In “Waltz With Bashir” Art Connects Gaza to Sabra and Shatila

Posted on January 25, 2009 by wallwritings

 

by James M. Wall             reduced-for-mailing-waltz

Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary film by Israeli Director Ari Folman, arrived in U.S. theaters during the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza. 

During the invasion, Gary Kamiya wrote a review of the film for Salon.com. He entitled it: “What Waltz With Bashir can teach us about Gaza”. Here is an excerpt from that review:

. . . . It is clear that [in the Gaza invasion] Israel has no strategic vision, no idea of what its onslaught is supposed to ultimately achieve or how to end it. When it finally ends its assault, Hamas will emerge from the rubble, Iran and Hezbollah will be empowered, Egypt and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas will be weakened, and America’s standing in the region will be lower than ever. . . .

. . . . [I]n a strange case of art imitating life, at the same time that Israel is blasting a defenseless population enclosed in a tiny area, an Israeli film has appeared that depicts an earlier war in which Israel was complicit in an appalling massacre.

America’s cultural gatekeepers have rightfully hailed Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir as a tour de force and cinematic breakthrough. On Sunday night, as Israeli warplanes carried out 12 bombing raids in Gaza, “Waltz With Bashir” won the Golden Globe Award for best foreign film.

Most people who see Folman’s stunning film will probably not connect it with Israel’s current war. But if they dig a little deeper, they might realize that the film’s moral lessons apply not just to the terrible events that took place 28 years ago but also to what is happening today.

Waltz With Bashir is about Folman’s attempt to recover his lost memory of his experiences as a soldier during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and in particular the Sabra and Shatilla slaughter of Palestinian civilians in two refugee camps.

Carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen, under Israeli protection and with its leaders’ complicity, it was one of the most notorious massacres of the 20th century. . . . (To read Gary Kamiya’s complete Salon review, click here)

TomDispatch.com, under the editorial direction of Tom Engelhardt, is publishing two long excerpts from a graphic memoir, Waltz with Bashir, which was developed in tandem with the film.

The novel will be in bookstores in a few weeks, but can be ordered in advance by clicking here.  The first TomDispatch excerpt is currently on line; the second will be posted by TomDispatch next Saturday. 

Waltz With Bashir is one of five nominees for the Academy Award category of Best Foreign Language Film of 2008.  This recognition could generate controversy when the winners are announced Sunday, February 22.

In his review of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, critic Ron Henderson had this to say in his Wall Writings post about Waltz With Bashir:

As though to underscore Israeli complicity in the massacre of hundreds (estimated as high as 3,000) Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Phalangists in the Beirut refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, soldier-filmmaker Ari Folman shifts away from animation in the final scene to jarring actual documentary footage of the few survivors leaving the camps. As a statement of conscience and shame, guilt and expiation, Waltz with Bashir stands high on the list of the best antiwar films made. 

Art and history come together in Gaza and in the Lebanon invasion that led to Sabra and Shatila.  Is the connection absolute? Of course not, no historical parallel is ever absolute. But as Gary Kamiya writes, there are “painful similarities”: 

. . . . Israel’s moral culpability for the 1982 massacre is not the same as its moral responsibility for the civilians killed in the current war. But there are painful similarities. Sooner or later the patriotic war fervor will fade, and Israelis will realize that their leaders sent them to kill hundreds of innocent people for nothing. And perhaps in 2036, some haunted filmmaker will release “Waltz With Hamas.” . . . .

Anthony H. Cordesman concludes his analysis of “The War in Gaza”, for the Center for Strategic and International Studies with blunt answers to difficult questions:

. . . . Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal or at least one it can credibly achieve? Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process?

To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes. To paraphrase a comment about the British government’s management of the British Army in World War I, lions seem to be led by donkeys. If Israel has a credible ceasefire plan that could really secure Gaza, it is not apparent. If Israel has a plan that could credibly destroy and replace Hamas, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to help the Gazans and move them back towards peace, it is not apparent. If Israel has any plan to use US or other friendly influence productively, it not apparent. 

As we have seen all too clearly from US mistakes, any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni, and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends. If there is more, it is time to make such goals public and demonstrate how they can be achieved. The question is not whether the IDF learned the tactical lessons of the [Lebanon] fighting in 2006. It is whether Israel’s top political leadership has even minimal competence to lead them. For Cordesman’s complete report, click here.

Posted in -Movies and politics, Middle East Politics, Movies | Leave a comment

Obama Names George Mitchell Top Middle East Envoy

Posted on January 22, 2009 by wallwritings

Friday update follows below:

by James M. Wall

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.  Or, if  you prefer, there is a God in Heaven who has finally figured enough is enough. You know the God I mean, the One who led President Barack Obama to choose George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy.

OK, if you don’t like this theology, or any theology, at least, accept Mitchell as a gift from Santa Claus one month late.

A former US Senator and skilled negotiator, Mitchell’s appointment as Obama’s Middle East envoy was announced Thursday afternoon when President Obama visited the State Department where he and Vice President Joe Biden welcomed Hillary Clinton to her new position as Secretary of State.

Many of the Zionist-leaning candidates for this top envoy position (led by Dennis Ross) from the Clinton and Bush eras, will most likely still end up working under Mitchell.  No problem there because the coaches, not the players, are supposed to call the plays in this game.

It will not be easy. The Obama-Mitchell duo must still deal with an American public that, in its media brain-washed stupor, accepted the canard that Israel killed 1400 Palestinians and destroyed 4000 homes in Gaza, to halt smuggling and rocket fire (neither of which were halted).

And then there is the Congress, our elected legislative leaders who embraced the attack on Gaza by an overwhelming vote with nary a word of concern over the human suffering and destruction in Gaza.

The 22 day invasion was planned well ahead of the inauguration of Barack Obama. It ended almost on the hour that the new president was sworn into office.

Israel’s leaders are themselves locked in a political campaign to choose a new Knesset and prime minister. Their pending February election no doubt led Israel’s leaders to gamble that they could “win” a war in Gaza before their Washington patron, George Bush, left office.

That gamble failed. Israel won nothing except a growing awareness in the world, and slowly also in the US, that Israel can be saved from itself not by its own leaders, but by an American president determined to bring a real peace to the region, not a “peace” designed to further Israel’s expansionist goals.

Mitchell is the first step. What do we know about Mitchell’s career in national politics?

Wikipedia gives Mitchell’s family history:

Mitchell’s father, George John Mitchell, was of Irish descent and was a janitor at Colby College and his mother, Mary Saad, was a textile worker who immigrated to the United States from Lebanon at the age of eighteen. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1954. In 1961, Mitchell received his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.

After a career in law, Mitchell became a US senator from Maine when the incumbent,  Edmund Muskie resigned to become Secretary of State during Jimmy Carter’s final year in office.  Mitchell served in the Senate until 1995.

The Huffington Post:

Mitchell, credited with arranging a peace accord in Northern Ireland, played the special envoy role for former President Bill Clinton and has handled other delicate diplomatic assignments since leaving the Senate in 1995.

The White House has been preparing key constituencies for this announcement. The first published report about Mitchell, by someone outside the administration, appeared in the conservative Washington Times, which got its confirmation from a ” representative of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations”.

Which suggests that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had been on the phone, doing what he was instructed to do, prepare the way and make smooth the path.

Richard Silverstein, who writes Tikum Olan, a blog “dedicated to Israeli-Palestinian peace, world music, and US politics”, is must reading to discover what the liberal Jewish community is saying, or at least hearing, about Middle East peace. (He describes himself as a Jewish liberal, may his tribe increase.)

Silverstein is, to put it mildly, overjoyed by the Mitchell choice.  He tells us why in his current posting:

This is an appointment that neither Israel nor the Israel lobby will like because they will have little opportunity to “play” Mitchell or game the system as they often attempt to do.  With a weak president or secretary of state, it’s far easier for both to manipulate U.S. political reality in their favor with the help of groups like Aipac and others.

However, we now have a strong president with a clear mandate to effect change in both the domestic and foreign sphere.  Mitchell too is a heavyweight who cannot be “played” or spun.  He has had previous experience in this field as well having been appointed by Bill Clinton to study the issues and provide advice on how to resolve them.

Opposition was immediate. James Besser wrote in the New York Jewish Week:

The expected appointment of a special envoy to breathe new life into Israeli-Palestinian negotiations could split the pro-Israel center while pleasing the Jewish left and outraging the right. The schism could be particularly deep if, as was widely reported this week, President Barack Obama appoints former Sen. George Mitchell to the job.

Some Jewish leaders say the very qualities that may appeal to the Obama administration — Mitchell’s reputation as an honest broker — could spark unhappiness, if not outright opposition, from some pro-Israel groups.

“Sen. Mitchell is fair. He’s been meticulously even-handed,” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But the fact is, American policy in the Middle East hasn’t been ‘even handed’ — it has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support.”

There are citizens of Israel who will greet the Mitchell news with a huge sigh of relief.  Citizens like Ha’aretz columnist Aklva Eldar:

Israelis were the only people in the world who hoped the Republican candidate would win. The new president can thus permit himself to reexamine the “special relationship” with Israel, especially with regard to its shared values with the United States and its contribution to American interests.

