Tuesday, October 14, 2014 

On recognising Palestine.

In general, the principles for recognising a state outlined by Malcolm "Rockets" Rifkind in yesterday's parliamentary debate on Palestine are good ones.  A state needs "a government, an army, a military capability", the second of which is conspicuous by its absence in Gaza and the West Bank, although Hamas if no longer Fatah most certainly has a military capability.  It also has two governments rather than one, he argued, which while ignoring the recent second unity deal between Hamas and Fatah is probably strictly true.  None of this is the fault of the Palestinians themselves, Rifkind said, and it's also the case that Israel has not previously accepted an eventual Palestinian state having a military at all.

Worth remembering then is how the government acted shortly after the vote at the UN giving Palestine observer status, the first step towards being recognised as a state.  William Hague in his inimitable half-pompous half-bluff style addressed parliament beforehand on how the government needed "assurances" from the Palestinians they wouldn't do anything silly with their new status, like try and pursue Israel at the International Criminal Court, as only Africans and ethnic cleansers can be prosecuted there.  Assurances weren't received, so the government despite fully supporting a two-state solution abstained.

No such assurances were demanded in contrast from the successor organisation to the Syrian National Council, when the government deemed it was the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people.  The Syrian National Coalition wasn't a government, didn't have anything like full control of the Free Syrian Army which even then was not an army in a real sense, only having a military capability of sorts, most of which it had but a tenuous connection with.  This hasn't exactly worked out, as we've seen.  Close to irrelevant from the moment it was born, it's now completely irrelevant, with hardly anyone continuing to pretend it has the support of almost any of the groups still fighting.  Except that is for US senators, who've been gullible from the outset.

There are nonetheless problems with recognising Palestine as a state when there is nothing to suggest there will be a peace deal any time soon.  With Hamas still refusing to recognise Israel, and the Netanyahu government now insisting on the Palestinians accepting Israel as the "nation-state of the Jewish people", it's difficult to know whether, even if against all the odds a future Israeli government reached a deal with Fatah it would resolve anything.  John Kerry's Herculean effort to break the impasse foundered principally over the Israeli refusal to release a final tranche of 26 prisoners.  As Mahmoud Abbas or sources close him briefed New Republic, if he couldn't get the Americans to persuade the Israelis to release 26 prisoners, how were they ever going to give him East Jerusalem?  Tzipi Livni, now presented as the member of Netanyahu's coalition most dedicated to reaching a peace deal openly told the Palestinians during the previous round of talks they were right to believe the continued annexation of land in the West Bank and expansion of settlements was designed to make a Palestinian state impossible.  It wasn't official government policy, but it was of some of the Israeli parties.

Perverse as it would be to claim there was never any intention on the part of Netanyahu and his ministers to try and reach a deal, it was on a plan that would have been rejected both by Hamas and the Palestinian street.  As Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat argued with Kerry, the 1967 borders which Israel has done so much to erase were not up for discussion.  Susan Rice, exasperated with the Palestinians quibbling over such minor details, remarked they "could never see the fucking bigger picture", apparently oblivious to how that was precisely what they were thinking about.

Recognising a Palestine not worthy of the name would not be a solution.  In a completely backwards way, the wrecking amendment tabled by the Labour Friends of Israel emphasising recognition should only come after a peace deal almost had it right: difficult as it will be for many to accept, only a deal which includes Hamas is likely to last.  Nor is there much point in engaging in gestures that don't lead anywhere; yesterday's vote was symbolic, as everyone stressed.  Would it however make clear to the Israeli government just how far opinion is turning against it?  To judge by the coverage in Israel itself, as well as the New York Times, the answer on this score at least was yes.

Solidarity is after all next to pointless when you're the one staring down the bullet of a gun, as the Kurds have been discovering the last few weeks.  Palestine is a cause that while always popular, ebbs and flows in the public conciousness: the efforts of apologists for the almost biennial slaughter in Gaza to paint all those who protested as anti-Semites have continued unabated while attention has turned elsewhere.  Nor has public opinion shifted because of Operation Protective Edge; the mood has been heading in this direction for a long time now.  If yesterday's vote further makes clear that "fucking Europe" means what it says, with all the consequences it has for Israeli trade, we might be heading towards the point where the Israeli political class realises it can't go on creating "reality" on the ground and getting away with it.  That will ultimately require American pressure of the kind we've yet to see or are likely to any time soon.  It is however coming.  Whether it will be too late by then for the two state solution remains to be seen.

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10/14/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, July 30, 2014 

Israel snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

If we spend our whole lives bending, what do you think we will get?  What are you trying so hard to understand, aren't the structures obvious yet?

In conflict, there comes a point where the only rational choice left, whether as a result of loss of men, materiel or territory is to surrender.  The alternative is complete annihilation.  This is predicated however on the victorious side accepting it.  Arguably, both positions were adopted respectively as the Sri Lankan forces closed in on the Tamil Tigers' last remaining strongholds, with the result being the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of civilians trapped in the crossfire.  Evidence of war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military following their eventual victory and the Tigers' belated surrender is also abundant.

Relating this to Gaza, Israel has no intention of fully reoccupying the Strip despite calls for just that from the far-right, not least as it would give the militant groups ever greater opportunities of abducting soldiers than "Operation Protective Edge" currently has.  It can't then force a victory that way.  It can try and exhaust the very ability of Hamas and Islamic Jihad etc to resist by keeping the military operation going for so long that their stockpiled caches of rockets and ammunition are completely depleted, but they can't know how long that will take, nor is there a guarantee the political pressure from the international community won't, finally, become too much to ignore.  Similarly, they don't know how many actual fighters Hamas etc have, nor can they trust their actions won't have pushed those with sympathy for the militant groups into joining/rejoining.

Just as there can only be peace through a negotiated settlement, so it appears there can now only be no peace through negotiations.  This is what is meant by the idea of "demilitarising" Gaza, something we've heard a lot of the past few days.  While it's not by any means clear just how "demilitarising" Gaza would be achieved, as the idea of UN monitors disarming Hamas while at the same time trying to provide for the hundreds of thousands reliant on UNRWA's various programmes, the implications are obvious.  Hamas, despite all the obstacles in its path, including the blockade and deteriorating relations with former allies such as Syria and Iran, has succeeded in becoming just that little more like Hezbollah in Lebanon.  During Operation Cast Lead, Hamas or other groups killed 6 Israeli soldiers.  56 have so far been killed in this latest conflict, including 5 inside Israel itself when Hamas used one of its "terror tunnels" to attack a military outpost.

