The Tunnels in Gaza

I attempted a trans­la­tion then recruited assis­tance from someone who has spoken Hebrew within the past decade.

Q: What are you doing here?
A: I work here, in the tunnels. We need to work here, because there isn’t any work outside.
A: All the passages are closed, so were forced to work here. By way of the tunnels, we bypass the Rafah passage. We pass pampers diapers, excuse my rudeness. We transport a lot of things. We transport medicine, flour, sugar, clothes. We transport every­thing, every­thing that’s at the market [shook ].

A: Who is this? (jokingly) I’ll buy your father also. “Who’s speaking?” Ill buy aluminum, copper, refrig­er­a­tors, engines, washing machines…  ACRAM! Yes.

A: I have here garbage, want to buy it?
A: Obviously, our lives here… before we go down inside, we pray.
A
: At any moment, something could fall on us and block the way and get stuck here thirty, forty days.

Q: How do you eat and and drink during those times?

A: Sometimes they pour milk and water down the pipes/channels. We don’t eat, only drink through the air pipe/channels.

[Via Gisha’s Gaza Gateway. Thanks Zoe for translation]

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Ethan Bronner’s Kid in the IDF: Fallout

So it’s now confirmed that Ethan Bronner, the army stenographer/NYT cor­re­spon­dent in Jerusalem, has a son who enlisted in the IDF. The Elec­tronic Intifada broke the story, and Phil Weiss did a good job of exposing it too, helping to push it along. A member of my Brooklyn for Peace Israel-Palestine Committee, Dennis Loh, asked Bronner about his son’s employ­ment status at a public talk. And now the public editor of the NYT has taken up the issue. Now, the story is becoming an embar­rass­ment and that’s good, because Bronner is generally an embar­rass­ment, a slick, polished pro­pa­gan­dist for atrocity and racism. Of course he is. The NYT Jerusalem bureau was not going to hire Michel Warschawski as its cor­re­spon­dent on goings-on in Israel. This sort of public pil­lo­ry­ing is good fun, and exposes the NYT for what is it–the house organ of the American Estab­lish­ment. But what happens if Bronner resigns? Some other sap will replace him. That’s how the pro­pa­ganda machine works. Struc­tures select for indi­vid­u­als. One Zionist reporter surreally replaces another, and while there’s room for jostling at the margins, generally, we can expect little.

A quick addendum. I normally agree with most of what Phil Weiss writes. But he comments, “If [the NYT] had any stones, it would seek to elevate Taghreed El-Khodary, the fabulous cor­re­spon­dent it has in Gaza.” Others have described El-Khodary to me in similar terms. I’d rather have her there than a scoundrel like Bronner. But really. Scoundrels come in different varieties. Tribalist scoundrels [Bronner]. Careerist scoundrels [Judith Miller]. And col­lab­o­ra­tor scoundrels [El-Khodary]. Via Angry Arab:

“In the debate over civilian casu­al­ties, there is no clear under­stand­ing of what con­sti­tutes a military target.” Tell me more, Taghreed. Children’s beds, ambu­lances, bakeries, mosques, schools, and colleges are not “clear” in their des­ig­na­tion. You mean to say that it is not easy for Israel to know whether a nursery is military or not, right? I get your point. With this lousy most callous article, I only wished that Taghreed would spe­cial­ize instead in focusing on the plight of Israeli col­lab­o­ra­tors who concern her a great deal.

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Anniversary of Hampshire Divestment

This is the one year anniver­sary of the Hampshire College divest­ment from companies profiting from the occu­pa­tion. Hampshire students organized, researched, and pressured, and repeating the heroic efforts of their pre­de­ces­sors, who made Hampshire the first college in the US to divest from South Africa, got Hampshire  “to wash its hands of the sys­tem­atic exploita­tion of the Pales­tin­ian people by the Israeli state.” Pre­dictably, Alan Der­showitz, afflicted with some weird sort of human-resident non-fatal rabies that only results in brain-death, actually called the cell-phone numbers of involved students and threat­ened them.

Hampshire SJP rec­om­mends a series of actions:

–Changing your status on Facebook to something like, “I remember Hampshire College’s Divest­ment from the Occu­pa­tion.“
–Trending this post (permalink: here) and the facebook event we’ve created on twitter, under #divestment2009 or something similar
–Read & educate yourself about the situation as it stands today at sites like:
Elec­tronic Intifada
Jewbonics [But if you’re reading this you’re already doing so!]
US Campaign to End the Occu­pa­tion
B’tselem
–Talk to friends and family members–spread the word
–And of course, if you’re looking to organize your own divest­ment campaign or simply join the inter­na­tional sol­i­dar­ity movement, check out some of our fabulous fellow activists over at Palestine Freedom Project, the afore­men­tioned US Campaign, and Jewish Voice for Peace, to start.

SJP Hampshire is a model of student orga­ni­za­tion. Serious and pro­fes­sional, they also organized a national BDS con­fer­ence last November, at which Ali Abunimah keynoted. Last December, they placed a mock-up of an apartheid wall on their campus, which the bur­geon­ing and beyond encour­ag­ing Amherst SJP shared with them.

Now Hampshire SJP says that on this anniver­sary we should keep pushing:

We hope, in the spirit of “remem­brance,” that this day is not simply memo­ri­al­ized in and of itself–for itself–but serves as an inspi­ra­tion for current and future struggles against injustice, both transna­tion­ally and locally–other movements which demand our sol­i­dar­ity just as much as we ask for theirs.

..

Like Fanon, any memory of injustice is also simul­ta­ne­ously a call to action in the present. Sunday, February 7th, should be a day to imagine how to carefully and skill­fully respond to the demands of Pales­tin­ian civil society, and to consider the role we have in our own com­mu­ni­ties, our own rela­tion­ships, as people concerned with justice.

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Yes, This means Ahmadinejad Won the Election

Quick question: what do confused sectors of the Western radical left and the editorial board of the New York Times agree about? That last June’s Iranian pres­i­den­tial election, which almost certainly was not fraud­u­lent, was fraud­u­lent, that Ahmadine­jad is not the legit­i­mately elected president of Iran, that to analyze or criticize the tactics or ide­olo­gies of the green movement is tan­ta­mount to Stalinism, and that the correct political stance vis-a-vis the green movement is posting YouTube videos of pro­test­ers pummeling working-class basij.

For the NYT, this is a matter of massaging reality so as to prepare the symbolic ground for imperial warfare and desta­bi­liza­tion. For the Empire, an inde­pen­dent nuclear-capable Iran is haram (forbidden). A state of suicide bombers armed with fissile material? Oh hell no. Muslims can barely be relied upon to refrain from building minarets or misog­y­nis­ti­cally con­trol­ling their women, in stark contrast to the coura­geous feminism that permeates the West. The repressed men of The Muslim World would almost certainly manifest their frus­tra­tion in Armaged­don if they got remotely near a nuclear weapon, and the West–lily-white pure when it comes to visiting Armaged­don upon other people–could not possibly tolerate such a fright­en­ing prospect.

Anyway, put to the side the tactical question of where Western leftists should orient their efforts–unremittingly against sanctions, clearly, which are option one in the rejec­tion­is­tist imperial armory. (Putting this political question aside is slightly ridicu­lous since it’s actually the only relevant issue right now for leftists or liberals). And then move on to some poll analysis that should seal shut the debate about Ahmadinejad’s social support–a proxy for Iranian sentiment con­cern­ing populist economic policies. This is something I harp about with abrasive frequency. When American leftists have no movement–like right now–we look around for something dis­tract­ingly beguiling. In this case, something so inchoate and that pulls in so many direc­tions that it makes it easy to impose our rev­o­lu­tion­ary hopes upon a non-revolutionary situation.

