Operation Protective
Edge begins July 8, 2014
“Locals describe intense bombardment” BBC
radio report, July 29, 2014
On August 7th near the end of the first three- day cease
fire and the exit of Israeli ground forces, Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman,
producer and guiding spirit, cited some of the grim statistics. In addition to about
1900 deaths, and many more injured, Democracy Now reported that some 500,000 Palestinians have been displaced with
187,000 still living in U.N. emergency shelters. An estimated 10,000 homes
completely destroyed, and 30,000 homes partially destroyed. At least at
least 11 UNWRA officials in Gaza were
killed and electricity, sewage and water facilities were destroyed.
How much of this
carnage did Israel intend? The question seems almost silly. Professor
Noam Chomsky, on Democracy Now’s August 8, 2014 program addressed the question
with his usual incisive clarity.
It’s a hideous atrocity, sadistic, vicious, murderous, totally without any credible pretext. It’s another one of the periodic Israeli exercises in what they delicately call "mowing the lawn." That means shooting fish in the pond, to make sure that the animals stay quiet in the cage that you’ve constructed for them. (See below for another definition of “mowing the lawn.”)
About a week earlier on Democracy Now‘s July 30, 2014
broadcast ("They
Thought They’d Be Safe. They Were Wrong": 20 Gazans Killed in Israeli
Bombing of U.N. Shelter) , a correspondent described Israeli bombing
protocols. Viewers were informed that
the assaults on Gaza
are always heavier at night. They continue throughout the day, but the heaviest assaults come at dark. And we wake up to see many people dead and to hear their stories and to see people burying their dead. And these people at this U.N. school in Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza were killed while they slept. Many of these people had come from border areas. They had heeded Israel’s warnings. Some came after leaflets were dropped on their areas, others came after their homes were destroyed by Israel, and they thought that they would be safe in a United Nations-run school. They were wrong.
None of this is new or even strange to many readers familiar
with the issue. But perhaps because I was inured to (or cynical about) most
major media coverage, I was more than surprised to see in the New York Times some of the details of
Israel’s battering of Gazan industry.
(
“Conflict Leaves Industry in Ashes and Gaza Reeling From Economic Toll”)
The Times gave the story a generous
half page on A10 for August 7th and included a photo of a bombed out
Gazan factory. The story went into some of the details of the destruction of
175 of Gaza’s most successful industrial plants.
The Times quoted
Ali Hayek, head of Gaza’s federation of industries “whose group represents
3,900 businesses employing 35,000 people.” Mr. Hayek believes that the
“occupation intentionally destroyed these vital factories that constitute the
backbone of society.” (The Times article
included a statement from the IDF “categorically” denying that factories were targeted;
only “facilities and locations that have been involved in
manufacturing or launching rockets” were attacked.)
The Times article ended with a quote from
Ahmad Tawasi, 30, a technician at Al Awda Co.’s 180,000 –square foot factory which had
employed 600 workers. Mr. Tawasi said
that if his home was destroyed he could “earn enough money to rebuild. But without the factory, he said, ‘I don’t
know what will happen.’”
The WWII Comparison
One of my colleagues likes to compare Israel’s barbarism to
the Nazis. I tend to avoid such
equations since they often provide interlocutors
with a knee-jerk, simple, means of running away from the issue. Also, comparing Nazis to Israelis tends to
blur the unique elements that distinguish each historical era, For example,
Hitler had the military and political wherewithal to direct the death of about
6 million Jews, Gypsies, etc., and to oversee another two score or so millions
of deaths of others, including about 5.6 million Germans.
Although the combined casualty lists in Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009,
about 1400 killed); the eight-day aerial
assault o f November 2012, 100 Palestinian deaths); and the July - August 2014 assault on Gaza do not bear comparison with Hitler’s
numbers, I take my friend’s larger point. The critical factor is the
intentionality. What the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians in Gaza amounts
to the most brutal and merciless savagery that current political circumstances
allow. The death and devastation especially in the current assault has gone
well beyond that which might have been predicted outside of elite Tel Aviv
councils before July 8, 2014.
There’s another and deeper personal connection. As a member
of a family that narrowly managed to escape Hitler's exterminations, I grew up
wondering how ordinary Germans were able to rationalize and live with the
horror that their government was perpetrating. Part of the answer must lie in the power of denial
facilitated by media and government propaganda. An ambiguous, even uncertain example
that somehow stuck out for me was the brief comment, as reported in the New York Jewish Week (April 8, 2014), of a
woman pained at news reports of civilian Palestinian casualties. At a “communal dialogue” at a Jewish Community
Center in Manhattan, entitled “Israel
Talks,” a woman affiliated with a Jewish
Reform Temple who described herself as
“deeply attached “ to Israel, asked, in regard to the ongoing Gaza operation, “Why
do they strike at hospitals? Their mistakes are so painful.”