This only underlines how the outside world and almost certainly Israel herself have underestimated Hamas.  We were told Hamas was weak, how it resorted to war as a sign of its decline, and it's true the unity government deal suggested Hamas knew its position was ebbing.  Only now do we discover that in fact Hamas has spent its time in Gaza preparing for just such a conflict, building the underground infrastructure any resistance group confined to a small area of land would need to store its weaponry.  It's also the case the tunnels provided Gazans with necessities denied by the blockade, as well as the odd luxury (if fried chicken can ever be described as such).  Nor is Hamas given any credit for its changes in strategy.  It still has its repellent, antisemitic charter which calls for Israel's destruction, but it has long since moved away from the suicide attacks that did so much damage to the Palestinian cause.  Had they wanted to they could have sent bombers through the tunnels; instead those who haven't been obliterated the second they stepped into Israel went for military targets.

Hamas then must be disarmed, not because its rockets threaten Israeli civilians in any meaningful sense, but as it now seems more formidable than before.  Israel has spent the last few years safe in the knowledge that Fatah is as corrupt and broken as it has ever been, while Hamas has been isolated and contained in Gaza, a situation especially useful for proving the governing party's military mettle prior to elections.  The reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, itself in response to Israel yet again not living up to promises made in an effort to kick start peace talks, led to Israel taking the opportunity presented by the kidnap/murder of three teenagers to pre-emptively strike against Hamas in the West Bank, which in turn brought us to where we are now.

We shouldn't pretend the political mood is shifting against Israel when it isn't. Philip Hammond is right to say it is undermining its own support, but it seems however much Israeli politicians insult and lecture both Obama and John Kerry neither is prepared to take on the lobby in the country. The real, significant change is at the lower level, where the voices of journalists are being heard before false balance is added later.  When hardened hacks say the situation is as bad as they've experienced, and news anchors make clear their disquiet, it's ever harder for the frankly increasingly laughable IDF propaganda to affect the picture.  The "most moral" army on the planet, which once did worry about so-called collateral damage, now tells desperate lies or not even that when it shells UN schools or kills children playing on the beach.  Shortly, if not now, Israel will no longer be able carry on as it long as.  That, even as the slaughter continues, is the very slightest of silver linings.

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7/30/2014 10:58:00 pm | |

Monday, July 28, 2014 

Our country is a graveyard.

Gentlemen, you have transformed
our country into a graveyard
You have planted bullets in our heads,
and organized massacres
Gentlemen, nothing passes like that
without account
All that you have done
to our people is
registered in notebooks

Tawfiq Zayad (Asad AbuKhalil's translation.)

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7/28/2014 06:06:00 pm | |

Thursday, July 24, 2014 

The (Palestinian) right to death.

Shall we cut straight to the chase this time?  As we know, Hamas stores its rockets in schools, hospitals, mosques, ambulances and so on and so forth.  There is a certain amount of truth to these claims: UNRWA has twice in recent days discovered rockets hidden in vacant schools, something it has condemned in the strongest possible terms.  The key word there though is vacant schools; regardless of what Hamas and the other militant groups are, they do not store rockets in places where civilians are sheltering from the violence.

When the IDF then shells an UNRWA school where hundreds of people were taking refuge, it knows precisely what it's doing.  When they say terrorists store weapons in all the places mentioned above they're making clear they reserve the right to attack anywhere; it's a defence in advance.  When those shells kill 15 innocents, all the IDF can do is try and divert some of the blame, even it involves telling easily disprovable lies.  According to the IDF, there was a humanitarian window between 10:00 and 14:00 today when those sheltering in the school could have left to try and find somewhere else to escape the violence.  Instead, Hamas apparently prevented them from leaving.  This is news to UNRWA, who say they tried to coordinate exactly such a window and it was never granted.  In any case, Hamas continued firing from Beit Hanoun.  The IDF was responding to that fire.  By shelling a school they had the exact coordinates of, where they knew there were hundreds of civilians who wanted to leave but couldn't.

Something about this story doesn't add up.  To be precise, this is the sort of story a five-year-old would find difficult to believe.  It leads you to one conclusion, and one conclusion only: the IDF doesn't care what it hits in Gaza, and it will always blame Hamas regardless of how bad it looks.  This is the exact sort of behaviour we condemn when it's the Syrian military doing it.  They're the same kind of lies we find outrageous when they're told by the Russians.  Yet still our representatives will keep repeating Israel has the right to defend itself.  The Palestinians, as said before, only have the right to die.

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7/24/2014 09:26:00 pm | |

Wednesday, July 23, 2014 

When words are not equal.

And what do you know, about alienation honey? Yeah please, explain how it feels.

There are numerous ways to shut down debate when it comes to Israel/Palestine.  The most obvious, and the most used and abused, is to cry antisemitism, although it must be stressed the line between vehement anti-Zionism and antisemitism is often an extremely fine one.  We saw this not too long ago when the Israeli ambassador to the UK denounced a Gerald Scarfe cartoon in the Sunday Times (having read a copy at the weekend, calling it a comic does a disservice to the Beano) as antisemitic on the grounds he portrayed Binyamin Netanyahu with a big nose, encasing Palestinians in a wall where the bricks were held together with blood.  This apparently invoked the blood libel and the age old antisemitic trope of caricaturing Jews as having big/long facial appendages.  As I noted at the time, it's fine for those who want to cry racism to do so on flimsy evidence, as Twitter would be even more unprofitable than it currently is if people didn't; when actual state actors start doing it to silence criticism, something much more sinister is at work.

Today we have a wonderful new example of the disparity in the nature of the discourse.  As they have in the past, Israeli politicians and those defending Israel's actions in Gaza have asked what other countries would do were they subjected to barrages of rockets on their towns and cities.  No nation could tolerate it, they say.  The IDF went so far as to photoshop an image of the House of Commons under just such an attack, questioning what we'd do then.  This obviously ignores how we dealt with the threat posed by the IRA, or how other countries which have faced down terrorist groups have done so without imposing a permanent siege on a heavily populated but relatively small city, but as the Israeli prime minister said, only Israel understands Israel.

When Lib Dem MP David Ward tweeted, saying "If I were in Gaza, would I fire a rocket? Probably yes" he was conducting a similar thought experiment.  You could say it's a rather redundant one, as transplanting yourself into such a situation without also taking into account how different your life would be makes it likely your entire world view would also be drastically altered, but at the same time it raises the question. What would you do? Would you resist as well, even if not necessarily alongside Hamas?  I find it likely I probably would.

Even to pose the question the other way it seems is to provide Hamas with succour, to suggest there is an equivalence between Hamas rockets and Israel defending itself.  Palestinians, as we really should have learned by now, don't have the same right to target those the UN says may have committed war crimes.  Indeed, according to the berk's berk, Tory chairman Grant Shapps, Ward's tweet may have incited violence, while Labour's Douglas Alexander said his "vile comments are as revealing as they are repellent".  Quickly the party issued a statement clarifying the obvious, that he was pointing out how people can be driven to such desperate measures, but not before the Board of Deputies of British Jews said Nick Clegg should expel Ward from the party.  Just as with everything else, words are simply not equal.

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7/23/2014 11:43:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 22, 2014 

It's so fucking funny.

