As we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, we can get a better understanding of the conditions of that time by following closely events in Palestine this week.
That is because Israeli behavior provides the best window we have into the mindset of the Western colonial powers a century ago, when foreigners with superior military equipment and an equally grand sense of their own national superiority killed, occupied, jailed, slaughtered, and exiled Arabs at will, treating them more like animals than human beings.
What we are witnessing today is Israel behaving against Palestinians much as the French, British and Italian colonial powers behaved against Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, Algerians and Libyans a century or more ago. In its colonization of Arab lands and its raw military savagery against civilians, Israel gives us the best history lesson available of the conduct of colonial powers who treated natives as servants or subversives without rights, and who dealt with them primarily by repeated shows of force.
Without the explanatory lens of colonial behavior, I can think of only two ways to understand how Israel can repeat every few years what it is doing now in Gaza, unleashing the power of its advanced military machines against an essentially helpless civilian population that has neither a means of escape nor shelters from the nonstop bombings from the air. Either Israelis are incredibly stupid people who do not grasp the futility of their repeated attacks that never seem to bring about the acquiescence, passivity and servility they seek from the Palestinians; or they are pathological killers who relish the sight of bombed Palestinian homes, weeping mothers and the burned and dismembered bodies of dozens of children.
I know that Israelis are neither of these things. They are normal people like all other people. So why do they keep doing what they are doing now, such as dropping 400 tons of explosives on defenseless Gazan families in 36 hours? Why do they do this and then return every few years to doing the same thing, always seeking to stop the Palestinians' armed resistance against Israeli occupation and siege, but never succeeding?
They do all this because they are locked in perhaps the longest running colonial confrontation in the world, between Jewish nationalism-Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism. They are acting exactly like all other colonial powers did toward the locals they conquered during the 18th and 19th centuries. This conflict started in the late 1890s with the First Zionist Congress' call for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the promotion of Zionist settlements in that land that was over 90 percent owned and inhabited by Palestinian Arabs. For 120 years now, Jewish Zionism and Palestinian Arabism have clashed, and Zionism has prevailed militarily and in other ways, but Israel treats Palestinians who resist its power and its aims like dogs.
Zionism's conflict with the indigenous Palestinian Arabs is now into the sixth generation, and counting. The 1.5 million Palestinians of 1947 are now around 8 million, and counting. They are all resisting in their own ways never forgetting who they are and where they came from, never accepting their dispossession and exile, never acquiescing that they must somehow live eternally in their own Babylonian exile.
Seeing Israel- Palestine and the wider Middle East today through the lens of the destructive consequences of colonial excesses helps us better understand the two dominant phenomena of the region today: the long-term instability and continuing conflicts sparked by colonial adventures a century or more ago, in the Middle East and other parts of the South; and the lingering tensions and violence in Palestine-Israel, which continue in an unbroken legacy from 19th century colonial practices.
Many anti-colonial movements around the world ultimately ended White Western tutelage over vast expanses of the globe except for Palestine, where the descendants of indigenous Arabs today still battle the descendants of immigrant Zionists (the small indigenous Jewish community that had lived in Palestine for centuries was always part of the local culture, and was not seen as alien or threatening, because they were not alien or threatening, or colonial in their mindset).
The delayed consequences of colonialism include the astounding varieties of political and sectarian violence and chaos that we are witnessing across the region, most viciously in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria and others lands that had been colonized by European powers and then ravaged by their own incompetent and vicious military rulers. These tumults, and the savage battles in Palestine-Israel, suggest that the colonial era has never really ended, and that we are still suffering the ugly consequences of White men from the North with powerful guns and fighter planes who feel they can kill thousands of darker people from the South with total impunity and come back and do it again three years later, and again three years after that.
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes is false." --William J. Casey, D.C.I
"We will lead every revolution against us." --Theodore Herzl
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
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[TD] Written by Chris Floyd [/TD]
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[TD="class: createdate"] Sunday, 13 July 2014 19:02 [/TD]
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The horror of Israel's latest slaughter in Gaza speaks for itself despite the mountainous flow of media sludge designed to obscure the reality of the aggression. Even the New York Times has been forced to print a few stories about the high number of civilian deaths being caused by the Israeli assault on the "Warsaw Ghetto" they have made of Gaza, noting the hospitals and mosques and private homes where dozens of innocent people have been blown to pieces by Israel's weaponry (much of it American-made).
