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Israel’s Warped Self-justification For Murder

December 31, 2008

Paul J. Balles exposes Israel’s warped definition of self-defence, which it uses as a cover for its murder of innocent Palestinians, including women and children, and its destruction of universities, mosques and other civilian infrastructure in the occupied Gaza Strip.

By Paul J. Balles | Information Clearing House, Dec 31, 2008

Israel brazenly lies, saying that Hamas broke the cease-fire when it was Israel that broke the cease-fire in November.

In Haaretz, Zvi Barel writes: “Six months ago Israel asked and received a cease-fire from Hamas. It unilaterally violated it when it blew up a tunnel, while still asking Egypt to get the Islamic group to hold its fire.”

Israel continues its propaganda, claiming that its attack on Gaza is in self-defence.

The Huffington Post reports, “A mother whose three school-age children were killed, and are piled one on top of the other in the morgue, screams and then cries, screams again and then is silent.”

Self-defence?

The New York Times reported: “At Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, women wailed as they searched for relatives among bodies that lay strewn on the hospital floor.”

Self-defence?

While the world is busy attempting to assess the damage from the financial crisis, Israel decides that it’s a fitting time to massacre 350 and injure another 1500 in Gaza.

Self-defence?

In its propaganda dissemination, Israelis have been getting instruction on how to paint Israel as angels and Hamas as devils. What makes Hamas Beelzebubs? They have sent 1000 rockets into Israel, killing four Israelis altogether.

Self-defence?

The Israeli navy attacked and rammed a humanitarian boat in international waters off the coast of Gaza, preventing it from delivering desperately needed medical supplies and treatment.

Self-defence?

Eva Bartlett (Canadian), International Solidarity Movement, reported from inside Gaza on 27 December: “Israeli missiles tore through a children’s playground and busy market in Diyar Balah. We saw the aftermath – many were injured and some reportedly killed.”

Self-defence?

Ewa Jasiewicz (Polish and British), Free Gaza Movement, observed: “The morgue at the Shifa Hospital has no more room for dead bodies, so bodies and body parts are strewn all over the hospital.”

Self-defence?

Sharon Lock (Australian), International Solidarity Movement, writing from Gaza: “This massacre is not going to bring security for the State of Israel or allow it to be part of the Middle East. Now calls of revenge are everywhere.”

Self-defence?

Jenny Linnel (British), International Solidarity Movement, reporting from Gaza: “In front of our house we found the bodies of two little girls under a car, completely burnt. They were coming home from school.”

Self-defence?

Nora Barrows-Friedman, Flashpoints Radio, says: “The people [in Gaza] are filled with panic and terror – and this comes after a prolonged siege that deprives them of needed food, medicine, clean water, electricity – the basics of life.”

Self-defence?

Laila El-Haddad, a mother from Gaza, writes: “My father just called to inform me he was OK – after warplanes bombed the Islamic University there, considered to be the Strip’s premier academic institution.” They also bombed a mosque. Why would the Israeli Air Force bomb a place of learning and one of prayer?

Self-defence?

Justin Alexander, writing for the Economist, notes: “”Israel’s past military responses to the rocket threat, although massively disproportionate, have … been largely ineffective. It demolished buildings and levelled large areas of farmland in the northern part of Gaza to reduce the cover available for rocket crews. It fired over 14,000 artillery shells in 2006, killing 59 Palestinian civilians in the process, in what was framed as a preventive tactic to make it more difficult for rocket crews to operate.”

Self-defence?

Haaretz ran an article by Gideon Levy reporting: “Within the span of a few hours on a Saturday [27 December] afternoon, the IDF sowed death and destruction on a scale that the Qassam rockets never approached in all their years, and Operation ‘Cast Lead’ is only in its infancy.”

Self-defence? Not on your life! Or death!

Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.

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May We No Longer Be Silent

December 31, 2008

America’s Crimes “Never Happened”

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | Counterpunch, Dec 30, 2008

The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, John Bryson Chane, delivered on October 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church.  The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine.  In his sermon he called on “politicians seeking the highest office in [our] land” to find the courage to “speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims” by the state of Israel.

Bishop Chane’s courage was to no avail.  When America’s new leader of “change” was informed of Israel’s massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources–food, medicine, water, energy–America’s president-elect Obama had “no comment.”

According to the Jerusalem Post ( December 26), “at 11:30 a.m., more than 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters swept into Gazan airspace and dropped more than 100 bombs on 50 targets. . . . Thirty minutes later, a second wave of 60 jets and helicopters struck at 60 targets . . . More than 170 targets were hit by IAF aircraft throughout the day. At least 230 Gazans were killed and over 780 were wounded . . .”

As I write, news reports are that Israel is sending tanks and infantry reinforcements in preparation for a ground invasion of Gaza.

Israel’s excuse for its violence is that from time to time the Palestinian resistance organization, Hamas, fires off rockets into Israel to protest against the  ghetto life that Israel imposes on Gazans.  The rockets are ineffectual for the most part and seldom claim Israeli casualties.  However, the real purpose for the Israeli attack is to destroy Hamas.

In 2006 the US insisted that the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank hold free elections.  When free elections were held, Hamas won.  This was unacceptable to the Americans and Israelis.  In the West Bank, the Americans and Israelis imposed a puppet government, but Hamas held on in Gaza.  After unheeded warnings to the Gazans to rid themselves of Hamas and accept a puppet government, Israel has decided to destroy the freely elected government with violence.

Ehud Barak, who is overseeing the latest act of Israeli aggression, said in interviews addressed to the British and American publics that asking Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas would be like asking the US to agree to a ceasefire with al Qaeda.  The terrorism that Israel inflicts on Palestinians goes unremarked.