Supposedly, the older you get, the more right-wing you become.  It's strange then that at least when it comes to foreign policy, the more I age, the more to the left I shift.  Perhaps it's because the propaganda accompanying those shilling for war becomes ever more egregious; maybe it's because those selling leaden death are about as plausible as a pig dressed as a chicken; or it could be that as my anger on much else has dimmed, and boy has it dimmed, if anything it still hasn't peaked when civilians are massacred by the "most moral" army on the planet, supported and backed to the hilt by our own wannabe bombers.

We must start though with the shooting down of flight MH17.  Here is the worst example imaginable of what happens when you give heavy weaponry to amateurs, or as could be the case, when professionals are made to answer to dilettantes.  As soon as the news emerged a civilian plane had came down in the area where the eastern Ukrainian rebels have been pushed back to it was apparent what had happened.  Regardless of how the Donetsk People's Republic fighters got their hands on a Buk, whether supplied directly by Russia or captured from the Ukrainians, they couldn't have kept fighting this long without the tacit, barely disguised support of Putin.  He bears a heavy responsibility for the tragedy, and the fact he either refused or failed to pressure the rebels into allowing immediate access to the crash site so investigators could carry out their work speaks of the inhumanity of the Russian president.

This said, there is little many in the west like more than the certainty of past battles.  To hear some commentators and politicians over the last few days you could be forgiven for imagining the Russians themselves had carried out the most heinous, despicable atrocity of recent times.  The strike on MH17 apparently occurred in a vacuum, few of the reports setting out how the Ukrainians had carried out air strikes in the area before last Thursday, at least one missile destroying a house and killing those inside.  Nor have there been such shootings down in the past, it would seem, neither the Korean flight brought down by the Soviets in 1983 or indeed the USS Vincennes incident of 1988 being recalled.

Those quite rightly demanding justice and the handing over of those responsible might well reflect on the punishment given to the US navy crew whom unintentionally killed 290 civilians on Iran Air Flight 655: they received their medals, while the captain got the Legion of Merit.  Few have considered the irony either of the media traipsing all over what would normally be a crime scene, access carefully controlled so as not to lose evidence or contaminate the area.  Indeed, if the scene had been quickly handed over to investigators, it's possible the bodies of the victims could have stayed where they landed just as long if not longer than they did; that was certainly the case with Lockerbie.

Watching last Friday's session at the United Nations Security Council was an instruction in how diplomacy does and doesn't work.  The anger of US ambassador Samantha Power was palpable, her words at times mawkish.  "We now all know the letter I stands for infant," she said.  It doesn't of course when it comes to Gaza, where instead it must stand for irrelevant.  If the same politicians who have barely been able to contain their contempt and rage at Russia over MH17 directed even a tenth of that feeling at Israel, the pressure would have almost certainly already told on Netanyahu.

Israel instead is held to different standards, always has been, always will be.  "No one understands Israel but Israel," as the Israeli prime minister apparently told John Kerry.  It's the story taken up by apologists, as well as those who don't bother to sugar the pill.  When we highlight the disparity in the number of casualties between the two sides, the context is we want more Israelis to be killed to even things up.  It's also extremely distasteful to share pictures of dead children, because doing so "devalues the currency of shared humanity", while if we do it for the Palestinians, we should also do it for the children of every other conflict or disaster.  God forbid that we see the victims of a war where one side has rudimentary rockets and rifles and the other has tanks and the finest weaponry the west can supply.

If it wasn't apparently designed to infuriate, the IDF Twitter account could be taken for satire.  We're told the ground invasion is to destroy the tunnels Hamas hides its missiles in, but they conceal them in every civilian building too.  Israel is threatened by Hamas fighters using the tunnels to attack settlements just outside the Strip, despite them being obliterated the moment they step out of them, yet when Hamas kills Israeli soldiers inside Gaza they're still terrorists, rather than resisting an invading force.  The media can't repeat enough the great lengths the IDF goes to avoid civilian casualties, despite multiple incidents every day that suggest at best either lack of care or at worst a complete indifference, yet similar statements from Hamas never make the cut.  When civilians don't leave despite being warned to flee, they're either human shields or Hamas wouldn't let them go.  That nowhere in Gaza is safe doesn't matter.  Hamas is responsible.

We've heard it all before, and no doubt we'll hear it again.  One thing we do seem to have been spared this time is the Palestinians don't feel pain such is their martyrdom ideation line, perhaps because the grieving for those killed has been there for all to see.  So too we've seen more reports from the "Sderot cinema" or other vantage points where an extreme, tiny minority of Israelis go to watch the carnage being wreaked on Gaza, cheering it on, just as vengeful and filled with hate as we're so often informed Palestinian children are brought up to be.  Whether they really approve of the horrific consequences on the ground, when 19 children were killed in a single strike, apparently just as guilty as the solitary target, we can't know.  They surely however demand justice just as much as the infants on board the MH17 did.

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7/22/2014 11:12:00 pm | |

Friday, July 18, 2014 

A pound of flesh.


Three branches of the Entez family, around 60 people, were sheltering in a house in Zeitoun when it was struck by an artillery shell shortly after 8.45pm. Three of the family were killed – Abed Ali, 24, Mohamed Ibrahim, 13, and Mohamed Salem, two – and four injured. Three of the exterior walls were destroyed in the blast.

In the wreckage of the home on Friday morning, Salem Entez, 29, Mohamed Salem's father, approached the Guardian with a plastic bag, which he opened to reveal pieces of flesh he was collecting for burial. "This is my son," he said.

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7/18/2014 01:49:00 pm | |

Wednesday, July 16, 2014 

You will be buried in the same box as a killer.

Back in the good old days of the Cold War, the estimated time between the warning a Soviet ICBM was heading towards your area and the actual strike itself was four minutes, although most think even that was a tad optimistic.  It certainly didn't leave long to get to anywhere that might be safer, unless say you lived within running distance of an underground station and weren't knocked over and trampled to death by all the others with the same idea.

Fortunately, our good friends the Americans remain the only people to have decided to go nuclear.  Less fortunately for the Palestinians, the latest humanitarian gesture on the part of the IDF is to fire a "warning" missile at houses they intend to destroy, not just leaving it to chance the occupants will answer the phone.  Caught on film is one house getting a "knock on the roof", then being struck by the following, far more destructive projectile.  The time between the warning and the attack? Four minutes.

We shouldn't feel sorry though for the owner and his family, or indeed any others living in the building as multiple families usually do in the crowded Gaza strip.  The owner's sons are apparently Hamas members, therefore completely justifying the razing of his house.  Moreover, as the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, since Hamas rejected the terms of the proposed Egyptian ceasefire everything that happens in Gaza from now on is solely their responsibility.

Not that it wasn't already.  A hospital struck by an Israeli missile was clearly a Hamas hospital, while the 55 UN installations either damaged or destroyed (since June 1st) were UN/Hamas installations.  The water supply infrastructure the UN warns is in danger of collapse due to the damage inflicted on it is a Hamas water supply.  How can it not be when Hamas members use it? The four cousins between the ages of 9 and 11 killed by an Israeli shell today were on a Hamas beach, inside a Hamas fishing shed, and it was witnessed by Hamas journalists who treated the survivors.  All 47 of the children killed so far have been Hamas children, still terrorists, just smaller.

Israel doesn't just have the right to defend itself, it has a responsibility to do so. The Palestinians by contrast don't just have the right to die, they have a responsibility to.  Hamas might rule the Gaza strip, and they might be responsible for everything that happens there, but they don't have the right to defend their territory, to resist.  Their use of rockets is a war crime, as they are too indiscriminate to properly target anything or anyone that could be considered as legitimate, not that there is anywhere in Israel that could be considered a legitimate military target anyway.

To step back from rocking the snark for just a second, Hamas was far too hasty in dismissing the Egyptian ceasefire proposal.  You can understand why they did; it only offered further talks rather anything substantive.  When we've been here twice before, Israel making promises to loosen the siege of Gaza that have subsequently come to nothing, it's not a surprise Hamas wants something this time they can hold the Israelis to.  In both previous examples it was also Israel rather than Hamas that broke the fragile peace.  Nonetheless, when the option is on the table to halt the suffering of the people Hamas claims to represent, to not at least give it a chance is close to unconscionable.

True, it's far easier to sell a ceasefire when the number of casualties on your side is 1, rather than 200 as it was yesterday for the Palestinians and there's little to show for it.  It doesn't however absolve Hamas of continuing with a policy which failed in the past and is going to again this time.  Israel has no intention of lifting the siege of Gaza, nor does Egypt under Sisi have any intention of making life easier for a movement that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood.  The only way of putting Israel under pressure over the Palestinians is to threaten and if necessary introduce boycotts, just as John Kerry warned Netanyahu were on the horizon if he continued to refuse to countenance even the slightest gestures needed to keep the talks with Fatah on track.  Netanyahu's response was to "wag his finger" at the US secretary of state.  Responsibility, as we've seen, is something only the Palestinians fail to exercise.

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7/16/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, July 09, 2014 

These perfect abattoirs.

Only a god can bruise.  Only a god can soothe.  Only a god reserves the right to forgive those who revile him.

How many ways are there to say exactly the same thing differently?  For those whom (rightly) argue that history doesn't repeat, it's difficult to explain why it is Israel and Hamas seem stuck in a perpetual loop of action and reaction, neither side moving forward, neither falling behind, while the poor bastards stuck in the middle have to suffer the consequences over and over again.

If there is a slight difference this time round, it's that Hamas can't really claim it was Israel that started it.  The kidnap and murder of Gilad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel, and Eyal Yifrah may not have been carried out by Hamas members, or with the knowledge of the leadership, but nor have they so much as condemned the heinous crime. Anyone mentioning one of the teenagers was old enough to serve in the IDF, as all Israelis are required to, or that they were settlers (or rather the children of settlers) is making abominable excuses. They had as much right to life as Muhammad Abu Khudair did, the 17-year-old abducted and set alight in an apparent act of vengeance.

As usual, the response of Hamas has played straight into Israel's hands.  If they had wanted they could have presented Israel's actions in the immediate aftermath of the abduction as what they were: cynical long planned manoeuvres designed to undermine the recently announced unity government.  Arresting hundreds of Hamas members wasn't about finding the boys, not least as we now know the Israelis must have realised it was unlikely they were alive, but about getting a reaction.  Naturally, the rockets from Gaza once again began to fly.  Coupled with the understandable anger on the Palestinian street at the murder of Abu Khadir, especially when Israeli politicians used irresponsibly inciteful language, the events of the past few days have been all too familiar.

Not that there is an equivalence between the missiles fired into Israel and those once again devastating the Gaza strip. Even the more advanced Katyushas obtained/manufactured by Hamas and the other militant groups kill only extremely rarely; their main purpose is to cause fear, to let Israelis know there will be no peace without a fair settlement that also includes them.  The Israeli missiles by contrast, provided often by American military aid, only extremely rarely fail to kill. They are also fired without compunction for the innocents caught up with those who might be militant members. The deaths of six others is a price deemed worth it for removing a Hamas terrorist, no matter how low down the pecking order, from this plane of existence.

It's also of course about collective punishment.  It doesn't matter the whole of Gaza may as well be a free fire zone, or there's nowhere the 1.7 million civilians can escape to, the tunnels into Egypt that once provided a lifeline mostly shut down by new president Sisi, the real victims are those in southern Israel.  No nation could put up with such rocket fire, say the Israelis and Americans as one, except say Syria, where the "moderates" (aka Islamists far more radical than Hamas) we support mortar Damascus every day. The Palestinians simply don't have the same right to defend themselves.

This supposedly was a battle neither side wanted, only for them to discover there wasn't a way around it. Bombing Gaza never turns out badly for whichever prime minister orders it. Hamas by contrast seems to believe the only way to get back its previous levels of support is by standing up to the onslaught, apparently unconcerned by how many civilians die in the process, thinking each death will only create more resistance.  Such grim calculus, such cynicism on both sides.

At this point, it's always worth remembering the Quartet's special envoy is a certain Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

Jesus fucking wept.

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7/09/2014 11:29:00 pm | |

Thursday, July 03, 2014 

A price to be paid.

I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.

There can be no forgiveness for child murderers.  May God avenge their blood.  They sanctify cruelty, and we mercy and compassion.

Rhetoric bound to incite, designed to incite, is nothing new in the Middle East.  Calls for revenge are commonplace, with both sides in Israel/Palestine issuing them.  Rarely though has an Israeli prime minister been so forthright, so irresponsible in their choice of words as Benjamin Netanyahu has since the discovery of the bodies of the three missing Israeli teenagers, presumed murdered by Palestinian terrorists.  "They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by animals," his initial statement read.  "We'll expand the battle as much as needed.  No matter where they hide, we’ll reach them until the last one and we’ll take our revenge," he added in his eulogy at the boys' funeral.

Hours later, after protests in Jerusalem which saw hundreds chanting "death to Arabs", 17-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair was abducted, his body later found dumped, apparently set alight.  Before then, as Human Rights Watch reports, two Palestinians had already been deliberately run over by Israeli settlers, one an 9-year-old girl.  Despite Ynetnews reporting on mobs in Jerusalem attacking Arabs, most attention has instead focused on Palestinians in the occupied east of the city clashing with police, amid a strengthening of the IDF presence on the edge of Gaza.

The revelation the Israeli authorities knew almost from the outset it was extremely unlikely Gilad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel, and Eyal Yifrah had survived for long after they were kidnapped does not come as a surprise.  The phone call one of the boys managed to make to the emergency services included audible gunshots; these were removed from the released version.  The car used in the abduction was recovered, without the fact blood had been found inside being made public.  Indeed, it seems as though they also knew who was responsible almost from the outset, with the two men since named as believed to be the kidnappers disappearing within 24 hours of the boys going missing.  Despite this, something that looks exactly like a campaign designed to undermine Hamas in the West Bank was undertaken, with the arrest of at least 400 men and an influx of 2,000 IDF soldiers.  7 Palestinians were also killed in the period following the abduction, four of them teenagers.

Nor does it seem despite the repeated claims of Netanyahu and others that Hamas had any real involvement in the murder of the three hitch-hiking teens.  Why would they having just succeeded in reaching an agreement with Fatah to share power?  Instead, it seems a rogue element recently distanced itself further from Hamas was behind the kidnapping, probably designed to undermine precisely the agreed accord between the previously warring factions.  With the Netanyahu coalition denouncing Mahmoud Abbas for trying to achieve Palestinian unity, announcing the construction of a further 1,500 homes in illegal settlements as a riposte, any excuse to disrupt Hamas further would have been seized upon.  It just so happens they had an extremely good one.

Whether the Israeli public will react with disgust to learning the truth was kept from them for so long remains to be seen.  The response to the discovery of the bodies was always going to result in an outpouring of grief and anger, yet even by the standards of the conflict it's been a shock to the system.  Smiling teenage girls posting photos of themselves holding racist slogans; soldiers showing off their weapons, one image with "revenge" spelled out in bullets; 35,000 likes for a Facebook page demanding retribution, described as "passionate" in the New York Times.  If there's a single encouraging sign to take from all of this, and it's an extremely slight one, the swift denunciation of the murder of Muhammad Abu Khudair by the US suggests they viewed the language used by Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett among others as beyond the pale, bound to exacerbate tensions rather than attempt to calm the situation.  That the Israeli prime minister has since toned down his rhetoric, albeit far too late, could be a sign of pressure being applied.  Even so, one again fears for the trapped, beleaguered people of Gaza.

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7/03/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, January 14, 2014 

Small mercies.

This septic isle can at times seem exactly that.  Whether it's politicians competing as to who can be the meanest to newcomers over a non-existent problem, documentary makers trying their hardest to portray benefit claimants in the least flattering light possible, the succession of aged celebrities currently standing trial on sexual assault charges, chief police officers (allegedly) threatening to use the Official Secrets Act against whistleblowers, or newspapers only able to discuss "difficult" topics if a fucking soap opera tackles one, things can get a bit grim.

We don't however live in a country where this passes as authoritative, informed comment: a place where black, despite looking really quite dark from whichever angle you look at it, is in fact white; and where you don't just mourn the passing of one war criminal at a time but also defend the honour of another, George W. Bush having been so cruelly misunderstood, only now regarded more favourably in comparison to the treacherous Obama.  Thank heavens for small mercies, eh?

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1/14/2014 09:54:00 pm | |

Monday, January 13, 2014 

The anti-Mandela.

Ariel Sharon was, in many ways, the anti-Mandela.  Whereas Mandela took up the gun relatively briefly and then spent the rest of his life pursuing a peaceful end to apartheid, Sharon never let a rifle or more accurately later, a Hellfire missile, slip from his grasp.  Not that you would necessarily know this from some of the obituaries on the man or from the state funeral he was given, attended by both the US vice president and our very own Tony Blair.  Never has a politician who was simply complying with international law when he ordered the evacuation of settlers from the Gaza strip, the one act in a long life of war that can be even vaguely described as peaceful, been so fêted and eulogised.

You could perhaps understand the coverage or the tributes if Sharon's disregard for civilian life or breaches of international law were one-offs in a career that spanned 60 years.  "Arik" however started as he meant to go on: he led the attack on the village of Qibya in the West Bank in 1953 in which at least 69 of the residents, two-thirds women and children, were killed.  Not that he was particularly concerned with the lives of his own men, either: always knowing better, in the 1956 Sinai campaign he ignored orders and drove his paratroop into the Mitla pass, where Egyptian forces were lying in wait.  38 under his command died.

The architect of the war in Lebanon, a war which failed in every single one of its aims, Sharon is most notorious for having been in command when the Phalangist militia carried out the massacres in Sabira and Shatila in retaliation for the assassination of Bachir Gemayel, wrongly believing Palestinian militants to have been responsible.  Around 2,000 are believed to have been killed in what was later regarded as an act of genocide, the aftermath filmed and reported on by numerous journalists.  Sharon was found "indirectly responsible" by the Kahan commission, yet still refused to resign as defence minister, eventually compromising by becoming minister without portfolio.

Sharon was also one of the biggest supporters of the settler movement, being completely open in his justification for the grabbing of land in the occupied territories: whatever they took he believed would stay theirs forever.  After helping to spark the second intifada with his deliberately provocative visit to the Temple Mount, declaring that the site would always remain under Israeli control, he became prime minister six months later, tying the "disengagement" from Gaza with the construction of the West Bank barrier, a policy he had previously opposed.  For all the surmising from some that the abandonment of Gaza, or rather what has become the perpetual siege of the territory would lead to dismantlement of settlements in the West Bank, the building of the wall, far from the 1967 border, was designed to become the de facto border for any eventual Palestinian state.  Not that this would be a state we would recognise: Sharon's vision was of a completely demilitarised series of statelets, the settlements that split and divide the West Bank remaining in place.

For all his failings however, Sharon the politician was a pioneer.  The evacuation of Gaza was a masterstroke, as the tributes have proved.  At the cost of a minuscule number of settlements, Sharon was reinvented as a mythical man of peace.  He was never anything of the kind.  Ever since his incapacitation the settlements in the West Bank have gone on growing, the Palestinians left with an ever dwindling amount of land that is barely even connected.  Israeli politicians, when they've so much as bothered to go through the motions, have rejected even the most generous offers from the negotiators of the Palestinian Authority, knowing full well that the longer they delay and prevaricate the lesser the chance that a Palestinian state will ever be established.

What better a sign of his creation of this new reality than Tony Blair's tribute?  Easy as it is to forget, Blair is the head of the Quartet of states and organisations meant to be pushing the two sides towards a settlement.  Palestinians watching today will see the envoy of pretty much the rest of the world eulogising a man who, as Blair himself said, often left "considerable debris in his wake".  Those who express warranted distaste when Palestinian prisoners released under goodwill gestures are welcomed home as heroes regardless of their crimes should bear today in mind: a state founded on terrorism giving a war criminal the very highest honour it can bestow.  And we wonder why the Arab street remains suspicious of the West and its double standards.

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1/13/2014 09:23:00 pm | |

Monday, December 03, 2012 

Ah, consistency.

Is there even the slightest logic to the coalition's policy on Israel-Palestine?  Last week William Hague, his mojo restored, stood up in the Commons and outlined how we would be abstaining on the recognition vote at the UN unless the Palestinians provided us with "assurances".  Requested "assurances" were duly not provided, and so we abstained while a mere 138 voted in favour, including some of our major European allies.

