“Surgical strikes.” Our foreign aid at work. Photos from Gaza by Eva Bartlett of the International Solidarity Movement. More fotos here. And if you find them disturbing, just imagine the effect across the Arab world.
Related posts:
- Gaza was ‘a high-tech military pogrom’
- Killing of 3 top Palestinian footballers in Gaza has helped unite Palestinian community
- What if Nixon had bombed the ghettoes in the name of law and order?
- Can you imagine the Times Op-Ed page running pieces supporting the Haditha massacre in Iraq?
- When U.S. Raises Its Voice, Israel Slows ‘Settlements’
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FROM BBC NEWS:
Israel bombs university in Gaza
from BBC News – last updated at 23:53 GMT, Sunday, 28 December 2008
Israeli air force jets have bombed the Islamic University in the Gaza Strip, a significant cultural symbol for Hamas.
Warplanes also struck Hamas government offices as air raids aimed at forcing Palestinian militants to halt rocket fire into southern Israel continued.
Palestinian medics say nearly 300 people have been killed in the air raids that began on Saturday.
Israel has threatened to launch a ground assault and is now calling up 6,500 army reservists……
ARTICLE- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7802515.stm
"Imagine if 275 Israelis had been killed yesterday"
and you will realize how racist our country still is.
excellent piece from The Guardian:
The recklessness of Hamas
Seth Freedman
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 December 2008 10.30 GMT
The last time I visited the embattled town of Sderot, I encountered a furious young resident who spat out his solution for his community's plight. "We have to kill all the militants [who are launching the Kassams]", he declared. "It's the only way to bring quiet back to the town. They had the chance to stop the rockets after we pulled out of Gaza, but they chose to carry on. I know they're suffering in Gaza too, but that doesn't excuse helping the terrorists attack us – they bring it on themselves".
What those militants sowed over the last few years, in the shape of thousands of rockets and mortars fired over the border at Israeli civilians, they reaped yesterday as the might of the Israeli air force came crashing down on Gaza. For all that I regularly sound off about almost every facet of the Israeli occupation and the government's policies towards the Palestinians, I struggle to see what option Israel's leaders had, other than to take the kind of action that they took this weekend.
As soon as the six-month ceasefire ended, with Hamas refusing to lay down their weapons and resuming their attacks on Israeli civilians, it was plain that Israel was being invited, if not provoked into, an operation to cut the head off the hydra. Hamas knew that with tens of thousands of Israeli men, women and children within range of the Kassam rockets, public opinion would demand action to protect those in the line of fire.
Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find an Israeli who thinks that Israel was wrong to respond to the rockets in the way it did today. I suspect that Israel's response was no different to that which citizens of any other state would demand of their leaders in similar circumstances.
As Israeli spokesmen have reiterated time and again in the media, there is not a country in the world which would allow such assaults to take place on a daily basis without taking action to defend their citizens. Hamas knew this, and that their barrage of rockets would inevitably bring retaliation on the people of Gaza. Despite the ever-louder sabre-rattling by Israeli politicians during the last week, Hamas continued to use heavily-populated civilian centres as launching pads for their daily attacks on Israel.
On Friday, militants in Gaza killed two Palestinian schoolgirls when a rocket aimed at Israeli targets misfired and slammed into a Palestinian house. That tragedy underlined the rocket crews' utter disregard for civilian lives, Palestinian or Israeli. In response, Israel has called time on these assaults, dealing a serious blow to Hamas's infrastructure. Cue deafening calls for restraint from the outside world.
But not all such calls are quite so deafening. Condoleeza Rice and Gordon Brown, in carefully-worded statements, have expressed their concern about Hamas rockets ahead of Israeli retaliation. Tzipi Livni was in Egypt last week obtaining Egyptian support for yesterday's activities. If Mahmoud Abbas openly condemns the air strikes and expresses support for the people of Gaza, the unspoken message is that he would not be entirely sorry to see Hamas brought to its knees.
Those who have condemned Israel, loudly and unequivocally, for falling into the trap laid by Hamas ought to be just as vocal in their condemnation of Hamas for setting such a trap in the first place. Speaking on SkyNews to an Israeli embassy spokesman, Tim Marshall castigated Israel for responding to Hamas rockets ("which rarely cause fatalities") with an assault leaving around 150 people dead. Who will castigate Hamas for their reckless endangerment of civilian lives in Gaza?
Gordon Brown said in the wake of the strikes: "Peaceful means are the only way of reaching a lasting solution to the situation in Gaza." I firmly believe that this is a view shared by the majority of Israelis, notwithstanding the devastation that is currently being wrought. I also firmly believe that this is a view shared by the majority of Palestinians, notwithstanding that their leadership (in Gaza at least) appears to take a different approach.
Gazans are human beings.
Sderot residents are human beings.
TALMUDIC ARITHMETIC:
"Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.
Paul Berger
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From Laura Rozen's excellent blog:
I asked former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy, currently in Israel, why, while recognizing the pressure on the Israeli government to do something about the rockets from Gaza hitting southern Israel the past weeks, did Israeli officials choose to strike Hamas security facilities at midday when they were full of people, with high loss of life and almost certain dramatic escalation of the conflict? "I do not fully understand why they went for such a disproportionate escalation," Levy writes. "My guess: a combination of electioneering and misplaced wishful thinking that this will push the Arabs/world to intervene and downsize Hamas on terms favorable to Israel ….[This] won't happen – certainly not in a sustainable way. By the way, Hamas probably thinks this will cause intervention on terms favorable to themselves – also misguided (though less so; long term, this helps Hamas is my guess)."
SOURCE – http://warandpiece.com/
EGYPTIAN TREACHERY:
"Citing diplomatic sources, the London-based daily al-Quds al-Arabi reported Sunday that Egyptian Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman had deceived Hamas into believing that Israel would not launch an attack on the Gaza Strip in the near future.
Omar Suleiman
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FROM "THINK PROGRESS"
By Matt Duss
Andy McCarthy: Will The Gaza Strikes ‘Educate’ The Palestinians?»
Commenting on Israel’s attack on Gaza, NRO’s Andy McCarthy wonders whether the strikes will “demonstrate that terrorism is a loser for those who vote for it.”
"The question is whether the Palestinian people are educable. Which brings me back to the first point: the Palestinians voted to put in power — i.e., vest with the power of a quasi-sovereign government — a terrorist organization which thinks legitimate governing consists of bringing about the annihilation of its sovereign neighbor and, meantime, targeting the said neighbor’s civilian population with bombing attacks. When you do that, you make yourself a target."
It’s one thing to defend Israel’s disproportionate attacks as a legitimate attempt to destroy Hamas’ capacity to launch rockets into Israel, but it’s quite another to defend them as an attempt to “educate” the Palestinian people. The former is debatable, the latter is a forthright embrace of terrorism, the use of force against civilians to achieve a political goal……….
ENTIRE POST -
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2008/12/28/andy-mccarthy-will-the-gaza-strikes-educate-the-palestinians/
Courtesy of BBC News:
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FROM MATT YGLESIAS @ thinkprogress.org:
Getting Tough
Marty Peretz on the Gaza attacks:
Message: do not fuck with the Jews.
I think that’s exactly right, and also incredibly idiotic. To people who feel besieged and impotent to resolve the political paralysis afflicting their country, something like sending the message “do not fuck with the Jews” must feel incredibly cathartic. But you have to ask yourself which Palestinian having lived through decades of Israeli occupation and all sorts of different ups-and-downs of Israeli policy and all manner of retaliatory strikes and cease-fires is really unaware that Israel doesn’t like being fucked with? The psychology of catastrophe is that one wants (a) to improve the situation, and (b) to lash out at a bad guy.
Under the circumstances, the temptation to decide that you can best accomplish (a) by doing (b) is overwhelming and so you respond to 9/11 by invading Iraq. But already the number of Israelis killed by Hamas rockets has increased (from a baseline of zero) since the retaliatory attack that was supposed to prevent such killings.
SOURCE – http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/12/getting_tough.php
PERETZ DEFECATION -
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_spine/archive/2008/12/27/very-disproportionate-indeed.aspx
Arabs suck at war.
Jews are great at killing helpless civilians.
That Guardian piece by Seth Freedman recommended by Jim Haygood (?) is terribly one eyed.So Hamas broke the ceasefire. But did Israel ever stop its brutal blockade of Gaza during this ceasefire – a blockade that has caused far more victims than those ineffective rockets ever did. And wasn't this blockade indiscriminately aimed at civilians and 'militants' alike?
Of course many Israelis prefer the victims of their oppression to play dead before they are actually killed. The rockets are then a disturbing sign that the victims have not yet accepted the peace of the cemetery.
>> So Hamas broke the ceasefire.
>> As soon as the six-month ceasefire ended, with Hamas refusing to lay down their weapons and resuming their attacks on Israeli civilians, it was plain that Israel was being invited, if not provoked into, an operation to cut the head off the hydra.
First off, Hamas did not break the ceasefire. The ceasefire was broken by Israel when, about three weeks ago, it launched a raid in Gaza, killing people as it went. That was the spark. Now, the incident figures nowhere in the discussion. Typical.
But secondly, Gazans have every right to resist the occupation by violent means. You can argue as to whether or not it is pragmatic for them to do so, but you can't say it is not in their right to do so. You can damn well bet that if Israels were penned up in the world's largest open-air prison, they'd fight back too.
Again, this is often lost in the discussion.
Actually, not only did Israel go into Gaza and kill people during the truce, as Sam notes, and Arie is dead right about the long slow
"diet" and blockade, which is still going on–Israel just "accidentally"
drove one of its patrol ships into the latest humanitarian boat, with
Cynthia McKinney on it. Israel obviously feels it can thumb its nose
at the world, sitting on Uncle Sam's shoulders all the way. This present Gaza dial up is the result of the democratic election, a true
democratic election monitored by outsiders, which Hamas won. Israel firsters in the USA and Israel just have never accepted any
government, free elected or otherwise, unless it was their puppet–or had nukes.
I have a sibling with Down Syndrome, and the last picture, the one of the little boy, looks like he has it too.
Not to mention the malnutrition and psychological trauma Israel has inflicted on this perfectly innocent child, it assaults him by air and puts him in the hospital?!?!
Infuriating. Disgusting. Appalling. ISRAEL
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