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Destruction of Gaza and the crimes of Hosni Mubarak

February 4, 2009

Collusion, Complicity and Sheer Insanity

By Rannie Amiri | Counterpunch, Feb 2, 2009

As staggering as the statistics detailing Gaza’s destruction may be, they still do not present a complete picture of the unique travesties and tragedies suffered by individuals, families, neighborhoods and villages during Israel’s savage 22-day assault on the tiny territory. Yet, they bear repeating. From the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (www.pcbs.gov.ps) and various NGOs:

  • 1,334 killed, one-third of them children (more children than ‘militants’ were killed)
  • 5,450 injured, one-third of them children
  • 100,000 displaced, 50,000 made homeless
  • 4,100 residential homes and buildings destroyed, 17,000 damaged (together accounting for 14 percent of all buildings in Gaza)
  • 29 destroyed educational institutions, including the American International School
  • 92 destroyed or damaged mosques
  • 1,500 destroyed shops, factories and other commercial facilities
  • 20 destroyed ambulances
  • 35-60% of agricultural land ruined
  • $1.9 billion in total estimated damages

In the face of such massive devastation and hardship—and this after the crippling 18-month siege had already reduced Gazato a state of bare subsistence—the behavior and actions of the regime of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak remain as contemptible after the war as they were before.

On Dec. 25, just two days prior to the onset of the vicious aerial bombardment of Gaza, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni met with Mubarak in Cairo. It is understood that Egypt gave the green light for the attack in the hope that the ruling (and democratically-elected) Islamist group Hamas would be toppled and the more pliant Fatah faction, led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, would supplant it.

Rafah crossing sealed

The reasons for Mubarak’s animus toward Hamas, and by extension, for his reprehensible decision to keep the vital Rafah border crossing with Gaza closed to humanitarian supplies was explained earlier.

Apologists for the dictator will say the 2005 agreement between Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the European Union (EU) that regulates movement across the border prohibits it from being opened in the absence of PA and EU observers.

It makes no mention, however, of barring critical humanitarian goods from reaching the territory, where conditions were becoming ever more desperate. Additionally, Egypt was a non-signatory to the treaty, which had already expired after one year and was never renewed.

If keeping the Rafah crossing—the only gateway to non-Israeli territory from Gaza—closed before and during the war was not a criminal act, doing so in its aftermath must surely be.

Preventing Gaza’s children from obtaining medical care

Reporting for The National, Jonathan Cook details four cases of children in Gaza who required urgent, life-saving surgery in France, but were denied entry into Egypt via Rafah. As the aunt of the one of the war’s child casualties remarked, “Each morning we arrived at the crossing and the Egyptian soldiers cursed us and told us to go away.”

Doctors accompanying the children were allowed to pass into Egypt, but the ambulances carrying them were not. Their exclusion was attributed to the Palestinian health ministry in Ramallah who did not authorize their exit, stating there was “no more reason to refer any more children for treatment abroad.” Egyptian authorities abided by their ruling, not wanting to create diplomatic trouble.

But that is no excuse.

First, Hamas, democratically elected to power in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, is the legitimate governing authority. Second, the term of Mahmoud Abbas as president of the PA expired on Jan. 9. Finally, emergency medical situations always take precedent over (alleged) bureaucratic considerations. Those in control of the Rafah crossing must be held directly responsible.

Feeding Israeli soldiers, not Gaza’s people

In light of catastrophic circumstances due to lack of basic foodstuffs (75 percent of Gaza’s children are thought to be malnourished and 30 percent are stunted in growth), a recent report by the popular Egyptian weekly Al-Osboa was all the more shocking. It revealed that an Egyptian company was allowed to provide Israel Defense Force soldiers with food during the war while Gazans were starving.

Iranian Red Crescent ship kept offshore

An Iranian ship sent by the country’s Red Crescent Society carrying 2,000 tons of medical supplies and other humanitarian aid for Gaza continues to be anchored 15 miles off Gaza’s shore. It had already been intercepted and prevented by the Israeli navy from reaching Gaza. Now, it awaits permission to dock in the Egyptian port of Al-Areesh to unload its cargo. To date, permission has not been grated.

In light of the above, blistering criticism of the Egyptian regime’s behavior has come from Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah:

“[Egypt] told the Arab and Islamic world that the Rafah border was opened and it was not … The opening of the Rafah crossing is crucial to the Palestinian people, the Resistance and the living conditions there … its closure is one of the biggest crimes in history.”

The reply from the Egyptian government was all too predictable:

“Hassan Nasrallah’s criticism of Egypt confirms once more that he is nothing more than an agent of the Iranian regime and takes his orders from Tehran.”

Irrespective of whether Nasrallah takes orders from Tehran or Tokyo, there were no substantive answers to his accusations. Instead, Egypt reverted to parroting tired anti-Iranian rhetoric which increasingly is falling on deaf ears.

Abetting the siege of Gaza, giving sanction to the Israeli onslaught and its crimes against humanity, and afterward, preventing aid from getting into the territory and the injured from getting out, are all egregious offenses.

Just as many call for Olmert, Barak, Livni and the generals and soldiers who participated in this war to be prosecuted for violating international law and committing war crimes, Mubarak’s own complicity makes him equally liable in facing similar charges.

Rannie Amiri is an independent commentator on the Middle East. He may be reached at: rbamiri at yahoo dot com.

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Why Are We Still at War?

February 4, 2009

Published on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

by Norman Solomon

The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.

For the crimes against humanity committed on Sept. 11, 2001, countless others are to follow, with huge conceits about technological “sophistication” and moral superiority. But if we scrape away the concrete of media truisms, we may reach substrata where some poets have dug.

W.H. Auden: “Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.”

Stanley Kunitz: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”

And from 1965, when another faraway war got its jolt of righteous escalation from Washington’s certainty, Richard Farina wrote: “And death will be our darling and fear will be our name.” Then as now came the lessons that taught with unfathomable violence once and for all that unauthorized violence must be crushed by superior violence.

The U.S. war effort in Afghanistan owes itself to the enduring “war on terrorism,” chasing a holy grail of victory that can never be.

Early into the second year of the Afghanistan war, in November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” program and told viewers: “Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic. It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.”

But the “war on terrorism” rubric — increasingly shortened to the even vaguer “war on terror” — kept holding enormous promise for a warfare state of mind. Early on, the writer Joan Didion saw the blotting of the horizon and said so: “We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of Sept. 11 to justify the reconception of America’s correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war.”

There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize — or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.

The new U.S. “war on terror” was rhetorically bent on dismissing the concept of peacetime as a fatuous mirage.

