Israel Bombs Gaza - Hundreds Dead

[Brown]

President Hugo Chavez is brave man. Shame on the Muslim world.

 

[maximus]

President Hugo Chavez is brave man. Shame on the Muslim world.

Let me rectify that. Only shame on the oil-rich Arab nations.

 

[abysmal]

It's such a tragedy...
I'm sorry to say but obviously most of the Arab leaders care more about themselves than their brothers in difficulty. Oil-riched Arab leaders are selfish and improvident. And Egypt and Syria are much scared by Israel after the frustration in 1967 and 1973. Iraq has had the 4th powerful army in the world. But just have a look what did it use the army for?

It's a Christianism-dominant world today. It's western countries who make the game rules. The rest of the world, either Muslim countries or China, have only two choices: compliance, or seeking for power to protect themselves. UN is absolutely unreliable, it's controlled by US. Even Russia cannot use UN to protect his brother Serbia, let alone the other countries.

 

[Neo]

‘World double standards on Kashmir, Gaza deplorable’​

* Gilani says Palestine situation not lesser tragedy than Mumbai
* Pakistan not isolated in international community
* Pakistan prays for India’s long life​

KARACHI: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Saturday condemned the Mumbai attacks but deplored the silence of the international community on the atrocities being committed in Kashmir and Gaza.

Referring to the Mumbai attacks, Gilani said a large number of innocent men, women and children had been martyred in Palestine and it could not be considered a lesser tragedy than Mumbai, and asked why the world was silent on the issue. He also cited the example of Kashmir, where he said people were being subjected to the worst kinds of oppression and suppression because they demanded the right to self-determination.

The prime minister was talking to reporters after laying the foundation stone of the Accident, Emergency and Trauma Centre at Karachi’s Civil Hospital.

Not isolated: Asked if Pakistan’s foreign policy was being challenged by India, Gilani said the impression that Pakistan had been isolated in the international community was false. He said the country had good relations with its friends.

Pointing out that terrorism was the common enemy, the prime minister said there were external threats to be encountered, but the government’s priority was the country’s stability.

He said intelligence failure was India’s internal matter, but Pakistan was fully prepared to cooperate.

Long life: The prime minister said Pakistan prayed for the long life of India, but if something happened there, the blame was shifted on Islamabad.

To a question on reported differences between the prime minister and President Asif Ali Zardari, Gilani said there were no differences as both belonged to the same party.

Gilani said a UN probe into Benazir’s murder was necessary, adding if Interior Adviser Rehman Malik conducted the investigation, people would say the PPP’s own government was carrying out the probe.

 

[IceCold]

In that case US is firing in FATA and attacking your country.
I see you lecture abt


Take a break. First prevent US from doing do.
and then replay to this.

Really! thanks but no thanks for the suggestion, you Indians are very fond or raising FATA issue over and over again and trying to relate it with every other incident going on in the world in this case Israel and Palestine.
Now tell me genius, how exaclty are the 2 related? What logical connection is there between the two that forced you to troll rather then posting something related to the thread title? Answer this one for me and perhaps we will move on with bursting your bubble.

 

[Introvert]

Israel is Washington's 'murder arm': Chavez
Updated at: 1112 PST, Sunday, January 11, 2009

Israel is Washington CARACAS: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Saturday accused Israel of being the ‘murder arm’ of the United States and said the solution to the Gaza crisis was in the hands of Barack Obama when he becomes US president in 10 days.

On announcing Venezuela's first humanitarian aid shipment for Gaza's embattled Palestinians, Chavez said he was not surprised Israel ignored the United Nation's call Thursday for a ceasefire in Gaza because, he said, "behind Israel lurks the United States." "It doesn't surprise me in the least.... The Israeli government doesn't comply because it is the United States. Unfortunately, Israel has become the murder arm of the United States," he added.