According to the London Times (December 28), “Britain and the United States were on a collision course with their European allies last night after refusing to call for an end to Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza. The wave of attacks marked a violent end to President George W. Bush’s sporadic Middle East peace efforts.  The White House put the blame squarely on Hamas.”  The British government also blamed Hamas.

For the US and UK governments, Israel can do no wrong.  Israel doesn’t have to stop withholding food, medicine, water, and energy, but Hamas must stop protesting by firing off rockets.  In violation of international law, Israel can drive West Bank Palestinians off their lands and out of their villages and give the stolen properties to “settlers.”  Israel can delay Palestinians in need of emergency medical care at checkpoints until their lives ebb away.  Israeli snipers can get their jollies murdering Palestinian children.

The Great Moral Anglo-Americans couldn’t care less.

In his 2005 Nobel Lecture, British playwright Harold Pinter held the United States and its British puppet state accountable for “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought.”  Everyone knows that such crimes occurred in the Soviet Union and in its East European empire, but “US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognized as crimes at all,” this despite the fact that “the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.”

Soviet crimes, like Nazi ones, are documented in gruesome detail, but America’s crimes “never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

America’s is “a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think.”

Pinter presents a long list of American crimes and comes to Iraq:  “The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was . . . an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading–as a last resort–all other justifications having failed to justify themselves–as liberation.”  Americans and their British puppets “have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.”

“How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal?”  Pinter’s question can also be asked of Israel.  Israel has been in violation of international law since 1967, protected by the United States’ veto of UN Resolutions condemning Israel for its violent, inhumane, barbaric, and illegal acts.

American evangelical Christians, who are degenerating into Zionists, are Israel’s greatest allies.  Jesus is forsaken as Christians swallow whole the Israeli lies. A couple of years ago the US Presbyterian Church was so distressed by Israel’s immorality toward Palestinians that the church attempted to disinvest its investment portfolio from assets tainted with Israel.  But the Israel Lobby was stronger.  The Presbyterian Church was unable to stand up for Christian principles and knuckled under to the Israel Lobby’s pressure.

This is hardly surprising considering that the US government doesn’t stand for Christian principles either.

America’s doctrine of “full spectrum dominance” means that, like Lenin’s dictatorship, America is not bound by law or morality, but by power alone.

Pinter sums it up in a speech he had dreams of writing for President George W. Bush:

“God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.”

If only our ears could hear, this is the speech we have been hearing from Israel for 60 years.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

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MIDEAST: Jewish Organisations Call For End to Gaza Bombings

December 31, 2008

By Ali Gharib | Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON, Dec 30 (IPS) – With a fresh outbreak of violence between Israel and Palestine, a battle of a different sort is being waged in Washington between various interests in Mid- East policy circles.

As Israeli air strikes continue to pummel the Gaza Strip for a fourth day and crude home-made rockets launched by Palestinian militants land in Israeli towns near the densely populated and besieged Strip, Jewish groups in the U.S. are taking two distinctly differing tacks at addressing the latest Middle East bloodshed.

Some of what are traditionally thought of as pro-Israel groups are undertaking a major public relations campaign to support the bombing runs against Hamas that have claimed more than 370 Palestinian lives — largely parroting the Israeli government that the attacks are a justified defence of Israelis.

The American Jewish Committee “expressed strong support for Israel… in its military operation aimed at terrorist targets in Gaza.”

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) urged U.S. leadership to “stand firmly with Israel as it strives to defend itself….”

In addition to a flurry of press releases, officials from the groups are making regular appearances in the media and organising conference calls.

But, rather than unquestioning support of Israel’s latest military venture in the decades-long conflict, four major Jewish organisations here are calling for an immediate end to the bombings, and for humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip.

One of the groups, Americans for Peace Now, the sister organisation of the Israel-based Peace Now, called for “the government of Israel to end its military operation in the Gaza Strip and to act toward achieving a ceasefire.”

And Bit Tzedek v’Shalom, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, called on the outgoing U.S. President George W. Bush administration “to initiate an international effort aimed at negotiating and immediate ceasefire.”

These strong statements, along with ones from J Street (the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement) and the Israel Policy Forum (IPF), are in sharp contrast to many of the more hawkish traditional pro-Israel groups, who make no mention of a cessation of armed hostilities. The confident assertions from the four groups are a relatively new sort of campaign.

“You see a voice that is increasingly clear and has a significant resonance in the American Jewish community, and beyond the Jewish community, that takes a position, stakes it grounds and won’t be intimidated,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator and the director of New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force, one of the four groups.

“This is an important position to be taking,” he told IPS. “It’s moving the ball forward on redefining the parameters of the debate on what it means to be responsibly and thoughtfully — rather than reflexively — pro-Israel.”

The move by the groups is in many ways the culmination of a public relations effort of its own that seeks to establish a strong pro-peace, pro-Israeli voice that is not afraid to depart from the line of the Israeli government.

The groups are expressing a position that they, too, appreciate and support Israel and believe in its right to defend itself, just like their counterparts in the traditional, more powerful, so-called pro-Israel groups.

But Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street, says that the issue does not lie in a right to self-defence — a given — but whether an operation like the attacks on Gaza will even work.

“While… air strikes by Israeli Defence Forces in Gaza can be understood and even justified in the wake of recent rocket attacks,” according to Ben-Ami, “we believe that real friends of Israel recognise that escalating the conflict will prove counterproductive, igniting further anger in the region and damaging long-term prospects for peace and stability.”

J Street echoed its director’s statement with a press release declaring that the recent massive escalation was “pushing the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict further down a path of never-ending violence.”