Israel has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a stateless limbo while carefully controlling almost every aspect of their lives, including what medicines they can have, what manufacturing and building materials they are allowed and even, at times, how much food they are allowed to eat to keep the population weakened but just above malnutrition levels. This brutal regimen in daily life is of course punctuated with regular night raids, bombings, kidnappings, "disappearings" and almost weekly civilians deaths at the hands of Israeli overseers. This has gone on year after year. Yet Western media and Western politicians are presenting a picture of a nuclear-armed, American-backed ultra-militarist Israel "under siege" from a handful of ineffective rockets fired by factions in Gaza which are answering violence with violence.
But as we all know, the West demands that Palestinians show superhuman, Gandhi-like forbearance in the face of murderous oppression and relentless, widespread violence killing their children and families. They are never to respond in kind unlike the Americans, who have killed hundreds of thousands of people in response to a single attack on their soil. This after killing, by Washington's own admission, more than half a million children in Iraq with peacetime sanctions against a nation which had never attacked the United States and posed no threat to it. The merest hint of a possible threat remotely occurring sometime in a barely imaginable future is justification enough for the Americans to lay waste to whole nations and kill thousands of people. (Of course, in many states in America this principle is now enshrined in law on an individual basis: you can shoot dead anyone you feel might be a "threat" to you whether they are or not. The stand your ground' laws are a perfect example of a nation rotting from the head, as the murderous militarism and adherence to violence embodied by the bipartisan elite seep down through every strata of society.) This is the true the only meaning of "American exceptionalism": the right to ruin, rape and murder in perfect moral purity.
To be sure, this golden aura can be loaned out at times to others. Israel above all seems to have acquired a permanent lease on American's license to kill. But it can also be spread around to other nations and factions, even terrorist groups, if it serves the purposes of the Potomac Imperium. Such as the "moderate al Qaeda" now being supported in Syria (or the al Qaeda forbears supported so fully in Soviet-era Afghanistan). Saddam Hussein was allowed to slaughter tens of thousands, and even use chemical weapons, with America's blessing and military aid and money. Later of course, he morphed into a new Hitler, and, as noted, America had to kill half a million children in his land, before invading the country and causing the deaths of a million more people. Why, even Vlad the Impaler Putin the current new Hitler in America's eyes was gifted with America's moral exemption when he was killing thousands of people in Chechnya.
But yes, Israel is the chief beneficiary of Washington's moral blank check. And so the false narrative the mendacious "frame" of a "besieged" Israel defending its poor, innocent self from unprovoked attack is promulgated at every turn by the Western political establishment and most of the media. Barack Obama and a bipartisan gaggle of Capitol Hill geese have lent their support to this narrative and to the massacre of the innocents that lurks behind it.
Yet as David Cronin notes:
There is no acknowledgement that Israel has been subjecting Palestinian civilians to collective punishment in clear violation of international law. There is no mention of the seven-year siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza. There is no recognition that Benjamin Netanyahu's government has used the murder of three Israeli teenagers as a pretext to kill much higher numbers of Palestinian children in recent days ….
"Pretext" is certainly the operative word. As Max Blumenthal reports, Netanyahu's government knew almost immediately that the three teenagers were dead, and who had killed them. But they suppressed these facts in order to rouse atavistic hatred among Israelis and to rally world opinion and sympathy preparatory to an assault on Gaza that was obviously long-planned, and which had nothing at all to do with the murder of the teenagers at the hands of a "rogue" clan at odds with the Hamas leadership. Blumenthal:
From the moment three Israeli teens were reported missing last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country's military-intelligence apparatus suppressed the flow of information to the general public. Through a toxic blend of propaganda, subterfuge and incitement, they inflamed a precarious situation, manipulating Israelis into supporting their agenda until they made an utterly avoidable nightmare inevitable.
Israeli police, intelligence officials and Netanyahu knew within hours of the kidnapping and murder of the three teens that they had been killed. And they knew who the prime suspects were less than a day after the kidnapping was reported.
Rather than reveal these details to the public, Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency imposed a gag order on the national media, barring news outlets from reporting that the teens had almost certainly been killed, and forbidding them from revealing the identities of their suspected killers. The Shin Bet even lied to the parents of the kidnapped teens, deceiving them into believing their sons were alive.
Instead of mounting a limited action to capture the suspected perpetrators and retrieve the teens' bodies, Netanyahu staged an aggressive international public relations campaign, demanding sympathy and outrage from world leaders, who were also given the impression that the missing teens were still alive.
