When the Olmert government announced the start of the current war against Gaza on December 27, government officials said Israel “was forced” to act because Hamas had broken (or at least, gratuitously ended) the ceasefire that existed from June 19 through December 18. Therefore, in some convoluted way, Hamas “started” the present war and is thus responsible for everything that has ensued within it.
These charges have been regularly repeated by government spokesmen since then, and repeated or further amplified by their entire echo chamber of Stepford supporters in the US ever since. (Including the WaPo’s dreadful Richard Cohen, yesterday.)
The charges against Hamas have been further amplified into many forms: “Hamas always wants to hit and kill civilians”, “Hamas always breaks ceasefires”, “The Hamas leaders are men of violence, pure and simple, with no real political agenda except to kill Israelis”, “In their lust for the blood of Israeli and others, Hamas is willing or even eager to see Palestinian suffer and die,” etc, etc.
But in fact, there is no truth to the original charge about how the 2008 ceasefire ended. And diligent researchers have now been going back to look at the entire history of Israel-Gaza violence over the past eight years, and have reached strong conclusions that completely refute the Israeli government’s war-talk.
Yesterday, MIT prof Nancy Kanwisher published, in the Huffington Post, her analysis of the figures the Israeli consulate in New York itself has posted on its “Israel Politik” web site. She underscored that in the four months July-October, Israel recorded the landing of only eleven rockets from Gaza.
Not stated there were:
- — whether those rockets were launched by Hamas or by other groups that it does not control;
— the explosive capability of those rockets;
— what the human and material damage from them was; and– most importantly of all:
— whether Israel launched any ordnance against Gaza in that same period (which it did), and with what effect; and
— how many Gazans died during those same months because of Israel’s maintenance of its inhumane siege around the Strip.
But even without those important pieces of comparative evidence, Kanwisher shows clearly that the tahdi’eh of June resulted in a generally effective cessation of rocket fire from Gaza– down from the levels of 257 rockets in February, 196 in March, 149 in May…
But what happened after the end of October? On November 4, Israel significantly violated the tahdi’eh by killing a Palestinian in Gaza, and from that point on the tahdi’eh started to unravel. Given that it was scheduled to end on December 18 anyway, urgent negotiations were anyway underway about the terms on which it might (or might not) be renewed.
Those negotiations failed.
Kanwisher also took the important step of going back over the entire history of Palestinian-Israel hostilities since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in September 2000. She looked at how pauses in the hostilities got broken in those years, looking at any pauses that were one day long or longer. Her basic data set was the casualty listings and statistics that have been systematically kept by the Israeli human-rights organization B’tselem.
She presented her findings on this in Figure 2 of the HuffPo piece. (It’s not optimally presented. I think the label that’s now at the top belongs on the left-hand side. And there should be a label along the bottom saying these are the respective lengths, in days, of the pauses considered? At least, that’s the only logical way I could read it.)
But her findings were important:
- this analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern — in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause — becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.
Certainly, these findings seem quite consistent with my own recllection of various incidents over these same years. Right back at the beginning of the Second Intifada, there were several weeks during which the Palestinians used overwhelmingly nonviolent means of confronting the Israeli soldiers in the OPTs, who struck back hundreds of times with live fire. I think there were more than 200 or 300 fatalities among Palestinians in those early weeks, before their resistance groups made the decision to use weapons in the intifada.
(Which of course was not how the matter was portrayed in the western media.)
Other pages on the Btselem website underline that the entire history of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities since September 2000 is one of stark asymmetry regarding casualties. This compilation page (with hyperlinks to details) shows that 4,781 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in the OPTs between September 2000 and the end of November 2008, and a further 69 were killed inside Israel, while 727 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians in Israel and the OPTs in that time, along with 335 members of the Israeli security forces, for an Israeli total of 1,062 Israelis.
By the way, this page tells you that from the beginning of the 2008 tahdi’eh until the end of November 2008, only one Israeli civilian was killed by ordnance coming from, quite possibly, Gaza, which is near Kibbutz Nir Oaz. But no Israeli civilians died from rocket fire in that period.
Kanwisher draws these very reasonable conclusions from her analysis:
- First, Hamas can indeed control the rockets, when it is in their interest. The data shows that ceasefires can work, reducing the violence to nearly zero for months at a time.
Second, if Israel wants to reduce rocket fire from Gaza, it should cherish and preserve the peace when it starts to break out, not be the first to kill.
Thanks for that great work, Prof. Kanwisher!
I stopped believing the Israeli-Clinton-Bush-Friedman narrative on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after doing my own analysis of the B’tselem data.
I went through all the death reports from the start of the Second Intifada. In particular, I discovered that 84 Palestinian youths 17 or younger had been shot and killed by Israeli Army snipers from Sept 29, 2000 to Jan 24, 2001. During that same period 1 Israeli youth, age 16, had been killed on Jan 17th, 2001.
As confirmed by the Mitchell Report most if not all of these youths were either unarmed or stone throwers.
I had to ask myself: were the Palestinian resistance groups allowed to defend their young people or not? Or were the Palestinan youth to be left defenseless against the IDF.
Through January 2001, all Israeli civilian deaths had been by gunfire, except for two who were killed by roadside bombs. The first suicide bombing did not occur until March 4th, 2001.
In other words, suicide bombings could not be the justification for the IDF killings of so many Palestinian youths. In fact, the IDF had strategically determined before the start of the Intifada to react very harshly against any uprising.
I have not been able to get a single Israeli supporter in America to either believe or look at my analysis.
“…the IDF had strategically determined before the start of the Intifada to react very harshly against any uprising.”
Certainly a very rational decision, given how very well that has always worked out for them. (sarcasm alert)
The IDF says that 4 of its 6 combat fatalities to date are from ‘friendly fire’, which undermines its claim that the accuracy of its bombing has been ‘surgical’.
Honestly! As Helena would know very well the November 4 and 5 killings of Palestinians related to the Israeli discovery of a tunnel being built by Hamas under the Israeli border with the objective of kidnapping some companions for Gilad Shalit!!!!
Neither Helena nor the Prof mention this salient fact, but perhaps they do not regard tunnelling under your ceasefire partner’s borders for murder and kidnap as breach of a ceasefire, any more than using ceasefire to import Grad missiles to threaten Beersheba?
And how stupid, stupid, stupid is Hamas?
This tunnel would not have appeared overnight; Israel no doubt had been monitoring its progress all through the “lull”, and sprang the trap for Hamas close to the expiry date.
Hamas, immature, fundie, dick waving, boyos the lot of them, fell into right into Barak’s trap; retaliated with rockets and mortars, and then ludicrously publicly eschewed a renewal of the ceasefire while Israel piously offered to renew it and gave Israel the pretext and justification.
And Hamas didn’t even see it coming, let alone the extent of it.
But that’s what you get from religious crazies who can’t make rational decisions in war because they believe everything they do is god ordained.
Arrogance, hubris, and once again thanks to the Hamas fans for making it possible.
Religious fundies, whether Christian, Islamic or Hasidic, are certainly an impediment to global progress.
But for the last two decades, the Israel-Palestine dispute has been about Israel’s refusal to return to its 1967 borders. The PLO and the entire world, except for the US, Israel, and the Marshall Islands, agreed to that outcome (UN Res. 242) twenty years ago.
Meanwhile, Israel is an ‘occupying power’ pursuant to the Fourth Geneva Convention, and must discharge its obligation to prevent physical suffering or extermination, murder, torture, corporal punishments, mutilation, collective punishments, reprisals, and to ensure displaced persons the ‘right of return’ to their homes.
Indeed it is, and here is another story that needs to be heard–Palestinian Mental Health Professionals warn of Shell-shocked children and the turn to Martyrdom (the piece could be much more extensive, inmho).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-palestine-israel-children-psychology
When you think the IDF massacre machine cannot get any worse, they manage to exceed your wildest imagination.
From the Jan 8 UK The Telegraph
Gaza medics describe horror of strike which killed 70
“Mohammed Shaheen, a volunteer with Palestinian Red Crescent, was in the first convoy of ambulances to reach the site of the blast in Zeitoun since it was first occupied then shelled by the Israeli army.
His testimony confirmed accounts, first reported in The Telegraph, from survivors of the extended al Samouni clan who said they feared between 60 and 70 family members has been killed.
“Inside the Samouni house I saw about ten bodies and outside another 60,” Mr. Shaheen said.
