Israeli Army Prosecutes Delinquent Soldiers

Abuses of power take place on all sides during all wars. The distinguishing feature of a state is how it handles these. What critics of Israel fail to understand is that its democratic nature provides internal institutional mechanisms to punish and prevent the excesses of a few wayward soldiers. To this end, there is a story in Haaretz last week about an IDF soldier who was arrested for stealing a credit card from a home in the northern Gaza strip during the recent war against Hamas and using it to withdraw 1,600 Shekels.

Of course this is a disgusting act. Using war as a cover for stealing private property for no justifiable reason other than self enrichment, should be prohibited. It goes against the moral code of the IDF and the Jewish people. It is disappointing of course to know that even one such act took place. We need to examine why it happened. But most importantly Israel has made it clear not only by its words, but by its actions, in arresting the guilty soldier that such behavior will not be tolerated.

What I find remarkable about the whole story is how well the institutional control mechanism within the IDF functioned. The article reports that a Palestinian residing in the northern Gaza Strip lodged a complaint with the army after the war that his credit card was stolen during Operation Cast Lead. He presented them with his credit card statement revealing a number of products had been purchased in Israel with it. In light of the seriousness of the complaint, the military prosecution ordered the Military Police Investigation unit to open probes in which they would take evidence in order to examine the claims. The unit found the Palestinian’s claim to be accurate, found the guilty party and arrested him.

It is firstly amazing that the Palestinian man chose to report the theft in the first place. From what we read in the newspapers, the IDF is a Palestinian child killing machine. Why would any sane Palestinian have believed that he would get justice from it? Not over a death but a few hundred dollars? And we know how those Jews like their dollars, just ask South Africa’s former Foreign Minister. Secondly, why the evil IDF would even have bothered to follow up on the complaint. And then thirdly, when finding guilt, actually go to the trouble of arresting the soldier and not just crying security concerns. This incident demonstrates that Israel’s critics have missed a thing or two about the morality of its army!

This is obviously only one swan, but it is does carry with it the hope of summer. Those who really care about Palestinian and Israeli wellbeing would be advised to take note. This is not Yugoslavia or Rwanda or even Faluja or Kabul. There is no need to impose an outside trial on the IDF and Israeli politicians for war crimes. Its courts and police investigation units will do it for you where necessary. If Judge Goldstone and co really wanted to make a difference, rather than spending their summer on a witch hunt, they should come to Israel to offer their expertise in strengthening these types of internal institutions.

Comments

[Religious Fundamentalist 1]

OR
you could see it simply as another case of Jihad Lawfare
and
realise that the IDF/Israel/Elders of Zion will get no credit ('scuse the pun) for this act whatsoever other than to pat themselves on their backs about how "ethical" they are and assuage the guilt of diaspora Jews too embarassed to stand up for Jewish rights to their historic homeland.

[BenCorp.]

@ Religious Fundamentalist
Wow. An IDF soldier confesses after questioning to being a common thief but it's not justice, just another ploy by the global jihad against jews to make you feel guilty. That's some impressive mental contortion you're doing there.

[Mark Whittington]

Bencorp, dont you knew that religious Jews think anything is justifiable if done by Jews. Its only a problem when you look at Jews without non Jews. Then its only ok if its done by religious Jews.

Diaspora Jews must understand that they can only defend their historic homeland by turning a blind eye to any injustices (according to the religious).

[BenCorp.]

Mark, I'm starting to get the picture.
Religious fanaticism of any faith is so dreary, I wish they would find a way to the afterlife without taking so many normal people with them.

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

BenCorp:
Try read again what I said, not what you think I said.

Then come back and show me what statement that I made is demonstrably false.

Mark:
You clearly have a miniscule knowledge of Jewish law, and even less of inter-Jewish politics. If I thought you actually wanted to understand, instead of pontificate I'd give you some reading material. But WELCOME anyway to the blog. I particularly value your comments and world view. I hope the readership empathize and understand your comments rather than dismissing them because they don't gel with their personal comfortable milieu.

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

Actually BenCorp, fanaticism of any sort is dreary. Including Fanatical Secularism and Fanatical Atheism and Fanatical Bowling

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3630461/a-lethal-double-standard.thtml

[Xenocratic]

Oh, so a single soldier being arrested for stealing a credit card somehow washes away all the egregious human rights violations that occurred during Operation Cast Lead which left around 1300 people dead, most of them Palestinian civilians, over 5000 wounded, with massive damage to civilian infrastructure and thousands homeless. Truly those citizens of Gaza who saw their innocent loved ones mercilessly slaughtered, or blinded by white phospherous, or maimed for life, should sing eternal praises to the IDF for this amazing commitment to human rights. I mean, surely prosecuting someone over the theft of a credit card is so much more meaningful than actually sending someone to prison for openly killing women and children. What a great beacon of humanitarian integrity the IDF truly is. They are the light of the world!

Back in the real world, you might want to refer your readers to the article in Haaretz, Israel's major daily newspaper, which details the fact that soldiers were given orders to "shoot to kill". The article is available at http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072830.html.

Anyone who wants an objective perspective on the Palestine-Israel issue would do well to avoid that right wing rag The Spectator.

Perhaps the author of this blog entry would like to have detailed background to the Palestine-Israel conflict that isn't so obviously skewed towards a pro-Israel stance and to that end I would recommend Noam Chomsky's 'The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians' & 'Middle East Illusions', as well as Jimmy Carter's 'Palestine: Peace not Apartheid', not to mention Edward Said's last collection of essays entitled 'From Oslo to Iraq adn the Road Map'. Why not also try the very exhaustive 'The Gun and the Olive Branch' by David Hirst, that is if you're prepared to have assumptions challenged.

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

Thank you XENO, I couldn't have said it better myself.

I would however be wary of quoting Noam or Jimmy as sound sources. Even us hard leftists are starting to get whiff of their odious habits of truth retelling. There is only so much rose colour you can add before you can't actually see through the lenses anymore.

[Xenocratic]

Thanks for the compliment. While I agree that we should resist relying on a single source, one must be constantly aware of the lengths that right wing loons will go to distort Chomsky's work and lie outright about what he's written (or not written in many cases). As someone who has read a fair bit of his work I am quite confident in my dealings with the dissemblers who want to claim that Chomsky supported the Khmer Rouge or made unsubstantiated contentions about what would happen in Afghanistan should the US invade, to name but two issues that the Chomsky-haters of this world use to discredit him.

Having noted this, I am also rather dubious of some of his perspectives on issues and his rigidity of his worldview which occasionally limits his analysis of pressing events. I have never been a champion of a single source so we should all constantly strive to expand our knowledge base as far as possible on as many subjects as reasonably feasible. The evidence that the IDF are grotesque violaters of human rights is so staggeringly apparent that only the most blinded of Israel apologists would even attempt to question this assertion. The recent criminal assault on Gaza earlier this year, which began with 200 people being killed on a single day, should have been enough to dispell any nagging doubts people had about the true nature of the State of Israel, though old ideological and religious habits clearly die very hard.

Pilger is another great source on this issue, though I'm sure the mere mention of his name will be enough to cause the right wing rabble rousing brigade to come scurrying out of their lairs. In particular, his chapter on Palestine in 'Freedom Next Time', entitled 'The Last Taboo'(a most apt title), is most instructive.

I really do wonder how this intractable conflict would be portrayed if the brutal occupying force weren't Jewish but were instead a junta in Latin America? Or Vietnamese? Or individuals of Dutch, German and French descent a la the Afrikaners? Because what assists me in keeping a clear picture of what's really happening is to forget entirely that we're talking about Jews and Palestinians and simply see the conflict in terms of one group of people subjecting another group to harsh subjugation and brutality. I do have my doubts that it will be possible to convince people on both sides of this divide to examine the opposing forces not in terms of religious or ethnic identity but simply in terms of two sets of people vying for the same slab of Middle Eastern real estate.

[Religious Fundamentalist 1]

Xeno,

Again, I must say Pilger is falling out of favour with those who prefer to stear away from outright lies. But I get your point.

For an interesting case in point about how the situation would be portrayed given a few changes in variables (such as Jews) you might want to consider the Sri Lanka / Tamil conflict.

And once again, before my friends the uber-rhetoricists get started, thanks again for your comments, please keep them coming it's vital this blog gets a bit of a shake-up.

[RF2]

Welcome Xeno.

It is so refreshing to have a new anti Israel opinion on this blog. What's more, we finally have someone who makes their points without irrational, anarchistic rhetoric screaming through every post.

To be sure, I thoroughly disagree with almost everything you say and feel you are at best miseducated about the situation in Israel. But I look forward to constructive blogging without name calling and insults. I hope the other bloggers will respect that too.

To address your post. You missed the point of the original article. The point was not that a theft prosecution excuses human rights abuses. It was that the very fact that there was such a prosecution is indicative that the allegations of human rights abuses were false. Read the article again and I'm sure you will see this.

Secondly, regarding the Haaretz article. I rememember tghe article. The allegations made were made by the leader of an ultra left wing anarchist organizations, a person who advocates refusing to serve in the IDF. Now whether you agree with his position or not you have to admit that he is not an unbiased source. What's more, none of the cases he quoted included an specific details - names, dates, units etc. It was all "i heard froma friend of mine". No rational court of law in the world would hang someone on such flimsy evidence, how can you find Israel guilty of such serious crimes on such unsubstantiated allegations.

Regarding the white phosphorous, this has been proven to be false. But even if it wasn't - war is war and you use whatever weapons you have on the enemy. Regarding who is the enemy, see previous articles on this blog. You can't take a palestinian policeman, with an AK47, military training and a rocket on his should aimed at Israel, and call him a non combatant because he was in the employ of the Palestinian police.

But please, all this aside Xeno. I have said before on this blog that anti Israel rhetoric in only anti semetic hatred if your criticisms are not followed by viable alternative suggestions.
The facts are as follows. Israel's civilian population has been bombarded by up to 80 rockets a day, on schools, community centres, houses etc, for the past eight years. In order to stop this Israel has tired asking, begging, pleading, absolute withdrawl from the entire Gaza strip, pin point military strikes, localised military action, closing of border crossings. All these efforts were met with an increase in rocket fire. So xeno, in order for anyone to take your comments as being anything other than a call to the gas chambers, you have to give us at least one suggestions as to what Israel should have done. This suggestions must a)not be something we've already tried and b) have a realistic chance of stopping to rockets.

I look forward to your reply

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

http://www.cjr.org/feature/a_matter_of_trust.php?page=all

An in-depth look at the reporting of the story referred to by Xeno.

[RF2]

RF1,
The analysis falls short. It briefly brushes over the key point. As of yet, no evidence whatesoever has emerged to substaniate the accusations. To claim that perhaps these soldiers now feel peer pressure to shut up ignores the fact that they were quite happy to tell all in public to start with. To claim that the idf was not thorough ignores the presence of organizations such as betselem who would jump onto any bit of evidence (even falsified). Yet since the initial report - not a word.

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

As i said, the analysis is of the reporting of the story. Not the story itself.

By the way, don't you have better things to do than float around here? nudge nudge

[Xenocratic]

Dear RF2

Firstly, I take issue with your categorisation of me as "anti-Israel", which implies that I am inherently opposed to every facet of the state of Israel, presumably as a concept and no doubt by inferene based on some deep ineradicable well of anti-Semitism. Glad at least that you distinguished between critics of Israel and anti-Semites, which all too few proponents of the state of Israel, as it is currently constituted, ever bother to do. I would prefer to be judged on what I stand FOR, such as respecting human rights, democracy, secularism, rationality, scientific methodology and inquisitiveness, to name but a few, rather than what I am against. I am opposed to all states that show disrespect for the values I hold dear, which includes much of the Middle East, many African countries, the likes of China and North Korea, and on and on. If those states, like Israel, were to change course I would commend them for it and stop being, in your highly inexact phrase, "anti-Israel". Anyone who was anti any particular state without coherent reasons for taking an oppositional stance should be dismissed out of hand. This is, after all, a species of racism.

Glad that you're able to respect my point of view even though you completely disagree with it. That is rare, particularly in this highly delicate area of international geopolitics. I would ask that you not use inflammatory terms such as "gas chambers" because this really is a very emotionally charged concept that immediately conjures up images of some of the most heinous acts the world has ever known. If we are to rationally address issues in the here and now we would do well to avoid constant suggestions of an impending apocalypse which actually perpetuates, rather than alleviates, current impasses.

Perhaps your points apropos the Haaretz article I linked to is true, though this is hardly the only piece of evidence for the IDF's barbaric behaviour during Operation Cast Lead. Let's recall how this situation began:

"The first bombardment took three minutes and forty seconds. Sixty Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed fifty sites in Gaza, killing over two hundred Palestinians, and wounding close to a thousand more."

That's Never Gordon in his article 'Israel's Four Real Objectives in the Gaza Attacks'. The rest is available at http://www.alternet.org/audits/115951/israel%27s_four_real_objectives_in_the_gaza_attacks/?comments=view&cID=1093050&pID=1093002.

Also contained in this rather brief article is the following, which addresses your main point in your blog post:

"Yet, the government is actively misleading the public, since Israel could have put an end to the rockets a long time ago. Indeed, there was relative quiet during the six-months truce with Hamas, a quiet that was broken most often as a reaction to Israeli violence: that is, following the extra-judicial execution of a militant or the imposition of a total blockade which prevented basic goods, like food stuff and medicine, from entering the Gaza Strip. Rather than continuing the truce, the Israeli government has once again chosen to adopt strategies of violence that are tragically akin to the one’s deployed by Hamas, only the Israeli ones are much more lethal."

I cannot believe that you can actually state, with something akin to a straight face(after all, your visage isn't visible in the electronic sphere) that the "use of white phosphorous has been proven false". Firstly, I actually watched Al-Jazeera extensively during Operation Cast Lead and it was possible to spot the use of white phosphorous. Now before you, or anyone else, goes off the deep end because of my reference to Al-Jazeera, I should remind you they were the only international news organisation to actually enter Gaza during the conflict. In short, they're the best we had throughout the three week onslaught. Also, for those able to drop their Westernised blinkers, this news station remains head and shoulders, and most other body parts, above all other international stations. Accounts by numerous doctors made it explicitly clear that white phosphorous was being used, and I saw a young boy in a hospital who had been blinded by the stuff. Saying no white phosphorous was used is like saying evolution is a lie, or that the earth is flat, you are contradicting a fact established to a virtually 100% certainty, unless everyone is lying, including my own eyes. Sorry, it did happen, end of story, no argument will be entered into on this point.

In the article Gaza is a Concentration Camp, Ellen Cantarow writes:

"On the broadcast program Democracy Now, a Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, who had just returned from Gaza to Denmark, told host Amy Goodman that "90 percent of those killed are civilians." Gilbert reported 971 dead, of whom 1 in 3 is a child under 18. He has worked in Gaza for years and was there for the first weeks of Israel's assault.

The Times of London, Human Rights Watch and B'tselem all report the illegal use of white phosphorous to strike civilians. When white phosphorous adheres to flesh, its flames continue to burn for five to 10 minutes, often penetrating to the bone.

Gilbert and other experts think Israel is also using a new weapon called dense inert metal explosive. It was developed by the United States to create lethal, powerful blasts within small areas. DIME inflicts wounds never before seen by surgeons in Gaza. According to Gilbert, conventional shrapnel damages limbs and other body parts as if they'd been cut by a huge knife. DIME, on the other hand, leaves "no signs of shrapnel," but rather "small pieces of some kind of substance" (DIME is made of nickel and cobalt). It crushes "the whole limb," not just part, with "multiple severe fractures, muscles split from bones." Some classify DIME weapons as nuclear because they are based on a fusion process. (Democracy Now, Jan. 14.)"

Full article available at
http://www.alternet.org/audits/120197/gaza_is_a_concentration_camp__/?page=entire

So tell me, exactly how humane is it to use a civilian population to conduct experiments on the efficacy of new types of explosive devices? That's only partially a rhetorical question.

Also of note in the article, written while Operation Cast Lead was in full destructive swing, is the fact that according "the Israel Project" 25 civilians have died as a result of rocket fire from Gaza "during the past seven years." As already noted, in the first day of Operation Cast Lead, 200 Palestinians, virtually all civilians, were wiped off the face of the planet. Wouldn't you say that this counts as at least partially disproportionate, if not shockingly so? Perhaps in these troubling statistics the reason for the continued rocket fire is at least partially explicable.

Near the end of this article we read this:

"It was planned six to 18 months in advance, according to journalist Jonathan Cook. The war design "required directing artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighborhoods from which rockets were fired, despite being a violation of international law. Legal advisers, Barak noted, were seeking ways to avoid such prohibitions, presumably in the hope the international community would turn a blind eye."

Operation Cast Lead fulfils at least three of the points under Article 2 in the Convention on Genocide: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

For more background on the situation in Gaza I highly recommend that you read Richard Falk's 'Understanding the Gaza Catastrophe' available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-falk/understanding-the-gaza-ca_b_154777.html. As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories he is someone whose views should be highly respected considering his intimate knowledge of the region. He writes, on January 2nd of this year:

"A flicker of hope emerged some six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot. During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel's 1967 borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine, and fuel to a trickle."

Furthermore:

"Clearly, prior to the current crisis, Israel used its authority to prevent credible observers from giving accurate and truthful accounts of the dire humanitarian situation that had been already documented as producing severe declines in the physical condition and mental health of the Gazan population, especially noting malnutrition among children and the absence of treatment facilities for those suffering from a variety of diseases. The Israeli attacks were directed against a society already in grave condition after a blockade maintained during the prior 18 months."

Also of interest is the following:

"There was no substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. It was at this point that rocket fire from Gaza intensified. Also, it was Hamas that on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom. Beyond this, attributing all the rockets to Hamas is not convincing either. A variety of independent militia groups operate in Gaza, some such as the Fatah-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are anti-Hamas, and may even be sending rockets to provoke or justify Israeli retaliation. It is well confirmed that when US-supported Fatah controlled Gaza's governing structure it was unable to stop rocket attacks despite a concerted effort to do so."

A recent Medialens alert provides details of a UN "inquiry into attacks on its buildings and personnel in Gaza". The inquiry's conclusion contends that the IDF were:

"involved in varying degrees of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property." (Donald Macintyre, 'UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report', Independent, May 6, 2009)

The Medialens article goes on:

"Incidents for which Israel was held responsible by the UN inquiry included:

* The deaths of three young men killed by a single IDF missile strike at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Asma school in Gaza City.

* The firing of heavy mortar rounds into the UNRWA Jabalia school, injuring seven people sheltering in the school, killing up to 40 people in the immediate vicinity and injuring a further 50.

