In another lifetime?

"THE shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend’s cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the region who feed on the conflict an excuse to advance their own causes.

But everywhere one looks, among the speeches and the desperate diplomacy, there is no real way forward. A just and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is possible, but it lies in the history of the people of this conflicted land, and not in the tired rhetoric of partition and two-state solutions.

Although it’s hard to realize after the horrors we’ve just witnessed, the state of war between the Jews and Palestinians has not always existed. In fact, many of the divisions between Jews and Palestinians are recent ones. The very name “Palestine” was commonly used to describe the whole area, even by the Jews who lived there, until 1948, when the name “Israel” came into use.

Jews and Muslims are cousins descended from Abraham. Throughout the centuries both faced cruel persecution and often found refuge with one another. Arabs sheltered Jews and protected them after maltreatment at the hands of the Romans and their expulsion from Spain in the Middle Ages.

The history of Israel/Palestine is not remarkable by regional standards — a country inhabited by different peoples, with rule passing among many tribes, nations and ethnic groups; a country that has withstood many wars and waves of peoples from all directions. This is why it gets so complicated when members of either party claims the right to assert that it is their land.

The basis for the modern State of Israel is the persecution of the Jewish people, which is undeniable. The Jews have been held captive, massacred, disadvantaged in every possible fashion by the Egyptians, the Romans, the English, the Russians, the Babylonians, the Canaanites and, most recently, the Germans under Hitler. The Jewish people want and deserve their homeland.

But the Palestinians too have a history of persecution, and they view the coastal towns of Haifa, Acre, Jaffa and others as the land of their forefathers, passed from generation to generation, until only a short time ago.

Thus the Palestinians believe that what is now called Israel forms part of their nation, even were they to secure the West Bank and Gaza. And the Jews believe that the West Bank is Samaria and Judea, part of their homeland, even if a Palestinian state were established there. Now, as Gaza still smolders, calls for a two-state solution or partition persist. But neither will work.

A two-state solution will create an unacceptable security threat to Israel. An armed Arab state, presumably in the West Bank, would give Israel less than 10 miles of strategic depth at its narrowest point. Further, a Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would do little to resolve the problem of refugees. Any situation that keeps the majority of Palestinians in refugee camps and does not offer a solution within the historical borders of Israel/Palestine is not a solution at all.

For the same reasons, the older idea of partition of the West Bank into Jewish and Arab areas, with buffer zones between them, won’t work. The Palestinian-held areas could not accommodate all of the refugees, and buffer zones symbolize exclusion and breed tension. Israelis and Palestinians have also become increasingly intertwined, economically and politically.

In absolute terms, the two movements must remain in perpetual war or a compromise must be reached. The compromise is one state for all, an “Isratine” that would allow the people in each party to feel that they live in all of the disputed land and they are not deprived of any one part of it.

A key prerequisite for peace is the right of return for Palestinian refugees to the homes their families left behind in 1948. It is an injustice that Jews who were not originally inhabitants of Palestine, nor were their ancestors, can move in from abroad while Palestinians who were displaced only a relatively short time ago should not be so permitted.

It is a fact that Palestinians inhabited the land and owned farms and homes there until recently, fleeing in fear of violence at the hands of Jews after 1948 — violence that did not occur, but rumors of which led to a mass exodus. It is important to note that the Jews did not forcibly expel Palestinians. They were never “un-welcomed.” Yet only the full territories of Isratine can accommodate all the refugees and bring about the justice that is key to peace.

Assimilation is already a fact of life in Israel. There are more than one million Muslim Arabs in Israel; they possess Israeli nationality and take part in political life with the Jews, forming political parties. On the other side, there are Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Israeli factories depend on Palestinian labor, and goods and services are exchanged. This successful assimilation can be a model for Isratine.

If the present interdependence and the historical fact of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence guide their leaders, and if they can see beyond the horizon of the recent violence and thirst for revenge toward a long-term solution, then these two peoples will come to realize, I hope sooner rather than later, that living under one roof is the only option for a lasting peace."

Tripoli; by Muammar Qaddafi [courtesy of the New York Times]

I wonder if anyone has put this on George Mitchell's desk—or Benjamin Netanyahu's—yet? Or will dare to?

Too late, it was, too late . . .

Better late than never? No. There are episodes of history when speaking out too late is just—too late. This is an example of one of them:

“. . .the foundation for solidarity between peoples and nations should be based not on who we are against, but on the idea of who we are and the values we share. Terrorists succeed when they render countries fearful and vindictive; when they sow division and animosity; when they force countries to respond with violence and repression. The best response is to refuse to be cowed.”

Why did no British minister say this, obvious to so very many of us, historians or not, European ministers or not, long before January 2009? Why should it only be said now, after another 'vindictive' attack by another 'fearful' country?

Because Blair, in his love affair with the US and Bush, would not, presumably, permit it amidst all the control-freakery for which his government became notorious.

And why did Blair so willingly subsume himself to the American Neocon war agenda? It puzzled a great many people eight years ago after it suddenly dawned on everyone that justifiable and explicable sympathy was about to develop into support and assistance for war.

People have searched for complex psychological and political reasons. I, too have worked my way through many of them, including one of the most obvious: that if military support for the US’s intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq was not forthcoming, then neither would the (American) replacement of Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Blackmail, after all, is in every country’s foreign policy arsenal, and for all its self-vaunted altruism, the US uses it against both its enemies and its allies.

If that is part of the explanation for engagement in wars that cost a Prime Minister his popularity, respect and finally his job, we shall not know for at least fifty more years, or probably a hundred, until a curator at Kew unties the red ribbon from the cardboard archive boxes. Or unless, of course, some forgotten carelessly unerased email between some Pentagon official to another in the State Department surfaces unexpectedly before that through a tangential Freedom of Information request.

I think there is a simpler, even banal, explanation. Some people, of little consequence in themselves, or of little talent, or eager to inflate it, seem to have a desperate need to associate themselves, however slightly, with those who are famous. I mean famous for more than fifteen minutes or for being in Big Brother.

I knew a young man like that. A newly graduated pyschologist, of all things, he would insinuate himself at every event he could find to be photographed within arm’s reach of some celebrity. He had the plausibility of the true conman: he could get through a cordon I would have had difficulty penetrating with a Scotland-Yard-issued press pass. He did it often, I think, not just to gratify his own desire, bolster his ego, but also, just like the schoolboy his behaviour resembled, to look big to his girlfriend.

The whole tenure of New Labour in Downing Street had Blair and the Blairites desperate to consort with the rich and famous. Footballers, rock stars, Indian industrialists. But anyone, if they are as persistent as that psychologist, can be photographed with them. But to be photographed with the ‘most powerful man in the world’? To appear to be his friend and confidant? ‘My’ psychologist would have creamed his jeans at the mere thought. That is the summit of the fame-seeker’s desire.

And that, I suspect, is all that led us into this disastrous ‘war on terror’. It was incidental to a politician's vanity and the furtherance of his self-image. And that is why it is very, very, late to say what Miliband* has said now.

*David Miliband's full article in the Guardian.

Who dies in this 'War on Terror'?

More people who are innocent than involve themselves in terrorist acts, that has become all too clear since George W Bush uttered that glib phrase. It has become since, not the slogan of a moral opposition against acts of terror against individuals, but one to exculpate acts by governments against peoples. The Israeli government was I think the first to seize on the new 'declaration of war' and apply it to any Palestinian resistance, and by extension, quickly to all Palestinians.

Recently, a very brave and honourable Sri Lankan journalist was murdered, an event, because he had fought valiantly against this 'War on Terror' that victimises, not the terrorist, but the population, he expected.

His last testimony upon his own death is here, and, because it raises all the questions that should be asked about the ramifications and consequences of this 'War on Terror' we are all so pressured to, if not blindly support, with one eye closed and one only half-open, accept, should be read by everyone.

I am a journalist myself; though not of the kind who might expect to be called to risk my life in a war zone, be imprisoned, assaulted, or assassinated for what I normally write. I hope, however, if it came down to it, I would also be able to show at least a portion of this man's bravery. And we should all be grateful for people like him.

Here is an edited version of so much in his last article that is relevant to all of us:

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

. . .we have consistently espoused the view that while separatist terrorism must be eradicated, it is more important to address the root causes of terrorism, and urged government to view Sri Lanka's ethnic strife in the context of history and not through the telescope of terrorism. We have also agitated against state terrorism in the so-called war against terror, and made no secret of our horror that Sri Lanka is the only country in the world routinely to bomb its own citizens. For these views we have been labelled traitors, and if this be treachery, we wear that label proudly.

. . .The LTTE are among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations ever to have infested the planet. There is no gainsaying that it must be eradicated. But to do so by violating the rights of Tamil citizens, bombing and shooting them mercilessly, is not only wrong but shames. . .

. . .a military occupation of the country's north and east will require the Tamil people of those regions to live eternally as second-class citizens, deprived of all self respect. Do not imagine that you can placate them by showering "development" and "reconstruction" on them in the post-war era.
The wounds of war will scar them forever, and you will also have an even more bitter and hateful Diaspora to contend with. A problem amenable to a political solution will thus become a festering wound that will yield strife for all eternity. If I seem angry and frustrated, it is only because most of my countrymen - and all of the government - cannot see this writing so plainly on the wall.

. . .As for me, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I walked tall and bowed to no man. And I have not travelled this journey alone. Fellow journalists in other branches of the media walked with me: most of them are now dead, imprisoned without trial or exiled in far-off lands. Others walk in the shadow of death.

. . .I hope my assassination will be seen not as a defeat of freedom but an inspiration for those who survive to step up their efforts. Indeed, I hope that it will help galvanise forces that will usher in a new era of human liberty. . .But if we do not speak out now, there will be no one left to speak for those who cannot, whether they be ethnic minorities, the disadvantaged or the persecuted.

[My emphasis.]

In memoriam Lasantha Wickrematunge and very many others.

In Gaza, a Ceasefire is not a Truce

To silence a gun, or even hundreds or thousands of them, in Gaza is not a truce. It is only a ceasefire. And it occurs to me that I with many others have come close to confusing the two.

The Israeli Prime Minister, however, has not. This unilateral ceasefire is only the offer of a calm before another potential storm threatening the Gazan population.

At some point, if Hamas has not run out of rockets to fire at Israel, or men to fire them, then the onslaught, replenished perhaps with the containers from the Wehr Elbe, will inevitably begin again.

We do not yet know what conditions the Israelis will impose in return for a truce. But they have achieved almost total military control of the lives and health of the Gazan population. no oil, petrol, gas, water, food, will flow without their consent. If the blockade they have insisted upon is controlled by them, then they can starve the entire population at will. And will.

At some point, no doubt, they will hope that Gazans will flee their country by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps to an unwilling but fearful and compromised Egypt, finally worn down and beaten violently in submission. Whether that can be achieved is doubtful. The UN, after all, cannot establish artificial refugee islands in the only other exit, the Mediterranean.

We return, yet again, to ask, if the ‘military goals’ have been fulfilled as the Israelis say, of what use is that without political ones? Except, once more, an example of the eagerness of some militaries to begin a war while paying attention to nothing more than the logistics of moving troops this way and that. To invade; to destroy; to kill; to withdraw. It is the Duke of York, but using his firepower as well as his men’s boots.

There has been mention of somehow installing, in a shattered society and over a submissive and psychologically shattered people, some form of outpost of the Palestinian Authority with Abbas as leader . . . If I were Gazan, and was able to laugh instead of weeping, I would laugh at the patent absurdity of the idea of re-imposing a political leader who had already long ago lost the confidence of the people of Gaza and in this war (and for long before) has been entirely impotent and ineffective.

There is only one real solution, and that is a truly viable state with both the West Bank and Gaza physically connected. The one, in fact, that Israel has spent thirty years making impossible. And now, by demonstrating yet again—Olmet actually threatening on as many words even as he announced the ceasefire—that it has the will, the power, a disregard for the world, and the ironmongery to devastate any neighbouring country (providing the US stays silent and continues to supply it with the materials) Israel has made a statement that it will never allow it.

‘Carthago delenda est.” I chose the harsh and bitter war cry of Cicero deliberately. Israelis would insert ‘Palestine’ , the ‘West Bank’ or ‘Gaza’ for ‘Carthage’. History, however, if there is ever to be a Palestinian State (which I for one now doubt), will have to replace that north African city with ‘Israel’.

Perhaps the Palestinians are destined before this decade is out, finally to become the itinerant successors to the Jews. Once a population is dispersed in a diaspora, then unification strong enough to regain a homeland is almost impossible. As Israelis know perfectly well. It is a part of their mythology. It took the distractions of colonialism and its jealousies, and two world wars, to create a situation in which a Jewish state could be founded.

But I see no appreciation of irony in the Israelis that that is where their policies and actions lead.

And what did you do . . .

in the war, Mr Hamas?

“I showed the world how ruthless, destructive tand vengeful the Israelis could be, destoying homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and over 6, 000 of ‘my people’s’ lives.

And how many Israeli tanks did you disable or destroy?

“- - -”

And how many Israeli mortar or machine gun platoons did you successfully attack?”

“- - -”

And how many Israeli soldiers did you kill?

“13?”

“Are you sure those deaths were not 'friendly fire' accidents?”

“- - -”

Did you not have an advantage in urban warfare?

“We chose not to endanger our loyal and innocent civilian population.”

Ah.

Do you think you have performed militarily as well as Hezbollah during the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon?

"- - -"

What exactly have you achieved?

“The people of Palestine know now for certain that Israel is their enemy forever, that they will never be able to be assured of living in peace and will always be threatened by them.”

Were they not aware of this before?
So what else have you achieved?

“The embargo that will be instituted by Israel, Egypt and the West will further reduce the situation of the Palestinian population.”

Yes. And so?

“They will become yet more angry and militant and rise up in their masses to support Hamas and attack the Israeli occupiers.”

As they have in this last few weeks?

“- - -”

You will be calling elections to confirm this support?

“- - -”

Well, and now, Mrs Hamas, how did you and your children enjoy the war?

Some of my best friends . . .

might not be Israeli any more. This is one of the very few eyewitness reports (out of thousands) of an attack on a civilian's home to appear on the mainstream media in the US. The victim is a Gazan doctor who works in Israel.



The background story appears to be this:

"So, Israel's channel 10 is interviewing its regular "good Palestinian", Dr. Az A-Din Abu al-Ayash, an OB-GYN who actually works at Israel's Tel HaShomer hospital outside Tel Aviv [. . .]

So Channel 10's Shlomi Eldar is interviewing the good doctor by phone, live on TV, when suddenly there's a boom and the doctor begins to scream "Oh god, they killed my daughters".

. . . One of our tanks missed its actual target and took out the good Dr's house, killing two of his daughters and injuring a third (who [. . .] was airlifted to the same hospital where her dad works).

This, by the way, happened after the doctor complained earlier in the week that a tank with its barrel pointed directly at the his window was making him nervous. So Ronni Daniel, [the . . .embedded IDF reporter] military reporter for Channel 2, reportedly spoke to the commander in question and got him to point that thing someplace else. Only temporarily, as it turns out."

(from 'Ricky B' (New Yorker, living in Israel) in 'Open Salon'. http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=84825)

Square brackets indicate where I have removed defamatory phrases in the original.

Then and Now in Gaza

This boy now. . .












. . .might have been this boy then.


(Photographer of boy with candle in Gaza unknown; on the right, by Mohammed Abed, for AFP.)

The Catalogue of Crime

So, at last, after so many attacks, so many incursions, so many 'targeted assassinations' patience with Israel has snapped. A state that is sixty years old can no longer assume impunity. UNWRA has warned that it is 'keeping a catalogue' of all Israeli actions which could be considered War Crimes.

This time, it is doubtful that even the most complacent American administration can save them. And Obama and Clinton must by now be all too aware that anything more than words of sympathy will merely increase the loathing of (in many countries) or distaste for (in most others) the USA.

They must know, among their European allies in NATO, several of whom have firmly resisted the previous administration's attempts to turn NATO into a kind of 102nd Division bound for Afghanistan, that any hope of military co-operation must be close to zero.

So Israel's foreign minister made a dash to Washington to get a last ditch promise to effectively starve and economically ruin the Gaza Strip for ever, by effectively asking the USA to assist with tightening and maintaining its blockade.

In other words, to continue the job that the war was intended to accomplish, but for which, now, there is simply not enough time.

The agreement is a 'memorandum of understanding', and therefore, hopefully not binding, for if the Obama administration conforms to its intent, the results will simply defeat any aspirations he may have to restore his country's reputation and influence anywhere else in the world.

But in the meantime, of course, the agreement has no doubt covered the last shipment of hundreds of tons of munitions the US has on the high seas for use in the last few days before Obama gets a grip. And the confirmation hearings have not yet ended, so in effect, his administration will be powerless well into January.

Whatever hopes there may be for a ceasefire, a complete one on the Israeli side, could well therefore be delayed for another two weeks or longer. It cannot necessarily be assumed that it might be an Israeli Inauguration present.

Especially when you read the story of munitions shipments on their way from the US to Israel:

"We know that the Wehr Elbe, a German-owned cargo ship left the USA on 20 December 2008 with a large consignment – 989 containers - of high explosives and other munitions destined for Israel," said Malcolm Smart, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme.

"Hired and now legally controlled by the US Military Sealift Command, it was heading for the Israeli port of Ashdod and was due to transit via Greece, though its latest reported position indicates that the shipment's route may have changed."

Tenders for two other arms shipments totalling 325 containers of US munitions were approved by the Pentagon on 31 December, four days after the start of Israel's current attacks on targets in Gaza.

