Jonathan Cook @ MindSay

You might recall my mentioning on 23 November the Jerusalem Post’s report on the new Human Rights Watch report accusing Palestinians of war crimes for protecting individual houses with ‘human shields’.  Then, on 29 November, Norman Finkelstein (reprinted immediately on CounterPunch) came out against the report and called for letters to HRW demanding a retraction.  This morning there was a press release from the International Solidarity Movement citing the relevant sections of the Geneva Conventions and establishing quite convincingly that HRW’s accusation was completely groundless, in their own terms.  Finkelstein’s page provides links for those who want to write to Kenneth Roth and Sarah Whitson, which I encourage you to do.  There are also letters from other readers on that page. 

 

Now, Jonathan Cook has also made an impressive contribution to the discussion of the issue, which you should read in full.  Among his observations,

 

Women volunteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind his head.

 

A few days ago I wrote that Gaza residents traumatized by projectiles falling on their homes didn’t have the option of fleeing because ‘of course departure is not an option for them’.  A correspondent has written casting doubt on this assertion, ‘From what I've read, it seems that Israel is perfectly willing to let Palestinians leave for other countries.  If that is true, that means departure is an option’.  On reflection, I wrote, ‘I have heard that, too.  In fact I think foundations exist, possibly run out of Yisrael Beitenu, that will pay their way and even give them a little grant.  But I'm not real sure how it works and frankly, I can't imagine anyone in Gaza being able to avail themselves of such an opportunity, as there are no Israeli officials there to entertain an application and the borders are closed.’  If you can shed any light in the issue, please let me know and I’ll post an update.

 

Hot on the heels of their recent military intervention in Tonga to protect the monarchy from prodemocracy ‘rioters’, in the interests of stability and democracy, Ha’aretz reports that New Zealand has now humiliated itself again by withdrawing a warrant for the arrest of Moshe Ya’alon for war crimes.

 

The warrant names Ya'alon for ordering an Israel Air Force attack on the home of senior Hamas official Salah Shehada in the Gaza Strip in 2002. Shahada, the founder of Hamas' military wing, and one of his aides were killed in the attack along with 13 civilians. 

This morning’s mail also brought an interesting ‘cogitation’ from MediaLens’s David Edwards, where he discusses some of the mechanisms that the educational system deploys in turning us into compliant ‘responsible’ members of society, regardless of considerations of what I think he would call ‘compassion’, and I would call ‘solidarity’.  Among the specific ploys that teacher John Taylor Gatto mentions in his book Dumbing Us Down,

 

The point is that a child who accepts the label ‘not very bright’ will, in his or her own mind, deem risible the notion that he or she might seek to understand the world, much less to challenge the assumptions accepted by the society by which he or she has been labelled. For a ’failure’ who has been successfully undermined in this way, to reject the labelling system itself will seem like the most obvious and wretched sour grapes. How can this one individual be right against a whole world of opinion? And from where can we gain the confidence that has been stripped away from us by the very system we are presuming to challenge?

 

On the other hand, the ‘bright’ child will feel a sense of affirmation and belonging that will make him or her disinclined to challenge the fundamental legitimacy and wisdom of the source of his or her own self-esteem. These are the ’winners’ who populate our public [i.e. private] schools, Oxbridge universities and corporate media offices.

 

Edwards also points out that ‘a lot of ’dim’ children are too ’bright’, or at least too true to themselves, to tolerate the trivia imposed on them as ’education’. To be indifferent to what is of minimal human significance is not a sign of stupidity.’

 

When I was a kid, maybe 6 or 7 years old, my grandmother took me to see a western and after some gripping scene I discovered to my horror that M&Ms actually do melt in your hand.  This was a seminal event in my life, to which I attribute my low tolerance for bullshit.  My mother recently reminded me of it out of the blue, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just my fevered imagination.  Nevertheless, I did well in school until I dropped out in grade 10 - a decision I have never had cause to regret.  I wish I’d been allowed to do it earlier.  One of the many advantages was that they never got around to teaching me to hate Shakespeare.

