Thanks to investigative journalist Gareth Porter we know that in January 2006, when Hamas won a 56 percent majority in the Palestinian parliamentary election, the Bush administration initiated actions to overturn the election results. It coerced the UN, the European Union and Russia into demanding that Hamas “disarm” before a political solution could be reached between Palestine and Israel.
This is a signal characteristic of administration’s behavior in foreign affairs: require the target to cede its bargaining chips as a precondition of negotiations. In the case of Iran, the “offer they must refuse” is the demand that they give up their UN guaranteed “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear development. The administration gave Hamas an ultimatum to bare its throat to an armed and U.S. backed Israel, a move that would have been suicidal. Given the overwhelming preponderance of the Israelis’ actions and rhetoric over the past three years, I see no way to avoid the conclusion that they consider genocide of a defenseless adversary to be a perfectly legitimate course of action.
And it looks like they can get away with it for at least as long as George W. Bush is in office.
Beggars and Choosers
In September 2006, both U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni declared that they would not accept a Palestinian government that included the newly elected Hamas majority. The Bush administration brought pressure on Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve the Hamas government and Rice talked Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into providing covert funds and training to the militant branch of the corrupt Palestinian Fatah party that been voted out of power.
Push came to shove, shove came to biff, Hamas ran Fatah out of Gaza, Israel slapped a blockade on Hamas and the rest is front page news. Israel’s latest talk of agreeing to ceasefire proposal “principles” sounds like a stall stratagem. Condi says the U.S. doesn’t want a ceasefire that will restore a “status quo,” which means the administration wants Hamas even more outgunned than it was before. Israel is equipped to spank the militaries of three neighboring countries. Hamas is armed with rockets that it makes from steel tubes and fertilizer. Israel says that any ceasefire it agrees to will have to include a “working” arms embargo. I guess that means Gaza farmers will have to adopt closed loop fertilizing; a fitting analog of what Israel, with help from the rest of the world, has been forcing the Palestinians to do for generations.
Israel is supposedly allowing a three-hour daily window for food and other supplies to get into Gaza via “humanitarian corridors.” Who do they think they’re kidding? Gaza was in a long-standing crisis situation before began its aerial assault. Three hours of humanitarianism in the middle of an all out invasion won’t amount to a sand ant’s breakfast.
Israel will go on pounding Gaza and Condi will make sure the get to do so as long as they want to, just like she provided high cover for them during the Lebanon travesty. How long Israel keeps this up is a matter of what it hopes to accomplish.
I googled “eliminate hamas” and got 774,000 hits. A lot of people out there are rooting for the best bloodbath ever. Uber-Likudnik Benjamin Netanyahu thinks Israel “ultimately” needs to remove the Hamas government from in Gaza, but doesn’t know if it can be done “right now.” Uh, huh. That sounds like a new entry in the Brave New World Dictionary: ul-ti-mate-ly (adverb) before January 20, 2009. Maybe.
“Eliminate Hamas” is code for something far more sinister; in the present context, it means pretty much the same as “eliminate Democrats and Republicans.”
There is no wiggle space for crazy talk like “We’re here to liberate the freedom loving people of Gaza from their Hamas oppressors” in this scenario. The people of Gaza put Hamas in power to free themselves from the oppression of Israel toadying Fatah. The Gaza Strip covers less than 140 square miles, and almost a million and a half Palestinians live in it. You can’t separate combatants from non-combatants in that kind of situation. The canard about how Hamas “uses women and children as human shields” is the most preposterous mantra in the history of war propaganda. Hamas fighters are defending their homes from within them, and unlike some people, they can’t pack mommy and the kids off to stay with relatives in Florida.
Burn, Babies, Burn!
There’s also no such thing as a “precision” weapon in a theater of war like Gaza. Maybe that’s why the Israelis aren’t being coy about their use of cluster munitions and incendiaries.
I’ve witnessed dozens of debates in the past few days over whether or not these weapons are legal, and I refuse to participate. You can argue laws of armed conflict until the return of the Jedi, and it won’t make a bit of difference. The Israelis are using them whether they’re legal or not. The pertinent question is what the Israelis are trying to accomplish with them.
Like many weapons, clusters and incendiaries have multiple applications, but they were designed with one thing in mind. Bomblet dispensing cluster weapons are for killing people. They’re okay for certain types of dispersed soft targets like fighter jets parked on a flight line, but the “AP” in APAM stands for “anti-personnel,” and Hamas doesn’t have any fighter jets.
Cluster munitions work great against large infantry units moving across open ground, but if the Hamas fighters were dumb enough to move across open ground in large numbers against the Israelis, the fighting would have ended really, really fast. Someone suggested to me that the Israelis may be using clusters to clear minefields. That might clear a few mines I suppose, but the unexploded munitions would create an even denser minefield than the one they were trying to clear. International organizations are still trying to clean up the cluster munitions Israel used in Lebanon and the ones we dropped on Afghanistan. Millions of the things are lolling around the world today, waiting for some kids and a mommy and a dog and a picnic basket to come along. The Israelis will leave tens of thousands of them behind for the Palestinians to remember them by.
Incendiaries are designed to start fires, like the ones they started in Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. Incendiary bombs provide night illumination and daytime smoke screens as a side effect, but seriously folks. If you’re a modern army like the Israeli Defense Force and you plan a major operation for months like the IDF planned this one, and all you want to do is turn day into night and vice versa, you use non-exploding flares and emission type smoke rounds, not incendiaries; just like you don’t pop off a couple of tactical nukes because you “forgot” batteries for the flashlights.
From the looks of things, Israel aims to leave the Palestinians in Gaza with what a Union colonel of the Civil War depicted as “nothing but their eyes to cry with.”
America is inertly watching a nation that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls our “friend and democratic ally” conduct a war of annihilation. Pressed about his lack of comment on the Gaza debacle at a January 7 news conference, President-elect Obama said that his “silence is not a consequence of lack of concern.”
If I threw my dogs a bone like that they wouldn’t get up to sniff at it.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
The Middle East struggle is essentially a “sidewalk fight” between consenting adults. The western world is essentially playing the role of parents in this squabble. The problem for parents trying to resolve any sidewalk fight between kids is attempting to figure out the truth. Who did what to whom and when, and for what reason?
Israel being a Jewish state is a perfect enemy to all of the surrounding Arab majority countries in the area. However, if Israel were to disappear from the region, do you think that would end military conflict in the area? Not in a thousand years! With the common enemy gone the remaining factions would continue to fight each other. Factions supported by Syria would attempt to eradicate those factions supported by Iran and so on and so forth. The nations of the Middle East have been fighting each other since ancient times, and when they lay down their arms and sincerely sue for peace, you will know that the Messiah has truly arrived.
As Norman Cousins observed several decades ago, “No man on earth is further away as a relative from any other man on earth than the 64th cousin.” We are all related and it is simply a question of distance. There is another old saying, “blood is thicker than water”. Many of us have little comprehension of what the term “water” means in this instance. Water represents the most essential subsistence for the human body. Without water you will eventually perish. However, with the most modest loss of blood from the body and you will die immediately. And between the two which is the one that unites us? It’s the BLOOD that unites us as human beings. Every human death diminishes us all as human beings.
So what do those of us who desire peace and love among our brothers do while destruction, bloodshed, and hunger continues to rage unchecked around the world? That is the question I leave you with, my brothers and my sisters….
parvenu,
Have you read this somewhere?: ‘…Hamas won a 56 percent majority in the Palestinian parliamentary election, the Bush administration initiated actions to overturn the election results.’
First you liken the battle to a sidewalk fight between consenting adults, then you have parents trying to break up a sidewalk fight between kids. So, which is it? In fact it is neither. We are delaing with ethnic cleansing and war enabled by the US, paid for by you and me. That’s what it is. Who did what to whom and when? Read Ilan Pappe’s ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ and you’ll learn all you need to know. He’s an Israeli historian.
Your response drifted far afield and failed to answer my final question.
The “western world”, i.e. the United States, plays a MUCH larger role than merely the “parent”.
