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.)

Not caught in the Net

I am not one for conspiracy theories, but over the weekend I have noticed that searching for individuals' blogs which are pro-Palestine or, more importantly, report on events from Gaza, appears to return surprisingly few results.

Which is odd, since a look at one or two of the links on this page will tell you that they are out there on the web.

Now this may be a function of the way Google's ranking system works, and the sheer volume if the pro-Israeli lobby, which also tends to adopt the tactic of 'overwhelming force' and effectively frowns out all others.

Including this blog, it appears; while some local American newspaper from some tiny backwater in Texas which happens to be called Palestine appears to turn up in searches near the top with astonishing frequency.

I am sure events of great moment occur from time to time in Palestine, Texas. (Matters of  moment there, according to the paper, are the citizens' thoughts on parking and a house which caught fire on New Year's Eve.) But not, I think, on the scale of what is happening in the other Palestine.

Given the number of houses in the other Palestine which, if not now burning, have certainly been bombed to rubble or bulldozed—surely the Israeli Army is the only one to send in bulldozers with the tanks when they go to war for the purpose of civil destruction?—I cannot see why this newspaper for a 'city' of 18,000 people ranks so highly against a country in the Middle East with a rather larger population.

I suspect, therefore, that this blog, although it is current while I write it, is for future documentarians of opinion on the Palestine issue, rather than one that might influence (however infinitesimally) current events.

I really do not want to adopt a conspiracy theory. But, given that the USA effectively controls the distribution of the World Wide Web, the enthusiasm of American military thinkers and strategists for the last few years for the "Information War"—including the development of tactics for 'interdicting' electronically distributed information—and that the US supports Israel so forcefully, I do wonder.

In the meantime, the Israeli publicity machine is offering up the excuse of all ruthless regimes in a war for attacking precisely those places where (as I heard a doctor in Gaza City point out in a call to the BBC World Service) people under attack gather for the comfort and succour of their god or other citizens. Or simple where they must go for the immediate necessities of life, like a market. Was there not outrage when Serbs shelled a market in Sarajevo once? Why is a market in Gaza different?

Here it is, courtesy of a pro-Zionist website, and being spread fast around the web in consequence:

' "Hamas operatives are in the hospital and have disguised themselves as nurses and doctors." one official said. Maj. Genral Anos Yadlin told the cabinet that Hamas was using mosques, public institutions and private homes as ammunition stores." '

So, of course with that salve to a few Israeli political consciences and, no doubt they hope for the rest of the world, then there is no structure in the Gaza strip that is likely to be left standing. But then, we know that was the aim from the beginning.

Or should: we have most recently the Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon to remind us if any still have any doubts that the Israeli purpose is not to disable Hamas and its structure, but to demolish the whole Palestinian society.

If they have not adopted the methods of Stalin as a little too unpalatable to the rest of the world, perhaps they have drawn lessons from their friends the Turks and their treatment of the Armenians instead. It certainly looks like it.

News from Gaza

Prof. Said Abdelwahed, who teaches English at Al-Azhar University, posted earlier in the day at Moments in Gaza:

I am okay so far. Air raids in my area in the last ten minutes were nine, and we expect the worst to come! In the morning between 3:00-4:00 they raided ten times on targets in Gaza city. Let alone the shelling from the Israeli navy vessels. They burnt more than ten local fishing boats on the spot! In the afternoon, Israel raido mentioned targeting 35 places in Gaza Strip. It included bridge that connects north and south of the eastern parts of Gaza city, and it included Gaza airport in Rafah. It getting worse and worse. It seems that the ground offensive is imminent!
I don't have electricity or water now. I am about to run out of diesel too. There is no way to go out. We have been inside as from day one (8 days so far and who knows!)
God bless you all.

He was then able to write something quickly just after the offensive began:

I have minutes to write. Nine F16s raided at targets in Gaza. Artillery shelled a 30 kilometers strip of cultivated land to the east of Gaza Strip. Then, several air raids followed; they targeted mosques, homes, al-Resala newspaper offices. Minutes ago, eleven praying men were killed in bombing a mosques in Beit Lahia at sunset (Magreb) prayers. Among them was a reporter of al-Aqsa TV. No electricity; no water; no life in the city.

Officially 460 people declared dead and 2300 injured. Mobile phone are out of order; land telephones can hardly catch and answer. Gaza is a city of ghosts. Ground offensive is on the move with two tanks and a bulldozer.

Laila El-Haddad, who is currently in the United States, and blogs at Raising Yousuf and Noor, spoke to her father in Gaza just after the news was announced:

He said Israel destroyed 3 JAWAL centers (the mobile provider) so many mobile phones, including his own, are down, but his landline is functional.

He tells me that a building behind my cousin's house in Gaza City was destroyed, and is now burning down in a voracious fire. It had an orphanage in it.

My mother says she won't lie..they are terrified.

Flares and firebombs are being shot to light up the sky. Propaganda fliers telling the people of Gaza that “they chose Hamas and and Hamas has abandoned them”; that “Hamas will lead them to catastrophe”‘ superimposed on an image of a bombed-out building; and calling on them to “take charge of their destiny” and to call a given phone number or email with tips and then a warning to call “in secrecy” (thanks for the tip). Israel is also broadcasting on al-Aqsa TV station there.

My father tells me Gaza's streets are as “dark as Kohl“.

Laila El-Haddad on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Gazamom

Gaza: Wrapping up a War and Packaging the Product

War to Americans is a commercial enterprise; conflict, peace and negotiation are a business plan that can be packaged prettily, advertised and sold. And, in this case, like Madoff’s schemes, covers a fraud.

“We were unable to come to any product,” said the American ambassador to the UN after three hours of discussion in the Security Council ended with nothing tonight. Unsurprisingly, since of course, the USA is intransigently and adamantly supporting its Middle Eastern client state. Though it looks now as though the US is nothing more than PR man and Financial Director for Rambo Israel Inc.: Israel the tail wagging the complaisant dog yet again.

I wondered after the invasion of Lebanon how much more both the USA and Israel actually wanted to be loathed and despised by almost the whole of the rest of the world? The answer appears to be the same as the length of a piece of string.

And the Americans and Israelis believe still that somehow they can package what is evidently to become an orgy of destruction of everything that makes any form of civilian existence in a state possible and probably this time beyond reconstruction for a decade as though it’s a new toy or Macdonalds meal.

Of course, the Israeli invasion of Gaza will be advertised by the Americans as another great success in their ‘war on terror’ in the TV commercial they and the Israelis are currently filming to a script that has obviously been on the shelf fo a year or more.

Hamas will have been rendered impotent, its militants killed, its leaders, civilian or military dead, imprisoned or deported. There will be supposed confessions, admissions of complicity with 'sponsoring states' allegations of all kinds of nefarious conduct, a new term for resistance fighters or homeland defenders instead of 'enemy combatants' now international pressure has finally made Guantanamo and its ethos unfashionable.

All to be introduced by some equivalent of Katie Couric wobbling her lower lip, pretending to be close to tears as it is explained to the sceptical purchasing public that all the deaths destruction misery and starvation were actually good for the Palestinians, probably for all Arabs too, and plucky little Israel has yet again smitten the anti-semites and the ungodly and heathen, ensured its survival and struck another blow for American-style democracy in the Middle East.

And the population of Gaza, including those newly forced in to exile by the destruction of their homes, reduced entirely to living on food aid in what could have been a country which made things and grew food and even exported both for the prosperity of its people had either the Ameriicans or Israelis ever been willing to allow it, will be assured by the the Americans that they have been ‘liberated’.

“Those who do not read history are condemned to repeat it.”

What puppet regime do the USA and Israel think they could install? Do they somehow even imagine Abbas returning in glory to Gaza City? Or does the USA have a friendly puppet-in-waiting for some renamed province like Kharzai or Chalabi?

Does the USA, however implausibly, see somewhere in their presentation a new opportunity for Haliburton and all those ‘security consultants’ left over from Iraq? Millions of dollars to be purportedly supplied to a Gaza ‘island’ to merely return to the US economy through a revolving door?

Or perhaps they have in mind the installation of some warlords, of factionalising Palestine so that groups go for each others throats, paid for by the CIA and Mossad with dollars out of suitcases, their macho viciousness made even more tumescent with free Viagara, until Palestine collapses into anarchy and ungovernability like Somalia or Afghanistan?

No doubt the scenario scripts a happy smiling Palestinian family driving into a sunset over Eilat waving a newly minted flag of two blue stripes and a Star of David with a small crescent inside it? To be broadcast on Fox, ABC and CBS, while the rest of the world goggles aghast and then screams with rage at the hypocrisy, absurdity, and above all cynical cruelty of the plan.

But then, this will be a ‘product’ labelled ‘made in Israel with ingredients from the United States of America’ and both the Israeli population and the American will be assumed to buy it as they would an SUV from those other bankrupt businesses Ford and GM. The rest of the world knows, of course, that an Israeli/American product is good for them, like Coca Cola for kids or a Uzi for gangsters.

But this time, that must be a delusion. Those times are past. No amount of millions spent on advertising in the end saves a bad company and a worse product. Or they may for a while, until the fancy product made of greed, exploitation and the complicity of governments, however subtly repackaged and sold by a Madoff or a Leahman Brothers brings three quarters of the world close to collapse.

The trouble is, the advertising agency’s view of the world does not always represent the truth, does not always correctly predict how people will react (or, since we are to use the jargon, ‘consume’) as we have seen with the attempt at taking over Afghanistan and regime change in Iraq. And, as the product goes bad or fails, it often damages or contaminates everything around it; so the shoddily made Afghan package has split open and spilled into Pakistan and India.

Of course, in the product specification for this war (which the manufacturers have in the background brief, but of course won’t make it into the final campaign posters, commercials and newspaper and magazine advertising) that the friends of Israel are so brilliant at disseminating, is the idea that hopefully, Iran, or Syria, angry and incensed at another onslaught on Palestinians and their destruction of a state will attempt to sabotage the product and the campaign perhaps by attempting to blow up the factory with a rocket or two and then these rivals can be taken out of the market and leave it free for the new one.

Even when advertising agencies spend a packet on market research and focus groups, the campaign can simply fail. Even if the product is a good one. If they ignore the market research (as both the Israelis and the USA are ignoring attitudes and opinions, let alone prospective new and yet more fanatical militancy developing around the world) the result can be an utter disaster.

All these years, the Palestinians and their Arab friends (what few there are: Egypt appears to have been almost subverted by the coca-cola dollar aid culture) have failed to 'package' their own 'product' (the same desire for nationhood, stability, prosperity and space in which to live and have their being expressed so loudly by others) effectively. Or, really, even at all.

It is the Israelis who adopted the marketing strategies and the campaign devices, created a whole international advertising agency to promote their cause and propaganda. Fundamentally, however, it is increasingly difficult to see it as a viable product for the late 21st century market. And it is certainly a dangerous one the way it keeps blowing up in innocent (if naive) consumers' faces.

Gaza Invasion: Overtaken by events

I had barely finished a piece predicting that the Israelis would follow their usual methods and invade the Gaza strip in the early hours of Sunday morning. (They do like, it seems, to respect their own Sabbath, but appear to like beginning wars on Christian ones, for some reason.) But I was only half-way through when I saw the IDF moving on on Sky News, so it became redundant.

A friend commented that surely the Israelis would need a huge force to suppress (or 'pacify') the Palestinians; but with the news that Israel was calling up reservists too, I pointed out that obviously that was exactly the intention. This is not exactly a rerun of Lebanon.

At least, not in terms of the force that is obviously to be used. It is, of course, a repetition in that if the Israelis have learnt a military lesson from that foolish episode, thay have not learnt the civil or political one.

That is simply that unless you are willing and have the ability to effectively colonise a country you invade militarily, are prepared to reconstruct it politically, socially and economically, and provide and staff its government, and then either gain the support of its population or repress it totally, a military action like this is, in the long term, utterly pointless and ineffective.

Or, of course, you can drive the population from the country altogether through the destruction of their homes, through depriving them of money and food, water and electricity, perhaps force them to the border at the point of a gun until they either drown in the Mediterranean or starve in the Sinai desert.

The first option is, it seems, beyond the competence of either the Israelis or the Americans, and in any case o doubtful expediency or even practicality in the 21st century, as the Americans have discovered. The second requires a ruthlessness and disregard for international ethics and laws. Now that the Israelis, along with their American allies, do possess. And it would put them into the same moral compass box as Stalin and Milosevich, Congo, Sudan and Ruanda . . .

Would they dare? If they and their American allies do not, then they will bolster not only even more resentment and miltant anger than they have already managed between them not only in the Middle East but in the rest of the world. With unpredictable and probably even more dangerous geo-political results as both China and Russia are no longer awed or effectively threatened by the US.

If they do, then the result will be the same. In either case, it is difficult to imagine how a state like Israel can have a longterm (historically, when we talk of centuries not decades) future; not at least as a religious Jewish one.

But the long term is not relevant to either of the two politicians primarily involved at the moment. The American President does not care; his reputation in history has already been irrevocably damaged and he knew had no political future after the end of this month. The Israeli politicians currently in office know either they will lose it next month or perhaps gain another year or two.

Never underestimate the pusillanimity or mendacity of politicians. Anyone who reads political autobiographies knows very well that their concerns are with themselves, their prestige, their position. Few spend more than a small fraction of their time in office not trying to enhance the latter, or plotting against opponents. Very few consider a future beyond their next electoral term, let alone one that extends into a century or two.