from Crikey …..

The Gaza Strip: Arabs don't count

Jeff Sparrow writes:

Here’s a headline from Israel Today that you didn’t see in many local papers: ‘US, Australia back Gaza strike; rest of the world doesn't.’

Yes, another Coalition of the Willing has been assembled and, yes, once again we’ve enrolled in its lonely ranks.

The Australian army won’t, of course, see action in Gaza but then the service John Howard provided for George Bush was always far more political than military. Australian support added a veneer of legitimacy to Bush’s illegal invasion – and, as the Israeli press notes, that’s the part Gillard’s playing now.

In fact, with most of the world erupting in anti-war demonstrations, if you close your eyes, it might be 2003 all over again.

The attack on Gaza began with what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz inevitably described as ‘shock and awe’. Once more, we were told that high-tech wonder weapons would surgically separate the belligerents from the combatants. Once more, this proved utter nonsense. Despite Israel’s exclusion of foreign journalists from Gaza, we know that the IDF has attacked a university, a school, a mosque, many civilian police stations, a television station, the Palestinian parliament, the ministry of education, the ministry of housing, and the ministry of foreign affairs.

As with Iraq, the military campaign follows a crippling regime of sanctions, the effects of which were largely ignored by the Western press. Famously, in 1996, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when confronted by the figure of half million Iraqi children dead because of the blockade, responded: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it." The Israelis arrived at the same calculation about Gaza where, even before the attacks, Palestinians were suffering from malnutrition. As to their state now, well, you can either believe Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (there is, she says, "no humanitarian crisis in Gaza") or Amnesty International ("The health sector in Gaza lacks equipment, medicine and expertise at the best of times and has been further depleted due to the prolonged Israeli blockade. It is now completely overwhelmed and unable to cope with the large number of casualties.")

The conventional narrative about Gaza holds that Hamas provoked the crisis, flouting a ceasefire and increasing its rocket launches in early December. Like the dog-and-pony show about Iraqi WMDs, this is entirely misleading. As Jeremy Hammond notes, in reality, the ceasefire actually came to an end on 4 November because, with the media’s attention focused on the US elections, Israel launched an airstrike into Gaza that killed five Palestinians.

Perhaps more importantly, though it’s rarely acknowledged in the Western media, for some time now Hamas has indicated that it would accept a two-state solution. In April this year, MSNBC reported the following:

The leader of Hamas said Monday that his Palestinian militant group would offer Israel a 10-year “hudna,” or truce, as implicit proof of recognition of Israel if it withdrew from all lands it seized in the 1967 Middle East War.

Khaled Mashaal told The Associated Press that he made the offer to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in talks on Saturday. “We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10 years as a proof of recognition,” Mashaal said.

In his comments Monday, Mashaal used the Arabic word “hudna,” meaning truce, which is more concrete than “tahdiya” - a period of calm - which Hamas often uses to describe a simple cease-fire. “Hudna” implies a recognition of the other party’s existence.

As recently as 23 December, Hamas was still making similar offers.

Hamas would consider renewing a lapsed truce with Israel in the Gaza Strip, but wants guarantees the Jewish state will halt incursions and keep border crossings open for supplies of aid and fuel, a spokesman said today.

One doesn’t have to admire Hamas’ political philosophy or strategic orientation to recognize that it’s not an amorphous expression of innate evil, firing missiles at Israel just for the hell of it. Given that the blockade of Gaza has been condemned by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and just about every reputable human rights organisation in the world, Hamas’ insistence on the opening of the border as a precondition of peace seems entirely reasonable. But, in 2003, we were told that Saddam refused admission to weapons inspectors (when in fact they were withdrawn by Richard Butler), and today we hear constantly that Hamas that makes negotiations impossible.

There’s a final comparison between Iraq and Gaza, and it’s even more important. More than anything, the invasion of Iraq re-accustomed the Western world to colonial violence on a massive scale, not simply because it resulted in the deaths of perhaps a million people but also because the day-to-day business of an occupation necessarily normalizes brutality, with Abu Ghraib merely the most overt example. Defending the indefensible in Iraq steeled a generation of apologists to accept a hitherto unthinkable level of cruelty – so long as it was inflicted on Arabs.

Today, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald draws attention to Michael Goldfarb, the editor of the Weekly Standard (an American version of Quadrant), writing about Israel’s assassination of a Hamas leader.

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it's not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man's entire family, it's hard to imagine that doesn't give his colleagues at least a moment's pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.

 

In September, President Bush lectured the United Nations on terrorism. "No cause," he said, "can justify the deliberate taking of innocent human life". The naïve might think that killing little children fits his description exactly, even if their father belongs to Hamas. But that would be to miss the point.

What the world learned from Iraq is that Arabs don’t count. And that’s what we’re seeing again in Gaza.

This report documents the widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force. It contains the testimonies of 33 children who bear witness to the abuse they received at the hands of soldiers from the moment of arrest through to an often violent interrogation.

Children report being painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand. The report finds that these illegally obtained confessions are routinely used as evidence in the military courts to convict around 700 Palestinian children every year.

Once sentenced, the children who gave these testimonies were mostly imprisoned inside Israel in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention where they receive few family visits, and little or no education.

The report concludes that this widespread and systematic abuse is occurring within a general culture of impunity where in 600 complaints made against Israeli Security Agency interrogators for alleged ill-treatment and torture, not a single criminal investigation was ever conducted.

The report also contains recent recommendations made by the UN Committee against Torture which expressed 'deep concern' at reports of the abuse of Palestinian children when it reviewed Israel's compliance with the Convention against Torture in May 2009.

http://www.dci-pal.org/english/publ/research/CPReport.pdf

from Crikey .....

dear mum: email from an Israeli prison cell

Sarah Haynes, a volunteer with Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, recently wrote this group email to her friends and family in Australia:

From: Sarah Haynes

Date: 2009/7/28

Subject: Not all tours end in arrest - but mine did.

To:

I am volunteering with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). This is an Israeli human rights group with a focus on house demolitions both in solidarity with the Palestinians who suffer the devastation of losing their home, but also to debunk the Israeli myths about actions based on security: Destroying peoples homes can have no security justification -- instead it is a tool in what the convener of the group, Jeff Halper, describes as the "matrix of control".

For a detailed account of the strategy of settlement, this article by ICAHD is pretty exhaustive.

As I mentioned in an earlier email there is a hotly contested area in East Jerusalem called Sheihk Jarrah -- it has even made it on to Obama's radar, with specific mention. There is a group of fanatical setters who want to create a new settlement complex in this neighbourhood, which means first expelling all the Palestinian residents, taking over their homes, then eventually razing the area for this new settlement.

Everytime settlers move into a neighbourhood means the Army also moves in to protect them, Palestinians are restricted from moving in the area, and the flavour of the neighbourhood of course changes. This is already a heartbreaking situation for Palestinians whose national aspirations both depend on East Jerusalem as capital for any future economically viable state, but also whose very cultural desire is tied up in this city.

The other point is that every home taken away from Palestinians is one less home available for Palestinians -- not just in that neighbourhood, but in toto. They do not have the option to buy somewhere else in Jerusalem or Israel so they become homeless, or squish in with over-crowded relatives. In some cases, as per the policy design, they will give up their Jerusalem residency and privileges and job opportunities, and instead move to the West Bank. As my Israeli tour guide said yesterday, "we politely make it impossible for them to live here".

So. As the tour was almost finished, we got a message that settlers were in the process of occupying a home in this neighbourhood, which we were just about to pass. We jumped off and proceeded to the house (with a little difficulty as the neighbourhood, unlike the new settlements, is still somewhat like a refugee camp and does not really have addresses).

The home in question is claimed to have been bought by American bingo centre millionaire Irwin Moskowitz, who is integral to the fanatical settler movement (see this article by Israeli peace group Gush Shalom). The sale is disputed by the locals who have a court case pending. This means the settlers should not take any action until the court has made a ruling on the "sale", but they have tried to move in on several occasions since the legally protected woman living there died recently.

This time they had turned up with the police and when we got there they were already taking to the house with sledge hammers, and putting up a tin fence (not actually demolishing, apparently just renovating). Neighbours watched helplessly. The police are notorious for helping the settlers, and often pretend not to know about court orders until they are presented with a new emergency injunction when a demolition has already started -- then they declare the house structurally unsafe and the demolition continues on this new logic!

This was the first time I had observed a demolition, and it really made me so sad. I could feel my heart in my chest, and the tightness of my throat. I wanted to cry with the Palestinians watching the process from the sidelines.

...six of us from ICAHD and ISM (International Solidarity Movement) sat down at the front of the alley way and linked arms to block the path of a small earth mover. After about 20 minutes the police told us to move, we didn't move, so they bodily removed us one at a time. They were very efficient. Five of us were put in a police van and taken to the station (four internationals, one Israeli).

So far, pretty normal Israeli police response to non-violent action here. We expected to be held for a couple of hours and then released on condition not to return to the area for a few weeks. A lawyer paid by the Rabbis for Human Rights arrived and began negotiating for our release.

Three more ISM activists arrived. They had been arrested two hours after us for taking photos. They had walked into the area without being stopped, took some photos, the settlers told them not to, they asked why, the police told them not to, they asked why, the police told to leave, they started to leave, they were arrested.

Meanwhile we were separated and interrogated. Some people got good cop, some got bad cop. Israeli girl of course got a major grilling, told she has ruined her life with an arrest, asked why she is a self-hating Jew etc etc. She has to go through a similar spiel with pretty much every single cop, guard, driver, gaol officer, and paper-work processor we encounter, and then again after shift change. Some just ranted at her, several actually seemed to listen to her perspective.