Category: Gaza08-09

The U.S. Senate is not made up of people who are monsters or idiots. But it is made up of people whose first inclination is to look out for their chances of re-election in a political system that is drenched in, and corrupted by, the influence of raw money.
The new US Senate was voted in Tuesday. Today, as Israel’s assault on Gaza continues, the Senate made one of its first items of business the adoption of a strongly pro-Israeli resolution– crafted in AIPAC’s policy shop— that expressed strong support for Israel’s viewpoint on all aspects of the current war.
This, even as the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was issuing the latest in its series of updates on the humanitarian crisis that Israel’s latest war of choice has inflicted on Gaza’s 1.5 million people.
It read in part:

The Israeli military operation has caused extensive damage to homes, civilian institutions and infrastructure. The entire Gaza Strip is on the verge of collapse, already weakened by the 18-month blockade on the territory. Most people have no electricity and no clean running water. While food assistance has entered, agencies are facing difficulties to distribute it due to the security situation. Food stocks are low in people’s homes, people are afraid to go out to find food and there is no cooking gas to cook whatever is available. Many homes do not have glass in their windows, and others are leaving them open to avoid shattering. Without electricity, the hospitals are operating on backup generators and are low on fuel, threatening the life-saving services doctors and nurses are urgently providing in the overloaded hospitals…

The report recounted the ICRC’s grisly story of its fieldworkers having yesterday discovered a cache of 12 bodies along with wounded people, including four young children left weak and hungry clinging the bodies of their dead mothers, who were stranded in an area of Zaitoun south of Gaza for the preceding four days. Though some of the wounded people there had called to friends outside, and the Palestinian Red Crescent, for evacuation help, the Israeli military would not allow evacuation for four days.
The OCHA report continued:

As of 16.00 on 8 January, the MoH in Gaza revealed that 50 bodies were recovered today from the rubble of houses: the total number of fatalities is now 758, of whom 257 (34%) are children and 56 (7.4%) are women. Of the 3,100 injuries, 1,080 (34.8%) are children and 452 (14.6%) are women. The danger to medical staff and the difficulty of extracting the injured from collapsed buildings makes proper evacuation and estimation of casualties difficult.
Palestinian militants continued to fire rockets and mortar shells into Israel resulting in moderate to light injuries. An IDF soldier was killed this morning.

So, 758 now-identified fatalities, of whom 313 were either women or children. We can assume that many of the men were civilians, too. (Including the police recruits mown down on the first day of the war.) I imagine it is hard, though, for the ICRC/PRCS, or any other body necessarily to tell who was a combatant actively involved in hostilites (which would make him– or her– a “legitimate” military target) and who was a noncombatant.
The OCHA report also said this:

On 8 January, a UN-contracted convoy transporting food through the Erez crossing was shelled. One UNRWA-contracted worker was killed and two injured. At approximately 14.00, a UN convoy of two armoured vehicles escorted an ambulance through Gaza City to recover the body of a local UN staff member during the scheduled humanitarian cease-fire. On Salah Ed Din Street the vehicles were targeted by three rounds of small arms fire. One armoured vehicle was hit. Two international staff were in the vehicle, but no casualties were reported. The movement of the convoy had been coordinated in advance [presumably with the IDF] and the UN vehicles were clearly identified. UNRWA has announced that it is temporarily suspending its operations until real security guarantees can be ensured.