Meanwhile, Israel's armed forces rampaged throughout the occupied West Bank and bombarded the Gaza Strip in a campaign of collective punishment deceptively marketed to Israelis and the world as a rescue mission.
Critical details that were known all along by Netanyahu and the military-intelligence apparatus were relayed to the Israeli public only after the abduction of more than 560 Palestinians, including at least 200 still held without charges; after the raiding of Palestinian universities and ransacking of countless homes; after six Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces; after American-trained Palestinian Authority police assisted Israeli soldiers attacking Palestinian youths in the center of Ramallah; after the alleged theft by Israeli troops of $3 million in US dollars; and after Israel's international public relations extravaganza had run its course.
Israeli forces began rounding up and interrogating family members of the main suspects, Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer abu Eishe, the day after the kidnapping of the Israeli teenagers. Yet this fact too was kept from the public, and from the world. As Blumenthal noted:
While Netanyahu and his top deputies blamed the entire membership of Hamas for the kidnapping, the Shin Bet gag order suppressed all information relating to the identities of the suspects until 26 June. As far as the Israeli public knew, the kidnappers could have been anywhere in the West Bank, in any schoolhouse or coffee house or hen house where anyone remotely affiliated with Hamas congregated.
Having manipulated an exceptionally suggestible population through the careful management of information, the military had all the political latitude it needed to rampage through cities far from the scene of the crime.
Blumenthal further notes:
According to Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, members of the Qawasmeh clan of Hebron have earned a reputation for attacking Israeli civilian targets during ceasefires between Hamas and Israel.
While an extended family of over 10,000 can hardly be blamed for the actions of some of its members, it is notable that attacks carried out by fighters from the family were privately criticized by top Hamas leaders, as Eldar explains. Hamas leadership regarded the operations as self-destructive acts of freebooting and often paid for them in the form of Israeli assassinations. In each case, the violence shattered ceasefires and inspired renewed bouts of bloodshed.
"The same is true now," Eldar writes. "Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Eishe have taken Hamas to a place where its leadership never intended to go."
Hamas leadership has yet to take responsibility for the kidnapping and likely had no knowledge of its planning. As Haaretz military correspondent Amos Harel notes, "So far, there is no evidence that Hamas' leadership either in Gaza or abroad was involved in the kidnapping." Harel adds that the fallout of the kidnapping "effectively froze the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation."
The latter is certainly one of the reasons behind the current onslaught. A reconciled Palestinian leadership could offer more formidable resistance to Israeli domination (although the years-long fecklessness of Fatah, its enormous corruption and frequent, brutal cooperation with Israel does not augur well for any principled resistance). But before any reconciliation or spine-stiffening could take hold among Palestinian politicians, Israel went on the attack.
Blumenthal tells a harrowing tale of the propaganda campaign waged by the Israeli government to whip the population into a frenzy of revenging bloodlust over the "missing boys" even as Netanyahu and his minions knew full well the boy were dead. These efforts were redoubled after the bodies were found, and of course led to the notorious murder of a Palestinian teenager by Israeli youths inflamed by the government's cold-blooded manipulations. I won't excerpt the passage here, but you should read the Blumenthal article in full.
But political power-playing to separate Fatah and Hamas were by no means the only impetus behind the operation. In a world whose lifeblood is fossil fuel, it's no surprise to find that the present attack on Gaza like the ISIS assault in Iraq is, in significant measure, one of the "resource wars" which many analysts believe will be one of the defining characteristics of the 21st century. As Nafeez Ahmed notes in the Guardian:
…in 2007, a year before Operation Cast Lead, [Israel's] concerns focused on the 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas discovered in 2000 off the Gazacoast, valued at $4 billion. Defense Minister Ya'alon dismissed the notion that "Gaza gas can be a key driver of an economically more viable Palestinian state" as "misguided." The problem, he said, is that:
"Proceeds of a Palestinian gas sale to Israel would likely not trickle down to help an impoverished Palestinian public. Rather, based on Israel's past experience, the proceeds will likely serve to fund further terror attacks against Israel…
A gas transaction with the Palestinian Authority [PA] will, by definition, involve Hamas. Hamas will either benefit from the royalties or it will sabotage the project and launch attacks against Fatah, the gas installations, Israel or all three… It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement."
Operation Cast Lead did not succeed in uprooting Hamas, but the conflict did take the lives of 1,387 Palestinians (773 of whom were civilians) and 9 Israelis (3 of whom were civilians).