Israel has since responded in the only way she knows how, by declaring that a further 3,000 new homes will be built, illegally, on the occupied West Bank.  As a result, Foreign Office minister Alastair Burt summoned the Israeli ambassador to let him know our deep displeasure.  Here's a thought: considering that one of the assurances we required from the Palestinians was that they drop preconditions to talks, their only one being that the Israelis declare a halt to all settlement building in the occupied territories, wouldn't it have made sense to vote in favour of their first step towards statehood when the threatened Israeli response was to, err, accelerate settlement building even further?  Just who is it here that's in breach of international law?  When are we finally going to recognise that there isn't going to be a negotiated peace when Israel has no intention of evacuating the West Bank settlements, the presence of which make a Palestinian state unviable?  When, in short, are we going to start treating Israel as the rogue state it is?

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12/03/2012 08:20:00 pm | |

Wednesday, November 28, 2012 

I'd like to give William Hague a few assurances as well.

How times change.  In Tony Blair's dog days, his refusal to push for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hizbullah-Lebanon war was in contrast to the stance of David Cameron's newly detoxified Conservative party, with William Hague denouncing the destruction of much of southern Lebanon as "disproportionate".  To begin with, it looked as though the Conservatives allied with the Liberal Democrats would continue with this more critical stance on Israel now they were in power: Cameron, visiting Turkey in the aftermath of the raid on the Gaza flotilla, described the impoverished and cut-off territory as a "prison camp".

It couldn't last.  After Hague decided that Hamas had "principal responsibility" for the week long slaughter fest in Gaza, ignoring entirely the timeline of events leading up to the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabar, and how this was by no means the first time Israel has launched an attack on the Palestinians with an election fact approaching, we now have the truly pitiful decision to abstain on the application for non-member observer status at the UN.  In the first place, to demand assurances from the Palestinian Authority in itself shows the disparity between what we ask of Israel, whom we merely chastise when they steal the identities of British citizens to kill a minor Hamas figure, and the recognised representatives of a people we helped put in this mess.

It's also that at least the first of the "assurances" demanded is so outrageous.  Just what exactly is the point of requiring the PA to return to peace talks without conditions when it's so abundantly clear that Israel is not prepared to make even the slightest of concessions, even as a gesture of goodwill?  If there is ever going to be a negotiated peace and a two-state solution, then the building of settlements in the occupied West Bank has to end.  It really is that simple.  Requesting that the PA set aside this most basic of requirements, one which it has to be remembered the Obama administration also demanded from the Israelis and was ignored over is ridiculous.

Indeed, this refusal by the Israelis to put even a temporary halt to settlement building is exactly what led to the process at the UN from the PA in the first place: they recognised, sadly, that the talks were going nowhere due to consistent Israeli intransigence, often backed by the US.  The Palestine papers revealed that Condoleezza Rice told them they would never have a state if they didn't accept that the settlements of Ariel and Ma'ale Adumim would remain Israeli territory, regardless of the illegality of both under international law.  The PA by contrast offered what even Tzipi Livni recognised was the "biggest Jerusalem in history", and yet was still rebuffed.

Easier to understand is Hague's second required "assurance", that should the PA gain non-member observer status they won't attempt to pursue Israel at the International Criminal Court.  Just as we were embarrassed by the attempt to have Livni arrested when she visited the UK, so we would be forever in the US's bad books should their true foremost ally find itself in trouble at the ICC.  The US of course refused to join lest its own overseas adventures come under scrutiny, leading Israel to make the same decision despite initially signing the Rome statute, most "moral military" on the planet or otherwise.

Hague's claim then that the PA's attempt to gain recognition could set back the peace process is a nonsense.  There is no peace process to be set back, for the reason that the situation on the ground has changed, both in Israel and Palestine.  Never has it been so clear that Israel's aim is to make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible, such is the continued colonisation of the West Bank and the near to completion construction of the wall separating the occupied territory from Israel.  Anything less than something approaching the 1967 borders will be unacceptable to the Palestinian people, and Israel has no intention of repeating the evacuation of Gaza, even if it were to lead to peace.  At the same time, the PA has become almost an irrelevance, weakened both by Israel's emasculation of the West Bank and the rise of Hamas.  Rightly or not, the Palestinian and the Arab street see the resistance of Hamas as achieving results, while the PA's recognition of Israel has led to 20 years of unrelenting occupation.

If anything, the reluctance of some western states to support the Palestinian bid is likely to further weaken the PA and so the merest chance of a return to negotiations than it being the other way around.  They have after all tried renouncing violence, recognising Israel, face-to-face talks under successive American administrations, and applying for full recognition from the UN Security Council, all so far for nowt.  Non-member observer status would provide a moment of respite.  By not supporting even this slight move towards statehood for Palestine, it just further highlights the utter hypocrisy of our support for some liberation movements while stymieing the baby steps of others.

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11/28/2012 11:59:00 pm | |

Wednesday, November 21, 2012 

Already looking forward to the next.

The news coming through this evening that a ceasefire has been agreed between Israel and Hamas is undoubtedly welcome.  Any halt to the violence, however short-lived, is to be applauded.  In practice however, the agreement brokered by Egypt has done little more than return us to the situation prior to the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari last Wednesday.  While in theory the deal calls for the opening of the crossings into Gaza, the implementation of the lifting of the economic blockade of the strip is only to be discussed after 24 hours of "de-escalation", more than suggesting that as has happened before, further progress is highly unlikely.  Dubious as it always was that Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak would have countenanced any loosening of the blockade when the whole point of "Operation Pillar of Defense" was to show themselves as strong, decisive military leaders before a waiting electorate, the deal seems to have merely set up the next assault on a terrorised territory and its imprisoned people.

The deal seems to have achieved little for Hamas either.  Once again, their infrastructure in Gaza has been either destroyed or substantially damaged, and the people that both support and oppose them have suffered terribly in the process.  They may have shown they've acquired longer range missiles, yet the ability to fire rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem serves little purpose when they either fail to hit their targets (if there is one in the first place) or are intercepted by the Iron Dome defence system.  The initial sounding of raid alarms in those cities might have a psychological effect in the short term and lead a few Israelis to wonder whether they really are being wisely led by their politicians, especially seeing as it was only after the assault on Gaza began that the Fajr-5s were fired, but it's liable to be fleeting in the extreme.

Also overstated has been the impact of the Arab spring.  Apart from visits to Gaza by the Egyptian prime minister, the Turkish foreign minister and a slight increase in the number of (newly elected) politicians denouncing Israel in no uncertain terms, hardly anything has really changed.  Indeed, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have picked up where Mubarak left off, acting as intermediaries for ceasefire deals while refusing to open the crossing into Gaza that would have let some of the population escape the bombing.  When the far-right Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman praises Mohamed Morsi for his role, then it's clear that while the faces have changed the same old alliances remain.

Nor have our leaders altered their tune one iota.  Who knows whether behind the scenes pressure was put on Netanyahu not to launch a ground offensive as his predecessors did; what we do know is that there's been barely a word of public criticism for how the offensive was conducted.  Israel has once again got away with targeting ambulances, journalists, and targets that simply can't be in any way construed as connected with Hamas, while the deaths of innocents alongside alleged militants are no longer even "collateral damage", rather "operational failures".  

