The Damascene Blog

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Thank you very much, prime minister.

If the "war" in Gaza taught us anything, it was that Palestine is no longer an exlusively Arab cause and should not actually be one. Today's powerful remarks by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (that Arab leaders don't dare to utter), the expulsion of Israeli ambassadors from Venezuela and Bolivia, the massive demonstrations that filled the streets of world capitals, the Spanish court's decision to investigate an Israeli war crime in Gaza, all prove that Palestine has become -and must always remain- a global human issue, of which Arabs should just keep their hands off.

* Picture by AP

Serious Partner?

It's all over the news. Obama delivered his noble message of peace to the Arab and Muslim world through an Arabic TV channel. He even used the word "respect" seven times, analysts say. I am not impressed. I still remember all the sweet Bush talk about Islam being a religion of peace and the hollow rhetoric about the well-being and prosperity of Palestinians and Iraqis.

What disappointed me in the interview was not Obama's old commitment to Israel's security and the US-Israeli alliance, but his unexpected adoption of rotten Bushism:

"I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side."

If the time is appropriate? Serious partnership? Isn't this the same Bush nonsense? Isn't this what the Sharon-Bush duo came up with during the second Intifada? Sharon then invaded the West Bank and declared that Yasser Arafat was no longer a peace partner. The peace process was stalled for years because there was no "serious partner on the other side of the table", while Bush's "man of peace" went on tormenting the Palestinian people. In search for that "serious partner", Arafat was set aside and forced to appoint Abbas as prime minister. Then Abbas was forced to hold "democratic" elections, and then there was no partner again.

Arabs have to deal with Israel's political trash (Sharon, Olmert and Netanyahu in a couple of weeks) while Israel gets to pick a "serious partner". A puppet partner is what they want. And then the time might be appropriate for so-called peace.

So much for a change.

John Pilger: A Criminal's Medal

John Pilger, the renowned Australian journalist who made the great documentary Palestine is Still the Issue, writes this excellent article in the New Statesman:

On 13 January, George W Bush presented presidential “medals of freedom”, said to be America’s highest recognition of devotion to freedom and peace. Among the recipients were Tony Blair, the epic liar who, with Bush, bears responsibility for the physical, social and cultural destruction of an ¬entire nation; John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia and minor American vassal who led the most openly racist government in his country’s modern era; and Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, whose government, according to the latest study of that murderous state, is “responsible for more than 90 per cent of all cases of torture” (…)

As deserving as Blair, Howard and Uribe are of the Bush freedom medal, others cry out for a place in their company. With the assault on Gaza a defining moment of truth and lies, principle and cowardice, peace and war, justice and injustice, I have two nominees. My first is the government and society of Israel. (I checked; the freedom medal can be awarded collectively.) "Few of us," wrote Arthur Miller, "can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

The bleak irony of this should be clear to all in Israel, yet its denial has emboldened a militarist, racist cult that uses every epithet against the Palestinians that was once directed at Jews, with the exception of extermination - and even that is not entirely excluded, as the deputy ¬defence minister, Matan Vilnai, noted last year with his threat of a shoah (holocaust).

In 1948, the year Israel's right to exist was granted and Palestine's annulled, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other leading Jews in the United States warned the administration not to get involved with "fascists" such as Menachem Begin, who became an Israeli prime minister.

This fascism, which was not often flouted openly, was the harbinger of Likud and Kadima. These are today "mainstream" political parties, whose influence, in the treatment of the Palestinians, covers a national "consensus" - that is the source of the present terror in Palestine: the brutal dispossessions and perfidious controls, the humiliation and cruelty by statute. The mirror of this is domestic violence at home. Conscripted soldiers return from their "war" on Palestinian women and children and make war on their own. Young whites drafted into South Africa's apartheid army did the same. Inhumanity on such a scale cannot be buried indefinitely. When Desmond Tutu described his experience ?in Palestine and Israel as "worse than apartheid", he pointed out that not even in white supremacist South Africa were there the equivalent of "Jews only" roads. Uri Avnery, one of Israel's bravest dissidents, says his country's leaders suffer from "moral insanity": a prerequisite, I should add, for the award of a Bush freedom medal.

My other nominee for a Bush freedom medal is that amorphous group known as western journalism, which has always made much of its freedom and impartiality. Listen to the way Israeli "spokespersons" and ambassadors are interviewed. How respectfully their official lies are received; how minimally they are challenged. They are one of us, you see: calm and western-sounding, even blonde, female and attractive. The frightened, jabbering voice on the line from Gaza is not one of us. That is the sub¬liminal message. Listen to newsreaders use only the pejoratives for the Palestinians, describing them as "militants" when they are resisters to invasion, even heroes, a word never used.

