A terrifying personal account of wanton Israeli destruction of the homes of ordinary Gazans and the resulting psychological terror that is being inflicted upon them, by Eva Bartlett.
Destruction in Izbet Abed Rabu.
There are many stories. Each account — each murdered individual, each wounded person, each burned-out and broken house, each shattered window, trashed kitchen, strewn item of clothing, bedroom turned upside down, bullet and shelling hole in walls, offensive Israeli army graffiti — is important.
I start to tell the stories of Ezbet Abbed Rabu, eastern Jabaliya, where homes off the main north south road, Salah al-Din, were penetrated by bullets, bombs and/or soldiers. If they weren’t destroyed, they were occupied or shot up. Or occupied and then destroyed. The army was creative in their destruction, in their defacing of property, in their insults. Creative in the ways they could shit in rooms and save their shit for cupboards and unexpected places. Actually, their creativity wasn’t so broad. The rest was routine: ransack the house from top to bottom. Turn over or break every clothing cupboard, kitchen shelf, television, computer, window pane and water tank.
‘The mere monitoring of bloody conflict assumes precedence over human suffering’ writes Robert Fisk in his swipe at the BBC.
I wonder if we are “normalising” war. It’s not just that Israel has yet again got away with the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza. And after its own foreign minister said that Israel’s army had been allowed to “go wild” there, it seems to bear out my own contention that the Israeli “Defence Force” is as much a rabble as all the other armies in the region. But we seem to have lost the sense of immorality that should accompany conflict and violence. The BBC’s refusal to handle an advertisement for Palestinian aid was highly instructive. It was the BBC’s “impartiality” that might be called into question. In other words, the protection of an institution was more important than the lives of children. War was a spectator sport whose careful monitoring – rather like a football match, even though the Middle East is a bloody tragedy – assumed precedence over human suffering.
In the slow evolution of US relations with Israel since 1948, as the latter mutated from a strategic liability to a strategic asset, Israel and its Jewish allies in the United States have always occupied the driver’s seat.
President Truman had shepherded the creation of Israel in 1947 not because the American establishment saw it as a strategic asset; this much is clear. “No one,” writes Cheryl Rubenberg, “not even the Israelis themselves, argues that the United States supported the creation of the Jewish state for reasons of security or national interest.”(1) Domestic politics, in an election year, was the primary force behind President Truman’s decision to support the creation of Israel. In addition, the damage to US interests due to the creation of Israel – although massive – was not immediate. This was expected to unfold slowly: and its first blows would be borne by the British who were still the paramount power in the region.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has revealed that roughly 75 per cent of construction of Israeli settlements has been carried out in contravention of Israeli law. The statistics are taken from a secret database compiled by the Ministry of Defence in order to fight legal challenges against the settlement programmes brought by the Palestinians. Scandalous indeed. You’d think that an illegal occupation would at least respect its own bogus laws.
More to the point, neither Haaretz nor the BBC, which picks up the story on its website, mention that 100 per cent of the Israeli settlements have been declared illegal by the World Court.
Ha’aretz reports on the sudden growth of an American movement to boycott the Israeli academy, in protest at the Zionist ‘scholasticide’ aimed at Palestinian schools, universities, and students. Palestinians have long had the reputation of being the best educated population in the Arab world, but this is now under threat. For years, students in the occupied West Bank and Gaza have had only intermittent access to education as a result of curfews, closures and checkpoints. The Red Cross has found that children in Gaza are suffering from micronutrient deficiencies – which affect brain development – as a result of the Israeli siege of the territory. Studies have shown that more than half of children in Gaza suffered post-traumatic stress disorder before the latest massacre, a condition which results in insomnia, panic attacks, and an inability to concentrate. And during the massacre, Israel targetted schools and the Islamic university (which, despite its name, teaches secular subjects). In this context, anti-boycott lobbyists’ evocation of ‘academic freedom’ seems (to be polite about it) to miss the point. Palestinian civil society organisations, and anti-Zionist Israeli academics such as Ilan Pappe, have called for the boycott.
Former Israeli defence minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer and six others are being accused of crimes against humanity – the killing of 15 people, mostly children, in Gaza in 2002 – as a Spanish judge opens preliminary investigations.
A Spanish judge today opened preliminary investigations into claims that a bomb attack on Gaza in 2002 warranted the prosecution of a former Israeli defence minister and six senior military officers for crimes against humanity.
With the Western mainstream media’s attention focused on the ‘peace’ efforts of the new US envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, one would expect the latest report by Peace Now, the largest extra-parliamentary movement in Israel, detailing the illegal expansion of settlements in the West Bank, to be of utmost relevance. But no. Yet again, key documentary evidence of grave violations of international law by the Israeli state is consigned to oblivion…
Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank increased sharply in 2008, despite Israel’s pledge at the beginning of the year to freeze all construction, according to a new report by an Israeli non-governmental organisation.
The report, released Wednesday by the group Peace Now, found that settlement construction in 2008 increased by almost 60 percent, including new construction both inside and outside of the security barrier and within illegal settlement outposts.
Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan quotes Avi Shlaim, reminds Shimon Peres of the sixth commandment (Thou shalt not kill), tells him ‘You are killing people’, and tells Davos he’s never coming again before storming off the stage.
So first it was Venezuela, then Bolivia, and now Turkey. Have the Arab states no shame?
Norman Finkelstein doesn’t think so. Here is what he told an audience in Bahrain: ‘The reaction from the Arab world was a total disgrace, a disgrace to the whole region and its people…What you showed in the last massacre in Gaza is that you have no shame at all…The most powerful reactions in the world came from Bolivia, Venezuela, Mauritania, Turkey and Qatar…There was more solidarity in South America than here’.
The Turkish prime minister has stormed out of a heated debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos over Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked out of the televised debate on Thursday, after the moderator refused to allow him to rebut the Israeli president’s justification about the war that left about 1,300 Gazans dead.
Before storming out, Erdogan told Shimon Peres, the Israeli president: “You are killing people.”
The Israeli regime’s bloodbath wasn’t just about upcoming elections and re-establishing deterrence, Norman G. Finkelstein writes [doc], though it did have much to do with this and was indeed calculated to pander to the worst elements of that society. Beyond this, the main goal of Israeli intransigence and its main goal in the Gaza slaughter was to fend off the latest threat posed by Palestinian moderation: that is, to sabotage credible peace efforts. This is an excellent summary of otherwise already well-established facts and a reminder of Israel’s stoush with Hezbollah:
Early speculation on the motive behind Israel’s slaughter in Gaza that began on 27 December 2008 and continued till 18 January 2009 centered on the upcoming elections in Israel. The jockeying for votes was no doubt a factor in this Sparta-like society consumed by “revenge and the thirst for blood,”[1] where killing Arabs is a sure crowd-pleaser. (Polls during the war showed that 80-90 percent of Israeli Jews supported it.)[2] But as Israeli journalist Gideon Levy pointed out on Democracy Now!, “Israel went through a very similar war…two-and-a-half years ago [in Lebanon], when there were no elections.”[3] Continue reading “Foiling Another Palestinian “Peace Offensive””
‘In the previous 16 years, most of the envoys for the president in the Mid East have been openly and publicly committed to Israel’s side. Some of them have been professional lobbyists for Israel.’
Jimmy Carter, the former US president, has said any future permanent Israeli-Palestinian agreement had to include Hamas, the Palestinian movement that controls Gaza.
Carter also told Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan on Wednesday that US presidents were unable or unwilling to take on Israel’s supporters in the US, but said he had high hopes for George Mitchell, the new US Middle East envoy.
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