* Aerial bombing of the UNRWA Bureij health centre on the same day, causing the death of a patient, serious injuries to two other patients and injuries to nine of the health centre's employees.

* Artillery firing by the IDF into the UNRWA field office compound in Gaza city, combined with the use of white phosphorus, causing injuries and considerable damage to it and the surrounding buildings, and leading to the disruption of the UN's humanitarian operations in Gaza.

* Artillery firing by the IDF into the UNRWA Beit Lahia school, again with the use of white phosphorus, causing the deaths of two children, aged 5 and 7, and injuries to 13 others.

Contrary to Israeli claims, the UN inquiry found no evidence that "Hamas militants" had used UN property to attack Israel or Israeli forces. Indeed, the report demanded that the UN urge Israel to retract its allegations to that effect."

Most tellingly for the UN, and the world at large, is the cowardice of the UN Secretary General:

"Shamefully, however, when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented the inquiry results, he rejected its authors' call for such an investigation. He even decided not to release the full 184-page report. According to a brief item on the BBC Arabic news website, the BBC was informed by "a diplomatic source" that the United States "informed Ban's office that the report should not be published in full due to the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks." (Cited in Hasan Abu Nimah, 'Ban Ki-moon's moral failure', The Electronic Intifada, May 6, 2009; http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10511.shtml)"

Clearly, the report shows just how brazenly at odds with humanitarian principles the IDF behaved during Operation Cast Lead, otherwise there would have been no problem with issuing the entire report.

I really am interested to know, RF2, how you can continue to defend the IDF after Operation Cast Lead in which about 1400 Palestinians, including 300 children, were killed, while 5000 more were wounded and "Israeli forces bombed and shelled schools, medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, United Nations buildings (including UN schools), power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes?" For the entire Medialens article, entitled 'Beholden to the Big Powers: Israel, Gaza and the UN' see www.medialens.org.

Although Religious Fundamentalist 1 has problems with his work, I would highly recommend Chomsky's article on Operation Cast Lead which is very thorough and provides a welter of sources to back up his assertions. The article is entitled 'Exterminate all the brutes' and is available at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20316.

RF2, could you please explain to me how I am "miseducated about the situation in Israel"? I mean beyond asserting that I am. The modern state of Israel was founded on the expulsion of around 750 000 Arabs which they still refer to as al-Naqba, or the Catastrophe. From that all else flows, I'm afraid. You cannot steal people's lands, kill their children, deprive them of water and movement, prevent them from accessing schools and arable land, as the disgraceful "Security Fence", aka the Annexation Wall, is currently doing and expect them to continue to play nice. Actually, the Palestinians did that for far longer than any reasonable person had any right to expect, enduring the aforementioned expulsion, followed by twenty years of brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza before the first Intifada in 1987. Or perhaps your version of history leaves out all the bad stuff done by the Israelis, which would be like ignoring the history of South Africa since 1652 and wondering why blacks are so poor and downtrodden today. The analogy is of course not perfect, but we are still dealing with colonial situations, even though that word is almost never used about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. To achieve a lasting peace negotiations must take place, which will inevitably lead to compromises, something which the Israeli government seems singularly unable to even contemplate. Norman Mailer said it best when he wrote that "you either change or pay more to stay the same". Currently Israel is paying a very high price to maintain the status quo, a situation which simply cannot go on indefinitely. I would thus advise them to change, at least somewhat, otherwise the apocalyptic scenario which you sketched might just become an unavoidable reality. I agree wholeheartedly with Neve Gordon's closing words in that article quoted above:

"If the Israeli government really cared about its citizens and the country’s long term ability to sustain itself in the Middle East, it would abandon the use of violence and talk with its enemies."

Dear Religious Fundamentalist 1

While I certainly don't consider Pilger to be perfect (who is?) I am most interested to know when Pilger has told or written "outright lies"? He may be biased in a number of situations, but surely subjectivity isn't enough to warrant such a harsh denunciation? I think he's one of the world's finest and bravest journalists and have immense respect for his work. Having said that, I try not to worship anyone so damning information you may possess will certainly be looked at with a scrupulous eye.

[Xenocratic]

I wrote quite a long post in response to RF2's post, but it must clearly be too excessive for this site as I am informed that my comment has been posted yet nothing of the sort actually occurs. Does anyone know how I can remedy this situation? Or should I just break up the post in smaller chunks? What is the word limit for comments?

[Xenocratic]

Dear RF2

Firstly, I take issue with your categorisation of me as "anti-Israel", which implies that I am inherently opposed to every facet of the state of Israel, presumably as a concept and no doubt by inferene based on some deep ineradicable well of anti-Semitism. Glad at least that you distinguished between critics of Israel and anti-Semites, which all too few proponents of the state of Israel, as it is currently constituted, ever bother to do. I would prefer to be judged on what I stand FOR, such as respecting human rights, democracy, secularism, rationality, scientific methodology and inquisitiveness, to name but a few, rather than what I am against. I am opposed to all states that show disrespect for the values I hold dear, which includes much of the Middle East, many African countries, the likes of China and North Korea, and on and on. If those states, like Israel, were to change course I would commend them for it and stop being, in your highly inexact phrase, "anti-Israel". Anyone who was anti any particular state without coherent reasons for taking an oppositional stance should be dismissed out of hand. This is, after all, a species of racism.

Glad that you're able to respect my point of view even though you completely disagree with it. That is rare, particularly in this highly delicate area of international geopolitics. I would ask that you not use inflammatory terms such as "gas chambers" because this really is a very emotionally charged concept that immediately conjures up images of some of the most heinous acts the world has ever known. If we are to rationally address issues in the here and now we would do well to avoid constant suggestions of an impending apocalypse which actually perpetuates, rather than alleviates, current impasses.

Perhaps your points apropos the Haaretz article I linked to is true, though this is hardly the only piece of evidence for the IDF's barbaric behaviour during Operation Cast Lead. Let's recall how this situation began:

"The first bombardment took three minutes and forty seconds. Sixty Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed fifty sites in Gaza, killing over two hundred Palestinians, and wounding close to a thousand more."

That's Never Gordon in his article 'Israel's Four Real Objectives in the Gaza Attacks'. The rest is available at http://www.alternet.org/audits/115951/israel%27s_four_real_objectives_in_the_gaza_attacks/?comments=view&cID=1093050&pID=1093002.

Also contained in this rather brief article is the following, which addresses your main point in your blog post:

"Yet, the government is actively misleading the public, since Israel could have put an end to the rockets a long time ago. Indeed, there was relative quiet during the six-months truce with Hamas, a quiet that was broken most often as a reaction to Israeli violence: that is, following the extra-judicial execution of a militant or the imposition of a total blockade which prevented basic goods, like food stuff and medicine, from entering the Gaza Strip. Rather than continuing the truce, the Israeli government has once again chosen to adopt strategies of violence that are tragically akin to the one’s deployed by Hamas, only the Israeli ones are much more lethal."

I cannot believe that you can actually state, with something akin to a straight face(after all, your visage isn't visible in the electronic sphere) that the "use of white phosphorous has been proven false". Firstly, I actually watched Al-Jazeera extensively during Operation Cast Lead and it was possible to spot the use of white phosphorous. Now before you, or anyone else, goes off the deep end because of my reference to Al-Jazeera, I should remind you they were the only international news organisation to actually enter Gaza during the conflict. In short, they're the best we had throughout the three week onslaught. Also, for those able to drop their Westernised blinkers, this news station remains head and shoulders, and most other body parts, above all other international stations. Accounts by numerous doctors made it explicitly clear that white phosphorous was being used, and I saw a young boy in a hospital who had been blinded by the stuff. Saying no white phosphorous was used is like saying evolution is a lie, or that the earth is flat, you are contradicting a fact established to a virtually 100% certainty, unless everyone is lying, including my own eyes. Sorry, it did happen, end of story, no argument will be entered into on this point.

In the article Gaza is a Concentration Camp, Ellen Cantarow writes:

"On the broadcast program Democracy Now, a Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, who had just returned from Gaza to Denmark, told host Amy Goodman that "90 percent of those killed are civilians." Gilbert reported 971 dead, of whom 1 in 3 is a child under 18. He has worked in Gaza for years and was there for the first weeks of Israel's assault.

The Times of London, Human Rights Watch and B'tselem all report the illegal use of white phosphorous to strike civilians. When white phosphorous adheres to flesh, its flames continue to burn for five to 10 minutes, often penetrating to the bone.

Gilbert and other experts think Israel is also using a new weapon called dense inert metal explosive. It was developed by the United States to create lethal, powerful blasts within small areas. DIME inflicts wounds never before seen by surgeons in Gaza. According to Gilbert, conventional shrapnel damages limbs and other body parts as if they'd been cut by a huge knife. DIME, on the other hand, leaves "no signs of shrapnel," but rather "small pieces of some kind of substance" (DIME is made of nickel and cobalt). It crushes "the whole limb," not just part, with "multiple severe fractures, muscles split from bones." Some classify DIME weapons as nuclear because they are based on a fusion process. (Democracy Now, Jan. 14.)"

Full article available at
http://www.alternet.org/audits/120197/gaza_is_a_concentration_camp__/?page=entire

So tell me, exactly how humane is it to use a civilian population to conduct experiments on the efficacy of new types of explosive devices? That's only partially a rhetorical question.

Also of note in the article, written while Operation Cast Lead was in full destructive swing, is the fact that according "the Israel Project" 25 civilians have died as a result of rocket fire from Gaza "during the past seven years." As already noted, in the first day of Operation Cast Lead, 200 Palestinians, virtually all civilians, were wiped off the face of the planet. Wouldn't you say that this counts as at least partially disproportionate, if not shockingly so? Perhaps in these troubling statistics the reason for the continued rocket fire is at least partially explicable.

Near the end of this article we read this:

"It was planned six to 18 months in advance, according to journalist Jonathan Cook. The war design "required directing artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighborhoods from which rockets were fired, despite being a violation of international law. Legal advisers, Barak noted, were seeking ways to avoid such prohibitions, presumably in the hope the international community would turn a blind eye."

Operation Cast Lead fulfils at least three of the points under Article 2 in the Convention on Genocide: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."

For more background on the situation in Gaza I highly recommend that you read Richard Falk's 'Understanding the Gaza Catastrophe' available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-falk/understanding-the-gaza-ca_b_154777.html. As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories he is someone whose views should be highly respected considering his intimate knowledge of the region. He writes, on January 2nd of this year:

"A flicker of hope emerged some six months ago when an Egyptian arranged truce produced an effective ceasefire that cut Israeli casualties to zero despite the cross-border periodic firing of homemade rockets that fell harmlessly on nearby Israeli territory, and undoubtedly caused anxiety in the border town of Sderot. During the ceasefire the Hamas leadership in Gaza repeatedly offered to extend the truce, even proposing a ten-year period and claimed a receptivity to a political solution based on acceptance of Israel's 1967 borders. Israel ignored these diplomatic initiatives, and failed to carry out its side of the ceasefire agreement that involved some easing of the blockade that had been restricting the entry to Gaza of food, medicine, and fuel to a trickle."

Furthermore:

"Clearly, prior to the current crisis, Israel used its authority to prevent credible observers from giving accurate and truthful accounts of the dire humanitarian situation that had been already documented as producing severe declines in the physical condition and mental health of the Gazan population, especially noting malnutrition among children and the absence of treatment facilities for those suffering from a variety of diseases. The Israeli attacks were directed against a society already in grave condition after a blockade maintained during the prior 18 months."

Also of interest is the following:

"There was no substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. It was at this point that rocket fire from Gaza intensified. Also, it was Hamas that on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom. Beyond this, attributing all the rockets to Hamas is not convincing either. A variety of independent militia groups operate in Gaza, some such as the Fatah-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade are anti-Hamas, and may even be sending rockets to provoke or justify Israeli retaliation. It is well confirmed that when US-supported Fatah controlled Gaza's governing structure it was unable to stop rocket attacks despite a concerted effort to do so."

A recent Medialens alert provides details of a UN "inquiry into attacks on its buildings and personnel in Gaza". The inquiry's conclusion contends that the IDF were:

"involved in varying degrees of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property." (Donald Macintyre, 'UN retreats after Israel hits out at Gaza report', Independent, May 6, 2009)

The Medialens article goes on:

"Incidents for which Israel was held responsible by the UN inquiry included:

* The deaths of three young men killed by a single IDF missile strike at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Asma school in Gaza City.

* The firing of heavy mortar rounds into the UNRWA Jabalia school, injuring seven people sheltering in the school, killing up to 40 people in the immediate vicinity and injuring a further 50.

* Aerial bombing of the UNRWA Bureij health centre on the same day, causing the death of a patient, serious injuries to two other patients and injuries to nine of the health centre's employees.

* Artillery firing by the IDF into the UNRWA field office compound in Gaza city, combined with the use of white phosphorus, causing injuries and considerable damage to it and the surrounding buildings, and leading to the disruption of the UN's humanitarian operations in Gaza.

* Artillery firing by the IDF into the UNRWA Beit Lahia school, again with the use of white phosphorus, causing the deaths of two children, aged 5 and 7, and injuries to 13 others.

Contrary to Israeli claims, the UN inquiry found no evidence that "Hamas militants" had used UN property to attack Israel or Israeli forces. Indeed, the report demanded that the UN urge Israel to retract its allegations to that effect."

Most tellingly for the UN, and the world at large, is the cowardice of the UN Secretary General:

"Shamefully, however, when UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon presented the inquiry results, he rejected its authors' call for such an investigation. He even decided not to release the full 184-page report. According to a brief item on the BBC Arabic news website, the BBC was informed by "a diplomatic source" that the United States "informed Ban's office that the report should not be published in full due to the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks." (Cited in Hasan Abu Nimah, 'Ban Ki-moon's moral failure', The Electronic Intifada, May 6, 2009; http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10511.shtml)"

Clearly, the report shows just how brazenly at odds with humanitarian principles the IDF behaved during Operation Cast Lead, otherwise there would have been no problem with issuing the entire report.

I really am interested to know, RF2, how you can continue to defend the IDF after Operation Cast Lead in which about 1400 Palestinians, including 300 children, were killed, while 5000 more were wounded and "Israeli forces bombed and shelled schools, medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, United Nations buildings (including UN schools), power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes?" For the entire Medialens article, entitled 'Beholden to the Big Powers: Israel, Gaza and the UN' see www.medialens.org.

Although Religious Fundamentalist 1 has problems with his work, I would highly recommend Chomsky's article on Operation Cast Lead which is very thorough and provides a welter of sources to back up his assertions. The article is entitled 'Exterminate all the brutes' and is available at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20316.

RF2, could you please explain to me how I am "miseducated about the situation in Israel"? I mean beyond asserting that I am. The modern state of Israel was founded on the expulsion of around 750 000 Arabs which they still refer to as al-Naqba, or the Catastrophe. From that all else flows, I'm afraid. You cannot steal people's lands, kill their children, deprive them of water and movement, prevent them from accessing schools and arable land, as the disgraceful "Security Fence", aka the Annexation Wall, is currently doing and expect them to continue to play nice. Actually, the Palestinians did that for far longer than any reasonable person had any right to expect, enduring the aforementioned expulsion, followed by twenty years of brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza before the first Intifada in 1987. Or perhaps your version of history leaves out all the bad stuff done by the Israelis, which would be like ignoring the history of South Africa since 1652 and wondering why blacks are so poor and downtrodden today. The analogy is of course not perfect, but we are still dealing with colonial situations, even though that word is almost never used about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. To achieve a lasting peace negotiations must take place, which will inevitably lead to compromises, something which the Israeli government seems singularly unable to even contemplate. Norman Mailer said it best when he wrote that "you either change or pay more to stay the same". Currently Israel is paying a very high price to maintain the status quo, a situation which simply cannot go on indefinitely. I would thus advise them to change, at least somewhat, otherwise the apocalyptic scenario which you sketched might just become an unavoidable reality. I agree wholeheartedly with Neve Gordon's closing words in that article quoted above:

"If the Israeli government really cared about its citizens and the country’s long term ability to sustain itself in the Middle East, it would abandon the use of violence and talk with its enemies."

Dear Religious Fundamentalist 1

While I certainly don't consider Pilger to be perfect (who is?) I am most interested to know when Pilger has told or written "outright lies"? He may be biased in a number of situations, but surely subjectivity isn't enough to warrant such a harsh denunciation? I think he's one of the world's finest and bravest journalists and have immense respect for his work. Having said that, I try not to worship anyone so damning information you may possess will certainly be looked at with a scrupulous eye.

[Shaun]

G’day Xenocratic
I believe in; human vales, the right to life and personal freedoms that are linked to national and social responsibility.
The fairly modern charade of “human right” is a bogus claim that is inertly racist as it spends a disproportion amount of time and energy focusing on the few. Case in point is the amount of time and recourses spent discussing issues in the Middle East where the numbers of killed are poultry when compared to the thousands murdered on a regular basis in Africa and South East Asia. Not to mention the millions who are displaced, maimed or raped and who go without a tear from “human right” activists.
While I’m sure that RF2 will have a concise answer to your previous post, there are significant falsehoods and outright lies that you are quoting as fact.
By quoting Dr Mads Gilbert as your primary medical source you taint all your medical evidence. Dr Gilbert’s claims have been roundly dismissed by most reputable medical organizations. Significantly, Dr Gilbert was caught “red handed” faking the resuscitation of a child apparently killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza. This fake video displayed on various news channels was proved to be staged both from a medical and film perspective and Dr Gilbert should be charged for necrophilia.
As someone who claims to respect human rights, I find it odd that you eagerly quote a man who praises the actions of those who murdered over 3000 civilians? (See Dr gilberts interview with Dagbladet, Sept. 30, 2001) Just to strengthen my initial point about bogus human rights, Dr Gilbert has spent many months in Gaza and Lebanon, but is yet to spend 1 hour in the conflict zones of Africa.
Your further medial “evidence” quoted reports of DIME and other strange munitions during the Gaza offensive. These claims are not only untrue, but plagiarized. You have quoted verbatim the erratic claims made by Robert Fisk about Israel using nuclear, DIME and unknown ammunition during the 2006 Lebanon war: (See Robert Frisks article in the Guardian October 30, 2006). Independent studies (including UN teams) found these accusations false.
Your post spent a great deal of time quoting Al-Jazeera, as it was on the news caster actually in Gaza at the time of the conflict. While it may have been the only live news caster in the zone this does not make it any more reliable. Most of us recall that during the initial US invasion of Iraq, Al-Jazeera constantly quoted and then upheld the information provided by the Iraqi ministers of information who spoke about the thousand of American military casualties and how Saddams regime was on the brink of ultimate victory. This caused many Al-Jazeera viewers like myself to view the stations as less than (as you claim)”head and shoulders, and most other body parts, above all other international stations,” and more like large rear-end body part backside.
Even in the Palestinian territories, the PA government is now unwilling cooperate with Al-Jazeera as they claim it has a pro-Hamas agenda. If the Palestinians themselves don’t trust Al-Jazeera and claim it has a pro Hamas agenda, how can you possible claim that they are unbiased?
Perhaps if you removed your anti-westernized blinkers you would see the twisted way Al-Jazeera operates.
You seem to take issue with “gas chamber references”, but you include the concentration camp references of Ellen Cantarow in your post. I am unaware of any concentration camp that has the shopping centers and amenities available in Gaza. The “concentration camp” terminology is an insult to the memory of the Thousands of Afrikaner children who died of dysentery and black water fever in British concentration camps, not to mention the situation in Auschwitz. If you wish to avoid holocaust like insinuations being used against you, don’t use them either.
Further more, Ellen Cantarow’s quotation of the Geneva conventions could just as easily be applied to Hamas, they fired missiles into Israel cities which were filled with ball-bearings, turning their rockets into primitive but still deadly cluster bombs. As these weapons were unguided, Hamas fighters were clearly unable to differentiate between civilian and military targets when they fired their projectiles at Israel. Ellen Cantarow quote: “Operation Cast Lead fulfils at least three of the points under Article 2 in the Convention on Genocide: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." Sound like she’s talking about Hamas.
On the other hand Israel made several warning to populated civilian areas before they were targeted. However cynical these warnings may seem, could you imagine the warriors of Palestine warning the inhabitants of a restaurant or resident of Israel’s southern cities that they were about to be targeted?

Your volumous claims of attack on UN/UNWRA infrastructure are most informative considering that the director general of the UNWRA is rather open about the fact that his organization in Gaza is filled with Hamas members and he has admitted that there have been many instances of UNWRA vehicles and buildings being used for “non-UN” purposes.
One case in point was the use of the courtyard around UNWRA boy’s school as a launce pad for Hamas rockets in October 2008. This was the same area that was attacked by Israel during operation cast lead.
Since you brought up the Geneva Convention. Perhaps you would be interested to know that the “use of a civilian are for military use, confirms upon same area the status of legitimate military target…”

Xenocratic, your “evidence” is flawed the claims you make are false and your quoted accounts are heavily tainted.

War is not pretty. But it is one of humanities most basic instincts. If you truly believe in upholding the rules of warfare, then all side have to adhere to them. How about starting with the universal rights of prisoners?

If you are truly pro anything and not merely anti-Israel, perhaps you could personally campaign for better treatment of Palestinians in Lebanon?
They are subject to some of the most racist conditions in the Middles East including laws that prohibit them from any kind of advance.

Rather that turning these posts into a 'tit for tat' over Israeli actions, perhaps you would be so kind as to answer the following questions.
1. When was Jerusalem the capital of a Muslim State, territory or province?
2. From 1949 until 1967 Arab countries controlled Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem including it holy sites. Why was no Palestinian state ever declared during this period?

Regards

[RF2]

Ok,
Where to begin.

I will start in the middle because this example epitomises the subtle lies that make up anti Israel propaganda:
"Jonathan Cook. The war design "required directing artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighborhoods from which rockets were fired, despite being a violation of international law"
Xeno, if these sites were being used for launching of rockets, which cook himself admits, then they loose their status as civilian areas. Just because cook says its a violation of int law doesn't make it so.

You amuse me. You quote a number of known anti Israel sources and then claim it is proven that Israel used White phosph. Then you have the audacity to claim that no further comment will be entered into. Well sunshine, you may have seen it on TV, I saw it from a lot closer. I can say for a fact that the white smoke you saw was Israeli smoke screen artillary.
That said. So what if Israel did use white phosph. As has been established by any number of credible sources, Israel was only targeting enemy combatants. Why should they be limited in their choice of munitions. This DIME stuff sounds great, why is it inhumane? As Shaun said, war is not pretty, it never has been.

You quoted a number of sources that claim that there was no significant rocket fire during the truce. What would you call significant. Granted once Cast lead started the number increased 10 fold, but during the c"ease fire" there were around 20 - 50 rockets a week fired into Israeli civilian areas. The Israeli military action has never been a cause for the rockets, only a response to it. After the disengagement Israel halted all military activity in the strip. The rockets continued.

So I return to my primary point. This can go backwards and forwards forever. Why? Because you are quoting numberous sources that are blatantly anti Israel and are full of lies. Shaun pointed out just a few. My question remains. What was Israel supposed to do? We left the area, we stopped all military activity, we asked nicely, we begged, we pleaded. Nothing. If you cannot make a suggestion as to what Israel should have done to stopped the rocket barrage on its civilians then I maintain my gas chamber analogy. For if your comments were born out of ignorance, love of Palestinians and humanity etc, then you would be able to suggest another option.

[Xenocratic]

Greetings Shaun

Very glad to hear that you “believe in…human vales, the right to life and personal freedoms that are linked to national and social responsibility”, sentiments which I heartily share. Though as your post makes clear the human lives you value are clearly only of a particular sort, but that’s your personal prerogative.

The belief that “human rights” are “a bogus claim that is inertly(sic) racist” because “it spends a disproportion amount of time and energy focusing on the few” is quite a common refrain from staunch supporters of Israel. The assumption clearly being that even though I’ve killed a number of people because someone else has killed far more we should instead focus on the latter. Nowhere in my posts thus far have I attempted to minimise the crimes occurring elsewhere in the world. One of the worst humanitarian crises in the last few decades occurred in the Congo where around 5 million people were killed between 1998 and 2003. Tens of thousands, if not more, have died subsequent to what has been described as Africa’s world war. This is a site devoted to supposedly offering a corrective to the anti-Israel bias in the South African media so it really wouldn’t have made much sense to bring up the abysmal treatment of Aborigines in Australia. In other words, I was attempting to stick to the topic which this site makes explicitly clear. My parents always taught me that two wrongs never make a right so if you’re attempting to minimise Israel’s crimes by appeals to the criminality of others that won’t cut it for me. I should also point out that it is actually inherently racist to defend a particular country regardless of their actions, as I’m sure you’re aware.

I’m not sure who these mysterious “human rights” activists are who don’t stand up for certain human rights, because they would then be rather remiss in their duties. However, we all only have limited time and energy so it makes sense for human rights organisations to focus their attention on certain areas. Resources and manpower are another issue to factor in to one’s assessment of the efficacy, or lack thereof, of human rights organisations. Another important factor, perhaps the most important one, is that we are all only responsible for the predictable consequences of our own actions, as Noam Chomsky repeatedly points out. It therefore makes sense for human rights organisations in the United States to focus attention on Israel because the US is not only the most powerful country in the world but without its military, diplomatic and economic support of Israel the country wouldn’t exist. Couldn’t, in fact, in its current configuration. Much as it was the responsibility of South Africans to end Apartheid and to prevent the old SANDF from destroying two countries, which they almost managed to do in Angola and Mozambique, it is the responsibility of citizens of a country to try and prevent heinous actions by the state for which they bear direct responsibility.

You spent most of your post merely dismissing my sources without providing any of your own, a strange and somewhat disconcerting phenomenon in a forum of this nature where I assumed that evidence is at least partially valued as a means to make one’s case. Or perhaps I missed something? All sources are biased to a greater or lesser degree, so the question really is about the extent of the evidence across a range of sources, again a rather elementary point which I shouldn’t have to point out.

I am unaware of Dr Mads Gilbert “faking the resuscitation of a child apparently killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza” so perhaps you’d like to provide the links for articles on this issues. He was certainly not my “primary medical source” as my post should have made abundantly. I also fail to see the relevance of your observation that Dr Gilbert has “yet to spend 1 hour in the conflict zones of Africa”. How does this in any way invalidate his testimony? Because someone isn’t serving in Latvia, how does that discredit what they have to say about Bosnia, where they are serving, to name but any random scenario that your point analogises to? I also wasn’t aware that Dr Gilbert “praises the actions of those who murdered over 3000 civilians”. While I’ve not read the interview, and would again dearly love a URL so that I could read it, I have a faint feeling, judging by similar assertions made about others, that as soon as people express any sort of comprehension, not sympathy, for why people in the Middle East might have reason to detest the United States they are classified as “eagerly” praising the 9/11 hijackers. Also, why shouldn’t Dr Gilbert be allowed to work in “Gaza and Lebanon”? Would you ever serve under such conditions? Wouldn’t have thought so.

You very confidently claim that the “reports of DIME and other strange munitions [used] during the Gaza offensive…are not only untrue, but plagiarized”. Firstly, I didn’t quote from Fisk, so you must have me confused with someone else. How can possibly dismiss claims by eyewitness testimony in this war by referring to the supposed “erratic(whatever that is supposed to mean in this context) claims made by Robert Fisk about Israel…during the 2006 Lebanon war”? This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Firstly you’ve falsely categorised my sources and then refer to supposed “independent studies” conducted by “UN teams” after the 2006 war to falsify claims made about the IDF’s actions in this war. The logic, or lack thereof, beggars belief. I also notice a disturbing trend of yours which is to confuse assertion with fact. I can say that everything Robert Fisk says is nonsense, but then I would need countervailing evidence to buttress my claims. Yet you seem to think that you can blithely impugn someone’s facts and provide nary a scrap of evidence to back up your assertions. I’m afraid that’s not how this game is played. In that case I could simply take your approach and dismiss all YOUR sources, although there are precious few of those to be found in your post. If you really cared about evidence, and not merely defending your beloved state against any and all accusations, you would actually review the evidence presented and not merely discard everything that challenges your particular worldview.

By the by, Robert Fisk is one of the world’s leading journalists who actually lives in the Middle East, Lebanon to be exact, but I’m afraid for a certain cast of mind he quite simply has the wrong story to tell, harshly critical as he is of Western Power and its offshoots, Israel being among the most prominent. I suppose it’s far easier to comfort oneself that the likes of Fisk, John Pilger, Alexander Cockburn and many others are merely telling scurrilous lies whenever they criticise Israel, without having to bother reviewing their evidence or undertaking a critical analysis oneself. That’s certainly one approach, though in my view not a particularly sound one.

I do wonder about your fundamental honesty as an interlocutor because you claim I “spent a great deal of time quoting Al-Jazeera” whereas in reality I mention the network twice and devote a grand total of four sentences in my entire post discussing the station. Perhaps we just have a different definition of the term “a great deal of time”. You actually spent far more time, as a percentage of your total post, discussing and “quoting” Al-Jazeera. I fail to follow your logic regarding Al-Jazeera’s supposed unreliability even though you admit they were the only newscaster in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. If they’re no more reliable, according to you, than CNN or Sky News that would be akin to saying someone who directly witnesses a bank robbery, let’s say they’re inside the bank, are no more reliable than someone who was outside and happened to be passing by. Remember, I don’t believe that Al-Jazeera, or any news source, is entirely reliable, I mean that’s a complete fallacy, however by virtue of their status inside Gaza during the operation, and the generally abysmal performance by the other major networks on almost any issue you care to mention, I think I’ll take my chances. I know too much about how the mainstream media operates, particularly the western media, to allow them to get the benefit of the doubt. A recent case in point, if you’re interested, would be the coverage of Russia’s supposed invasion of South Ossetia in August last year, one of the most debased mainstream media performances I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, which says a lot. Go on trusting them if you must, I’ve learned the hard way that most of the bilge spewing forth from CNN et al isn’t worth the energy the news anchors used in reading their teleprompters.

Your main point intended to discredit Al-Jazeera is rather instructive. You claim that “Al-Jazeera constantly quoted and then upheld the information provided by the Iraqi ministers of information who spoke about the thousand of American military casualties and how Saddams regime was on the brink of ultimate victory”, which isn’t quite how I remember it, but let’s put that aside. Remember, quoting someone isn’t the same as vindicating their view. Of course Saddam’s regime would make those claims, and did, as is well known. But let’s concede that Al-Jazeera seriously dropped the ball on this one, firstly how does it in any way discredit their coverage of Operation Cast Lead considering all the other studies that have been conducted that corroborate so much of what they reported. Secondly, did any of the other major news networks in any way discredit the Bush Administration’s claims that Saddam had WMDs? I’m still waiting for BBC and CNN and Sky News to apologise about how woeful their coverage was on this issue. Instead they all solemnly reported on Colin Powell’s disgraceful performance in his presentation of the case for war at the UN, a performance which he has subsequently disowned and considers it one of the most shameful undertakings he has ever been a part of. I didn’t hear much scepticism coming from your beloved western media then. A study was conducted which revealed that only 2% of BBC’s coverage of the lead up to the war included anti-war individuals. 2%!!!! This from one of the most trusted and supposedly balanced sources of news in the world. I could go on and on in this vein, but hopefully my point has been made, and should be made constantly when comparing what the western media tells us is going on and what a study of the real world reveals.

The point you make regarding my referring to Ellen Cantarow’s article equating Gaza with a concentration camp is somewhat valid, however as inexact as the analogy may be, it is still far more accurate to refer to Gaza as a concentration camp than to say that Palestinians want to send Jews to the gas chambers. To imply that Gaza has “shopping centres and amenities” and to leave it at that, is highly misleading. There have been reports that due to the oil embargo in Gaza the territories single power station couldn’t continue running so the only sewage treatment facility naturally also couldn’t function causing raw sewerage to run along the streets. Some great place with its “shopping centres and amenities”! According to Chris Hedges, another fine journalistic talent and someone who has actually been to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, in an article published 12 days before Operation Cast Lead commenced, wrote:

“Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.”

He quotes Richard N. Veits, a former US ambassador to Jordan, who stated that “This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality”. He goes on to say that “I am almost breathless discussing this subject. It is so myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all this. The Israeli manipulation of a population in this manner is comparable to some of the crimes that took place against civilian populations fifty years ago.”

Hedges’ article continues:

“The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza ‘a crime against humanity’. Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as ‘a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention’. He has asked for ‘the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law’.”

Falk rightly condemns Hamas rocket attacks but maintains that “such Palestinian behavior does not legalize Israel’s imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and health-threatening character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract the U.N. or international society from discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people.”
Hedges quotes Falk further:

“A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anaemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live.”

Perhaps the following paragraph should forever dispel the notion that Gazans are living it up in a territory that has all these wonderful “shopping centres and amenities”:

“Gaza now spends 12 hours a day without power, which can be a death sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. There are few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer or cystic fibrosis medication. Hospitals have generators but often lack fuel. Medical equipment, including one of Gaza’s three CT scanners, has been destroyed by power surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit visas, meaning some of those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, have died. Of the 230 Gazans estimated to have died last year because they were denied proper medical care, several spent their final hours at Israeli crossing points where they were refused entry into Israel. The statistics gathered on children—half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 17—are increasingly grim. About 45 percent of children in Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit and vegetables, and 18 percent have stunted growth.”

For all those that want to blame Hamas for Israel’s response the following might be of passing interest:

“The point of this Israeli siege, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel. Palestinians have launched more than 200 rockets on Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no Israeli casualties”.

The full article is available at
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081215_israels_crime_against_humanity/

So am I to understand that the UN report quoted by Medialens should be dismissed out of hand? Please provide citations of your claims that the “director general of the UNRWA is rather open about the fact that his organisation in Gaza is filled with Hamas members”. Even if your “case in point” about “the use of the courtyard around UNWRA boy’s school as a launce pad for Hamas rockets in October 2008” is valid, how does that exculpate the IDF’s actions, outlined in the report that I quoted from?

Even though you seem peculiarly immune to inconvenient evidence I shall try again, and hopefully this time you actually review the sources and provide some meaningful ones of your own. Firstly, let’s start with the 71 page report compiled by Human Rights Watch entitled "Rain of Fire: Israel's Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza" which, as Nigel Parry writes:

“provides witness accounts of the devastating effects that white phosphorus munitions had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza. Human Rights Watch researchers in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school. The report also presents ballistics evidence, photographs, and satellite imagery, as well as documents from the Israeli military and government”.
(http://nigelparry.com/news/hrw-white-phosphorus-report.shtml)

The article also quotes from Fred Abrahams, the senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report who states that "In Gaza, the Israeli military didn't just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops…It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren't in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died."

The full report is available at www.hrw.org

How about the report compiled by the American National Lawyers Guild, available at http://www.nlg.org/NLGGazaDelegationReport.pdf, which states in its executive summary that:

“During its 22 day offensive, Israeli forces killed more than 1400 Palestinians, including at least 288 children, and injured over 5300, of which at least 1606 were children. The majority of those killed were civilians”.

Two weeks after the end of Operation Cast Lead the National Lawyers Guild sent a delegation “of seven attorneys and one law student” to Gaza and the delegation “found more than ample evidence to establish a prima facie case that the Israeli military committed significant violations of international law in Gaza from December 27, 2008, to January 18, 2009”. In particular the delegation found that “Israeli forces appeared to have violated”:

- the principle of distinction by engaging in the willful killing of a number of Palestinian civilians

- the principle of proportionality by carrying out a number of attacks where the “collateral damage” that resulted was vastly disproportionate to the direct military advantage that could have been achieved by Israel

- customary international law on the use of weapons by misusing certain weapons, including the use of indiscriminate weaponry in residential and other heavily populated civilian areas

- the obligation to provide medical care to the wounded by deliberately denying or delaying access to medical care for wounded people

- the prohibition on attacking medical facilities and personnel.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS) sent a team to Gaza on a medical fact-finding mission and compiled a report available at tinyurl.com/dh4lec, though must warn you that many of the photos, including of wounded children, are particularly disturbing. They conducted a number of case studies of people effected by Israel’s incursion into Gaza. In their conclusion the report states:

“The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone. Nearly all the people we spoke to slept cuddled together with the other members of their family in a central room of the house during the three weeks of attack. No one knew where or when the next bomb or explosion would occur. It appears that the wide range of attacks with sophisticated weaponry was predominantly focused on terrorising the population.

The attack caused an enormous amount of infrastructural damage and destruction, displacing a large volume of the population to other areas. An estimated 21,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged and the total number of people being displaced from their original home is estimated over 50,000.

A large number of places of worship (mosques) were attacked and many of them completely destroyed. The attack on the places of worship deprived ordinary civilians from worshipping at places of sanctuary and peace, and forcing them to pray outside in the road or squares.

A large number of educational buildings were also completely destroyed, including a school. Because of the densely populated Gaza Strip (3800 people per km2 ) there is a chronic stress on the existing school buildings. The majority of school buildings are used for two different shifts each; one school shift use the building in the morning and another shift the same building in the afternoon. The destruction of existing school buildings will undoubtedly have an aggravated effect on the educational system.

