Comment Fred Mrozek il y a 4 heures
Thank god that for every psycho turd like Netanyahu, there is a shining mensch like Miko Peled, or Gerald Kaufman, or Dr. Hajo Meyer. You have got to love every man or woman who takes personal risks in order to criticize their own when it is necessary to do so. And in the case of modern Israel, “friends don’t let friends”… become ethnic-cleansing fascists, warmongers or soul-less monsters.”
E:60’s Jeremy Schaap travels to Jerusalem to report on those who have been called “the most dangerous fans” in Israel soccer.
The U.S. vote against raising the status of Palestine at the United Nations was a deeply cynical move. It was cynical because there is not a chance that President Obama believes that he did the right thing. It is also cynical because, in the name of friendship for Israel, Obama led Israel closer to the cliff.
The last thing a true friend of Israel would have done would be to stand by as Israel demonstrated its almost complete international isolation. Just eight countries backed the Israeli position – the US, Panama, Palau, Canada, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Czech Republic and Micronesia – while 138 voted with the Palestinians. Was this display helpful to Israel?
But Obama was not trying to be helpful. The administration enabled this “disaster” (from Israel’s point of view) because Obama seems to truly not care about Israelis or Palestinians.
Take the two most recent examples. The first was his absolute refusal to express a word of sympathy for the Palestinians killed in the Gaza war. Under previous administrations, certainly under every Democratic administration, sympathy was expressed for the dead and injured on both sides along with a call for an end to the fighting. But Obama would not do that. Even when asked directly his spokesperson at the State Department would only speak of Israel’s pain. (To her credit, Secretary of State Clinton did say that she felt for both sides.)
But not Obama. He is determined not only to demonstrate that there is “no daylight” separating the two countries but that no amount of darkness separates us either.
The argument that he has to behave this way because of the power of the lobby doesn’t hold up. I would be the last person in the world to deny that the lobby is a powerful force in the making of U.S. Middle East policy. But, unless there is some mysterious element to the lobby’s power that I am missing, its ability to intimidate ends when a president is re-elected.
Believing that Obama is worried about Congressional Democrats being punished in 2014 is just as inaccurate. One: that is two years away. Two: Obama has rarely demonstrated (like almost all presidents before him) much concern for the Congressional wing of his party. And, three: the November 6th election demonstrated yet again that Jewish voters do not cast their ballots (or make campaign contributions) based on Israel. Nor do Israel’s fundamentalist Christian backers. Jews are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats and Christian Zionists are conservative Republicans. Those facts seem never to change.
Besides, does Obama really believe that he would lose votes or campaign contributions from Jews and other pro-Israel Americans if he expressed sympathy for dead Palestinian children? Or called on both sides to stop the violence. I hold no brief for the lobby but Obama could have said what he no doubt felt without losing anyone’s support. Even the lobby does not demand that politicians withhold human sympathy.
As for the United Nations vote, Obama could have prevented the huge embarrassment inflicted on both Israel and the United States by telling Israel to “chill.” I am glad he didn’t because I think the vote will be seen by history as a significant step toward Palestinian statehood. But it also delegitimized Israel in the eyes of the world which is a terrible defeat for those of us who care about Israel ultimately achieving peace and security alongside the Palestinians.
And it could easily have been averted if Obama had told Israel that the United States would vote for the resolution and that Israel should, too. In that case, the vote for Palestine’s elevated status would have been unanimous which would have rendered the Palestinian victory meaningless. Unanimous backing for any measure almost always demonstrates the measure’s insignificance. Instead, Israel’s hysteria and America’s arm-twisting against the resolution gave the Palestinians a big victory, a victory that the United States and Israel both elevated to historic proportions.
So why did Obama behave the way he did? I am afraid it is because he does not think Israelis or Palestinians are worth the hassle. If he can avoid dealing with Netanyahu and his vocal backers here, he will. He has more important fish to fry – like the domestic economy and preserving the social safety net.