Now, in early 2009, we’re entering what could be called Endless War 2.0, while the new president’s escalation of warfare in Afghanistan makes the rounds of the media trade shows, preening the newest applications of technological might and domestic political acquiescence.

And now, although repression of open debate has greatly dissipated since the first months after 9/11, the narrow range of political discourse on Afghanistan is essential to the Obama administration’s reported plan to double U.S. troop deployments in that country within a year.

“This war, if it proliferates over the next decade, could prove worse in one respect than any conflict we have yet experienced,” Norman Mailer wrote in his book “Why Are We at War?” six years ago. “It is that we will never know just what we are fighting for. It is not enough to say we are against terrorism. Of course we are. In America, who is not? But terrorism compared to more conventional kinds of war is formless, and it is hard to feel righteous when in combat with a void…”

Anticipating futility and destruction that would be enormous and endless, Mailer told an interviewer in late 2002: “This war is so unbalanced in so many ways, so much power on one side, so much true hatred on the other, so much technology for us, so much potential terrorism on the other, that the damages cannot be estimated. It is bad to enter a war that offers no clear avenue to conclusion. … There will always be someone left to act as a terrorist.”

And there will always be plenty of rationales for continuing to send out the patrols and launch the missiles and drop the bombs in Afghanistan, just as there have been in Iraq, just has there were in Vietnam and Laos. Those countries, with very different histories, had the misfortune to share a singular enemy, the most powerful military force on the planet.

It may be profoundly true that we are not red states and blue states, that we are the United States of America — but what that really means is still very much up for grabs. Even the greatest rhetoric is just that. And while the clock ticks, the deployment orders are going through channels.

For anyone who believes that the war in Afghanistan makes sense, I recommend the Jan. 30 discussion on “Bill Moyers Journal” with historian Marilyn Young and former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey. A chilling antidote to illusions that fuel the war can be found in the transcript.

Now, on Capitol Hill and at the White House, convenience masquerades as realism about “the war on terror.” Too big to fail. A beast too awesome and immortal not to feed.

And death will be our darling. And fear will be our name.

Norman Solomon is a journalist, historian, and progressive activist. His book “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” has been adapted into a documentary film of the same name. His most recent book is “Made Love, Got War.” He is a national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign.

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The tale of two apartheids

February 4, 2009

Israeli leaders are usually loath to admit that Israel is an apartheid-style state. Yet there have been moments of candor.

Socialist Worker, January 29, 2009 | Issue 689

IN APRIL 1976, John Vorster, president of the then-racist apartheid regime of South Africa, paid an official state visit to Israel, where he was given the red-carpet treatment.

Columnist: Paul D’Amato

Paul D'Amato Paul D’Amato is managing editor of the International Socialist Review and author of The Meaning of Marxism, a lively and accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition he founded.

Israeli television showed him on his first day, visiting the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. At an official state banquet held for Vorster, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin toasted the “ideals shared by Israel and South Africa.”

Why was an outspoken member of a Nazi militia in South Africa during the Second World War and a leading member of the party that crafted official apartheid policies in South Africa being feted in Israel?

A statement in the South African government’s yearbook made two years after Vorster’s visit provides an answer: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

These close ties came from the identification that both states had for each other’s cause. Both were settler states that claimed to be bringing “civilization” to so-called backward peoples. And both were committed to using any and all means to maintain their regional domination over the “natives” that they had conquered–in South Africa, to create a white state based on the exploitation of Black labor; in Israel, to create an exclusively Jewish state through the systematic removal of the indigenous Palestinian population.

Victims of repression in South Africa and Palestine

In an excellent two-part article in the Guardian in 2006, Chris McGreal quotes Ronnie Kasrils, then the intelligence minister in the post-apartheid government led by the African National Congress. Kasrils, who is Jewish and had co-authored a petition protesting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, explained why such a close affinity could develop between the two countries:

Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity.

This is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa, who also had the biblical notion that the land was their God-given right. Like the Zionists who claimed that Palestine in the 1940s was “a land without people for a people without land,” so the Afrikaner settlers spread the myth that there were no black people in South Africa when they first settled in the 17th century. They conquered by force of arms and terror and the provocation of a series of bloody colonial wars of conquest.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

VORSTER’S VISIT signaled an acceleration of economic, diplomatic and military cooperation between the two countries, a collaboration that already had a lengthy history.

South African Gen. Jan Smuts, who had a close relationship with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizman, Israel’s first prime minister, had been instrumental in convincing Britain to sign the Balfour Declaration that agreed to the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” After 1948, South Africa was one of the first countries to recognize Israel.

N. Kirschner, a veteran South African Zionist leader, wrote in 1960 in an Israeli publication: “There exists a bond between Jewish aspirations and the aspirations of the people of South Africa.”

That bond was expressed chiefly in growing military and secret nuclear cooperation. Each country shared its intelligence and counterinsurgency techniques with the other, and South Africa purchased arms from Israel. Israel purchased nuclear materials from South African in order to develop its secret weapons program, and in return, Israel provided scientific and technical assistance to help South African build its nuclear bombs.

Hundreds of white South Africans graduated from Israeli military training schools. “It is a clear and open secret,” wrote an Israeli journalist in 1976, “that in army camps, one can find Israeli officers in not insignificant numbers who are busy teaching white soldiers to fight black terrorists, with methods imported from Israel.”

The parallels between Israel and apartheid South Africa are striking. In South Africa, the white colonial settler minority conquered the Black majority, forcing them into Bantustans–so-called independent African homelands–that covered only 13 percent of the country. This allowed the whites to declare South Africa a white country.

Blacks, who outnumbered whites by 4-to-1, became the cheap labor that built South Africa’s economy, but they couldn’t be citizens.

Likewise, Theodore Herzl, known as the father of Zionism, sold the Jewish state to its potential imperial backers as “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”

Variations on statements such as this one from Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department, can be found scattered throughout the writings of the founders of the state of Israel: “There is no room for both peoples together in this country…There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries. To transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe should be left.”

These principles guided the Zionist armies and paramilitary gangs that used massacres and terror to drive 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948 in order to create the state of Israel, and again led to the expulsion of 325,000 Palestinians from their land after the 1967 war.

These are not old, outdated views, but the deeply held conviction of leading Zionists today. Listen to the ravings of Israeli Professor Arnon Soffer, head of the Israel Defense Force’s National Defense College, speaking to the Jerusalem Post in 2004 about Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza:

We will tell the Palestinians that if a single missile is fired over the fence, we will fire 10 in response. And women and children will be killed, and houses will be destroyed. After the fifth such incident, Palestinian mothers won’t allow their husbands to shoot Qassams, because they will know what’s waiting for them.

Second of all, when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful.

It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist…Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee “peace”–it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THERE ARE some differences between South African and Israeli apartheid.

Israel’s relationship to Arab labor was different than that of the South Africa rulers to the Black majority. Rather than exploiting cheap Arab labor, the early Zionist settlers in Palestine built their state-in-embryo by excluding Arab labor, under the slogan “Jewish Land, Jewish Labor.”

After the formation of the state of Israel, Arabs did become a source of cheap labor, but Israel has never been dependent on Arab labor–whereas in South Africa, strikes threatened to bring down apartheid because Black labor was its lifeblood.

Yet the similarities are more striking than the differences. If apartheid South Africa declared itself a white state by creating the fiction of Black “homelands” and implementing pass laws to severely restrict the movement of Africans, in Israel, an exclusively Jewish state was creating by expelling the majority of Palestinians from their lands and legally barring their return.

A battery of laws were put in place after 1948 that grant the state legal authority, in various ways, to seize Arab farms, orchards, homes and businesses if the owners are absent for any length of time, or for “security” reasons. At the same time, any Jew in the world was granted the legal right to enter Israel and become a citizen.

Today, Israel treats the Arab minority within its current borders as third-class citizens (behind the Mizrahim, or the Middle Eastern, as opposed to European, Jews). Palestinians receive lower wages and education funding, face routine harassment and police brutality, and are subjected to high incarceration rates; they are restricted from owning land, and are victims of land seizures and expulsions that continue to this day.

A paper on Israel’s Arab minority by Eric Gust of the Center for Contemporary Conflict explained that “advancement of Arabs within Israeli society, whether in the demographic, economic, political or educational sectors, is viewed as occurring at the expense of the Jewish population, and could be perceived as a threat to the Jewish nature of Israel.”

Israel is also an apartheid state in form, if not in legal terms, because it has turned the lands it occupied in 1967–the West Bank and Gaza–into South African-style Bantustans, whose inhabitants face economic blockade and routine assaults from the Israeli army and settlers, and whose towns and refugee camps are cut off from each other by an apartheid wall and a system of checkpoints, while special roads crisscross the West Bank that can only be used by Jews.

Any “two-state” solution that Israel accepts will merely put a legal stamp on this fact.

Israeli leaders are usually loath to publicly admit that Israel is an apartheid-style state. Yet there are moments of candor.

Former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Force, Gen. Rafael Eitan, speaking at a closed meeting of Israeli professionals in 1983, gave a presentation that considered South Africa’s Bantustan policy as a possible solution to the Palestinian problem.

Last November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a statement that if Israel was unable to implement a two-state solution, it would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

He had warned four years earlier: “We don’t have unlimited time. More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against ‘occupation,’ in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle–and ultimately, a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.”

Israel leaders look with horror on the prospect of the struggle for a democratic, secular Palestine–a state for all its inhabitants–because the whole basis of the existence of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state would be destroyed.

For that same reason, those of us who oppose Zionism should welcome such a struggle with open arms.

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Under the Black Flag: Israeli War Crimes

February 3, 2009

By URI AVNERY | Counterpunch, Feb 2, 2009

A Spanish judge has instituted a judicial inquiry against seven Israeli political and military personalities on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The case: the 2002 dropping of a one ton bomb on the home of Hamas leader Salah Shehade. Apart from the intended victim, 14 people, most of them children, were killed.

For those who have forgotten: the then commander of the Israeli Air Force, Dan Halutz, was asked at the time what he feels when he drops a bomb on a residential building. His unforgettable answer: “A slight bump to the wing.” When we in Gush Shalom accused him of a war crime, he demanded that we be put on trial for high treason. He was joined by the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who accused us of wanting to “turn over Israeli army officers to the enemy”. The Attorney General notified us officially that he did not intend to open an investigation against those responsible for the bombing.

I should be happy, therefore, that at long last somebody is ready to put that action to a judicial test (even if he seems to have been thwarted by political pressure.) But I am sorry that this has happened in Spain, not in Israel.

* * *

ISRAELI TV VIEWERS have lately been exposed to a bizarre sight: army officers appearing with their faces hidden, as usual for criminals when the court prohibits their identification. Pedophiles, for example, or attackers of old women.

On the orders of the military censors, this applies to all officers, from battalion commanders down, who have been involved in the Gaza war. Since the faces of brigade commanders and above are generally known, the order does not apply to them.

Immediately after the cease-fire, the Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak, promoted a special law that would give unlimited backing by the state to all officers and soldiers who took part in the Gaza war and who might be accused abroad of war crimes. This seems to confirm the Hebrew adage: “On the head of the thief, the hat is burning”.

* * *

I DO NOT object to trials abroad. The main thing is that war criminals, like pirates, should be brought to justice. It is not so important where they are caught. (This rule was applied by the State of Israel when it abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and hanged him in Israel for heinous crimes committed outside the territory of Israel and, indeed, before the state even existed.)

But as an Israeli patriot, I would prefer suspected Israeli war criminals to be put on trial in Israel. That is necessary for the country, for all decent officers and soldiers of the Israeli army, for the education of future generations of citizens and soldiers.

There is no need to rely on international law alone. There are Israeli laws against war crimes. Enough to mention the immortal phrase coined by Justice Binyamin Halevy, serving as a military judge, in the trial of the border policemen who were responsible for the 1956 massacre in Kafr Kassem, when dozens of children, women and men were mown down for violating a curfew which they did not even know about.

The judge announced that even in wartime, there are orders over which flies “the black flag of illegality”. These are orders which are “manifestly” illegal – that is to say, orders which every normal person can tell are illegal, without having to consult a lawyer.

War criminals dishonor the army whose uniform they wear – whether they are generals or common soldiers. As a combat soldier on the day the Israeli Defense Army was officially created, I am ashamed of them and demand that they be cast out and be put on trial in Israel.

My list of suspects includes politicians, soldiers, rabbis and lawyers.

* * *

THERE IS not the slightest doubt that in the Gaza war, crimes were committed. The question is to what extent and by whom.

Example: the soldiers call on the residents of a house to leave it. A woman and her four children come out, waving white handkerchiefs. It is absolutely clear that they are not armed fighters. A soldier in a near-by tank stands up, points his rifle and shoots them dead at short range. According to testimonies that seem to be beyond doubt, this happened more than once.

Another example: the shelling of the United Nations school full of refugees, from which there was no shooting – as admitted by the army, after the original pretexts were disproved.

These are ”simple” cases. But the spectrum of cases is far wider. A serious judicial investigation has to start right from the top: the politicians and senior officers who decided on the war and confirmed its plans must be investigated about their decisions. In Nuremberg it was laid down that the starting of a war of aggression is a crime.

An objective investigation has to find out whether the decision to start the war was justified, or if there existed another way of stopping the launching of rockets against Israeli territory. Without doubt, no country can or should tolerate the bombing of its towns and villages from beyond the border. But could this be prevented by talking with the Gaza authorities? Was our government’s decision to boycott Hamas, the winner of the democratic Palestinian elections, the real cause of this war? Did the imposition of the blockade on a million and a half Gaza Strip inhabitants contribute to the launching of the Qassams? In brief: were the alternatives considered before it was decided to start a deadly war?

The war plan included a massive attack on the civilian population of the Strip. The real aims of a war can be understood less from the official declarations of its initiators, than from their actions. If in this war some 1300 men, women and children were killed, the great majority of whom were not fighters; if about 5000 people were injured, most of them children; if some 2500 homes were partly or wholly destroyed; if the infrastructure of life was totally demolished – all this clearly could not have happened accidentally. It must have been a part of the war plan.

The things said during the war by politicians and officers make it clear that the plan had at least two aims, which might be considered war crimes: (1) To cause widespread killing and destruction, in order to “fix a price tag”. “to burn into their consciousness”, “to reinforce deterrence”, and most of all – to get the population to rise up against Hamas and overthrow their government. Clearly this affects mainly the civilian population. (2) To avoid casualties to our army at (literally) any price by destroying any building and killing any human being in the area into which our troops were about to move, including destroying homes over the heads of their inhabitants, preventing medical teams from reaching the victims, killing people indiscriminately. In certain cases, inhabitants were warned that they must flee, but this was mainly an alibi-action: there was nowhere to flee to, and often fire was opened on people trying to escape.

An independent court will have to decide whether such a war-plan is in accordance with national and international law, or whether it was ab initio a crime against humanity and a war-crime.

This was a war of a regular army with huge capabilities against a guerrilla force. In such a war, too, not everything is permissible. Arguments like “The Hamas terrorists were hiding within the civilian population” and “They used the population as human shields” may be effective as propaganda but are irrelevant: that is true for every guerrilla war. It must be taken into account when a decision to start such a war is being considered.

In a democratic state, the military takes its orders from the political establishment. Good. But that does not include “manifestly” illegal orders, over which the black flag of illegality is waving. Since the Nuremberg trials, there is no more room for the excuse that “I was only obeying orders”.

Therefore, the personal responsibility of all involved – from the Chief of Staff, the Front Commander and the Division Commander right down to the last soldier – must be examined. From the statements of soldiers one must deduce that many believed that their job was “to kill as many Arabs as possible”. Meaning: no distinction between fighters and non-fighters. That is a completely illegal order, whether given explicitly or by a wink and a nudge. The soldiers understood this to be “the spirit of the commander”.

Continued >>

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Fidel Castro attacks Obama over Gaza

February 2, 2009
Al Jazeera, Jan 31, 2009

Castro says the US should return the naval base at Guantanamo Bay to Cuba [AFP]

Fidel Castro, the former Cuban president, has attacked Barack Obama, the US president, accusing him of supporting “Israeli genocide” against the  Palestinians.

Castro, who had recently praised Obama as “honest” and “noble”, said in a column posted on a government website that Obama was continuing the policies of George Bush, his predecessor, by supporting Israel.

The former Cuban leader, who was succeeded by his brother Raul as president in February, accused the US of having enabled Israel to become an “important nuclear power”.

He also accused the US of giving Israel military aid with which it “threatens extreme violence against the population of all the Muslim countries”.

Castro highlighted statements made by the Obama administration that reiterated its strong support for Israel, which recently carried out a 22-day assault on Gaza in which more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed.

Obama has repeatedly reiterated his strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks by Palestinian fighters.

Guantanamo claim

Fidel Castro also criticised Obama for suggesting Cuba would have to make concessions before it considers returning the territory of the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

“Maintaining a military base in Cuba against the will of the people violates the most elemental principles of international law,” Castro said.

“Not respecting Cuba’s will is an arrogant act and an abuse of immense power against a little country,” he added.

Cuba indefinitely leased Guantanamo to the US in 1903 after the US occupied the country during the 1898 Spanish-American War.

Castro has claimed that the base at the south-eastern tip of Cuba was taken over illegally.

Obama said during his election campaign he was willing to consider holding talks with nations with poor relations with the US, such as Cuba and Iran.

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Violent clashes in Russia as angry protesters call for Putin to resign over economy

February 2, 2009

By Daily Mail Reporter | Daily Mail Online

Last updated at 2:34 PM on 31st January 2009

Russia was rocked today by some of its strongest protests yet as thousands rallied across the vast country to attack the Kremlin’s response to the global economic crisis.

The marches, complete with Soviet-style red flags and banners, pose a challenge to a government which has faced little threat from the fragmented opposition and politically apathetic population during the boom years fuelled by oil.

Pro-government thugs beat up some of the protesters.

Supporters of the National Bolshevik Party carry flares through Moscow's streets

Banned: Supporters of the National Bolshevik Party carry flares through Moscow’s streets

About 2,500 people marched across the far eastern port of Vladivostok to denounce the Cabinet’s decision to increase car import tariffs, shouting slogans urging Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to resign. Many there make their living by importing cars.

Meanwhile in Moscow arrests were made as about 1,000 diehard Communists rallied in a central square hemmed in by heavy police cordons.

Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov told them the Kremlin must throw out Western capitalism and impose sweeping nationalisation.

Eduard Limonov, leader of the banned National Bolshevik Party – and one of the Kremlin’s most radical critics – was arrested at another Moscow square.

Communists and members of the Action Society of Russia's Citizens march in Vladivostok

Red flags and even images of Lenin and Stalin are borne aloft as Communists and members of the Action Society of Russia’s Citizens march in Vladivostok

Police dispersed demonstrators from the United Civil Front, comprising several radical opposition groups, who launched an illegal rally on a street near the Kremlin.

Protesters gathered near an Metro station but then sidestepped police by taking a train across the city to another location.

Some of the protesters were later arrested. Others were brutally beaten up by activists from pro-Kremlin youth groups.

Several dozen demonstrators marched on a central Moscow street, shouting slogans such as ‘Down with the government!’ and ‘Russia without Putin!’

A bloodied protester marches in Moscow with the United Civil Front

Bloodied: A protester marches in Moscow with the United Civil Front

‘We are demanding civil freedoms and pushing for the government’s resignation,’ said one of the protesters, Valery Nadezhdin.

Several van-loads of riot police only arrived at the site after protesters dispersed.

The protests come after years in which the Kremlin has sidelined political opponents and established tight controls over civil society and the media, rolling back many post-Soviet freedoms.

Today a small group of activists from an opposition youth group, We, stood near the Russian government’s monolithic headquarters with blank posters and their lips sealed with tape. All were arrested.

Police drag away a member of the National Bolshevik Party during a rally in central Moscow

Flashpoint: Police drag away a member of the National Bolshevik Party during today’s rally in central Moscow

The authorities countered with a rally of the main pro-Kremlin United Russia party next to the Kremlin – an area off-limits to all other demonstrations – where soldiers served hot tea and biscuits to some 9,000 participants.

United Russia also staged similar rallies in several other cities across Russia.

In St. Petersburg, where opposition groups were banned from holding rallies, they put individual protesters on the streets.

One, Denis Vasilyev of the United Civil Front, stood on a street with a placard saying: ‘Put the Government Under People’s Control!’

Police took down his details.

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Living (and dying) in the age of barbarism

February 2, 2009

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William Bowles | uruknet.info, Jan 31, 2009

Israeli Soldiers Play ‘Sophie’s Choice’ With Palestinian Mothers
“…Out of all the devastation I have seen so far, there is one story in particular that I think the world needs to hear. I met a mother who was at home with her ten children when Israeli soldiers entered the house. The soldiers told her she had to choose five of her children to “give as a gift to Israel.” As she screamed in horror they repeated the demand and told her she could choose or they would choose for her. Then these soldiers murdered five of her children in front of her…” www.uruknet.de/?p=51196[1]

“Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. [Let us] Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration…” Franz Fanon ‘The Wretched of the Earth’

It surely cannot have escaped your attention that our much vaunted ‘democracies’ are in fact barbarian states masquerading as civilized. And if you haven’t noticed then it’s time you did not only because they do their ‘civilizing’ in your name but when they’ve done ‘civilizing’ the brown and poor people of our planet, it’ll be your turn next to get ‘civilized’.

The greed of the few would seem to be the underlying cause and of course greed needs power and to paraphrase, (private) power corrupts and total (private) power corrupts completely. Looked at historically, the crime against humanity committed by the ‘Chosen People’ in Gaza is but the tip of an iceberg but it is most definitely as brazen a piece of ‘civilizing’ as we have witnessed recently.

In turn, this brazen and murderous use of power reflects the complete separation between the rulers and the ruled. They claim to act in ‘our’ names but as long as they are accountable to no one, they can claim to represent anything they choose to.

What makes my blood run cold is the arrogance of these ‘masters of the universe’. Take for example the following extract from Turkish prime minister Erdogan’s ‘exchange’ that took place this week at the Davos conference:

Moderator: There was a heated debate here. This is a discussion that can last for hours. We are already out of time.

Erdogan: One minute.

Moderator: Mr. President, well, you know…

Erdodan: One minute, one minute! No! One minute.

Moderator: Ok, but I want you not to speak more than one minute.

Erdogan: Mr. Peres, you are older than me. Your voice is very loud. I know that you are speaking aloud because of the requirement of a sense of guilt. My voice will not be that loud. About murdering, you know killing very well. I am well aware how you murdered children on beaches. Two former prime ministers of your country had important sayings to me. You have former prime ministers who say When I entered Palestine over armed combat cars, I consider myself more and more pleased. I can give their names, maybe some of you wonder. Besides, I condemn those of you who applaud this persecution. Because applauding these killers who murdered those children, who massacred those people is, I believe, also another crime committed against humanity. Look, we cannot disregard a reality here. Here, I jotted down a lot of notes, but I dont have time to answer all of them. But, I will say you only two things:

Moderator: Excuse me Prime Minister, we can’t start the debate again.

Erdogan: Excuse me. First, excuse me, do NOT interrupt me! First, The Old Testament says in the 6th commandment: You shall not kill! But there is murder here. Second, this is also very interesting. Gilad Atzmon, a Jew himself, says: Israeli barbarity is far beyond even ordinary cruelty. Besides, Avi Shlaim, Professor of Oxford who performed his military duty in Israeli army, says in the Guardian the following:

Moderator: Prime Minister, Prime Minister. I wanna ask to our host.

Erdogan: Israel became a gangster state. (to the moderator) I thank you, too. For me, Davos is done for me from now on. I will not come again. You all know this in this way. You are not letting us speak. (pointing to Shimon Peres) He spoke for 25 minutes, but you let me speak 12 minutes. No way!

Now I don’t know who the ‘moderator’ is but I assume he or she is a European talking to the prime minister of Turkey! (Watch the video).

For us regular folks conditioned to be deferential in the presence of POWER, the Davos display should be an indication of what we are dealing with here, actions that are in actuality expressions of weakness and weakness that leads to desperation and desperate and murderous actions in defence of POWER.

The problem we confront is in linking the greed of our ruling classes to their actions, hidden as they are behind all manner lies and half-truths about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, words that have been debased and cheapened to the point where they cease to have any meaning.

Worse still, the real culprits are, for the most part, hidden from view, instead they are represented by a professional political class that utilizes all the trappings of its power to bury the reality. It maybe a cliché but all one need do is follow the money.

All of our major politicians are either in bed with big capital or will be once their public offices come to an end. We call it revolving door politics. They sit on the boards of corporations, retained as ‘consultants’, become lobbyists and/or are part of an intricate network of cross-connected directorships, thinktanks, they even marry each other, thus dynasties are created of the ‘high and mighty’ that extend across the generations.

Many are overtly corrupt, receiving kickbacks and payoffs for ‘services rendered’, in short a Corporate Mafia that makes the ‘mafia’ of the movies small potatoes indeed as the recent revelations concerning the House of ‘Lords’ shows, with as many as 140 ‘Lords’ on the receiving end of gifts for fixing legislation or other services rendered (the four names recently revealed is but the tip of the iceberg).

Without any kind of oversight except lip service to the idea of transparency or accountability, never mind absolutely no democracy, over time they have become brazen in their contempt for the working man and woman, flaunting their wealth in our faces. The examples are everywhere especially of late with literally billions being paid to what are actually a bunch of cheap crooks and shysters, these so-called captains of industry.

In the final analysis however, it is our own total lack of political participation that has allowed this situation to come to pass. It is argued that we have no real choice when it comes to who we have to vote for, but the vote is only a small part of the democratic process, it’s what leads up to your vote that counts.

For nearly a century we fought for the universal franchise, eventually forming our own political parties that we trusted to represent us and fight for our interests, a trust that has been betrayed over and over again. Thus we have become cynical and fatalistic about the political process to the point where we have opted out in our droves, preferring instead to consume. But the party, as they say, is over.

On the face of it, as so many say, ‘it’s always been this way, there’s nothing we can do about’ but history tells a different story even right now as the events shaking France reveal. And the reason the French are in revolt is simple, they have trade unions and political parties that may not be the best but they are vehicles through which citizens can act collectively, so much so that Sarkozy ignores them at his (political) peril. (Watch the video ‘Working Class Fightback: Lessons of the Last Great Depression’.)

The BBC disguises it when it talks of “social unrest”, newsspeak for revolt (see ‘Crisis may ’spark social unrest’’).

The BBC piece quotes France’s finance minister Christine Lagarde who tells us that “trust in the financial system needed to be restored.

“Leaders needed to send a clear, understandable signal to ordinary people about how governments were intending to act, she added.”

Laughably and in direct contradiction, another BBC piece quotes that buffoon Gordon Brown, “Gordon Brown says there is no precedent for the “first financial crisis of the global age”, (‘PM says ‘no clear map’ for crisis’). What they really mean is that there is no capitalist solution to the crisis as crisis is fundamental to capitalism.

By contrast and to illustrate the point, here in the UK we turn against our fellow workers, incited by Gordon Brown’s cynical calls for “British jobs for British workers”. The contrast could not be greater and once more revealing the total bankruptcy of those who claim to lead us.

If we are to put our trust in political parties once again, they are going to have to prove to us that our trust is deserved by not being opportunistic and making promises they cannot deliver on.

Note

1. The term ‘Sophie’s Choice’ originates with the ordeal of an inmate in Auschwitz who had to make the choice as to which of her two children should be put to death.

:: Article nr. 51424 sent on 02-feb-2008 01:39 ECT
 www.uruknet.info?p=51424

Link: www.creative-i.info/?p=4366

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Israel Asserting Middle East Supremacy: From Gaza to Tehran

February 2, 2009

“The Israeli Defense Force is the most moral army in the World!”
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

By James Petras | Information Clearing House, February 2, 2009

Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany bombed, invaded and annexed countries and territories as a prelude to their quest for World Empire.  Israel’s drive for regional dominance has followed in their footsteps, imitating their style: Indiscriminate aerial bombings of civilian and military facilities, a savage blitzkrieg led by armored vehicles, disdain and repudiation of all criticism from international agencies was accompanied by an open, military buildup for a new and bigger war against Iran.  Like the Nazi leadership, who played on the ‘Bolshevik threat’, the Israeli high command has set in motion a vast world-wide propaganda campaign led by its world Zionist network, raising the specter of ‘Islamic terror’ to justify its preparations for a military assault on seventy-four million Iranians.  Just as Nazi Germany interpreted the passivity, sympathy and impotence of the West when confronted by ‘facts on the ground’ as license for aggression, the Israeli military machine receives a powerful impetus for new wars by the Western governments’ inaction and flaccid response to its invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of Syria and now its Nazi style blitz and conquest of Gaza.  For the Israeli high command, the impotence and complicity of the Western states, marks the way to bigger and bloodier wars to establish Israel’s supremacy and dominance of the Middle East, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf.

Gaza Blitz:  Dress Rehearsal for an Assault on Iran

Israel’s military victory in Gaza is a dress rehearsal for a full-scale military assault on Iran.  In the course of their Gaza extermination campaign, Israeli political and military strategists gained a great deal of vital information about: (1) the levels of complicity and impotence of European, North American and Arab states;  (2) the high degree and depth of material and political support obtainable from the United States government in pulverizing adversaries; (3) the high degree of internal support among the Jewish electorate for even the most brutal killing fields; (4) the massive unquestioning backing of an offensive war from all the biggest and most politically influential and wealthiest Jewish-Zionist organizations in the US and Western Europe; (5) the weakness and ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the incapacity of the entire range of humanitarian organizations to limit Israel’s extermination campaign directed at destroying the very existence of an entire people; (6) the unconditional backing of the entire mass media and news agencies in the US and most of the mass media in Europe and the rest of the world; (7) the willingness of the liberal critics to equally blame the victims of extermination and the exterminators for the ‘violence’, thus neutralizing any effective consequential condemnation of the Israeli state; and (8) the adaptation of practically all the journalists, writers, academics and politicians to the entire euphemistic vocabulary of the Israeli propaganda office.

For example, sustained total war is called an ‘incursion’.  Ten thousand aerial assaults by hundreds of Israeli helicopters and fighter-bombers are equated with sporadic harmless homemade rocket attacks as ‘violence’.  Israeli targeting of thousands of civilian homes, hospitals and basic infrastructure are labeled ‘terrorist’ targets.  Resistance fighters are labeled ‘Hamas terrorists’.  The bombing of the Red Cross, the United Nations relief facilities, hospitals, mosques are called ‘mistakes’ or justified as ‘launching sites for Hamas terrorists.

Israeli political leaders have drawn the lesson from their dirty little ‘war’ that they can totally destroy a nation, decimate a society and murder and maim 7000 civilians with impunity.  Israeli leaders learned they can carry out an offensive genocidal war without suffering breaks in diplomatic relations (except Mauritania, Qatar, Bolivia and Venezuela).  The Israelis have successfully tested the loyalty and submissiveness of the major Arab regimes in the region and secured cooperation and acquiescence from Egypt, the ‘Palestinian Authority’, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.  Israeli civilian-military leaders calculate that with this high degree of governmental complicity, combined with support from all the major Zionist leaders and mass media moguls, they can dismiss even large-scale street protests, repeated calls for boycotts and United Nations denunciations.  Israeli leaders know that the criticism of major religious leaders and the growing number of Jewish dissidents, critical intellectuals and activists will have no consequential impact on Western governments nor lessen the fervor and loyalty of the major Jewish organizations.

Continued >>

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Chomsky: Neither The US Nor Israel Is A “Genuine Party To Peace.”

January 31, 2009


By Noam Chomsky | Information Clearing House, Jan 28, 2009

Barack Obama is recognized to be a person of acute intelligence, a legal scholar, careful with his choice of words. He deserves to be taken seriously – both what he says, and what he omits. Particularly significant is his first substantive statement on foreign affairs, on January 22, at the State Department, when introducing George Mitchell to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace.

Mitchell is to focus his attention on the Israel-Palestine problem, in the wake of the recent US-Israeli invasion of Gaza. During the murderous assault, Obama remained silent apart from a few platitudes, because, he said, there is only one president – a fact that did not silence him on many other issues. His campaign did, however, repeat his statement that “if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that.” He was referring to Israeli children, not the hundreds of Palestinian children being butchered by US arms, about whom he could not speak, because there was only one president.

On January 22, however, the one president was Barack Obama, so he could speak freely about these matters – avoiding, however, the attack on Gaza, which had, conveniently, been called off just before the inauguration.

Obama’s talk emphasized his commitment to a peaceful settlement. He left its contours vague, apart from one specific proposal: “the Arab peace initiative,” Obama said, “contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts. Now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative’s promise by supporting the Palestinian government under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all.”

Obama is not directly falsifying the Arab League proposal, but the carefully framed deceit is instructive.

The Arab League peace proposal does indeed call for normalization of relations with Israel – in the context – repeat, in the context of a two-state settlement in terms of the longstanding international consensus, which the US and Israel have blocked for over 30 years, in international isolation, and still do. The core of the Arab League proposal, as Obama and his Mideast advisers know very well, is its call for a peaceful political settlement in these terms, which are well-known, and recognized to be the only basis for the peaceful settlement to which Obama professes to be committed. The omission of that crucial fact can hardly be accidental, and signals clearly that Obama envisions no departure from US rejectionism. His call for the Arab states to act on a corollary to their proposal, while the US ignores even the existence of its central content, which is the precondition for the corollary, surpasses cynicism.

The most significant acts to undermine a peaceful settlement are the daily US-backed actions in the occupied territories, all recognized to be criminal: taking over valuable land and resources and constructing what the leading architect of the plan, Ariel Sharon, called “Bantustans” for Palestinians – an unfair comparison because the Bantustans were far more viable than the fragments left to Palestinians under Sharon’s conception, now being realized. But the US and Israel even continue to oppose a political settlement in words, most recently in December 2008, when the US and Israel (and a few Pacific islands) voted against a UN resolution supporting “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” (passed 173 to 5, US-Israel opposed, with evasive pretexts).

Obama had not one word to say about the settlement and infrastructure developments in the West Bank, and the complex measures to control Palestinian existence, designed to undermine the prospects for a peaceful two-state settlement. His silence is a grim refutation of his oratorical flourishes about how “I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security.”

Also unmentioned is Israel’s use of US arms in Gaza, in violation not only of international but also US law. Or Washington’s shipment of new arms to Israel right at the peak of the US-Israeli attack, surely not unknown to Obama’s Middle East advisers.

Obama was firm, however, that smuggling of arms to Gaza must be stopped. He endorses the agreement of Condoleeza Rice and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni that the Egyptian-Gaza border must be closed – a remarkable exercise of imperial arrogance, as the Financial Times observed: “as they stood in Washington congratulating each other, both officials seemed oblivious to the fact that they were making a deal about an illegal trade on someone else’s border – Egypt in this case. The next day, an Egyptian official described the memorandum as `fictional’.” Egypt’s objections were ignored.

Returning to Obama’s reference to the “constructive” Arab League proposal, as the wording indicates, Obama persists in restricting support to the defeated party in the January 2006 election, the only free election in the Arab world, to which the US and Israel reacted, instantly and overtly, by severely punishing Palestinians for opposing the will of the masters. A minor technicality is that Abbas’s term ran out on January 9, and that Fayyad was appointed without confirmation by the Palestinian parliament (many of them kidnapped and in Israeli prisons). Ha’aretz describes Fayyad as “a strange bird in Palestinian politics. On the one hand, he is the Palestinian politician most esteemed by Israel and the West. However, on the other hand, he has no electoral power whatsoever in Gaza or the West Bank.” The report also notes Fayyad’s “close relationship with the Israeli establishment,” notably his friendship with Sharon’s extremist adviser Dov Weiglass. Though lacking popular support, he is regarded as competent and honest, not the norm in the US-backed political sectors.

Obama’s insistence that only Abbas and Fayyad exist conforms to the consistent Western contempt for democracy unless it is under control.

Obama provided the usual reasons for ignoring the elected government led by Hamas. “To be a genuine party to peace,” Obama declared, “the quartet [US, EU, Russia, UN] has made it clear that Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel’s right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements.” Unmentioned, also as usual, is the inconvenient fact that the US and Israel firmly reject all three conditions. In international isolation, they bar a two-state settlement including a Palestinian state; they of course do not renounce violence; and they reject the quartet’s central proposal, the “road map.” Israel formally accepted it, but with 14 reservations that effectively eliminate its contents (tacitly backed by the US). It is the great merit of Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, to have brought these facts to public attention for the first time – and in the mainstream, the only time.

It follows, by elementary reasoning, that neither the US nor Israel is a “genuine party to peace.” But that cannot be. It is not even a phrase in the English language.

It is perhaps unfair to criticize Obama for this further exercise of cynicism, because it is close to universal, unlike his scrupulous evisceration of the core component of the Arab League proposal, which is his own novel contribution.

Also near universal are the standard references to Hamas: a terrorist organization, dedicated to the destruction of Israel (or maybe all Jews). Omitted are the inconvenient facts that the US-Israel are not only dedicated to the destruction of any viable Palestinian state, but are steadily implementing those policies. Or that unlike the two rejectionist states, Hamas has called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus: publicly, repeatedly, explicitly.

Obama began his remarks by saying: “Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel’s security. And we will always support Israel’s right to defend itself against legitimate threats.”

There was nothing about the right of Palestinians to defend themselves against far more extreme threats, such as those occurring daily, with US support, in the occupied territories. But that again is the norm.

Also normal is the enunciation of the principle that Israel has the right to defend itself. That is correct, but vacuous: so does everyone. But in the context the cliche is worse than vacuous: it is more cynical deceit.

The issue is not whether Israel has the right to defend itself, like everyone else, but whether it has the right to do so by force. No one, including Obama, believes that states enjoy a general right to defend themselves by force: it is first necessary to demonstrate that there are no peaceful alternatives that can be tried. In this case, there surely are.

A narrow alternative would be for Israel to abide by a cease-fire, for example, the cease-fire proposed by Hamas political leader Khaled Mishal a few days before Israel launched its attack on December 27. Mishal called for restoring the 2005 agreement. That agreement called for an end to violence and uninterrupted opening of the borders, along with an Israeli guarantee that goods and people could move freely between the two parts of occupied Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The agreement was rejected by the US and Israel a few months later, after the free election of January 2006 turned out “the wrong way.” There are many other highly relevant cases.

The broader and more significant alternative would be for the US and Israel to abandon their extreme rejectionism, and join the rest of the world – including the Arab states and Hamas – in supporting a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus. It should be noted that in the past 30 years there has been one departure from US-Israeli rejectionism: the negotiations at Taba in January 2001, which appeared to be close to a peaceful resolution when Israel prematurely called them off. It would not, then, be outlandish for Obama to agree to join the world, even within the framework of US policy, if he were interested in doing so.

In short, Obama’s forceful reiteration of Israel’s right to defend itself is another exercise of cynical deceit – though, it must be admitted, not unique to him, but virtually universal.

The deceit is particularly striking in this case because the occasion was the appointment of Mitchell as special envoy. Mitchell’s primary achievement was his leading role in the peaceful settlement in northern Ireland. It called for an end to IRA terror and British violence. Implicit is the recognition that while Britain had the right to defend itself from terror, it had no right to do so by force, because there was a peaceful alternative: recognition of the legitimate grievances of the Irish Catholic community that were the roots of IRA terror. When Britain adopted that sensible course, the terror ended. The implications for Mitchell’s mission with regard to Israel-Palestine are so obvious that they need not be spelled out. And omission of them is, again, a striking indication of the commitment of the Obama administration to traditional US rejectionism and opposition to peace, except on its extremist terms.

Obama also praised Jordan for its “constructive role in training Palestinian security forces and nurturing its relations with Israel” – which contrasts strikingly with US-Israeli refusal to deal with the freely elected government of Palestine, while savagely punishing Palestinians for electing it with pretexts which, as noted, do not withstand a moment’s scrutiny. It is true that Jordan joined the US in arming and training Palestinian security forces, so that they could violently suppress any manifestation of support for the miserable victims of US-Israeli assault in Gaza, also arresting supporters of Hamas and the prominent journalist Khaled Amayreh, while organizing their own demonstrations in support of Abbas and Fatah, in which most participants “were civil servants and school children who were instructed by the PA to attend the rally,” according to the Jerusalem Post. Our kind of democracy.

Obama made one further substantive comment: “As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime…” He did not, of course, mention that the US-Israel had rejected much the same agreement after the January 2006 election, and that Israel had never observed similar subsequent agreements on borders.

Also missing is any reaction to Israel’s announcement that it rejected the cease-fire agreement, so that the prospects for it to be “lasting” are not auspicious. As reported at once in the press, “Israeli Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who takes part in security deliberations, told Army Radio on Thursday that Israel wouldn’t let border crossings with Gaza reopen without a deal to free [Gilad] Schalit” (AP, Jan 22); ‘Israel to keep Gaza crossings closed…An official said the government planned to use the issue to bargain for the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group since 2006 (Financial Times, Jan. 23); “Earlier this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that progress on Corporal Shalit’s release would be a precondition to opening up the border crossings that have been mostly closed since Hamas wrested control of Gaza from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in 2007” (Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23); “an Israeli official said there would be tough conditions for any lifting of the blockade, which he linked with the release of Gilad Shalit” (FT, Jan. 23); among many others.

Shalit’s capture is a prominent issue in the West, another indication of Hamas’s criminality. Whatever one thinks about it, it is uncontroversial that capture of a soldier of an attacking army is far less of a crime than kidnapping of civilians, exactly what Israeli forces did the day before the capture of Shalit, invading Gaza city and kidnapping two brothers, then spiriting them across the border where they disappeared into Israel’s prison complex. Unlike the much lesser case of Shalit, that crime was virtually unreported and has been forgotten, along with Israel’s regular practice for decades of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and dispatching them to Israeli prisons, often held for many years as hostages. But the capture of Shalit bars a cease-fire.

Obama’s State Department talk about the Middle East continued with “the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan… the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism.” A few hours later, US planes attacked a remote village in Afghanistan, intending to kill a Taliban commander. “Village elders, though, told provincial officials there were no Taliban in the area, which they described as a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds. Women and children were among the 22 dead, they said, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, the head of the provincial council” (LA Times, Jan. 24).

Afghan president Karzai’s first message to Obama after he was elected in November was a plea to end the bombing of Afghan civilians, reiterated a few hours before Obama was sworn in. This was considered as significant as Karzai’s call for a timetable for departure of US and other foreign forces. The rich and powerful have their “responsibilities.” Among them, the New York Times reported, is to “provide security” in southern Afghanistan, where “the insurgency is homegrown and self-sustaining.” All familiar. From Pravda in the 1980s, for example.

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Israel and the Bomb

January 31, 2009

The Calculus of Death

By Jules Rabin | Counterpunch, January 31 / February 1, 2009

Can Israel be trusted with the nuclear bombs it steadfastly refuses to admit owning?

On the evidence of events in Gaza, I think not. Here’s why.

In the last week of December, when Israel lost patience over a series of rocket attacks from Gaza that killed three Israelis in as many days, on top of 25 more who had been killed in the same manner in the eight years preceding, the Israeli armed forces retaliated with sustained and overwhelming attacks on the entirety of densely populated Gaza.

Under intense Israeli bombardment and tank fire, over 1,300 Gazans, a third of them children, were killed in the 21 days of the Israeli onslaught — a stunningly great number of them under circumstances that have opened Israel to charges of committing war crimes.

Mark the ratio: 1,300 Palestinian lives, fighters and civilians, taken in skewed payment for the original three Israelis, whose deaths were the proximate cause — call it the last straw after eight years of rocket attacks from Gaza — of the assault on Gaza.

And mark the overwhelming swiftness of the reaction. It took Israel a mere 22 days to present the people of Gaza with a definitive version of the type of blunt lesson that the Hamas government of Gaza had been trying for eight years of intermittent rocket attacks to teach Israel.

With those ratios in mind — the 1,300 Palestinian deaths achieved in 22 days and the 28 Israeli deaths inflicted in eight years — it’s fair to ask how might an Israel in possession of an arsenal of nuclear weapons react if instead of a ragtag force of guerillas like that of Hamas it were threatened by a modern army like its own, equipped with tanks and attack jets. If, say, as happened with Gaza, a major Israeli city were to undergo an assault of 22 days duration that turned a great part of it into rubble, and caused a thousand Israeli deaths.

On the showing of the overwhelming scale of its punitive assault on Gaza, could we expect Israel to show restraint — nuclear restraint — in the event of an assault by an armed force more nearly matching its own? When there is no other lesson on earth, militarily speaking, that can be taught as swiftly and conclusively as the one the nuclear bomb teaches?

In the calculus of death, how many lives of the “other” will the taking of the life of a single Israeli, or three, or a thousand, be worth, finally, tomorrow and the next day and the last day of all?

Jules Rabin is a writer, political critic, and longtime resident of Marshfield, Vermont.

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