It's Palestinians who have the right to defend themselves

Justice requires a change in the balance of forces on the ground 

Seumas Milne                      Guardian/UK                           20 November 2012

The way western politicians and media have pontificated about Israel's onslaught on Gaza, you'd think it was facing an unprovoked attack from a well-armed foreign power. Israel had every "right to defend itself",Obama declared. "No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders."

He was echoed by Britain's foreign secretary, William Hague, who declared that the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas bore "principal responsibility" for Israel's bombardment of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip.

In fact, an examination of the events over the last month shows that Israel played the decisive role in the military escalation: from its attack on a Khartoum arms factory reportedly supplying arms to Hamas and the killing of 15 Palestinian fighters in late October, to the killing of a 13 year-old in an Israeli incursion and, crucially,the assassination of the Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari last Wednesday during negotiations over a temporary truce.

Israel's PM Netanyahu, had plenty of motivation to unleash a new round of bloodletting. There was the imminence of Israeli elections (military attacks are par for the course before Israeli polls); the need to test Egypt's new president, Mohamed Morsi, and pressure Hamas to bring other Palestinian guerrilla groups to heel. So after six days of sustained assault by the world's fourth largest military power on one of its most wretched and overcrowded territories, at least 130 Palestinians had been killed, an estimated half of them civilians, along with five Israelis.

Despite Israel's withdrawal of settlements and bases in 2005, the Gaza Strip remains occupied, both effectively and legally – and is recognised as such by the UN. Israel is in control of Gaza's land and sea borders, territorial waters and natural resources, airspace, power supply and telecommunications. It has blockaded the strip since Hamas took over in 2006-7, preventing the movement of people, materials, and food supplies in and out of the territory. So Gazans are an occupied people and have the right to resist, including by armed force (though not to target civilians), while Israel is an occupying power that has an obligation to withdraw – not a right to defend territories it controls or is colonising by dint of military power.

Even if Israel had genuinely ended its occupation in 2005, Gaza's people are Palestinians, and their territory part of the 22% of historic Palestine earmarked for a Palestinian state that depends on Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem. Across their land, Palestinians have the right to defend and arm themselves, whether they choose to exercise it or not. But instead the US, Britain and other European powers finance, arm and back to the hilt Israel's occupation, including the siege of Gaza – precisely to prevent Palestinians obtaining the arms that would allow them to protect themselves against Israeli military might.

It's hardly surprising of course that powers which have themselves invaded, occupied and intervened across the Arab and Muslim world over the last decade should throw their weight behind Israel doing the same thing on its own doorstep. But it isn't Palestinian rockets that stop Israel lifting the blockade, dismantling its illegal settlements or withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza – it's US and western support that gives Israel impunity.

Emboldened by the wave of change and growing support across the region, Hamas has also regained credibility as a resistance force, and strengthened its hand against an increasingly discredited Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah. The deployment of longer-range rockets that have now been shown to reach Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is also beginning to shift what has been an overwhelmingly one-sided balance of deterrence.

The truce being negotiated on Tuesday would reportedly enforce Hamas responsibility for policing the strip and crucially break the blockade, opening the Rafah crossing with Egypt for goods as well as people. It doesn't, however, look like the long-term security deal with Hamas Israel was looking for, which would risk deepening the disastrous Palestinian split between Gaza and the West Bank.

Any relief from the bombardment, death and suffering of the past week has got to be welcome. But no ceasefire is going to prevent another eruption of violence. Whatever is finally agreed won't end Israel's occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land or halt its war of dispossession against the Palestinian people. That demands unrelenting pressure on the western powers that underwrite it to change course. But most of all, it needs a change in the balance of forces on the ground.             [Abridged]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/20/palestinians-have-right-defend-themselves

Fight Against Climate Change Blocked by Luddites at Big Oil

Linda McQuaig                           Toronto Star                               November 21, 2012

In the interest of fighting climate change, most of us avoid buying SUVs —vehicles that aren’t necessary unless one intends to take the whole family for a spin through downtown Baghdad. Most of us also recycle and keep the thermostat low. However, these gestures are doing almost nothing to stop the warming of the planet.