 

I’m going to post this before it gets too long, but I’m currently writing something about Jimmy Carter’s speech broadcast Thursday, Democracy Now!, and the DN interview with Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abunimah.  I may post it later today.

 

 

 

According to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour in an interview with The Jerusalem Post Thursday,

 

"In one case you could have, for instance, a very objectionable intent - the intent to harm civilians, which is very bad - but effectively not a lot of harm is actually achieved," she said. "But how can you compare that with a case where you may not have an intent but you have recklessness [in which] civilian casualties are foreseeable? The culpability or the intent may not sound as severe, but the actual harm is catastrophic."

 

Believe it or not, she is attributing the objectionable intent to those firing Qassam rockets.  I suppose it should be welcome that she at least recognizes that the IOF is culpable for the foreseeable, but of course unintentional, Palestinians who just happen to be accidentally killed and injured by Israeli artillery barrages, missiles, bullets and other obviously harmless projectiles. 

 

On CounterPunch the other day, Kathleen Christisson issued a moral challenge,

 

…any Jew anywhere who allows Israel to commit these acts and pursue these policies in the name of all Jews -- for Israel does claim to act in the name of Jews everywhere -- without speaking out against Israel, without screaming protests, must be ashamed.  Any American who allows the United States to support Israel -- to support it militarily with infusions of arms in the billions of dollars every year and to sustain it morally and psychologically -- without loud protest should be ashamed.

 

Further on the Gemayel assassination, Charles Glass writes,

 

So, what can the United States do? I can tell you what it has done. In 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger approved the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. In 1982, his successor, Al Haig, encouraged Israel's invasion. Then, in 1990, another American secretary of state, James Baker, gave the go-ahead for the Syrian army to return to the parts of Lebanon from which it had been excluded in 1982. Neither Syria nor Israel entered Lebanon without an American okay. An American diktat could keep them both out, if the US cared as much about Lebanon as its politicians claim.

 

Jonathan Cook, as always worth a read, makes a convincing, if admittedly inconclusive, case that the Syrians are not necessarily the ones with most to gain from the assassination,

 

Gemayel's death, and Syria's blame for it, strengthens the case of the neoconservatives in Washington -- Israel's allies in the Administration -- whose star had begun to wane. They can now argue convincingly that Syria is unreformed and unreformable. Such an outcome helps to avert the danger, from Israel's point of view, that White House doves might win the argument for befriending Syria.

 

For all these reasons, we should be wary of assuming that Syria is the party behind Gemayel's death -- or the only regional actor meddling in Lebanon.

 

In much the same vein, Robert Fisk writes,

 

That little matter of the narrative - and who writes it - remained a problem yesterday, as the Western powers pointed their fingers at Syria. Yes, all five leading Lebanese men murdered in the past 20 months were anti-Syrian. And it's a bit like saying "the butler did it". Wouldn't a vengeful Syria strike at the independence of Lebanon by killing a minister? Yes. But then, what would be the best way of undermining the new and boastful power of the pro-Syrian Hizbollah, the Shia guerrilla army which has demanded the resignation of Siniora's cabinet? By killing a government minister, knowing that many Lebanese would blame the murder on Syria's Hizbollah allies?

 

For another take on the NYT coverage of the assassination, Chris Marsden writes in WSWS,

 

What the Times presents as an accidental result of Gemayel’s assassination provides a more convincing argument for anti-Syrian forces being responsible than its own efforts to blame Hezbollah or Syria.

 

As the Times predicted, Hezbollah has been forced to put the planned anti-government rallies announced earlier by its leader Sheik Hasan Nasrallah on hold. Instead, Gemayel’s funeral yesterday was the focus of a massive demonstration by anti-Syrian and pro-government forces.

 

In today’s Times, Steven Erlanger, always ready to cast a critical eye on events in Palestine, writes,

 

After another surge of violence in and around the Gaza Strip over the past month, Israel and the Palestinians moved gingerly on Friday toward reinstating an often-broken cease-fire between them.

