Global Research, February 13, 2009
The Irish Times – 2009-01-24
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Evidence is mounting that the Israeli defence forces used the Gaza assault as a testing ground for new, horrific weapons that have confounded doctors’ attempts to save the wounded.
THERE WERE MANY ways to die during the Israeli offensive on Gaza.
From their hospital beds at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, Atallah Saad, 13, and Yussef Salem, 17, told me how “zananas” – remotely piloted drones that fire missiles – wounded them and killed Atallah’s mother and pregnant sister-in-law, and two of Yussef’s school friends. The drones were given the nickname because they make a loud z-z-z-z-z sound. But the most shocking thing about them is that an Israeli operator watches his target – in these cases, all civilians – through a surveillance camera before launching the missile. Death by remote control.
White phosphorous was another, much publicised means of death. Each M82581 artillery shell, manufactured by General Dynamics in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, bears the initials PB. And each of the 155mm shells contains 116 felt wafers soaked in phosphorus, which ignites on contact with oxygen. The phosphorous makes the white jellyfish-shaped clouds seen on television during the December 27th-January 17th Israeli offensive. It provides cover for advancing troops, but it also burns houses and people. If one of the felt pads lands on your skin, it burns until all the fuel is consumed, creating deep, wide, chemical burns, often to the bone.
Dr Nafiz Abu Shabaan pulls a plastic bag from under his desk. It is filled with white phosphorous, buried in sand. The brown pieces look like dog dirt, and re-ignite if broken open. Mahmoud al Jamal, 18, sits in the doctor’s office, his right ear congealed, his fingers and part of his chest eaten away by white phosphorous. The unsightly wounds make him look like a leper.
Al Jamal was walking at dawn when he saw the white jellyfish in the sky. “Everything was set on fire around me. I felt my body burning. I fell down and I asked the man lying next to me to help me, but he was dead. Then I lost consciousness.” Al Jamal’s brother later told him how smoke poured from his body in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
The Israeli’s use of white phosphorous is amply documented. Israel says it is legal, but human-rights groups say its use in civilian areas might constitute a war crime. Dr Abu Shabaan is more concerned by evidence of new, mysterious weapons and appeals for an impartial international investigation into Israel’s use of new weapons.
“We’ve seen many, many cases of amputation – like a cauterised wound, with no bleeding,” he recounts.
“Some have minor chest injuries, but the X-rays show nothing and they die suddenly, without explanation.”
Palestinian and foreign doctors who’ have treated the war-wounded at Shifa suspect the injuries may be caused by Dense Inert Metal Explosive, also known as Focus Lethality Munition, a weapon invented through Israeli-American cooperation.
“We are guinea pigs to the Americans and Israelis,” says Dr Abu Shabaan. “The Americans give the Israelis new weapons, and they try them out on us.”
“They are definitely testing weapons on us,” says Dr Sobhi Skaik, a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and the head of the surgery department at Shifa. “The amount of damage done by these weapons is not commensurate to the wounds. We found computer chips, magnetic pieces and transistors in wounds. Sometimes there are only minute pin-point punctures to the abdomen and chest, but you see huge damage to internal organs. One patient had his liver burned black, as if it had been grilled. We think there must be something embedded in the human body that is releasing poison and killing.”
YET FOR ALL the high-tech and Frankenstein weaponry, perhaps Israel’s most vicious arm against the Palestinians has been “al-hissar”, the siege, imposed on the Gaza Strip 19 months ago when Hamas, after winning a democratic election that the world refused to recognise, seized power from the Fatah Palestinian Authority.
The world turned a blind eye as Gazans languished in the world’s biggest prison, unable to travel, import, export or interact with anyone or anything beyond their borders. And the world largely ignored the rockets Hamas fired in anger and frustration from within the siege.
As a result of this dual negligence the conflict exploded, killing 13 Israelis and 1,300 Palestinians.
The siege was one reason casualties were so high in the three-week war, says Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch. With the Israeli and Egyptian borders closed, “It wasn’t possible for Gazans to escape. The only way to get out was on a stretcher.”
For 19 months, Gaza has endured shortages of fuel, food, medicine and building materials. The Palestinians suffer the additional humiliation of using their tormentors’ currency, but two months ago the Israeli government cut the supply of shekels, creating a severe cash shortage. Fayad Salam, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, was forced to plea with the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.
