It would be cynical to introduce Lawrence of Cyberia's article on Israel's ongoing invasion of Gaza by asking why the US does not follow Israel and invade Canada, but it would not do justice to the depth of understanding she brings to the Gazan mentality today. In fact, there is rather an irony at play in Israel's invasion of Gaza that is a much better approach to this understanding.
Two thirds of the Palestinians living in Gaza are refugees from the 1948 ethnic cleansing that emptied Palestine of two thirds of its Arab population. That the UN organization, UNWRA, responsible for these refugees since that year, reported that it ran out of food weeks before the ceasefire terminated provides at least one clue as why Hamas' refused to continue it.
But if you want to know what the Palestinians are all about, what their mentality is, and why they fight back today in Gaza, read on. (For links, see the original article.)
President-Elect Barack Obama has come under increasing pressure to break his silence on the Gaza crisis, as the United States, almost alone worldwide, maintained its resolute support of Israel.
By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 8:52PM GMT 30 Dec 2008
As the third day of Israeli air strikes drew to a close, Mr Obama continued his holiday in Hawaii with a game of golf, keeping his distance from reporters who might hurl a question at him.
Girl wounded in Israeli airstrike on Gaza, english-aljazeera.net, Feb 7, 2008
Mr Obama does not become president for another three weeks and his aides argue that any comment by him could send mixed messages to the world about American foreign policy.
But Mr Obama's silence is being interpreted by many as an implicit agreement with President George W Bush's stance that the crisis is the fault of Hamas and that Israeli military action should not let up until the Islamist group agrees to stop firing rockets into Israel.
By Tuesday morning, a small group of pro-Palestinian supporters had gathered outside Mr Obama's $5 million (£3.5 million) holiday home. Some pointed out that he had made statements about the Mumbai terrorist attacks and a range of other issues. . . .
The images of him playing golf are reminiscent of those of Mr Bush, who was mocked for making comments to reporters about international crises just before teeing off.
310 Killed in Israeli offensive, including 37 children, as of December 30, 2008.
Blood on Their Hands: Child Killings by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the Gaza Strip
What had been a truce between Israel and the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip seems to have abruptly come to a halt; with the Israelis blaming Hamas and Hamas blaming Israeli oppression of the displaced Palestinians for the simmering hostilities that are now boiling over into military-scale violence.
Before the recent holidays and an immoderate amount of snow buried me in things that could not be done on the computer we had been having a conversation about the strategic importance of our relationship with Egypt. Within that series of discussions we explored the influence of the political opposition, and we considered the fragility of President Mubarak's hold on power.
We also noted the immediate proximity of Egypt to the Gaza Strip.
Today we're going to tie all of that together-and the end result of all that tying is that we better keep a close eye on Egypt, because trouble in Gaza has spilled over into trouble in Cairo....and that's one more Middle Eastern problem we don't need.
On her Monday night MSNBC program, the normally excellent Rachel Maddow attempted to provide a synopsis of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In my opinion, her outline of that history mostly reproduced the flimsy narrative we get from most of the American media. I was eagerly anticipating Maddow's comment on the crisis since I consider her to be pretty much awesome, but ultimately I feel she missed an opportunity to offer the American public a more illuminating take on the region and its problems.
In her account, Palestinian grievances went largely unmentioned, the specific outcomes of the 1967 war were not described, the question of the settlements and roads and checkpoints that perforate the West Bank went unexplored.
Maddow offered no insight into why Palestinians might vote for Hamas over Fatah, a political movement riddled with corruption and gangsterism from within and undermined by Israeli state policy from without. Her conversation with some lightweight NBC journalist afterward emphasized schism between the BAD "chauvinist," uneducated Arab masses that despise Israel and support Hamas and the GOOD Western-educated Arab elites that are quietly green-lighting Israel's offensive. Nevermind that many of those Arab elites are corrupt despots that don't give a rat's ass about the Palestinians and are often implicated in the exploitation of Palestinian Arab refugees in their own countries.
Also, while I consider the rocket fire from Gaza to be useless and immoral, it can't quite be described as "unprovoked" (Maddow's words) given that Israel is strangling Gaza in a long, agonizing siege.
