“The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battle field on a largely defenseless civilian population is the final phase in the decades long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.” ～ Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges’ original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay “One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists.”
Max Blumenthal’s latest takes us on a shocking and at times bizarre tour of right-wing Pastor John Hagee’s annual Washington-Israel Summit, blowing the cover off the Christian Zionist movement in the process. Starring Joe Lieberman, Tom DeLay, Pastor John Hagee, Ambassador Dore Gold and a host of rapture-ready evangelicals praying for Armaggedon.
Bolivia has declared Israel to be a “terrorist state” and renounced a visa exemption agreement with the country in protest over the ongoing Israeli military offense in Gaza which already killed more than 1,300 dead and left over 7,000 wounded.
Canceling the 1972 agreement which allowed Israelis to travel freely to Bolivia “means, in other words, we are declaring (Israel) a terrorist state,” the country’s President Evo Morales announced.
Morales explained that Operation Protective edge clearly shows that “Israel is not a guarantor of the principles of respect for life and the elementary precepts of rights that govern the peaceful and harmonious coexistence of our international community.”
The announcement came after a cabinet meeting of the government of Evo Morales which decided that; “The Bolivian state and people have made a firm decision to terminate the agreement on visas to Israel, from August 17, 1972, signed under a regime of dictatorship in Bolivia and that allowed Israeli citizens to enter Bolivia freely without even entry visa.”
Earlier in July, Morales filed a request with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to prosecute Israel for “crimes against humanity.”
IDF’s colossal defeat in Gaza this week leaves Israel and Israelis with just three political and personal options:
1. Mass expulsion – ethnic cleansing of the entire Palestinian population from territories controlled by Israel. Such action may sound unreasonable or even phantasmic, but it is actually consistent with Zionist ideology and has many supporters within Israel and within the current Israeli cabinet. Moreover, oppression and brutality are embedded within Jewish political culture and even within the culture of the Jewish Left. Clearly Israel possesses the military capability and fire power to proceed with such a plan for Nakba II.
2. Exodus – mass emigration of Israelis who, quite reasonably, prefer to run for their lives. This option is obviously embedded within the exilic Jewish culture and completely consistent with Jewish diaspora identity. Emigration is available to most Israelis at the moment. However, it is likely that as violence in the region continues to escalate and Israel finds itself complicit in more and more war crimes and human rights abuse, Israelis may find out that their freedom to travel around the world is gradually restricted.
3. Buying time – Israel’s favourite option. And certainly Benjamin Netanyahu’s preferred policy.
While both the 1st and the 2nd options are consistent with Jewish ideology, heritage and culture, it is the 3rd option that has been chosen by Israel’s governments for decades. It entails constant devastation of Gaza by means of medium scale massacres in the hope that Palestinians will eventually surrender and accept the domination of the Jewish State.
Just a month ago it seemed as if only divine intervention could save the Palestinians. However, as things stand at the moment, even God may find it difficult to rescue his favourite people. Israel has sunk into a fatal political, military and ideological paralysis. The destiny of the Jewish State has been revealed. It has no future in the region.
The key to understanding of Israel’s paralysis is not complicated. As much as Israelis favour the deployment of their devastating military might and its fire power, Israelis do not like to be caught with blood on their hands. As much as they like to kill, they hate to be the killers. This dilemma has matured into a political, ideological, strategic and spiritual deadlock. It puts the Jewish State into an impossible scenario that makes dwelling on someone’s else land simply unimaginable.
Noticeably absent among the viable options above is peace. Reconciliation is not a viable concept anymore. The notion of ‘peace’ as we understand it in the west (harmony and reconciliation) does not exists in modern Hebrew. The word ‘shalom’ that is commonly translated as ‘peace” is understood by Israelis as ‘security for the Jews.’ Israel has had plenty of time to reach harmony and reconciliation with the Palestinians. But it didn’t happen and for a reason. Israel is the Jewish State, it is ethnocentric to its core, it is blind to the notion of universal rights and totally dismissive of the Palestinians and their rights.
It may be crucial at this point to add that the final stage of the Jewish State and the genocidal enthusiasm in which it manifests itself, throws a devastating light on Jewish culture and the dangerous aspects that are entangled with Jewish identity politics and Jewish national collectivism.
What does it mean to use human shields? Employed by the Germans and Japanese in the second word war, the tactic is premised on an underlying trust in your enemy’s humanity. It appeals to the compassion and mercy of the combatant that they not slaughter the innocent in order to avenge their target. The ‘shield’ is not the human bodies surrounding the ‘guilty’ party, the shield is the clemency that mankind instinctively affords the innocent. The shield evaporates only when confronted by an enemy who is not merely a fellow solder locked in a power battle, but a psychopath unconcerned with the pain of others. Such is the case with the Hamas. They are faced with an enemy who is willing to obliterate pregnant women, babies, kids, handicapped people, schools and crowded hospitals in order to smash their target. The Israelis repeatedly demonstrate a pathological disregard for any life that is not a Jewish life, and it is for this reason alone, that the Hamas are utterly incapable of ever using ‘human shields.’
However, Netanyahu, pro Israeli media and Zionist supporters can’t resist endlessly recycling their trope that the Hamas use civilians to guard their rockets. They are clearly flummoxed as to why this assertion does nothing to quell the snowballing international outrage at the massacres they are committing. Their argument attempts to plant in our minds the notion that the Hamas actively invite the Israeli military to slaughter and maim innocents and, in doing so, prove that their savagery deserves to be annihilated. Paradoxically therefore, according to the twisted logic of Zionists, the more innocent Palestinians that die, the worse the Palestinians are. As a collective they are guilty of being innocent.
But this propaganda ploy doesn’t work. Not only does it not work, it boomerangs completely. Every time a Zionist apologist repeats their ‘human shield’ accusations they merely advertise their own deficit of basic humanity. They tell us ‘the Hamas think we have empathy for our fellow human beings, but if you look at the casualty figures, you’ll see how mistaken they are.’
The other issues at play here are the rights of the Palestinians to defend themselves and the pragmatics of warfare in a refugee camp. Israel is extremely fond of telling the world that they have the right to defend themselves. They enjoy a nuclear arsenal, cutting edge American weaponry and the formidable Iron Dome technology. Yet, although Israel constantly brags about its own egalitarian credentials, for some reason Israel refuses to grant the Palestinian people this same intrinsic right to defense that it demands for itself. Palestinians are not allowed to protect themselves. They are not allowed to fight. Instead we are invited to imagine that it is somehow acceptable for the Palestinians to have no weaponry whatsoever, no army, no solders, no rights. We are lead to believe that the only way for Palestinians to prove their integrity, is to lie down like lambs and quietly live out the unspeakably miserable lives of squalor, poverty and despair that Israel has designed for them. In short, Israel wishes the Palestinians were suicidal but, inconveniently, they keep proving to us that they are not.
Obviously asking a people to passively embrace their own ethnic cleansing is implausible. One would hope that the Jews, more than anyone, might be capable of grasping such a fundamental truth – but sadly not. Given then, that the people of Gaza, like any other human beings, have right to defense, where exactly should they store their weapons? In the rolling valleys and tumbling hills of Haraat al-Daraj? Amid the fauna-filled acres of Shuja’iyya? Gaza is home to approximately 1.8 million people, it is 25 miles long by 5 to 7 miles wide and sealed by both an Egyptian and Israeli blockade. It is the most crowded open air prison on earth. The only place to feasibly store weapons is inevitably in the proximity of the people forced to live there cheek by jowl. Israel has now ordered some 43% of the territory to be evacuated. But where to? The Kafka-esque request to insist people go, knowing there is nowhere to go to, is clearly there to benefit Israeli PR, not save lives. And it doesn’t fool anyone. There are currently hundreds of thousands of displaced. The schools that have opened to receive those fleeing are already overflowing and Palestinians that endured the bombings of schools during Operation Cast Lead, know that even a so called ‘refuge’ can not guarantee safety. Lets be clear: the only people putting the Palestinians in danger are the Israelis. The only people killing innocent people are the Israelis. The Hamas may not be the party that the chattering classes of the West would want to govern them, but they are democratically elected and they have as much right as Israel, Britain, France and America to fight against an oppressor that quite literally wants to ‘wipe them off the map.’ They face a tough job, but one thing they can’t do is use human shields against an enemy that doesn’t recognise them as human.
How the Term ‘Human Shield’ is Used to Justify State Sponsored Massacres
Abby Martin breaks through the propaganda rhetoric of ‘Human Shields’, calling out instances such as the second Iraq War and the current conflict in Gaza where the term has been used to demonize the entire demographics and populations subjected to being overthrown.
Extensive war crimes in Donbass from July 2 to July 24, 2014. Kiev’s warmongers/zionists continue genocide of civilian population and deliberate destruction of Eastern Ukraine’s infrastructure – schools, hospitals, kindergartens, power plants, train stations, etc. The majority of the footage and interviews you will see in this documentary film have never been shown on TV.
Map courtesy of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
To protect itself from Hamas rockets and tunnels, Israel is forcing tens of thousands of people out of their homes, turning their old neighborhoods into a no-man’s land.
This narrow strip of land that used to be called “the Gaza Strip,” already one of the more densely populated places on Earth, is growing dramatically smaller. The Israeli military, relentlessly and methodically, is driving people out of the 3-kilometer (1.8 mile) buffer zone it says it needs to protect against Hamas rockets and tunnels. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the buffer zone eats up about 44 percent of Gaza’s territory.
