elected politicians will provide the political cover that justifies the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that Israel receives.

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Some Israelis Cry Out for Peace

January 12, 2009


By Daan Bauwens |  Inter Press Service

TEL AVIV, Jan 11 (IPS) – Another peace rally Saturday night brought together about a couple of thousand Israelis to demand an immediate end to the ongoing assault in Gaza. The demonstration was held in front of the Hakirya, the central command of the Israeli Defence Forces and the Ministry of Defence in the heart of Tel Aviv.

This was the third peace rally in three weeks. The first was held directly after the first air bombing of Gaza. It was attended by a few hundred protesters. At the second, more than 2,000 people came out on the streets.

“We have a humanistic and political message,” says Yosef Douek of the movement Peace Now which organised the demonstration. ‘Children in Gaza and Sderot want to live in peace and security. There is no use whatsoever to a continuation of these military actions.”

Peace Now was joined by Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom, after the joint Palestinian-Israeli non-governmental organisation Alternative Information Centre made an appeal to make Jan. 10 “a huge global day of mobilisation against the Israeli war in Gaza.”

“We are doing what we can to influence public opinion although I believe the effect of our actions is very limited,” says Yosef Douek. “Because we live in a country where media aren’t interested in breaking the political consensus. At the same time, the political approach to our message is non-existent. Everybody feels a patriotic urge to support the war, at least at this stage. I strongly believe this will change very soon. Public support will collapse, just as it did in previous wars.”

“This war started with a clear feeling of triumph,” says Ido Gideon, member of Meretz, a Jewish leftist party that supported the Israel Defensive Forces operation when it first began. “People in Israel thought that it would be a clean and fast operation to prevent Hamas from firing any more rockets at us. There was a clear feeling of vengeance amongst Israelis for what had happened that needed a response. Now things are getting out of hand, and vengeance has made place for disillusionment.”

But the group is finding it difficult to gain support both within Israel and internationally. “Whenever there is an Israeli military action, all leftists around the globe become anti-Israeli,” says Gideon. “All anti-war protests around the world are mingled with an anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish sentiment that is clearly aimed at the Jews’ right to live in this country. That makes it hard to be a leftist in Israel. Because in the first place, it isolates the whole of Israel, in the second place, it isolates the forces that are trying to change it.

“I am making the same battle as them,” Ido adds, “with one big difference: I’m making the battle inside of Israel. And whenever I go outside of Israel, I have to make another battle: the one of defending my right to be a Jew and live in this country.”

“The difference now with previous wars is the disproportionate use of violence, which has led to enormous anger in the rest of the world,” says Ronen Eidelman, an internationally known Jewish artist, writer and activist. He is engaged with linking art, culture and grassroots politics as editor of the online art and culture magazine Maarav, and is setting up several initiatives against the war in Gaza. “Last week we published a booklet with works of poets and artists against the war, which we distributed at the demonstrations. For some people, poetry is something they connect more to than an article in the newspaper.”

Last Tuesday, as President Shimon Peres attended the dedication of Israel’s national poet Bialik’s house in Tel Aviv, a group of poets recited Bialik’s poem ‘On the Slaughter’, and asked the attendees how they are able to “sip champagne while hundreds are being murdered in Gaza.”

“These initiatives are part of a much broader anti-war movement,” says Ronen Eidelman. “The cultural initiatives are only one thing out of a huge Israeli peace movement which is much larger than newspapers tend to say.”

“It is time Israelis and Palestinians start talking about pain instead of guilt,” says Ido Gideon. “Both sides have to realise that the holocaust is as much a part of the Israeli national psyche as is the Nakba for the Palestinians.” Nakba refers to the mass deportation of a million Palestinians from their cities and villages, massacres of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundreds of Palestinian villages when the state of Israel was founded in 1948.

“We have to find a way to make both stories live together in the same land, whether or not you hold one of both to be more true than the other,” says Gideon.

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Gazans fear Israel using phosphorus

January 12, 2009
Al Jazeera, January 12, 2008

Human Rights Watch said it was clear Israel had fired shells containing white phopshorus[GALLO/GETTY]

Doctors in Gaza City have told Al Jazeera that people have been admitted suffering burns consistent with the use of the controversial chemical white phosphorus.