Yet climate change has disappeared from the political agenda. While the media diligently scrutinize the security risk posed by a hot relationship between a general and his biographer, there’s little airtime to consider the security risk posed by something even hotter: the planet. (A Pentagon-commissioned study in 2003 concluded that global warming would lead to brutal storms, flooding, drought and widespread human strife. “)

The news on the climate front is devastating. In a report earlier this month, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), one of the world’s largest accounting firms, states the world has “passed the critical threshold” and that current carbon reductions amount to “a fraction of what is required against the international commitment to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.” In order to keep within that limit by 2050, the accounting firm says the world will have to dramatically accelerate its annual pace of carbon reduction — to a rate never before achieved, and then continue at that rate “for 39 consecutive years.” No problem! That’s if we want to keep warming to just 2 degrees Celsius — which may be too high. So far, we’ve warmed the planet by only 0.8 degrees Celsius — and yet that little bit of warming packs quite a punch, as the U.S. east coast learned last month.

In a brilliant article in Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben sets out exactly why Big Oil and the rest of the fossil fuel industry so fiercely resist action to tackle climate change. The companies currently have proven reserves of oil, gas and coal worth $27 trillion. If the world were to reduce carbon emissions enough to keep the temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius, 80 per cent of those reserves would have to stay in the ground! McKibben notes that this means the fossil fuel industry would “be writing off $20 trillion in assets” — not something corporate moguls do, especially when it involves their core business.

One proposed solution is a “fee-and-dividend” scheme, which would heavily tax fossil fuels and then return the revenue to the entire population by monthly check, encouraging everyone to save money by switching to cleaner energy. This would help the public transition to a greener economy. But it wouldn’t help Big Oil, whose executives would remain hell-bent on stopping the march of progress — just as 19th-century textile workers fiercely resisted being replaced by spinning machines. While those workers angrily smashed the machines, the world moved on to a prosperous new era of large-scale factory production, enabling the public to enjoy brightly colored cotton calicoes.

The workers, dubbed Luddites, paid a heavy price for their resistance. They were executed for destroying the machines, and have been ridiculed throughout history. By contrast, the Luddites running Big Oil are enjoying the biggest bonanza in history, even as they block the saving of the planet — a more grievous offense, by any reckoning, than denying the world the benefits of the spinning machine or even the calico ball.        [Abbrev.]

© 2012 Toronto Star  

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1290137--fight-against-climate-change-blocked-by-luddites-at-big-oil-mcquaig

Israel demands our support because it fights its ‘war against ‘terrorists’ in our name

We westerners set the precedent when it comes to "collateral damage", now the Israelis are reeling out the same tired excuses

By Robert Fisk                Independent/UK                   20 November 2012

Enough is enough. Now we have even “National Infrastructure” Minister Uzi Landau – one of my favourite dogsbodies in the Israeli government – talking about “collateral damage” and the justification for bombing Hamas’s broadcasting station. It could be used for transmitting military instructions, he said. But wasn’t that exactly what our own beloved Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara – now, I suppose, Lord Blair of the Holy Land – said after Nato bombed the Serb television station in Belgrade, when Nato, too, was blathering on about “collateral damage”?

We Westerners set the precedents in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq – trains, bridges, TV stations, wedding parties, blocks of civilian apartments, you name it – and now the Israelis can trot along behind and produce, whenever necessary, the same tired list of excuses we invented for Nato.

It’s odd, the way they all get away with it. Lord Blair, whose 92 Business Class trips to the Holy Land have produced a peace beyond all peace, is now talking about how it’s in everybody’s interest to have a truce – is his face getting a bit skeletal, or is that my imagination? – and a truce, I suppose, we shall have, well over 100 Palestinian and three Israeli dead too late. But is it all worth it? Was the murder by Israel of Hamas’s military leader Ahmed al-Jabari in fact not staged to provide an excuse to bomb all those new missiles that Hamas has acquired?

That wise old Israeli owl Uri Avneri – he is 89 years old – thinks this is just the trap that Hamas fell into by launching its preposterous “Gates of Hell” rocket attacks in revenge for Jabari’s death. The whole Operation “Pillar of Defence” was about destroying Hamas’s weapons – not about the largely ineffective missiles themselves.

Isn’t this why Israel gave its operation the name it did? For, despite our constant repetition of “Operation Pillar of Defence”, Israeli friends tell me that the correct Hebrew translation of this sick war is Operation Pillar of Cloud. Which makes a lot more sense. For this comes from the Book of Exodus (13:21) – “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way.” I wonder, indeed, if the ridiculous William Hague realised he was doing God’s work when he gave his support to this bloodletting?

