Israel/Gaza
yosi
NYC Posts: 3,046
Thought this was a pretty good post on the situation:
The Iron Dome, Press Bias, and Israel's Lack of Strategic Thinking
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Some observations as the Gaza crisis continues to unfold:
1. The Iron Dome anti-rocket and missile defense system seems to work better than most people expected. Israel is becoming very good at shooting down missiles.
2. Israel also seems to be getting better at not killing civilians in Gaza. The numbers are of course too large, and this could change in an instant, but right now the casualty rate is much lower than in Operation Cast Lead. And yes, of course, much smaller than the numbers from the American drone war in Pakistan. Hamas, of course, is trying to maximize civilian casualties. Which brings me to:
3.The media is biased against Israel. Yes, got it. Yes, Israel is being judged harshly. Yes, I know that probably 300 people have been murdered in Syria since this Gaza affair started, and no one cares. An acquaintance of mine, a Syrian living in Beirut, wrote me in frustration about this last night. "We get very little interest from the international press compared to the Palestinians. What should we do to get more attention?"
My advice is to get killed by Jews. Always works. That said, what do pro-Israel people want? And what does Israel itself want? Israel is more powerful than its Palestinian adversaries, and the press almost axiomatically roots for the underdog. There is much greater sympathy for the Palestinian cause than before, which is partially Israel's fault -- if Israel didn't appear to be a colonizer of the West Bank, it would find more sympathy. Jews, and certainly a Jewish state, are never going to win popularity contests, but the situation wouldn't seem quite so dire to Israelis and their friends if people plausibly believed that the Netanyahu government was interested in implementing a two-state solution.
4. Barack Obama hasn't turned against Israel. This is a big surprise to everyone who has not paid attention for the last four years, or who had decided, for nakedly partisan reasons, to paint him as a Jew-hater.
5. Israel's media campaign -- Gamify? -- is disgraceful. David Rothkopf just pointed out to me that people are most influenced by their enemies. In this case, the braggadocio of the IDF is beginning to resemble the braying of various Palestinian terror outfits over the years. All death is tragic, even the deaths of your enemies.
6. I'll be asking the same question over and over again the coming days: What is Israel's long-term strategy? Short-term, I understand: No state can agree to have its civilians rocketed. But long-term, do Israeli leaders believe that they possess a military solution to their political problem in Gaza? There is no way out of this militarily. Israel is not Russia, Gaza is not Chechnya and Netanyahu isn't Putin. Even if Israel were morally capable of acting like Russia, the world would not allow it. So: Is the goal to empower Hamas? Some right-wingers in Israel would prefer Hamas's empowerment, because they want to kill the idea of a two-state solution. But to those leaders who are at least verbally committed to the idea of partition, what is the plan? How do you marginalize Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Jews and the Jewish state, and empower the more moderate forces that govern the West Bank?
Here's one idea: Give Palestinians hope that Israel is serious about the two-state solution. And how do you do that? By reversing the settlement project on the West Bank. It is not unreasonable for Palestinians to doubt the sincerity of Netanyahu on the subject of the two-state solution, when settlements grow ever-thicker. There's no way around this: The idea of a two-state solution will die if Israel continues to treat the West Bank as a suburb of Jerusalem and Kfar Sava, and not as the future location of the state of Palestine.
UPDATE:
7. Hamas also lacks coherent thinking. Here is David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on where Hamas went wrong in this latest round of violence:
Hamas seems to have miscalculated on several fronts. First, it may have believed that Israel would avoid major action for fear of antagonizing the new government in Cairo, given Gaza's proximity to Egypt and Hamas's close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. It may also have believed that recent shows of regional solidarity (including the Qatari emir's visit to Gaza last month and ongoing support from Turkey) would raise the diplomatic cost of Israeli action to prohibitive levels.
