Thursday, January 22, 2009 

The Palestinians of Gaza - not human enough, obviously.

This is shocking:

The BBC has refused to broadcast a national humanitarian appeal for Gaza, leaving aid agencies with a potential shortfall of millions of pounds in donations.

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella organisation for 13 aid charities, launched its appealtoday saying the devastation in Gaza was “so huge that British aid agencies were compelled to act”.

But the BBC made a rare breach of an agreement dating back to 1963 when it announced it would not give free airtime to the appeal. Other broadcasters then followed suit. Previously, broadcasters have agreed on the video and script to be used with the DEC, with each station choosing a presenter to front the appeal, shown after primetime news bulletins.

The BBC said it was not the first time broadcasters had refused to show a DEC appeal.

The corporation said it had been concerned about the difficulties of getting aid through to victims in a volatile situation. The BBC, which has faced criticism in the past over alleged bias in its coverage of the Middle East, said it did not want to risk public confidence in its impartiality.

The DEC’s chief executive, Brendan Gormley, said the decision could have a big impact on its appeal. “We are used to our appeal getting into every household and offering a safe and necessary way for people to respond. This time we will have to work a lot harder because we won’t have the free airtime or the powerful impact of appearing on every TV and radio station.”

...

A BBC spokesperson said: “Along with other broadcasters, the BBC has decided not to broadcast the DEC’s public appeal to raise funds for Gaza. The BBC decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story. However, the BBC will of course continue to report the humanitarian story in Gaza.”


In other words, the BBC have given in to those just waiting to grasp at the slightest hint of bias before they'd even had a chance to. It wasn't as if this was just going to be on the BBC; the other channels would have carried it as well. They've in effect decided that the Palestinians of Gaza are not as human or as equal as those who have been victims of natural disasters; it seems it would take something far worse than the man-made carnage Israel visited upon Gaza for the impoverished and hungry citizens of a tiny, cut off piece of land to be treated the same as everyone else.

I didn't think that the BBC's coverage of the assault on Gaza was that bad, or certainly not as terrible as some of those on the fringes of the left thought, judging by there being another protest outside the BBC this Saturday before the march heads to Downing Street. You get the feeling that if the BBC doesn't change its minds about this tomorrow that they'll be a hell of a lot more there than there otherwise would have been.

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Wednesday, January 21, 2009 

War crimes and the second revenge of Hamas.


It's always morbidly amusing the way that Israel announces it's investigating what may or may not have happened during its latest military escapade to have unfortunately resulted in the premature evacuation of souls. The reality is that it knows full well in almost all of the cases exactly what happened without any need to investigate further - hence the very quick indeed discovery that at least 200 white phosphorus shells were fired into Gaza over the 3-week period, with the likewise by no means whatsoever doubtful claim that 180 of them hit their target, which was naturally either Hamas fighters or rocket launchers. 20 of these shells, again if we are to believe the Israelis, seem to have either gone missing or been potentially used for purposes other than targeting of the "enemy", with apparently conclusive evidence that at least three hit the UNRWA's compound, destroying the food and medicine in their warehouses.

The use of white phosphorus, which international law explicitly states has to be used with great caution around civilians, seems to only be the tip of the iceberg of the breaching of the Geneva conventions in Gaza. Numerous stories of children being shot dead by Israeli troops are beginning to emerge, as are reports of the summary demolition of houses that had dared to get in the way of the IDF's advance, regardless of whether or not they had any civilians in them. It's little wonder that the media were until Friday when Egypt began letting in some journalists from their side of the border deliberately kept out - the Western, more respected media would have been forced into broadcasting the same reports which al-Jazeera and the other outlets with Palestinians on the ground carried, potentially further raising the anger and putting more pressure on politicians to demand an end to the conflict.

As could have been predicted, the tunnels which Israel were trying to destroy are already back up and running, if indeed they had been closed during the bombardment itself. The troops may now have withdrawn back to the border, but the crossings into Gaza remain closed; even with more aid now being allowed in, the tunnels will still be helping to keep the impoverished and cut-off citizens off the territory from suffering too badly from the shortages. With the food, livestock and cigarettes will doubtless also come the rockets, the other part of the justification for the murderous assault on the territory.