Since the discovery of oil and gas in the Occupied Territories, resource competition has increasingly been at the heart of the conflict, motivated largely by Israel's increasing domestic energy woes.
Mark Turner, founder of the Research Journalism Initiative, reported that the siege of Gaza and ensuing military pressure was designed to "eliminate" Hamas as "a viable political entity in Gaza" to generate a "political climate" conducive to a gas deal. This involved rehabilitating the defeated Fatah as the dominant political player in the West Bank, and "leveraging political tensions between the two parties, arming forces loyal to Abbas and the selective resumption of financial aid."
…As Dr Gary Luft - an advisor to the US Energy Security Council - wrote in the Journal of Energy Security, "with the depletion of Israel's domestic gas supplies accelerating, and without an imminent rise in Egyptian gas imports, Israel could face a power crisis in the next few years… If Israel is to continue to pursue its natural gas plans it must diversify its supply sources." …
Earlier this year, Hamas condemned a PA deal to purchase $1.2 billion worth of gas from Israel Leviathan field over a 20 year period once the field starts producing. Simultaneously, the PA has held several meetings with the British Gas Group to develop the Gaza gas field, albeit with a view to exclude Hamas and thus Gazans from access to the proceeds. That plan had been the brainchild of Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair.
But the PA was also courting Russia's Gazprom to develop the Gaza marine gas field, and talks have been going on between Russia, Israel and Cyprus, though so far it is unclear what the outcome of these have been. Also missing was any clarification on how the PA would exert control over Gaza, which is governed by Hamas.
According to Anais Antreasyan in the University of California's Journal of Palestine Studies, the most respected English language journal devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel's stranglehold over Gaza has been designed to make "Palestinian access to the Marine-1 and Marine-2 gas wells impossible." Israel's long-term goal "besides preventing the Palestinians from exploiting their own resources, is to integrate the gas fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore installations." This is part of a wider strategy of:
"…. separating the Palestinians from their land and natural resources in order to exploit them, and, as a consequence, blocking Palestinian economic development. Despite all formal agreements to the contrary, Israel continues to manage all the natural resources nominally under the jurisdiction of the PA, from land and water to maritime and hydrocarbon resources."
For the Israeli government, Hamas continues to be the main obstacle to the finalisation of the gas deal. In the incumbent defence minister's words: "Israel's experience during the Oslo years indicates Palestinian gas profits would likely end up funding terrorism against Israel. The threat is not limited to Hamas… It is impossible to prevent at least some of the gas proceeds from reaching Palestinian terror groups."
The only option, therefore, is yet another "military operation to uproot Hamas." Unfortunately, for the IDF uprooting Hamas means destroying the group's perceived civilian support base which is why Palestinian civilian casualties massively outweigh that of Israelis. Both are obviously reprehensible, but Israel's capacity to inflict destruction is simply far greater.
So here is another reason why the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation cannot be borne by Israel; it not only blocks a billion-dollar deal for existing Israeli gas, it also cuts Israel off from exploiting the 1.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas off the Gaza shore. As Ahmed notes, this isn't the only cause behind the current operation but it is a central one.
But beyond all the politics and petrodollars driving the madness of the latest assault lie the ordinary people whose bodies and lives are being ripped to shreds. As'ad AbuKhalil, the Angry Arab,' is, as usual, an important source for some hard fragments of reality amidst the toxic sludge of spin and propaganda. AbuKhalil points us to a number of stories on the human toll of the attacks. Such as this one:
Sahir Salman Abu Namous was just four years old, soon to turn five. … Sahir was killed on Friday afternoon when an Israeli warplane bombed his family home in the Tal al-Zaatar neighborhood in northern Gaza. "He was playing and smiling next to his mother when missile shrapnel divided his head," Mahmoud writes. "His father took him to the hospital screaming Wake up my son! I bought toys for you, please wake up!'"
…Sahir Salman Abu Namous was one of 21 children who had been killed in the onslaught by Friday.
A piece of shrapnel divided his head. "Wake up my son!" Wake up, indeed: the soul of the world is sleeping, and the murderous rampage goes on.
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"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
20-07-2014, 09:53 PM (This post was last modified: 21-07-2014, 04:39 AM by Peter Lemkin.)
