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Avi Shlaim: The newspeak of Israeli propagandists

January 26, 2009

The Guardian, Monday 26 January 2009

What Uri Dromi says about Hamas is pure and poisonous Israeli propaganda (This Hamas hallucination, 23 January). In every respect his article is almost the exact opposite of the truth. Dromi claims that: “The Orwellian mindset of the organisation is as much a barrier to peace as the rockets it fires.” But it is the newspeak of Israeli propagandists like Dromi that is truly Orwellian.

Over the last four weeks the powerful Israeli propaganda machine has been churning out lie after lie about Hamas in order to excuse its own inexcusable onslaught. Israel stopped journalists going into Gaza, preventing any independent reporting on the war crimes its forces were committing. Truth is usually the first casualty in war. Gaza was not even a war in the conventional sense of the word; it was one-sided carnage.

Here are some of the facts Dromi ignores or wilfully misrepresents. First, Hamas is the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people, not the corrupt regime led by Mahmoud Abbas. Second, Hamas spokesmen have repeatedly declared their readiness for a long-term ceasefire. Khalid Mish’al recently did so on these pages (Comment, 6 January). Third, Hamas has a solid record of observing ceasefires, while Israel has a consistent record of sabotaging them. Fourth, even during the ceasefire Israel did not lift its economic blockade of the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza, a form of collective punishment forbidden by international law. Fifth, the offensive unleashed in Gaza was illegal, immoral and unnecessary. If all Israel wanted was to stop rocket attacks from Gaza, all it had to do was to observe the ceasefire brokered by Egypt in June 2008.

Professor Avi Shlaim
Oxford

Tags:Avi Shlaim, economic blockade, Gaza invasion, Israel, Israeli propaganda, journalists not allowed, lies about Hamas, one-sided carnage, Palestinians, Uri Dromi
Posted in Commentary, Palestine, Peace Movement, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

International Law and Israel’s War on Gaza

January 25, 2009

by Francis A. Boyle

Global Research, January 24, 2009

mwcnews.net

When the Oslo Document was originally presented by the Israeli government to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations in the Fall of 1992, it was rejected by the Delegation because it obviously constituted a bantustan. This document carried out Menachem Begin’s disingenuous misinterpretation of the Camp David Accords–expressly rejected by U.S. President Jimmy Carter–that all they called for was autonomy for the people and not for the land too.

Soon thereafter, unbeknownst to the Delegation and to almost everyone else, the Israeli government opened up a secret channel of negotiations in Norway. There the Israeli government re-presented the document that had already been rejected by the Palestinian Delegation in Washington, D.C. It was this document, with very minor modifications, that was later signed at the White House on 13 September 1993.

Before the signing ceremony, I commented to a high-level official of the Palestine Liberation Organization: “This document is like a straight-jacket. It will be very difficult to negotiate your way out of it.” This PLO official agreed with my assessment and responded: “Yes, you are right. It will depend upon our negotiating skill.”

Of course I have great respect for Palestinian negotiators. They have done the best they can negotiating in good faith with the Israeli government that has been invariably backed up by the United States. But there has never been any good faith on the part of the Israeli government either before, during or after Oslo. Ditto for the United States.

Even if Oslo had succeeded, it would have resulted in the imposition of a bantustan upon the Palestinian People. But Oslo has run its course! Therefore, it is my purpose here today to chart a NEW DIRECTION for the Palestinian People to consider.

An agenda for an international legal response:

First, we must immediately move for the de facto suspension of Israel throughout the entirety of the United Nations System, including the General Assembly and all U.N. subsidiary organs and bodies. We must do to Israel what the U.N. General Assembly has done to the genocidal rump Yugoslavia and to the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa! Here the legal basis for the de facto suspension of Israel at the U.N. is quite simple:

As a condition for its admission to the United Nations Organization, Israel formally agreed to accept General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) (1947) (partition/Jerusalem trusteeship) and General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) (1948) (Palestinian right of return), inter alia. Nevertheless, the government of Israel has expressly repudiated both Resolution 181 (II) and Resolution 194 (III). Therefore, Israel has violated its conditions for admission to U.N. membership and thus must be suspended on a de facto basis from any participation throughout the entire United Nations System.

Second, any further negotiations with Israel must be conducted on the basis of Resolution 181 (II) and its borders; Resolution 194 (III); subsequent General Assembly resolutions and Security Council resolutions; the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949; the 1907 Hague Regulations; and other relevant principles of public international law.

Third, we must abandon the fiction and the fraud that the United States government is an “honest broker.” The United States government has never been an honest broker from well before the very outset of these negotiations in 1991. Rather, the United States has invariably sided with Israel against the Palestinians. We need to establish some type of international framework to sponsor these negotiations where the Palestinian negotiators will not be subjected to the continual bullying, threats, harassment, intimidation and outright lies perpetrated by the United States government.

Fourth, we must move to have the U.N. General Assembly impose economic, diplomatic, and travel sanctions upon Israel pursuant to the terms of the Uniting for Peace Resolution (1950), whose Emergency Special Session on Palestine is now in recess.

Fifth, the Provisional Government of the State of Palestine must sue Israel before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for inflicting acts of genocide against the Palestinian People in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention!