In addition, Hamas may not have expected an attack against a high-profile target like Jabari, which was a change from Israel's pattern of sporadic retaliation to rocket fire. Indeed, Israel considered him a leading terrorist -- he was responsible for overseeing at least one suicide bombing in the late 1990s and was key in Hamas operations during the second intifada, when the group carried out numerous suicide attacks. And when Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, he organized its fighters into a military force with companies, battalions, and brigades. Jabari is also believed to have overseen the detention of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, allowing himself to be photographed when Shalit was swapped for Palestinian prisoners last year.
The Iron Dome, Press Bias, and Israel's Lack of Strategic Thinking
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Some observations as the Gaza crisis continues to unfold:
1. The Iron Dome anti-rocket and missile defense system seems to work better than most people expected. Israel is becoming very good at shooting down missiles.
2. Israel also seems to be getting better at not killing civilians in Gaza. The numbers are of course too large, and this could change in an instant, but right now the casualty rate is much lower than in Operation Cast Lead. And yes, of course, much smaller than the numbers from the American drone war in Pakistan. Hamas, of course, is trying to maximize civilian casualties. Which brings me to:
3.The media is biased against Israel. Yes, got it. Yes, Israel is being judged harshly. Yes, I know that probably 300 people have been murdered in Syria since this Gaza affair started, and no one cares. An acquaintance of mine, a Syrian living in Beirut, wrote me in frustration about this last night. "We get very little interest from the international press compared to the Palestinians. What should we do to get more attention?"
My advice is to get killed by Jews. Always works. That said, what do pro-Israel people want? And what does Israel itself want? Israel is more powerful than its Palestinian adversaries, and the press almost axiomatically roots for the underdog. There is much greater sympathy for the Palestinian cause than before, which is partially Israel's fault -- if Israel didn't appear to be a colonizer of the West Bank, it would find more sympathy. Jews, and certainly a Jewish state, are never going to win popularity contests, but the situation wouldn't seem quite so dire to Israelis and their friends if people plausibly believed that the Netanyahu government was interested in implementing a two-state solution.
4. Barack Obama hasn't turned against Israel. This is a big surprise to everyone who has not paid attention for the last four years, or who had decided, for nakedly partisan reasons, to paint him as a Jew-hater.
5. Israel's media campaign -- Gamify? -- is disgraceful. David Rothkopf just pointed out to me that people are most influenced by their enemies. In this case, the braggadocio of the IDF is beginning to resemble the braying of various Palestinian terror outfits over the years. All death is tragic, even the deaths of your enemies.
6. I'll be asking the same question over and over again the coming days: What is Israel's long-term strategy? Short-term, I understand: No state can agree to have its civilians rocketed. But long-term, do Israeli leaders believe that they possess a military solution to their political problem in Gaza? There is no way out of this militarily. Israel is not Russia, Gaza is not Chechnya and Netanyahu isn't Putin. Even if Israel were morally capable of acting like Russia, the world would not allow it. So: Is the goal to empower Hamas? Some right-wingers in Israel would prefer Hamas's empowerment, because they want to kill the idea of a two-state solution. But to those leaders who are at least verbally committed to the idea of partition, what is the plan? How do you marginalize Hamas, which seeks the destruction of Jews and the Jewish state, and empower the more moderate forces that govern the West Bank?
Here's one idea: Give Palestinians hope that Israel is serious about the two-state solution. And how do you do that? By reversing the settlement project on the West Bank. It is not unreasonable for Palestinians to doubt the sincerity of Netanyahu on the subject of the two-state solution, when settlements grow ever-thicker. There's no way around this: The idea of a two-state solution will die if Israel continues to treat the West Bank as a suburb of Jerusalem and Kfar Sava, and not as the future location of the state of Palestine.
UPDATE:
7. Hamas also lacks coherent thinking. Here is David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on where Hamas went wrong in this latest round of violence:
Hamas seems to have miscalculated on several fronts. First, it may have believed that Israel would avoid major action for fear of antagonizing the new government in Cairo, given Gaza's proximity to Egypt and Hamas's close ties with the Muslim Brotherhood. It may also have believed that recent shows of regional solidarity (including the Qatari emir's visit to Gaza last month and ongoing support from Turkey) would raise the diplomatic cost of Israeli action to prohibitive levels.