These two consignments were due to be shipped to Ashdod from Askatos in Greece, but they have now been cancelled, according to information provided to Amnesty International by the US Military Sealift Command.

Tender documents show that these shipments contain white phosphorus, known for its potential to cause severe burns and an indiscriminate weapon when used as an airburst in densely-populated civilian areas as now alleged in Gaza.

The US Department of Defence says it is now looking at other means to deliver the munitions to a US stockpile in Israel. A US-Israel agreement has allowed US munitions stockpiled in Israel to be transferred to the Israeli Defence Force in "an emergency".

[from 1158munich.blogspot.com/ sources not confirmed.] Did the foreign minister's dash to Washington really have anything whatsoever to do with discussing a ceasefire? It would be rather naive after this to believe it.

Israel: a Country to which neither Red Crosses nor Red Crescents have Meaning

As you can see in this report of the destruction of a Gaza hospital.

We know what the Israeli response will be; first the well-rehearsed and threadbare "We do not target civilians" and then a campaign to 'prove' that Hamas militants were using a hospital as a firing point, patients with intravenous needles in their veins as 'human shields' and babies' incubators for cover; and then that in any case, doctors at the hospital are Hamas or Hezbollah supporters anyway. (There have already been stories to that effect planted on the web about the Norwegian doctor who has been giving the BBC regular reports.)

We merely now must add two more flags to the blue one the Israelis have utterly failed to respect; and to the red, green and black one they never have and never will respect until they are forced into it.

And lest anyone forget, they took their cue from one Donald Rumsfeld and the NeoCons in this. And, given an inch of support, have, in their usual fashion, taken mile upon mile upon mile.

Nerves shot in Gaza; nerves raw in Israel

From a brief listen to tonight’s BBC Radio 4 News at Ten, the Israeli preparations for meeting any international investigation of their conduct in Gaza, or a potential war crimes investigation, are already well advanced.

We heard some being trialled tonight: briefly, for example, whether the Israeli response in Gaza was ‘proportionate’ as the UN and international law requires) should depend on the ‘numbers at risk’ (8 million against 1.5 million) as against the number of deaths. (By the time I have posted this, probably 1,000 Gazans, 13 Israelis.)

Alleged ‘war crimes’ by Israeli forces should be investigated by the Israelis. (The ICC is only supposed to intervene if the country responsible fails to carry out an investigation.) But we know that Israeli investigations seldom amount to very much.

The other potential refutations are not worth bothering with, they are predictable by anyone of reasonable intelligence.

And, in a report from Egypt, 400 of those 1000 dead are children; thousands injured. Many of those children now in hospital in Egypt (may of whom will be paralysed, some in a coma forever) bear wounds that neurologists (at least one very highly regarded in Britain, should it be said, as it no doubt will, that Egyptian doctors do not know what they are talking about) say must have been caused by gunshots at close range, often, almost always, to the head.

We will be(and are being) told that Israeli forces do not shoot children, that these are casued by Hamas fighters. Yet, over and over again, Israeli snipers have targeted young teenagers from their watchtowers. And we heard tonight, yet again, that Israeli soldiers encouraged a family to leave their home, the grandmother carrying a white flag, and then shot at the children. The spine of a two-year old is severed; she will not walk again. A young boy’s brain is so damaged he will never wake up from a coma.

It seems as though the Israelis (having realised after the Senate querying of Hillary Clinton that American unconditional, unquestioning, support may not last very much longer, barely one more week even) grasping that they may have finally gone too far even for their greatest ally, are showing signs of, if not fear, a little nervousness, at the potential consequences.

Just a little late.

And who is going to pay for the medical treatment, the frequent surgery, the long-term care, let alone the pyschological treatment, thousands on thousands of young Palestinians are going to need? Who will pay for their rehabilitation? Who rebuild the hospitals, clinics, day centres one day, one year? I can guess who will, but who should is a different matter.

Which country ruthlessly and persistently pursues others, their banks and industries, for reparations for sixty-year-old injuries for people and their families who are in many cases no longer alive? Why should not the time come when it is the turn of the State of Israel not to be owed, but to owe?

(I see that my Al-Jazeera death counter stopped working suddenly. I've checked another blog, and it's gone blank there too. How odd, just when it was within a handful of the emotive 1,000. And the day Jewish organisations have launched a campaign complaining to the press of the 'hacking' of Jewish and Zionist websites . . .)

Presidential Optimism; Palestinian Pessimism

Stating one’s optimism for the future is not the same as recognising reality and formulating a plan to deal with the outcome of events. That is all that president-elect Obama has done. And it can only lead to more pessimism in Palestine.

Perhaps we have what can only be termed the ‘transition problem’ to blame. It seems absurd that a changeover of power should involve an almost total hiatus of the exercise of it for two months.

In the much more leisurely and less populated age of the late eighteenth century, then an orderly transfer of power of elected officials spread around a continent over a couple of months was permissible. After all, news of a war or natural disaster might take that long to arrive at the centre of power, and by the time a government might formulate a response to it the crisis could well have resolved itself.

But even then things were changing, and in Europe only a decade or two later, semaphore telegraphs were transmitting reports from the south to the north of the continent in hours, not weeks or months. In the 21st century, where a devastating war can be launched in minutes or hours to see the government of a major world power practically paralysed in both its reactions and policies borders on the ridiculous.

There can be little doubt that the Israelis chose their time with precisely that in mind. While the policies of the incoming administration on the Middle East were far from clear by the end of the presidential election, it was obvious that there would be at least some change. And with Obama’s insistence as the Wall Street crash hit on leaving it to the current President to deal with (on the grounds ‘there can be only one president at a time’, though the temptation to ‘leave them to their own mess’ must have been equally if not more influential on any decision to keep out of it) the opportunity must have been enticing.

But it should surely not be beyond the wit of even politicians to be able to come to some agreement on the diplomatic messages to be sent, or to announce that the two administrations were at least consulting. Why should it be impossible for an outgoing american administration not to offer up a warning on the lines that “if you are proposing X, the new government may not support you as we would” and for the two to signal that by saying that they were in close consultation?

I do not know, but I am sure that would happen in the British system, where e civil servants prepare for the likely policies and stances of a government of a different political persuasion before an election. And in one where ambassadors are not replaced at whim by a new administration and would be able to transmit just such advice.

It is at least partly this outdated method of changing governments that has led us to where we are now. And it is a place from which Obama, for all his claims that he has formed a team that will concentrate on the Middle East and the problems posed there, will now find himself on a diplomatic (and possibly military) journey of years and one whose starting point, and many of the way points for many miles of it, has been determined by another country.

The Middle East, and much of the world, will not be able to feel much optimism at the prospect of that journey. Even any feeling of optimism the prospect of a president of somewhat more liberal imagination and with some notion of engagement and negotiation might have engendered in November must now have dissipated, replaced by nothing more than a resigned hope that things may be prevented from becoming much worse.

In fact, in the last week of the dying administration, its atavistic members have ensured that any new policy will be treated with suspicion. We have seen the ‘leak’ that while the Bush administration headed off an earlier attack on Iran, it did so by agreeing to involve the CIA in ‘covert action’ there. A deliberate attempt, were it not that in fact Iranian diplomats are not so stupid, to make any US approach to Iran in the coming days suspect. And in the last few days, the Israelis have been planting stories mostly in the American media that an Iranian ‘suitcase-sized’ nuclear bomb is only months, if not weeks, away from perfection, and the need for Israeli pre-emptive strikes is even more urgent. That might, three weeks ago, have been dismissed as somewhat desperate propaganda, but it becomes much more frightening when it is purveyed by a state which faces the prospect of world revulsion and if not active sanctions against it, a growing distaste for co-operation among an increasing number of countries.

Obama’s thoughts, as relayed in the American media, remind me of an interview with a British civil servant seconded to the notorious American-run Iraq Transitional Authority just after the invasion. He was given a copy of the ‘plan’ for re-establishing Iraq’s finances, not then imagining it was effectively to be managed by the CIA from bales of dollar notes and suitcases. He was struck by its exemplar of pre-planning itself, as he read “The currency to be established by the occupying forces will be the US dollar, replacing” and turned the page to read, “the Deutschmark”.

If that is an example of the developmental planning that goes into American policies, obviously dusting off a plan for the re-establishment of a country in another continent that was sixty years old, can we really expect better of Obama’s team for the Middle East in the weeks—not months or years—they have to produce something viable and constructive? What yellowing inappropriate document from the years of the Palestine Mandate will they take from the secret shelves of the Sate Department?

I would like to think they will have the intellect, determination, and knowledge to do better, but another story from the same civil servant does not make me hopeful. He was also given a ‘plan’ for restoring the electricity supply to Baghdad. it listed the power stations, their presumed output before the war, and their output over the six months to come. It said nothing about how the mechanics of how that was to be achieved. “This isn’t a plan,” he told them. “It’s merely a statement of optimism.”

