Anas’s Blog

It’s pissing off, man, having to defend my indignation at what’s currently happening in Palestine against those who feel that either I’m motivated by anti-semitism or who regard me as well-meaning though, perhaps, misguided. But it’s obvious, given the level of misunderstanding, that I do.

There have been a few specific criticisms thrown my way that seem to come from a standard stock of such criticisms aimed at anyone who takes on a stance that is critical of Israel (thankfully I haven’t had the opportunity to encounter many zealous defenders of Israel, so I haven’t been exposed to whatever poisonous retorts they might have to offer). The truth is that often these criticisms are little short of absurd and often betray a deeply held set of double standards that, for hypocrisy, are more than a match for the apologetics offered for the murderous actions of European states during the height of Western Colonialist expansion. Whatever apparent validity these criticisms may have derives from the general climate of ignorance in which they take place.

One of the most popular, I’ve found, is the argument that the situation in Israel/Palestine is so complicated, so complex, with so many different and varying points of view to contend with, that my oversimplistic analysis in which the Palestinians are cast as the poor helpless victims and the Israelis are invariably the sadistic villains is deeply unhelpful, full stop.

A variant on this is the more sympathetic argument that, yes, the Israelis may not be completely committed to the peace process, but then neither are the Palestinians. I mean, they’ve just elected Hamas to power, a group that is completely dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In consequence, I’m told that my overly partisan stance is fundamentally unconstructive, that my lack of compassion for the Israelis is problematic and perhaps telling of a deeper and more irrational hatred of the concept of a Jewish state.

The problem with these criticisms is not that there’s anything wrong with them in themselves; they might, in fact, depending on the context be perfectly sound and well founded. The problem is that they’re used indiscriminately, to counter any charges against Israel’s actions in Palestine — or rather, along with the normal ad hominem retorts, to dismiss anyone who seems to feel particularly incandescent at Israel’s actions.

These sorts of statements are meant to imply that, at the present moment, given the supposed disinclinations of either party towards a peaceful resolution, the status quo, however bad, is the best we can hope to maintain. This attitude reminds me of comments that Tony Blair made during this summer’s Israeli massacre of Lebanese civilians, in which he voiced his regret at the loss of life but was adamant that the timing wasn’t right for an Israeli ceasefire. This was of course after as many Western residents of or visitors to Beirut and Lebanon had been evacuated as was possible.

It just brought home to me how eminently acceptable the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians were to Blair: the extent to which he was and still is quite prepared to sacrifice other people’s wives and children. If he had been that sure of the righteousness of Israel’s bombardments and that the risk to innocent civilians was tolerable to the extent that it did not compel urgent calls for a ceasefire, maybe he should have put his money where his mouth was and shipped his wife and children over to Beirut.

Similarly the ongoing humanitarian situation in Gaza (and indeed in the West Bank) for which — despite the often correct accusations of incompetence and corruption among the Palestinian leadershup — Israel (and therefore again by extension the US) is primarily and chiefly responsible, is completely unacceptable; what’s more the sheer brutality, horror and injustice of Israel’s actions are such that they risk causing significant and irrevocable long term damage to whatever meagre prospects remain of there ever being peace in the Middle East. Ultimately the criticisms listed above fail to recognise the greivousness of the suffering and injustice in Gaza, if not the whole of Palestine, which is why I find them enormously distasteful.

The indescriminate rounds of murder and mutilation, the house demolitions the collective starvation, impoverishment, torture, the extrajudicial killings of political figures — in short, the living hell to which the Gazans are being subjected and the destruction of Palestinian civil sociery —  are, if they’re acknowledged at all, justified with reference to Israeli security. As though Israel were some bloodthirsty Aztec God whose appeasement could only be secured through the blood sacrifice and the suffering of Palestinian innocents. If indeed as many of its supporters seem to imply the security of Israel can only be bought through the murder, brutalization and slow motion genocide of a whole people then perhaps it must lose its moral legitimacy as a state, and cannot therefore remain viable (although it’s clear that numerous other states have exacted similar genocidal tolls and gone on to enjoy prosperous existences). The truth is that as countless peace activists and commentators have pointed out the security of Israel clearly does not require such bloody and systematic brutality, though certainly its ongoing territorial expansion does. Supporters of Israel who fail to actively criticise these policies should be aware of the full import of their actions.

Yes, the actions of those Palestinians firing shells into civilian Israeli areas are immoral and should be condemmed, but there is very little comparison to the scale of Israel’s attrocities in Gaza. I mean, if the suffering of one side is so utterly disproportionate, so asymmetric, then is there any good reason why the level of concern and attention shouldn’t be?

A few days ago I read an article by Kathleen Christison, an ex-CIA analyst, entitled “How can we allow this to go on?”, in which, clearly shocked by the scale of suffering it reveals, she quotes heavily from another article by the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. Arguing for the restoration of Israeli settlements he adds that “[t]hey could serve as the last human shield for a million and a half residents who now comprise one of the most helpless populations in the world. Incarcerated, without any assistance, they are liable to starve to death. Exposed, without any protection, they fall prey to the Israel Defense Forces’ operations of vengeance.”

Levy adds (and Christison quotes):

Burying its 350 dead since the summer, Gaza threatens to become Chechnya. There are thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people in Gaza, unable to receive any treatment. Those on respirators are liable to die due to the frequent power outages since Israel bombed the power plant. Tens of thousands of children suffer from existential anxiety, while their parents are unable to provide help. They are witnesses to sights that even Gaza’s old-timers have never seen before.

Anyone who does not believe this can travel to Beit Hanun, an hour from Tel Aviv. The trauma is only intensifying there, in a town that lost nearly 80 of its sons and daughters within a week. The shadows of human beings roam the ruins. Last week, I met people there who are terrified, depressed, injured, humiliated, bereaved and bewildered. What can one say to them? That they should stop firing Qassams? But the vast majority of them are not involved in this at all. That they should return Gilad Shalit? What do they have to do with him? They only know the IDF will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions, without them being guilty of a thing. In Israel’s dark southern backyard, a large-scale humanitarian tragedy is unfolding. Israel and the world, including the Arab states, are covering their eyes and the last resort, as absurd as it sounds, might be to long for the settlements. The situation is that desperate.

Responding to this and to another part of Levy’s article comparing the Gazan situation with Darfur, Christison whose extreme exasperation is palpable throughout the article, writes:

How can we Americans ignore this? How can we bear it? How can we bear to continue paying for Israel’s atrocities? How can we possibly allow this inhumanity to be perpetrated in our name without crying out in horror, without bringing down our own government that sits by doling out the money and the weapons to keep this horror going, without severing altogether any ties with Israel’s Nazi government?

The major difference between Darfur and Chechnya, and Gaza is that our responsibility as British (and of course American) citizens is that much greater in Gaza, given the extent of the support we offer to the Israelis, and the shameful media coverage and disinformation that fills our sceeens.

The Guardian website has hosted some really excellent material over the past few days, but three particular articles have caught my attention and  are worth mentioning. The first two are opinion pieces exploring the recent assassination of Pierre Gemayel. Both of them bring up a host of important issues about the actual coverage of the conflict, as well as containing speculation as to who may or may not have been behind the assassination.

Jonathan Cook’s Prime Suspects takes the eminently sensible view that, in the absence of any strong physical evidence as to the identity of the culprits — something which is conceded by all of the news sources I’ve come across — the obvious question to ask is who benefits the most? Well the media has been quick in assuring us that, yes, Syria & Hezbollah will benefit greatly from this, the death of another anti-Syrian politician, and that they only need to kill two more cabinet ministers to destroy the government’s quorum (whatever that is).

Except, as far as I can work out Syria and especially Hezbollah probably have more to lose than gain through the assassination of Gemayel. Cook’s article is all about stating the obvious, so obvious that the media doesn’t want to patronise us by spelling it out: Israel (and by extension the US) has a world to gain by damaging Hezbollah’s credibility and especially by triggering a large scale civil war in Lebanon. Israel obviously favours extrajudicial killings of politicians when it comes to its personal shooting targets, the Palestinians, and it’s quite happy to murder thousands of Lebanese in cold blood so I doubt whether it would have had many moral qualms in orchestrating the murder of Gemayel.

Except again, this is one possibility that for one reason or another the media cannot and does not want to entertain, taking it as read that in the absence of further evidence and by default it was the Syrians what done it.

The second piece by Julie Flint raises the possibility that Israel may be tried for war crimes in the ICC. Flint asks, quite rightly, why the fuss over Gemayel, when 1,183 innocent civilians were taken out in cold blood over the Summer, with British and American assistance.

The third piece I want to link to because of the intense popularity that the clip of the Iranian-American student being tortured by UCLA Campus police in full view of a bunch of gawping students has had recently (you know the one, I don’t even want to link to it). We shouldn’t forget Forest Gate however, another example of police brutality, nor the ongoing campaign of villification, through the spreading of falsities, against the victim of what was supposedly an intelligence cock up (seems to be a major cause of death and injury in the world today). I can tell you as a brown skinned chap I’m trying to resign myself to the fact that if the authorities fuck up (and there’s a good chance they might) or I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time I will be shown little in the way of clemency or humanity. It’s just one of the reasons I love this country so much.

I think I’ve probably doubled my traffic just by having a post title with the word ’sex’ in it (”Pakistan to become free-sex zone”)–which word seems only to benefit when put into close conjunction with the word ‘free’. Who’d a thunk it?

One of the stupidest grounds for defending capital punishment has to be the oft-quoted rationale of “a life for a life.” I overheard one old geezer arguing for the death penalty to another on exactly this basis in the local Salvation Army store while I was rumaging for bargains. Now I’ve heard this quote plenty of times before, but maybe because of my currently reduced mental capacity it stuck with me and the more I thought about it, the more it became a completely moronic thing to say. If I kill someone and am then executed, well then surely someone is then going to be actively responsible for taking my life, which makes them a candidate for having their lives terminated by the logic of “a life for a life”, and so on, and so on…where does it stop?  No, if you are going to kill someone, it has to be because God told you to or has given you permission.

Here is an extremely important article from Chris Hedges, about the necessity of the world’s taking action at this juncture against the completion of the Aparthied wall. The consequences of inaction at this stage could have dire repercussions not only for the tormented people of Palestine who’re already being subjected to the most severe indignities and depredations at the hands of the Israelis (and whose fate is relatively unimportant), but for the security of the whole region and consequently the whole world.

To quote the article:

When Yasir Arafat agreed to end his exile to return to Gaza, swallow his pride and formally recognize Israel’s right to exist, when he turned his Fatah fighters into a collaboration police force in the West Bank and Gaza, he was broke. The communist states that had once bankrolled him had collapsed. He was humbled to the Oslo peace accord, under which he took the bitter pill of accommodation with his detested Zionist enemy. Unless Israel too feels pressure it will never seek accommodation with the Palestinians, relying instead on increasing forms of repression and mounting violence. These measures, depriving Palestinians of hope and dignity, are the fuel of radical movements and ensure not peace but unending war. Israel has ignored the terms stipulated for the U.S. loan guarantees, and so we have a choice—to uphold our own demands and international law or be a party to Israeli policies that will lead to an unraveling of the region’s stability.

In other news, it was amusing to see John Bolton — the guy’s a walking caricature of himself — so vehement in his denunciation of the asssassination of Pierre Geyamel. Odd, when you consider the US administration’s acquiescence in and implicit support of Israel’s targeted assassinations and kidnapping of Palestinians officials.

