Posts Tagged ‘Gaza’

« Older Entries

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza

September 17, 2024

Eleven-month-old polio patient in Gaza

Genocide consists of trying destroy or partly destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.  It has two elements.  One is actions that directly or indirectly threaten the survival of the group, including killing them, causing them bodily harm and imposing conditions of life intended to destroy them.  The other is the intention to destroy the group.

I’m going to do a presentation this evening on Zoom to a discussion group of my church, in which I argue that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza and that the U.S. government should cut off all aid to Israel.  This post, and four preceding it, are the result of my preparation for that presentation.

The massacre in Gaza is genocidal in both scope and intention.

How many Palestinian Arabs have been killed?  The usual number that is given is about 40,000.  That is a minimum number, based on the number of reported deaths in Palestinian hospitals.  That number is growing more slowly because Gaza’s hospitals are being destroyed, one by one, and the deaths are not being reported.

It is reasonable to think that most of those who are killed never get to a hospital.  They die at home or under the rubble.  The Lancet, the authoritative British medical journal, estimated last summer that the death toll had reached 186,000.  Ralph Nader has estimated the number at 200,000.  Others have given even higher figures.

None of these figures are unreasonable.  They are huge, percentage-wise, considering that the estimated Palestinian Arab population of Gaza is only slightly over 2 million.  Also, any figure is already obsolete by the time it is published.  The number of dead is rising, week by week.

The number of Palestinians killed by bombs will be vastly outnumbered by the number who will die this winter of malnutrition, exposure and disease because of the Israeli blockade of food, water and medical supplies and the destruction of sanitation and water purification systems.  Already most Gazans are homeless, malnourished and sick.

U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, drawing on a study by the University of Edinburgh, estimated 23,000 Palestinians are being killed each month, directly and indirectly.  This means 10 percent to 15 percent of the Gazan population will be dead by the end of this year.

Without a cease-fire, she said, the Israel Defense Forces “could end up exterminating almost the entire population in Gaza over the next couple of years.”  

But even with a cease-fire, the effects of the blockade will ripple out, in the form of children with stunted growth and chronic health problems throughout their lives.  Of course these dead won’t necessarily be counted as casualties of war.

(more…)

Tags:, ,
Posted in Human Rights, Medicine and Health, War and Peace | 6 Comments »

The killings in Gaza and those who support them

September 13, 2024

Here is a quote from a letter from last summer by 45 volunteer doctors and nurses who went to help in Gaza.

Here are some quotes by Israeli leaders, officials and public figures about the war in Gaza.

Which side are you on?  Those who try to save lives or those who call for more killing?

LINKS

The Little Things That Kill Lots of People by Indrajit Samarajiva for indi.ca.

Israel Is Winning the Genocide and Losing the War by Indrajit Samarajiva for indi.ca.

(more…)

Tags:, ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, Medicine and Health, War and Peace | 3 Comments »

In Gaza hospital, children shot in the head

September 13, 2024

Dead children in Gaza.  Image via @AlnaouqA on X.

Last July, a group of 45 American physicians and nurses who’d volunteered to help in Gaza hospitals sent a letter to President Biden about the horrors they’d witnessed.

Two of the physicians, Mark Perlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa, separately wrote a long article about it.

The horrors they described are shocking to any person of normal human feeling and also against international law.  But I’m going to focus only two things: Palestinian children with gunshot wounds to the head, and Palestinian physicians who’d been subjected to traumatic torture.

First, a quote from the group letter to Biden:

We urge you to realize that epidemics are raging in Gaza.  Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas with no running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking. I

It is virtually guaranteed to result in widespread death from viral and bacterial diarrheal diseases and pneumonias, particularly in children under the age of five. We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and that tens of thousands more will die in the coming months. Most of them will be young children.

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter treated children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.

Now a quote by Perlmutter and Sidhwa:

While touring the hospital we walked through one of the ICUs and found multiple preteens admitted with gunshot wounds to the head. One might argue that a child could have been injured unintentionally in an explosion, or perhaps even forgotten when Israel invaded a children’s hospital and reportedly left infants to die in a pediatric intensive care unit.

Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.

We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head.  They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die.  

Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.

The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”

A large percentage of the population of Gaza are children, so it is unsurprising that a lot of children would be among those killed by Israeli missile strikes, bombings and artillery strikes.  Shooting young children in the head is a new level of atrocity.  What purpose could it serve except to decimate the population of Gaza?

(more…)

Tags:, ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, Medicine and Health, War and Peace | Leave a Comment »

Eyeless in Gaza

March 25, 2024

Six-year-old Palestinian girl after an eye removal operation (The Intercept)

Yasser Khan, a Canadian eye surgeon, has twice travelled to Gaza to perform eye removal operations on Palestinian children and adults injured by Israeli Defense Forces shrapnel.  Just back from his second trip, he was interviewed by The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill about what he’d seen.

What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine… 

Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen.

A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon….

These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore…..

I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere.

It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value.