 

Not worth mentioning in the newspaper of record is that the surge of violence has been perpetrated by the occupying military force.  Not worth mentioning is that artillery and firearms are discharged with an intent to cause harm.  And above all, it is not only not worth mentioning, but forbidden to mention, that the ‘often-broken cease-fire’ was unilateral, that Hamas refused to respond to Israeli provocation for over a year and a half.

 

True to form, history in the NYT’s view, began on 25 June,

 

Israel re-entered Gaza in late June in response to the capture of a soldier, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, by a group of Palestinian militants that included Hamas.

 

That the Israeli military kidnapped two Palestinian civilians the previous day, civilians, not coincidentally, whose names the NYT will not publish, couldn’t possibly have anything whatever to do with Shalit’s capture.  Once again, small mercies.  At least Mr Erlanger has managed to temper his language – usually, Shalit is ‘kidnapped’ or ‘abducted’, as if his tank crew were not a legitimate military target.  As if it was some kind of crime.  Which of course it was. By definition.  What the occupied and oppressed do is criminal, what the occupiers and oppressors do is anticipatory retaliation, or the like.

 

Sometimes I feel like it must be tiresome reading about the cynical bullshit I see in the media.  But people read the bullshit itself every day, day in day out – I know people who actually subscribe to the hard copy of the Times, so I guess I’ll just keep it up.

Grossman’s speech continues to elicit comment.  I neglected to mention Uri Avnery’s critique.  Jonathan Cook takes on both Grossman and Avnery and is as incisive as usual.  While crediting Avnery’s decades of mainly principled leadership of the Israeli peace movement, such as it is, he hits the nail on the head when he points out,

 

The bottom line in any peace for Avnery is the continued existence and success of Israel as a Jewish state. That rigidly limits his ideas about what sort of peace a "radical" Israeli peace activist ought to be pursuing.

 

Like Grossman, Avnery supports a two-state solution because, in both their views, the future of the Jewish state cannot be guaranteed without a Palestinian state alongside it. This is why Avnery finds himself agreeing with 90 per cent of Grossman's speech. If the Jews are to prosper as a demographic (and democratic) majority in their state, then the non-Jews must have a state too, one in which they can exercise their own, separate sovereign rights and, consequently, abandon any claims on the Jewish state.

 

Meron Benvenisti wrote in Ha’aretz the other day,

 

In the present reality, when the very concept of "peace" has become subversive, bringing it up again might be considered a stirring event and a cardinal text. But the passive stance taken by the spokesman for the peace camp should be noted: all that a fighter for peace has to do is preach to the hollow leadership.

 

Where is the call to join the struggle against the injustice of the security fence, the choke-hold of the roadblocks, the siege on Gaza, the killing of women and children, the destruction of the institutions of the Palestinian Authority, the deporting of Palestinian families "without documents"?

The Times also editorialized a few days ago on the opportunity Rumsfeld’s resignation present to build ‘The army we need’.

 

Part of the problem, it turns out, is that Rumsfeld ‘didn’t like the Clintonian notion of using the United States military to secure and rebuild broken states.’  Like Somalia?  And Haiti?  And Kosovo?

 

And ‘circumstances in Afghanistan and Iraq called for just the things Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t like’, and that is the problem, obviously.

According to George Friedman, in his Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report for 11.21.2006,

 

New York Democrat Charles Rangel, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has called for the reinstatement of the draft…Rangel's essential point is that the way the United States has manned the military since World War II is inherently unjust. It puts the lower classes at risk in fighting wars, leaving the upper classes free to pursue their lives and careers… When those who benefit most from a society feel no obligation to defend it, there is a deep and significant malaise in that society.

