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.