We cannot afford, even in the first month of Obama’s presidency, merely ‘statements of optimism’. But the development of a plan to bring some form of peace to the Middle East is going to need the exercise of intellects that the USA has previously shown little sign of nurturing.

Perhaps the Obama administration should conclude that it would be best to adopt just one of the previous president’s policies: abstinence. Not from sex, but from supplying Israel with money, weapons and ideological support. And above all abstain from interference, for it has done a great deal of harm, caused thousands upon thousands of deaths, in the last twenty years and no discernible good.

And in Gaza, the objective is?

So, the invasion of the Gaza Strip enters its third stage, and it we a ‘military operation’ whose ‘military objectives’ are ‘close to attainment’. But what does the attainment of a military objective mean if there is no political one?

It seems that as far as the Israelis are concerned, there is no political objective except to disable any civil, political or social structure in Gaza for five, perhaps ten years. To cow a population and instil into it a fear of death, or worse, mutilation that will last for the same period.

To impress on the countries of the EU or the Arab world that spending further millions on building hospitals, clinics, schools, universities, libraries, government offices, will be entirely wasted since Israel will (as today’s statement by the Foreign Minister makes perfectly clear) hold it within its rights to destroy them again at any time it chooses.

Much has been written on the resentment and loathing that Israel’s actions will engender among not only the Palestinians but many Arabs. But there are other agendas, an d one is an Israeli political one which no-one seems to recognise, and again, it is one that the Israelis have learnt from practices against them by another regime.

The deployment of Israeli army reservists is significant. It is a commonplace of political speech now to talk of ‘ownership’. This is not ‘involvement’ in a process so much as organising complicity and joint responsibility. Other regimes have known well that to involve as much of the ordinary population in an armed conflict is to make all its members participate in responsibility for the actions of a few.

And this is what the Israelis are doing politically to their own population by involving the reservist in the destruction of Gaza and the injuries inflicted on women and children there. The thousands of ordinary workers, the teachers, the taxi drivers, the metal fabricators, the software designers, the students, have now, by their deployment in Gaza, been given the same ‘ownership’ of the destruction and death being wrought there previously by the ‘professionals’.

And they will go home and have to defend all the military actions, all the breaches of international law, all the breaches of the Geneva Conventions, even the War Crimes, that have occurred there, which as civilians they might otherwise have been able to deny, deplore or pretend for their own peace of mind never happened. Now, they are all involved. And, every Israeli citizen, having ‘ownership’ then owns the consequences. Every citizen (since all serve in the reserve) is a military target for the future.

Cynically, this Israeli government has actually thus brought about a situation in which it has put its entire population in even more danger for the future; and planted the seeds for a bush burning with anxiety,fear, and hate on its own side for generations.

Was that Israel’s intended political objective? Since it is clear it had none for Gaza, I am inclined to think it was. Or at least, now the Israelis have understood the breadth and depth of distaste around the world, even among those allies who have previously done their best to if not support them, not to oppose them directly, they have deliberately made it one.

Propping up the Cause against the Palestinians

You have already heard this from many interviewees on the broadcast media who purport to be independent and even objective, as well as from official Israeli spokespersons.

[“Hamas’] senior leaders completely abandoned the population and are concerned only in saving their own skiins.”

“. . . mosques, institutions and private homes were being used by Hamas as bases of operation and arms caches. The entire terror infrastructure is located in the heart of the civilian population which acts as a human shield.”

“Hamas has placed almost a million Israeli civilians within its range of fire (about 15% of its total population!) No country in the world would agree to daily fire at its civilians’ homes.

“Stopping [Operation Cast Lead] midway will not only lead to a resumption of terrorism but will also serve as encouragement to Hamas and other extremist elements in the region.”

“There is today no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip . . .(in the course of the past week 400 trucks and 10 ambulances entered the Gaza Strip from Israel.)”

“The figures we have indicate that the percentage of casualties among univolved civilians stands at about 12% (50 out of 400 killed), much lower than any similar event such as NATO’s bombing in Kosovo or Afghanistan.”


A communique sent by the Israeli foreign Ministry to “media volunteers” who are asked to flood blogs, websites and media with these points if they respond to this email:

“Dear friends,
We hold the [sic] military supremacy, yet fail the battle over the international media. We need to buy time for the IDF to succeed, and the least we can do is spare some (additional) minutes on the net. The ministry of foreign affairs is putting great efforts in balancing the media, but we all know it's a battle of numbers. The more we post, blog, talkback, vote – the more likely we gain positive sentiment.”

As you can see from reading many media blog threads which do not even originate any discussion of the Gaza War, they are often sidetracked into it, presumably frequently by volunteers who have taken up the invitation.

My Arab friends have often, and still do, bewail the Palestinians’ apparent inabilty to produce rational and reasoned counter-argument, let alone similar counter-propaganda . . .But then, may not in the end, the views and opinions of those who honestly believe in their cause, the reports of eyewitnesses, outweigh the manufactured propaganda and partial representations?

We can hope so; propagandists seldom seem to remember that the most effective propaganda is truth and the evidence of truth.

See The Guardian

Truth will out even in Gaza. . .

. . .even when the controlling forces ban journalists and cameramen in the hope that pictures and stories will not illustrate their actions to the rest of the world.

The BBC broadcast two interviews with eyewitnesses, children (one 13) who are being treated for their injuries after being rescued from the house Israeli soldiers tricked over a hundred people into believing would be a place of safety, and then, in total breach of the Geneva Conventions, shelled it.

They tell their stories simply, with obvious honesty and directness, and they are compelling and distressing to anyone who believes they have the right to call themselves humane and civilised.

What makes it a war crime is not just that deceit, not just deliberately and consciously targeting civilians, men, women and children, but that for four days they refused to allow medical help to reach them.

An interview with an Israeli spokesman (fortunately recorded by the BBC before the interviews with the two surviving children, or no doubt the story would have changed) produced what for years so many of us have come to expect even when we do not know the real story: half-truths, lies, and propaganda.

Israeli troops were not operating in the area; Israel tries hard to avoid civilian casualties; this was an area where the population is under the thumb of Hamas and therefore could be persuaded to say anything; it is Hamas propaganda. In any case the Israeli army is investigating.

And that last phrase usually seems to mean 'investigating as to how this crime can be covered up, made to appear the fault of the victims, or, as an absolute last resort, which Israeli soldier is most expendable and can be charged later with mere 'neglect of duty' or something minor.

I do not for a moment think that many American citizens, or Israeli ones, though there will be some who dare to speak out, will not swallow the initial Israeli story. There are enough friends of Israel to swamp a great deal of the American media with it, and for many, it will no doubt believed more true with time.

But the rest of the world, I think, is becoming thoroughly sickened by this kind of thing. Though I have avoided writing it, comparisons between the behaviour of the SS in Jewish ghettoes in World War II and some Israeli behaviour in Gaza now are inescapable.

And I trust it will be a source of shame for generations of Israelis to come that they allowed to happen, have called for, and have supported, some of the very abuses that they have for sixty years held another nation, now much changed, to account for. And to which they claim they owe in part the legitimacy of their state.

I think you will find the interviews here on BBC World Service Newshour for the rest of the day.

Determination and Desperation in Gaza and Israel

So, the Israelis are determined to continue their ‘reduction’ (military planners prefer that to ‘destruction’ or ‘annihilation’) of the Gaza Strip despite the UN Resolution. Hamas, with absolutely nothing to lose, not even life, since now so much of that has been lost anyway, are determined to continue whatever resistance or attacks they can put together.

The determination of Hamas, of course, is born of desperation, of fear that at some stage they will be exhausted both of men and arms, and wiped out in Gaza and possibly anywhere else in future. And the desperation of the whole populace, who have been driven to shiver and starve as the Israelis have finally almost entirely have deprived them of homes, power, fuel and food.

Eighty per cent of Gazans now require food aid; only ten per cent will get it, since although some food can get to warehouses, as the Israelis humanely open a crossing for an aid convoy, it cannot be distributed to the majority of the citizens as the Israelis have destroyed the infrastructure through which it could be delivered. It is of course, the old Israeli tactical trick of giving with one hand while taking away with the other and previously having taken a great deal with both.

So, as Gazans are still proving stubborn, are still not marching in the streets to plead with the Israelis to finally take them over as a client, pliant, colony; are not marching in the streets demanding that Hamas (now, in Israel-speak “this murderous Palestinian organisation”: you see the Israeli desire now to extend their ‘reduction’ to the Palestinians of the West Bank?) goes into exile on a cruise liner, nor demanding they cease rocketing Israel. As if they could: who could dare, could be determined enough, to risk even standing for ten seconds in a street knowing that they would be targeted almost instantly and the house they stepped out of shelled or reduced to add to the rubble blocking the roads?

