Gaza in the Time of Ashura

The Gaza War is coming at a poignant time for the Shiite world, since the opening 10 days of the first month of the Muslim year, Muharram, are a time of mourning for the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Husayn b. Ali. The tenth of the month, called Ashura, is especially sacred. Some Shiites hold public processions and beat, whip or cut themselves in grief that Husayn was struck down by forces of evil. It is therefore a season of heightened emotionalism, in which the focus is on grieving for the weak, cut down by powerful forces of oppression.

Radical Sunni guerrillas took advantage of this season of processions to the shrines of the Prophet's descendants to attack the gathered Shiites in Iraq. On Monday, a suicide bomber killed 40 and wounded dozens near the shrine of Imam Musa Kazim at Kadhimiya, north Baghdad. While this tactic might have made a perverted sort of sense two or three years ago, as some Sunni Arabs sought Sunni-Shiite conflict as a way of destabilizing Iraq, now that the Shiites have won the battle for Baghdad so decisively, such attacks are just petty revenge or nihilism. They no longer seem to have much political charge.

Iraqis, both Sunni and Shiite, are exercised about Gaza.

For the Shiite world (Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, south Lebanon, central Afghanistan and South Asia), the attack on Gaza is being read as the martyrdom of Husayn.

All the leading Shiite clerics condemned Israel and called for aid to the Gazans during the past week.

Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrullah addressed enormous crowds of Shiites in Beirut on Monday, calling Gazans' resistance to Israel miraculous. He had earlier vehemently attacked Egypt for staying silent and essentially collaborating with Israel in repressing the Palestinians. But Nasrullah has renounced launching an attack on Israel itself.

An Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander and members of the Bahraini parliament called Monday for an oil boycott of the West over the Gaza War.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is refusing to go down that path again. One analyst pointed out that it is easier just to raiee the price with belligerent rhetoric.

The emotionalism of the Ashura season makes it an ideal period during which vehement anti-Israeli and anti-American feeling can be foregrounded.

On Friday, two days after Ashura, there will be a huge protest in the Iranian capital of Tehran.

This whole episode may strengthen the hardliners in Iran and give the regime the excuse it needs to sideline more liberal candidates for prime minister. If Israel prolongs the campaign, there is likely to be increased networking and solidarity among Shiites across national borders. I worry that American targets are closer and easier to hit, and that they will go after the US military as a way of getting at Israel. Nor would the campaign necessarily come during the present operation; Middle Easterners have longer memories about these things than do Americans.

Remember, most Muslims see Israel as merely doing the US bidding in attacking Gaza.

Here is a round up of what the aid agencies have been saying about the situation for civilians in Gaza.

The Analysts at Jane's Defense Weekly expect the Israeli attack on Gaza to last another 10 days or so. They do not expect it to achieve any tangible success, and therefore predict a long-term poor security situation in southern Israel.

Robert Lowe at Chatham House reviews the background of the crisis and concludes,

'The Israeli attack offers no remedy, rather it is a symptom and cause of the open-ended Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it is seriously harming a civilian population already enduring great hardship. Israel has tried and failed to crush Hamas and other Palestinian groups before and it has no clear plan for ending the conflict with Hamas or its occupation of Palestinian territory. Israel cannot impose its will by force and one day it will need to talk to the people it is currently punishing through bombardment and blockade.'

Full posting here.

Israel/Gaza Cyberwar and Parallels to Abu Ghraib

SC magazine reports that Muslim and Israeli hackers have been going at each other in cyberspace, as an adjunct to the fighting in Gaza:

'More than 10,000 sites have been compromised by hackers, many Muslim radicals who are gaining control of the sites to scrawl anti-Israeli, anti-American and pro-Palestinian messages, said Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham . . . a number of high-profile Israel-based sites, including Ynetnews.com and israelairlines.com, recently fell victim to defacement when a Moroccan-based hacker team illegally accessed a New York-based domain registrar . . .'

For a while, there was an Israeli site encouraging denial of service attacks by Israeli hackers, that appears to have been taken down.

PC World adds, "The defacements have primarily affected small businesses and vanity Web pages hosted on Israel's .il Internet domain space."

For a while, Iran's PressTv reports,

' The widely-circulated Israeli daily's website, Ynetnews.com, has been defaced and is now a picture guide to the progressive takeover of Palestinian land by settlers since 1946. The website, which is widely acknowledged as pro-Zionism, also draws parallels between the US conduct in Iraq and the Israeli siege on Gaza with a picture showing Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks above an image of American soldiers torturing detainees in Abu Ghraib prison.'

All those things Bush & Cheney are proud about, like the immense pile of bodies they have had carefully counted (as Tom Engelhardt points out), have not been forgotten by the Muslim world. Gaza reminds them. I shouldn't have thought making an explicit connection to Abu Ghraib would have been necessary-- most people in the Muslim world view Israeli actions as US actions. It is one of the great worries I have, that this attack on Gaza will reignite al-Qaeda terrorism on US soil. More on that later.

From here on out, surely all wars will have a strong cyberspace dimension. Propaganda and counter-propaganda are nothing new, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry is taking a direct role in manipulating Western media on Gaza. But hacking and denial of service attacks have their own dynamics that will change the way the game is played.
/End



Full posting here.

"It's Hell in Here" "They are Bombing 1.5 million People in a Cage"

CBS News broadcasts an interview with a Norwegian physician on the scene in Gaza.

He says he has seen one military casualty come into the hospital. Of 2500 wounded, 50% are women and children. Doing surgery around the clock. There are injuries you do not want to see-- children coming in with open abdomens, with injured legs, we had to amputate both of them. This is a war on the civilian population of Gaza. It is a very young population. They cannot flee. They are fenced in. They are bombing one and a half million people in a cage.



Please write CBS News and thank them for their journalistic integrity in running this piece.

Casualty toll in Gaza as of Monday morning from the Mizan Center for Human Rights.

Apparently the Israeli military trained on this online video game.

Also please write your representative and senator, send this link, and demand that the US intervene diplomatically to stop this atrocity.
/End
Full posting here.

Have Bush and the Neocons Ruined it for the Israelis?

The Israeli propaganda blitz around their attack on Gaza has been greeted with uncharacteristic skepticism by the American public and even by some of the mainstream US press. Even the Jewish American community is uneasy about this one, in a way perhaps unparalelled since the 1982 Israeli attack on Lebanon and siege of Beirut. Jews for Peace in Los Angeles are actively protesting the Gaza atrocities, and newspaper articles from around the US on local protests held this weekend often mention mixed Arab-American and Jewish-American rallies.

If it is true that Americans are greeting Israeli talking points with more criticism this time, is it because we have been intensively exposed for the past 8 years to precisely this sort of mental manipulation by Bush-Cheney and their stable of Neoconservatives?

Let's take some of the basic techniques of propaganda practiced by Bush and compare them to those deployed by the Israeli leadership in the past 8 days.

1. Deny it all.

Bushie Examples: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld denied that there was massive looting in Iraq during April of 2003, alleging that CNN had one tape of a guy stealing a vase and kept looping it over and over again. "How many vases can they have?" he asked. In mid-summer 2003, Rumsfeld denied that there was a guerrilla war in Iraq, even though Jamie McIntyre of CNN was able to quote the Pentagon definition of guerrilla war, and it fit Iraq. Rumsfeld just replied, "No."
Cont'd/

Then there was Bush's insistence that "Brownie" had done a "heckuva job" in New Orleans after Katrina.

Kadima Examples: When French President Sarkozy requested a two-day halt in Israeli air strikes so that humanitarian aid could reach ordinary Gazans, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni replied, “there is no humanitarian crisis in the [Gaza] Strip and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce.” The UN and others involved in humanitarian work in Gaza do not agree:

' the UN agency insisted it was desperate to get supplies into the enclave."The military incursion compounds the humanitarian crisis following more than a week of shelling and an 18-month long blockade of the territory," the UN humanitarian coordinatory said in a daily report. There was an "almost total blackout" across most of Gaza and land and mobile phone networks were also down because they depend on backup generators which had no fuel, the report said. All Gaza City hospitals have been without mains electricity for 48 hours and now rely on backup generators which the UN said were "close to collapse." The report said that "for the second consecutive day Israeli authorities have refused to allow an ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) emergency medical team into Gaza" to help at the main Shifa hospital. The territory has been sealed off for more than two days. . . More than 510 Palestinians have already been killed in Israel's nine day old offensive on Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which on Saturday was intensified with the launch of a massive ground operation. The UN said the tank fire and air attacks were preventing medical staff reaching hospitals and ambulances could not get to injured "because of continuous fire." The World Food Programme has coordinated emergency food deliveries into Gaza in recent months but the Israeli army said there was plenty of food in Gaza warehouses and that the territory's Hamas rulers had halted distribution.'

In line with Livni's Big Lie, the Israeli army said with a straight face that the reason the World Food Program doesn't send food into Gaza is because its warehouses there are "full."

2. Pretend that your main concern is for your own victims

Bushie examples: They refused to say that they "invaded" or "conquered" Iraq, always using the word "liberation" when they spoke of their war of aggression. Bush was not invading and occupying Iraq, he was liberating the long-suffering Iraqis. Richard Perle even maintained that they would be "grateful" for being "liberated." I.e., we're doing this to you for your own good.

The Bushies renamed the Iraqi guerrilla resistance to the US "anti-Iraqi forces." They even managed to get some clueless CNN anchors to report that "anti-Iraqi forces attacked US troops in the Triangle of Death today." The implication was that the US military and its allies were the pro-Iraqi forces.

Kadima: Livni said, "But Hamas is not our problem alone; it is also a problem for all the Palestinians in the region." I.e., Israel is bombing and attacking Gaza on behalf of the Palestinians to secure their welfare.

3. Demonizing the opponent, ad hominem arguments

Bushies: "Axis of Evil" (courtesy Neocon David Frum). Bush called Saddam a "threat" even if he had no weapons!. Saddam was intrinsically dangerous, ontologically dangerous; his danger to the US could not be divorced from his very being in existence. (How silly this all is is easily demonstrated by the Reagan and first Bush administration's active alliance with . . . Saddam.)

Israeli pundit: Confronting the depths of Hamas's evil.

Hamas won the elections for the Palestine Authority in January 2006 and formed a government; yet Livni objects even to speaking of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, because Hamas, she says, is just a terrorist organization. (It has engaged in terrorist tactics, just as Livni has committed state terror on a large scale, as with dropping a million cluster bombs on civilian areas of south Lebanon; but Hamas isn't "just" a terrorist organization, or Livni's bombing of policemen and the ministry of interior in Gaza would make no sense; she thinks it was the government of Gaza, obviously. Hamas has engaged in diplomacy, has called truces, etc. It is made up of human beings, not demons.)

4. Repetition of simple slogans until they become accepted as true

Bushie examples: There are so many I don't know where to start. But the repeated innuendo that Saddam Hussein was operationally connection to the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on the US is the big example. The assertion that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" (itself a propaganda phrase intended to suggest nukes) was made over and over again, and Bush, Rice, andothers constantly used "mushroom cloud" and other nuclear imagery for Iraq.

Kadima: Israeli leaders have repeated over and over again that they "had no choice" but to attack Gaza. But of course they had a choice. They had negotiated before, they could have negotiated again. Assertions that the Palestinians walked away from the 2000 Camp David negotiations, that Israel is involved in a "peace process", that the colonies in the West Bank can't be moved back to Israel, all of these are constantly repeated.


5. Use of half-truths

Bushie examples: Bush would boast that 2/3s of the al-Qaeda leadership had been killed or captured, without mentioning that many in its upper echelons, like, oh, Osama Bin Laden had not. Or he slammed the Democrats who had voted against his illegal war of aggression as "not supporting liberation."

Kadima examples: Israelis point to thousands of rocket attacks by Hamas on Israel, without mentioning that no Israelis had been killed by them during the truce stretching from mid-June, 2008 until December 26. That is, the prelude to the most violent Israeli attack on Gaza since 1967 was . . . not a single Israeli death at the hands of Hamas in the preceding half-year. And in 8 years, Hamas had killed about 15 Israelis with those home made rockets, during which time the Israelis had killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly 1000 of them minors. The rockets were small, handmade affairs for the most part and most landed uselessly. Some did damage to property and a few wounded or killed people. That would be a legitimate assertion. But the quotation of "thousands" of rockets is a half-truth and intentionally misleading.

Another half-truth is that Israel is involved in a "peace process" or supports Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, when in fact it has gone on stealing Palestinian land in the West Bank and making Palestinian lives miserable and colonizing them.

Then there are other techniques such as 6) appeal to fear and 7) appeal to prejudice. Apologists for the attack on Gaza depict Gazans as murderous, jihadi, homophobic, sharia-wielding fanatics, in a word, Muslims, and therefore of course their lives don't matter. Sound familiar?

Having been treated to these propaganda techniques repeatedly and continuously for 8 years, the US public can suddenly hear the similarity in the assertions of Israeli officialdom and its supporters.

Of course, the Neoconservatives had borrowed a lot of their techniques from the Jabotinsky/ Likud tradition of revisionist Zionism, so what goes around comes around.

By the way, since Tzipi Livni admitted Sunday that her government is resisting a diplomatic solution to Gaza and wants to keep the war going as long as possible, and that one impediment is "the pictures coming out of Gaza"-- i.e. of dead children and civilians and ordinary policemen, I'll just put in this link for those with a tough stomach. Not for the squeamish (and not an endorsement of the site). Here is another one; same caveats

Thanks to Lefty Coaster for the Kos Diary on yesterday's IC posting.
Full posting here.

Davidson Guest Op-Ed: "Whose Interest Defines National Interest?"

Lawrence Davidson, author of Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest, writes in a guest op-ed for IC:

Why is it that most Americans pay little attention to foreign policy? For instance, over the last eight years we have seen the awful consequences of foreign policies that support dictators, supply the weapons for war crimes against the Palestinian people, launch invasions of sovereign nations under false pretenses, and earn the United States the anger, bordering on hatred, of growing numbers of people around the globe? Yet there is no real outcry among Americans except for a small, if increasingly vocal, minority.

In a recently published book, Foreign Policy Inc: Privatizing American National Interest (University Press of Kentucky, 2009) I explain why most Americans disregard foreign policy (it is due to a phenomenon I call "natural localism") and examine the consequences of this long standing popular posture.
Cont'd


A major consequence of this disregard is that actual policy formulation has come under the influence of well organized and financed lobby groups which do have interests in foreign affairs. This is certainly the case as regards the Middle East. Here both Jewish Zionists and Christian fundamentalist Zionists have achieved ascendent influence over policy formulation toward Israel and the Palestinian territories and much of the rest of the region as well. Likewise, a neo-conservative interest group with strong ties to Israel, achieved command positions in the Defense and State Departments under the administration George W. Bush. Relative to these lobbies, the influence of oil interests is of only secondary importance. One can argue that as a result of this situation, there is no foreign policy reflecting genuine US national interests for this important part of the world. There has been, and continues to be, only the parochial goals of special interests which present their own aims to the public as "national interests."

The public’s inattention to foreign policy has inevitably led to a deep and persisting ignorance of the consequences of US foreign policy. The mainstream mass media, whose editors and reporters are themselves often biased in their perspectives and ignorant of the "facts on the ground," has helped perpetuate a myth that American foreign policy is mainly an altruistic effort to export our domestic ideals: democracy, modernity, development, etc. The long list of dictatorships that Washington has seen fit to subsidize and arm, the coups and right wing revolutions that the CIA has been involved in (sometimes aimed against democratically elected governments), the subordination of whole economies to the interests of US business concerns, the collusion of multiple US administrations in the destruction of Palestinian people, and other dubious policies have conveniently been overlooked by most of the media. Thus, when those abroad who resist US policies do damage to American lives and property, the vast majority of American citizens have no context to understand their behavior. They are easily convinced they are terrorists who simply "hate our values."

Yet the truth of the matter is that America’s policies in the Middle East have been lobby driven for at least the last 60 years. And, unbeknownst to the general public, they helped create the historical context for the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then, the response of the Bush administration to that attack went on to made things much worse for the US. There are more than a billion Muslims in the world and a growing number of them are now seriously angry at America. There are over 300 million Arabs and many of them are willing to materially support those who stand up against the US and its ally Israel. These vast numbers represent the sea in which our country’s adversaries now swim. The US has not the manpower, the intelligence capacity, nor the staying power to fight and defeat all the various organizations that have and will arise to confront us. Keep in mind that these will not be regular armies, but will be guerrilla operations and clandestine groups who, as we have seen, are already capable of doing us great damage both in their own part of the world and here in America.

Under the circumstances, it is in the interest of all Americans that there be a thorough policy review of past and present foreign policy efforts in the Middle East. This should be done with transparency and include a national public debate on just what are our national interests in that part of the world. If oil is one of them, is it also in the national interest to use force to control that resource at its source? Is Israel really a country important to the United States, or just important to certain powerful but parochial special interests? And, what has truly been the results of Israel’s US subsidized policies toward the Palestinians? Finally, is it an offense warranting impeachment when the president lies, misleads, distorts information and then sends American troops to their deaths based on that presentation? These issues are important to all Americans. They deserve to be publically aired. Progressives should demand these subjects be taken up at all levels of government from town and county councils on up. Media outlets should be picketed with demands for open debate on foreign policy. And, most importantly, Americans should insist that the incoming Democratic administration promote the necessary public debate on national interests and foreign policy formulation. If we ignore this, and allow things to go on as they are, then we can expect nothing but continuing disaster.

By Lawrence Davidson
Professor of History
West Chester University
West Chester, PA
ldavidson a/t wcupa d o t edu

Professor Davidson is author of the just-published Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest





Full posting here.

Unlikelihood of a Shiite-Majority Cabinet in Iraq: 1939

A little bit of irony from the British archives on Iraq.

"Muhammad al-Sadr, the President of the Senate, is believed to aspire one day to head a predominantly Shia Cabinet, but,though his name has been mentioned recently in political circles as a possible Prime Minister, the Sunni effendi element is unlikely ever to accept a Shiah 'alim as Prime Minister. It is also doubtful whether Muhammad al-Sadr could ever succeed in consolidating Shiah opinion behind him."

Basil Newton, British Ambassodor to Iraq/ Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, Baghdad, December 8, 1939
/End
Full posting here.

Gaza 2008: Micro-Wars and Macro-Wars

With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, we have entered the age of micro-wars.

The first wars that Israel fought with its Arab neighbors were conventional struggles in which infantry, artillery, armor and air forces played central roles.

Israel's enemies had few effective tools in the 1950s and 1960s. Abdel Nasser encouraged Palestinian resistance from Gaza in 1955, but it was more harassment than a serious military operation. The Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian conventional armies were what Israel's leaders worried about. Jordan was no match for the Israelis and it had a history of secret agreements with the Zionist leaders, so its military was only a threat when, as in 1967, other Arab leaders convinced the Jordanian leadership to join in a collective effort.
Cont'd

Israel's policies were not merely defensive, contrary to the propaganda one constantly hears from New York. Moshe Sharrett's diaries demonstrate conclusively the expansionist character of the regime. Israel's leaders badly wanted the Sinai Peninsula and therefore a commanding position over the trade of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal in the 1950s and 1960s. There was also some petroleum there. Israel used superiority in armor and air power in 1956 to take the Sinai, in conjunction with an orchestrated Anglo-French attack on Egypt's position in the Suez Canal (which Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalized that summer). President Dwight D. Eisenhower, afraid that vestiges of Old World colonial thinking would push the Arabs into the arms of the Soviets, made Israel relinquish its prize. But hawks in Israel took the Sinai from Egypt again in the 1967 war, in which Israel again demonstrated that armor plus air superiority always defeats armor that lacks air cover (Israel managed to destroy the Egyptian air force early in the war).

Egypt could not accept loss of its sovereign territory. As the largest Arab state, with a third of the Arab population, and a developing economic, technological and military capability, Egypt could not be dismissed. Its leader from 1970, Anwar El Sadat, found a way of striking back. Egypt launched the 1973 war as a surprise attack, and used sophisticated underwater sand-moving equipment to get across the canal and penetrate into the Sinai. By this time Egypt had Soviet SA-6 surface-to-air missiles that served as anti-aircraft batteries and was careful to keep its tanks under their umbrella. Had Egypt had a better air force, Egyptian armor could have rolled right into Israel proper in October of 1973. The Israeli cabinet is said to have feared it was the fall of the Third Kingdom. But even in the absence of a proper air force, the Soviet SAMs were a game-changer. I would argue that they were the difference between the crushing defeat of Egypt in 1967 and the draw-to-slight victory Cairo won in 1973.

The writing was on the wall. Israel could not have the Sinai. Egypt was too big and too increasingly powerful an enemy to continue to provoke it. 1973 settled that. The Egyptian public was tired of war and its expense, and so both sides were willing to conclude the Camp David Peace Treaty of 1978. Egypt got the Sinai back permanently. Israel escaped the most serious military threat in the region.

Israel's political tradition seeks expansion if possible; if not possible, it seeks a balance of power with its enemies. If that is not possible, it seeks to be held harmless from its avowed foes. If that is not possible, it is willing to wage total war to punish the enemy population until it accepts at least a cold peace. (I mean by "total war" war on the civilian population in which the guerrilla group is embedded, as for instance dropping a million cluster bombs on the farms of south Lebanon in 2006 or half-starving Gazan children in 2007-2008, methods illegal in international law but routinely deployed by Israeli leaders and defended by most Zionists everywhere.) Where necessary, Israel is willing to give up territorial expansion to get the cold peace.

The 1982 Lebanon War was a hybrid. Israel deployed a conventional army against the Palestine Liberation Organization and Lebanon. The PLO fought an unconventional struggle in Beirut, and reached out diplomatically to the US, France and Italy to achieve a negotiated outcome rather than an outright defeat. The PLO had to leave Beirut. But Israel's victory was pyrrhic. 1. The Lebanon War was highly unpopular at home and abroad because it seemed unprovoked. 2. The PLO was not destroyed. 3. Israel's old expansionist tendencies kicked in and it was unwilling to relinquish South Lebanon, such that it began occupying yet another Arab country. 4. Israel's occupation helped create the Shiite resistance we now call Hizbullah, which evolved into a highly effective unconventional military force.

Jordan's government was neutralized in the early 1990s with a peace treaty, just as Egypt's had earlier been with Camp David. The PLO also engaged in the peace process off and on, and with the death of Arafat the old guerrilla PLO seemed to end, as Fatah became a political party.

That development left Israel with three main regional enemies: Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas. Hizbullah in turn gradually attracted Iranian patronage. In the case of the Levantine players, the main issue was Israeli occupation of their land-- south Lebanon and the Shebaa Farms for Hizbullah, the Golan Heights for Syria, and Gaza and the West Bank (the most vigorously colonized of the Occupied Territories) for Hamas.

The Arab-Israeli wars of the opening years of the 21st century have not been conventional wars. They have been micro-wars. Israel had demonstrated in the earlier Arab-Israeli wars that it could generally win a conventional struggle.

The new repertoires of struggle against Israel had four dimensions.

First, they depended on fundamentalist religious party organization (Hizbullah, Hamas), wherein cadres gained popularity in their own base by providing aid and services (e.g. hospitals, soup kitchens, etc.) This development marked a distinctive move away from the leftist romantic guerrilla model of the late 1960s and the 1970s, which was secular and less organic. Because they are religious and political communities, they can lace their guerrilla organizations and materiel through the civilian sphere. Guerrilla operations might be planned out in a civilian apartment building. Rockets might be stored in a mosque.

Second, they deployed new tactics such as suicide bombing, sophisticated tank-piercing explosively formed projectiles, and the launching of small rockets on Israeli settlements and nearby towns. (Large rockets are vulnerable to the Israeli air force; small rocket launchers are mobile and hard to locate).

Third, the micro-warriors depended on regional-power backing (Syria, Iran) and technical help in the modification of rocket technology and in other areas, such as breaking Israeli codes and gaining the ability to monitor Israeli military communications.

Fourth, they targeted Israel's Achilles heel, its demographic vulnerability. Jewish communities are economically thriving and well integrated in the industrial democracies, and there are significant pull factors encouraging Israeli emigration. Some Israeli demographers think that if one counts the second generation, there are 900,000 Israelis outside of Israel. There are as many as 200,000 Jews now in Germany, mostly from the former Soviet Union, who preferred to go there rather than to Israel. During the Second Intifada or Palestinian uprising, in some years Israel's retention rate of new immigrants fell to unheard-of low levels. Some 50 percent of American immigrants to Israel have returned to the US,and Israel has lost nearly 10% of its one million Russian immigrants. All the violence is nervous-making. The micro-wars, the wars of the rockets, are intended to discourage in-migration to Israel by the Russians and other former East Bloc Jews, and to foster out-migration by Israeli Jews, which the Israeli leadership and Zionism generally view as a dire threat to the character of the Israeli state.

All four dimenstions played a part in Hizbullah's success in forcing Israel to end its occupation of south Lebanon in 2000. That forced withdrawal was micro-war's first big success, and a more decisive victory than Egypt gained with conventional arms in 1973. Israel had to give up its claim on a slice of Arab territory without receiving any guarantees of peace or any advantage whatsoever.

All four dimensions were also at play in the summer, 2006 Israeli-Lebanese War. Hizbullah deployed its rockets so effectively that one fourth of Israelis were forced to flee their homes temporarily. Although the earlier Arab-Israeli wars did sometimes send Israelis to bomb shelters, I don't believe that as much of a fourth of the population was ever made to flee their own dwellings before. Hizbullah benefited from the loyalty to it of villagers and townspeople it had helped with clinics and other social services. Hizbullah was able to penetrate Merkava tanks and even hit an Israeli ship at sea. With Iranian and Syrian help, they had cracked Israeli codes and could listen in on their enemy's military communications. The Israelis had no idea where their caves and tunnels were. Israel lost the war with Hizbullah in the sense that the latter proved resilient. Only by ratcheting the struggle up to a total war, in which Israel hit Lebanese infrastructure in general and killed over 1000 Lebanese, many of them not Hizbullah or even Shiites, was it able to convince the other Lebanese and the UN/Europeans to intervene to restrain Hizbullah. The Israeli attempt to permanently ethnically cleanse the Shiites from Lebanon's deep south near the Israeli border by the use of cluster bombs failed. The ensuing de facto truce allowed Hizbullah to re-arm with rockets and to gain legitimacy as part of the Lebanese cabinet, but the European border patrols under the banner of UNIFIL (UN peacekeepers) have forestalled further micro-warfare against Israel for the moment.

Even as the northern front quietened from fall of 2006, despite Israel having achieved few of its war goals, a new microwar broke out in Gaza.

In the 1980s, when the secular, left-leaning Palestine Liberation Organization predominated as the Palestinian political force, Israeli intelligence funneled some aid to Hamas (descended from the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood), a fundamentalist group, in hopes of dividing and ruling the Palestinians. That part of the plan worked, but Israeli intelligence created a monster, since as Hamas grew in strength and popularity, it grew increasing vocal about its rejection of Israel and its ambition to see the state dismantled, allowing the emergence of a fundamentalist Muslim Palestinian state where Israel now stands.

The current Israeli military effort to substantially weaken Hamas in Gaza follows on the contradictions in Kadima Party policy. In 2005 Kadima, led by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which Israel had occupied in 1967. But since Kadima refused to negotiate with Hamas, Israel was unable to shape the political structures of its former colony, leaving the outcome to chance. It was not a stable place By 2005 Gaza had a population of 1.5 million. Although it was a relatively nice little Mediterranean region before the rise of modern nation states, its traditional markets were Egypt and Jordan, and after 1967 its only outlet was Israel, which already produced much the same things as Gaza did. So Gaza had become trapped economically.

Hamas became popular in Gaza in part because of services and in part because of its rejectionism vis-a-vis Israel, and it won the January, 2006, elections for the Palestinian Authority. Because of its rejectionist ideology and its willing to deploy terrorism and micro-war against Israel, Israel and the United States boycotted the PA under Hamas and strove to undo the results of the election.

Here is Aljazeera's timeline for what happened next:

' June 25, 2006: Palestinian fighters conduct an operation in Israel, killing two Israeli soldiers capturing another, Corporal Gilad Shalit.

June 28, 2006: Israel launches Operation Summer Rains in what it says is an attempt to recover the captured soldier. Israel launches air strikes against of bridges, roads, and the only power station in Gaza. Hundreds of Palestinians are killed during aerial and ground attacks over the following months.

June 29, 2006: Israel captures 64 Hamas officials, including eight Palestinian Authority cabinet ministers and up to twenty members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

September 8:, 2006 UN officials say Gaza is at "breaking point" after months of economic sanctions and Israeli attacks.'

By summer of 2007, the Israelis and the US had managed to sponsor a coup in which the secular Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, took back over the West Bank, and Hamas was confined to Gaza. Hamas pursued the tactic of sending small home-made missiles against nearby Israeli towns, mainly Sderot, emulating what Hizbullah had been doing to the Israeli colony in the occupied Shebaa Farms in 2005-2006. Israel responded primarily by squeezing the Gaza public, denying it enough food, fuel, electricity and services to function healthily, in hopes that it could be made to turn against Hamas. This punishment of the civilian population (half of which consists of children and some large proportion of which does not anyway support Hamas) is illegal in international law, and failed in its purpose. Hamas became ever more entrenched.

Israel's current attack on Gaza is aimed at forestalling an ever more successful microwar waged by Hamas. Its rockets were inaccurate and most seem to have fallen uselessly in the desert. But they did do some property damage and killed 15 Israelis over 8 years, and they also inflicted psychological blows on the fragile Israeli psyche. The Israeli leadership saw a danger that Hamas would become ever better entrenched, organically, in Gaza society and gain all the advantages such a social penetration offers, and that monetary aid from Iran and explosives smuggling through tunnels from the Egyptian Sinai would allow them eventually to wage a truly effective micro-war.

The Israeli leadership knew that it could not reply to Hamas's microwar without engaging in total war on the Gaza population, and that this step would be unpopular with the world's publics. But the Israeli leadership has successfully thumbed its nose at world public opinion so often and so successfully that this sort of consideration does not even enter into their practical calculations (except to the extent that they are careful to do a lot of propaganda for their war effort). Their estimation that they will suffer no practical bad consequences of attacks on civilians is certainly correct in the short to medium term.

The Israel lobbies are wealthy and powerful, and the US congress depends heavily on them for campaign funding. If the US legislators voted on the Gaza operation, they would support Israel except for the same 10 who objected to the war on Lebanon (the 10 are mostly from congressional districts with a lot of Arab-Americans). Israel will suffer no practical sanctions from any government. Egypt and Jordan are afraid of Hamas and are more or less handmaidens of Israeli policy toward Gaza. Syria and Lebanon are weak. Iran, for all the hype it generates, is distant and relatively helpless to intervene. European governments have largely ceded the Palestinian-Israeli issue to the US and Israel. Gordon Brown is publicly calling for a ceasefire while secretly supporting Bush's attempts to stop any such thing at the UN.

The main immediate problem for the Israelis is that simply preventing Hamas from waging an ever more sophisticated microwar is an extremely short-term and technical objective. It may or may not be achievable by the methods of the current war, which appear so far to be conventional methods. Its outcome is not very material to a settlement of the larger issues.

The big long-term problem Israel has is that its assiduous colonization of the West Bank has made a two-state solution almost impossible, turning it into an Apartheid state. And if you go on practicing Apartheid long enough, that begins to attact boycotts and sanctions. And forestalling a Palestinian state means that likely the Palestinians will all end up Israeli citizens.

I was on the radio recently with John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, and he expressed the hope that Egypt would take back Gaza and Jordan what is left of the West Bank. You may as well dream of pink unicorns on Venus. It isn't going to happen. The Palestinians are Israel's problem. War on them, circumscribe them, colonize them all you like. They aren't going anywhere, and you can't keep them stateless and virtually enslaved forever, occasionally exterminating some of them as though they were vermin when they make too much trouble. That, sooner or later, will lead to boycotts by rising economic powers and by Europe that could be extremely damaging to Israel's long-term prospects as a state.

It may still be 10 or 20 years in the future. But because of Israel's economic and demographic vulnerabilities, for it to lose the war of global public opinion may ultimately be more consequential than either macro-war or micro-war.

----

An intelligent response to this posting at Kos. As a point of information, I should explain that when I talked above about the medium to long term prospects of Israel becoming a pariah state because of the unpopularity of Apartheid policies, I was suggesting that governments would begin to sanction it, not just that public opinion would turn against it. Although the Kos diarist "LithiumCola" alleges that world public opinion is already against Israel, it is not in any way that matters practically-- tourism, willingness to buy Israeli-made goods, partner in business, etc. If that willingness changed and change also occurred at the government level, it would create a difficult situation for the Israelis. This eventuality would depend on Apartheid conditions continuing for more decades, which may or may not happen.
Full posting here.

Israel Destroys American School in Gaza, Kills Guard

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports of Israel's heavy artillery bombardment of densely populated Gaza on Saturday that "The American School north of Gaza was directly hit and almost completely destroyed, with one school guard killed. In addition, at least three to five schools were damaged by Israeli shelling of nearby targets." I presume that this is the school working to promote US good relations with Palestinians that now no longer exists.. Of course, the rest of the humanitarian situation is pretty bad, too--"Distribution of food assistance to the most vulnerable is erratic due to the security situation."

The OCHA [pdf] issued the following report on Saturday regarding the Gaza humanitarian situation, about 4 hours before Israel invaded. Personally, I find that the pdf format is often an impediment to the spread of information. The files are huge, they require proprietary software, and don't suit a lot of the world that is still dependent on dial-up connections. So I am posting the report in HTML here.
Cont'd


OFFICE FOR THE COORDINATION OF HUMANITARIAN AFFAIRS
P.O.Box 38712,
East Jerusalem,
Phone: (+972) 2-582 9962 /
582 5853,
Fax: (+972) 2-582 5841
• ochaopt@un.org •
www.ochaopt.org

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

GAZA HUMANITARIAN SITUATION REPORT 3 January 2009 as of 16:00 Israeli military operations and heavy bombardment of the Gaza Strip continued into their eighth day. Violence As of 3 January, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, 432 people have been killed and 2,200 persons have been injured.