So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual. ……

Most amputations occur at the weak points, the elbow or the knee, and so they’re better tolerated. But these [shrapnel fragments] are causing mid-thigh, mid-arm amputations that are more difficult, more challenging, and also the rehabilitation afterward is also more challenging. Also these shrapnels [are] unlike a bullet wound. A bullet wound goes in and out; there’s an entry and exit point. Shrapnel stays there. So you gotta take it out.

So the injuries I saw were — I mean, I saw people with their eyes blown apart. And when I was there, and this is my experience, I treated all children when I was there the first time. It was kids that [were aged] 2, 6, 9, 10, 13, 15, and 16, and 17 were the ones that I treated. And their eyes unfortunately had to be removed. They had shrapnel in their eye sockets that I had to remove and, of course, remove the eye. There’s many patients, many children who had shrapnel in both their eyes.

And you can only do so much because right now, because of the aid blockade and because of the destruction of most of Gaza, there’s no equipment available to take shrapnel that’s in the eye out. And so we just leave them alone and they eventually go blind.

And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed. ……

(more…)

Tags:, ,
Posted in Heroism, Medicine and Health, War and Peace | 2 Comments »

Aaron Bushnell’s challenge: What would you do?

February 28, 2024

Aaron Bushnell vigil site in New York City

Last Sunday Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell notified the press that he was going to engage in an act of “extreme protest” against Israel’s war on Gaza in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.  He set himself on fire while shouting “free Palestine” and died soon after of his burns.

Bushnell was a cyber defense operations specialist with the 531st Intelligence Squadron at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. He was assigned to the 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing at Fort Meade in Maryland.

The New York Post reported Bushell had told a friend that he had access to intelligence information that showed U.S. troops were killing Palestinians in Gaza.  President Bush denies there are U.S. troops on the ground, but the U.S. government has said there are U.S. Special Forces in Israel to identify hostages and “assist with strategy,” but not in combat roles.

Shortly before his final act in this world, Bushnell posted the following message on Facebook: Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery?  Or the Jim Crow South?  Or apartheid?  What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”  The answer is, you’re doing it.  Right now.

Bushnell’s question makes me feel ashamed.  I am aware of the slaughter in Gaza, I am aware of the futility of the Ukraine war, I am aware of a lot of other terrible things, but what, really, am I doing about any of these things?

I write about them on my blog, which is viewed by a few hundred people.  But what risks have I taken?  What hardships or even personal inconveniences have I suffered?  Little or none.  

I don’t, of course, advocate suicide protests.  If Bushnell had been my friend, I would have done my best to prevent him for doing as he did.  But I can’t help respecting his “extreme protest” on behalf of people he did not personally know.

There are many in my circle of friends and acquaintances who are indignant about the injustices of the past and scornful of honored figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln for falling short of their standards, while being willfully blind to the crimes of the present.

But am I any better?  I avoid starting arguments with my complacent friends, lest I be considered a nuisance and a crank.  What will be the judgment of future generations on people like me, who understood the crimes of our time, but never risked or sacrificed anything to stop them?

(more…)

Tags:,
Posted in Heroism, War and Peace | 5 Comments »

The war in Gaza is a massacre, not a war

February 26, 2024

A blogger named Sam Kriss has written a great post about Israel, Palestine and Gaza.

He points out that the war in Gaza is not a war in the sense that most people understand war.

Sam Kriss

In the 1956 and 1967 wars, the Israel Defense Forces conquered Gaza in a few days.  For all practical purposes, they’ve conquered it again. But the IDF rampages through Gaza as if there were.

The targets of the IDF are not usually terrorists in the sense that most people understand terrorism. They are any and all noteworthy Palestinians with a sense of national identity, whether they be physicians, poets, professors or actual fighters.

I wrote a post about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to identify targets, but I didn’t realize the full significance of it, given that the Israeli government treats resistance in any form as terrorism. 

But Kriss doesn’t stop with documenting the atrocities.  He goes on to reflect on how people who have been oppressed feel that they have a license to oppress others, just as people who’ve been bullied as children feel they are entitled to be bullies themselves.

In their own eyes, Kriss writes, the IDF are not killers of unarmed school teachers and shopkeepers. They are heroes fighting the Eternal Anti-Semite who has threatened Jewish survival down through history, from Pharaoh to Hitler and now is incarnated in the form of Palestinian Arabs.

Kriss is Jewish himself, and he goes on to reflect on the contradictions between Judaism as an expression of universal human values ( the Hebrew prophets invented the concept of social justice) and Judaism as a religion of national identity.

He ends with a note on the wrongness and futility of Palestinian terrorism.  Read the whole thing.  It is full of ugly truths.

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Terrorism, War and Peace | 2 Comments »

USA, allies cut off funds to Palestine refugee aid

February 3, 2024

One of the International Court of Justice’s orders to Israel was to provide immediate humanitarian aid to relieve the lack of food, water and medical supplies to Palestinian Arabs in Gaza.  

Israel ignored the order.  Instead it demanded a cutoff in funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), the agency that provided food, water and medical supplies.

The excuse was that 12 UNRWA employees were involved with Hamas.  So far as I can tell, no details have been provided about what they supposedly did.

Gaza refugee camp.  Via NPR.

UNRWA immediately suspended the 12, but I don’t think that was the point.  Israel has been trying to get rid of UNRWA for years, and this was an excuse.  

What’s new and noteworthy is that the U.S. government and many of its allies have immediately jumped in to support the cutoff of funds, although it was based on a mere accusation.

The reported number of Palestinian civilians being killed in the Gaza war is already more than 10 times the number of Israelis reported killed in the Oct. 7 terror attack.  

The report only lists the number of Palestinians who died in hospitals.  Many more are likely dead under the rubble of Israeli bombings.  

But even these will be a small number compared to those who will die as a result of famine, lack of water and lack of medical care if the blockade continues.  (A trickle of aid is being allowed in, but not nearly enough to enable survival.)  

Al Jazeera reported that nearly the entire population of Gaza depends on UNRWA for food, water and hygiene supplies.  It said 1 million Gazans, about 45 percent of Gaza’s population, shelter in UNRWA schools, clinics and other buildings.  

Food, water and other supplies are being cut off.  Schools, clinics and other buildings are being bombed.  Tens of thousands have been killed; hundreds of thousands may die.

If this isn’t genocide, it’s the next thing to it, and my own government is an accomplice.

UNRWA was created in 1949 to care for 700,000 Palestinians left homeless and with no place to go after Israel’s War of Independence. It is separate from the other UN refugee agency, which was created later.

A Palestinian refugee is defined as a person whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period from June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”

Descendants of male Palestinian refugees, including adopted children, are also eligible.  According to the agency’s website, the refugee population has swelled to more than 5.9 million refugees, including roughly two-thirds of the 2.3 million people living in Gaza.

President Trump cut off U.S. funding for UNRWA, but President Biden partially restored it.

The agency says it employs more than 13,000 aid workers, including refugees themselves, in the Gaza Strip alone. Those workers operate more than 150 permanent and temporary shelters and run 80 mobile health teams, including some that have been damaged or destroyed in the most recent conflict.  More than 150 UNRWA workers have been killed by Israeli forces.

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, Law and Justice, War and Peace | 2 Comments »

The ICJ issues orders to Israel in genocide case

January 26, 2024

Here are spoken and written versions of the International Court of Justice’s preliminary order in the Israel genocide case.

Text of the International Court of Justice interim ruling on South Africa v. Israel.

I think Yves Smith had an accurate view of the significance of the ruling.

Of critical importance, and a huge smackdown to Israel, is the Court came as close as it reasonably could to calling for a ceasefire in ruling for the provisional measure (which it devised itself) for Israel to cease military action against Palestinians as members of a protected group under the Genocide Convention. I had opined that the Court could not call for a ceasefire since it could not bind Hamas to comply. It would not be sound or shrewd to give Israel an easy pretext for defying the court by saying that a one-sided ceasefire would leave it defenseless. But impressively, the court went as far as it could, and way way further than I expected, in constraining Israel military operations against the Palestinian population.

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Law and Justice, War and Peace | 5 Comments »

Israel’s ‘genocidal intent’

January 13, 2024

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power | 1 Comment »

In Gaza war, truth was the first casualty

December 28, 2023

This is an important video.  We the public were told horrible stories of atrocities committed by Hamas attackers on Oct. 7, 2023.  But aggressive wars are almost always accompanied by baseless atrocity stories and this video shows that Israel’s latest invasion of Gaza is no exception.

(more…)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in War and Peace | 8 Comments »

Half of Americans age 18-24 favor Hamas

December 19, 2023

A strong majority of Americans support Israel in its war against Hamas.  But a new poll indicates that 51 percent of Americans age 18-24 think Israel should be ended and given to Hamas and the Palestinians.

That could be long-range bad news for a future Israel, which depends for its survival on continuing economic and military aid from the United States.

I myself condemn the government of Israel for its murderous tactics in the Gaza war and for its oppression of the Palestinians.  

But that does not mean I wish for the tables to be turned, and Hamas to do to the Israelis what the government of Israel is now doing to the Palestinians.  I hope for a peace agreement between the two nations, impossible as that seems at the moment.

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Foreign Affairs | 2 Comments »

John J. Mearsheimer on Gaza

December 18, 2023

John J.  Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is a leading scholar of international relations.   The following is the best article I’ve read on the Gaza situation so far.  

Click on the title to read the article in its original form.  Click on the byline to read Mearsheimer’s Substack.  

Like him, I would be ashamed to be silent when I am in a position to speak the truth as I see it without fear of blacklisting or other forms of retaliation.

DEATH AND DESTRUCTION IN GAZA

By John J. Mearsheimer

I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect Israeli or American policy in that conflict. But I want to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history.

What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose. As J-Street, an important  organization in the Israel lobby, puts it, “The scope of the unfolding humanitarian disaster and civilian casualties is nearly unfathomable.”[1]

Let me elaborate.