UNRWA’s quite wrenching decision to suspend its long-established relief services is quite understandable, in the circumstances. But this means that the humanitarian situation can only be expected to deteriorate– and more rapidly, now, than ever.
Information about the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza has been available for a number of days now, and has been reported on the US media. In light of that, I find the one-sided nature of the resolution passed by Congress (the AIPAC-suggested text is here– PDF) literally nauseating.
Do the Senators have any idea how heartless and brutal they look to just about everybody else in the rest of the world when they pass such a slaveringly pro-Israeli resolution?
The House of Representatives is expected to take up a similar or concurrent resolution on the matter shortly. No doubt since all Representatives face re-election in two years and are therefore already “running” for the 2010 election, the vote there will also be an easy one for the AIPAC crowd.
It is true that in the US system, the actual conduct of foreign policy is the responsibility of the president, not congress. So these resolutions have no immediate impact on policy. But they do act as a “warning shot across the bows” of the incoming president, to show him that though some pro-peace organizations — like the courageous and agile Jewish Voice for Peace organization– may have emerged here in recent years, still AIPAC is the Biggest Bully on the Block and can come in like steamroller whenever it sees a chance.
It would be great if the members of the US’s two houses of Congress could show even a little basic human decency in their attitude to the multiply devastated population of Gaza, instead of simply dancing to AIPAC’s tune and cheering on all aspects of Israel’s current war effort against Gaza.
But another thing the members of Congress should consider is the effect their resolutions have on the safety of all US citizens in many countries around the world. In Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr has already called on his supporters to start killing US soldiers because of the US’s support for Israel in the current war. But what about all the other US citizens– soldiers, business-people, students, or just travelers– who find themselves in every country of the world today? Why on earth would anyone in the US Senate or House of Representatives think today’s resolution serves the US citizenry, at all?
It doesn’t. It is just yet another chapter in the long story of the US’s close alliance with Israel helping to drag down the influence of the US all around the world.
A tragic day today. For many reasons.

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!

On Dec. 31, the US Military Sealift Command published a solicitation for bids from shipping companies to ship two boats, each containing 168 TEU’s (twenty-foot equivalent container units) of ammunition, from Greece to Israel.
(HT: Danger Room.)
That’s a considerable amount of ammunition. Its type was not stated.
If the international community is serious about a ceasefire this must involve credible efforts to impose an arms embargo on both sides until the ceasefire is concluded.
US arms shipments to Israel are sent (free of cost to Israel) for the express purpose of “self defense.” There is no way Israel’s current war against Gaza could be described as self-defense without a truly Orwellian effort to bend the meaning of the term completely out of any logic or acceptability.

President Bush has been trying to delay calls for a Gaza ceasefire as long as possible, but today there were more signs that other international actors were trying to push the conflict-termination diplomacy ahead with or without him. This on a day when at least 40 double-refugees* in Gaza were killed, and tens more wounded, when an Israeli tank fired on a UN-run school in Gaza, and when president-elect Obama made his first semi-substantive comments on the continuing Gaza-Israeli crisis.
Obama expressed deep concern about civilian deaths in both Gaza and Israel. On the politics of conflict-termination, he said,

“After Jan. 20 I’m going to have plenty to say about the issue, and I am not backing away at all from what I said during the campaign, that starting at the beginning of our administration, we are going to be engaged effectively and consistently in trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East…That’s something I am committed to.”

“Resolve the conflict in the Middle East” is a good and encouraging goal in this context. It implies aiming for something considerably deeper, more far-reaching, and more durable than merely a ceasefire!
Of course, as I’ve noted before, a ceasefire in the immediate round of fighting between Israel and Gaza can, if it is well planned and well implemented, be used as a constructive segue into a broader effort speedily to secure an overall Palestinian-Israeli (and hopefully also pan-Arab-Israeli) peace.
That this might be what’s on Obama’s schedule is possibly indicated by the still unconfirmed reports– here from Jim Lobe— that the chief envoy Obama will name on Arab-Israeli (but not Iranian) issues will be Richard Haass.** Richard was, in an earlier incarnation, the author of the dreadful “ripeness” theory in Arab-Israeli diplomacy– an approach that turned out merely to excuse the endless prolongation of the search for peace and thus to allow Israel additional years and decades in which to pursue its settlement-construction program. However, sometime in the late 1980s he disavowed that idea. He was the first head of the State Department’s influential policy planning unit in the first George W. Bush administration, but resigned early on, quite possibly because he disagreed with the decision to invade Iraq. He is a cautious realist in the Brent SCowcroft mold, and therefore far from the worst choice Obama might make for Arab-Israeli envoy.
Of course, we should also recall that during the election campaign, another thing Obama said was that he completely understood Israel’s desire to hit back at Gaza in response to the rockets that fell on southern Israel. But it’s interesting that that was not the statement from the campaign that he chose to recall today.
… Meanwhile, Sarkozy has been in Syria and Egypt, and Rice has been working the UN crowd in New York. Unclear if the thrust of her intervention there is to explore or to block possibilities for a speedy ceasefire. But Sarkozy’s intense involvement– which is mirrored in some but by no means all other European capitals– calls to mind the role that Jacques Chirac played in 1996 in activating the diplomacy that ended the Israeli assault on Lebanon of that year.
There are many intriguing similarities between these two situations:

1. Both wars were launched by Israeli governments facing imminent general elections and were clearly conducted in the context of enhancing their electoral chances. (Note to Olmert/Livni/Barak: It actually backfired for Shimon Peres that year.)
2. In both cases, the war was launched after the breakdown of a shaky previous ceasefire between Israel and a locally rooted, Iranian-allied organization that had been labeled and quarantined by western powers as “terrorist.”
3. In both cases, Israel killed hugely disproportionate numbers of Arab civilians in the country targeted, including in incidents of mega-lethality. (Today’s casualties on a UN-run school call to mind the massacre at Qana in April 1996, when Israel killed 106 civilians who had sought refuge in a UN base in south Lebanon.)

So the way things turned out at the end of the 1996 Israel-Lebanon war was very interesting. The hostilities were brought to an end through the conclusion of a formal international agreement to which the governments of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, the US, and France were all party, with the governments of Lebanon and Syria informally undertaking to ensure that Lebanon’s Hizbullah was on board it and would observe it.
During the negotiations then, those two governments acted as the channel to include Hizbullah in the negotiation. The governments of Israel, the US, and France refused point-blank to negotiate directly with Hizbullah, but recognized that they needed to ensure Hizbullah’s agreement to the ceasefire if it was to succeed. (The western powers had an exactly similar approach to Hizbullah during the negotiations that ended Israel’s 2006 assault against Lebanon.)
So what made the 1996 ceasefire between (in effect) Israel and Hizbullah much more durable and effective than the one that had preceded it in 1993 were that it was a formal international agreement, with its terms clearly written down and understood by all parties– plus it had an international verification mechanism, in the form of a five-power monitoring committee– that, yes, included Syria along with the other four negotiating governments– that was able over the years that followed to investigate any charges from any side about infractions of others. The 1996 ceasefire was a notable diplomatic achievement for Hizbullah.
… Fascinating if that might be where we’re headed in Palestine, now.
(More later.)
—
* “Double-refugees” because, since the school was in the Jabaliya refugee camp it is most likely these poor individuals were among the 80% of Gaza’s population who are, or are descended from, Palestinians who fled or were forced out of what is now Israel, back in 1948.
** Much less encouraging than the reports about R. Haass were those that Dennis Ross would be named the Obama administration’s special envoy on Iranian affairs. Ross has been a visible hawk on Iran for a long time now.

I’ve just read the executive summary of the Crisis Groups latest paper on the Israel-Gaza war. There are some good things in it but I’m quite disappointed at how tame it is. Not least because the CG acts as a sort of unified “Policy Planning Staff” for most of the West European governments. So if this is the advice the EU governments and countries like Australia and Canada are getting, then I think it’s far too incremental and wimpy. Crucially, it makes no mention of linking attainment of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas organically to a determined new international push to secure a final-status peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Here are the CG’s main policy prescriptions:

To protect civilians, limit political damage (regional polarisation and radicalisation, further discrediting of any “moderates” or “peace process”) and avoid a further catastrophe (massive loss of life in urban warfare in Gaza, a Hamas rocket hit on a vital Israeli installation), third parties should pressure both sides to immediately halt military action. In short, what is required is a Lebanon-type diplomatic outcome but without the Lebanon-type prolonged timetable.
To be sustainable, cessation of hostilities must be directly followed by steps addressing both sides’ core concerns:
1. An indefinite ceasefire pursuant to which:
   * Hamas would halt all rocket launches, keep armed militants at 500 metres from Israel’s border and make other armed organisations comply; and
   * Israel would halt all military attacks on and withdraw all troops from Gaza;
2. Real efforts to end arms smuggling into Gaza, led by Egypt in coordination with regional and international actors;
3. Dispatch of a multinational monitoring presence to verify adherence to the ceasefire, serve as liaison between the two sides and defuse potential crises; countries like France, Turkey and Qatar, as well as organisations such as the UN, could play an important part in this; and
4. Opening of Gaza’s crossings with Israel and Egypt, together with:
   * return of an EU presence at the Rafah crossing and its extension to Gaza’s crossings with Israel; and
   * coordination between Hamas authorities and the (Ramallah-based) PA at the crossings.

But, as noted above, this prescription makes no mention whatsoever of the urgent need to re-start the negotiations for a final Israeli-Palestinian peace, on a completely new basis.
Why should Hamas, or Israel, or any other party be happy with a return to a slightly improved version of the status-quo-ante if the big issues of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinian remain unresolved and there is no big hope held out for an imminent future in which a clear basis has been laid out and agreed upon for a speedy resolution of all the outstanding claims between the two peoples?
If the present horrendous crisis is not enough to force a jump-restarting of international efforts to secure a final-status peace, then I can’t imagine what kind of a crisis this would require! But meanwhile, why should we assume that a continuation of the interminable peace-processing efforts of the past 15 years would bring an outcome, two or five or ten years down the pike that would be any different from today’s?
I’m also a little uncertain about the timing of what the CG is advocating. They say there should be a cessation of hostilities that is “followed by … an indefinitie ceasefire pursuant to which … Hamas would halt all rocket launches, etc., and ….Israel would halt all military attacks on and withdraw all troops from Gaza.”
But wouldn’t the cessation of hostilities itself directly mandate the halting of all hostilities and (hopefully) the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, rather than these ceasefire steps “following” a cessation of hostilities?
I think their wording could be a lot clearer on those issues.
I note that the CG is not calling for the disarming of Hamas, but only for limitations on its deployment of “armed militants.” And it’s calling for the dispatch of a multinational presence to monitor the ceasefire. Both of these are realistic steps that could be expected make the ceasefire more politically palatable to Hamas than the status-quo-ante. But by the same token we could expect them to be strongly resisted by Israel, which would presumably strongly prefer to see the ceasefire agreement mandate the disarming of Hamas, and which has steadfastly maintained its opposition to any new international truce-monitoring presence in the OPTs for 41 years now.
So even these fairly cautious steps advocated by the Crisis Group would be politically hard to attain. Given that that’s the case, why not go whole hog and actually “use” this crisis to take some bold new steps toward the attainment of a final Israel-Palestinian peace? After all, if the “international community” is going to have to confront and rile this present belligerent government of Israel quite a bit even to get a workable ceasefire, why not rile them just a bitmore and go for the final peace?
Any kind of a ceasefire is going to necessarily include some steps that the citizens of both countries find hared to stomach or unsatisfactory. But least if there is also a meaningful new effort to secure a final peace, Israelis and Palestinians can all look forward to an imminent future in which the armed conflict is definitively past, the terms of future coexistence have been laid down, and people can start to rebuild their lives on a longterm basis and plan for a productive future. Yes it will involve “painful comproimises” (to use Ariel Sharon’s term.) But there will be better future in sight.
This conflict is not more intractable than that between France and Germany, or that between Whites and Blacks in South Africa. For many decades, people thought those other conflicts could “never” be resolved. But they were. This one can be, too.

It is a revealing measure of the paucity or non-existence of Israel’s actual, on-the-ground intelligence network inside Gaza today (as in Lebanon in 2006) that the IDF’s psy-ops department feels obliged to launch thousands of leaflets and undertake frantic robo-calling and robo-texting in order to beg anyone– anyone at all!– in Gaza to become an informer.
Yesterday, Electronic Intifada spoofed into the IDF’s “Report-a-Terrorist’ hot-line system and had a hilarious conversation with the Israeli Shin Bet officer who answered the call. (HT: Laila al-H.)
Read (or listen to) the whole thing. The way the Shin Bet manipulator guy responded once he figured he’d been spoofed (took him a while… ) is pretty revealing. Basically, he let loose with a stream of Zionist hate-propaganda to the effect that there never was a Palestinian nation, etc etc.
So here are the ways to contact the hotline: By phone: +972-2-583-9749. By email: helpgaza2008@gmail.com. I’m sure they have operators are standing by to help.