We should also expect a sigh of relief from Israeli novelist David Grossman who wrote about the Gaza invasion in Ha’aretz,

We must speak, because what has happened in the Gaza Strip over the last few weeks sets up a mirror in which we in Israel see the reflection of our own face – a face that, if we were looking in from the outside or saw it on another people – would leave us aghast.

We would see that our victory is not a genuine victory, and that the war in Gaza has not healed the spot that so badly needs a cure, but only further exposed the tragic and never-ending mistakes we have made in navigating our way.

Palestinian journalist Rami Khoury should be encouraged as well. He wrote  recently in the Beruit Daily Star:

On no other foreign policy issue does Congress collectively stick its head in its back pocket, turn off its power of independent judgment, and disregard the impact of its decisions on how the US is perceived around the world.

On no other issue does Congress vote according to the interests of a foreign country, rather than according to the US national interest. This kind of blind, wholehearted plunge into a maelstrom of pro-Israeli fanaticism and zealotry reflects precisely how strong the pro-Israeli lobby is in the United States, and how weak are the voices of reason, balance and justice as drivers of American foreign policy.

Of course, a successful George Mitchell scenario depends on Barack Obama carrying forward a vision for justice and peace (in that order) for both Palestinians and Israelis. Can either side be trusted?  History tells us there are dangers down this path of trust.

Israel began work on its Dimona nuclear weapons complex in 1960, using heavy water it had obtained from the British in 1956. You heard that right.  Work on the “secret” Dimona plant was begun that long ago, with promises from David Ben Gurion that it was for peaceful use only.

In his book, A World of Trouble, Patrick Tyler recalls that the “first CIA ‘special’ national intelligence estimate on Dimona arrived on President Eisenhower’s desk in early December, 1960, just after John Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in the presidential election.”

Could Israel be trusted to develop a nuclear capability for peaceful purposes only?

The journalist Arthur Krock asked John McCone, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, whether the discovery of Israel’s secret nuclear program offered “a very perfect opportunity” for Israel “to agree to be the model for an inspection system whereby the benevolence of intent could be proved, not only to us but to the world.”

McCone agreed that it could.  But it was not to be.

That was 49 years ago, nearly half a century. The Dimona project remains officially “secret” to this day, a public deceit maintained in Israel, with support in the US from a compliant Congress and media.

Today Dimona is the heart of Israel’s nuclear arms industry. Here is a report from the BBC from August, 2005:

The BBC’s Newsnight program, broadcast late Wednesday, said government papers held at the National Archive show Britain shipped 20 tons of heavy water to Israel in 1959. The program said the water was vital for the production of plutonium at Israel’s secret Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert.

Newsnight said British officials did not impose any conditions on the sale, such as stipulating the heavy water could be used only for peaceful purposes. The BBC report said the United States had refused to supply heavy water to Israel without such safeguards.

Robert McNamara, who became President Kennedy’s defense secretary in 1961, told the BBC that Britain didn’t inform the Americans it had sold heavy water to Israel. (page 63)

This is what Barack Obama faces: A world in which allies sell lethal material to other allies while, maybe, keeping the US out of the loop.

Will President Obama and George Mitchell break that mold and make justice, not profit and power, the goal?  As Ronald Reagan liked to say, quoting from one of his movies, “Gee coach, I’d sure like to try.”

“Try” is all that we now have left to ask of President Obama. And our trust is all we have to give him, now that we have given him the keys to the future. The Mitchell appointment is a good first step. Now we wait, and if we are so inclined, pray to a divine power of our choice.

First Update: Friday morning

Helena Cobban’s blog, Just World News, has the full text of President Obama’s statement on the Mitchell appointment, delivered at the State Department.  Cobban is a veteran Christian Science Monitor journalist with a strong background of reporting on the Middle East.

London Times OnLine is moderate in its praise of the Mitchell appointment. OnLine references Mitchell’s experience in Ireland as valuable background, but warns against assuming too much from the historic parallel.

Robert Fisk, of the London Independent found very little encouragement for the Arab world in Obama’s inaugural address. His analysis is a stern reminder that the task ahead for President Obama will not be easy.  His column was written before Obama made the Mitchell appointment.

Fisk, who writes from Beruit, is a highly respected foreign with years of experience covering the Middle East.  He offers a sobering reminder that years of neglect leave their toll on a people living under military occupation. A sample:

. . . Did Obama’s young speech-writer not realise that talking about black rights – why a black man’s father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people?

It wasn’t a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop. . . .

Juan Cole looked for small signs of hope for the Palestinians in the Mitchell announcement. He concluded his Friday blog posting with these words from President Obama:

. . . As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime” and with the international community and the Palestinian Authority participating.’

Cole writes that these words from Obama were:

. . . worth the price of admission. Considering the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians, caring at least a little about them as human beings. It is not enough by any means, but at least it is pointing in the right direction.

Posted in Middle East Politics | 4 Comments

“Lift Every Voice and Sing”

Posted on January 20, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall

After Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States, he delivered a stirring inaugural address that called on Americans to join with him in addressing the problems facing the nation.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily nor in a short span of time. But know this, America — they will be met.

His inaugural address was what we have come to expect from the new president, a mixture of realism and inspiration, laced with historical references.

Obama’s speech was followed by a benediction from 87-year-old Joseph Lowery, from Atlanta, Georgia, whose opening words must have sounded familiar to the millions of African Americans in the crowd and around the nation.

Lowery’s prayer began with the third verse of James Weldon Johnson’s hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing, which, since it was written in 1920, has emerged as the “national anthem” of the African American community.

Dr. Lowery was a close friend and colleague of Dr. Martin Luther, Jr. They worked together in the early days of the civil rights movement.

Lowery’s presence at the inaugural connected two historic moments in American history, the civil rights movement and the inauguration of our first African American president. (To hear the words and music of the entire hymn, click here). For another version of the hymn, click here.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far along the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

Posted in Religion and politics | 4 Comments

Pastor to Obama:”Perhaps you are where you are for such a time.”

Posted on January 18, 2009 by wallwritings

 by James M. Wall                            

On Sunday morning, President-elect Barack Obama and his family worshipped together at the 19th Street Baptist Church.  The Obamas’ new hometown newspaper, the Washington Post, covered the event:

President-elect Barack Obama and his family attended services this morning at one of the oldest historically black churches in Washington, thrilling a congregation that sang, clapped and prayed through a 90-minute celebration of spirit and Scripture.

It was supposed to be a surprise visit at Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, but it seemed anything but. Hundreds of parishioners began lining up early this morning, hoping to get a spot in the pews for what their pastor had earlier said would be a very “special” day. The pastor, Derrick Harkins, focused his sermon on how God prepares people for challenging situations.

He told Obama: ” . . . perhaps, just perhaps, you are where you are for such a time.” . . .. (To continue reading the Post report, click here.)

Pastor Harkins’ careful theological qualification is a welcome change from the triumphant style of far too many religious figures who leave the distinct impression that they are absolutely certain that their words are from God’s mouth. “Perhaps” is a qualifier too often missing in religious discourse.

Pastor Hawkins’ enthusiasm about the new president was unrestrained. But he made no claim that God had “placed” Obama in his new role. 

Drawing from the morning’s Old Testament lesson (Esther 4: 12-17) Hawkins referred to the experience of Esther who is urged by her cousin Mordecai to use her place in the king’s circle to speak up for her people, the Jews of Persia. Esther feared persecution, but was determined to speak out.

Hawkins spoke of others in history who turned away from the “flowery bed of ease” to be champions of justice (Rosa Parks, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr.). He placed Obama on that list.

If indeed, Barack Obama is where he is for reasons that transcend human understanding, then we should rejoice in this possibility. But let us never forget that modesty in claiming ultimate sanction is greatly to be desired, especially in those who hold political power.

This is no time for doctrinal certainty in our multi-cultural, multi-religious nation. It is, however, a time for calling for personal faith to move into vigorous social action.

Our nation, at this moment in its history, is a wounded nation, driven into economic despair through a myriad of sins, led by pride, greed. covetousness and selfishness.

Ours is also a wounded nation that has allowed its leaders to carry forward an empire-building project that is destructive and dangerous to the health and well being of the world.

The words of Harry Emerson Fosdick’s hymn, written in 1930, transcend parochialism as it seeks help from the “God of Grace, God of Glory”.  There is nothing parochial in these words from verse three:

Cure Thy children’s warring madness, Bend our pride to Thy control. Shame our wanton selfish gladness, Rich in things and poor in soul. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal, Lest we miss Thy kingdom’s goal.

It is a “warring madness” that drives a world that clings to the belief that war is a solution to any problem.  This is most certainly a time when we need to hear a voice that will “shame our wanton selfish gladness”, while we insist on remaining “rich in things and poor in soul.”

I believe Barack Obama knows this as well as any man who has assumed the awesome responsibility of leading this nation.  

We are the keepers of our brothers and our sisters. This Tuesday Obama will deliver an inaugural address that will speak of the need for a national value system that honors responsibility and accountability.

Barack Obama has emerged as a public figure with enormous appeal to the young. Somehow, some way, we must make sure our children and our grandchildren join with their elders in hearing and heeding Obama’s message this week.

