Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Israel and/or Palestine Page 9 of 10

Media Coverage of Israel’s killing of Palestinians

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On July 20, 2014

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During Operation Cast Lead, the last time Israel decided to concentrate a large number of war crimes into a short period by kicking the shit out of Gazans despite the fact that Palestinians offer exactly zero real military threat to Israel I wrote a lot about it, and received the strongest pushback of my writing life: rich donors don’t like it when you say bad things about Israel.

Coverage in the US, of Israel, is so slanted that the Washington Post runs with 2 Israeli soldiers dying rather than over 60 civilians being slaughtered.

Simply put, for most news organizations, when Israel goes on a rampage, inflicting massively disproportionate collective punishment (a war crime), you have to make your bones.  Ideally you should cover for Israel: make excuses or slant coverage.  Of course the Post mentions that many more Palestinians are being killed by Israel than vice-versa; and of course the Washington Post will get around to mentioning the number of children killed

But the Washington Post editors know what all news editors know: about half the audience only reads the headlines.  Half of the remaining audience reads only the first paragraph.  If you don’t get around to mentioning inconvenient facts until later, most people will never read them.  You can feel virtuous “we covered that”, while being a propaganda outlet at the same time.

As with a lot of topics, writing about Israeli war crimes endangers your career.  The publishers and editors don’t want to hear; powerful politicians don’t want to read it.  Those who wrote against the Iraq war tended to get demoted or lose their jobs.  It’s not so bad for Israel and Palestine, of course: if you’re the sort of person who might write such articles, you’ll never make it to a position to write those articles.

Oh, to be sure, there are exceptions, and there are more in Britain than in the US.  But they are exceptions.

Writing about Israel and just noting the facts even handedly (starting with the higher casualty numbers, say), if you’re career minded, or just want to be able to feed your family, is a bad move.  It’s just not worth it.

Israel

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On June 30, 2014

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1) Israel is a settler state.

2) Israeli land was, mostly, taken from other people, by force.

3) Thus the vast majority of Israelis live on land taken by force from the indigs.

4) The “settlers”,are simply the leading edge of taking land and destroying homes, by force, from the indigs.

5) Israel is, also, a religious ethnic state where you only have the full rights of citizenship if you are of the correct religion.

If you are a believer in modern secular democracy, it is hard to see any solution for the Israel/Palestine issue which is not a single state solution.  Give everyone in Palestine full citizenship rights, including the right to vote.

It happened in South Africa. It may happen in Palestine.  If it doesn’t, the other routes out are uglier: full-on ethnic cleansing, or a loss by Israel of its “Jewish legal identity” in war (no, their nukes won’t protect them.)

America isnt’ going to be able or willing to support Israel’s colonial ambitions forever.

None of this is to say that Israel’s crimes are unique.  Conquering indigs and taking their land is old-hat. Those of us who live in North America are lucky—our genocide was long over before most of us were born, and much of it was done by germs.  We keep the few remaining indigs largely on reservations, where they live in squalid 3rd world conditions, far from the sight of their conquerers.  Israelis live right on top of those they are conquering, and have to become indifferent at best or monsters who regard Palestinians as sub-human at worst, in order to function.  After all, the Palestinians are still right there, in their face, daring to look like humans who some mother loved.

“The weak do what they must, the powerful what they will” – Thucydides.  And the Palestinians are weak.  And the Israelis are still (comparatively) strong.

They won’t be forever, however.  When they aren’t, they should worry that they will reap as they have sowed.

The Gaza Reminder

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On November 19, 2012

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is about the value of human life.

When I was a child, my father once threw some Christian evangalists off our property.

They had said, “everyone who doesn’t believe in Christ will go to hell.”

Now my father had a temper, but the way his voice dropped to a whisper, and the step he took towards them screamed incipient violence and they virtually ran.

I didn’t ask why, but he told me.

“I lived in Bangladesh, Malaysia and other Muslim countries for years.  Anyone who tells me that the good people I knew are going to burn in hell, can go to hell.  I’ll have nothing to do with any God who does that or people who believe that.”

I always remembered that.  Truth be told my father was slightly racist himself, he was of that generation.  But he was ashamed of it, he knew better, and he fought it.  What he understood was something simple: every human life has the same value.  Any moral system which places one life above the other is not ethical, it is evil.

We in the developed world, and in America and Israel in particular, don’t believe that.  We don’t even, any more, give it lip service.  And we especially don’t believe that a Muslim life is worth the same as an American life, or an Israeli life, or well, pretty much any non-Muslim life.  When Madeline Albright can say that half a million dead Iraqi children is a price worth paying for the sanctions, even before 9/11, we’ve become inhumane.

Osama bin Laden once asked, rhetorically, if Muslim blood was red, and if Muslim children were worthy of life as much as American children.

Israel is doomed.  The generation of young American Jews do not have the loyalty to Israel, no matter what it does, that older American Jews, as a group, have.  The world is coming to see Israel as an apartheid state, which is what it is.  The demographics are against it, and at some point America will cut Israel off, and Israel’s economy is not sustainable without the US.

And more to the point, somewhere, alive today, is the person who believes that losing Jerusalem is an acceptable price for wiping out Tel Aviv.  That person has been created by Israeli policy, by Western policy and by Saudi policy.  Israel is a small country.  It will not exist in 50 years.  It may be destroyed in an apocalyptic terror attack, it may be destroyed in military action, it may be destroyed by demographics, it may fall apart economically.  Its military advantage is already going away.   Hezbollah took away Israel’s armor advantage, straight up defeating them in their last invasion of Lebanon.  The Israeli air force was unable to substantially dent Hezbollah’s missile force, despite complete air supremacy.  If Hezbollah had had the good missiles, it could have wreaked much more damage.

Right now Hamas has rockets.  They look like something out of the 15th century.  They are pathetic.  It won’t stay that way forever.

All this before we get to the fact that Israel’s military is incompetent.  They are no longer the Israeli military of 68, they are an occupation military, and occupation militaries are only good at fighting weaklings, they always become corrupt, brutal and weak themselves.

Israel faces a stark choice: the two-state solution is no longer viable, there is not enough water and arable land, and too much population.  It can no longer work.  Israel can either become a secular single state, giving a vote and rights to everyone, it can ethnically cleanse out all Palestinians and become a pariah state, or it can cease to exist (option 2 and 3 may both occur).  Its end, moral or physical, may occur through terror, demographics, war, economic collapse, military decline or more likely, some combination, but it is as close to any historical process comes to inevitability.

Israel is acting like a monster, killing vastly disproportionate numbers of Palestinians.  But the grave it is digging, in the not so long run, isn’t that of the Palestinians, it is its own.

W.H. Auden once wrote the line that applies to Israel, and to the Palestinians, for that matter: Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.

I can find no joy in this, no happiness, but it is what it is.  If Israelis, not Israel the religious-ethnic state, want to avoid catastrophic destruction, their only solution is simple: stop doing evil, and start doing good.

People will dismiss that as naive, but it is the hardest of hard headed pragmatism, and as such, is advice unlikely to be taken.

Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.

UNIFIL presence in Lebanon will increase civilian casualties

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On July 7, 2010

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Intentional, or a side effect?

In the last war, much of the fighting took place on open scrubland, Merli said. But the deployment of United Nations forces in southern Lebanon had forced Hezbollah into built up areas where troops from the international UNIFIL force have no authority.

Not good.  Note that Hezbollah fought outside built up areas for military reasons: they felt they were more effective there, because outside of population centers they were also away from informants.  UNIFIL’s mission means the next war will be fought in population centers.

Somehow that does not seem to be something a UN peacekeeping operation should be ensuring.

Enough with the Sanctimony over Israel, Jews, Palestine and the Holocaust

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On June 13, 2010

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Look, enough. Let me lay it out really simply for the dense.

The Palestinians did not deserve to be colonized, displaced and turned into 2nd class citizens in their own land because Europeans tried to kill off the Jewish people.

The morality here is the same as the morality of Iraq and 9/11.  “Well, some folks attacked us, so we’re going to use it as an excuse to beat the shit out of someone who was completely uninvolved.”

So, enough with the sanctimony about Helen Thomas’s statement about Israeli Jews from the usual suspects on the left.

Telling the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to “go back to Poland” is outrageous. I received a “defense” of Thomas’s remark from a leftwing blogger who suggested that if HE were a refugee in World War II he would not have wanted to live in Israel. Not helpful. Going back to 1948 — let alone suggesting the repatriation of the descendants of European Jews to the countries that annihilated them — is as absurd as it is hideous.

Oh really, is Germany or Poland as bad a place to be a Jew as Gaza or the West Bank are to be a Palestinian?  Why, exactly, did Western nations pay for their sins by giving Jews a nation in the Middle East instead of, say, a chunk of Germany and Poland?  Why take from, why punish, those who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Is it really as bad to be told to go back to a first world nation where you would have full citizenship, as it is to be forced to live in a slum where you have no rights, can be starved at will, can’t travel as you choose, can have your house bulldozed and your farm destroyed?  Is it really so “hideous”?

Of course it isn’t.

The fundamental truth of Israel’s existence is that it is a settler nation in the modern world.  Yes, there have been plenty of them, including Canada, the US and virtually every nation in the Americas, but is that an excuse to do it again?  To not learn from the past?  To turn our heads and say “well, too bad for the Palestinians, because we Western nations need to expiate our sins, and we intend to make them pay for what we did wrong?  And hey, whatever, it’s not as bad as what we did to the American Indians, so the Palestinians should just suck it up?”

Obama wanted Helen Thomas gone because she had a habit of asking questions he hated.  She was a fool to walk right into it, but hey, someone who was the soul of discretion wouldn’t have asked the questions over the years Helen asked.

You want eunuchs in the White House press corp?  This is how you get them.

A Gaffe: saying the truth in the worst way possible

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On June 7, 2010

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As with Helen Thomas when asked what she thought about Israel.  “I think they should get the hell out of Palestine.”

Israel is a colonial power occupying a land whose population was, prior to their getting rid of many of them, majority non-Jewish.  This is why “right of return” is a non-starter, because if all the people pushed out of Israel were allowed to return…

What would Turkey’s NATO allies do in the case of a Turkish/Israeli throwdown?

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On June 1, 2010

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The general assumption has been that if push comes to shove between Israel and Turkey, that NATO allies will not support Turkey, and that the US will supply Israel, but not supply Turkey.

I wonder if those two things are both true.

It’s interesting to note that Britain, normally a staunch Israeli ally, in response to the attack on the aid flotilla in international waters called for an end to the Gaza blockade.  As with both Turkey and Israel’s actions, one imagines this may be driven by domestic political concerns.  To put it simply, Britain has a lot more Muslim citizens than Jewish ones, and England’s Jewish residents tend to be liberal and unlikely to become radicalized and blow things up.  Electorally, helping Palestinians may be a winner.

In the US, AIPAC and the Jewish lobby are generally considered amongst America’s strongest lobbies.  But it’s worth putting in perspective—when George Bush senior tackled AIPAC, he crushed them.  The vast majority of likely Democratic voters aren’t that sympathetic to Israel.  And to mess with Israel, all Obama has to do is stop protecting it at the UN, which is completely under his control, and not preferentially ship supplies to Israel in the case of a crisis, something which is also 100% inside the executive’s purview.

Obama has been snippy with the Israelis in the past, as when new settlements were announced during vice-President Biden’s visit.  While it’s hard to read Obama, I think it’s clear that he hasn’t appreciated the way Israel has taken the US’s support for granted.

And hey, changing the conversation from the BP oil spill can only be good.

I also don’t think it’s clear that Israel can use its nukes on Turkey without any other nuclear power threatening retaliation.  Glassing a major metropolis is not something likely to make Britain, the US or France happy.  In the US the idea of using nukes seems to occasion something of a yawn, but in the rest of the world it is the ultimate taboo.

Likewise, I’m not entirely sure that if Israel attacks Turkey’s military vessels in support of what may soon be considered an illegal blockade of Gaza, that other NATO nations won’t back Turkey up if it responds with a naval blockade of its own.  In particular, I’m not sure that the new British government comes in on Israel’s side, nor am I sure France does.  And either of those nations is more than capable of slapping Israel around if Israel gets too big for its britches.

Israel’s been pissing off its friends for a long time now.  This particular attack seems to have been done for domestic political reasons, and was a deliberate flouting of international law, a slap in the face “you won’t do anything about this, we can do whatever we want.”

Works, until it doesn’t.  I don’t know if Israel has crossed the line, but I think it may have.  For Britain, in particular, to come out with a statement calling for the end of the Gaza blockade is not a small thing.

All of which is a long way of saying, I’m not so sure the US, and particularly Britain, will automatically support Israel in any confrontation with Turkey.

Holy Sweet Lord, Turkey has announced they will send another flotilla to Gaza—escorted by the Turkish Navy!

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On May 31, 2010

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If they actually do this, it is the very definition of throwing down.

Wow.

Does Israel want a war with Turkey?  They can’t win it, short of using nukes, and Turkey is a NATO member, if Israel attacks NATO ships, Turkey can invoke Article V (in fact, they can invoke it already, since the ships were attacked by a non NATO power on the high seas.)  If Turkey does so, of course NATO nations will refuse, but doing so will break NATO.

This is high stakes.

Update: I might add that in the case of a war between Turkey and Israel, if Turkey is serious, unless Israel uses nukes, my money is on the Turks.  They have a huge armored corp, and the nations between Israel and Turkey aren’t going to say no if Turkey asks for access (because if they do, Turkey will just roll right through them.)  Also if Turkey and Israel goes to war, it’s at least 50/50 the Egypt jumps in as well.

Israel is really playing with fire on this one.

Update 2: See Sean-Paul’s comments on the domestic reasons of Turkey’s reaction, and what the death of the Israeli/Turkish Entente means.

Update 3: See this analysis (h/t Pogge) for the legalities.  Short of it is that if the act wasn’t rogue, then this was an act of war, not an act of piracy.

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