Dear Friends and Colleagues,
You may find these articles about Palestine informative and of interest.

Best wishes

Noureddine
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Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask

Wednesday, 7 January 2009

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-do-they-hate-the-west-so-much-we-will-ask-1230046.html
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians.
Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in
another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in
"purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?


Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them
children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700
Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana
massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them
children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were
ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an
Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and
Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and
prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the
old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties.
"Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet
another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And
every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an
excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on
their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate
ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and
children, would be alive.

What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be
too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if
it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After
covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian
troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose
cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war
against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in
Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by
our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being
visited upon Gaza.

I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for
these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here
are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that
the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the
ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they
supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately
used the innocent refugees as cover.

The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing
Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own
commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When
Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a
blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at
Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also
sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a
war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border –
were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel
claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have
been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was
never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed
Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees
took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were
travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the
Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by
playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.

Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance
carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were
ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The
Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was
untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to
the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was
that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.

And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all
these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie –
heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime
– and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost
certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very
definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff
and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't.
Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six
Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment
killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around
Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a
week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at
Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part
of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale.
This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the
level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs
himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger
on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate
us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.

-----------------------------------------------

How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastroph.

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the
Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its
merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through
understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in
May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British
officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant
state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary,
Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a
gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used
to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on
the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this
assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s
and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within
its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial
project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do
with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim
was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and
military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been
one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of
the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a
tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's
prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of
economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate
de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of
Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of
cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of
local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the
Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the
economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era.
Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an
insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of
exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish
settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local
residents.. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the
arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by
jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population
lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them
still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip
remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to
resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a
unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and
destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic
resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis
out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence
Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a
contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year
after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing
the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and
peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose
land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of
Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank
to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a
peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist
expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in
what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest.
Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity,
the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the
Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control
all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted
overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air
force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by
flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless
inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of
authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything
to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to
undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with
reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all
the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only
genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of
Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative
Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led
government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically
elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist
organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising
the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax
revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a
significant part of the international community imposing economic
sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against
the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed
for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently
purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject
coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more
than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and
that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that
the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They
are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What
they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which
to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political
programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism
of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a
two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity
government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.
Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included
Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival
Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent
Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by
Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah
leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power.
Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to
instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in
the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to
seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of
a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a
broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian
people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared
aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its
leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is
to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a
humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence
and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general
election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election,
all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their
toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a
crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their
reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July
2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of
the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in
the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by
putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN
Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free
pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression
but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room
for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between
David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and
defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and
overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is
accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago
of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as
the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict.
Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an
unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak -
terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam
rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until
Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these
primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense,
prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the
circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its
response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate.
The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal
from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in
2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222
children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to
Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of
unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza.
Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into
force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of
the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from
leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp
drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is
unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of
trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water
and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to
see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the
people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would
still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly
forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of
its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza,
Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages
of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire
agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and
that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent
civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in
getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack
of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of
its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It
did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men.
Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the
eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people
against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel
is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that
has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a
humanitarian catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But
Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye
for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more
than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a
land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket
attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and
destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their
resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that
glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution
to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's
concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to
the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not
through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly
declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish
state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has
rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace
plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and
compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it
difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with
"an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually
violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and
practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political
purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it
must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its
Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the
mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like
everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the
past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
• Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University
of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and
of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace.