Thank goodness European media is stepping forward and speaking out more. Why shouldn't we move the billions that we send to Israel to Pakistan whom the latter is floundering at the face of growing fundamentalism in its northern borders because it cannot financially fight them?
First, let's make sure we know what's really going on in Gaza. And it's never what the country in charge, the country killing civilians with American-made bombs says. We have a stake in this. We should really make sure we're on the right side of humanity.
Showing posts with label Gaza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaza. Show all posts
Monday, February 16, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
A Few Dead Terrorists
Results of the bombing of the UNRWA School in Gaza Palestine:
I'm ready for ALL WAR to be illegal and for anyone who orders death upon others or pulls a trigger because he or she is ordered to be executed.
I'm so finished with this tit-for-tat excuse for killing. I'm sick of it.
I'm ready for ALL WAR to be illegal and for anyone who orders death upon others or pulls a trigger because he or she is ordered to be executed.
I'm so finished with this tit-for-tat excuse for killing. I'm sick of it.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Facts About Gaza
This is the best article I've read so far that lays out the facts on Hamas and Gaza. It's worth a read:
What You Don’t Know About Gaza
By RASHID KHALIDI
Published: January 7, 2009 in The New York Times
NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.
THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.
THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza’s air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
THE BLOCKADE Israel’s blockade of the strip, with the support of the United States and the European Union, has grown increasingly stringent since Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. Fuel, electricity, imports, exports and the movement of people in and out of the Strip have been slowly choked off, leading to life-threatening problems of sanitation, health, water supply and transportation.
The blockade has subjected many to unemployment, penury and malnutrition. This amounts to the collective punishment — with the tacit support of the United States — of a civilian population for exercising its democratic rights.
THE CEASE-FIRE Lifting the blockade, along with a cessation of rocket fire, was one of the key terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This accord led to a reduction in rockets fired from Gaza from hundreds in May and June to a total of less than 20 in the subsequent four months (according to Israeli government figures). The cease-fire broke down when Israeli forces launched major air and ground attacks in early November; six Hamas operatives were reported killed.
WAR CRIMES The targeting of civilians, whether by Hamas or by Israel, is potentially a war crime. Every human life is precious. But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers. Negotiation is a much more effective way to deal with rockets and other forms of violence. This might have been able to happen had Israel fulfilled the terms of the June cease-fire and lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip.
This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."
What You Don’t Know About Gaza
By RASHID KHALIDI
Published: January 7, 2009 in The New York Times
NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.
THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.
THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza’s air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
THE BLOCKADE Israel’s blockade of the strip, with the support of the United States and the European Union, has grown increasingly stringent since Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. Fuel, electricity, imports, exports and the movement of people in and out of the Strip have been slowly choked off, leading to life-threatening problems of sanitation, health, water supply and transportation.
The blockade has subjected many to unemployment, penury and malnutrition. This amounts to the collective punishment — with the tacit support of the United States — of a civilian population for exercising its democratic rights.
THE CEASE-FIRE Lifting the blockade, along with a cessation of rocket fire, was one of the key terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This accord led to a reduction in rockets fired from Gaza from hundreds in May and June to a total of less than 20 in the subsequent four months (according to Israeli government figures). The cease-fire broke down when Israeli forces launched major air and ground attacks in early November; six Hamas operatives were reported killed.
WAR CRIMES The targeting of civilians, whether by Hamas or by Israel, is potentially a war crime. Every human life is precious. But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers. Negotiation is a much more effective way to deal with rockets and other forms of violence. This might have been able to happen had Israel fulfilled the terms of the June cease-fire and lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip.
This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Israeli Bombing of the Interned City of Gaza
From the blog of my friend Masood Raja. To read more of Masood's blogs visit: Masood Raja for blogs on postcolonial literature and his political commentary.
Masood writes:
As we witness in horror the carnage unleashed by the sophisticated Israeli war machine, the US media and most of their European cohorts have also launched—as usual—a sophisticated barrage of racialized dissimulation. In the overall narrative of the coverage:
Hamas broke the truce by firing rockets into Israeli territories.
Israel has a right to self-defense
=
Bombing of Gaza = Self defense
Nowhere in this overarching narrative can one find a reference to the material suffering of the last one year that has brought Gaza to the brink. Let us remind ourselves:
Gaza has been under an Israeli embargo for the last year.
It is a city with the highest density of population per square mile in the world.
A twenty-four foot high WALL surrounds the city.
The two exits—one on Israeli side and the other on Egyptian side—have been mostly closed for the last year.
So these people, with the highest density of population in the world, have been living in the worst kind of collective jail for almost an year, but we still want them to act as if their lives are similar to any settler across the wall or any other citizen of the so-called civilized world.
The media narrative also emphasizes the fact that Israel hit ‘symbols of Hamas’ and about 175 of the people killed in the last three days were members of the police. As if by being part of the police force of Gaza, they had automatically forfeited their right to live. But here is the ultimate irony: If the cause of the attack is to force Hamas to stop people from firing rockets at Israel, then how in the ‘hell’ will Hamas do that if its entire security/police infrastructure has been destroyed?
Yesterday I also listened to a most bizarre coverage of the bombing by BBC. The BBC commentator was broadcasting from the home of an Israeli settler family. The participants, all youg educated people, were supporters of the bombing. The few callers, who called from Gaza, despite being bombed and despite their limited English abilities, were silenced by these suburban war sympathizers for not organizing themselves against the policies of Hamas. So here were these young Palestinians, both of whom had lost relatives in the bombing, being lectured by these middle-class, educated and privileged Israeli war sympathizers about the importance of resistance. And no one, of course not the BBC reporter, grasped the irony in this. What the Israeli war sympathizers wanted was for the Gazans to, somehow transcend their own lived reality and see it from the point of view of their oppressors.
What was also missing in this staged encounter between the two unequal groups was any reference to the material conditions of Gaza. Is it fair to put people in a collective jail, cut off from the world, so that the only form of civic dispensation comes from one party alone—Hamas—and then expect them to, somehow, revolt against it? Unless the logic behind this entire exercise is to break the Palestinian will to a point where they are so pacified that they stop asking for any form of justice, but that policy of creating the samideen failed a long time ago, and numerous reconquests of Gaza are not going to quash the traces of Palestinian national identity.
So this is my question to my enlightened friends and colleagues from the West: Why is it that when it comes to peoples' rights in South Africa, Africa, China, Tibet and elsewhere, you raise your voices to oppose it, but when it comes to Palestinians all you have to offer is an indifferent silence? Are Palestinian rights less sacred than others; is their blood cheaper than European or American blood?
Think about it!
Peace and Love.
Masood writes:
As we witness in horror the carnage unleashed by the sophisticated Israeli war machine, the US media and most of their European cohorts have also launched—as usual—a sophisticated barrage of racialized dissimulation. In the overall narrative of the coverage:
Hamas broke the truce by firing rockets into Israeli territories.
Israel has a right to self-defense
=
Bombing of Gaza = Self defense
Nowhere in this overarching narrative can one find a reference to the material suffering of the last one year that has brought Gaza to the brink. Let us remind ourselves:
Gaza has been under an Israeli embargo for the last year.
It is a city with the highest density of population per square mile in the world.
A twenty-four foot high WALL surrounds the city.
The two exits—one on Israeli side and the other on Egyptian side—have been mostly closed for the last year.
So these people, with the highest density of population in the world, have been living in the worst kind of collective jail for almost an year, but we still want them to act as if their lives are similar to any settler across the wall or any other citizen of the so-called civilized world.
The media narrative also emphasizes the fact that Israel hit ‘symbols of Hamas’ and about 175 of the people killed in the last three days were members of the police. As if by being part of the police force of Gaza, they had automatically forfeited their right to live. But here is the ultimate irony: If the cause of the attack is to force Hamas to stop people from firing rockets at Israel, then how in the ‘hell’ will Hamas do that if its entire security/police infrastructure has been destroyed?
Yesterday I also listened to a most bizarre coverage of the bombing by BBC. The BBC commentator was broadcasting from the home of an Israeli settler family. The participants, all youg educated people, were supporters of the bombing. The few callers, who called from Gaza, despite being bombed and despite their limited English abilities, were silenced by these suburban war sympathizers for not organizing themselves against the policies of Hamas. So here were these young Palestinians, both of whom had lost relatives in the bombing, being lectured by these middle-class, educated and privileged Israeli war sympathizers about the importance of resistance. And no one, of course not the BBC reporter, grasped the irony in this. What the Israeli war sympathizers wanted was for the Gazans to, somehow transcend their own lived reality and see it from the point of view of their oppressors.
What was also missing in this staged encounter between the two unequal groups was any reference to the material conditions of Gaza. Is it fair to put people in a collective jail, cut off from the world, so that the only form of civic dispensation comes from one party alone—Hamas—and then expect them to, somehow, revolt against it? Unless the logic behind this entire exercise is to break the Palestinian will to a point where they are so pacified that they stop asking for any form of justice, but that policy of creating the samideen failed a long time ago, and numerous reconquests of Gaza are not going to quash the traces of Palestinian national identity.
So this is my question to my enlightened friends and colleagues from the West: Why is it that when it comes to peoples' rights in South Africa, Africa, China, Tibet and elsewhere, you raise your voices to oppose it, but when it comes to Palestinians all you have to offer is an indifferent silence? Are Palestinian rights less sacred than others; is their blood cheaper than European or American blood?
Think about it!
Peace and Love.
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