“We found fifteen people still alive but injured so we took them in the ambulances. I could see an Israeli army bulldozer knocking down houses nearby but we ran out of time and the Israeli soldiers started shooting at us.”
“We had to leave about eight injured people behind because we could not get to them and it was no longer safe for us to stay.” Mr. Shaheen was in a convoy led by a jeep from the International Committee for the Red Cross.
Concern had been gowing that Zeitoun had witnessed massive civilian casualties after surviving members of the Samouni clan reached Gaza City three days ago. They said that after the Israeli army first took the town on Saturday night soldiers had ordered about 100 members of the clan to gather in a single house owned by Wael Samouni around dawn on Sunday.
At 6:30AM on Monday the house was repeatedly shelled with appalling loss of civilian life.
A handful of survivors, some wounded, others carrying dead or dying infants, made it on foot to Gaza’s main north-south road before they were given lifts to hospitals. Three small children were buried in Gaza City that afternoon.
According to the survivors between 60 and 70 family members had been killed by shrapnel and falling masonry.
Convoys of ambulances twice headed to the area to look for wounded but they were driven back by Israeli shooting.”
It is no wonder the izzy’s allow no independent observers into the area. They are carrying out a massacre. Considering the fact that the overwhelming majority of jews both in Israel and thruout the world support this massacre, I don’t think I can ever look at a jew as a human being anymore.
bb, you don’t get it. Hamas is allowed to act as if it were at war, even during lulls, while Israel is required to pretend that it is at peace. Thus, if Hamas is planning an attack, Israeli pre-emption of that attack is the breach of the cease fire and aggression.
Any principle to the above? Not really, but it does allow the Israel hating crowd to pretend to make an argument.
None of this is new.
“I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes started [on the Golan]. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow someplace where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.” –Moshe Dayan interview with Rami Tal, 1976.
Israel’s standard operating procedure: provoke. If unsuccessful, provoke again. When the other side finally responds, publicize the fact that “the other side started it.”
The Western media has been eagerly gullible and more than happy to publish this BS for most Israel’s entire existence.
Joshua-
Speaking with your forked tongue, as usual, twisting words and their meanings.
Having trouble sleeping at night, since you support the ongoing massacres of women and their babies?
Long ago public opinion became wise to the propaganda of Hasbaristas like yourself.
I would ask our dear host if sd’s comment satisfies the requirements of her “courtesy” rules.
Oh yes, I forgot, there is the IOKIYHI*, exception
* It’s ok if you hate israel!
Joshua-
When one is a stooge, it is not discourteous for another to point out the fact.
You, sir, are a stooge.
I said that with as much courtesy as possible.
Thank you to this Web Site for enlightening me!
Here I used a link to a web site with the Hamas Charter.
Have you read it?
The Charter is a sad, sick, racist,document and clearly advocates violence.I thought we could all agree to speak out against that. You should keep your eye on the ball.
Hard to defend an organization with a charter like this.
If it’s Curly, then I’ll take it as a compliment.
Yes John, that’s been the excuse for decades…. lez find something we don’t like in the charter of whatever enemy we wish to bomb. (come to think of it, that’s part of the reason why Hamas was set up — to undermine Fatah)….
So if the charter of the organization is so foreign, then the lives of all those who support the movement, or permit the fish to swim in their sea, are forfeit…. in your apparent logic.
This is from BBC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfnPjzOGB5s
Excellent posts, Helena. Very informative blog with original insights.
A link to an article that vividly personalizes the scope of the destruction in Gaza:
“AP Gaza reporter finds hometown in rubble”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090107/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_gaza_a_reporter_s_story
All semites are equal but some are more equal than others.
Paul Woodward, who runs the War in Context web site, has also written about the effective of the ceasefire, making use of graphics produced by the Israeli foreign ministry that showed this clearly. He mentions that some of these graphics have now been taken down from their web site, or modified. See this entry:
http://warincontext.org/2009/01/04/editorial-israeli-propaganda-campaign-downplays-the-success-of-the-truce/#comment-3342
A Statement of Determination to Boycott Israel Sponsored by The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP)
If you would like to add your name to this declaration please send an e-mail to GazaEmergency@bricup.org.uk giving your name and the city where you live.