There were long queues at ATMs in Gaza City this week, but no matter how much they have in salary or savings, cash is rationed and Palestinians can withdraw only 1,000 Israeli shekels per month. “If the Israelis could deprive us of air, they would do it,” says a Palestinian doctor.
The siege of Gaza lies at the heart of the conflict. “If the Israelis want the war to end, they must open all the borders and end the siege,” says Hamas government spokesman Tahir al-Nounou. “Because the siege is war; the siege is killing our people.”
The only lifeline for Gaza are some 1,300 tunnels beneath the Gaza-Egyptian border. It costs $10,000 (€7,800) to dig a tunnel. The best tunnels are bored with sophisticated machines that compress earthen walls so no give-away sand appears outside. Some have railway tracks and electricity, and the tunnels are a lucrative business for Gazans and Egyptians. Because Hamas is believed to import weapons through the tunnels, Israel carpet-bombed them during the offensive. Yet only an estimated 400 were destroyed, and by mid-week the tunnels were again open. Huge plastic cubes in metal frames, holding petrol, appeared on the pavements of Gaza City.
But the return to a semblance of normality cannot efface the three-week nightmare. Whole families were wiped out. Abu Mohamed Balousha, who lost five daughters, and the Samounis of Zeitoun, where a four-year-old boy was the only survivor in a family of 30, have become causes célèbres.
Everyone has a worst memory. For ambulance driver Hathem Saleh, it was desperate telephone calls from the wounded. “When you have been talking to him on the phone and you cannot reach him because the Israeli tank will hit you – it happened to me many times . . . I could hear cries and the Israelis were shooting at us.”
Dr Mahmoud al Khozendar, a chest physician, tells of a colleague whose Russian wife was cut in half when an Israeli missile hit their home. It also killed their six-month-old child. “He took the two parts of his wife and put her on the bed with the baby. He escaped with a wounded son and daughter, and asked the Red Crescent to go back for the bodies.”
At Shifa, al Khozendar had a room full of limbs he could not match with bodies, and one body with two heads. “Most of the bodies were buried without names,” he says.
THERE WERE MANY ways to die during the Israeli offensive on Gaza. Perhaps the greatest number killed were crushed to death when the Israelis fired heavy tank artillery at their houses. Halima Radwan, 60, seemed particularly symbolic to me. Radwan was a young woman when she and her family fled from Israel in the 1967 war. She spent her life as a wandering Palestinian, moving to Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt. In 1996, in the glory days when Gaza had an airport and Palestinians carried passports, she and her husband Ahmad, a PLO official, decided to move back to “Palestine”. They built a five-bedroom villa in the Abed Rabbo district of Gaza. A month before the offensive, they paid off their debts and celebrated.
Maher Radwan, 36, is Halima and Ahmad’s only son and a mechanical engineer with the Palestinian Authority. He, his wife and children lived with his parents. “Before the ground offensive started, I decided to take my wife and children further from the border,” Maher recounts in front of the ruined villa. “I begged my parents to come with us, but they said ‘No, we are old. The Israelis won’t harm us’.”
On January 6th, an Israeli tank fired a shell at the Radwans’ house. Ahmad was wounded in the head and walked out with a white flag. He begged the Israelis to allow the Red Crescent to rescue his wife Halima, who was buried alive in her kitchen. The Israelis said no. Halima lived for four days under the debris of her house, which the Israelis then dynamited.
“They knew she was there and they saw her, because they searched the house before they destroyed it,” says Maher.
As soon as the ceasefire took effect last Sunday, he went with friends and relatives to dig his mother out. “I had the tiniest hope she might still be alive.” But Halima’s legs, shoulder and head had been crushed by concrete.
Broken porcelain, a framed verse from the Koran and a piece of plaster with Hebrew writing by the Israeli soldiers are scattered in the ruins of the Radwan family home. The pigeons they raised have returned to roost on the broken roof. Maher Radwan’s neighbours say there can be no peace with the Israelis who did this. But Maher is more sad than angry. Peace might still be possible, he says, “if only there were wise Israeli people”.
