The death of Israel's 'shooting and crying' soldier By Gabriel Piterberg
Not heeding Hegel's dictum that scholars, like Minerva's owl, ought to await dusk before spreading their wings, I would venture that Israel's ferocious onslaught on Gaza's Palestinians might deliver a coup de grace to one of the most effective tools in its propaganda kit: the image of the morally handsome, "shooting and crying" Israeli soldier.
Palestinian US College Grad Loses 2 Brothers in Israeli Shooting; Father Watched Son Bleed to Death After Israeli Troops Bar Ambulances
AMY GOODMAN: Well, as the [Israeli] Foreign Minister [Tzipi Livni] was denying Israeli war crimes in Gaza Friday, my next guest lost two of his brothers to Israeli attacks on that same day. Amer Shurrab is a Palestinian from Khan Yunis living in the United States. On Friday, his father and two brothers were fleeing their village when their vehicle came under Israeli fire. Twenty-eight-year-old Kassab died in a hail of bullets trying to flee the vehicle. Eighteen-year-old Ibrahim survived the initial attack, but Israeli troops refused to allow an ambulance to reach them until twenty hours later. By then, it was too late. Ibrahim had bled to death in front of his father.
Award-winning British Mideast correspondent Robert Fisk writes a column as well as reporting on the Middle East. Just shortly before Israel began bombing Gaza, he wrote a column going into the diplomatic origins of the prolonged Israeli refusal to make peace after the 1967 War, "One missing word sowed the seeds of catastrophe". This was from December 20. The subhead is "No one in 1967 thought the Arab-Israeli conflict would still be in progress 41 years later" and it begins thus:
A nit-picker this week. And given the fact that we're all remembering human rights, the Palestinians come to mind since they have precious few of them, and the Israelis because they have the luxury of a lot of them.
And Lord Blair, since he'll be communing with God next week, might also reflect that he still - to his shame - hasn't visited Gaza. But the nit-picking has got to be our old friend United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. This, you'll recall, was supposed to be the resolution that would guide all future peace efforts in the Middle East; Oslo was supposed to have been founded on it and all sorts of other processes and summits and road maps.
It was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasises "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict".
Readers who know the problem here will be joined by those who will immediately pick it up. The Israelis say that they are not required to withdraw from all the territories - because the word "all" is missing and since the definite article "the" is missing before the word "territories", its up to Israel to decide which bits of the occupied territories it gives up and which bits it keeps.
Hence Israel can say it gave up Sinai in accordance with 242 but is going to keep East Jerusalem and much of the West Bank for its settlers. Golan depends on negotiations with Syria. And Gaza? Well, 242 doesn't say anything about imprisoning one and a half million civilians because they voted for the wrong people. No one in 1967 dreamed that the Israeli-Arab conflict would still be in ferocious progress 41 years later. And as an Independent reader pointed out a couple of years ago, the Security Council clearly never intended the absence of a definite article to give Israel an excuse to stay in the West Bank. Alas, our reader was wrong.
I don't have a lot to say about Gaza and what's happening there now. It is unspeakably evil. It should have been stopped 40 years ago. What else is there to say? More words only serve to make it seem like it could possibly be explained, or justified or normalized. But it cannot.
However, obviously, in order to make right, one must talk. But I have someone to talk for me. From the Democracy Now! interview I wrote about yesterday, I will let South African freedom fighter Breyten Breytenbach speak for me, on the flip.
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