Anytime Israel does anything militarily there are going to be accidents and there are going to be civilians that get hurt and killed, and the opponents of Israel will obviously make the most of those incidents for influencing world opinion. But sometimes Israel does things that just seem so incredibly counterproductive that I feel like they must be intentional. Why would they attack boys playing hide and seek on the beach right in front of the Al-Deira hotel where many journalists are staying to cover the conflict?
Of course, I understand that it’s possible that this attack was done in error. But I think this man makes a lot of sense:
As the reporters left, Mohammad Abu Watfah was wheeled out of a lift after surgery to remove the shrapnel in his stomach. As relatives gathered not far from the Al-Deira hotel to bury the four dead boys, barely 90 minutes after the attack on the beach, the boys’ uncle, Abdel Kareem Baker, 41, said: “It’s a cold-blooded massacre. It’s a shame they didn’t identify them as kids with all of the advanced technology they claim they’re using.”
Earlier in the article it was mentioned that all the victims were members of “the extended Bakr family.” Could this have been collective punishment for the transgressions of the patriarch? Did Israel know precisely who they were attacking?
I think this is a stronger possibility than that their drone operators can’t distinguish boys playing on the beach from members of Hamas.
And, if this is correct, then Israel actually wants the bad publicity because the whole point is to get families to insist that no one within their extended family have anything to do with Hamas lest the Israelis liquidate them all. The more people who hear of this tragedy the better because it will have more deterrent effect.
It might not even be the worst strategy for killing the resistance, but it’s impossible to reconcile with any human rights standard I can think of.
Why? Shoving their impunity and the failure of the US to call them out into our President’s face. It is the foreign policy version of what is going on at the border with Mexico.
Remember that Bibi and Mitt Romney worked for the same outfit in their younger days. Does Mitt hold grudges like the Bush/Cheneys do?
what are you getting at? I’m not following here
Me either.
From the first contact of the Obama administration, Bibi Netayahu has deliberately undercut every effort Obama has made to unwind the the violence between Israel and Palestine within the old even-handed peace process approach. And then Bibi collaborated with the GOP to undercut the opening with Iran.
Netanyahu’s close ties with the Republican Party in the US did not make sense, given the pro-Israel folks in the Democratic Party, until in 2012 we found out that Bibi and Mitt go way back.
Refugees from Central American violence have never been treated as inhumanely as they are these days on the border–with Rick Perry and Hannity acting like they are going “wetback hunting” with assault rifles. This is calculated election move.
Emphasizing the failure of Kerry’s Israeli-Palestine peace overture in such a graphic way as killing four kids on a beach seems the same gratuitous stunt for a US mid-term election year. (I would argue that Victoria Nuland’s war in Ukraine is of the same GOP-supporting character.)
Netanyahu is emphasizing the powerlessness of the President to stop foreign aid to Israel in the midst of a Congress that seeks to impeach him “just because”.
The GOP is calling in chips globally in desperation to win this mid-term.
But Bibi is capable of ordering this sort of gratuitous violence for his own reasons. And currently he’s the moderate voice.
Did you see the president’s little speech in the white house press room today? It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. I stared in disbelief as he defended Israel and the whole thing felt like he was reciting some speech by rote or saying words he didn’t believe in.
The whole thing struck me as very odd, and what you have written here made me think of the speech, though I’m not exactly sure why.
State Department press session was equally surreal.
Any idea of what might be going on?
Sometimes you write something here at the frog pond and it’s like you supplied the piece that was missing from the puzzle, and then everything makes sense.
I’m hoping for that this time, for obvious reasons.
I have no idea why beginning with Ukraine, the President and John Kerry have allowed the neo-cons burrowed in the State Department to run amok. The craziness in Congress over lawsuits and impeachment seem to be one reason and my suspicion is that there are folks acting in concert on the domestic and foreign policy side to try to destroy this Presidency before the mid-terms in order to capture the Congress.
Thanks. Well, they are succeeding at one thing – I have been feeling frustrated and discouraged and beaten down by all the crazy wrong stuff that’s happening on every front.
Where they’ve missed the boat is thinking that means I won’t vote in november; all this crap makes me more certain that we need to take back the house and make some gains in the senate.
Anyone who things that divided government is working is either out of their mind or hates Obama more than they love our country.
From the first contact of the Obama administration, Bibi Netayahu has deliberately undercut every effort Obama has made to unwind the the violence between Israel and Palestine within the old even-handed peace process approach.
Given the President’s little speech today, can one really say Obama feels any different than Congress re: having their heads up Netanyahu’s ass?
One never knows what a politician actually feels. The fact is that Obama’s toeing of the Israeli special relationship line has not caused Netanyahu to actually treat him with the respect that heads of state usually receive as a matter of course. Either Netanyahu is a racist, a tool of the US GOP, or both.
Thanks for clarification. I’m with Watergirl, comment below, in finding what’s happening confusing given my understanding of our president. But I’m wondering if he’s making small gestures only so that Israel and Ukraine emerge as clearly the primary actors in their situations. Nothing will ever be resolved if the situations unfold purely as an extension of our foreign policy.
BTW- could you shoot me an email Tarheel? I have something I want to show you.
Done.
It’s also the first cousin of what is going on in Syria/Iraq.
Playing empire sure does cause a lot of long-term blowback!
>>Of course, I understand that it’s possible that this attack was done in error.
BooMan, every once in a while you say something so fucking stupid that I doubt your sanity.
>>I think this is a stronger possibility than that their drone operators can’t distinguish boys playing on the beach from members of Hamas.
I think their drone operators don’t give a fuck which Palestinians they kill. They’re getting paid to kill Palestinians, I strongly suspect they enjoy it, and they did this to rub in everyone else’s face that they can and will kill all the Palestinians and there is no power on earth that can stop them.
The Israelis learned, first hand, that to get away with genocide, you have to do it very, very slowly.
This is all we are seeing.
Next topic.
So much like the ghettos in Poland. Only instead of months, it’s been maintained for decades with periodic sweeps to kill a few of the inhabitants. A major difference is that Israel would be fine if all the Palestinians emigrated to somewhere else. Of course, that was the original plan for the Jews in Germany and those that were able to leave, did so.
The Warsaw ghetto was inhumane; and so is the Gaza ghetto.
Exactly.
On one level the inhumanity is horrible to witness. Like something from the distant past – not something we expect in the 21st century.
On another level, more distant, it’s fascinating to watch. How a country that was founded by a group that was one of the main victims of the Holocaust actively committing the exact same atrocities – starting in 1948 with snatching land and buildings from the occupants – and being totally unaware that they have turned into exactly that which they so despised.
I think the phrase “Never Again” is great. I’m just deeply disgusted that for most Israelis what they really mean is “Never Again to Us – screw everyone else”.
As bad as Israel has treated the Palestinians, they are not engaged in a policy of extinction. It may feel good to throw the Holocaust in the Israeli’s faces and make comparisons, but there is no good reason to exaggerate the similarities. The Israelis are not doing the “exact same thing” to the Palestinians that the Nazis did to the Jews. It’s more like what the Germans did to the French.
Fair point. But I suspect that Israel feels that as long as they aren’t actually firing up the ovens and gas chambers they aren’t really as bad as the Nazis. Basically, they can do everything up to, but not including, genocide, and that makes it okay.
And the treatment of Gaza has been pretty damn close.
Here’s my point.
When Germany conquered France and occupied it, they used brutal tactics to suppress the French Resistance but they didn’t have any intention of eradicating French people from the face of the planet. That ambition was reserved for gays, gypsies, and Jews, which is what made National Socialism uniquely evil.
The Israelis are occupying conquered territory and using brutal tactics to suppress the resistance. The majority of the people there are supportive of continuing to occupy the conquered territory, just as the Germans supported owning Vichy France. But only a handful of Israelis actually want to kill every Palestinian or force them all to flee.
Even right now, the government is basically trying to figure out how to solve their vulnerability to rocket fire rather than just kill a bunch of people. Their initial motive was to prevent Hamas and Fatah from forging a cooperative relationship, but part of that is because they know that the Gazans had amassed a huge arsenal of rockets.
While it’s true that Hamas was suppressing the use of rocket fire, the arsenal was growing and becoming ever more threatening.
Israel created the conditions that led to the resumption of rocket fire and are using the resumption as the pretext to destroy Hamas and eliminate their stockpile of weapons.
This behavior has a logic behind unlike the bizarre notion that Aryans are a super race that should eradicate whole ethnicities from the planet.
I believe Israel would have better options if they would stand up to the Settlers and give up on the Greater Israel project, and so I find their behavior to be morally deplorable. But it isn’t rooted in genocidal thinking.
What an odd comparison.
It’s unknown how the Germans would have treated the French if the occupation had lasted for sixty years, but in the four years that it did, non-Jewish French civilians weren’t herded into ghettos. The Vichy government did the Nazi’s dirty work in rounding up and deporting Jews beginning in 1942. It also actively collaborated with occupation forces to defeat the Resistance. A significant portion of the non-Jewish Polish population was similarly accommodating, but originally the Nazis planned to disappear them as well.
Likely that a super majority of Israelis want every Palestinian to leave all lands that fall within “Greater Israel.” Preferably move far away and relieve Israel of any refugee camps on its borders.
Nobody here is suggesting that the Israelis want or ever intend to mimic the Nazis “final solution.” However, that was the third stage in their effort to remove Jews and other populations that they considered undesirable. However, Israel has replicated the first two stages.
And as Max Blumenthal notes, this is not new territory. The far right probably wants to maintain the statelet-occupation-reservation-prison, or make them second-class citizens of Israel. The liberals? They’d rather do the ethnic cleansing. It’s that ugly spot in their head that won’t go away…so let’s just make it go away.
Excerpt from an excellent interview:
This is another of the many situations where the off-the-charts evil of the Nazis clutters up the discussion. Somebody can be pursuing policies similar to evil Nazi policies, even to the point of becoming quite evil themselves, and still be vastly less evil than the Nazis were. That’s the situation here.
The problem is that the Nazis are really the only example of many of these kinds of things that most people know about. So there’s just no good historical reference – use the Nazis and and the apologists say “hey, they’re not as bad as the Nazi”; use something else and most people don’t get the reference.
I think the comparison of Palestinians under Israeli rule with the French under Nazi rule is flawed from the beginning. Germany ruled France, but it didn’t think France was Germany, or that French people were interlopers in that part of Germany known as “France”. The underlying premise of Zionism, however, is that Palestine is Israel, and Israel is a state for Jewish people.
So the position of Palestinians under Israeli rule is much more tenuous than that of the French. They are living under an ideology – Zionism – that says they are interlopers in their own land. Unfortunately for Zionism, those “interlopers” exist in numbers too big for Zionism to absorb. If Palestinians were left to live as citizens in their own land, they would simply vote themselves free of Zionist rule, and the experiment would be over. So it is an underlying imperative of Zionism that ultimately Palestinians need to be disappeared.
Of course this doesn’t require putting people in gas chambers under the cover of a cataclysmic war. It doesn’t necessarily mean killing them at all. There are lots of ways Zionism can tackle its “Palestinian problem” which don’t require gas chambers, just a lot of patience, a lot of stalling tactics (“negotiating” partition while simultaneously expanding your colonization through the land supposedly being partitioned, for example) and a much longer term outlook than you credit it with.
For instance, you can initially bluff your way through, pretend there are no Palestinians, and therefore no Palestinian problem (“Land without a people for a people without a land”; “no such thing as a Palestinian people”).
Or you can take the Moshe Dayan approach, and deliberately make conditions in the Occupied Territories so unlivable that the people who live there will “voluntarily” leave (“you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wants to can leave – and we will see where this process leads … In five years we may have 200,000 less people – and that is a matter of enormous importance”). Also espoused by Ariel Sharon (“You don’t simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away … I prefer to advocate a more positive policy … to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave.” )
Or the other Ariel Sharon approach, i.e. let them stay, but as invisible people walled in bantustans with no right to vote for the government that rules them (“[former Italian prime minister Massimo D’Alema] said that three or four years ago he had a long conversation with Sharon, who was in Rome for a brief visit. According to D’Alema, Sharon explained at length that the Bantustan model was the most appropriate solution to the conflict. The defender of Israel quickly protested. “Surely that was your personal interpretation of what Sharon said.” D’Alema didn’t give in. “No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a precise quotation of your prime minister.”)
Or the Ben Gurion approach of driving out large numbers of civilians under cover of war, and never letting them return (“We [i.e. Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon] walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his questions: `What is to be done with the population?’ B.G. waved his hand in a gesture which said, `Drive them out!”). Also espoused by Benjamin Netanyahu (“Israel should have taken advantage of the suppression of the demonstrations in China [Tiananmen Square], when the world’s attention was focussed on what was happening in that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the Territories. However, to my regret, they did not support that policy that I proposed, and which I still propose should be implemented.”)
So Zionism has lots of solutions to its Palestinian problem, but they all involve making them physically or virtually disappear. This is not by accident, but arises out of Zionism’s original sin, which is this: You could never have created, and even today cannot maintain, a Jewish state in a place as un-Jewish as Palestine without getting rid of millions of people from the pre-existing population.
That is the tenuous situation Palestinians face vis-a-vis Zionism, just because they are the wrong ethnic-religious “sort” of people. It doesn’t seem to me to be at all analogous to that of the French under German rule.
Ethnic cleansing through forced refugees and gradual occupation of land is closer to what the US did to American Indians than to the Holocaust.
That said, it is a horror and against both international law and the charter of the UN, both of which Israel has signed.
And US silence in the face of 66 years of a policy of ethnic cleansing is not to our credit.
“How much does Israel care about what the world thinks?
They just killed 4 kids on a beach in front of a hotel filled with journalists.”
~Yousef Munayyer
They. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck. And by any rational basis, why should they? Settlements continue to expand as this “peace process” continues on. American opinion — even among “liberal Democrats” — overwhelmingly favors Israel. The more barbaric they get, the more they win it seems. They could drop a nuclear warhead on the beaches of Gaza and get a unanimous statement of approval from Congress and the State Department.
Although I do commend you for at least blogging about it. Every other “liberal” blog (not left, mind you) has been silent except you, and LGM.
Also, your theory — entirely plausible — reminds me when I was 15 and at a lunch “Bible discussion” with my old youth pastor. I asked him how he could reconcile the good of God when he ordered these people to massacre not only those other people, but their children, too. He plainly said, “Because if they didn’t, there would be blow-back and the need to seek vengeance”. I’m paraphrasing what he said, but that was the general gist. He wasn’t just saying this as “That’s why they did it” as a rational basis. No, he said it as if he approved of it.
“settlements”. Sigh.
One reason why I enjoy traveling abroad is access to non-US media. That means, of course, non-AIPAC-approved media.
The term “settlements” is an abomination. “Stolen land” would be more appropriate.
Ever notice how Israelis are “murdered” by “terrorists” and “hard-line extremists” while Palestinians are “caught in the crossfire”?
Recently I read how Nutty-yahoo is “pounding” terrorist/extremist “targets” in Gaza in response to Hamas aggression while Arab “terrorists” are firing rockets into “civilian” areas in Israel. Every fucking US-authored article and headline that Google News pops up is written as if straight from the Israeli censorship bureau.
This conflict is more one sided than Jim Crow and Apartheid.
Hm, I guess Atrios did blog about it, once:
Max Blumenthal catches the NYT:
Four boys were just killed on a beach in Gaza. So the NY Times features a photo of Israeli cops ducking for cover.
Rachel Maddow ignores the story in Israel/Palestine
Will she ignore it tonight? We’ll find out in ~45 mins.
Not in US media:
Mothers of all Palestinians must be killed: Israeli MP
holy shit.
You said it!
Through Lens, 4 Boys Dead by Gaza Shore; If children are being killed, what is there to protect me, or anyone else?
This sort of behavior makes me so sick. As a Jew, I’ve never before, until now, wished that Israel had never been created, that the entire partition had not happened. But wasn’t this (and all the other atrocities) an all-but-inevitable result? Yes, there were some Jews, perhaps many, who wanted to live in peace with their Arab neighbors and thought it possible. But when entire villages like Lydda and Ramle were deliberately overrun in “48, that was the end of any possibility of peaceful coexistence.
Ben-Gurion ordered it because he saw there was no other way for a contiguous state of Israel to exist. How did the rest of the world not see it? Or did they just not give a rip because the inhabitants weren’t white?
I bet this is calculated to inflame not anti-Israel but anti Jewish feeling. A few antisemitic marches and rallies especially by Muslims would generate a powerful counter to Israeli condemnation.
Did they do what on purpose?
Kill Palestinians on a beach? Yes, of course they did. Just another step forward by an apartheid state committing genocide just slow enough to not be condemned by it’s patrician supporter, the US.
Kill a couple of kids? Yes, of course they did. Just another step forward by an apartheid state committing genocide just slow enough to not be condemned by it’s patrician supporter, the US.
Remember, folks. They hate us because of our freedumbs.
You know what’s even more sick and demented? Our government blaming it this on Hamas. It just shows how it isn’t just Congress that has their head so far up Netanyahu’s ass.
Cross-posted from Richard Silverstein’s Tikun Olam — Gaza War Day 8: 180 Palestinian Dead.
The cease-fire scam from warmonger Tony Blair, Egypt’s Sisi and war criminal Netanyahu to foil the expected arrival of Secretary Kerry to broker a deal between parties.
My post @MoA — Hamas roots in the Muslim Brotherhood and has no friends left in ME but Turkey and Qatar. At Informed Comment — Gaza: Families destroyed by Israel’s bombs. At Mondoweiss — Israel’s message to the Palestinians: Submit, leave or die.
Just 10 days ago …
What happened next? Start miliary action to please the crowd, even Rome’s Ceasar knew how to entertain the populus by gladiator fights and feeding Christians to the lions in the Coliseum.
○ Likud Policy of Israel and A Clean Break from Arab States
Just 18 months ago before US initiated a new round of ‘peace talks’ foiled by Israel’s hawks and PM Netanyahu –
○ Cease Fire Deal? Clinton On ME Peace Mission, Meeting Netanyahu.
○ GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) Development at Boeing
○ IAF uses new US-supplied smart bunker-buster missile GBU-39 – Dec. 28, 2008
The Obama administration continued to fulfill all military wishes of the Netanyahu regime urged on by his blackmail to bomb Iran for Israel’s ‘security’. Keeping Israel on the qualitative military edge ahead of its Arab neighbors. Pentagon has approved military hardware for the UAE, Saudi Arabia and latest order by Qatar – US Patriot missiles in a major arms deal worth $11 billion.
OK, is comparison with the Nazis still unacceptable?
OF COURSE they did it in purpose.
Ya’ll are overthinking this. There is no secret plan to the killing. They’re just killing. Look at Vietnam. There’s no public relations plan here. They know they can do whatever they like.
Israel says the four boys who were killed were “human shields”:
Link
How can you not realize that this would be a terrible strategy. It would have the opposite of a deterrent effect. A man might condemn his brother or an organization for a crime, but if you kill his own child in revenge, you’ve instantly made him your enemy. If Israel declares entire extended families to be fair targets, then they will de-facto create more hostility towards Israel, not less. The entire conflict is founded on both sides in vengence for past wrongs. This simply feeds into that.
Ya’ll are overthinking this. There is no secret plan to the killing. They’re just killing. Look at Vietnam. There’s no public relations plan here. They know they can do whatever they like.
Flash Games