A Blog from David Crump
Ali Abunimah is the co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of two excellent books: The Battle for Justice in Palestine, and One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. I have read them both.
In this recent interview with Al Jazeera English, Mr. Abunimah concisely describes the root causes of the current wave of violence in Israel-Palestine.
Workable solutions can only arise from honest analysis of the real problems.
Orly Noy is an Israeli journalist writing from Israel. Her latest piece at +972 Magazine is titled, “Our Humanity is Being Put to the Test.”
Yes, the attack on Israel was a vile crime. Now, Israel’s response reveals the criminality (or humanity) of its own society.
Below is an excerpt:
Morality is never a privilege, a luxury, an accessory that we can don when it’s convenient or remove when less so. Morality isn’t an indulgence we can’t afford during a catastrophe.
Insisting on morality is an insistence on context, without which this horrible violence loses its meaning and gets reduced to “human animals that want to destroy us for no reason.” To insist on morality and context is not to justify a crime. On the contrary – it is to ensure our understanding of reality includes all of the factors that contribute to it, so that we can more effectively change it.
If Hamas’ crimes justify unmitigated destruction through the collective punishment of the people of Gaza, what morality can we claim to condemn Hamas, especially given the harm Israel has inflicted there over the years?
Read the entire article here.
Every western power you can shake a stick at is pledging to “stand with Israel” in its new war against the people of Gaza and Hamas.
With the catastrophic Israeli death toll topping 900, with 100s more missing and taken as hostages, the well-polished rhetoric of Israel’s fight for civilization is now on display. It will be a war of light against darkness, we are told.
Innocent, ennobled Israeli victims will take up their weapons and fight “with purity of arms” against the unwashed, barbarian hoards inhabiting the Gaza Strip.
Earlier yesterday, the Israeli defense minister announced that Israel had been attacked “by human animals.” Thus, justifying Israel’s impending savage response as it pays the Palestinians back in kind, inhumanity for inhumanity.
Such rhetoric is not new. In fact, Israeli politicians have a long history of making degrading, dehumanizing remarks against the 5.4 million Palestinians who are kept under lock and key in the dungeons otherwise known as the Occupied Territories (consisting of Gaza and the West Bank).
Yes, people are right to point out that the Hamas attack against Israeli civilians was a war crime. But when have these defenders of Israeli virtue ever cried out against the perpetual war crimes committed against the people of Gaza?
50% of the Gazan population are children. The median age is 16. It is one of the most densely populated pieces of real estate on earth, denser than Tokyo.
For the past 16 years Israel has walled these people off from the rest of the world, literally encircling all 2.2 million behind a hi-tech military fence, complete with sniper towers and automated, high powered semi-automatic machine guns.
Israel has boasted about calculating the number of calories needed to sustain the population at a near starvation level. And the minimal caloric intake is enforced. A military blockade keeps a stranglehold on everything and everyone entering or leaving the Strip.
In past bombing campaigns, Israel has already destroyed all infrastructure, including power plants and water purification facilities. Native industries have been demolished. Unemployment is 60%. Only a small fraction of the available drinking water is fit for human consumption.
So, when anyone, whether politician or church leader, heartily invokes the pledge of “standing with Israel” as that country prepares to lay siege against 1.1 million malnourished, impoverished children and their family members, struggling as best they can to survive in a nearly impossible situation, I am forced to call a time out.
Israel boasts about planning its own war crimes, and now our leaders tell us it’s time to stand with Israel?
Excuse me?!
For 56 years the Palestinian people have been suffering under Israel’s military dictatorship.
For 16 years the people of Gaza have been suffocated – nearly to death – by a military blockade, from which it is impossible for them to escape.
When has the west ever objected? When have we protested? When has the US called Israel to account for its brutal mistreatment of our fellow human beings?
Are Israeli lives more precious than Palestinian lives? While paying pious, vapid lip-service to human rights, the western states certainly behave as if Israel were merely conducting innocent experiments on laboratory animals, not Mengele-like violations on 2.2 million precious Bearers of God’s Image.
In the last 10 months alone, approximately 250 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank. How loudly – and when and where, exactly? – did President Biden, or any other western leader, lament over the flagrant killings of those people, including the 40 innocent Palestinian children included in that death toll? When were condolences sent to their grieving mothers and fathers?
Israelis curse the home-made rockets, sans guidance systems, that rain down on southern Israel from Gaza. Where was their grief when Israeli missiles bombarded the densely populated Jenin refugee camp only months ago? Oh, I remember, they were cheering and applauding for that exercise in slaughter.
Israelis grieve over the images of families torn apart as they are kidnapped and taken away to secret locations under Hamas control.
But this is daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank. Night raids are the norm. Family members are regularly ripped from each other’s’ arms as children are “disappeared” into IDF prison facilities. This is the typical state of affairs in Palestinian homes suffering under Israeli military occupation.
So, No. It is not time to stand with Israel.
It is long past time to confront Israel with the obvious question: What the bloody hell did you expect would happen?
This past summer marked the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, the supposed peace agreements that were intended (or were they?) to end the incessant hostilities between Zionist Israel and the Palestinian people living in the Occupied Territories.
Below are two different video news reports ostensibly covering the negotiations and eventual signing of these peace accords.
The first report is from CBN, a supposedly Christian news organization. As such, I expect them to maintain a high level of honesty, even-handedness, and truthfulness.
The second report is from Mondoweiss. (I will also disclose that it is produced and narrated by a friend of mine, Umna Patel.) Mondoweiss is a secular organization claiming to tell both sides of the story when it comes to Israel-Palestine.
While watching these two videos, ask yourself: Which one tells me about the details of the Oslo Accords? Which report best informs me about this piece of Middle East history, the role played by Oslo, and its long-term effects? Which one attempts to explain the specifics of why the Accords did not bring peace?
I’ll give you a hint on what I consider a dead give-away in rating these two clips.
Notice that the CBN report starkly portrays the characters involved as good guys in white hats (Israel) and bad guys in black hats (Palestinians). Period. There is no nuance or explanation. We are only told that Palestinians are inclined to violence and that they hate Israel. (Really, is anything in life that simple?)
In the CBN report, Israel is always the innocent victim of irrational Palestinian hatred. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are always bent on destroying Israel.
Sadly, the supposed “Christian” account is pure propaganda.
It’s the secular Mondoweiss account that informs and explains the real story in a balanced fashion.
The CBN report:
The Mondoweiss report:
Even though western pundits continue to promote the old idea of a “Two State Solution” for Israel-Palestine, the facts on the ground (as Israeli politicians like to say) buried this possibility long ago.
In the wake of the disastrous Oslo Accords, with 700,000 or more Jewish settlers entreanched in the many illegal settlements scattered throughout the West Bank (what Israel calls Judea and Samaria), the old idea of a two state solution has become a blind man’s fantasy.
That’s why men (and women) like Jeff Halper are promoting a new vision called the One Democratic State Campaign. A program for Israel’s truly democratic future where all citizens, Jews and Palestinians, throughout the whole of the land — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — would have the same citizenship status with equal rights.
It’s the only “solution” that can bring real justice to Israel-Palestine. And justice is the necessary precursor to lasting, genuine peace.
Take some time to listen to Jeff Halper explain how this could work:
Katie Halper is an independent journalist and political commentator. Until last week, Ms. Halper was a visiting host on the news program The Hill.
That is, she WAS a regular guest on the show until she was summarily fired for reading her editorial spot explaining the details of Israeli apartheid.
Yes, Israel IS an apartheid state. It has always been an apartheid state, since day one. There is NO non-apartheid phase in Israel’s history because Israel was founded as a Jewish supremacist state.
If this is new information to you, then I encourage you to read my new
book, Like Birds in a Cage: Christian Zionism’s Collusion in Israel’s Oppression of the Palestinian People (Cascade, 2021).
But the pro-Israel, pro-Zionist public relations machine works very hard to hide this fact from the rest of the world.
They have been working particularly hard in recent years since Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem have all published their own reports extensively cataloguing the ins-and-outs of Israel’s comprehensive, systemic, apartheid regime.
I will let Ms. Halper explain it all for you:
Israeli journalist Gideon Levy critiques the work of Israel’s spy agency, Shin Bet in the most recent edition of the Jerusalem daily, Haaretz. The article is
titled “Israel’s Stasi Preaches Morality.”
Below is an excerpt explaining why Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza will forever resist Israeli oppression:
. . . It is difficult to assess the real balance – how many terror attacks the Shin Bet thwarts and how many attacks it motivates with its unchecked activities. But when Bar boasts of 2,000 recent arrests, it’s clear there are more than a few innocent people among them, and people who will be radicalized by their very detention.
In a reality in which every night, soldiers accompanied by dogs terrorize people sleeping in their homes and snatch citizens from their beds at the behest of the Shin Bet, without any legal supervision of course, and in a reality where hundreds of people are detained without trial for months and years, also by order of the Shin Bet, it is clear that the damage is enormous. The most serious consequence is turning Israeli democracy into one of the most brutal military tyrannies in the world, even if only in its own backyard.
The Shin Bet barely operates in sovereign Israel. But what it is doing in the occupied territories, which are an inseparable part of Israel, apparently forever, makes it impossible to define Israel as a democracy anymore, certainly not when it is clear that this is not a temporary situation. There is no evil with which the Israeli Stasi – in the territories the Shin Bet is the Stasi in every way, with more advanced technology than the infamous East German organization had – is unfamiliar.
Just this week I met, at the Al-Arroub refugee camp, an 11-year-old boy who lost an eye to an IDF bullet. Now he has also been defined as a security risk, who is barred from entering Israel for treatment at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center on the order of the Shin Bet. Last week, two cancer patients in the Gaza Strip died; they were unable to receive treatments in Israel in time because the Shin Bet denied them entry for two months.
Click here to read the entire article.
I just finished participating in another political action campaign with Jewish Voice for Peace focused on the recent Israeli bombing of Gaza.
Below is a collection of reasonable testimonies from both Jewish and Palestinian young people addressing this tragedy of non-stop violence.
Please check it out:
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to a group of courageous young people from Israel and Palestine who are working to build a better, more peaceful future. As yet another round of conflict threatens to erupt, I urge you to listen to what they have to say. pic.twitter.com/tZe0HsqytE
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) August 5, 2022
The Jerusalem Post reported in 2014 on the Israeli military policy of “mowing the grass” in Gaza.
Of course, no one living in Gaza has an actual lawn. Instead, this is Israel’s not-so-clever euphemism for its periodic military attacks against the human beings living in Gaza.
Yes, the Israeli military actually thinks it’s clever to describe the way they periodically mow down innocent Palestinian civilians as a public service in lawn care.
Ha ha…
Mowing Gaza’s grass accomplishes several goals for Israel.
First, as I explain in my book Like Birds in a Cage, regular Israeli airstrikes and
bombings, causing mayhem, death, and destruction is intended to remind the Palestinian people of who their Master is.
Thus, mowing the grass gives Israel yet another opportunity to sear the Palestinian conscience, to quote the military’s own description of this policy goal.
Like random electrical shocks administered to a caged dog, the Palestinians are supposed to surrender their will, abandon all resistance, and lapse into a state of learned helplessness.
Fortunately, however, the Palestinian people are refusing to learn Israel’s intended lesson.
Here is the sequence of events for the most recent exercise in Israel’s deadly conscience searing:
It began on August 1st when Israeli commandos captured a leader of the rebel organization called Islamic Jihad (IJ) who was living in the West Bank.
Several days later Israel followed up on that raid by launching an airstrike on Gaza in order to assassinate another IJ leader in his home. He was killed with several others.
Then Israel announced that it was launching a “preemptive strike” against Gaza in response to intelligence reports detailing IJ’s plans to use heavy artillery against Israel. Of course, as usual, Israel never provided any details about this supposed intelligence. The world is expected to simply take Israel’s word at face value.
What followed was another merciless blood-letting.
At last count, as best I can discover, hundreds of Gazans have been injured, approximately 65 people were killed, 15 of them being children. The total damage to homes, businesses, and infrastructure has yet to be determined.
The IJ forces launched almost 1,000 rockets against Israel. Yet, Israel did not suffer a single casualty. Some of these rockets did not even make it outside of Gaza, landing short and killing Palestinians instead.
These statistics tell us everything we need to know about the grotesque asymmetry characteristic of this “conflict.” A nuclear power is using state-of-the-art weaponry to mow down people living under military occupation whose weapons are like children’s toys in comparison.
I can’t help but wonder what happened to the (imaginary) heavy artillery that IJ was supposedly preparing to fire against Israel. Such rockets never made an appearance among the 1,000-or-so homemade IJ missiles that traced their wobbly, white streaks erratically across the Gazan sky this past week.
So, there you have it. The entire Israel-Palestine situation in a nut shell.
Israel continues its military occupation and blockade of Gaza and the West Bank, and they continue to get away with it.
Israel mows down hundreds of innocent men, women, and children, and gets away with it. Again, Israel will not suffer a single negative consequence from the outside world.
Palestinians make a feeble attempt to defend themselves against Israeli aggression, and they are vilified by Israel and its allies.
Which all raises a vital question: Whose conscience is being seared by this perpetual savagery?
It is mind-numbingly absurd to hear the president of the United States seriously referring to “the two state solution” as the best hope for the Palestinian people.
The supposed “two state solution” died years ago, asphyxiated beneath the weight of 700,000 illegal Jewish settlers occupying hundreds of illegal, Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank; buried beneath the unending
Israeli land grabs, government annexations of “military zones,” illegal home demolitions, unremitting crop destruction, orchards butchered, olive trees and vineyards uprooted, not to mention the brutal, suffocating military occupation now entering its 75th year.
As Israeli journalist Gideon Levy explains, Biden’s appeal to the future prospects of a two-state solution, one for Israel and one for Palestinians, expresses America’s surrender to Israel’s stone-cold hard-heartedness, inflexibility, and Zionism’s blinding belief in Jewish, ethnic entitlement.
Posing as a neutral mediator, while never — no never — acting as anything of the sort, the US has encouraged decades of false hope and wasted effort in supposed “Peace Talks” between Israel and the Palestinian leadership.
Granted, Yasser Arafat was a foolish negotiator — but never the intransigent deceiver that Israel and the USA always made him out to be — and the PLO made plenty of irresponsible mistakes while betraying their own people.
But as Israel’s greatest political supporter, financier, and supplier of military hardware and technology, the US never intended to assist the Palestinians in their efforts to escape Israeli’s colonial domination.
For instance, when dealing with the Likud negotiators under Begin and Netanyahu, the US never — never — challenged the Likud party platform proclaiming that Israel would never permit the creation of a Palestinian state.
If that’s not reprehensible collusion, I don’t know what is.
After all, what are 4.5 million Palestinian refugees when compared to two colonial, nuclear armed super-powers pledged to watch each other’s backs? The strategic interests of neither America nor Israel has ever included the moral imperative of justice for oppressed, brown-skinned, Arab human beings.
Why has anyone ever been foolish enough to imagine otherwise?
Mr. Levy’s latest article in Haaretz newspaper is titled “Biden Signs the Palestinians’ Death Certificate.”
Read Levy’s analysis below (all emphasis mine):
At Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, of all places, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a death certificate. The two-state solution died a long time ago, and now so has the Palestinians’ strategic choice of relying on the West in their struggle for their national rights.
This was depicted as an excellent choice. The protégé and even the darling of Western Europe’s social democratic stars of those days – Willy Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme and François Mitterrand – continued on to the Israelis’ hearts. Sartawi began with meetings with representatives of the Israeli left. Yasser Arafat enthusiastically joined the path his adviser had blazed. It seemed much more promising than winning support from Karachi.
Fifty years later this road has reached its end, with the Palestinians bleeding on the ground. An American president only gives them a few hours – on a visit that gives new meaning to the terms doing the minimum and lip service. So the time has come to awaken from the dream that Europe and America will ever do something for the Palestinians that won’t be to the satisfaction of their unassailable cherished one, Israel.
It’s a president who doesn’t bother to correctly pronounce the name of Shireen Abu Akleh, [Biden mispronounced her name as Abu Al-Qaeda!] the journalist killed almost certainly by Israel, becoming a national and international symbol. Jamal Khashoggi he knows how to pronounce. The Palestinians no longer have anything to look for in this arena. When Biden quoted from a poem that says how “hope and history rhyme” and threw them $100 million for Augusta Victoria, it was clear that it’s lost with the United States.
With an American president who promises them a two-state solution, but “not in the near term,” you get to the end of the story. You feel like asking Biden: “What will happen ‘not in the long term’ that will achieve this solution? Will the Israelis decide on their own? Will the settlers return on their own? When there are a million of them instead of 700,000, will that satisfy them?
Will America ever think differently? Why should this happen? With the laws against BDS and the new and distorted definitions of antisemitism, the United States and Europe are lost as far as the Palestinians are concerned. The battle has been decided, Israel has all but beaten them, and their fate might be the same as that of the indigenous peoples in the United States.
It’s enough to look at the picture of the meeting in Bethlehem: Twelve grim Palestinian men in ties around the two leaders in a group photo of despair. It’s enough to recall Biden’s words in 1986 to the secretary of state at the time, George Shultz: “I hate to hear an administration … refusing to act on a morally important point. … I’m ashamed that this country puts out a policy like this, that says nothing, nothing.”
Biden was referring to U.S. policy on the previous apartheid country, South Africa. Amazingly similar remarks can be hurled now at Biden because of his approach to the second apartheid country. But there’s no Biden to hurl them.
