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By Rania Khalek

“The Israelis are using a wide variety of sophisticated modern weapons against a basically naked civilian population,” said renowned Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert in a phone interview with The Electronic Intifada on Tuesday, 22 July.

“This is state terrorism at a very sophisticated and very high level,” he added.

Speaking over the phone from al-Shifa hospital where he is helping to treat the wounded, Gilbert described the horrors he has witnessed in Gaza in recent days as the bodies of mostly Palestinian women and children are brought to the hopsital torn to shreds by an Israeli arsenal deliberately aimed at civilians.

War on children

With the Gaza death toll quickly approaching 700, the United Nations says some 80 percent are civilians, among them at least 168 children. Over the last few days alone, Israeli forces have on average killed at least one child in Gaza per hour. Children also make up one-third of the more than 4,000 wounded, many with debilitating injuries that Gaza hospitals are ill-equipped to properly treat due to dire shortages caused by the Israel’s illegal siege.

“One of these kids would have a whole cross-professional team in an American hospital or Norwegian hospital,” said Gilbert.

Israel, it seems, is waging a war on children.

Meanwhile, more than 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza are internally displaced, access to clean drinking water is increasingly scarce and electricity is practically non-existent, explained Gilbert. Gaza is a man-made humanitarian catastrophe.

Bombing hospitals, killing paramedics

Israel has bombed at least 25 health care facilities, killing and injuring several medical workers, said Gilbert, whose repeated appeals for the UN to step in and protect Palestinian hospitals from Israeli attacks that clearly violate international law have been resulted in meaningful action on the ground.

“[Medical facilities] are being targeted and they’re being bombed and the patients and the staff are getting killed,” said Gilbert.

“What would have happened if Palestinian fighters had bombed an Israeli hospital and killed five patients?” Gilbert commented. “The world would have turned upside down. What is this second-hand, or even third-hand or fourth-hand citizenship in the world for the Palestinians?”

Yesterday the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published an open letter co-authored by Gilbert and signed by several doctors and scientists strongly denouncing Israel’s crimes against Gaza’s health sector.

“Israel is saying that they are bombing Gaza to get rid of tunnels and terrorists,” said Gilbert. “I see no tunnels and terrorists in Shifa hospital. I see only ordinary people like you and me.”

The following full transcript of the interview with Dr. Gilbert has been edited for clarity.

Rania Khalek: Some crazy things happened on what’s yesterday for you all. There was a UN school that was shelled, several mosques have been hit. So I’m wondering how things are going at the hospital amid all the chaos.

Mads Gilbert: It’s demanding, but the Palestinians are keeping their high spirit. The hospital is working and it’s receiving patients, the caseloads are coming, the injured have been taken care of, the killed are taken to the morgue.

The relatives are crowding into the hospital and what is new since last time we talked is of course the huge Shujaiya massacre in which we don’t know yet how many were killed but it was a large number of Palestinians killed during this night of immense bombardment of Shujaiya, which is a city of around 60,000 people. And that night we received 400 patients from midnight until the next morning. We received among them I think it was 47 killed. So of course that was a very dramatic night.

And in the early morning hours, as the sun rose up, the refugees or those who had been trapped in this bombardment, came wandering to Shifa, many with bare feet and very pale and shocked and devastated and they had lost their homes and many had lost their family members. And they sought refuge in the garden of Shifa and suddenly Shifa had not only the patients and their families, but they had a large group of refugees, internally-displaced persons actually in the middle of its garden.

So the garden was crowded with hundreds of homeless Palestinians who had been through a hellish night. I talked to some of them and it was heartbreaking to hear their stories of how they had been trapped in their houses, extremely careful of the bombardment of course, desperately calling to get some help to get evacuated. I talked to several families who had injured family members who could not be evacuated by the ambulances and actually bled to death before they could be evacuated.

So that was a very dramatic night and morning and we worked continuously. The whole fabulous, incredibly hardworking staff at Shifa did I would say an outstanding job to try and accommodate all of these. People are exhausted but they’re standing tall and they show up for their shifts despite the fact that they get no salaries.

The framing of Gaza is often forgotten.

There is almost no water, ninety percent of the water is undrinkable. The water supply to the residential areas if very very limited. There is almost no electricity. Gaza is running on generators and battery charged lights. When you’re sitting there working on some report or your on the Internet, suddenly it’s time for the electricity to disappear and there will be eight hours of blackout.

RK: I was going to ask about the bombing of the hospital yesterday. It wasn’t the first hospital that was bombed, but it was the intensive care unit that was targeted?

MG: It was.

RK: Are you at all concerned at Shifa?

MG: Of course. But bear in mind that twenty-five different medical institutions have been attacked by the Israeli occupation forces and nine medical staff have been killed or injured.

Three have been killed — one doctor, one pharmacist and one administrative worker — and six have been injured. And as I said, twenty-five medical facilities, among them thirteen primary health care centers, eight ambulances. We have the bombing of the [Mobarat] hospital, killing three handicapped patients.

And then came of course the horrible bombing of al-Aqsa hospital, which is totally in contravention to all international laws. And they claimed, as they always claim, that it was used as a hide out for some anti-tank positions for the Palestinian fighters.

I don’t know if you saw us on Huffington [Post] Live tonight. There was a debate about Gaza. I was participating on Skype from Gaza and the [World Health Organization] boss in Gaza. He was challenged by the anchor in the US, that the Israelis said that the reason they had to shell the hospital was that the Palestinians had an anti-tank position close to the hospital.

He then replied that they had immediately sent down an investigative group consisting of several [United Nations] experts and OCHA [UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] people and they could find absolutely no trace of any weapon. The hospitals in Gaza have never ever been proven to conceal or hide or harbor any militant needs, be it fighters or weapons. This is just another of the many lies which the Israeli propaganda machine is spewing out. Israel is puking it out around the clock.

So al-Aqsa hospital [was] attacked, absolutely horrible, and it caused me and the Ministry of Health to send out a press release yesterday calling for the international community to consider the attacks on health facilities as war crimes under international law and called upon the international community and the United Nations to take immediate actions to prevent further attacks on medical facilities, ambulances and patients.

I myself have repeatedly appealed and urged the UN to place [inaudible] a UN flight at all hospitals in Gaza and to escort ambulances and to have international observers at all health facilities in Gaza. This has not been followed up, they’re sort of coming and going every now and then. I don’t think it is a lack of willingness from the local UN staff, but I think this is at a higher level.

You could ask UN headquarters in New York, why are you not protecting the Palestinian civilian hospitals and the ambulances? They’re being targeted and they’re being bombed and the patients and the staff are getting killed. Turn around, do it the other way, put up the mirror. What would have happened if Palestinian fighters had bombed an Israeli hospital and killed five patients? The world would have turned upside down.

What is this second-hand or even third-hand or fourth-hand citizenship in the world for the Palestinians?

RK: Let me ask you about the injuries you’re seeing. Is it the same injuries as before? Last time we talked you mentioned most of the injuries were shrapnel wounds. Is it the same or are the injuries you’re seeing now more from bombing homes? What’s happening now?

MG: The Israelis are using a wide variety of sophisticated modern weapons against a basically naked civilian population. They have no shelters, which is largely uncommunicated I think in the picture of Gaza. Whereas we see all these reports about individual shelters and home shelters and big cover shelters in Israel, and that’s fine. But Israel has never allowed Palestinians to build shelters and they don’t have early warning systems like sirens and they don’t have a civil defense that is really capable of defending the civilians.

So they are easy prey for this large arsenal of very powerful and carefully engineered weapons used by the Israeli armed forces.

So what we see are a variety of injuries caused by a man-made hand. The large artillery shells are causing devastating amputations. The explosions cause burns and blast injuries, meaning that the power wave of the explosion hits the body and can rupture internal organs so they start to bleed.

We just had a patient now, a young man, who had shrapnel openings. I could fit my fist into the shrapnel opening into his abdomen. He had maybe a hundred, small and large, the largest being large enough to accommodate my hand. One of them went down to his thigh and had ripped off the muscles attached to his leg.

We had a very young shebab [boy] also with a shrapnel that had penetrated his brain, which was very professionally extracted by the neurosurgical team here at Shifa. They are extremely good staff and doctors. They are doing surgery at a high level.