Yes, millions mobilized as part of the Green Wave in June and more recently during Ashura. The green movement is real. But here’s the problem. The Iranian state is strong, deeply-embedded in civil society through a range of social welfare programs, many of them directed towards the rural poor, others ben­e­fit­ing the urban lower-classes. And the Iranian gov­ern­ment, extending well beyond Ahmadine­jad, is also repres­sive and anti-democratic. Repres­sive and anti-democratic gov­ern­ments fre­quently provoke back­lashes in favor of democracy. And sometimes, those back­lashes redound neg­a­tively upon the working-classes. Sometimes author­i­tar­i­an­ism brings pros­per­ity. This stuff is fairly obvious and banal, but debate on Iran tends to cliche, train-wrecked syllogism, and the crafting of straw-men, so sometimes it’s helpful to pedan­ti­cally lay out the obvious, which I do by way of massively ellip­ti­cal intro­duc­tion to a poll from World­Pub­li­cOpin­ion. Its gist? Iranians may not like their gov­ern­ment but they do think Ahmadine­jad is their legit­i­mately elected president. The reason a majority of Iranians voted for him? Probably because his gov­ern­ment is perceived, more-or-less rightly, as one in favor of economic populism within a global neo-liberal regime of accu­mu­la­tion. My thinking? So long as the Green Movement fails to braid together economic redis­tri­b­u­tion and political lib­er­al­ism, it will not gain the crucial societal mass that will enable it to become a force capable of restruc­tur­ing the Iranian state so as to enable it to defend the Iranian people from both the economic and military arms of the Empire. Tra­di­tion­ally, defense of economic redis­tri­b­u­tion and fighting the empire were the concerns of radicals, dis­si­dents, and social­ists. So were facts. In modern times, not so much.

Indi­ca­tions of fraud in the June 12 Iranian pres­i­den­tial election, together with large-scale street demon­stra­tions, have led to claims that Mahmoud Ahmadine­jad did not actually win the election, and that the majority of Iranians perceive their gov­ern­ment as ille­git­i­mate and favor regime change.

An analysis of multiple polls of the Iranian public from three different sources finds little evidence to support such conclusions.

The analysis conducted by the Program on Inter­na­tional Policy Attitudes at the Uni­ver­sity of Maryland (PIPA), was based on:

  • a series of 10 recently-released polls conducted by the Uni­ver­sity of Tehran; eight conducted in the month before the June 12 election and two conducted in the month after the election, based on telephone inter­views conducted within Iran
  • a poll by GlobeScan conducted shortly after the election, based on telephone inter­views conducted within Iran
  • a poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org (managed by PIPA) conducted August 27–September 10, based on telephone inter­views made by calling into Iran
Pre-Election Voting Intentions
Post-Election Self-Reports of Vote Choice
Confidence in Institutions

The study sought to address the widely-discussed hypothe­ses that Ahmadine­jad did not win the June 12 election and that the Iranian people perceive their gov­ern­ment as ille­git­i­mate.  It also sought to explore the assump­tion that the oppo­si­tion rep­re­sents a movement favoring a sub­stan­tially different posture toward the United States.  The analysis of the data found little evidence to support any of these hypotheses.

Steven Kull, director of PIPA, said, “Our analysis suggests that it would not be prudent to base US policy on the assump­tion that the Iranian public is in a pre-revolutionary state of mind.”

On the question of whether Ahmadine­jad won the June 12 election, in the week before the election and after the election, in all polls a majority said they planned to or did vote for Ahmadine­jad.  These numbers ranged from 52 to 57% imme­di­ately before the election and 55 to 66% after the election.

Steven Kull comments, “These findings do not prove that there were no irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the election process.  But they do not support the belief that a majority rejected Ahmadinejad.”

The analysis did reveal factors that could have con­tributed to the impres­sion that Ahmadine­jad did not win.  Uni­ver­sity of Tehran polls show that in the first few weeks of the campaign his support dropped pre­cip­i­tously and he did not enjoy majority support in the city of Tehran.  But in the week before the election, his support recovered outside the capital.

Going into the election 57% said they expected Ahmadine­jad to win.  Thus it is not sur­pris­ing that, in several post-election polls, more than seven in ten said they saw Ahmadine­jad as the legit­i­mate president.  About eight in ten said the election was free and fair.

The polls did reveal some reser­va­tions about the gov­ern­ment.  Less than a majority expressed full con­fi­dence in the Guardian Council (42%) and the Ministry of the Interior (38%).  While over eight in ten said they were satisfied with the current system of gov­ern­ment, in June less than a majority (49%) said they were very satisfied and this number dropped to 41% in July.

However none of the polls found indi­ca­tions of support for regime change.  Large majori­ties, including majori­ties of Mousavi sup­port­ers, endorse the Islamist character of the regime such as having a body of Islamic scholars with the power to veto laws they see as contrary to sharia.

To address the pos­si­bil­ity that the data collected within Iran may have been fab­ri­cated, PIPA compared the patterns of responses, including within subgroups, in data collected inside Iran to those collected by calling into Iran from the outside.  Steven Kull comments, “The patterns of responses at many levels are so similar, whether the data was collected inside Iran or by calling into Iran, that it is hard to conclude that these data were fabricated.”

Another concern is that Iranian respon­dents were not answering candidly out of fear of some type of reprisal for making state­ments in support of the oppo­si­tion or critical of the regime, par­tic­u­larly in the post-election envi­ron­ment.  As noted above, on some questions majori­ties expressed views that were less than fully laudatory of the government.

Still there was the fact that after the election, the numbers express­ing support for Mousavi dimin­ished suggests that some self-censoring may have been occurring.  Thus PIPA put special emphasis on analyzing the responses of those who felt bold enough to say that they voted for the oppo­si­tion on the assump­tion that they would be frank on other issues as well.  While Mousavi sup­port­ers are less affir­ma­tive of the legit­i­macy of the regime than the public as a whole, still a majority says that they believe that Ahmadine­jad is the legit­i­mate president and affirm the Islamist nature of the regime.

Some analysts have suggested that if the oppo­si­tion were to gain power this would lead to fun­da­men­tal changes in the Iranian posture toward the US.  Focusing on those respon­dents who said they voted for Mousavi, as an approx­i­ma­tion of the oppo­si­tion, PIPA found that a majority were ready to negotiate with the US on a number of issues, while the Iranian public as a whole was more divided.  However, Mousavi sup­port­ers, like the general public, were quite negative in their views of the US gov­ern­ment and were strongly committed to Iran’s nuclear program.

A majority of Mousavi sup­port­ers did favor diplo­matic relations with the US, and were ready to make a deal whereby Iran would preclude devel­op­ing nuclear weapons through intrusive inter­na­tional inspec­tions in exchange for the removal of sanctions.  However, this was equally true of the majority of all Iranians.

Full Report (PDF)
Ques­tion­naire with Findings, Method­ol­ogy for All Three Surveys (PDF)

WPO Dataset for Download (SPSS Format)
GlobeScan Dataset for Download (SPSS Format)

[Thanks Yoshie]


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Open Shuhada Street!

There will be an inter­na­tional day of action of 25 February to open Shuhada Street. Click here for more infor­ma­tion on the campaign.

Here is the Inde­pen­dent on the situation in Shuhada Street:

After a 13-year-old process of closures and seg­re­ga­tion which began – iron­i­cally – with the Goldstein attack on Pales­tini­ans in the mosque, and continued through the intifada, there are now 304 closed shops and ware­houses – 218 of them shut down by military order. The whole of the “sterile zone” pro­tect­ing the set­tle­ments is closed to Pales­tin­ian vehicles. And the central section of Shuhada Street is closed to Pales­tin­ian pedes­tri­ans, except for four families who still live on this once densely populated but now desolate artery. The term used by B’Tselem and ACRI for the steady Pales­tin­ian depop­u­la­tion of the area is “enforced eviction”. Jan Kris­tiansen, a former head of the (already decade-old) Temporary Inter­na­tional Presence in Hebron, described it as “ethnic cleansing”.

While ACRI and B’Tselem pointed out that a resident of the Old City wanting to cross one side of Shuhada Street to the other needs to go round the entire city centre and pass through a number of check­points, the Army insists that the restric­tions on pedes­trian movement in the city are “minimal”. As for vehicles, the Army says that those carrying supplies like con­struc­tion materials are allowed through with prior autho­ri­sa­tion and that the required detours add only 10 minutes to the journey for Pales­tini­ans. The official stresses that the closures are needed for security reasons and insists, “I am respon­si­ble for the lives of Pales­tini­ans and Israelis. I am not just in charge of the Israelis.”

Occu­pa­tion, totally absurd.

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Gaza Gets 1/5 of the Minimum Necessary Truckloads

Gaza gets between 418 and 534 truck­loads of goods a week when it requires 2,400, minimally. According to an American official, my leaders do not accept the Israeli policy of pre­vent­ing goods from reaching Gaza because of what Ha’aretz coyly calls the “political situation” there. “We do not accept the current situation at the Gaza crossings,” one of them said. Pre­sum­ably why 54/53 of 435 con­gress­peo­ple said they do not accept the “closure,” in another cute euphem­iza­tion, of Gaza. Not that I have faith in Obama to be anything other than a scoundrel, but 370 congress-people sup­port­ing a barbaric siege? That is the Lobby.

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Eric is Pathetic

So while I sit around in Cairo anxiously waiting for the Egyptian security forces to decide when or if they will permit inter­na­tion­als to enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing–they will report­edly open the border sometime in the next 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 weeks–I need some amusement. Thank­fully, the Nation printed a few letters outlining the many obvious idiocies–every word in the piece–in Eric Alterman’s paean to Israeli cultural pro­duc­tion, written to celebrate the one year anniver­sary of the metic­u­lous bom­bard­ment of a refugee camp. To mourn the Cast Lead Operation, Eric wrote about the intro­spec­tive capa­bil­i­ties of the society that produced it. A few comments from readers:

Alterman assumes a referee status between right and left thinkers on the conflict, when actually he is a sweet-talker for one of the longest-running, most brutal occu­pa­tions in history. Eric, cut the theme music.

–NAOMI WALLACE

To help us find the fair and balanced tipping point along the “one-dimensional picture presented by both left and right,” Alterman pre­scribes some Israeli movies, of which I’ve seen two. Waltz With Bashir is indeed a good flick, but it’s entirely about Jewish angst; not exactly on point. The Lemon Tree is on point, however. It’s a moving drama­ti­za­tion of precisely what Carey is claiming: that occu­pa­tion is at the core of existence in the ter­ri­to­ries, and that the phony “peace process” the PA has so dis­as­trously bought into has no hope of reversing the relent­less tra­jec­tory of oppres­sion, dis­pos­ses­sion and state violence.

–GEORGE P. SMITH

Smart, cutting, astute, and unan­swer­able, right?

Says Eric:

I’ve been writing for The Nation for twenty-seven years now. I just turned 50, so with luck, I have another twenty-seven or so years in me. During that time I hope, just once, to read someone other than myself in this magazine observe that the Israelis do not bear respon­si­bil­ity for absolutely every mis­for­tune that has befallen the Pales­tin­ian people. And that in fact, the Pales­tin­ian lead­er­ship, and those who call them­selves “militants”–but the rest of the world calls “terrorists”–bear sig­nif­i­cant respon­si­bil­ity as well. I guess today is not that day…

With 27 years of writing expe­ri­ence, Eric is still upset that other writers have intel­lec­tual and literary ranges that extend beyond truism, platitude, and cliche. He also seems to be upset at the world–a Zionist motif–and so ignores it. So when Roane Carey explic­itly calls the PA’s acco­mo­da­tion­ism a “mask,” and refers to “Abbas and his cohort ha [ving] already lost most of the last shreds of cred­i­bil­ity,” Eric is unable to parse this as Carey writing that the “Israelis do not bear [total] responsibility…etc.” The problem is that Israel and American Zionism bear primary and dom­i­nat­ing respon­si­bil­ity for the whole fucking mess. And the latter, or at least the Jewish component of main­stream American Zionism, iden­ti­fies tribally and cul­tur­ally with the former, and Eric has woven this tribalism into the warp of his grating persona for the last 30 years or so. It’s no wonder he is eager to divert blame elsewhere, to place “sig­nif­i­cant” respon­si­bil­ity on the Hamas ter­ror­ists who are under illegal occu­pa­tion and hermetic blockade. No wonder, but increas­ingly pathetic.

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IDF Soldiers Disciplined or something

An internal IDF inves­ti­ga­tion has found (or hasn’t found–hasbara makes figuring things out difficult sometimes) that some Israeli officers autho­rized the attack on the United Nations school during the Cast Lead massacre. The attack appar­ently “jeop­ar­dized” the lives of others in an “unau­tho­rized” manner, as opposed to autho­rized and legally sanc­tioned child killing. Some are saying that the gov­ern­ment admitted using white phos­pho­rus during this par­tic­u­lar assault, a hard charge to deny, although Israel has been denying it with every exha­la­tion since the beginning of the massacre, since white phos­pho­rus is a little hard to miss. IDF spokes­peo­ple say otherwise. Coverage of Israeli war crimes military oper­a­tions is obviously better than silence about Israeli military oper­a­tions. But the genre, at least as practiced in Western news­pa­pers, is still a bit prob­lem­atic, at least insofar as their readers see it as adding to the “debate” about the legality of IDF policies [as proof of the tendency of the IDF to lie it’s much more helpful insofar as it does help dismantle state pro­pa­ganda]. These dis­patches replicate the problems of the Goldstone Report on a micro­cos­mic level–antiseptically legal­is­tic micro-analysis.

I think this type of fact-based reporting so cleansed of his­tor­i­cal context or ethical and moral judgment is poten­tially damaging, because it severely restricts our moral imag­i­na­tion to judgments based on pro­ce­dural lib­er­al­ism, analyzing this action to determine whether or not it violated Article 5 of one con­ven­tion, examining that one and noting its dis­pro­por­tion relative to the provo­ca­tion, usually a rocket made out of cherry-bombs and aluminum foil. Clearly, all the incidents add up to war crimes indict­ments of the sort that prevent Israeli officers from vaca­tion­ing in Europe, and this is good. War criminals do not deserve freedom of movement. If they want to summer in Valencia, they should be thrown in the dock. There need to be con­se­quences, and if the only way to do so is to work through insti­tu­tions devoted to liberal jurispru­dence, then that is the best way to proceed.

But even knowing nothing about any par­tic­u­lar use of white phos­pho­rus, we know that (a) any use of white phos­pho­rus in a populated area is a priori illegal and (b) that the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas on earth. And even knowing nothing of anything that went on in Gaza during Cast Lead, we know that the blockade is illegal and the incite­ment to violent resis­tance. Inevitably, one is drawn into this surreal debate–was X use of force justified, how could we make Y use in the future comport with accepted standards of inter­na­tional human­i­tar­ian law? The wrong questions.

A discourse locked in legal­is­tic quibbling over whether this or that weapon–dense inert metal explo­sives, white phos­pho­rus, flechette rounds, drones–are illegal both generally and in a given war-time scenario is ulti­mately a diversion. It makes us discuss legality of means vs focusing on the morality of ends, and we end up in a carnival of Swiss jurispru­den­tial dis­trac­tion while the occu­pa­tion continues, the blockade [PDF] grows ever-tighter, and politi­cide continues apace, which I guess would be fine if Israeli were a bit more careful about making sure that it followed the Geneva and Hague Con­ven­tions while it bombs the shit out of Gaza.

Two senior Israeli army officers have been “dis­ci­plined” over the firing of artillery shells towards a United Nations compound in a crowded urban area during the war in Gaza last year.

It is the first acknowl­edge­ment by the Israeli military of any of the serious alle­ga­tions raised by inter­na­tional human rights groups and two UN inves­ti­ga­tions, which have found grave breaches of inter­na­tional law and evidence of possible war crimes.

The UN compound was hit and its main warehouse burned to the ground, and three people were injured during the attack in Gaza City on 15 January last year. Several other buildings in the area were hit that day, including a Pales­tin­ian hospital.

The two officers were named in Israeli press reports today as Gaza Division Commander Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg and Givati Brigade Commander Colonel Ilan Malka. It is not clear what form of dis­ci­pline the men faced, but both were accused of “exceeding their authority in a manner that jeop­ar­dised the lives of others”, according to an Israeli report on the conduct of the war that was submitted to the UN on Friday.

The report found Israeli troops “fired several artillery shells in violation of the rules of engage­ment pro­hibit­ing use of such artillery near populated areas”. However, it also stated that Israel’s military advocate general “found no basis” to order a criminal inves­ti­ga­tion into the incident in Tel al-Hawa. So far only one Israeli soldier has been pros­e­cuted over the war – for stealing a credit card from a Pales­tin­ian house.

Last year, a UN Board of Inquiry report inves­ti­gated Israeli attacks on UN buildings and staff in Gaza during the war and accused the Israeli military of “neg­li­gence or reck­less­ness”. It singled out several incidents, including the attack on the UN compound. The warehouse, run by the UN Relief and Works Agency which supports Pales­tin­ian refugees, was the biggest in Gaza and was full of food and aid for the population.

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Congressional Scorecard on Palestine

Continue reading Con­gres­sional Scorecard on Palestine

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Obama Flounders, Because It’s Hard to Lie

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There is maybe some intel­lec­tu­al­iz­ing to be done about this. I don’t know. I think on this point Obama is utterly cynical, and here he is simply verbally bumbling, because maybe this is one of the few issues on which he hasn’t even swallowed his own bullshit.

[Thanks everyone]

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