So, the determination of the Israelis to effectively destroy Palestine and reduce Palestinians to a state of utter despair and incapacity is unabated. Its public expression, yet again, adopts the pseudo-legitimacy of the language of Americans in their war on terror. They will not be ‘dictated to’ by ‘foreign countries’, least of all, now, by such as ‘American cheeseburger-eating surrender monkeys’.

This is where, as many of us anticipated, where American foreign policy and ‘pre-emptive’ military ‘armed diplomacy’ has led: to ruthless action by a ruthless state under the guise of protecting its statehood and its own self-respecting, self-obsessed status and power apart from the rest of the world. It is an attitude that has brought the USA in the end to an economic collapse and an international disrespect that not even the most liberal new President (and Obama is not that for all his outward charm) can cure for a generation.

In its desperation and defiance, Israel is set on a course to follow its mentor, but unlike its parent, it cannot threaten countries internationally. The USA has bought (no doubt with of offers of finance it could never, it turns out, afford anyway, or threats of withdrawal of arms and technology, a couple of European countries to place its ‘Star Wars’ stations in them. The whole of Europe is now reaping the rewards of this American intervention aimed at Russia. (It is ludicrous to suppose that antimissile missiles, never yet proven to work in the way they are claimed to, must be placed in Poland or the Czech Republic to intercept missiles fired from Iran or North Korea.) All those states bordering on Russia are now short of gas in a cold winter, and in terms of heating will be no better off than the Gazans who have equally been deprived. In desperation, are they going to turn to the USA for energy it neither can nor would supply to Europe? Rather they are going to abandon it.

What countries can Israel buy or threaten to support it against the Palestinians, apart from the USA? Just as despised, it can only rely on propaganda ; or will it dare, finally, in desperation at losing all international support as the UN Resolution now shows with even the USA abstaining instead of vetoing it as it has done so many times before, threaten, sub rosa, the use if its own terror weapon, its nuclear arsenal on its feared near neighbours?

The Russians have learnt that the USA is powerless and impotent in some areas in which it has (literal) power; that in the field of energy supplies its supposed power of ‘protecting its allies’ is meaningless. It, and no doubt others will find more holes in that fabric, and the USA, like Israel, will no doubt find itself in the desperate situation of being almost entirely without allies and friends.

Yesterday, while the US was still blocking any UN resolution that was not kind to Israel and cruel to the Palestinians, President-elect Obama held a press conference in which he refused to answer any questions on Gaza. However, a correspondent described his body language showed he was very angry. Perhaps it was the knowledge that within a matter of days American policy over Israel might change was what finally persuaded the American ambassador, a friend ot the notorious Neocons who led the USA into these disasters of intervention in the name of the ‘War on Terror”, the same the Israelis immediately adopted as excuse for any of their own actions, to abstain.

In any case, the determination of the Israelis, who immediately said the cease-fire resolution was ‘unworkable’ without, obviously, even discussing it, makes almost any new American policy also unworkable in the short term, unless Obama can raise the determination to defy the powerful Jewish-American lobby that has kept the USA in such close step with their spiritual homeland.

Meanwhile, the situation of all Palestinians will remain desperate. A hundred civilians. it is reported, were recently ‘encouraged’ by Israelis who controlled a part of southern Gaza to take shelter inside a house. Which the Israelis shelled. The ambulances finally allowed in by the Israelis could not reach the dead and wounded: they had to be carried to them on carts. There are eyewitness testimonies. Many will be determined that the Israelis should stand before an international tribunal for war crimes when this is finally over. Or as, if Israel cannot e stopped, the skeletons of the starving are collected from the ruins of Gaza.

Possibly, all the Israelis can hope for in future support from the USA may be that an Obama administration might bow to a Jewish lobby and prevent that final humiliation. And then, of course, any suggestion of morality in either ‘democratic’ state would be in shreds.

Wars that arise out of small events in their turn create other events and those lead to greater events that unpredictably dwarf those out of which the war began. That was true of the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty Years War, the First World War, the War on Terror and will be true of this.

And, of course, in all this, no-one has been saying very much of self-determination.

Delivery expected here soon

. . . of, I hope, more food for thought, unlike in Gaza, where the UN says 80 per cent of the population of 1.5 million requires food for the body which because of Israeli military actions and destruction can only be delivered to ten per cent.

A State Divided . . .

To declare that the Gaza Strip and West Bank could be in the foreseeable future a 'single viable state' was, and is, it has always seemed to me, an absurdity. It is as if someone were to say that Canada and Mexico could be a single unified state with a United States in between forbidding all physical communication between them even including the Panama canal, the Atlantic and the Pacific.

That has effectively been the geopolitical policy of Israel (and tacitly that of the USA) since Oslo. Were anyone to look at the map of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, from the beginning, it is clear that their geographical placement has never been dictated by the likelihood of expanding some Israeli agricultural industry for those who desire to live in what will always be ‘Indian territory’ as far as they are concerned.

They are military outposts like Roman or US Army forts in the West, the roads that connect them organised like wagon trails designed for the speedy deployment of armed forces, not for trade between an Israeli-populated town or city and a Palestinian one.

No viable state in any case can be constructed in the interstices of this kind of geo-miltary structure to begin with unl ess the population that falls through the cracks is either exterminated or demoralised and demilitarised to the extent they can be herded into reservations that are far away from tribal homelands, the earth that supported them, the gods that sustained them spiritually. Ask the native Americans.

Ask any of those Jews around the world who so vehemently make demands for a ‘biblical’ Israeli estate. The cry is that the land, the history of another people is irrelevant. That the Palestinians can all find a better home by ‘going to their brothers’. It is as though there were to be an orchestrated demand that I, whose English ancestry is Viking, and therefore of less antiquity that Palestinian Arabs, should join ‘my brothers’ in Norway.

Or, by a more recent analogy, since genetically I am part Italian, I should be forced to emigrate to Italy, a country and a culture, having been brought up entirely in England, I know only from visits, as a Palestinian would know Lebanon, Syria, Morocco or Libya (whose Arabic dialects are sometimes almost as different as English and Italian.) And why should Norway or Italy be at some time required to accept hundreds of thousands of people like me?

Even though I would actually be quite happy to live in Italy, a country and a civilisation I have grown to love, the Palestinian analogy is more akin to the Norwegian one, a country I have never visited, a language I know nothing of (not even from the Old Norse Sagas, which I have never felt any affinity with whatsoever).

It is clear that Israeli policies must inexorably, decade by decade, lead to the depopulation of the West Bank and Gaza. The withdrawal and demolition of settlements in Gaza was not a colonist’s abandonment of a foothold in a New World. It was merely a withdrawal of Israeli citizens to avoid their being caught up in the ‘collateral damage’ of a blitzkrieg that was, no doubt through biennial repetition over decades, if not centuries, to leave a country’s population no alternative but to flee the rubble and ruin for ever, or stay and die.

But people are stubborn. Especially when there are a million and a half ot them in a reatlivel small extent of land. The Palestinians of Gaza are not Native Indian tribes scattered over a continent frequently at war with each other and therefore unable to combat the approaching threat.

Unable to combat an armed threat, certainly, since even the Palestinian police, the organisation that in most countries protects the population from the criminal depredations normal in every society have been denied the arms they need. And the nascent Palestinian army that was to protect it has been dismantled, disarmed and made impotent.

So what do the Israelis want from their war on Gaza? The reduction of a physical state into dust and rubble out of revenge, that much is clear. And then? Having failed to persuade the majority of the population to abandon their country voluntarily to seek comfort with their ‘cousins’ and ‘brothers’ in Saudi, Dubai or Sudan, to deprive and starve them completely until we see hundreds of thousands of bodies in the streets, skeletons covered with nothing but skin, like those in Leningrad or Belsen? And the few hundred pitiful survivors are finally helped onto C-45 transports provided out of charity by the USAAF by the Israeli Medical Corps?

To close the tunnels that keep up a minimal amount of what Palestinians require merely to avoid starvation, would have in the end almost precisely that effect. It is naiveté in the highest degree, or pure unadulterated cynicism (neither of which surprise me in anything Blair is associated with) to expect the Israelis to open up road air and sea communications now with any hope of permanence, when for forty years they have closed off all of them at will or whim.

Was this—the total destruction of a land and the effective deportation of a population reduced to numb acquiescence by malnutrition and despair—the ‘war aim’ of the Israeli’s latest operation? Or was it just brutal revenge? It has been presented to the world as the latter and that is unpalatable enough to much of it. I cannot help suspecting now the former.

A Reminder from another War, another Era

An image Israelis, and particularly those responsible for the attack on the UN school, should meditate on while recalling the circumstances that led to its being painted.

And Dr Zalmay Khalilzad* and Gabriela Shalev** ought especially to pause and contemplate the copy which hangs on the wall of the UN on their way to a Security Council meeting; after all, they walk past it, although it seems its relevance has not so far impinged on their consciousness.

* The US ambassador to the UN, who has Neocon relationships, and
** the Israeli ambassador

News from Erehwon

Or, why Americans are both poorly served by their media and often ill-informed about what is happening around the world.

On the day Gazans buried the dead from the Israeli attack on a UN school, these were the 'Top Stories' on one of the major US Tv news networks, ABC:

• Obama Deficit May Dent Stimulus
• Power Lunch: Obama Meets With Former Living Presidents(It would be real news if he had lunched with a few dead ones, wouldn't it?)
• Federal Judge Faces More Sex Charges
• Obama's New Ride (the new Cadillac armoured personnel carrier, sorry, Presidential limousine)
  
• There Are Beetles in your Juice
• Joe the Plumber Turns War Correspondent (Well, not really, but you could say appropriately, he's going to that drain on American resources, Israel . . .
• Weatherman Wipes Out
• SUV Flies, Crashes Into Gas Station
• Cops Can't Stop Rap Music
• Travoltas Turn to Scientology
• Affleck's Little Lady
• Who's Having the Bad Hair Day? (Not Palestinians . . .)
  

There was a single news item on Gaza: Cease Fire Soon? Fighting Resumes in Gaza; but the list speaks for itself of the importance of this appalling war assumes in the thinking of a major American TV network, and what its audience is presumed to be interested in, not what they might deserve to know.

For further illumination on the news you really need to know if you are a citizen of the USA, take a look at the column below the weatherman wiping whatever it was he was caught wiping.

That night in an interview on British Channel 4 News an Israeli miltary spokeswoman first said there were "Hamas fighters in the vicinity" of the school and Israeli troops thought they were in danger and defended themselves. Pressed as to why the Israeli Army had been given the coordinates of their school by the UN and told it was a refuge for civilians but nonetheless attacked it and destroyed it, she then claimed Hamas militants had been firing at Israeli soldiers from the school. The UN insists there was no firing from anybody but the Israelis.

Suspect, Suspicion, Subversion?

I wrote briefly on the idea of the 'information war' as the American miltary terms it, and how there has been quite a lot written about the idea of influencing (read subverting or even, in part, controlling) the media and particularly the internet in a time of war. I am wondering if I am seeing an example on Palcast.

Suddenly, 'podcasts' have appeared which are not really audio presentations, programmes, diaries or polemics on Palestine, but are simply news items. From Voice of America, no less.

I do not listen to VoA, and perhaps it has changed and become more like the BBC World Service, instead of being simply a propaganda voice for the USA. However, it is certainly, having glanced over the website, very much focused on the US angle of vision, and, as we all know, that is much more favourable to Israel

Why, I ask, has a website which says its aim (and a very laudable one too) is to provide a voice for Palestinians and podcasting on Palestine, placing short news items which link to the VoA front page? Discounting the idea that this is not really a 'podcast' as we understand it in the first place, why not choose one from Reuters, Agence France Presse or Al Jazeera?

The intent behind the proponents of the 'information war' is to place as much favourable information to their side as possible in all media, and especially on the internet. The concentration is there, because this is a fundamentally American idea, and Americans have seen newspaper readership, TV and radio audiences decline, while much of the US population now gets its news from the internet.

(Of course, this America-centric idea ignores the fact that large populations do get their news from radio broadcasters like the BBC World Service, which I heard recently has seven million listeners in Kenya alone, and there are many around the world whose access to the internet is limited, through simple lack of electricity, phones or money, never mind the latest 2 gigaHertz Intel-inside laptop.)

Among the various devices proposed to get the 'right' point of view across is to effectively flood sites with supportive stories, comments and refutations (easy enough when you can have as many effectively anonymous email names and addresses from Yahoo! or Hotmail as your Kray computer can hold) and try to get potentially influential or widely read ones to link to 'supportive' sites and thereby diminish both the frequency of appearance of adverse sites and consequently their apparent popularity. And thus relegate their listing in google searches down towards the 2,380,689th of the 2,380,701 results.

I suspect very much that this is actually happening in this conflict. As we non-Americans know well by now (or should have learnt) US methods, while sometimes subtle, can equally be sometimes  enthusiastically blatant. Which is why the sudden appearance of relatively bland and uninformative news items about discussions taking place about a ceasefire, made to appear positive just in that, which we have all heard in other news media in tthe hourly news anyway, and which advances oIur knowledge very little, on a site supposed to be dedicated to disseminating information about Palestine and Palestinians makes me suspicious.

However it may be, to become a relay for a news broadcaster (it wouldn't matter whether it was VOA, BBC News, France Inter or Radio Moscow) diverts our attention from those who may be producing podcasts giving us eye-witness or on-the-spot authoritative information. It may not be as obvious as jamming radio and TV broadcasts (which Israel is doing), but  nonetheless the effect is similar. It may not be a strategically important battle, but the tacticians of the 'information war' hope to sway public opinion to their side by force, not of arms, but an apparent manipulated and imaginary majority consensus.

It is doubtful, I think that this is going to work in this conflict. Many people around the world come to form an opinion based not on the transitory attitude or fashion of the moment (though there are always those, and they are often among the most vociferous) but on what they have seen, heard, understood and considered over however many years they have lived. And based it, in this case, on the reputation and actions of a state over the last twenty years.

A friend of mine, an Arab who has now lived more than half her life in Europe, tells me she has observed a shift in public attitude towards Israel of fundamental importance. For a decade or more, she says, Europeans particularly have tired of the constant iteration of Israelis as victims, the playing on sympathy for events 60 years ago in which the majority of the world population had no involvement or responsibility for, the almost incessant blame game in demands for compensation for real victims whose numbers sometimes seem to defy the normal attrition of age and illness, and the reliance, finally, on it all as an excuse for violence and inhumanity to another race.

The upshot is that there is a growing (and perhaps now fully grown) feeling that Israel is just another world state and must expect to be treated like one. If, as any other state will, it acts aberrantly or outside international law then it is responsible for its actions and there are no excuses, no more that there would be for any other.

If that is the case, and I have felt it myself, then this time, the information war in favour of Israel was lost before it began. It is, to me, increasingly ironic, that much of the reporting of what Israel (and the US) would prefer not to be heard or seen, and has tried to physically prevent, is being brought out into the open by the traditional media, not only using traditional methods, but all those of the information age as well.

But we should beware. In the information war prospectuses I have read, there is no provision for a cessation of hostilities, a truce, or a ceasefire. There is no guarantee that the subversion of the internet and information would not continue until history is re-written, the out-of-favour faces airbrushed out, the pages rearranged, the books confiscated, photographs denounced as fakes while the fake itself is presented as authentic, publishers banned.

It is just as easy now as it was before the electronic age. Internet service providers can be bullied ('supporting terrorism' and threatened with the freezing of assets), the cables carrying traffic cut. (How many times has that happened accidentally in the last couple of years, when telegraph and telephone cables laid in the nineteenth century survived for decades?) And of course, whatever their mission statements say, search engine companies in search of revenue will allow their supposed fundamental principles to flex or even buckle under government pressure.

We need to become aware again not of the potential for subversion of the state, but by the state. Especially when it is espoused and even practised by states which publicise their democratic credentials and their freedoms so frequently and forcefully.

Despised of Men

So blame me. I voted for Blair, didn’t I? I cannot say I loathed the Tories, nor despised them nor say I hated Thatcher and all her works and therefore voted New Labour.

Though that is what I said at the time and they were some of my reasons. I catch myself repeating it now sometimes. But those are now the wrong words and I should not have used them. For such things they are hyperbole. They must be reserved, now, as they should for other inhumane ones, for the Israeli regime, its actions and the personnel who perform them.

Even then, having been over-used, those words are hardly strong enough. But they are all I have.

And now, I truly do, in the full meaning of the words, loathe and despise Tony Blair. Leading us into a misbegotten war for purely political reasons and self-aggrandisement, only veneered with the morality that should have informed them, that hardly anyone in Britain of any intelligence can understand, let alone endorse, was bad enough.

To change a party almost surreptitiously from a socialist one to a conservative one that has, centimetre by centimetre, dismantled all kinds of welfare and education structures that it not only conceived but we thought it held inviolable, to, inch by inch, restrict our civil liberties in the name of a war on terror conceived by a regime in another country, and then to toady to its wishes, was bad enough.

So I said I came to loathe and despise him for that.

I should, since in a way I have been involved with words all my life, have been more circumspect. I have read enough history to know that words like these should always be held in reserve for the circumstances that really do require them, like ‘tragedy’ and ‘disaster’.

For now, having thought his title of “Middle East Envoy’ was some sort of honorarium, a title without a job, merely to gain lucrative lecture fees in the USA, in which view I thought I was confirmed by his near Trappist silence about the issues and problems of the Middle East, he has spoken.

What he said merely confirms that he always was George Bush’s poodle. That, about to receive a medal from the American Congress, out of vanity he has not the moral courage to propose anything that would upset the American love affair with Israel and risk its members jeering him instead of cheering. And why he converted to Catholicism instead of Judaism is beyond me.