We had a young man who had a shrapnel, he was sitting in his home yesterday in central Gaza at the family’s apartment. It was shelling close to his apartment and the shrapnel traveled through the window and through his neck and caused an open fracture of the mandible [of the jaw] and also ripped open his carotid artery. So that was life-threatening bleeding. He was treated. We just went [on a] night round to look at him. He had a repair of his carotid artery and he had a reconstruction of the shattered jaw with metal plates and very small screws, like tiny nails to put into and reconstruct it. And he had an opening of the air pipe to breathe directly through the hole on the neck instead of directly through the mouth.

He of course was looking like a football and had a very severe edema, but he will survive. He was clenching the fist when we asked him, both eyes totally closed by the edema and unable to speak because of the large jaw injury, but he communicated with us and was taken good care of in the ICU.

I saw a little girl tonight, what was her name? Shumaiya, 4 years old, lost her mother and two of her siblings in an attack on Shujaiya, penetrating shrapnels to the abdomen, laparotomies, meaning opening the abdomen twice already. She will have another operation tomorrow.

And next to her laid Madeleine, 14. Two of her uncles were killed. She had severe burns on those arms and open fractures. I could go on forever.

That’s why I wrote in the open letter. I said, Mr. Obama, if you have a heart, come to see us. Spend one night in Shifa, I will dress you up as a cleaner and I’m sure it’s going to change your whole perception of what this is all about. You are so alienated to these empty words of “I regret so much that civilian casualties, blah blah,” that you don’t even have any empathy that can in any sense influence your political decisions. Instead you provide new tens of millions of dollars to this merciless Israeli war machine. Come on. Come visit us. Come and explain to the mothers and fathers, come and explain to Shumaiya why her mother had to be killed and her two siblings had to be killed.

Israel is saying that they are bombing Gaza to get rid of tunnels and terrorists. I see no tunnels and terrorists in Shifa hospital. I see only ordinary people like you and me and our children.

RK: Yesterday there were several families that were wiped out in their homes. Is that what you’re seeing at Shifa as well, entire families?

MG: Yes, of course we see that. We had three dead come in today. We had the Baker family yesterday that was shelled next to the hospital. I believe three were killed or died on admission. That was very close, just a block away from Shifa and the whole building was shaking when the F-16 rockets hit. And that was the same family who lost the four shebab, the four boys playing football on the beach.

RK: Their home was bombed yesterday?

MG: Yeah, their whole family residential block was bombed and we had forty injuries coming into the hospital immediately because it was so close. I believe three were killed, the rest were more or less injuries. We did four or five major surgeries. There were shrapnels and bleedings and screams and the whole clan came to the hospital and it was really a moment of chaos and horrible scenes. Within an hour or two we had sorted and patched up and selected those to have surgery and did operations on them and they filled up the ICUs, and so passes the day.

RK: Lastly, I want to ask you, is there anything in the past two days since I spoke to you last that has really struck you as something that you feel people need to know about, other than everything you’ve already said?

MG: The UN count is now 100,000 internal refugees in Gaza — 100,000 people who have either lost their homes or been threatened by Israeli attack forces to leave their homes and they have more or less nowhere to go. The family homes are so crowded now.

This is state terrorism at a very sophisticated and very high level.

If you go on Al Jazeera English, there is a piece by Richard Falk today. You know him?

RK: Yes I do.

MG: He has a very, very powerful piece today where he uses the same term I’ve been using, mainly state terrorism. He’s talking about the unspeakable acts of violence.

I’m at a loss for words to explain to your leaders [why] it is that these Palestinian people are constantly being exposed to merciless killings from this huge power which has another huge power behind it that seems to have a circle of empathy which is just outside their own. The government of Israel is not having any human core in the sense that they include the rest of humankind in their ideal system.

It seems that the Palestinians have been excluded as worthy of the same value systems as they [Israelis] apply to themselves.

This is of course the core problem, two core problems. Number one, Israeli apartheid which we see in the numbers I gave you last time. And number two, Israeli impunity. Impunity and apartheid are two key words to understand the current situation.

To conclude, let me give you the latest update. As of tonight, 622 killed since 6 July, and 160 of these 622 killed are children.

There are 3,099 injured. Of these 1,213 are children. Now imagine 1,200 injured children, just to care for them, just to comfort them, just to follow up with feeding, with cleaning, with rehabilitation, with pain relief. It takes a whole team. One of these kids would have a whole cross-professional team in an American hospital or Norwegian hospital. Here, they have their family around them, that’s their most important asset. But 1,200 injured children, it’s an enormous task for any health care system. And 698 women injured. We’re up to 1,800-1,900 injured children and women.

In the ICU, there are 104 injured, and for the last 24 hours we had 64 killed and 489 injured — for the last 24 hours.

During that night of the massacre in Shujaiya, the 20th of July, we had 141 killed and 452 injured; 47 of these killed came to Shifa. We had horrendously heartbreaking scenes when the families were reunited with their dead ones. And still nobody knows how many dead are lying in the rubble of the bombed houses in Shujaiya.

Last night they bombed a high-rise building, I think it’s 12 stories high. When they shot the first rocket, the front wall fell off in a way. In one of the apartments, the fifth or sixth floor, there was a family of two adults and five children screaming to be released. And then came the second rocket and they were all killed. We got them in charred. Five children and two adults. Terrorist, hmm? Tunnels? Hamas?

These are people. These are people. They are covered by international law. They are covered by the UN declaration for human rights. But Israel is exempted, has this phenomenous impunity that makes it seem like both you and I are paralyzed in the domain of Israeli control.

RK: Every time I talk to you it’s just heartbreaking and awful. I really hope the next conversation we have isn’t so dark.

MG: Can I just give you the light side? The light side is the resilience of the Palestinians. This is not a suffering people. This is not a begging people. They stand up. They stand tall.

My love and my immense admiration for the staff and the volunteers in Shifa. And not to forget the paramedics — the sacrifice, the risk in every mission they do out in this dark city of death and destruction from the Israeli attack forces. My deepest admiration.

Shifa hospital stands tall. People are tended to. The surgeons, the operating room scrub nurses, they work day and night. Nobody dies because nobody tried to rescue them. If they die it’s because the injury was too devastating for a body to sustain or if they came to us too late.

RK: Thank you for all that you do and I hope this is over soon.

Rania Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass and marginalized.

24 July, 2014
Electronicintifada.net

By Justin Podur

 

Q: Didn’t Hamas start this fighting by provoking Israel?

A: According to this interpretation of events: 1. Palestinians killed Israeli teens -> 2. Israel responded -> 3. Hamas began rocket fire -> 4. Israel attacked Gaza.

A longer cycle. The first problem with this sequence is that if you go a little further back, you find further provocations and attacks by Israel, further responses by Palestinians, and so on, going back decades. For example, on May 15, 2014, Israeli soldiers murdered two Palestinian teens in Beitunia, for no apparent reason (see: http://electronicintifada.net/tags/beitunia-killings ). Even if you see the conflict as a ‘cycle of violence’, the primary responsibility lies with the more powerful party, since it is the more powerful party that will determine the course of both war and peace in any ‘cycle’. Israel is by far the more powerful party. The question of ‘who started it’ is really a question about who is responsible. Israel can stop this massacre at any moment.

Ilan Pappe wrote recently that “The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers.”

Revenge does not apply to innocents. But the second problem is more important. It is immoral to see the killings of the Israeli teens as a ‘response’ to, or ‘revenge’ for, the killings of the Palestinian teens in May. It is also immoral to see the torture and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager by Israeli settlers as a ‘response’ to the killings of the teens. The only acceptable moral response to crimes like murder is to bring the individuals responsible to justice. Justice, according to the law, does not allow revenge against other people.

An offshore prize? There may be yet another reason for these constant assaults on Gaza: offshore gas deposits that Israel wants to access, but without having to deal with a Palestinian government that could negotiate some benefit for it. Nafeez Ahmad wrote about this in the Guardian on July 9/14 ( http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jul/09/israel-war-gaza-palestine-natural-gas-energy-crisis ). He quotes Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon, who in 2007, as Israeli army chief of staff, said:

“A gas transaction with the Palestinian Authority [PA] will, by definition, involve Hamas. Hamas will either benefit from the royalties or it will sabotage the project and launch attacks against Fatah, the gas installations, Israel – or all three… It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.”

Substitute the word “Palestinians” for “the radical Islamic movement”, and you have a more honest statement of what these attacks may be about: “drilling without consent”.

The unity government. The real target of Israel’s current attack is more likely the unity government agreement between Hamas and Fatah, which was recognized even by the US. Ilan Pappe ( http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-incremental-genocide-gaza-ghetto/13562 ) wrote:

“The present genocidal wave has, like all the previous ones, also a more immediate background. It has been born out of an attempt to foil the Palestinian decision to form a unity government that even the United States could not object to.