In addition, Hamas may not have expected an attack against a high-profile target like Jabari, which was a change from Israel's pattern of sporadic retaliation to rocket fire. Indeed, Israel considered him a leading terrorist -- he was responsible for overseeing at least one suicide bombing in the late 1990s and was key in Hamas operations during the second intifada, when the group carried out numerous suicide attacks. And when Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, he organized its fighters into a military force with companies, battalions, and brigades. Jabari is also believed to have overseen the detention of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, allowing himself to be photographed when Shalit was swapped for Palestinian prisoners last year.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
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Comments
Regarding the IDF's precision targeting...according to UN estimates the average ratio for militaries around the world of civilian to combatant casualties is 3 to 1. That is to say 3 civilians killed for every 1 combatant killed. In Iraq and Kosovo the estimates are that the ratio was 4 to 1. It is assumed that the ratios in Serbia and Chechnya were much higher. The ratio for the IDF's operations in Gaza in 2003 was 1 to 1, far better than the global average. Since 2003 the IDF's civilian to combatant ratio has gotten even better - the current ratio is 1 to 30, meaning that for every civilian killed in Israeli airforce attacks in Gaza 30 combatants are killed. Leaving aside questions of politics, I think it is reasonable, in light of the sheer statistics, to at least acknowledge that the Israeli military is expending a great deal of effort to avoid civilian casualties, and is now much better at doing so than pretty much every other military on earth.
With regard to your comment about calorie restrictions imposed on Gaza, as I understand it that is simply not the case. There is no calorie restriction currently being imposed on Gaza.
Finally, I'd just like to push back on your statement of support for the Palestinians fighting back against their occupiers...I have no problem, in general, with people supporting Palestinian resistance to occupation, but I think that in the current context you must, as such a supporter, answer the question of how it is that blindly firing hundreds of rockets into densely populated civilian areas is a legitimate form of resistance?
I also think that you have to answer the question of how, exactly, you think Israel should respond to such attacks on its civilians? Perhaps you'll say that they should respond by ending the occupation...I agree with that, but it's much easier said than done, and doesn't, I think, bear on the immediate issue confronting the Israeli government, namely, that 1/6 of its civilian population can't venture anywhere that isn't close to a bomb shelter for fear of being caught outside when the siren sounds. I also want the occupation to end, but even the most dovish government (which clearly this one is not) couldn't accomplish that overnight, and is responsible for the safety of its citizens in the meantime. Perhaps the military isn't the right solution (I very much doubt that it is in this instance), but I think if you're going to criticize the Israeli government for taking action to protect its citizens it's reasonable to ask you what you think their alternatives are?
Oh, so the reason why the overwhelming majority of the world “roots” for the Palestinians has nothing to do with the fact that they are attacked (militarily or economically or otherwise) on a daily basis by a power that has their populations subjugated to the point of desperation… it’s just that they are the “underdog”, like this was a football match.
Ok, got it!
:roll:
Mexico City - July 18th 2003
Mexico City - July 19th 2003
Monterrey - December 7th 2005
Mexico City - December 9th 2005
Mexico City - December 10th 2005
Mexico City - November 24th 2011
I agree with you that there are very legitimate reasons to favor the Palestinians over Israel...that said, I do think that the media favors "underdogs" as a general rule, if for no other reason than they're in the business of selling papers (or ad time), and underdog stories make for better copy.
I never saw any papers rooting for Iraq the last several years.
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
Acting like bullies because the US government is on their side.
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=197627&p=4702679#p4702679
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
This article is so full of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies, that It'd take me all day to list them all.
Just another self-serving diatribe from one of America's leading Israel-apologists.
Overnight? They've had 60 years to abide by international law and withdraw from the occupied territories.
with a last name like Goldberg, I'm pretty sure I know where this guy stands.