So I do now loathe, despise and hate Blair, not only as a politician, but as a human being. And this time, I use the words in the full sense of the meaning, not as casual hyperbole in political debate.

I would like to see him in a London street some time in the future. Though I dare say he will find Sacrament, Santa Fe or Seattle even, more to his liking. Not to spit on him, not to throw a shoe at him, not to accuse him of war crimes.

To look at him, and see all those around me do the same, with that glance that says so obviously: “Shouldn’t I recognise him? Wasn’t he famous once? What a pity to see him like that now. Was he on Big Brother. Or was it American Idol?”

I cannot think of anything that a politician who tried to choose celebrity over morality would find more hurtful and destructive of his psyche. Especially of a man who sold himself as someone who would preside over fresh bright happy dawns and has instead offered blood red sunsets. And I hope he lives a long and fruitless life, so as to be punished to the full by it.

Revenge! Let Loose the Dogs of War!

There is a well known proverb, usually attributed as an Arab one, though I think it has more universal origins, to the effect that “revenge is a dish best served cold”.

It is a concept I have never understood, at any temperature. I will admit that a handful of times during my life that I have wreaked petty vengeance. I think twice I have deliberately mentally hurt someone, though I hope not for very long.

I have never, and never now expect to, revenged myself for any slight with physical violence (unless you count a judo throw of a school bully when I was 13, and only twice since even threatened it. And they are all episodes of my life I still remember, and regret.

But among some, it seems almost endemic. Let me give you an example. Of course, compared to the vengeance being wreaked on Gaza, it is trivial. But it illuminates an attitude, I think.

Some years ago, I was asked if I would have a meeting with someone who, as it happened, lived on the opposite side of the street to me, who needed advice on developing a complex idea into something that could be put on the Web. That was not really my expertise, but I was asked because I knew a young team who had just set up a business developing quite complicated computer games and were making a considerable success of it.

It turned out, in the end, that this involved the Jewish Kabbala. Now that is something that i have long suspected engenders a great deal of troublesome nonsense, sometimes dangerous, and in any case the concept described to me, inevitably accompanied with sheets and sheets of complicated diagrams, seemed to me entirely unworkable.

Not wanting to be too dismissive or impolite, I suggested that it would be very problematic, since it would certainly involve search algorithms that even Google has yet to come up with simply to achieve the kind of initial indexing the thing would need, but I said that as far as the interactive parts of it were concerned, my friends would probably have the kind of imagination and technical expertise that it needed.

It was then that I realised this might not be, as I had somewhat innocently thought, merely an impartial academic interest, or a personal enthusiasm, when I suddenly recollected that the blue and white cloth I had passed in the hallway was an Israeli flag. I had to explain that if this was to be some kind of overtly religious Jewish endeavour, there might be a problem.

My contacts, I explained, while not being any more religious than me (which is to say not at all) were nonetheless young British boys of Arab descent. Though, I said, if I were to put it to them I thought they would be amused, they would be all too well aware of the potential for, shall we say, cultural conflict, so I would prefer to have some reassurance about the standpoints of the people they would be dealing with on what could be a long project before I approached them.

What I meant, of course, was that I had no intention of landing three very clever lads I liked (even if they had been descended from Welsh Patagonian sheepfarmers) with a bunch of fanatical Zionists, which is what I had by then begun to suspect this was really about.

Well, as usual in this sort of case, I heard no more. I made a couple of follow-up calls, but they were not returned, and I pretty well forgot about it except as a little amusing paradoxical tale to be told to a friend or two over a drink after dinner.

I had, in fact entirely forgotten it until a neighbour told me he’d heard that my flat had been raided by the police because I was a suspected terrorist. At one in the morning. Had I actually been arrested?

When I managed to get my jaw back in working order, I told him far from it, I had rather been hoping that the visiting policemen were going to arrest the two teenagers who I had heard earlier trying to break into my flat, but had run away when they realised there was someone inside, not me. That two police cars had turned up was merely accidental. It had been, apparently, otherwise a quiet night.

Rather angry, of course I demanded to know where this story came from. It originated, he admitted rather shamefacedly, from—would you like to guess?

Yes, the gentleman I mentioned at the beginning with an interest in the Kabbala.

In a thoroughly irritated mood, I rounded up my local friends and acquaintances, and made sure that the true story got about; the rumour was one that (as I am sure the originator knew) could have done me very serious professional damage.

He had heard, it turned out, for I had not mentioned it, it being nothing to do with my professional life whatsoever, that I had a certain sympathy for the Palestinian cause from that same neighbour, who had then thought nothing of what had been a casual aside.

Why should he have indulged in such a petty act of revenge? I know no reason except that he must have decided, presumably, that views abhorrent to him or opposed to his (I speculate) deserved some kind of retribution. And certainly, the one he chose could have had disastrous consequences. Except that he could not have known (and only will now if he reads this) that since my phone had been tapped off and on for many years*, whatever rumour he started would hardly have interested Special Branch.

We passed in the street occasionally after that, but he never acknowledged me. Perhaps that was because, somewhat provoked, I put a Palestinian flag in my window where I knew he would be able to see it.

Revenge, however petty, is always bitter, never sweet. And it is particularly bitter, and unforgiveable, when it is targeted on a whole people.

(*How do I know that? I cannot tell you, but it is not based on paranoia or mysterious clicks and buzzes . . .I was tipped off by what we journalists call “an unimpeachable source”. And should Special Branch or MI5 read this and consider calling round to ask who that was, I take the ethics of my profession seriously and I’m not going to reveal it to them either.)

Weapons of Moderate Destruction?

Israel is the USA’s public weapons show. Not only that, it has consistently been the country which dares apply the tactics and methods of warfare that the Pentagon dare not. At least, dare not until the Israelis show whether the rest of the world will be outraged by them or offer up a blind eye.

That has been obvious for years. And in some respects I am sure it is reciprocal. What little I have read of the publications that emanate from such places as the Washington Defence University have pretty well convinced me there is a thriving trade of ideas about how to conduct warfare or ‘anti-insurgent’ operations as it is now often sanitized, between the two.

But, while I suspect that many interrogation techniques developed by the Israelis for use against Palestinians were refined (if that is the word) by US forces and the CIA and led to the viciousness and nastiness of Abu Ghraeb, for example, it is the way Israelis effectively appear to conduct ‘field trials’ of weapons that perturbs me.

Apparently, the IDF is using phosphorous shells in Gaza. Supposedly, these are to provide covering smokescreens for advancing troops. My ex-miltary friend, however, tells me this is nonsense. Such a disguising fog can be created by other methods. Phosphorous burns on contact, and, if my memory of chemistry at school is correct, sticks to clothes and skin and water (which anyone might in panic think was what should put out flames) intensifies the fire.

It is, he has led me to believe, not a tactical weapon to aid the deployment of soldiers; it is an antipersonnel weapon that while fulfilling one purpose, has as at least its secondary object, of killing and injuring people in the most agonising way conceivable and thereby creating fear and terror. Even the most highly trained and ruthless soldier would be unlikely to be able to continue firing while burning to death. And anyone near the victim—even the majority of highly trained professional soldiers—would be either humane enough to try to put an end to the agony or in a state of such fear they would be paralysed.

Of course, this is precisely the kind of weapon best calculated to disrupt guerilla fighters. Fear, especially of burning to death, is a very powerful weapon. And when it is used in a city or a country as densely populated as Gaza, in the streets of Gaza City, how would any regular soldier distinguish between a ‘regrouping’ Hamas fighter and a terrified civilian teenager running away? Even if these things were fired singly and in visual range, and they are not.

After all, even in Britain, armed police have in the past shot a man they thought was carrying a sawn off shotgun in a carrier bag (it was a broken chair leg, and whether he was a known criminal or not does not excuse the killing, especially in a country which has abolished the death penalty), in the USA more recently, armed policemen shot a man they described as ‘believed to be carrying a lethal weapon’. It was a crutch, of the kind I use as a walking aid myself.

While I doubt that I am likely to be ambushed and shot dead by armed police in London (Jean-Charles Menendez notwithstanding) I doubt I would survive more than seconds in Zaitoun, and the friends who know me as a pacifist would have a very hard time countering the claim that I was killed carrying a grenade launcher.

The IDF perhaps will attempt to assure, if not the rest of us, at least their own citizens, that their soldiers are so well trained that that is indeed possible to burn only fighters and not civilians to death. But, as we all know from the frequent communiqués of American forces after bombing raids in Afghanistan or Pakistan, from the Israelis after their ‘targeted assassinations’ (a weasel phrase for ‘premeditated murder’, for that is what an planned assassination is) and helicopter missile attacks, in the dark all cats are grey, and all the dead dug out of the rubble of houses are terrorists.

Corpses cannot protest their innocence, and in the past both Americans and Israelis have relied heavily on that to divert criticism of their methods. We will hear much of the numbers of ‘terrorists killed’ when some final body count is performed in Palestine and that will be a much higher figure than the number of dead civilians.

