The assault on Gaza, planned over six months and executed with perfect timing, was designed largely, as Neve Gordon has rightly observed, to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch.
Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with Obama and Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet. The EU politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians etc (for all the gory detail, see Harvard scholar Sara Roy’s chilling essay in the London Review of Books) were convinced that it was the rocket attacks that had “provoked” Israel but called on both sides to end the violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt and Nato’s favourite Islamists in Ankara failed to register even a symbolic protest by recalling their ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UN security council to discuss the crisis.
As result of official apathy, one outcome of this latest attack will be to inflame Muslim communities throughout the world and swell the ranks of those very organisations that the west claims it is combating in the “war against terror”. [more]
Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
[...]
How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.
Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on Gaza-the buildings blown to rubble, the children killed on their way to school, the long rows of mutilated corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the crowds of terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, the hospitals so overburdened and out of supplies they cannot treat the wounded, and our studied, callous indifference to this widespread human suffering-wonder why we are hated?
Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate and time and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love. “Expose thyself to what wretches feel,” King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, “and show the heavens more just.”
Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods. Over 350 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, and over 1,000 have been wounded since the air attacks began on Saturday. Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, said Israel is engaged in a “war to the bitter end” against Hamas in Gaza. A war? Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder.
As Israel presses its bloody assault on Gaza, dropping broad hints that it is planning a ground attack to complement four days of bombings that have killed hundreds, it’s clear that Israel’s actions are likely to bolster, not weaken, the very enemy it is fighting.
Writing in the Washington Post, Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab points out that, before the latest crisis, Hamas was in sharp decline. The headline on his thoughtful piece is: “Has Israel Revived Hamas?” He says: “Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine.”
Over the past two years, Kuttab notes, Palestinian support for Hamas — an ultrareligious, terrorist-inclined wing of the fanatical Muslim Brotherhood movement — has declined sharply, from a 30 percent in 2006 to 22 percent in August, 2007, to just 17 percent in 2008 — compared to 40 percent for Fatah, the mainstream, secular nationalist wing of the Palestinian body politic. Kuttab points out that Hamas has “turned down every legitimate offer from its nationalist PLO rivals and Egyptian mediators.” Now, he says, the attacks are a “bonanza for Hamas” and says that Israel’s assault will achieve “results exactly the opposite of its publicly proclaimed purposes.”
Quite a lot of the dead this weekend appear to have been Hamas members, but what is it supposed to solve? Is Hamas going to say: “Wow, this blitz is awesome – we’d better recognise the state of Israel, fall in line with the Palestinian Authority, lay down our weapons and pray we are taken prisoner and locked up indefinitely and support a new American ‘peace process’ in the Middle East!” Is that what the Israelis and the Americans and Gordon Brown think Hamas is going to do?
Yes, let’s remember Hamas’s cynicism, the cynicism of all armed Islamist groups. Their need for Muslim martyrs is as crucial to them as Israel’s need to create them. The lesson Israel thinks it is teaching – come to heel or we will crush you – is not the lesson Hamas is learning. Hamas needs violence to emphasise the oppression of the Palestinians – and relies on Israel to provide it. A few rockets into Israel and Israel obliges.
Not a whimper from Tony Blair, the peace envoy to the Middle East who’s never been to Gaza in his current incarnation. Not a bloody word.
We hear the usual Israeli line. General Yaakov Amidror, the former head of the Israeli army’s “research and assessment division” announced that “no country in the world would allow its citizens to be made the target of rocket attacks without taking vigorous steps to defend them”. Quite so. But when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, when their guerrillas were crossing from the Republic to attack police stations and Protestants, did Britain unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic? Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn’t want to lower ourselves to the IRA’s level.
Yes, Israel deserves security. But these bloodbaths will not bring it. Not since 1948 have air raids protected Israel. Israel has bombed Lebanon thousands of times since 1975 and not one has eliminated “terrorism”. So what was the reaction last night? The Israelis threaten ground attacks. Hamas waits for another battle. Our Western politicians crouch in their funk holes. And somewhere to the east – in a cave? a basement? on a mountainside? – a well-known man in a turban smiles.