Al-Qassam Brigade of Hamas claims they have one IDF soldier as a prisoner [denied by Israel]. Crowds are celebrating in Gaza and West Bank. Israel lost 13 dead IDF today too - 18 total. Over 469 Palestinian dead - mostly non-combatants. Over 90 killed today in one part of one neighborhood - totally destroyed to rubble - thousands homeless.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Interesting headline from the Indy. The Anglo-Yank-Israeli propaganda machine is starting to suffer due to its perpetually lying nature:
Quote:Israel-Gaza conflict: The myth of Hamas's human shields
Israel blames Gaza death toll on Palestinians for deliberately putting people in line of fire. But can strikes ever be targeted to minimise civilian casualties in such a densely populated area?
What used to be a three-storey house had been turned into debris sunk into a deep crater with twisted steel rods jutting out. Twenty-six people were killed in the mostly deadly air-strike so far in this bloody conflict. Twenty-four of them were from one family, the Abu Jamaa.
Around the same time that attack was taking place on Sunday evening, Benjamin Netanyahu was charging Hamas on TV with using "human shields" to gather "telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause". It has long been the Israeli case that the militants cynically and deliberately carry out attacks and store weapons in residential areas and have also stopped people living there from evacuating homes when fighting breaks out.
There have been instances in the 13 days of the current war when the Israelis have sought to provide evidence proving their case. After warplanes targeted the al-Farouq mosque, near the Nuseirat refugee camp, for instance, the military issued aerial photographs which, it stated, showed that the building was being used to store rockets. We have also had the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, announcing that it had discovered 20 rockets hidden in one of its disuse schools in a "flagrant violation" of international law. And rockets are seen to be regularly fired from stretches of open ground close to homes.
Are militants also deliberately placing themselves in residences which are then attacked? On the day that Al-Farouq was attacked, the Israeli military also carried out a missile strike on a home for the handicapped in Beit Lahiya, killing two disabled residents and injuring four others. A neighbour claimed that a member of the Islamic Jihad group and his wife had also lived in the building; but he could provide no names or dates for this. In pictures: Israel launches further air strikes on Gaza 1 of 105
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Jamilla Alaiwa, a 59 year old social worker who founded the home 24 years ago told me that this was categorically untrue. "If the Israelis have proof of this let them make it public. There was no one from Islamic Jihad or Hamas living there. We are not involved in politics." The Israeli military stated they were investigating what happened; their conclusions have not reached Gaza. Were they, perhaps, fed false information?
Some Gazans have admitted that they were afraid of criticizing Hamas, but none have said they had been forced by the organisation to stay in places of danger and become unwilling human-shields. The Bani Sobeila area, near Khan Younis, where the Abu Jamaa deaths took place received leaflets dropped from the air last week warning them to leave.
But almost all stayed. One reason for that was many of the houses belonged to the Abu Jamaa clan who felt there was safety in staying together. Another reason was given by a neighbour, Abdullah al-Daweish: "Where do we go to? Some people moved from the outer edge of Khan Younis to Khan Younis centre after Israelis told them to, then the centre got bombed. People have moved from this area to Gaza City, and Gaza City has been bombed. It's not Hamas who is ordering us in this, it's the Israelis." READ MORE: ISRAELI TANKS 'SHELL GAZA HOSPITAL' KILLING AT LEAST FOUR FEARS THAT VIOLENCE COULD TRANSFER TO FRENCH STREETS ROCKETS FIRED AT THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT' IN IDF PROPAGANDA
Why did they think the house targeted? "We don't know," said Saied Abu Jamaa, a cousin who was in his home next door when the blast took place. "Tawfiq, who is the head of the family, is a policeman, but why should he and his family and his neighbours die for that?" Tawfiq Abu Jamaa, 40, distraught figure in a brown jellabiya at the funeral was also at a loss to understand why he had lost his wife and eight children. The sole survivor has Nour, a son of four.
There were 10 recently destroyed buildings on the half-hour drive from Khan Younis to Shujaiya, a town where 90 people had been killed in a 24 hours, an onslaught condemned by the Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas as a "heinous massacre": and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as " an atrocious action".
Members of families who owned six of the buildings had moved in with relations and neighbours in the area. Their reason for staying behind was primarily because there was, they said, nowhere else to go. There were also declarations about not giving up one's land, not giving in to invaders.
There was denial of coercion by Hamas. "I am not going to go because I can do something Hamas cannot do", maintained Nabil al-Masri. "I know from times before that if Israeli soldiers get into an empty house they will ruin it on purpose. Hamas cannot stop them going into my house if we leave, but, by staying here we can try to make sure that doesn't happen." VIDEO: THE CONFLICT IN GAZA
Hamas can, however, be accused of making people complacent, repeatedly stating in the media that the Israeli warnings were psychological games and asking the population to ignore them. Some mentioned this as a reason for staying behind; returning home having initially left.