While Palestinian public opinion is often included in discussions of Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, rarely is it actually quantified. This is too bad, since there are public opinion polls in Palestine (including Gaza), and because American discussion of the region tends to be extremely abstract, airy, and quasi-mythological. Any stateside discussion of "what needs to happen" in Israel and Palestine should include references to public opinion in the region. After all, Israel / Palestine is not an American mandate, and our goal should be to continually facilitate a discussion toward a path to a permanent peace agreement supported by the majority of both Israelis and Palestinians. We have no business dictating terms, such as, for example, how Jerusalem should be administered, if there should be land swaps, or whether or not to waive the right of return.
A few hysterics have been trying to peddle the line that an unnamed leftists are just as biased against Israel as the M$M is biased against Palestinians. It is not enough, in their view, that people like myself denounce violence on both sides. We must denounce it with equal vigor. And they will be the judges of whether our vigor is sufficient. Otherwise, we are but a mirror image of the warmonger "pro-Israeli" M$M, and no better than they are.
There are so many things wrong with this sort of "holier-than thou" false equivilency stance, that we could talk of nothing else for days on end. But the bottom line is really pretty simple.
You see, I think it's pretty obvious, and quite rational why a progressive blog, particularly one with a significant Jewish presence, would focus much more attention on Isreali state violence rather than Palestinian violence--reasons in addtion to the obvious fact that Israeli state violence is so vastly more extensive than Palestinian violence, however indiscriminate violence on both sides may be.
The reason we focus more on Isreali state violence is that we are morally, legally and politically responsible for that violence in ways that we are not responsible for the Palestinian violence. And if we truly wish to end the violence on both sides, then the way to do that is to work strenuously to end the violence on our side--and that will give us moral standing and credibility to call for ending violence on the Palestinian side as well.
The eastern end of the Mediterranean is occupied by a crazy country and a crazy non-country, and nothing anybody says about it will ever make any difference.
Apologists for Hamas don't want to explain what Hamas intended to accomplish with a series rocket-attacks on southern Israel between July and December 2008.
Did they think they could defeat Israel with a couple of bottle-rockets?
Or is it possible that they intended to provoke massive retaliation and buy "moral outrage" from the rest of the world at the price of Palestinian lives?
Meanwhile apologists for Israel adjust the parameters of discussion to frame a few rockets flying out of Gaza, and that frame is nested in yet another frame, also delimited by bombs and rockets, and so on all the way back to the creation of Israel, apparently ex nihilo, with the tacit assumption that opposition to the existence of Israel has always and only arisen out of the irrational intransigence of fundamentalist Islam.
But the entire foreign policy establishment of the United States opposed the creation of Israel, once upon a time, beginning at the top with Secretary of State George Marshall and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal.
Harry Truman eventually over-ruled the almost unanimous opposition of his military and diplomatic advisers, because in 1947 Harry Truman had a problem that he could not solve: where to put at least 250,000 displaced Jews after WWII.
Republican "heartlanders" were violently opposed to large-scale Jewish immigration, and Truman attributed the loss of a few Democratic seats in the 1946 election to Republican agitation about a mere 1000 Jews smuggled in by Henry Morgenthau. Accepting 250,000 Jewish immigrants looked like political suicide for the Democratic Party.
And, of course, no one else would take them in sufficient numbers to empty refugee camps from Kiev to London.
Truman also couldn't just walk away from the problem, and not only because of intense Jewish pressure in the United States, as anti-Israel propagandists often claim. An enormous crime had been committed by Germany, and committed in slow motion, with insane organization.
This was a nightmare that haunted the collective unconscious of the entire civilized world. How was such a thing possible? No one knew, and no one knows now.
So Harry Truman solved his problem at the expense of the indigenous population of Palestine, Israel was created, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled into refugee camps where millions of them are still confined.
No powerful advocates argued for the resettlement of these refugees, and their collective nightmare was just beginning. The Arab world refused to absorb the great majority of displaced Palestinians in 1947, and still refuses to issue more than a miserly trickle of immigration visas. Even now the border between Gaza and Egypt is gated and guarded on the Egyptian side just as mercilessly as the analogous border is guarded by Israel.