I understand that but nonetheless ignoring the Israeli-Palestinian issue – by simply parroting the Israeli line – has done terrible damage to America’s standing in the world. Look at the UN vote which was neatly summed up by the front-page New York Times headline: “UN Assembly, In Blow To U.S., Elevates Status of Palestine.” Perhaps it is of no concern of Obama’s that Israel appears utterly isolated, but so does the United States. To put it in crude terms: we look like Israel’s tool.
I will not conclude by expressing the hope that Obama will now do the right thing for Israel, Palestine and, most importantly, the United States by convening negotiations and acting as an “honest broker.” I doubt he can do that anymore both because he has entirely lost the trust of the Arab world and because events have demonstrated, in large part due to this administration, that history can move on without us. But primarily because I do not think President Obama cares enough to invest any time or energy in Middle East peacemaking. He seems not to care that resolving conflict in a vital region of the world is not just some favor we do for people 6000 miles away; it is something we do to defend America’s interests. It’s sad. But above all, it is just cynical.
Postscript: Prime Minister Netanyahu reciprocated President Obama’s misplaced kindness today when he announced that he will build 3000 new settler housing units in the E-1 corridor of the West Bank. This housing, designed to permanently separate the southern West Bank from the northern part and to separate both from Jerusalem would destroy any chance of achieving the two-state solution. It also breaks a specific promise Netanyahu made to Obama.
Additionally, AIPAC is rushing to get Congress to “punish” Palestinians for going to the UN by blocking aid. Netanyahu and his lobby now believe (probably correctly) that Obama will permit them to do whatever they want. This is what the United States gets for its “no daylight” policy and what we taxpayers get for $3.5 billion a year in aid.
Friday 24 September 2010
Gideon Levy is the most hated man in Israel – and perhaps the most heroic. This “good Tel Aviv boy” – a sober, serious child of the Jewish state – has been shot at repeatedly by the Israeli Defence Force, been threatened with being “beaten to a pulp” on the country’s streets, and faced demands from government ministers that he be tightly monitored as “a security risk.” This is because he has done something very simple, and something that almost no other Israeli has done. Nearly every week for three decades, he has travelled to the Occupied Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without propaganda. “My modest mission,” he says, “is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.’” And for that, many people want him silenced.
The story of Gideon Levy – and the attempt to deride, suppress or deny his words – is the story of Israel distilled. If he loses, Israel itself is lost.
–
Norman Finkelstein
by Richard Silverstein on November 19, 2012 · 67 comments
Day 6: 95 Palestinians killed, 720 wounded.
The title of this post is harsh. But the one I first considered was even more so: “Barack Obama, go to Hell.” I am so glad I didn’t vote for this man for president. At the time I cast my vote I did it thinking I was doing the right thing. But in my heart regretting it. If I had voted for him, now I my heart would be turning bitter as gall.
Here is what this sorry excuse for a leader had to say today in Thailand:
“[T]here is no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders. So we are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on people’s homes…
Let’s understand what the precipitating event here was that’s causing the current crisis, and that was an ever-escalating number of missiles that were landing not just in Israeli territory but in areas that are populated.”
I also discovered this statement which appears to have been made separately and covers related, but different ground:
“Israel has every right to expect that it does not have missiles fired into its territory,” President Barack Obama said at a news conference in Bangkok at the start of a three-nation visit to Asia.
“If that can be accomplished without a ramping up of military activity in Gaza, that’s preferable,” Obama said. “It’s not just preferable for the people of Gaza. It’s also preferable for Israelis, because if Israeli troops are in Gaza, they’re much more at risk of incurring fatalities or being wounded.”
Let’s address this lame excuse for a political argument. First, it could’ve been (and possibly was) drafted by an Aipac staffer. It’s directly taken from pro-Israel talking points. You’ve heard the same bullshit from Michael Oren a hundred times. What this argument omits is that Israel has Gaza in a stranglehold. It has turned the enclave into a virtual prison having no economy, no exports, no ability to travel in or out. Gaza is occupied in effect by Israel. This occupation is illegal. Any nation has a right to resist such an occupation.