My mother’s most beloved trick: take a simple orange,
turn it into pure sorrow. She did this in the manner
of a spell, a story (the same story over, over). The dark
handkerchief of her words whisked away, and presto—
the dour ’30s, a girl whose teeth vibrated with ache, who
walked barefoot in snow. Who received one orange each year
in her Christmas sock. The story really began here—with her
hand rolling the cool pebbled flesh across her cheek
in that farmhouse so bitter she could see her breath.
With her inhaling its sweet citrus rodeo, wheeling it
along her sill. Sketching it with her last stubby crayon
for posterity. Telling her diary about the sunny supple star
from which it travelled to her. Positioning her thumb in its
softest point then stopping herself, praying for strength
to resist. Truth was, this is a modern girls’ story (the moral:
defer, defer) more than a saga of peasants rising from the
dead
fires of their own hungers, as martyrs. After all, consider
the inner world of the orange—labial, lush, lost,
utterly lost at the first fissure in its pulpy stockade.
More fallen, even, than the common apple.
This all happened prior to me, which must make me
the logical conclusion, the sequel, if you like, to
the orange story, the sad document of a woman’s ultimate
defeat,
the daughter who, like the wedding guest, must stop her life,
must listen.
Rachel Maddow responds to Pastor Rick’s newest video chat in which he nails people who disagree with him as “Christophobes” – ha ha, very funny Rick – and denies that he ever compared same-sex unions to sexual unions between brothers and sisters, old men and girls, polygamists and pedophiles – which is, of course, a lie:
Naturally, Barack Obama will continue to ignore this. However, as Rachel says:
President-Elect Obama, this is not going away.
Nor should it. The people who think it should don’t give a damn about homophobia and refuse to acknowledge the connection between denying people their civil rights and the very real abuses they suffer as a result.
Pastor Rick advocates that a “new civility” be brought to political discourse – a sort of “post-disagreeableness”. He wants to be able to say hateful things without being accused of “hate speech”, though he’s not prepared to offer that degree of “civility” in return. Unh hunh. What’s new about that?
The deceased, daughter of
the deceased, who is herself daughter of the deceased, who is the deceased’s sister
The deceased resister’s sister is related by marriage to the mother of the deceased, who is grandaughter of the deceased’s grandfather
and neighbour to the deceased’s uncle (etc. ..etc.)
No news worries the developed world,
for the time of barbarism has passed
and the victim is Joe Bloggs. Nobody knows his name,
and the tragedy, like the truth, is relative (etc. ..etc.)
Quiet, quiet, for the soldiers need
at this hour to listen to the songs
which the dead resisters had listened to, and have remained
like the smell of coffee, in their blood, fresh
Truce, truce. A time to test the teachings: can helicopters be turned into ploughshares?
We said to them: truce, truce, to examine intentions.
The flavour of peace may be absorbed by the soul.
Then we may compete for the love of life using poetic images.
They replied, “Don’t you know that peace begins with oneself,
if you wish to open the door to our citadel of truth?
So we said, “And then?”
Writing is a small ant which bites extinction.
Writing is a bloodless wound.
Our cups of coffee, and the birds, and the green trees
with the blue shade, and the sun leaping from wall
to wall like a doe
and the waters in the skies of infinite shapes, in what is left to us
of sky…and other matters the memory of which has been put on hold
prove that this morning is strong and beautiful
and that we are guests of evermore
Well, at least the current Israeli attack on Gaza won’t create any refugees. Gazans have nowhere to run and face the aggression of Egypt when they try:
… on Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, the ground shook on Sunday afternoon. In a matter of four minutes, Israeli aircraft destroyed 40 smuggling tunnels running under the border. The tunnels are used to smuggle goods and weapons into Gaza.
Area resident Fida Kishta rushed to the border once the smoke cleared – and she wasn’t alone.
Hundreds gathered at the border wall, trying to get across. Egyptian border guards opened fire above the crowds, trying to scatter them. Instead, residents manned a bulldozer and tried to knock down the wall.
When that didn’t work, they set an explosive device beside it, knocking what Kishta said appeared to be a small hole. Dozens of defiant Gazans clambered over it, but were eventually returned to Gaza.
At times, shock turned into confusion and denial. A news photographer who found the body of a friend under the rubble drove him home, unwilling to believe he was dead.