Fargo 2003
Winnipeg 2005
Winnipeg 2011
St. Paul 2014
Of course it is Yosi. It's perfectly true to anyone who happens to inhabit a topsy-turvy World like something Alice in Wonderland experienced.
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much' - Why The American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End
P.116: "Indiscriminate attacks differ from direct attacks against civilians,' Israel's leading authority on International law, Yoram Dinstein, observed, in that "the attacker is not actually trying to harm the civilian population": the injury to the civilians is merely a matter of "no concern to the attacker." From the standpoint of LOIAC [Law of International Armed Conflict], there is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction: they are equally forbidden. [Yoram Dinstein - 'The Conduct of Hostilities under the law of International Armed Conflict' 2004].
Is this what you mean by Israel 'expending a great deal of effort to avoid civilian casualties', Yosi?
Norman Finkelstein - 'Knowing Too Much' - Why The American Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming To An End
P.145: In February 2008 HRW [Human Rights Watch] issued a report entitled 'Flooding South Lebanon: Israel's use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006'. The report found that Israel dropped as many as 4.6 million cluster submunitions on south Lebanon during the war. It was the "most extensive use of cluster munitions anywhere in the world since the 1991 Gulf war," while relative to the size of the targeted area the density of the attack was historically unprecendented. (Apparently the only reason Israel did not drop yet more cluster munitions was that it's stocks had been depleted). Some 90 percent of these cluster munitions were dropped "during the final three days when Israel knew a settlement was imminent," the U.N ceasefire resolution having already been passed but not yet gone into effect.
P146: Israel's cluster munition attacks on Lebanon were indiscriminate in multiple respects: the inaccuracy of their delivery (or carrier) systems; the "wide dispersal patterns" of such weapons; and the "high dud rates" endangering civilians returning to their homes after the ceasefire. In addition, the saturation use of these weapons in civilian areas multiplied manyfold the inherent dangers posed by them.
P.147: HRW reported that Israel's cluster attacks "blanketed" both "built-up areas" and "fields", resulting in the high saturation of towns and villages," and the "systematic 'flooding' of certain villages and populated areas."
The "vast majority" of cluster munitions targeted "population centers" such as towns and villages. In the village of Yohmor, "bomblets littered the ground from one end...to the other. They were on the roofs of all the houses, in gardens and spread across roads and paths. Some were even found inside houses." In the village of Zwtar al-Sharkiyeh deminers had to remove "2000-3000 submunitions" inundating a primary school and it's environs, although "Hezbollah had not used the school at any time during the war and there had been no Hezbollah forces anywhere in the town."
Meanwhile, according to a "very conservative" estimate, "submunitions contaminated at least 26 percent of south Lebanon's agricultural land," transforming olive and citrus groves and tobacco fields into "de facto minefields." Many fields were simply "abandoned," while desperate farmers continued to work others despite the lethal hazards. From the ceasefire until December 2009 the explosion of duds caused 227 civilian casualties, of whom 35 percent were children.
P148: According to HRW, individuals bear responsibility for "war crimes" if they "intentionally or recklessly" authorize or conduct attacks "that would indiscriminately or disproportionately harm civilians." In other iterations HRW defines war crimes as attacks that are "knowingly or recklessly indiscriminate or deliberate"; the "knowing or reckless disregard for the foreseeable effects on civilians and other protected objects"; "deliberate attacks on civilians, as well as indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks when committed with knowledge or reckless indifference to their illegal character": military justification and with criminal intent."
P.149: Consider now HRW's description of the Israeli cluster attacks on Lebanon:
By their very nature, these dangerous, volatile submunitions [i.e, the duds] cannot distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, forseeably endangering civilians for months or years to come.
It is inconceivable that Israel...did not know that...it's strikes would have a lasting humanitarian impact.
Many of the cluster attacks on populated areas do not appear to have had a definite military target. Our researchers...found only one village with clear evidence of the presence of Hezbollah forces out of the more than 40 towns and villages they visited.