The counter-argument to that was the need to prevent panic spreading. Almost 85,000 people have been on the move, overwhelming the shelters set up by the UN by sheer numbers. Classrooms meant for 30 now hold up to 70, one typical example was the Girls Preparatory Secondary School, at a suburb of Beit Lahiya in the north, with a capacity of 800 which has taken in 1600. Homes of relatives, a traditional source of refuge, are also feeling the strain. READ MORE: KERRY FLIES TO MIDDLE EAST TO URGE CEASEFIRE COMMENT: HOW WE RESPOND TO GAZA ON TWITTER COMMENT: SUFFERING CONTINUES FOR LACK OF A PEACE BROKER
Yasir Hamidi had six additional mouths to feed, along with his family of four, once the bombing began; five more relatives had joined since the ground invasion. His salary from the Ministry of Health stopped even before the conflict started because Gaza's Hamas administration is bankrupt. "The family members brought some money, but they had to leave almost everything else behind: we are living on my savings, but it will not last for long. After that, who knows?" Mr Hamidi spread his hands in resignation.
Gazans point out that the outside world remains largely unaware just how small and confined the place is just 25 miles long and just a few miles wide. It is blocked in by closed borders to Israel in the north and east and Egypt in the south. There is no route out by the sea to the west with an Israeli naval blockade. Getting to travel abroad is an excruciatingly long process.
This may be due to Hamas and Islamic Jihad exporting violence, as Israel and Egypt claim, but it is the increasingly large percentage of the 1.7 million population being pushed by the violence into the already heavily congested centre, who are suffering as the relentless bombings and shootings continue.
At the funeral of the Abu Jamaa family, as another body in a shroud was lowered into the grave, Saied, the cousin said: " That is the only escape many of us will have from here."
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
The BBC seems to be living up to its biased reputation in covering Palestinian resistance to occupation and Israeli war crimes. It seems there was pretty much no coverage of the MASSIVELY HUGE rally in London calling for Israel to stop the slaughter while they did manage to cover one pro Israel rally attended by about 30 people. The boring not to mention marginal Queen's baton relay has been covered ad infinitum too.
Never mind the 'war on terror' rhetoric, writes Nafeez Ahmed. The purpose of Israel's escalating assault on Gaza is to control the Territory's 1.4 trillion cubic feet of gas - and so keep Palestine poor and weak, gain massive export revenues, and avert its own domestic energy crisis.
If Palestinians develop their own gas resources, the resulting economic transformation could in turn fundamentally increase Palestinian clout.
Israel's defence minister is on record confirming that military plans to uproot Hamas' are about securing control of Gaza's gas reserves
The conquest of Gaza is accelerating. Israel has now launched its ground invasion, bringing the Palestinian death toll to 260, 80% of whom are civilians.
A further 1,500 have been wounded and 1,300 Palestinian homes destroyed. Israel's goal, purportedly, is to "restore quiet" by ending Hamas rocket attacks on Israel.
Last Tuesday, Israeli defence minister and former Israeli Defence Force (IDF) chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon announced that Operation Protective Edge marks the beginning of a protracted assault on Hamas.
The operation "won't end in just a few days", he said, adding that "we are preparing to expand the operation by all means standing at our disposal so as to continue striking Hamas." The price will be very heavy ... yes, $4 billion!
The following morning, he went on: "We continue with strikes that draw a very heavy price from Hamas. We are destroying weapons, terror infrastructures, command and control systems, Hamas institutions, regime buildings, the houses of terrorists, and killing terrorists of various ranks of command ...
"The campaign against Hamas will expand in the coming days, and the price the organization will pay will be very heavy."
But in 2007, a year before Operation Cast Lead, Ya'alon's concerns focused on the 1.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas discovered in 2000 off the Gaza coast, valued at $4 billion.
Ya'alon dismissed the notion that "Gaza gas can be a key driver of an economically more viable Palestinian state" as "misguided".
The problem, he said is that "Proceeds of a Palestinian gas sale to Israel would likely not trickle down to help an impoverished Palestinian public. Rather, based on Israel's past experience, the proceeds will likely serve to fund further terror attacks against Israel ...
"A gas transaction with the Palestinian Authority will, by definition, involve Hamas. Hamas will either benefit from the royalties or it will sabotage the project and launch attacks against Fatah, the gas installations, Israel - or all three ...
"It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement." Resource competition is at the heart of the conflict
Operation Cast Lead did not succeed in uprooting Hamas, but the conflict did take the lives of 1,387 Palestinians (773 of whom were civilians) and 9 Israelis (3 of whom were civilians).
Since the discovery of oil and gas in the Occupied Territories, resource competition has increasingly been at the heart of the conflict, motivated largely by Israel's increasing domestic energy woes. Mark Turner, founder of the Research Journalism Initiative, reported that the siege of Gaza and ensuing military pressure was designed to "eliminate" Hamas as "a viable political entity in Gaza" to generate a "political climate" conducive to a gas deal.
This involved rehabilitating the defeated Fatah as the dominant political player in the West Bank, and "leveraging political tensions between the two parties, arming forces loyal to Abbas and the selective resumption of financial aid."
Ya'alon's comments in 2007 illustrate that the Israeli cabinet is not just concerned about Hamas - but concerned that if Palestinians develop their own gas resources, the resulting economic transformation could in turn fundamentally increase Palestinian clout. It's not called Leviathan for nothing
Meanwhile, Israel has made successive discoveries in recent years - such as the Leviathan field estimated to hold 18 trillion cubic feet of natural gas - which could transform the country from energy importer into aspiring energy exporter with ambitions to supply Europe, Jordan and Egypt.
The chief obstacle is that much of the 122 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.6 billion barrels of oil in the Levant Basin Province lies in territorial waters where borders are hotly disputed between Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Cyprus.
Amidst this regional jockeying for gas, Israel has its own little-understood energy challenges. First, it could take until 2020 for much of these domestic resources to be mobilised.
Worse, a 2012 letter by two Israeli government chief scientists - which the Israeli government chose not to disclose - warned the government that Israel still had insufficient gas resources to sustain exports despite all the stupendous discoveries. The letter, according to Ha'aretz, stated:
"We believe Israel should increase its use of natural gas by 2020 and should not export gas. The Natural Gas Authority's estimates are lacking. There's a gap of 100 to 150 billion cubic meters between the demand projections that were presented to the committee and the most recent projections. The gas reserves are likely to last even less than 40 years!" Israel's looming power crisis
As Dr Gary Luft - an advisor to US Energy Security Council - wrote in the Journal of Energy Security, "with the depletion of Israel's domestic gas supplies accelerating, and without an imminent rise in Egyptian gas imports, Israel could face a power crisis in the next few years ...
"If Israel is to continue to pursue its natural gas plans it must diversify its supply sources."
Israel's new discoveries do not, as yet, offer an immediate solution as electricity prices reach record levels, heightening the imperative to diversify supply. This appears to be behind Prime Minister Netanyahu's announcement in February 2011 that it was now time to seal the Gaza gas deal.
But even after a new round of negotiations was kick-started between the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority and Israel in September 2012, Hamas was excluded from these talks, and thus rejected the legitimacy of any deal.
Earlier this year, Hamas condemned a PA deal to purchase $1.2 billion worth of gas from Israel Leviathan field over a 20 year period once the field starts producing.
Simultaneously, the PA has held several meetings with the British Gas Group to develop the Gaza gas field, albeit with a view to exclude Hamas - and thus Gazans - from access to the proceeds. That plan had been the brainchild of Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair.
But the PA was also courting Russia's Gazprom to develop the Gaza marine gas field, and talks have been going on between Russia, Israel and Cyprus, though so far it is unclear what the outcome of these have been. Also missing was any clarification on how the PA would exert control over Gaza, which is governed by Hamas. The curse of Gaza's fossil fuel wealth
According to Anais Antreasyan in the University of California's Journal of Palestine Studies, the most respected English language journal devoted to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel's stranglehold over Gaza has been designed to make "Palestinian access to the Marine-1 and Marine-2 gas wells impossible."
Israel's long-term goal "besides preventing the Palestinians from exploiting their own resources, is to integrate the gas fields off Gaza into the adjacent Israeli offshore installations."
This is part of a wider strategy of "separating the Palestinians from their land and natural resources in order to exploit them, and, as a consequence, blocking Palestinian economic development.
"Despite all formal agreements to the contrary, Israel continues to manage all the natural resources nominally under the jurisdiction of the PA, from land and water to maritime and hydrocarbon resources." Hamas - an obstacle to peace? Or an obstacle to a gas deal?