“My children are wetting the bed, they cry when they hear planes,” said Amal Hassan, 38, a mother of three children. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Maybe the next bomb will fall here, maybe the next person killed will be one of us,” Hassan said. [more at The Star]
Gazans are people about whom no one cares at all, apart from Hamas. No wonder Hamas has their support.
It turns out that most Israelisagree with the “shock and awe” response of their government to Hamas’ intransigent use of rocket fire into their country. But few think it will actually work:
Israel’s massive assault on the militant Hamas organization in the Gaza Strip shook the Middle East this weekend. Few people expected Israel to deal such a blow, with such carnage, against a group whose repeated rocket attacks posed no existential threat to the powerful country.
“What’s happening here is capital punishment,” said a stunned Sabri Saidam, a former Fatah minister of communications, and no friend of Hamas. This was “the fastest massacre in the shortest time span” he had ever heard of.
It should come as no surprise. Since before the founding of the state in 1948, Israel’s military doctrine has been about deterrence, about striking fear in the hearts of its enemies whenever possible. Israel’s weekend attacks were as much about instilling awe in future enemies as they were about shocking the country’s current nemesis.
Now, that power of deterrence is in doubt. A poll released Sunday night in Israel showed that 81 per cent of Israelis favoured the action being taken against Hamas, but only 39 per cent thought it was likely to be effective. Even Israelis appear to have lost faith.
Israel has succumbed to exactly the “strategy” that they condemn in Hamas: neverending, ever escalating violence (thought it could well be argued that Hamas doesn’t have the possibility of escalation). I am expected not to expect more from Israel. Apparently, I am expected to expect the use of reason from people who are universally proclaimed not to have reason at their beck and call, that is, the members of Hamas. What is apparent to me is that nobody has reason at their command. At least, nobody who has any power to exert influence or take action, such as the United States or the governors of my own country. Israel has embarked, once again, on a course of action that has no possibility of ending the violence, but only the surety of increasing it.
Well, what am I expected to think of that? Or is thought and the use of reason simply to be discouraged?
Nevertheless, I continue to think. What I understand of these views of the Israeli aggression toward Gaza is that many people find it understandable. So do I. On an individual level, if someone kept threatening my family by lobbing bombs into my backyard, I might well be inclined to strike back. On the other hand, if I thought that would increase the danger to my family while harming people who had nothing to do with the backyard bombs and if I had lots of time to think about it, which Israel indeed has had, I’d think I’d better think it out again.
The rains of death continue to fall in Gaza. And silently, we watch. and silently, governments plotted: how shall we make the thunder and clouds rain death onto Gaza? Egypt; the United States; Israel…
And it will all seem, in the end of the day, that they are somehow a response to something. As though the situation were not only acceptable- but normal, stable, in the period prior to whatever this is a response to. As though settlements did not continue to expand; walls did not continue to extend and choke lands and lives; families and friends were not dislocated; life was not paralyzed; people were not exterminated; borders were not sealed and food and light and fuel were in fair supply.
But it is the prisoners’ burden to bear: they broke the conditions of their incarceration. They deviated. But nevertheless, there are concerns for the “humanitarian situation”: as long as they do not starve, everything is ok. Replenish the wheat stocks immediately.
The warden improves the living conditions now and then, in varying degrees of relatively, but the prison doors remain sealed. And so when there are 20 hours of power outages in a row, the prisoners wish that they were only 8; or 10; and dream of the days of 4.
From the abstract to a paper entitled “What We Talk about When We Talk about Ideology” by Bryan D. Lammon:
… much of political science scholarship quite clearly suggests that judging is ideological. What “ideological” means, however, is much less clear. A bit of reading between the lines reveals that much of judicial politics scholarship conceives of ideology predominantly as partisan politics. Along these lines, much of the scholarship presents an image of judges as consciously and actively promoting a political agenda.
This conception of ideology and ideological judicial decisionmaking, however, is quite unsatisfying. It conceives of ideology predominantly in political or partisan terms, and, bearing the influence of traditional notions of individual rationality and autonomy, it portrays judges as rational actors that can consciously impose their policy preferences through their decisions. This portrayal reflects the same conception of rational, wholly autonomous individual behavior that law and psychology is challenging. However, even if one rejects judicial politics’ conception of ideology and its influence, one still must contend with the reams of empirical research that judicial politics scholars have amassed.
You can read the rest of the abstract and download the article here [pdf]