Speaking at the Lincoln Memorial Sunday afternoon, Obama employed his usual inspiration with his caution of realism:

What gives me the greatest hope of all is not the stone and marble that surrounds us today, but what fills the spaces in between. It is you – Americans of every race and region and station who came here because you believe in what this country can be and because you want to help us get there.

It is the same thing that gave me hope from the day we began this campaign for the presidency nearly two years ago; a belief that if we could just recognize ourselves in one another and bring everyone together – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents; Latino, Asian, and Native American; black and white, gay and straight, disabled and not – then not only would we restore hope and opportunity in places that yearned for both, but maybe, just maybe, we might perfect our union in the process.

We have a new leader. Let us rejoice in his presence among us, for, as Pastor Hawkins said on Sunday morning, just perhaps, he is where he is “for such a time” as this.

                                                    #####################

First Monday update:

HBO had exclusive television control of the inaugural celebration Sunday afternoon. For reasons as yet unclear, it started its coverage after the opening prayer delivered by Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, depriving its viewers of an opportunity to experience the prayer. Bishop Robinson is openly gay. Huffington Post posted a telephone video of the prayer, taken from a distance.  The sound is good. The posting also includes a full text of the Bishop’s prayer. Click here for the story and to hear and read the prayer. 

Second Monday Update:

As you will note in the updated Huffington Post piece referenced above, HBO initially blamed the Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC) for excluding Bishop Robertson from the live broadcast. PIC  responded:

“We had always intended and planned for Rt. Rev. Robinson’s invocation to be included in the televised portion of yesterday’s program. We regret the error in executing this plan – but are gratified that hundreds of thousands of people who gathered on the mall heard his eloquent prayer for our nation that was a fitting start to our event.” — PIC communications director Josh Earnest.

Third Monday Update:

Before we move into Inaugural Day, here is a final treat. Since HBO owns the footage, this footage had to come from overseas. “No harm was done to HBO” in the making of this tape, a great sing out from the pre-Inaugural celebration on the Lincoln Memorial mall.  The clip was posted on line by the Oxdown Gazette blog. 

Pete Seegar joins Bruce Springsteen in leading the crowd in singing This Land is Your Land, Woody Guthrie’s celebration of  land and freedom.  As Tony Karon notes in his blog, Rootless Cosmopolitan, the lyrics Pete provides were once suppressed as too subversive for establishment taste.  

Listen carefully, the lyrics talk of a sign that says “Private Property” (but on the other sign the land belongs to everyone) and they sing of relief lines and hunger in this land. Springsteen describes the song as “perhaps the greatest song ever written about our home”. To which, let the people say, amen.

Posted in Religion and politics | Leave a comment

Israel Calls a Timeout While Gaza Continues to Suffer

Posted on January 17, 2009 by wallwritings

 

by James M. Wall

Late Saturday night, Israel and its allies, the US and Egypt, made a grand show of calling a “time out” (also known as a “ceasefire”) in Israel’s relentless attacks against Gaza’s civilian population. 

The US has agreed for its part to monitor the border between Egypt and Gaza. Egypt’s President Hosni Muburak will inform his people that he favored a ceasefire to end the bloodshed.

And, of course, Israel went through its “democratic” dance by letting the Knesset vote on the ceasefire. But not before killing a few more Gazan children. Don’t want those Palestinians to think we are getting soft, do we fellows? 

Steven Erlanger writes in the New York Times Saturday:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel announced late Saturday night that the Israeli military would begin a unilateral cease-fire in Gaza within hours while negotiations continued on how to stop the resupply of Hamas through smuggling from Egypt.

Mr. Olmert, who said all Israeli objectives for the war had been reached, said Israel was responding positively to a call by President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt earlier in the day for an immediate cease-fire, in a clearly orchestrated move by two countries that both see the Hamas movement in Gaza as a threat. Meanwhile, Hamas leaders outside Gaza have insisted that the group will fight on, regardless of any Israeli declaration.

The announcement came on a day in which Israel was again criticized by the United Nations over civilian deaths in Gaza — this time after a tank fired at a United Nations school, killing two young brothers taking shelter there.

United Nations aid officials raised questions about whether the attack, and others like it, should be investigated as war crimes. The Israeli Army said that it was investigating the reports at the highest level but that initial inquiries indicated that troops were returning fire from near or within the school.

You know, the usual drill, investigate but let folks know our guys were only responding to attacks. For Gaza’s population, nothing will change. The siege will continue. Starvation will continue. Medical care will remain virtually nonexistent. And a few rockets may still be fired into Israel from Gaza, which Israel will publicize widely. 

Haaretz Correspondent Ari Shavit has a different take, as do an increasing number of Israeli citizens. Shavit says Israel’s actions are “destroying Israel’s soul.” 

Israel’s leaders, meanwhile, are worried less about Israel’s soul and more about the impact of the Gaza war on Barack Obama’s inauguration. Juan Cole, in his Informed Comment blog, detects a connection between the inaugural and the time out.

There are rumors that the Israeli government will declare a cease fire Saturday. They had better. Because if they ruin the Obama inauguration by splashing the bloody bodies of dead Palestinian children all over the press during the next few days, no Americans, even the most pro-Israeli, are going to forgive them. The war has left 1,140 Palestinians dead, over 300 children, and over 5,000 wounded including many women and children, as well as 13 Israelis (4 of them civilians killed by rocket fire). We pay for these wars, we provide the fighter jets, bombs, and tanks. And we don’t want our money used for this sanguinary purpose in the first place; we have enough to be guilty about all on our own. And we especially don’t want to hear a peep from over there while we swear in our first African-American president.

So the Gazan people have the inauguration to thank for this “time out”.

And if you think this is a cynical explanation, then travel back to October, 1956, with author Patrick Tyler, whose new book, A World of Trouble; The White House and the Middle East–from the Cold War to the War on Terror, includes a scene from an earlier time in this Middle East drama.

Read carefully and see if you can find where things have changed, or where they remain the same.

Golda Meir, Israel’s foreign minister in 1956, opens our return to the past by confronting John Foster Dulles with what may have been one of the first times this argument was thrown at an American: “what if the US were attacked from the Mexican and Canadian borders”  

Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and their pro-Israel friends in Congress , may think they are being creative. Little do they know they are reading from the same script handed to Golda Meir in 1956.  

Tyler puts this history in context. 

It was the end of the 1956 presidential campaign. Aban Eban was Israel’s ambassador to Washington, when he received an urgent summons from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Aides to Dulles had tracked down Eban at the Congressional Country Club in the Washington suburbs where, as Patrick Tyler reports in his book, Eban “had been enjoying a round of golf with Congressman Sidney Yates of Illinois and the journalist Martin Agronsky”. 

Dulles had just learned that Israel was mobilizing its armed forces to strike Egypt.

Tyler reports that Dulles knew the Jewish state faced no immediate provocation. But the fact that it had summoned its population to arms raised suspicions in Washington.

President Dwight Eisenhower, in the final days of his campaign for reelection against Democrat Adlai Stevenson, was furious.  He wrote to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion warning against any “precipitous military action by Israeli forces”. 

When Eban arrived at the State Department to face an equally angry Dulles. The secretary wanted to know if Israel feared an attack from Jordan. 

Tyler writes: 

Yes, Eban replied, it did–he was now on the verge of blatantly deceiving the secretary of state.  Given Israel’s fears, Eban continued, he understood that its mobilization might raise the question of whether Israel’s intentions were defensive or offensive. But all of his information, Eban said, indicated that Israel’s mobilization was for defensive purposes. 

That was a lie, of course. Eban knew more about the mobilization than he was allowed to say.

He had just returned from Tel Aviv  following a meeting with Prime Minister Ben Gurion. Since coming out of retirement in 1955, Ben-Gurion had staged “large scale raids on jordan and Egypt in retaliation for attacks against Jewish settlements.

A raid at Qalqilya on the night of October 10 had urned into a ferocious battle in the densely populated Arab town, and when dawn broke nearly one hundred Palestinians lay dead with as many wounded. The Israeli paratrooper force, under the command of Ariel Sharon, a brash  young practitioner of the punitive strike,  limped home with eighteen dead and sixty wounded.

Eban had come to understand that the border tension with Jordan was a “calculated charade”. Ben Gurion had a different target. He had been conspiring with Great Britain and France for the three nations to combine forces and move against Egypt. Their goal:

Seize the Suez Canal, overthrow the Egyptian regime and expand Israel’s frontiers into the Sinai Peninsula and thereby bolt Jewish foundations even more firmly on the Mediterranean shore where the Hebrew nation had been born. . .

Unlike Truman, Eisenhower was not beholden to Jewish votes or the Jewish community’s nascent political fund-raising machine. . . 

Since Eisenhower’s election in 1952, he and John Foster Dulles had:

worked diligently and creatively to find solutions in the Middle East. The alarm went up [in Israel] because most of these schemes required Israel to give up land or share water resources with the Arabs.  Eisenhower’s motivation was straightforward and certainly not hostile to Israel.  He was out to protect and expand American interests n the region.

