Horror on Gaza Beach
DEMOCRACY NOW! Had The Best Roundup here
Meanwhile, in the US, the Obama administration and the Congress
have piled on. . .in support of the slaughter and to back Israel’s aims in the
current hostilities.
Obama Endorses Israel’s Gaza
Assault at White House “Iftar”
At the annual White House
Iftar dinner commemorating the Muslim holiday of Ramadan, President Barack
Obama endorsed Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip and defended
government spying on Muslim-Americans. Alongside dozens of Muslim-American
community activists and Muslim diplomats, the White House welcomed Israeli
Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, an outspoken advocate of Israel's settlement
enterprise who has claimed Muslim and Arab culture is endemically violent.
More
Senate passes resolution in
support of Israel
The Senate passed a
resolution expressing support for Israel on the same night the country launched
a ground offensive into the Gaza Strip. Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.)
and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) authored S.Res. 498, which reaffirms Senate support
for Israel, condemns unprovoked rocket fire and calls on Hamas to stop all rocket
attacks on Israel. “The United States Senate is in Israel’s camp,” Graham said
on the Senate floor Thursday. Passage of the resolution came moments after
Israel announced
that it launched a ground offensive into the Gaza Strip, following a week of
heavy rocket attacks from Hamas forces. More
Senator Elizabeth Warren was anxious to avoid
responding to a question about Gaza.
The House
and Senate
resolutions, which were undoubtedly written by AIPAC,
make no mention of casualties in Gaza, call the rockets “an unprovoked attack”
and also demand that the Palestinian Authority dissolve its unity
agreement with Hamas.
Gaza: this shameful injustice will only end if the cost of it
rises
For the third time in five years, the world’s fourth largest
military power has launched a full-scale armed onslaught on one of its most
deprived and overcrowded territories. Since Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza
Strip began, just over a week ago, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed.
Nearly
80% of the dead are civilians, over 20% of them children. Around 1,400 have
been wounded and 1,255 Palestinian homes destroyed. So far, Palestinian fire
has killed one Israeli on the other side of the barrier that makes blockaded
Gaza the world’s largest open-air prison. But instead of demanding a halt to
Israel’s campaign of collective punishment against what is still illegally
occupied territory, the western powers have blamed the victims for fighting
back. If it weren’t for Hamas’s rockets fired out of Gaza’s giant holding pen,
they insist, all of this bloodletting would end. More
We single Israel out because we in the west are shamefully
complicit in its crimes
For its many supporters in the west, Israel is being unfairly
singled out for criticism… Why pick on plucky Israel? What about the Chinas,
Russias, Syrias, Saudi Arabias, Irans, Sudans and Burmas? Where are the
protests against Isis, Boko Haram or the Pakistani Taliban? … Israel
is “singled out” today, but by its friends and not just by its enemies.
It has been singled out for unparalleled support – financial,
military, diplomatic – by the western powers. It is indeed, to quote Ben-Ami, a
“special case”. Which other country is in receipt of $3bn a year in US aid,
despite maintaining a 47-year military occupation in violation of international
law? Which other country has been allowed to develop and stockpile nuclear
weapons in secret? More
THE
CURRENT FIGHTING IN SOME HISTORICAL CONTEXT
“CUTTING THE GRASS” is a racist term used
by the Israeli security establishment as a way to “manage” Palestinian
resistance by periodically launching limited attacks on Gaza to degrade to
ability of Hamas and other armed factions to confront the occupation of their
land. It is a strategy for limiting, rather than ending the conflict. Short
VIDEO here
GAZA
is the size of heavily urban Suffolk County – but at 1.8 million inhabitants
almost three times as densely populated. With all its borders closed, there is
literally nowhere for people to escape or hide from the bombing.
Compared to the intermittent firing of small-caliber mortars and
mostly home-made rockets from Gaza, since 2006 there have been almost
continuous Israeli attacks and assassinations against political and civilian
leaders in Gaza. There have been thousands killed in Gaza and tens of thousands
wounded or displaced from their homes. During the same period, the best estimate
is that 27 Israelis have died since 2004 in rocket attacks launched from Gaza.
(In 2012 alone, 263 Israelis died in traffic accidents).
Gaza continues to be legally occupied territory:
While Israel has argued that it ceased occupying Gaza in 2005 when
it unilaterally redeployed its troops outside of Gaza and withdrew its settlers
from Gaza, Gaza continues to be occupied in accordance with international law
and in the views of the international community, including the U.S.[i], the EU, and the U.N.[ii]. Israel’s continued responsibility as the occupying power in
Gaza results from several factors. First, Israel continues to exert
effective control over Gaza including control of the borders, airspace,
waterways, population registry, currency, the movement of people, trade,
electrical supply, water supply, and more. Second, Israel maintains and exerts
a right to conduct regular military operations in Gaza, giving it effective
military control over the territory. Under
international law[iii], effective control is the key measures of occupation. More
Since 2005, when Israel decided to remove its settlers and troops
from inside Gaza, in order to maintain its siege from outside and strengthen
its colonization of the West Bank, there have been almost continuous restrictions
on the entry of food and other humanitarian necessities. Israeli
politicians joked,
in the infamous words of Dov Weissglass, chief aide to former Israeli President
Ariel Sharon: “the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to
make them die of hunger… It's like an appointment with a dietician. The
Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die…"
Israel’s Incremental Genocide in
the Gaza Ghetto
The present genocidal wave
has, like all the previous ones, also a more immediate background. It has been
born out of an attempt to foil the Palestinian decision to form a unity
government [4] that even the United States could not object to… Ever
since June 1967, Israel searched for a way to keep the territories it occupied
that year without incorporating their indigenous Palestinian population into
its rights-bearing citizenry. All the while it participated in a “peace
process” charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral colonization
policies on the ground. With the decades, Israel differentiated between
areas it wished to control directly and those it would manage indirectly, with
the aim in the long run of downsizing the Palestinian population to a minimum
with, among other means, ethnic cleansing and economic and geographic
strangulation. More
Israel controls two out of three sides of Gaza on the land and its
naval patrols maintain a sea blockade; Israel’s (and US) ally Egypt keeps the
third land side mostly closed and in any case honors the agreement with Israel
to limit Rafah access to foot traffic alone. So all goods coming in and
out of Gaza are controlled by Israel.
Compared to the intermittent firing of small-caliber mortars and
mostly home-made rockets from Gaza, since 2006, there have been almost
continuous Israeli attacks and assassinations against political and civilian
leaders in Gaza, with concomitant “collateral damage” killing hundreds of
others.
Periodically,
Israel launched heavier attacks resulting in even higher casualties, the
majority civilian in all cases. Notice the consistent and obscene Israeli
terminology in naming its attacks:
June 2014 – Protective Edge: 265 killed and
counting
November 2012 – Pillar of Defense: killing 168
Palestinians and destroying hundreds of homes
December 2008 – Cast Lead: More than 1,400 Palestinians, the
majority of them civilians, were killed and over 16,000 Gazans were permanently
displaced from their homes which were destroyed during the attack.
February 2008 – Warm Winter: killed 120 (34
children) and injured 269 (at least 63 children)
June 2006 – Summer Rains/Autumn Clouds: at least 351
Palestinians dead and 848 injured
February 2006 – Lightning Strike
September 2005 – First Rain
October 2004 – Days of Penitence: 130 killed, hundreds
wounded
May, 2004 -- Operation Rainbow: at least 43 killed,
hundreds wounded.
Whenever a temporary truce was negotiated (and scrupulously
maintained by Hamas), the pattern has been for Israel to renege on the terms
and break the ceasefire with fresh attacks when it deemed them useful.
And contrary to the Israeli claims that this was “to protect its citizens,” the
pattern reveals that the most dangerous time for Israeli civilians is when
Israel is launching an attack on Gaza.
Reigniting Violence:
How Do Ceasefires End?
…we found that this pattern -- in which
Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause --
becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods
of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24,
or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence
lasting longer than 9 days… Thus, a
systematic pattern does exist: it is overwhelmingly Israel, not Palestine, that
kills first following a lull. Indeed, it is virtually always Israel that kills
first after a lull lasting more than a week. More
A Tale of Two Ceasefires
Egypt, acting as the United States normally does, worked out the
details of its ceasefire idea primarily with Israel. The deal
reflects the Israeli and Egyptian agenda: it mostly follows the formula of
“quiet for quiet,” essentially bringing back the status quo ante of early June.
It offers Hamas a vague promise of future negotiations to address the siege of
the Gaza Strip. But this is hardly something Hamas will put stock in. The 2012
ceasefire agreement, which was negotiated by then-Egyptian President
Mohamed Morsi, a man much friendlier to Hamas than the current Egyptian
leadership, also made such a promise and it never came to anything. Finally,
Egypt says it is willing to open the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and
Egypt more widely but only if Hamas allows Palestinian Authority security
to police it instead of their own people. It’s not hard to see why
Hamas viewed that offer, and its exclusion from the talks, more like a
call to surrender than a ceasefire… Hamas recently confirmed its
terms for a ceasefire: Israel should lift the siege it
has imposed on the strip for the last seven years, and release all the
prisoners it arrested last month during its sweep of the West Bank
while the Netanyahu government was keeping the Israeli public and the
world from immediately finding out that the three youths who
were ostensibly being searching for were
already dead. In exchange, Hamas would agree to a ceasefire. More