But this leads me to another little matter. One of the new Israeli lines on the war runs like this. Israel kills “terrorists” by the score along with a handful of “collateral damage” innocents – and the world rages against Israel. Yet isn’t the Syrian regime killing Syrian innocents by the thousand every month? Where are the mass protests, the venting of wrath at Bashar al-Assad? What hypocrisy! But of course, this is in itself a hypocrisy. We know the old “Hama rules” of Syria; no one asks us to support them. And comparing Israel’s brutality to that of the Assad regime is playing the old Lord Blair game: we weren’t perfect in Iraq – but we weren’t as bad as Saddam.

No. Israel claims to hold the same values as the supposedly moral West. It says that it is fighting “terrorism” in our name as well as its own. It says it is fighting like us. It is playing by our Western rules. We are all Israelis now; that is what we are meant to say. Hamas is our enemy, as well as Israel’s. And so – for this is the effect – we too must be contaminated by the war crimes of Israel’s pilots. That, I believe, is why we protest against Israel. Operation Pillar of Cloud must not be committed in our name. 

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/we-are-all-israelis-now-its-brutality-unlike-syrias-is-fought-in-the-name-of-the-wests-war-on-terror-8335857.html

Journalistic Cliches Cannot Conceal Reality

by Robert Fisk                         Independent/UK                                     November 19, 2012

Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Here we go again. Israel is going to “root out Palestinian terror” – which it has been claiming to do, unsuccessfully, for 64 years – while Hamas, the latest in “Palestine’s” morbid militias, announces that Israel has “opened the gates of hell” by murdering its military leader, Ahmed al-Jabari.

Hezbollah several times announced that Israel had “opened the gates of hell” for attacking Lebanon. Yasser Arafat, who was a super-terrorist, then a super-statesman – after capitulating on the White House lawn – and then became a super-terrorist again when he realized he’d been conned by Camp David; he, too waffled on about the “gates of hell” in 1982.

And we journos are writing like performing bears, repeating all the clichés we’ve used for the past 40 years. The killing of Mr Jabari was a “targeted attack”, it was a “surgical air strike” – like the Israeli “surgical air strikes” which killed almost 17,000 civilians in Lebanon in 1982, the 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, in 2006, or the 1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians, in Gaza in 2008-9, or the pregnant woman and the baby who were killed by the “surgical air strikes” in Gaza last week – and the 11 civilians killed in one Gaza house yesterday. At least Hamas, with their Godzilla rockets, don’t claim anything “surgical” about them. They are meant to murder Israelis – any Israelis, man woman or child.

As, in truth, are the Israeli attacks on Gaza. But don’t say that or you’ll be an anti-Semitic Nazi; almost as evil, wicked, unspeakable, devilish and murderous as the Hamas movement with which – again, please don’t mention this – Israel happily negotiated in the Eighties when they encouraged this bunch of mobsters to take power in Gaza and thus decapitate the exiled super-terrorist Arafat. The new exchange rate in Gaza for Palestinian and Israeli deaths has reached 16:1. It will rise, of course. The exchange rate in 2008-9 was 100:1.

Mr Jabari was the “No 1 shadowy leader” of Hamas, according to the Associated Press. But how on earth can he be shadowy when we know his date of birth, family details, his years of imprisonment by Israel during which he changed allegiance from Fatah to Hamas? So while I’m on it, those years of Israeli imprisonment didn’t exactly convert Mr Jabari to pacifism, did they? Well, no tears then; he was a man who lived by the sword and died by the sword, a fate which, of course, will not afflict Israel’s warriors of the air as they kill civilians in Gaza.

Washington supports Israel’s “right to defend itself” then claims a spurious neutrality – as if Israel’s bombs on Gaza didn’t come from the United States as assuredly as the Fajr-5 rockets come from Iran. But is there nothing to stop this nonsense, this garbage war? Hundreds of rockets fall on Israel. True. Thousands of acres of land are stolen from Arabs by Israel –for Jews and Jews only – on the West Bank. There isn’t even enough land left there now for a Palestinian state.  The problem, oddly, is that Israel’s actions in the West Bank and its siege of Gaza are bringing closer the very event which Israeli trumpets it fears every day: that Israel faces destruction.