Last week, two British High Court judges 
Darwin’s revolutionary ideas
February 13, 2009February 12 is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. Phil Gasper explains the significance of his ideas, and why they still spark controversy today.
Socialist Worker, February 12, 2009 | Issue 690
CHARLES DARWIN’S ideas revolutionized biology in the 19th century, but they also had a profound and lasting impact far outside narrow scientific circles, challenging religious dogmas and affecting almost every field of human knowledge.
Yet Darwin himself was a reluctant revolutionary–a man who shunned the limelight, hated controversy and became physically ill worrying that his ideas would shock Victorian England.
Darwin was a child of the rising liberal bourgeoisie. His paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a prominent doctor and freethinker who wrote a speculative work on biological evolution in the 1790s. His mother was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the famous pottery.
Darwin grew up in Shropshire in England, and later attended Edinburgh University to study medicine, but soon discovered he did not have the stomach for it. He transferred to Cambridge with ideas of becoming a country parson, but instead, the botanist John Stevens Henslow ignited his interest in science.
In 1831, Henslow arranged for Darwin to join a surveying voyage on HMS Beagle as personal companion to the ship’s captain, Robert FitzRoy. The voyage lasted nearly five years and was the turning point in Darwin’s life.
A collection of Darwin’s writings can be found in The Darwin Reader, edited by Mark Ridley. Ridley is also the author of How to Read Darwin, a short and clear introduction. Darwin’s complete works are now available online.
The best biography of Darwin is Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. Desmond and Moore have also just published Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.
For those interested in the debate around creationism and “intelligent design,” Philip Kitcher’s Living With Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith is a good introduction. The debate is put into a broader historical context in Critique of Intelligent Design: Materialism versus Creationism From Antiquity to the Present by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York.
Finally, Ever Since Darwin, a collection of essays by the late Stephen Jay Gould, explores the continuing relevance of Darwin’s ideas and criticizes their misappropriation by biological determinists of various stripes.
The Beagle took him to South America, the Galapagos Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and southern Africa, before returning to England in 1836. Darwin made detailed geological, botanical and zoological observations and accumulated a large collection of specimens. Back in England, he gained respect for his work as a geologist, including proposing a novel theory for the origin of coral reefs.
Much more radically, however, by the time of his return, Darwin had come to privately reject orthodox accounts of the origin of biological species, which viewed them as having been created in pretty much their present forms.
His observations of the similarities between living and fossil mammals, and between the distinct species of plants and animals on the Galapagos Islands and their counterparts on the South American mainland, persuaded him that biological evolution had taken place, even though he was not yet sure how.
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WITHIN A few years, Darwin had elaborated his entire theory of evolution. The crucial idea is that evolution is the result of natural selection–organisms that are better adapted to their environments are more likely to survive and reproduce, thus passing on their advantageous traits to the next generation.
Although Darwin formulated his theory as early as 1837, it was to be more than 20 years before he finally made it public.
The main reason for this delay was his nervousness about the materialist implications of his views and the challenge they posed to the dogmas of orthodox religion, regarded by the upper classes as a bulwark of the status quo during a period of social unrest in early Victorian Britain.
In Darwin’s account, evolutionary change was largely the result of the random, ultimately purposeless process of natural selection. This suggests a thoroughly materialist picture of the world that banishes vital forces and preordained purposes from nature, and which implies that mental phenomena emerge when matter is arranged in complex ways.
Such ideas undermine not only traditional religious views of divine creation, but also more sophisticated versions of theism, which claim that God works through evolution.
“Love of the deity effect of organization [of the brain], oh you materialist!” he wrote privately in the late 1830s. “Why is thought being a secretion of brain more wonderful than gravity a property of matter? It is our arrogance, our admiration of ourselves.”
Darwin confided to his friends that going public with his ideas about evolution would be like “confessing to a murder.” In 1839, Darwin married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who, unlike him, was devoutly religious, adding a personal dimension to this conflict.
Darwin and his wife moved to Down House in Kent, and from this period onwards, he was in poor health, probably caused at least in part by his intellectual anxieties. But Darwin’s family inheritance allowed him to devote his time to science and to accumulate a mass of evidence supporting his views.
Darwin finally went public with his ideas in 1858, after learning that a young Welsh naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had reached similar conclusions. The following year Darwin published his masterpiece, The Origin of Species, which makes a methodical case for evolution.
Darwin argues that natural selection is a real process, analogous to the way in which plant and animal breeders can dramatically alter the characteristics of a group of organisms over a series of generations by permitting only those with desired traits to reproduce.
In the natural world, a population of organisms can become better and better adapted to its environment over a period of time, and the characteristics of its members at the end of the process may be very different from those of their ancestors.
Darwin went on to argue that natural selection is capable of giving rise not simply to new varieties, but to new species, and that it can in principle account for all the characteristics of existing organisms, even “organs of extreme perfection” like the human eye.
In the Origin, Darwin presents an enormous quantity of evidence that natural selection is not only a possible explanation of the origin of species, but that it is the only reasonable one. The data ranges from the pattern of development revealed in the fossil record, to facts about the geographical distribution of organisms, to anatomical and developmental similarities between otherwise very different living things.
Darwin demonstrates that his view can provide satisfying explanations of such matters, while from the point of view of those who believe in divine creation, they remain conundrums.
For instance, the forelimbs of humans, cats, bats, porpoises and horses perform very different functions and have very different forms, but remarkably share the same underlying bone structure. This only makes sense if all these creatures had a common ancestor in the distant past.
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EVEN THOUGH Darwin avoided the issue of human evolution in the Origin (a subject he was later to discuss at length in The Descent of Man), its publication inevitably sparked intense controversy. The eminent geologist Adam Sedgwick condemned Darwin’s views for their “unflinching materialism,” and figures such as Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, attacked evolution from a religious perspective.
But it was precisely Darwin’s materialism that explains the enthusiasm of his contemporaries Karl Marx and Frederick Engels for his new theory. Less than a month after the Origin was published, Engels remarked in a letter to Marx: “Darwin, whom I am just now reading, is splendid.”
Marx himself read the Origin the following year and commented to Engels, “Although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our own view.” Several years later, Marx sent Darwin an inscribed copy of Das Kapital (although the story that he wanted to dedicate the second edition of this work to Darwin is a myth).
Although Darwin didn’t engage in the public debate around The Origin, several younger scientists, including Joseph Hooker and Thomas Huxley, came to his defense. Within less than a decade, the bulk of the scientific establishment had been won over to evolution, although it took longer for natural selection to be accepted as the central mechanism.
Darwin’s ideas were initially viewed as a challenge to the existing social order, but attempts were soon being made to use them in its support. The political theorist Herbert Spencer formulated the doctrine of Social Darwinism, defending laissez-faire economics on the grounds that it represented the principle of the “survival of the fittest” applied to human society.
Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, founded the eugenics movement, which viewed social inequalities as having a biological basis and advocated intervention to “improve” the human stock.
But while there have been many attempts to link Darwin’s ideas to the claim that social inequalities are biologically determined, and while Darwin undoubtedly shared many of the prejudices of his era, there is evidence of the opposite–that his biological theories were shaped by a commitment to human equality.
Darwin was horrified by slavery, and from an early age was a committed abolitionist who believed that all men are brothers. According to a new book by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, his convictions played an important role in leading him to the idea of the common descent of all organisms.
New attempts to use Darwinian ideas to explain social inequality have emerged in recent decades, including sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which argue that evolution has shaped human beings to live in hierarchical, competitive societies.
But the history of human evolution reveals that the distinctive characteristic of our species is its flexibility, and that for most of human history, our ancestors lived in societies based on common ownership, cooperation and equality.
While Darwin’s ideas have been misused by defenders of the status quo, they continue to come under attack from religiously motivated critics who advocate creationism or its somewhat more sophisticated variant the theory of “intelligent design.”
The truth is, however, that Darwin had already refuted such ideas 150 years ago. Today, they are utterly without merit, and represent an attack not just on evolutionary biology but on scientific rationality itself. Although Darwin did not get everything right, the evidence for evolution has only increased since his death in 1882.
Darwin’s ideas represent one of the great achievements of humanity’s efforts to understand the natural world. Properly understood, they should be part of the arsenal of everyone fighting for progressive social change today.
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Tags:biological evolution, Charles Darwin, doctrine of Social Darwinism, human knowledge, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, origin of biological species, Robert FitzRoy, The Origin of Species, theory of evolution
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