Chavez, Latin America's most prominent leftist leader and staunch foe of outgoing US President George W. Bush, said the solution to the Gaza conflict was squarely in the hands of Bush's successor Obama, who is to be inaugurated January 20. "Let's wait and see what Obama will do when he takes power as president... and head of the empire," Chavez said, using his pet name for the United States. "Because if anybody can stop that massacre it's the US president, because it was a US president who ordered it" in the first place, he said. He slammed the international community for not doing enough to stop the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, which since December 27 has killed more than 850 people, according to Gaza emergency services. "They're killing the Palestinian people in Gaza and the world sits there, arms crossed, drawing up (UN) resolutions. We should move on to more concrete actions. We went as far as we could and threw out the (Israeli) ambassador," Chavez said. Venezuela on Tuesday expelled Israel's ambassador to Caracas as calls mounted in Latin America for an end to the Jewish state's deadly assault on the Gaza Strip. The following day, Israel expelled Venezuela's charge d'affaires. Chavez said Venezuela's first air shipment of relief supplies for Gaza would be leaving Sunday for Egypt. Meanwhile in La Paz, Chavez ally and anti-American President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, said the United Nations was under Washington's thumb and he regretted that the world body was unable to stop the bloodshed in Gaza. "What I'm sorry about is that the United Nations is not for the people of the world, it's a United Nations for the US Empire, and we don't want that," Morales said Saturday.

Israel is Washington''s ''murder arm'': Chavez - GEO.tv

 

[pkpatriotic]

The time of the righteous - Haaretz - Israel News
By Gideon Levy
Jan 11, 2009

This war, perhaps more than its predecessors, is exposing the true deep veins of Israeli society. Racism and hatred are rearing their heads, as is the impulse for revenge and the thirst for blood. The "inclination of the commander" in the Israel Defense Forces is now "to kill as many as possible," as the military correspondents on television describe it. And even if the reference is to Hamas fighters, this inclination is still chilling.

The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as "exercising caution": the frightening balance of blood - about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn't raising any questions, as if we've decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism.

Rightists, nationalists, chauvinists and militarists are the only legitimate bon ton in town. Don't bother us about humaneness and compassion. Only at the edges of the camp can a voice of protest be heard - illegitimate, ostracized and ignored by media coverage - from a small but brave group of Jews and Arabs.

Alongside all this, rings another voice, perhaps the worst of all. This is the voice of the righteous and the hypocritical. My colleague, Ari Shavit, seems to be their eloquent spokesman. This week, Shavit wrote here ("Israel must double, triple, quadruple its medical aid to Gaza," Haaretz, January 7): "The Israeli offensive in Gaza is justified ... Only an immediate and generous humanitarian initiative will prove that even during the brutal warfare that has been forced on us, we remember that there are human beings on the other side."

To Shavit, who defended the justness of this war and insisted that it mustn't be lost, the price is immaterial, as is the fact that there are no victories in such unjust wars. And he dares, in the same breath, to preach "humaneness."

Does Shavit wish for us to kill and kill,and afterward to set up field hospitals and send medicine to care for the wounded? He knows that a war against a helpless population, perhaps the most helpless one in the world, that has nowhere to escape to, can only be cruel and despicable. But these people always want to come out of it looking good. We'll drop bombs on residential buildings, and then we'll treat the wounded at Ichilov; we'll shell meager places of refuge in United Nations schools, and then we'll rehabilitate the disabled at Beit Lewinstein. We'll shoot and then we'll cry, we'll kill and then we'll lament, we'll cut down women and children like automatic killing machines, and we'll also preserve our dignity.

The problem is - it just doesn't work that way. This is outrageous hypocrisy and self-righteousness. Those who make inflammatory calls for more and more violence without regard for the consequences are at least being more honest about it.

You can't have it both ways. The only "purity" in this war is the "purification from terrorists," which really means the sowing of horrendous tragedies. What's happening in Gaza is not a natural disaster, an earthquake or flood, for which it would be our duty and right to extend a helping hand to those affected, to send rescue squads, as we so love to do. Of all the rotten luck, all the disasters now occurring in Gaza are manmade - by us. Aid cannot be offered with bloodstained hands. Compassion cannot sprout from brutality.

Yet there are some who still want it both ways. To kill and destroy indiscriminately and also to come out looking good, with a clean conscience. To go ahead with war crimes without any sense of the heavy guilt that should accompany them. It takes some nerve. Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who preaches for this war and believes in the justness of the mass killing it is inflicting has no right whatsoever to speak about morality and humaneness. There is no such thing as simultaneously killing and nurturing. This attitude is a faithful representation of the basic, twofold Israeli sentiment that has been with us forever: To commit any wrong, but to feel pure in our own eyes. To kill, demolish, starve, imprison and humiliate - and be right, not to mention righteous. The righteous warmongers will not be able to allow themselves these luxuries.

Anyone who justifies this war also justifies all its crimes. Anyone who sees it as a defensive war must bear the moral responsibility for its consequences. Anyone who now encourages the politicians and the army to continue will also have to bear the mark of Cain that will be branded on his forehead after the war. All those who support the war also support the horror.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Israel and the problem of Gaza war-crime charges |
Does the world have the appetite to prosecute Israel for war crimes in Gaza?

Israel is facing demands for an inquiry into allegations of serious breaches of humanitarian law – but history shows the chances of a successful prosecution are low

Peter Beaumont
guardian.co.uk,
Saturday 10 January 2009

After Israel's killings in Gaza, after the images and outrage, have come the inevitable stern warnings about culpability for war crimes.

In the aftermath of Monday's Israeli shelling of a building full of members of the Saimouni clan in Zeitoun, killing 30, the call by Navi Pellay, the UN's Human Rights Commissioner, for an independent investigation into whether war crimes had been committed came not a moment too soon.

This was not the only incident that inspired outrage. After the Israeli Defence Forces targeted a school –run by the UN refugee agency UNRWA – that was crowded with those fleeing the violence, there were claims that the attack was a crime against humanity.

The response of Israeli spokesmen last week was to repeat a mantra familiar down the years; feebly to promise an investigation – or lack of knowledge – while insisting that its forces were committed to the principles of humanitarian law. All of which, in the end, largely results in nothing.

Last week, it was not only Pellay who served warning to Israel over its conduct of Operation Cast Lead. The International Committee for the Red Cross also challenged Israel's behaviour. In an unusually blunt statement, it accused Israel of breaches of humanitarian conventions for failing to bring assistance to wounded and starving civilians and preventing ambulance access for four days.

On the initial claims that have emerged from Gaza – many of which have yet to be independently verified – there are a series of allegations.

B'Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights and other Israeli and Palestinian rights organisations, whose field workers have been at the forefront of gathering initial reports on a battlefield from which international media observers are banned, have assembled a deeply worrying list of allegations.

They have described civilians being fired on in doorways; attacks on ambulance crews, aid workers and schools being used as civilian refuges. Above all, there is the bombing and shelling to smithereens of whole areas, burying scores of residents beneath the rubble.

But amid the growing clamour over the allegations of war crimes, a critical question remains. What, if any, recourse has the international community to punish those alleged to be accountable?

The reality is that international laws, and their application regarding the conduct of conflict, are frustratingly inexact, difficult to apply and, because of the way that many have been historically framed by both treaty and customary law, not necessarily universally binding in practice.

There are two strands of law applicable regarding the conduct of war.

Jus ad Bellum sets the conditions for the use of armed force – here, Israel has argued that it is entitled to respond to Hamas rocket fire. Then there is Jus in Bello – governing how war is then conducted. It is the latter that would be at the heart of any UN-sanctioned investigation. That law itself is incorporated into different paths which carry different weight: customary law, derived from generally accepted practices, and law governed by treaty and convention such as the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute which established the International Criminal Court in 2002 (to which Israel and US are not parties and therefore not prosecutable in.)

At the centre of the allegations over war crimes is not simply the issue of whether civilians are killed – it is not a crime per se if civilians are killed in the course of military operations. Rather, it is centred on two crucial issues: whether the civilian population is deliberately targeted and the issue of proportionality.

As humanitarian law has developed since the framing of the Geneva Conventions in 1949 – which in turn built on the Hague Convention of a generation earlier – the idea of proportionality has developed over the years, both in customary law and via treaty. Its foundation was Article 51 of the 1949 Convention, prohibiting the use of "clearly excessive force" which, while being clear in its intent, remains difficult to define.

In 1977, the first additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions attempted to develop a working definition of the treatment of civilian populations in war time (although, again Israel did not ratify the protocol.) It insisted that a population remained civilian in nature even if there were those among it who could not be defined as non-combatants and that care should be taken to protect it.

On the issue of proportionality, the Protocol also insisted that it is the duty of an attacking force, when considering targets, to weigh the risk of civilian deaths against the value of military targets and objectives – a concept that was refined again for inclusion in the Rome Statute which founded the International Criminal Court.