To that end, Eisenhower and Dulles, conspiring with the British, worked to overthrow Iran’s prime minister Mohammed Mossadeg, because he had moved to nationalize British Petroleum’s assets in Iran. 

Looming over all of this maneuvering was Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser, the dynamic former Army officer who after leading a 1954 revolt against the British, became president of  Egypt. The US, Britain, France, and Israel all united in their dislike and distrust of Nasser. 

(The Egyptian leader was highly popular throughout the Arab world. But he faced opposition at home.  Nasser was a secular socialist. The Muslim Brotherhood objected to the secular nature of his new government. This is the same Brotherhood that continues to plague Egypt’s secular government today and just, incidentally, helped give birth to Hamas.) 

What infuriated Eisenhower was that Ambassador Eban “had deceived Eisenhower’s secretary of state  on a crucial matter of war and peace.” Eban begged Dulles for time over the weekend  to confer with his government. 

On Monday, the Israelis attacked.  To Eisenhower, Israel was in a “brazen violation of the armistice” that ended the Israel-Arab war in 1949 and led to the creation of the state of Israel.

Eisenhower prepared to call the US Congress into session and “throw America’s weight behind the victim (Egypt)”.  What he did not know was that six days earlier, Israel, France and Britain conspired to deceive the US government.

To set up this conspiracy, Ben Gurion had flown from Tel Aviv to Paris accompanied by his military chief of staff, Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, a young Defense Ministry aide to the prime minister.

They met French Prime Minister Guy Mollet and laid out Israel’s goal. Israel wanted to begin with:

. . .the dissolution of Jordan as a state, giving all the land west of the Jordan River to Israel and all the land east of the river to Iraq. . . . Next he proposed the dismemberment of Lebanon, giving Syria the eastern quarter and Israel the southern quarter up to the Litani River and consolidating what remained as a Christian state under the Maronite majority of Mount Lebanon.

A western approved ruler was then to be put in place in Syria. Egypt would be forced to give up control of the Suez Canal to international control. Further, Ben Gurion confided to an incredulous Mollet that Israel believed that there were significant oil deposits in western Sinai.  Israel wanted total control of the Sinai. In return France would be invited to conduct a joint exploration for the Sinai oil.

Before Eisenhower could call on Congress to side with Egypt against the Israeli invaders, both Britain and France joined Israel by attacking Egypt.  

It was at this moment that Ben-Gurion sent his foreign minister, Golda Meir, to meet with John Foster Dulles. 

This was the heart of Meir’s defense to John Foster Dulles:

. . . “Imagine attacks from enemies of camped on the Mexican and Canadian borders inflicting those kinds of casualties in America, she said. “What would the United States have done in such a situation?”

She said the reason there was so much hatred among the Arabs was that they hated the idea that Israel existed. Existence was the only condition that the Jewish state insisted on for peace, and peace had failed because the Arabs would not accept that condition.  

Nasser, she said, was using the passions of the Arabs to achieve his ambition.  In her disarming way, she told Dulles that she was not going to insist that Israelis were angels, but Israel’s conscience was clear.

After fifty three years, the language remains the same: “How would Americans feel if they were shot at from the Mexican and Canadian borders”, Israel demands the right to exist, and all Arab states must acknowledge that.  And, of course, its all the Arab’s fault; Israel is just defending its people.

What has changed? Not much in the language (Peres and Sharon are still around). The power roles are reversed. The US president and his secretary of state take orders from Israel. There is no Ike and no Dulles to angrily threaten to join forces with an Arab enemy.

Fifty three years later,  US leaders conspire with Israel to go through the charade of agreeing to a ceasefire.  

The man who will be inaugurated Tuesday has a choice. Will the US  return to the strong hand played by Eisenhower and Dulles? Or will the US continue the deceit and compliance of Bush and Rice?  We will know soon.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

War crimes? Or “part of a new strategic ballgame in the Arab-Israel arena”?

Posted on January 14, 2009 by wallwritings

 

by James M. Wall

With the invasion of Gaza ending its third week, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reported Friday, January 16, that the Palestinian death toll is now 1115, of whom 370 are children and 85 are women.

The number of injured is at least 5,015, of whom 1,745 are children and 740 are women. An estimated 400-500 are critically injured. 

Mindful of these mounting death and injury figures, the International Federation for Human Rights, has urged the UN Security Council to refer Israel to the International Criminal Court for possible war crime charges in Gaza. 

Nine Israeli human rights groups called on Wednesday for an investigation into whether Israeli officials had committed war crimes in Gaza since tens of thousands of civilians there have nowhere to flee, the health system has collapsed, many are without electricity and running water, and some are beyond the reach of rescue teams. . . .(New York Times).

The London Guardian writes that the UN general assembly, which is meeting this week to discuss the issue, will consider requesting an advisory opinion from the international court of justice.

The British Broadcasting service reported Tuesday that an Israeli air strike has totally destroyed a Gaza clinic which served pregnant women, mothers and babies. The clinic, run by the Near East Council of Churches, was struck by a missile after a 15-minute warning was sent to the building’s owners. The attack came on Saturday, January 10.

Funding for the clinic and its [medical equipment valued in the “hundreds of thousands dollars] came, in part, from the European Union and churches in the United States, including the United Methodist Church Committee on Relief (UMCR) which works with Action by Churches Together and Muslim Aid to provide humanitarian assistance in Gaza. . .destroyed-clinic

Five days earlier, three clearly-marked mobile health clinics – supported by DanChurchAid, another ACT partner – also were destroyed in an Israeli air strike. The United Methodist Church news agency reported:

David Wildman, a Board of Global Ministries executive, [was informed by] the Department of Services to Palestinian Refugees, an independent organization affiliated with the Middle East Council of Churches, that Israeli missiles have hit the clinic in Al-Shuja’ia, destroying the facility and all its contents. . . . 

“Minutes before the missile hit the building which hosts the clinic, the Israeli Air Force fired a warning missile next to it, forcing all residents of the building and the adjacent buildings to flee the area,” Zack Sabella of the Department of Services to Palestinian Refugees reported. “A short while after, the army directly hit the building and razed it completely.”

It is believed the Israelis may have been targeting the owner of the three-story building, who was residing on its upper floors. The clinic was one of three in the Gaza strip, said Wildman, who last met personally with staff at the Department of Services for Palestinian Refugees in February 2008. “The United Methodist Church has supported the DSPR . . . for decades,” he added.

Ha’aretz reports on its interview with one European ambassador stationed in Tel Aviv. 

The straw that broke the camel’s back for that ambassador was the Red Cross report from Gaza that small children had been found wounded, near the corpses of their mothers, under the ruins of their homes, and other reports of civilians on the verge of dying in places ambulances could not reach because of the fighting.

“The international organizations in Gaza are talking about 200 dead children,” he said. “I don’t know how to explain these things to myself, never mind to my government,” added the ambassador. “Your action is brutal and you don’t realize how much damage this is causing you in the world. This is not only short term. It’s damaged for years. Is this the Israel you want to be?” 

A new strategic ballgame?

Meanwhile, far away from Gaza, on Wednesday morning the New York Times gave its readers a twin dose of Tom Friedman and Jonathan Goldberg, each singing the praises of Israel’s invasion of Gaza in their faux “we are liberals” style. 

Glenn Greenwald was appalled by the Times Friedman-Goldman tag team:

Tom Friedman, one of the nation’s leading propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel’s wars, has a column today in The New York Times explaining and praising the Israeli attack on Gaza.

For the sake of robust and diverse debate (for which our Liberal Media is so well known), Friedman’s column today appears alongside an Op-Ed from The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the nation’s leading (and most deceitful) propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel’s wars, who explains that Hamas is incorrigibly hateful and radical and cannot be negotiated with. 

One can hardly imagine a more compelling exhibit demonstrating the complete lack of accountability in the “journalism” profession — at least for those who are loyal establishment spokespeople who reflexively cheer on wars — than a leading Op-Ed page presenting these two war advocates, of all people, as experts, of all things, on the joys and glories of the latest Middle East war.

Tony Karon, a Jewish journalist from South Africa, now with Time magazine and the author of his own blog, Rootless Cosmopolitian, exposes Michael Oren the Historian, as a flack for Israel’s march through Gaza.  

An unremarkable op ed in the LA Times that trots out Israel’s boilerplate arguments that bombing the crap out of Gaza is actually an attack on Iran, was penned by Yossi Klein Halevy and Michael Oren. What is remarkable, though, is that Oren, AIPAC’s favorite historian, is listed simply as “a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center and a professor at the foreign service school of Georgetown University.”

What they forgot to note, of course, is that Oren is currently in Gaza, in the uniform of the Israeli Defense Force, in which he is a reserve officer whose current duty is as a media officer working to shape perceptions of the Gaza operation. I’d have thought that should have been made clear.

Foreign journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza. They must sit on the border and relay to the world what Michael Oren, a professor at the foreign service school of Georgetown University and an officer in the Israeli Defense Force, tells them. 

Back in the US, with the Times‘ tag team of Friedman and Goldberg giving their “liberal” version of Oren the Historian’s reading of the Gaza war, a different perspective is available from the “news” commentary of Jon Stewart.