The staggering number of cluster munitions rained on south Lebanon over the three days immediately before a negotiated ceasefire went into effect puts in doubt the claim by the IDF that it's attacks were aimed at specific targets or even strategic locations, as opposed to being efforts to blanket large areas with explosives and duds.
Cluster munition attacks on or near population centers, like those launched by Israel, give rise to a presumption that they are indiscriminate, as the weapons are highly imprecise with a large area effect that regularly causes foreseeable and excessive civilian casualties during strikes and afterwards.
P.150: Given the extremely large number of submunitions employed and their known failure rates, harm to remaning and returning civilians was entirely foreseeable.
Israel was well aware of the continuing harm to Lebanese civilians from the unexploded duds that remained from it's prior use of munitions in South Lebanon in 1978 and 1982.
The paucity of evidence of specific military objectives, the known dangers of cluster munitions, the timing of large scale attacks days before an anticipated ceasefire, and the massive scope of the attacks combine to point to a conclusion that the attacks were of an indiscriminate and disproportionate character.
A senior U.N demining official said he had "no doubt" that Israel had deliberately hit built-up areas with cluster munitions, stating "these cluster bombs were dropped in the middle of villages".
Israeli soldiers were well aware of the large numbers of duds their cluster strikes were producing. A soldier said that his...commander gave a "pep talk" after a period of heavy fire, saying, "just wait until Hezbollah finds the little presents we had left them".
Given the sheer number of cluster duds on the ground, casualties are unavoidable.
P.151: In South Lebanon in 2006, Israel employed a means of warfare that was likely to cause significant harm to civilians - unreliable and inaccurate submunitions used widely and heavily in populated areas. Despite ample past experience of the deadly effects of cluster duds on the civilian population of South Lebanon, awareness of the impending end of the war, and the knowledge that there would be a legacy of unexploded duds creating de facto minefields, the IDF did not refrain from launching these attacks...The post-ceasefire casualties have to our knowledge all been civilians or deminers, and civilian access to agricultural areas and property has ben severely affected. The aftereffects of israel's cluster strikes were foreseeable by the IDF.
The paucity of evidence of specific military objectives, the known dangers of cluster munitions, the time of large-scale attacks days before an anticipated ceasefire, and the massive scope of the attacks themselves lead to the conclusion that the attacks were of an indiscriminate and disproportionate character.
We found scant evidence that would demonstrate a concrete and direct military advantage with relation to any possible military objectives, such as attacking fighters, rocket launchers, or strategic locales.
When considering the foreseeable civilian damage that could ensue, the anticipated and soon-approaching end to the armed conflict weighs heavily against Israel's last-minute saturation of civilian areas with old cluster stockpiles...The fact that duds would turn civilian areas into de facto minefields, given the large number of submunitions employed and their known failure rates, was foreseeable - testimony from soldiers (and the reported IDF prohibition of firing cluster munitions into areas it would subsequently enter) indicate that the IDF knew this.
A composite distillation of these HRW statements would read: Just before an agreed-upon ceasefire Israel saturated Lebanese civilian areas having no military targets with cluster munitions; the inevitable and foreseeable - in fact foreseen - consequence was that many Lebanese civilians were injured and killed.
P.152: Like HRW, the U.N Commission of Inquiry found that Israeli cluster attacks were indiscriminate...many towns and villages were littered with the bomblets as well as large tracts of agricultural land," and that "the use of cluster munitions by [the] IDF was of no military advantage."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/06/israel
Israeli soldiers tell of indiscriminate killings by army and a culture of impunity
In recent months dozens of soldiers, including the son of an an Israeli general, all recently discharged, have come forward to share their stories of how they were ordered in briefings to shoot to kill unarmed people without fear of reprimand.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/sep/06/israel1
Israeli troops say they were given shoot-to-kill order
Israeli military prosecutors have opened criminal investigations following allegations by soldiers that they carried out illegal shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed Palestinians.
Some of the soldiers, who also spoke to the Guardian, say they acted on standing orders in some parts of the Palestinian territories to open fire on people regardless of whether they were armed or not, or posed any physical threat.
The soldiers say that in some situations they were ordered to shoot anyone who appeared on a roof or a balcony, anyone who appeared to be kneeling to the ground or anyone who appeared on the street at a designated time. Among those killed by soldiers acting on the orders were young children.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/ ... -does-fit/
Human Rights Watch reports that of the “twenty-two civilian killings” during the Israeli siege of Jenin, “Many of them were killed willfully or unlawfully, and in some cases constituted war crimes. Fifty-seven-year-old Kamal Zghair, a wheelchair-bound man, was shot and then run over by IDF tanks on April 10 as he was moving his wheelchair—equipped with a white flag—down a major road in Jenin. Thirty-seven-year-old Jamal Fayid, a quadriplegic, was crushed to death in the rubble of his home on April 7 after IDF soldiers refused to allow his family to remove him from their home before a bulldozer destroyed it.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/no ... srael-gaza
US gives 'full backing' to Israel
The Israeli ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren[...] "The United States has given us the full backing to take whatever measures are necessary to defend our citizens from Hamas terror," he said. "Israel has received unequivocal and outstanding support from the United States and all branches of government. From the White House, from Congress, in both parties, completely bipartisan support."
...The Israeli ambassador has been leading a PR drive in Washington to cast Israel as the innocent victim of indiscriminate terror attacks, a claim strongly challenged by Palestinians who accuse Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, of engineering the conflict as a political strategy in the run-up to January's general election.
...The Palestinian delegation to the US accused Washington of taking Israel's side.
"The United States response is at best biased and weak because it completely ignored the fact that Israel started the escalation. The US has a moral obligation to ask Israel not to deploy its US-made weapons to kill and injure civilians. The US is also expected to tell Israel that there is no military solution to the conflict. The only way to achieve peace is to uproot the cause of its absence: Israel's military occupation of Palestine," it said. "It is shameful that certain countries are justifying the murder of Palestinian civilians. It is time for all to understand that Palestinian lives are as precious as any others in the region and around the world. The political complicity must end and Israel must be held accountable."
Sure, the media is biased against Israel. And Goldberg's only proof of this is to ask why they aren't focusing on the situation in Syria instead.
Though being familiar with the topsy-turvy universe that Israel's apologists inhabit, this really comes as no surprise.
Meanwhile...
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/mau ... a-coverage
Linguists, including Noam Chomsky, condemn "reprehensible" Gaza coverage
Wednesday 11/14/2012
The Electronic Intifada received today the following statement from international academics who recently participated in a conference on linguistics at the Islamic University of Gaza which decries major media outlets’ failure to report on recent killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza. I wrote about this pattern of omission and bias on my blog earlier today, focusing on The New York Times’ omission of Palestinian civilian casualties and its privileging of Israeli military and government officials in its report on today’s attacks.
Media reporting on Gaza: Nous accusons.
While countries across Europe and North America commemorated military casualties of past and present wars on November 11, Israel was targeting civilians. On November 12, waking up to a new week, readers at breakfast were flooded with heart rending accounts of past and current military casualties. There was, however, no or little mention of the fact that the majority of casualties of modern day wars are civilians. There was also hardly any mention on the morning of November 12 of military attacks on Gaza that continued throughout the weekend. A cursory scan confirms this for Canada’s CBC, the Globe and Mail, Montreal’s Gazette, and the Toronto Star. Equally, for the New York Times and for the BBC.
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) report on Sunday November 11, five Palestinian civilians including three children had been killed in the Gaza strip in the previous 72 hours, in addition to two Palestinian security personnel. Four of the deaths occurred as a result of Israeli military firing artillery shells on youngsters playing soccer. Moreover, 52 civilians had been wounded, of which six were women and 12 were children. (Since we began composing this text, the Palestinian death toll has risen, and continues to rise.)
Articles that do report on the killings overwhelmingly focus on the killing of Palestinian security personnel. For example, an Associated Press article published in the CBC world news on November 13, entitled Israel mulls resuming targeted killings of Gaza militants, mentions absolutely nothing of civilian deaths and injuries. It portrays the killings as ‘targeted assassinations’. The fact that casualties have overwhelmingly been civilians indicates that Israel is not so much engaged in “targeted” killings, as in “collective” killings, thus once again committing the crime of collective punishment. Another AP item on CBC news from November 12 reads Gaza rocket fire raises pressure on Israel government. It features a photo of an Israeli woman gazing on a hole in her living room ceiling. Again, no images, nor mention of the numerous bleeding casualties or corpses in Gaza. Along the same lines, a BBC headline on November 12 reads Israel hit by fresh volley of rockets from Gaza. Similar trend can be illustrated for European mainstream papers.
News items overwhelmingly focus on the rockets that have been fired from Gaza, none of which have caused human casualties. What is not in focus are the shellings and bombardments on Gaza, which have resulted in numerous severe and fatal casualties. It doesn’t take an expert in media science to understand that what we are facing is at best shoddy and skewed reporting, and at worst willfully dishonest manipulation of the readership.
Furthermore, articles that do mention the Palestinian casualties in Gaza consistently report that Israeli operations are in response to rockets from Gaza and to the injuring of Israeli soldiers. However, the chronology of events of the recent flare-up began onNovember 5, when an innocent, apparently mentally unfit, 20-year old man, Ahmad al-Nabaheen, was shot when he wandered close to the border. Medics had to wait for six hours to be permitted to pick him up and they suspect that he may have died because of that delay. Then, on November 8, a 13-year old boy playing football in front of his house was killed by fire from the IOF that had moved into Gazan territory with tanks as well as helicopters. The wounding of four Israeli soldiers at the border on November 10 was therefore already part of a chain of events where Gazan civilians had been killed, and not the triggering event.
We, the signatories, have recently returned from a visit to the Gaza Strip. Some among us are now connected to Palestinians living in Gaza through social media. For two nights in a row Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from sleeping through continued engagement of drones, F16s, and indiscriminate bombings of various targets inside the densely populated Gaza strip. The intent of this is clearly to terrorise the population, successfully so, as we can ascertain from our friends’ reports. If it was not for Facebook postings, we would not be aware of the degree of terror felt by ordinary Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This stands in stark contrast to the world’s awareness of terrorised and shock-treated Israeli citizens.
An extract of a report sent by a Canadian medic who happened to be in Gaza and helped out in Shifa hospital ER over the weekend says: “the wounded were all civilians with multiple puncture wounds from shrapnel: brain injuries, neck injuries, hemo-pneumo thorax, pericardial tamponade, splenic rupture, intestinal perforations, slatted limbs, traumatic amputations. All of this with no monitors, few stethoscopes, one ultrasound machine. …. Many people with serious but non life threatening injuries were sent home to be re-assessed in the morning due to the sheer volume of casualties. The penetrating shrapnel injuries were spooky. Tiny wounds with massive internal injuries. … There was very little morphine for analgesia.”
Apparently such scenes are not newsworthy for the New York Times, the CBC, or the BBC.
Bias and dishonesty with respect to the oppression of Palestinians is nothing new in Western media and has been widely documented. Nevertheless, Israel continues its crimes against humanity with full acquiescence and financial, military, and moral support from our governments, the U.S., Canada and the EU. Netanyahu is currently garnering Western diplomatic support for additional operations in Gaza, which makes us worry that another Cast Lead may be on the horizon. In fact, the very recent events are confirming such an escalation has already begun, as today’s death-count climbs. The lack of widespread public outrage at these crimes is a direct consequence of the systematic way in which the facts are withheld and/or of the skewed way these crimes are portrayed.
We wish to express our outrage at the reprehensible media coverage of these acts in the mainstream (corporate) media. We call on journalists around the world working for corporate media outlets to refuse to be instruments of this systematic policy of disguise. We call on citizens to inform themselves through independent media, and to voice their conscience by whichever means is accessible to them.
