It’s happening: we are at last seeing significant American mainstream dissent from the Israeli line during this conflict. There is growing space to voice criticism of our closest friend in the Middle East because of what is widely perceived to be a “disaster” unfolding in Gaza (to quote Ali Abunimah).
Friends and commenters call me optimistic/naive (as Michael Ratner does on Law and Disorder radio today) but in my list below is everything from John Kerry’s hot-mic moment expressing anger at the Israeli brutality– a moment Kerry has survived– to The New Yorker accusing Israel of a “war crime,” to TV reporters Richard Engel and Karl Penhaul describing the inhumane conditions in Gaza, to Anne Barnard of the New York Times explaining to Americans that Gaza is an open-air prison, to Lawrence Weschler’s outburst, that Israel has “rabies” and Gaza is “a concentration camp.”
I am saying that this brutal and pointless onslaught is operating on the US mainstream the way that the massacres of Cast Lead operated on the left five years ago: People are saying Enough! They see that Israel has no plan at all besides wrecking Palestinian lives. “The monstrosity that is Israel is naked, for all the world to see,” Scott Roth writes.
And look at this great tweet from James Fallows, accompanying a famous foto of US atrocities in Vietnam:
When strategic message becomes ‘They’re forcing us to kill children,’ strategy is in trouble. As US learned. pic.twitter.com/5OVVLpvY4x
— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) July 21, 2014
It is just a matter of time before some liberal Zionists (who are merely the most amenable voices inside a reactionary American support community) begin to jump off the Zionist tank. Today Haaretz reported the following, according to Americans for Peace Now:
J-Street pulls sponsorship from pro-Israel rally in Boston – The left-wing organization complained there was ‘no voice for our concerns about the loss of human life on both sides, or the acknowledgement of the conflict’s complexity.’ (Haaretz+)
So even J Street (actually a center-right organization; it supports endless military aide to support apartheid) senses a change in the US climate, and feels safe taking a baby step.
More on the shifting climate.
In Gaza, NBC’s Richard Engel retweeted this very sensible message from Jon Snow, a British TV announcer:
If you strangle a people, deny them supply, for years, extreme reaction is inevitable. the one begets the other.
Bernard Avishai had a piece at the New Yorker last week called “Watching Gaza” that said Israel is guilty of war crimes, killing civilians in an effort to discredit Hamas. And the endgame, Avishai says, is rightwing consolidation of greater Israel, and the Palestinians going to the international criminal court.
bombing these homes every few years—“mowing the lawn,” as one commander put it before earlier Gaza operations—demonstrates that Israel will not shrink from inflicting hundreds of random civilian casualties, through which it hopes to discredit Hamas. If you don’t think this is a war crime, talk to your Palestinian friends…
Israel’s problem is no longer just Ban Ki-moon and CNN. Since 2012, the streets of the West Bank have grown more volatile; a new generation, as distrustful of the two-state peace process as Israeli rightists, has come of age. Jerusalem is witnessing mob violence on both sides of its divide. Israel cannot bomb civilians and expect that students in Hebron and Ramallah will only vent their fury on Facebook. Bassem Khoury, a Palestinian entrepreneur and former economics minister, wrote to me this morning that the pressure on Abbas to sign the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, pushing Israeli leaders toward facing the sanctions of international law, has become irresistible. Wherever Abbas goes, Khoury writes, “cries of ‘either sign or leave’ are being heard amongst the disgruntled, particularly the youth.”
…In the absence of a credible peace process, which Netanyahu has preëmpted, the consequence of this war will be, in effect, the consolidation of a Jewish state in which the Arab minority will stop imagining a place for itself. And how long will Hezbollah stay out of the fray?
That consolidation of a racist state is why Andrew Sullivan now says the two-state solution is dead; so let’s move on to a struggle for equal rights within one country.
Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group had an excellent piece on the New York Times op-ed page on the “road to war,” saying that Israel chose this war as a means of blocking the unity deal between Hamas and Fatah.
the most immediate cause of this latest war has been ignored: Israel and much of the international community placed a prohibitive set of obstacles in the way of the Palestinian “national consensus” government that was formed in early June….
Thrall says in so many words that the siege of Gaza is immoral and has to be lifted.
For many Gazans, and not just Hamas supporters, it’s worth risking more bombardment and now the ground incursion, for a chance to change that unacceptable status quo. A cease-fire that fails to resolve the salary crisis and open Gaza’s border with Egypt will not last. It is unsustainable for Gaza to remain cut off from the world and administered by employees working without pay.
Many writers are citing J.J. Goldberg’s piece at the Forward, “How Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War in Gaza,” which says that Israel manipulated the teen killings in the West Bank to have a war with Hamas, and now Israel is going off a “cliff.” Goldberg is essentially conveying a portrait of an intolerant political culture that Max Blumenthal gave us in his 2013 book, Goliath, a place whipped by war fever and fear of Arabs.
Anne Barnard at the Times has a remarkably straightforward rendition of Palestinian conditions in Gaza.
Perhaps most important, the vast majority of Gazans cannot leave Gaza. They live under restrictions that make this narrow coastal strip, which the United Nations considers occupied by Israel, unlike anywhere else.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain in 2010 called Gaza “an open-air prison,” drawing criticism from Israel. But in reality, the vast majority of Gazans are effectively trapped, unable to seek refugee status across an international border. (Most are already refugees, those who fled from what is now Israel and their descendants.)
So the people of Gaza are refugees–it’s about time that is brought home to Americans. Barnard’s report is similar to Karl Penhaul’s excellent report on CNN last night, about people running for their lives in Gaza. Penhaul quoted moving calm statements by Sameh Grega, who had to abandon his mother when he fled Shuha’iyeh, and at the end of the report, by a young man describing the killing of his mother and brother.
And Pat Lang agrees with me, that things are shifting. He adds a realist gloss to it:
As sad as it is to say, the main effects of this round of fighting in Gaza will be found; 1- in the worldwide political damage done to Israel for the callous massacre of civilians and 2- the impact on Israeli and more importantly American popular opinion of a high Israeli military body count. Throughout previous Israeli operations intended to “mow the grass,” in Gaza, the IDF has operated with impunity, able to continue from day to day without major fear of the likelihood of its own casualties in dead and wounded. If these present reports are correct, that has changed. The American people have many admirable characteristics but their inability to see virtue in “losers” is not one of them. An ability on the part of the Hamas/IJ fighters to inflict casualties on the IDF would raise the public image of the Palestinians in America. According to the Israel FB page, Hamas now says that it will equip large numbers of Gazan youth with grenades and send them against IDF forces in suicide attacks. The Israelis do not seem to understand how potent a weapon that would be.
Disclosure: This article contains a reference to Michael Ratner, who was a financial supporter of our website at the time the article was published.
The Moldovan nite klub bouncer is talking about banning Al Jazeera from operating in Israel.
The Middle East’s only democracy, the serene villa in the jungle of the backward Arab masses.
Not.
The problem with this, another optimistic/things-are-changing/Israel-is loosing assay is quite simple, although is buried under the pile of quasi-intellectual nonsense.
If the things are changing, as all things are, to which direction:
To support Hamas? Muslim Brotherhood? ISIS or Asad? Wahabi or Shia? Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad? Or maybe PA and Egypt?
You see, there is no gray areas in the Middle East and you cannot go there, and not to get involved and choose sides.
Kerry and Obama are frustrated, but they know better.
Europe is frustrated, but it knows better as well.
China, India, Egypt, Jordan, even (god forbid) Russia- all know their choice.
Damn, even Saudis and Qataris , play their games, keeping in mind Iran’s ambitions, and their umbrella from US and (yes) Israel.
I’m quite confident in Israel future and the consequences of its actions.
Just a small remark- 40 million dollars had cost those home-made rockets alone. Millions were spend building bunkers- don’t you think they could’ve been spent better?
You may be optimistic and naive. I hope you’re right, but this has happened before–during the summer 1982 Lebanon War, for instance. Israel mercilessly bombing Lebanese cities. Within a few years it was like it had never happened. Sabra and Shatila erased the memory of Israel’s bombing of Lebanese civilians and you might think that, well, okay, but that was a massacre under Israel’s watch, so that wasn’t good for their reputation. But you’d miss the point. It was a massacre for which Sharon was directly responsible, but it was carried out by Christian Phalangists and Sharon was criticized (slapped on the wrist) for it by Israel. The end result was that Israel became the country which polices itself and then, several years later, Sharon wins a lawsuit against Time Magazine when it claimed more than it could prove about Sharon.
The net result–hasbara types said that Israel was blamed for a massacre committed by others. And mainstream press types summarize 1982 as Israel responding to aggression, though perhaps not in the best way since they got bogged down afterwards. The moral denunciations of Israel’s bombing–it was like it never happened at all. I read about it later (I mostly ignored it at the time) in Chomsky (yeah, that awful terrible Chomsky guy who is secretly an agent for the Zionists or whatever the current line on him is). And that war was one with tens of thousands of deaths.
Maybe big difference today is the internet. If the MSM wrote something stupid in pre blogging days, there was no way for the average person to correct it. Write a letter and hope they’d print it. Like anyone would care if they did. But I think they find it harder to ignore us now.
‘Did you do anything nice today, Daddy?’ (other than to kill children and those patients in intensive care)
As heavily-armed, conscript Israeli soldiers brutally ended the lives of 74 defenceless civilians in their own homes, (and today the sick in hospital), in Gaza – it was reminiscent of other massacres in the Middle East although rarely, if ever, have others targeted unarmed mothers, wives, children and the sick. The UN Secretary General yesterday branded the massacre as ‘atrocious’.
Killing women and children in their own home must take great bravery and courage when you have to go back to your own home and confront your own wife and children who will ask you ‘Did you do anything nice today, Daddy?”
It is a war crime under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in relation to civilians and non-combatants that expressly prohibits “acts of violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture”.
Channel 4 agrees with you Donald; attributes the change to the internet. Paul Mason: http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/impact-social-media-israelgaza-conflict/1182
My colleague, Matt Frei, tweeted that CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interview with Netanyahu was less a grilling more “a warm bath and a back rub”. Others used more profane metaphors.
But now, for the first time in a major Arab-Israeli conflict, the American public has other sources of reality. All research says that young people everywhere regard Twitter as essentially a news service, and via your social network you can easily get served up words and pictures more impactful than anything on TV. By the time many Americans woke up on Sunday, these pictures were of dead Palestinian children.
Netanyahu complained the Hamas strategy was to provide “telegenically dead” people: but where Israel is losing the hearts and minds of the world is not via “tele” anything: it is in the JPEGs that stream into millions of people’s mobile phones every time they glance at the object in the palm of their hand.