The evidence can no longer be denied:

Read the rest of this entry »

U.S. vetoes U.N. resolution on Israel

Ambassador: Arab-backed draft document is ‘biased,’ ‘politically motivated’

The Associated Press

UNITED NATIONS - The United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council draft resolution Saturday that sought to condemn an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip and demand Israeli troops pull out the territory.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the Arab-backed draft resolution was “biased against Israel and politically motivated.”

“This resolution does not display an evenhanded characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace to which we aspire and for which we are working assiduously,” he told the Security Council.

It was the second U.S. veto of a Security Council draft resolution concerning Israeli military operations in Gaza this year. The U.S. blocked action on a document this summer after Israel launched its offensive in response to the capture of an Israeli soldier by Hamas-linked Palestinian militants.

The draft received 10 votes in favor and four abstentions, along with the U.S. vote against. Britain, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia all abstained.

Danish Ambassador Ellen Margrethe Loj said her country abstained because the draft did not include “a more thorough recognition of the complexities on the ground.” [More]

The statements released today by both US-based Human Right’s Watch and the Israeli human rights organisation BT’Selem on the Israeli Beit Hanoun massacre of 19 Palestinian civilians make for intensely interesting and disturbing reading. Remember Ehud Olmert claimed these were the result of a “technical failure.” In fact there’s also been an internal Israeli army probe into the shellings which we are told were part of a strategy aimed at ending Palestinian Qassim rocket attacks into Israel. The probe incidentally was headed by one Major General Kalifi, who also happens to have been Deputy chief of ground forces at the time of the massacre.

According to their statement HRW argue that the internal probe was to all intents “insufficient,” adding that “[t]he Israeli government should immediately conduct a comprehensive independent investigation to establish these issues”. In fact HRW call for a thoroughgoing investigation into the whole Israeli policy of shelling Gaza. HRW specify that the investigation:

should examine the policy that has led Israel to fire some 15,000 artillery shells into Gaza since September 2005, killing 49 Palestinian civilians and seriously injuring dozens more. A comprehensive investigation should identify issues of individual and command responsibility, including criminal responsibility, for any violation of international humanitarian law committed in the conduct of these artillery operations in northern Gaza.

HRW also suggest that the Israeli army may be guilty of several serious contraventions of international law:

Only military objects can be the lawful target of attack under international humanitarian law. International law also permits attacks on military objects in or near civilian areas only if their destruction would provide a definite military advantage at the time of the attack, and even then, only if the concrete military advantage outweighs any anticipated civilian casualties or damage. An artillery attack, with no specific military target at the time of the attack, directed at or near areas populated by civilians, violates international law. The evidence suggests that Israel’s day-old information that homemade rockets had been launched from the area, with no specific information that rockets continued to be launched from the area, was an insufficient basis for considering the area attacked to be a legitimate military target. That insufficiency was compounded by the intended target’s location near a heavily populated neighborhood, where significant civilian casualties could be reasonably anticipated.

Indeed, the IDF’s internal probe is rendered even more suspect by the fact that the IDF “has [in the recent past] systematically failed to investigate cases in which its soldiers have used lethal force against Palestinian civilians, fostering a climate of impunity in the army and robbing victims of an effective remedy.”

But, doesn’t Israel have the right to defend itself against attacks on its own citizens? The HRW document doesn’t seem to be denying that; what it does deny Israel, in line with international law, is Israel’s right to defend itself regardless of the cost. It’s a simple principle and can be exemplified as follows: if someone harms your children, you do not then have the right to taken even more harmful action against their children in response. (Yet funnily enough as we saw during the Lebanese war, this simple principle is broadly ignored by staunch apologists for Israeli terrorism). HRW puts it thus:

Human Rights Watch recognizes that the stated justification for this Israeli attack is Palestinian groups’ ongoing firing of homemade rockets into populated civilian areas of Israel, but that does not excuse Israel’s own violation of the same international humanitarian law that makes the Palestinian attacks unlawful. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly called on Palestinian armed groups to cease immediately firing homemade rockets into Israel, in contravention of international humanitarian law. Since September 2005 alone , Palestinian armed groups have fired around 1,700 homemade rockets into Israel, injuring 36 Israeli civilians. The rocket attacks have largely been launched toward civilian areas rather than at any apparent military target, which makes them illegal under the laws of war, and criminal. Even in cases where there may be military targets as well as civilians and civilian objects, these rockets are inherently indiscriminate weapons, since that they cannot be aimed at a specific target, and thus violate the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks. To date, the Palestinian Authority has been unable and unwilling to rein in the armed groups responsible for the attacks.