“The collapse of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s desperate “peace” initiative legitimized the Palestinian appeal to international organizations to stop the occupation. At the same time, Palestinians gained wide international blessing for the cautious attempt represented by the unity government to strategize once again a coordinated policy among the various Palestinian groups and agendas.”

Q: Wait, what is the unity government?

A: Beginning last July (2013), there was another “peace process” that was initiated by US Secretary of State John Kerry, involving Netanyahu on the Israeli side and Mahmoud Abbas, from Fatah, whose electoral mandate expired in 2009 (a point I’ll return to). The deadline set for an agreement was April 2014. Over the course of this “peace process”, Israel continued to build settlements in the West Bank, a Palestinian territory Israel is militarily occupying.

When the April 2014 deadline arrived, Abbas had no agreement from Israel to show, only new settlements and new preconditions for talks. At that point, Abbas agreed to join Hamas in a unity government and prepare for new elections, which would be the first since 2005/6, when Abbas won the presidential election (2005) and Hamas won the legislative elections (2006).

Even though Israel had offered Abbas nothing, when the unity government proposal arose, Netanyahu said that Abbas could have peace with Israel or with Hamas, but not both – but he had already shown that Israel had no interest in peace, regardless of what Abbas did.

It is worth noting just how favorable the unity government agreement was, to both Abbas and, potentially, to Israel, as Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group (ICG) wrote in the July 17/14 NYT: Hamas transferred formal authority to Ramallah, giving up official control of Gaza. But “Israel immediately sought to undermine the reconciliation agreement by preventing Hamas leaders and residents from obtaining the two most essential benefits of the deal: the payment of salaries to 43,000 civil servants who worked for the Hamas government and continue to administer Gaza under the new one, and the easing of the suffocating border closures imposed by Israel and Egypt that bar most Gazans’ passage to the outside world.” Qatar offered to pay the salaries. The UN offered to deliver the salaries. But the US allowed Israel to block both efforts.

Q: But why did Hamas reject the ceasefire offers?

A: A frequently used negotiating tactic is to make demands that the other side cannot meet. Israel’s ceasefire terms are to temporarily cease the shelling, bombing, and killing until the next time they decide to resume it, while Gaza’s borders remain closed, its water, electricity, and its people’s freedom of movement remain completely under Israeli control. Hamas’s conditions have been published in English on the Electronic Intifada and elsewhere ( http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/palestinian-factions-reportedly-set-10-conditions-10-year-truce-israel ). Sometimes they are presented as 10 conditions, sometimes as 5 conditions, but they boil down to one: the siege of Gaza must end. The siege has driven the Palestinian economy into tunnels – tunnels that Israel is now invading Gaza to destroy. The siege is killing the society, and each round of Israeli attack further destroys the infrastructure that enables people to survive, infrastructure that cannot be rebuilt – because of the siege. Returning to Nathan Thrall in the NYT: “For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it’s worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. A cease-fire that fails to resolve the salary crisis and open Gaza’s border with Egypt will not last. It is unsustainable for Gaza to remain cut off from the world and administered by employees working without pay.”

Q: Civilian deaths have been kept to a minimum by Israeli doctrine, haven’t they?

A: Israel’s doctrine is to inflict punishment on the population in order to get them to turn on their leaders. In Rania Khalek’s words ( http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israel-deliberately-targeting-civilians-gaza )

“The Dahiya doctrine (which refers to the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut that Israel purposely decimated in its 2006 assault on Lebanon) is Israel’s preferred method of warfare. Under this doctrine, the Israeli army deploys overwhelmingly disproportionate force against civilian infrastructure to restore Israel’s deterrence and turn the local population against its enemy, i.e. Hizballah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

“In the lead up to Operation Cast Lead, senior Israeli army General Gadi Eisenkot disclosed Israel’s plans to expand the Dahiya doctrine, telling an Israeli newspaper, “We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases.” He added, “This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized.”

“Two months later Israel pulverized the Gaza Strip, killing some 1,400 people, including almost 400 children, some of whom were deliberately murdered while raising white flags.”

Q: Even if 80% of deaths have been civilians, 20% have been militants, right?

A: Israel defines militants in an expansive way. Civilian police are defined as militants. Rania Khalek again:

“Using precision guided missiles, the Israeli army claims it is only bombing people and infrastructure “affiliated with Hamas terrorism” — and the international community is buying it.

“What is not being discussed, however, is who and what constitutes a Hamas affiliate.

“Hamas is more than just a militant organization, it is the political party that was democratically elected in 2006 to govern the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Hamas’s control means that almost everyone and everything in Gaza can be considered a Hamas affiliate. This unchallenged loose definition has enabled Israel’s war architects to widen the definition of legitimate targets to include civilians and civilian infrastructure, including mosques, schools, hospitals, banks, electricity lines and residential homes, all of which have been targeted.

“Aside from a weak condemnation issued by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, the international community has largely accepted Israel’s methodology, completely abandoning defenseless Palestinian civilians as they’re being maimed and slaughtered by one of the world’s most powerful armies.”

Q: Such civilian deaths as have occurred have occurred because militants hide among civilians, right?

A: There is nowhere for anyone to hide in Gaza. Gaza is one of the most densely populated 360 sq km strips of land on earth. Israel defines everyone in Gaza as a militant. Israel and Egypt have ensured that no one can leave Gaza. Israel is now shelling and bombing Gaza. Civilians have no place to hide from Israeli bombs and shells. There is nowhere civilians can go to prevent Israel from defining them as militants, and there is nowhere anyone can go in Gaza to be safe from bombs – Israel bombs houses, apartments, UNRWA compounds, hospitals – the story of ‘militants hiding among civilians’ is simply an Israeli excuse for bombing and killing civilians freely.

Q: Surely you cannot expect Israel to stand by while the rockets continue to terrorize them?

A: As a moral and legal question, occupying powers do not have a right to defend themselves, except by leaving. As a practical question, is Israel behaving in a way that will stop rocket attacks? Brian Dominick has answered this question, in response to a blog post by Juan Cole ( http://radicalreboot.tumblr.com/post/91670379821/israels-real-motives-in-operation-gazaunderattack ):

“…there are obvious ways to thwart rocket attacks that put Palestinian noncombatants at no or far less risk, all of which Israel ignores in favor of a widespread campaign of death dealing. These alternatives have the downside, from the Israeli hardline viewpoint, of failing to terrorize and traumatize Palestinians. These ways include but are likely not limited to:

“Opening Gaza borders to (inspected) trade so the commercial viability of the Gaza tunnel system is undermined and factions must make their own tunnels just for smuggling weapons. This reduction would likely be dramatic, and it would also bring Israel into compliance with international law that bans the collective punishment of civilians. It would also mean an end to Israel’s murdering of commercial smugglers.

“Help the Hamas government suppress rocket fire from factions not beholden to or remotely respectful of ceasefires between Hamas and Israel—the ones doing most of the rocket attacks between periodic uber-crises. (I don’t personally love the idea of Israel choosing factions, but this would be an indication of Israel actually wanting rocket attacks to end.)

“Israel could actually pursue peace and a solution to the overall crisis that actually respects Palestinian demands. That is, stop giving their enemies reasons to actively fight them, and watch support for the remaining fighters all but evaporate. I can’t guarantee this would work, but it has never been tried.

“Stop targeting Hamas’s civilian, non-operational leadership for assassination, which draws profound resentment from the Palestinian people and consistently, as Juan Cole notes, strengthens Hamas’s hand in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“The… way we know rocket suppression is nowhere on Israeli hawks’ agenda is that each such operation in the past six or more years has resulted in a tremendous spike in the number of rockets fired, often resulting in more rockets than would be launched during relative calm for months at a time. This is a predictable result of air strikes and incursions, which won’t after all restrict the rocket fire nearly as effectively as ceasefires historically have.”

Q: The civil wars in Iraq and Syria, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the conflicts in Sudan and Congo and Nigeria have claimed many more lives than this conflict. Isn’t it hypocrisy for people in the world be so upset over a few hundred dead Palestinians in the face of these much larger death tolls?

A: This question is a major logical failure. If a murder of a complete innocent cannot be a moral response to another murder, as above, then a big mass murder in an unrelated conflict cannot excuse a smaller mass murder here. The deaths caused by the Syrian regime in the Syrian civil war, or by the rebels there, or by ISIS in Iraq, or the Iraqi government, cannot be used as an excuse for Israel’s killings in Palestine. In Ilan Pappe’s words ( http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-incremental-genocide-gaza-ghetto/13562 ):

“I will concede that all over the Middle East there are now horrific cases where dehumanization has reaped unimaginable horrors as it does in Gaza today. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the EU and Israel’s other friends in the world…

“Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else.

