Israeli forces shell UN headquarters in Gaza
By IBRAHIM BARZAK and AMY TEIBEL - 1 hour ago
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israeli forces shelled the United Nations headquarters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, setting fire to the compound filled with hundreds of refugees as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon was in the region on a mission to end Israel's devastating offensive against the territory's Hamas rulers.
Ban expressed "outrage" over the bombing. He said Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told him there had been a "grave mistake" and promised to pay extra attention to protecting U.N. installations. The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the bombing, which a U.N. official said injured at least three people.
....
Shells also struck a hospital, five high-rise apartment buildings and a building housing media outlets in Gaza City, injuring several journalists.
Bullets entered another building housing The Associated Press offices, entering a room where two staffers were working but wounding no one. The Foreign Press Association, representing journalists covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, demanded a halt to attacks on press buildings....
Ban, who arrived in Tel Aviv on Thursday morning from Egypt, said he was "outraged" by the attack on the U.N. headquarters.
"I conveyed my strong protest and outrage to the defense minister and foreign minister and demanded a full explanation," Ban said. He said Barak told him there had been a "grave mistake" and promised to pay extra attention to protecting U.N. installations....
U.N. spokesmen confirmed that at least three people were wounded but said the fire and smoke engulfing the compound made it impossible to know if it had been completely evacuated.
U.N. spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna said the U.N. had given Israel the coordinates of the building and the compound was also clearly marked with U.N. flags and logos. Large stocks of food and fuel used to supply hospital and water pumps were at risk of destruction, as were valuable U.N. archives dating back to 1948, Abu Hasna said.
Hours earlier, thousands of residents had fled their homes with the advance of Israeli ground troops into Gaza City's Tel Hawwa neighborhood. Many were clad only in their pajamas, and some were wheeling elderly parents in wheelchairs, one of them with an oxygen tank. Others stopped journalists' armored cars and ambulances pleading for someone to take them to a U.N. compound or to relatives' homes.
Rasha Hassam, a 25-year-old engineer, ran out of her apartment building carrying her screaming, crying, 6-year-old daughter, Dunia.
"God help us, God help us, where can we flee?" she cried. "All I want is to get my poor child away from here. We want to survive."
Thousands of others were trapped in Tel Hawwa's high-rise buildings by the fire, too afraid to even attempt to flee.
Three shells hit the Al Quds hospital in the neighborhood, setting its pharmacy building ablaze, trapping about 400 patients and staff inside the main hospital building, said Khaled Abu Zeid, a medic inside the building reached on his mobile phone. Gunfire was also reported around the building. It was not clear how many people inside had been wounded in the fighting.
What Can Be Done?
There are no easy ways to change directions. But there is clearly a shift happening, and we must look for ways to take advantage of that shift, magnify and expand on it.
Yesterday, in a comment to my diary "A Zionist Historian Debunks Israel's Attack On Gaza", jeffroby wrote:
So what? Thoughts on how to proceed, one state, boycott
Paul, you make clear the justice of the Palestinian position about as well as it can be made. But what we run up against is that Israel is overtly committed to ignoring anything but force, and the U.S. government is about as monolithic in support of Israel as can be imagined. Then what is our leverage? What are the fault lines that can be hammered?
Here are a few points to consider as I essentially think out loud:
(1) The 2-state solution is becoming less and less viable with each passing day.
(2) A 1-state solution would mean the death of Israel as an explicitly Jewish state. The irony here is that Israel, by missing the chance of a 2-state solution, is courting its own destruction.
(3) World opinion, including Europe, the Arab world, and U.S. liberalism, is generally aligned in favor of a 2-state solution around something like the 1967 borders.
(4) As Bowers recently pointed out, Israeli opinion agrees that the current situation is effectively one of apartheid, even though, once again, American liberal opinion lags behind Israeli public opinion.
(5) The word "boycott," which has generally been the province of academics, is popping up more and more recently.