Sixth, An International Criminal Tribunal for Israel (ICTI) can be established by the UN General Assembly as a “subsidiary organ” under article 22 of the UN Charter. Article 22 of the UN Charter states the UN General Assembly may establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its functions. The purpose of the ICTI would be to investigate and Prosecute suspected Israeli war criminals for offences against the Palestinian people.

On January 4, 2009, Nobel Peace Laureate, Mairead Maguire wrote to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon and Father Miguel D’Escoto President of United Nations General assembly adding her voice to the many calls from International Jurists, Human rights Organizations, and individuals, for the UN General Assembly to seriously consider establishing an International Criminal Tribunal for Israel in view of the ongoing Israeli atrocities against the people of Gaza and Palestine.

Francis A. Boyle is Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois. He was Legal Advisor to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations (1991-93)

Tags:a bantustan, apartheid regime, Father Miguel D'Escoto, International Court of Justice, Israel, Mairead Maguire, Menachem Begin, Palestine Liberation Organization, Professor Francis A. Boyle, the Oslo Document, UN Resolutions, United Nations System, USA
Posted in Human rights, Palestine, Peace Movement, US policy, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

Reasons for War?

January 25, 2009

Livni’s Bombs

By Saul Landau | Counterpunch, January 23 / 25, 2009

On January 18, Israel and Hamas agreed to a weeklong cease-fire. Prime Minister Olmert declared Israel had achieved its objectives. “Hamas was hit hard, in its military arms and in its government institutions. Its leaders are in hiding and many of its men have been killed,” said Olmert.

More than 1,100 [1,300] Palestinians lay dead, more than a third women and children, countless more wounded and Gaza’s physical infrastructure destroyed or badly damaged. 13 Israelis died. Hamas still rules Gaza – from within, but has no control of its borders – and presumably can still smuggle weapons in from Egypt.

The truce is beyond shaky as President Obama takes office with an unqualified “I support Israel” policy and a core of Israeli kiss asses for advisers (Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk as examples).

The world witnessed another stupid and lopsided war in which Israel delivered deadly round of rockets and bombs into civilian neighborhoods in Gaza. As people shook their heads in disgust and bewilderment, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained the two possibilities: “If Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to educate Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.”

A small price to pay — 1,400 dead – to learn an important lesson! Obviously the newly educated but now less numerous Palestinians will shout “Never again” as their slogan opposing Hamas in the next elections in Gaza thus showing that they “understand the consequences of previously voting for Hamas.” (Jan. 14)

Friedman also labeled Bush’s invasion of Iraq “the most noble act of US foreign policy since the Marshall Plan.” (NY Times, Nov. 30, 2003)

In 2006, Friedman praised Israel for successfully teaching a lesson by bombing and killing 1,000 plus Lebanese. “Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.”

One problem emerged with Friedman’s logic: Hezbollah emerged far stronger from the 2006 Israeli invasion; Israel much weaker.

Luckily, fanatic Arab militants seem to reject Friedman’s pedagogical method. Imagine, if they began to teach Jews around the world a similar lesson about the violent consequences that would result from supporting Israel! Imagine Friedman’s equivalent writing for the Nazi propaganda machine explaining how killing civilians in London, Leningrad or Warsaw would educate those supporting resistance to the folly of their loyalties!

The Friedman clones on op-ed pages and print and TV newsrooms throughout the West allows Israeli propaganda to prevail. But not as much as previously!

In a McClatchy/Ipsos poll of 1000 Americans adults, 44% supported Israel’s use of force, and 44% blamed Hamas for the Israeli invasion. Only 14% thought Israel had started the conflict. 57% thought Hamas was using excessive force, while only 36%, Israel. (LA Daily News, 1/14/09)

The media mostly omitted coherent history of Israel occupying Gaza after the 1967 Six-Day War and its subsequent illegal occupation of the territory; or that the UN has repeatedly demanded in resolutions that Israel withdraw. After Hamas won the 2006 Gaza elections, Israeli authorities stopped delivering tax revenues on imports that the Gaza government needed to pay bills and police.

Israeli blockaded the Gaza border – an act of war under international law. This provoked the rocket firings into Israel, most of them missing human targets. Simultaneously, Israelis fired missiles into Gaza killing and wounding far more people than the inaccurate Palestinian missiles. The Israeli blockade stopped medical supplies as well, leading to more death and disaster.

The US press didn’t print the most outrageous pro Israel statements.

At a rally in New York, reported Max Blumenthal, “a man held a banner reading, ‘Islam Is A Death Cult.’” Some rally-goers “called for Israel to “wipe them [people of Gaza] all out.” (Alternet, Jan 13)

Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Israel Beiteinu, which polls say will soon be Israel’s fourth largest party, demanded in a university speech in Israel that bombing in Gaza continue until Hamas “loses the will to fight.” Lieberman continued: “We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II.” (Jerusalem Post,January 13, 2009)

Instead of reading such statements, the US public got regurgitated reports about Israeli leaders courageously removing troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005. Surprise! On New Year’s Eve CNN asked: who broke the June 2008 ceasefire that led to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza? Mustafa Barghouti got air time. In 2005, this Palestinian physician got almost 20% of the vote for President of the Palestinian National Authority against Mahmoud Abbas. “The world press,” he declared, “is overwhelmed with the Israeli narrative, which is incorrect. The Israeli spokespersons have been spreading lies.”

