Why Were They Killed?

Why Were They Killed?

Truth and Trauma in Gaza

by KATHY KELLY

Dec 02, 2012

Dr. T., a medical doctor, is a Palestinian living in Gaza City.  He is still reeling from days of aerial bombardment. When I asked about the children in his community he told me his church would soon be making Christmas preparations to lift the children’s spirits.  Looking at his kindly smile and ruddy cheeks, I couldn’t help wondering if he’d be asked to dress up as “Baba Noel,” as Santa Claus.  I didn’t dare ask this question aloud.  ??“The most recent war was more severe and vigorous than the Operation Cast Lead,” he said slowly, leaning back in his chair and looking into the distance.  “I was more affected this time. The weapons were very strong, destroying everything. One rocket could completely destroy a building.”

The 8-day Israeli offensive in November lasted for fewer days and brought fewer casualties, but it was nonstop and relentless, and everywhere.

“At 1:00 a.m. the bank was bombed, and everyone in the area was awakened from sleep.  Doors were broken and windows were shattered.  There was an agonizing sound, as if we were in a battlefield.”

“The bombing went on every day.  F16 U.S. jets were hitting hard.”

“This is more than anyone can tolerate.  We were unsafe at any place at any time.”

U.S. media and government statements are full of accounts about the scattershot Hamas rocket fire that had taken one Israeli life in the months before the Israeli bombing campaign.  The U.S. government demands that the Gazans disarm completely.  Due to simple racism and a jingoistic eagerness to get in line with U.S. military policy, Western commentators ignore the bombardment of Gazan neighborhoods which has caused thousands of casualties over just the past few years. They automatically frame Israel’s actions as self-defense and the only conceivable response to Palestinians who, under whatever provocations, dare to make themselves a threat.

“Any house can be destroyed.  The airplanes filled the skies,” Dr. T. continued.  “They were hitting civilians like the one who was distributing water.”  The Palestine Centre for Human Rights report confirms that Dr. T is discussing Suhail Hamada Mohman and his ten year old son, who were both killed instantly at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, November 18, 2012 in Beit Lahiya while distributing water to their neighbors.

Dr. T. then mentioned the English teacher and his student killed nearby walking in the street.  The PCHR report notes that on November 16, at approximately 1:20 p.m., Marwan Abu al-Qumsan, 42, a teacher at an UNRWA school, was killed when Israeli Occupation Forces bombarded an open space area in the southeast section of Beit Lahia town.  He had been visiting the house of his brother, Radwan, 76, who was also seriously wounded.

And Dr. T. mentioned the Dalu family.  “They were destroyed for no reason. You can go visit there.”

The next day, I went to the building north of Gaza City where the Dalu family had lived.

In the afternoon on Sunday, November 18, an Israeli F-16 fighter jet fired a missile at the 4-story house belonging to 52-year-old Jamal Mahmoud Yassin al-Dalu. The house was completely destroyed as were all inside.  Civil Defense crews removed from the debris the bodies of 8 members of the family, four women and four children aged one to seven.   Their names were:

    Samah Abdul Hamid al-Dalu, 27;

    Tahani Hassan al-Dalu, 52;

    Suhaila Mahmoud al-Dalu, 73

    Raneen Jamal al-Dalu, 22.

    Jamal Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 6;

    Yousef Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 4;

    Sarah Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 7;

    Ibrahim Mohammed Jamal al-Dalu, 1;

On November 23rd, two more bodies were found under the rubble, one of them a child.

The attack destroyed several nearby houses, including the house of the Al-Muzannar family where two civilians, a young man and a 75year-old woman, also died.  They were: Ameena Matar al-Mauzannar, 75; and Abdullah Mohammed al-Muzannar, 19.

One banner that hangs on a damaged wall reads, “Why were they killed?”  Another shows enlarged pictures of the Dalu children’s faces.

Atop the rubble of the building is the burned wreckage of the family minivan, flipped there upside down in the blast.

The Israeli military later claimed it had collapsed the building in hope of assassinating an unspecified visitor to the home, any massive civilian death toll justifiable by the merest hint of a military target.  Qassam rockets killing one Israeli a year are terrorism, but deliberate attacks to collapse buildings on whole families are not.

“All Palestinians are targeted now,” a woman who lives across the street told us. Every window in her home had been shattered by the blast.  She had been sure it was the end of her life when she heard the explosion. She had covered her face, and then, opening her eyes, seen the engine from the neighbor’s car flying past her through her home.  She pointed to a spot on the floor where a large rocket fragment had landed in her living room. Then, looking at the ruins of the Dalu building, she shook her head. “These massacres would not happen if the people who fund it were more aware.”

Mr. Dalu’s nephew Mahmoud is a pharmacist, 29 years of age, who is still alive because he had recently moved next door from his uncle’s now-vanished building to an apartment that he built for himself, his wife and their two year-old daughter who are also alive.  With his widowed mother and several neighborhood women, he and his wife had been preparing to celebrate his daughter’s birthday.  A garland of tinsel still festoons a partly destroyed wall.  The blast destroyed much of his home’s infrastructure, but he was able to shepherd his family members and their guests out of the house to safety.  Several were taken to the hospital in shock.

“I don’t know why this happened to us,” Mahmoud says.  “I am a pharmacist.  In my uncle’s house lived a doctor and a computer engineer. We were just finishing lunch.  There were no terrorists here.  Only family members here.   Now I don’t know what to do, where to go. I feel despair.  We are living in misery.”

“Any war is inhuman, irreligious, and immoral,” my friend, Dr. T., had told me.

Dr. T. is afraid that Israel is preparing a worse war, one with ground troops deployed, for after its upcoming election.  “We are hopeful to live in peace.  We don’t want to make victims. We love Israelis as we love any human being.”

“But we are losing the right to life in terms of movement, trade, education, and water.  The Israelis are taking these rights; they are not looking out for the human rights of Palestinians.  They only focus on their sense of security.  They want Palestine to lose all rights.”

Election logic aside, Israel has already violated the ceasefire – at any time the missiles and rockets could start raining down once more. Year round, that is what it means to live in Gaza.

I decided not to bring up the Santa Claus question and instead thanked him for his honest reflections and bade him farewell.



ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!


Sincerelyours

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!

Read More

The Strong and the Sweet

The Strong and the Sweet

The UN and Palestine

by URI AVNERY

Dec 02, 2012

It was a day of joy.

Joy for the Palestinian people.

Joy for all those who hope for peace between Israel and the Arab world.

And, in a modest way, for me personally.

The General Assembly of the United Nations, the highest world forum, has voted overwhelmingly for the recognition of the State of Palestine, though in a limited way.

The resolution adopted by the same forum 65 years ago to the day, to partition historical Palestine between a Jewish and an Arab state, has at long last been reaffirmed.

I hope I may be excused a few moments of personal celebration.

During the war of 1948, which followed the first resolution, I came to the conclusion that there exists a Palestinian people and that the establishment of a Palestinian state, next to the new State of Israel, is the prerequisite for peace.

As a simple soldier, I fought in dozens of engagements against the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. I saw how dozens of Arab towns and villages were destroyed and left deserted. Long before I saw the first Egyptian soldier, I saw the people of Palestine (who had started the war) fight for what was their homeland.

Before the war, I hoped that the unity of the country, so dear to both peoples, could be preserved. The war convinced me that reality had smashed this dream forever.

I was still in uniform when, in early 1949, I tried to set up an initiative for what is now called the Two-State Solution. I met with two young Arabs in Haifa for this purpose. One was a Muslim Arab, the other a Druze sheik. (Both became members of the Knesset before me.)

At the time, it looked like mission impossible. “Palestine” had been wiped off the map. 78% of the country had become Israel, the other 22% divided between Jordan and Egypt. The very existence of a Palestinian people was vehemently denied by the Israeli establishment, indeed, the denial became an article of faith. Much later, Golda Meir famously declared that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”. Respected charlatans wrote popular books “proving” that the Arabs in Palestine were pretenders who had only recently arrived. The Israeli leadership was convinced that the “Palestinian problem” had disappeared, once and forever.

In 1949, there were not a hundred persons in the entire world who believed in this solution. Not a single country supported it. The Arab countries still believed that Israel would just disappear. Britain supported its client state, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The US had its own local strongmen. Stalin’s Soviet Union supported Israel.

Mine was a lonely fight. For the next 40 years, as the editor of a news magazine, I brought the subject up almost every week. When I was elected to the Knesset, I did the same there.

In 1968 I went to Washington DC, in order to propagate the idea there. I was politely received by the relevant officials in the State Department (Joseph Sisco), the White House  (Harold Saunders), the US mission to the UN (Charles Yost), leading Senators and Congressmen, as well as the British father of Resolution 242 (Lord Caradon). The uniform answer from all of them, without exception: a Palestinian state was out of question.

When I published a book devoted to this solution, the PLO in Beirut attacked me in 1970 in a book entitled “Uri Avnery and Neo-Zionism”.

Today, there is a world consensus that a solution of the conflict without a Palestinian state is quite out of the question.

So why not celebrate now?

Why now? Why didn’t it happen before or later?

Because of the Pillar of Cloud, the historic masterpiece from Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Avigdor Lieberman.

The Bible tells us about Samson the hero, who rent a lion with his bare hands. When he returned to the scene, a swarm of bees had made the carcase of the lion its home and produced honey. So Samson posed a riddle to the Philistines: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness”. This is now a Hebrew proverb.

Well, out of the “strong” Israeli operation against Gaza, sweetness has indeed come forth. It is another confirmation of the rule that when you start a war or a revolution, you never know what will come out of it.

One of the results of the operation was that the prestige and popularity of Hamas shot sky-high, while the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas sank to new depths. That was a result the West could not possibly tolerate. A defeat of the “moderates” and a victory for the Islamic “extremists” were a disaster for President Barack Obama and the entire Western camp. Something had to found – with all urgency – to provide Abbas with a resounding achievement.

Fortunately, Abbas was already on the way to obtain UN approval for the recognition of Palestine as a “state” (though not yet as a full member of the world organization). For Abbas, it was a move of despair. Suddenly, it became a beacon of victory.

The competition between the Hamas and Fatah movements is viewed as a disaster for the Palestinian cause. But there is also another way to look at it.

Let’s go back to our own history. During the 30s and 40s, our Struggle for Liberation (as we called it) split between two camps, who hated each other with growing intensity.

On the one side was the “official” leadership, led by David Ben-Gurion, represented by the “Jewish Agency” which cooperated with the British administration. Its military arm was the Haganah, a very large, semi-official militia, mostly tolerated by the British.

On the other side was the Irgun (“National Military Organization”), the far more radical armed wing of the nationalist “revisionist” party of Vladimir Jabotinsky. It split and yet another, even more radical, organization was born. The British called it “the Stern Gang”, after its leader, Avraham Stern”.

The enmity between these organizations was intense. For a time, Haganah members kidnapped Irgun fighters and turned them over to the British police, who tortured them and sent them to camps in Africa. A bloody fratricidal war was avoided only because the Irgun leader, Menachem Begin, forbade all actions of revenge. By contrast, the Stern people bluntly told the Haganah that they would shoot anyone trying to attack their members.

In retrospect, the two sides can be seen as acting as the two arms of the same body. The “terrorism” of the Irgun and Stern complemented the diplomacy of the Zionist leadership. The diplomats exploited the achievements of the fighters. In order to counterbalance the growing popularity of the “terrorists”, the British made concessions to Ben-Gurion. A friend of mine called the Irgun “the shooting agency of the Jewish Agency”.

In a way, this is now the situation in the Palestinian camp.

For years, the Israeli government has threatened Abbas with the most dire consequences if he dared to go to the UN. Abolishing the Oslo agreement and destroying the Palestinian authority was the bare minimum. Lieberman called the move “diplomatic terrorism”.

And now? Nothing. Not a bang and barely a whimper. Even Netanyahu understands that the Pillar of Cloud has created a situation where world support for Abbas has become inevitable.

What to do? Nothing! Pretend the whole thing is a joke. Who cares? What is this UNO anyway? What difference does it make?

Netanyahu is more concerned about another thing that happened to him this week. In the Likud primary elections, all the “moderates” in his party were unceremoniously kicked out. No liberal, democratic alibi was left. The Likud-Beitenu faction in the next Knesset will be composed entirely of right-wing extremists, among them several outright fascists, people who want to destroy the independence of the Supreme Court, cover the West Bank densely with settlements and prevent peace and a Palestinian state by all possible means.

While Netanyahu is sure to win the coming elections and continue to serve as Prime Minister, he is too clever not to realize where he is now: a hostage to extremists, liable to be thrown out by his own Knesset faction if he so much as mentions peace, to be displaced at any time by Lieberman or worse.

On first sight, nothing much has changed. But only on first sight.

What has happened is that the foundation of the State of Palestine has now been officially acknowledged as the aim of the world community. The “Two-State solution” is now the only solution on the table. The “One-State solution”, if it ever lived, is as dead as the dodo.

Of course, the apartheid one-state is reality. If nothing changes on the ground, is will become deeper and stronger. Almost every day brings news of it becoming more and more entrenched. (The bus monopoly has just announced that from now on there will be separate buses for West Bank Palestinians in Israel.)

But the quest for peace based on the co-existence between Israel and Palestine has taken a big step forwards. Unity between the Palestinians should be the next. US support for the actual creation of the State of Palestine should come soon after.

The strong must lead to the sweet.


ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!


Sincerelyours

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!

Read More

Knocking on the Iron Wall

Knocking on the Iron Wall

Palestine, the UN and Australian Labor
 
by RICK KUHN
 
Dec 02, 2012
 
One week Australia’s Labor Party Prime Minister Julia Gillard cheers on Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza, the next the parliamentary Labor Party caucus rolls her over recognition of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly.

In the United Nations, Labor foreign minister Bert Evatt pushed for the partition of Palestine and in 1948 as the President of the General Assembly in 1948 supported the new Israeli state. Ever since Australian governments, Labor and conservative, have been hardline backers of Israel.

Has the Australian Labor Party’s position on Israel really changed?

The shift does not mean that Labor is now hostile to Israeli apartheid. Labor has a slightly different view from Israel, the United States and the Coalition about how best to preserve Israel as a racist state. The current Foreign Minister Bob Carr understands that the Arab Spring means that minor concessions have to be made to prop up the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, which is Israel’s policeman on the West Bank.

The laws that define Israel as a Jewish state mean that its Palestinian citizens have second class status. They are not allowed to live in most areas, their separate schools are underfunded, they are ineligible for many welfare services and public sector jobs, Arabic is treated as inferior to Hebrew.

After living for decades under Israeli occupation, the Palestinians of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem have no say at all over Israel’s policies. Jews, like me, have a right of ‘return’ to Israel so long as they can demonstrate their hereditary Jewishness through their mothers’ lines. Palestinian refugees born in what is now Israel and their children and grandchildren have no right to return.

Australia abstained in the General Assembly’s overwhelming vote to accept Palestine not as a member of the UN but just an ‘observer state’, like the Pope’s toy state of the Vatican. Gillard had wanted Australia to vote against the resolution, with Israel, the United States and a handful of its clients.

The General Assembly decision will not improve the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

At best, it gives the issue of Israel’s repression of the Palestinians a little more profile and will probably lead to cases in the UN’s International Court of Justice, which will also help publicise the issue. Neither the USA nor Israel accepts the authority of the Court. The USA’s veto on the Security Council still ensures that the UN’s executive body will not act against Israel and that Palestine will not become a member of the UN.

If we want to understand the main reasons for Labor’s marginal departure from the Israel/US script for the Middle East, we have to look to Palestine and the Arab world rather than the New York and the Hague where the UN and ICJ sit.

Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has implemented the doctrine of the ‘iron wall’. This holds that the dispossession of the Palestinian people can only be maintained by armed force and that if the Palestinians ever accept the Jewish state it will only be because Israel’s military actions have made them give up hope.

The right wing Zionist Zeev Jabotinsky formulated the doctrine in 1923. But all Israel’s governments, including the Labour administrations of the country’s first decades, have pursued it.

Gillard’s support for Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’ is an endorsement of the iron wall.

The Arab Spring is revolutionising much of the Middle East, including Israel’s neighbours Egypt, Jordan and Syria. The vast majority of Arab people want democracy and better living standards. And, unlike the dictators and kings who formally or informally came to terms with Israel, they have real sympathy for their Palestinian sisters and brothers.

Israel and the United States, which backed the dictators Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt and still backs Abdullah the absolute monarch in Jordan, are much more isolated in the Middle East today than two years ago. Israel is even more dependent on US military and diplomatic backing. The United States needs Israel more than ever, as its one really reliable, powerful and relatively stable ally in a region whose location and oil give it outstanding global strategic importance.

The Australian Labor government’s minor shift on Palestine recognises that it is necessary to prop up the dictatorial Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, his Fatah party and its allies, on the West Bank.

The PA is invaluable to Israel. Shawan Jabarin, director-general of Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, currently in Australia, this week said ‘To be honest, the PA serves the Israelis’. The PA’s ‘security coordination’ with Israel is coordination in the repression of Palestinians. Without consulting the Palestinians, Abbas recently gave up on the Palestinian right of return.

Particularly after the Palestinians of Gaza resisted the latest Israeli attacks and were even able to secure some concessions from Israel, the credibility of the PA is at a low ebb. The government of Gaza is run by Fatah’s equally dictatorial but less corrupt Islamist rival Hamas.

The success of the PA’s project of gaining observer state status at the UN will be a small boost to its prestige and the declining plausibility of the ‘two state solution’ of the conflict in Palestine, which the Israeli, the US and Australian governments claim to support. That ‘solution’ would leave Israeli apartheid in tact.

The ALP caucus deal no doubt also reflected other considerations much less directly connected with the Middle East. Bob Carr wanted to stay on the right side of some of the governments that voted for Australian membership of the UN Security Council in October. Although the Labor left initially wanted Australia to actually support Palestine’s observer state status, the caucus deal appeared to demonstrate that the left is not entirely irrelevant through a concession on an issue of quaternary significance. The decision might help Labor hold some seats in Sydney with substantial Arab and Muslim populations.

Finally, there has been a major shift in wider public attitudes in Australia to Palestine over the past three decades, as opposed to the solid bipartisan Zionism of the ALP and Coalition. But the government has been quite wiling to ignore overwhelming public rejection of some of its policies, even on issues like equal marriage where Australian national interests, that is corporate interests, are not at stake. Australia’s abstention in the General Assembly vote is part of a strategy that is intended to advance those interests. Whether it will succeed in strengthening the capacity of the US governments to impose their will on the world and hence Australia’s ability to call the shots in the south west Pacific and south east Asia is another question.



ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!


Sincerelyours

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!

Read More