The question regarding any tactic is whether it can achieve critical mass to become effective, unlike the "one little candle" schemes that sound good and go nowhere. I think there has been a shift in world and even U.S. opinion, in response to the latest round of horrors, that can give it that critical mass within a very few years. (South African apartheid was brought down, but over how many years? We've got to think beyond the latest atrocities.)
A boycott has to have specific ends. Boycott Israel until it jumps into the sea? Boycott Israel until it promises to be good?
The task of progressive leadership is not to simply support what is popular, which is not leadership, or to put forward its most ideal demands. I mean, I have some very strong ideas about how the world should be run, but impotent isolation is not my idea of a good time. The task is to develop a position (and tactic) that intersects popular movement but is slightly ahead of it.
Thus boycotting Israel in demanding a 2-state solution fails to lead, and locks us into a solution that is becoming unviable daily. Boycotting Israel in demanding a 1-state solution puts us in a state of splendid isolation.
But what goals would be compatible with and advance both 1- and 2-state solutions:
(1) Stop settlement expansion and close down (at least) the Hebron settlement.
(2) Free travel for Palestinians. Close the checkpoints, open up Gaza.
(3) End Israeli military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza. Allow Gaza full access to the world economy.
The above is not a fixed plan of action. Rather I set forth a methodology that can give us tactical relevance and can be built upon. There are many questions that remain unanswered. In the real world, not all questions have to be answered.
And Sara added:
Boycott Problems...
This has been considered in the past -- and there have been problems with each effort. This isn't to say it isn't an idea to be explored, but some of the "failures" need to be understood.
About four years ago, the Presbyterian Church USA decided to sell off stock in Caterpillar earth moving Equipment because it was being used to destroy houses on the W. Bank. It was something of a symbolic effort -- but it raised quite a storm in the US, with AIPAC and associates going head to head with the Presbyterians. Sadly, it was also at a time when Caterpillar was very much at odds with its UAW Union, and that was brought into the mix, causing the Presbyterians to back off, as the UAW Union was brought into the dispute, very much making a mess of the symbolic action the Presbyterians had intended. They never intended to be engaged in a Labor Management dispute. A few good things came of it -- some Presbyterian Congregations were well read on the issues, and had provocative discussions and conferences over the multiple issues with neighboring Jewish Congregations -- but it was not well organized, and remained local.
I tend to think something similar to what the Presbyterians attempted could work -- assuming the intent is to open honest dialogue on Israeli Occupation Tactics, if it had been better planned, hadn't been open to fuzzing the issue with the Labor issue -- and if it had been planned on a much broader basis...more than just Presbyterians.
I would add another dimension--organizing within the Democrtic Party, if for no other reason than because it is so counter-productive for our efforts to combat global terrorism. Democracy Now! headlines this morning reported:
Bin Laden Tape Calls for "Holy War" Over Gaza
Osama bin Laden has resurfaced in a new audiotape calling for a holy war over the Israeli attack on Gaza. The undated recording condemns Israel and the United States.Osama bin Laden: "We are with you, and we will not let you down. Our fate is tied to yours in fighting the Crusader-Zionist coalition, in fighting until victory or martyrdom. God has bestowed us with the patience to continue the path of jihad for another seven years, and seven and seven... The question is, can America continue its war with us for several more decades to come? Reports and evidence would suggest otherwise."
As it becomes increasingly clear how counterproductive this attack--and the entire philosophy behind--really is, both for Israel and the US, it should become possible to do real, sustained grassroots organizing within the Democratic Party. Democrats as a whole are far less supportive of Israel's attacks than Republicans are. Only 31% minority of Democrats were supportive immediately after the attacks began, according to Rasmussen, compared to 55% of Republicans.
It's obvious, of course, that Obama does not want to have to deal with this. But there's really no avoiding it. bin Laden's original motivation--his obsession over US troops in Saudi Arabia--held very little resonance. It is US meddling in general, our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Israel/Palestine conflict that fuel the anger he and other jihadists draw on to make "holy war."
The neocon way, the Likkud way, do not work. They are fighting fire with gasoline, and using every failure as an excuse for more of the same. It's time to go a different way. |
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