Miko Peled on Freeing Palestine

I have written extensively on the outrages that Israelis perpetrate daily upon Palestinians—in the occupied West Bank, in Gaza and in Israel proper. Nothing I could write, however, could approach what Israeli-born Miko Peled (he now lives in California) has to say about this matter. That’s because having been born and grown up in Israel, having had a father who was a leading general in the Israeli army, having had a niece who was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber, Peled as a source of information is unimpeachable. He cannot be accused of anti-semitism; he cannot be accused of mushy liberalism; he cannot be accused of wanting to drive Israelis into the sea. He can only be accused of telling the truth.

            That is why I want you to watch this powerful video. To give you an idea of what’s inside, here are some of the things Peled has to say:

The Peace talks and all these so-called efforts are an attempt to bring the Palestinians to surrender. But, the Palestinians will not surrender. And Palestinians will not go away.

It is extremely important to realize:

Hamas is Not the problem.

Gaza is Not the problem. 

The Rockets are Not the problem.

Zionism & Israel are the problem.

Zionism is a racist, colonial, idea.

That’s why “Zionism has to go” is a true statement. 

Below is the link to the video. Please watch it, and send the link to your friends. Israel could not continue with its violence, with its outright murder of civilians, without the constant support and protection of the United States, of all the craven US Senators and Representatives who fall all over themselves voting to give Israel more and more weapons and more and more resolutions lauding them for their war crimes. We as US voters send these fools and cowards to represent us, and so are all responsible. Listen to Miko Peled. Zionism has to go.

P.S.: If the link doesn’t work, you can key in the URL for www.veteransnewsnow.com and find the link to the Peled video.

http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2014/08/30/509617-miko-peled-zionism-must-go-free-palestine-end-the-occupation/

Lawrence DiStasi

The En-Closure of Gaza

We hear constantly in the mainstream media, and in the hallowed halls of the U.S. government, the great rationale for bombing the hell out of Gaza: Israel has a right to defend itself. ‘If the Gazans would only stop firing those rockets, we Israelis would be glad to cease our fire.’ But Hamas, Gaza’s duly and democratically-elected government, keeps insisting that a ceasefire isn’t enough, because it will only put Gazans back in prison. What’s needed, says Hamas, is for Israel to lift the siege of Gaza and open the borders so that Gazans are no longer prisoners. That would constitute a permanent ceasefire worth partaking in.

            Rarely, however, do we hear anything about this notion other than ridicule of it. ‘Those terrorist Hamas leaders—they want Israel to reward them for their aggression. Have they no morals?’ But perhaps this notion deserves a bit of consideration. What does Hamas actually mean here? Why do they insist that the real aggressor is Israel, even aside from bombs and rockets, and that it is Hamas that has the right to defend itself?

            A recent article by Prof. Daniel C. Maguire, “Hiding War Crimes Behind a Question,” (July 24, 2014, Consortiumnews.com), provides some light here. That is, according to Maguire, “siege (or blockade) is itself an act of offensive warfare,” indeed, one of the most devastating forms of warfare and one that is condemned by ethical and religious and civic leaders from Maimonides to Just War theorists to humanitarian law. Therefore, since the Gazans have been under siege since at least 2007 (in 2006, explaining its “economic warfare” on Gaza, Dov Weisglass, adviser to then-PM Ehud Olmert, said the goal of the siege was to put the people of Gaza “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”), and since that siege or blockage of both entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip has become even more devastating since the new Egyptian government closed the tunnels near Rafah that were the only lifeline for Gazans until then, the policies and military measures locking Gazans into their open-air prison have become even more suffocating. Their farmers cannot trade with other countries including their relatives in the West Bank and Israel, their fishermen cannot fish, their builders cannot build, even hospital supplies and food are rationed, their meager supplies of water and electricity have been cut off, they have no airport, and the few places where they can take refuge are themselves being bombed. In short, like the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, Gazans have decided that they would rather “die on our feet than on our knees.” And that the continuous warfare against them, the never-ending siege, gives them, not the Israelis, the right to defend themselves.