At the beginning of the week it looked as if this could have been a decisive blow against Hamas, and yesterday's puerile victory rallies were a sign of weakness, not strength, but the hours are already beginning to show the events in a different light. Negotiation with Hamas looks more and more unavoidable, especially as Obama is apparently living up to his pledge to talk to Iran without pre-conditions. When Israel assassinted Sheikh Yassin, the almost blind, disabled spiritual leader of Hamas in a truly cowardly Hellfire missile strike, the organisation had its revenge in their victory in the elections. Their revenge this time round may well turn out to be that "Operation Cast Lead" has not even began to destroy them - but instead left them as the de facto Palestinian group to which both Israel and the US will eventually have to deal with.

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Friday, January 16, 2009 

An end in sight?



If it wasn't for all the reports informing us that Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni wanted a ceasefire long ago, honestly, really, you could cynically imagine that from the very beginning there was a plan for the Israeli assault on Gaza. We already know that even prior to the six-month ceasefire with Hamas which even the Israelis admit they were first to breach, Israel was planning for the attack on Gaza which has filled so many with horror over the past three weeks. Why not then that the plan was to start the assault on the 27th of December, while the West is still caught up in its own post-Christmas feculence, blame it on Hamas ending the truce by goading them to fire barrages of rockets into Israel, and then spend the three weeks leading up to Obama's inauguration trying your hardest to annihilate Hamas and force them into a humiliating further ceasefire, ensuring that no longer can they smuggle weapons while also hopefully keeping up the siege?

Things haven't of course gone entirely to plan. Israel perhaps didn't plan on the ferocity of the response from Europe and other countries around the world, but it's managed to get by regardless. It perhaps hasn't done as much damage to Hamas as it would have liked, but it's probably destroyed the vast majority of the tunnels, killed two of their senior leaders, and Hamas hasn't put up anywhere near the sort of fight which Hizbullah managed in Lebanon in 2006, although whether this is because, as we've seen, the Israeli plan this time round has been overwhelming force and taking no prisoners, but regardless, it must still be tremendously pleased with the very low civilian and military casualties, especially when compared to the 1,100 Palestinians killed and over 5,000 injured. Where it has triumphed beyond doubt is with the United States in the very last days of the Bush administration. Not only did Olmert successfully intervene with Bush to stop Condi Rice from ending her monstrous period as secretary of state by voting for a security council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, but they've got just the sort of agreement they want which binds the US to help with the monitoring of the Egypt-Gaza border, and all without apparently so much as consulting the incoming administration. Not a bad last day's work by any means.

Where this leaves Israel's standing in the world at large remains to be seen. The anger which the attack on an impoverished, prison like tiny territory has inspired not just on the streets of the Arab world but on western Europe's as well is quite possibly unprecedented in recent times. There were riots in Oslo, huge demonstrations in all of the major capital cities and dozens of the smaller ones as well, and also, sadly and frighteningly, a rise in anti-Semitic attacks. That was always to be expected when there are individuals that cannot differentiate between a people and a state, just as some cannot between Muslims and terrorists, but nonetheless all such violence, abuse and vandalism has to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. Smashing Starbucks' windows, let alone attacking a synagogue, is not going to change one thing in Gaza, let alone Israel, quite the reverse. Likewise, the overreaction of those who want to deflect attention from the carnage in Gaza has been as self-serving as always: witness Harry's Place, perennial defenders of Israeli aggression who have been vocal in their denouncing of protesters linking Israel to the Nazis, comparing the tiny number of smashed windows to... the Nazis and especially Kristallnacht, a photoshopped site banner conflating the two explicitly. Not only is this ahistorical in the extreme, it also demeans and debases the real suffering which those who lived in Nazi Germany during that period went through. A state organised and executed pogrom and an idiot with a brick shutting down a single bourgeois coffee shop from hell for a day are incomparable.

It's easy to see why some have been so quick to change the subject from Gaza itself to those on protests though; even the majority of them must recognise just how indefensible the attack on Gaza has been. Never before has the Zionist trick of screaming anti-Semitism at those criticising Israel been shown up to be so shallow and futile, Elizabeth Wurtzel's attempt to do just that on CiF completely monstered. For all Israel's attempts to win the PR battle, their single decision not to allow journalists into the Gaza strip itself produced a vacuum that could be filled only by the Palestinians on the ground themselves, the likes of al-Jazeera and the other Arab media profiting, the images of the hundreds of children injured filling the screens and newspapers every day now for nigh on 3 weeks.

