A few days ago, I left Gaza with Medea Benjamin (above, as we came through the Sinai) and four other members of her Code Pink delegations. I wasn’t really able to write about Gaza while I was there. We had so many wrenching meetings and encounters over nine days that it was all I could do to drag myself back into my room at 1 in the morning and then rise at 6 or 7 the next day to begin the cycle again.
When I said that I was witnessing bondage out of the Bible, a friend I made in Gaza, Mond Mishal, (right), a would-be graduate student, shook his head.
“Don’t talk about the bible, or an old story. You must find a new metaphor. We are being experimented on. This is a human experiment,” he said.
The other friend I made there, Reem Abu Jaber, echoed the point: “This is beyond books and fairytales. Sometimes I think that words are not made for what we are going through.”
Over the next few days I’ll be offering individual stories from Gaza in an effort to persuade Americans that this is persecution. In the meantime, I wanted to give my overall impressions.
Our days were full for a simple reason: Gaza is lonely. Shunned by the world community and closed off from interaction, the people feel an utter loss of respect, and so almost anyone who knew that the Code Pink delegation was there, from the UN relief agency to Hamas leaders to the International Solidarity Movement and even the New York Times correspondent, wanted to meet with us to try to explain the Gaza experience. These meetings always went over time with exhausting emotional exchanges. Gazans have been written out of the human family, notwithstanding the fact that they are “civilized to their core” (as John Ging of UNWRA says), and the hunger to regain respect in the eyes of the world pervaded every encounter we had, along with rage and helplessness at the global picture of Gaza as a place filled with crazy extremists.
“They think there is one man in Gaza with a long beard and he is saying these things,” Abu Jaber said, referring to Sheikh Yassin—“He is not me. But you must see the context, why he was doing this and saying this.”
She touched on the pervasive atmosphere of the trip, of hatred, communicated between two separated peoples. I’m more interested in the Israeli hatred, because Israel is the powerful party, and I’m Jewish and feel responsibility when I witness the intense racism I observed in Gaza. “What are we, cows and donkeys?” wailed Aisha Abed Rabbo, (left) who had been rendered homeless, living in a tent, through what Human Rights Watch has determined was the “wanton” destruction of housing in the easterly village of Izbet Abed Rabbo.
The answer to Aisha is: Yes; to them you are not much more than cows or donkeys. I know some of this prejudice. I grew up with a sense of Jews as a superior people. As readers of this site know, I am proud of Jewish achievement, I’m a reader and writer because I am Jewish, my culture granted me intellectual confidence. But there is a downside to the exceptionalism, a disdain for people who live off the land, and I saw it at every hand in Gaza. The vicious graffiti on the walls, the use of white phosphorus in civilian neighborhoods (which I’ll document in days to come), the rampant trashing of property—these arise from the cultural and racial differences between Jews and Palestinians that have been inflamed by colonization, war, and maybe worst of all, segregation. When you see this stuff at first hand, all Michael Walzer’s just-war arguments about how Israelis really ought to treat Palestinian civilians in the same way that they would Israel civilians during a battle in a neighborhood come off as overly detached. He knows Jewish exceptionalism as well as I do and knows the contempt that goes along with it. A few hours in Gaza reveals that the Israelis would never treat Palestinian civilians as they would Jewish ones, and inasmuch as Walzer removes this conduct from its real cultural life, he does us no real service.
Just look at this ambulance that the Israelis crushed under a building in a kind of sport, after they stripped the driver of his uniform, which is mutilated here.
That’s Norman Finkelstein walking away (photo right). Finkelstein and I had a running joke. Whenever we visited schools or cultural centers, where children were singing songs and women were learning English, he would walk out and pronounce, “It’s just like Jeffrey Goldberg said! That was a slamdunk! This is [the evil kingdom of] Amalek!” Making fun of Goldberg’s view of the Palestinians as hatefilled extremists, when we had seen ordinary kids singing songs, playing games.
Here it is important for me to add that Goldberg’s view of Gaza draws on truths; and from the moment I arrived in Gaza the Goldberg in me was engaged. Islamic society is different from mine; and in Gaza the difference goes beyond religious difference to racial, cultural and class difference (Gazans are so much poorer than Israelis). I don’t like fundamentalism of any kind; but the strict roles for women in Gaza seem especially illiberal to me. I did not see one woman driving a car there. Here we are in a classroom (left) with a teacher clad head to toe in religious robe, wearing gloves, too, and just a slit for her eyes. I wondered at the model she was making for 10 and 11 year olds. And just as I urge the lesson of American minority rights for Israel’s racist treatment of Palestinians, so I urge a little Title IX on the Muslims.
Something else Goldberg is right about is the hatred toward Israelis and Jews. I heard this expressed often. “Before I hated them. Now I hate them even more,” said our translator, who had lost her home to the latest slaughter. Several Palestinians told me that the only solution is to push the Jews out of historical Palestine. Here, this woman who works for UNRWA is pointing at a map of Palestine and explaining that it is our land and they should just put their things on their backs and go back to the country from which they came, or go into the sea. “It is our land,” I heard that three or four times.
Many of the Gazan trash bins in the street are decorated as this one at left is, with the Star of David.
People routinely spoke of the Israelis as the Jews. The yehud, they would say. The failure to distinguish upset one of the Jews in our delegation, Joyce Ravitz (right), a lifetime Hadassah member and now a one-stater, who made a point of saying that many Jews had come out here to help Palestinians. Finkelstein told me that his parents, concentration camp survivors, always referred to the Nazis as Germans, and that this was a natural confusion, as Nazis were the only Germans they knew.
Given the horrifying onslaught Gazans have experienced at the hands of the Jewish state, which controls and reduces their lives, hatred of Jews is comprehensible to me; and besides, I think that definitions of Jewish identity are a real issue in this conflict. For most Jews, a Palestinian life is simply not worth as much as a Jewish life (Just read Israel Shahak on this question; or consider the fact that Dershowitz says that it is the “sacred mission” of Jews to protect Jewish life –as opposed to others’ lives).
The ethnocentrism and contempt were brought home by the meeting we had with the families of men held in Israeli jails. About 60 or 70 of these people were gathered in the room, for us, as the minister of detainees brought up one after another to the microphone. A boy who had not seen his father in 21 years. This 82-year-old man, Jalal Sagr, who reminded me of my own father, and who has not seen his son in many years and wants to see him before he dies. This little girl with a picture of her father.
I have no idea what the jailed men did or didn’t do. That’s an argument for another day. The simple point is that These people haven’t seen their kin in years. They’re not allowed to visit. And their men are less than 100 miles away in a foreign country. The inhumanity of this is crushing when you consider the point that several family members made, that Gilad Shalit has been held by Hamas for 3 years and his name is known worldwide. Every ambitious politician in Washington knows his name, and meantime there are 11,000 Palestinian prisoners and we never learn a thing about them!
Thus the racist double standard of Arab life being worth so much less than Israeli life is exported from Israel and Palestine to America, and these poor people know it.
Over two weeks in the Middle East, I came to the idea that Israel/Palestine has become an epicenter of hatred; and hatred flows out to the outside world from both sides. The insistence that all of Palestine is Palestinian and Israel/Jewish settlement doesn’t exist has resounded in Arab countries for decades; I have heard it in Egypt and Syria. And the insistence that Palestine is Jewish is meanwhile carried by neoconservatives and Zionists into high levels of American establishment, feeding the settler movement. I’ve fought the Jewish hatred of Arabs for years on this site; and I regret nothing I have done to elevate the Palestinian narrative. It is unheard in the United States, where the Zionist narrative is embraced by politicians who parrot a racist mantra again and again at AIPAC–Israel made the desert bloom–as if Palestinians weren’t growing in the desert for millennia.
Yet I recognize from my trip that there are dangers in the Palestinian narrative. It is backward looking, and it is too large in Palestinian consciousness. Many Palestinians are having lives in other places; and yet, because of the ongoing oppression, this narrative of dispossession and massacre and humiliation crowds the consciousness, just like the Holocaust narrative that I was nursed on as a young man (and that led Jeffrey Goldberg to emigrate to Israel out of the belief that the U.S. was not safe for Jews). I sense that the Nakba narrative is a liability in forming identity. It is its own form of mythology, and while mythologies are rooted in truth, it is not a help in actually imagining a Palestinian future. “We are living 10 percent in the present and 90 percent in the past,” Mond Mishal said to me. The ratio needs to be reversed in order to imagine a future.
I don’t know how Palestinians get past this. Americans could play an important role. They must force the acknowledgment and recognition of the Nakba in world culture, because the failure to acknowledge it is a form of holocaust denial. Barack Obama demonstrated this power the other day when he acknowledged Palestinian humiliations in his Cairo speech, and instantly won the hearts of many Arab youths whom I talked to.
Much as I dislike Islamist fundamentalism, it too must be understood as a form of cultural resistance the Palestinians have been reduced to by their extreme conditions. Sensing Israel’s contempt and returning the hatred, Gazans have fallen back on the thing that sets them apart from us, their religion, and made it scary and alien to us. Mond told me there used to be a liberal culture in Gaza, now it is absent. And with staggering unemployment figures (you hear numbers like 80 percent) there is no middle class, on which democratic life depends. The siege of Gaza is breeding ignorance and idleness and a smuggling culture that undermines civil society.
I believe that we have enormous power to shape the Arab spirit. Code Pink’s outreach to Hamas leaders had an effect in softening the group’s politics; and myself I feel an urgency about working with one foot in the Jewish community and the other in non-Jewish communities, to try and build connections between Arab intellectuals and American intellectuals, connections that could make my country safer and also transform Jewish life.
I’ve said nothing about the larger politics here because I’m boggled now. The occupation and siege are aimed at destroying the Palestinian spirit, that is the only obvious conclusion to me. “Whatever we do now, we are not going to a good place,” Reem Abu Jaber said, breaking down in front of a room full of visitors at the Qattan Center for the Child, which she heads. “You will talk, I know you will. Tell people to come and see my real face, not a media face.” [she is shown here holding a child’s painting of the onslaught]
Myself I almost don’t care how the savage siege and occupation end, with one state, two states, or multiple cantons. What matters most of all is that there is Palestinian freedom of movement and the walls of hatred and suspicion start to come down. On our last night, I was sitting with Mishal, Norm Finkelstein and Roane Carey of the Nation, when Mishal said that Arafat should have accepted the deal in 2000–just as the Arab states should have accepted partition in '47. “They made the same mistake, twice.”
It was a shocking thing for us to hear (Carey has edited an important book criticizing the deal offered at Camp David), but who were we three American lefties to argue with a young man whose dream of becoming an intellectual of the world has been smashed through an unending siege by a great power that is not going away– a young man who accepts that reality?
Ging urged the Code Pink delegation to go to Israel, and try to work with Israelis. I know he's right. A couple of people said to me that the jail that the Israelis have built for the Gazans is the jail in their own minds. “Israeli politicians need their close friends to help them to understand what they are doing,” Hasan Zeyada, a psychologist at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, said, appealing to us. “They have a very tragic experience in the second world war, and … they are psychologically displacing and projecting their suffering on the Palestinians. They need mature politicians to help them pass that experience and integrate it. Only when the Israelis feel guilty about what they have done to the Palestinians will we come to a place of peace.
"And this is your responsibility now, to help them understand.”
A forceful harsh tone (Gevurah in Hebrew) is at most a means to a morally engaged life. Ultimately it contrasts with and yields to compassion (chesed) as the primary value in a moral life. I don't see much sign of that in anything Chabad has said or done. All I see is schmaltz for Jews and vomit for everyone else.
OK, I think it originated in the aftermath of the Gazan war and as the doctors from several outside countries came in to study the effect. So from a Palestinian perspective it may be the combination of Israel's action, e.g. testing new weaponry, new application techniques, as some observers termed it plus the inquiries of outside observers coming in to study the effects. I can see your point, but you can't deny the world to use metaphors that describe how they experience this conflict, or the Gazans to find metaphors for it. The Nazi's SS doctors experiments on camp victims, although they also tested bombs on inmates to study the wounds, isn't really so close. The wounds created by bombs was the exception, mainly they tested bodies reaction on virus material, in search for antibodies and all kind of other more sick medical stuff. The phrase didn't trigger that imagery at all for me, although I am very familiar with the topic, for the simply reason, it's a completely different scenario. I somehow agree with Phil, it was the most startling metaphor for the situation. In a cage, not able to run away, bombed with all kind of newly tested weaponry (according to the evidence on the ground) and studied after. If you feel this equates the Israelis with Nazis, you must acknowledge too that the Israelis or the hawkish pro-Israeli forces use the Nazi imagery for the whole Arab world. And I just don't see you are as sensitive in this context. The Nazis are the peak of authoritarian, right wing power. The standard is the right wing targets civilians, Palestinian terrorists target civilians thus they are in a direct line with the Nazis. The problem is the Nazis were a state power not anti-state-power guerrilla forces. So the "pro-Israel" side uses selective imagery in this context too. Look the "cage situation" the fact that you are shot at if you try to fish in the sea, that you can't move freely and have the constant impression of surveillance from all kind of tools and planes above, as from all kind of intelligence forces inside, really suggests the image to me. But to end on a more conciliatory note, I appreciated Phil's more balanced approach too. It's important we register our sentiments, emotions that confrontations with a different culture triggers. The neocons couldn't have tried to hijack the left's human rights discourse with their bringing democracy narrative if there wasn't a grain of truth to it. If there wasn't indeed a cultural clash. The multi-layered return of religion. The ultimate source of ideologies? I am thankful about this: so I urge a little Title IX on the Muslims. I could say more about that, and how I discovered more subtle continuities from 19th girls education to the sixties over here. My mother's: Sit decently. The internalization of the male gaze in the female. Something not easy to accept for a tomboy. This e.g. would have been indecent: http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyranni... (technically not so good, but the posture fits) But this "clash" feels clearly exploited by Israel. If you force ahead into ever more wars you can avoid finding a solution to the conflict. Look with what article Pat Lang combined the video by Joseph & Max. I urge you to follow the link and read it not just Pat Lang's comment. Who by the way knows the ME and the Israeli military well: http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyranni...
I think the hostility to Richard's post is completely unwarranted. I think you guys are entirely missing his point. You are not reading what the man says and trying to understand, but reacting to your own preconceptions. This is lazy. If you are going to condemn a man personally, at least try to understand his views first. He does skirt the issue of Israeli culpability for Gaza, but that does not invalidate what he is trying to say; he looks at the bigger picture and then chooses not to go that last step. That is something to point out and follow-up on, and does not excuse personal attacks. There is an element that we are ALL human experiments, and of others. Implicit in the notion of 'experiment' is that there is a consciousness that has designed and is observing the experiment. Richard says there is an element of this in all of us, and I think this is true. Whether it is designed by God or just 'is' , there is a mathematical understructure to our physical reality, including the chemical 'brain circuitry' through which our consciousness is expressed. The growth of our sentience can be said to have occurred in an experiment of sorts. More to the point, the development of human civilization can be viewed as such an experiment with the unpredictable element of human decision-making, i.e., sentient rats in a maze writ large. The point I'm trying to build up to is that each of contributes to the experiment of human civilization with our decisions that affect others. Most people contribute along the margins as passive workers and consumers. Some actively contribute to changes in (civilizational) system complexity, e.g. developing better farming techniques which have drawn most of the population away from direct work on gathering of food creating a dependence on long-distance transport and distribution of food, or engaging in terrorism like 9-11 which has significantly altered American political, social, and economic structure, and not for the better. Osama Bin Laden was very specific about one of his goals: driving us bankrupt. He could only 'pinprick' America, not slit our wrists. However, his pinprick goaded the fools and cowards who were at the time the stewards of American civilization to slit our wrists for him. It is my opinion that this is the sense of Richard's sentence "And, there is an element that we co-create our world." What Richard leaves out is the fact that it is the Israelis who are driving the co-creational process in the conflict, and they are driving it over a cliff. It is they who have designed, monitored, and calibrated the experiment in human misery taking place in Gaza. Their hypothesis is 'how much misery do we have to inflict on Palestinians to destroy their self-confidence enough that they cease to resist our ethnic cleansing and colonization?' How do Jews and/or Zionists co-create their world (an important question)? How do Palestinians and/or Arabs and/or Muslims co-create our world? How do dissenter co-create our world? These are critical questions that must be addressed during a final-status agreement, and dissent is a vital consideration. A 'critical mass' of popular support is necessary for any agreement's success, and for subsequent normalization of state-to-state relations. Small groups of violent dissenters can cause disruption far exceeding the physical damage they inflict, e.g. Al Qaeda, and larger less violent minority groups, e.g. the Israeli colonization movement, can prevent or sabotage the consensus necessary for changes in state policy designed to re-order large-scale 'co-creation' to be more cooperative or at least less confrontational. In this sense of large-scale patterns of co-creation in the I/P conflict, the dominant structure is tit-for-massive-tat, reiterated. Positive changes can happen from below from large popular movements forcing changes in governance, obviously not a possibility at the present time, or from above with changes in governance inducing support or at least acquiescence in a large enough portion of the population to isolate violent extremists who would disrupt the re-ordering, or from a combination of the two. Blame is the opposite of the moral acknowledgment that we co-create. I disagree. Blame is a (negative) part of the co-creative process. It must be addressed for its successful re-ordering. I am only seeking to understand the structure of the conflict and its potential solutions, not making an argument for moral equivalence. Clearly the Israelis are the original aggressor in the region having been driven from Europe by the Holocaust. However, both Israelis and Palestinians must sacrifice their demands of retributive justice for their dead if they want justice for their living, or their unborn.
I don't deny Phil the right to post what he does. And, you can't really deny me the right to comment on what I observe, and what I would prefer. I appreciate the metaphor. Obviously I disagree with how that cage got constructed. I conclude that it was of joint construction of those that rejected any approach of reconciliation. That is likud, Israel Beitanhu, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Islamic Jihad, others.
You're really on this bash Chabad kick. You must have read the series of posts at Tikkun Olam. You should get to know some Chabadniks respectfully to see what they are really like. I'm close with a number of them. My son is a chabadnik in a yeshiva in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. There are things of their approach that are sincere, effective, inspiring. And, there are aspects of their approach that are too isolating for my even religious sensibilities. The theological questions for me revolve around two themes: What does it mean to be obliged to function as a nation of priests? (To me it implies an attitude of humble shaman relative to all of nature, all peoples, starting with what one is most intimate with, family, friends, etc.) The orthodox approach is summarized as "build a fence around the practice of Torah", which is an expression of fear that one will fail to fulfill Torah commandments. I see the isolating approach as analagous to riding a bicycle too slowly. In attempting to be that careful, one doesn't have enough momentum to actually ride. Then again, I've seen bicycle messengers stand a stoplight without moving at all without falling. (I used to be able to do that when I was a messenger.)
Thanks for your comments Colin. I agree with you that reforms are needed in Israeli thought and institutions. I find that primarily blaming (rather than critiqueing) hinders that effort to change the society. I use a pressure cooker metaphor for dissent there and in Gaza. Where there is a confident path, a carrot if you will, then dissent can contrast between behavior that is unacceptable, and behavior that is conditionally acceptable. Then BDS actions might be practical. Where there is no clear successful path, then BDS is just more pressure. Even two-inch thick pressure-cookers will eventually explode. Better that dissent be skillful, so that change occurs rather than explosion. I love the Arab League proposal as it creates a path. I love that imaginative supporters of Palestinian rights and sovereignty like King Abdullah of Jordan, Abbas, and others, have determined to evaluate the rational objections of Israel to the proposal, propose approaches that address the rational objections, thereby elimainting those objections as any basis of recalcitrance. That is what Obama is doing in asserting "The US will never abandon Israel" while simultaneously insisting that Israel act in a humane way towards Palestinians. Its brilliant, and already effective. The big question is "does Hamas really want to get there?", "Do leftist and right/leftist dissenters really want to get there? My impression from 4 decades of dissent, is that too damn many dissenters care more to be able to say "I told you so", for some indivdiual or political opportunistic agenda, than to say improve the lives of Palestinians.
Colin While I agree that personal invective rarely accomplishes much (and I'm certainly guilty of personal invective toward witty), I completely disagree with your endorsement of his WITTY-cisms, which Rowan quite astutely characterized as "classic psychobabble." Witty's latest contribution is of a piece with the rest of his postings which have, so far as I can see, ONE aim–to deflect attention from the sort of monstrous and criminal denial of Palestinian rights and dignity reported on by Phil and so many others. "Co-creation of reality" overwhelmingly implies shared blame, which I must say I find an extraordinarily distasteful description of a massive, nuclear equipped military raining bombs and phosphorus on a caged, terrified, half starved population, denied even basic foods, much less, building suppplies to repair the hospitals schools and industries blown to shreds. I think it's despicable.
I rest my case.
In 1975 I was 25 and probably the first non-Arab American to live at Jebalya Camp for six weeks. I was a student at Columbia Journalism School in New York and went to live with a Palestinian family and report on their travails under Israeli military occupation. The New York Times afterwards was highly intrigued by my story – they had never seen anything like it. But after leading me on for almost a year they treated the story and me with contempt. It was never published in one piece. It was Pulitzer material
You think that Hamas was not a party to escalation, that somehow the incremental firing of hundreds of rockets (without Israeli military response) into Sderot, then Ashkelon, then Beersheba was NOT any cause whatsoever to the violence that occurred?
I am also astounded and humbled by your commitment to find the truth and present it clearly and in a way that results in improved condition for Palestinians. Please continue to write at the top of your game, and seek truth even if it conflicts with your preconceptions, or your audiences' expectations.
Jacobwolfen launches into another irrelevant rant. How about trying to answer the question?
Maybe he's being ironic, in a Stephen Colbert rather than Bill O'Reilly fashion? The hard part is keeping a straight face.
Keep lying, you freak. Hamas enforced a rigid cease fire which israel deliberately broke, murdering 6 Palestinians in a move calculated in advance to trigger the resumption of missile fire and the needed pretext for israel to commence a vicious massacre, planned months in advance. Who do you imagine you're jiving with this stupidity?
They forgot to mention these kind of incidents. Good on the IDF. Israelis 'thwarted Gaza horse bomb attack' Four Palestinian militants have been killed on Gaza's border as Israeli forces fired at what they said were men and horses carrying explosives. The Israeli military said its forces returned fire at a group including a few men wearing explosive vests and five horses loaded with explosives. Israel said the Palestinians opened fire and tried to plant bombs near a crossing on the Gaza-Israel border. Palestinian officials said about 10 gunmen were involved in the incident. The Palestinian health ministry, which is run by the Hamas movement that controls Gaza, confirmed that four fighters were killed in the shooting. Israeli forces fired on the militants with machine guns and tanks backed up with combat helicopters, the military said. There were no Israeli casualties in the incident, which took place north of Nahal Oz, the main terminal for transferring fuel into Gaza. Nahal Oz and the nearby Karni crossing, used for transferring grain and animal feed, were closed in the wake of the incident. It is one of the worst clashes since Israel's three-week operation in Gaza in December and January. Both Israel and the Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip, declared unilateral ceasefires in the wake of the fighting. Senior Hamas leader, Ismail Haniya, said the incident was confirmation that Israel's "aggressive intentions" continued, and accused Israel of not respecting the cease fire. Although Gaza has been relatively quiet since Israel's three-week offensive against Hamas ended on 18 January, the border is a flashpoint for sporadic violence.
Talk about arrogance. According to you, all Israelis are brainwashed, and YOU know better than them. Do you have to worry every single minute of every single day in your whole life that some homicide bomber may blow up you and your family? Do you have to worry that someone in your family who is serving in the Army to protect the State of Israel will be wounded or killed? Do you have to worry every day that the lunatics in Iran will get their wish and rain missles down on Israel, only worse than what Saddam did?
Actually, the comparison is very apt, whether you like it or not.
And you know what I am saying, Jacobwolfen? I don't think so! I honestly don't think you have the capacity to understand what humanity is! Humanity is being able to stand with those that are suffering from oppression and brutality, even, and probably most importantly, if it is at the hands of our own racial or ethnic group. Otherwise all Germans would have identified as Nazi's, all whites as superior. People who are racist, such as you, have a hard time understanding this and will fall back on easy, but empty, slanderous insults. At least being called an anti-semite puts me in honorable company, such as Jimmy Carter, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
"you freak". Your civility lasted what 8 seconds. Hamas broke the cease fire for the first month and a half then when it became obvious that keeping their word was important, they enforced it for 3 1/2 months. Then the December 4 th incident was contreversial. It could have been as you said, an intentional subversion of the cease-fire, or the opposite equally could be true, that Hamas was building a tunnel for offensive purposes on the edge of violating the cease-fire. For a week and half there was active firefights, then the two determined to restore the cease-fire for the remaining month (with a couple incidents of violations both ways). The operation was ready months in advance, but could not have been started without a Hamas provocation. Israel has 100's of "plans", 99 of which they didn't do. Hamas escalated UNTIL Israel responded militarily. They started off shelling the desert, then escalated to Sderot, then to Ashkelon, then to Beersheva (with a 40% Arab population). They adopted the Gandhian invocation "The purpose of civil disobedience is to evoke a response", but not through civil disobedience, through "low-grade" terror. Where did you get your info on what occurred, from Norman Finkelstein or Ali Abunimeh, but rejected the New York Times, Haaretz, European papers?
At least most of us can agree on this point. :o}
You have a lot to learn about the history of Palestine.
NO–you fucking bozo, The israeli government admitted that THEY broke the cease fire. And please don't accuse me of having been civil to you. That's something I pride myself on avoiding.
Do you think Israel's tactics of murdering Palestinians in order to provoke a response, which they answer with overwhelming force is something NEW? you think this started with the Gaza massacre?? Moshe Dayan and other israeli louts described the strategy quite plainly DECADES ago. It has been standard operating procedure, you lying storage tank of Nazi sewage.
of COURSE my comparison is "unoriginal." Anyone with a brain and eyes in his head makes the obvious association between oppressed Jews suffering like caged animals within the Warsaw Ghetto and oppressed Palestinians suffering like caged animals within Gaza. understand, rat scum?
My mistake. I thought that's where you met Phil. Anyway, my other comment still stands. I did try asking you. The more you explain the more loftier your sentences get and the less sense they make. I used to really respect you. But slowly I have come to see your for who you really are. You pretend to be peacefull but you are not.
Phil, thank you for this forum and for your insightful commentary, and thank you for sharing your personal evolution with us. You have a good heart and intellectual integrity, and I hope you will influence many! For those of your readers who might be interested in helping some of the people of Gaza in a very personal way, I recommend Eva Bartlett's site In Gaza. The link is at http://groundforcegaza.co.uk/About.aspx . In addition to working with the International Solidarity Movement, protecting farmers trying to harvest their crops, she works with a Scottish group called Ground Force Gaza, link at http://groundforcegaza.co.uk/About.aspx . They are a group of volunteers who just want to make a small difference in individual Gazan's lives. Eva is their on the ground contact. Her site in very moving, and she collects contributions via Western Union and distributes them personally to the families whose stories she eloquently tells.
and whoever said that jews are over their hatred of the nazis? in every moive, book, and documentary we are reminded of the concentration camps. the holocaust must be one of the most recurring words in the english language! and for what the Nazis did to the jews, a world war came out as a result. last time i checked, a world war didnt come up to defend the gazans from the last atrocious invasion. it just happened this year u know. and people have already forgotten it. perscution for the mere sport of it is the greatest war crime. and of that, Israel is guilty
Phil and I are family friends. My aunt and Phil's mother were best friends. Our families have intermingled since. Phil and I spent parts of summers together as somewhat radical teenagers from 14 to 17. We've attended seders together when held at my aunt's house. We see each other at family events, weddings, bar/bat mitzvahs. I think of Phil as a close friend, in that I care about him as a person in my life, even as we argue and chafe.
Where did they do that? Specifically. I read widely and critically during that period, and didn't see that.
Is it possible for any decent, right-thinking Jew not come away from reading this post with utter shame about what Israel is doing to the people [human beings] of Gaza. This posting from Gaza ought to be compulsory reading for all the dead-headed one-eyed supporters of Israel be they members of AIPAC, Congress or the wider Jewish community. Phil, you need to be saluted for what you have done in going to Gaza, exposing to the light of day what is being wrought there and reporting so movingly and thoughtfully about what you saw and experienced. In the fullness of time the naysayers and throwers of brickbats will hang their collective heads……
"…results in the DISENFRACHISEMENT of the 5.4 million Zionists in the region.." And Phil came to the conclusion that to be a humanist Jew he needs to reject Zionism while you came to the conclusion that you must forever embrace Zionist ideology as being necessary to the Jewish identity….
If only they could be shown how the Zionist ideology cult that has largely consisted of lies and fabrications, that has been using the Holocaust narrative to keep Jews in line, has been brainwashing them, reform from within can be made possible… …
Dayan said "at LEAST 80%" of the incidents with the syrians leading up to the war were provoked by israel. Menachem Begin admitted Egypt had no intent to attack "We must be honest," he said. "WE attacked THEM.' Dayan talks about creeping a little further and a little further into the DMZ until there was an Arab response at which point, Israel called in an airstrike and annexed the land. This was official Israeli policy, referred to by Dayan approvingly as "creeping annexation." Israel has been at this game since the very beginning. Dayan again: On Israeli settlements on the Golan Heights and in Hebron, in a 1976 interview with Rami Tal, as quoted in Associated Press reports (11 May 1997) Along the Syria border there were no farms and no refugee camps — there was only the Syrian army… The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land … and they dreamed about it… They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land… We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was…The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us. On the taking of the Golan Heights in 1967, indicating many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and that many who pressed the government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for farmland; in a 1976 interview with Rami Tal, as quoted in The New York Times and Associated Press reports (11 May 1997) and so on and so forth http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:TJw8-jkk2QQJ... Stop lying, witty Stop lying, witty stop lying, witty
Richard Witty, Israel's use of provocation and "strategic escalation" has been very well documented by both Israelis and others since the first years of its existence. And yes, Dayan did explicitly admit in writing that Israel intentionally provoked incidents with the Syrians for years. Further, what Dayan described came as no surprise to those of us who had read and heard accounts from third party observers around the DMZ. In fact, most of the firing from the Golan that Israel used as an excuse for various attacks was intentionally provoked by Israel.
I'm not convinced that Richard Witty is lying. I think he just doesn't know. Sometimes we avoid finding out things we would rather not know.