And at the very heart of establishing whether war crimes have been committed is the issue of intention. If – as Chris Gunness, the UNWRA spokesman for Gaza, has said – Israeli officials have admitted that there was no mortar fire from the school used as a refuge when it was hit, what must be established is precisely why was it targeted and to what realistic military intent.

Similarly, the intention of Israeli jets in allegedly destroying 180 houses in Rafah on Wednesday night is required to be balanced against the stated military objectives to establish whether the house destruction was indiscriminate or disproportionate, or whether the bombing was simply targeting civilians? It is this requirement for the law to establish the difference between intent and the resulting civilian casualties – that critics argue inevitably favours the attacker.

But any hopes that a UN-led investigation might lead to an indictment – either against Israeli soldiers and those commanding them, or Hamas – at the International Criminal Court for targeting civilians are likely to be short lived. As neither Palestinians nor Israelis are signatories to the Rome Statute, the court cannot take up a case – perhaps explaining both Israel's evacuation of foreign passport holders and its unwillingness to admit the foreign media.

Another alternative that has been tried and tested is the Special Tribunal, set up under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council. This option is also regarded as a non-runner as the US would certainly veto that suggestion.

That would leave either a prosecution by local authorities, a rare thing in an Israel that has shown itself markedly unwilling to prosecute its soldiers even for apparently egregious human rights abuses, or prosecution in a foreign court where universal jurisdiction for war crimes has been incorporated into the legal system under treaty obligations of the 1949 Geneva Convention. Eligible countries include Britain.

This allowed the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and – more recently – persuaded Israeli Major-General Doron Almog not to get off his flight to Heathrow in 2005 after being tipped off that he faced arrest in connection with the destruction of 59 houses in Gaza.

Despite the fact that proportionality in both law governed by custom and treaty is a well established legal concept, that has not stopped Israel's attempts to argue otherwise. Its hasbara (spin) operation has been working overtime to persuade opinion formers that the issue of proportionality is a red herring – not least because of what it says has been the similarly disproportionate use of force by Israel and the UK in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is an argument that, in effect, amounts to the idea that one crime should justify another. It is a strategy, however, that is increasingly counterproductive. For Israel's perceived evasions, in the midst of rising concern over humanitarian abuses, have only served to fuel fresh suspicion and anger.

It is a strategy that Israel must realise is a highly risky one.

International humanitarian law is not static. As its institutions have rapidly developed, so, too, has the acceptance of them and willingness to attempt to bring to account those suspected of war crimes in different and increasingly imaginative ways – albeit, sadly far too selectively over abuses committed by the US and UK in recent years.

While the prospects of a prosecution now might seem remote for now, as the Pinochet case demonstrated, there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. The calls for an investigation serve another crucial function. They deliver a powerful political message that enough is enough.

A message underwritten with a warning to soldiers, officers and politicians alike that the same memory of crimes and guilt that impelled Israel's own dogged pursuit of the functionaries of mass murder over the decades is very long. And increasingly has no territorial limit.

 

[pkpatriotic]

Israel and the west will pay a price for Gaza's bloodbath
Whether the current ceasefire talks succeed or fail, Hamas has already been strengthened by the US-backed assault
Seumas Milne
The Guardian,
Thursday 8 January 2009

Over the last 12 days, Israel has inflicted a bloodbath on the Gaza Strip that matches the darkest days of the Iraq war. Backed to the hilt by the US author of that catastrophe, it has killed more than 650 people in less than a fortnight, including at least 200 children, and wounded three thousand. Yesterday, after killing 50 civilians in UN schools sheltering refugees - "C'est la guerre", the Israeli minister Meir Shitreet told the BBC when asked about the atrocities - the Israeli government agreed a three-hour daily lull in the carnage for "humanitarian purposes", as diplomatic manoeuvring intensified over a possible ceasefire deal. All this at the cost of only 10 Israeli dead, six of them soldiers.

But despite this gruesome demonstration of its overwhelming power, Israel once again faces the threat of political and military failure, just as it did in Lebanon in 2006. After its most pulverising assault ever on the blockaded territory, Hamas remains standing, its administration intact, its rockets reaching ever further into Israel proper. Far from turning the Gazan population against the Islamist movement, the signs are that Israel's onslaught is cementing its support.

From what has emerged so far, the deal touted by President Sarkozy and Egypt would trade a full ceasefire for the opening of Gaza's border crossings - which reflects Hamas's own terms - combined with an international force on the Egyptian border to police arms-smuggling tunnels. So long as that didn't challenge Hamas's authority or involve stationing foreign troops inside Gaza, the Palestinian movement could clearly live with such an arrangement.

The Israeli government yesterday declared it accepted the principles of the plan, while the details had yet to be agreed. But it's hard to see how a deal that could have been struck without war would be seen as anything other than a Hamas victory. And the domestic electoral boost won by Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak as a result of the firestorm they have unleashed would then be lost. That's why the logic of what they have started is likely to push the Israeli government to set impossible conditions, blame Hamas for a breakdown and intensify its onslaught still further.

If Israel's leaders are going to be able to declare the victory they failed to achieve in Lebanon, they can hardly be seen to leave the power and appeal of Hamas intact, let alone strengthened. At the very least, they would want to arrest or kill key Hamas leaders and stage a humiliating parade of captured fighters - combined perhaps with a buffer zone in the north of the strip.

But that would require Israeli troops to take their land invasion into the heart of the strip's cities and refugee camps, at a certain cost of heavy casualties and public support. They would then face the choice of whether to drive Hamas underground and reimpose a full-blown occupation - or face intensified guerrilla war against sitting targets in a security zone, as happened in Lebanon in the 1990s. No wonder Livni and Barak are divided about what to do.

Whichever choice they make, the war is already cutting the ground from beneath Israeli and western policy across the region. Among Palestinians, it is undermining Mahmoud Abbas - whose presidential term runs out tomorrow - and his Fatah movement, while increasing support for Hamas in the West Bank, where US-trained and EU-financed security forces have now arrested hundreds of activists and banned Hamas demonstrations.

It is also strengthening those inside Fatah who want to break with the western-enforced schism between the two wings of Palestinian politics. Hussam Khader, a West Bank "Young Guard" Fatah leader, is one of those now demanding direct unity negotiations with Hamas, and for the Fatah-linked Al-Aqsa Brigades to fight alongside Hamas against Israel's onslaught.

"Israel has made a big mistake," he told me this week, "because Hamas will become stronger and Fatah weaker as a result of the war, even if Israel re-occupies the Gaza Strip." Comparing Hamas's resistance in Gaza to the battle of Karameh that secured Yasser Arafat's leadership of the Palestinians in 1968, Khader predicted: "After this war, Hamas will lead the PLO."

The same trend can be seen in the wider Middle East, where Hamas has won powerful new supporters, including democratic Turkey, while western allies, such as the Egyptian and Saudi dictatorships, have lost more credibility by being seen to have tacitly supported Israel's attempt to crush Hamas at the expense of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Most of those Palestinians are in fact refugees or the families of refugees from the towns of southern Israel, including Ashkelon and Ashdod, which have been targeted by Hamas - and from which they were ethnically cleansed when Israel was established in 1948.

But the bulk of the western media would have us believe that the cause of this war is Hamas's firing of mostly home-made rockets into Israel - which no state could tolerate without retaliation. In this myopic fantasy land, there is no 61-year national dispossession, no refugee camps, no occupations, no siege, no multiple Israeli violations of UN security council resolutions and the Geneva conventions, no illegal wall, no routine assassinations, no prisoners and no West Bank.

Nor would you have much sense that - as Akiva Eldar, the Israeli Ha'aretz columnist, wrote this week - "Gaza is still, practically and according to international law, occupied territory", and part of one political entity with the occupied West Bank. Or that the US, Britain and the EU, while paying lip service to ceasefire calls, prepared the ground for this barbarity with money, arms and diplomatic support as hope of a viable two-state solution has disintegrated before our eyes.

Pressure now has to be brought to bear not only on Israel, but on those governments that support it - including Britain's. That's why the call by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, for an arms embargo on Israel and the suspension of the EU's new cooperation agreement with Israel - the first mainstream party leader to do so - is so significant. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, calls it naive. In reality, the naivety lies in imagining that the west can continue to underwrite the injustice and bloodshed inflicted with no respite on the Palestinian people, without paying a price for it.

 

[Patriot]

Dispatches: The Killing Zone

British report on Israeli violence in Gaza against not only Palestinian civilians, but international aid volunteers and foreign reporters as well.

[video=google;5863204188744026936]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5863204188744026936[/video]
**** Zionists..I don't hate jews but these Zionists scums have to be removed from this planet.

 

[Stumper]

Someone in the thread said "
**** Zionists..I don't hate jews but these Zionists scums have to be removed from this planet."

I really dont know if hate is gonna remove hate. Sounds very easy to say specially since its not one of my own. But still, we as human beings cant go on like this for sure!!!

Thought would share this URL (and im sure there are many more like this)
PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL/SHELLING on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Made me sick. The people in Gaza are living in hell for sure.

 

[Patriot]

Someone in the thread said "
**** Zionists..I don't hate jews but these Zionists scums have to be removed from this planet."

I really dont know if hate is gonna remove hate. Sounds very easy to say specially since its not one of my own. But still, we as human beings cant go on like this for sure!!!

Thought would share this URL (and im sure there are many more like this)
PALESTINIANS-ISRAEL/SHELLING on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Made me sick. The people in Gaza are living in hell for sure.

No doubt about that..It's a hell.Just watch the documentary

 

[idune]

Who will save Israel from itself?

By Mark LeVine

One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling.

The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report titled "Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report," confirmed that the June 19 truce was only "sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by ... "rogue terrorist organisations".

Instead, "the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement" occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day.


According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European University study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with only 8 per cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.

Indeed, the Israeli foreign ministry seems to realise that this argument is losing credibility.

During a conference call with half a dozen pro-Israel professors on Thursday, Asaf Shariv, the Consul General of Israel in New York, focused more on the importance of destroying the intricate tunnel system connecting Gaza to the Sinai.

He claimed that such tunnels were "as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnels," and offered as proof the "fact" that lions and monkeys had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a private zoo.

Israel's self-image

The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.

With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way to diminish civilian casualties - long a centre-piece of Israel's image as an enlightened and moral democracy - is falling apart.

Anyone with an internet connection can Google "Gaza humanitarian catastrophe" and find the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting the reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that preceded it.

The Red Cross, normally scrupulous in its unwillingness to single out parties to a conflict for criticism, sharply criticised Israel for preventing medical personnel from reaching wounded Palestinians, some of whom remained trapped for days, slowly starving and dying in the Gazan rubble amidst their dead relatives.

Meanwhile, the United Nations has flatly denied Israeli claims that Palestinian fighters were using the UNRWA school compound bombed on January 6, in which 40 civilians were killed, to launch attacks, and has challenged Israel to prove otherwise.

War crimes admission
Additionally, numerous flippant remarks by senior Israeli politicians and generals, including Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, refusing to make a distinction between civilian people and institutions and fighters - "Hamas doesn't ... and neither should we" is how Livni puts it - are rightly being seen as admissions of war crimes.

Indeed, in reviewing statements by Israeli military planners leading up to the invasion, it is clear that there was a well thought out decision to go after Gaza's civilian infrastructure - and with it, civilians.

The following quote from an interview with Major-General Gadi Eisenkot that appeared in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in October, is telling:

"We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages] are military bases," he said.

"This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised."

Causing "immense damage and destruction" and considering entire villages "military bases" is absolutely prohibited under international law.

Eisenkot's description of this planning in light of what is now unfolding in Gaza is a clear admission of conspiracy and intent to commit war crimes, and when taken with the comments above, and numerous others, renders any argument by Israel that it has tried to protect civilians and is not engaging in disproportionate force unbelievable.

International laws violated

On the ground, the evidence mounts ever higher that Israel is systematically violating a host of international laws, including but not limited to Article 56 of the IV Hague Convention of 1907, the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention (more specifically known as the "Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949", the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the principles of Customary International Humanitarian Law.

None of this excuses or legitimises the firing of rockets or mortars by any Palestinian group at Israeli civilians and non-military targets.

As Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur, declared in his most recent statement on Gaza: "It should be pointed out unambiguously that there is no legal (or moral) justification for firing rockets at civilian targets, and that such behavior is a violation of IHR, associated with the right to life, as well as constitutes a war crime."

By the same logic, however, Israel does not have the right to use such attacks as an excuse to launch an all-out assault on the entire population of Gaza.

In this context, even Israel's suffering from the constant barrage of rockets is hard to pay due attention to when the numbers of dead and wounded on each side are counted. Any sense of proportion is impossible to sustain with such a calculus.

'Rogue' state

Israeli commentators and scholars, self-described "loyal" Zionists who served proudly in the army in wars past, are now publicly describing their country, in the words of Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim, as a "rogue" and gangster" state led by "completely unscrupulous leaders".


Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, has declared that Israel's actions in Gaza are like "raising animals for slaughter on a farm" and represent a "bizarre new moral element" in warfare.

"The moral voice of restraint has been left behind ... Everything is permitted" against Palestinians, writes a disgusted Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy.

Fellow Haaretz columnist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Amira Haas writes of her late parents disgust at how Israeli leaders justified Israel's wars with a "language laundromat" aimed at redefining reality and Israel's moral compass. "Lucky my parents aren't alive to see this," she exclaimed.

Around the world people are beginning to compare Israel's attack on Gaza, which after the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers was turned literally into the world's largest prison, to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Extremist Muslims are using internet forums to collect names and addresses of prominent European Jews with the goal, it seems clear, of assassinating them in retaliation for Israel's actions in Gaza.

Al-Qaeda is attempting to exploit this crisis to gain a foothold in Gaza and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, as well as through attacking Jewish communities globally.

Iran's defiance of both Israel and its main sponsor, the US, is winning it increasing sympathy with each passing day.

Democratic values eroded

Inside Israel, the violence will continue to erode both democratic values in the Jewish community, and any acceptance of the Jewish state's legitimacy in the eyes of its Palestinian citizens.

And yet in the US - at least in Washington and in the offices of the mainstream Jewish organisations - the chorus of support for Israel's war on Gaza continues to sing in tight harmony with official Israeli policy, seemingly deaf to the fact that they have become so out of tune with the reality exploding around them.

At my university, UCI, where last summer Jewish and Muslim students organised a trip together through the occupied territories and Israel so they could see with their own eyes the realities there, old battle lines are being redrawn.

The Anteaters for Israel, the college pro-Israel group at the University of California, Irvine, sent out an urgent email to the community explaining that, "Over the past week, increasing amounts of evidence lead us to believe that Hamas is largely responsible for any alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza".

I have no idea who the "us" is that is referred to in the appeal, although I am sure that the membership of that group is shrinking.

Indeed, one of the sad facts of this latest tragedy is that with each claim publicly refuted by facts on the ground, more and more Americans, including Jews, are refusing to trust the assertions of Israeli and American Jewish leaders.

Trap

Even worse, in the Arab/Muslim world, the horrific images pouring out of Gaza daily are allowing preachers and politicians to deploy well-worn yet still dangerous and inciteful stereotypes against Jews as they rally the masses against Israel - and through it - their own governments.

What is most frightening is that the most important of Israel's so-called friends, the US political establishment and the mainstream Jewish leadership, seem clueless to the devastating trap that Israel has led itself into - in good measure with their indulgence and even help.

It is one that threatens the country's existence far more than any Qassam rockets, with their 0.4 per cent kill rate; even more than the disastrous 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon, which by weakening Israel's deterrence capability in some measure made this war inevitable.

First, it is clear that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, it cannot stop the rockets unless it agrees to a truce that will go far to meeting the primary demand of Hamas - an end to the siege.

Merely by surviving (and it surely will survive) Hamas, like Hezbollah in 2006, will have won.


Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge.

Second, Israel's main patron, the US, along with the conservative Arab autocracies and monarchies that are its only allies left in the Muslim world, are losing whatever crumbs of legitimacy they still had with their young and angry populations.

The weaker the US and its axis becomes in the Middle East, the more precarious becomes Israel's long-term security. Indeed, any chance that the US could convince the Muslim world to pressure Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons has been buried in Gaza.

Third, as Israel brutalises Palestinians, it brutalises its own people. You cannot occupy another people and engage in violence against them at this scale without doing even greater damage to your soul.

The high incidence of violent crimes committed by veterans returning from combat duty in Iraq is but one example of how the violence of occupation and war eat away at people's moral centre.

While in the US only a small fraction of the population participates in war; in Israel, most able-bodied men end up participating.

The effects of the latest violence perpetrated against Palestinians upon the collective Israeli soul is incalculable; the notion that it can survive as an "ethnocracy" - favouring one ethnic group, Jews, yet by and large democratic - is becoming a fiction.

Violence-as-power

Who will save Israel from herself?

Israelis are clearly incapable. Their addiction as a society to the illusion of violence-as-power has reached the level of collective mental illness.

As Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman described it on January 10, "Israel has created an image of itself of a madman that has lost it".

Not Palestinians, too many of whom have fallen prey to the same condition.

Not the Middle East Quartet, the European Union, the United Nations, or the Arab League, all of whom are utterly powerless to influence Israeli policy.

Not the organised Jewish leadership in the US and Europe, who are even more blind to what is happening than most Israelis, who at least allow internal debate about the wisdom of their government's policies.

Not the growing progressive Jewish community, which will need years to achieve enough social and political power to challenge the status quo.

And not senior American politicians and policy-makers who are either unwilling to risk alienating American Jewish voters, or have been so brainwashed by the constant barrage of propaganda put out by the "Israel Lobby" that they are incapable of reaching an independent judgment about the conflict.

During the US presidential race, Barack Obama was ridiculed for being a messiah-like figure. The idea does not sound so funny now. It is hard to imagine anyone less saving Israel, the Palestinians, and the world from another four years of mindless violence.

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to be published An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.

Al Jazeera English - War on Gaza - Who will save Israel from itself?

 

[thorosius]

U.S. Seeks Ship to Move Unusually Large Amount of Weapons to Israel

January 10th, 2009

Colin Powell, October 2008: "There's going to be a crisis come along on the 21st or 22nd of January that we don't even know about right now."

And now, a freakishly large U.S. arms shipment is due to arrive in Israel in two lots, the first on 25 January and the second by the end of January.

Via: Reuters:

The U.S. is seeking to hire a merchant ship to deliver hundreds of tonnes of arms to Israel from Greece later this month, tender documents seen by Reuters show.

The U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command (MSC) said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as “ammunition” on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January.

A “hazardous material” designation on the manifest mentions explosive substances and detonators, but no other details were given.

“Shipping 3,000-odd tonnes of ammunition in one go is a lot,” one broker said, on condition of anonymity.

“This (kind of request) is pretty rare and we haven’t seen much of it quoted in the market over the years,” he added.

The U.S. Defense Department, contacted by Reuters on Friday in Washington, had no immediate comment.

The MSC transports armour and military supplies for the U.S. armed forces aboard its own fleet, but regularly hires merchant ships if logistics so require.

The request for the ship was made on Dec. 31, with the first leg of the charter to arrive no later than January 25 and the second at the end of the month.

The tender for the vessel follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip.

A German shipping firm which won that tender confirmed the order when contacted by Reuters but declined to comment further.

CHARTERS “RARE”

Shipping brokers in London who have specialised in moving arms for the British and U.S. military in the past said such ship charters to Israel were rare.

Israel is one of America’s closest allies and both nations regularly sell arms to each other.

A senior military analyst in London who declined to be named said that, because of the timing, the shipments could be “irregular” and linked to the Gaza offensive.

The ship hired by the MSC in December was for a much larger cargo of arms, tender documents showed.

That stipulated a ship to be chartered for 42 days capable of carrying 989 standard 20-foot containers from Sunny Point, North Carolina to Ashdod.

The tender document said the vessel had to be capable of “carrying 5.8 million pounds (2.6 million kg) of net explosive weight”, which specialist brokers said was a very large quantity.

The ship was requested early last month to load on December 15.

In September, the U.S. Congress aproved the sale of 1,000 bunker-buster missiles to Israel. The GPS-guided GBU-39 is said to be one of the most accurate bombs in the world.

The Jerusalem Post, citing defence officials, reported last week that a first shipment of the missiles had arrived in early December and they were used in pentetrating Hamas’s underground rocket launcher sites.

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[Cheeta]

While the Arabs are seeking larger amounts of joy making instruments to the peninsula. Shame for them and the Muslim nation in general.
Qazzafi being a former high class socialist had made a call to the Arabs of the immediate neighbourhood of Palestine to start fight back or send irregular volunteer guerillas to the battle spot but he was put a deaf ear to day before yesterday. Today the Iranian President has also called the Muslim countries around Israel to fight back but it seems that unless and untill the city of Riadh is not bombed the sleeping man with the big name of Khadimul Harmein will not make its caterpillar like move out of the cushion.