Look at the difference when it comes to an attack within Israel: the explosion on the bus in Tel Aviv happened directly outside the building where the IDF has been conducting its media operations from.  For all we know, the person who apparently threw the bomb onto the bus may well have been specifically targeting someone who works there and had just left the building.  Instantly however, both the wider media and politicians referred to it as a terrorist attack.  If that's a terrorist attack, and it's a description I wouldn't demur from, then what was the extra-judicial killing of Ahmed al-Jabari, a man who Israel had long worked with to contain the situation in Gaza, an attack that also killed innocent bystanders?

As so often in the past, this difference in approach is then reinforced by reporting that at worst actively dehumanises the Palestinians.  Jodi Rudoren's report for the New York Times of the Dalu family's funerals seemed determined to emphasise these apparent differences: they don't so much mourn as accept their fate, such is the "culture of martyrdom that pervades this place", nor are they "overcome with emotion nor fed up, perhaps because the current casualty count pales in comparison to the 1,400 lost four years ago".  Rudoren's inference seems clear: only when so many are killed does their numbness and anger get overwhelmed by sadness.  In posts on her Facebook page, Rudoren went further, saying the reaction from some of those who had lost relatives was "ho-hum".  Even the usually excellent Jeremy Bowen made similar references on his 10 O'Clock News broadcast last night.

It's true that some of the most hardline figures in Gaza do put martyrdom and resistance above everything else, and this is always going to be most evident when the international media are around.  That this is anything approaching universal however is utter nonsense, as countless photographs from Gaza show.  Whether it's the death of family members or the loss of their home, Palestinians, amazingly, do have emotions.  Cut them and they bleed.  

Remarkably, it's also the case as was shown during Operation Cast Lead that a minority of Israelis positively delight in the bombing of Gaza, when hundreds travelled to a hill overlooking the territory to get a better view of the assault.  We don't though tend to hear about how Israel has a militaristic culture, and that Arabs are too often treated as second-class citizens, as the former would be a generalisation much too far which would only ever feature, if at all, in a comment piece.  Rudoren it should be noted later clarified her comments after she was criticised by the Mondoweiss blog, but her piece in the Times has not been altered to reflect that.  Where she was right is this is a conflict that no one in the world actually wants to seem to solve, and today's events have not taken us closer to any sort of resolution.

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11/21/2012 11:44:00 pm | |

Tuesday, November 20, 2012 

Neither one thing nor the other.

I realise it's a motif I've been over-dependent on recently, but such has been the scale of bullshit of late that it's been difficult not to feel like we've been mysteriously plunged into a parallel universe.  A couple of months back David Cameron appeared before the UN general assembly, and reaching for the most emotive imagery he could muster, he said the UN had been stained by the blood of children killed in Syria.  Not, you'll note, that China and Russia had the deaths of protesters on their consciences through their blocking of security council resolutions, but that the UN itself was in some way responsible for the impasse.  As for our own role, we naturally couldn't be blamed for having abused the doctrine of the responsibility to protect in Libya, overthrowing Gaddafi when the UN resolution which authorised the no-fly zone called for a ceasefire between the two sides, and so setting Russia and China dead against any repeat.

The use of language similar to Cameron's could of course never be countenanced in relation to Israel.  It doesn't matter how many minors are accidentally killed, or even deliberately targeted, of which there have been 1,338 since September 2000 in both the West Bank and Gaza, their blood simply isn't worth as much.  The closest our politicians have ever come to denouncing Israeli tactics is debating whether or not reducing much of Lebanon and Gaza to rubble is "disproportionate".  Those with exceptional memories might recall that during the Israel-Lebanon-Hizbullah war William Hague went so far as to use the D word, much to the outrage of Stephen Pollard.  Once in power, the Tories have returned to type, with Hague declaring Hamas "bears principal responsibility" for the latest murderous assault on an tiny, impoverished, cut-off territory.

Imagine my lack of surprise then when Hague stood up in the Commons today and announced that we would recognise the newly formed National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people.  This is a group formed out of the ashes of the Syrian National Council, the previous attempt by exiles to rally support for the Syrian opposition, and one which had next to no support from within Syria itself, reminiscent of the exile groups which had a major hand in pushing for the invasion of Iraq.  Despite claims that this new formation is more representative and appealing to those actually fighting Assad's forces, rebels in Aleppo have already rejected its imposition on them.

Our vote of confidence in the national coalition is also in spite of how its leader, described almost universally as a moderate in our press, has some views that would doubtless sit comfortably with the more fundamentalist fighters.  Angry Arab notes that Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, in a series of posts on his blog, variously describes one of Saddam Hussein's positives as he "terrified the Jews" (amongst other anti-Semitic remarks), Shiites as "rejectionists" and Facebook as a possible US-Israeli intelligence ploy.  He also believes masturbation causes TB, and praises Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Egyptian cleric the Tories took such a disliking to when Ken Livingstone brought him to London.

Isn't this almost irrelevant when the most important thing is to get rid of Assad?  Well yes, but clearly we have different standards when it comes to the Palestinians.  By any measure Hamas has far more popular support than this latest Syrian concoction, and yet we refuse to recognise it and its right to defend the people of Gaza against Israeli aggression.  Leaving aside Hamas, William Hague also made clear today that the government is yet to make its mind up as to whether support the move by the Palestinian Authority to apply for recognition at the UN general assembly.  If we won't even support the move by the Fatah leadership when we supposedly still want two states, why pursue such similarly futile gestures when it comes to Syria?

It's fairly apparent that despite the whisperings in the ear of Nick Robinson we have little to no intention of arming the Syrian opposition, let alone going further and actively intervening.  The most we seem willing to provide is communications equipment, and frankly, that's one thing the Syrian fighters on the ground seem to have plenty of.  I'm incidentally all for the arming of the Syrian opposition if the anti-aircraft missiles the rebels are desperate for head straight afterwards to Gaza to be used in self-defence against fighter jets, but not if they're soon being used to target passenger planes, something al-Qaida has previous in.

Our position is ultimately neither one thing nor the other.  We support the Saudis in wanting to maintain the Sunni domination of the Middle East while weakening Iran, not so much as mentioning the unpleasantness in Qatif, Bahrain or indeed in Jordan, and yet we leave the actual arming of those pursuing what has turned into a sectarian war in Syria to other people.  This peeves the Saudis and Qataris, and also peeves those like me who see the hypocrisy in our position of wanting a free Middle East except in those places where we always have and always will support despots.  Meanwhile, we ignore those who've yearned for their own state for over 60 years, while recognising a group which was created last Tuesday and has no real support whatsoever as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people.  Once upon a time, we were colonalists.  Now we simply act as though we still are.

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11/20/2012 11:47:00 pm | |

Monday, November 19, 2012 

The cynicism of a terrorist state, exacerbated by the uselessness of the media.