Therein lays the crux of these groups’ assertions. While many of the other Jewish groups have been at best lukewarm on the peace process and the two-state solution, the peace groups see them as essential to the continued existence of Jewish state.

By encouraging steps that they see as contributing to peace between Israel and her Arab neighbours, including the Palestinians, they contend they are helping Israel in the long run.

Levy said that the groups are essentially saying, “We love Israel too, but it doesn’t do us or Israel any good to be the mouthpiece for the talking points of the Israeli foreign ministry.”

Levy also pointed to the peace groups’ statements as an indication of a U.S. Jewish perspective, rather than strictly an Israeli one.

Indeed, the J Street release stated that re-establishing the ceasefire and making a concerted, international-led effort towards a sustainable resolution to the broader conflict “is a fundamental American interest.”

“We too stand to suffer as the situation spirals, rage in the region is directed at the United States, and our regional allies are further undermined,” said the statement, speaking from a U.S. perspective.

J Street is circulating a petition that has already garnered 14,000 signatures and which the group says it is already using to lobby President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team and congressional leaders.

The petition calls for “strong U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to urgently reinstate a meaningful ceasefire that ends all military operations, stops the rockets aimed at Israel and lifts the blockade of Gaza.” Those actions, it says, are “in the best interests of Israel, the Palestinian people and the United States.”

The intense pressure from both sets of groups is very much aimed at the transition team, with Obama just three weeks away from being sworn into office, said an analysis of varying views in Jewish Week, a New York-based newspaper.

Obama and his transition team have been very cautious in their brief statements about the escalation, often repeating a talking point that there is only one president at a time.

But Obama campaigned on a renewed and vigorous attempt at Israeli-Arab peace, and he reiterated his commitment when announcing his foreign policy team last month.

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Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed

December 31, 2008

The US-backed attempt to bring Hamas to heel by overwhelming force is in fact more likely to boost the movement’s appeal

Israel’s decision to launch its devastating attack on Gaza on a Saturday was a “stroke of brilliance”, the country’s biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot crowed: “the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed”. The daily Ma’ariv agreed: “We left them in shock and awe”.

Of the ferocity of the assault on one of the most overcrowded and destitute corners of the earth, there is at least no question. In the bloodiest onslaught on blockaded Gaza since it was captured and occupied by Israel 41 years ago, at least 310 people were killed and more than a thousand reported injured in the first 48 hours alone.

As well as scores of ordinary police officers incinerated in a passing-out parade, at least 56 civilians were said by the UN to have died as Israel used American-supplied F-16s and Apache helicopters to attack a string of civilian targets it linked to Hamas, including a mosque, private homes and the Islamic university. Hamas military and political facilities were mostly deserted, while police stations in residential areas were teeming as they were pulverised.

As Israeli journalist Amos Harel wrote in Ha’aretz at the weekend, “little or no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians”, as in US operations in Iraq. Among those killed in the first wave of strikes were eight teenage students waiting for a bus and four girls from the same family in Jabaliya, aged one to 12 years old.

Anyone who doubts the impact of these atrocities among Arabs and Muslims worldwide should switch on the satellite television stations that are watched avidly across the Middle East and which – unlike their western counterparts – do not habitually sanitise the barbarity meted out in the name of multiple wars on terror.

Then, having seen a child dying in her parent’s arms live on TV, consider what sort of western response there would have been to an attack on Israel, or the US or Britain for that matter, which left more than 300 dead in a couple of days.

You can be certain it would be met with the most sweeping condemnation, that the US president-elect would do a great deal more than “monitor” the situation and the British prime minister go much further than simply call for “restraint” on both sides.

But that is in fact all they did do, though the British government has since joined the call for a ceasefire. There has, of course, been no western denunciation of the Israeli slaughter – such aerial destruction is, after all, routinely called in by the US and Britain in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead, Hamas and the Palestinians of Gaza are held responsible for what has been visited upon them. How could any government not respond with overwhelming force to the constant firing of rockets into its territory, the Israelis demand, echoed by western governments and media.

But that is to turn reality on its head. Like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip has been – and continues to be – illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Despite the withdrawal of troops and settlements three years ago, Israel maintains complete control of the territory by sea, air and land. And since Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006, Israel has punished its 1.5 million people with an inhuman blockade of essential supplies, backed by the US and the European Union.

Like any occupied people, the Palestinians have the right to resist, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But there is no right of defence for an illegal occupation – there is an obligation to withdraw comprehensively. During the last seven years, 14 Israelis have been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, while more than 5,000 Palestinians were killed by Israel with some of the most advanced US-supplied armaments in the world. And while no rockets are fired from the West Bank, 45 Palestinians have died there at Israel’s hands this year alone. The issue is of course not just the vast disparity in weapons and power, but that one side is the occupier, the other the occupied.

Hamas is likewise blamed for last month’s breakdown of the six-month tahdi’a, or lull. But, in a weary reprise of past ceasefires, it was in fact sunk by Israel’s assassination of six Hamas fighters in Gaza on 5 November and its refusal to lift its siege of the embattled territory as expected under an Egyptian-brokered deal. The truth is that Israel and its western sponsors have set their face against an accommodation with the Palestinians’ democratic choice and have instead thrown their political weight, cash and arms behind a sustained attempt to overthrow it.

The complete failure of that approach has brought us to this week’s horrific pass. Israeli leaders believe they can bomb Hamas into submission with a “decisive blow” that will establish a “new security environment” – and boost their electoral fortunes in the process before Barack Obama comes to office.