Gaza Emergency
You don’t seem to grasp the real issue behind the conflict. The muslims in Gaza and what is left of Palestine have lost their right to cry for human compassion. When 5 arabic countries declared war on Israel, a country created for the survivors of the holocaust, they escalated a conflict which they could not win. To the victor go the spoils, you just don’t grasp that it is the victor who sets the terms of peace, not the defeated. The muslims have brought on the onslaught and now they will pay a price in blood, don’t try to rationalize it, your bleeding heart bullshit is losing its voice in the public forum and now the dominant forces are taking their rightful place to dictate the life and death of those that chose to continue the struggle. Maybe if you were to do some fighting, or read a little of history, you would know that only through preparation for war can you ensure any future peace. No matter how far off that future may be. The jews have learned a lesson from the nazis that oppressed and murdered their people. Organization and strength through arms will deter any aggression, only a more organized/powerful military can stop them. The muslims have neither and ultimately it will lead to their destruction
ghoulJoshua is more concerned about being courteous to the izzy massacre machinge and its defenders than the actions of the izzy massacre machine. Twisted.
Another ghoul here still whines about a piece of paper. Actions speak louder that words, bub. Massacering children means less than words on a piece of paper.
James Nye, another defender of the ZioNazis and the IDF Massacre Machine heard from. Bub, don’t regurgitate ZioNazi lies here. All honor to the brave Hamas fighters who are fighting the American-sponsored Israeli Massacre Machine.
“Maybe if you were to do some fighting, or read a little of history, you would know that only through preparation for war can you ensure any future peace. No matter how far off that future may be.”
*Duh!* If you exterminate everyone else but your kins, of course you would in the future, no matter how far off that maybe, achieve what you call peace. But at what cost and what kind of peace can you call that but your own twisted idea of peace. Please don’t bring this kind of logic here, it’s really an insult to intelligence.
“If you only have love for your own ways, then you’ll only have space to discriminate” — Where is the love? by Black Eyed Peas
Welcome James Nye. Sterling use of your Megaphone software. The carnage in Gaza must be keeping GIYUS.ORG very busy.
Sixty three years ago the U.S.A. put concentration camps out of business, liberated their surviving inmates. Today we aid and abet the massacre of the inmates of the concentration camp called Gaza. Measures of our depravity – of what we’ve become – don’t come any starker.
Sixty three years ago the U.S.A. put concentration camps out of business,
Your statement ignored the fact that those “concentration camps” are shifted out side US; remember Vietnam War or S. America most recent Iraq and WHITE Phosphor in Fallujah and Abu Ghriab its no more as “concentration camps” its Open Camps.
You statement it white wash of US the US ugly face uncovered and long time but the Megaphone media and your leaders make you believing those Massacre Machine done by your Heroes, making symbols from their names and memorials for telling those wars against civilians and innocents people far from US land as Heroisms acts.
Just like Israelis with a dream of 3000 years trying to sale by bringing people from around the world and settle them on land grabbed and stolen from native people lived thousand of years or on claimed the land was inhabitant as a Promised Land.
Um, Mr. Nye, great propaganda, if utterly bone chilling & uncivilized…. so the strong do what they please, the weak suffer what they must…
Is that what we are to learn from the holocaust? Is that what zionism today is reduced to? (surely hope not?)
And so now it’s ok to exterminate the weak today, who dare to protest their lot.
(and of course, you leave out that a lot of the Palestinians are Christians…. but that would mess up your script)
#also for your interest: YOUR COMMENTS WOULD BE GRATELY APPRECIATED: (1)
David Brooks tells us in the NYTimes that Israel is in a psychological war with HAMAS:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/opinion/06brooks.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
And, a Norwegian physician treating Palestinian war victims in Gaza describes the use by the Israelis of new and illegal weapons:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11636
Max Blumenthal in the HUFFINGTON POST describes the claims of Zionist American pundits on how good are Israel’s assaults on Gaza and how this is withering away US support for Israel:
http://www.alternet.org/audits/117568/
All in all, we are seeing a seismic shift in the moral standing of a nation that is really not a nation because it has no recognized borders, being in constant violent expansion and so refusing to define its limits. A noted Israeli political theorist once concluded that, as a result of no defined borders and consequent non-recognition of this expanding state by its neighbors, it cannot call itself a nation. So, a fetus of a nation on a very richly $$$ supplied American placenta, Israel has had the illusion that it is bound by no law either of physics or man. Even in response to American Jews that risk their own American standing in support of Israel, the Jerusalem Govt insisted since 2001 that these are foreigners and should mind their own business as Israel does whatever it wants. Yet, Israel is a helpless fetus on an American cash placenta supplying it billions of dollars a year.