“It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way.

“A world that would stop employing double standards in its dealings with Israel is a world that could be far more effective in its response to war crimes elsewhere in the world.”

Q: Palestine was never a country. The Arabs attacked Israel in 1967…

A: The problem with this question is that it misunderstands the parties to the conflict. The questioner has slipped from “Israel and the Palestinians” to “Israel and the Arabs”. “The Arabs” are not a party to this conflict – Arab-speaking countries of the Gulf, North Africa, and the rest of the Middle East are not under Israel’s occupation, nor are they refugees from Israel’s founding in 1948. The Palestinians are. The Palestinians are the victims of the current Israeli operations, not “the Arabs”.

The most succinct summary of how the situation has developed, and the relative power of the parties to this conflict, can be viewed in the Disappearing Palestine map:

http://www.juancole.com/images-ext/2010/03/map-story-of-palestinian-nationhood.jpg

Juan Cole, who recently posted about the map, describes some of the background and the accuracy of the map here: http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/map-story-of-palestinian-nationhood.html

For other questions about the background of Israel/Palestine, please see Stephen Shalom’s Q/A on the background of the Israel/Palestine conflict. http://www.peacenowar.net/Palestine/News/Q&A.htm

Q: Who is winning?

A: Writing in the NYT on July 18/14, Jodi Rudoren, like many others, makes much of the difference between this Israeli attack on besieged Gaza and previous attacks, like 2009 and 2012. In 2009, Rudoren writes, “Israel quickly bisected the tiny coastal enclave and blockaded Gaza City, where they engaged in gun battles with Hamas fighters. On Friday, the troops operated mainly in farmland within about a mile of Gaza’s northern, southern and eastern edges, and quickly announced they had uncovered more than 20 tunnel exit points. Setting the bar relatively low helps hold back public expectations, provide the military with achievable goals, and build international legitimacy.” In this analysis, Hamas is isolated and weaker because in previous rounds, Hamas could count on more support from Syria’s government (right now in the middle of a civil war) and a friendly government in Egypt (which was never that friendly, but which has now, under Sisi, returned to the traditional pattern of working for Israel and isolating the Palestinians since the 2013 coup). Israel, and consequently, the Western media, are focused on “the tunnels” – into which much of Palestinian life has been driven because of the siege – as the enemy. Israel claims that Hamas’s fighters are a threat because of these tunnels.

While these differences do exist, the main elements are exactly the same. Israel is unlikely to send soldiers into tunnels to fight in close quarters with Palestinians. There are too many risks for that, and very little cost to Israel to continuing its high-tech, indiscriminate killing from a distance. This has been referred to by an analyst (Roni Bart) as “a kind of rolling-fire induced smokescreen”, a “new policy” as of 2009 which “caused a large number of casualties among the civilian Palestinian population”, because “most of the fighting took place in built up and populated areas”. (Roni Bart, “Warfare-Morality-Public Relations: Proposals for Improvement”, Strategic Assessment, June 2009 Vol. 12, No. 1)

Israel’s ability to keep this up depends on several factors. One is the regional factor, which is now providing few restraints (civil war in Iraq and Syria, a pro-Israel regime in Egypt). Another factor is how difficult it is for Western leaders to sell the war to Western civil society. In this attack, a gap may have opened up between the Israeli public and the Western public at large, as the picnics, outrageous comments, trophy photos and the like that are being shared in social media and collected in Western media show – see for example ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/15/world/middleeast/israelis-watch-bombs-drop-on-gaza-from-front-row-seats.html ). At some point, the atrocities will reach a level that will trigger Western leaders to get Israel to stop.

Q: Is there anything to do?

A: Israel is a part of the West. Its economy and politics are fully integrated with the West. It simply cannot do this without support from the US, Canada, and Europe. If you go to demonstrations against Israel’s attacks, whether this one or the next ones, join the BDS Movement (bdsmovement.net), write letters to politicians or to media outlets, you will be up against an organized an organized, extensive, pro-Israel effort. You will have to do your homework and realize there are people preparing professional talking points about every historical fact and argument you come across. It may be years before anything improves, and things may get still worse. But Israel depends on international support, including from the public, more than most – that is why they devote so much energy and effort to politicians and the media in the West. This is a conflict where activists can make a difference.

Justin Podur is a writer and activist based in Toronto.
24 July 2014
teleSUR English

 

By Hussein Al-alak
The first Holocaust of this century is taking place in Mosul, Iraq, and the British Government is strangely silent. Churches have been destroyed, the population branded like the Jews of NAZI occupied Europe and now, for the first time in 2000 years, Iraq’s Church bells have fallen silent.

Reports have flooded the media, how the Christians and the Shiite of ISIS occupied Mosul, were ordered to pay a higher tax, leave or face death by the sword.

Like their NAZI predecessor’s, the property of minorities has been confiscated and many of those fleeing have been stopped at check points, where armed ISIS militia have threatened harm to people, in exchange for the few personal possessions, grabbed while in the hurry to flee.

Like the Synagogues of NAZI occupied Poland, Churches and other holy shrines have been demolished, burned to the ground, and precious artifacts looted to fund the global Jihadist movement.

Priests, Nuns and the few civilians seeking sanctuary, have also been turned out on to the streets and forced to seek refuge further north, in to Kurdish controlled area’s.

No one is immune from the brutality of ISIS, not even the elderly, women and children. Pictures have emerged from inside of Mosul, of Iraq’s Turkmen being crammed into cargo lorries, with scene’s inside the vehicles echoing the historic indignity of the 20th century, from the trains which entered the gates of hell itself, Auschwitz.

ISIS have also sought to continue the legacy of those in NAZI occupied Europe, where inside Iraq’s new Warsaw or Krackow Ghetto, have cut the water supply to those suspected of hiding remaining Christians or Shiite, or for those minorities still visible but unable to flee.

The Vatican itself has released the names of those Iraqi Muslims, who having been raised in a multi-ethnic community, decided to defy the segregation policies of the Islamic State but for some, their efforts may be seen as being in vain, as those Iraqi’s were
soon put to death by those, who some in the West, still view as heroes.

Other acts of resistance are also being recorded, where daubed over the red ISIS inscribed “N” for Nazarene, which ISIS placed on the homes of Christian’s, brave Mosul residents have been writing in black “We are all Christians” now.

But why has the British Government remained so silent, especially after its long time criticisms of Syria’s Human Rights record, its relentless hostility to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and the fact that Queen Elizabeth 2nd, who heads Britain’s Church of England, has come out in “solidarity” with the “persecuted Christian community of Mosul”.

For many people, it’s felt the British Government, cannot accept certain responsibilities, one being the possible involvement of British and other European citizens in the first Holocaust of this century. In the case of the United Kingdom, a minimum of 500 citizens are currently known to be fighting for ISIS but this figure has been disputed by Government officials and is believed to be much higher.

Over the past couple of years, British newspapers have also shown, what many describe as being a sympathetic approach to British ISIS recruits, with parallels having been drawn with those men who died fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War.

And no British city has been immune from ISIS recruitment either, in Manchester alone, one British Pakistani ISIS member was killed in Syria, while a British Somali family has a son and two teenage daughters currently somewhere in either Iraq or Syria.

In the past, the British Government has sought to discourage people from going over to fight, with threats of enforcing prevention of terrorism legislation and promises to revoke citizenship but as the situation in Mosul has now proven, the level of crimes being committed, has become much more serious.

The International body Human Rights Watch, recently warned that “the laws of war ban all parties to a conflict from targeting, intentionally damaging, seizing or destroying religious, cultural and historic properties” while “discrimination on the grounds of religion is strictly prohibited. Murder of civilians, taking hostages, as well as pillaging, constitute war crimes”.

The Geneva Convention itself states that food and water be provided and the refusal to do so, constitutes a war crime. The Nuremberg Trials also found itself able to convict members of Hitler’s NAZI establishment, on the grounds, that withholding such essentials as water, was in itself a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment.

What many are finding ironic about the British Governments silence over the ISIS actions in Mosul, is that the British Government was one of the founding countries which established these international laws and while in the past, Britain showed enthusiasm for prosecuting Germany’s NAZI war criminals, now they seem suddenly struck dumb, on how to prosecute their own.

Hussein Al-Alak is a British based journalist and is chairman of the Iraq Solidarity Campaign UK.

