Saturday 3 January 2009

Gaza: Planning, prescience, provocation




The problem with political commentators is that they often end up cosying up to the people they are supposed to be analysing more than any other journalists, with the possible exception of sports reporters.


The whole ethos is enticing. The pressures to be ‘reasonable’, ‘fair’ or ‘unbiased’ from political spokesmen and politicians (who are of course adept at manipulating opinion) becomes gradually transmuted into clubbiness. To be those three things means, often, to become less questioning, less independent.

After all, there are rewards and punishments: to be on the plane with the ‘opinion formers’ or with the catering staff. To be invited to the drinks parties and the expensive meals and the ‘off the record’ briefings’ or to stand in the cold and rain eating a soggy hamburger while your pleas for an interview are unheard. To have direct phone numbers in your contact book for a chummy chat, or to continually be met with ‘so-and-so is unavailable for interview’.

The best withstand it; many fall into the cuddly warmth of being accepted as ‘one of us’. And it leads to ‘commentary’ which is often regurgitated public relations at best, deliberately disseminated propaganda at worst. And this, of course, makes up a lot of what we hear about the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

I heard one, who claimed, at first sight quite reasonably, that Israel’s attacks were not launched partly because there is effectively no administration with any power in the USA during this ’’transition period’, when the outgoing President is effectively helpless (but not wordless) and the incoming one can remain mute and inactive. “Monitoring the situation’ usually means hoping either it will go away or someone else will fix it.

No, it was a hurried response to the end of a ceasefire and a series of subsequent rocket attacks. This is the disingenuousness that commentator cosiness leads to. It conveniently ignores the fact that the date of the end of the ceasefire agreement could hardly come as a surprise, any more than that the sun generally rises in the east in the mornings.

It ignores the impression that most people around the world (except for Americans) have been given for most of 2008 that any Palestinian peace process, let alone the establishment of a Palestinian state was simply no longer on an Israeli political agenda.

It fails to take account of the constant reiteration of cries of ‘terrorism’ and the association of Hamas with supposedly ‘terrorist’ states like Syria and Iran, as though the three had somehow been conducting some kind of war against the west that no-one was the victim of.

It also conveniently forgets that if neither Israel nor the USA will talk to a governing political party, then no effective negotiations to continue a ceasefire could ever be held after the current agreement expired.

And it is simply nothing but the worst kind of naiveté to believe that a state goes to war with the kind of aerial power that Israel has shown, nor builds up an armoured invasion force of the size Israel has on the borders of another state in a matter of a few days as a hurried response to an unexpected attack.

And to believe that any state would not deliberately prepare and choose a moment when its actions were least likely to be disputed by its main ally because of its own internal disarray is downright childish. Especially if that state is one as politically sophisticated and opportunistic as Israel has often shown itself.

Beware the political commentator or analyst. Their predictions are seldom any more accurate than those of Nostradamus, their foresight is minimal (I cannot be the only outsider who felt something was going to happen over the Christian holiday?) but their hindsight, when they write the books and the articles afterwards, is of course, 20/20.

At some stage, no doubt, the “Mission Accomplished” banner will be unfurled; one President or the other (as far as Palestine is concerned it hardly matters which) will announce that “terrorism” (or Hamas, unless the organisation survives after all, which is by no means impossible) has been “defeated”, and if either is too obviously untrue, then the smart bombs will no doubt be programmed for Syria or Tehran. Both of which countries’ populations have been progressively dehumanised for the purpose over the last few years by the Americans in their media. Just as “Palestinian” is in practical effect, synonymous with “Hamas” and “terrorist” in at least most American and Israeli minds, despite the mealy-mouthed protestations of the propagandists of both countries.

And the bodies will be buried; the count disputed and diminished. Lessons have been learnt from American practice in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Civilised forces do not target civilians, only terrorists, therefore the dead, by definition, of course are all terrorists. But that is a syllogism of the kind that is always false. And its use shows the moral vacuum and cynicism that lies behind this kind of planned operation, its organisers, its proponents and its financiers.

The dead have no opportunity for denial. But some of us at least must remember that there should be a presumption of innocence. And ‘civilised’ countries that urge just that, the presentation of evidence and due judgement on others so vociferously should not be allowed to deny the exercise of them even, perhaps especially, in a war.

Palestine: With friends like these . . .




I have just heard President Bush's pusillanimous statement.

It is no surprise that it makes him close cousin to the Israelis. But what is depressing (apart from its being pure propaganda) is that he claims the USA are better 'friends' to Palestinians than the people of the party they elected.


Of course, we now know all too well that American support of 'democracy' extends only to the kind of democracy that suits their own policies. The Palestinians in Gaza chose Hamas, for entirely understandable reasons—like dismay at venal peculation and corruption—which would have been lauded by the USA had they been more amenable.

But Israel requires an enemy to defeat; America, yet again, is looking for a bogeyman and (after discovering that Hezbollah was no more easy to exterminate than Bin Laden or Fidel Castro and Lebanon no easier to destroy than Cuba) has chosen Hamas.

The danger is that the current administration continues also to harp on its 'Axis of Evil' enemies Syria and Iran. In continually effectively blaming both those countries (with the support of most of the American media) for supposedly maintaining Hamas' ability to show at least some form of defence of the population of Gaza, Bush is effectively telling Israel it may view both those countries as fair targets in its own current terms.

Yet again, as happened with the invasion of Lebanon, the tacit approval of the USA for Israel's actions has been taken as wholehearted support. Yet again, America is allowing Israel to dictate events in the Middle East, apparently blind to the potential consequences.

Countries which use other nations to fight their proxy wars for them, apart from being politically immoral, set fires which burn for generations and destroy hundreds of thousands of people.

It is simply despicable that this President (and so many complacent Americans) should point to the USA's 'humanitarianism' exemplified by further donations to the UN which have no relevance to the Palestinians, which is a salve to a few tender consciences for many disastrous humanitarian catastrophes around the world for which the US's policies and military actions (or political and military failures, like that in Somalia, for example) are responsible.

Palestine: Noises in the Night




The last few days and nights there has been a constant background buzz of a helicopter hovering in the sky not far from my flat in London. Annoying and intrusive at first, it has now become merely another background noise like the hum of traffic on the nearby Westway, as familiar as the sound of the Eurostar's horn on its way to the maintenance depot at North Pole.

The helicopter is, of course, though I didn't grasp it at first, not monitoring some crime wave in the area of London in which I live (which is what I first feared) but of course, is guarding the air space over the Israeli Embassy and, I presume, filming and monitoring the daily protesters who gather nearby.

It is worth noting that although the British media reports these demonstrations as being 'outside the Israeli Embassy', in fact they are not. The Israeli Embassy is practically unapproachable, and no-one in the Embassy glancing out of one of its windows (if any were to, which I would doubt) would be able to see them. And probably not hear them either, though I suspect that there will be security men or Mossad operatives poring over video of the protesters. Many of whom I imagine would be well advised not to holiday in Eilat in the future.

But that mildly irritating buzz, of course, is nothing to what the inhabitants of the Gaza strip are hearing all hours of the day and night. What kind of fear and dread the noise of unmanned and lethal drones, the sudden blast and shock of a missile exploding, the howl of a jet aircraft overhead, and the scream and squeal of shells passing overhead, I cannot in truth imagine.

it has been described to me by friends who have been the victims of an Israeli bombardment. But nothing in my experience gives me, and can give very few Westerners who are pontificating about the need for ‘restraint’, no real idea of what it must be like. Even though I have, just twice in the last twenty years, heard revolver shots in my own London street, and once, was round he corner from an IRA bomb, which left me dazed, deaf and disorientated but otherwise unharmed.

To deliberately inflict this on the scale the Israelis are doing it yet again, as they have before and most recently in Lebanon, amounts to a perverse form of cruelty. It is, obviously intended to frighten and intimidate.

And yet, my knowledge of Palestinians tells me that while people may be frightened, the result will inevitably be that they are not intimidated into sullen subjection but angered and—if it were possible—provoked into even greater loathing of the politicians, at least, if not the populations, of the two countries that have inflicted this upon them

This was the effect of the Blitz on London and the bombing of Dresden. It could be said to have been the result of the ‘shock and awe’ bombardment of Baghdad, though the anger and loathing of the perpetrating country and its soldiery took perhaps not days or months, but years to develop.

It astonishes me that after 60 years, there are only two military powers in the world which have neither understood nor learnt this lesson, the USA and Israel. Perhaps that should not be so surprising, because it appears so often that the two countries are, militarily, twins in what is called ‘doctrine’ and tactics. Both have constantly begun wars in which air power and missiles, the demolition of infrastructure from the air, have been expected to disempower and disable a country.


And though it has never succeeded in anything other than reducing a country to poverty and anarchy, we are hearing Israeli military spokesmen (and women) repeating yet again the mantra that destroying physical embodiments of government—ministries, offices, schools, universities—will incapacitate a population that in the case of Gaza has been used to the improvisation of local populations and local communities unconnected with any governmental or political organisation.

A military doctrine based on assumptions like these demonstrates nothing more than a maive grasp of how a society under occupation, or at war, actually functions. that naiveté and ignorance can perhaps be understood in the case of Americans, who have not been the victims of an occupation, or of war on their own territory for more than a century.

Perhaps this may also be true of Israel, since it also has never suffered occupation. But I think there are e deeper reasons. One, no doubt, is that since Israel relies so much on the USA for its military ability, that these doctrinal assumptions somehow come attached to the dollars that pay for the war machine.

Or, and I suspect this is fundamental, that it is simply that the Israelis view Arabs (and particularly Palestinians) in 19th century colonial terms; politically and socially underdeveloped, undereducated, and therefore incompetent and easily influenced or overborne. We see precisely the same traits in American attitudes to peoples and societies in various parts of the world. It is a part of what is so often referred to as ‘American arrogance’.

Historically, the arrogance that diminishes other peoples, culturally, politically or economically inevitably is bolstered by militarism and war. Until maintaining that cultural, economic and intellectual superiority through military means becomes unsustainable.

Maybe the bombardment of Gaza, an invasion, the destruction of the entire governmental and societal infrastructure of the territory, and what I expect to be a form of imposed ‘cantonisation’ in which Gaza is militarily reduced to small overpopulated ‘camps’ with no communication allowed between them, will, for Israel, be a sufficient resolution of the Palestinian problem, one which can allow no possibility of a functioning state any larger than a small town can exist for another 50 years or more.

But whether it will cow Palestinians into accepting it as a permanent fact of history I doubt. A people’s aspirations to live freely in their own state, to make their own decisions free of outside influence, to maintain and develop a culture, are not destroyed along with ministries, schools and mosques in weeks; not even after a series of invasions and occupations over years and decades? Not even if that population is entirely and deliberately dispersed away from its homeland, as I fear may well be the eventual conclusion of this current Israeli action.

Should not the Israelis (and Americans) of all people, be able to understand that?