I do not support firing missiles from Gaza into Israel. But I do not support Israel’s occupation of Gaza either. I do not expect Gazans to roll over and play dead for Israel’s benefit or for the benefit of a U.S. president who has his head up his ass.
The real issue isn’t whether Israel has a right to attack Gaza. The issue is how to get at the root causes of this conflict and resolve it. F-16s, drones, targeted assassinations and helicopter gunships only kick the football farther down the road, as Mitt Romney so aptly put it (who’d have ever thought that Obama would actually follow a Mideast policy outlined by Romney).
Obama says he’s opposed to an Israeli invasion not because many Gazans will be killed (he clearly doesn’t care about that) but because Israelis will die. Have you ever heard anything so callous? Yes, I suppose in all the history of this conflict there have been far more callous statements. But by a U.S. president? Not so many.
Barack Obama: go to Hell. You don’t give a damn. You don’t have a moral bone in your body. Give back that Nobel Peace Prize. You don’t deserve it. In fact, you’ve pissed on it and turned it from gold to (cast) lead.
(Guardian, Steve Bell)
Former Israeli national security advisor Gen. Giora Eiland, on the other hand, made an amazingly forthright statement about what should be the outline for a fair resolution of the current impasse in Gaza. For that reason, of course, it will be ignored by those in power. But it still deserves a fair hearing:
“Israel’s bottom line interest toward Gaza is a security issue – that they won’t fire at us,” said Eiland, who also served as the head of Israel’s National Security Council. “Consequently, if we can reach an arrangement, it’s preferable to give ground on certain political issues in exchange for a better security arrangement.”
This sort of agreement would include “a mutual cease-fire and an Egyptian guarantee of not just quiet, but also that no weapons will enter Gaza,” Eiland said, adding that “this arrangement would be guaranteed by additional parties, for example, Qatar and Turkey.”
Among the political compromises that could be made in exchange for such a security arrangement, Eiland listed lifting the naval blockade of Gaza “so that the European Union member countries could send under supervision dinghies into Gaza’s port.”
Eiland also suggested that Israel recognize Gaza as a state under Hamas’ rule. “This is a country a ruled by an elected government and I expect that this government will act in a responsible manner, like a state would,” Eiland said.
“It’s not enough to say ‘Hamas will surrender,’” Eiland continued. “We need to give something, if not to Hamas, then to others. It’s impossible to reach a point where one side will surrender. Sometimes we become captive to slogans like ‘We won’t talk with Hamas.’ I say the opposite. It’s a fact that Hamas rules Gaza and that Gaza is a state. We need to recognize this and utilize the advantages this situation presents.”
The thinking is that if Israel recognizes Hamas as ruler of Gaza, it will place the onus on the Islamist group to run Gaza and fully control what happens there. In effect, Eiland is saying to make Hamas put their money where their mouth is: you want to rule this place–do it. And if you don’t, we and the world community who are enforcing this agreement will hold you accountable.
There is also a strategic element to his thinking that is unspoken. If Israel breaks Palestine into two entities, then Palestinian strength and aspirations for statehood will be even more fragmented than they are now. Hamas will have less interest in creating a coalition government with Fatah because it will control its own fiefdom in Gaza. The West Bank and Gaza may be permanently severed. That part of Eiland’s strategy is pernicious in the long-term. But it doesn’t mean that much of what he’s saying wouldn’t make things better than they are now in Gaza itself.
I can’t tell you how refreshing this breeze is. It’s a bit of truth. And coming from a general bristling with medals and lots of dead Israeli enemies under his belt. This is not some peacenik or “Arab lover.” This is the very same dude who whitewashed the Mavi Marmara massacre on behalf of the IDF, for whom he investigated it.
I do have to say though that there’s a strange dynamic at work in Israeli politics: when you’re an official and within the system, you lie and say things that make you and your country sound like an idiot. When you leave the system, all of a sudden you become a seer and things you didn’t appear to know or couldn’t say come tripping off your tongue. The same phenomenon occurred with Ehud Olmert after he resigned his prime ministership. While he was in office he tried to sell Mahmoud Abbas a bill of goods in the guise of a legitimate peace agreement. After he left, he called the settlements a cancer eating at Israel’s insides.