John Mearsheimer

First, Israel is purposely massacring huge number of civilians, roughly 70 percent of whom are children and women. The claim that Israel is going to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties is belied by statements from high level Israeli officials. For example, the IDF spokesman said on 10 October 2023 that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” That same day, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have lowered all the restraints – we will kill everyone we fight against; we will use every means.”[2]

Moreover, it is clear from the results of the bombing campaign that Israel is indiscriminately killing civilians. Two detailed studies of the IDF’s bombing campaign – both published in Israeli outlets – explain in detail how Israel is murdering huge numbers of civilians. It is worth quoting the titles of the two pieces, which succinctly capture what each has to say: 

“‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza”[3]

“The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows Unprecedented Killing.”[4]

Similarly, the New York Times published an article in late November 2023 titled: “Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace.”[5] Thus, it is hardly surprising that the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said that “We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and unprecedented in any conflict since” his appointment in January 2017.[6]

Second, Israel is purposely starving the desperate Palestinian population by greatly limiting the amount of food, fuel, cooking gas, medicine, and water that can be brought into Gaza. Moreover, medical care is extremely hard to come by for a population that now includes approximately 50,000 wounded civilians. Not only has Israel greatly limited the supply of fuel into Gaza, which hospitals need to function, but it has targeted hospitals, ambulances, and first aid stations.

Defense Minister Gallant’s comment on 9 October captures Israeli policy: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”[7] Israel has been forced to allow minimal supplies into Gaza, but the amounts are so small that a senior UN official reports that “half of Gaza’s population is starving.” He goes on to report that, “Nine out of 10 families in some areas are spending ‘a full day and night without any food at all’.”[8]

Third, Israeli leaders talk about Palestinians and what they would like to do in Gaza in shocking terms, especially when you consider that some of these leaders also talk incessantly about the horrors of the Holocaust. Indeed, their rhetoric has led Omar Bartov, a prominent Israeli-born scholar of the Holocaust, to conclude that Israel has “genocidal intent.”[9] Other scholars in Holocaust and genocide studies have offered a similar warning.[10]

To be more specific, it is commonplace for Israeli leaders to refer to Palestinians as “human animals, ”human beasts,” and “horrible inhuman animals.”[11] And as Israeli President Isaac Herzog makes clear, those leaders are referring to all Palestinians, not just Hamas: In his words, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.”[12] Unsurprisingly, as the New York Times reports, it is part of normal Israeli discourse to call for Gaza to be “flattened,” “erased,” or “destroyed.”[13] One retired IDF general, who proclaimed that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” also makes the case that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer.”[14] Going even further, a minister in the Israeli government suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza.[15] These statements are not being made by isolated extremists, but by senior members of Israel’s government.

Of course, there is also much talk of ethnically cleansing Gaza (and the West Bank), in effect, producing another Nakba.[16] To quote Israel’s Agriculture Minister, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”[17]Perhaps the most shocking evidence of the depths to which Israeli society has sunk is a video of very young children singing a blood-curdling song celebrating Israel’s destruction of Gaza: “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.”[18]

(more…)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, War and Peace | 3 Comments »

Must Hamas be destroyed? Can it be?

December 11, 2023

Hamas is the face of the Palestinian war with Zionism.  The eyes of the world are on that war, in which tens of thousands, mainly on the Palestinian side, have already been killed, with no end in sight.

Israel’s government says it will continue the war until Hamas is totally destroyed, while the U.S. government defines Hamas as a terrorist organization.  In the U.S., you can be criminally prosecuted for contributing to a Hamas-related charity.

But just what is Hamas?  Where did it come from?  How did it come to rule Gaza?  Why did it launch the Oct. 7 attack on Israel?  What are its ultimate aims?

What follows is my effort to answer these questions as accurately and as impartially as I can.   In order to be impartial, I refer to territory of the former Palestine Mandate, the land “between the river and the sea,” as the Holy Land rather than as Israel or Palestine.

Hamas was founded in 1987 in a refugee camp in Gaza.  It arose in opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s willingness to negotiate a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

That was a concession on the part of the PLO.  The PLO’s original demand was a “right of return” of all Palestinians to land from which they’s been driven off, followed by creation of a unified secular democratic state with equal rights for all.  

Such a “one-state” solution was unacceptable to Israel.  It would have meant Palestinians would be in the majority and Israel would not longer be a Jewish state.

Commentators said Israel was offering “land for peace,” but the reality was that this was what the PLO was doing.  The PLO was offering to allow 7 million Palestinians to be restricted to 22 percent of the Holy Land and leave 78 percent to 7 million Israelis, in return for self-government in that 22 percent.

Hamas said this was equivalent to surrender.  Its 1988 manifesto called for the Holy Land to be an Arab Muslim land, with its capital in Jerusalem, under Islamic law (although with tolerance for all religions).

 The PLO had defined the conflict as ethnic Arabs (including Arab Christians) vs. ethnic Jews. The 1988 Hamas manifesto defined the conflict as Muslims fighting infidels and unbelievers.  Hamas’s manifesto expressed respect for the PLO, but rejected its secularism.

The Israeli government actually looked with favor on Hamas in the early stages.  It was seen a fringe movement that undermined Palestinian unity and weakened the PLO’s negotiating position.

All this was taking place during what Palestinians call the First Intifada, or Uprising.  It was sparked when an Israeli driver in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp crashed his vehicle, causing the death of four Palestinians.  Rioting broke out and spread.

Palestinians took nonviolent actions like mass boycotts and refusing to work jobs in Israel, but also attacked Israelis with rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms. Police struck back and Palestinian fatalities dramatically outpaced Israeli ones.

The rebellion lasted until PLO-Israel negotiations produced the Oslo Accords of 1993.  The PLO recognized the government of Israel as legitimate and here to stay, and Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.   PLO leader Yassir Arafat was put in charge of a new Palestinian Authority, with the understanding it would transition into an independent Palestinian state.

(more…)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, History, War and Peace | 8 Comments »

War by mass targeted assassination

December 1, 2023

Air war on Gaza.  Source: +972 Magazine.

An investigative journalist in Israel reports that Israel’s air war in Gaza is guided by an artificial intelligence system called Habsora, or The Gospel, that supposedly identifies the locations of Hamas fighters and activists.

Yuval Abraham, writing for the online +972 Magazine, reports that the Israeli army knows, or believes it knows, the location of most Hamas militants, and is bombing their homes and other locations, no matter how many other people may be killed in the process.  

His reporting is based on anonymous sources, but backed up by data analysis and on-the-scene reporting.  Abraham wrote:

Several of the sources, who spoke … … on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the Israeli army has files on the vast majority of potential targets in Gaza — including homes — which stipulate the number of civilians who are likely to be killed in an attack on a particular target. This number is calculated and known in advance to the army’s intelligence units, who also know shortly before carrying out an attack roughly how many civilians are certain to be killed.

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander.

Habsora analyzes data from a range of sources, including drone footage, intercepted communications and surveillance data.  This is used to determine movements and behavior patterns of individuals and large groups, which then generates targeting recommendations.

I think that what Israel is doing with AI is an alarming new development whose significance is above and beyond the Gaza War alone.  Military commanders will soon identify enemy troops by name and target them individually.  They will have the option of targeting the enemy troops’ families.

I don’t know which would be the most alarming – that such a method of warfare could be used with pinpoint accuracy, or that it couldn’t be, but would be used anyway.

(more…)

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, Technology, War and Peace | 1 Comment »

Palestine’s representative addresses the UN

November 28, 2023

Hat tip to Bill Harvey.

This is an argument you will never hear if your sources of information are limited to so-called mainstream newspaper and TV news.

If you haven’t heard the pro-Palestinian argument, I believe this is well worth 11 minutes of your time.  I didn’t hear any statement I would dispute, but even if you think the Palestinian case is by definition wrong, you should know what it is.

As for myself, I didn’t hear any statement on the video that I think inaccurate.

I am a lover of peace, although not a pacifist, and my inclination in conflicts is to look for a possible middle ground of agreement.  But in terms of historic rights and wrongs, I don’t see a middle ground.  

There is such a thing as Palestinian terrorism and hostage taking, which I of course condemn, but the military might on the Israeli side, and the amount of suffering and number of victims on the Palestinian side, are so great as to override any claim of military equivalency.

But any hope of peace depends on a critical mass of people on both sides recognizing that the other is here to stay and has to be lived with.  This would require the Israeli side to withdraw settlements on the West Bank and cease ongoing economic sanctions against Gaza, and the United States to cease unconditional military and economic aid to Israel, and it would require the Palestinian side to accept that they will never regain sovereignty over all of their historic homeland.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, War and Peace | 4 Comments »

‘A Super Bowl of victimhood’

November 8, 2023

An Israeli writer named Etgar Keret, in an interview published in The New York Times a week or so ago, spoke about selective empathy and his feeling of helplessness in the face of the Gaza tragedy.

Can you explain to me how you feel about the invocation of the Holocaust at this time? Because I’ve heard what happened on Oct. 7 compared to the Holocaust. And I’m wondering how that sits with you, as the child of Holocaust survivors.

In some sense I feel that my parents trained me all my life for this moment.  And I think that the most important thing that I got from my parents was saying that when there are big incidents, there are big narratives.  And those big narratives would say: You have a role.  You are now a victim.  You are now a hero.  And they said, “Don’t believe those roles.”

What is the narrative that’s being written now?

Well, I think that we are living in a very binary world, with social media and all the vaccinators, anti-vaccinators, Trump, Democrats.  So I think that in this sense, there are many super strong sentiments right now.

I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times a long time ago about how I don’t like the terms “pro-Israel” and “pro-Palestinian.”  Because when you speak to somebody and he says that he’s pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian, then it doesn’t matter what argument you’re going to give, he’s going to stay in the same opinion.

It’s like, being “pro-Israeli,” are you pro-children dying in Gaza from bombing?  The idea is that reality is complex, and, for me, the primal responsibility is a human one.