I wondered if she, unlike many of her co-religionists,
understood on some level that there was Israeli intentionality behind attacks
on hospitals, UN shelters, schools, etc. Of course, in the end, at least in
public, she felt that she had to come down on the side of “mistakes.” Was it
because he was a member of the Reformed congregation rather than Orthodox that
she was unable to filter out news of some of the effects of the Israeli assault?
I felt certain that while she could not accept Noam Chomsky’s characterizations , yet perhaps
it was possible that there was more of the Palestinian truth that she might be able to absorb.
***
Interview with a victim –what means terror?
At the end of July, Democracy Now interviewed Amer Shurrab
a Palestinian from Khan Younis in
the Gaza Strip, currently doing his graduate studies in the U.S.. Shurrab is one of the survivors of a family
ravaged by Israeli firepower and oppression. Five years ago, in Israel’s
Operation Cast Lead operation, Amer’s two brothers were killed. They were shot
while driving home in the Fukhari
region, in the middle period of a “cease fire,” a few hundred yards after
getting clearance from an Israeli tank crew. In the end, Amer’s brothers died from their wounds
when the Israelis refused to allow an ambulance to the scene for 20 hours.
Amer’s personal horror
was compounded in July 2014 when he learned that four of his cousins had been
killed in Gaza. On the question of intentionality, Shurrab was clear: "Israel is deliberately targeting
civilians from day one of this attack. …They have been bombing houses, wiping
entire families to try to scare people into submission."
Shurrab’s last phrase
raises the questions of whether it is Israel’s intention to “scare the people
into submission? I doubt it. Palestinians have had more than six decades since
1948 to be familiar with the terror of Israel’s “purity of arms,” lately
including drones, F-16s, shrapnel and phosphorous bombs, explicit graffiti and
human waste left by departing Israeli soldiers.
Far from requiring
Palestinian submission, it seems that, on the contrary, Israel deliberately
provokes rocket attacks and as much Palestinian resistance as they can
manufacture in order to create pretexts for their assaults, for mowing the lawn. And
by “mowing the lawn,” we mean periodic pogroms on a scale of Cast Lead and
Protective Edge. These large operations are intended emphasize the message that
Palestinians are not wanted in the land
and that they will be made to suffer more and more until that time when one way
or another they can be removed entirely.
A review of the timeline of the 2014 assault by
Mouin Rabbani, a senior fellow at the Institute
for Palestine Studies in Beirut, writing for the London Review of Books, (“Israel Mows the Lawn”) helps set
the context. Rabbani writes that, stymied by Palestinian diplomacy, Israeli Prime
Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seemed “a
drowning man” when he was thrown a “lifebelt” with the disappearance of three settler youth on June
12, 2014. Rabbani sees a connection between Netanyahu’s escalation and the June 2,
2014 inauguration of a new Palestinian Authority government following the April
reconciliation agreement between Hamas
and Fatah. Despite the lack of evidence that Hamas had anything to do with the
teens’ disappearance, Netanyahu
held Hamas directly responsible and launched a hostage
rescue operation’ throughout the West Bank. It was really an organized military
rampage. It included the killing of at least six Palestinians, none of whom was
accused of involvement in the disappearances; mass arrests, including the
arrest of Hamas parliamentarians and the re-arrest of detainees released in
2011; the demolition of a number of houses and the looting of others; and a
variety of other depredations … On the
night of 6 July, an Israeli air raid resulted in the death of seven Hamas
militants. Hamas responded with sustained missile attacks deep into Israel,
escalating further as Israel launched its full-scale onslaught.
Rabbani’s timeline adds piquant substance to the
conspiracy theory that the teens were murdered, not by Palestinians, but in a
false-flag operation by the Mossad in
order to create a suitable pretext for
the coming operation against Gaza. (See Cintayati,
“10 Reasons .. Hitchhikers June July 2014 was an Israeli False Flag”)
The U.S. Role
BBC radio interviewed a Palestinian with U.S. citizenship who voted for
Barack Obama twice. The unnamed Palestinian said: “It was a mistake [to support Obama.] He helping Israel.”
4 August 2014
One of the points, touched on from time to time on Democracy
Now’s coverage is that the U.S. has done
little or nothing to stop the slaughter.
On the contrary, President Obama seemed effectively to be smoothing the
way and condoning the butchery, even past the point of previous Israeli
operations. On Democracy Now’s August 6
broadcast, professor and author Norman Finkelstein, a well known critic of
Israeli policy, emphasized that the U.S. was uncritically signaling its full
support for the Israeli assault when it repeatedly insisted that “Israel has
the right to defend itself.”