And today, Israel is swinging between the Nazi Lebensraum thesis and the Holocaust victim due from the world reparations– cash for moral hazard– as it perpetrates war crimes for which, in the past, others have been hung.
The question is: does Israel do all this for “existential survival”?
The answer obviously is NO, particularly as TV news footage of the combat was interspersed with “shalom” appeals for tourism to Israel at this very time. Rather, numerous analysts in Israel and abroad define Israel’s real existential problems as two:
1) Young Israelis, once educated, “sneak out” of Israel to take offers of jobs abroad that pay well in recognition of the high quality of Israeli education;
2) Diaspora Jews who have something to contribute to Israel refuse to move there. For example, Israel feels no compunction about advertising to American Jewish doctors– DESPITE AMERICA’S DESPERATE SHORTAGE– to “make the aliyah” to Israel, offering them all sorts of grants and fees at US taxpayers’ expense (Ha’aretz). Yet, only older Diaspora Jews, in the main, retire to Israel; however, invariably, they leave in disgust as their pensions are exhausted on high taxes.
Today, “settlements” sneak out over Palestinian territories, engulfing them by force, if not by sheer madness. But the US DeptState tells us that 78% of these settlements are unpopulated because there are not enough settlers coming to live there. The Great Aliyah has dwindled to a trickle. And still, Israel expands, substituting “security” for lebensraum in its rhetoric as it disregards all efforts by its American benefactors to bring it into line with the moral and legal demands of the World Community.
“Security,” let us recall, is how Hitler justified Germany’s brutal expansion. The result was not security but destruction of all peoples subjugated vas well as the German “master race.” In 2006, Israel was forced by GW Bush into an attack on Lebanon that was expected to expand to Syria and Iran. But Israel Army (IDF) incompetence and hubris cost a stalling of the attack resulting in a courageous withdrawal of forces by Israeli PM Olmert. For that, he was slandered in a neocon-Israeli conspiracy that depicted him as a petty thief of public funds. With an election before them, his Israeli successors in power– Livni and Barak– face severe biases that favor Netanyahu, the seeming Zionist hardliner of Likud: Livni is a woman and so was declared ineligible for the Premiership by the rabbis; and Barak is still despised for his bungling of the Clinton Peace Plan and is reputed to be a tricksters who invariably fails and tries to cover up with lies and erratic violence. This should be kept in mind when reading the following by Arnaud de Borchgrave, a rather radical pro-Zionist-Right publicist:
“The immediate objective in Gaza against Hamas is to restore Israel’s image of military invincibility, badly damaged 2 1/2 years ago when a punitive raid into south Lebanon triggered a hail of Hezbollah rockets and missiles that forced the population of northern Israel into underground shelters. A botched Israeli military operation gave the Israel Defense Forces a black eye — and invincible Israel, in the eyes of its enemies, became vincible.”
Borchgrave provides us further analysis that, if correct, suggests that not only is the current “shooting fish [Palestinians] in a barbell [Gaza]”– reminiscent of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews in the militarily surrounded and strangulated Warsaw Ghetto– is a mere political gambit by the various electoral parties competing in the forthcoming election; but also, that the creeping “settlements” for non-existent “settlers” are really the main functions of an attempt to make sure that no Palestinian State ever comes into existence. This makes Israel’s efforts even worse than those of the white racist Afrikaners in South Africa, trying to squeeze the blacks into Bantustans, and more like Milosevic’s attempt at “ethnic cleansing,” because Israel is indeed trying to create an ever expanding purely JEWISH state by eliminating the Palestinians through displacement as refugees in the Arab world or through extermination by means of “made in the USA” firepower:
” For two of Israel’s three principal contenders in the Feb. 10 elections, Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister) Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, hundreds of air strikes, a massive artillery barrage and a ground offensive against Hamas targets demonstrated they could be just as tough as the challenger, superhawk and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For those whose priority objective is the creation of a viable Palestinian state — the United States, the European Union , 22 Arab countries — it was yet another setback.