What that means on the ground is scenes of extraordinary devastation in places like the Al Shajaya district approaching Gaza’s eastern frontier, and Beit Hanoun in the north. These were crowded neighborhoods less than three weeks ago. Now they have been literally depopulated, the residents joining more than 160,000 internally displaced people in refuges and makeshift shelters. Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “scorched earth.”
It’s not like Israel didn’t plan this. It told tens of thousands of Palestinians to flee so its air force, artillery and tanks could create this uninhabitable no-man’s land of half-standing, burned-out buildings, broken concrete and twisted metal. During a brief humanitarian ceasefire some Gazans were able to come back to get their first glimpse of the destruction this war has brought to their communities, and to sift through their demolished homes to gather clothes or other scattered bits of their past lives. But many were not even able to do that.
US President Barack Obama meets with Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. on March 12, 2014 (Photo: The New York Times)
By Eric Zuesse
The Ukrainian leadership has resigned, because of their unwillingness to impose the IMF’s terms, which would impoverish the population within months. That impoverishment would be extracted from the Ukrainian public in order to repay the IMF’s loans, which had been skimmed off by Ukraine’s oligarch billionaires into secret bank accounts in Switzerland and other tax-havens.
Two of the four parties in Ukraine’s ruling coalition have bolted, refusing those IMF terms on loan-repayment; and, so, on July 24th, Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had been appointed by Obama’s agent Victoria Nuland, tendered his resignation, and he announced: “The fact is that today you failed to vote for the laws, and I have nothing (with which) to pay wages of policemen, doctors, teachers; nothing to buy a rifle with, nothing to fuel an armored personnel carrier with. Today you failed to take a decision to fill the gas storages to allow us to live through the winter, to at last free ourselves from dependence on Russian gas.”
As the great journalist Michel Chossudovsky, reported on July 24th, Ukraine’s figurehead President, Petro “Poroshenko believes that when sanctions [against Russia] are not working, there are grounds for appeal to the United States Congress to grant Ukraine the special status of a major ally outside NATO (like Israel, Australia, and the Philippines) to enable it to solve its security problems. The granting of the ‘status of ally outside NATO’ would set the stage for the possible deployment of US and NATO forces inside Ukraine in the context of joint military operations with the Ukraine Armed Forces and National Guard.”
Consequently, there is now being promoted in Kiev “a bill foreseeing the expansion of U.S. military and technical aid.”
In other words: The government that Obama installed in February is now seeking direct U.S. support in order to continue its ethnic cleansing campaign, which is aimed at getting rid of the people who had elected the man, President Viktor Yanukovych, whom Obama’s February coup in Kiev had overthrown. The people that Obama then placed into control there are now expecting direct U.S. assistance, to complete that ethnic-cleansing campaign, which is being carried out in the ethnic-Russian portions of Ukraine, so as to eliminate the Ukrainians who would be opposing the placement into Ukraine of nuclear missiles within a mere ten-minute flight-time to annihilating Moscow.
Palestinian protestors throw stones toward Israeli police during clashes in the Shuafat neighborhood in Israeli-annexed Arab East Jerusalem, on July 2, 2014, after a Palestinian teenager was kidnapped and killed in an apparent act of revenge for the murder by militants of three Israeli youths. (AFP PHOTO / AHMAD GHARABLI)
If Israel insists, as the Bosnian Serbs did in Sarajevo, on using the weapons of industrial warfare against a helpless civilian population then that population has an inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The international community will have to either act to immediately halt Israeli attacks and lift the blockade of Gaza or acknowledge the right of the Palestinians to use weapons to defend themselves.
No nation, including any in the Muslim world, appears willing to intervene to protect the Palestinians. No world body, including the United Nations, appears willing or able to pressure Israel through sanctions to conform to the norms of international law. And the longer we in the world community fail to act, the worse the spiral of violence will become.
Israel does not have the right to drop 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on Gaza. It does not have the right to pound Gaza with heavy artillery and with shells lobbed from gunboats. It does not have the right to send in mechanized ground units or to target hospitals, schools and mosques, along with Gaza’s water and electrical systems. It does not have the right to displace over 100,000 people from their homes. The entire occupation, under which Israel has nearly complete control of the sea, the air and the borders of Gaza, is illegal.
The failure of the international community to respond has left the Palestinians with no choice. The United States, since Israel’s establishment in 1948, has vetoed in the U.N. Security Council more than 40 resolutions that sought to curb Israel’s lust for occupation and violence against the Palestinians. And it has ignored the few successful resolutions aimed at safeguarding Palestinian rights, such as Security Council Resolution 465, passed in 1980.
Against the Grain 