Empire : What future for 'Greater Israel' ?

Part one of a discussion on the deadlocked peace process between Israel and Palestine, the politics behind the expanded settlements, the diminishing likelihood of a two-state solution, and more with Avraham Burg, former head of the Israeli parliament and former chairman of the World Zionist Organization; Avi Schlaim, Prof of International Relations at Oxford; and Ian Black, Mid East editor for The Guardian.

Think you can predict the positions taken by the former chairman of the World Zionist Organization? Bet you can't.

"What we do in the occupied territories is a simple pure colonialism.

When will public opinion in Israel be ripe for dismantling the settlers' militia? The way to do it and to support any prime minister to go for it ... it will happen when Israelis feel they have something to lose and they are not ready to sacrifice their future and the future of their children for a tiny messianic eschatological minority."

Part Two follows.

Netanyahu : "80% of Americans support us. It's absurd."

Israeli's Channel 10 has aired a video of Prime Minister Netanyahu, secretly-recorded 9 years ago, in which he boasts of conning the US and scuttling the Oslo peace accords.

"I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in our way."

"80% of Americans support us. It's absurd."

"They asked me before the election if I'd honor [the Oslo accords]," he said. "I said I would, but ... I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I'm concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue."

He also said the only way to deal with the Palestinians is to "beat them up so badly it's unbearable."

Various translations of the vid provided by Haaretz, Washington Post, and Tablet, who also posts the original.

Ten days ago Netanyahu said he did not intend to extend a 10-month moratorium on housing starts in West Bank settlements that expires in September, saying, "I think we’ve done enough."
32 new Israeli homes were just approved in the settlements even as occupied Palestinian houses are being demolished.

"I believe Prime Minister Netanyahu wants peace,” responded Obama, as Washington plans to provide Israel with $2.7-billion in security aid for 2010.

Collective punishment - by the numbers

CIA World Factbook 2010 - Gaza
Population - 1½ million
Median age : 17.5 years. With half the population under 17½ years old, Gaza is slightly ahead of Chad, Niger, and Uganda.
44% of the population is under 14 years old.
2% is over 65.
Population below the poverty line - 70%
Unemployment rate - 40%
Literacy rate - 92%
Arable land - 29%

UNICEF - Gaza
Number of homes obliterated in last year's war - 3,500
Number of homes damaged - 50,000

"Throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) almost 12,000 children under five years old still die from preventable causes each year, as do more than 1,800 children under 12 months old."

So. Despite horrific child mortality rates, half the population of Gaza are children, children living in rubble below the poverty line with a 60/40 likelihood of future employment.

As the CIA Factbook notes cryptically : "The rapid growth of a young adult population unable to find employment can lead to unrest".

Bradley Burston, senior editor at Haaretz :

"We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege, which is itself becoming Israel's Vietnam.

We explain, time and again, that we are not at war with the people of Gaza. We say it time and again because we ourselves need to believe it, and because, deep down, we do not. "

h/t Big News Network : 800,000 kids bearing brunt of Gaza blockade , which sent me off to check out their sources.

Israel lost at sea

Bradley Burston is a senior editor at Haaretz; his blog is A Special Place in Hell

The Second Gaza War : Israel lost at sea
We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege, which is itself becoming Israel's Vietnam.

A war tells a people terrible truths about itself. That is why it is so difficult to listen.

We were determined to avoid an honest look at the first Gaza war. Now, in international waters and having opened fire on an international group of humanitarian aid workers and activists, we are fighting and losing the second. For Israel, in the end, this Second Gaza War could be far more costly and painful than the first.

In going to war in Gaza in late 2008, Israeli military and political leaders hoped to teach Hamas a lesson. They succeeded. Hamas learned that the best way to fight Israel is to let Israel do what it has begun to do naturally: bluster, blunder, stonewall, and fume.

Hamas, and no less, Iran and Hezbollah, learned early on that Israel's own embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza was the most sophisticated and powerful weapon they could have deployed against the Jewish state.

Here in Israel, we have still yet to learn the lesson: We are no longer defending Israel. We are now defending the siege. The siege itself is becoming Israel's Vietnam.

continued ...

Israel attacks flotilla bound for Gaza

Hours after Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was presented with this Toronto Maple Leafs jersey in Toronto, Israeli commandos dropped from helicopters onto the lead vessel of a six ship international aid flotilla bound for Gaza and opened fire.

Israeli Radio is reporting 16 to 19 killed with 30 injured and confirms the flotilla was in international waters.

According to AFP, "the Israeli military censor ordered a block on all information regarding those injured or killed during the storming of the ship."

The six ships bearing 10,000 tons of supplies and over 600 activists from 40 countries, including 86 year old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Northern Ireland, are now being towed to Ashod.

I was watching a Turkish TV live feed from the lead vessel until it went off the air. I couldn't understand what anyone was saying except for a voice shouting in English that they were in international waters and a woman calling for help for the wounded. The live footage is now being rebroadcast at the same link with commentary in English.

But back to the jersey photo op. Netanyahu says Israel has never had a better friend than Canada and thanked Steve today for being "an unwavering friend of Israel."

Too true. Canada was the first country in the world to boycott Gaza for electing Hamas. When Israel bombed Lebanon in 2008 killing 1400, Steve called Israel's actions "measured". A Canadian killed when Israel shelled UN offices went unremarked by our government. We support the Wall at the UN. Peter Kent, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, has more than once stated on his website that "an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada." We have cut off funding to humanitarian groups like Kairos and UNRWA who have been sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, and replaced members on the board of the once independent group Rights and Democracy with pro-Israel hawks. Canada had the largest delegation at last year's Conference on Anti-Semitism in Israel and provides nearly twice the Canadian forces to man the borders of Gaza as does the United States. We have our own McCarthyite Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and banned George Galloway from Canada. Con MPs have sent out flyers to their constituents suggesting that Liberals are soft on anti-Semitism, the definition of which has now been expanded to include any criticism of Israel, following the lead of our prime minister who has accused MPs of anti-Semitism in the House of Commons. Last month the Ethics Commissioner reported that Israel is the top destination of choice for MPs seeking junkets abroad paid for by outside organizations, and Ontario Premier McGuinty is there now drumming up trade. Two years ago Israel and Canada signed what it pleases Israel's Ministry of Public Security to describe on their website as a pact on "cooperation in home land security and counter terrorism issues."

BFF

Against this complicity by our own government in the three-year-old Israeli blockade of Gaza, we must raise our voices in support of international law. We must no longer allow our government to speak in our name here.

Witness Gaza. Witness. Gaza.

Choosing sides

Written by brebis noire, crossposted from the black ewe.

I often wonder about the different reasons that make people choose one side of an debate or conflict over another. Also, what motivates us to change our minds - or admit that we see reason on the other side and therefore must grudgingly switch over. Do some people *know* that they are on the wrong side, but protecting their own interests, preserving prejudice or wilfull ignorance prevents them from admitting it? I tend to think so.

I’ve had Deborah Ellis’ courageous book Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak for a few months, but finally started to read it the other night with my kids; we’ve read 10 or so of the children’s stories so far. It’s hard reading, but we’re used to it; we were very grateful for her Breadwinner (Parvana’s Journey) trilogy, and we’ve read some difficult books about animal suffering as well, such as Black Beauty.

The book is balanced and honest. Ellis mentions that she obtained parental permission to do all of her interviews, and if any of the parents ended up objecting after the fact, she did not include those interviews in the book. She also did not include interviews in which the children were “very rabidly” against the other side, because she didn’t want that to be the legacy left by those young people. Of course, she could have changed names or not used photos, but rabid partisanship was not the overall feeling she got from the children and youth she interviewed. The Israeli and Palestinian children (both Muslim and Christian) are girls and boys between the ages of 8 and 18. Their opinions and stories have not made me wince or roll my eyes; on the contrary, they all have the mark of reality - none of them appear to be overly tinged by parental, religious or cultural influence.

Still, as one would expect from these children, the sides are very well drawn: they know exactly who they are, and what and who they are up against. They speak about not knowing any Palestinian children, if they are Israeli, and vice versa. Some of the children say they don’t want to know children from the other side, while others say they do, because then they would understand that they are not the evil people they are made out to be by the other side. At least one child remarked that the children of the other side might start out being nice, but then they grow up to be just like their parents, hating them because they are Palestinian, or Israeli.
All of the children wish the conflict would just go away and leave them in peace: to not live in fear of being blown up, say the Israelis; and to not live with constant fear, harassment, indiscriminate shootings, interminable waits in lines at checkpoints and roadblocks, and cruel and unpredictable cancellations of school, jobs and activities, say the Palestinians.

My son has listened carefully to these accounts and has become convinced that the Palestinian children have it much worse, though of course he understands the chronic fears of the Israeli children, who live in fear during every normal outing you could imagine, including walking beside parked cars that might blow up at exactly the wrong moment for you. He understands the fear on all sides, probably because real and imagined fears are a normal part of every child’s existence, even when the objective reasons to fear aren’t that high on the relative scale. Still, he’s chosen his side based on a gut instinct of what is worse, and who is bearing the brunt of the violence and daily injustice.

I’m a bit troubled by that, because it wasn’t my goal to have him choose sides - after all, choosing sides will cause him grief at some point; so maybe it’s best to remain numb, or indifferent? Or to imagine that both sides are equally at fault, through historical miscalculations and power-grabs? Or, at a meta-level, to find some kind of universal self-satisfying explanation about how all humans are inherently vicious and will never get along unless they admit they are sinful and surrender to God? Certain religious currents instill us with this sense of helpless pessimism (I’m looking at you, evangelical Christians).

But I’m not sure anymore what the point is, because the war in Israel and Palestine has escalated in an appallingly lopsided fashion, either in spite of or because of the obvious pitiful circumstances to which the residents of Gaza have been reduced since 2005. The interviews from Three Wishes were carried out in 2002 - that’s ages ago, especially from the pov of an 11-year-old; but consider as well, that that is just slightly longer than all of World War II, and we’re still talking about it and learning new facts and analysis.

I wanted to write about animal and veterinary issues today and yesterday. And I probably will, but before I can get started on the pile of veterinary journals and articles on my desk, and sort out the events and issues I dealt with at work this week, I had to get this out. If you haven’t already, please go to Amnesty International Canada’s site and sign the petition to tell our Foreign Minister to insist that civilians be protected and that unlawful attacks cease. Last I checked, it was up to 999 signatures.

And just to show that the sides are not so clearly drawn, read here about a massive Israeli protest against the Israeli government’s action in Gaza.

© the black ewe

h/t: Creekside