The geopolitical can named “Palestinian state” has been kicked down the road one more time. Slowly working its way back center stage was the 2002 Saudi plan that called for the recognition of Israel by all 22 Arab states in return for the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War (with minor adjustments in Israel’s favor to be negotiated). Originally put forward by Saudi King Abdullah seven years ago, and endorsed by the entire Arab world, moderate Arab leaders have been hinting President Obama would adopt it for his new Middle East roadmap.
Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008/09 have convinced an overwhelming majority of Israelis that a Palestinian state cannot coexist peacefully with the Jewish state. The 260,000 Jewish settlers in 140 settlements in the West Bank are not about to upstake to make room for a revanchist Palestinian state. The lessons of Hezbollah’s missiles in 2006 and Hamas’ in 2008 have convinced most Israelis a Palestinian nation in the West Bank, even if demilitarized under U.N. or even U.S. control, would not give up the dream of recovering the homes their fathers and grandfathers lost 62 years ago.
A month after Israel forced 8,500 Jewish settlers out of Gaza in December 2005, Hamas defeated the corrupt and ineffective Fattah movement in parliamentary elections. By 2007, a civil war drove Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his government out of Gaza to the West Bank, now under Israeli control.
Another showstopper for a Palestinian state is Jerusalem, specifically Arab East Jerusalem, where several thousand Israelis have moved in piecemeal over the past four decades. No Palestinian leader could accept anything less than a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, which no Israeli leader, expecting to stay alive politically, could endorse.
Meanwhile, Israel’s rekindled status as invincible carried the day, aided and assisted in the midst of the Gaza offensive by the IDF’s new YouTube channel, using the blogosphere as another war zone. Israeli politicians, drowned out by the voices of Hezbollah during the 2006 Lebanon war, dominated news networks with footage from unmanned drones and fighter-bombers that showed Hamas loading rockets onto a pickup truck to be driven closer to the border — but hit by an IAF air strike almost immediately.”
Below is the URL for the entire de Borchgrave article: http://www.upi.com/Emerging_Threats/2009/01/05/Commentary_Israels_endgame/UPI-96761231165240/
Some American Zionist organizations are mercilessly punishing and trying to silence any questioners of critics of Israel’s own version of the Warsaw Ghetto perpetrated on the inhabitants of Gaza. But hubris provokes reckless bragging by the Israelis and their friends over their ability to literally exterminate Palestinians. Thus, fear from defeat in Lebanon two years ago may have motivated the initial assault, but the hubris born of the massacre of a helpless people is producing rhetoric that has an eerie similarity to that emanating from Germany while it destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto.
One of the Founding Fathers of Zionism coined the term “Zionazis” to warn his people of the wrong path they were on, blinded by the ease with which they could murder, rape and pillage Palestinian villages. For those of us who consider the Jewish Community in the West a pillar of what is best in our moral culture, Israeli militarism and the blind support it extracts from much of the OFFICIAL Diaspora Jewish Community leaders, make us wonder if our enthusiastic support for Israel– “my ally right no matter what”– may not have been a disservice to it, fomenting the creation of a Frankenstein with our dollars and arms. Worst still, an America, broke and tethering on depression, cannot help but notice the monster it has nurtured through its immense foreign aid $$ placenta and fueled with its arms giveaway to Israel. Following Israel’s tutoring of our troops post-9/11, we are more or less defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. And just when we came to realize the devastating consequences of this “boom,boom,boom…kill, kill, kill” policy, we are asked to support what can only be classified as a “Zionazi” operation, using the term EXACTLY as devised by its Zionism Founding Father.
As Israeli casualties mount– inevitable, given that the victims see no escape, just an opportunity to take some of the massacring IDF troops with them– there is no doubt that the same political motives that moved Livni (noted in the Israeli press as an amoral opportunist) and Barak (also noted as a man driven mad by his own arrogance) into this war of annihilation, will drive them– AS IN LEBANON– into a meaningless cease-fire… meaningless in that though the fire ceases, the hate and thirst for revenge does not. Israel will then be surrounded by vengeful hate that turns into fearless military discipline. Such negative homogeneity it has not known for 50 years. Nothing, therefore, will have been accomplished to justify the current massacre from the air and from artillery, probably not even an end to the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. As the troops go in, IDF hubris born of bravado, will turn to an annoying whiney plea for $billions upon $billions more from the USA; these will be mixed with Israeli threats that if the American placenta is not engorged with dollars, the Israeli “Defense” Forces will be forced to attack anew, perhaps even Iran while US forces are helpless in next door Iraq.