…

There is no inherent reason why enlistment -- or conscription -- should be targeted toward those in late adolescence. And there is no reason why the rich themselves, rather than the children of the rich, should not go to war…Rangel is correct in saying that the upper classes in American society are not pulling their weight…If Americans are serious about dealing with the crisis of lack of service among the wealthiest, then they should look to the wealthiest first, rather than their children.

 

Unlike his namesake, Thomas L., George Friedman has an interesting way of thinking.  At least he knows there’s a class war going on.  If only he could get past the idea that ‘nations’ have geopolitical interests independent of the interests of their ruling classes…well, then he wouldn’t be writing these analyses, and Stratfor wouldn’t attract the clientele they seek, would they?

Private property rights!

 

Ha’aretz reports that, ‘according to a survey by the Peace Now settlement monitoring team’, 74%  ‘of the 102 outposts in the West Bank…are at least partly built on private Palestinian land’.

 

‘Dror Etkes, the head of the monitoring team…called construction on these lands "highway robbery."’

 

And here’s me thinking the issue is that all of every ‘outpost’, ‘settlement’, ‘Jewish neighbourhood’, kibbutz, moshav, city, and, yes, highway, throughout historic Palestine, including ‘Israel proper’, was built on stolen Palestinian land. 

 

‘"The removal of the outposts, and punishment of the people responsible for their construction, will bring Israel somewhat closer to the level of a country in which the rule of law prevails," Etkes said.’

 

And justice can wait.

 

Speaking of justice, I’m just reading Jonathan Cook’s Blood and religion: the unmasking of the Jewish and democratic state.  Pretty compelling stuff.  Those ‘Israeli Arabs are incredibly patient and forgiving people.  Just reading about what they put up with makes me see red.  But ultimately, just more evidence that Zionism is racist and Zionists are not embarrassed about being racists – it’s in a good cause, after all.

[Originally posted 2006 07 21]

"The Middle East has been through too many spasms of violence, and we have to deal with underlying conditions so that we can create sustainable conditions for political progress there."  US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801436_pf.html

 

Truer words were never spoken, at least by Ms Rice and the neocons.  Now, if only she meant them for real.  But that would be asking for too much – as the aphorism goes, ‘Trying to embarrass a politician with accusations of hypocrisy is as futile as trying to embarrass a dog with accusations that he licks his own balls’.

 

And while on the topic of dogs’ balls, here’s what the Forward’s editorial had to say ‘This fight began when Israel was attacked on its southern border on June 25, without provocation and without a shred of justification. The attackers were armed gangs that are sworn to the destruction of the Jewish state and make no other pretense. On July 12, a second front was opened on Israel's northern border, this time by an armed gang from a neighboring state that does not even have a semblance of a territorial dispute with Israel.’ 

 

Don’t they think anyone will have noticed the two Palestinian civilians kidnapped within Gaza’s ‘borders’ by the Israeli military on 24 June, the very day before Shalit’s capture ‘without provocation’?  The Forward may not have reported it, but it’s widely known.  And even if they happened to have succeeded in insulating themselves, as well as their readers, from this inconvenient little fact, in my dialect of English, which is the same as theirs, blockading Gaza, shelling the beach with or without casualties, shelling residential buildings and infrastructure, and extrajudicial executions with or without ‘collateral damage’, separately or collectively, all count as provocation.

 

Don’t they think, moreover, that anyone will remember the Shebaa Farms? 

And then you read all the crap about how the ‘terrorists’ manipulate the western media!

Writing of the similarity of the situations in Beirut and Haifa, Juan Cole writes, ‘The big international companies with offices not far from where the rockets landed include Microsoft, and the danger posed to Israel of capital flight in the billions dwarfs in magnitude the Lebanese losses of $100 million a day, mainly in forfeited tourism.’  I would have thought that the destruction of literally all of Lebanon’s infrastructure would come to more than that, not to mention the losses sustained by individual households of their dwellings and possessions as the Israelis quite publicly and deliberately drive them north of the Litani, as Cole himself reports.  Expelling civilians is of course a war crime, but what difference will one more war crime make, when committing war crimes is effectively Israel’s raison d’etre.

 

In the same piece on Salon, Cole is at pains to assure the reader that ‘There is no question that Israel has the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, and to respond appropriately to Hezbollah's illegal and immoral abduction of two soldiers and killing of others.’  Indeed, he makes the same point twice, ‘Of course Israel has the right to defend its citizens against missile attacks and its soldiers against being attacked.’  I suppose this could be a vain attempt to insulate himself from the inevitable accusations of anti-Semitism, but he should be used to that by now.  He probably believes that this is obvious.

 

Indeed, a state does, in principle, have not just the right, but the responsibility, to protect its residents.  But this raises two issues: How can a state legitimately do this?  And do states in reality take on this responsibility?

 

In the context of Israel, little could be more obvious than that the most effective way of protecting Israelis from Hisb’allah rocket attacks would have been to refrain from bombing Lebanon in the first place.  The rockets were a response to the bombing, not the other way around.  The bombing was a response to the capture of two soldiers, but it was not the only possible response, it was not the most effective response, and, unless you happen to agree with Bolton’s racist comments about the relative value of Lebanese and Israeli lives, not the most humane, either. 

 

It is one thing to protect citizens from rocket attacks by provoking rocket attacks, but what about protecting citizens from other perils.  There’s an advert in Ha’aretz every day appealing to me to help feed the third of Jewish children in Israel who go to bed hungry.  With the homeless camped on their doorsteps, Israeli politicians gleefully go off and squander their US billions on war toys. 

 

Jonathan Cook reports from Nazareth:

Several Israeli armaments factories and storage depots have been built close by Arab communities in the north of Israel, possibly in the hope that by locating them there Arab regimes will be deterred from attacking Israel's enormous armory. In other words, the inhabitants of several of Israel's Arab towns and villages have been turned into collective human shields – protection for Israel's war machine. Several Israeli armaments factories and storage depots have been built close by Arab communities in the north of Israel, possibly in the hope that by locating them there Arab regimes will be deterred from attacking Israel's enormous armory. In other words, the inhabitants of several of Israel's Arab towns and villages have been turned into collective human shields – protection for Israel's war machine…. The fifth of the Israeli population who are not Jewish but Arab are rarely to be found hiding in public shelters because the authorities neglected to build any in their towns and villages.

 

It all makes things look as if the Israeli state is not that concerned about protecting its citizens per se.  Rather, they are interested in proclaiming that they protect certain citizens from certain perils, while assiduously inciting those perils in the first place.

If Israel were serious about protecting its citizens from rocket attacks, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Releasing the prisoners and withdrawing to the 1967 ‘borders’ would probably do the trick, although there is much much more Israel would have to do to redress the Palestinians’ legitimate grievances.

 

Cole concludes his article, ‘Just as their 1982 invasion of Lebanon and occupation of the south haunted them for a generation, they will be living with the blowback of their ill-considered war on hapless little Lebanon for decades to come. Tragically, the United States, as Israel's closest ally, will also have to suffer for its actions.’

 

So what’s so tragic about that?  The US congress and Senate have speedily passed resolutions applauding Israel’s wanton attack. ‘It harshly condemns Israel's enemies and says Syria and Iran should be held accountable for providing Hezbollah with money and missile technology used to attack Israel.’ (AP). But the US$3 billion plus per year Americans spend arming Israel, and not feeding its poor starving Jewish children, is a non issue. 

 

Meanwhile, back in Turkey, according to Reuters, ‘Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan rapped the United States on Tuesday for tolerating Israel's attacks on its enemies in Lebanon while refusing to allow Ankara to crush Kurdish rebels hiding in northern Iraq.’  So Israel now has the distinction of setting new standards in international diplomacy.

 

Many thanks to Information Clearing House (http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/), which provided links to most of the material I have discussed here.  It looks like a particularly valuable resource and the guy who runs the site is obviously putting in a monumental effort.  I have donated to the site and if you are reading this, you probably should consider doing so too.