Human rights campaigners say that Israeli forces have used the munition, which can burn away human flesh to the bone, over Gaza City and Jabaliya in recent days.

Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, said: “Doctors here say they are seeing unprecedented levels of deep burns.

“They cannot categorically say that white phosphorus is being used, they are saying that the munitions being dropped are unprecendented.”

Residents in densely-packed Jabaliya have described Israeli forces exploding shells that drop scores of burning fragments and spread suffocating smoke.

“Its the first time we see this type of weapon, it must be new and its seems like its phosphorous,” one resident told Al Jazeera.

“Its suffocating and has a deadly poisonous smell that I am sure will cause a lot of sickness and disease on all of the civilians here,” he said.

Another witness said she saw “… a bright flash and then all of these sparks fell on our area … landing all around us and in our homes. Our mattresses caught on fire”.

Law ‘violated’

The use of the munition in densely-populated areas violates the requirement under international humanitarian law for all feasible precautions to be taken to avoid civilian injury and loss of life, Human Rights Watch said.

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International law permits the use of white phosphorus in order to cover troop movements and prevent enemies from using certain guided weapons.

Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst at the human rights group told Al Jazeera on Saturday that he had watched Israeli ground forces using white phosphorus.

“Clearly it is [white phosphorus], we can tell by the explosions and the tendrils that go down [and] the fires that were burning,” he said.

“Today there were massive attacks in Jabaliya when we were there. We saw that there were numerous fires once the white phosphorus had gone in.

“We went by Israeli artillery units that had white phosphorus rounds with the fuses in them.”

Major Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman, told Al Jazeera that the Israeli army was “using munitions with accordance to international law”.

“The policy of the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] is to not specify the types of munition, we have not done it before and we will not do it now.”

Mark Regev, the Israeli government spokesman, said he was unable to confirm or deny whether the military was using the chemical, but that Israel did not use munitions that were banned under international law.

“I don’t have the knowledge of the detail of what ammunition we are using. I can only know for a fact that Israel uses no ammunition that is outlawed under conventions and that Nato forces would not use in a similar combat situation,” he told Al Jazeera.

Israel used white phosphorus during its 34-day war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement in 2006, while the United States used it during the controversial siege of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004.

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Enough. It’s time for a boycott of Israel

January 12, 2009

The best way to end the bloody occupation is to target Israel with the kind of movement that ended apartheid in South Africa

It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause – even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.”

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can’t go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren’t good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

Punitive measures will alienate rather than persuade Israelis.

The world has tried what used to be called “constructive engagement”. It has failed utterly. Since 2006 Israel has been steadily escalating its criminality: expanding settlements, launching an outrageous war against Lebanon, and imposing collective punishment on Gaza through the brutal blockade. Despite this escalation, Israel has not faced punitive measures – quite the opposite. The weapons and $3bn in annual aid the US sends Israel are only the beginning. Throughout this key period, Israel has enjoyed a dramatic improvement in its diplomatic, cultural and trade relations with a variety of other allies. For instance, in 2007 Israel became the first country outside Latin America to sign a free-trade deal with the Mercosur bloc. In the first nine months of 2008, Israeli exports to Canada went up 45%. A new deal with the EU is set to double Israel’s exports of processed food. And in December European ministers “upgraded” the EU-Israel association agreement, a reward long sought by Jerusalem.

It is in this context that Israeli leaders started their latest war: confident they would face no meaningful costs. It is remarkable that over seven days of wartime trading, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s flagship index actually went up 10.7%. When carrots don’t work, sticks are needed.

Israel is not South Africa.

Of course it isn’t. The relevance of the South African model is that it proves BDS tactics can be effective when weaker measures (protests, petitions, backroom lobbying) fail. And there are deeply distressing echoes of apartheid in the occupied territories: the colour-coded IDs and travel permits, the bulldozed homes and forced displacement, the settler-only roads. Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, said the architecture of segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was “infinitely worse than apartheid”. That was in 2007, before Israel began its full-scale war against the open-air prison that is Gaza.

Why single out Israel when the US, Britain and other western countries do the same things in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Boycott is not a dogma; it is a tactic. The reason the strategy should be tried is practical: in a country so small and trade-dependent, it could actually work.

Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less.

This one I’ll answer with a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus’s work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

Our modest publishing plan required dozens of phone calls, emails and instant messages, stretching between Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Paris, Toronto and Gaza City. My point is this: as soon as you start a boycott strategy, dialogue grows dramatically. The argument that boycotts will cut us off from one another is particularly specious given the array of cheap information technologies at our fingertips. We are drowning in ways to rant at each other across national boundaries. No boycott can stop us.

Just about now, many a proud Zionist is gearing up for major point-scoring: don’t I know that many of these very hi-tech toys come from Israeli research parks, world leaders in infotech? True enough, but not all of them. Several days into Israel’s Gaza assault, Richard Ramsey, managing director of a British telecom specialising in voice-over-internet services, sent an email to the Israeli tech firm MobileMax: “As a result of the Israeli government action in the last few days we will no longer be in a position to consider doing business with yourself or any other Israeli company.”

Ramsey says his decision wasn’t political; he just didn’t want to lose customers. “We can’t afford to lose any of our clients,” he explains, “so it was purely commercially defensive.”

It was this kind of cold business calculation that led many companies to pull out of South Africa two decades ago. And it’s precisely the kind of calculation that is our most realistic hope of bringing justice, so long denied, to Palestine.

A version of this column was published in the Nation (thenation.com)

naomiklein.org

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Ahmadinejad, Chavez Call for World Summit on Gaza

January 11, 2009
Axis of Logic, January 11, 2009
By Fars News Agency – Teheran		 Email this article Printer friendly page

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez called for organizing a global summit to find a resolution to end Gaza catastrophe.
During their phone talk, the two presidents condemned Israel’s slaughter of civilians in Gaza and stressed Palestine’s nation will overcome Zionists through resistance and perseverance.
The two presidents then emphasized leaders of different countries must hold a summit to find a way that ends the current situation in Gaza, the Iranian students news agency reported.
Iran’s President then appreciated Chavez for his revolutionary stances towards Israel and supporting Gazans and asserted through any possible way the Zionists must be prevented from continuing offensives against Gaza Strip.
Venezuelan President expelled Israeli ambassador as he put it in a “gesture of dignity” to show condemnation to Israeli massive offensives against Gaza.
On December 27 Israel launched military operation Cast Lead on Gaza Strip already crippled by a tight economic blockade. Palestinians death toll has passed 800 people and the number of injured reaches 3310.
Israel has acknowledged it will continue the operation despite UN Security Council resolution 1860 which has urged Tel Aviv to accept an immediate ceasefire.
Meantime, Venezuela expelled Israeli ambassador to Caracas in reaction to the massacre of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Hundreds of Basiji students here on Thursday gathered outside Venezuelan Embassy in Tehran to thank Venezuelan government’s expulsion of Zionist regime’s envoy.
The Basijis offered wreath of flower to thank Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez government for expulsion of the diplomat from its territory.
They chanted “Hero Hugo Chavez, the supporter of the oppressed,”
“Oh revolutionary Chavez, thank you, thank you”,
“Long live freedom lover Chavez” and
“Compromising Arabs shame on you”.
Some of the demonstrators too asked Arab states to take lessons from Venezuelan government that expelled the Israeli ambassador.
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8710211224

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A socialist answer to the Gaza crisis

January 11, 2009
WSWS, 10 January 2009

The following statement [PDF] is being distributed at international demonstrations being held this weekend against the Israeli war in Gaza.

The criminal character of the Israeli blitzkrieg against Gaza is becoming clearer day by day. According to the United Nations, nearly 800 men, women and children have been killed so far by the Israeli military and over 3,200 people have been wounded. Universities, schools, houses, bridges and drainage systems have been destroyed by huge 500-pound bombs. The extent of the humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip defies description.

Israel is continuing to intensify the war. On Thursday, the United Nations stopped vital supplies of food for the population of Gaza after its workers were deliberately targeted by the Israeli army.

All over the world people are reacting with a sense of shock and anger to the slaughter of the defenseless Palestinian population by the modern Israeli military machine. International protests are increasing, as are the numbers of people taking part. Numerous demonstrations are planned for today with rallies and protests taking place in the US as well as numerous European cities, including Paris, London and Berlin.

How can the Israeli terror be halted? How can the future of the long-suffering Palestinian people be assured?

The organizers of today’s demonstrations have no answer to offer. Their main response is to appeal to Western governments and the United Nations to intervene and exert pressure on Israel. This invariably leads to a dead end. In reality, only a socialist offensive on the part of the international working class can bring peace to the Middle East and secure a viable future for its people—Palestinian, Israeli and Arab.

The genocidal offensive launched by the Israeli government is inseparably connected to the crisis of the capitalist world economy. After decades of unrestrained enrichment, the ruling classes all over the world have nothing to offer the working masses except poverty, unemployment, exploitation, repression and war.

Israel demonstrates this development in microcosm. Israeli society is wrought by profound social divisions. Its government is thoroughly embroiled in corruption. One of the aims of the onslaught on the Gaza Strip is, in the middle of an election campaign, to divert attention from the seething social tensions inside Israel itself.

Zionism has proved to be a trap for the Jewish people. Socialists have always warned that the Jewish question cannot be solved by setting up a capitalist national state on a religious basis. The overcoming of anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews is inseparably bound up with the abolition of capitalist class society and the fate of the international working class. The Holocaust was made possible only by the prior destruction of the German workers’ movement by the Nazis.

With its terrorizing of the Palestinians, the Israeli state has lost any moral legitimacy. This is reflected inside Israel itself, where political life is increasingly dominated by religious zealots and right-wing fanatics who intimidate the Israeli population. It is a tragic irony that the closest parallel to the Israeli onslaught on the encircled population of Gaza is the murderous clearing of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis.

Israel can conduct its war only because it has the unconditional support of the US and the complicity of the European and Arab bourgeoisies.

The US pumps $3 billion annually into the Israeli military, supplying it with the most modern weaponry. Not only President Bush and the Republicans, but the Democrats in the Senate as well have unequivocally backed Israel. Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, has remained silent—which amounts to tacit agreement.

The European ruling elites are playing a more disguised but equally perfidious role. Not one of them has condemned the Israeli aggression. Instead, they have justified the Israeli aggression as a legitimate act of self-defense and declared Hamas to be responsible for the suffering of the Palestinians. According to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, responsibility lies “clearly and exclusively” with Hamas.

The Europeans, however, are concerned about the possible consequences of the reckless actions of Israel and the US. They are therefore demanding a cease-fire. They fear the war will destabilize the Arab bourgeois regimes and undermine their own influence in the region. They also fear an increase in tensions within their own countries, which, especially in the case of France, are home to millions of immigrants from North Africa and Arab countries.

While Israel continues to intensify its terror against the Palestinians, Europe, led by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, is pushing for a cease-fire on terms acceptable to Israel and the US.

Gaza is to be transformed from a prison into a high-security ghetto. The small strip of borderland between Gaza and Egypt—the only one not controlled by Israel—is to be hermetically sealed and supervised by an international security force. The authoritarian Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak and the US-sponsored Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas will be given the task of policing Gaza. Israel will thereby be freed of any responsibility for feeding Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants, and Mubarak will take over as the prison warden.

Mubarak is as yet hesitating, afraid of the domestic repercussions of such a step. But if the bribe is high enough, he will agree. His government is largely dependent on international financial assistance.

Mubarak played an important role in the preparation of the war. He shares the Israeli goal of destroying Hamas, which he fears because of its links to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Two days before Israel launched the war, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni paid a visit to Cairo to inform Mubarak of Israel’s plans. When the war started, Egypt made sure its border with Gaza remained closed, thereby blocking the only possible escape route for the encircled Palestinians.

While it is necessary to defend Hamas against the assassination of its leaders and the vilification of its supporters as “terrorists” by those inflicting state terror against a civilian population, this movement has no perspective for confronting and defeating the conspiracy between the US, Israel and the Arab bourgeois regimes. As an Islamic organization, it rejects the class struggle. Rather than turn to the Arab, Israeli and international working class for support, it is attempting to strike a deal with the Arab regimes and the imperialist powers. This is of a piece with its perspective of increasing pressure on Israel by firing rockets at Israeli villages.