It will however be the savagery of the Israeli assault which will live long in the memory. Most people might have given them the benefit of the doubt if they'd only managed to hit the one UN building, and believed the story of there being fire from within the compound; when you hit another school where people are sheltering and then finally hit the UNRWA headquarters itself, apparently with phosphorus shells which quickly turn the aid and food stored there into an inferno, it starts to look like it's either deliberate or that the IDF doesn't care what it hits. It's not just the phosphorus shells, which when used as a weapon as they apparently have been are illegal under international law, but also the apparent use of one of the newer discoveries in the world of armaments, DIME, or Dense Inert Metal Explosives. These bombs have the advantage of being more accurate and covering only a small radius, but the downside of completely eviscerating those that they come into contact with. Whether the Israelis are definitively using these weapons or not is difficult to know for sure, but the injuries that some of the doctors in Gaza have been seeing, where limbs have been effectively ripped off without suffering the shrapnel wounds associated with conventional shelling suggests that this might well be the case. Gaza may well be a testing lab for new weapons, being tried on a human and overwhelming civilian population. This is without considering the hospital that was hit, ambulances which have been targeted, the paramedics that have been killed trying to save others and the estimated $1.4 billion damage done to the infrastructure of the territory, not to mention the accusations of war crimes from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the demands for investigations into them by the UN and other governments.

What Israel will have achieved at the end of all this is difficult to know for sure. It probably won't save the Labour-Kadima coalition from being defeated, even if the spilling of Palestinian blood, which always seems to a vote-winner, has been taken to extremes. It might be able to win a "victory", by stopping the weapon smuggling into Gaza, not lifting the siege, declaring a unilateral ceasefire so they look like the good guys after all, and even turn a few Gazan minds against Hamas once the dust has settled and they see the devastation and decide that the sacrifice may not have been worth it. That however seems unlikely. In the worst case scenario for Israel, it could well end up having the opposite effect, showing the world that the real aggressors are not the terrorists of Hamas but those that don't apologise for killing hundreds of children, inspiring boycotts and continued protests, showing that Hamas are going to have to be dealt with if a peace settlement is ever going to be reached, and further establishing the spirit of resistance in a people that have been resisting now for over 60 years. Furthermore, they look set to have to deal with an Obama administration that at the moment is suggesting that it is willing to negotiate with Hamas, and that is also likely to be far tougher on Israel than the Bush administration has ever been, even if that isn't saying much. It's unwise to suggest that this might be one of the last gasps of a nation that has tried to enforce peace without a settlement and has failed, and one of the first of a nation that will have to do the opposite if it is ever to have complete security, but we can live in hope. Whatever happens, those killed in this latest senseless conflict will most certainly not be forgotten.

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Wednesday, January 14, 2009 

Over 1,000 dead and still they go and watch.



Israel should be proud: it took the IDF exactly a month to kill nearly 1,000 people in Lebanon during the 2006 war with Hizbullah; this time it has taken them only 18 days. Lebanon however had a population of roughly 4 million; Gaza has a population of 1.25 million. All while the IDF has been pummelling Gaza, Israelis have been travelling to Parash Hill, near Sderot, to have an overview of what their military is inflicting on a population that it first sealed off, then attempted to starve, and is now finally trying to bomb into submission. We've already seen smiles and laughter, stories of picnics and ghouls saying that more could be done, now we have a CNN reporter smiling and laughing with two women as they discuss the carnage going on only miles from where they're sitting. There's the others openly celebrating as they look through binoculars as the air strikes rain down and the phosphorous lights up the sky. And then there's the mealy-mouthed others, those who've had their own homes hit by Palestinian rockets, offering insincere concern for the innocents that might also be suffering in Gaza, the ones whose homes will be unrepairable and the others that will never recover from their injuries.