Now Israel exists, in spite of George Marshall's opposition, and James Forrestal's opposition, and the opposition of almost anybody else anywhere who had a realistic appreciation of what the creation of Israel would involve, and I do not mean to exclude Jewish supporters of the creation of Israel from the category of people who had absolutely no idea what they were doing.
But now that Israel exists, it's senseless for Hamas to provoke massive retaliation with their absurd and pathetic attacks on southern Israel. There is no other conceivable purpose for that idiocy except the propaganda value of carnage on the front page of newspapers and TV, and this is the paradigm of Palestinian "leadership" from 1947 all the way to 2008.
For Fatah and Hamas, the Palestinian people are only inanimate tokens on a world-historical battlefield, and, in the idiom of the Koran, the political "leaders" of Palestine are wolves unto their own people.
Israel cannot be destroyed without raining down nuclear destruction on every Arab capital, and the condition of Palestinians cannot be improved by rocket attacks, but all those pin-pricks can eventually drive any Israeli government over the brink into the madness of bombing cities and claiming that only a handful of "civilians" have been killed.
So nothing much has changed since Harry Truman "solved" his problem with Jewish refugees in 1947.
The eastern end of the Mediterranean is occupied by a crazy country and a crazy non-country, and nothing anybody says about it will ever make any difference.
We know American politicians are all supposedly friends of Israel. Any serious candidate for high office is expected to noisily and repeatedly profess their support for Israel and its security policies. Obama got some (deserved) credit when he complained to a group of Jewish leaders about a "strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud ap-proach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel." He also got some (undeserved) credit for some fairly revolting remarks he made before AIPAC.
It was this "friendship" between the American political class and the Israeli leadership that resulted in shameful bipartisan support for Israel's foolish and disproportionately bloody response to Hezbollah's provocations in 2006. That idiotic adventure took the lives of hundreds of innocent people, destroyed a great deal of Lebanese civilian infrastructure and produced political crisis that has yet to be resolved and that may soon result in a big electoral victory for the Israeli right. It also greatly damaged Israel's reputation and moral standing, even in terms of its coverage in the fiercely pro-Israel American press.
A good friend will tell you when you've had enough to drink or will confiscate your car keys when you're drunk at a bar. A good friend will restrain you when you're engaged in self-destructive behavior. Are our leaders good friends to Israel?
Israel's murderous attacks on Gaza (in response to terroristic but militarily pathetic Palestinian rocket fire)constitute self-destructive behavior. These operations are a desperate, cynical move by a failing political coalition that hopes to outflank its right-wing opposition through a display of brutality. Will these bombings secure Israel's security in the long-term, short-term or mid-term? Certainly not. They are sowing dragons teeth for future bloodshed. Obama surely knows this. Even Bush, somewhere in his avian brain, must know this. Today's Palestinian dead will be gruesomely avenged at Israeli bus stops and pizza parlors and many other soft civilian targets for years and decades to come. Blood for blood.
We know that our sociopathic leaders are pathologically indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians. But the moral cowards that run our political establishment also don't really give a fuck about Israeli lives or the future of the Holy Land's Jewry. They are concerned only with pacifying and managing the set of constituencies and lobbies that guarantee their job security. Just as a true friend to Israel would've restrained the Jewish State from launching its 2006 war in Lebanon, (Israel would be better off today if the U.S. had nipped that idea in the bud) so too would a true friend to Israel speak out against the horror we are seeing in Gaza.
Whitey Ford of Everlast talks about where the song "Stone in my hand" came from:
The political stuff is definitely more of 'put yourself in somebody else's shoes' kind of stuff. "Stone In My Hand", that was inspired by a picture of some Palestinian teenagers throwing rocks at tanks. It's like, he's going to throw this rock at a tank. You know it's not going to do anything but you're that frustrated, you're that angry that it's like, 'OK, f**k it. This is all I got, and they're going to take this out of my cold dead hand' kind of thing.
It's interesting that a full third of the first part of the video passes with images of African and Asian resistance before Ford gets to the Middle East. It's also interesting that he's cross-referencing Palestinian resistance with more "popular" movements, such as that against the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Chinese in Tibet. He also juxtaposes video of himself with a stone in his hand and Palestinian kids throwing rocks.
There's no question that Clinton's views on Iraq are tilted more towards hawkishness than many of us would like, but I've noted before that the criteria I'm going to use to evaluate her performance is Israel. My sense of the conflict is that, though there are many obstacles to peace, domestic US politics in the form of AIPAC has always been the elephant in the room. There are signs the group itself is moderating, the political environment has become much more favorable for diplomatic work and the Clinton's have the credibility and gravitas to work on a two state solution without worrying about upsetting right-wing Jews.
Clinton believed in Presidential destiny, and not content to just be a Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton can certainly translate this desire 'go big' into another realm by solving the dominant problem in the Middle East. I hope she does.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - The Israeli navy on Monday turned away a Libyan ship heading to Gaza with 3,000 tons of humanitarian aid, ending the most high-profile effort yet to break a blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory.
The Al Marwa was approaching the Gaza coast when it was stopped by an Israeli navy vessel. The navy vessel ordered the Libyan ship via radio to turn back, said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, adding that no force was used.
In Gaza's small port, spectators, journalists and dozens of porters had assembled to await the arrival of the Libyan ship.
Link HERE for the rest of the story via MSNBC.
Additional information indicated that the Al Marwa was going to dock in an Egyptian port and that there would be an attempt to deliver its humanitarian cargo to Gaza through the Rafah crossing, which is controlled by Egypt. By this latest report, it is not clear that that is happening.
Israel's blockade of Gaza has reportedly led to the deaths of 261 medical patients in need of treatment outside of Gaza, but who were prevented from leaving.
That the Israeli navy continues to control the Gaza coast merely shows that the siege of Gaza is just an extension of the military occupation that Israel has exerted in the Palestinian territories for over 40 years.
This Libyan chapter in the Gaza siege is still developing and further information may be available later in the day.
Last week, Arab foreign ministers issued a joint statement in Cairo that their governments would send food and medicine to Gaza. They said they would coordinate with Egypt to ensure the supplies enter Gaza, suggesting they would take the land route, rather than confronting Israelis at sea. Egypt has otherwise kept the Rafah crossing with Gaza closed most of the time.
Syria and Turkey to follow Kaddafi's lead to rescue the Gazan Palestinians.
Regarding these latest events concerning Israel's siege of Gaza, one can't help but to repeat the words of the great Brooklyn actor, William Bendix: what a revoltin' development dis' is!
The scary Islamic world, in the form of Arab nations no less, have entered the Gaza saga acting like a bunch of damned humanitarians, while Israel, its great friend, the US, and its partners, the EU and Russia, the so-called Quartet, are acting...well, how can one put it in a polite manner: like a bunch of fucking...sorry, the proper word just won't come.
A newspaper reader displays a copy of an advertisement by the Palestinian Authority published in an Israeli newspaper, at a coffee shop in Jerusalem, Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008.
I've been holding off on even a tentative verdict regarding the transition from the lame-duck Bush to the incoming hope-duck Obama administration. Partly because I just don't know. Partly because I'm remaining cautiously optimistic. Partly because I feel like I'm cursed and that my cynicism and skepticism, coupled with my hope and pride, if made public, might just jinx everything and ruin Obama's presidency. Okay, I've obviously just been watching way too much Twin Peaks lately.
(And by "watching" I mean obsessively and consecutively beaming the entire series into my skull. And by "lately" I mean in the past three days. And by "too much" I mean not nearly enough because, honestly, Twin Peaks was a watershed moment/phenom in television and American history and in a just world ABC would still be airing new episodes once a week and showcasing the best and most unique in television writing, production, directing and acting. Oh well.)
And, partly because the Sky has been Falling for so many on the left that I just really couldn't get with the chorus of naysayers. Not because those sounding the alarms on the left are Chicken Littles and wrong about Obama being Clinton Redux - I've had the same fear - but just because homogeneity is just not my thing and always induces illustrious yawns. (At least I think they look illustrious.)
But this recent front page diary about Obama's pick for National Security Advisor by Chris just screams for my attention.
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