And when I see people watching the horrible tragedy that is happening here as if it were a Super Bowl of victimhood, in which you support one team and really don’t care about the other, empathy becomes very, very selective. You see only some pain. You don’t want to see other pain. I think that in situations like this, it’s a reflex to go to something that you know.  But it’s a bad reflex when the world changes around you.

==Etgar Keret Struggles to Make Sense of the Violence and Loss Around Him, an interview in The New York Times.

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in War and Peace | 1 Comment »

The Biblical language of genocide

November 1, 2023

]

Genocide is not a word to be used lightly.  Not all crimes against humanity rise to the level of genocide.  Apartheid and racism are not necessarily genocide; the subjugated people are not being wiped out.  

But some Israeli leaders are talking about genocide of the people of Gaza, based on their interpretations of the Bible.  The following quotes and videos, most of them from a post by a blogger called Simplicius the Thinker, illustrate this.

◾️ Netanyahu keeps referring to biblical prophecies on his press conferences:

– ” You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible, and we do remember and we are fighting. Our heroes who fight in Gaza continue a dynasty of heroes that goes back 3000 years in history – from Joshua to the heroes of 1948, from the Six Day War to the Yom Kippur War and all other wars.”

◾️The words about Amalek are taken from the 1st Book of Samuel: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: I have remembered what Amalek did to Israel, how he opposed him on the way when he came out of Egypt” (15:2). The Lord ordered King Saul to destroy the enemy and all his people: “Now go and defeat Amalek and destroy all that he has; and give him no mercy; but put to death both husband and wife; from youth to infant; from ox to sheep; from camel to donkey” (15:3).

Here is Moshe Feiglin, a member of Israel’s ruling Likud party. 

(more…)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, Religion, War and Peace | 2 Comments »

Can Hamas win?

October 22, 2023

[Added 10/23/2023]  My answer to the question is: I don’t know.

I had thought of the Hamas uprising as the equivalent of a prison riot or Indians going on the warpath, a doomed enterprise equivalent to suicide by cop. But John Helmer, an independent journalist who normally reports on Russia, thinks Hamas has a well-thought-out strategy that could win. Here are key points from his latest post.

Hamas has prepared in well-kept secret an offensive against Israel to achieve five objectives – the first to demonstrate how inferior the Israeli military is, how vulnerable, how incompetent their intelligence on the Arab world.  This has been achieved by the initial attack of October 7.

The second Hamas objective has been to demonstrate the Israeli plan of ethnic cleansing of Gaza,  genocide against the Arabs, and incorporation of all Israeli-occupied territories in a single theocratic Zionist state —  Quod erat demonstrandum.

The third objective is to hold out against the expected Israeli counterattack for long enough to activate the Hezbollah forces on the northern Lebanon front;  Syrian and Iranian forces on the eastern Golan front; and the West Bank Palestinians, including the Jordanian Palestinians; the latter’s targets will be US air and armored land force bases in Jordan.  So far, so good.

The final Hamas objectives are to compel the vacillating sheikhdoms to resist US pressure; limit oil and gas supplies to the enemy markets; prevent regional land base and air transit rights being activated in support of Israel — so far, so good.

And lastly, the fifth objective, to engage the friendly nuclear powers – Russia, China – to deter, and if necessary combat US forces in the region and Israel’s threat to fire its nuclear weapons.

Helmer says Hamas has been doing well against the Israeli Defense Force so far.

On the Gaza front, Hamas has fought the IDF to a standstill outside the Gaza border wall.  The Israel Air Force has dropped about 4,000 tonnes of bombs per week, 8,000 tonnes to October 21; that is more than the US Air Force dropped on Afghanistan in the peak year of 2019.   

More than 3,500 Palestinians have been killed so far, including at least 1,030 children  and hundreds of family units; more than 12,500 people have been injured, one million Palestinians displaced, and thousands of homes destroyed. About 1,200 are missing believed to be trapped under the rubble.

The Israeli and US government record, reported by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in Washington, documents the continuing firing from Gaza into Israeli territory in what the ISW calls its “Iran updates”.

A prolonged IDF siege threatens to kill several hundred thousand Palestinians by starvation, dehydration, disease, and a combination of artillery and aerial bombardment, while leaving the Hamas forces relatively unscathed and waiting to inflict a higher rate of casualties on the IDF than it has ever experienced.  

(more…)

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in War and Peace | 2 Comments »

Irreconcilable differences

October 22, 2023

History is a tragedy, not a melodrama.  ==I.F. Stone.

  • Israel’s ruling party believes that God gave the Jews the land of Israel “from the river to the sea.”
  • Hamas believes that God gave the Muslims the land of Palestine “from the river to the sea.”
  • Israel was a refuge to poor refugees who had no other place to go.  Even today, most of its inhabitants have no other place to go.
  • Gaza is inhabited by poor refugees with no other place to go
  • Israelis believe that they are ultimately fighting a war for survival.
  • Gazans are struggling to survive right now.
  • The only way the Israelis can achieve their goal is to drive out the Palestinian Arabs or make their lives so miserable they will leave voluntarily.
  • The only way the Palestinian Arabs can achieve their goal is to make life in Israel so dangerous that the inhabitants will leave and no new immigrants will come.

Right now everything is overshadowed by Israel’s large-scale killing of people in Gaza and its attempt to drive them from their land.  This is the main thing that humane, disinterested people should be concerned with at the moment.  But neither side really cares about outside public opinion, except insofar as it affects the outcome of the struggle.

I don’t see any path to a good outcome in the long run until both sides fundamentally change.  Maybe things will look different after the current ongoing tragedy plays itself out. Many long-term foes in history have come to accept peaceful coexistence in the end.

LINK

Memo for the Final Solution for One State – Israel or Palestine by John Helmer for Dances With Bears.

(more…)

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in War and Peace | 5 Comments »

Ethnic cleansing, genocide and Gaza

October 20, 2023

Israel was established as a homeland for Jewish people so, among other reasons, that they could be safe from anti-Semitism.  The Zionists’ problem was that there was no place on earth that was not already occupied by other people.

So, like many other people before them, they established their rule by conquest.  Like many another people before them, the indigenous people resisted.  

As has happened so many times before, both sides committed and justified atrocities because both thought they were fighting for survival.  As usual, the established power does most of the killing, but the rebels get most of the blame.

Source: Ian Welsh

Moshe Dayan, the famous Israeli war hero, explained the issue in 1956 at a funeral oration of an Israeli farmer killed by a Palestinian Arab.

Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.

We should demand his blood not from the [Palestinian] Arabs of Gaza but from ourselves. …Let us make our reckoning today. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house. . . . Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of [Palestinian] Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.

Source: Moshe Dayan Quotes via Palestine Remembered.

This is an honest statement.  Morality doesn’t count, Dayan said.  He would do whatever it took to ensure the survival of his own people.  The plan is to keep pressure on until Palestinians either leave their homeland or submit.  

In the aftermaths of World Wars One and Two, borders of European countries changed and Europe was filled with refugees who never returned to their homelands.  Many pro-Israel commentators ask why Palestinians can’t simply accept defeat.  

There may have been a time when that was possible, following the 1967 war in which Israel took over the West Bank and Gaza.  But ongoing Jewish settlements in those areas, backed up by the Israeli military, closed off that possibility.

(more…)

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, War and Peace | 3 Comments »

The long odds against Israel-Palestine peace

August 9, 2014

The Israeli novelist Amos Oz is an example of a sincere Zionist who sincerely wants peace between Israel and the Palestinians.  He favors lifting the blockade against Gaza and recognition of a truly independent Palestinian Arab state.

But in regard the Israeli army’s attack on Gaza, he posed the following questions:

Amos Oz

Amos Oz

Question 1: What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery?

Question 2: What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?

via Deutsche Welle

I might say that if my neighbor had been the original occupant of my house, that if I’d kicked him out, and that if I had a record of killing my neighbor’s relatives, regardless of age, he would be exceedingly foolish to expect me to be deterred from anything by a child on his lap.

But this is not a meaningful answer to Oz’s argument, which is that Israel should try to make peace, including lifting the blockade on Gaza, but that so long as Hamas militants attack Israel, Israel has no realistic choice but to respond and retailiate.

Jewish peace advocates say Israel should negotiate a truce, end the blockade and freeze the settlements (or, which is highly unlikely, shut them down).   They are right in saying that so long as Israel bombs and blockades the people of Gaza, and expands settlements on the West Bank, there is no possibility of peace.

But if bombing, blockade and settlements ceased, the Palestinian Arabs would not necessarily be content to let bygones be bygones, and to sit in peace on the 22 percent of the original Palestine remaining to them.

In the one case, peace is impossible; in the other, peace is unlikely.

I don’t say this in any gloating spirit.  The government of my own country, the United States, has done a global basis what the Israeli government has done locally.   Both countries have operated like the Michael Corleone character in Godfather II—seeking safety by trying to kill all their enemies.

But perfect safety is an illusion, the number of potential enemies is unlimited and there comes a time when it is too late to escape the consequences of past actions.   I hope it is not too late for Israel.  I hope it is not too late for us Americans.

§§§

Read and listen to some other Jewish voices below.

(more…)

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in War and Peace | Leave a Comment »

Be careful what you wish for

August 1, 2014

“If Hamas were destroyed and gone, we would probably end up with something much worse. The region would end up with something much worse,” [Army Lt. General Michael] Flynn [outgoing head of the Defense Intelligence Agency] said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado [last week].

“A worse threat that would come into the sort of ecosystem there … something like ISIS,” he added, referring to the Islamic State, which last month declared an “Islamic caliphate” in territory it controls in Iraq and Syria.

via Reuters.

Israel reportedly supported Hamas in the 1980s as a counterweight to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Terrorism | Leave a Comment »

Israel from underdog to top dog

August 1, 2014

300px-Arab_Israeli_Conflict_6

I am not Jewish.  I am not a Zionist.  I think of Israel as I think of Britain or France—as a foreign country whose people I wish well, but whose interests are not necessarily those of my own country.