            Once one decides to look into this notion, the plight of the Gazans and the violations of the Israelis take on ever darker tones. Numerous international organizations have condemned the siege as illegal. In 2010, a UN fact-finding mission into Israel's attack on the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla concluded:

'The Mission considers that one of the principal motives behind the imposition of the blockade was a desire to punish the people of the Gaza Strip for having elected Hamas. The combination of this motive and the effect of the restrictions on the Gaza Strip leave no doubt that Israel's actions and policies amount to collective punishment as defined by international law..” (cited on http://imeu.org/article/reference-sheet-israel-gaza-international-law1 ).

In 2011, a UN panel of experts similarly concluded that Israel’s blockade of Gaza (resulting in its deadly attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May 2010) does violate international law, stating that it amounts to collective punishment  “in flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law.” This is because, according to a detailed position paper produced by the Israeli organization, GISHA (http://gisha.org/UserFiles/File/publications/GazaClosureDefinedEng.pdf,), the closure of Gaza is in fact collective punishment, authorized in September 2007 when “Israel’s Security Cabinet approved a decision that openly called for restricting the movement of people and goods into and out of Gaza.” The Gisha position paper explained, in fact, that the “restrictions on the movement of people and goods through Gaza’s borders” are neither ‘economic sanctions,’ as Israel argues, nor a siege or a blockade as they are commonly known. Rather, they “constitute a closure imposed for purposes of collective punishment - and are therefore illegal under international law.” Though this might appear to constitute a technical distinction, it is extremely important in this case because while both sieges and blockades are sometimes legal, the type of closure imposed on Gaza is not. It is, as noted, a closure (I prefer to call it an en-closure, like fences or walls that enclose farm animals) imposed for purposes of collective punishment, and therefore illegal.

            So why is the en-closure not a siege? Quite simply, because a siege is “the act of surrounding a particular area in order to induce surrender.” That is, the only reason the laws of war allow a siege is to bring about a surrender, after which the siege would be lifted. A siege is temporary, in other words; it happens only for a limited time, until the town or area opens itself to its besiegers. But in Gaza, there is no time limit. Gaza is closed indefinitely (except, of course, to the Israeli military). Israel controls everything about Gaza: its entrances and exits, its ability to trade or sell goods, its import of the most basic goods, the sea outside it, its air space, practically the air it breathes. Again, Israel’s en-closure of Gaza has no military objective. Rather, it is aimed at civilians,

with the goal of using them as a point of pressure on the Hamas regime - in blatant violation of the fundamental international law prohibition against collective punishment and deliberately harming civilians. (Gisha report)

In a similar way, and for similar reasons, the en-closure of Gaza cannot be considered a blockade. For Israel’s aim is not the blockade’s normal aim of depriving an enemy of needed military supplies, as can be seen from the obvious fact that what is kept out of Gaza is not just weapons but a broad range of civilian goods including hospital supplies, “most of which have absolutely no military use or potential for military use.” Neither can the closure be considered “sanctions,” which usually involve an agreement among nations to refuse to trade with the target nation. This doesn’t apply in Gaza’s case, because no other nation (with the possible exception of the U.S.) has joined these sanctions, and more, because numerous other nations have indicated that they want to trade with Gaza, but Israel is using military force to prevent anyone from trading with Gaza, or even, as in the case of the Flotilla—where nine Turkish nationals were killed—bringing it humanitarian supplies.

         The conclusion of the Gisha report, therefore, is simple and even more devastating to the en-closure than its simple illegality due to its purpose of collective punishment. This is because the report adds the fact that “the closure of Gaza is taking place in the context of an occupation.” That is,

Israel continues to control Gaza through substantial control of Gaza's land crossings, total control of Gaza's airspace and territorial waters, control of the Palestinian population registry (including the question, who is a "resident" of Gaza) and control of tax policy and transfer of tax revenues. That control rises to the level of "effective control", the test in international law for the existence of a state of occupation. Gisha's position is that Israel owes obligations to Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank commensurate with the level of control it exercises.

In short, it is not just that the imprisonment of the people of Gaza (a majority of them refugees from Israel’s original seizure of their homes/land in 1948) in a total enclosure is illegal collective punishment; it is also a violation of Israel’s obligations as an occupying power—obligations including “the right to life, the right to freedom of movement, the right to water, the right to health, the right to decent living conditions, protection from hunger and the special duties owed to protect children,” hundreds of whom her military has killed in the latest invasion and assault. These have been Israel’s obligations since 1967, when the occupation began, and they have been violated repeatedly for nearly fifty years. They have been violated even aside from the violations incurred during each of the last three invasions that have now killed nearly 5,000 people in Gaza and wounded thousands more, the vast majority of them civilians.

            So the next time you hear the rationalization about ‘self-defense’ from Israel or from United States officials up to and including the President, you might want to think about the right of the Gazans to defend themselves against their deadly en-closure. You might also want to think about whether, in the absence of United States support—vetoes in the UN Security Council; U.S.military aid amounting to $3 billion each year, plus a recent Congressional vote to send several hundred additional millions to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome defenses—the state of Israel could for so long get away with its blatant depradations against a helpless population, its gross violations of international and humanitarian law, its grim pursuit of its aims without regard for truth or justice or simple human decency.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Slaughter in Gaza--Again

It seems as if I’ve written about this before, and I have—twice: once in the 2008 Israeli invasion of Gaza (over 1400 Gazans killed), and again in 2012 when Israeli forces again invaded the “largest open-air prison in the world,” the Gaza Strip. It's the most densely populated urban region in the world: 1.5 million inhabitants with no air defenses or air-raid shelters or heavy weapons of any kind. I used the same language then, too, as I described in 2012 the latest massacre in the Gaza Strip by the full panoply of modern weapons that Israel, with immense help from the United States, has managed to amass over the years. The blog was called “You Cant Kill Them All,” (Nov. 12, 2012) but it made the point that it wasn’t for lack of the Israeli desire to do just that, as this comment from Gilad Sharon, Ariel Sharon’s son, made quite clear:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire. (emphasis added)

Now we have the Israelis doing just this, flattening not only entire neighborhoods, but hospitals and UN schools and every other conceivable place of refuge for Gaza’s residents, refugees all from previous Israeli war crimes, who are expected—because of Israel’s ‘humanitarian’ warnings to get out of their homes in advance of shelling—to take refuge in just these places. And so we have the usual justifications for Israel in the mass media outlets who parrot everything said by the Israeli prime minister, and United States officials up to and including Barack Obama who parrot the underlying justification: Gaza started it with rocket fire and the digging of tunnels, and Israel has a right to defend itself (and, which the President does not express of course, experiment with new weapons and forms of ammunition which will benefit our own eager military).

            But of course Gaza didn’t start it, nor did Hamas. The three settler teens who decided to hitchhike in Palestinian territory (current settlements, including Kiryat Arba, are built smack in the middle of the Palestinian city of Hebron so that many homes and businesses in Hebron’s Old City have been shuttered to accommodate the illegal settlers; perhaps one reason the teens felt they had the “right” to hitchhike in hostile territory), were kidnapped to be held for ransom, and then killed by the panicked pair operating on their own, who apparently realized that the cell phone call by one of the kids would soon bring IDF forces down upon them. This led to Israel’s blaming of Hamas and bombing of Gaza for revenge (not to mention a Palestinian teen burned to death in Israel) and Hamas rockets being fired in response, and the eventual Israeli ground invasion.

            In a very real sense, though, it doesn’t matter who started it, or what the proximate justifications trumpeted throughout the world by Israel’s propaganda machine consist of. The truth is that the Israelis do not want a separate Palestinian state, they do not want a single Israel with Palestinians included, they want a Jewish state, and the Palestinians—the original, indigenous inhabitants of all this territory—are in the way. They have always been in the way, they continue to be in the way, and they will always be seen as subhuman obstacles—in the way. Given this indelible “demographic” fact, the real solution the Israelis seek is to make the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and even the neighborhoods and cities in Israel where Palestinian ‘citizens’ of Israel live—to make them all unbearable. Unlivable. That’s what the slow starvation and blockade and periodic invasions and destruction of Gaza are about. That’s what the Jewish settlements right in the middle of Palestinian cities in the West Bank are about. That’s what Israel’s insistence on getting Palestinian leaders to agree to Israel’s right to exist—not just to exist as a state, but as a Jewish state—is about. Because once you grant that Israel has a right to provide preferential status to any Jew throughout the world (which it has done from the beginning), over any Palestinian no matter how ancient his or her pedigree or claims in the land of Palestine—once you grant that right, and the corollary right to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel, then Palestinians are no more. And that is exactly what Israel wants.