Mark the timeless propaganda that suggests there are two equal powers fighting a "war", not a stricken people, attacked and starved by the world's fourth-largest military power and which ensures they have no places of refuge. And note the omissions - the BBC does not preface its reports with the warning that a foreign power controls its reporters' movements, as it did in Serbia and Argentina, neither does it explain why it shows only glimpses of the remarkable coverage of al-Jazeera from within Gaza.

There are, too, the ubiquitous myths: that Israel has suffered terribly from thousands of missiles fired from Gaza. In truth, the first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001; the first fatality occurred in June 2004. Some 24 Israelis have been killed in this way, compared with 5,000 Palestinians killed, more than half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. Now imagine if the 1.5 million Gazans had been Jewish, or Kosovar refugees. "The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force to try to protect the people of Kosovo . . ." declared the Guardian on 23 March 1999. Inexplicably, the Guardian has yet to call for such "an honorable course" to protect the people of Gaza.

Such is the rule of acceptable victims and unacceptable victims. When reporters break this rule they are accused of "anti-Israel bias" and worse, and their life is made a misery by a hyperactive cyber-army that drafts complaints, provides generic material and coaches people all over the world on how to smear as "anti-Jewish" work they have not seen. These vociferous campaigns are complemented by anonymous death threats, which I and others have experienced. The latest tactic is malicious hacking into websites. But that is desperate, since the times are changing.

Across the world, people once indifferent to the arcane "conflict" in the Middle East now ask the question the BBC and CNN rarely ask: Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine does not? They ask, too, why do the lawless enjoy such special immunity in the pristine world of balance and objectivity?

The perfectly spoken Israeli "spokesman" represents the most lawless regime on earth, ¬exotic tyrannies included, according to a tally of United Nations resolutions defied and Geneva Conventions defiled. In France, 80 organisations are working to bring war crimes indictments against Israel's leaders. On 15 January, the fine Israeli reporter, Gideon Levy, wrote in Ha'aretz that Israeli generals "will not be the only ones to hide in El Al planes lest they be arrested [overseas]".

One day, other journalists and their editors and producers may be called on to not only explain why they did not tell the truth about these criminals but even to stand in the dock with them. No Bush freedom medal is worth that.

Education

From today's editorial in the Guardian:

"Even if it had killed off the entire leadership of Hamas, Israel would have only educated thousands of Palestinian children to take up arms in their place."

What Has Israel Achieved?

Olmert declared victory in Gaza. Can someone explain to me what victory means? Beside the horrific war crimes and the massacre of hundreds of armless civilians, what has Israel achieved?

Stop Hamas rockets? This was the main declared objective of the Israeli attack. Even while Olmert was giving his cease-fire press conference, rockets were still flying into Israel. During the war, Hamas rockets have reached deeper targets inside Israel than ever before. The Israeli "Defense" Forces brag about their success in reducing the number of rockets by more than 50 percent (from about 70 a day to 20-30 now). How impressive! How long will it take before Hamas is able to fire 70 of those homemade rockets again? A week maybe? Do people in south Israel really feel safer today? Haaretz reported today that only 41% of Israelis think the operation in Gaza succeeded; an equal number think it failed.

Kill Hamas men? Two thirds of the people killed in Gaza were unarmed civilians. More than 300 were children. Tens of those counted as non-civilians are actually young officers in Gaza's civilians police force, not militiamen, and were not necessarily affiliated with Hamas. Many were in the police force long before Hamas rose to power in Gaza. The policemen were killed on day one when numerous police stations were hit by the Israelis before they were evacuated.

Take Hamas fighters prisoner? Read this interesting report from Yedioth Ahronot, in which Israeli officials express "disappointment" at the low number of Hamas men who were taken prisoner during the invasion. According those officials, 200 Palestinians were kidnapped by Israel during the first 10 days of the offensive. Only 30 had "connections to Hamas".

Assassinate Hamas leaders? Israel indeed killed Said Siam and Nizar Rayyan, both prominent Hamas leaders. This was probably a strong blow to Hamas, but how significant is it in the long term? This is not the first time Israel targets Hamas leaders. Yahya Ayyash was assassinated in 1996, Salah Shehadeh in 2002, Abdel Aziz Ar-Rantissi, Adnan El-Ghool and Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin in 2004. Hamas recovered after each blow and actually gained more support and popularity after the 2004 assassinations.