On 3 January, the IAF continued air and naval strikes in all parts of the Gaza Strip, particularly North Gaza, Gaza and the Middle area, with airstrikes focusing on moving vehicles, residences, open areas, and former Israeli settlements. In addition to the airstrikes, the IDF has commenced shelling areas in Gaza up to and exceeding one kilometer from the Israel-Gaza border.

At the moment of issuing this release, artillery shell fire has been reported from the eastern border to open areas in North Gaza, Gaza and the Middle Area. Increasing numbers of warning leaflets are being dropped, warning people to evacuate the targeted areas, exacerbating confusion and panic among the civilian population. The American School north of Gaza was directly hit and almost completely destroyed, with one school guard killed. In addition, at least three to five schools were damaged by Israeli shelling of nearby targets.

Palestinian militants fired 20 rockets and mortars into Israel injuring 3 Israelis.

Health According to WHO [The World Health Organization], many medical supply donations have entered the Strip in recent days, including through Rafah, and more are in the pipeline. The main challenge for now is how to catalogue and manage these supplies. WHO is identifying which individual items may still be needed, particularly in regards to medical equipment which is more difficult to assess.

Intensive care unit capacity in hospitals is still limited and the lack of specialist surgeons remains a problem. Blood units have entered Gaza, bringing supplies to adequate levels. In addition to the Ministry of Health’s current central warehouse, UNRWA has identified a storage facility for incoming MoH pharmaceuticals. A logistical team of pharmacists and other staff are shifting supplies currently held in small storage spaces throughout Gaza to the new central warehouse for organization and inventory; all new medicines arriving will also be stored in this new warehouse. Three more storage facilities in the north, central and south have been identified.

Since 27 December, 103 patients entered Egypt through Rafah for external medical treatment. Of growing concern are the 700-1000 chronic medical patients who had been receiving regular treatment in Israel and East Jerusalem each month. The existing referral system through Erez for these patients has been disrupted. Without electricity from the Gaza Power Plant (GPP), hospitals are operating on backup electric generators. These generators cannot be relied on to provide constant power to hospitals, and it is critical that fuel is delivered to the power station in order for mains electricity to be restored.

Food

Distribution of food assistance to the most vulnerable is erratic due to the security situation.

Since 27 December, WFP (through implementing partners) has distributed only a fraction of the 1350 metric tonnes available and the food that is currently being distributed should have been distributed in the October- December cycle. UNRWA resumed its prior food distribution in seven distribution centres on 1 January which it had suspended on 18 December; distributions are continuing today.

Water and Sanitation

On 2 January, airstrikes in the Al Mughraga area damaged a main drinking water pipe, cutting off water supplies to 30,000 people in Nuseirat Camp. Beit Lahiya Sewage Lagoon: There is a particular emerging concern, that current military operations could damage the sand walls of the Beit Lahiya sewage lagoon causing a massive sewage overflow. In addition to agricultural areas, up to 15,000 people are directly at risk. Two years ago, five people were killed and 2,000 displaced when the lagoon overflowed.

Shelter

Several hundred people have sought shelter at locations provided by UNRWA. The Agency has 91 preidentified locations throughout the Gaza Strip, primarily schools, with a capacity for 40,000 persons, including non-refugee displaced if necessary.

Crossings

KEREM SHALOM: Closed today. A total of 75 truckloads including 42 for humanitarian aid agencies were allowed entry to Gaza through Kerem Shalom crossing yesterday, 2 January. These included 46 truckloads of food supplies (including 21 trucks for UNRWA), five medical supplies (MoH and WHO), 17 truckloads of animal feed, five power generators for ICRC, and two trucks of other items.

RAFAH: Three truckloads of medical supplies (Qatari, Kuwait and Egyptian donation) were allowed entry to Gaza through Rafah crossing today. Five medical cases were allowed out.

EREZ: Closed today. 226 foreign nationals (Russians, Ukrainians, Americans and Norwegians) were allowed out through Erez yesterday. International staff of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have been prevented from entering Gaza for the past two months, adversely affecting program management and assessments.

Priority imports neded:

Power plant and electrical transformers: Industrial fuel is needed to power the Gaza Power Plant, which has been shut down since 30 December. Replacement of ten transformers which were completely damaged is also urgently needed to restore electricity supply to 250,000 people in central and northern Gaza. All water, sanitation and other utilities, which provide basic services to the population, as well as hospitals and the general population are affected by the outages; some areas have now experienced power outages for up to 48 hours. Hospitals are increasingly reverting to generators to support intensive care and operating room functions.

Wheat grain: Essential to provide flour for local bakeries and humanitarian food distribution to the population of Gaza. There are long lines at bakeries and bread rationing has been implemented by the Gaza authorities.

Cash: Has still not entered the Gaza Strip and is urgently needed, including for the UNRWA cash distribution program to some 94,000 dependent beneficiaries, as well as its “cash for work” program.


Full posting here.

Israel invades Gaza

After a four-hour artillery barrage, Israeli troops moved into the northern part of the Gaza strip on Saturday.

This land operation raises the same question Jonathan Freedland asked about the whole Gaza War, which is whether it is wise and how it will end with any lasting advantage to Israel. Me, I can't see it. The Israelis used to assassinate and attack Hamas when they controlled Gaza, with no success in destroying the movement. So how can they destroy it now when they don't control Gaza and are just making a temporary incursion into a heavily populated, complex territory?

Human Rights Watch has slammed Israel for indiscriminate attacks on civilians during the Gaza operation, which is a war crime.

At 2:06 pm on Saturday 1/3 EST, I was watching CNN, the US feed, which had temporarily switched to the London desk of CNN International. CNN International began an interview with PLO spokesman Saeb Erakat, the first time I have seen a Palestinian commenter on US television during the past week with the exception of the PA envoy to the UN.

CNN US suddenly interrupted the Erekat interview and switched to Ben Wiedeman in Jerusalem to explain the task Israel had before it. It has been 20 minutes and they have never returned to finish the Erekat interview. Have any of the major magazine shows had any Palestinians at all on this week as commenters?

2:31 PM CNN US did a telephone interview with Mustafa Barghouti, who complained that CNN's coverage was all from the Israeli side. He insisted that Hamas had been ready to negotiate a cease-fire and pointed out that Hamas had killed no one during the truce since June and before the Israeli attack. Barghouti has a pretty thick accent and I don't know how well he is understood by US audiences. Why is it that Israeli interviewees all have American accents but no similar Palestinian observers can be found?

Earlier on Saturday CNN invited Gen. David Grange on, one of the military commentators outed by the New York Times as part of a Pentagon influence-peddling scheme for the media. Grange kept talking about what "we" would do if "we" took rocket fire the way the Israelis had from Hamas. Grange did not say what "we" would do if militant European refugees landed at Norfolk, took over Virginia, expelled its population, and then kept the refugees from McLean huddling over in West Virginia in camps for decades with no reparations, recently denying them sufficient food and fuel to avoid a humanitarian crisis. But of course that would never happen to the Granges, so why bother to even mention any point of view but the hawks'?

Besides,the point of CNN US seems to be to prevent voices like Saeb Erekat's from being heard, though they are allowed on adult channels intended for the rest of the world.

/End.


Full posting here.

Thousands Protest Israel, US in Kabul

Thousands of Afghans rallied on Friday against the Israeli attack on Gaza Three thousand protesters in Kabul burned Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush in effigy, chanted death to Israel and death to infidels, and demanded that the 30,000 US troops in Afghanistan depart.

That is what the US really needed at this juncture, was to lose new propaganda points away to the Taliban.
Full posting here.

30 Killed, 112 Wounded in Bombing; Iraqi Air Force Carries Aid to Gaza;

A suicide belt bomber killed his own clansmen at a tribal reconciliation meeting at Yusufiya just south of Baghdad, killing at least 30 and wounding 110. It was the first big suicide bombing of 2009.i

There was also a bombing each in Baghdad and Mosul that left 6 civilians wounded.

Sawt al-Iraq reports in Arabic that the Israeli attack on Gaza continues to roil Iraq. On Friday, worshipers at several mosques in the northern, largely Sunni Arab city of Mosul (pop. 1.7 mn.) prayed for the souls of the Palestinian victims. Mosque preachers condemned the attacks launched by the Israeli military on the Gaza Strip, and praised the steps being taken by the Turkish government to get a ceasefire.
Cont'd

The holding of extra mourning prayers was coordinated by the Sunni Pious Endowments Board in the city. The preachers urged worshippers to pray for their brethren in Gaza and to make mention of their sufferings in their daily personal prayers until they are succored. Mosul is some 80% Sunni Arab, and the Arabs there have had a special interest in the welfare of Palestinians for decades. There were demonstrations and riots in Mosul over the Zionist colonization of Palestine as far back as the 1930s.

There was a rally against the war on Gaza at the main mosque in Mosul on Wednesday.

The Shiite preachers of Kufa, Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad also condemned the Israeli attacks and called for urgent aid to be provided to the inhabitants of Gaza. Some 5,000 Shiite students protested Israel in Baghdad's Sadr City and cleric Muqtada al-Sadr called for international intervention to halt what he called a massacre of innocents in Gaza; he also called for humanitarian aid to be sent to the victims.

Sawt al-Iraq adds, "The Iraqi Air Force on Wednesday (12/31) made four flights to El Arish in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula to ferry humanitarian and medical aid to the residents of the Gaza Strip, which has been subjected to Israeli air strikes for several days, according to the press spokesman for the [Iraqi] Ministry of Defense."

Let me just repeat that. Iraq's air force is carrying aid to the Gazans via Egypt! And when Iraq gets its act together and gets rich from oil and gas, isn't it obvious that the aid will increase significantly?

Kurdish-Arab tension is rising in Mosul ahead of the Jan. 31 provincial elections, with one Arab party accusing Kurds of attempting to suppress it. On Wednesday, a candidate for the Sunni Arab party, "Iraq for Us," was assassinated in a cafe in Mosul.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that there are lively contests among the Sunni Arab parties as well. The Iraqi Islamic Party (descended from the Muslim Brotherhood) is competing against the Awakening Councils or tribal levies paid by the US originally to turn on the radical fundamentalist vigilantes. There are also secular parties running.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that fear of sectarian violence in Baghdad is still keeping Iraqis from traveling out of their own neighborhoods. (There are few mixed districts left, and for Shiites to go into Sunni ones or vice versa is still thought dangerous). Dora in south Baghdad was for some years a stronghold of fundamentalist Sunni guerrillas, until they were expelled in 2007-2008 by Awakening Councils. The district is the site of the famed Assyrian Market, which was closed in 2006 at the height of the sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing campaigns. Al-Hayat reports that Shiite entrepreneur from Bayya' to the north began a bus service between the two districts last week, offering passengers a way to move across the Sunni-Shiite divide for the first time in years.

Full posting here.

Moderates Must Give up Moderation: Jordanian Press on Gaza

The USG Open Source Center paraphrases articles in the Jordanian press on the Israeli attack on Gaza. Jordan is one of only two Arab states to have a formal peace treaty with Israel, and its intellectuals clearly want the government to abrogate it. Worse, they have been driven by the images of dead children dug out of mosques in Gaza to advocate Jordanian violence against Israel.

'Jordanian Press Says Israeli Operation in Gaza Will Not Achieve Security, Peace
Jordan -- OSC Summary
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

. . . Yasir Abu-Hilalah writes an article in Al-Ghadd[Tomorrow] on page 26, in which the writer discusses the elements of strength that HAMAS has. He says that HAMAS has around 25,000 fighters, who need training and weapons. He says that the Israelis admit that HAMAS has grown more professional after its control of the Gaza Strip and managed to smuggle a large amount of weapons and explosives through tunnels. He adds that HAMAS has hundreds of male and female suicide bombers. Then, HAMAS has rockets, which constitute a "real force of deterrence" despite the fact that these rockets are not sophisticated . . .
Cont'd


Fahd al-Khitan also writes an article in Al-Arab al-Yawm on page 3, in which he says that "in light of what is happening in Gaza, Arab moderates should stop marketing illusions about peace." He says that Jordan has done its utmost on the political and human level to declare solidarity with Gaza and condemn the Israeli actions. He adds:"We should conduct a profound review of the political discourse by rehabilitating a previous position, which the state had adopted; namely, supporting the right of the Palestinian people to resisting the occupation and not being satisfied by saying that negotiations are the only way for achieving peace because this path has failed to achieve anything since the peace processwas launched 17 years ago. This position should be translated into direct and public relations with the Palestinian resistance movements, alongside continuing official relations with the Palestinian Authority" . . .

. . . Amman Al-Arabal-Yawm in Arabic, an independent newspaper often critical of government policies, publishes an article by Chief Editor Tahir al-Adwan on page 20, in which thewriter criticizes the delay in holding a meeting for the Arab foreign ministers to discuss the "criminal Israeli aggression" on Gaza. The writer says: "Yesterday, while I was watching the news conference of the Palestinian president and the Egyptian foreign minister, I heard one statement from both men, which is (making efforts to stop the aggression), and I had thought that the president and the minister meant what they were saying because making efforts more than 36 hours after the start of the aggression was enoughat least to reduce the severity of the Israeli aggression. However, the reality of the situation is that while the news conference was in progress, the raids were escalating to the extent that Gaza appeared to be in a total holocaust. It is either that Israel is brushing aside the (efforts of its Arab friends) or that it hears about these efforts from news conferences only." . . .