Hamas is heavily reliant on Syria, which will have no problem dropping its support for Hamas if Israel pays the appropriate price. It is to this end that Sarkozy and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan (a former Islamist) are intervening. They both maintain close contacts with Israel and Syria, and are pressuring Syria either to force Hamas to end its resistance, or to abandon the organization altogether.

The fate of the population of Gaza is inseparably bound up with the international working class. The Palestinian people cannot expect any support from the United Nations, Arab regimes or European governments, which have betrayed them time and time again and share responsibility for their plight.

The international economic crisis will inevitably provoke explosive class struggles—in the Middle East, Europe and the US. These will provide the basis for a combined offensive by the international working class. The precondition for such a struggle is a break with all those parties and organizations that subordinate the working class to the national interests of the bourgeoisie. An independent socialist perspective is required.

That is not the orientation that dominates today’s demonstrations. Instead, many organizations that call themselves “left” or even “anti-capitalist” are trying to divert the protests behind their respective governments.

In Germany, the position taken by the Left Party is no different from that of the Merkel government. Leaders of the Left Party such as Gregor Gysi hold Hamas responsible for the outbreak of the war. Another Left Party leader, Norman Paech, demands the sending of UN troops to block the supply of weapons to Gaza. Others, like Wolfgang Gehrcke, hail the initiatives of French President Sarkozy. Monika Knoche calls upon the German government to support “the initiative of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.”

In France, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) appeals to the “International Community,” i.e., the imperialist governments organized in the United Nations. On its web site, the “New Anti-Capitalist Party” being formed by the LCR prominently published an appeal by the Israeli peace activist Michel Warschawski, who demanded “an international intervention now” and called for “pressure to be exerted on Western governments” to send international troops.

At a time when growing numbers of workers and youth are coming into conflict with their own governments and the capitalist system, such organizations are seeking to divert the opposition to imperialism into support for the respective bourgeois regimes and their policies.

In the US, the organizers of the demonstrations subordinate them to the Democratic Party. They address appeals to the incoming president, Barack Obama, who has long since made clear that he will continue in all essentials the foreign policy of George W. Bush.

The World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International call upon all participants in the demonstrations to reject this orientation. The events in Gaza urgently raise the necessity of uniting the Jewish and Arab working class in the struggle for a Socialist Federation of the Middle East. This perspective is inseparably bound up with the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism all over the world.

The World Socialist Web Site editorial board

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Israel Rejected Hamas Ceasefire Offer in December

January 11, 2009

By Gareth Porter | Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (IPS) – Contrary to Israel’s argument that it was forced to launch its air and ground offensive against Gaza in order to stop the firing of rockets into its territory, Hamas proposed in mid-December to return to the original Hamas-Israel ceasefire arrangement, according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the proposal.

The proposal to renew the ceasefire was presented by a high-level Hamas delegation to Egyptian Minister of Intelligence Omar Suleiman at a meeting in Cairo Dec. 14. The delegation, said to have included Moussa Abu Marzouk, the second-ranking official in the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, told Suleiman that Hamas was prepared to stop all rocket attacks against Israel if the Israelis would open up the Gaza border crossings and pledge not to launch attacks in Gaza.

The Hamas officials insisted that Israel not be allowed to close or reduce commercial traffic through border crossings for political purposes, as it had done during the six-month lull, according to the source. They asked Suleiman, who had served as mediator between Israel and Hamas in negotiating the original six-month Gaza ceasefire last spring, to “put pressure” on Israel to take that the ceasefire proposal seriously.

Suleiman said he could not pressure Israel but could only make the suggestion to Israeli officials. It could not be learned, however, whether Israel explicitly rejected the Hamas proposal or simply refused to respond to Egypt.

The readiness of Hamas to return to the ceasefire conditionally in mid-December was confirmed by Dr. Robert Pastor, a professor at American University and senior adviser to the Carter Centre, who met with Khaled Meshal, chairman of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus on Dec. 14, along with former President Jimmy Carter. Pastor told IPS that Meshal indicated Hamas was willing to go back to the ceasefire that had been in effect up to early November “if there was a sign that Israel would lift the siege on Gaza”.

Pastor said he passed Meshal’s statement on to a “senior official” in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) the day after the meeting with Meshal. According to Pastor, the Israeli official said he would get back to him, but did not.

“There was an alternative to the military approach to stopping the rockets,” said Pastor. He added that Israel is unlikely to have an effective ceasefire in Gaza unless it agrees to lift the siege.

The Israeli Embassy in Washington declined to comment Thursday on whether there had been any discussion of a ceasefire proposal from Hamas in mid-December that would have stopped the rocket firing.

Abu Omar, a spokesman for Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Syria, told CBS news Wednesday that Hamas could only accept the ceasefire plan now being proposed by France and Egypt, which guarantees an end to Israel’s blockade of Gaza as soon as hostilities on both sides were halted. Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said Israel would only support the proposal if it also included measures to prevent Hamas from re-arming.

The interest of Hamas in a ceasefire agreement that would actually open the border crossings was acknowledged at a Dec. 21 Israeli cabinet meeting — five days before the beginning of the Israeli military offensive — by Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet. “Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce,” Diskin was quoted by Y-net News agency as saying.

Israel’s rejection of the Hamas December proposal reflected its preference for maintaining Israel’s primary leverage over Hamas and the Palestinian population of Gaza — its ability to choke off food and goods required for the viability of its economy — even at the cost of continued Palestinian rocket attacks.

The ceasefire agreement that went into effect Jun. 19, 2008 required that Israel lift the virtual siege of Gaza which Israel had imposed after the June 2007 Hamas takeover. Although the terms of the agreement were not made public at the time, they were included in a report published this week by the International Crisis Group (ICG), which obtained a copy of the understanding last June.

In addition to a halt in all military actions by both sides, the agreement called on Israel to increase the level of goods entering Gaza by 30 percent over the pre-lull period within 72 hours and to open all border crossings and “allow the transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza” within 13 days after the beginning of the ceasefire.

Nevertheless, Israeli officials freely acknowledged in interviews with ICG last June that they had no intention of opening the border crossings fully, even though they anticipated that this would be the source of serious conflict with Hamas.

The Israelis opened the access points only partially, and in late July Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni declared that the border crossings should remain closed until Hamas agreed to the release of Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier abducted by Hamas in June 2006. The Hamas representative in Lebanon, Usam Hamdan, told the ICG in late December that the flow of goods and fuel into Gaza had been only 15 percent of its basic needs.

Despite Israel’s refusal to end the siege, Hamas brought rocket and mortar fire from Gaza to a virtual halt last summer and fall, as revealed by a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) in Tel Aviv last month. ITIC is part of the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Centre (IICC), an NGO which is close to the Israeli intelligence community.

In the first days after the ceasefire took effect, Islamic Jihad fired nine rockets and a few mortar rounds in retaliation for Israeli assassinations of their members in the West Bank. In August another eight rockets were fired by various groups, according to IDF data cited in the report. But it shows that only one rocket was launched from Gaza in September and one in October.

The report recalls that Hamas “tried to enforce the terms of the arrangement” on other Palestinian groups, taking “a number of steps against networks which violated the arrangement,” including short-term detention and confiscating their weapons. It even found that Hamas had sought support in Gazan public opinion for its policy of maintaining the ceasefire.

On Nov. 4 — just when the ceasefire was most effective — the IDF carried out an attack against a house in Gaza in which six members of Hamas’s military wing were killed, including two commanders, and several more were wounded. The IDF explanation for the operation was that it had received intelligence that a tunnel was being dug near the Israeli security fence for the purpose of abducing Israeli soldiers.

Hamas officials asserted, however, that the tunnel was being dug for defensive purposes, not to capture IDF personnel, according to Pastor, and one IDF official confirmed that fact to him.

After that Israeli attack, the ceasefire completely fell apart, as Hamas began openly firing rockets into Israel, the IDF continued to carry out military operations inside Gaza, and the border crossings were “closed most of the time”, according to the ITIC account.

Israel cited the firing of 190 rockets over six weeks as the justification for its massive attack on Gaza.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

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