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.