|
.
. .
and Olmert Smote the
Philistines
By John Maxwell
It’s a time-tested
method used for more than four thousand years; people
always get killed but nothing is ever settled.
God confided to
Moses that he was giving the Israelites title to the
land of Canaan. There was one small problem: lots of
other people were already living in Canaan and had been
for ages. So, in order to enforce the Israelites’ title,
Joshua had to clear the land.
The book of Joshua
tells of the labours of the hero and the Israelites as
they laid claim to their divine endowment smiting cities
and their rulers right left and centre … ‘So
Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the
south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all
their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly
destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel
commanded.
And finally, “. . .
Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the
Lord said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an
inheritance unto Israel according to their divisions by
their tribes. And the land rested from war.”
Palestine did not
long rest from war. The first kingdom of Israel lasted a
few generations before splitting in two, largely owing
to the arrogance of Rehoboam, a precursor to Ariel
Sharon. Sharon also came a cropper trying to exterminate
the Palestinians and has lain comatose now for most of a
decade.
Before his
unfortunate seizure Mr Sharon’s government had been
accused – by the International Committee of the Red
Cross – of war crimes against the Palestinians. In 2001
the Red Cross condemned Israeli settlements in the
occupied territories as equivalent to war crimes under
international law. “The transfer, the installation of
population of the occupying power into the occupied
territories is ... an illegal move and qualifies as a
grave breach," said ICRC's René Kosirnik at a press
conference in Tel Aviv … equal in principle to war
crimes."
Condoleezza
Shamed
Later, when Mr
Sharon was attempting to pulverise the Palestinian
Authority and Yasser Arafat, Sharon’s soldiers targeted
not only journalists, but Red Cross and Red Crescent
ambulances, doctors and nurses, women and children as
well as Palestinian policemen and Arafat himself.
Since Mr G.W Bush
was at that time trying to assemble support within the
Arab world for a posse to go after Saddam Hussein the
US President did not find Sharon’s behaviour ‘helpful’.
Then as now, the Israeli government demonstrated a
contempt for its patron the US, and Mr Bush was very
upset. He was sufficiently upset not only to withhold
$800 million in aid promised to Israel by the outgoing
Clinton administration, he decided to support a
Security Council resolution which spelled out, for the
first time , the right of Palestinians to their own
independent state. This commitment got lost somewhere
between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.
The political nous
and social evolution of Sharon’s successor may be gauged
by a tale told by Mr Olmert himself. In the Israeli
leader’s version of why the US had abstained on a UN
resolution attempting to get Israel to play by the
rules, Mr Olmert gave himself a starring role.
"When we saw that
the secretary of state, [Condoleezza Rice] for reasons
we did not really understand, wanted to vote in favour
of the UN resolution . . . I looked for President Bush
and they told me he was in Philadelphia making a
speech," Olmert said .
"I said, 'I don't
care. I have to talk to him now.' They got him off the
podium, brought him to another room and I spoke to him.
I told him, 'You can't vote in favour of this
resolution.' He said, 'Listen, I don't know about it, I
didn't see it, I'm not familiar with the phrasing.'
"He gave an order
to the secretary of state and she did not vote in favour
of it - a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organised
and manoeuvred for. She was left pretty shamed and
abstained on a resolution she arranged."
Now! Aint that
Sump’n !
Or, as they say in
Peoria – WOW!!!
Mr Olmert does not
perhaps know that waiting to succeed Miss Rice is a
woman who is not partial to being kneecapped by a
self-important, obnoxious, sexist, Middle Eastern
potentate, and we may credibly suspect that Mrs Clinton
and her boss and the entire Obama Cabinet may soon be
itching to put Israel in its place.
Successes of the
Blitzkrieg
What has Israel
achieved in nearly three weeks of its Gaza blitzkrieg?
• As the Guardian
says “The extraordinary number of civilian deaths, and
of children in particular, is for many a defining and
shocking feature of this 18-day offensive. The figures
are stark. At least 910 Palestinians are dead, among
them 292 children. At least 4,250 are injured, among
them 1,497 children. Many have injuries that will leave
them permanently disabled and facing more operations and
months or years of rehabilitation therapy”
More than half of
Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants are children.
• Israel has
reduced to rubble the physical infrastructure of Gaza,
destroying, schools, community centres, homes and
apartments as well as farms, shops, factories, and
places where people might seek shelter in emergencies.
About two-thirds of
the territory's 1.5m people have no electricity; the
rest have only an intermittent supply, the UN says.
Hospitals are overloaded with the injured, and 500,000
Gazans still have no access to running water. "Israeli
bombardment is causing extensive destruction to homes
and to public infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip
and is jeopardizing water, sanitation and medical
services."
•The
indiscriminate destruction is not only intended to
terrorise and intimidate, it is clearly also,
maliciously intended to destroy social capital, to maim
the society’s ability to recover and to take care of
itself. It is punishment of people,as human beings,
innocents with no argument with anyone and to make sure
that, as after a ferocious natural cataclysm, a tsunami,
a Katrina, there is not only enormous material loss but
deep emotional scarring and wounds that may never heal.
• The blitzkrieg
has destroyed Fatah and all Palestinian opposition to
Hamas. In the West Bank strongholds of Fatah everyone is
now for Hamas. In the Egyptian Hospitals outside Gaza
news agencies are reporting that people who are wounded,
people who were never politically active, want to go
back to Gaza to fight for Hamas. The conversion rate is
quite remarkable and even more so on the Arab street in
places like Cairo, Damascus, and Jerusalem.
•Despite public
vows by Israeli politicians to destroy Hamas's military
capability, Israeli officials said Tuesday that the
movement had lost only a fraction of its fighters and
retained a large stockpile of rockets and other
armaments. A "few hundred" Hamas fighters have been
killed, out of a total force of 15,000, according to a
senior Israeli military official.
To say that the
government of Israel may be wrong or evil, is
interpreted not as a political judgment but as an
expression of racist prejudice. Criticising Israel is
attacking Jews and Jewishness and is therefore anti-semitic.
‘ … those
countries that count’
The Israeli
government’s attitude to external criticism may be
gauged from the following quotation:"The tone of the
criticism is moderate, restrained, more balanced, at
least in the case of those countries that count," a
senior government official said.
Such extreme
positions have provoked a backlash inside and outside of
Israel. Some of he world’s most prominent Jews have
publicly condemned the actions of the Israeli government
and one of the best known – journalist Naomi Klein has
joined other people, Jews and Gentiles, in calling for
an economic boycott of Israel.
As the Guardian,
no enemy of Israel said on Tuesday: “That is why the
talk elsewhere is now of boycotts, of arms embargos, of
revoking trade agreements, withholding financial support
and cancelling export credit guarantees. These are not
all appealing options, nor should they be yet necessary.
But a country which truly rejects the collective
concerns of the international community leaves its
friends, never mind its enemies, running out of road.”
(my italics)
That such a
situation should come about is remarkable sinceis almost
impossible for Hamas to have its case presented fairly.
In the great western world where the press is free it
seems impossible to find any big news agency which
conveys the real grievances and arguments of the
PALESTINIANS, let alone Hamas. As Mark Levine points out
in the Huffington Post: 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.Levine: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-levine/who-will-save-israel-from_b_156943.html
What has changed
has much to do with the arrogance of Israel. By banning
independent journalistic coverage of the blitzkrieg the
Israelis have eliminated much of the usual spin that
favours Israel and demonises the Palestinians. When the
public and the press have to depend almost entirely on
video, photographs and statistics, the truth has a
better chance of surfacing.
Amira Hass, a
journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors writes:
“History did not
begin with the Qassam rockets. But for us, the Israelis,
history always begins when the Palestinians hurt us, and
then the pain is completely decontextualized.
‘ …Gaza is not a
military power that attacked its tiny, peace-loving
neighbor, Israel. Gaza is a territory that Israel
occupied in 1967, along with the West Bank. Its
residents are part of the Palestinian people, which lost
its land and its homeland in 1948.
In 1993, Israel had
a one-time golden opportunity to prove to the world that
what people say about us is untrue - that it is not by
nature a colonialist state. That the expulsion of a
nation from its land, the expulsion of people from their
houses and the robbery of Palestinian land for the sake
of settling Jews are not the basis and essence of its
existence. -http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1055241.html
Silent Spring?
Somewhere near the
beginning of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring she has a
wonderful paragraph about what she calls ‘biocide’ –
the indiscriminate broad spectrum war against insects
and other “pests” that, she warned us – nearly a
half-century ago – was doomed to failure. This was
because the barrage of pesticides was not only poisoning
us but simultaneously, accelerating the forced evolution
of many life forms. In what she called a triumphant
affirmation of Darwin’s thesis of natural selection she
predicted what we have since seen happening – the
evolution of super pests, insects, bacteria and
diseases, making inconsequential our efforts at pest
extermination..
The Israeli
government is the only government I know of with a
state policy of targeted assassination. While the
government did not declare that assassination of Hamas
leadership was a priority in Gaza, it clearly was, as
the attacks on the homes of leaders demonstrated.
Sharon tried to
exterminate Fatah and got Hamas.
Has Israel already
found its next Rehoboam? Its next exterminator?
(Endnote:
Democratic Israel has banned from contesting elections
two small Arab political parties. Will any notice be
taken by the free world’s press? Stay tuned)
Copyright ©2009
John Maxwell
jankunnu@gmail.com
*
* * * *
95 Palestinian
fighters killed in Gaza war—A Palestinian human
rights group has revealed that only 95 resistance
fighters were killed in the 23-day Israeli offensive
into Gaza.
From the 1194 Gazans officially registered as killed in
Israeli attacks from December 27 to January 17, a
whopping 1099 were civilians, the Gaza-based Palestinian
center for human rights reported on Sunday.
Only 95 of those killed were resistance fighters. . . .
The Israeli onslaught on Gaza has cost the Palestinian
economy at least $1.6 billion. A governmental report on
the war revealed on Monday that Israel reduced some
4,000 residential buildings to rubble and damaged 16,000
other houses during the conflict.
Since the cessation of the hostilities, at least 100
bodies have been recovered from the rubbles. The number
of those killed in Israeli attacks has been put at
around 1,300, according to the latest statistics. Nearly
6,000 Gazans have been injured in the attacks.
PressTV
*
* * * *
Mapping an Occupation--WestBank
*
* * * *
* *
* * *
posted 18 January
2009 |