Barghouti charged that “Israel started attacking Hamas, and never lifted the blockade on Gaza.” CNN’s Rick Sanchez then said he had confirmed Barghouti’s version of the facts. Israel, not Hamas had started the war.

A NY Times columnist (Nicholas Kristoff, January 8), a Wall St. Journal writer (George Bisharat, January 10) and Time (January 8) also questioned Israel’s behavior. (“Why Israel can’t win”)

Until Israel began its Gaza massacre, US and mainstream Israeli media have accepted as axiomatic that Hamas means “terrorists.” Reporters have repeated the line about Hamas using Gaza residents as “human shields” after launching missiles targeting innocent Israelis. Humane and very patient Israel had no choice but to bomb the bejeezus (or the bemohammed) out of the “military installations” — homes, clinics, refugee camps and schools as examples. Israelis naturally feel terrible about the thousands of dead and wounded women and children.

Rashid Khalidi pointed out “as an occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.” It has failed miserably to meet this responsibility. (NY Times, January 8)

Pro-Israeli media denigrates cowardly Hamas for seeking shelter among civilians. Imagine, as Uri Avnery suggested, German propaganda during World War II. “The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins.” Hamas, Uri Avnery wrote, do not “hide behind the population.” Rather, the population views them as their only defenders. (The Progressive, Jan. 11)

In 2006, George Bush pushed free and fair elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas won. The residents had become fed up with corrupt and insensitive Fatah, the US backed party of the Palestinian National Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas.

Because Palestinians made “the wrong choice,” Israel shut off fuel and electricity and restricted needed imports and peoples’ movements. The result: high unemployment, extreme poverty and hunger. Israel had used economic means to punish Gaza’s population for its electoral choice. Then, it subjected them to collective military punishment. Israel’s kill and destroy method seems unlikely, however, to convince Palestinians to reject Hamas, just as other people suffering punishment from oppressive military goliaths did not yield to brute force – even those who read Thomas Friedman on pedagogy.

Israel presented its bombing as deterrence, teaching a lesson by killing. Much of the world saw the response as disproportionate and downright barbaric. The US equivalent of suffering in Gaza as of January 16 would have meant 226,000 dead Americans, one third women and children and 1 million plus wounded, a third of them women and children.

Israeli apologists refer to bombing the UN Fakhura school and the Jabaliya refugee camp as inevitable mistakes of a necessary war. Israel must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets and Hamas fighters had fired mortars from or near the school. Later, Israel showed an aerial photo portraying the school and mortar, but subsequently admitted the photo was a year old.

Although the US public tended to believe Israel’s version, not the retraction, the war has caused confusion. What was this war about? Could it be as banal as gaining seats in the coming elections? That Israeli Defense and Foreign Ministers Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni have shown their voting publics – elections next month – they have bigger cojones than the hawkish Bibi Netanyahu?

Saul Landau received the Bernardo O’Higgins award from the Republic of Chile for his work on human rights. His latest book is A Bush and Botox World (AK/CounterPunch Press).

Tags:cease-fire, death toll, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Palestianisn, Thomas Friedman
Posted in Commentary, Palestine, Uncategorized, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

Galloway: From London to Gaza

January 25, 2009

Despite official apathy to the suffering in Gaza, Londoners are gathering for a solidarity convoy to deliver aid to Palestine

- George Galloway
- guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009 10.00 GMT

The government is always looking for some Islamic organisation to proscribe or some Muslim cleric – preferably with a steel claw – to ban. All in the name of community cohesion and preventing violent extremism. But how many Muslims does the government think have been radicalised by the horrific scenes coming out of Gaza and the complacent hypocrisy of the British foreign office?

The appeal for a policy that breaks with slavish support for Israel’s actions operates on a number of different levels. I’ve long since stopped addressing the great lacuna which passes for an ethical sense at King Charles Street. An argument based on naked self-interest stands a better chance. And from that point of view the efforts by various branches of government not only to justify the unjustifiable in Palestine, but to delegitimise protests over it are extremely difficult to fathom.

Take the official policy of systematically undercounting the number of people who take part in protests. Among other things, that tells those who take part in the hope of making a difference that peaceful, democratic protest will not even be registered properly, let alone make a difference to political outcomes. Then there are the extraordinary attempts to clamp down on protest. In Birmingham, for example, the council, the largest local authority in Europe, withdrew permission for a demonstration over Gaza just days before it was due to take place. It went ahead, without incident, thanks to the leadership of my friend Councillor Salma Yaqoob, who marshalled a cross-section of politicians behind it.

In Tower Hamlets young people organised a 100-strong car cavalcade in protest at the massacres in Gaza and advertising a national demonstration in central London. The following day the police were handing out fliers at Brick Lane mosque telling people that such activities were illegal. Of all the problems we face in Tower Hamlets – including illegal activities – not one of them is young men cooperating with one another and using their cars to form peaceful convoys with a socially engaged message. I’m sure the same is true elsewhere in the capital.

