Israel's Weapons of Mass Deception

Three days ago, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs replaced their usual map of the Gaza Strip with one featuring a Christo-like pink skirt inside Gaza.

The printing inside the accompanying tiny info box reads :

"The Israeli military has declared an area 3 kms from the fence separating Israel and Gaza as a "no go" zone, sending evacuation warnings to many communities located there.

This area covers 162 km sq. (44% of the Gaza Strip)

Around 250,000 people were residing in this area prior to its declaration."

44% of the Gaza Strip and a quarter million people

The IDF's ostensible purpose for annexing and occupying and bombing an additional 44% of the Gaza Strip is to destroy rocket sites and underground tunnels. 

On the map inside the pink "no go" pink zone near the top is the village of Beit Hanoun, where as you can see here, the IDF searched for rockets and tunnels and human shields by shelling the second floor pediatric ward of Beit Hanoun hospital :

“It’s now chaos, the military is shelling directly at us. There are two patients on the second floor and we think they’re okay, but we can’t move them easily as they’re bed-bound. I’m bleeding from a head wound and there’s another person injured. People are very frightened.”

IDF shells also searched inside an ambulance and a paramedic; neither survived.

This same approach didn't really work out well for the entire border town of Shejaiya either, as people return today during the ceasefire to collect what they can and bodies are pulled from the rubble  :

So what kicked off this collective punishment again, as the number of Palestinian dead reaches 1,000?

On June 12, three Israeli teens were kidnapped from an Israeli settlement.

That same day Israeli authorities received a 911 phone call from one of the boys that ended with gunfire and Palestinian security forces reported to Israel that two suspects had disappeared from Hebron within 24 hours of the abduction.

Mondoweiss  [italics mine]:

The supposition that the boys were dead was advanced when Israeli authorities found the car in which the abduction had taken place, with DNA evidence they’d been shot.

The information about the gunshots on that desperate last phone call was widely known in the media, but as we reported, the Israeli government issued a gag order against these facts being published. And over the last two-and-a-half weeks of June, the Israelis launched extensive raids across the West Bank, locking down Hebron, supposedly to find the boys. But the major focus of the raids was rooting out Hamas affiliates and arresting them. In fact, the purpose of the raids seemed to be to break up the recent unity government between Hamas and Fatah, which Israel has vigorously opposed. 

The boys’ bodies were found on June 30, in a shallow grave in the West Bank; and again the deaths were exploited to punish Hamas. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said : “Hamas is responsible… Hamas will pay.”

There were a lot of holes in the story. 

Sheera Frenkel was never convinced it was Hamas; neither was Max Blumenthal; and in response to the question a month ago as to whether Hamas leadership or some rogue cell was to blame, an IDF source responded : "I don't think that we know enough to say anything conclusively as of yet." 

And that was because their main suspects were from the Qawasmeh clan, a family with a history of blowing up Hamas' attempts to come to terms with Israel.

Schlomi Eldar, Israel Pulse, June 26, 2014 : Accused kidnappers are rogue Hamas branch

"Each time Hamas had reached an understanding with Israel about a cease-fire, at least one member of the family has been responsible for planning or initiating a suicide attack, and any understandings with Israel, achieved after considerable effort, were suddenly laid waste. If there is a single family throughout the PA territories whose actions can be blamed for Israel’s assassination of the political leadership of Hamas, it is the Qawasmeh family of Hebron.

On Aug. 19, 2003, after a tahadiyeh was reached between Israel and all of the Palestinian factions, with the support of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, two suicide bombers blew themselves up on the No. 2 bus in Jerusalem. Some 23 Israelis were killed in the attack, including seven children. All of the passengers on the bus were on their way back from prayers at the Western Wall to mark the end of the Sabbath. Most of them were yeshiva students. The attack put an abrupt end to the tahadiyeh just 52 days after it was announced ... The Qawasmeh family planned and implemented the attack during a cease-fire, which was supposed to have ended the second intifada, a cease-fire that had the support of Yasser Arafat, then-PA chairman, his Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and, of course, Yassin, the leader of Hamas.

Possible that while both Hamas and Netanyahu have been driven to this most recent carnage by their more extreme and unhinged "affiliates", both are now hoping to gain an edge thereby.

So today we are all looking at this man : Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld and his 

tweets yesterday with BBC reporter Jon Donnison :

"Israeli police Mickey Rosenfeld tells me men who killed 3 Israeli teens definitely lone cell, Hamas affiliated but not operating under leadership."

Too late! Everyone has already eaten the yellowcake.

Operation Protective Edge Yellowcake has levelled cities and murdered over a thousand people to date over what they at least suspected as far back as June 12 had little to do with a PR campaign about Hamas kidnapping and killing the Israeli teens. 

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h/t Canadian Cynic for a better photo of Beit Hanoun hospital

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Interview with Hamas

Part One. Part Two is up at The Real News Network, with Part Three to come.

Canadian journalist and film maker Paul Jay was the creator and producer of Counterspin with host Avi Lewis, the gutsiest CBC news program ever in my opinion. Jay also founded Hot Docs! and is senior news editor at TRRN.

Usamah Hamdan was born in Gaza. Further bio and interview transcripts at the link.

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Fisk, Grossman, Frum : On talking to Hamas

Robert Fisk : So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza...
"It would have helped if Obama had the courage to talk about what everyone in the Middle East was talking about. No, it wasn't the US withdrawal from Iraq. They knew about that. They expected the beginning of the end of Guantanamo and the probable appointment of George Mitchell as a Middle East envoy was the least that was expected. Of course, Obama did refer to "slaughtered innocents", but these were not quite the "slaughtered innocents" the Arabs had in mind.
There was the phone call yesterday to Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe Obama thinks he's the leader of the Palestinians, but as every Arab knows, except perhaps Mr Abbas, he is the leader of a ghost government, a near-corpse only kept alive with the blood transfusion of international support and the "full partnership" Obama has apparently offered him, whatever "full" means. And it was no surprise to anyone that Obama also made the obligatory call to the Israelis.

The friendly message to Muslims, "a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect", simply did not address the pictures of the Gaza bloodbath at which the world has been staring in outrage. Yes, the Arabs and many other Muslim nations, and, of course, most of the world, can rejoice that the awful Bush has gone. So, too, Guantanamo. But will Bush's torturers and Rumsfeld's torturers be punished? Or quietly promoted to a job where they don't have to use water and cloths, and listen to men screaming?"


An inaugural address is kind of like a birthday card, I guess - not really the appropriate venue to point out the recipient's various moral failings. And it's early days yet, although an Obama cabinet that includes Dennis Ross, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton may never get further than promoting "blood transfusions".


Israeli writer David Grossman, front page of Tuesday's Haaretz :
"When the guns become completely silent, and the full scope of the killing and destruction becomes known, to the point where even the most self-righteous and sophisticated of the Israeli psyche's defense mechanisms are overcome, perhaps then some kind of lesson will imprint itself on our brain. Perhaps then we will finally understand how deeply and fundamentally wrong our actions in this region have been from time immemorial - how misguided, unethical, unwise and above all, responsible, time after time, for fanning the flames that consume us.

We must speak to the Palestinians : Instead of ignoring Hamas at this time, we would do better to take advantage of the new reality that has been created by beginning a dialogue with them immediately, one that would allow us to reach an accord with the whole of the Palestinian people. We must speak to them and begin to acknowledge that reality is not one hermetic story that we, and the Palestinians, too, have been telling ourselves for generations. Reality is not just the story we are locked into, a story made up, in no small measure, of fantasies, wishful thinking and nightmares."


Canada's creepy one-time speech writer for George Bush on talking to Hamas, Reuters :
"U.S. analyst David Frum said talking to violent men was "an invitation to more violence."
He wrote: "Advocates of talks with terrorists often present themselves as pragmatists. Not so. They are guided by unstated biases and pure wishful thinking."


Surely the very definition of wishful thinking here is expecting to achieve any kind of peace by ignoring Gaza's democratically elected government and the people being punished for electing them.

How's that "ceasefire" going?

(Reuters) : Israel completes Gaza troop withdrawal
"Israel completed a troop pullout from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Wednesday, starting its relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama by leaving Palestinian land devastated by its 22-day offensive.
"We've redeployed on our side of the frontier and we will follow events closely," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. "If Hamas breaks the ceasefire, we of course reserve the right to act to protect our people."

Meanwhile, today : Israeli gunboat fire wounds 2 Gazans
"An Israeli gunboat firing off the shores of Gaza City has wounded a man and a girl.
The Israeli military says it was firing to deter a Palestinian fishing vessel that had strayed off-limits.
A shell fired by the boat hit a house in a beachside refugee camp. Another shell landed about 100 yards (meters) away in an empty area near a U.N. aid distribution center."

Yesterday Israeli troops shot and killed two Gaza farmers along the border - 28 year old Kassab and 18 year old Ibrahim. Amy Goodman interviews their surviving brother.

Israel has told the United Nations and other aid groups they must apply for project-by-project Israeli approval and provide guarantees none of the work will benefit Hamas, Western and Palestinian officials said.
Israel, the officials said, is also preventing the Western-backed Palestinian Authority from transferring cash to the Gaza Strip to pay its workers and others hard-hit by war.

Haaretz : Gaza - over 1000 dead, one third children

All the following four news items are from today's Israeli paper Haaretz. The Israeli paper Haaretz. What an embarrassment it is to compare its coverage and analysis to that of the sorry mealy-mouthed apologetics coming from our Canadian media and politicians.

Gideon Levy : The IDF has no mercy for the children in Gaza nursery schools
"About a third of those killed in Gaza have been children ... out of the 1,000 total killed as of Wednesday. Around 1,550 of the 4,500 wounded have also been children according to figures from the UN, which says the number of children killed has tripled since the ground operation began.
But the horrifying proportion of this war, a third of the dead being children, has not been seen in recent memory. About half of Gaza's residents are under 15.

The public's shocking indifference to these figures is incomprehensible. A thousand propagandists and apologists cannot excuse this criminal killing.
They did not die because they were used as human shields or because they worked for Hamas. They were killed because the IDF bombed, shelled or fired at them, their families or their apartment buildings. That is why the blood of Gaza's children is on our hands, not on Hamas' hands, and we will never be able to escape that responsibility."


Israel Foreign Ministry preparing for 'day after' IDF leaves Gaza
"The Foreign Ministry has created a special task force to prepare for the aftermath of the Israel Defense Forces' Gaza operation. The team will submit proposals for two of the army's main concerns - Iran and Hamas taking control of Gaza's postwar reconstruction, and the harm the offensive might cause to Israel's image abroad.

The ministry hopes to avoid a situation similar to the one in southern Lebanon after the 2006 Second Lebanon War. There, Iran sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Hezbollah to transfer to families whose homes had been destroyed, burnishing the militant group's reputation among the population.
Israeli officials believe after the fighting stops and foreign journalists are allowed entry into the territory that negative sentiment toward Israel will only grow as the full picture of destruction emerges.

The task force's preliminary recommendations highlight the need for Israel to project two kinds of messages abroad. The Arab world must receive a deterrent message indicating Israel will not accept a reality in which its civilians have to endure rocket fire.
The Western world, however, must be presented with the message that despite the scale of destruction rained on Gaza, Israel is a democratic state with a similar worldview to countries in Europe and the United States.

Still, Foreign Ministry officials are convinced that these public relations efforts will not suffice to restore Israel's image and will need to be backed up by diplomatic progress with the Palestinians."


U.S. may cut $1 billion in loan guarantees to Israel over West Bank settlements
"The United States administration plans to cut about $1 billion from the balance of its loan guarantees to Israel because of its investments in the settlements.
Israel has used about $4.4 billion of the $9 billion in loan guarantees extended by the U.S. in 2003.
The loan guarantees arrangement specifies that the U.S. will reduce the guarantees by the amount the Israeli government spends on settlements in the West Bank. The U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv monitors that spending and the administration informs Jerusalem of the amount it is holding back from the guarantees."


ANALYSIS / Egypt's Gaza truce plan is mostly bad for Hamas
"After 19 days of fighting and more than 1,000 Palestinian fatalities, the first significant signs that Hamas is breaking could be seen Wednesday night. Hamas representatives to talks with Egypt announced an agreement in principle on Wednesday to the Egyptian cease-fire proposal.

The Egyptian proposal is mostly bad for Hamas. It doesn't let the organization bring the Palestinian public any political achievement that would justify the blood that has been spilled, and even forces on it the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, in the form of its renewed presence at the Rafah crossing (as a condition for its reopening).

Once the cease-fire is reached, the IDF will withdraw from the positions it captured in Gaza, and only then will the two sides begin to discuss the opening of border crossings and removal of the blockade, which was the reason Hamas gave for waging war.