So that paradoxically, Israel’s response to the unlawful actions committed by Palestinian fighters has been to commit the same unlawful actions against the Palestinians themselves; and predictably given the absolute disparity between the two sides in terms of arms and defensive capability, the Israeli response has incurred a far bloodier toll. So, not so much an eye for an eye, but two eyes, a nose, two ears, a neck, two shoulders and a torso for an eye.

The last resort of Israeli apologists always seems to be to point out that even though the Palestinians always suffer disproportionately more than the Israelis (who’ve suffered no deaths as a result of the lastest round of Palestinian shellings) the intentions of the Israelis are different from the intentions of the Palestinians. However the argument, at least in this case, only has any weight if you’re prepared to discount the worth of Palestinian lives completely, at least in the course of “defending” Israeli lives: that is if you’re willing to take the risk inherent in firing rockets into heavily populated areas as acceptable in order to protect Israelis from the same (a risk Israel has proven itself time and time again willing to accept with regard to Palestinian lives). As HRW conclude, such acts can only be regarded as just under international law if “the concrete military advantage outweighs any anticipated civilian casualties or damage.” International law merely reflects a basic principle of morality here: intention cannot be divorced from foreknowledge of effects. Regardless of whether the Israeli’s intentions were indeed to prevent rocket attacks, the awareness that their “preventative” actions would likely result in several civilian deaths makes them directly culpable for those deaths. That this has to be spelled out, really says something profound about the coverage of this conflict; coverage in which intuitive notions of morality and right and wrong are often baldly ignored.

In fact to turn to the BTSelem report:

Even according to the military, the shelling was not defensive; it was not aimed at Palestinian fire or Qassam rocket-fire that was in progress. The artillery was aimed at what the IDF refers to as a “launching space,” i.e., an area from which the army believes that Qassams had previously been fired.

Shells fired from cannons several kilometers away are known and expected to occasionally miss their target by a few hundred meters. For this reason, it is especially likely that such weapons will harm civilians when they are fired towards or near densely-populated residential areas. Several such cases have occurred over the past year, and it was to be expected that they could recur.
Moreover, in April 2006, it was reported that the IDF reduced – from 300 meters to 100 meters – the “safety range” between populated areas in the Gaza Strip and the areas targeted for artillery fire. Six human rights organization, B’Tselem among them, warned about the great risk inherent in the decision, contending it would lead to the injury of innocent civilians. The organizations petitioned the High Court of Justice to order the IDF to cancel the decision. The High Court has not yet ruled in the matter.

BTSelem conclude:

The circumstances involved in the killing of the Palestinians in Beit Hanun, including the fact that the attack was not a defensive action, raise a grave concern that the shelling constitutes a war crime. The Israeli military’s contention that they did not mean to harm civilians is meaningless, and cannot justify an action that amounts to a war crime.

In other words it would be more than remiss of Israel not to properly investigate what may likely be a war crime.

So what was the official response in the UK and US to the massacres? Well as usual it betrayed a lack of recognition of the humanity of and a complete sense of contempt towards the Palestinians. There was no immediate call for sanctions, no outright condemnations of the Israeli bloodbath or severe reprimands from amongst its biggest funders and armers. Just placid statements of regret such as for example from Margret Beckett:

It is hard to see what this action was meant to achieve and how it can be justified… Israel must respect its obligation to avoid harming civilians.

