Massive Protests in London, Barcelona
Some videoblogging for a snowy Sunday (where I am).
Israel renewed its strikes and shelling against targets in densely-populated Gaza on Sunday morning. Some 850 Gazans and 13 Israelis have been killed in the fighting.
Cameraman films death of younger brother (CNN). Warning: graphic:
Cont'd
Aljazeera English gives voice to the children and other innocent victimes of the Israeli attack on Gaza. (Graphic).
There was a little-covered demonstration in Washington DC that addressed president-elect Obama and asked for a change in policy.
A protest culture around Gaza is growing up in the West of some sophistication, as exemplified in this professional and touching performance by musician Michael Heart :
A wave of street protests swept Europe and the Middle East on Saturday. Personally, I don't think these events are very effective, though they can help with networking and social solidarity. They won't cause significant changes in Israeli policy. Setting up an effective counter to the Israel and military-industrial lobbies on Capitol Hill, now that would make a big difference.
Still, the scale of the protests is breathtaking.
100,000 protesters came out in London on Sunday against Israel's war on the civilians of Gaza.
About 20,000 protested in front of the Israeli embassy, and some elements of that crowd became unruly, as this video from ITN explains:
BBC has video of how things went bad in that particular section of the event.. The announcer noticed British Jews and even expatriate Israelis at the rally, who joined in disgust at what the Israeli government is doing.
Singer Annie Lennox was among the speakers on Saturday:
She called what is happening a genocide. If one thinks of genocide as large numbers of people being killed, as in Rwanda or Cambodia, then her terminology seems exaggerated. But a case could be made that she used the right word.
Contemporary international legal thinking on genocide does consider destroying the lifeways of a people to be in this category. Here is the UN definition:' In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part . . . '
That what the Israeli government is doing is intended to destroy in part the Palestinians as an independent people seems to me incontestable.
Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz considered what Saddam Hussein did to the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq in draining their swamps and expelling them to slums around Basra and Amara to be one of the reasons an Iraq War needed to be fought. I can't see any particular difference between what Saddam did to the Marsh Arabs and what Israel did to the Palestinians who became refugees in Gaza and who are now under bombardment again.
At our Global Affairs blog, see the columns on Gaza by Dick Norton and Farideh Farhi; Farhi's is "Israel, Gaza War, Return of “Emboldened Iran,” and Obama."
Jean-Baptiste Gallopin argues in a French op-ed for Liberation that the Israelis are destroying the civic infrastructure of Gaza, including police stations and municipal buildings, that will ensure that chaos reigns when Israeli troops withdraw. He is right. None of us can understand why a country would want to create chaos right on its borders.
Prominent British Jews are calling for a ceasefire.
David Rose has discovered documents demonstrating that the summer, 2007 break of Fatah with Hamas was orchestrated by the Bush administration after the two had finally achieved a national unity government that January. The plan was later doctored to make it look like it was all coming from Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas.
For other takes on Gaza see Helena Cobban, Marc Lynch, and Joshua Landis, among others (see my Friends and Interlocutors on the right).
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Oooops, this part of the first draft of the posting was an older video coming out of an operation in Bethlehem. Sorry for the error.
CBC reports on Israeli military killing of civilians with Israeli army footage that Israeli television leaked. It shows the killing of a mother of two. There is touching footage of a young girl trying not to show the enemy her tears. Israeli soldiers appear to have delayed an ambulance from coming in time to save her. One of the Israeli soldiers says "I don't know what we are doing here. Purification maybe. It's dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy should be here so far from his home."
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/11/2009 12:00:00 PM
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26 Comments:
The 'civilized world' is watching a brutal and violent action purportedly being done for the sake of peace.
There is something very, very wrong with this picture
"None of us can understand why a country would want to create chaos right on its borders."
Incomprehensible only if one thinks of the leaders as thinking, responsible adults.
Remove the thinking part, say, by appeals only to emotion and self-serving pseudo-logical mantras, then one is left with only responsible adults.
Remove the responsible part with frequent and persistent maneuvers that always shift blame onto the Palestinians, then one is left without responsible adults.
The result is the same as one would expect of a middle school gang - violent, destructive, unrepentant.
Now, factor in a protector such as the US. Finally, just for laughs, repeat the mantra - "No one has the right to criticize (this gang)."
"Still, the scale of the protests is breathtaking."
Somebody once said, "Quantity has a quality all its own." Mao Tse-tung, I think.
"You can't fool all the people all the time." - Abraham Lincoln said that.
"A pogrom is a pogrom is a pogrom." - I said that, just now.
"You can't hold the moral high ground when you're slogging through the sewer." - I said that, too. Just now. Yup.
Israel's atrocities go unpunished. Imagine having mass murderers in your town being supported by the police and local government. Why would they stop?
The western media are very careful not to interview the "kill the Arabs, kill the Arabs" types but these are the majority in this savage nation (collectivety, while one must acknowledge the small minority of decent jews.)
They get to freely practice their sadism and racial hatred; are rewarded by allowing them to steal other peoples' land and water and using them as cheap labor. Can you blame them? American values for sure.
Note the Israelis absolute sense of superiority and arrogance. No human connection between these soldiers and politicians with the people whose lives they so totally dominate.
Thank you for posting this. The little girl and her brother--their dignity despite the terrible situation--brought tears to my eyes. Thank you, too, for your wonderful blog.
Yep, Barcelona too. 100,000 of us.
Here's some photos:
http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia/barcelona-mes-100.000-manifestants-solidaritat-amb-palestina-i-contra-
And some video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AklnyrPm5jg&eurl=http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia/barcelona-mes-100.000-manifestants-solidaritat-amb-palestina-i-contra-
Luis, in Spain
Dear Professor Cole,
I want to personally thank you for your enlightened articles and posts regarding the genocide in Gaza. Ahmad Sadri forwarded them to me. I have sent the links to your articles and posts to students, friends and foes alike. You have made it easy for me to defend the Palestinian cause. Thank you,thank you, thank you....
If only we had more people like you.
I am an Iranian-American living in France who opposes the regime in Iran and has a great affinity for the Palestinian people and their cause. Here is an article I recently wrote regarding GAZA:
http://www.iranian.com/main/2008/audacious-militarism
and one on Iranian racism and some Iranians reaction to Gaza:
http://www.iranian.com/main/2009/jan/feeling-superior
Again Many Thanks,
Setareh Sabety
Sabety60@yahoo.com
Pardon me if this is a repeat, but I'm getting weird errors from Blogger, so I'll resubmit once.
Jean-Baptiste Gallopin argues in a French op-ed for Liberation that the Israelis are destroying the civic infrastructure of Gaza, including police stations and municipal buildings, that will ensure that chaos reigns when Israeli troops withdraw. He is right. None of us can understand why a country would want to create chaos right on its borders.
**************
I have to disagree with you Pr. Cole, here, depending on how the term "country" is used.
First, this seems to me to be the exact same game that Israel played before when it attacked and destroyed Fatah "security forces" and police, and then complained of Fatah's inability to crack down on Hamas and other militants.
I don't think the Israeli political establishment gives much of a damn at all about the potential threat of chaos for Israeli civilians in the South.
The political establishment's goal is to destroy any moderate opposition such that all that remains are easy to dismiss extremists and militants.
This is not some sort of 'conspiracy' theory, it's simple straightforward logic if you buy in to the last couple of generations' worth of crazy Israeli militarist obsessions with using force to destroy your moderate opposition.
And it's "effective" too, in terms of perpetually delaying some negotiated settlement.
In the same way, none of the Bush Jr. administration and the neo-Khan ideologues cared what harm Americans would suffer from the chaos caused by the Iraq invasion, either.
These types just don't give a damn, not about our lives, not about Palestinian lives, not about Israeli lives, just their lives and careers and ideologies.
Juan, this videotape is old. Months, maybe years old. I've seen it before.
Clarification: It's the first video that's old, the one leaked by Israeli TV. Why was it leaked? Maybe because what it documents is not as bad as what is actually happening now.
In retrospect, the timing of the Congressional Green Light to Hamas is breathtakingly cynical (as a move to counter the UN resolution).
Protests, large and small, are essential. The problem is that a lot of folks seem to think action starts and stops there. Action needs to take a lot of forms. and one of the most important is lobbying - you sure as hell are right about that. We need to support alternative voices in DC. But that doesn't mean protests are less important. it's a way of making them MORE effective, more important.
Someone pointed out here at IC that the Gaza shock-war news is stuck on Israel's legal right to 'self defense'. As if that is an unlimited mandate. As if a homicide of innocents in this country is washed clean by arguments that someone felt threatened. Feeling threatened is not enough to justify wholesale destruction of schools and homes occupied by Gazans.
Nuclear Israel's right to defend against the actual and attempted Hamas missile murders has to be scaled and measured against the size of the threat, and the effect of hundreds of bystander homicides committted in the Gaza bombing. The bombing can't be re-justified by necessity of IDF force protection, Jewish reservists that have suffered more casualties from Israeli fire than from Arabs who are fighting a defensive battle, Moslem lending credibility to the Hamas banner.
The mostly symbolic threat represented by tiny Hamas against nuclear missile and blitzkrieg capable Israel increases, INCREASES, when 10 Arab children are shredded for every Jewish child threatened. Israel may be winning the infowar in the US, but Turks, Persians and Arabs don't watch Katie Couric.
Given the geometry, that the very real horror of mangled Arab children on Jazeera TV will strengthen their enemies, Israel is not fighting for security of it's citizens. It is fighting for a renewed lease on land taken by arms in '67, and for jewish-right votes the next election.
As 'Werkshop' suggests above, are US politicians and commercial news producers any less cynical than Likud or Hamas?
I just had to turn off the ABC 'Sunday Morning with Stephanopoulis' show.
Obama was the featured interview. The new admin. is coming into office with VP Biden 'the mensch', and 'anything for Isreal' SecState Clinton who was schooled by hawkish Madeleine Albright. That's who we will be paying to filter ME policy ops to Obama.
The Roundtable discussion guests were neo-Newt Gingrich, opposite Tom Friedman. Gingrich likened 'them' to Nazis that had no right to exist, period, and no one challenged that. I once respected the young Friedman, for pointing out how his eyewitness accounts of 'indescriminate Isreali shelling of Beruit' would get edited out by the NY Times. Tom passed for reasonable next to Newt, but he hasn't seen Arab cities demolished by Israeli arms in some time.
The real threat to the likes of Olmert or Netanyahu was the logic of Rabin. That is, peace is the desired product, the measure of military security policy. PM Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish citizen who valued Arab land over Israeli peace.
Nuclear Israel is equally well armed in the battle for US pubic opinion. US politics and newsbiz are currently configured to rain shock and awe destruction, to banish anyone who breaks ranks. Team Obama is not likely to commit political suicide, by dithering over support for disproportional homicide in Gaza.
Prof Cole's Peace Lobby initiative recognizes that it will take a long campaign from outside government and network news, to change the question from how to guarantee perpetual Israeli supremacy, to one of movement towards equal human rights for all in Palestine. That is a discussion that Irsael First advocates will try to avoid with every tactic available to them.
For balance, will you also post pictured of the non-violent pro-Israeli rallies taking place today?
If you need pictures, you can get them at the following link:
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/
The pro-Israeli rallies have no reports of violence, no looting, no thugs shouting for the death of another race of humanity...all in all a civilized affair.
"The pro-Israeli rallies have no reports of violence, no looting, no thugs shouting for the death of another race of humanity...all in all a civilized affair."
If you consider support for mass murder a "civilized affair."
- Rodolfo
"None of us can understand why a country would want to create chaos right on its borders."-
That is true, if you perceive it as a border. "Why create chaos among another groups vying for power over the same area?", is a more accurate questions.
A food for thought or a technical solution for the Kassam rockets that was available all along and the Israeli MoD refused even to test:
The Phalanx/CIWS system based on the M61 Vulcan autocanon may be a good solution for Kassam rockets and mortar shells.
* The Kassam rockets are homemade artillery rockets propelled by a mixture of sugar and the chemical fertilizer potassium nitrate. Diameter is 6-17cm, length 79-200cm, overall weight 5.5-200kg, explosive payload 0.5-10kg, range 3-10km. There is no guidance system and no stabilization spin. The alert to impact time is 15-45 seconds, suggesting a longer flight time. New models have ranges up to about 40km and their specifications are probably different from those given above.
* The official solution is the developing Iron Dome missile system. Each interceptor is said to cost more than $50,000. Response time is said to be about half a minute, more than the flight time of the shorter range Kassams attacking the town of Shderot.
* CIWS effective range is 1-5 nautical miles, i.e. max range is 9km. About 10 units would cover the 40km + 10km front nicely. Since each system costs 15M USD a full deployment is supposed to cost 150M USD.
* Mean time between jams or failures is in excess of 10,000 rounds. With a firing rate of 50-75 rounds/second we get 133-200 seconds of continuous firing until maintenance.
* Maximum burst size is said to be 1000 rounds, probably much more than is needed for interception. The magazine drum holds enough ammunition for 20s (Block 0), 31s (Block 1) and 20.6s (Block 1A and newer).
* A land based version of CIWS was tested by the US as a Counter-Rocket, Artillery, Mortar (C-RAM) system. Global Security talking about C-RAM systems in general says tests showed a 60-70% shoot-down capability.
* CIWS is the core of the C-RAM system selected by the US. It seems such systems are deployed by the US and UK in Iraq under a October 2005 Northrop Grumman $38 million contract at 8 forward operating bases. These bases include the Green Zone and Camp Victory in Baghdad and Logistics Support Area Anaconda in Balad. The British Army also uses such a system in southern Iraq
* The C-RAM system uses High-Explosive Incendiary Tracer, Self-Destruct (HEIT-SD) ammunition that explode on impact with the target, or upon tracer burnout. This seems to solve the problem of collateral damage. Anyway, being a basically defensive system collateral damage may be viewed leniently or even considered acceptable retaliatory. An Israeli expert thinks that most shells will overshoot anyway and land in the sea.
* The CIWS array may have to be used for only one interception every few days. The other side constantly offers a ceasefire and when these are in effect the Kassam/mortar firing rate drops to the said level, supposedly because of incomplete control over the launching crews.
Main sources were "Global Security":http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/cram.htm and Wikipedia, see the "Qassam_rocket", "Phalanx_CIWS", "Counter-RAM" entries.
We need to get the facts straight. No one has condemned Hamas for breaking the truce and firing rockets on Israel. This is sad that the world would turn a blind eye to Israel fate and side with a terrorist group. A country has every right to defend itself against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. The charter of Hamas calls for the complete annihilation of Israel.
The US has been completely subservient to Israel for decades, to the point even of covering-up a deliberate attack by the Israeli air force on the USS Liberty in 1967. There is apparently no war crime that Israel can commit that the USG will not tolerate. I am a political scientist and diplomat, and I am unable to understand this. It surely cannot just be the money from AIPAC.
How to stop this madness? The Democrats have been as bad as the Republicans. In nine days we will find out if anything changes...but the return of Dennis Ross already suggests the answer.
Do you know how many spooks read your analysis and agree 100%?
We work in high levels of government - from various agencies.
You are a patriot Sir and we salute you.
I'm struck by the reference in the video to "any war", as if this were "any war". Like Iraq, it is a war of choice - for Israel - so this tragedy, the death of the two boys playing on the roof, is not just some impersonal affect of "any war".
Paul Street, in an article on Znet, points out that the NYT has an article about sveral civilians killed in anexplosion, which refers to them having been killed by a tank shell, as if somehow the shell itself was responsible for what happened, not those who shot the shell, not those who directed those who shot the shell.
There seem to be a thousand ways that war propagandizers in the media have for suggesting, implying, that somehow the attack on Gaza wasn't a choice.
Life must go on in Gaza and Sderot
Scenes from the Gaza Strip
In the US, Gaza is a different war
Propaganda war: trusting what we see?
Aaarrrrgh!
Every so often, the IDF goes on the offensive and kills a number of Palestinians, regrettably mostly civilians. There is an outcry. The EU protests. The UN High Commissioner on Human Rights protests. The Red Crescent protests. The Israeli ambassador tells Congress that "Israeli has the right to defend itself." The Quartet offers a peace plan that requires Hamas to admit guilt, Israel says it is doing all it can for peace, the media praises Israel and demonizes Hamas, and we all forget that Israel starved Gaza for a year (starving 1000s to death) before Hamas kidnapped one IDF soldier, but Israel is still praised for its restraint. Then, everything settles down and Israel proceeds to starve Palestinians for a year until the next time they want to engage in their bloodsport.
Protests help to get public attention on the IDF problem, but only effective action (Cole says to neuter AIPAC, I say to boycott Israel) will stop the IDF bloodsport.
The wingnuts, (Michelle Malkin and her ilk) are calling this footage fake.
Anonymous said...
We need to get the facts straight.
Let's examine these facts.
No one has condemned Hamas for breaking the truce and firing rockets on Israel.
Simply not true, unless one considers Jimmy Carter to be 'no one.'
This is sad that the world would turn a blind eye to Israel fate and side with a terrorist group.
Which doesn't explain why the world continues to support Israel in the face of its creeping genocide of the Palestinian people.
A country has every right to defend itself against all enemies, both foreign and domestic.
We aren't talking about self defense, but we are talking about disproportionate response (a euphemism for state brutality) and collective punishment, a war crime.
The charter of Hamas calls for the complete annihilation of Israel.
The state of Israel denies the right of return to Arab refugees, so it is logical that these refugees would call for the dismantling of that racist provision through the dismantling of Israel.
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