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.
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.
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.
Quick question: what do confusedsectors 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
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.
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.”
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.
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 Nationprinted 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.
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.
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.