In case  you missed Stewart’s critique of American politicians and their tortured analogies of Mexico and Canada throwing rockets across our borders, his January 5 clip is not to be missed.

Update:  Additional diplomatic responses to Israel’s invasion in Mondoweiss:

As reported in Ha’aretz the world’s diplomatic corps is beginning to turn on Israel after over two weeks of attacking Gaza.  Today, President Evo Morales announced that Bolivia is breaking relations with Israel. He wants the International Criminal Court to bring genocide charges against top Israeli officials.

Also today, the EU said that the ongoing negotiations with Israel to boost their political and trade ties will be put on a “time out.”  

For more from Mondoweiss, click here.

 


Posted in Media, Middle East | 1 Comment

Memo to Team Obama: Read Rabbi Rosen and Roger Cohen Before You Announce Your Middle East Team

Posted on January 12, 2009 by wallwritings

by James M. Wall                  

On Sunday morning, our pastor led us in a “Congregational Reaffirmation of the Baptismal Covenant”. We were asked to respond to a series of questions, including this one:

“Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?”

Monday morning, Episcopal priest Cotton Fite, from Evanston, IL, introduced me (via email) to Rabbi Brant Rosen, also of Evanston, a religious leader who is courageously responding from his own faith tradition to use the freedom and power of God to “resist evil, injustice and oppressive” in all of its forms. 

Rosen, the rabbi of Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation (JRC), writes a blog which he calls Shalom Ray. His December 28, 2008 posting is “Outrage in Gaza: No More Apologies”.

My latest definition of courage: A Jewish rabbi who is outraged over the deaths in Gaza, and says so, out loud, so all can hear him.  This courageous rabbi concludes his posting with a question: “Now I have said it. Now what do I do?”

If after reading Rosen’s blog you have the same question, I have a series of suggestions for all of us.

First, read Rosen’s posting (pasted below) and then link to his blog for his earlier postings. Next, flood Team Obama with links to Rosen’s blog. Team Obama needs to know that before the new president promises “change” in the Middle East he must listen to different Jewish voices, like that of Rabbi Brant Rosen.

Next, send Team Obama a link to Roger Cohen’s New York Times column: Mideast Dream Team? Not Quite.

Finally, add your comment of your own to Rabbi Rosen’s blog, and then write an email note of thanks to Roger Cohen.

Here is Rabbi Rosen’s posting:

The news today out of Israel and Gaza makes me just sick to my stomach.I know, I can already hear the responses: every nation has a responsibility to ensure the safety of its citizens. If the Qassams stopped, Israel wouldn’t be forced to take military action. Hamas also bears responsibility for this tragic situation… I could answer each and every one of these claims in turn, but I’m ready to stop this perverse game of rhetorical ping-pong.

I don’t buy the rationalizations any more. I’m so tired of the apologetics. How on earth will squeezing the life out of Gaza, not to mention bombing the living hell out of it, ensure the safety of Israeli citizens? We good liberal Jews are ready to protest oppression and human-rights abuse anywhere in the world, but are all too willing to give Israel a pass.

It’s a fascinating double-standard, and one I understand all too well. I understand it because I’ve been just as responsible as anyone else for perpetrating it. So no more rationalizations. What Israel has been doing to the people of Gaza is an outrage. It has brought neither safety nor security to the people of Israel and it has wrought nothing but misery and tragedy upon the people of Gaza.

There, I’ve said it. Now what do I do?

One final word: Turn that ship around, Mr. President!

This ominous essay from Global Research reports that large shipments of US arms are headed to the Middle East, bound for Israel. The shipment is being handled by a Greek merchant shipping company.

Does this mean we can expect even more attacks beyond Gaza which will lead nowhere but to the suffering shown in this You Tube presentation of the song of defiance and hope,  “We Will Not Go Down”

Arms used by Israel in Gaza were shipped well before the current invasion began.  Does the new shipment promise attacks beyond Gaza? Global Research believes they are:

The request by the Pentagon to transport ordinance in a commercial vessel, according to Reuters, was made on December 31, 4 days after the commencement of the aerial bombings of Gaza by F16 Fighter jets. 

Analysts have hastily concluded, without evidence, that the 2 shipments of “ammunition” were intended to supply Israel’s armed forces in support of its military invasion of Gaza.

“A senior military analyst in London who declined to be named said that, because of the timing, the shipments could be “irregular” and linked to the Gaza offensive.” (Reuters, January 10, 2009)

These reports are mistaken. Delivery of ordinance always precedes the onslaught of a military operation. The ordinance required under “Operation Cast Lead” was decided upon in June 2008. Further to Tel Aviv’s request under the US military aid program to Israel, the U.S. Congress approved in September 2008 the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster high precision GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39). 

The GBU 39 smart bombs produced by Boeing were delivered to Israel in November. They were used in the initial air raids on Gaza: 

“…The Israel Air Force has used the new lightweight GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb acquired from the USA, in the recent attacks in Gaza. The [Jerusalem] Post mentioned the new weapons ordered last September having arrived last month [November], and already put to action with the IAF fighters. These weapons could have been deployed by the Boeing/IAF F-15Is, since sofar SDB is cleared for use only with this type of aircraft.

Team Obama has to know this. It also has to know that “delivery of ordinance always precedes the onslaught of a military operation.”  

President Obama, on January 20, announce a Mideast team that will deliver “change we can believe in”.

And, may we also suggest, Sir, with all due respect,  that on January 20. you order that ship to turn around and proceed back to the US. 

Posted in Middle East Politics, Religion and politics | 3 Comments

Obama Breaks his Silence; Promises Effective, Consistent and Immediate Action on Gaza After January 20

Posted on January 11, 2009 by wallwritings

 Update Number One:

Read Roger Cohen’s column in today’s New York Times. It is not to be missed. He throws some cold water on the hopes recorded in this posting and my “How come there ain’t no brothers on the wall? posting. 

I trust you are able to link to Cohen’s column because I don’t want to spoil it for you with excerpts.  If you can’t link to it, go out and buy the paper, like in the old days! Then write to Cohen and sing his praises. He says the obvious and on this issue it is precisely the obvious that Team Obama team does not want to hear. Be thankful that this is in the New York Times.  Team Obama DOES read that newspaper.  

By James M . Wall

An alert reader writes to say that President Elect Obama has not been completely silent on the Gaza conflict, contrary to what I had written in an earlier posting.  She is correct.  

The good news is that Obama’s comments were noted in Politico, a news website, and Reuters News Service. The bad news is that the MSM (mainstream media) treated Obama’s breaking of his silence with indifference.  Few in the public even noticed.

Bob Smith, of Politico, had this specific reference in his January 6 column:

Breaking his silence on the conflict in Gaza, the president-elect deplored the civilian casualties, which have been overwhelmingly on the Palestinian side, after a meeting with fiscal and economic advisors today.  “I’m very concerned with the conflict taking place there,” Obama said. “I’m monitoring the situation on a day to day basis.  “The loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern to me, and after January 20th I’ll have plenty to say about the issue.”  Obama said he was “not backing away at all from what I said during the campaign” and that “starting at the beginning of our administration, we’re going to engage effectively and consistently in trying to resolve the conflict in the Middle East.”  Obama’s emphasis on civilian casualties breaks slightly with the White House line, which has been to blame Hamas first.

A day later, Reuters News Service had this follow up:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Barack Obama, who has avoided commenting on foreign policy matters, said on Wednesday he will “engage immediately” in the situation in the Middle East when he becomes president.  Obama . . . .  repeated that he was deeply concerned about the situation in Gaza but said he it would be imprudent to send signals that his incoming administration is running foreign policy.  “I am doing everything that we have to do to make sure that the day that I take office we are prepared to engage immediately in trying to deal with the situation there,” he said at a news conference. “Not only the short-term situation but building a process whereby we can achieve a more lasting peace in the region.”

Obama is still not specific as to how he will act in the Gaza crisis. He continues to repeat his “one president at time” mantra while only hinting at some as yet unidentified bold action. This absence of specificity bores the media, which is why we read or hear so little about it. But the breaking of Obama’s silence is real. It could bring a dramatic new move toward peace after January 20. 

Meanwhile, the US Congress remains oblivious of the suffering of 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza. Both the Senate and the House have approved a pro-Israel resolution that overwhelmingly endorsed Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The resolution was so disconnected to the reality of the more than 800 dead Palestinians (including at least 300 children) that it could only have been written by AIPAC.

Ha’aretz points to the oxymoronic (my terms, not theirs) Congressional resolution which defined Israel as simultaneously a Jewish and a democratic state. This inherent contradiction ignores the ways in which non Jews in Israel do not have equal rights nor legal protection under the current Israel government. The list is long. It is documented by a Palestinian NGO. Adam Horowitz posted his reaction on Phillip Weiss’ Mondoweiss.

 Few media outlets bothered to report on the congressional vote.  Congress endorsing a pro-Israel resolution is not news. It remained for television voices like those of Bill Moyers to speak up for the dead and suffering in Gaza. 

 Glenn Greenwald reports that Moyers “delivered a poignant essay on Israel/Gaza” Friday night on his PBS Journal. The Moyers segment began with a video clip of  “a mostly ignored anti-war march this week in Washington (while media hordes, down the street, fixated on the Roland Burris circus).” It concludes with Moyers’ insightful take on the disproportional suffering of the Gazan civilian population.  