So some of this may be at work in Eiland’s change of heart, if you can call it that. But who cares? Truth is truth whether it comes from a sane person or a mad man.
Something further that is interesting here is that Eiland is making these statements–ones that cut to the heart of the weakness of Israel’s “mowing the grass” approach to Gaza–only five days after the start of hostilities and even before the expected invasion. In other words, the general is already saying the emperor has no clothes. The way this usually works is that the critics wait until a few weeks in after the soldiers and civilians have started dying in significant numbers. That’s the time when the body politic becomes more receptive to such contrarian thinking. So Eiland is bucking this trend and deserves credit for doing so.
al-Dalou family children massacred in Gaza (Harry Fear)
When you read the following you will understand my outrage directed against Barack Obama. Today should be the Kfar Kana or the al-Samouni moment in this war. The former was the tragedy during the 2006 war when Israel attacked a Lebanese village near a UN base killing scores of civilians. After that atrocity, the war was essentially over though Israel didn’t realize it at the time. My fear is that the murder of 12 Gaza civilians in a bombing that flattened a 3-story apartment building filled with civilians will not be enough of a tragedy to end this growing madness. More of the innocent may have to die before the world tells Israel: Dayenu!
The al-Dalou family was sheltering in its home from the bombardment. Earlier, two male family members had left to procure supplies because they feared an imminent invasion. They survived. Five women, four children (all between two and five years-old) and two men died. One of the women was 81 years old:
Khalil al-Dallu screams. “They said Mohammed was alive!” he shouts as emergency workers pull the body of a young man from a Gaza City home levelled by an Israeli strike on Sunday. His face quickly crumples into tears as the emergency staff tell him that his cousin is in fact dead — one of six members of the Dallu family killed when an Israeli missile struck the Nasser neighbourhood, flattening the three-story building where they lived.
“The whole family is martyred!” he cries, as the body of 35-year-old Mohammed al-Dallu is placed in an ambulance.
“What was the sin of the children and the infants, Israel?” he screams, raising his hands to the sky.
The emergency workers carry on with their grim task. By the time their work is done they have pulled 11 bodies from the pancaked building and others around it. The body of Mohammed’s wife is also retrieved, as well as those of five of their children. The body of another woman, also a family member, is also pulled out although she is not immediately identified.
The strike has also killed two of their neighbours from the Muzzana family.
Mohammed’s father, Jamal, and his 17-year-old son Abdullah, are among the survivors. When the Israeli strike happened, they were out buying food to boost the family’s stocks because they feared an Israeli ground invasion.
Jamal leans on a bloody electricity pole for support, overwhelmed at the horror and loss in front of him, his relatives crowding around as pieces of his grandchildren are plucked from their former home. Near hysterical with anger and sorrow, Ibrahim shouts: “Don’t tell his brother Abdullah, the trauma will kill him!” The brother, 26-year-old Abdullah, is currently studying in Turkey to become a doctor.
… Ahmed Hato, 13, is still dazed by the sudden death visited on the family.”I was playing with the sons of the neighbours at the entrance to the street. There was a huge explosion, the earth shook and dust and rocks went everywhere. I don’t know how, but I ended up on the ground and without injuries,” he says.
Ahmed’s father can’t watch the rescue efforts, and doesn’t answer his phone. Instead he cries openly for Mohammed, whom he saw just an hour before the strike. Mohammed, a Hamas police officer, “was a good man, moral and kind to everyone,” he says. “Everyone loved him. His death is a huge loss for the family.”
It turns out, as it often does in these sorts of IDF incursions, that the IAF was trying to assassinate the head of Hamas’ rocket warfare unit, Yechiya Rabiah (must be the guy who took over from Dirar Abusisi after his “forced retirement” at the hands of the Mossad and Ukrainian intelligence), who lives nearby. Ooops, they got the wrong house. Another intelligence failure. Only killed 12 innocent civilians as a result. Terribly regrettable. But if Rabiah would only do the IDF the favor of living in an open field so it could kill him cleanly, these sorts of things wouldn’t have to happen. You know how that Hamas uses civilians as human shields.
What created even more bitter irony is that just as when it dropped a bunker buster bomb during the 2006 war on Hassan Nasrallah’s Beirut hiding place, the IDF crowed that it’d taken out yet another terrorist bad guy. Turns out that Nasrallah and Rabiah are very much alive. What do you say in the midst of such insanity: woops?
Even an IDF journalist-stenographer like Avi Issacharoff writing in Haaretz concedes the Gaza operation is “starting to get into trouble” because too many civilians are dying. All I can say is boker tov buddy, civilians were dying from the first moment of the fighting. It’s just that now they’re starting to pile up like cordwood. But if Issacharoff wants to wake up only today on day six, it’s better than sleep walking through an entire war before realizing 1,400 Gazans have been slaughtered as happened during Cast Lead.
At what point does Barack Obama become moved enough, or boxed in enough by this suffering that he’s finally got to get off his ass and do something?
By the way, Israeli polls find that while 90% of Israelis support the Gaza war (only 16% support a ceasefire), only 46% support an invasion while 32% are opposed. That’s a sizable minority viewpoint.
The picture above is doing the rounds on the internet labelled as a Palestinian child victim of US-backed Zionist bombing in Gaza. In fact, it seems that it depicts a Syrian child injured by Russian and Iranian-backed Asadist barbarism. No matter – the two are interchangeable today. Both are fighting hyper-violent tyrannies rooted in the Sykes-Picot carve-up of bilad ash-Shaam. And while Zionism bombs Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Asad’s forces continue to bomb Palestinian refugees in the Yarmouk camp, Damascus. The film below shows some of the aftermath of this bombing. Below that we reprint an article by novelist Ahdaf Soueif, in which she describes the changed Arab environment meeting the latest aggression on Gaza, and points out that Israel’s action is in part aimed to take “the heat off Bashar al-Assad’s murderous activities in Syria.”
[youtube http://youtu.be/1GMBos0g_eQ?]If you click here, you can listen to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. You can hear explosions, drones and ambulances. This is the soundtrack of the lives of Palestinians there now. They’re recording it and transmitting it, and their friends all over the world – particularly the Arab world – are listening to it live.
We are also reading the tweets and blogs the young Gazans are putting out, and taking a good look at the images they’re posting – like the one of Ranan Arafat, before and after. Before, she’s a pretty little girl with green eyes, a green halter-neck top and green ribbons in her hair. After the Israeli bomb, she’s a charred and shrunken figure. Her mouth is open. A medic lifts – for just a moment – her blue hospital shroud.
In that hospital, Shifa in Gaza City, we watched the Egyptian prime minister, Hisham Kandil, this morning. For the first time in 42 years an Egyptian prime minister was where we Egyptians wanted him to be. For the first time a government official was telling the truth when he said he spoke for the Egyptian people. And he was spot on when he referred to the Egyptian people first, before the Egyptian president.
Since he won the presidency, Mohamed Morsi has tried to be a pragmatic politician. He pressed on with “security co-ordination” with Israel in Sinai; he started sealing up the tunnels that provide a lifeline to the besieged Gazans; he rejected the proposal of a free trade area on the borders between Egypt and Gaza; and he sent an ambassador to Tel Aviv with a fulsome letter to Shimon Peres. And so he found himself uncomfortably cosied up with remnants of the Mubarak regime and aficionados of the military government.
The rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood and their Freedom and Justice party had a hard time justifying the actions of their man in the presidential palace to the rest of the country. Progressives and liberals mocked them for their big talk on Palestine all the years they were in opposition, and their resounding silence now they were in power. Skits about Morsi’s “love letter” to Peres appeared online and parodies on Cairo walls.
Now, the Israelis have pushed him – pushed him perhaps into a position where he’ll find himself more at ease in his presidency, and more in tune with the people. Large groups of young Egyptians have been heading for Gaza; my youngest niece is one of them. Like the efforts of the world’s civil society to send ships to Gaza, young Egyptian civilians with a passion for freedom are going to support their friends. And on a more “official” level, medics and pharmacists have already arrived there. Abdel Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, a presidential candidate and doctor, has gone – as he did in 2008 during Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead“, long before he had political intentions. The Arab Doctors’ Union has called for donations and volunteers.
Israel has always sold itself to the west as a democracy in a sea of fanaticism. The Arab spring has undermined that narrative, possibly fatally. So Israeli politicians have been pushing hard for a war against Iran and, in the interim, they’ve gone on a killing spree in Gaza. If they had wanted to instigate violence against themselves they could not have done better than to assassinate Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas commander who’s prevented attacks on Israelis for the past five years. With his killing they’ve raised the probability of these attacks resuming, as is happening now. They can then try to hijack the narrative of the Arab spring and wind the clock back to “Islamist terrorists v civilised Israelis”. Meanwhile, they take the heat off Bashar al-Assad’s murderous activities in Syria – and, of course, score hawkish points for Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak before the coming elections.
But they have served to remind the world that Israel is a democracy where politicians may order the murder of children to score electoral points. Palestinian children, true. But the citizens of the world don’t make racist distinctions. On Thursday there were protests for Gaza across the world. They continued today. And there will be many more.
In every Arab country where the people rise up to demand their rights, they demand action on Palestinian rights as well. Tunis has just announced that its foreign minister is heading for Gaza. In Jordan today, hundreds of thousands were on the streets and, as well as demanding the fall of their own regime, they’re also calling for justice for Palestine. Protesters are out in Libya. In Egypt, people are heading for Rafah. We are heading for true representation of the people’s will in the region and, in the coming years, governments will need to follow the road shown to them by their people.
Greetings World.
For far too long, Anonymous has stood by with the rest of the world and watched in despair the barbaric, brutal and despicable treatment of the Palestinian people in the so called “Occupied Territories” by the Israel Defense Force. Like so many around the globe, we have felt helpless in the face of such implacable evil. And today’s insane attack and threatened invasion of Gaza was more of the same.
But when the government of Israel publicly threatened to sever all Internet and other telecommunications into and out of Gaza they crossed a line in the sand. As the former dictator of Egypt Mubarack learned the hard way – we are ANONYMOUS and NO ONE shuts down the Internet on our watch. To the IDF and government of Israel we issue you this warning only once. Do NOT shut down the Internet into the “Occupied Territories”, and cease and desist from your terror upon the innocent people of Palestine or you will know the full and unbridled wrath of Anonymous. And like all the other evil governments that have faced our rage, you will NOT survive it unscathed.
To the people of Gaza and the “Occupied Territories”, know that Anonymous stands with you in this fight. We will do everything in our power to hinder the evil forces of the IDF arrayed against you. We will use all our resources to make certain you stay connected to the Internet and remain able to transmit your experiences to the world. As a start, we have put together the Anonymous Gaza Care Package – http://bit.ly/XH87C5 – which contains instructions in Arabic and English that can aid you in the event the Israel government makes good on it’s threat to attempt to sever your Internet connection. It also contains useful information on evading IDF surveillance, and some basic first aid and other useful information. We will continue to expand and improve this document in the coming days, and we will transmit it to you by every means at our disposal. We encourage you to download this package, and to share it with your fellow Palestinians to the best of your ability.
We will be with you. No matter how dark it may seem, no matter how alone and abandoned you may feel – know that tens of thousands of us in Anonymous are with you and working tirelessly around the clock to bring you every aid and assistance that we can.
We Are Anonymous
We Are Everywhere
We Are Legion
We Do Not Forgive
We Do Not Forget
To the oppressors of the innocent Palestinian people, it is too late to EXPECT US
________________________
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