Read Dion Nissenbaum on the “lawn-chair war” being waged (or, more precisely, ogled) by residents of the Israeli town of Sderot:

They gather every morning on the southern Israeli hilltop as the pairs of Apache helicopters on attack runs swoop over the Mediterranean coast and air strikes send charcoal clouds curling over the Gaza Strip skyline.
They don’t seem to be bothered by the occasional Qassam rockets and mortar rounds that explode in the surrounding fields.
They have come to watch the war.
They come from Sderot, the southern Israeli town hardest hit years of persistent Palestinian rocket attacks that are the casus belli for the Israeli military campaign to destabilize Hamas.
The journalists have come too.

Also, look at the second photo in the photo gallery on this WaPo page (also published in the print edition.) The caption reads: “Israeli children in the southern town of Sderot collect fragments of a Palestinian Qassam rocket that landed outside their neighbor’s house. ”
Now, I assume that Israeli parents are no less concerned for the wellbeing of their children than Palestinian parents or any other parents. So I conclude that these kids’ parents thought the risk involved in their kids going outdoors to do this was very low. (And the kids don’t seem to be collecting their fragments in any kind of rushed or scared manner. More, they are just sauntering along a street-lamp street.)
Street lamps? Children sauntering in the street? Residents sitting on lawn-chairs watching the crump of artillery shells a mile or two away?
Does this sound like a war?
And just a couple of miles away, Palestinians are living through hell on earth. There are many excellent, first-person accounts available on the web. Including this from Dr. Said Abdel-Wahad yesterday:

Husain al-Aiedy is a Palestinian (58 years of age) lives to the east of Gaza city. He has been living in the same place for more than 25 years. His house is located in the middle of green fields. He is an UNRWA employess. He is now in one room with 20 others of his family, and families of two of his brothers. They are packed in one small room without electricity, water, food or telephone! just nothing around him except a battlefiled. Last night at 10:30 p.m. Mr Al-Aiedy was caught in the middle of the fight and a shell landed in his house to injure five of his family! He has been appealing to have an ambulance to evacuate the injured but in vain. All appeals to send him an ambulance to evacuate the injured and if possible, the rest of the family, have failed so far! At a circle of more than one and half kilomteres the Israeli army is in total control, thus no one can reach Mr Al-Aiedy except the Israelis! This situation needs an urgent humanitarian action by human rights organizations from anywhere!

This is not a war, it’s a bloodbath. Certainly, under the definitions in international humanitarian law, a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
International humanitarian law places on any military commander a positive duty to use force only with both discrimination (that is, discriminating between military persons and facilities and those that are non-combatant; and minimizing to the maximum degree possible any harm to the latter) and proportionality (that is, the nature of the attack must be proportionate to its military aim.)
Israel’s military is observing none of these restrictions.
The number of deaths in Gaza from bloodbath that started December 27 is now rising ever higher into the 500’s, and there have been thousands of serious injuries.
Proportional to the population of the US, 500 dead in Gaza translates into 100,000 dead in the US. That, in just ten days. (How would Americans feel?)
UN workers say that at least a quarter of the Palestinian deaths have been of civilians. In the past couple of days, the proportion of civilian deaths seems to have risen considerably.
In Israel, there have been five confirmed deaths, four of them civilians. (Updated, 3 p.m. 1/5/09.)
No wonder it’s lawn-chair time in Sderot! A time for kids to roam the street “collecting rocket fragments” as a hobby or a curiosity.
Please not that in making the above observations I am not calling for any increase in the number of Israeli casualties. I am calling for an immediate end to all casualties. I am calling for an immediate and ruable ceasefire that I hope will segue directly into a definitive international effort to define and implement a final-status peace between these two peoples, who have suffered for too long.
But meanwhile, no-one can credibly claim that the present fighting is a defensive “war of no choice” for Israel that has been forced upon it. On the contrary, it was not.
We can recall that back in February, when there was an earlier round of escalation between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Israel’s deputy defense minister threatened to unleash “a new Shoah” (Holocaust) in Gaza if Hamas should continue firing and upgrading its rockets.
Israel never followed through completely on that threat at that time, and in June its government reached a six-month ceasefire deal with Hamas. There were infractions of that ceasefire from both sides (including, by Israel, a number of major ground incursions, artillery attacks and, most importantly, a complete failure on commitments to lift the siege of Gaza.) But it did provide a welcome measure of relative calm to both peoples. When its six-month term expired, Hamas decided not to renew it because of Israel’s non-compliance with the six-monther.
So now, is Israel following through on Vailnai’s threatened Shoah?
In international law, a finding of genocide requires a finding of mass killings plus a finding of “genocidal intent.” I don’t think, in the present circumstances– Vilani’s threats notwithstanding– that such intent could be proven.
However, genocide is not necessarily always the worst of international crimes (despite what many western liberals seem to believe.) “Crimes against humanity” can have lethal and society-destruction effects that are just as grave as those from genocides, even in cases where genocidal intent cannot be proven. As, for example, in the many mass killings that have been plaguing Congo or the Central African Republic in recent years. And as in Gaza, today.
End the killing! Let Palestinians live a life of lawn-chairs and confidence in their future!