There seems to be only one constant when it comes to Israel and Palestine: media coverage becomes more and more unbalanced.  Every separate assault by the Israelis on Gaza is treated as though it occurs in a vacuum, and is only launched with great reluctance in response to rocket fire from the territory Israel so bravely disengaged from.  At the end of last week the BBC news website made it look as though it was Hamas attacking Israel, and not the other way round.  There is very little, if any examination of the difference between the missiles launched from Gaza by resistance groups, often home-made, antiquated and weak, and the finest weaponry money can buy as used by the Israelis, and yet these attacks are reported as though they are all but identical.

Away from the accounts provided by sites such as Electronic Intifada, which notes this latest outbreak of violence effectively began when a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by the IDF while he was playing football, sparking a wave of retaliatory rocket attacks, the most honest piece to feature in a British newspaper was in the Graun, written by the deputy head of Hamas's political bureau.  This is how skewed reporting on Gaza has become: while the IDF tweets incessantly and Israeli politicians and spokesmen use almost the exact same formulations as they did four years previous, all of which is lapped up by the mainstream media and barely questioned, those associated with Hamas, a supposed terrorist organisation dedicated to the destruction of Israel, are the ones telling the closest to the truth.

We shouldn't be in the slightest bit surprised then at the specific targeting of buildings used by Hamas's TV station (as well as foreign journalists) to try and get their side of the story across.  One such strike today killed three members of Islamic Jihad, with the IDF tweeting soon after that the men were hiding there and "not to be interviewed".  How they knew all of this is anyone's guess; what's clear is that their intelligence isn't always so good, as shown by yesterday's strike on the home of the Dalou family.  Believing that a Hamas target was inside the house, the IDF apparently wasn't aware or more likely didn't care that a strike on him would also kill innocents.  As it was, 10 members of the Dalou family were massacred, including 4 children.  The target wasn't among them.

Then again, in the eyes of Israeli politicians, the IDF and indeed much of the media, there is no such thing as an innocent Gazan citizen.  Anyone and anything can be targeted as long as they can be linked with Hamas, however tenuously.  Buildings struck are Hamas buildings; schools are Hamas-run, as are hospitals.  During Operation Cast Lead, the wholesale murder of police officers was justified on the basis they were Hamas police officers, and the argument has since been taken to its logical conclusion.  Israel is of course perfectly prepared to make long-standing agreements with Hamas, whereby Hamas pledges to do the best it can to keep rocket fire from other militant groups to a minimum in return for a cessation of air strikes, but when it's election time and there are votes to be won from an ever more hardline public, Hamas once again becomes the implacable genocidal foe that must be put out of commission once and for all.

It's this murderous cynicism that sickens more than anything.  It's not just Palestinians whose lives are put in the balance by this most vile form of electioneering, although they are overwhelming those most at risk; it's the Israelis in the path of the rockets who face uncertainty too.  As pathetic as the rockets fired from Gaza mostly are, 3 Israelis were killed directly as a consequence of the policies pursued by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, believing that they can succeed where Kadima failed before.  They are backed to the hilt by our own leaders, who while condemning the bloodshed in Syria and say something must be done about Assad wring their hands over the carnage in Gaza, putting the blame almost wholly on Hamas.  In the US, one of the senators urging the arming of the Syrian rebels threatened Egypt with the cutting off of aid if they "kept inciting violence between the Israelis and Palestinians".   This same man would like the Islamists in Syria to get their hands on modern anti-air missiles, weapons which would almost inevitably find their way straight afterwards to Gaza.

As little as possible then is explained, lest it alter the narrative that Israel is the victim rather than the aggressor.  Electoral cynicism is skirted over, as is the blockade of Gaza that prevents civilians from escaping from what is effectively a free fire zone.  At least in Syria those in the firing line between rebels and the regime can for the most part escape should they choose; those in Gaza have no such option, unless they have a medical complaint so urgent that even the Israelis can't refuse them access to hospitals outside of the Strip.  The history of the occupation, the Oslo accords, the setting up of the Palestinian authority and the lack of progress ever since, overwhelmingly the result of Israeli intransigence, goes by unmentioned.  That the settlements in the West Bank continue to be expanded, with ever more Palestinian land seized and cut off isn't relevant.  Palestinian resistance is condemned, whether it's through rockets or stone throwing, while the attempt to gain statehood through the UN is blocked.  Despite all this injustice, the Palestinian cause only grows stronger, and the strength and belief of the people remains undimmed.  They will one day have a state, and one day Israel's crimes will be brought to account.  That day cannot come soon enough.

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11/19/2012 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, November 15, 2012 

Meanwhile, in bizarro world...

The UK is considering whether to officially recognise the Palestinian opposition, sources say.

Foreign Secretary William Hague is to meet leaders of Hamas and Fatah in London on Friday to discuss the "grave and worsening" situation in Gaza.

Although high profile US figures such as John McCain have long been calling for the arming of the Palestinians, up until now Britain has only offered "non-military" aid to the opposition.  According to BBC political editor Nick Robinson, David Cameron believes the bloody conflict in Gaza is reaching what one of his advisers calls "the something must be done stage" - the moment when the public will demand action to save the lives of ordinary Gazans unable to escape from the blockaded strip.

This new tone was reflected in a statement from William Hague:

"Israel bears principal responsibility for the current crisis.  It is crystal clear this is merely the latest shamefully cynical move by politicians desperate to show themselves as the toughest on the Palestinians ahead of an election, just as Operation Cast Lead was four years ago.  The extra-judicial killing of Ahmed al-Jabari shows the depths to which Israel is prepared to sink - killing a man who had long worked with them towards keeping the peace, and then posting a video of the attack on the internet.

"As has happened before, Israel broke a truce it signed up to, only to then claim to the world at large that rocket fire from Gaza had forced their hand.  Whilst we condemn the launching of missiles from Gaza that are impossible to aim accurately, we recognise that the bombing of the territory makes an already difficult life there intolerable.  Palestinians have the right to live without fear of attack from Israel.  The deaths of innocent children are especially difficult to take - as the father of 11-month old Omar al-Masharawi asked, what had his son possibly done to deserve his fate?

"We have long supported a two-state solution, but it is becoming increasingly clear that Israel is not prepared to be a partner for peace.  Ignoring international law, it continues to build settlements in the West Bank, and has made life ever more difficult for ordinary Palestinians.  Much as we support an urgent resumption of negotiations, we have little faith they would be successful.  As such, we are considering whether the time has come to arm the Palestinian opposition so they can adequately defend themselves."

Asked for a response, the Israeli government gave the exact same statement as it has after past attacks on Gaza:

"Terrorists human shields Hamas terrorists rocket fire terrorists deliberately target terrorists other side will have to pay intolerable nothing to do with election terrorists Hamas human shields escalation that will exact a price terrorists."

Bashar al-Assad is understandably delighted at all this.

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11/15/2012 10:28:00 pm | |

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