But as with Israel’s disastrous assault on Lebanon two years ago – or its earlier siege of Yasser Arafat’s PLO in Beirut in 1982 – it is a strategy that cannot succeed. Even more than Hezbollah, Hamas’s appeal among Palestinians and beyond doesn’t derive from its puny infrastructure, or even its Islamist ideology, but its spirit of resistance to decades of injustice. So long as it remains standing in the face of this onslaught, its influence will only be strengthened. And if it is not with rockets, its retaliation is bound to take other forms, as Hamas’s leader Khalid Mish’al made clear at the weekend.

Meanwhile, the US and Israeli-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has been further diminished by being seen as having colluded in the Israeli assault on his own people – as has the already rock-bottom credibility of the Egyptian regime. What is now taking place in the Palestinian territories is a futile crime in which the US and its allies are deeply complicit – and unless Obama is prepared to change course, it is likely to have bitter consequences that will touch us all.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

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Israel’s War Crimes

December 30, 2008

By Richard Falk

The Nation, December 29, 2008

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Editor’s Note: This statement was issued December 27 in response to Israel’s attack in Gaza by Professor Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories and a longtime member of The Nation‘s editorial board.

The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war.


» More

  • Israel’s War Crimes

    Israeli/Palestinian Conflict

    Richard Falk: Israel’s airstrikes on Gaza are severe and massive violations of international law–and nations that have supplied weapons and supported Israel’s siege of Gaza are complicit in the crimes.

  • Richard Falk: The sick man of Europe gets a jolt of life, but will it last?

  • Questionable Verdict

    Iraq

    Richard Falk: Even the most naive American voter cannot be expected to see the morally, legally and politically questionable death sentence given to Saddam Hussein a milestone in the Bush Administration’s illegal war in Iraq. As the milestones pile up, so do the bodies.

Those violations include:
• Collective punishment: The entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.

• Targeting civilians: The airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.

• Disproportionate military response: The airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.

Earlier Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza’s besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims.

Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response. I note that Israel’s escalating military assaults have not made Israeli civilians safer; to the contrary, the one Israeli killed today after the upsurge of Israeli violence is the first in over a year.

Israel has also ignored recent Hamas diplomatic initiatives to re-establish the truce or ceasefire since its expiration on 26 December.

The Israeli airstrikes today, and the catastrophic human toll that they caused, challenge those countries that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israel’s violations of international law. That complicity includes those countries knowingly providing the military equipment including warplanes and missiles used in these illegal attacks, as well as those countries who have supported and participated in the siege of Gaza that itself has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.

I remind all Member States of the United Nations that the UN continues to be bound to an independent obligation to protect any civilian population facing massive violations of international humanitarian law–regardless of what country may be responsible for those violations. I call on all Member States, as well as officials and every relevant organ of the United Nations system, to move on an emergency basis not only to condemn Israel’s serious violations, but to develop new approaches to providing real protection for the Palestinian people.

About Richard Falk

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University, is the United Nations Human Rights Rapporteur in the Occupied Territories and a member of The Nation editorial board. He is the author of many books, including The Costs of War: International Law, the UN, and World Order After Iraq. more…

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Bush, Obama, and the Gaza Blitz

December 30, 2008

by Patrick J. Buchanan | Antiwar.com, Dec 30, 2008


Unwilling to control its fighters, who fired scores of missiles into Israel at the end of their six-month cease-fire, Hamas gave Israel the provocation it needed to deliver a savage blow to the Palestinian enclave in Gaza.

Saturday was the bloodiest day in the history of the Palestinian people since being driven from their homes in the war of 1948. One thousand were killed or wounded, as the Israeli air force conducted over a hundred strikes – on graduation ceremonies for Hamas fighters, police stations, and storage sites for rockets.

About Israel’s right and duty to defend its border towns, there is no dispute. When Hamas permits Gaza to be used as a launch pad for rockets, it must expect retaliation. Nor can Hamas claim some right to dictate the limits of that retaliation.

Yet the wisdom of so savage a retribution for rockets that killed not one Israeli is open to question. And crass Israeli politics seems to be behind this premeditated and planned blitz.

With Likud’s hawkish “Bibi” Netanyahu ahead in the polls for the Feb. 10 election, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Labor’s candidate, had to show that he, too, could be ruthless with Hamas.

Kadima Party candidate and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has an even greater need than the highly decorated Barak to show toughness. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, departing in scandal, wants to exit in a blaze of glory, to blot out the memory of a botched war against Hezbollah that he launched in the summer of 2006.

However, while Israel’s politicians all seem to have a stake in these devastating strikes, Israel herself will pay the price.

Given the casualty toll, over 300 dead and 1,300 wounded as of this writing, Hamas will have to exact its pound of flesh. The Hamas wing that seeks renewed war with Israel will now shout into silence the wing working with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak on a new cease-fire.

The moderate Palestinian Mahmoud Abbas, who has been talking to Israel, testifying to her good faith, has been made to appear the puppet and fool. A new Intifada spreading to the West Bank, with suicide attacks inside Israel, is now possible.

Moderate Arabs, who have recognized Israel or backed peace, will now be seen by the Arab street as appeasers impotent to stop the public suffering of the Palestinian people.

As for President Bush’s hopes of midwifing a peace that would create a Palestinian state, they are as dead as the Annapolis process he set in train. In advancing peace in the Middle East, Bush’s eight-year record is now a near-absolute failure.

For four years, Bush refused to talk to Yasser Arafat, though Bill Clinton had negotiated with him, as had four Israeli prime ministers, two of whom shared a Nobel Prize with Arafat. In his second term, Bush, after insisting Hamas be included in free elections in Palestine, refused to recognize Hamas when it won those elections.

Arafat was a terrorist and Hamas is a terrorist organization, declared Bush, and we don’t negotiate with terrorists. Yet Bush de-listed Libya as a state sponsor of terror and sent Condi Rice to chat up Col. Gadhafi, though Gadhafi still has on his hands the blood of scores of American school kids from the Lockerbie massacre of 1989 that Libya and Gadhafi engineered

For eight years, like the “dummy” in a hand of bridge, Bush has sat mute as his Israeli partner, Sharon or Olmert, played America’s cards as well as their own. The Bush response to Saturday’s carnage, as anticipated, was to blame Hamas for causing it and urge Israelis to be careful about civilian casualties as they go about their reprisals.

Whatever Israel decides, we support. For eight years that has been the most reliable guide to U.S. Middle East policy.

And Barack Obama? Forty-eight hours after the Israeli blitz began, he and his national security team remain silent.

Hopefully, Obama will bring with him a new Mideast policy, one made in the USA, for the USA. Hopefully, just as Israel has its private links to Syria through Turkey, to Hamas through Egypt, and to Hezbollah, Obama will establish independent U.S. channels to all three, and adopt a separate U.S. policy toward all three, as Israel does.

While the United States must support Israel’s right to defend her towns and to strike bases from which Israelis are being attacked, Obama should denounce the collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, by Israel’s cutting off their electricity in the dead of winter and denying them the food and medicine many need to survive.

For us to remain silent in the face of this comports neither with our interests or our values. Israel’s policy of withholding from the weak and innocent of Gaza, women and children, the necessities of life, to punish the guilty who rule at the point of a gun, is a policy that Obama should declare the United States will no longer support with tax dollars.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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Blood and tears in the streets of Gaza

December 30, 2008

Eric Ruder reports on Israel’s latest escalation of its barbaric war on the Palestinian people.

Socialist Worker, December 29, 2008

Israeli air strikes have killed nearly 300 Palestinians in two days of bombing (Fady Adwan | propaimages)Israeli air strikes have killed nearly 300 Palestinians in two days of bombing (Fady Adwan | propaimages)

GAZA IS under attack by one of the most deadly military machines on the planet–with even worse to come as Israel masses troops for a threatened ground invasion.

Starting at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, Israel’s F-16 jet fighters and Apache helicopters, supplied by the U.S., unleashed a punishing assault on targets of every kind–police stations, mosques, hospitals, media outlets, community centers and buildings owned by the Hamas party.

Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world, so the “precision strikes” supposedly aimed at “Hamas militants” were bound to take a toll on the civilian population. By late Sunday night, the official death toll after 36 hours of killing stood at nearly 300.

Meanwhile, Israeli ground forces and tanks were stationed at the border, and the military announced it was calling up its reserves, an ominous sign that the scale of the atrocities could grow worse.

Israel’s all-out offensive caused fury across the Middle East. Thousands took to the streets to protest Israel’s assault and the silence of many Arab regimes as the slaughter of Palestinians was broadcast on television news stations. In several places, anger was directed at the Egyptian government for its unwillingness to open its border with Gaza to relieve the pressure from Israel’s crippling siege of the last 18 months.

What you can do

Emergency protests have already taken place in cities around the country, with more planned for the coming days–including a national day of action called for Tuesday, December 30. Contact local organizers for details where you live.

For updates on the current situation in Gaza, plus commentary and analysis on the background to the war, read the Electronic Intifada Web site. Electronic Intifada Executive Director Ali Abunimah’s “Gaza massacres must spur us to action” is a good starting point for further reading.

You can also find updated coverage on conditions in Gaza and the efforts of activists to stand up to the Israeli war at the Free Gaza Web site.

Between the Lines: Readings on Israel, the Palestinians and the U.S. “War on Terror,” by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad, documents the apartheid-like conditions that Palestinians live under today.

For background on Israel’s war and the Palestinian struggle for freedom, read The Struggle for Palestine, a collection of essays edited by Lance Selfa on the history of the occupation and Palestinian resistance.

In the U.S., antiwar coalitions, human rights groups and others organized emergency-response actions, drawing hundreds to demonstrations in cities across the U.S. More protests will take place this week; a national day of action has been called for Tuesday.

Israel’s attack began with simultaneous air raids on more than 30 targets. Within the first nine hours, the Israeli military reported it had dropped more than 100 tons of bombs. Not since the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel began its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, have Palestinians in Gaza been subjected to such an outburst of destruction.

In an interview, Dr. Haider Eid relayed the horror as he talked about conditions in Gaza:

I live in Gaza City itself, where most of the air strikes took place. The attacks came just as schoolchildren were returning home from school. It was absolutely horrible. The timing was chosen to cause a massacre.

I rushed to the Shifa hospital–along with ambulances, cars and trucks that were also streaming to the hospital with the wounded. I stood in front of the gate. I don’t like to see the mangled bodies, but this was especially horrible. Cars carried dismembered bodies, detached legs and arms and heads.

The part of this that I’m still trying to cope with are the bodies of the children. This is something you don’t wish on your worst enemies, to tell you the truth. The morgue at the hospital is the largest in Gaza City, but it ran out of space to keep the bodies.

As he talked, a thunderous noise drowned out Haider’s voice. “Oh my God! A huge explosion just took place as I’m speaking with you,” said Haider. “That was very close. Oh my God! Another one! I’m sorry. I must go.” Haider hung up to check on his relatives, and subsequent attempts to reach him have so far been unsuccessful.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

ISRAEL CLAIMED that it launched its offensive on Gaza to defend itself from Palestinian rocket attacks aimed at towns in southern Israel. Predictably, the U.S. backed up this assertion. “The United States strongly condemns the repeated rocket and mortar attacks against Israel, and holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The ceasefire Rice referred to began six months ago, but the terms of it were never honored by Israel, and in fact, it expired days before the assault began.

Under the truce, Palestinian militants agreed to end their rocket attacks against Israel, while Israel was supposed to lift its suffocating siege of Gaza, which has led to critical shortages of all manner of necessities, from flour to electricity to medical supplies.

But the Israeli government didn’t end the siege. The blockade is designed to punish the people of Gaza for the “crime” of voting Hamas into the majority in the Palestinian Legislative Assembly in January 2006 elections. Backed by the U.S., and with the collaboration of rival Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, Israel continued to hope that the population of Gaza would turn against Hamas.

Within Israel, only a tiny number of voices dissented from the claim–thoroughly dominant in the mainstream Israeli and U.S. media–that Israel was acting in self-defense against Hamas’ aggression. Days before the Israeli offensive began, Jerusalem Post columnist Larry Derfner wrote:

We don’t want to see how people in Gaza are living, we block it out of our minds–which, I suppose, is natural for a society at war, but which also keeps that war going longer than it might if we would recognize that Gaza is getting so much the worst of it.

The [Palestinian] Kassam [rockets] have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them…

This is crazy. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East, but because we still think we’re the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, or the Israelites under Pharaoh, we spend a lot more time fighting our enemies than we might if we looked at the whole picture, not just our half of it.

There may be a way out of this war, and if Israel does not take it–if it does not accept Hamas’ offer of a ceasefire, which it should have offered Hamas from the beginning–then the principal blame for the war will lie with us. Our arrogance and blindness will get a lot of innocent people killed. And no one has a clue about when, or where, or how it will end.

This comment makes it obvious that the death toll from Israel’s air strikes only count for part of the casualties in the latest phase of the war. Those Palestinians who died as a consequence of Israel’s blockade–a clear violation of international laws prohibiting the use of collective punishment and attempts to physically destroy a people and their society–have to be included.

As Palestinian author and activist Ali Abunimah said in an interview:

The idea that this is about Israel’s “self-defense” is a very partial and one-sided claim. The reality is that Israel asked for a ceasefire with Hamas and got it, during which there were no rockets fired by the Palestinians.

During this so-called ceasefire, Israel continued to maintain a punishing blockade on Gaza, starving people, depriving them of food and medicine. Many people were dying in Gaza, not because of bombs, but because they couldn’t get cancer treatments, insulin and other basic medications. They weren’t even allowed to travel to get medical treatment.

Hundreds of Palestinians have died because of the Israeli blockade. Ehud Barak’s orders to prevent medicine from reaching Gaza were just as lethal and just as intended to kill as his orders to send bombers into Gaza.

Israel’s harsh treatment of Palestinians living in the West Bank further underscores the hypocrisy of Israel’s claim to be defending itself. As Abunimah points out:

There has never been a single rocket fired at Israel from the West Bank. And yet during the period of the so-called truce in the West Bank, Israel continued extrajudicial executions, continued to confiscate Palestinian land, continued to demolish Palestinians homes, continued to kidnap Palestinians and imprison them. Israeli settlers engaged in regular pogroms and rampages, attacking Palestinians and destroying their property.

What was the excuse for that? Israel never needed the excuse of rockets to continue its systematic violence against Palestinians.

– – – – – – – – – – – – –

BECAUSE OF Israel’s debilitating siege, the residents of Gaza are particularly ill-equipped to deal with the physical, medical, humanitarian and psychological consequences of this new offensive.

The statistical measures of Gaza’s desperation are truly awful. Malnutrition in Gaza is comparable to the dire situation of countries in sub-Saharan Africa, affecting some 75 percent of the population–46 percent of children in Gaza suffer from acute anemia. The majority of children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and thousands of kids require hearing aids because of repeated exposure to the earsplitting sonic booms of low-altitude flyovers by Israeli fighter jets.

Blood supplies are running critically low. There are chronic shortages of electricity, drinking water, flour, bread and more. Unemployment is well over 50 percent. The economy is in total freefall.

This is all by design. According to the logic of Israeli officials, the pressure is necessary to force Gaza’s residents to turn against Hamas. Such measures have always failed in the past–on the contrary, they have led to ever more intense and desperate anger at Israel’s brutality.

But according to Abunimah, the latest offensive has also exposed a new development–the outright surrender of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah wing of the Palestinian national movement that he leads:

For a long time, the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has been colluding with Israel and the U.S. against Hamas. Since the election in January 2006, the PA has been determined to overturn the election result and to maintain itself in power, and it has done that with guns provided by the U.S. and Israel.

Many Palestinians were not willing to confront this directly because it’s a very painful truth. But the situation in Gaza has pulled the mask off, and Palestinians everywhere are now openly pointing to Ramallah as having colluded directly with the Israelis–and indeed the comments of PA President Mahmoud Abbas in Cairo that Hamas is to blame for this have sickened and revolted Palestinians.

This has laid bare the reality that Abbas is working for the Israelis and is more loyal to them than to the Palestinian people that he claims to lead.

As for the U.S., it has long presented itself to the world as an “honest broker,” as Palestinians struggled to establish an independent state in their homeland.

Yet U.S. economic, military and diplomatic support has been the essential ingredient that allowed Israel to continue its occupation of Palestinian land and its immunity to diplomatic sanctions or international pressure to grant even the basic Palestinian right to the necessities of life.

For activists in the U.S., it’s our responsibility to expose the complicity of the U.S. in the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. This means building public demonstrations and protests, as well as ongoing campaigns to pressure the U.S. to end its support for Israel. And it means exposing the lie that Israel is acting in self-defense when it carries out massacres in Gaza.

“What can we fairly ask of Palestinians when 1.5 million people are blockaded, besieged, imprisoned in a giant ghetto, when they cannot eat due to lack of food while living under a so-called truce?” asks Abunimah. “Israel’s idea of a truce is that Palestinians have a right to remain silent while they starve to death.

“Palestinians also have a right to defend themselves. That self-defense may take many forms, but Israel has never respected Palestinians’ right to defend themselves, whether they do so through armed struggle or peaceful means. The Israeli response is always bombs and bullets. That’s the full picture that’s not being exposed anywhere.”

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Israel vows to continue war on Gaza

December 30, 2008
Al Jazeera, Dec 30, 2008

Hundreds of people have been killed and many wounded in four days of air raids [AFP]

Israel has warned that the onslaught in the Gaza Strip could last for “weeks” as the fourth consecutive day of aerial attacks targeted several Hamas government buildings.

Around 350 people have been killed, many of them civilians, and local hospitals have warned they are unable to cope with any more casualties.

Palestinian medical workers said at least 10 people had died in the latest raids on Tuesday, with security guards and civilians among those killed.

But Israel said there would be no let up until the threat of Palestinian rockets attacks from the Gaza Strip had been removed.

“There is no room for a ceasefire,” Meir Sheetrit, Israel’s interior minister, said.

“The government is determined to remove the threat of [rocket] fire on the south.

“Therefore the Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel.”

Four Israeli citizens have been killed by missiles fired from Palestinian positions since the offensive began on Saturday.

Military preparations

The Israeli army has been massing infantry and armoured forces along the border amid increasing fears that a ground invasion is planned.

In depth

Focus

 Arab street angry over Gaza attacks

Reaction: Raids take toll on Gaza

Gaza strikes a challenge for Obama

Videos

 Gaza pounded for third straight day

US backs Israeli air raids

Hospitals in Gaza struggle to cope

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Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, said the military “has made preparations for some long weeks of action”.

On Monday, areas of the border were declared “closed military zones” and thousands of reservists have been called up by the Israeli military.

Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Gaza City, said that there was little the residents of the strip could do to prepare for any possible ground assault.”In a city that is so densely-populated, a ground offensive would mean urban warfare, street-to-street fighting … leaving many Palestinians in the crossfire,” he said.

“Unlike other conflict zones where there is the possibility to flee the war zone, Gaza itself has become the war zone. There is nowhere for the population to go, they are in the middle of all these attacks.”

Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, has added his voice to calls for an end to the violence.

Speaking at UN headquarters in New York on Monday, he said both sides should end the fighting and said regional powers should do more to help resolve the crisis.

“All this must stop,” Ban told a press conference.

“Both Israel and Hamas must halt their acts of violence and take all necessary measures to avoid civilian casualties. A ceasefire must be declared immediately. They must also curb their inflammatory rhetoric.”

Hamas blamed

Speaking to Al Jazeera, the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, said the Israeli offensive was aimed at Hamas and not the Palestinian people, urging civilians to leave for safer places away from places close to Hamas infrastructure.

“We tried to avoid this. You know that Israel accepted the truce that was initiated by the Egyptians in order to create peace and quiet. We adopted the truce. What we got in return? We got in return daily attacks, we got in return smuggling of weapons to Gaza Strip with long-range [capabilities],” she said.

Support for Israel came from the US, with the White House saying Hamas must halt cross-border rocket fire.

“In order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable ceasefire,” Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman said.

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SLAUGHTER IN GAZA

December 28, 2008

John Wight, Socialist Unity, Dec 27, 2008

Israel has unleashed hell on Gaza. At time of writing 200 men, women, and children are known to have been slaughtered in airstrikes using US supplied fighter aircraft. Over 300 are known to be injured, many of whom will undoubtedly die as a direct consequence of Israel’s ongoing siege, responsible for creating a dire shortage of basic medicines and leaving medical facilities in Gaza degraded and overwhelmed.

In the immediate aftermath of its latest attack on Gaza, the Israeli military issued a statement warning that this is only the beginning, that operations against Gaza will deepen, in a haunting reminder of the threat made earlier in the year by Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, who promised the Palestinians of Gaza a ‘shoah’ – or holocaust.

Surely now it is time to stop equivocating when it comes to this issue? Surely now the world must stand up and take action in response to what is the most sustained, barbaric, and brutal occupation in modern history, in a part of the world where crimes against humanity have been allowed to exist for too long under the guise of exceptionalism, victimhood, and democracy?

In response to Israel’s latest outrage, the usual round of supine statements calling for Hamas to stop rocket attacks against Israeli towns in resistance to the occupation of Palestinian land have been released from capitals throughout the West. And, yes, yet again the world is being regaled by claims from Israeli spokespeople and their supporters that an existential threat to Israel from Hamas and Palestinian terrorists lies at the root of the current crisis. It is a claim to the status of victim that has been repeated so often through the years of this perennial struggle it has assumed the status of received truth. It is a received truth which flies in the face of a history of ethnic cleansing and occupation.

As such, one of the most disgraceful aspects of this ongoing conflict is the way in which our mainstream media continues to present it as a struggle between two equal sides. In fact, on the contrary, wherever and whenever possible the media acquiesces in Israel’s role of victim, as a courageous little outpost of western civilisation in the midst of Arab hordes committed to its destruction.

Alarm bells should be set ringing when we hear such easy assertions being made by mainstream commentators and journalists. For we’ve been here before, haven’t we? In fact, the entire history of empire, colonialism, and imperialism is replete with oppressors attempting to portray themselves as victims and their victims as terrorists and savages that need to be either tamed, cleansed or subjugated; and, of course, always in the interests of security and stability.