24 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

After days of placing hostile blame for the downing of the Malaysian airliner on Russia, the White House permitted US intelligence officials to tell reporters that there is no evidence of the Russian government’s involvement.

Obviously, the US satellite photos do not support the Obama regime’s lies. If the White House had any evidence of Russian complicity, it would have released it to great fanfare days ago.

We are fortunate that the analytical side of the CIA, in contrast with the black ops side, retains analysts with integrity even after the purge of the agency ordered by Dick Cheney. Incensed that the CIA did not immediately fall in line with all of the Bush regime’s war lies, Cheney had the agency purged. The black ops side of the agency is a different story. Many believe that it should be defunded and abolished as this part of the CIA operates in violation of statutory US law.

Don’t hold your breath until Washington abolishes black-ops operations or the Obama regime apologizes to the Russian government for the unfounded accusations and insinuations leveled by the White House at Russia.

Despite this admission by US intelligence officials, the propaganda ministry is already at work to undermine the admission. The intelligence officials themselves claim that Russia is, perhaps, indirectly responsible, because Russia “created the conditions” that caused Kiev to attack the separatists.

In other words, Washington’s coup overseen by US State Department official Victoria Nuland, which overthrew an elected democratic Ukrainian government and brought extreme Russophobes into power in Kiev who attacked dissenting former Russian territories that were attached to Ukraine by Soviet communist party leaders when Russia and Ukraine were part of the same country, has no responsibility for the result.

Washington is innocent. Russia is guilty. End of story.

The day previously, State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, one of the Obama regime’s brainless warmonger women, angrily turned on reporters who asked about the Russian government’s official denial of responsibility. Don’t you understand, she demanded, that what the US government says is credible and what the Russian government says is not credible!

Rest assured that the owners of the media and the editors of the reporters received calls and threats. I wouldn’t be surprised if the reporters have lost their jobs for doing their jobs.

There you have it. America’s free press. The American press is free to lie for the government, but mustn’t dare exercise any other freedom.

Washington will never permit official clarification of MH-17. Today (July 23) the BBC (the British Brainwashing Corporation) declared: “Whitehall sources say information has emerged that MH17 crash evidence was deliberated tampered with, as the plane’s black boxes arrive in the UK.”

After making this claim of tampered with black boxes, the BBC contradicted itself: “The Dutch Safety Board, which is leading the investigation, said ‘valid data’ had been downloaded from MH17’s cockpit voice recorder (CVR) which will be ‘further analyzed’. The board said: ‘The CVR was damaged but the memory module was intact. Furthermore no evidence or indications of manipulation of the CVR was found.’”

The BBC does not tell us how the black boxes are simultaneously in British and Dutch hands, or how they got into British and Dutch hands when the separatists gave the black boxes to the Malaysians with the guarantee that the black boxes would be turned over to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) for expert and non-politicized examination.

So where are the black boxes? If the Malaysians gave them to the British, Whitehall will tell whatever lie Washington demands. If Washington’s British puppet actually has the black boxes, we will never know the truth. Judging from the hostile and unsupported accusations against Russia from the bought-and-paid-for Netherlands prime minister, we can expect the Dutch also to lie for Washington. Apparently, Washington has succeeded in removing the “investigation” from the ICAO’s hands and placing the investigation in the hands of its puppets.

The problem with writing columns based on Western news reports is that you have no idea of the veracity of the news reports.

From all appearances, the Obama regime intends to turn the “international investigation” into an indictment of Russia, and the Dutch seem to be lined up behind this corrupt use of the investigation. As the Washington Post story makes clear, there is no room in the investigation for any suspicion that Kiev and Washington might be responsible. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/malaysia-flight-17-prosecution-faces-major-evidentiary-and-legal-obstacles/2014/07/22/a8c7ebe4-11db-11e4-98ee-daea85133bc9_story.html

By continuing to trust a corrupt West that is devoid of integrity and of good will toward Russia, the separatists and the Russian government have again set themselves up for vilification. Will they never learn?

As I write, more confusion is added to the story. It has just come across my screen that Reuters reports that Alexander Khodakovsky, “a powerful Ukrainian rebel leader has confirmed that pro-Russian separatists had an anti-aircraft missile of the type Washington says was used to shoot down the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and it could have originated in Russia.” Reuters says that this separatist commander (or perhaps former commander as later in its report Reuters describes Khodakovsky as “a former head of the ‘Alpha’ anti-terrorism unit of the security service in Donetsk”) is in dispute with other commanders about the conduct of the war.

Khodakovsky makes clear that he doesn’t know which unit might have had the missile or from where it was fired. He makes it clear that he has no precise or real information. His theory is that the Ukrainian government tricked the separatists into firing the missile by launching airstrikes in the area over which the airliner was flying and by sending military jets to the vicinity of the airliner to create the appearance of military aircraft. Reuters quotes Khodakovsky, “”Even if there was a BUK, and even if the BUK was used, Ukraine did everything to ensure that a civilian aircraft was shot down”

Not knowing the nature of Khodakovsky’s dispute with other commanders or his motivation, it is difficult to assess the validity of his story, but his tale does explain why Ukrainian air control would route the Malaysian airliner over the combat area, a hitherto unexplained decision.

After the sensational part of its story, Reuters seems to back away a bit. Reuters quotes Khodakovsky saying that the separatist movement has different leaders and “our cooperation is somewhat conditional.” Khodakovsky then becomes uncertain as to whether the separatists did or did not have operational BUK missiles. According to Reuters, Khodakovsky “said none of the BUKs captured from Ukrainian forces were operational.” This implies that Russia provided the working missile to the separatists if such a missile existed.

I find the separatists’ reply convincing. If we have these missiles why to the fools in Kiev send aircraft to bomb us, and why is their bombing so successful? The separatists do have shoulder fired ground to air missiles of the kind that the US supplied to Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion. These missiles are only capable for low flying aircraft. They cannot reach 33,000 feet.

According to Reuters, the reporting of its story was by one person, the writing by a second, and the editing by a third. From my experience in journalism, this means that we don’t know whose story it is, how the story was changed, or what its reliability might be.

We can safely conclude that the obfuscations are just beginning, and like 9 /11 and John F. Kennedy’s assassination, there will be no alternative to individuals forming their own opinion from researching the evidence. The United States government will never come clean, and the British government and presstitute media will never stop telling lies for Washington.

Washington’s bribes and threats can produce whatever story Washington wants. Keep in mind that a totally corrupt White House, over the objections of its own intelligence agencies, sent the Secretary of State to the United Nations to lie to the world about Iraqi weapons of mass production that the White House knew did not exist. The consequences are that millions were killed, maimed, and displaced for no other reason than Washington’s lie and rising instability in the Middle East.

The Obama regime lied on the basis of concocted “evidence” that Assad had used chemical weapons against the Syrian people, thus crossing the “red line” that the White House had drawn, justifying a US military attack on the Syrian people. The Russian government exposed the fake evidence, and the British Parliament voted down any UK participation in the Obama regime’s attack on Syria. Left isolated, the Obama regime dared not assume the obvious role of war criminal.

Blocked in this way, the Obama regime financed and supplied outside jihadist militants to attack Syria, with the consequence that a radial ISIL is in the process of carving out a new Caliphate from parts of Iraq and Syria.

Keep in mind that both the George W. Bush and Obama regimes have also lied through their teeth about “Iranian nukes.”

The only possible conclusion is that a government that consistently lies is not believable.

Since the corrupt Clinton regime, American journalists have been forced by their bosses to lie for Washington. It is a hopeful sign that in their confrontation with Marie Harf some journalists found a bit of courage. Let’s hope it takes root and grows.

I do not think that the United States can recover from the damage inflicted by the neoconservatives who determined the policies of the Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama governments, but whenever we see signs of opposition to the massive lies and deceptions that define the US government in the 21st century, we should cheer and support those who confront the lies.

Our future, and that of the world, depend on it.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

24 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

Why hasn’t Washington joined Russian President Putin in calling for an objective, non-politicized international investigation by experts of the case of the Malaysian jetliner?

The Russian government continues to release facts, including satellite photos showing the presence of Ukrainian Buk anti-aircraft missiles in locations from which the airliner could have been brought down by the missile system and documentation that a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter jet rapidly approached the Malaysian airliner prior to its downing. The head of the Operations Directorate of Russian military headquarters said at a Moscow press conference today (July 21) that the presence of the Ukrainian military jet is confirmed by the Rostov monitoring center.