Strengthen Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas? I think the result was quite the contrary. Hamas now has more support in the Arab World and Palestine than it ever had. It is much more difficult today for Fatah to regain any power or influence in Gaza. Read this report about injured Palestinians who have never been Hamas members vowing, from their hospital beds in Cairo, to go back to Gaza and fight with Hamas.

Subdue the Palestinians and kill the spirit of resistance? Good try. But this had failed before, in Deir Yassin in 1948, in Beirut in 1982 and in Genin in 2002. Will Israel ever learn? After almost a month of barbaric bombing and despite the heavy toll of death and carnage, Gazans still stand defiant.

Promote the Israel/Bush version of the lame "peace process"? Yeah, peace. Ask the people in Gaza about peace. Ask the four children who laid for days beside their mothers' corpses while ambulances were being turned back by the Israelis. Ask the parents who lost their children and the boys and girls who were orphaned. Ask those who lost a leg, an arm, or an eye, and those who were burned with white phosphorus. Ask people all across the Arab world who watched this on TV in agony and anger. In the hearts of millions, Israel has planted seeds of hate that it will continue to sow for generations to come.

May the souls of those massacred in Gaza rest in peace. We will never forget. We will never forgive.

US Medical Students Denounce Israeli Crimes

"The principles we accepted on entering the medical profession compel us to speak out in the face of these gross violations of basic decency and respect for human life."

This is what 753 students from various medical schools across the US said in a statement they published in the Lancet, a leading medical journal, announcing their solidarity with Gaza and condemning the brutal Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians:

With sadness and urgency we, medical students, express our outrage at the brutal Israeli attacks and subsequent humanitarian disaster that is occurring in Gaza. As we write, more than 600 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded in Israel's disproportionate assault that began on Dec 27, 2008. Not just as medical students, but as Christians, Jews, and Muslims; as Arabs, Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians, we write in solidarity with the people of Gaza as they suffer yet another major humanitarian disaster.

On Dec 10, 1948, the General Assembly of the UN proclaimed that access to medical care is an inalienable human right. More than 60 years later, as medical supplies in Gaza's overstretched and underequipped hospitals dwindle, this right is far from realised. The international community has been slow to respond with aid and even that which is offered is not reaching those in need.

Hospitals scramble to operate with-out power, medicines, and clean water as medical equipment and health workers are prevented from crossing the border. WHO reports that health personnel have been targeted in breach of medical neutrality and in violation of international human-itarian law. Testimonies gathered by Physicians for Human Rights—Israel report that patients wait in vain for treatment that cannot be provided by overwhelmed medical personnel in paralysed clinics. This massive influx of seriously injured civilians would overwhelm even the best of the hospitals in which we train.

Meanwhile, the bombardment of Gaza—one of the most densely populated regions in the world—continues unabated and the international community refuses to address Israel's abhorrent policy of collective punishment. Israel claims only to target militants, yet the lists of wounded and dead are rife with civilians, many of them children.

Irrespective of the complex dynamics of this conflict, human rights, medical neutrality, and the protection of non-combatants always demand respect. Israeli "high-precision" weapons have destroyed a UN school in Jabaliya, which was being used to house refugees, killing 40 civilians alone. We do not dismiss Hamas's role, nor condone its targeting of Israeli civilians. How will the slaughter of Israeli or Palestinian civilians bring peace to this region? We fear this will instead breed new generations of hate, distrust, and misunderstanding. Yet the numbers of lives lost tell the story: Israel's response is disproportionate and unacceptable.

We cannot sit idly in silence as this violent assault on a civilian population kills and maims hundreds of people. The principles we accepted on entering the medical profession compel us to speak out in the face of these gross violations of basic decency and respect for human life. We implore the international community to shoulder its responsibility to the people of Gaza. We are embarrassed at US complicity and regret that many of the weapons fired come from our own country.

As members of the medical profession, we call for an immediate cessation of hostilities, the immediate and comprehensive provision of humanitarian aid, and recognition of the neutrality guaranteed to medical providers by international law. Israel has only now approved limited humanitarian corridors, but this is insufficient and has proven ineffective. We stand united in opposing the health and human rights disaster inflicted on the citizens of Gaza. As we hope for a return to civility, dialogue, compromise, and resolution, our hearts go out to all of the victims of this tragedy. The violence must stop.

We declare that we have no conflict of interest.

List of signatories.

Gaza Must-Reads

When Israel Expelled Palestinians
By Randall Kuhn, the Washington Times

In the wake of Israel's invasion of Gaza, Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: "Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico."

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players.