In 2007 (of course with more or less zero coverage from the mainstream media and zero debate in Congress) the U.S. signed a new ten year $30 Billion dollar financial and military “aid” package for Israel.
The deal stipulates 70 percent of the money is to be used to buy “material” from U.S. defense contractors.
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/middleeast/news/article_1343797.php/Israel_US_sign_30-billion
-dollar_defence_aid_package
time to take OFF the blinders, folks. this is nothing more than a pork package from democrats AND repugs in congress who want to keep the dollars flowing to the defense industries in their respective states– and BRIBES from the very same defense contractors, errrrr, I mean campaign contributions to members of congress who keep the money flowing.
meanwhile, Palestinian children sit next to their dead mothers.. crying.
This is bullshit, folks. and unfortunately this will not be changed by Obama (just one of many U.S. policies to NOT be changed).
The Western world is NOT the United States, but rather includes the United States. Europe from a classic viewpoint is the original Western World.
Understood.
I meant to say the United States as part of the “western world”.
Now that we’ve put that no-brainer behind us, what’s your opinion of the continued U.S. policy of arming Israel?
that is the real issue here.
Your opening premise is ludicrous on its face. This is not a “sidewalk fight”, and it is not between “consenting adults”. It is a fight for their very survival by a small, weak, dispossed, and oppressed people against a world-class military power determined to obliterate it.
And on top of it, you comment is incoherent in the extreme.
Three articles are worth reading.
The Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?
Re-settling Gaza
By LINDA MAMOUN
Think these evacuees can feel compassion for what the Palestinians went through in 1948??
Comptroller finds state failed to house
most Jews evacuated from Gaza
Final solution…loud and clear:
Suicide by Israel
By Spengler
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KA08Ak01.html
Thanks for this diary, Jeff.
We are all getting to be somewhat cynical about the US relationship to Israel, and just beginning to appreciate the “tail wagging the dog” problem we have, which started out as the basis of a lousy movie. But I believe that Americans are no longer cheering on the killings. The pictures are too horrific. Thee’s no such thing as a Hamas baby.
I’ll be writing in coming weeks about our Israel policy. Given Obama’s silence on Gaza–there can be two presidents at a time working on the economy but not on foreign policy–and the people he’s putting in office I don’t believe I’m seeing much change.
Jeff
I agree. And that’s why Israel acted ahead of the Obama’s oath of office.
ops. Misunderstood you. I do think there will be a change.
Obama’s warning to Israel
By Aluf Benn
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053404.html
This means that Israel will find it difficult to close the crossings into the Gaza Strip at will.
What are we going to do to ensure this? End the foreign aid and weapons sales? Ha.
How about sending more soldiers? I read that we have some based in Egypt to make sure that the victims can’t escape.
I remember what happened to other soldiers that we sent to keep peace.
‘By Way of Deception’ by Victor Ostrovsky (pp. 322-5)
October 23,1983 — 241 Marines died when a truck packed with explosives blew up a Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport. At the same moment a similar explosion blew up a French military barracks a few kilometers away, killing 56 French troops. It was confirmed Israel knew of the attacks and suspected they engineered both of them.
In the summer of 1983, this same informant told the Mossad about a large Mercedes truck that was being fitted by the Shi’ite Muslims with spaces that could hold bombs. He said it had even larger than usual spaces for this, so that whatever it was destined for was going to be a major target. Now, the Mossad knew that, for size, there were only a few logical targets, one of which must be the U.S. compound. The question then was whether or not to warn the Americans to be on particular alert for a truck matching the description.
The decision was too important to be taken in the Beirut station, so it was passed along to Tel Aviv, where Admony, then head of Mossad, decided they would simply give the Americans the usual general warning, a vague notice that they had reason to believe someone might be planning an operation against them. But this was so general, and so commonplace, it was like sending a weather report; unlikely to raise any particular alarm or prompt increased security precautions. In the six months following receipt of this information, for example, there were more than 100 general warnings of car-bomb attacks. One more would not heighten U.S. concerns or surveillance.
Admony, in refusing to give the Americans specific information on the truck, said, “No, we’re not there to protect Americans. They’re a big country. Send only the regular information.”
At the same time, however, all Israeli installations were given the specific details and warned to watch for a truck matching the description of the Mercedes.
The general attitude about the Americans was: “Hey, they wanted to stick their nose into this Lebanon thing, let them pay the price.”
I own that book. I think the CIA is no any longer in Israel’s back pocket.
I agree about Obama. At best we will end up with a repeat of Clinton.
My expectations of Obama were so low I did not think he could disappoint me, but he has managed to lower my expectations. The people he has gathered around him, and the people they have gathered around them are not exactly the people you want helping to determine Middle East policy.
Today Amy Goodman had former Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk on. I have not listened to the whole thing yet – can’t stomach too much of it at once – but so far virtually everything he said was directly contrary to the facts, and verifiably so. He lied about things that are common knowledge.
Norman Finkelstein was also on the program. He spoke facts and backed them up with sources. Indyk refused to debate him (he thought he was there to push his latest book of lies), and said he was acting as a Hamas propagandist.
Martin Indyk was on Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy team during her presidential campaign. Now she will be Secretary of State. Martin Indyk was also part of that team of “honest brokers” – aka AIPAC shills – that Clinton took along to help negotiate a “fair peace”.
Obama is looking less and less promising by the day.
agreed Obama is being lazy sod, just like the Democratic Congress has been doing for 2 years. They could have stopped the Iraq war, but no the President is dictator of America.
Dennis Ross who wants to attack Iran.
Richard Haas ditto.
I’m reminded of the Twilight Zone episode Eye of the Beholder.
NO CHANGE!!
.
The operation has so far killed 758 people in Gaza, of whom 257 were children and 56 women, with 3,100 wounded, 1,080 of them children and 452 women, according to Palestinian reports cited as credible by UN officials.
General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto chided the lack of action in announcing his decision to call a meeting of the Assembly, also this evening.
“I can’t stand the smell of formaldehyde,” he told a news briefing at Headquarters. “Rigor mortis seems to have taken over, and we are failing the world, we are failing the cause of peace,” he added, referring to “the dysfunctionality of the Security Council.”
BREAKING NEWS – AGREEMENT UNSC RESOLUTION GAZA CEASEFIRE
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Thanks, Oui.
J
last paragraph written in the third person? You sound like Bob Dole.
If I thought Israel COULD eliminate Hamas I might support the action. Yes, despite what it means then the problem in that particular stretch would be over.
But it’s not going to be over no matter what Israel does militarily.
Actually, I would not recommend supporting the elimination of Hamas in any case. I do not support their religious agenda at all, and I reject utterly Hamas’ targeting of civilians just as I reject Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians, but if anyone actually bothered to try to work with them in a respectful manner, I think they would be pleasantly surprised to discover that they are not a bunch of wild-eyed, maniacal personifications of pure evil at all. In fact, collectively they have become increasingly moderate over the years, despite Israel’s well-documented practice of murdering the most moderate among them.
Only when Spain finally realized in dealing with the Basques that it was foolish to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result, and sincerely worked with them toward a mutually agreeable resolution, lo and behold, terrorism lost its luster with most Basques, and the problem became much easier to contain. There is no reason to believe that it would be different with Hamas, which has generally shown much more interest in peace than Israel has, and which has repeatedly declared its willingness to accept a two-state solution.
I’m agnostic most of the time but times like this I lapse into a suspicious deism. People keep behaving dumber and more hateful than anyone could reasonably expect. Could a secretive nonhuman agency be filling our minds with flattery and resentment through a method of exotic particle physics? Some Jews believe Hebrews are The Chosen of Yahweh, Adonai, Elohim, or whatever it is calling itself this year. Some Japanese believe they are the special people of Ameratsu, the sun goddess. Some Americans believe that the nation has a unique destiny described as American Exceptionalism. Of course there are many others like the folks who persist in miscalling Northern Europeans Aryans, when the real Aryans are the Romany AKA “Gypsies”, Pakistanis and Iranians we are encouraged to despise. If by chance such a Creator exists it is time It grew up and allowed humanity to act their age.