The reports continue to come in of suspected atrocities, of deliberate targeting of civilians. The Times speaks to a soldier that says everything is being treated as hostile, that this is the most "aggressive line" that has ever been taken with the Palestinians, that even he is shocked by the devastation that they are discovering and which Israel has tried as hard as possible to stop being glimpsed by too many Western eyes. The BBC reports that women responding to an Israeli call to leave, additionally carrying white flags, were shot and one was killed, while others trying to find water were similarly shot and apparently killed. From a less reputable source is an even more shocking, upsetting story, of an 92-year-old man injured on the first day of the Israeli bombardment, only reached today, found decomposing with a white flag in his hand. If substantiated, it is such accounts that remain on people's minds for years to come.

So brutal has the assault on Gaza been that even those supposedly on the Israeli left, such as Yossi Alpher, co-editor of Bitter Lemons, are left looking for comparisons which play down the carnage which has been unleashed. Alpher alighted upon the final battle for Fallujah in Iraq at the end of 2004, where similar accusations of war crimes were made, but which reflects better on the IDF as there were suggestions that up to 6,000 civilians were killed, out of an insurgent force estimated at being between 3,000 and 6,000. Israel claims there are around 20,000 Hamas fighters in Gaza. Alpher fails to mention that even if it did calm Fallujah somewhat, all that it achieved was a dispersal of the insurgency from the city into Anbar province itself, with it only eventually being tackled by the rise of the Awakening programme, when the tribal sheikhs tired of the tyranny and bloodshed brought by their alliance with the likes of al-Qaida in Iraq. Furthermore, there's a rather larger inconvenient fact which Alpher strangely omitted from his analogy: the US army allowed a large majority of the population of Fallujah to flee the city before the attack. In Gaza no one has been allowed to leave, except for those holding foreign passports who wanted to, and the very few that have been transferred to Egyptian hospitals for treatment. If we accept the Israeli figures of 20,000 Hamas fighters, and add another 10,000 to account for the militants of Islamic Jihad and other groups, that leaves 995,000 civilians directly in the line of fire, with hardly anywhere to run to, far above the numbers that were left in Fallujah to face the US military at its most destructive.

As alluded to yesterday, it is indeed telling that it's Iraq that Israelis are pointing towards, for it's quite true that the war on Iraq now has even less justification than Israel's assault on Gaza. They talked of the "shock and awe" of the initial "surprise" attacks on the police and Hamas security officials, and doubtless they would like Hamas to be seen as the Islamic State of Iraq is in that country. You could at least however see the motives for attacking Iraq, whether it was to remove the supposed threat from WMD, to overthrow a tyrant that had been subjugating his people for decades, or to gain control of the country's oil, as being either somewhat noble or at the very least either defensible or achievable, as indeed the initial removal of Saddam Hussein was. The same cannot be said for the attack on Gaza. It won't stop the rocket fire without agreeing to the lifting of the siege, it won't turn the people of Gaza against Hamas, and it probably won't help either Ehud Barak or Tzipi Livni to win the election and keep the Labour/Kadima coalition in power. Just as we are now horrified by the spilling of blood in Iraq, it has to be hoped that eventually both sides in the conflict on Gaza will come to feel the same nausea, and reject the hate that both sides push. Before that though, the killing has to first stop.

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009 

Time to boycott Israel.



The above is what the Palestinians of Gaza have now been living with for 17 days. Presumably a "bunker busting" bomb, which the United States only very recently sold Israel, the ostensible target is supposedly the smuggling tunnels out of Gaza into Egypt. Those tunnels, which do smuggle weapons, were also helping to keep Gazans alive by bringing in fuel, food and other essential products which were either in short supply or blocked from entering the Strip by the Israelis. If the blockade is not lifted and the tunnels are successfully destroyed, the people of Gaza will suffer more once this is over than before.

There were around 60 air-strikes on the Strip on Monday night/Tuesday morning, not all probably of the same horrifying, shocking power as that one but undoubtedly more than enough to utterly destroy countless buildings and the humans that may well have been inside them. One such strike targeted a Christian Aid health clinic that contained hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of medical equipment, desperately needed in Gaza. The attack was not a mistake, but completely deliberate: the owners were telephoned 15 minutes before and told to get out, along with the family that lived above it. Why an ordinary home and clinic were methodically chosen and given the OK to be destroyed is a question that will probably never be answered.