But there was a time when I had considerable sympathy for the State of Israel.  The map above shows why.  The nations in green are members of the Arab League, whose 1967 Khartoum resolution reaffirmed a long-standing policy of no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.  The countries marked in dark green show the countries that went to war with Israel at one time or another.

As long as Israel was surrounded by larger and more populous countries dedicated to its destruction, I thought of Israel as the underdog.   Their situations were not comparable.

 There was never any possibility that Israel could threaten the existence of Egypt, Syria, Iraq or the other Arab nations.  But there was a very real possibility that the Arab nations together could wipe Israel from the map of history.

I argued that the Jewish people had as much right to create a new nation as the Germans or Italians in an earlier era.  I would argue that people who are in peril cannot be expected to follow moral rules.

I argued that if the Soviet Union was providing unlimited armaments to Egypt and Syria to destroy Israel, it was only right that the USA provide military aid to Israel.  I argued—I think that 40 or so years ago, this argument was plausible—that more Arab civilians, even more Palestinian civilians had been killed by Arab governments during Israel’s existence than had been killed by Israelis.

Nowadays I no longer make these arguments because I no longer see Israel as the underdog.  The map below shows why.

No Arab government threatens to attack Israel.  Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties.  Israel has committed acts of war against Lebanon, Syria and Iraq with impunity.

Their only enemies are the powerless, miserable Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank.  All the arguments I made in justification of Israel could now be made in justification of Hamas and Fatah.

The Palestinians have as much right to constitute themselves as a nation as the Israelis did.   People who are being killed indiscriminately have the right to fight back by any means necessary, especially against a nation being given virtually unlimited aid by the USA, the world’s largest military superpower.

There is no possibility that the Palestinians can threaten the existence of Israel.  But there is a very real possibility that Israel can eliminate the Palestinian presence in Gaza and the West Bank.

map-story-of-palestinian-nationhood

(more…)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, War and Peace | Leave a Comment »

A Jewish critique of Israel’s policies

August 1, 2014

Rabbi Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Council and of the Synagogue Council of America, in interviews on Democracy Now, calls for the Israeli government to cease its attacks on Gaza and to recognize the human rights of the Palestinian Arabs.  The interview is a excellent, objective summary of the situation.

I think Rabbi Siegman is representative of what is best in the Jewish tradition, which is older and much richer than Zionism.  I think he is right in advocating real self-determination for the Palestinians, as opposed to the fake self-determination they have now.

I would like to think that true self-determination would open a path to peace.  Peace is impossible otherwise.  But I fear Israel may have passed the point of no return.  Rabbi Siegman said in the interview that part of the purpose of the attacks on Gaza is to destroy the possibility of an independent Palestine and of peace talks that might lead to an independent Palestine.  That purpose may have been accomplished.

I recall a story about an American officer offering compensation to an Iraqi family for the killing of the father.  The eldest son said it wasn’t enough.  The American asked how much compensation would be enough.  The son replied, “Ten dead Americans.”

But I don’t want to write anything that, in however tiny a way, would diminish the chances for peace, however small they may be.  Age-old enemies have made peace in the past, as in Ireland.  It is up to Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, not to me, to say whether peace is possible.

LINKS

Israel Provoked This War: It’s up to President Obama to end it by Henry Siegman for Politico.

The Liberal Zionists by Jonathan Freedland for the New York Review of Books.

I thank Jack Clontz for calling my attention to the Democracy Now interview.  It is well worth viewing in its entirety.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Abuse of Power, War and Peace | 1 Comment »

War and peace: Links & comments 7/22/14

July 22, 2014

Lessons from America’s War for the Greater Middle East by Andrew Bacevich for Notre Dame magazine.

Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international relations, retired career Army officer and self-described conservative Catholic, talks as much good sense about American military and foreign policy as anybody I know about.

In this article, he traces American policy toward the Middle East from the 1980 Carter Doctrine, which stated that the U.S. would use force to protect access to the oil of the Persian Gulf, down to the present day.  He sees more continuity than differences between the Democratic and Republican administrations.

The policy is based on the hope that, by the application of force, the United States can counter tendencies in the Islamic war that threaten American interests.  The result has been death and destruction, with the result that the people of the Middle East see the United States as the main threat to their freedom and well-being.

Bacevich says its time to stop ignoring reality and attempting the impossible.

Ukraine Open Thread (and Links) on Naked Capitalism.

Fact-Free Zone by Dmitry Orlov on ClubOrlov.

‘It was Putin’s missile’ by Pepe Escobar for Asia Times.

I don’t know who shot down the MH-17 airliner over Ukraine.  I agree with President Obama that a thorough and complete investigation is needed to determine the facts.  Why, then, is he ramping up a cold war against Russia, as if all the facts were known?

Israel mows the lawn by Mouin Rabbani for the London Review of Books

The author says the policy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to prevent, by any means necessary, the emergence of a Palestinian state that is independent in fact and not just in name.  The last thing Netanyahu wants is a peace process.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Foreign Affairs, War and Peace | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries