Blaming the Victim for Gaza Slaughter Defies Morality
Zionist Extremism Has No Morals | 05.03.2008 23:55 | Anti-racism | World
One of Zionist Extremism's favourite tactics is Blame the Victim. The fact that this is then reflected - without exception - in our highly-concentrated media is a testament to the influence of Zionism throughout the corporate press. That Zionism has no trouble with this Projection only highlights the racism inherent to this violent Cult.
To blame the victims for this killing spree defies both morality and sense
Seumas Milne, The Guardian
Washington's covert attempts to overturn an election result lie behind the crisis in Gaza, as leaked papers show
March 05 2008
The attempt by western politicians and media to present this week's carnage in the Gaza Strip as a legitimate act of Israeli self-defence - or at best the latest phase of a wearisome conflict between two somehow equivalent sides - has reached Alice-in-Wonderland proportions. Since Israel's deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, issued his chilling warning last week that Palestinians faced a "holocaust" if they continued to fire home-made rockets into Israel, the balance sheet of suffering has become ever clearer. More than 120 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces in the past week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. During the same period, three Israelis were killed, two of whom were soldiers taking part in the attacks.
So what was the response of the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, to this horrific killing spree? It was to blame the "numerous civilian casualties" on the week's "significant rise" in Palestinian rocket attacks "and the Israeli response", condemn the firing of rockets as "terrorist acts" and defend Israel's right to self-defence "in accordance with international law". But of course it has been nothing of the kind - any more than has been Israel's 40-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, its continued expansion of settlements or its refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees.
Nor is the past week's one-sided burden of casualties and misery anything new, but the gap is certainly getting wider. After the election of Hamas two years ago, Israel - backed by the US and the European Union - imposed a punitive economic blockade, which has hardened over the past months into a full-scale siege of the Gaza Strip, including fuel, electricity and essential supplies. Since January's mass breakout across the Egyptian border signalled that collective punishment wouldn't work, Israel has opted for military escalation. What that means on the ground can be seen from the fact that at the height of the intifada, from 2000 to 2005, four Palestinians were killed for every Israeli; in 2006 it was 30; last year the ratio was 40 to one. In the three months since the US-sponsored Middle East peace conference at Annapolis, 323 Palestinians have been killed compared with seven Israelis, two of whom were civilians.
But the US and Europe's response is to blame the principal victims for a crisis it has underwritten at every stage. In interviews with Palestinian leaders over the past few days, BBC presenters have insisted that Palestinian rockets have been the "starting point" of the violence, as if the occupation itself did not exist. In the West Bank, from which no rockets are currently fired and where the US-backed administration of Mahmoud Abbas maintains a ceasefire, there have been 480 Israeli military attacks over the past three months and 26 Palestinians killed. By contrast, the rockets from Gaza which are supposed to be the justification for the latest Israeli onslaught have killed a total of 14 people over seven years.
Like any other people, the Palestinians have the right to resist occupation - or to self-defence - whether they choose to exercise it or not. In spite of Israel's disengagement in 2005, Gaza remains occupied territory, both legally and in reality. It is the world's largest open-air prison, with land, sea and air access controlled by Israel, which carries out military operations at will. Palestinians may differ about the tactics of resistance, but the dominant view (if not that of Abbas) has long been that without some armed pressure, their negotiating hand will inevitably be weaker. And while it might be objected that the rockets are indiscriminate, that is not an easy argument for Israel to make, given its appalling record of civilian casualties in both the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.
The truth is that Hamas's control of Gaza is the direct result of the US refusal to accept the Palestinians' democratic choice in 2006 and its covert attempt to overthrow the elected administration by force through its Fatah placeman Muhammad Dahlan. As confirmed by secret documents leaked to the US magazine Vanity Fair - and also passed to the Guardian - George Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Elliott Abrams, the US deputy national security adviser (of Iran-Contra fame), funnelled cash, weapons and instructions to Dahlan, partly through Arab intermediaries such as Jordan and Egypt, in an effort to provoke a Palestinian civil war. As evidence of the military buildup emerged, Hamas moved to forestall the US plan with its own takeover of Gaza last June. David Wurmser, who resigned as Dick Cheney's chief Middle East adviser the following month, argues: "What happened wasn't so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen."
Yesterday, Rice attempted to defend the failed US attempt to reverse the results of the Palestinian elections by pointing to Iran's support for Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel's attacks on Gaza are expected to resume once she has left the region, even if no one believes they will stop the rockets. Some in the Israeli government hope that they can nevertheless weaken Hamas as a prelude to pushing Gaza into Egypt's unwilling arms; others hope to bring Abbas and his entourage back to Gaza after they have crushed Hamas, perhaps with a transitional international force to save the Palestinian president's face.
Neither looks a serious option, not least because Hamas cannot be crushed by force, even with the bloodbath that some envisage. The third, commonsense option, backed by 64% of Israelis, is to take up Hamas's offer - repeated by its leader Khalid Mish'al at the weekend - and negotiate a truce. It's a move that now attracts not only left-leaning Israeli politicians such as Yossi Beilin, but also a growing number of rightwing establishment figures, including Ariel Sharon's former security adviser Giora Eiland, the former Mossad boss Efraim Halevy, and the ex-defence minister Shaul Mofaz.
The US, however, is resolutely opposed to negotiating with what it has long branded a terrorist organisation - or allowing anyone else to do so, including other Palestinians. As the leaked American papers confirm, Rice effectively instructed Abbas to "collapse" the joint Hamas-Fatah national unity government agreed in Mecca early last year, a decision carried out after Hamas's pre-emptive takeover. But for the Palestinians, national unity is an absolute necessity if they are to have any chance of escaping a world of walled cantons, checkpoints, ethnically segregated roads, dispossession and humiliation.
What else can Israel do to stop the rockets, its supporters ask. The answer could not be more obvious: end the illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and negotiate a just settlement for the Palestinian refugees, ethnically cleansed 60 years ago - who, with their families, make up the majority of Gaza's 1.5 million people. All the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, accept that as the basis for a permanent settlement or indefinite end of armed conflict. In the meantime, agree a truce, exchange prisoners and lift the blockade. Israelis increasingly seem to get it - but the grim reality appears to be that a lot more blood is going to have to flow before it's accepted in Washington.
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s.milne@guardian.co.uk
Zionist Extremism Has No Morals
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Nowhere To Run
06.03.2008 00:20
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You've come to Passaic, New Jersey for a meeting in a community center. You sit down around the table with a dozen other people. Suddenly you hear an air raid siren. Terror grips everyone's face. They jump up and dart out of the room. They yell to you, "Run! We have 15 seconds!" You dash after them, towards a safe room at the end of the corridor. Crowded inside, the people hold their breath, waiting for the rocket to land. Total silence. Then an explosion.
All the people frantically dial their cell phones, trying to locate their family members. It isn't safe to go out yet, they tell you, because often these attacks come in pairs. After several nerve-racking minutes, people file out and return to their jobs. Your meeting proceeds quickly, tensely. Twenty minutes later, the air raid siren goes off again, and the whole scene is repeated.
Could you live like this?
Would you wonder: "Why should I have to?"
This scene is the daily reality for the 22,000 Jews who live in Sderot, a town in Israel's western Negev desert. One mile away is the Gaza Strip, controlled for the last year by the democratically elected terrorist organization Hamas.
TRYING TO IGNORE
Toronto resident Rachelle Bronfman came to Israel last October for a vacation. Leaving behind her husband and three children, she came for a ten-day "Women's Mission." She had been to Israel many times before, but this time she just wanted to have a good time, without getting involved in any of Israel's sticky issues.
Then her cell phone rang. The caller identified himself as Alon Davidi and asked if Rachelle could come and look at his project. She didn't want to get involved. "Just fax me," she tried to brush him off. Alon insisted that his project was too big to describe by fax. He persuaded Rachelle to meet him in Jerusalem.
"I knew there would be rocket attacks into Israel's borders, but I didn't want to deal with it."
Alon explained that he is the head of the Sderot Defense Council, a NGO he started to help his fellow residents in the embattled town deal with the traumas of their children and themselves. He opened up his laptop and starting showing Rachelle pictures of what's happening in Sderot: wrecked living rooms with rocket-pierced holes in the ceilings, elderly people crouching for cover, children with the panicked faces Rachelle had seen only in movie theaters during a horror film.
"I knew in the back of my mind," recalls Rachelle, "that when Israel pulled out of Gush Katif there would be rocket attacks into Israel's borders, but I didn't want to deal with it and I tried to ignore it. As I talked to this person who lives in Sderot about the people and damages, it was hard to ignore it. He asked if I would come to Sderot. I said, 'Okay, I'll come. I owe it to these people at least to go.'"
Rachelle asked other women in her group to join her. Seven women agreed to forego shopping that day and instead go to Sderot. Alon sent a minivan for them. A mere hour and a half after leaving Jerusalem, they had crossed the width of the country and were on the battlefront.
Alon took them around to see his projects, all geared to give a psychological respite from the 24/7 tension of living under intermittent barrages of rocket fire. "People are terrified to come out of their apartments," Rachelle explains, "so Alon organizes local programs for the children. He also takes them to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for a day -- a day without having to worry for their lives. I decided then and there that I had to do something."
Rachelle returned to Toronto and organized, with help from the local UJA, a giant rally in support of Sderot. The rally, attended by 2500 people, featured a live hook up to Sderot, so people in Toronto could hear Sderot residents describing their trauma-filled lives. Keynote speaker Alan Dershowitz asserted that Sderot is one of the world's worst human rights disasters, as innocent people living within the internationally recognized borders of their own country are simply sitting ducks for enemy attacks.
Last Thursday Rachelle returned to Sderot to ascertain that the money she had raised was being properly used to alleviate the stress of the local residents. She arrived at 10 AM and went directly to a meeting at the community center. Suddenly the air raid siren went off. Fifteen seconds to get to safe shelter! Rachelle dashed after the others into the safe room.
"You have less than 15 seconds to get to safety. If you're walking in the street or taking a shower -- there's no place to go!"
"The worst part," recalls Rachelle, "was to see grown men with terror in their eyes. These are men who have served in the Israeli army. But they were terrified."
Every time Rachelle sat down for a meeting, the air raid siren shrieked again -- six times in less than four hours. "It was scary," she testifies. "You have less than 15 seconds to get to safety. If you're walking in the street, or driving in a car, or taking a shower -- there's no place to go! Then you hear the boom of the rocket exploding. And everyone dials their cell phones, desperately calling their children. Where are you? Are you safe? Looking at this scene, I couldn't believe it was real."
Finally someone told Rachelle that she had to leave -- it was too dangerous to stay in Sderot. Her hosts took her toward the minivan for her return to Jerusalem. Suddenly the siren went off. People glanced in all directions around the parking lot. Where to run? Someone located a shelter at the far corner. They ran as if their lives depended on it -- because they did.
This shelter was a concrete roof with two walls. Two sides were completely open for instant access to fleeing pedestrians. Rachelle was told to huddle down and put her arms over her head. If the rocket hit next to one of the open sides, the shrapnel would injure them all. She heard the rocket explode somewhere blocks away. They waited to make sure a second rocket was not on its way. Then they sprinted to the minivan.
Rachelle's hosts told her driver to drive very fast on the access road leading out of Sderot because there are no bomb shelters along that road. Rachelle and eight other people got in. The minivan careened out of town at top speed.
The driver floored it on the access road. Suddenly the siren went off. He screeched to a stop.
It was the most terrifying experience of her life. And it's what these people live with every day, 24 hours a day.
Everyone leapt out of the vehicle and started to run. Rachelle glanced around. Only open fields. Nothing but dirt and rocks. There was no place to run. But she followed the others. Then someone shouted, "Drop down!" Rachelle dived down into the dirt, her hands a flimsy protection for her head. "I'm going to die here," she thought, shaking, as the faces of her family flashed before her. It was the most terrifying experience of her life.
The rocket exploded nearby, but not near enough to injure them. "That's when it hit me, what these people live with every day, 24 hours a day."
SURREAL REALITY
Israel evacuated Gaza in July, 2005, uprooting 9,000 Jews from the flourishing communities they had built there over two generations. The logic of the withdrawal, supported by a majority of Israelis and insisted upon by the world, was that once the settlements, the supposed "obstacle to peace," were destroyed, the Palestinians would direct their energies to building up their own state within their own borders. When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was asked what Israel would do if the Palestinians instead launched rockets over the border fence into Israel, he replied that the Israeli response would be swift and emphatic, and that the world would stand behind Israel in its legitimate steps to defend itself.
In the two and a half years since every last Israeli civilian and soldier left Gaza, the Palestinians have launched over 2053 Kassam rockets into communities on Israel's side of the international border. They have killed 12 people and wounded over a hundred. In the last two weeks, a ten-year-old boy lost his leg to a rocket attack and another youth almost lost his hand. Last Wednesday, Roni Yihye, a 47-year-old father of four from Moshav Bitcha, was killed by a Kassam rocket while attending classes at Sapir College.
No country in the world would put up with even one such attack on its territory. Can you imagine the United States sustaining a rocket attack on Passaic and not going to war? Can you imagine England sustaining a rocket attack on Brighton and "practicing restraint"?
Rather than "swift and emphatic," Israel's response has been half-hearted and restrained. Air strikes have targeted the rocket launch areas, as well as terrorist cells and their leaders. Yet even such limited counterattacks have elicited international ire. Can you imagine Switzerland condemning the United States and England for their aerial bombardments of German cities during WWII? Of course not!
How's this for a jaunt into the surreal?
Months ago, the government of Israel declared Hamas-controlled Gaza "an enemy entity." Yet Israel -- along with Egypt -- continues to supply this "enemy entity" with 70% of its electric power.
Israel supplies Gaza with gasoline for the vehicles that it uses to take Kassam rockets to their launch sites to be used to attack Israel.
When Israel stopped supplying 1% (according to the BBC) of Gaza's electricity, the world denounced the move as a "humanitarian crisis."
The UN Security Council has never condemned the attacks on Israel's sovereign territory. But this weekend, following Israel's stepped-up air and ground reprisals, the Security Council, meeting in emergency session, prepared a statement calling for an end to all violence in the Gaza area, both rocket attacks and Israel's military reprisals, thus equating the Palestinians' attacks and the Israeli defensive efforts.
Some 4,000 residents of Sderot have already fled the city. Rachelle Bronfman was asked why the 22,000 remaining residents don't also move to a safer city. She replied, "Most of them are too poor. Their apartments are worthless. But even if they had the money, where would they go? Eventually all of Israel will be within range of missiles from Gaza in the South, Hizbullah in the North and the PLO-held territories in the heartland."
Her words were strangely prophetic. Last Thursday, eight long-range Grad missiles from Gaza hit Ashkelon, Israel's port city of 100,000 residents. The Grad missiles originated in Iran and were smuggled into Gaza through the porous border with Egypt.
Soon there will be no place to run for any Israeli.
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About the author: Sara Yoheved Rigler
Sara Yoheved Rigler is a graduate of Brandeis University. Her spiritual journey took her to India and through fifteen years of teaching Vedanta philosophy and meditation. Since 1985, she has been practicing Torah Judaism. A writer, she resides in the Old City of Jerusalem with her husband and children. Her articles have appeared in: Jewish Women Speak about Jewish Matters, Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul, and Heaven on Earth.
One-sidedness is not constructive
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