The patterns of injuries, many of which were apparently caused by anti-personnel weapons, are characterized by a high proportion of maiming and amputations, which will cause lifelong disabilities for many.”

The report goes on to declare:

“There is absolutely no doubt that the number of medical institutions, such as hospitals and mobile clinics were specifically targeted including a large number of ambulances. A number of ambulance personnel told their stories of repeated attacks on their ambulances over the last year. Many of them were shot at, at least five times over the last two years.

There were many stories about patients who were prohibited from being evacuated by ambulances for medical care for their wounds. A number of patients died as a result of the delay in transportation to a medical institution.

Besides the large-scale, largely impersonal destruction that the team witnessed and heard of, it was especially distressing to hear of individual cases in which soldiers had been within seeing, hearing and speaking distance of their victims for significant stretches of time, but despite the opportunity for “humanisation”, had denied wounded people access to lifesaving medical care, or even shot at civilians at short range.

The attack had an enormously distressing effect on the population of children and it appears that children were disproportionately affected by the attack. There were not only many (directly as well as indirectly) injured and maimed children, but there was also severe psychological damage to many of the child witnesses interviewed. Children are prone to develop severe psychological damage as a result of their family members, friends or other acquaintances being hurt and not being able to protect the children.

In general this attack left the population of the Gaza Strip without any hope for the future. At nearly any point in the Gaza Strip destroyed houses, mosques, factories as well as other buildings can be seen. As a result of the decreased capacity it will take a long time before these buildings can be repaired. Additionally there are a large number of people wounded and/or permanently maimed or scarred. These are likely to act as permanent reminders of the three week period of terror for nearly all citizens of the Gaza strip.

In summary, an object of warfare is to acquire military dominance over the opponent. However, in the situation in the Gaza Strip, there seems to be already a significant military dominance from one opponent over the other. The real reason for this severe military attack on a predominantly civilian population remains rather obscure”.

But I suppose all the people who compiled these reports are merely liars, or haters of Israel, right?

I really don’t see why I have to answer your questions when you didn’t bother answering any of mine. However, because I’m such a good sport I’ll have a go at answering those two questions which you posed.

Your first question regarding Jerusalem ever having been “the capital of a Muslim State, territory or province” is clearly meant to obscure a number of very significant points. The first major one is perhaps best formulated as another question, namely since AD70 when has Jerusalem been the capital of a Jewish “state, territory or province”. In fact, when have Jews even been the majority in that area since the sacking of Jerusalem in the aforementioned first century date until the twentieth century? Jerusalem, and what is commonly referred to as Palestine (though clearly not by proponents of the State of Israel) have been territories with a majority Muslim population for many centuries, so the implication of your question is moot. Let me ask you yet another question, just because there may not have been an official independent Muslim State, which as you well know is due to colonial control of the region by either Western Powers or the now defunct Ottoman Empire, how does that give Jews the right to kick people off their lands who have been living their for many generations? This happened in 1947-48 yet you very conveniently sidestepped by question by asking a completely irrelevant one which has no bearing on what the issue at hand is, namely the mass dispossession of one groups land by another group, regardless of who said groups are. It is very telling that you made no mention of al-Naqba in your post, so I’ll raise it again with the hopes that next time you might at least make passing mention of this key event in Palestinian history.

Your second question again hopes to obscure more than it seeks to find any kind of illumination. Be that as it may, let me attempt to tackle it. You are indeed correct that between “1949 until 1967 Arab countries controlled Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem including it holy sites”, yet I’m not so sure how you can be so certain that “no Palestinian state [was] ever declared during this period”. This is technically perhaps true, though I’m quite sure the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the West Bank, which was then part of Jordan, would have dearly loved to return to their ancestral land. They may not have been calling for what we now understand as a Palestinian state, but they would surely have been none too pleased that they no longer lived in what is today considered the State of Israel. In 1967 when Israel took control of Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan it became responsible for the inhabitants of those Occupied Territories. This is yet another elementary fact about occupation which you appear to have forgotten. The calls for a Palestinian state are thus directly related to the dire conditions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation who quite naturally demand a state of their own where they believe, quite correctly in my view, that they will be better treated. If you assume that they are treated wonderfully in the West Bank and Gaza then perhaps it would be a mystery why there is this call for an independent Palestinian state. Those of us who live in the real world find it perfectly understandable.

Your question is also rather intriguing if we relate it to South Africa, a country whose history is often compared to that of Palestine. Looked at in a certain way it would be perfectly reasonable to ask, during Apartheid, when has Pretoria ever been the capital of a black “state, territory or province”? After all it was white people who constituted the “state” of South Africa within its present borders and who ensured that the country became united in 1910 and a republic in 1961. Does this mean that blacks therefore had no claims to being recognised as full citizens of the Republic of South Africa? This seems to be what your questions are implying, though I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that this is purely unintentional on your part. Put in the terms I’ve just outlined, it should become clear how dangerous it is to presuppose that because X has never occurred in history we should therefore ensure the status quo even if this results in massive human rights violations for a substantial sector of society.

I am indeed “pro” many things, as I pointed out, and the glib assertion that I’m merely “anti-Israel” is one of the oldest tricks in those who fancy themselves as being pro-Israel in the narrow nationalistic and jingoistic sense of that term. It is precisely because I would like Israel to continue existing that I believe it is best for the country to make peace with its neighbouring population, either granting them a state of their own, or possibly creating a single secular state that encompasses the Occupied Territories. The present course, which has skewed ever more rightward in recent years, will lead to nothing but terminal warfare and an ultimately self defeating siege mentality that cannot be sustained. For those who claim to be so pro-Israel, presumably yourself, that they want to see Israel continue on its very dangerous current path are actually the greatest enemies Israel could have, much as those who couldn’t countenance whites negotiating with blacks were eventually marginalized and a peaceful resolution to Apartheid brokered. The lesson is highly instructive, as dialogue is always more effective than the barrel of a gun in realising a lasting peace. You may fool yourself into thinking this is impossible, but those who sought to preserve an egregiously unfair status quo have always argued thus.

As someone who seems unable to concede that Palestinians are treated horrendously both within Israel, where they have to carry special identification books (sound familiar?) and far worse in the Occupied Territories you really have no leg to stand on by referring to the “racist conditions” in Lebanon. As bad as it might be for Palestinians in Lebanon it is nothing compared to their treatment in Israel and the OT. When was the last time the Lebanese killed 1400 Palestinians in a three week period, injuring 5000 more? Your point can therefore be dismissed both by referring to the “two wrongs don’t make a right” syndrome and by your own selective blindness on this matter.
For me to continue to participate in this exchange I will have to insist, as I’ve already done, that you not simply claim that my evidence “is flawed” and that “the claims [I] make are false and [my] quoted accounts are heavily tainted”, but actually substantiate your statements. After all anyone can simply dismiss evidence, which is what creationists do all the time who find the mountains of evidence for evolution to be too troubling for their delicate religious sensibilities. If you want me to see you as anything but a vulgar apologist for Israel(note I’m not actually accusing you of this) then I’ll need substantial counter evidence, and not mere assertions or refusals to accept what I present.

[Xenocratic]

Dear RF2

You certainly didn’t know where to begin as you didn’t even really start providing any sort of meaningful critique of my post. Instead you quote from a single article which is supposed to demonstrate the “subtle lies that make up anti-Israel propaganda”, an observation that completely misses the point Cook was making. He’s also not the only journalist to note that the invasion had been planned months in advance and was designed as an election ploy to show how tough Kadima and Labour are on “militants”, one could say they were trying to out-Netanyahu Netanyahu. The deadly attack also mysteriously ended just before Obama’s inauguration on the 20th January, as other commentators have pointed out.

I’ve noticed a certain trend in both your and Shaun’s post where you dismiss all sources cited as “anti-Israel”. What, exactly, does this term mean in your books? It seems to be borrowed from the lexicon of totalitarianism and propagandistic apologetics where every source critical of your sacred state is dismissed out of hand without addressing any of the points raised. By constantly dismissing the articles and studies I cite as “anti-Israel” you are merely attempting to deflect any criticism of the Israeli government’s actions in the most brazenly convenient manner imaginable which basically amounts to a supreme cop-out. Until such a time as both of you actually examine the evidence presented instead of spouting off about how biased said evidence is there really is no point in continuing this discussion.

Because there is so much evidence from so many sources condemning Israel’s actions during Operation Cast Lead it may seem as if they’re all “critical” of Israel, but that is because the IDF’s actions were contemptible and shocking, an uncontroversial observation except to the most jingoistic observers. In light of your attitude on this matter, I suppose one could claim, as some still do, that the coverage of apartheid in the international press was sensationalistic and too harshly critical, but that doesn’t mean that the stories were ever less true for being so. The reason I try and avoid debates with religious fundamentalists is that they are completely immune to evidence, which you both seem to be. Perhaps you’ll still prove me wrong, but at this stage, judging by your posts, the prognosis isn’t particularly good.

Another tendency both you and Shaun share is the notion that war somehow excuses any atrocities committed by Israel. You have thus inadvertently admitted that such actions occurred during the Operation, so thank you for being honest, circuitously though this may have be. The point about white phosphorous isn’t simply academic as the use of this substance on civilians is a war crime, uncontroversially so. It’s a rather big deal, in other words, and not to be glibly dismissed. Perhaps you’d like your children or other loved ones exposed to substance that burns right down to the bone? As for your statement that this “DIME stuff sounds great” and the question of why it is “inhumane” I refer you to the articles I quote from, and more available from numerous sources, to find a description of just how “great” this stuff is in destroying human lives. That you should even ask the question of why it is inhumane makes me seriously wonder about your ethics, or lack thereof. Until such a time as you’ve experienced first hand what DIME and white phosphorous does to human beings, either reading accounts of people who have actually been exposed to these munitions, or suffered from the effects yourself, I think you’d better keep mum on the subject lest you be taken for an insensitive hypocrite.

Furthermore, if war somehow provides a cover for all manner of heinous actions then by your own rationale Israel has no right to condemn any of Hamas’ actions. Why stop there? According to the “war is not pretty” attitude what right do we have to condemn the Nazis’ attacks on Britain during World War 2, or Japan’s near destruction of Peking, or the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of people? What we have here is more than just a slippery slope, it’s a sheer drop.

To even talk of war in the context of Operation Cast Lead is deeply misleading. War is technically a conflict between two states and no amount of mental contortion can transform Gaza or the West Bank into anything resembling a state. For starters, neither territory has an army whereas Israel has the world’s fourth most powerful one and is a state unconditionally supported by the world’s foremost military power. The people living in Gaza have been devastated by a terrible embargo that has seen the bulk of the population teetering on the brink of starvation, with more than half the children eating one meal a day. There isn’t a shred of parity between the two sides. The casualty figures should make this crystal clear as only 13 Israelis died during the operation, which included 3 soldiers killed by their own country. This leaves just 10 Israelis killed by Hamas, of which only 4 were civilians, the rest being soldiers who invaded Gaza. Compare this with around 1400 Palestinians killed during the three week bombardment and the vast disjuncture between the two sides becomes even more strikingly clear.

Your statement that the “Israeli military action has never been a cause for the rockets, only a response to it” is straight out of the Israeli propagandists handbook and not even worthy of a comment. As is the idiotically false statement that “After the disengagement Israel halted all military activity in the strip”. You are so far around the bend on this that, to quote scientists when confronted with an almost impossibly loopy theory, you are not even wrong.

I have already provided what I believe to be a start to finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, namely negotiation. You seem either too stubborn to acknowledge this or perhaps you just somehow missed what I wrote in an earlier post. By declaring that one won’t talk to one’s enemies is tantamount to saying that one desires an endless stalemate. A good place for Israel to start would be to rise to a minimal level of elementary morality by applying to themselves the same standard that they apply to others. They ask Hamas to renounce violence, but when has Israel ever done so? They ask Hamas to recognise the state of Israel (which they now do, by the way), but when has Israel ever recognised a Palestinian state? Israel and the US no longer even accept the terms of the famous “Road Map”, but yet they expect the Palestinians to do so. In more honest times such behaviour would be condemned as the epitome of obscene hypocrisy.

It might also be a good idea for Israel to stop constructing its illegal “security” wall which has basically been a big land grab for yet more Palestinian territory. Or how about dismantling the settlements on the West Bank, also illegal under international law? Maybe Israel could also think about not stealing so much water from the West Bank for the comforts of a few Israelis at the expense of the Palestinian masses. Maybe an end to the deeply inhumane embargo on the Gaza Strip might also change a few people’s attitudes towards the State of Israel.

Without a clear sighted acknowledgement of the nature of the situation in Palestine, which you and Shaun and countless others with a blind allegiance to Israel seem unable or unwilling to do, a lasting solution to the conflict will never be found.

[Xenocratic]

I posted a very lengthy response to Shaun, but for some reason it has not been yet appeared on this thread. Don't know what the problem could be, just letting you know I didn't let his contentions go unchallenged.

[Xenocratic]

Greetings Shaun

Very glad to hear that you “believe in…human vales, the right to life and personal freedoms that are linked to national and social responsibility”, sentiments which I heartily share. Though as your post makes clear the human lives you value are clearly only of a particular sort, but that’s your personal prerogative.

The belief that “human rights” are “a bogus claim that is inertly(sic) racist” because “it spends a disproportion amount of time and energy focusing on the few” is quite a common refrain from staunch supporters of Israel. The assumption clearly being that even though I’ve killed a number of people because someone else has killed far more we should instead focus on the latter. Nowhere in my posts thus far have I attempted to minimise the crimes occurring elsewhere in the world. One of the worst humanitarian crises in the last few decades occurred in the Congo where around 5 million people were killed between 1998 and 2003. Tens of thousands, if not more, have died subsequent to what has been described as Africa’s world war. This is a site devoted to supposedly offering a corrective to the anti-Israel bias in the South African media so it really wouldn’t have made much sense to bring up the abysmal treatment of Aborigines in Australia. In other words, I was attempting to stick to the topic which this site makes explicitly clear. My parents always taught me that two wrongs never make a right so if you’re attempting to minimise Israel’s crimes by appeals to the criminality of others that won’t cut it for me. I should also point out that it is actually inherently racist to defend a particular country regardless of their actions, as I’m sure you’re aware.

I’m not sure who these mysterious “human rights” activists are who don’t stand up for certain human rights, because they would then be rather remiss in their duties. However, we all only have limited time and energy so it makes sense for human rights organisations to focus their attention on certain areas. Resources and manpower are another issue to factor in to one’s assessment of the efficacy, or lack thereof, of human rights organisations. Another important factor, perhaps the most important one, is that we are all only responsible for the predictable consequences of our own actions, as Noam Chomsky repeatedly points out. It therefore makes sense for human rights organisations in the United States to focus attention on Israel because the US is not only the most powerful country in the world but without its military, diplomatic and economic support of Israel the country wouldn’t exist. Couldn’t, in fact, in its current configuration. Much as it was the responsibility of South Africans to end Apartheid and to prevent the old SANDF from destroying two countries, which they almost managed to do in Angola and Mozambique, it is the responsibility of citizens of a country to try and prevent heinous actions by the state for which they bear direct responsibility.

You spent most of your post merely dismissing my sources without providing any of your own, a strange and somewhat disconcerting phenomenon in a forum of this nature where I assumed that evidence is at least partially valued as a means to make one’s case. Or perhaps I missed something? All sources are biased to a greater or lesser degree, so the question really is about the extent of the evidence across a range of sources, again a rather elementary point which I shouldn’t have to point out.

I am unaware of Dr Mads Gilbert “faking the resuscitation of a child apparently killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza” so perhaps you’d like to provide the links for articles on this issues. He was certainly not my “primary medical source” as my post should have made abundantly. I also fail to see the relevance of your observation that Dr Gilbert has “yet to spend 1 hour in the conflict zones of Africa”. How does this in any way invalidate his testimony? Because someone isn’t serving in Latvia, how does that discredit what they have to say about Bosnia, where they are serving, to name but any random scenario that your point analogises to? I also wasn’t aware that Dr Gilbert “praises the actions of those who murdered over 3000 civilians”. While I’ve not read the interview, and would again dearly love a URL so that I could read it, I have a faint feeling, judging by similar assertions made about others, that as soon as people express any sort of comprehension, not sympathy, for why people in the Middle East might have reason to detest the United States they are classified as “eagerly” praising the 9/11 hijackers. Also, why shouldn’t Dr Gilbert be allowed to work in “Gaza and Lebanon”? Would you ever serve under such conditions? Wouldn’t have thought so.

You very confidently claim that the “reports of DIME and other strange munitions [used] during the Gaza offensive…are not only untrue, but plagiarized”. Firstly, I didn’t quote from Fisk, so you must have me confused with someone else. How can possibly dismiss claims by eyewitness testimony in this war by referring to the supposed “erratic(whatever that is supposed to mean in this context) claims made by Robert Fisk about Israel…during the 2006 Lebanon war”? This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Firstly you’ve falsely categorised my sources and then refer to supposed “independent studies” conducted by “UN teams” after the 2006 war to falsify claims made about the IDF’s actions in this war. The logic, or lack thereof, beggars belief. I also notice a disturbing trend of yours which is to confuse assertion with fact. I can say that everything Robert Fisk says is nonsense, but then I would need countervailing evidence to buttress my claims. Yet you seem to think that you can blithely impugn someone’s facts and provide nary a scrap of evidence to back up your assertions. I’m afraid that’s not how this game is played. In that case I could simply take your approach and dismiss all YOUR sources, although there are precious few of those to be found in your post. If you really cared about evidence, and not merely defending your beloved state against any and all accusations, you would actually review the evidence presented and not merely discard everything that challenges your particular worldview.

By the by, Robert Fisk is one of the world’s leading journalists who actually lives in the Middle East, Lebanon to be exact, but I’m afraid for a certain cast of mind he quite simply has the wrong story to tell, harshly critical as he is of Western Power and its offshoots, Israel being among the most prominent. I suppose it’s far easier to comfort oneself that the likes of Fisk, John Pilger, Alexander Cockburn and many others are merely telling scurrilous lies whenever they criticise Israel, without having to bother reviewing their evidence or undertaking a critical analysis oneself. That’s certainly one approach, though in my view not a particularly sound one.

I do wonder about your fundamental honesty as an interlocutor because you claim I “spent a great deal of time quoting Al-Jazeera” whereas in reality I mention the network twice and devote a grand total of four sentences in my entire post discussing the station. Perhaps we just have a different definition of the term “a great deal of time”. You actually spent far more time, as a percentage of your total post, discussing and “quoting” Al-Jazeera. I fail to follow your logic regarding Al-Jazeera’s supposed unreliability even though you admit they were the only newscaster in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. If they’re no more reliable, according to you, than CNN or Sky News that would be akin to saying someone who directly witnesses a bank robbery, let’s say they’re inside the bank, are no more reliable than someone who was outside and happened to be passing by. Remember, I don’t believe that Al-Jazeera, or any news source, is entirely reliable, I mean that’s a complete fallacy, however by virtue of their status inside Gaza during the operation, and the generally abysmal performance by the other major networks on almost any issue you care to mention, I think I’ll take my chances. I know too much about how the mainstream media operates, particularly the western media, to allow them to get the benefit of the doubt. A recent case in point, if you’re interested, would be the coverage of Russia’s supposed invasion of South Ossetia in August last year, one of the most debased mainstream media performances I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, which says a lot. Go on trusting them if you must, I’ve learned the hard way that most of the bilge spewing forth from CNN et al isn’t worth the energy the news anchors use in reading their teleprompters.

Your main point intended to discredit Al-Jazeera is rather instructive. You claim that “Al-Jazeera constantly quoted and then upheld the information provided by the Iraqi ministers of information who spoke about the thousand of American military casualties and how Saddams regime was on the brink of ultimate victory”, which isn’t quite how I remember it, but let’s put that aside. Remember, quoting someone isn’t the same as vindicating their view. Of course Saddam’s regime would make those claims, and did, as is well known. But let’s concede that Al-Jazeera seriously dropped the ball on this one, firstly how does it in any way discredit their coverage of Operation Cast Lead considering all the other studies that have been conducted that corroborate so much of what they reported? Secondly, did any of the other major news networks in any way discredit the Bush Administration’s claims that Saddam had WMDs? I’m still waiting for BBC and CNN and Sky News to apologise about how woeful their coverage was on this issue. Instead they all solemnly reported on Colin Powell’s disgraceful performance in his presentation of the case for war at the UN, a performance which he has subsequently disowned and considers it one of the most shameful undertakings he has ever been a part of. I didn’t hear much scepticism coming from your beloved western media then. A study was conducted which revealed that only 2% of BBC’s coverage in the lead up to the war included anti-war individuals. 2%!!!! This from one of the most trusted and supposedly balanced sources of news in the world. I could go on and on in this vein, but hopefully my point has been made, and should be made constantly when comparing what the western media tells us is going on and what a study of the real world reveals.

The point you make regarding my referring to Ellen Cantarow’s article equating Gaza with a concentration camp is somewhat valid, however as inexact as the analogy may be, it is still far more accurate to refer to Gaza as a concentration camp than to say that Palestinians want to send Jews to the gas chambers. To imply that Gaza has “shopping centres and amenities” and to leave it at that, is highly misleading. There have been reports that due to the oil embargo in Gaza the territory’s single power station couldn’t continue running so the only sewage treatment facility naturally also couldn’t function causing raw sewerage to run along the streets. Some great place with its “shopping centres and amenities”! According to Chris Hedges, another fine journalistic talent and someone who has actually been to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, in an article published 12 days before Operation Cast Lead commenced, wrote:

“Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.”

He quotes Richard N. Veits, a former US ambassador to Jordan, who stated that “This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality”. He goes on to say that “I am almost breathless discussing this subject. It is so myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all this. The Israeli manipulation of a population in this manner is comparable to some of the crimes that took place against civilian populations fifty years ago.”

Hedges’ article continues:

“The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza ‘a crime against humanity’. Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as ‘a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention’. He has asked for ‘the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law’.”

Falk rightly condemns Hamas rocket attacks but maintains that “such Palestinian behavior does not legalize Israel’s imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and health-threatening character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract the U.N. or international society from discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people.”

Hedges quotes Falk further:

“A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anaemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live.”

Perhaps the following paragraph should forever dispel the notion that Gazans are living it up in a territory that has all these wonderful “shopping centres and amenities”:

“Gaza now spends 12 hours a day without power, which can be a death sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. There are few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer or cystic fibrosis medication. Hospitals have generators but often lack fuel. Medical equipment, including one of Gaza’s three CT scanners, has been destroyed by power surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit visas, meaning some of those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, have died. Of the 230 Gazans estimated to have died last year because they were denied proper medical care, several spent their final hours at Israeli crossing points where they were refused entry into Israel. The statistics gathered on children—half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 17—are increasingly grim. About 45 percent of children in Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit and vegetables, and 18 percent have stunted growth.”

For all those that want to blame Hamas for Israel’s response the following might be of passing interest:

“The point of this Israeli siege, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel. Palestinians have launched more than 200 rockets on Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no Israeli casualties”.

The full article is available at
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081215_israels_crime_against_humanity/

So am I to understand that the UN report quoted by Medialens should be dismissed out of hand? Please provide citations of your claims that the “director general of the UNRWA is rather open about the fact that his organisation in Gaza is filled with Hamas members”. Even if your “case in point” about “the use of the courtyard around UNWRA boy’s school as a launce pad for Hamas rockets in October 2008” is valid, how does that exculpate the IDF’s actions, outlined in the report that I quoted from?

Even though you seem peculiarly immune to inconvenient evidence I shall try again, and hopefully this time you actually review the sources and provide some meaningful ones of your own. Firstly, let’s start with the 71 page report compiled by Human Rights Watch entitled "Rain of Fire: Israel's Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza" which, as Nigel Parry writes:

“provides witness accounts of the devastating effects that white phosphorus munitions had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza. Human Rights Watch researchers in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school. The report also presents ballistics evidence, photographs, and satellite imagery, as well as documents from the Israeli military and government”.
(http://nigelparry.com/news/hrw-white-phosphorus-report.shtml)

The article also quotes from Fred Abrahams, the senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report who states that "In Gaza, the Israeli military didn't just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops…It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren't in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died."

The full report is available at www.hrw.org

How about the report compiled by the American National Lawyers Guild, available at http://www.nlg.org/NLGGazaDelegationReport.pdf, which states in its executive summary that:

“During its 22 day offensive, Israeli forces killed more than 1400 Palestinians, including at least 288 children, and injured over 5300, of which at least 1606 were children. The majority of those killed were civilians”.

Two weeks after the end of Operation Cast Lead the National Lawyers Guild sent a delegation “of seven attorneys and one law student” to Gaza and the delegation “found more than ample evidence to establish a prima facie case that the Israeli military committed significant violations of international law in Gaza from December 27, 2008, to January 18, 2009”. In particular the delegation found that “Israeli forces appeared to have violated”:

- the principle of distinction by engaging in the willful killing of a number of Palestinian civilians

- the principle of proportionality by carrying out a number of attacks where the “collateral damage” that resulted was vastly disproportionate to the direct military advantage that could have been achieved by Israel

- customary international law on the use of weapons by misusing certain weapons, including the use of indiscriminate weaponry in residential and other heavily populated civilian areas

- the obligation to provide medical care to the wounded by deliberately denying or delaying access to medical care for wounded people

- the prohibition on attacking medical facilities and personnel.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS) sent a team to Gaza on a medical fact-finding mission and compiled a report available at tinyurl.com/dh4lec, though I must warn you that many of the photos, including of wounded children, are particularly disturbing. They conducted a number of case studies of people effected by Israel’s incursion into Gaza. In their conclusion the report states:

“The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone. Nearly all the people we spoke to slept cuddled together with the other members of their family in a central room of the house during the three weeks of attack. No one knew where or when the next bomb or explosion would occur. It appears that the wide range of attacks with sophisticated weaponry was predominantly focused on terrorising the population.

The attack caused an enormous amount of infrastructural damage and destruction, displacing a large volume of the population to other areas. An estimated 21,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged and the total number of people being displaced from their original home is estimated over 50,000.

A large number of places of worship (mosques) were attacked and many of them completely destroyed. The attack on the places of worship deprived ordinary civilians from worshipping at places of sanctuary and peace, and forcing them to pray outside in the road or squares.

A large number of educational buildings were also completely destroyed, including a school. Because of the densely populated Gaza Strip (3800 people per km2 ) there is a chronic stress on the existing school buildings. The majority of school buildings are used for two different shifts each; one school shift use the building in the morning and another shift the same building in the afternoon. The destruction of existing school buildings will undoubtedly have an aggravated effect on the educational system.

The patterns of injuries, many of which were apparently caused by anti-personnel weapons, are characterized by a high proportion of maiming and amputations, which will cause lifelong disabilities for many.”

The report goes on to declare:

“There is absolutely no doubt that the number of medical institutions, such as hospitals and mobile clinics were specifically targeted including a large number of ambulances. A number of ambulance personnel told their stories of repeated attacks on their ambulances over the last year. Many of them were shot at, at least five times over the last two years.

There were many stories about patients who were prohibited from being evacuated by ambulances for medical care for their wounds. A number of patients died as a result of the delay in transportation to a medical institution.

Besides the large-scale, largely impersonal destruction that the team witnessed and heard of, it was especially distressing to hear of individual cases in which soldiers had been within seeing, hearing and speaking distance of their victims for significant stretches of time, but despite the opportunity for “humanisation”, had denied wounded people access to lifesaving medical care, or even shot at civilians at short range.

The attack had an enormously distressing effect on the population of children and it appears that children were disproportionately affected by the attack. There were not only many (directly as well as indirectly) injured and maimed children, but there was also severe psychological damage to many of the child witnesses interviewed. Children are prone to develop severe psychological damage as a result of their family members, friends or other acquaintances being hurt and not being able to protect the children.

In general this attack left the population of the Gaza Strip without any hope for the future. At nearly any point in the Gaza Strip destroyed houses, mosques, factories as well as other buildings can be seen. As a result of the decreased capacity it will take a long time before these buildings can be repaired. Additionally there are a large number of people wounded and/or permanently maimed or scarred. These are likely to act as permanent reminders of the three week period of terror for nearly all citizens of the Gaza strip.

In summary, an object of warfare is to acquire military dominance over the opponent. However, in the situation in the Gaza Strip, there seems to be already a significant military dominance from one opponent over the other. The real reason for this severe military attack on a predominantly civilian population remains rather obscure”.

But I suppose all the people who compiled these reports are merely liars, or haters of Israel, right?

I really don’t see why I have to answer your questions when you didn’t bother answering any of mine. However, because I’m such a good sport I’ll have a go at answering those two questions which you posed.

Your first question regarding Jerusalem ever having been “the capital of a Muslim State, territory or province” is clearly meant to obscure a number of very significant points. The first major one is perhaps best formulated as another question, namely since AD70 when has Jerusalem been the capital of a Jewish “state, territory or province”. In fact, when have Jews even been the majority in that area since the sacking of Jerusalem in the aforementioned first century date until the twentieth century? Jerusalem, and what is commonly referred to as Palestine (though clearly not by proponents of the State of Israel) have been territories with a majority Muslim population for many centuries, so the implication of your question is moot. Let me ask you yet another question, just because there may not have been an official independent Muslim State, which as you well know is due to colonial control of the region by either Western Powers or the now defunct Ottoman Empire, how does that give Jews the right to kick people off their lands who have been living their for many generations? This happened in 1947-48 yet you very conveniently sidestepped by question by asking a completely irrelevant one which has no bearing on what the issue at hand is, namely the mass dispossession of one groups land by another group, regardless of who said groups are. It is very telling that you made no mention of al-Naqba in your post, so I’ll raise it again with the hopes that next time you might at least make passing mention of this key event in Palestinian history.

Your second question again hopes to obscure more than it seeks to find any kind of illumination. Be that as it may, let me attempt to tackle it. You are indeed correct that between “1949 until 1967 Arab countries controlled Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem including it holy sites”, yet I’m not so sure how you can be so certain that “no Palestinian state [was] ever declared during this period”. This is technically perhaps true, though I’m quite sure the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the West Bank, which was then part of Jordan, would have dearly loved to return to their ancestral land. They may not have been calling for what we now understand as a Palestinian state, but they would surely have been none too pleased that they no longer lived in what is today considered the State of Israel. In 1967 when Israel took control of Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan it became responsible for the inhabitants of those Occupied Territories. This is yet another elementary fact about occupation which you appear to have forgotten. The calls for a Palestinian state are thus directly related to the dire conditions of Palestinians under Israeli occupation who quite naturally demand a state of their own where they believe, quite correctly in my view, that they will be better treated. If you assume that they are treated wonderfully in the West Bank and Gaza then perhaps it would be a mystery why there is this call for an independent Palestinian state. Those of us who live in the real world find it perfectly understandable.

Your question is also rather intriguing if we relate it to South Africa, a country whose history is often compared to that of Palestine. Looked at in a certain way it would be perfectly reasonable to ask, during Apartheid, when has Pretoria ever been the capital of a black “state, territory or province”? After all it was white people who constituted the “state” of South Africa within its present borders and who ensured that the country became united in 1910 and a republic in 1961. Does this mean that blacks therefore had no claims to being recognised as full citizens of the Republic of South Africa? This seems to be what your questions are implying, though I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that this is purely unintentional on your part. Put in the terms I’ve just outlined, it should become clear how dangerous it is to presuppose that because X has never occurred in history we should therefore ensure the status quo even if this results in massive human rights violations for a substantial sector of society.

I am indeed “pro” many things, as I pointed out, and the glib assertion that I’m merely “anti-Israel” is one of the oldest tricks in the book of those who fancy themselves as being pro-Israel in the narrow nationalistic and jingoistic sense of that term. It is precisely because I would like Israel to continue existing that I believe it is best for the country to make peace with its neighbouring population, either granting them a state of their own, or possibly creating a single secular state that encompasses the Occupied Territories. The present course, which has skewed ever more rightward in recent years, will lead to nothing but terminal warfare and an ultimately self defeating siege mentality that cannot be sustained. For those who claim to be so pro-Israel, presumably yourself, that they want to see Israel continue on its very dangerous current path are actually the greatest enemies Israel could have, much as those who couldn’t countenance whites negotiating with blacks were eventually marginalized and a peaceful resolution to Apartheid brokered. The lesson is highly instructive, as dialogue is always more effective than the barrel of a gun in realising a lasting peace. You may fool yourself into thinking this is impossible, but those who sought to preserve an egregiously unfair status quo have always argued thus.

As someone who seems unable to concede that Palestinians are treated horrendously both within Israel, where they have to carry special identification books (sound familiar?) and far worse in the Occupied Territories you really have no leg to stand on by referring to the “racist conditions” in Lebanon. As bad as it might be for Palestinians in Lebanon it is nothing compared to their treatment in Israel and the OT. When was the last time the Lebanese killed 1400 Palestinians in a three week period, injuring 5000 more? Your point can therefore be dismissed both by referring to the “two wrongs don’t make a right” syndrome and by your own selective blindness on this matter.

For me to continue to participate in this exchange I will have to insist, as I’ve already done, that you not simply claim that my evidence “is flawed” and that “the claims [I] make are false and [my] quoted accounts are heavily tainted”, but actually substantiate your statements. After all anyone can simply dismiss evidence, which is what creationists do all the time who find the mountains of evidence for evolution to be too troubling for their delicate religious sensibilities. If you want me to see you as anything but a vulgar apologist for Israel(note I’m not actually accusing you of this) then I’ll need substantial counter evidence, and not mere assertions or refusals to accept what I present.

[RF2]

Xeno

First, I must apologize. At first I had assumed that you were just anoter ignorant fool that has been reading too much anti Israel propaganda. I see now that I did not give you enough credit. You are far too familiar with the above quotes and sources and have researched the matter deeply.
I can be confident that you, however, are not unbiased. Every single source you have brought is known as being constantly critical of Israel. This is the reason Shaun and I dismissed them. But you are right, we should supply you with our own and I will do so tomorrow should time allow.

A few notes on your post. You can't claim that I am lying because you don't like my comments. It is an absolute fact that the IDF did not conduct any military operations inside Gaza for a number of months after the disengagement. All this time rockets were landing inSderot and surrounding areas. Search your sources, you won't find any reports of Israeli army inside Gaza at this time. What there were incidents of IDF shooting people IN THE PROCESS of lying mines next to the border fence in order to blast IDF border patrols.

Question: How is it that Gaza can complain about have to shut its power plant when Israel supplies its electricity?

Its interesting that you note that Gaza has 3 CT scanners. Not that is relevant to Cast Lead but it is relevant to the picture of abject poverty and concentration camp conditions present in Gaza. Bara serves a population 5 times that of Gaza (with more poverty) and is served only by bara, which, last time I was there, had only 1 CT. In fact the whole of greater JHB, an area many many times the size of Gaza with many more inhabitants has only around 5 government hospitals with CT scanners. So supermarkets, CT scanners, a zoo - this insn't exactly Orange Farm we're talking about here.

Regarding the timing of the Operation. I tend to agree. There is no doubt in my mind that the Operation was timed in relation to the elections and was set to end before Obama's inauguration. This however does not detract form the necessity of the Operation. The problem with the time was that the Operation was delayed, it should have happened much earlier. Israeli civilians were killed and injured because of the decision to wait.

To clarify my position on the cruelty of war. My comments regarding DIME etc were based on the fact that Israel targetd military targets only. The was collateral damage but the blame for this lies on the shoulders of those who shot missiles from school playgrounds. Once you accept that you are trying to kill enemy combatants I do not see why DIME, or Shmime or whatever other explosive should be worse that TNT. Now whether or not you choose to belive that Israel targeted only combatants is a function of the sources you use, but it does not make me less humane because my positions is based on my sources. You can tell my sources are wrong but that is irrelevant to my believing that munitions need not be limited on enemy combatants.

I am aware that the PA now accepts Israel, please could you provide a link showing that Hamas does too.

What do you mean by negotiating? If you mean making concessions, well Israel has already left the area. We stopped military activity. Borders were open. What more can Israel offer? We supply water and electricity to the area as well. If yiou claim that concessions need to be made in the West Bank before the violence from Gaza will stop, surely a bit of goodwill is required. You left Gaza, we'll behave nicely to show you that leaving areas we want will bring some peace. But instead we see that we leave and we get shot at more.

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

Xeno, please allow me to help you argue:

As I understand it, you are making the claim that the IDF is in general a machine of human rights abuses and in particular in the case of the Gaza Cast Lead operation.

In order to do this (wrt Gaza) you need to show one of two things:
1) The entire campaign was illegal / illegitimate
2) The campaign was legal, but certain actions / operations were excessive or contravened international rules/laws of war.

Illegal/Illegitimate (1)
I don't think you're arguing the first. Because if you were you'd spend more time on issues of dialogue. More on that later.

International Law (2)
It seems then, based on my para above, and on your quotes that you're focused on the particular events in the campaign. In supporting your claim you have brought 3 main claims:
1) Mads Gilbert: based on your subsequent research I assume by now you are embarrassed to have quoted him to start with.
2) The first bombardment, various schools, hospitals, ambulances hit etc, all (most?) of which are admitted to by the IDF with the comment that under Geneva, as Shaun pointed out, they were legitimate targets.
3) White Phosphorous: please read the IDF preliminary report which debunks said claim.