In the battle of rockets – not least Iran’s Fajr-5s and Hezbollah’s drones – a new warpath is being trodden by both sides. It’s no longer about Israeli tanks crossing the Lebanese border or the Gaza border. It’s about rockets and hi-tech drones and computer attacks – or “cyber-terrorism”, of course, if committed by Muslims – and the human dross ripped apart by the wayside will be even less relevant than it has been over the past three days.

If Benjamin Netanyahu believes that the arrival of the first Iranian Fajr rockets necessitates the Israeli big bang on Iran, and then Iran fires back – and perhaps at the Americans, too– and brings in Hezbollah – and Obama gets swallowed up in another Western-Muslim war, what happens then? Well, Israel will ask for a ceasefire, as it routinely does in wars against Hezbollah. It will plead yet again for the undying support of the West in its struggle against world evil, Iran included.

And why not praise the killing of Mr Jabari? Please forget that the Israelis negotiated via the German secret service with Mr Jabari himself, less than 12 months ago. You can’t negotiate with “terrorists”, right? Israel calls this latest bloodbath Operation Pillar of Defense. Pillar of Hypocrisy, more like.     © 2012 Independent/UK           [Abridged]

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent http://www.commondreams.org/robert-fisk

Surely the Bloodshed Has to End

Izzeldin Abuelaish                     Guardian/UK                          November 18, 2012

I was shocked to read of it. Another massacre. How many more massacres can Palestinians stand? How many can onlookers tolerate? Surely, now it's time to face reality: military means and violence will never put an end to this conflict. The notion of occupied and occupier must finish. The Israelis cannot claim self-defence. It is invasion, using all means from all directions –air, ground and sea.  Rather than self-defence, it is escaping responsibility. By contrast, is it not the right of the occupied to fight and free themselves from occupation and the continuous invasion and humiliations? . It's time for political leaders to be courageous. What are they going to say to their children when they watch other children killed. Where's an international system built on justice and human values?

This action endangers the life and future not only of Palestinians but also of Israelis. For this act is suicidal as well as destructive. The ultimate enemies are ignorance, arrogance, fear and greed. And the real courage would be to implement the peace treaties and plans. As I write, 39 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed and more than 300 people severely wounded. The killed include eight children, three women, including one pregnant, and four elderly. Of the severely wounded there are 102 children. It is, again, a human tragedy.

The political and military leadership – including all Israeli generals – know that military means will never put an end to this violence. We also know that occupations end and this one will eventually finish too. So, let's call a halt now to this craziness. Instead of using force against civilians, why not invest energy in moving forward in the peace treaties? The wound cannot heal while all the time there is a great commitment to deepening it and to add salt to it. My family in Gaza are not safe; and the same can be said for all those innocent people in Israel.

"No government would tolerate a situation where nearly a fifth of its people live under a constant barrage of rockets and missile fire," argues the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an election in January. What about the Palestinian people who have suffered for decades?

The military was ordered to conduct "surgical strikes" in Gaza, said Netanyahu, but Israel would take "whatever action is necessary to defend our people." There were also reports of rocket fire on Gaza overnight.  It's news to me that Netanyahu is a surgeon.. We, as doctors, practise constructive and curative surgery, not the destructive and traumatising sort. That is the kind of surgery he needs to learn and practice.

In the midst of the escalation in violence, to be courageous would be to create, to build and construct; and to save lives. There's no courage in using power against innocent, unarmed civilians – or civilians armed just with their faith and their will to live independent lives. Nor is there courage – on either side – in manipulating the situation for limited political and individual interest.

The doctor's role is to help, to minimize the suffering and to deliver safely the children of the future. It's time for the international community to help and support Palestinians in this beautiful project. The world is plagued by violence and conflict. We need to move forward and emphasize the dignity that each human being deserves regardless of gender or race. The freedom should not stop at Palestine borders, and we can endure through truth and justice.  Let us hope this is a turning point, and a way towards Palestinian freedom.  ©                [Abridged]

Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian doctor and infertility specialist. In 2009 three of his daughters were killed by Israeli shells. He now campaigns for peace and teaches at the University of Toronto

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/17/izzeldin-abuelaish-plea-for-peace-gaza-israel