Of course, coming from a self-depleting Israel, it will all be a bluff. Alas, HAMAS will have shown that, like Hezbollah, it can die in dignity and keep on firing those strategically meaningless rockets, nothing but symbols of defiance of a year long blockade and strangulation of Gaza interrupted by Israeli “targeted assassinations of HAMAS elected leaders.
Rabin, one courageous Israeli soldier said: “enough of the killing; let us make peace for our children.” For his irresistible reasoning he got a bullet in the head when the rabbis issued a “fatwa” that any Jew willing to give an inch of “Jewish land” (sic) deserves to die. That was the end of the TWO states solution. The question Livni/Barak forced us to face is: FINE, IF YOU INSIST ON A *ONE* STATE SOLUTION, WHY DO WE HAVE TO EXSANGUINATE AMERICA SO THAT AN EXCLUSIVELY JEWISH STATE CAN KEEP THREATENING AND EXTERMINATING ITS OWN PALESTINIANS?
This invariably brings us back to the “one state” solution of two peoples in one nation that Arafat warned about. In such a state, where in loco Jews and Arabs have one-man-one-vote equality, soon the birth rate of Arabs will make Israel a predominantly Muslim state. The only option Zionists see for preventing that is to force Diaspora Jews to move “back home” (sic) to Israel. There exists no state today that distinguishes its Jewish from its other citizens. Therefore, there is no way that Israel can blackmail the West into expelling its Jews to Israel. Furthermore, it would be sheer folly to confuse the affection Jews have for Israel with duality of loyalty. Indeed, in the current crisis, few Israeli born “reverse aliyah” Americans returned to join the struggle. Instead– like Rehm Emanuel, soon to be Obama’s White House Chief-of-Staff– they remained in their new homelands to loyally serve the interests of their adopted Diaspora homelands. The olims go West, not to Israel, in a reverse aliyah. The compelling reason has to do with something a hundred times as old as Zionism: Jewish culture and Jewish ethic, based on peace and building, not on war and destroying for lebensraum.
I can only hope that the American people, in their desperate search for a scapegoat for their economic catastrophe, do not look to their fellow American Jews. What the neocons will have to be in the docket of public opinion and history to account for in no way relates to American Jews, loyal “AMERICA FIRST” Americans– mostly because they have recently suffered the opposite of what America stands for and thus have not not forgotten.
The totalitarian media in the West today, spewing propaganda on behalf of Israel, in no way suggests that “THE JEWS” are in control or in favor of what goes on in Gaza. The first neocon lie that they alone speak for American Jews and that Jews who oppose them are unbalanced “self-hating Jews” is a foolish gimmick that is the reason for current purging of the neocons from any position of influence. Obama won as much Jewish as black support, despite the malevolent “Big Lie” propaganda of the neocons that he is a Muslim and an anti-Semite. Indeed, as I can personally attest, the “anti-Semite” smear is an hysterical smokescreen put up by “professional” Jews– reminiscent of “professional” anti-Communists– whose goal is fear, hysteria and isolation so that OUR Jews live in panic and duly feed the coffers of these high-life frauds. Madoff’s prototypes can be found as easily in the so-called “Holocaust Industry” as on Wall Street. It is up to us to make sure that our fellow Americans never lose sight Americanism of the mass majority of Jews who contributed so much to our society and so generously to our well being, forever distinguishing themselves from the small group of freaks, frauds and cheats who seek to acquire “mensch-hood” by stampeding us “goyim cattle” into what they want: they call it “World War IV.”
Jews are as tortured by video from Gaza as any of us. Humanitarianism is as Jewish as is circumcision. And the bravura of old ex-Reds who seek to feel manly applauding the bloodshed is the abnormal in the Jewish Community, NOT the mass normal. We should all guard our Jewish neighbors’ safety for, as ever in the short history of Zionism, the Zionists cared and care little for the Diaspora Jews that, in the words of PM Sharon, “will be damned, losing their Jewish soul” if they don’t move to Israel with all their gelt by 2020. Throughout history Zionist cared little for those who remain diasporic, even through the Holocaust.
Israel is a wonderful nation that I always admired when I went there to learn about it and bathe in its achievements. But a mix of local motives and migrants from afar has driven it to grandomania madness. There is a most touching Israeli poem about an old man who spends his lonely grief-ridden days at the grave of his son, felled IDF soldier. The son cries out from the grave: do not cry for your loneliness, father, but for me who is under the dark, damp, cold ground because of your grandiose ideologies. I had so many dreams and could have done so much but you took it all from me, sending me to die for your ideologies. Israel’s army is not professional, it is all reservists. Young Israelis, not knowing when they shave in the morning, whether they will put on a uniform to fight or a suit to build a career, have had enough and have been seeking refuge in the West. This bleeding of its youth is fatal to a nation and all the Arabs know it.
Now Iran stands to frighten Arabs with its future puny atomic bomb. This will draw them to seek protection under Israel’s nuclear umbrella, the world’s 4th largest, in exchange for which Israel can demand acceptance as an equal member of the region. Only Israel’s high-tech ability can take the Arabs out of their one crop (oil) banana republic economies, making it indeed the “light onto the [Arab] nations” which the Founding Fathers of Zionism originally sought to become. But for now, we in the West must more vigilantly than ever protect our Jews; meanwhile, the Israelis must seek some sort of two nations, one economy relation with the Palestinians. HAMAS is nothing but the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Fundamentalist revolutionary organization which came into existence through the help of Ayatollah Khomeini of Shia Iran and Sharon of Israel, the latter hoping it would fragment Palestinian nationalism under Arafat. Like Hezbollah, it is a resistance religious group that seeks a return to religious compliance through combat. But most Palestinians are secular, distinguishing religion from politics. They voted for HAMAS (in an election forced on them by Bush) as a protest against corruption and incompetence in the Palestinian Authority. If instead of Zionazi punitive tactics for the way they voted (there is no need to mention GW Bush’s criminal incompetence and irresponsible support for such “collective punishment” on all Gaza Palestinians), Israel had come to terms with HAMAS and had rewarded good management with economic cooperation, the present crisis, nor the rockets that fell on Israel, would have been the essence of the current scene. But Israel, as Borchgrave admits, is out to eliminate any Palestinian state. As he reports, that’s why Israel feeds “facts on the ground” expansion of so-called settlements. A DETERMINED TRADE OF SETTLEMENTS BACK TO A 1967 BORDER IN EXCHANGE FOR A COMMON INTEGRATED ECONOMY WITH THE REGION WOULD MAKE ISRAEL THE LEADER RATHER THAN THE PARIAH OF THE MIDDLE EAST. Even now it is not too late. The weakness Israel has shown through its sedding of Gaza blood can more than be neutralized by an abandonment of its current Zionazi lebensraum policy, adopting in exchange, a total peace accord. Radical Islam is tired. Outrage may arouse it momentarily here and there, but nothing will make it slumber again like a real fair and mutually beneficial peace. This is the challenge for Obama and this is what Israel must courageously face.
The world’s only religion born of forgiveness and kindness came from the same peoples who today manufacture hate towards each other. A civil ethic consistent with the roots of the region can convert the unforgiving desert in which these peoples live. If we stop buying their oil as if addicts ready to pay any price and allow the planet to reclaim the sand and the peoples therein, once we end our global warming pollution, the peoples of the Middle East will rediscover the old Jewish ethic of fairness from which both peoples provene.
Daniel E. Teodoru
Take another run at it, Salah, old son. You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
You’ve got the wrong end of the stick.
Hummm……. keep your stick/propaganda to yourself
James Nye
You sad, twisted, arrogant, bigoted little man, the world view presumably from a soldier, presumably IDF, no doubt. So, by your limited intelligence, by what estimate should the carnage in Gaza end? That’s a rhetorical question James, as by your calculation, it would end with every last muslim deserving death, which they stupidly brought on themselves. Correct? And just how, pray tell, does someone lose ‘their right to cry for human compassion?’ That doesn’t even make sense grammatically! Whatever dude, go beat on your chest somewhere else before you explode in a testosterone fit of rage all over this forum. Anger management, per chance?
And by the way you cretin, why should the Palestinians pay the price of what the Nazi’s did to the Jews?