War on Goldstone now deploys human-rights orgs and, you guessed it, the Holocaust
This Philip Weiss report (January 25, 2010) goes after Israel for playing the Holocaust card (part of Israel’s framing itself as a victim) in an attempt to dismiss the UN Goldstone Report on the Gaza massacre last year. 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians including over 300 children were killed. Questions that seem to stump Israeli apologists remain unanswered: how did so many Palestinians die and why did Israel break the ceasefire negotiated by Egypt.
The war that was launched this past weekend against the Goldstone report in the New York Times is aimed at the mildmannered Sec’y General of the United Nations. So Norman Finkelstein tells me, and this Haaretz piece confirms. On February 5, Ban Ki-moon will report to the General Assembly on the progress of the report (which was published last summer by the UN Human Rights Council). Before then Ban will have gotten the Israeli gov’t’s response to the Goldstone report-its effort to nullify the findings-and Haaretz says the goal is to get Ban to say, I accept the Israeli response to the charges, let the Israelis investigate the Gaza slaughter.
Today the campaign for Ban is playing… the Holocaust card! “Israeli leadership is planning an all-out attack on the report to coincide with Wednesday’s anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz.”- AFP. Israeli leaders are rushing to Auschwitz this week, even as the Israeli information minister has declared the report to be “anti-Semitic.”
The world will mark International Holocaust Day on Wednesday. Monday will see President Shimon Peres fly to Berlin and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leave for a visit to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. They will be joined by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in Budapest and Information Minister Yuli Edelstein in New York. Before meeting with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Edelstein referred to the report accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza, calling it “anti-Semitic”.
The Israelis are also turning to human rights organizations in this war. Note that in his New York Times in which he published the Israeli claims re Goldstone without contradiction, Ethan Bronner put forward the Arab League report on the Gaza war, prepared by John Dugard, in an effort to make Judge Goldstone seem extreme. Bronner also deployed the Israeli human-rights orgs Breaking the Silence and B’tselem for his tendentious assertion that “virtually no one in Israel” believes that Israel targeted civilians in the war, as Goldstone alleged.
“I do not accept the Goldstone conclusion of a systematic attack on civilian infrastructure,” said Yael Stein, research director of B’Tselem. “It is not convincing.”
Yes, and Gaza was reduced to rubble, and numerous police stations and the jail and the legislature and schools and hospitals were targeted and/or destroyed. I wonder what Stein would call that infrastructure? Terrorist infrastructure? “Stein’s comment is an outrageous falsehood, as anyone knowing the timing of the destruction can confirm: 90% of the destruction in the last 72 hours while Israel was withdrawing and in full control of the territory; 2,000 homes were destroyed in that period,” explains Finkelstein.
The scholar reminds me that both B’tselem and Breaking the Silence are targets of an Israeli Foreign Ministry effort to end their foreign funding. Right wing Israeli polls have called B’tselem a “trojan horse.” This is mortal combat…
Links also in the original.
“I do not accept the Goldstone conclusion of a systematic attack on civilian infrastructure.
It is not convincing. But every incident and every policy has to be checked by an independent
body because the military cannot check itself. They need to explain why so many people were killed.”
Yael Stein, research director of B’Tselem
Elihu Richter and Yael Stein carried out a careful study of the casualty estimates based on a wide range of indicators, and criticize the B’tselem report for systematically inflating the “civilian” category by using definitions that skew the results and contradict the statistical probabilities.
Dr. Yael Stein MD
Center for Injury Prevention and Genocide Prevention Program
Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine
See also report by CAMERA
Yael Stein, Research Director at the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, explained the effects of white phosphorous on the human body to RFI.
“White phosphorus causes awful burns, it’s incredibly hard to treat, even if you just touch it, it causes awful burns on the skin, which of course is severe suffering. I don’t think it’s bearable.”
Stein says that her group has talked to doctors and other medical staff who confirm that they have treated its effects. Stein finds the military’s denials ridiculous.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."The CAMERA garbage:
Victims dont kill as many women and kids and innocent men I may add as Israel has.
What keeps amazing me is that so many people who should know better seem to be pretending that so-called “Operation Cast Lead” (is naming deadly and destructive rampages like this supposed to sanitize them?) is the first time Israel has committed this kind of slaughter and obviously intentional destruction of infrastructure. It’s as if they have not even noticed Israel’s entire 60-plus year history of this kind of behaviour. Have people already forgotten Lebanon, 2006? And what about that terrible period prior to `Arafat’s death during which Israel punished the Palestinian Authority for every failure of its security services to adequately protect the occupiers by destroying more and more and more of their security infrastructure, and making it physically impossible for Palestinian security personnel to move from one area to another? And what about all the attacks in and on Lebanon, Palestine, and on and on and on in which they killed disproportionate numbers of civilians, especially children, and clearly targeted civilian infrastructure, including medical emergency services.
Israel has ALWAYS intentionally targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure, and before Israel did, the Zionists did. Why are so many experienced people pretending Gaza 2008-9 is something new when it is just more of the same?
Since 1982, when Sharon went on a rampage through southern Lebanon reaching Beirut and its outskirt Palestinian refugee camps, and 20,000 Shiites and Palestinians were killed, and massacres occurred at the Sabra and Shantila camps, all of which gave birth to Hezbollah, Israel has invested considerably in propaganda services at home and abroad, obviously in the US, and Britain more recently.
You asked why. That’s my understanding.
Yes, I get that part, but so many of the people who are treating so-called “Cast Lead” as a unique, or at least an unusual event are very experienced and sophisticated, and have been studying and reporting on, or at least aware of Israel’s human rights violations for years if not decades. Nevertheless, they are treating this as something new and different, as if they haven’t seen it hundreds of times before.
It may have something to do with the extremeness of the brutality, but also that the Europeans just reached their limit. The response overseas was too loud for the American press to ignore.
Alternatively, the Israel as victim and reactionary theme may have run out of steam. Israel did break the ceasefire by entering Gaza to kill six Palestinian militants. We don’t even know if they were Hamas militants, as other groups are operating in Gaza as well.
Just some ideas.
I don’t think the assault on Gaza was necessarily more brutal than previous rampages. I think your suggestions that Europeans had reached their limit, finally the U.S. press was forced to hear, and quite possibly the “all right, enough with the world’s only real victims crap” was part of it too. It still seems odd to me that so many people who have been all too aware of Israel’s history of brutal rampages, targeting civilians, intentionally destroying civilian infrastructure, and scorched earth policy (anyone remember Quneitra?) seem to think this was something different. To me it seemed like just more of the same. In any case, if it has led people to some sort of tipping point at long last, then that is the very thin, faint silver lining around a cloud of utter disaster.
Now, when will Obama actually grow a backbone that he can use when dealing with Israel?
As for the backbone question, you guess is as good anyone’s.
You’re not incorrect about the brutality of the earlier massacres in Lebanon and Gaza. My point, not well made, was that Gaza just got more attention, or perhaps it was the “tired of watching them” factor, standing by doing nothing or even condoning them through silence, e.g., Turkey’s prime minister’s face off with Peres. Hard to believe the man, Peres, has a Nobel Peace Prize and has a Peace Center named for him. How often can we look away and still live with ourselves?
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It’s not Israel that has changed but the world of which it is part and became isolated after the Gaza War. Under Bush/Sharon all actions on the West Bank (Jenin) and Gaza were covered under the “terror threat” after 9/11. The Palestinians were involved with extensive suicide attacks in Israel, so little sympathy or understanding can be expected. The roles have turned after the inauguration of Obama, Erdogan’s anger, the criticism of human rights abuse and the UN Goldstone report. The world is now taking a different view with the suffering and poverty in Gaza, the continued building of settlements in occupied Palestinian territory and the Israeli arrogance through the media. Palestinians have become victims again and Israel is seen as the aggressor. Too bad the US administration has backed down to the rhetoric of Netanyahu and his right-wing compatriots.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."This I’d say. The Palestinians in Gaza have reached the state here no one can buy them as a credible threat to Israel anymore.
Well, what you say may be true, except for the buying into it part. Israel hasbara services continue to ply notions about “Israel’s right to exist,” and continue to give out the false impression that Israel is a victim of terrorism under threat, the main terrorist groups today being Hamas and Hezbollah.
It’s all a cover for the continuing occupation and the colonialism of Palestinian lands that it supports. A very slick operation.
Sorry, did I forget to mention Iran?
The internet has exposed the “fruits” of Zionism to the world. Can’t put that genie back in the bottle.
but have you seen it?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/03/barak-apartheid-palestine-peace
Yes, I did see it, BBC I think, but I already had too many other things up and even on the rec list. There is so much material on the IP conflict that it becomes a matter of choice and importance. This is important, mainly because he took on Netanyahu, whose claims to lands in the West Bank, Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, the borders, military presence, etc, in other words, the status quo today, already guarantees that “formal” Apartheid will be the next phase of the conflict. There are now only semantic differences separating military occupation and Apartheid in the territories.
Thanks for mentioning the article.
See this:
Dr. Norman Finkelstein at the University of Waterloo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNQSV3BBtZ4
What a hero.