... Amman Al-Ghadd in Arabic, an independent Jordanian daily, publishes an article on page 32 by Samih al-Ma'ayitah, in which he says that "what is required is not only expelling Israeli ambassadors and closing the embassies, but also driving Israel out of all aspects of Arab life. I am talking here about a comprehensive Arab-Islamic course that drives out the Zionist entity, and all forms of relations with it, from the Arab-Islamic political, economic, and security life."


Full posting here.

Iraq Regains National Sovereignty; Takes Control of Green Zone, Basra Airport; MEK Terror Group to Leave

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki announced Thursday that Iraq had "regained its national sovereignty". It could in fact be argued that for the first time since the end of the Gulf War, Iraq is again for most purposes an independent country in international law. It was put under Chapter 7 of the United Nations charter in the early 90s, having been found an aggressor against Kuwait. In some ways, its Chapter 7 status was taken advantage of by the Bush administration in its invasion of Iraq. There are still some things Iraq wants from the UN, and the Russian ambassador there has suggested that some Article 7 provisions will last for a while yet. But the main thing standing between Iraq and sovereignty now is anyway not international law but the large foreign troop presence on Iraqi soil. Still, that presence is underpinned by a bilateral treaty concluded by a sovereign Iraqi parliament with the United States. Cont'd . . .

US troops now need warrants for arrests, though they can detain suspects for 24 hours while they seek to justify it to a judge. Thousands of Iraqis imprisoned by the US will have to be released unless valid legal cases can be built against them.

In a move of the utmost symbolism, Iraqi troops are now taking control of the Green Zone, the few acres in downtown Baghdad, surrounded by blast walls, where US military and diplomatic personnel have worked, and where parliament and many Iraqi government offices are located. US military control of this area has often provoked tensions. Once Marines manhandled a member of parliament from the Sadr Movement who was coming in for a vote, provoking widespread criticism. The nerve center of the US in Iraq and of its Iraqi political allies had to be put behind blast walls because otherwise it would have been constantly bombed and sniped at. The area took a great deal of mortar fire as it was, endangering US State Department personnel who were sleeping in flimsy shelters. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has announced his determination to take down the blast walls. Minister of Defense Abdul Qadir al-`Ubaidi pledged to reopen the road between the Green Zone and the Republic Bridge within days, according to al-Hayat.

Bombings and other violence killed 8 in the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk or their environs on Thursday.

Basra authorities arrested a leader of the "Army of Heaven" millenarian cult that launched attacks last year this time. It is the beginning of the Islamic new year, and apparently the cult is seeking ways of taking power.

Al-Maliki also announced that there is "no place in Iraq for the terrorist" Mujahidin-e Khalq (MEK) organization. The Iraqi government has taken control of Camp Ashraf, northeast of Baghdad, the terrorist training camp leased by Saddam Hussein to 3500 members of the Iranian MEK cult. The MEK carried out terrorist attacks inside Iran on behalf of Iraq, as well as spying on, and making false allegations about, Iran's civilian nuclear energy program. MEK have probably been triple agents, sharing information with and pushing disinformation on Saddam, Israel and the US through various channels. They also served Saddam as an SS, repressing Iraqi dissidents. When the US took Iraq in 2003, the Neoconservatives at the Pentagon wanted to adopt the terrorist group for covert operations against Iran and against the Shiite fundamentalist parties in Iraq that had been hosted in exile by Tehran. The Pentagon/ Neoconservative interest in the MEK appears to have been connected to its secret ties to Israel, and prominent members of the American Israel lobby such as Daniel Pipes and Patrick Clawson went to bat for this motley crew of bombers and saboteurs (ironically, they have been prolific in accusing ordinary Americans of being 'terrorist supporters' if they declined to ask 'how high' whenever Bibi Netanyahu commanded us to jump). The State Department, in contrast, pushed for listing the MEK as a terrorist organization. In the end, as usual in the Bush administration, Washington gave us the worst compromise possible, declaring MEK a terrorist organization and going on using it for espionage and sabotage in Iran as well as against Iraqi Shiites. In 2005 the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Da`wa Party came to power in elections in Baghdad, the very parties against which MEK had been conspiring, and they have repeatedly tried to get rid of the Mojahedin, but were stopped by the Pentagon. The 'Islamic Marxist' guerrillas are likely now to be expelled. Al-Maliki said that they would not be forced to return to Iran, and could go to other destinations of their choice, but could not remain in Iraq.

The British military has handed over the control tower at Basra International Airport to Iraqi authorities. Britain had been using the airport as a military base, but now will withdraw outside it and allow it to function as a civilian, Iraqi facility. This step is a further phase in the British withdrawal from Iraq; the UK once had 40,000 troops in the country, and is now down to about 4,000. They will likely all be out by July 1.

As the foreign troops leave, Iraqis will have to settle their differences themselves. Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani slammed Iraqi Arab leaders for provoking ethnic tensions with Kurds.

Full posting here.

Bombing Refugee Camps in Gaza Instead of Paying the Refugees Reparations

The news keeps reporting that the Israeli air force bombed refugee camps in Gaza.

Did you ever wonder how those refugee camps got to be in Gaza? Cont'd . . .

I mean, where are they refugees from? There didn't used to be refugees in Gaza, before 1948, after all. The grandparents of today's refugees were living in their own homes, which their ancestors had lived in for centuries if not millennia.

After Germany created Jewish refugees in WW II, it was made to pay reparations to the victims, right?

Israel hasn't paid a dime to any of the Palestinian families it expelled in 1948, [pdf] which is itself a violation of international law.


Palestinian refugees created by Israeli military actions, 1948.

Update: Israel continued to bomb Gaza on day 7 of blitz. The airstrikes continued Friday morning.

Israel has killed 37 children and 17 women since it began its bombardment last Saturday. About a fourth of the over 400 persons killed are estimated to be obviously civilians because they were children or women; the proportion of the civilians killed is likely actually higher because a lot of the men are probably noncombatants, too. Likewise, large numbers of the over 2000 Gazans wounded have been innocent civilians.

Gazans are facing starvation and death, according to UN humanitarian chief John Holmes. The power plant has been knocked out, making it impossible for the hospitals properly to treat the over 2000 wounded in the airstrikes, or indeed, for patients needing oxygen & etc. to get it. Hospitals have resorted to generators, but they run on fuel, which is in short supply and many Gazans are without electricity. Some 20,000 a day are not getting the UN wheat rations and other foodstuffs on which they rely, given that Israel long ago destroyed their economy. That is, there is real and increasing hunger in Gaza, 50% of the population of which is children.

Tzipi Livni said the purpose of the operation was to weaken Hamas.

Wasn't that the purpose of all those assassinations carried out by Ariel Sharon in 2003-2004? Didn't they assassinate Sheikh Yasin and Rantisi & etc. then? Did Hamas disappear? If Livni and Ehub Barak think that aerial bombardment is the right way to deal with a group like Hamas in a place like Gaza, they are just as out of touch with reality as George W. Bush.


Full posting here.