So, to pursue your argument you need a reliable source that ambulances / schools etc were not reasonably believed by the IDF to have been used by Gazan fighters.

Back to point 1:
XENO: "But Hamas has repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent truce"
This really hurts your position since:
long-term truce = hudna

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

A few side comments:

1) Xeno:
When you mention the Nakba do you believe all lands lost in war going back to (insert date here) should be returned to the aboriginal peoples?

2) Do you think ALL war is illegitimate, or do you think there are circumstances that justify it? e.g. do you think Hamas/PA is justified in taking up arms in search of self determination?

3) If Palestine was a state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates under the control of the Hashemite dynasty (as an example). And Palestinians and Jews were EACH fighting for their own state, would you support both?
Even if they blew up Jordanian woman and children on busses in Amman?
Would your answer change if say the new "Tamil state" had the objective not of self governance but of the murder and destruction of Sri-Lanka as an independent entity? (please excuse the mixed metaphor)

4) Do you think carrying an ID book is a form of persecution and denial of human rights ?(I gleaned this from your post of May 23: 17:25)
Do you think it is illegitimate anywhere in the world or only in Israel?
What if you're a foreign national, e.g. a zimbabwean in JHB?
Do you think you should be required to produce an ID/passport to enter another country?
Do you carrying a driver's license is also a human rights infringement?

4) Do you think that the Id books, border checks, night raids etc that the palestinians endure in the West Bank are worse than the artillery bombardments, barring from education and total restrictions of freedom of movement in Lebanon? (again from 23 May 17:25)
Are you contending this based on actual reporting from Lebanon, personal experience or hearsay?

5) What measures do you think are legitimate to take to prevent the loss of human life? i.e. do you think it is legitimate to arrest a whole village for a week assuming you have reasonable intelligence that someone in the village intends to murder civilians? Does this change if the village is supportive of or against the proposed
attack?
What about bombing a city of people that support and work towards your death? Assuming of course there is no way to otherwise remove the threat?

RF2:
1) You contend that the PA now "accepts Israel" - I think you need to brush up on your facts. They recently recanted to save face in the arab world, and moreover the reporting that they "Aceepted" Israel was not fairly representative - check out what they actually "accepted"

2) You also contend there was no other option that the campaign. Shaun and RF2 know that I thought the campaign was ill conceived and should not have been undertaking.

3) For your general edification on the Mads Gilbert, white phosphorous and various UN claims and counter-claims check out Melanie Phillips for thorough, well researched and documented articles on these issues.

So much more ... so little bandwidth

[Xenocratic]

Hello RF2

So glad that you no longer think of me as an "ignorant fool", very kind concession on your part. However you have once again insisted on dismissing all my sources as "anti-Israel" without explaining what you mean by this. As far as I'm concerned the only people who are anti-Israel in the sense that I think you mean are neo-Nazis and anti-Semites of all stripes, who I wouldn't pay any attention to in the first place. If by "anti-Israel" you simply mean any and all critics of Israel then I'm afraid you resemble nothing so much as the apologists for apartheid who for decades saw the whole world, and anyone critical of this heinous regime, as being anti-Afrikaners. I actually have people of this stripe in my family so I'm well aware of the mentality. Now please don't think I'm accusing you outright of this, it's just an impression that has been created. The reason I state this is that you've not managed to condemn anything the IDF did during Operation Cast Lead while rehashing pronouncements from IDF spokesman. Needless to say, these people are not the most impartial of sources, and the same could be said of all representatives of the Israeli government.

I am certainly not "unbiased", but neither is anyone else on planet earth. I have presented you and Shaun with three major studies conducted on the Operation, excluding excerpts from a UN study quoted in my first long post, yet I am simply to believe that Human Rights Watch and the American National Lawyers Guild, among others, are simply "constantly critical of Israel". In fact you go even further to dismiss all my sources as falling into this selfsame trap. Could you please provide a detailed contextual framework for why all my sources are only interested in criticising Israel, as opposed to standing up for human rights? We really won't get anywhere with me providing copious amounts of sources and you simply dismissing them as "anti-Israel", a term I suggest you assiduously avoid without making it very clear what you mean by this.

I find your use of the term "collateral damage" most disturbing as this is a term, much like "enhanced interrogation techniques", meant to obscure the reality of warfare and to make palatable what is most certainly a detestable act. Again I must refer to the notion of universality, would you be comforted by the thought that your father or children or any loved ones were killed by accident? One civilian killed in combat is one too many.

You write that "Israel targeted military targets only" which may have been the military's intention but was certainly not how the attack played out, as numerous credible sources have made clear. So would you describe the female dorm of Gaza University as a "military target", to name but one example? If you're going to say that all civilian buildings bombed had Hamas fighters launching rockets from them I'm afraid you will be showing your own very blatant bias on this issue.

You quite blithely mention the term "sources" repeatedly so where are these? I'm not quite sure what you mean by the sentence "You can tell my sources are wrong but that is irrelevant to my believing that munitions need not be limited on enemy combatants." Are you saying that you actually believe it is justified to use munitions on civilians? A most troubling admission if I have you correct.

I quoted from Chris Hedges article, though there are other sources on this, that Israel killed a number of Palestinians in Gaza on 4 November last year which effectively broke the ceasefire. I have always condemned rocket fire from Hamas but can understand the immense frustration of a population crammed into one of the most densely populated regions on earth that have been brutally occupied for decades. You have repeatedly failed to acknowledge the background of this conflict without which any current outbreak of hostilities cannot adequately be understood. Perhaps you might also be interested in the fact that in a divide and conquer strategy Israel helped create Hamas, or at least did nothing to prevent their formation?

As for this organisation recognising Israel, here are URLs for two articles, on in the Guardian and the other in Haaretz:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jan/11/israel

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1035414.html

In terms of violence against Israel, as noted in my earlier lengthy post, between 2000 and 2008 only 17 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On December 27 2008, the first day of Operation Cast Lead, 200 people were killed, virtually all of them civilians. During the Second Intifada which lasted officially between 2000 and 2006 there were over 5000 Palestinian casualties, half of which were children, and 1000 Israelis. Food for thought, perhaps?

Regards
Xeno

[Religious Fundamentalist 1]

Xeno, again, I'm really trying to help you here but you just keep shooting yourself in the foot:

1) Both the guardian and the haaretz article are carefully selected quotes from Meshal's statements to reflect the guardian and haaretz world views. In fact Meshal did not say he recognised Israel as a legitimate Jewish state and it's continued existence was a fact etc. What he did say is that it exists today. And in future things will be different. He also used the term Hudna, again. I suggest you read his actual words and not rely on the guardian or haaretz. And moreover, once again it is simply shown that your source is just not up to scratch.

This is the second Ha'aretz article which has let you down.

2) Playing the numbers game is totally immoral since it equates results/actions and not intentions. By your logic, Israel can only be justified if it suffers equal numbers of casualties. And if your house is broken into by one armed robber the police should send only one policeman. You owe yourself more. And you owe yourself a better understanding of international law wrt war and the proportionality doctrine.

3) Aaccusations that the IDF hit non-legitimate targets , i.e. " If you're going to say that all civilian buildings bombed had Hamas fighters launching rockets from them " require some firm sources. So far, everything you've mentioned has been refuted or admitted, with mitigation. If you want to argue on the mitigation - then go ahead, but so far you haven't.

4) "brutally occupied for decades" this is a typical red herring used as an excuse to justify barbarism and evil. By the same logic one can justify the residents of Sderot lobbing makeshift mortars into Gaza. Or say, sending their army in to prevent rocket fire from the neighbours.

5) The background as you see it, or as RF2 sees it is actually irrelevant to the current situation in so far as there exists a situation on the ground that must be dealt with. And that it requires either a genuine cease fire or a complete victory to resolve.

Most importantly though, you keep dodging the point. Which is simply this:
Rockets are killing people in Israel, and there are repeated attempts to infiltrate sovereign Israeli territory and muurder citizens. Negotiations have stalled (I assume you've looked up the word Hudna by now). Withdrawal from Gaza appears to have made matters worse. International intervention has, without exception, made things worse the world over.
What do you propose?

[Religious Fundamentalist 1]

One other point, you keep claiming that the IDF is killing people etc, and that the world would do something about it if it wasn't the Joos doing the persecuting.

You have yet to give an example that would support this theory. All of those that I can think of support that contention that the world disproportionately criticises Israel. Here's the list I come up with:
Zimbabwe, China, Sri Lanka, Darfur, Sudan, Bosnia, Iraq (both times), Iran, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Myanmar, Rwanda, Pakistan, India.

[Religious Fundamentalist 1]

Sorry, I missed this gem the first time around:
"One civilian killed in combat is one too many."

What about Israeli civilians?

[Xenocratic]

Dear RF1

I'm afraid this will probably be my last post on this matter. I'm also not going to bother answering all those questions because you have either missed most of what I've posted or intentionally misinterpreted my stances.

A key sentence in your numerous posts was one where you tell me to "please read the IDF preliminary report which debunks said claim." Hmmmm, let's think about this. So a detailed report from an independent human rights group, namely Human Rights Watch, which as its name suggests cares only about human rights violations, regardless of the actors involved (as can be testified by their yearly reports) is to be discarded whereas we are supposed to trust a report by one of the principal agents involved in the conflict in question. That basically gives the game away as far as I'm concerned as it shows me that you are completely blinded on this issue and will swallow any old pabulum disgorged by the Israeli government.

This in line with your assertion, which you share with Shaun and RF2, that "everything [I've] mentioned has been refuted or admitted, with mitigation". I'm afraid nothing I've quoted from has been refuted, at least not by you or the other two characters who've responded to me on this thread. As I told them assertion is never equal to fact, so by merely saying something you've proved nothing, as your last few posts make amply clear. Without any evidence in your corner to back up your assertions and to, as you claim, "refute" mine this discussion is thoroughly pointless. To quote Christopher Hitchens, "that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence".

Your accusation that my reference to a brutal occupation lasting for decades is a "red herring" is rich coming from someone whose post consists of virtually nothing but bright red herrings. Since when did I use the acknowledgement of reality "as an excuse to justify barbarism and evil"? People did what could be described as evil things to fight against apartheid which, while never justified, could be explained by looking at the lives they were forced to lead. There is nothing logical about the conclusion you reach apropos the "residents of Sderot lobbing makeshift mortars into Gaza" because they are not the ones who have been occupied, an elementary point. I realise why you have such a blinkered view of this issue if you actually believe, as your post suggests that the "background as you see it...is actually irrelevant to the current situation" because history in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict is infinitely relevant. As I've already noted nothing can be understood about what is happening now without examining history.

I admit I don't know much about how the Palestinians are treated in Lebanon, but I am quite sure it is better than how they are treated in the Occupied Territories, as my previous post made clear. Israel occupied Southern Lebanon from 1982 until 2000 and were responsible in that time for thousands of deaths in this country, which excludes what occurred during the 2006 war there. The IDF still makes regular incursions into Lebanon, though this is never reported by the mainstream media. If perhaps you can prove, actually citing sources (not something you or Shaun or RF2 are particularly adept at), that the Lebanese massacred 1400 Palestinians in a three week period and injured 5000 then perhaps you might have some leg to stand on in this issue vis-à-vis how the Palestinians are treated in Lebanon. In any case, as noted, that's not the issue, the issue all along has been Israel's behaviour, the subject of this blog. What Lebanon does is irrelevant and invokes the spectre which I have encountered time and again from you and Shaun and RF1 who seem to think that if someone else is doing the same thing, or worse, what I'm doing is vindicated.

You refer to the significance of intentions which are supposedly more important than actions. I find this interesting with regards to your reference to Hudna, by which you hope to impugn all peaceful overtures from Hamas or any other Islamic group. So according to you Israel's intentions are always what the government says Israel is doing rather than what they actually do. However, when it comes to Hamas nothing they say should ever be trusted. Michael Parenti points out that "no one has ever seen an intention", so what we tend to be left with are actions. All the most heinous criminals in history have always told the world what wonderful people they are and what amazing plans they have for the world. Do you think Hitler ever told Germans what a shockingly detestable person he was? Now we can talk about how untrustworthy Hamas is, but to disregard everything their leaders say while trusting everything that the Israeli government says is racist to the core, as I'm sure you are at least partially aware. This highlights another trend I've noticed in your posts and that of Shaun's and RF2's, namely to nitpick every source I submit while providing none of your own and repeating Israeli propaganda as if it's the height of impeachable fact. If you are simply going to dismiss all sources that I adduce, and to pretend that you are blessed with some clairvoyant capacity unknown to the rest of us, I will have not choice but to conclude that your identification with Israel is based on ethnic-religious identification and not on anything approaching reality. You're completely free to hold this position, though this discussion, such as it is, will then be undeniably futile for both of us. Either you care about evidence, regardless of how uncomfortable it may make you or how your many preconceptions may be shattered, or you don't in which case you resemble nothing so much as a religious fundamentalist, people I tend to avoid like the plague.

You described yourself as a leftie in an early post on this thread, though I've had scant evidence of this in subsequent posts. Perhaps you'd like to clarify your real ideological stance as I'm drawing some rather unfavourable conclusions.

Your reference to the unfairly critical press Israel receives is another huge red coloured herring, to borrow your phrase, as it is clearly attempting to deflect any attention from the subject of discussion, which is, after all, Israel. I never said "the world would do something about it if it wasn't the Joos doing the persecuting", just noted the very skewed media coverage. If you can honestly say that the likes of CNN and SkyNews and the BBC are more critical of Israel than they are of some of the countries on your list, notably Zimbabwe, Sudan, Iran and Pakistan, to name but four, then I fear for your sanity. Just look at all the coverage of the refugee situation in Pakistan, or the military assault on the Tamil Tigers which recently came to a close in Sri Lanka, compare that with how the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is covered. We here constantly about how Iran is trying to acquire nuclear weapons while not a peep is heard about Israel's arsenal of up to 200 nukes. A study was conducted by Glasgow university in 2007, I believe, in which it emerged that only 9% of Britons believed that Israel had taken land from the Palestinians. Most people thought that there were just two sides vying for the same piece of land and not one who has been an occupying power since 1948. Israel has the world's fourth largest military in the world and receives around $4 billion a year from the US, which accounts for a large bulk of US foreign aid every year. Any other country you can think of with this sort of support from the world's most powerful state?

As for my quoting of numbers of casualties, I was trying to illustrate a point about how Israelis never tire of painting themselves as the victims yet they suffer far fewer deaths than Palestinians, which should have been obvious, but clearly not to you. It certainly wasn't my logic to suggest, as you scurrilously did, that "Israel can only be justified if it suffers equal numbers of casualties". I never even vaguely inferred that, but considering how you've addressed almost none of my points, preferring either outright elision or flights of fantastical imaginings, this shouldn't have been surprising.

I stand by my statement that "one civilian killed in combat is one too many", and I've always maintained that any Israeli civilian killed is an utter tragedy. I condemn suicide bombing and rocket attacks from Gaza, always have and always will. Unlike you, RF1, I try and understand what fuels such barbaric action. Also, I actually take cognisance of, and feel sympathy for, Palestinian civilians, something that neither you, nor RF1, nor Shaun, have ever demonstrated, at least not in your posts. So I'll turn your question right around, what about Palestinian casualties?

I'm still waiting for evidence of where Pilger has lied and what exactly your problem is with Noam Chomsky.

[Shaun]

Cheers Xeno.

You take pride in the sources you provide yet you are rather defensive when these sources are questioned or “knit picked.”
Rather childish…

With regards to examples of Jon Pilger lying:
1. The National Times (12 January 1980) Pilger said: “I’ve been criticising the North Vietnamese for years.”
No criticism of North Vietnam exists in any of Pilger’s writing prior to 1981.
2. The guardian (Wednesday 2 July 2008)
Pilger wrote: Israel is high in an international league table for its murder of journalists, especially Palestinian journalists, who receive barely a fraction of the kind of coverage given to the BBC's Alan Johnston.
3. Palastine is still the Issue, (16 September 2002)
Pilger claims on air that 90% of Palestinians killed are civilians.
The truth is that: between 2000 and 2003, 39% of Palestinian deaths are "non-combatant" -- versus 79% of Israeli deaths are "non-combatant."
(http://www.btselem.org/english/statistics/Casualties_Data.asp?Category=1&region=TER)

It’s been fun

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

"I admit I don't know much about how the Palestinians are treated in Lebanon, but I am quite sure it is better than how they are treated in the Occupied Territories,"

Based on what exactly are you sure? Your own bias?

Maybe on the fact the no one actually knows how many civilians were killed on Lebanon's artillery bombardment?
Maybe based on the fact that they are unable to leave their towns (yes, not even with a dompas), unable to earn a living or become educated?

Israel is not perfect. No democracy is, but your self righteous contempt is unfairly and unreasonably focused on Israel.
How many blogs did you comment on about South Africa sitting idly by while Zim burned?
How many blogs did you comment on about SA's treatment of the foreigners after the xenophobic attacks?
Don't you realise that the incidence of reporting / exposure of "human rights abuses" is inversely proportional to the actual occurrence and heavily affected by Jihad Lawfare or are you just a self-righteous westerner gladly fading into civilisational obscurity?

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

I had a pretty long post with copious links ... if it doesn't reappear I'll get really upset.

[Xenocratic]

Greetings Shaun

I wasn't being defensive, just making the point that simply dismissing all my sources as inaccurate without providing any of your own is no way to conduct a rational conversation. What you and RF2 and RF1 have repeatedly done throughout your various posts amounts to sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming "it's all lies!", which is really childish behaviour as opposed to what I've constantly called for. Then again considering that you've once again failed to produce anything in the way of facts, while I've consistently provided sources for my assertions, leads me to believe that you simply don't have any, barring the Israeli government, of course.

Thanks for providing me with a grand total of three instances of Pilger's dishonesty, which I will certainly look into. Judging by how fast and loose you've hitherto played with the facts I don't hold my breath that any of your claims will hold up to much scrutiny. You have provided no evidence to debunk the second claim you list, and in the URL you provide for the third "lie" there is no information confirming those percentages you cite. Even if they are true how exactly is a Palestinian "combatant" defined? Would a child who throws rocks at a tank be so classified? After doing some digging I arrived at the following stark statistics, conveninetly obscured by those pathetic percentages you quote which are precisely meaningless in giving any sort of a reflection of the nature of the conflict:

Between 29.9.2000-26.12.2008 the amount of Palestinians killed in the OT and Israel totalled 4861 according to B'Tselem.

The amount of Israeli civilians killed during this time, again including the OT and Israel, is 727. Thus for every one Israeli killed there are almost 7 Palestinian deaths.

The amount of Palestinian minors killed during this period totals 956, while the amount of Israeli minors killed is given as 123. That is one Israeli minor killed for almost 8 Palestinian youths.

Most interestingly of all, the report lists the number "Palestinians who did not take part in the hostilities and were killed by Israeli security forces ( not including the objects of targeted killings)" as 2200. They report that the number of "Palestinians who were killed by Israeli security forces and it is not known if they were taking part in the hostilities" as being 883. Even if we exclude the latter number according to the B'Tselem site which you cited then the number of Palestinian civilians killed during the entire period is 45%. Now if we add the 883 killed by security forces who are not confirmed as having participated in the hostilities, then the percentage of civilians could be as high as 63.4%.

But of course this whole argument is ridiculous if we don't take into account why Palestinians are "combatants" in the first place. By your rationale blacks who actively fought against apartheid deserved to be killed and shouldn't have been taken into account in any critique of the apartheid regime, a thoroughly inhumane position to be sure.

Considering your own sources don't state what you claim they do, I think I'll take my chances with Pilger. If all you have after more than forty years of work are three supposed lies, coupled with your known gullibility in the face of brazenly lying Israeli government officials, plus your blithe disregard of all evidence that doesn't accord with your narrow worldview, forgive me for not dismissing Pilger's work out of hand and running into the arms of the likes of Alan Dershowitz(another known liar FYI) and William Kristol.

By the by, how many books of Pilger have you read? Or have you merely read gossip sites that actively attempt to discredit the likes of Pilger and Chomsky because they dare utter inconvenient truths? I don't claim to have read all his books, but have generally found him to be a very scrupulous journalist who provides copious citation, certainly something that neither you, nor RF1 and 2 can ever be accused of.

I dare say it has been marginally enjoyable, though more frustrating on the whole, considering what I've been forced to contend with...

[Xenocratic]

RF1

Are you unable to understand plain English sentences, or are you just not very bright? How many times must I state that this blog is devoted to Israel, and the article I commented on was also about Israel, ergo I have been discussing this particular state. By constantly referring to what other countries are doing you are very transparently seeking to deflect attention away from your beloved State of Israel. Just because Sudan, for example, is a hellhole has no relevance on what Israel is doing. I have long been a harsh critic of the South African government's callous approach to Zimbabwe and their failure to take a much harder stance on that demented dictator Mad Bob Mugabe. I was outraged and deeply disgusted by the Xenophobic attacks, as all decent human beings should have been. To imply that I spend all my time focused on Israel to the exclusion of all else is yet another fabrication from your fevered brain, and a typical ploy from Israel’s more insistent apologists. Why don't you answer the question of what one state's actions has to do with those of another? I fail to see the logic, because there isn't any, which can frankly be said of most of your posts, I'm afraid.

I'm very interested to know where you acquire so much knowledge of how Lebanon treats its Palestinian population, driven there by Israel's actions which you typically have nothing to say about. Interesting how everyone else, and all other countries, are to be harshly denounced but poor precious Israel has hardly a smudge to her name. You at least admitted that she's not perfect, which is a start, I suppose. Perhaps even you can rise to a minimal level of honesty yet, though I have my doubts.

I have absolutely no idea what you're on about when you ask "Don't you realise that the incidence of reporting / exposure of 'human rights abuses' is inversely proportional to the actual occurrence and heavily affected by Jihad Lawfare or are you just a self-righteous westerner gladly fading into civilisational obscurity?" What, exactly, is "Jihad Lawfare"? How is it possible that "incidence of reporting/exposure of 'human rights abuses'" are "inversely proportional to the actual occurrence?" As for the accusation that I'm "a self-righteous(clearly one of your favourite accusations) westerner gladly fading into civilisational obscurity" you'll also have to explain that one to me. Sorry for being so slow in the face of nonsensical sentences punctuated by garbled gibberish. I certainly don't feel myself fading into "civilisational(sic) obscurity", or perhaps this is one of those mysterious diseases that is undetected at first and then suddenly strikes when one least expects it. I'll have to down a lot of Vitamin C if I hope to avoid this insidious ailment.

I can see that this discussion has devolved into a sophomoric mudslinging session, which is what I was afraid would happen. I fear I'll have to therefore opt out of this maelstrom of ad hominems before all the issues are obscured beyond any redemption, which has already happened to a great degree.

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

Xeno,

Can you please give us the links to Derschowitz' lies?

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

How is it possible that "incidence of reporting/exposure of 'human rights abuses'" are "inversely proportional to the actual occurrence?"
- you're kidding right?

Please just answer the question RF2 proposed in the beginning and which you keep skirting:
Do you believe Israel cannot kill foreign civilians under any circumstances to protect the lives of their own?
OR
are you simply trying to argue they do it excessively?

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

" Interesting how everyone else, and all other countries, are to be harshly denounced but poor precious Israel has hardly a smudge to her name. "

Erm, no. I vehemently criticize Israel on many issues, including the decision to go into Gaza, and the method by which the war was carried out. But as you repeatedly point out, that is not the "focus" here, so please stop deflecting.

I am defending Israel's obligation to protect her citizens against hostile adversaries. You have yet to admit such a right even exists.

[Xenocratic]

RF1

You "vehemently criticize Israel on many issues"? That's certainly news to me. All you've been doing is defending Israel against any and all charges of misconduct. Why don't you unburden yourself of some of these criticisms so that I know that you're being serious and not merely claiming this to create the impression you're interested in fairness.

There is a massive difference between discussing Zimbabwe in a blog devoted to Israel and discussing the history of the current Israel-Palestine conflict. To do so is anything but "deflecting", it is embroidering the context which is always needed when discussing this issue. You've already stated your antipathy to looking at history so it may seem as if a reflection on history is dodging the issue at hand, but for those of us who still reside in the real world such historical consciousness is necessary to find present day solutions.

By insisting that Israel has an "obligation to protect her citizens against hostile adversaries" you pretend that Palestinians shouldn't have a similar right. By finding a lasting solution to the currently intractable situation the hostilities between the Palestinians and the Israelis could be neutralised, or at least considerably mitigated. By repeatedly claiming that Israel has a right to defend its citizens, without facing up to why they should be defended in the first place, is a recipe for endless conflict.

So I'm asking you to look honestly at the situation and be consistent in the rights you think the State of Israel is supposed to possess. By claiming that Israel has a right to exist, but not a Palestinian state, or the right to use force, but not the Palestinians, is to demonstrate not only a deep-seated bias but also an unwillingness to actually find a genuinely peaceful and lasting solution to what is a nightmarish scenario for both sides.

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

Xeno,

The Palestinians are entitled to defend themselves, obviously. Who exactly do you want them to defend themselves from? The Israelis who keep giving land and keep begging to be left alone?

Are you trying to argue that shooting kassams at civilians and suicide bombings on buses is "defense"?

For a lasting solution, someone has to stop shooting first. But a hudna is not a cease fire / peace treaty - so how do you propose to reach a compromise and accommodation with two organisations unwilling to negotiate anything other than a hudna and hell bent on destruction of their negotiating partner?

[The Blacklisted Dictator]

Xenocratic,

Let us assume that you are Israel's PM and are heading a coalition that would automatically comply with any policy that you initiated. What would you immediately do to create a long and lasting peace?

When you have outlined these policies, please let us know how you think The Palestinians, Israel's Arab neighbours and Iran would respond.

[Xenocratic]

Religious Fundamentalist 1

My jaw slackened audibly upon reading the intense inanity and downright dishonesty of your recent post beginning with “The Palestinians are entitled to defend themselves, obviously”. The fact that you can even ask “who exactly do you want them to defend themselves from?” shows that you truly are a know-nothing know-it-all, though in your case a know-nothing know-nothing is a far more apt description. Your nom de plume on this thread is more well chosen than you think, though you spell it incorrectly, as you really do possess the cast of mind most associated with religious fundamentalists of all stripes, that is an ineluctable adherence to rigid dogma and an insidious immunity to any and all forms of evidence. On this issue it is now very clear that you are nothing but a sanctimonious and servile apologist of the lowest order.

Based on your bemusement and lack of comprehension of why Palestinians should possibly have any reason to attack those innocent Israelis you bang on about ad nauseam, you reveal an almost incomprehensible ignorance at best and a deep seated delusion at worst. Or perhaps you’re just contemptuously callous, not an unknown phenomenon among pro-Israel zealots. You are so clueless, which I put down to wilful ignorance rather than a lack of intelligence, that this discussion is frightfully futile and beyond my patience threshold. This is the last you’ll be hearing from me.

But a few points need to be dealt with before I recuse myself from further participation in this discussion, such as it is. If Israel really were “begging to be left alone” and “keep giving land”, as you point out without a trace of irony, then why does the Israeli government continue to demolish homes, kill civilians, grab Palestinian land, evict them from East Jerusalem in a slow takeover, build a “security” wall which cuts into Palestinian land well beyond the ‘67 borders, build more illegal settlements in the West Bank in direct contravention of international law, collectively punish the population of Gaza which is unlawful under the Geneva Convention, and create sonic booms with fighter jets near Gaza which causes more trauma to an already deeply traumatised populace?

If the Israeli government really were such paragons of morality why would Mondli Makhanya, a black South African who spent the bulk of his life living under Apartheid, write in his Sunday Times editorial during Operation Cast Lead “that not in their worst hour of depravity could the Nats have been so vile”? About ten years ago another black journalist, this time working for The Star, travelled to Palestine and contended that what he saw there was worse than apartheid. How can you possibly write off what a man of such unimpeachable morality as Desmond Tutu has to say about the Israel-Palestine conflict, who has resoundingly denounced the actions of the State of Israel? Or are we to believe that he, a lifelong fighter for justice and human rights, is simply another anti-Israel bigot and liar? Have you actually ever travelled to the West Bank or Gaza to see for yourself the conditions that the Palestinians live under?

I also wonder whether perhaps you’re Jewish, RF1. Because if this is the case I wonder whether you can honestly say, in your heart of hearts, that if another state was doing what Israel is responsible for you would so adamantly invoke defensive posturing and glibly dismiss all qualms over their actions with a metaphorical shrug of the shoulders?

I now realise the real reason you see fit to dismiss and slander Noam Chomsky and John Pilger is because of their incisive fact based critiques of Israel over the years and who have brought to bear on the long running conflict not only a keenly attuned analytical faculty but first hand experience of the dire plight of the Palestinians from the frontlines of their struggle against merciless usurpers. If you concede that they are correct about Israel, which they are, then you will be forced to change your supremely skewed opinions, and we certainly wouldn’t want that, now would we?

It is also painfully clear from all the aggregated posts on this thread that I have forgotten more about the Israel-Palestine situation than you, RF2 and Shaun will ever know. Or, more to the point, much more than you three will ever care to know lest awkward reality intrude on your rose tinted infatuation with the Israeli state. The three of you are intellectual and moral lightweights who wouldn’t stand a chance against me in a formal debate, as opposed to this scattershot discussion. I come at you thick and fast with a myriad of sources and quotations from numerous articles and you counter with….well, assertions that my sources are flawed coupled with some of the most outrageous lies imaginable. All in all it’s been quite a shameful performance, but at least I’ve gained yet more insight into the workings, or lack thereof, of the wantonly brainwashed mind.

Not that it will make the slightest bit of difference to a mind as warped with Islamaphobia and ethno-religious chauvinism as yours, but for the public record I feel it’s necessary to provide more sources in strengthening my case. In seeking to further buttress my contentions I did some more digging and re-reading and in so doing uncovered a number of gems, though sadly at your expense.

I’ll start with the late great Edward Said whose eloquence and moral passion on the situation in Palestine know few equals. Although he was writing in the early years of this millennium much of what he wrote still carries considerable weight in understanding the present situation. In an essay entitled ‘Emerging Alternatives in Palestine’, Said writes the following:

“In the United States the government and, with a handful of exceptions, the ‘independent’ media have echoed each other in harping on Palestinian violence and terror, with no attention at all paid to the thirty-five-year-old Israeli military occupation, the longest in modern history: as a result, American official condemnations of Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority after September 11 as harbouring and even sponsoring terrorism have coldly reinforced the Sharon government’s preposterous claim that Israel is the victim, the Palestinians the aggressors in the four-decade war that the Israeli army has waged against civilians, property, and institutions without mercy or discrimination. The result today is that the Palestinians are locked up in 220 ghettos controlled by the army; American-supplied Apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, and F-16s mow down people, houses, olive groves, and fields on a daily basis; schools and universities as well as businesses and civil institutions are totally disrupted; hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed and tens of thousands injured; Israel’s assassinations of Palestinian leaders continue; unemployment and poverty stand at about 50 percent – and all this while General Anthony Zinni drones on about Palestinian ‘violence’ to the wretched Arafat who can’t even leave his office in Ramallah because he is imprisoned there by Israeli tanks, while his several tattered security forces scamper about trying to survive the destruction of their offices and barracks”.

This essay was originally published in Al-Ahram in the January 10 – 16 2002 edition, and Al-Hayat published on January 18, 2002. Republished in ‘From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map’, excerpt from page 144.

In another essay, entitled ‘What Has Israel Done?’, Said writes:

“ ‘Plucking out the terrorist network’, ‘destroying the terrorist infrastructure’, ‘attacking terrorist nests’ (note the total dehumanisation involved in every one of these phrases) are repeated so often and so unthinkingly that they have therefore given Israel the right to do what it has wanted to do, which in effect is to destroy Palestinian civil life, with as much damage, as much sheer wanton destruction, killing, humiliation, vandalism, and purposeless but overwhelming technological violence as possible. No other state on earth could have done what Israel has done with as much approbation and support as the United States has given it. None has been more intransigent and destructive, more out of touch with its own realities than Israel.
There are signs, however, that the amazing, not to say grotesque, nature of these claims (Israel’s ‘fight for existence’) is slowly being eroded by the harsh and nearly unimaginable devastation wrought by the Jewish state and its homicidal prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Take this front-page report, ‘Attacks Turn Palestinian Plans into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust’, by the New York Times’ Serge Schmemann (no Palestinian propagandist) on April 11: ‘There is no way to assess the full extent of the damage to the cities and towns – Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tul Karm, Qalqilya, Nablus, and Jenin – while they remain under a tight siege, with patrols and snipers firing in the streets. But it is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state – roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines – has been devastated’. By what inhuman calculus did Israel’s army, using fifty tanks, 250 missile strikes a day, and dozens of F-16 sorties, besiege Jenin’s refugee camp for over a week, a one-square-kilometre patch of shacks housing fifteen thousand refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and with no defences whatever, no leaders, no missiles, no tanks, nothing, and call it a response to terrorist violence and the threat to Israel’s survival? There are reported to be hundreds buried in the rubble that Israeli bulldozers are now trying to heap over the camp’s ruins. Are Palestinian civilian men, women, children no more than rats or cockroaches that can be killed and attacked in the thousands without so much as a word spoken compassionately in their defence? And what about the capture of thousands of Palestinian men who have been taken off by Israeli soldiers without a trace, the destitution and homelessness of so many ordinary people trying to survive in the ruins created by Israeli bulldozers all over the West Bank, the siege that has now gone on for months and months, the cutting off of electricity and water in all Palestinian towns, the long days of total curfew, the shortage of food and medicine, the wounded who have bled to death, the systematic attacks on ambulances and aid workers that even the mild-mannered Kofi Annan has decried as outrageous? Those actions will not be pushed so easily into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how its suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security”.

Ibid, page 173

Moving to Operation Cast Lead, an article entitled ‘Prima facie evidence of war crimes’ appeared in the Mail & Guardian in the January 16 – 22 2009 edition of the newspaper. Some key quotations from the article:

“As the death toll from the Israeli assault on Gaza topped 900 this week, pressure mounted for an independent inquiry into specific incidents, such as the shelling of a UN school turned refugee centre where 40 people died and whether the military tactics used by Israel systematically breached humanitarian law.

The UN's senior human rights body approved a resolution on Monday condemning the Israeli offensive for "massive violations of human rights".”

Some more telling excerpts include:

“Israel's actions prompted an unusual public rebuke from the International Red Cross after the army had moved a Palestinian family into a building and shelled it, killing 30. The surviving children clung to the bodies of their dead mothers for four days while the army blocked rescuers from reaching the wounded.

Human Rights Watch has called on the UN security council to set up a commission of inquiry into alleged war crimes.

Two leading Israeli human rights organisations have separately written to the country's attorney general demanding he investigate the allegations. But critics are sceptical that any such inquiry will take place given that Israel has previously blocked similar attempts, with US backing.”

How about the following to open the eyes of the brazenly blinkered among us:

“Amnesty International says the dropping of powerful shells on residential streets that send blast and shrapnel over a wide area constitutes ‘prima facie evidence of war crimes’.

‘There has been reckless and disproportionate and in some cases indiscriminate use of force,’ said Donatella Rovera, an Amnesty investigator in Israel. ‘There has been the use of weaponry that shouldn't be used in densely populated areas because it's known it will cause civilian fatalities and casualties.’

Israel's most prominent human rights organisation, B'Tselem, has written to the attorney general in Jerusalem, Meni Mazuz, to press him to investigate suspected crimes including how the military selects its targets and the killing of scores of policemen at a passing-out parade.

‘Many targets seem not to have been legitimate military targets as specified by international humanitarian law,’ said Sarit Michaeli of B'Tselem.

Rovera has also collected evidence that the Israeli army holds Palestinian families prisoner in their own homes as human shields. ‘It's standard practice for Israeli soldiers to go into a house, lock up the family in a room on the ground floor and use the rest of the house as a military base, as a snipers' position. That is the absolute textbook case of human shields’.”

(available online at http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-01-17-prima-facie-evidence-of-war-crimes).

On the same page as this article appeared one by Noam Chayut who is described as a “veteran lieutenant of the Israeli military who served during the second intifada”. He can certainly not be described as an anti-Israel bigot as he is both an Israeli and someone who has served in the military. His article is tellingly entitled ‘More brute than human’. I thought the following might be of interest:

“The Israeli government and its supporters claim we are really the victim, that we had no choice but to attack Gaza, that we hurt civilians only because they are being used as human shields, that Israel wants peace and Hamas wants death.

Israel's critics, on the other hand, claim that it had a choice, it broke the ceasefire, that we have killed over a thousand in Gaza over the past three years, before the invasion began, and that the siege in Gaza was designed to use civilians to put pressure on their leaders to change - the same logic as the despised human shields.

I view the situation from another perspective - that of an Israeli citizen concerned about the future of our democracy.

I am no stranger to the Israeli military, having served for more than four years as a soldier in an elite reconnaissance unit and then as a lieutenant and deputy company commander.
I thought I could maintain a high standard of moral conduct while controlling the lives of Palestinians under my occupation. I was wrong. It is impossible to coerce your surroundings by force and then go home and be a regular citizen.

The power you use and abuse in the Occupied Territories very quickly goes to your head. You come home less of a human being and more of a brute. It is impossible to maintain a system of force towards another people and a democracy in dealing with your own.

…….

And why talk of the future when Israel's present conduct towards its own citizens has already deteriorated to a frightening low? Most of the world has heard about Gaza, but not that Israel has barred the media from entering the territory, with the exception of few Israeli journalists who accompany the troops and write reports that could have been written by the military itself.

More than 700 Israelis have been arrested for protesting against the war. More than 200 were still in custody at the time this was written, a third of them Israeli citizens under the age of 18.

But the Israelis who have been hurt most by this repression are not Jewish, but Arab citizens of the state. Israel's Parliament this week banned Arab political parties from running in general elections next month, a sign of growing confrontation with the country's Arab minority.

The present and future of Israeli democracy is in serious question.

The world must understand that nations always have a choice about how to conduct themselves and these choices have consequences. Only then can we ask real questions.

We must ask if Israel did all in its power to avoid this war. I and a growing number of Israelis do not believe this is the case.

More importantly, we must ask ourselves about our moral boundaries as a nation. I and a growing number of ex-combatants believe we crossed them long ago and are witnessing the collapse of our democracy as all means become acceptable in achieving vague military aims”.

(available online at http://www.mg.co.za/printformat/single/2009-01-18-more-brute-than-human).

Some great democracy where hundreds of protesters are arrested and Arab political parties within Israel can’t even run in the elections. Even setting this aside, the overarching meaning of Mr Chayut’s sentiments are difficult to refute, that is if the reader can wrench himself away from a simplistic one-dimensional paradigm.

In Ed O’Loughlin’s January 7 2009 article for the Irish Times, entitled ‘One-sided reality of combat in Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, he seriously shatters some illusions, at least those held by the deeply prejudiced amongst us:

“You could be forgiven for thinking that there was a major ground battle going on in the Gaza Strip right now.

"Fierce fighting" vies for headline space with "intense combat", while Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters swap "heavy exchanges of fire" in "house-to-house clashes". But experience of Israel's many previous raids into Gaza in recent years - the Israeli government is blocking independent foreign journalists from witnessing this one - suggests a more one-sided reality.

Unlike the Hizbullah men who fought the Israeli army to a standstill in Lebanon two years ago, Hamas's gunmen have no modern anti-tank missiles. Their mainly home-made rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are useless against the heavy armour of the Israeli defence force's tanks and armoured personnel carriers. The Palestinians have no artillery or precision heavy weapons, and no air defences to counter Israel's US-supplied fighter bombers and attack helicopters, or the armed robot aircraft which circle constantly overhead. Their automatic rifles would be lethal against unprotected soldiers encountered at short range, but the tactics which Israel has perfected for the Gaza Strip ensure that its soldiers are seldom exposed to effective enemy fire.

In fact, only about a dozen troops have died while participating in numerous deep raids inside Gaza since the IDF's last major loss in May 2004. Then, 11 troops were killed in two separate incidents involving poorly armoured vehicles since withdrawn from service”.

He goes on:

“The Palestinian death toll from such incursions has been vastly higher: Operation Rainbow, May 2004, killed at least 53 Palestinian militants and civilians; Operation Days of Penitence, October 2004, killed between 104 and 133; Operation Summer Rains, June 2006, 400 plus; Operation Autumn Clouds, November 2006, at least 70; last year an unnamed raid on Jabaliya killed over 100. All these raids and numerous smaller ones were duly reported in the foreign media, condemned as disproportionate by much of the international community and then quietly forgotten. The present Operation Cast Lead (some 630 Palestinians killed, as of last evening, and rapidly rising), is well on course to dwarf them all combined - as evidenced by yesterday's single incident toll of 42 civilians, killed when an Israeli artillery shell landed near a UN-run school.

In a typical Israeli invasion, small teams of undercover soldiers use the cover of darkness to seize control of civilian homes selected for their fields of fire, taking the residents hostage and building snipers nests to cover the tanks that rapidly join them. In ensuing operations, the tanks and snipers sit back and take a heavy toll of the young Palestinian gunmen who invariably rush to the scene - one of the most under-reported aspects of the Israeli-Palestine conflict is the ineptitude of the martyrdom-loving Palestinians when it comes to basic guerrilla tactics.

While their comrades keep the neighbourhood pinned down, infantrymen typically use civilian hostages as human shields - this is known in the IDF as the "neighbour procedure" - as they go door to door rounding up the menfolk, most of whom are then marched off to Israel to be interrogated and, if suspected of militant links, convicted and jailed. (Torture of suspected terrorists is tolerated by the legal authorities and courts in Israel, and torturers are allowed to defend themselves by asserting that the torture was ‘necessary’.)”

Further on we read:

“Most Israeli government spokesmen and women have so far denied that the aim of the current operation is to eliminate Hamas militarily in the Gaza Strip. But the underlying logic of Israel's internal political and military intrigues, and of both sides' stated aims, suggests otherwise. Hamas says it will not renew its previous six-month ceasefire with Israel, which unravelled last month following mutual violations, unless the Jewish state agrees to end its crippling three-year-old economic blockade of the Strip's desperate population - a demand echoed by human rights groups and local UN agencies.”

(article available online at
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0107/1230936731427.html).

For those with the stomach for it I highly recommend another decisive dose of demystification which can be gleaned from Henry Siegman’s article ‘Israel’s Lies’, published in the London Review of Books on the 29th January 2009. Be warned, though, you might be forced to change some cherished beliefs about Operation Cast Lead. Here are a few telling excerpts:

“Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.

I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’

The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel’s intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision, citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel’s leaders as a ‘plucked chicken’. They armed and trained his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas – brutally, to be sure – pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush administration imposed the blockade.

Israel seeks to counter these indisputable facts by maintaining that in withdrawing Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Ariel Sharon gave Hamas the chance to set out on the path to statehood, a chance it refused to take; instead, it transformed Gaza into a launching-pad for firing missiles at Israel’s civilian population. The charge is a lie twice over. First, for all its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.”

More terrifying truth-telling is contained further on in the article:

“Israel’s government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a ‘terror organisation’ (Israel’s preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons. According to Benny Morris, it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. He writes in Righteous Victims that an upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict’. He also documents atrocities committed during the 1948-49 war by the IDF, admitting in a 2004 interview, published in Ha’aretz, that material released by Israel’s Ministry of Defence showed that ‘there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought . . . In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.’ In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF carried out organised executions of civilians. Asked by Ha’aretz whether he condemned the ethnic cleansing, Morris replied that he did not:

A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.

In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists”.

Some more food for intellectual nourishment:

“It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a ‘terror organisation’. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions.

These are not the conclusions of an apologist for Hamas but the opinions of the former head of Mossad and Sharon’s national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy. The Hamas leadership has undergone a change ‘right under our very noses’, Halevy wrote recently in Yedioth Ahronoth, by recognising that ‘its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future.’ It is now ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state within the temporary borders of 1967. Halevy noted that while Hamas has not said how ‘temporary’ those borders would be, ‘they know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their co-operation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: they will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.’ In an earlier article, Halevy also pointed out the absurdity of linking Hamas to al-Qaida.

In the eyes of al-Qaida, the members of Hamas are perceived as heretics due to their stated desire to participate, even indirectly, in processes of any understandings or agreements with Israel. [The Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled] Mashal’s declaration diametrically contradicts al-Qaida’s approach, and provides Israel with an opportunity, perhaps a historic one, to leverage it for the better.”

(article available online at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n02/sieg01_.html).

That’s it, I’m now officially done with this excuse in abject futility. Best of luck stewing in your pervasively prejudiced juices.

Cheerio

[Religious Fundamentalist 1]

Xeno,
Being an intellectual (and moral) lightweight I didn't quite understand.

So you're saying you still haven't looked up "hudna" and in reponse to BD's question, you'd advocate opening the borders, implementing a uni-lateral Israeli ceasefire and negotiating with Hamas?

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

Chaps,
It seems we accidentally broke another one.

We really need to stop questioning Hamas' bona fides and UN/Pilger facts or we'll wallow in our own intellectually and morally stunted posts and lose the great moral light of better educated people.

I blame you BD. How can you possibly ask such a nasty and insidious question?

[Shaun]

I dont know chaps.. Do you think he really left us?

[Religous Fundamentalist 1]

To illustrate a now mute point I'd like to point out as an example one easily identifiable "factual inaccuracy"* in Henry Siegman's article (London Review of Books quoted above by Xeno)

Re the incidents of 4 Nov 2008, the article states:
"This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas"
No context given. 10 minutes of google searches will reveal exactly why the IDF went in, what the mission objective was etc. Siegman's deliberate cherry picking/distortion of facts to suit his version of events should be enough to discount him.

This is more than just a reporting error though, it taints the whole conception of the "cease fire" and subsequent campaign.

Forgetting for a moment the fact that Gaza shares a border with Egypt, the white elephant is: if all the ammunition got into Gaza what effective blockade was there?

_________________________________
* for the simple minded Religious Fundamentalist, like me, the term "factual inaccuracy" was translated as "lie" before the advent of post-modernism and moral relativism.

[Religious Fundamentalist 1]

I dunno Shaun, I'm just a simple inane and dishonest know-nothing know-nothing fundamentalist - I couldn't possibly answer such a difficult question.

[RF2]

This thread highlighted something very important. Something I have brought up before and something I hope anyone on this blog will remember before getting into public debate with the likes of Xeno.

You can't win an argument with a liar. He will always have a counter to whatever you say.

To those of us with a critical eye, going through this thread will show that we discredited Xeno's sources by showing them to have lied before. After that one does not need to defend any particular accusation, the source is invalid. In fact, many accusations cannot defended precicley because they are lies. If Pilger et al would stand up and claim that Israeli's did x, y and z, there is not likely to be any evidence to the contrary as how do you disprove and non event.

What is important to note is that were an average ignorant joe to read this thread I'm sorry to say, Xeno ahs beat us hands down. It takes careful scrutiny and knowledge of the perversion of his sources, of their previous lies and their stated alliances (to quote Edward Said as objective, I mean really) to see the Xeno has no credibility. And it is precisely this need for extensive an understanding of the subject that prohibits us from debating live in front of those not knowledgeble in the area.

To be sure, we did not counter many of his accusations. As pointed out above, some we just impossible to counter other than to say they are a lie. Unfortunately, to Xeno, and many others, as soon as an accusation is made it is automatically verified.

I do have to agree that his activity in other human rights abuse collumns does not detract from his legitimacy in commenting on the Middle East.

But most importantly, it is vital to point out that Xeno did not answer the most important question: What was Israel supposed to do that have not already tried.

As an aside, does anyone here believe he was in the IDF. Not because of his views. Alas there are a couple of vets who've gone a bit loony. But a few other little things give me the impression that this is not true

[Shaun]

Give us all bit more credit RF2.

We did a great job of countering Xeno’s claims. (Body count, humanitarian crisis, civilian targets)
We proved his sources inaccurate and in some cases ghastly. (HRW, Pilger, Gilbert)
We shot back questions that he was unable to answer. (As you pointed out, and more)
In each post we made it plainly obvious that Xeno’s knowledge of the true nature of the events in question his general history background was seriously lacking.
Most importantly, it was a fun ambush. Each of us came at Xeno from our own personal angle and he was clearly overwhelmed.
Great things always seem to happen we work together.
I’d say that we racist Zionists can chalk up another victory.
Alah Akbar, Drinks on me.

[Religious Fundamentalist 1]

I'm inclined to take a more nuanced view on the "victory". What I did particularly find rewarding was having someone challenging the axioms of our position by replacing with their own(in no particular order) inter alia:
1) The IDF doesn't defend it attacks, and Hamas is "defending" the palestinians
2) That somehow Hamas statements can be interpreted to be "peace" overtures, i.e. that the takiyha and hudna are easily translatable as cease-fire / peace agreement
3) That IDF actions to prevent an attack is somehow a violation of a cease fire
4a) That there is some level of "acceptable" rocket fire that is somehow inevitable until grievances have been addressed
b) but no level of civilian deaths / collateral damage that is acceptable from the IDF
5) That the PA/Hamas is willing to negotiate, i.e. to compromise and give up on some of their ambitions
6) That IDF actions are comparable to HAmas actions despite their different statuses under international law (not to mention the moral relativism)
7) That is Israel just stopped the "cycle of violence" then we could all just get along
8) That anything said by Israel is automatically "propaganda" but anything reported by (say) pilger, must be fact. Irrespective that Pilger merely made it up or is quoting an "eye-witness" palestinian. (I would submit that the term Eye-witness palestinian, like Hudna, doesn't translate well)

There are one or two other issues. But I think these positions largely reflect an inability to accept that people may have interests that they hold more dear than maximum utility coupled with an obsession with the victim culture. There's also the issue that Western culture looks upon the concept of truth and lies differently to other cultures. In any event, it's worth a cogitate.

_____________________________________________

There really isn't much disagreement over "facts" per se, it's really the interpretation (and selective quotation) that leads to the disagreements, i.e. the axioms one uses to assess them.

To argue more effectively with anyone, we need to focus on these axioms (as for instance BD's question would have done) and not get tied into refuting dubious sources.
______________________________________________
It is interesting to me that prior to '93 it really was not universal common wisdom that the Palestinians were entitled to a state. In fact prior to about 67 you'd have had a hard time persuading people there exists such a nation. Today you can just imagine the creative, brilliant and crushing "sophomoric/makeshift" epithets Xeno would have lobbed over the line at anyone who even mentioned such heresy, but he does seem comfortable suggesting that the Jews really aren't entitled to Israel at all.
I think this all reflects Ezra Levant's well described strategy of normalisation/de-normalisation - for which we can heartily thank our good friend Saba Peres.
_____________________________________________

As a final thought, we keep trying to apologise and nicely persuade people like Xeno to see our point of view, and Israel and the IDF hamstring themselves to try appease these world views. But it really is obvious both from what action the world actually takes with respect to human rights abusers and from the actual moral worth of their condemnations that nothing is gained by this strategy. In fact Xeno's repeated diatribes hammer home precisely this point.
Why does Israel buy into a foreign notion of morality? It's clear nobody else does!

[RF2]

Cheers RF1, I think your last post is accurate and well put.
I would like to echo your last point. When it is clear that Irael will be damned regardless, then international opinion should not be a consideration.

Sorry Shaun. I still maintain that an average person would see our victory. He would be blinded by the numbers, casualty rates and emotion language. Once those lies are out there discrediting their source has little effect on the ignorant masses. I'm not saying we didn;t win, I'm saying that our victory is only clear to those who are either familiar with the situation or are extremely critically minded. Also, I have to disagree - his knowledge was not lacking at all, it was extensive. But it was distorted and perverted, and it is most dangerous to publicly debate such a person. These are exectly the people who will go onto to places like 702 and it only takes one person to decide to take them on and they will fry him.

Speaking of frying its burgers for supper - goodbye

[The Blacklisted Dictator]

Steve,

I commend Supernatural for not censoring posts but it might be an idea to encourage higher linguistic standards. In this regard, I refer you to the comments recently written by "Xenocratic".

So who is "Xenocratic"? Firstly, I have to admit that his verbose style makes it extremely difficult to analyze since the writing is, quite frankly, indigestible.

However, I think that Xenocratic's last post has the whiff of Na'eem Jeenah. Of course, it could be Iqbal Jassatt (The MRN), but my guess is that it is Jeenah. Perhaps the following quotes are the most revealing since they incorporate the condescending/pretentious rhetoric which is usually associated with the ex Director of The So Called Freedom of Expression Institute.

Whoever it is, the author should read George Orwell's essays on style and the English language. He would then at least begin to understand, that brevity is preferable to a whole load of "frightful" long-winded sentences.

Here are a few revealing examples from Xeno's last post....

Your nom de plume on this thread is more well chosen than you think, though you spell it incorrectly, as you really do possess the cast of mind most associated with religious fundamentalists of all stripes, that is an ineluctable adherence to rigid dogma and an insidious immunity to any and all forms of evidence. On this issue it is now very clear that you are nothing but a sanctimonious and servile apologist of the lowest order

You are so clueless, which I put down to wilful ignorance rather than a lack of intelligence, that this discussion is frightfully futile and beyond my patience threshold. This is the last you’ll be hearing from me. ("frightfully futile" .. is the writer a member of the English upper class?? " I say old chap, this discussion is "frightfully futile"!)

That’s it, I’m now officially done with this excuse in abject futility. Best of luck stewing in your pervasively prejudiced juices.
Cheerio Posted by: Xenocratic | May 26, 2009 at 13:26

But why is "Jeenah/MRN?" using a nom de plume? I would have thought that the author/propagandist should, at least, have the courage to reveal his true his true identity!

Of course, "Xenocratic" is an incredibly pretentious nom de plume but I suppose that is par for the course. ( Btw, the Greek prefix "Xeno" means stranger.)

[The Blacklisted Dictator]

RF2,

Was Xeno in The IDF?

If you read Xeno's last post carefully, you will notice major differences (much more venom and hatred) to the earlier posts. At first I thought that Xeno might have been a member of The SAHRD. But now, I think he might either be Na'eem Jeeenah or Iqbal Jassatt (MRN). Of course, I blog to be corrected.

[The Blacklisted Dictator]

RF1,

My main gripe about the debate with Xeno is that it was so long-winded that virtually nobody (other perhaps than the participants) could possibly have had the patience to follow it.
Unfortunately, a debate which mainly focusses on the validity of "source" based material inevitably evades the core issues. It is important to pose questions succinctly if the opponents premises are to be exposed.

I would imagine that Xeno believes in a bi-national state with a minority Jewish population living under a Palestinian controlled government. He would obviously welcome mass Israeli emigration, perhaps to
Madagascar or Uganda. It should, moreover, be noted that many Israelis intend to emigrate if Iran goes nuclear, so one should not rule the practicality of such a solution to the conflict.

My pessimistic personal view (worthless I know!) is that there will be no peace between Israel and her Palestinians+ Arab/ Iranian enemies for the foreseeable future. The real question is thus how to minimize casualties whilst both sides are at war.

[Steve]

Brilliant argument guys. I think there are some real gems here and although I didn't have time to follow it in detail, I'm going to print this out and read it over Shabbos. Some really fine points were put across by all of you.

(Not you Xeno, but well tried.)