The Israeli propaganda unit has a foothold at the most important American newspaper. Shocking story in the Times about how life has returned to normal in southern Israel after the slaughter of 1400 people in Gaza. Artists turning rockets into sculpture. Mention of the Goldstone report about halfway thru, fleetingly.
Writer Isabel Kershner is married to an Israeli, Hirsh Goodman. Wikipedia says that she is British. We have said here before that she is Israeli–something Weiss was told by a body he trusts last spring. He might be wrong. He wrote Kershner a letter asking to clarify the point. She has not responded.
The article was a shocker, a travesty . . . In keeping with the Times’ speak-no-evil Zionist editorial policies, the piece was only from the perspective of Israelis, nothing that would humanize the Palestinians.
Worse, Kershner seemed to be justifying/whitewashing the atrocities of Gaza by suggesting the only reason all is quiet in southern Israel is because the IDF decimated Hamas — implying the peace is proof that Operation Cast Lead was justified. Horrible.
Now compare this “slice of life” story from Israel (making little flowers out of the spent casings of Hamas’ crude rockets) to the same-day Reuters story on how the Palestinians are so impoverished after the IDF bombed them back to the Stone Age that they have to paint donkeys to resemble zebras their zoos can’t obtain because of the blockade. Sickening, man.
That is precisely the Israeli position. They call it “deterrence.” That if they kill enough children and raze an entire society to the ground, the resistance will be cowed into submission.
And this is the fundamental reason for their rejection of the Goldstone Report – that it would deny this this capacity for deterrence, deny them the right to commit atrocities and war crimes that they fully intend to commit in the future. It is the basis of their policy to demonstrate that they are the mad dogs that no one had better provoke.
In the Israeli mind, the atrocities of Gaza were a success at “defending themselves” and nothing must stand in their way of carrying out more such operations in the future.
Its accurate in fact and in significance.
The behavior of Hamas makes a difference in the world.
It IS the story, a very large part of it anyway. To diminish that is to distort.
Says the guy who trivializes the deaths of 300 Palestinian children by exonerating their murderers.
I suppose wiping out the Warsaw Ghetto bought German colonists in Poland a lot of peace, too.
But Richard you can’t marginalize Hamas. It is part of Palestinian society the way that the Sunni militants were part of Iraqi society. Hundreds if not thousands of Americans were killed by those terrorist militants. And we have forgiven them in order to make a government there.
If Hamas is unwilling to compromise, then they remain enemy in a life-long death dance.
They have a path to integrate into the PA, if they renounce their militia status, and accept the constitution of the PA as a whole, or undertake constitutional due process to amend it.
When elected for parliamentary majority, they announced that they renounced the prior law and parts of Palestinian constitution, particularly ANY law or agreement that recognized Israel as Israel.
The idea that Israel will not exist by some magic, or international solidarity, is a suicidal fantasy.
The article never mentions the 3 year blockade or 40 year occupation, but the ending still takes the cake:
“The roses are created with a combination of brute force and finesse, then they are welded onto metal bases shaped like a map of Israel, growing out of the spot that marks Sderot. There are no lines on the map demarcating the borders of Gaza or the boundary of the West Bank.
That, Mr. Bob says, is “because I am not trying to say this is mine, and this is yours.””
This is just unbelievably frustrating to read.
Isabel Kershner used to write for the Jerusalem Report where she may have met her husband, Hirsh Goodman. Hubby founded and edited the magazine after emigrating to Israel from South Africa in 1965. For some years he has been an analyst at Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies.
That Kershner, who doubt is an Israeli citizen, is one of the NYT’s two main correspondents in Israel, tells us again, as if we needed further proof, how deeply the Israel line has made mince meat of what used to be the norms of professional journalism.
Three simple questions:
1. Had the rockets stopped for an extended period prior to Cast Lead?
2. Have the rockets stopped now?
3. What is the reason for the different answers to (1) and (2)?
1. Yes, with minor exceptions.
2. Yes, with minor exceptions.
3. There is no difference to answers 1 and 2.
In case you doubt my answer to number 2, google “rocket fire sderot 2009″ and you’ll find incidents in May and August of this year, and probably others, well after the end of Cast Lead.
The real question is #3.
“Deterrance” works. The greater the “deterrance” the greater the payoff. Germany grappled with jewish question and now does not have jewish problem. (Luck of quotation marks marks is deliberate).
Jews don’t (sercasm alert) undermind their economy, polute (sarcasm alert) their air, conspire to take over (sarcasm alert) the government. Peace and quiet for good 60 years. I guess the Israel government is well on its way to develop their own doctrine to deal – once and for all – with palestinian problem.
Extreme brutality often works. It worked for Saddam Hussein. Everyone in Iraq feared him and there was no serious uprising against his rule.
It worked pretty well for Stalin, well enough that he had to invent conspiracies to put down, in order to keep his prisons busy. It worked pretty well for Hitler.
This is the company Israel wants to keep.
Some of the most egregious demagoguery engaged in by the writers/editors of this blog are the headlines, including this one. As if the rockets from Gaza shot by Hamas were an attempt to integrate Sderot. You can label the war against Gaza a war crime or a slaughter, but it still doesn’t compare to the killing of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. You can label Hamas as the elected representatives of the Palestinians of Gaza but they still don’t compare to Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. Jim Crow might be an accurate description of the Jews only roads in the West Bank, but Sderot is not on the West Bank. Headlines are no place for nuance, I realize. But there are choices which you make when you write headlines and you have chosen demagoguery.
As I have to constantly remind you and others like you, the worst violence suffered by Sderot was shortly before it was rechristened as such atop the razed, ethnically cleansed Palestinian village named Najd. You think history has forgotten that, have you?
Chaos- Could you be specific as to your vision for the solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict?
“You can label the war against Gaza a war crime or a slaughter, but it still doesn’t compare to the killing of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney.”
You are correct, WJ. In terms of the morbid outcome, the wanton slaughter in Gaza was about 480 times greater than the killing, monstrous as it was, of those three civil rights workers.
Palestinians are human beings, too. A humanist would tally their murder in the same way as that of other victims of brutal homicide. An ethnocentric apologist for Israel would not.
The Gaza situation is not simple. A state of war exists between Israel and Hamas. The vacuum left in the aftermath of the Israeli withdrawal was filled by Hamas. Because Hamas has claims on the West Bank and Israel proper they are not willing to declare peace with Israel and therefore on a level of kill or be killed Israel is right to go to war against Hamas.
War is organized murder and there is some truth regarding the death of 1200 people or 1400 people and the death of the 3 in Mississippi.
On the other hand only recently in the last few hours you have posted that the Jewish holocaust was not even unique at the time and when I asked you to be specific you chose silence, so I wonder where your humanist response is. I may be ethnocentric, but you seem to hate a specific group. I don’t hate the Palestinians. They didn’t choose to be born in Palestine and I didn’t choose to be born a Jew in the 20th century. But nonetheless we were both born as fate chose. Today there are approximately five million Jews living in Israel. They speak Hebrew and their holidays are according to the Jewish calendar. Do you want to send them to Wyoming, Kiev, Brooklyn or to Hamburg?
How do you propose to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict?
How come when Israel needs to run roughshod over human rights, “Palestine doesn’t exist! It never existed!” But when Israel needs to justify it’s actions, its “We’re at war with another nation!”
There was no “vacuum” left by Israeli withdrawal. The whole withdrawal was political theater by Israel designed to distract people from the acceleration of the illegal colonization activities in the West Bank, while laying the ground work for justifying Israel’s further sabotage of the political process later on. Dov Weissglass said as much himself.
“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians…
The American term is to park conveniently. The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians. There is a decision here to do the minimum possible in order to maintain our political situation. The decision is proving itself. It is making it possible for the Americans to go to the seething and simmering international community and say to them, `What do you want.’ It also transfers the initiative to our hands. It compels the world to deal with our idea, with the scenario we wrote. It places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure. It forces them into a corner that they hate to be in. It thrusts them into a situation in which they have to prove their seriousness.”
link to haaretz.com
That’s what Israel’s sincerity in the peace process, and the Gaza withdrawal especially, amounts to.
WJ – analogies aren’t meant to assert identity. They address a point of comparison. I think the headline is thought-provoking and makes a very valid comparison.
I occasionally wince at Phil’s titles, and wince much more often at some of the comments. But I think you’re wrong. The comparison to Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney is imprecise because the details are different, but arguably the war crimes in Gaza were far worse. The Israelis have done much worse things to the Gazans than the Gazans have done to them and yet this article trivializes it. There’s no mention of the blockade or the Gazan civilians killed by Israel before the war–one would think it was just rockets from Gaza, followed by the war. There is demagoguery here, but it isn’t Phil’s–it’s in the article. And it’s not seen as such, because it’s all soft-spoken and oh-so-civilized, the way the NYT generally is. Phil is a bit shrill, so his “demagoguery” sticks out, I suppose.