If the authorities in London and across Britain thought this through they would welcome this efflorescence of political protests over Gaza. How better to marginalise the violent extremists than by creating the space for radical but democratic political engagement?

And that space is burgeoning, whether the government likes it or not. The upsurge in solidarity and political engagement over Palestine is astonishing – and almost wholly outwith the political mainstream. The kinds of meetings I and others in the anti-war movement have been addressing across Britain are reminiscent of 2002 and the build-up to the Iraq war. This time, however, people want to do much more than march and rally. There is a groundswell of solidarity.

That’s why I’ve taken the initiative to launch a solidarity convoy from Britain to Gaza, through north Africa, headed by firefighting equipment donated by the Fire Brigades Union. The convoy will contain trucks and vans from towns and cities across the country containing medicines and other necessities the Palestinians of Gaza desperately need.

This is not an alternative, of course, to the vast amounts of aid that ought to be airlifted now to Gaza. The purpose of the convoy, however, is not simply to bring aid. It is to provide a focus for solidarity and actions such as those in Birmingham city council, which has taken a big step towards boycotting Israel. I think the time is ripe to push these issues into London councils and the London Assembly. The mayor of London’s silence over Gaza is out of step with the feeling of most Londoners. That gap is going to be keenly felt in the coming months.

The convoy’s route through north Africa is deliberately chosen. It will take it through big Arab centres and into Egypt, which holds the key to the liberation of Gaza and Palestine. The response to the call for the convoy has been overwhelming. Mosques, community groups, trade unions and other organisations are busy organising to get a truck on the road and to fill it with useful things.

In my experience it is tapping something wider than a basic humanitarian response to the suffering in Gaza. I cannot think of anything better to forge the bonds of social solidarity the government says it wants to see. In the 1930s ordinary people across Europe rallied to aid the people of Republican Spain, who faced the bombing of towns and the massacres of civilians by the jackbooted General Franco. The cry was “Aidez L’Espagne!” – today the call should be “Viva Palestina!”

Tags:authorities in London, Birmingham, Gaza, General Franco, George Galloway, Israel, massacres in Gaza, Palestinians, protests, solidarity convoy, suffering in Gaza
Posted in Human rights, Palestine, Peace Movement, Uncategorized, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

Cornering of Civilians Unprecedented, Says UN Official

January 24, 2009

By David Cronin BRUSSELS | Inter Press Service

Jan 22 (IPS) – Israel’s refusal to allow civilians any exit route from Gaza as its defence forces rained bombs down on schools and houses appears unprecedented in modern warfare, a United Nations investigator has said. Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, described the sealing off of the Gaza Strip in order to ensure that nobody could flee it as “a distinct, new and sinister war crime.” “For the first time in a military operation, the civilian population as a whole has been locked into a war zone,” he told a meeting of the European Parliament by telephone. “No children, women, sick people or disabled people were allowed to leave. For the first time, the option of becoming a refugee has been withheld.” Arguing that the conduct of the three-week offensive against Gaza could amount to a “horrible abuse of Israel’s role as the occupying power,” he noted that international law – particularly the 1949 Geneva convention – obliges the occupier to provide adequate food and medical facilities to the population it seeks to control. The 18-month blockade which preceded Operation Cast Lead was “unlawful”, he added. Aged 78, Falk boasts a lengthy record as an academic, and as a campaigner for disarmament and human rights and on environmental issues. Yet his outspoken defence of Palestinian civilians has made him something of a persona non grata for the Israeli government. Last year it refused to allow him to enter the occupied territories, accusing him of an anti-Israel bias. Zvi Tal, deputy head of Israel’s embassy to the European Union, sought to defend the attacks on Gaza by describing the situation there as “a very peculiar one.” Since the Islamic organisation Hamas fought its rival Fatah over who should administer Gaza in 2007, the territory has had the status of a “hostile entity”, he said, claiming that Israel bombed UN schools because some gunmen had taken shelter there “in order to drag us in.” “Sometimes in the heat of fire and the exchange of fire, we do make mistakes,” Tal told IPS. “We’re not infallible.” Of the 1,330 people killed during the operation, 904 were civilians. The Palestinian ministry of health has stated that the dead included 437 children, 123 elderly men and 110 women. By contrast, 13 Israelis, three of them non-combatants, lost their lives. Raji Sourani, Gaza-based director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, noted that more bodies are continuously being extricated from the rubble of razed buildings. He said 27 persons died Jan. 21 alone from injuries in the bombing. He castigated the EU for not taking a firm line against Israel’s actions. The Union abstained from voting on a motion put before the UN Human Rights Council earlier this month on the need to investigate violations of human rights and humanitarian law by Israel. The Czech Republic, which holds the EU presidency, said the motion “addressed only one side of the conflict.” Sourani also protested at the decision of EU governments in December to go ahead with a planned upgrading of their relations with Israel. Despite numerous reports that Israel was systematically discriminating against Palestinians, the EU agreed to continue with moves to make Israel a ‘privileged partner’. This would integrate Israel into the EU’s single market to a large degree. “It is a shame to see the conspiracy of silence from official Europe,” Sourani added. “It is a shame that Europe rewarded Israel’s de facto apartheid system and its economic and social suffocation of Gaza by upgrading relations with Israel.” Next week, the EU’s foreign ministers will assess the situation in Gaza when they meet in Brussels. A Cypriot member of the European Parliament (MEP) Kyriacos Triantaphyllides, urged them to call off efforts to develop closer ties with Israel. “We can’t talk about upgrading relations with Israel at the moment,” he said. “I’m sorry, we just can’t.” Hélène Flautre, a French Green MEP, dismissed claims by Israel that it had to bomb schools because Hamas may have been firing from them. “Just because a fighter is in a school, you cannot go and kill a hundred civilians,” she said. “That is not allowed under international law.” Normally, the Red Cross, a humanitarian organisation, refrains from making public comments. Yet it has strongly denounced Israel’s activities in Gaza, complaining about how children have been found hungry beside the corpses of their parents because aid workers had been preventing from reaching them. Vincent Cassard, deputy head of the organisation’s Middle East division, complained that “a number of people died because of lack of access to healthcare” and that half of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants do not have proper access to water or sanitation. He also protested at how the Al-Quds hospital, run by the Palestinian Red Crescent society, had been targeted by Israeli forces. Filippo Grandi, deputy chief of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said that up to 50,000 people sought refuge in schools operated by his agency. On at least three occasions civilians were killed inside or in the immediate vicinity of those schools. He argued that unless the blockade of Gaza is lifted and progress made towards resolving the underlying political problems there, recovery from Israel’s offensive “will be difficult and I fear impossible.” (END/2009)

Tags:civilians refused exit, Israel, israeli attack on Gaza, occupying power, Palestinian civilians killed, Richard Falk, UNRWA, war crime
Posted in Palestine, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

U.N. Chief Appalled at Israeli Destruction in Gaza

January 22, 2009

By Thalif Deen | Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 20 (IPS) – When Israel went on a military rampage during its 22-day air strikes and artillery attacks on Gaza, it largely singled out residential neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and U.N. buildings on the pretext of targeting Hamas fighters.

But John Ging, director of operations for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), based in Gaza, kept insisting there were no Hamas fighters anywhere in the vicinity of U.N.-run schools or warehouses.

“What we have regretted in the past is that we have not been given a hearing to answer,” he told reporters Monday.

He charged that most of the allegations made by Israel were “unsubstantiated, unfounded – and continue to be repeated.”

Perhaps his strongest indictment of the Israelis was reflected in his response to a question on military tactics: “We don’t, in a civilised world, shoot the hostage to get to the hostage taker.”

But in reality that was what the Israelis were doing in Gaza, says an Arab diplomat, echoing Ging’s comment.

“The Israelis violated every single international convention governing the rules of war and the treatment of civilians,” he told IPS. “Their military excesses can, in no way, be justified.”

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who praised Israel at a press conference in Jerusalem last week, describing the Jewish state as “a responsible member of the United Nations”, apparently had second thoughts when he saw the devastation caused in Gaza.

Standing outside a U.N. compound that was destroyed by Israel, Ban told reporters Tuesday: “I am just appalled. Everyone is smelling this bombing still. It is still burning. It is an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations.”

Despite pleas from the secretary-general, Israel bombed U.N.-run facilities, including schools and warehouses, on four different occasions.

One of the bomb attacks on the UNRWA compound took place on the same day Ban arrived in Israel.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the final tally read: 1,314 Palestinians killed, including 416 children and 106 women; 5,320 injured, including 1,855 children and 795 women.

In comparison, the number of Israelis killed included four civilians and nine soldiers, along with 84 injured.

And according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the buildings destroyed included 4,100 residential homes (with 17,000 damaged), 20 mosques, 25 educational institutions and medical facilities, 31 security offices, 16 government buildings and 1,500 factories and shops.

The Office of the U.N.’s Humanitarian Coordinator pointed out that 16 health facilities and an equal number of ambulances were destroyed or damaged during the 22-day conflict.

Nadia Hijab, senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, told IPS: “The scale of the devastation is such that Israel and its supporters are unlikely to be able to bury or bulldoze it out of the collective conscience of the world.”

There have already been calls to bring war crimes charges against Israeli leaders, she pointed out.

Although the formal wheels of international justice may grind slowly, citizens are not waiting.

“Trade unions in different parts of the world are calling for a boycott. Israel’s fruit shipments are rotting in its warehouses as importers in Scandinavia, Jordan and the UK cancelled orders,” she said.

In an open letter in the London Guardian last weekend, Israeli citizens themselves called on world leaders to impose sanctions against their own country: “This is the only road left. Help us all, please!”

Although a ceasefire has been declared, said Hijab, Gaza’s torment and siege is not over and the U.N.’s “We the peoples” are likely to remain mobilised until justice is done.

Speaking from Gaza, Ging told reporters that the population in Gaza remains shell-shocked, traumatised and living in real fear.

Asked about the “most outrageous” incident he had witnessed, Ging said: “The dead children.”

Meanwhile, the United Nations is expected to lead international efforts to rebuild Gaza.

But Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the external affairs commissioner of the 27-member European Union, was quoted as saying that the EU would not fund reconstruction as long as Hamas was in control of Gaza.

Humanitarian aid, however, would be provided without any conditions, she added.

Hijab told IPS that “it is almost as though there are two different worlds, with the mainstream media, European and U.S. leaders, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon living in one world.”

And in the other, she said, are the leaders of the Third World, the president of the General Assembly (Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann), and millions of outraged citizens.

D’Escoto has taken a very strong stand denouncing the United Nations as ineffective in taking any action against Israel.

Hijab said the former parrot the Israeli line about Israel’s need for protection while the latter exchange U.N. reports and eyewitness accounts of the destruction and damage to thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure.

They also share photographs of phosphorous shells showering white flame on unprotected civilians; read about the killing of entire families among the thousands of dead and wounded; and respond with horror to the reports of women whose legs have been shorn off by new kinds of weapons, she added.

Tags:Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Hamas, Israel, John Ging, military rampage, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, ttacks on the UNRWA, U.N.-run schools or warehouses, violations of rules of war
Posted in Commentary, Palestine, Uncategorized, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

Judith Laitman and Tsela Barr: We must demand a just peace for Palestinians

January 20, 2009

Judith Laitman and Tsela Barr | The Capital Times, Jan 19, 2009

As American Jews, we grew up learning to revere Israel, the “Jewish state” — the refuge of the persecuted. We had come to expect that Israel would have a highly developed moral consciousness and a collective awareness of what it means to have another group want to annihilate you. So it is shocking for those of us who grew up with these romantic myths to witness the state of Israel assuming the role of oppressor, of murderer of innocents, of desensitized military annihilator.

And it is even more grotesque for Israel and its defenders to continue to pretend that it is the Israelis who are the victims and that its recent savage assault on Gaza was just a defensive act. Worse yet, if people of conscience even express sympathy for the Palestinian victims, they are accused of anti-Semitism. These tactics purposely obscure the real obstacle to peace in the Middle East — Israel’s rapacious 40-year military occupation of Palestinian lands, and its brutal blockade of Gaza and its 1.5 million inhabitants.

So let us look at the record:

It was Israel that broke the six-month cease-fire with an incursion into Gaza on Nov. 4 in which they killed six Palestinians.

Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza in 2005. But it retained complete control of Gaza’s land borders, airspace, and maritime access, maintaining a blockade that by itself is an act of war. This blockade resulted in a severe humanitarian crisis, even before the recent assault.

The Israeli attacks on Gaza were a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions, which require an occupying power to protect an occupied population.

In the West Bank, which has committed no aggression toward Israel, Israel continues to expand its settlements, continues to build an illegal wall that divides Palestinian land, continues to destroy the homes of innocent Palestinians on their own land, builds roads that are Jews-only, and subjects Palestinians to daily humiliations and disruptions at hundreds of Israeli military checkpoints.

The Palestinians and the Arab League have made offers of peace that would ensure Israel’s security if it returned to the 1967 borders. This represents major concessions on the part of Palestinians, who in 1948 were mandated 45 percent of Palestine. The 1967 borders give the Palestinians less than half of that. Israel has rejected these offers.

Israel receives $3 billion a year from U.S. taxpayers. Gazans were assaulted by U.S. F-16s and Apache attack helicopters.

One-third of the more than 1,100 people killed in the recent assault on Gaza were children.

Now Israel has called a cease-fire and claimed its “objectives” have been met. Some scholars say these “objectives” relate to an Israeli policy known as “the Iron Wall.” This is a strategy of inflicting such massive pain on the Palestinians that they will either leave or accept their subjugation so that Israel can achieve its goals of a “Greater Israel.” According to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim: “Israel is practicing state terror using violence on a massive scale against Palestinian civilians for political purposes.”

The bombs may be quiet for now, but this is no time for us to be silent. Let us speak out at every opportunity against the oppression — and the terrorism — that continues to go on against the Palestinian people. Life will not return to normal for the victims in Gaza, and it shouldn’t for us either. We must demand a just peace for the Palestinians and an end to the colonial project that is destroying Israel’s soul.

Judith Laitman and Tsela Barr are members of the Madison chapter of American Jews for a Just Peace, ajjpmadison.org.

Tags:American Jews, bombing, Israel, Israeli attacks on Gaz, occupied population, Palestine, Palestinian victims, violation of international law, West Bank
Posted in Human rights, imperialism, Peace Movement, Uncategorized, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

Gazans count cost of war

January 20, 2009

Al Jazeera, January 20, 2009

Palestinians say 25,000 buildings were damaged
or destroyed in Israel’s assault on Gaza [EPA]

Palestinians returning to their neighbourhoods have begun to unearth the true scale of destruction left by Israel’s 22-day offensive on the Gaza Strip.

Fragile ceasefires – declared separately by Israel and Palestinian fighters – continued to hold on Tuesday, as Israeli troops pulled back from some key points in Gaza towards the border.

Israeli army radio quoted unnamed military officials as saying that troops would pull out of Gaza by the time Barack Obama, the US president-elect, takes office on Tuesday.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, is also set to survey the destruction in a trip to Gaza during the day.

Estimates for the rebuilding of Gaza’s devastated infrastructure have been put at billions of dollars.

Dire situation

In video

Unearthing Gaza’s destruction

Israel’s scorched earth tactics

John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief, says hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency aid supplies will be needed for the people of Gaza.

Although 100,000 people had running water restored in their homes as of Sunday, 400,000 were still without it, Holmes said.

Electricity in Gaza is available for less than half the day and about 100,000 people have been displaced by the war.

Despite the three-week Israeli onslaught that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians and destroyed thousands of buildings, Hamas and other Palestinian factions claimed victory in the fighting.

Israel had said the aim of its operations in Gaza was to cripple Hamas’s ability to launch rockets into the south of the country.

But a masked man calling himself Abu Obeida and claiming to be a spokesman for Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, said the group’s rocket-launching capacity had not been diminished, and threatened to renew fighting if Israeli forces did not withdraw.

“They [Israel] say they weakened Hamas. We assure you that what we have lost in this war is nothing compared to what we [still] have,” he said in a televised news conference on Monday.

Abu Obeida vowed that Hamas would replenish its arsenal of rockets and other weapons, in defiance of any Israeli or international efforts to cut off smuggling routes.

“Do whatever you want, bringing in and manufacturing the holy weapons is our mission, and we know how to acquire weapons,” he said.

Disease fears

GAZA TOLL

At least 1,300 people killed, including more than 400 children and more than 100 women

At least 5,300 Palestinians injured, including nearly 1,900 children and 800 women

At least 100,000 people forced from their homes

At least 13 Israelis killed, including three civilians

Meanwhile, scores of bodies have been discovered in the rubble of destroyed buildings since the fighting was halted.

Abed Sharafi, an ambulance driver, said on Monday that he had helped pull out the bodies of 15 children and women from under their house.

“They were so badly decomposed that we couldn’t distinguish boys from girls. Some had been there for 15 days,” he said.

Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from Gaza City, said the World Health Organisation was warning of an outbreak of disease with bodies now several weeks old and sewage flowing over many areas because of the destruction to infrastructure.

The deposed Hamas-led government in Gaza estimates that more than 5,000 buildings were completely destroyed and 20,000 damaged or partially destroyed in the fighting.

Tags:Ban Ki-moon, destruction, dire situation, Hamas-led governmen, Israel, Israeli invasion of Gaza, Palestinians, rebuilding of Gaza, World Health Organisation's wsarning
Posted in imperialism, Uncategorized, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

Is Israel’s Gaza War a New War Crime?

January 19, 2009

by Dennis Bernstein | ConsortiumNews.com, Jan 17, 2009

The use of the internationally banned substance white phosphorus in highly densely populated areas of the Gaza Strip gives new meaning to the phrase “white power.” White western supremacy enforced by latest advanced weaponry.

And not only white phosphorus, but also the latest in bunker buster bombs, unmanned drones, not to mention U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, etc.

Journalists, human rights officials, international aid workers, and many doctors and field medics, including high officials of the Red Cross and the UN, have accused the Israelis of using white phosphorus illegally against civilian populations, as well as other advanced weaponry. They have repeatedly witnessed burns on civilians, including women and children, consistent with the use of white phosphorous.

Meanwhile, Richard Falk, internationally respected legal scholar, and Special Reporter for the UN on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, stated in a recent interview that Israel has potentially committed a new kind of war crime, by making it impossible for endangered civilians to flee a war zone.

Israel “has basically locked the population into this war zone and as far as I know, that hasn’t really happened before in such a systematic way and it probably should be considered a new kind of war crime,” said Falk.

On Jan. 15, Israeli forces bombed several hospitals and a UN compound. As many as 500 people were sheltering in the Al-Quds Hospital in the city’s southwestern Tal Al-Hawa district when it was bombed multiple times by Israel and set on fire.

A hospital spokesman said the fire was sparked by phosphorus shells. “We have been able to control the fire in the hospital,” the spokesman told reporters, “but not in the administrative building. We hope that the flames don’t spread again to the wings of the hospital.”

Sharon Lock is an independent journalist and human rights activist from Australia. For the past two weeks, Lock has been riding in a Red Crescent ambulance in Gaza, documenting attacks on medics and ambulances, as they try to reach hundreds of victims of the bombings, people cut down in the streets or caught under the rubble of hundreds of destroyed buildings.

According to Lock, who was in Al-Quds Hospital when it was struck multiple times, 80 percent of the calls for help have gone unanswered, because Israeli forces “attack the medics” when they try to retrieve the wounded and the dead, “even after they have been given permission to move in.”

In an interview on Jan. 16, Lock described the attack on Al-Quds Hospital, in a densely populated part of Gaza City, one of three medical centers bombed by Israel in a single day.

“During the night we had quite a lot of attacks, about 50 strikes people counted in our immediate area,” she told me, “and about 4 or 5 had actually hit our building. The two that did involve major damage happened in the morning …

“One was a rocket that went through the wall of the hospital, into the pharmacy building, and we retrieved the rocket shell. The other went through the roof of the social center, which was a part of the hospital complex, and that started the fire on the roof which the medics were fighting.