The Russian Defense Ministry pointed out that at the moment of destruction of MH-17 an American satellite was flying over the area. The Russian government urges Washington to make available the photos and data captured by the satellite.

President Putin has repeatedly stressed that the investigation of MH-17 requires “a fully representative group of experts to be working at the site under the guidance of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).” Putin’s call for an independent expert examination by ICAO does not sound like a person with anything to hide.

Turning to Washington Putin stated: “In the meantime, no one [not even the “exceptional nation”] has the right to use this tragedy to achieve their narrowly selfish political goals.”

Putin reminded Washington: “We repeatedly called upon all conflicting sides to stop the bloodshed immediately and to sit down at the negotiating table. I can say with confidence that if military operations were not resumed [by Kiev] on June 28 in eastern Ukraine, this tragedy wouldn’t have happened.”

What is the American response?

Lies and insinuations.

Yesterday (July 20) the US Secretary of State, John Kerry confirmed that pro-Russian separatists were involved in the downing of the Malaysian airliner and said that it was “pretty clear” that Russia was involved. Here are Kerry’s words: “It’s pretty clear that this is a system that was transferred from Russia into the hands of separatists. We know with confidence, with confidence, that the Ukrainians did not have such a system anywhere near the vicinity at that point and time, so it obviously points a very clear finger at the separatists.”

Kerry’s statement is just another of the endless lies told by US secretaries of state in the 21st century. Who can forget Colin Powell’s package of lies delivered to the UN about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” or Kerry’s lie repeated endlessly that Assad “used chemical weapons against his own people” or the endless lies about “Iranian nukes”?

Remember that Kerry on a number of occasions stated that the US had proof that Assad crossed the “red line” by using chemical weapons. However, Kerry was never able to back up his statements with evidence. The US had no evidence to give the British prime minister whose effort to have Parliament approve Britain’s participation with Washington in a military attack on Syria was voted down. Parliament told the prime minister, “no evidence, no war.”

Again here is Kerry declaring “confidence” in statements that are directly contradicted by the Russian satellite photos and endless eye witnesses on the ground.

Why doesn’t Washington release its photos from its satellite?

The answer is for the same reason that Washington will not release all the videos it confiscated and that it claims prove that a hijacked 9/11 airliner hit the Pentagon. The videos do not support Washington’s claim, and the US satellite photos do not support Kerry’s claim.

The UN weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq reported that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. However, the fact did not support Washington’s propaganda and was ignored. Washington started a highly destructive war based on nothing but Washington’s intentional lie.

The International Atomic Energy Commission’s inspectors on the ground in Iran and all 16 US intelligence agencies reported that Iran had no nuclear weapons program. However, the fact was inconsistent with Washington’s agenda and was ignored by both the US government and the presstitute media.

We are witnessing the same thing right now with the assertions in the absence of evidence that Russia is responsible for the downing of the Malaysian airliner.

Not every member of the US government is as reckless as Kerry and John McCain. In place of direct lies, many US officials use insinuations.

US Senator Diane Feinstein is the perfect example. Interviewed on the presstitute TV station CNN, Feinstein said: “The issue is where is Putin? I would say, ‘Putin, you have to man up. You should talk to the world. You should say, if this is a mistake, which I hope it was, say it.’”

Putin has been talking to the world nonstop calling for an expert non-politicized investigation, and Feinstein is asking Putin why he is hiding behind silence. We know you did it, Feinstein insinuates, so just tell us whether you meant to or whether it was an accident.

The way the entire Western news cycle was orchestrated with blame instantly being placed on Russia long in advance of real information suggests that the downing of the airliner was a Washington operation. It is, of course, possible that the well-trained presstitute media needed no orchestration from Washington in order to lay the blame on Russia. On the other hand, some of the news performances seem too scripted not to have been prepared in advance.

We also have the advanced preparation of the youtube video that purports to show a Russian general and Ukrainian separatists discussing having mistakenly downed a civilian airliner. As I pointed out earlier, this video is twice damned. It was ready in advance and by implicating the Russian military, it overlooked that the Russian military can tell the difference between a civilian airliner and a military airplane. The existence of the video itself implies that there was a plot to down the airliner and blame Russia.

I have seen reports that the Russian anti-aircraft missile system, as a safety device, is capable of contacting aircraft transponders in order to verify the type of aircraft. If the reports are correct and if the transponders from MH-17 are found, they might record the contact.

I have seen reports that Ukrainian air control changed the route of MH-17 and directed it to fly over the conflict area. The transponders should also indicate whether this is correct. If so, there clearly is at least circumstantial evidence that this was an intentional act on the part of Kiev, an act which would have required Washington’s blessing.

There are other reports that there is a divergence between the Ukrainian military and the unofficial militias formed by the right-wing Ukrainian extremists who apparently were the first to attack the separatists. It is possible that Washington used the extremists to plot the airliner’s destruction in order to blame Russia and use the accusations to pressure the EU to go along with Washington’s unilateral sanctions against Russia. We do know that Washington is desperate to break up the growing economic and political ties between Russia and Europe.

If it was a plot to down an airliner, any safety device on the missile system could have been turned off so as to give no warning or leave any telltale sign. That could be the reason a Ukrainian fighter was sent to inspect the airliner. Possibly the real target was Putin’s airliner and incompetence in implementing the plot resulted in the destruction of a civilian airliner.

As there are a number of possible explanations, let’s keep open minds and resist Washington’s propaganda until facts and evidence are in. In the very least Washington is guilty of using the incident to blame Russia in advance of the evidence. All Washington has shown us so far are accusations and insinuations. If that is all Washington continues to show us, we will know where the blame resides.

In the meantime, remember the story of the boy who cried “wolf!” He lied so many times that when the wolf did come, no one believed him. Will this be Washington’s ultimate fate?

Instead of declaring war on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, and Syria, why did Washington hide behind lies? If Washington wants war with Iran, Russia, and China, why not simply declare war? The reason that the US Constitution requires war to begin with a declaration of war by Congress is to prevent the executive branch from orchestrating wars in order to further hidden agendas. By abdicating its constitutional responsibility, the US Congress is complicit in the executive branch’s war crimes. By approving Israel’s premeditated murder of Palestinians, the US government is complicit in Israel’s war crimes.

Ask yourself this question: Would the world be a safer place with less death, destruction and displaced peoples and more truth and justice if the United States and Israel did not exist?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

22 July, 2014
Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By William Hanna
On 26 November 1947, when it became apparent to Zionists and their supporters that the UN vote on the Partition of Palestine would be short of the required two thirds majority in the General Assembly, they filibustered for a postponement until after Thanksgiving thereby gaining time to threaten the loss of aid to nations such as Greece — which planned on voting against — into changing their votes. U.S. President Truman — also threatened with loss of Jewish support in the upcoming Presidential election — later noted that “The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders — actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats — disturbed and annoyed me.”

On 29 November 1947 the UN voted for a modified Partition Plan — despite Arab opposition on grounds that it violated UN charter principles of national self-determination — recommending the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States with a Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. The resolution’s adoption prompted the 1947–48 conflict including atrocities by Zionist terror gangs whose genocidal brutality was responsible for the murder of thousands of unarmed Palestinian civilians and the forced exodus of more than 700,000 others. At the time, the consensus of opinion was that Israel’s contentious creation had been permitted as a conscious and wilful act of Holocaust compensation which included toleration of its crimes against humanity. Since then, Israel has steadfastly adhered to that successful tactic of blackmail, bribery, and bullying to suppress and silence — with accusations of anti-Semitism/Holocaust denial — any criticism of its blatant human rights violations and arrogant disregard for international Law.

The fear of being branded an anti-Semite is now a universal phobia which Zionist Apartheid Israel reinforces with Gestapo-style vigilance that has permeated through universities, corporate media outlets, and parliaments. This is most evident in the United States where the American Israel Public Affairs committee (AIPAC) is active on college campuses with a Political Leadership Development Program of pro-Israel activities including reports on faculty members, students, and college organisations critical of Israeli policies. The “miscreants” — exposed in AIPAC’s College Guide and the pro-Israel Campus Watch — are then subject to harassment, suspension, or even dismissal.

AIPAC’s lobbying of the U.S. government includes provision of in-depth policy position papers focussing on Israel’s illusionary strategic importance to the United States. The Congressional Record is monitored daily and comprehensive records are kept of all members’ speeches, informal comments, constituent correspondence, and voting patterns on Israel-related issues. AIPAC itself estimates that more than half of Congress and Senate members (who place Israeli interests above those of their own country) can always be relied upon for unflinching support. Every year some 70 to 90 of them are rewarded with “AIPAC-funded” junkets to Israel. The irony behind AIPAC’s erosion of American democracy is that it is in effect financed ($3 billion annual U.S. aid to Israel) by American taxpayers of whom 50 million are living below the poverty line with 47 million of them receiving food stamps.

The insidious cancer of AIPAC is also being spread (with more free junkets) by “Friends of Israel” groups in most European parliaments; by the Australian Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC); and by the recently formed South African Israel Public Affairs Committee (SAIPAC) which will endeavour to silence criticism by a people already familiar with the iniquities of Apartheid.!

Furthermore, the mainstream corporate media — apart from being mostly owned or influenced by friends of Israel — is also fettered by the fear of offending the Zionist lobby which insists that even the term Apartheid Israel is anti-Semitic. This media stranglehold is tightened even further by Zionist media watch organisations such as Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) and Britain’s BBC Watch, who waste no time in vilifying any negative reports on Israel.

Despite being a nation in a profound existential crisis, Chutzpah Israel continues claiming to be a Jewish social democracy with exemplary ethical values. Such claims serve as a smokescreen for the endless lying, cheating, stealing, and murdering while ensuring a lack of accountability for its heinous crimes by undermining the process of Western democratic governance. Instead of unconditionally condemning Israel for its latest assault on the Gazan Palestinians, Western leaders confirm they have been bought to betray the moral values of their constituents by mealy-mouthing the false premise of “Israel’s right to defend itself” with its overwhelming military might. Presumably therefore, Palestinians — who are occupied, persecuted, and blockaded in open prisons (without a single tank, warplane or warship) — are not allowed to desist and defend themselves.

Israel has no such right (God-given or otherwise) because for over sixty years it has been the aggressor with a genocidal brutality matching that of the Nazis. Zionism’s goal of creating a “Greater Israel” requires the “Final Solution” expulsion of non-Jews even if it means that — as was recently enunciated by the Israeli Interior Minister — “Gaza should be bombed into the Middle Ages.” During WW2, innumerable lives and resources were expended to defeat Nazism. Yet today, nothing is done while an even more insidious form of evil slowly destroys the concept of democratic governance and what little is left of human decency.

The time has come for the “Silent Majority” to finally give voice to their outrage — without demonstrations or violence — by repeatedly emailing their elected representatives. Lowlife politicians who have their inbox regularly swamped with thousands of emails will quickly realise that ignoring the will of the majority to serve minority Zionist and corporate interests alone, will not be enough to get them reelected. THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE MADE TO CONTINUE PAYING FOR THE WEST’S GUILT COMPLEX OVER THE HOLOCAUST.

William Hanna is a freelancer with a recently published book the Hiramic Brotherhood of the Third Temple.

22 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Ramzy Baroud

On the 13th day of Israel’s so-called Operation Protective Edge, stories of entire families collectively pulverized, women and children keenly targeted by Israeli soldiers saturate the media. Until now, 430 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and 18 Israel soldiers been killed at the hands of the Resistance. In Shejaiya, elders, mothers and children scrambled for cover as shells mercilessly rained down, stealing the souls of countless innocents.

The destruction is overwhelming, and everywhere, Palestinians lament there is nowhere that is safe. Regardless, resolve is strong and the people of Gaza will not resign themselves to surrender.

The resistance movement in Gaza is often misrepresented intentionally at times, and at other times innocuously. In the heat of the information battle that has ensued since Israel unleashed its latest war many facts and essential context have gone missing.

Historically, Gaza has been a hub for uninterrupted popular resistance since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the hands of Zionist militias, and later the Israeli army, in 1947-48. An estimated 200,000 of Palestine’s then nearly 800,000 refugees were forced there, with most enduring squalid and humiliating conditions.

Despite the shock of war and the humiliation of defeat, Gazans fought back almost immediately. There was no Fatah, no Hamas, and no siege – in comparison to its current definition – and Gazans didn’t organise around any political factions, or ideologies. Rather they assembled in small groups known to Gazans as Fedayeen – freedom fighters.

These were dispossessed refugees still unaware of the complexity of their political surroundings, and the Fedayeen were mostly young Palestinian refugees fighting to return to their home. But their operations grew bolder day by day. They would sneak back into their towns – which then eventually became part of Israel – with primitive weapons and homemade bombs. They would kill Israeli soldiers, steal their weapons and return with the new weapons the second night.

Some would secretly go back to their villages in Palestine to ‘steal’ food, blankets and whatever money they had failed to retrieve in the rush of war. Those who never returned received the funerals of martyrs, with thousands of fellow refugees marching with symbolic coffins to graveyards. Hundreds never returned and few bodies were ever recovered.

Following every Fedayeen strike, the Israeli army would hit back at Gaza’s refugees, inspiring yet more support and recruits for the growing commando movement.

The prowess of those young refugee fighters was on full display in November 1956, when Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and large swathes of Sinai following the Suez Crisis. Egyptians fought the Israeli army with much courage, but the Palestinian garrison based in Khan Younis – now a major target in the latest Israeli war – refused to surrender.

When the fighting was over, Israel moved into Khan Younis and carried out what is now etched in the Palestinian collective memory as one of the most horrific mass killings in Gaza’s history – a massacre of 124 men and boys in the Rafah refugee camp known as al-Amiriyah School Massacre

“The victims were herded into the school under the batons of the soldiers”, reflects Dr Ahmed Yousef, in a recent article. “Those who survived the beatings were met with a hail of bullets and the demolition of the building over their heads. The bloodstains stayed on the school walls for years to remind us children of Israel’s crime.”

Yousef, then a child in a brutalized Rafah, would later become a top adviser to Hamas’ first Prime Minister Ismael Haniyeh in Gaza. His article, originally published in Arabic, was entitled: “The resistance will not surrender… we will be victorious or die.”

Are there any surprises in how the past is knitted both to Gaza’s present and future? It should also be of no surprise that Palestine’s mightiest resistance today, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was formed by a small group of school kids in the central Gaza Strip.

These were poor refugees who grew up witnessing the brutality of the occupation, and the abuse it invited into their daily lives. (The group adopted the name of Izz al-Din al-Qassam, an Arab preacher who fought British colonialism and the Zionist forces until he was killed by British forces in a Jenin orchard in 1935.)

The first young men who started al-Qassam were all killed shortly after the inception of their group. But what they started has since become a massive movement of thousands of fighting men and woman which, as this article was being written, were keeping Israeli forces in northern Gaza at bay.

Resistance in Gaza, as in any historical inevitability, can never be interrupted. Successive Israeli governments have tried extreme measures for decades before the so-called Operation Cast Lead of 2008-9.

After the 1967 war, Ariel Sharon was entrusted with the bloody task of “pacifying” the headstrong Strip. Then the head of Israel’s Defense Forces’ southern command, he was nicknamed the “Bulldozer” for good reason.

Sharon understood that pacifying Gaza would require heavy armoured vehicles, since Gaza’s crowded neighbourhoods and alleyways weaving through its destitute refugee camps were not suited for heavy machinery. So he bulldozed homes, thousands of them, to pave the way so tanks and yet more bulldozers could move in and topple more homes.

Modest estimates put the number of houses destroyed in August 1970 alone at 2,000. Over 16,000 Palestinians were made homeless, with thousands forced to relocate from one refugee camp into another.

The Beach Refugee Camp near Gaza City sustained most of the damage, with many fleeing for their lives and taking refuge in mosques and UN schools and tents. Sharon’s declared objective was targeting “terrorist infrastructure”. What he in fact meant to do was target the very population that resisted and aided the resistance.

Indeed, they were the very infrastructure he harshly pounded for many days and weeks. Sharon’s bloody sweep also resulted in the execution of 104 resistance fighters and the deportation of hundreds of others, some to Jordan, and others to Lebanon. The rest were simply left to rot in the Sinai desert.

It is the same “terrorist infrastructure” that Sharon’s follower, Benjamin Netanyahu, is seeking to destroy by using the same tactics of collective punishment, and applying the same language and media talking points.

In Gaza, the past and the present are intertwined. Israel is united by the same purpose: crushing anyone who dares to resist. Palestinians in Gaza are also united with a common threat: their resistance, which, despite impossible odds seems likely to intensify.

Just by taking a quick glance at the history of this protracted battle – the refugees versus the Middle East’s ‘strongest army’- one can say with a great degree of conviction that Israel cannot possibly subdue Gaza. You may call that a historical inevitability as well.

Ramzy Baroud is a PhD scholar in People’s History at the University of Exeter.