It is getting on for forty years since the world showed outrage at a photograph of a screaming naked girl burnt by an American weapon like the ones the Israelis are using in Gaza. But there are few photographers, if any, to take that kind of picture in Gaza. Supposedly, being a ‘humane’ people, the Americans abandoned weapons like these, though there have been reports napalm has been used by them again in Afghanistan.

If the Israelis get away with using what is simply a terror weapon, if the rest of the world shrugs its shoulders, then ‘burn baby burn” is going to turn into a (literal) Marine Corps war cry within months. The US forces—having known for years now that they along with the Israelis, can disregard whatever humanitarian international conventions are inexpedient for them—will know they can get away with it too.

And then? Poison gas? Irradiation? Secret crematoria? Once you begin to excuse the use of deliberate cruelty and institutionalise it, you are not setting foot on a staircase on which you can choose to stop on the third step down or the twentieth, and climb back up again to the higher summit of humanity; it leads inexorably downwards to the lowest step of depravity. It becomes an accelerating escalator which only goes down and cannot be reversed.

And yes, the middle of a war is the time to protest. Before the reasons and the rationale for using them, the excuses for mistakes made, are nicely laundered, folded, and presented to us smelling of lavender. While the reality of weapons of, not ‘mass’, but equally terrible ‘moderate’—I term them so because we will be told that these were used with 'moderation', sparingly, are not really so horrific, and were only used in self-protection as a last resort against manic terrorists and so on—destruction is clear before us.

Update:

I've been informed by my ex-military friend (who was appalled at the Israeli's use of this weapon) that it is being deployed even more brutally and cynically than I imagined. He tells me that film reportage clearly shows that these shells are 'airbursts', that they explode not on the ground on targets, but in the air above and therefore spray burning white phosphorous over a wide area, and in a crowded place like Gaza, inevitably over many buildings and their occupants. If this is not, in international law, a war crime (and I dislike that phrase being used as loosely as it often is) I do not know what is.

Gaza: "There is no Humanitarian Crisis"

To which this article should be sufficient answer:


Wounded Gaza family lay bleeding for 20 hours

By Amira Hass

Three hours after the Israel Defense Forces began their ground operation in the Gaza Strip, at about 10:30 P.M. Saturday night, a shell or missile hit the house owned by Hussein al A'aiedy and his brothers. Twenty-one people live in the isolated house, located in an agricultural area east of Gaza City's Zeitoun neighborhood. Five of them were wounded in the strike: Two women in their eighties (his mother and aunt), his 14-year-old son, his 13-year-old niece and his 10-year-old nephew.

Twenty hours later, the wounded were still bleeding in a shed in the courtyard of the house. There was no electricity, no heat, no water. Their relatives were with them, but every time they tried to leave the courtyard to fetch water, the army shot at them.

Al A'aiedy tried to summon help on his cell phone, but Gaza's cell phone network is collapsing. Shells have hit transponders, there is no electricity and no diesel fuel to run the generators. Every time the telephone works, it is a minor miracle.

At about noon Sunday, Al A'aiedy finally managed to reach S., who called me. There was nothing else that S., who lives nearby, could do.

I had known Al A'aiedy for eight years, and I called Physicians for Human Rights. They called the IDF's liaison office to ask it to arrange to have the wounded evacuated. That was shortly after noon - and as of press time, the liaison office had still not called PHR back.

Meanwhile, someone else had managed to reach the Red Crescent Society. It called the Red Cross and asked it to coordinate the evacuation of the wounded with the IDF. That was at 10:30 A.M. - and as of press time Sunday night, the Red Cross had still not been able to do so.

While I was on the phone with PHR, at about noon, H. called. He just wanted to report: Two children, Ahmed Sabih and Mohammed al-Mashharawi, aged 10 and 11, had gone up on the roof of their Gaza City house to heat water over a fire. There is no electricity or gas, so fire is all that remains.

Tanks are spitting shells, helicopters are raining fire, warplanes are causing earthquakes. But it is still hard for people to grasp that heating water has become no less dangerous than joining Hamas' military wing.

An IDF missile hit the two boys, killing Ahmed and seriously wounding Mohammed. Later Sunday, an Internet news site reported that both had died. But H.'s cell phone was not answering, so I could not verify that report.

And there was no point in trying H.'s land line: A bomb destroyed his neighborhood's entire phone system on Saturday. The target was a print shop (yet another of the IDF's "military" targets). Its owner, a retired UNRWA employee, had invested his entire pension in the shop.

In B.'s neighborhood, the bombs hit the water mains, so she has had no water since yesterday morning. "I'm already used to coping without electricity," she said. "There's no television, but I hear what happens from friends who call. One friend called from Lebanon, another from Haifa. And Ramallah. But without water, how will we manage?"

A. offered his own take on the situation: "I keep the children away from the windows because the F-16s are in the air; I forbid them to play below because it's dangerous. They're bombing us from the sea and from the east, they're bombing us from the air. When the telephone works, people tell us about relatives or friends who were killed. My wife cries all the time. At night she hugs the children and cries. It's cold and the windows are open; there's fire and smoke in open areas; at home there's no water, no electricity, no heating gas. And you [the Israelis] say there's no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Tell me, are you normal?"

From Ha'aretz

Words, words, words . . .Operation 'Cast Lead'

The codewords some armed forces give their operations quite often suggest more about the purpose underlying them, even their tactics, strategies and objectives, than some military planners seem to be aware of.

I presume that is why the British, I am told by someone who has served in their armed forces, choose random words from a list which give away absolutely nothing, and simply go through them alphabetically until they reach Z. Operation Tellec, for example, instead of “Enduring Freedom’.

The method also has the advantage, of course, that in the event of a failure to achieve the objectives of the operation, or a defeat, some over-optimistic phrase does not come back to bite them, or some piece of wishful thinking does not forever become an object of derision or a subject for sarcasm in either the press or the history books like the American example quoted.

The Israeli military operation against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip is called ‘Operation Cast Lead’.

Before you dismiss my contention that words may suggest more than appears at first sight and say “Well, yes, this is merely some gung-ho expression for producing lots of bullets to be fired at Hamas militants” in modern shot-towers in Tel Aviv, take a moment to recall the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon and what was left behind.

Apart from wholesale destruction, the IDF left behind large numbers of cluster bombs; banned now by virtually every country in the world except, of course, the two usual suspects who delight in leaving behind deadly traps for civilians when their optimistically-named operations go wrong and they are forced to withdraw. Or, as it used to be called before warfare was described as though it was a publicity stunt or an advertising campaign, a retreat.

“Cast lead”. Much of Israel’s most deadly bombs and shells are supplied by the US; it is almost as though the Pentagon uses Israel as a test bed to see what they can get away with next time. As we know from the first Gulf War, and other ‘operations’ (that word itself of course a mere euphemism for what used to be called ‘war’) lead shells are made from depleted uranium. Supposedly inert, or so the users have continually claimed, although there is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.

So, when the Israelis speak of ‘casting lead’, does not that now suggest to you that what will be cast over the ground and streets of the Gaza Strip (and no doubt its borders or city and town boundaries as they eventually withdraw) will be a great deal of lead armament? Which is likely to be lethal, one way or another, in both the short and very long terms?

My friend with military experience commented to me today that he has little doubt the Israelis have been using cluster bombs again. There will be, again, the protestations that many left behind were simply ‘defective’ and failed to explode, and therefore subsequent deaths and injuries which happen after the Israelis leave are merely unfortunate accidents. Just a little more ‘collateral damage’.

Yet it seems to me far more deliberate: is it not odd that so many of these ‘defective’ bomblets (designed to maim and injure as much as to kill) somehow do become effective again and explode weeks and months later?

As far as I remember, Israel has not signed the international treaty against the use of landmines. I understand they claim they do not use them. I forgot to ask my military friend if he happens to know what word the US uses for devices that work just like landmines but can plausibly be called something else. An ‘MRM’ perhaps: a “Movement Restricting Munition”. Perhaps, if he does know, he might not be able to tell me.

However, I cannot help feeling that in the months and years to come, we will find out if they come to light among the rest of the lead the Israelis so enthusiastically want to spread around the ground of Gaza.

What is it about some military minds that means they do not comprehend that words and phrases are not merely words, but convey concepts? And the concept behind these words is not just the spreading of death and destruction over the course of a week or two, but, one must suspect, for a decade or a generation.

(And, need I remind you, that Israel has nuclear weapons? Or that in late years there has been much American discussion on the tactical military use of small-scale nuclear weapons? Or that the two countries appear to follow each others' military dogmas? The last by-product of uranium is lead . . .Let us hope that the choice of these words does not imply that they are mulling over a tactical nuclear strike anywhere, too. But they suggest to me it is at least at the back of their minds and has taken at least some root in their military and political psychology.)