And from Israel’s greatest ally as well and its chief global source of military and financial support? The Guardian reported that:

The US called on Israel to exercise ‘restraint’, noting its ‘regret’ at civilian casualties and the launch of an inquiry into how a residential area had come under artillery fire.

UN rapporteur John Duggard on the other hand, had this to say:

This brutal collective punishment of a people, not a government, has passed largely unnoticed by the international community. The Quartet… has done little to halt Israel’s attacks.

Worse still, the [UN] Security Council has failed to adopt any resolution on the subject or attempt to restore peace to the region. The time has come for urgent action on the part of the Security Council.

Interestingly enough, I was also reading an online article from the American Prospect website today, which examined the burgeoning relationship between China and Africa. Although the article’s account of the Afro-Chinese relationship gave cause for much optimism (China’s investment in Africa may prove extremely beneficial to the growth of African economies) it seemed a tad apprehensive at the same time:

[S]ome African observers have suggested that when China does not join other nations in pressuring regimes to change their practices, its inaction actually amounts to interfering in domestic politics — on behalf of abusive rulers, and in contravention of the wishes of average Africans.

Quite rightly, the claim here is that one country’s inaction may itself be a means of granting its consent to the immoral and unjust actions of another country with which it may be closely alligned through, in this case substantial investment interests. I don’t need to spell out how this translates to the case of Israel and the US (and also the UK); and yet very few Western commentators seem to explicitly make the connection. Nor is it reflected in mainstream news coverage.

 BTW.The BBC’s coverage of Bait Hanoun has been, as usual, pitiful (not to say it wasn’t covered, it was on for example Newsnight, it’s how it was covered that pisses me off).

A photo from a morgue of a mother and her two children, victims of yesterday’s Beit Hanoun attrocity. Words are really worthless in sight of an image such as this.

Yet more savagery from the IDF occupying force.

The Guardian reports:

At least 19 Palestinians were killed and 40 wounded when five Israeli shells hit a row of houses in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun this morning.

The dead and injured - including nine children, four women and six men - were sleeping when the first shell hit at around 6am local time. Many of the victims were taken to hospital in their pyjamas.

…

Israeli army sources said that the army fired a volley of artillery shells at the northern Gaza Strip which missed their target, probably because of a human or technical error. Officially the army said it was still investigating the incident.

Witnesses said that the first shell hit a home, causing deaths and injuries. Residents took shelter while rescuers attempted to retrieve the bodies and care for the wounded. Many residents were sheltering in a nearby alleyway when a second shell landed, causing most of the casualties. A further five or six shells landed in the same vicinity over a period of 15 minutes, witnesses said.

…

The killings follow Israel’s withdrawal from Beit Hanoun after a one-week occupation which resulted in the deaths of 52 Palestinians. During the operation, Israeli soldiers visited the houses that were hit, searched them and questioned the residents. The operation was aimed at preventing the firing of missiles at Israel, but rocket attacks have continued.

…

Beit Hanoun is on the border with Israel and is overlooked by Israeli tanks and artillery batteries.

Israel has fired tens of thousands of shells into Gaza in the last year, killing dozens of civilians. In June a family of seven and another man died when a shell landed on a beach in northern Gaza.

…

Israeli leaders showed little remorse for the deaths, stating that the army did not intend to kill civilians[Phew! That's ok then]. Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, described the incident as “regrettable” while Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, said that Israeli operations would continue as long as missiles were fired over the border, weapons were smuggled into Gaza and Hamas continued to provoke Israel.

Read Sami Abdel-Shafi’s comments in the Guardian on Israel’s recent policies in Gaza and their human cost.

It’s good to see that the Israelis are implementing their usual policy of pre-emptive strikes against terrorists; in this and many other instances it’s so pre-emptive that they’re killed and mutilated while they’re still children (9 children this time). As with a lot of Middle Eastern stories, it going to be instructive to examine the coverage and level of outcry in the Western media over this.

BTW, I’m planning on writing an entry explaining why I feel the issue of Palestine is important later this week in response to some criticisms I’ve had.