22 July, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Ali Abunimah

This evening I gave an interview to Al Jazeera English (video above). I would like to develop some of the points I made.

If military victory and strength are measured in the number of civilians, especially children, that an army can deliberately target and slaughter with sophisticated machines, then there is no doubt that Israel is winning in Gaza, and has always been the winner in Palestine.

But even though it is still mercilessly killing civilians in Gaza as I write these words, Israel has, in political and strategic terms, already lost the “war” it launched on Gaza on the false pretext of stopping rockets.

As I’ve argued repeatedly, and as the facts show, the easy and time-tested way for Israel not to receive rockets from Gaza is not to attack Palestinians in Gaza.

Israel’s defeat in Gaza will be as significant as its defeat in Lebanon in 2006 (where it also “won” in terms of murdering civilians: 1,200 in total, a third of them children).

Lebanon off limits

For decades, when Israeli leaders needed to court popularity or create a distraction, they attacked or invaded Lebanon, slaughtering Palestinian and Lebanese civilians with total impunity.

Due to fierce resistance that Israel did not expect, the Israeli army lost 121 soldiers during its 34-day invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Since that painful lesson, even an Israeli prime minister as foolish as Benjamin Netanyahu would not be eager to repeat the experience of his predecessor Ehud Olmert.

With Lebanon off limits, Gaza became Israel’s convenient outlet for its bloodlust, with repeated massacres in 2006 (during the Lebanon war!), in December 2008-January 2009, in November 2012 and now.

All these massacres have been committed against a population held in an open-air prison, virtually cut off from the outside world.

Israel found it could bomb Gaza from the air and, yes, even though the resistance could fire rockets back, these amounted to pinpricks.

Only when large barrages are being fired in the context of Israel’s present massive assault do rockets from Gaza cause more damage, but very little is physical: it is economic and psychological.

With the present massacre, too, Israel insisted on needless bloodshed when it could have had “security” by sticking to the November 2012 ceasefire agreement it signed, which includes the requirement to lift the siege.

Gaza fights back

Israel’s great “deterrent” threat was always the ground invasion of Gaza. A deterrent is often more effective as a threat than as a reality. If it is used and proves to be a bluff, it no longer works.

Now Israel has gone into Gaza, and Israelis are shocked at the extent of the losses they are suffering.

Israel has so far admitted to 25 dead soldiers in just four days of ground operations. That’s a higher daily casualty rate than it suffered in Lebanon.

Had Netanyahu known that would be the price, he would not likely have launched this foolish and criminal slaughter in Gaza.

Al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, has proven to be capable, tenacious and ingenious, engaging Israelis in fierce combat inside Gaza and taking the fight to Israeli territory.

But don’t take my word for it. Israeli officers are saying it themselves as Anshel Pfeffer reported for Haaretz:

One officer, a veteran of Gaza operations, who left the fighting area for a few hours, told Haaretz: “I’ve been to Shujaiyeh before, but I’ve never seen it – or Hamas – like this before. Their equipment and tactics are just like Hezbollah. Missile traps and IEDs everywhere – and they stay and fight instead of melting away like in the past.”

They stay and fight because, unlike Israel, Palestinians in Gaza have no choice, no alternative, no option to go back to a slow death under a crippling siege.

Why no ceasefire?

Now the question is: why hasn’t there been a ceasefire yet?

Let’s be clear: the Palestinian demand to end the siege is not a “precondition” and it is not a political demand. It is a basic humanitarian right.

Now the problem for Israel, the US and their Arab allies, especially the Sisi dictatorship in Egypt, is this: they know that this “war” is not going to get better for Israel the longer it goes on.

But they do not want to give the Palestinian resistance a victory. So now Power, on behalf of the United States and Israel, is reframing the most basic humanitarian rights as negotiable and unreasonable “preconditions.” By doing so she is assisting Israel’s incremental genocide in Gaza.

Palestinians still have and must rely on alternatives to awaiting the mercy of the likes of Samantha Power and her boss, US President Barack Obama.

They are resisting tenaciously on the ground, as is their right, and globally, a growing movement understands that Israel will continue to commit its massacres with impunity until we stop it.

Palestinian mourners pray during the funeral of members of the Abu Jami family, at least 23 of whom were killed when Israel bombed their house in Khan Younis, 21 July 2014. (Ezz al-Zanoun / APA images)

The price, in innocent human life, of our failure to stop Israel’s repeated pogroms so far is enormous and catastrophic. As I wrote after the 2008-2009 massacre, Israel can never bomb its way to legitimacy. But its bombs still kill.

We owe it to all those whose lives Israel has stolen not to let them down.

Arms embargo now!

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

22 July, 2014
Electronicintifada.net

Statement of the International Progress Organization

The international community, represented by the United Nations Organization, has a joint responsibility to stop the ongoing armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people in Gaza. The situation constitutes a serious threat to peace and security according to Article 39 of the UN Charter. Due to their political paralysis resulting from disputes among member states, neither the League of Arab States nor the Organization of Islamic Cooperation can play any constructive role for the ending of hostilities.

The disproportionate use of force by the State of Israel, the effective Occupying Power in Gaza, is in violation of the most fundamental norms of international humanitarian law. Under the provisions of Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which is applicable in the present conflict, the civilian population must under no circumstances become the target of attacks. Whatever the political and military reasons for specific tactical decisions may be, the numbers speak for themselves: a total of 3 civilians killed on the side of the Occupying Power stands in sharp contrast to hundreds of civilian victims, many of them children, on the side of the people of Gaza. According to a United Nations estimate, three quarters of the more than 700 Palestinians killed were civilians.

Deliberate attacks against civilian targets constitute war crimes under international humanitarian law and give rise to judicial responsibility under international criminal law. An especially tragic case occurred in the southern Gaza strip on 20 July. In its July 21, 2014, issue, the New York Times reported an Israeli air strike on a four-story house in Gaza where families had assembled for iftar, the daily fast breaking during the holy month of Ramadan. 25 members of four family households died, among them a suspected member of the Hamas military wing. 19 of those killed were children. It must be clearly stated that the presence of a military person in a family gathering or religious ceremony does not make the location a military target. In this and many other instances, each State Party, according to Article 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, is “under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts.” While, at the present moment, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has no jurisdiction in the present case since neither the State of Israel nor the State of Palestine have acceded to the Rome Statute, each State signatory of the Geneva Conventions possesses (universal) jurisdiction to prosecute war crimes committed in the course of the present conflict.

The embargo imposed on the people of Gaza continuously since 2006 has constituted an act of collective punishment and a grave breach of international humanitarian law. The people of Gaza have been deprived of their basic human rights, namely their right to a decent life including the freedom of movement. As a result of the embargo, the infrastructure is in ruins and basic services, particularly in the medical field, have collapsed. Confining almost two million people to a prison-like situation will not only nurture a sense of desperation, but is a morally shameful act. As enforcers of the embargo, the State of Israel as Occupying Power and the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt bear the joint responsibility for this morally outrageous situation.

Under these circumstances, a ceasefire between the State of Israel and the Authorities of Gaza will be a futile undertaking – unless the agreement addresses the root causes of the conflict. This means, first and foremost, that the cessation of hostilities must be accompanied by a mutual and comprehensive commitment to non-aggression between Israel and Hamas. This will have to include not only an obligation, on the part of the Gaza authorities, to desist from rocket attacks against Israel, but also a clear and unambiguous commitment, on the part of the State of Israel, to lift the illegal and inhumane embargo imposed on the territory of Gaza. Only this measure will do away with Israel’s status as de facto Occupying Power in Gaza, one of the root causes of the conflict.

It is to be hoped that the governments of the United States of America, on the side of Israel, and of Turkey and Qatar, on the side of the people of Gaza, will be facilitators of such a comprehensive agreement, the implementation of which will have to be monitored by the United Nations Organization.

Vienna, 24 July 2014
RE/25057c-is

 

By Gulf Daily News

The former employee at US National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden, has revealed that the British and American intelligence and the Mossad worked together to create the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Snowden said intelligence services of three countries created a terrorist organisation that is able to attract all extremists of the world to one place, using a strategy called “the hornet’s nest”.

NSA documents refer to recent implementation of the hornet’s nest to protect the Zionist entity by creating religious and Islamic slogans.

According to documents released by Snowden, “The only solution for the protection of the Jewish state “is to create an enemy near its borders”.

Leaks revealed that ISIS leader and cleric Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi took intensive military training for a whole year in the hands of Mossad, besides courses in theology and the art of speech.

16 July 2014