Think British Empire, think Nazi occupation of Europe, think French and US occupation of Vietnam, think French occupation of Algeria, think British occupation of Ireland, think Israel’s occupation of Palestine – the same pattern emerges.

Among the aforementioned examples, the state of Israel has enjoyed something of an Indian summer in terms of its ability to continue to deny the Palestinians their national, civil, and human rights. This is largely due to the guilt which still pervades the upper reaches of European and US society over a European Holocaust in which the Palestinians played no part. This guilt has combined with strategic objectives – namely oil – to provide Israel with the economic aid which has enabled it to amass the fourth largest military in the world, a nuclear arsenal, and with it legitimacy for a state policy of ethnic cleansing.

That the Palestinians have managed to survive 60 years of occupation, expropriation, economic embargo, and state terror is testament to their courage and indomitability. But even a courageous people can only survive such brutality for so long without succumbing and being sent into the night, which is why now more than ever the campaign to boycott Israel must be stepped up in line with the call from Palestinian civil society.

A sobering thought to consider that 60 years ago 530 Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed, and that 750,000 men, women, and children were forcibly expelled by Zionist terrorist organisations like the Stern Gang and Irgun in the process of 78 percent of historic Palestine being expropriated. The extent of this crime against an entire people reflected the horror of the crime committed by the Nazis which preceded it. Those who sought sanctuary in another’s land did so in the name of the victims of that holocaust. But perpetrators of crimes against humanity can never claim to act on behalf of victims of crimes against humanity. It is indeed a cruel irony of history that the victims of the genocide carried out by the Nazis are wedded to the victims of Israel’s barbarism which followed through a bond of human suffering that transcends ties of religion, race, or ethnicity.

The continued siege of 1.5 million human being in Gaza is biblical both in its scale and cruelty. Aided and abetted in the carrying out of this crime against civilians by the Egyptian government and the EU, Israel’s excuse for continuing the siege is continuing rocket attacks from Gaza into Israeli towns adjacent, in particular the Israeli town of Sderot.

But here again we see the work of a generation of scholars in service to Israel and its interests in the rewriting of history. In the case of Sderot, a determined attempt has been made to suppress the fact that this is a town established on land where the Palestinian village of Najd once stood.

Najd’s inhabitants were forcibly expelled from their village on 13 May 1948 by the Negev Brigade of the then nascent Israeli army, before Israel was declared a state and before any Arab armies entered Palestine. Therefore, in accordance with UN Resolution 194, and also with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, Section 2, the villagers of Najd have a right of return to their homes.

The village of Najd was destroyed and settled by Zionists in 1951. It has been known ever since as the Israeli town of Sderot.

The history of the origins of Sderot is one repeated hundreds of times all over what is now the state of Israel. Therefore, the question a world interested in justice should be asking the Israeli government is a simple one:

Do the Palestinians have the right to exist?

As we await the answer to this question from the Israeli government and its supporters, all people of conscience and consciousness must answer the plea for solidarity from the long suffering Palestinians of Gaza.

Their cause is the cause of humanity in our time.

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Inside Gaza: ‘The hospital morgues were already full. The dead were piled on top of each other outside’

December 28, 2008

By Sami Abdel-Shafi in Gaza city
The Independent, UK, Sunday, 28 December 2008

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I am safe, and yet I feel like a walking dead person. Everything around me shows it. It is hard to write something of any coherence while exposed to cold winter air and to the smell that lingers after the detonation of Israeli bombs. They must have been massive. During the bombing I opened all the windows around my apartment to avoid them imploding as a result of the vacuum shocks sweeping through Gaza City after each enormous bang. While the bombing continued, I jumped down two flights of stairs to my father’s house, to make sure he was OK. Should I open up all his windows too? That would expose the old man to the risk of illness. We have no medical care or medication. However, the risk from shattering glass was greater, so I opened them all.

Mobile phones did not work, because of electricity outages and the flood of attempted calls. I flipped the electricity generator on so that we could watch the news. We wanted to understand what was going on in our own neighbourhood. However, this was impossible. Israeli surveillance drones flew overhead, scrambling the reception. All I could do was step outside, where I found crowds of frantic people, lines of rising smoke and the smell of charred buildings and bodies that lay around targeted sites nearby. Somebody said the bombs had been launched in parallel raids over the entire Gaza Strip. What was the target here? Perhaps a police station about 200 metres away. Other bombs annihilated blocks less than a kilometre away, where one of the main police training centres stood. When the strikes began, a graduation ceremony for more than 100 recruits in a civil law enforcement programme was under way. These were the young men trained to organise traffic, instil civil safety and maintain law and order. Many of them were killed, it is said, in addition to the Gaza Strip’s police chief.

News came by word of mouth. There had been more than 150 deaths and more than 200 people were injured or missing under rubble after the first two hours of bombing. Israel had said it would continue the offensive and deepen it if necessary. Likewise, it was said that Hamas had launched more rockets at southern Israeli towns, causing one death and four injuries. Gaza had never seen anything like the numbers of dead bodies lying on its streets. Hospital morgues were already full. The dead were piled on top of each other outside.

Bombs targeting a Hamas security force building badly damaged an adjacent school, and several children were injured. We heard of many other targets around the Gaza Strip. It reminds me of the “shock and awe” campaign the Allies launched over Baghdad in 2003. But shock and awe did not bring stability or peace.

These bombs were launched by Israel, as we had known they would be. The world watched the situation simmer then boil over, but did nothing. There are some who believe that hell is divided into different classes. The ordinary people of Gaza have long been caught in the tormenting underworld. Now, if the world does not heed what has happened here, our situation will worsen. We will be trapped in the first class of hell.

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