What is becoming clear is that as Israel repeatedly ignores calls for a ceasefire, the anger and reaction to the offensive in Gaza continues to grow. Perhaps most indicative of the realisation by many that first isolating a population, starving them and then finally subjecting them to a "shock and awe" style bombing for over two weeks is not how civilised democracies behave is that even the mainstream US press is beginning, however cautiously, to give space to those criticising Israel. The Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, even gave over column space in its notoriously right-wing comment pages to a piece by George Bisharat which had the headline "Israel is committing war crimes". In a session only an hour-long after a statement by David Miliband, in which he seemed to have mixed up Hamas and Israel, having said that "Hamas have shown themselves over a number of years to be murderous in word and deed", whilst Israel was "a thriving democratic state with an independent judiciary", apparently having missed that two of the three Arab political parties were banned yesterday, while under the cover of the war on Gaza hundreds of protesters have been arrested and many of them indicted for expressing their views, MPs beyond the usual suspects spoke out against the attacks, with Sir Patrick Cormack declaring himself "ashamed of Israel" after previously being one of its friends, while Ming Campbell asked if "any other democratic state were behaving in that way, would we not by now be considering what other economic and diplomatic steps were available to us?"

Previously, the talk of boycotts, arms embargoes and other measures were made either by trade unions that wanted academic boycotts, boycotts I would have opposed as counter-productive and unlikely to have any real effect, or by left-wing groups that likewise have been repeatedly condemned and ignored. These are though, and now should be start to be considered as real, legitimate options that can be used against what is incredibly close to becoming a rogue state, completely unconcerned by and apparently beyond international opinion. Let's be clear: it is only by an absolute miracle and the almost unbelievable work of the otherwise collapsing health infrastructure in Gaza that only around 970 have been killed so far, with over 4,000 injured. Of that 4,000, hundreds if not more are going to have suffered amputations and other horrific injuries, to the extent where they will be disabled for the rest of their lives, if indeed they manage to survive. The boy in the top image was blinded, apparently by white phosphorus. 40% of the 970 are women and children, with a good percentage of the rest non-fighters or police officers who were deliberately targeted in the first couple of days of attacks. As Gerald Kaufman said in parliament, if Hamas had killed 970 Israelis in just over two weeks, the response of the international community and our own government would have been rather more damning that it has been up till now, even considering that our response has been more biting and quicker than it was during the Lebanon war when we openly colluded with the US and Israel in delaying talks for a ceasefire.

Tomorrow's Guardian leader considers the issue head on, another sign of just how seriously thoughts of potential boycotts and other direct action are being considered by the mainstream. Its main suggestion is that Israel's ambassador's presence should be requested by David Miliband, to show just how high feeling is running within government vis-a-vis his country's Gaza policy. It concludes by mentioning the other options, describing them as "not all appealing, nor should they be yet necessary", which is far from suggesting that they should be immediately dismissed. We know of course that hardly any of these things, even a request to see Ron Prosor, are likely to be taken. After all, if what Israel is doing in Gaza constitute war crimes, or a crime of aggression, where would that leave what we ourselves, in partnership with the United States, have visited on Iraq for what's now approaching 6 years, a war which Miliband and Brown both voted for? We don't even have the justification that Iraq had been firing rudimentary rockets into our territory; the best we could come up with, ignoring the fatuous argument regarding the prior UN resolutions, would be that Iraq did have some missiles that breached their agreements regarding weapons, but which were being destroyed by the UN weapons inspectors. That is almost certainly partly the reason why the criticism of Israel has not been as harsh as it was towards Russia over last summer's war with Georgia, where it was apparently felt we had more of a free ride, regarding Russia's authoritarian turn and rigged elections.

If however the government is unwilling to act, not even for instance imposing an arms embargo on Israel as suggested by Nick Clegg at the very least temporarily, then individually we should be prepared to either boycott Israeli produce or repeatedly demonstrate against what is being done by a supposed democratic state against a people as a whole. We need to be clear that Israel is not an apartheid state, although it is certainly approaching it, that it is not yet instituting a genocide on Gaza, and that comparing Israel to the Nazis is both ahistorical and deeply insulting, even if understandable in the circumstances. We should however be equally clear that as a country its treatment of the Palestinians is now so unbearable that it has placed itself outside the boundaries of civilised nations, and that until it changes its behaviour, we will impose personal sanctions upon it. Israel needs to know that even if other governments are not turning away from it as a result of such murderous cynicism, individuals and their businesses will.

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