“We did manage to put it out eventually but it was quite difficult. And then, actually, we were only in the middle of getting the last bits of the fire out, when we heard shouting from upstairs and went up to the main steps and I saw my medical colleague covered in blood.

“He said that he’d just picked up a little girl who was part of a family fleeing their house, and who had come to the hospital to take shelter. He heard screaming and had gone out and saw she had been shot by a sniper, and had gunshot wounds to her face and also to her abdomen and so he swept her off and brought her in for surgery. ”

Later the central building at Al-Quds was bombed and also set ablaze. Lock and other medical staff had to walk hundreds of Palestinians, who had fled to the hospital for safety, through the darkened streets to another location in front of Israeli snipers who had taken positions on the roofs of various building near the hospital.

Overflowing Morgues

Caoimhe Butterly is an Irish human rights activist working in Gaza City as a volunteer with ambulance services and as co-coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement. Butterly describes in troubling detail what life was like at Shifa Hospital, another key medical center attacked by Israel with U.S.-made weaponry.

“The morgues of Gaza’s hospitals are overflowing. The bodies in their blood-soaked white shrouds cover the entire floor space of the Shifa Hospital’s morgue. Some are intact, most horribly deformed, limbs twisted into unnatural positions, chest cavities exposed, heads blown off, skulls crushed in.

“Family members wait outside to identify and claim a brother, husband, father, mother, wife, child. Many of those who wait their turn have lost numerous family members and loved ones. … Blood is everywhere. Hospital orderlies hose down the floors of operating rooms, bloodied bandages lie discarded in corners, and the injured continue to pour in – bodies lacerated by shrapnel, burns, bullet wounds. Medical workers, exhausted and under siege, work day and night and each life saved is seen as a victory over the predominance of death.”

On the same day, Israeli shells rained down on a UN compound in Gaza City, setting fire to its warehouses and reducing to ashes tons of sorely needed food and medical aid. Some 700 Palestinians had fled to the UN complex at the time of the bombings and a number of them were wounded.

John Ging, director of United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip, accused the Israelis of bombing the UN Food Complex with phosphorus shells.”They are phosphorus fires so they are extremely difficult to put out because, if you put water on, it will just generate toxic fumes and do nothing to stop the burning,” he said.

On Jan. 17, two Palestinian young boys, brothers aged five and seven, were killed when Israeli tank fire hit a UN school in Gaza. Twenty-five other Gazans were wounded in the shelling at the school run by the UN relief agency in Beit Lahiya, The school was the third UN shelter to be hit by Israeli fire in its 22-day war on the tiny Gaza strip.

Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN-run school, said several tank rounds hit the school. The third floor of the school took a direct hit after a short pause, killing the pair of brothers and injuring another 14 people.

Gunness said about 1,600 civilians had sought refuge from the fighting inside the building when it was hit. And he made it clear that Israel knew what it was hitting.

“The Israeli army knew exactly our GPS coordinates and they would have known that hundreds of people had taken shelter there,” he told Arab-run news services. “When you have a direct hit into the third floor of a UN school, there has to be an investigation to see if a war crime has been committed.”

John Ging added “People today are alleging war crimes here in Gaza. Let’s have it properly accounted for. Let’s have the legal process which will establish exactly what has happened here. It is another failure for our humanity and it is exposing the impotence of our [the international community’s] inability to protect civilians in conflict.”

The statistics through the 20th day of the war – over 1,100 Palestinians dead, of which 300 are children, and 5,400 more wounded, some critically. So far the Israeli strikes have claimed over 15 mosques, many schools, at least three hospitals, several UN facilities, more than six field medics, and hundreds of private homes and civilian apartment buildings.

Tutu’s Concern

In 2006, Nobel Laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu, one of the leaders of the South African anti-apartheid movement, was prevented from entering Israel and the Gaza Strip to investigate another potential massacre of innocent Palestinian civilians.

It took him two years to finally get in. Tutu has been quoted many times in regards to the similarities between the former apartheid system in South Africa and the current treatment of occupied Palestinians.

Tutu wrote in 2003, “Yesterday’s South African township dwellers can tell you about today’s life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a (Palestinian) grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier.

Dennis Bernstein is an award-winning investigative reporter and public radio producer. He is co-host and executive producer of the daily radio news magazine, Flashpoints, on Pacifica Radio, and a contributing editor to the Pacific News Service.

Tags:Al-Quds hospital, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Christopher Gunness, Dennis Bernstein, Gaza Strip, Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, Israel, Israeli forces, John Ging, morgues of Gaza's hospitals, Richard Falk, Sharon Lock, Shifa Hospital, war crimes in Gaza, white phosphorus
Posted in Human rights, Palestine, Uncategorized, War Criminals, Zionist Israel | Leave a Comment »

More photos of latest Israeli attack on Palestinians of Gaza

January 18, 2009

Source: Desert Peace

April 17, 2008 at 8:33 am

Image by Abonoon

The following were taken yesterday….. zionism in action. Even the camera cried as can be seen above. Share these photos with all…. ISRAEL MUST NOT GET AWAY WITH THESE CRIMES.