            Here is how Ali Abunimah, of Electronic Intifada, put it in a recent piece (http://mondoweiss.net/2014/03/abunimahs-justice-palestine.html):

Simply put, Palestinian parents are trampling all over Israel’s right to maintain a Jewish majority by having children, and their babies, by virtue of not being born to Jewish parents, are violating Israel’s right merely by living and breathing. Israelis themselves see the births of non-Jewish babies—whether to Palestinian citizens of the state or in the occupied territories –—as an assault on their rights and on the very existence of Israel. The routine use by politicians and media of the term “demographic threat” to describe these babies attests to this phenomenon.  “The most pungent expression of this fear,” David Hirst reminds us, came from Golda Meir, who was Israeli prime minister in the 1970s. “The Palestinians’ birth-rate was so much higher than the Jews’ that her sleep was often disturbed, she would say, at the thought of how many Arab babies had been born in the night.”

This makes it vividly clear why one of Israel’s legislators recently expressed the hope that the invasion now going on would finish off the Gaza Strip for good. Or why another gave vent to his desire that the “snakes” to which Gazan mothers were giving birth would be exterminated. Or why killing Palestinian children by bombing them or imprisoning them or beating them is looked upon by Israelis with such indifference. It also explains why the so-called ‘peace process’ recently abandoned by Secretary of State John Kerry was in fact a failure and why it never had a chance of succeeding from the outset. Israel does not want a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. Israel does not want a two-state solution or a one-state solution or any state solution. What Israel wants—and it is a horror to say it—is a final solution. That solution, however it is achieved (making life in the occupied territories such a living hell—without water, without electricity, without jobs, without a safe roof anywhere—that Palestinians will flee), is the reduction in the Palestinian population, the cessation of Palestinian births, the expulsion of whatever Palestinian people remain from the land they call Eretz Israel—the land they insist their God gave them for their Jewish state.

            This is the process that is going on right now. And as long as the world allows this organized slaughter of a defenseless population to go on, there will be no justice, no peace, no coexistence. There will be only what we have had since at least 1967: a slow holocaust, a daily genocide carried out in the bright light of day as the politicians and pundits and moneyed interests prate about fairness and justice and rights to defense and the search for a ‘reasonable partner for peace.’ And the world’s population nods in agreement or turns to another channel with less disturbing images for the children.

Lawrence DiStasi

Why Would Anyone Hurt Innocents?

I have refrained from commenting on the Boston Marathon bombings or bombers until now. Too much gets said and speculated about too quickly in such cases. But one question, the same one that emerged after 9/11 (Why Do They Hate Us?), has continued in the days after the bombings, and today, something else was added in response. Richard Falk, the Special Rapporteur in the UN Human Rights Council, with special responsibility for the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, wrote a piece in Foreign Policy Journal that has elicited howls of protest—lambasting Falk for allegedly justifying the bombings, blaming Israel, and calling for him to be sacked (and drawn and quartered) for his words. I have tried several times to access Foreign Policy Journal today, but the site seems to be blocked (I wonder who might have done such a thing?). From reports, though, it appears that Falk said several things: first, that “the American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” And second, that “The United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink U.S. relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East.” He also seems to have cited a PBS call-in program shortly after the bombing in which some callers said the United States was responsible for “officially-sanctioned torture,” while others implied that the attack was “retribution for torture inflicted by American security forces.” Falk quoted another caller as linking the Boston bombing to our drone attacks that have killed “women and children attending weddings and funerals in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Falk himself then allegedly noted that American politicians lack “the courage to connect some of these dots,” and urged that all of us should be meditating on W.H. Auden’s line from his poem, “September 1, 1939”: “Those to whom evil is done/ Do evil in return.” He then made reference to “our geopolitical fantasy of global domination,” and predicted that more such attacks would follow from our policies:

            “The war drums are beating at this moment in relation to both North Korea and Iran, and as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”

            Predictably, Susan Rice, America’s rather belligerent UN Ambassador, tweeted her outrage about Falk’s “highly offensive Boston comments,” saying it was time for him to go. Israeli publications and groups lit up the internet demanding Falk’s termination—not surprising since he’s been one of the few officials willing and able to call attention to Israel’s illegal policies and actions against the Palestinians.

            The question is: What exactly has Falk said that is objectionable or untrue? Is it not the case that the United States has attacked both Iraq and Afghanistan (and, by proxy, Libya) in the past decade, and assassinated by drone countless Pakistanis, Yemenis, and others in Muslim countries without even a declaration of hostilities?  Does it not continue to beat the drums of war against Iran, North Korea, and now Syria? And when it comes to Israel, was Falk not being exceedingly muted, even kind in his criticism by saying only that “Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment?” For the truth is that U.S. presidents and the U.S. Congress might almost be mistaken for members of the Israeli Knesset themselves, usually out-shouting Israeli politicians in their defense of Israel’s violations of international law and common decency—not to mention sending billions of dollars in aid and weapons each year to Israel, one of the world’s advanced economies, and blocking with its veto in the UN sanctions against Israeli violations voted by almost all other nations.

            But even beyond that, Americans and American officials have expressed outrage over the Boston bombers’ vicious use of “pressure cooker bombs” that sent nails and ball bearings blasting into the bodies of innocent bystanders. And it is true: these were vicious little bombs designed to wound and maim the flesh of innocents. But has anyone thought to wonder where the bombers might have got the idea for what, in war, are called “cluster bombs?” Weren’t there reports testifying to Israel’s use of vicious little “dime” (dense, inert, metal explosives) bombs in its 2008 invasion of Gaza against a defenseless population?   And what about the United States and its use of cluster bombs? Its refusal, even today, to outlaw the use of land mines?

            As it happens, I’m even now reading Nick Turse’s detailed account of war crimes during the Vietnam War, Kill Anything That Moves (Holt: 2013). And what he says about America’s murderous policy against civilians in Vietnam (leaving out the horror of napalm and white phosphorus and the constant artillery and naval bombardments) is horrifying. It was, in fact, the American military that concluded, in the early 1950s, that it had to find weapons that, without alarming too much the conscience of the world (if the U.S. had used nuclear weapons, that is), would prove effective in guerilla war by maiming, not killing, the population in which guerilla warriors “swam.” So our war geniuses came up with cluster bombs—devilish little anti-personnel weapons that spread steel pellets far and wide, and that entered flesh in various parts of the body, thus causing doctors devilish amounts of time and trouble trying to locate and remove them. According to Turse, the the BLU-3 bomblet (the military gave these fiendish toys lovely little names like the “pineapple” or the “guava”) had 250 steel pellets spring-loaded into a small container. Dropped 1000 at a time from B-52 bombers flying high above the countryside, the pineapples burst open to blast 250,000 lethal ball bearings into heavily populated areas so that they could tear through the flesh of women and children and old people (the young men routinely fled from their villages because any man found in a village was automatically assumed to be a Vietcong.) Another type, the CBU-24, was packed with 640 to 670 separate BLU-26 bomblets, each one of those loaded with 300 steel pellets. This meant that just one "guava" could send 200,000 steel fragments shooting in all directions; while a single B-52 bomber could saturate an area of about a square mile with more than 7.5 million deadly pellets. From 1964 through 1971, according to Turse, the U.S. military ordered over 300 million pineapples and guavas—“nearly seven for each man, woman and child in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.”

            Did we hear the howls of all the millions of Vietnamese children whose flesh was torn apart by these diabolical devices? Do we hear them today?

            Ah no. The howls we hear are howls of outrage attacking a UN official named Falk who dared to draw attention to the savagery that we have unleashed, and that our proxy Israel has unleashed throughout the Middle East.

            And the howls of those who keep asking: “Why? Why do they hate us?”

Lawrence DiStasi