The American public is starting to notice the carnage in Gaza, even in unexpected outlets like this link from the conservative Wall Street Journal: “Israel is Committing War Crimes: Hamas’s Violations are no justification for Israel’s actions”, written by George E. Bishart, a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. 

Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel’s acts.

In the online The American Prospect, January 8, Matthew Yglesias writes:

 . . . an active American role is vital to obtaining peace. Absent external pressure, the internal logic of politics tends to point toward momentary conflict escalating out of control. But playing that role effectively requires something more than diplomats who understand the situation. It requires political commitment.

Yglesias cites the January 12 Newsweek article by Aaron David Miller, which is also referenced in one of my earlier posting. 

[Miller’s article] . . .  included his widely quoted revelation that he “can’t recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli prime minister about the damage that settlement activity — including land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions — does to the peacemaking process.” That is, indeed, a remarkable (and deplorable) fact. But equally interesting was Miller’s observation that Bill Clinton was often “privately frustrated with Netanyahu’s tough policies” back during Netanyahu’s spell as Prime Minister, but Clinton did not “allow those frustrations to surface publicly.” Miller’s criticism of Clinton-era policy cuts deep — not that the administration was too sympathetic to Israeli views but that even when the administration wasn’t sympathetic, it didn’t want to say so . . . 

Jimmy Carter has just written a column for the Washington Post which explains why the Gaza invasion could have been avoided. Carter will be out around the time of the inauguration with another book on the Middle East, a sequel to Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Any Carter book on this topic is guaranteed to drive the Israel Lobby up the wall. Nor does it please the Lobby that A Man from Plains, the film documentary on Carter’s recent book tour is now available on DVD.

There is clearly a stirring in the land toward a desire for Obama’s “change we can believe in” to make changes in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For this reason, we must pay close attention to what President-elect Obama is promising: “effective, consistent and immediate engagement” with “the situation” in Gaza. Obama’s approval ratings are currently high enough for him to take bold action. 

Now is the time, as my mother would say, to look on the bright side. Obama’s popularity will soar even higher after his inaugural address. Another national nightmare may soon come to an end. The darkness may be lifting for Gaza and Israel. 

So what are we to say about those AIPAC certified Middle East envoys who are waiting to be announced? (See my earlier blog posting). Good question. Here is a scenario that makes sense to me. It is a strong possibility that those envoys, veterans of Middle East diplomacy, will join other pro-Israel Obama appointees (Emanuel and Clinton, e.g.) as players in an Obama “trip to China”, a dramatic rerun of the  ploy that worked so well for Richard Nixon that it gave the US its new World Banker.  

Obama’s AIPAC-certified appointees bring experience to their positions. But Obama has assured us he will set the policy. Which is why we may surmise–with no evidence in hand–that Barack Obama will instruct his Middle East team that they will be expected to reassure their Israeli friends that Israel’s security is not in danger under an Obama administration.

At the same time, Obama will expect his team to join him in making sure that both the Palestinians and the Israelis understand that the word “honest”, as in “honest broker”, will once again really mean an honest US policy.   

Finally, there is this promising development: The London Guardian is reporting that a President Obama will reach out to Hamas leaders. It will be US policy to reverse the Bush doctrine that Hamas must always be treated as a pariah. In his story in the London Guardian, Jonathan Freedland writes:

The incoming Obama administration is prepared to abandon George Bush’s doctrine of isolating Hamas by establishing a channel to the Islamist organisation, sources close to the transition team say. The Guardian has spoken to three people with knowledge of the discussions in the Obama camp. There is no talk of Obama approving direct diplomatic negotiations with Hamas early on, but he is being urged by advisers to initiate low-level or clandestine approaches, and there is growing recognition in Washington that the policy of ostracising Hamas is counter-productive.

The move to open contacts with Hamas, which could be initiated through the US intelligence services, would represent a definitive break with the Bush presidency’s ostracising of the group. The state department has designated Hamas a terrorist organisation, and in 2006 Congress passed a law banning US financial aid to the group.

One week from Tuesday, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States of America. On that day he will become “the only president we have”.  Will his “effective, consistent and immediate” actions on Israel-Palestine propel the region toward a stable peace? A world weary of war, waits for the answer.

Posted in Middle East Politics, Politics and Elections | 1 Comment

Question for Barack Obama on Middle East Envoys: How come there ain’t no brothers on the wall?

Posted on January 8, 2009 by wallwritings

                     spike-lee                                                                                   

by James M. Wall

The word on the street is that President-elect Obama has chosen three envoys to represent him in the Middle East. All three are AIPAC certified, which means they will travel from Tel Aviv to Islamabad with a certification stamped on their passports that reads: The bearer can be trusted to take only those actions which are in the best interests of the state of Israel.

Three other veteran Middle East diplomats are not on the list: Aaron David Miller, Robert Malley and Zbigniew Brzezinski. They have either lost, or never had, AIPAC certification.

During Barack Obama’s Democratic primary struggles against Hillary Clinton, AIPAC’s candidate for president, this trio of Miller, Malley and Brezenski, provided advice to Obama. No more. All three Middle East specialists were jettisoned overboard by Obama as so much baggage to lighten his political load.  All three diplomats had failed to pass the absolute loyalty to Israel test.

It need not be this way. On the home front, Barack Obama chose an intelligence leadership team with no connections to the dark past of  the Bush-Cheney torture policies, described in Phillippe Sand’s’ Torture Team. (Reviewed in the London Guardian). An Obama administration says goodbye water-tortures and renditions, farewell Abu Gharib and Gitmo. This is change we can believe in.

The federal budget? Obama picked Nancy Killefer to birddog his budget, sniffing out “dubious government programs” that waste the taxpayers’ money.  And, take note, all programs means Social Security and Medicare as well as bridges to nowhere. Again, change we can believe in, our tax dollars spent wisely.

But for the Obama envoy team in the Greater Middle East, where is the change? If these appointments go through we will have business as usual, Clinton and Bush redux, sixteen years, and counting, of a White House that is the Best (and Only remaining) Friend Israel has left on the globe.

On torture, Medicare and Social Security, Obama acts boldly.  But on Israel, the source of the Middle Eastern anguish, Obama turns his back on change.

Journalist and blogger Phillip Weiss strongly disapproves of the Obama envoys for Iran, Afghanistan/Pakistan, and Israel/Palestine. (If you don’t know that US loyalty to Israel has a major impact on all those areas, well, you are not paying attention in class.)

Weiss can say the unsayable on this topic because, even though he is anything  but AIPAC certified, he is a proudly Jewish blogger from New York City, whose daily dialogues with his fellow Jews of all political persuasions are must reading for anyone wanting to listen in on discussions across the Jewish political spectrum. (It helps if  you understand Yiddish).

Weiss, a journalist with the New York Sun when he isn’t writing his blog, uses his Mondoweiss blog to cry out to Jews and non-Jews, hey, out there, pay attention to the Jewish influence on American policy in the Middle East. Here is a recent posting by Weiss with news of those flawed appointments:

Obama is said to have chosen Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke and Richard Haass as his envoys re Iran, Afghanistan/Pakistan, and Israel/Palestine respectively. And the Israel lobby is just another lobby. It is not that some Jews can’t be fairminded. And I don’t know much about Haass except that he’s utterly conventional, a former Bushie, pro-Iraq, mobbed up with Martin Indyk. The issue here is, religion and ethnicity matter. Where’s the balance? Where’s [Daniel] Kurtzer? Where’s [Aaron David] Miller? Where’s an Arab-American? Where’s…. Obama?

There is still no MSM (main stream media) official word on these appointments, but the conservative Atlantic Monthly blog seems pretty sure that the envoy team is set (though in an update he is not quite certain on Haass):

Transition officials confirm that President-elect Obama has asked Dennis Ross, Richard Haass, and Richard Holbrooke, to serve as his chief emissaries to  world hot spots.

It’s expected that Ross will get the Iran portfolio, that Holbrooke, the hard-headed architect of the Dayton Peace Accords, will take the tough (and tougher) Southwest Asia portfolio, which includes India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and that Haass will deal with the Middle East.  Each men’s turf is still in flux, so the assignments might change. Other envoys will be added to this list; they’ll deal with Africa and South America.

All three have the chops; all three are considered realists; all three have direct experience as envoys; Haass was the U.S. government’s chief negotiator in Northern Ireland; Ross shuttled between Mideast capitals during the Clinton administration, and Holbrooke, as mentioned, brought warring sides together in the Balkans.  Haas served under Presidents Clinton and Bush and is currently the president of the Council on Foreign Relations.   A transition spokesman declined to comment. . . .

No question but that this trio has “chops”, are “realists” and extensive experience as envoys.  All three beamed down from pictures on the State Department wall during the eight years of the Clinton administration. Their loyalty to Israel is well known to AIPAC, the Jewish Lobby, and politicians in Washington and Tel Aviv.  They all possess what Holly Hunter in O Brother Where Art Thou, calls “bona fides”, the seal of approval that satisfied the editorial boards of, you know, the usual crowd, the Post, Times, Tribune, Wall Street Journal.