Israel’s leaders have given contradictory signals about how they want the current war to end. Some say they want to force Hamas to bend to their will. Some have said they want to break the organization completely. But now that Israel has sent ground forces deep into Gaza it is clearer than ever before that it will be unable to bring about either of these outcomes.
At the end of the day, to extricate itself from the uber-quagmire that Gaza represents, both physically in itself and politically throughout the region and the world, Israel will still have to engage in a negotiation with Hamas. Here’s why.
1. Hamas’s leaders have shown that they cannot be “broken” to the extent that they will bow to Israel’s will. Israel may be able to kill or capture most or all of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza– and it is possible, though unlikely, that some of those men may break under torture and give an appearance of bowing to Israel’s will. But Hamas’s overall leadership structure remains outside Gaza Through an intentional decision of Hamas in the 1990s, the overall leadership was vested in leaders not subject to any direct Israeli pressure. Hamas’s overall leader, Khaled Meshaal, lives and works in Damascus. Beyond him, Hamas has an extensive network of leaders distributed throughout the Arab states and further afield. (And contrary to US-Israeli hasbara attempts, Hamas has supportive relations with a number of Gulf Arab states.)
2. But Hamas’s structures inside Gaza are steely and resilient, too. They have been honed through 20 years of confrontation with Israel, in the course of which Israel has assassinated more than 100 Hamas leaders, including the highest layers of its leaders in Gaza. Also, for 38 years ending in 2005, the IDF had direct control over all of Gaza, which it exercised using very repressive means, including very intrusive house searches, mass arrests, torture and other means of intimidation, and extensive systems of movement controls. But Hamas in Gaza (which, ironically, had in an earlier era been incubated by the Israeli occupation forces as an alternative to the secular nationalists of the PLO) overcame all those measures taken against it prior to 2005, regenerating capable new layers of leadership to replace those annihilated by Israel. As I’ve noted previously, each new generation of leadership emerged steelier than the last one.
3. Many Israelis close to the government have suggested that Abu Mazen’s US-trained Fateh forces could be brought into Gaza from the West Bank and help Israel both to police Gaza and to impose a political endgame on a defeated Hamas. That is impossible, for two reasons. First, Hamas is not about to be defeated– so if Fateh forces do come into Gaza, it will be through a negotiated agreement between the two Palestinian movements, not through the imposition of Israeli-Fateh force on Hamas. Second, the Fateh forces are already coming under considerable pressure in the West Bank, where opinion has shifted sharply in favor of Hamas since Israel began this war December 27. The rising tide of criticism that Abu Mazen faces in his comfortable Ramallah home-base will not allow him to enter Gaza as an Israeli proxy. If he did, he might lose Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank to Hamas. Today, Abu Mazen has made clear that he won’t accept a role as Israeli cat’s-paw in Gaza.
4. Might Israel seek to impose a solution on Hamas by bringing in Arab or international forces to replace the IDF as it withdraws? This, too, is a quite illusory goal. No country is going to send forces into Gaza to replace (or even more, supplement) the IDF presence there unless it has credible guarantees that this deployment will not expose it to Hamas’s opposition both within Gaza and possibly far beyond. Every country recognizes that the desperate situation of the population in Gaza means that any security system that is imposed on them will be harshly resisted. Also, no country is going to deploy forces there without guarantees that Gaza can simultaneously be opened back up to the world economy. No country wants to openly collaborate with Israel in maintaining the siege on Gaza’s people.
5. Israelis and its backers in Washington and elsewhere also need to understand the region-wide and global implications of any prolongation of the infantry (and air and naval) actions against Gaza’s people. The longer this war goes on, the higher the regional stakes rise. At some point– in Gaza as in Lebanon in 2006– Israel’s leaders themselves will start crying out for a way out. So will the United States, which has its own very extensive interests in the region and whose forces are noticeably more over-stretched than they were in 2006. The terms on which Israel is able to extricate itself from the mess it has created in Gaza will become more unfavorable for it with every day the war continues. Better for Israel to nail down the exit/end-game now, rather than wait any more days. (So they may hope to kill another two dozen Hamas leaders if they can just carry on fighting– possibly including the elected Prime Minister and Foreign Minister? It would change nothing, see #2 above. But killing Haniyeh or Zahhar would certainly have broad political/security consequences throughout the region.)
6. All the above proves that the only way for Israel to minimize the damage it ends up suffering from the present, very ill-chosen war of choice is by winning the agreement of the Hamas leadership to the terms of a negotiated ceasefire for Gaza. Hamas leader Meshaal, who has been calling for a renewed ceasefire throughout the war, has clearly laid out the movement’s terms for it. It must be, he said, a ceasefire that is reciprocally binding on both parties (as the previous six-month ceasefire was.) But this time, unlike in the previous ceasefire, Israel must be obligated to follow through on the commitment to lift the siege of Gaza.
7. There are many channels through which this indirect negotiation can take place. The mediation effort of Turkish prime minister Rejep Teyip Erdogan may be the most effective. The UN Security Council could play a role in the negotiation (if the US weren’t blocking this). But it will certainly need to play a role in helping orchestrate and perhaps monitor the implementation of the ceasefire.
8. Since the world is now in a crisis over Gaza, the leaders of the P-5 nations at the security Council should all seriously consider the benefits of “using” this crisis as a springboard directly into an authoritative, international peace conference at which the terms of final peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and Syria, and Israel and Lebanon are finally hammered out. The peoples of the region and the security of the world have suffered far too much already from the endless ineffectuality of the efforts the US has made over the past 15 years to exercize complete control over the peacemaking. It is the failure of those efforts that have brought us where we are.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time following the Gaza tragedy on Twitter today. If you’re a member, my name there is helenacobban (strange, but true.) Twitter has this good aggregating facility, so to find everything that anyone there has tagged as “#gaza” go here.
If you’re a Twitter member and you want your contribs on Gaza to show up in the aggregator, just insert “#gaza” into the message.
From the #gaza channel there I learned from Laila el-Haddad that she and her dad are both scheduled to be on CNN at 10 p.m. and 10:30 tonight, EST. Her dad, Dr. Mousa el-Haddad, is a retired pediatrician born and raised in Gaza, now back living there. (Laila’s in the US right now.)
Also from her “tweets” there I got a link to this excellent article by veteran Gaza psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj, which conveys just a little what it’s like to be living in Gaza City right now.
I guess Twitter is one of the places where the new Israeli hasbara effort is trying to have an impact. So far, it seems to be incredibly heavy-handed. English Al-Jazeera is also using Twitter very helpfully– check it out here.
The Egyptian leftists seem to be using something called Jaiku as much as Twitter, but I simply can’t follow too many of these new things all at one time.
If any of you has other good resources to share on the continuing #Gaza crisis, please post them there.

The ground war has begun. Pray for the peoples of Gaza and Israel, especially the hardest hit and most vulnerable among them.
Work for a ceasefire now!