The July 31, 2014 edition of Democracy Now provided a lesson
in how the U.S. can get caught in the middle as it attempts to balance its role
as neutral observer with its unconditional support for Israel. On July 31 the
U.S. condemned Israeli shelling of a UN school (see above) killing at least 20,
but “refused to blame or condemn Israel for carrying it out.” That same day the
Pentagon “confirmed its approval of an Israeli request to restock Israel’s
supplies of ammunition.” Weapons to be
restocked included “mortar rounds for tanks and ammunition for grenade
launchers.” The very next day, Democracy
Now reported that the U.S. got much more specific in its condemnation. The
shelling of the school, Washington said, was “totally unacceptable and totally indefensible.”
At first I wondered why the U.S. would make public its
restocking of Israeli weaponry since officials were well aware of international
condemnation of both the U.S. and Israel. Later I theorized that the White House decided it needed to reassure both the public
and Congress that despite it’s denunciation of the Israeli shelling it continues
its solid support of Israel.
It’s a world tragedy that President Obama has turned out to
be as hostile to the Palestinians – not to mention other Arabs and Muslims, and
others -- as were his predecessors. In his five years in office, I don’t recall
him once acting in a way that would help Palestinians in a matter of any
significance.
***
The Limits of Left Zionism
One of the highlights of Democracy Now’s coverage was
its interview with the charismatic Yonatan
Shapira, a former Israeli captain and Air Force pilot. Shapira was
one of the organizers in 2003 of 27 Air Force pilots who refused to participate
in Israeli military operations against Palestinians.
One point he made in the interview could serve as a reply to
those who justify what the Israelis are doing as self-defense. He uses the
analogy of the rapist and victim. Apologizing for his strong language, he
imagines the Israeli onslaught as “gang rape.”
I would imagine it as gang rape. And forgive me for using
this hard language, but when you have a group of people raping someone, and
this person that is being raped [is] starting to scratch, the first thing you
want to do in order to stop the scratches is to stop the rape. And what Israel
… is trying to do is to continue the rape and deal with the scratches.
And I say, stop the rape, stop the occupation, stop the
apartheid, stop this inhumane ghettoization of Palestinians, and then—then—we
can start talking, and we can reach peace agreements and all these beautiful words
that now don’t mean anything for us.
Yonatan is probably as good as it gets as a representative of
the Israeli left. Yet I couldn’t help wondering what he meant by “stopping the
apartheid.” If he’s a Zionist, as I
suspect, he would intend Jewish primacy over non-Jews. I guess also that like
many left Zionists, he favors the Two -State Solution not as something real for
he must understand that that no present or foreseeable Israeli government will
permit an independent Palestinian state in the Middle East. This has been the
case ever since November 1947, when the UN General Assembly passed the
Partition Resolution opening the way for the Jewish state.
The so-called Two-State Solution is merely a talking point,
a way of putting off serious consideration of a modus vivendi for both
peoples. I’s also a deliberately
fanciful means of thinking about the “the demographic problem” – the higher Palestinian birth
rate -- as well as the issue of according human and national rights to Palestinians. As long as the Two-State Solution remains “on
the table” Yonatan can picture in his
mind a future resolution that will deal with the practical problem that
Palestinians face as all the land for their “state” is gobbled up dunam by
dunam (about a quarter acre), not to mention the daily oppression and
humiliation they undergo.
It’s a separate question to ask whether leftists like Yonatan
worry that despite their opposition to certain Israeli policies, their moral and
political support for Zionism – a Jewish state in the former Palestine – indirectly
aids those policies including ongoing, never-ending pogroms – mowing the
lawn? Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian takes up the question of “The
Liberal Zionists,” in an article in the New
York Review of Books . He points to the phenomenon on the
Israeli left of “shooting and crying” (yorim u’vochim) defined as condemning “the
horror of killing Arabs … while the killing … continues.” The critique is that by
doing both –crying and shooting -- the left has its cake – expressing
condemnation for Israeli policy – and they eat it too – they enjoy the benefits
of continued Jewish supremacy.
***
The Wish and the Dream
I later wondered if I could be wrong about whether or not
Yonatan is a Zionist. Is it possible that he’s anti-Zionist? Wishful thinking soon inspired some
daydreaming. I imagined Yonatan seeking
me out to say that like me, he has dropped
his Zionism; that he has come to believe
that Palestinians and Israelis
ought to be equal before the law. He has decided that Jewish preeminence
in Israel/Palestine was no longer acceptable.
In my daydream Yonatan was super serious and as charismatic
as ever, intent on the struggle to find a way for the twelve million souls
between the Jordan and the Mediterranean to share the land in a spirit of equal
justice, respect for human rights and democracy for all. In that case, he explained,
it could make the need for U.S. resupply, or drones, or F-16s, or hostile
graffiti, supererogatory.
The End