For the Israeli government, Hamas continues to be the main obstacle to the finalisation of the gas deal. In the incumbent defence minister's words:
"Israel's experience during the Oslo years indicates Palestinian gas profits would likely end up funding terrorism against Israel. The threat is not limited to Hamas ... It is impossible to prevent at least some of the gas proceeds from reaching Palestinian terror groups."
The only option, therefore, is yet another "military operation to uproot Hamas".
Unfortunately, for the IDF uprooting Hamas means destroying the group's perceived civilian support base - which is why Palestinian civilian casualties massively outweigh those of Israelis. Both are obviously reprehensible, but Israel's capacity to inflict destruction is simply far greater. The IDF's aggressive new combat doctrine
In the wake of Operation Cast Lead, the Jerusalem-based Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (Pcati) found that the IDF had adopted a more aggressive combat doctrine based on two principles:
"zero casualties" for IDF soldiers at the cost of deploying increasingly indiscriminate firepower in densely populated areas;
and the "dahiya doctrine" promoting targeting of civilian infrastructure to create widespread suffering amongst the population with a view to foment opposition to Israel's opponents.
This was confirmed in practice by the UN fact-finding mission in Gaza which concluded that the IDF had pursued a "deliberate policy of disproportionate force" aimed at the "supporting infrastructure" of the enemy. "This appears to have meant the civilian population", said the UN report.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is clearly not only about resources. But in an age of expensive energy, competition to dominate regional fossil fuels are increasingly influencing the critical decisions that can inflame war. http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_an..._grab.html
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
David Guyatt Wrote:Interesting headline from the Indy. The Anglo-Yank-Israeli propaganda machine is starting to suffer due to its perpetually lying nature:
Quote:Israel-Gaza conflict: The myth of Hamas's human shields
Israel blames Gaza death toll on Palestinians for deliberately putting people in line of fire. But can strikes ever be targeted to minimise civilian casualties in such a densely populated area?
I was listening to some one whose name I don't know now, Israeli though, and they were defending the genocide by saying that because the Palestinians had voted for Hamas that made them all terrorist and open game so to speak. Ergo Israel had not killed any civilians just terrorists.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
Quote:I was listening to some one whose name I don't know now, Israeli though, and they were defending the genocide by saying that because the Palestinians had voted for Hamas that made them all terrorist and open game so to speak. Ergo Israel had not killed any civilians just terrorists.
Ultimatum One warning from the Prime Minister of Israel to the enemy population, in which he announces that Israel is about to attack military targets in their area and urges those who are not involved and do not wish to be harmed to leave immediately. Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel's humanitarian efforts. Hamas may unconditionally surrender and prevent the attack.
Attack Attack the entire target bank' throughout Gaza with the IDF's maximum force (and not a tiny fraction of it) with all the conventional means at its disposal. All the military and infrastructural targets will be attacked with no consideration for human shields' or environmental damage'. It is enough that we are hitting exact targets and that we gave them advance warning.
Siege Parallel to the above, a total siege on Gaza. Nothing will enter the area. Israel, however, will allow exit from Gaza. (Civilians may go to Sinai, fighters may surrender to IDF forces).
Defense Any place from which Israel or Israel's forces were attacked will be immediately attacked with full force and no consideration for human shields' or environmental damage'.
Conquer After the IDF completes the "softening" of the targets with its fire-power, the IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations.
Elimination- The GSS and IDF will thoroughly eliminate all armed enemies from Gaza. The enemy population that is innocent of wrong-doing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave. Israel will generously aid those who wish to leave.
Sovereignty Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever. Liberation of parts of our land forever is the only thing that justifies endangering our soldiers in battle to capture land. Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel. The coastal train line will be extended, as soon as possible, to reach the entire length of Gaza.
According to polls, most of the Arabs in Gaza wish to leave. Those who were not involved in anti-Israel activity will be offered a generous international emigration package. Those who choose to remain will receive permanent resident status. After a number of years of living in Israel and becoming accustomed to it, contingent on appropriate legislation in the Knesset and the authorization of the Minister of Interior, those who personally accept upon themselves Israel's rule, substance and way of life of the Jewish State in its Land, will be offered Israeli citizenship.
"We'll know our disinformation campaign is complete when everything the American public believes is false." --William J. Casey, D.C.I
"We will lead every revolution against us." --Theodore Herzl
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