Hamas representatives did say on Wednesday night they had not yet accepted the Egyptian proposal, but in the same breath they said it was the only proposal on the table."

And from the Jerusalem Post :
Israeli groups: Probe IDF 'war crimes'
A forum of Israeli human rights organizations on Wednesday called on the country's political and military leadership to launch a domestic probe into "suspected war crimes" committed during Operation Cast Lead.
Text of their letter here.

Canada : Israel firsters

Maps of Palestinian loss of land, 1946 to 2000.
Israel is about the same size as Vancouver Island; Gaza, that little green strip on the coast, is a little more than twice the size of the District of North Van, or a little smaller than Seattle.


Yesterday Canada stood alone in voting against a UN human rights resolution "adopted by a roll-call vote of 33 in favour, one against and 13 abstentions" which :

"strongly condemned the ongoing Israeli military operation in Gaza, which had resulted in massive violations of human rights of the Palestinian people, and demanded the occupying power, Israel, to immediately withdraw its military forces from Gaza".

The resolution also called for

"the end to the launching of the crude rockets against Israeli civilians that resulted in the loss of 4 civilian lives and some injuries"

Full UN text here.

Yes it was heavily weighted against Israel, causing European nations and others to abstain from the vote, but Canada's stated reason for voting against it merely repeated the US/Israeli line that Israel didn't start it (italics:mine):

"MARIUS GRINIUS (Canada), speaking in an explanation of the vote before the vote, thanked the Palestine delegation for its consultations, but said the draft text still failed to clearly recognize that rocket fire on Israel had led to the current crisis. It also used unnecessary, unhelpful and inflammatory language. Canada therefore called for a vote and would vote against the resolution."

According to Reuters : "The resolution, whose wording diplomats said had been softened at the request of Palestinian envoys in an effort to get a consensus in the Council, was opposed outright by Canada."

So what did Hamas want?
Khalid Mish'al, head of the Hamas political bureau, speaking in Damascus on January 11, 2009 :

"Concerning us, we want the immediate and complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the lifting of the unjust siege on Gaza that has led to the current situation.
Our other request is the opening of all border crossings including the Rafah border crossing.
We, with an open mind, will deal with any initiatives and decisions based on these three requests.

Therefore, we will not accept any negotiations for a truce in the light of and under the pressure of a military campaign and siege.
Let the military campaign stop, let the Israelis withdraw, and let the rights of our people be admitted to, let them recognize our rights to live without a siege and closed
border crossings, just like other humans, then we are ready to discuss a truce, just like we did before.
We will not accept a permanent truce, because it will take the right of resistance from the Palestinian people. The resistance is against occupation and military campaigns and therefore as long as occupation exists, resistance will too…"

Canada's Dept of Foreign Affairs , via The Star :

"The resolution wholly failed to acknowledge Hamas's continual rocket attacks on Israel that brought about the current crisis, and ignored a state's legitimate right to self-defence," a spokesperson said in an email.
"Canada remains deeply concerned about the ongoing hostilities ... and encourages all diplomatic efforts to achieve an immediate, sustainable and durable ceasefire. But first and foremost, Hamas's rocket attacks must stop so that a ceasefire can be realized."

In May last year, a month before he received the B’nai Brith International President’s Gold Medallion, Stephen Harper said :

"... anti-Israeli sentiment is really just as a thinly disguised veil for good old-fashioned anti-Semitism"

In October 2007 Stockwell Day and Israeli Public Security Minister Avi Dichter signed an interim mutual cooperation agreement on homeland security "to enable cooperation in the fields of combating terror and border security".
Dichter laid out guidelines to the Canadian public security committee for a Canadian-Israeli security cooperation similar to the Israel US Homeland Security Pact he signed in February in Washington DC.
The Canada Israel Declaration of Intent was signed on March 23, 2008.

Gaza toon

h/t Beijing York

Vatican : Gaza "a big concentration camp"

Reuters : "Pope Benedict's point man for justice and peace issues on Wednesday issued the Vatican's toughest criticism of Israel since the latest Mideast crisis began, calling Gaza a "big concentration camp".

NYTimes : "The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday it had discovered “shocking” scenes — including small children next to their mothers’ corpses — when its representatives gained access for the first time to parts of Gaza battered by Israeli shelling.
The statement said a team of four Palestine Red Crescent ambulances accompanied by Red Cross representatives made its way to Zeitoun Wednesday where it "found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all, there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses.
In response, the Israeli military did not comment directly on the allegation. In a statement, it accused Hamas, its foe in Gaza, of deliberately using "Palestinian civilians as human shields" and said the Israeli Army "works in close cooperation with international aid organizations during the fighting so that civilians can be provided with assistance. "

Presumably this "close cooperation" began just yesterday, the first time the Red Cross was allowed access.

"....an eye for an eyelash..."

Meanwhile, over at the National Post, Kelly McParland happily quotes Jason Cherniak, "President of Liblogs, a site that aggregates blogs from writers identifying themselves as Liberals", who gives us a short history of Gaza in which Israel is astonishingly blameless.
I will refute each of Mr. Cherniak's remarks with those of someone much more expert than myself : Avi Shlaim, "Oxford Professor of International Relations who served in the Israeli army", writing in yesterday's Guardian :

Cherniak : "In the summer of 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza. This was a complete and total withdrawal, where even settlers whose families had lived in Gaza for decades were withdrawn to Israel. It was everything the world had ever asked from Israel as far as the Gaza strip was concerned. Israel showed nothing but restraint from the summer of 2005 until December 2008 in its relations with the people of Gaza."

Shlaim : "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."

Cherniak : "Eventually, by June 2008, Israel was able to negotiate a cease fire with Hamas, the “State of Calm Agreement”, brokered by Egypt. That agreement fell apart in December 2008 when Hamas once again began attacking Israel with rockets imported from Syria and Iran."

Shlaim : "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."

Cherniak : People need to "demand that governments around the world start to take action to save the people of Gaza from their own elected government[Hamas]."

Shlaim : "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."

Shlaim writes that Gaza is "an open air prison".
This morning "Israel warned thousands of people in the Rafah zone on the Egyptian border to leave their houses ahead of planned air raids on Thursday.
"You have until 8am [06:00 GMT]," said leaflets which were dropped by the Israeli military."

Where are they to go for safety? Certainly not UN buildings or schools.

So which description do you prefer, Mr. Cherniak : "concentration camp" from the Vatican or "open air prison" from the Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford ?

Sign Amnesty International Canada's Open Letter to Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lawrence Cannon, to take action. Write to your MP and local papers. Letters count. Spread the word.

The Times : Adjusting our distorted image of Hamas

From William Sieghart at Times Online :

"Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them. Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state. It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won't recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world's commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.

In the five years that I have been visiting Gaza and the West Bank, I have met hundreds of Hamas politicians and supporters. None of them has professed the goal of Islamising Palestinian society, Taleban-style. Hamas relies on secular voters too much to do that. People still listen to pop music, watch television and women still choose whether to wear the veil or not.

The political leadership of Hamas is probably the most highly qualified in the world. Boasting more than 500 PhDs in its ranks, the majority are middle-class professionals - doctors, dentists, scientists and engineers. Most of its leadership have been educated in our universities and harbour no ideological hatred towards the West. It is a grievance-based movement, dedicated to addressing the injustice done to its people."

Continued at Times Online ...

Would somebody like to sing "Do They Know It's Christmas"?

From Dec 27 to 29, 2008

Israelis : 5 dead, 31 wounded

Palestinians : 375 dead, 1500+ wounded

Haim Ramon, the deputy to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert :

"The goal of the operation is to topple Hamas. We will stop firing immediately if someone takes the responsibility of this government, anyone but Hamas. We are favourable to any other government to take the place of Hamas."

In 2006 Israel jailed one third of the Hamas cabinet, democratically elected by a majority.

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Yossi Alpher, a former Mossad official, on the economic blockade :

"It has not manipulated Palestinians into hating Hamas, but has probably been counterproductive. It is just useless collective punishment."

Haaretz :

"Israel has always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over."

Robert Fisk :

"One and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza."

Center for Strategic and International Studies via the G&M:

"Israeli leaders synchronized their retaliatory attacks to the political calendar in the U.S., thinking it was better to strike before President George W. Bush left office on Jan. 20 because they weren't as sure about what president-elect Barack Obama's reaction would be.

The governing Labour and Kadima parties are believed to want to improve their odds in coming national elections, demonstrating that they are as tough as hawkish Likud Leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently ahead in the polls."