Gaza’s children remember the first day of attacks a year ago

About Adam Horowitz

Adam Horowitz is Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Israel/Palestine

{ 49 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Oscar says:

    link to dover.idf.il

    On the 1 year anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, here’s the IDF’s new hasbara website, crowing about its military supremacy, the successes of the war, and drooling with lust over the new weaponry that was used “for the first time” on the civilian population.

    • Oscar says:

      Operation Cast Lead marked the initiation of a number new weaponry systems in the IDF

      A year has passed since Operation Cast Lead. This operation brought with it many achievements, mainly for the security of the State of Israel. In addition to the relative quiet in the southern regions of the country, Israel has also gained confidence in new weapons which were initiated during that operation one year ago. Operation Cast Lead was unprecedented in its use of weapons which were used there for the first time.

      The meaningful lessons learned can be summarized thus: the weapons which were used in this operation had the significant task of protecting the lives of the IDF forces and their functionality in a military battle and in the minimization of damage to innocent civilians. Initiation of new weapons was completed both carefully and efficiently, with precise and clear knowledge, and the weapons’ operational abilities were truly proven in real life battle conditions. Below is just a sample of the weapons initiated during Operation Cast Lead, which saved soldiers’ lives and minimized damage to innocent civilians.

  2. potsherd says:

    “Showing Sderot to the World”

    and making sure the world never sees Gaza.

  3. Chaos4700 says:

    Yonira, sweetie? Here’s some more Gazan children for you to mock. Also, some more testimony for you to deny, Witty, too. Should be like… well, taking candy from a child for someone like you.

  4. sammy says:

    Here’s some more Gazan children for you to mock

    Why bother? Do you really expect them to care simply because there is a face to the victims?

    • Chaos4700 says:

      No, obviously, but pointing out how immoral and vicious and callous they are makes me feel better about verbally assaulting them. I’m guessing people think I enjoy what I do. I don’t. I do it because I feel an obligation to remind people how ugly the nature of the people we are dealing with here.

  5. sammy says:

    I think you have to take it for granted that they feel no shame, that no matter how many victims are laid before them, they are too busy feeling their victimhood to actually look past their own “anguish” at what the victims are feeling. I am not comfortable with bringing victims before such people. It seems voyeuristic to indulge their self pity.

  6. If you presented the memories of the children of Gaza with the memories of the children of Sderot, then you could have made a convincing statement for reconciliation and decency for Palestinians.

    In picking ONLY Palestinian experience to report, you demonstrate the militant approach, the advocacy for Palestinian militancy, rather than the advocacy for civilian values of safety and interaction.

    Its a great tragedy of the solidarity form of dissent. Even if it conflicts with your view that the Palestinians deserve more attention as more obvious victims, the solidarity approach keeps the approach at either/or, rather than at any sincere attempt to make a change from the current status.

    • Chaos4700 says:

      How about the children of Najd, Witty? How about them?

    • sammy says:

      The children of Najd are the children of Gaza , Sderot is an occupied Palestinian village and it is a war crime under the Geneva conventions for the occupying army to fill it with civilians after dispossessing the natives.

      So if you want to show any pictures of the “children of Sderot” show them to the occupation army, that displaced the natives of Najd and replaced them with Jews.

    • Chaos4700 says:

      Oooh! Actually, yeah, let’s put side by side photos of every single rocket attack on Sderot with every single photo of the destruction of Gaza we can find, Witty. Let’s put them side by side and be completely objective about it, yes?

    • Shafiq says:

      Oh yeah Witty, because there’s an equivalence between the suffering of Sderotian children and Gazan children, isn’t there? Of course, you can’t mention Palestinian suffering without counter-balancing it with Israeli suffering – that would just be evil, wouldn’t it?

      I mean, what’s the difference between having to spend 30 minutes in a bomb shelter worrying about whether you room got hit and despairing about the possibility of your family being wiped out overnight by a bomb dropped by an F-16 and your inability to hide in a bomb shelter because Israel doesn’t allow them to be built?

    • gmeyers says:

      Richard,

      Trying to create equivalence between the children of Sderot and the children of Gaza doesn’t work: the numbers simply don’t allow it. On a one-to-one basis, yes, the tragedy of a Sderot victim matches that of a Gazan victim but that’s where the equivalence stops. Gazan victims aren’t just far more numerous, Sderotians have far more choices than Gazans.

      • Equivalence is an irrelevant comment. The question is of how Adam’s posts are presented.

        In ONLY condemning, he commits to the approach of militancy, which is a failing approach. An alternative approach is the opposition to violence, opposition to aggression, which is more principled and more convincing.

        • We saw this same juxtaposition during the Vietnam War. Even in the pacifist AFSC, there were some that took partisan solidarity positions, rejecting the idea of objection to violence, instead objecting to dominance (and sometimes adopting assertively militant positions in the name of non-violence).

          Thankfully, more stuck to their principles, though they weren’t the loudest and AFSC got a permanent smear that it took a decade to clarify, and still attracted militants that distorted their message.

        • Shafiq says:

          Really? I don’t see much text other than the title. Are you saying he must qualify every attempt to portray the difficulties faced by Gazan children, with that of Sderotian children?

          Since when has Adam been militant? Or the anti-war protesters? And why do you assume that every commenter here is on the left?

          When was the last time you mentioned the plight of Palestinian children without placing the blame squarely on Hamas?

  7. ROAR!!!

    Rather than reconcile.

    • sammy says:

      Reconcile with occupation? With apartheid? How does one reconcile with murder? Would you share your home with a Nazi?

      • Chaos4700 says:

        It’s funny to think that if Witty were alive during WW2 and his logic prevailed, France and Poland (at the very least) would be speaking German nowadays.

        • sammy says:

          His logic prevailed in many places. Hitler proved it, by sending Jews to several countries to be saved. Like the Palestinians today, no one wanted them and their choices were to perish or return. Remember the St Louis? That was just some Dick Witty putting his family, race and state before some “disease ridden Jews”.

          link to ushmm.org

          There have always been Dick Wittys who considered themselves as more worthy of charity than the actual victims. There will always be Dick Wittys and we should not waste our energies trying to make them be something they are not.

    • Chaos4700 says:

      You know, all that salivating you’re doing while Gazan children talk about how scared they are and how much they suffered isn’t doing a whole lot to dispel the “blood libel” myth, Witty.

  8. sammy says:

    Here is an exercise in humanism for you, Witty.
    Everytime you talk about a Palestinian, visualise a Holocaust victim and imagine you are talking about them. See how that feels.

  9. VR says:

    Lets get to the rubber meeting the road. The fact of the matter is that Israel planned its attack specifically with the children leaving their schools for maximum damage to innocent children. Than again, with the targeting of civilian neighborhoods, schools and general infrastructure they wanted to guarantee the killing of children.

  10. Comparing the Gaza carnage to the rockets on Sderot is of a monstrous bad faith.

    While the rocket attacks were certainly a war crime, the damage they caused was minimal. So much so that Sderot residents are now longing for the days when the problem was the Qassams, not poverty.

    Yes, that’s right — the Sderot residents want the Qassams back so that the State won’t neglect them as it is doing now that the rockets are over. So much for the “permanent psychological damage” they suffered!

    • Chaos4700 says:

      Huh. I guess one thing can be said about Israel when it uses Jewish people as human shields… at least the pay was good.

      I find it rather laughable that we see now that Sderot was never an economically viable community in the first place — it only exists because A) Israel needed to raze a Palestinian village — Najd — and put something in its place, and B) they needed an excuse to park people close to the border with Gaza to generate lots of PR, the “war tourism” industry and an excuse to create a “kill zone” inside Gaza.

      Zionists continue to be the worst enemy of the Jewish people.

    • gmeyers says:

      Hey HB,

      Fancy seeing you here!

  11. Oscar says:

    Have you seen this video on the Gaza Freedom March on YouTube? Man, some disturbing images. . .

    link to youtube.com

  12. The irony of you fools’ comments comparing my attitude to nazis, or claiming that I bear no sympathy for Palestinians, is that in FACT, I do regard Palestinian civilians in an active compassionate light.

    I hope that you think similarly of Israelis.

    It would be wonderful if you considered the extent to which your militancy cements the relationships that keep Gazan Palestinians isolated.

    • sammy says:

      Like the Warsaw ghetto? Yeah, those intransigent, unaccepting miltants. What were they thinking????

    • VR says:

      “…in FACT, I do regard Palestinian civilians in an active compassionate light.”

      hahaha! With such compassion we could eradicate all but our own in the world and blow them a “compassionate” kiss. You are either a consummate liar or self-deceived Witty, either way it does the Palestinians no good as they perish. What an accomplished ass you are.

    • Chaos4700 says:

      Witty, the only thing you have ever done at all with regarding the plight of the Palestinians is to claim that you are compassionate. Not once have you ever demonstrated that compassion. About the most generous thing you have ever said is, “It’s so sad, what the Palestinians have forced Israel to do to them.”

      You have about as much compassion, I dare say, as the late Golda Meir. And just about as much integrity or honesty.

    • aparisian says:

      Witty, Palestinians are not the one who own F-16s and white phosphorus. How can the aggressor be the victim?

  13. Donald says:

    In your case you shed tears for the Palestinians and put the blame for their suffering under the Gaza blockade entirely on Hamas and the left. At the same time you fly into hysterics at the mere mention of sanctions of any sort against Israel. You regularly whitewash Israeli atrocities.

    I think you have this pleasant illusion about yourself because you compare yourself to the sorts of Zionists that frequent the comment section at “Realistic Dove”. By that standard almost anyone looks compassionate.

  14. aparisian says:

    I just read this story link to normanfinkelstein.com
    and i am so angry!!!!

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