Palestinians now under fire in Gaza are crying out to Barack Obama with their own version of a question from Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing:

The place in Sal’s Pizzeria. The location is New York City’s Harlem. It is the hottest day of the summer. Tensions are high.                       do-the-right-thing3

Young African American patron: (Giancarlo Esposito): “Hey, hey Sal, how come there ain’t no brothers on the wall here?”

Sal, the owner, behind the counter: (Danny Aiello): You want brothers on the wall? Get your own place. You can do what you wanna do.  You can put your brothers and uncles and nieces and nephews, your step fathers, step mothers, you want, you see? But this is my pizzeria, American Italians on the wall, only.

If the Obama administration can only name envoys who have bona fides handed to it by AIPAC, how does that differ from Sal’s statement: “This is my pizzeria, American Italians on the wall, only?”

The American public, oblivious to what is done in their name and with their money, need to know that Dennis Ross, slated as an envoy to Iran, brings to the table a hard line loyalty to Israel. His picture has been hanging on the State Department pizzeria wall for a long time.  Here is a news story of a recent Ross address to a Jewish audience:

Washington DC–Dennis Ross said the United States should back a cease-fire in Gaza only if it ensures that Hamas “can’t rebuild.”  “We want some stability,” said Ross, a former top Middle East negotiator in the Clinton administration, in a talk at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, Md.

“If Hamas is left with the capability to rearm,” he said, then the current conflict will have been “just a prelude” to the next round. He hoped that some sort of “enforcement mechanisms” to restrain the terrorist group could be developed in any kind of truce. —Global News Service of  the Jewish People.

Another recent posting on Mondoweiss is from David Bromwich who teaches literature at Yale. Bromwich has written on politics and culture for The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and other magazines.

Bromwich responds to AIPAC favorite Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column, which was published  January 7, in the midst of the current Israeli-Hamas conflict. Here is part of Bromwich’s reaction to the column:

. . . [Friedman] does not speak of the facts of the slaughter: the 100-to-1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli dead; the bombing of institutions and private houses that were known to be entirely or almost entirely inhabited by civilians. Not one word of pity for the sufferings of Gaza, and not a hint of reproach to Israel. Friedman espouses the righteousness of these killings as a benefit to all parties, whether they realize it or not. If one were looking for evidence that Israel’s special relationship to the U.S. has corroded the moral sense of both countries, one could hardly point to a more finished specimen of the corruption of heart in question. . . .(For the complete Bromwich posting, click here.) 

The future looks dark in the Middle East for any hope of a change we can believe in. But could this Cassandra cry be premature? Maybe the State Department walls will not be completely filled with Sal’s “Italian Americans only.”  Maybe, just maybe, two non AIPAC-certified candidates (both also Jewish) Daniel Kurtzer and Aaron David Miller, could still join the Obama team.

Aaron David Miller was at Camp David in 2000 as an advisor to Bill Clinton. Miller later wrote critical essays debunking the AIPAC doctrinal belief that Arafat turned down “a generous offer” from Israel.  His picture on the State Department pizzeria wall was put in storage. Even so, Miller, fully aware that the Obama envoy choices are still pending, chose to go bold himself.

He wrote a Newsweek column that speaks bluntly to the need for the new president to get tough with Israel:

Jews worry for a living; their tragic history compels them to do so. In the next few years, there will be plenty to worry about, particularly when it comes to Israel. The current operation in Gaza won’t do much to ease these worries or to address Israel’s longer-term security needs. The potential for a nuclear Iran, combined with the growing accuracy and lethality of Hamas and Hizbullah rockets, will create tremendous concern. Anxiety may also be provoked by something else: an Obama administration determined to repair America’s image and credibility and to reach a deal in the Middle East.

Don’t get me wrong Barack Obama–as every other U.S. president before him—will protect the special relationship with Israel. But the days of America’s exclusive ties to Israel may be coming to an end. Despite efforts to sound reassuring during the campaign, the new administration will have to be tough, much tougher than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush were, if it’s serious about Arab-Israeli peacemaking. . . . (for the entire article, click here…)

The Wall Street Journal has pointed to a broader role for Daniel Kurtzer in the Obama administration:

President-elect Barack Obama may name Daniel Kurtzer, a veteran U.S. diplomat, to the post of special envoy to the Middle East, a senior Israeli diplomatic source told the daily Ha’aretz. Kurtzer has served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt, from 1997 to 2001, and to Israel, from 2001 to 2005. The appointment of Kurtzer, 59, to a post reporting directly to the president instead of to the secretary of state would emphasize the importance Obama places on the regional peace process, Ha’aretz reported.

In one of his final essays, written in 2000, Edward Said reminded described an ongoing harsh reality that continues today in Gaza: ” [t]he cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities, and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded.” Said had lost patience with talk of “sides” in the conflict. It was time, he wrote:

“to pause and declare indignantly that there is only one side with an army and a country:  the other is a stateless dispossessed population of people without rights or any present way of securing them. . . .

The Obama administration must not tolerate another four years in which the AIPAC, the Israel Lobby–and  media cheerleaders like Friedman–maintain their veto power over US policy in the Middle East.

If we are to have change we can believe in, President-elect Obama must act as boldly on Israel’s role in the Middle East, as he has on our policies on torture and the economy. Nothing less than “the moral sense of both countries” is at stake. 

Posted in Middle East Politics | 2 Comments

Week Two in Gaza (Monday Update): “Publish it not in the streets of As’kelon”

Posted on January 3, 2009 by wallwritings

 

Monday Noon Update

by James M. Wall

Bill Kristol was in the New York Times Monday, channeling George C. Scott as General Patton,  gleefully rubbing his hands together as he predicts that Gaza will not repeat the failure of the Lebanese 2006 invasion. This time, promises Kristol, “our boys will give the enemy what for”, or words to that effect.

Why? Because the terrain is flat, the enemy is isolated, and boy, do we have the superior war machine. And, of course, “our” cause is just.  This is the best the nation’s newspaper of record can offer? 

No better than the Washington Post, which blessed its readers with Charles Krauthammer over the weekend (syndicated in the Chicago Tribune Monday), with the flat statement that Hamas is the reason for this season of death and destruction. To Krauthammer, Israel is only doing what any peace-loving parent would do for his children: Drive south and kill the children of the other side’s peace-loving parents. (Patton, again).

The US mainstream media is at the barricades once again.  Shock and Awe is back.  Israel is marching to glorious victory,  backed by an almost total US media smokescreen, US funding, and the latest in US military technology. World opinion? Who cares? Israel’s back is covered from the Big Bad UN by US vetoes.  And who pays attention to protests on US streets or in London and Paris government offices? 

The American public and the media that provides that public with its daily dose of Israeli propaganda, are so effectively brainwashed, that the Gaza “rocket rationale” for the invasion is still the dominant plot line. It may take weeks before the real reason (see below) for the invasion reaches the masses.

Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher, writes in Huffington Post to deplore the silence of US media outlets and offers this contrast to coverage in Ha’aretz, from Jerusalem:

In the usual process, the U.S. government, media here — and many of the leading liberal bloggers — are silent or playing down questions about whether Israel overreacted in its massive air strikes on Gaza, while the foreign press, and evenHaaretz in Israel, carries more balanced accounts.

Anyone who cares should consult the respected Haaretz site often, if for no other reason than to learn that criticism of Israeli military actions are usually more heated inside that country than in the USA. The New York Times, for example, as of today (Monday), has not yet editorialized on the air assault. You may recall the lockstep support in the U.S. for Israeli’s invasion of southern Lebanon, which included the use of U.S.-made cluster bombs. That invasion turned out to be a genuine fiasco.

The Israeli land assault on Gaza has been treated by US media as a military achievement.  The larger story is the damage to institiutions like the American School in Gaza, built in 2000 with international support.  The school before its destruction is described here.

This first hand report comes from Eyad el Sarrraj, who chaired the school’s board of directors for seven years. His report, sent from the West Bank by Palestinian businessman Sam Bahour, is being circulated further by Pauline Coffman, former chair of the Chicago area Presbyterian Middle East Task Force. 

“Thanks to two Israeli airstrikes, the American School in Gaza, previously known as “an oasis of learning”, became just another pile of rubble and ashes, an ordinary scene in today’s Gaza. The only guard of the school was killed in the attack. So much for American/Israeli values of education. How was the AMERICAN school in Gaza of any help to Hamas or any other faction? . . .  Israel’s war on Gaza is not only aimed at defeating a certain party, but its aimed at making the Palestinians go years back instead of advancing. So much for creating moderate Palestinians!

“Today they flattened the American school which I was the chairman of for seven years and was the best school in Gaza and best playgrounds and design in Palestine. Its graduates went to MIT, Harvard and Princeton. Something the Israelis share with the Islamic fundamentalists (who attacked the school several times because it teaches the American curriculum); they want to keep us backward.”   

As the American School in Gaza lies in ruins, the United States sits quietly by, granting its empire-building sanction to a military invasion of an Arab population which is trapped behind a worldwide wall of indifference, alone and isolated. 

This CBS video footage, narrated by Mads Gilbert, is a rare appearance on a major US television network of the impact of the bombing in Gaza.  Middle East scholar Juan Coles posted this footage, with comments, on his blog, Informed Comment.  

Robert Fisk, London Independent correspondent, has more on the “few square miles” of Gaza under attack:

Crammed into the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and darkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West. Gaza was always an insurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel Sharon’s bloody “pacification”, starting in 1971, to be completed, and Gaza is not going to be tamed now.

Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice –. . .  the late Edward Said . . .– is silent. “It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in,” Said once said of Gaza. “It’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.”

The US mainstream media dutifully reports Israel’s rational for bombing Gaza, honoring a cover story with a short life span. This bombing, so the Israelis say, is in retaliation for rocket attacks into southern Israel, some of which reached the city of As’kelon, of which more later. 

The first Israeli bombs fell on Saturday, December 27. Four days later,  the rocket rationale had given way to the real reason for the bombing: regime change. Shock and Awe is back again, a dark reminder of the initial rationale for Israel’s 2006  invasion of Lebanon, that time, retaliation for Hezbollah’s incursion across Israel’s northern border.  

The US Jewish Forward magazine’s Larry Cohler-Esses and Nathan Guttman, described the 2009 shift:

It was on the third and fourth days of its retaliatory air offensive in Gaza that the fork in the road for Israel became clear: another cease-fire agreement, or regime change. On December 29, after days of circumspect public statements, the rhetoric of some of Israel’s most visible officials changed markedly.  “The goal of the operation is to topple Hamas,” declared Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon during a December 29 television interview. “We will stop firing immediately if someone takes the responsibility of this government, anyone but Hamas. We are favorable to any other government to take the place of Hamas.”

The initial 2006 rationale for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon–a Hezbollah border incursion into northern Israel–soon gave way to the real reason: regime change. Hezbollah was a “terrorist” group that had to be eliminated. That did not turn out well for Israel. Hezbollah is now a major player in the Lebanese parliament. For Israel, the invasion was a costly failure.

Israel retreated from Lebanon, taking advantage of a delayed cease fire, courtesy of Condi Rice, during which the IDF fired additional cluster bombs during its retreat. The Electronic Intifada has this reminder of what happened:

. . . [In 2006] Israel fired cluster bombs, either US-supplied or manufactured in Israel, on nearly 1,000 individual strike sites across 1,400 square kilometers of southern Lebanon, an area slightly larger than the US state of Rhode Island.  Each cluster bomb can release up to 2,000 bomblets, and about a quarter of the bomblets failed to explode on impact in Lebanon. Since the war, unexploded bomblets have killed at least 30 people and injured some 200 others. . . .

As week two of the 2009 Gaza invasion begins, Israel’s political leaders are busy campaigning for their upcoming February elections. They seek to outdo one another in their zeal to kill the dangerous enemy to the south, the mighty Gaza army armed with all those rockets.  Those campaigners enjoy total freedom to repeat their Lebanon military disaster. Both the outgoing and incoming US administrations are looking the other way as the slaughter in Gaza continues. 

All of the Israeli presidential candidates and the US leaders must have been aware of the long range plans behind the invasion. Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky connects Robert Negroponte, the current White House point man in the region, to the long-planned attacks:

The aerial bombings and the ongoing ground invasion of Gaza by Israeli ground forces must be analysed in a historical context. Operation “Cast Lead” is a carefully planned undertaking, which is part of a broader military-intelligence agenda first formulated by the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001: 

“Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas.” (Barak Ravid, Operation “Cast Lead”: Israeli Air Force strike followed months of planning, Haaretz, December 27, 2008)

It was Israel which broke the truce on the day of the US presidential elections, November 4. . . . 

On December 8, US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte was in Tel Aviv for discussions with his Israeli counterparts including the director of Mossad, Meir Dagan. “Operation Cast Lead” was initiated two days day after Christmas. It was coupled with a carefully designed international Public Relations campaign under the auspices of Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Hamas’ military targets are not the main objective. Operation “Cast Lead” is intended, quite deliberately, to trigger civilian casualities.  What we are dealing with is a “planned humanitarian disaster” in Gaza in a densly populated urban area. . . . 

Gaza does not have an army that could possibly cope with such a strategy.  But Gaza does have a desperate and angry population that will not easily yield to either bombing or an invading army. It will continue its sporadic rocket firing and it may secure additional military arms, supplied, most likely, by Iran. But Gaza will not offer a serious military threat to Israel’s combined air and ground forces.  Meanwhile, the US vetoes any UN resolutions to halt the attacks and the major powers remain silent.

So why did Israel do it?   Time magazine’s Tony Karon, writing in his blog, has one explanation:

It’s fear of another Holocaust that has driven Israel to bomb the crap out of the Palestinians in Gaza — at least, that’s if you believe what you read on the New York Times op ed page. (Never a good idea, of course, because as I have previously noted, when it comes to Israel and related fear-mongering, there simply is no hysteria deemed unworthy of the Times op ed page.)

[Benny] Morris, a manic fellow at the best of times prone to intellectual mood swings — having laid bare the ethnic cleansing that created modern Israel, Morris then didn’t as much recant as complain that the problem was that Ben Gurion hadn’t finished the job. And since the 2000 debacle at Camp David, of course, he’s been a de facto editorial writer for Ehud Barak, the failed former Prime Minister nicknamed “Mr. Zig-Zag” while in office because of his inconsistency — and who, of course, is the author of the current operation in Gaza.

Another answer to the question, “why did Israel do it?”, involves the aforementioned Ehud Barak:  Israel’s February 18 elections for the parliament and prime minister. There are three leading candidates for prime minister: Current foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Kadima party leader, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from the right-wing Likud party, and former prime minister and current Defense Minister Barak.

All three sail comfortably along with US backing, undeterred by any outrage from the United States, where public opinion maintains its ignorance about Israel’s determination to find its security in a hostile Middle East through its military power.

The US mainstream media treats Israel as a 51st “state”, avoiding any serious coverage of the ugly reality of the invasion of Gaza where 40 percent of the population confronting the invasion is under the age of 15. 

Robert Fisk has no patience for American public/political ignorance, writing in his London Independent column:

But watching the news shows, you’d think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.

Fisk finds it ironic that a few of those Hamas rockets landed in the “modern Israeli city” of As’kelon.  He explains:

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.

When the Palestinians living in As’kelon were driven from their homes in 1948, their “abandoned” homes were quickly filled by immigrant Jewish families. 

Moving into week two of death and destruction in Gaza, we conclude this posting with two historic documents, one modern and another quite ancient.  First, a video clip from a television interview which captures what has to be described as an “historic”  exchange between MSNBC conservative television host Joe Scarborough, and former Carter National Security advisor, Zbignew Brezenski. 

The clip, which is nine minutes long, demonstrates how easily the pro-Israel bias of mainstream US media blends with ignorance of the topic discussed.  Watch the entire clip, but if you want to skip to the exchange between Scarborough and Brezenski, move to the six minute mark.

In Huffington Post’s introduction to the clip, Zbignew Brezenski is quoted speaking candidly to Scarborough about the newsman’s lack of understanding of recent Middle East politics. In a sudden burst of frustration, Brezenski says to Scarborough:

 “You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.” 

What gives this exchange a certain poignancy is the fact that Brezenski’s daughter, Mika, is the co-host of the show with Scarborough. She is obviously uncomfortable with Scarborough as he struggles to regain the upper hand in the interview, sarcastically referring to Brezenski as “chief”, an affectionate name given Brezenski by his grandchildren. 

On a more somber note, Robert Fisk has reminded us that As’kelon, now within the borders of Israel, courtesy of the 1948 war, figures prominently in a much earlier war involving David, who laments the death of Jonathan and Saul. In David’s lament he demands that the news of the death of Saul and Jonathan not be published in As’kelon, nor told in Gath, less their women rejoice.  

Read it aloud. It is both poetic and biblical. It is also a grim biblical reminder that weapons of war will perish and the mighty will fall, no matter how much effort is spent trying to hide the truth of war’s futility from the people of As’kelon or the citizens of Main Street, USA. 

These words are from Second Samuel, Chapter One:

Now it came to pass after the death of Saul, when David was returned from the slaughter of the Amal’ekites, and David had abode two days in Ziklag;  

It came even to pass on the third day, that, behold, a man came out of the camp from Saul with his clothes rent, and earth upon his head: and so it was, when he came to David, that he fell to the earth, and did obeisance. And David said unto him, From whence comest thou? And he said unto him, Out of the camp of Israel am I escaped.

And David said unto him, How went the matter? I pray thee, tell me. And he answered, That the people are fled from the battle, and many of the people also are fallen and dead; and Saul and Jonathan his son are dead also. . . .

. . . . Then David took hold on his clothes, and rent them; and likewise all the men that were with him: and they mourned, and wept, and fasted until even, for Saul, and for Jonathan his son, and for the people of the LORD, and for the house of Israel; because they were fallen by the sword.  . . . 

And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over Jonathan his son:  . . . 

The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Publish it not in the streets of As’kelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph. . . .

How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished.”

Posted in Politics in Religion | 1 Comment