What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their homes in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people in the United States and abroad, planted forests on their former towns, creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy? Sounds pretty awful, huh? I may be called anti-Semitic for speaking this truth. Well, I'm Jewish and the scenario above is what many prominent Israeli scholars say happened when Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza. But this analogy is just getting started. Full article.

Israel Free Ride Ends
By Michelle Goldberg, the Guardian

Slowly, though, something is changing. As Israel pulverises Gaza, questions and doubts about Israeli policy are becoming more prominent in the American media. The failure of the war in Iraq and the attendant discrediting of neoconservatism has opened up new space in the American conversation. With the American right dejected and weakened, there's less pressure on the press to display the kind of boorish one-sidedness that self-congratulatory conservatives like to call "moral clarity". Israel's disproportionate retaliation in Gaza is increasingly recognised as both brutal and, in all likelihood, ultimately futile. In destroying Gaza, Israel is also destroying the American taboo that has ensured the country such unstintingly favourable media coverage. Full article.

IDF Has No Mercy for Children in Gaza Nursery Schools
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz

One can say Hamas hides among the civilian population, as if the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv is not located in the heart of a civilian population, as if there are places in Gaza that are not in the heart of a civilian population. One can also claim that Hamas uses children as human shields, as if in the past our own organizations fighting to establish a country did not recruit children.

A significant majority of the children killed in Gaza did not die because they were used as human shields or because they worked for Hamas. They were killed because the IDF bombed, shelled or fired at them, their families or their apartment buildings. That is why the blood of Gaza's children is on our hands, not on Hamas' hands, and we will never be able to escape that responsibility. Full article.

Enough. It's Time for a Boycott
By Naomi Klein, the Guardian

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. Full article.

Lancet Blasts Israel Atrocities in Gaza
By AFP

Israel is responsible for "large and indiscriminate human atrocities" in Gaza, and the world medical establishment is a silent accomplice in the bloodshed, The Lancet charged on Wednesday.

In an editorial released ahead of publication next Saturday, the British health journal said Israel, by hitting civilians and wrecking medical infrastructure, had carried out attacks that were "unjustified and disproportional."

"The collective punishment of Gazans is placing horrific and immediate burdens of injury and trauma on innocent civilians. These actions contravene the fourth Geneva convention."

The editorial also blasted "national medical associations and professional bodies worldwide," accusing them of keeping silent as the destruction unfolded.

"Their leaders, through their inaction, are complicit in a preventable tragedy that may have long-lasting public-health consequences not only for Gaza for also for the entire region," it said. Full article.

Jewish British MP Likens Israel to Nazis

Powerful remarks by Gerald Kaufman during a debate on Gaza in the House of Commons today:

My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.

On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians—the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that “500 of them were militants.”

That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.

The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.

The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said: “You make peace by talking to your enemies.”

However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.

It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.

Source: British Parliament website.

On Moderate Arabs

The silence and indifference of the whole Arab world toward what's going on in Palestine is not new. However, while Israel continues the massacre in Gaza, so-called moderate Arab countries are showing unprecedented levels of shamelessness in dealing with the situation. A 'moderate' Arab country actively participated in the siege of Gaza and closed its borders to refugees. Some 'moderate' Arab officials publicly accused the Palestinians of being responsible for the bloodbath. Several Arab leaders who belong to the 'moderate' camp still insist on rejecting calls for an emergency summit meeting on Gaza. And while Israeli envoys were expelled from Venezuela and Bolivia, some 'moderate' Arab countries still host Israeli embassies on their soil.

I used to call myself 'moderate' but during this wave of crisis, the 'moderate' Arab countries have managed to turn moderation into a synonym for cowardice.

History Did Not Begin With Qassam Rockets

But for us, the Israelis, history always begins when the Palestinians hurt us, and then the pain is completely decontextualized. We think that if we cause the Palestinians much greater pain, they will finally learn their lesson. Some term this "achievement."

Nevertheless, the "lesson" remains abstract for most Israelis. The Israeli media prescribes a strict low-information, low-truth diet for its consumers, one rich in generals and their ilk. It is modest, and does not boast of our achievements: the slain children and the bodies rotting under the ruins, the wounded who bleed to death because our soldiers shoot at the ambulance crews, the little girls whose legs were amputated due to horrible wounds caused by various types of weaponry, the devastated fathers shedding bitter tears, the residential neighborhoods that have been obliterated, the terrible burns caused by white phosphorus, and the mini-transfer - the tens of thousands of people who have been expelled from their homes, and are still being expelled at this very minute, ordered to cram into a built-up area that is constantly growing smaller and is also under sentence of incessant bombing and shelling.

Read full article in Haaretz by Amira Hass, Israeli journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors.