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| Palestinians carry the body of Salsabeel Abu Jalhoumm, a 21-month-old girl who was killed early on Sunday when an Israeli air strike hit near her home in the northern Gaza Strip, 2 March 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages) |
"The Day the Earth and Sky Traded Places"
"By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Around 10:30pm on the night of February 28, M and his wife S spoke in low tones in a dark room dimly lit by a battery-operated lamp. They were trying to decide if it was still safe to send their children to school and decided in favor because the elementary school building is in a safer part of the city near a number of international offices. The electricity in the building had been out 10 hours by then and the couple pulled blankets around them to keep warm in the damp winter air. They live on the 6th floor of Shifa Tower, an 11-story apartment building housing more than a hundred families.
When the blast occurred that took out the Interior Ministry building across the street, there was no time to think about what to do. M flew into his children's bedroom and threw himself over the sleeping body of his son, Basel, to shield the young boy's body from the glass shattering in the windows beside his bed. Then after a matter of seconds the three young children, two girls and the boy, were taken to the windowless kitchen, all of them now fully awake and crying out in terror. M threw blankets and pillows around them where they huddled for the night in restless sleep and dreams of horror, their mother sobbing silently over them as she caressed their faces.
M returned to the children's room in time for the second deafening blast that made him put up his arms instinctively. When he let them down and looked out into the night sky, it was all brown, the earth from underneath the destroyed buildings was swirling around outside the bedroom windows and he could see nothing but flying debris, smoke and a wall of dirt. For some time he could not hear well, only watch-dazed- hypnotized by the silence after the aerial strikes.
In the morning, no one went outside. "This is a black day in Gaza," M wrote; "a holocaust as (Israeli deputy defense minister Matan) Vilnai put it. There is an attack every five or ten minutes. It keeps our nerves on edge and our senses strained. There is so much rage at what is happening; especially the scenes of murdered children and babies. I am so busy I don't know how to describe my feelings. I work to avoid feeling because right now that's too unbearable."
Watch as A, a Hamas soldier, runs for his life into his house. His pursuers miss shooting him so they launch three rockets into the house on the edge of Jabalya camp killing everyone inside (four family members). They are angry now so every house in the way gets the same treatment and without the "militant" to guide their next moves: rockets fired into the interiors of homes with no knowledge of who is inside. Eye-witnesses report this and worse: a six month old baby girl becomes tiny body parts with her mother and brother. A small child is cut apart by shrapnel and screams that she doesn't want to die just before leaving this world. The mothers and fathers cannot protect them so they weep and scream at the funerals that this side of the world never views, especially during basketball season.
Who really cares about these children? Every Palestinian is a militant because everyone (sooner or later) wants Israel off their land, out of their lives, and forgotten like a horrible dream. It is for this reason that they are all equal targets: none of them is intelligent enough to understand that their land isn't their land, their lives are not their lives, and their horrible dream is their present and future. Have no pity on those who don't get it.
The night strikes from F-16s and helicopter missiles continued throughout the day on Friday the 29 and into the first weekend in March, unceasing in their ferocity and indiscriminate killing revenge for the death early last week of an Israeli student at Sapir College outside Sderot. For every one Israeli life, scores of Palestinians must die. God help us now that two Israeli soldiers have been killed fighting on occupied land, against unwilling slaves; killing innocent people to maintain a 60-year-old injustice. Brace yourself, Gaza. You will pay dearly for the continuation of this crime.
Let us not reflect too much on what all this means. How, for example, would the 47-year-old Sapir College student like to know that his death has been far more useful to his State than his life? For in death he provided another pretext to carry out mass murder of the Arab Untermenschen blocking the otherwise pleasant view to the sea in the southeastern Promised Land. His death challenged the Israeli rules of combat: the "We kill and You Die" warfare, the only type allowed by the Neo-Jewish Masters and their allies in the United States who have no intention of making a just peace with the lower forms of life in their midst. The sanctimonious demand that the Qassams must be stopped is a deliberate lie intended to make you forget that the Qassams provide a near fool-proof pretext for grabbing more of Gaza and setting more of it to ruin; and that the Qassams are the result of systematic national torture and evisceration, borne themselves of occupation, caused by it, improved upon by periods of siege, sadism and mass killing.
Peace would require relinquishing regional hegemony. Peace would demand sharing the land and the resources equally. Peace might, heaven forbid, require democratic decision making in a region where the Israelis are not better, more entitled, more deserving of Their Way than everyone else in the neighborhood. Well, sorry, but these are not on Israel's agenda. The leaders of the hapless Sderot student's racially pure dreamland are grateful for his dying: Now the angry flames of intolerance can burn on feverishly. Into those flames the bodies of each dead Gazan man, woman or child should be flung, like books, to consecrate the ritual, the burnt offering, of those who owe the latter-day Israelites their Modern Day Zion. In Holy Victimhood shall We Reign Supreme.
Surely this would satisfy Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit who bellowed that if it were up to him, Israeli soldiers going into Gaza should shoot "everything that moves" like babies and toddlers, grandfathers and mothers, orange trees and wasted-away donkeys pulling cartloads of rotten vegetables; like flowers and seabirds, chickens and goats, rats and cockroaches. A scorched-earth policy will suffice. They'll create their apocalyptic wilderness and will call it peace.
No one needed Sheetrit to legitimize the strategy of creating oblivion from hell. Untermenschen who can be denied food, water, fuel, electricity, medical supplies, the right to leave and return home, the right to not to die in an ambulance that without the proper permits, the right to their own land and their own nationhood precisely because they are lesser human beings can also be picked off one by one or in groups or in families or because they are "militants," or all of the above, who deserve no fair hearing, due process, photographs, names, headlines, stories, grief or televised tear-jerker funerals to commemorate their sacrifices. In such a world contexts are an insult to the intelligence of the policy-makers.
Plea after plea from human rights organizations, legal organizations, religious charities and leaders, children's welfare organizations, medical aid projects, refugee relief societies, international humanitarian agencies, celebrities, parliamentarians, foreign policy analysts and countless others go not only unheeded but unread, unheard, a waste of one's time. Is there a reason why the carnage in Gaza is continuing before our very eyes and no State or Non-state actor strong enough to make a difference is bothering to step in? The shame is ours, for Israel and its US Master have long since resided in the lowest circle of Hell for betraying the name of humanity.
Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a member of the board of the Israeli Coalition against House Demolitions-USA branch, founder of the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project and a freelance journalist. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net"
"Assault on Gaza: Day of grief and defiance"
".... In Gaza, medical officials said a 21-month-old Palestinian girl, two other civilians and three militants were killed yesterday. The Israeli military said four soldiers had been hurt and two Israeli civilians were slightly injured after 21 rockets were launched by militants, including three longer range Katyushas, one of which directly hit a house in Ashkelon.
Among those buried yesterday were six members of one family including its head, Abd el-Rahman Mohammad Ali Atallah, and his 60-year-old wife, Suad, two sons and two daughters, who were killed late on Saturday afternoon when their house was destroyed by three aerial bombs which residents near by said also injured four children including a two-day-old infant. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which documents all Palestinian deaths, and is opposed to all attacks on non-combatants including in Israel, said 49 of the dead since Wednesday were civilians.
As thousands of Gazans streamed on foot through streets abnormally empty of cars because of severe fuel shortages to and from near-continuous funerals in Beit Lahiya and Gaza City's Sheikh Radwan cemetery, Fatima Abed Rabbo, 23, told how she was shot in the left shoulder as she stood by her one-year-old daughter, Doha, at her home in Jabalya during the bloody first hour of the Israeli incursion shortly after midnight on Saturday.
Lying on her bed at the Kamal Odwan hospital, where the first 40 dead victims of the assault were brought on Saturday morning, Mrs Abed Rabbo said the shot had come through the door of her balcony at about the same time as her friends and neighbours Jaqueline and Eyad Abu Shbak, a teenage brother and his sister, were killed in their home.
She said Jaqueline, 16, who she said had been hit by shrapnel after an Israeli missile hit a parked car outside the home, was an especially good student in the science department of her high school. Eyad, 14, who was struck by a bullet, had just started high school.
"They were excellent people," she said. "Our family and theirs were always in and out of each other's houses. Two ambulances came at the same time to take us away. They were dead and I was alive."
Mrs Abed Rabbo was close to tears how she described how she was still breastfeeding Doha but had had no contact with her or her two-and-half-year-old son, Anas, both of whom were being cared for by relatives, since being taken to hospital because of the military closure of the area after the incursion. "The phones are not working and my husband who came with me in the ambulance has not been able to get back." A spokesman for the Red Cross confirmed yesterday evening that Palestinian ambulances were still unable to reach parts of the area of the incursion to pick up injured persons.
Mrs Abed Rabbo, the wife of a policeman employed by the Fatah-dominated administration in Ramallah, which has outlawed Hamas, said her extended family in that district had nothing to do with the armed factions and insisted that her street was not used for firing rockets. "There are no orange groves here for people to hide in. I don't know how the Arab world is standing by while this is happening. I feel they are giving the green light to what is happening here. We are sick of denunciations, denunciations. We want people to come and change this situation. I hope you will take this reality to the Arabs, the whole world and especially the Americans."
Mrs Abed Rabbo insisted that although Hamas and other militants may have fired at IDF troops after she was taken to hospital, there had been no firing beforehand. "If the resistance had been firing the ambulance would never have got to me," she said. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights claimed the Israeli forces "fired indiscriminately as they advanced".
Nearby houses and apartment blocks were evacuated early yesterday after two missiles inflicted limited damage on the ground floor and top floor of the offices of de facto Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, in what a Hamas security guard at the site said had been a "message". He added: "My guess is that [the Israelis] will come back and hit it again."
Hamas gunmen could be seen at street corners in doorways in the Al Journ and Masoud districts of Jabalya yesterday, apparently ready to fight against Israeli forces deployed a few hundred metres away.
After nightfall, two loud explosions could be heard from Israeli air strikes, including on a building in the Beach refugee camp where Mr Haniyeh lives.
In the West Bank town of Hebron, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by troops during a protest against the Israeli offensive in Gaza.
A military spokesman said that youths had thrown firebombs in a "violent demonstration" which had put soldiers at risk.
Voices from the Gaza blogs
"I had a long day, an awful day, taking photos and writing from on the ground in Gaza City and northern Gaza. I met with two children who survived Wednesday's Jabalya soccer bombing: the other four kids were, as you likely know, killed. One of the children I saw had no flesh on their legs, had burns all over their bodies." - Rafah Today – Daily Life in Palestine, Mohammed Omer in Rafah, Gaza
"We celebrated Yousuf's fourth birthday today. We ate cake. And we counted the bodies. We sang happy birthday. And my mother sobbed. We watched the fighter jets roar voraciously on our television screen, pounding street after street. Yousuf tore open his presents, and asked my mother to make a paper zanana, a drone, for him with origami; And we were torn open from the inside, engulfed by a feeling of impotence and helplessness; fear and anger and grief; despondence and confusion." - Raising Yousuf, Unplugged: diary of a Palestinian mother, Laila El-Haddad in Gaza City
"Walking to the Red Crescent Society (I do not have fuel in my car), I can hear successive explosions, from different parts of the city, and the drone in the sky. I can also clearly see the security forces soldiers, outside their headquarters, as it is under threat of bombing by the Israeli military forces. I had to walk very fast , expecting the worst. Arriving at work, I find we do not have enough fuel for the ambulance and other vehicles. No fuel has entered Gaza for 17 days , our store has been exhausted.Oh my God, this situation will have its disastrous impact on our health facilities." - From Gaza, With Love, Dr Mona El-Farra, Gaza City
©independent.co.uk Lega"
"Israeli Violence Endangers Us"
"by Ira Chernus
“Worst Israeli - Palestinian Clashes in a Year as Air and Ground Forces Enter Gaza,” the front-page headline in the Sunday (March 2) New York Times read. That makes the conflict sound like a roughly even match. You had to read down a few paragraphs and do some math before learning that the suffering is hugely one-sided. Palestinian deaths this week outnumbered Israeli deaths by about 30 to 1, and the count of serious injuries is even more lopsided.
As usual in the U.S. mainstream media, there was no mention of the many Hamas calls for a cease-fire and immediate peace negotiations, all rejected or ignored by Israel. Are the media afraid that they’ll bring down a firestorm of pro-Israeli rage on their heads if they even hint that Hamas might have the moral upper hand here?
Politicians in the U.S. certainly tread lightly when they talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Just a day before the “worst clashes” headline, the Times ran another front-page story: “Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters.” According to that story, American Jews worry that Obama will not give sufficient support to Israel’s hard-line policies. No matter how much Obama insists them that he will continue the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel — which has always meant a green light from Washington for virtually every act of violence the Israelis perpetrate — many Jews remain unconvinced, the article reports.
But who speaks for American Jews? Typically, it’s the leaders of national Jewish organizations. They would have us believe that nothing matters more to Jews than Israel.
In fact, the leaders are increasingly out of step with the mass of Jewish voters. Look at the numbers from the American Jewish Committee’s 2007 Annual Survey of Jewish Opinion. Asked to name their single most important issue when voting for president, only 6% said Israel. About one-quarter of Orthodox Jews named Israel as their main issue. That means, among the vast majority who are not Orthodox, the number who put Israel at the top of their list is so small as to be statistically insignificant.
So the Times misled us by suggesting that Obama’s stand on Israel is a major problem for his campaign. If those who support the Israeli government look carefully at his position statements on the Middle East, they will find little to disagree with. Even those who don’t look carefully, or remain suspicious, are unlikely to let that one issue dissuade them from voting for him.
This is not to say that U.S. Jews have anything like a progressive position on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Only 46% favor establishing a Palestinian state. That’s quite a bit lower than polls find among Israeli Jews. 63% agree that “the West and the Muslim world are engaged in a clash of civilizations.” 82% agree that “the goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.” Numbers like these suggest that most Jews would accept the Israelis’ justification for their current onslaught in Gaza — although the number of Jews who stand against Israeli violence is growing rapidly.
If Israel were the number one issue for Jewish voters, any thoughtful candidate would face a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, any criticism of Israel might really harm the candidate’s chances. On the other hand, it is obvious that when Israel perpetuates the cycle of violence — killing Palestinians rather than accepting the Hamas call for truce and negotiations — it endangers Americans as well as Israelis. Every Palestinian civilian that Israel kills is another recruiting poster for those who would like to do harm not only to Israel but to the U.S. An American president should feel obligated to do whatever it takes to stop that.
Any thoughtful candidate knows that Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas because most Israelis, like most U.S. Jews, believe Hamas is dead set on destroying Israel. So whatever Hamas leaders say, Israel discounts it as a devious trick. But this Israeli belief about Hamas is a leap of faith. There is no compelling evidence that requires a rational person to accept it.
On the contrary, a rational person would say, “Let’s look at history.” Twenty years ago, Israel insisted that the Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by the Fatah party, was determined to destroy Israel. All the assurances to the contrary given by its leader, Yassir Arafat, were rejected as cunning lies. Israel even made it illegal for any Israeli to talk to any representative of the PLO.
Then the Israeli government secretly broke its own law, negotiating an agreement with the PLO in Oslo that was supposed to lead to a two-state solution. The negotiations are still very rocky, at best. But Israeli leaders now seem to accept Fatah’s good faith pursuit of a two-state solution, which means accepting Israel’s permanent existence. In negotiations with Fatah, the legal question of acknowledging Israel’s right to existence is simply ignored.
An American president who cared above all for national security, in Israel as well as the U.S., would insist that the Israelis treat Hamas the same way they treated Fatah and the PLO: Stop fighting, start talking, and accept de facto recognition as sufficient.
Yes, that position might be politically damaging for a presidential candidate — if Jews voted on the basis of the candidate’s approach to Israel. Fortunately for all the candidates, Israel is not the issue uppermost in Jews’ minds when they go to vote. So the dilemma need not cause the candidates to lose too much sleep. Once a candidate becomes president, though, he or she should lose plenty of sleep worrying that bellicose Israeli leaders, deaf to Hamas appeals for negotiation, will endanger the security of Americans and Israelis alike.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. chernus@colorado.edu"
"Israel keeping true to its racist words"
"Rami Almeghari, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2008
Following Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai's Friday warning that the Gaza Strip faces "a holocaust" if homemade rocket fire continues, Vilnai's aides rushed to downplay the remarks, claiming the minister did not mean a holocaust exactly.
However, the following day, the Israeli army, through ground forces and helicopters in the sky, killed 61 Palestinians in Gaza, at least ten of them children. Since Wednesday, 26 March, Israeli occupation forces have killed at least 77 Palestinians in Gaza and injured approximately 130, including children who won't live to see their first birthday.
Vilnai's racist declarations against the Palestinian people are certainly not the first from a high-ranking official in the allegedly democratic state of Israel.
Last Thursday, 28 February, Israeli cabinet minister Meir Sheetrit said that the solution to the rocket fire would be for Israel to "hit everything that moves with weapons and ammunition." Earlier in the month, during a cabinet session Sheetrit stated that "exactly what I think the [Israeli army] should do [is] decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it."
Genocidal statements calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians are not reserved for those in Gaza, however. The extreme rightist Yisrael Beitenu party leader and former Deputy Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who was born in Moldova and immigrated to Israel at the age of 20, advocates for the "transfer" or ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinian citizens in Israel and has declared that Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset who meet with Palestinian leaders from the West Bank and Gaza should be executed as traitors.
Before Lieberman was Rehavam Ze'evi, the assassinated Israeli tourism minister and founder of the fascist Moledet party which makes the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians part of its party platform. Regarding the 180,000 Palestinian laborers from the West Bank and Gaza working for substandard wages in Israel before the state imposed a total closure, Ze'evi described them in a 2001 radio interview as "a cancer" and advocated that "[Israel] should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice."
Dehumanizing the Palestinians has been necessary for Israel to justify its actions ever since, and even before, the state was declared on destroyed historic Palestine in 1948 and then in 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Taken together, they indicate the historic effort to destroy Palestinian national aspirations and this is what Israel is trying to do in Gaza, which Nobel prize winner and late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once wished would be swallowed by the sea.
Gaza is no stranger to devastation. In 1956, for example, former Israeli prime minister and war criminal Ariel Sharon moved troops under his command into the town of Khan Younis where a massacre was committed. Since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, Israel has been particularly cruel to Gaza, committing crime after crime without sanction from the so-called international communiy. The firing of homemade rockets -- no match to Israel's US-supplied and funded military arsenal -- came only after decades of violent Israeli oppression against Palestinians trying to shake off the military occupation.
Fourteen Israelis have been killed by the crude rockets since Palestinian resistance began firing them in 2001, while approximately 300 Palestinians were killed just in the few months since the renewed peace process was declared in Annapolis in November of last year. Nearly 5,000 Palestinian men, women and children have been killed since 2000, all "terrorists" in the eyes of Israeli intelligence chief Yuval Diskin.
Though he may have passed on, the words of deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ring ever true thirty years since he uttered them: "Those who call us terrorists wish to prevent world public opinion from discovering the truth about us and from seeing the justice on our faces. They seek to hide the terrorism and tyranny of their acts, and our own posture of self-defense."
Rami Almeghari is currently contributor to several media outlets including Palestine Chronicle, IMEMC, The Electronic Intifada and Free Speech Radio News. Rami is also a former senior English translator at and editor in chief of the international press center of the Gaza-based Palestinian Information Service. He can be contacted at rami_almeghari at hotmail.com.
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