Hagit Borer, linguist, Queen Mary University of London (UK)
Antoine Bustros, composer and writer, Montreal (Canada)
Noam Chomsky, linguist, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, US
David Heap, linguist, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Stephanie Kelly, linguist, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Máire Noonan, linguist, McGill University (Canada)
Philippe Prévost, linguist, University of Tours (France)
Verena Stresing, biochemist, University of Nantes (France)
Laurie Tuller, linguist, University of Tours (France)
The horrific crimes human beings commit against each other seem endless.
Maybe human DNA is to blame.
No, not human DNA. The Israeli occupation is to blame.
Also, I choose to place more trust in statistics than hearsay. They seem more reliable to me as a general rule.
Hugh Freaking Dillon, what the fuck do you mean by "with a last name like Goldberg, I'm pretty sure I know where this guy stands."?! The man's got a Jewish name so clearly he must be a blind supporter of Israel no matter what they do such that you don't have to actually consider what he has to say because you can assume that you already know what positions he'll take?!
Shame.
Is that how you justify Israel's ongoing land-grab and ethnic cleansing? By blaming the conflict on Palestinian resistance to the occupation with 'two wrongs don't make a right'?
Hearsay? Is that your definition of official reports by Human Rights Watch, and the U.N Commission of Inquiry?
How about you address the points I raised re: Israel's deliberate attacks on Palestinians, instead of sidestepping them?
And what are these two a-priori wrongs that you mention? Was the fact that the Palestinians were living peacefully on their own land for 1000 years, wrong? Is it wrong for the Palestinians to resist their dispossession by the Israeli's? Is it wrong to fight back against ethnic cleansing?
http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/42/a42r159.htm
General Assembly
94th plenary meeting - 7 December 1987
8. Also urges all States, unilaterally and in co-operation with other States, as well as relevant United Nations organs, to contribute to the progressive elimination of the causes underlying international terrorism and to pay special attention to all situations, including colonialism, racism and situations involving mass and flagrant violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms and those involving alien domination and occupation, that may give rise to international terrorism and may endanger international peace and security;
14. Considers that nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of peoples forcibly deprived of that right referred to in the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation or other forms of colonial domination, nor, in accordance with the principles of the Charter and in conformity with the above-mentioned Declaration, the right of these peoples to struggle to this end and to seek and receive support;
It maintains the above ratio by listing practically every murdered Palestinian of fighting age, or otherwise, as a combatant. I.e, It lists children, and policemen as combatants, as it did during the Gaza massacre of 2008-2009.
http://edition.presstv.ir/detail.fa/89577.html
The Israeli IDF has updated its casualty figures for the war on the Gaza Strip and suggests that only 309 Palestinians killed were innocent civilians, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported on Wednesday.
The IDF claims that the number comes from the 1,249 Palestinian fatalities it identified from the 1,370 it acknowledges as dead.
The figures presented by Israel are flatly contradicted by those presented in the latest UN human rights report issued on March 17.
According to the conservative report, 1,434 Palestinians lost their lives in the war on the blockaded Gaza Strip, 235 of whom were combatants.
The UN puts the number of civilian fatalities at 960, including 288 children and 121 women.
The report, while dismissing the legality of the Israeli war on the Palestinian territory, concedes that the grave war crimes committed in Gaza necessitate accountability and criminal prosecution.
Israeli war crimes include the use of deadly white phosphorus shells in densely populated civilian areas. While Tel Aviv initially denied using the controversial weapon, mounting evidence later forced officials to admit having employed the shells
You should read Finkelstein's latest book - though I know you won't. He dedicates an entire chapter to Jeffrey Goldberg and systematically exposes him for the fraud that he is.
Michael Neumann - The Case Against Israel
'...Israel, and the Zionist movement that created it, has consistently been in the wrong in it's conflict with the Palestinians. The Zionist movement took their land, that is, it deprived them of sovereignty over that land. The Palestinians had done nothing to provoke this usurpation. Sovereignty was the right of the Palestinians, of the inhabitants of Palestine, not of the settlers who came with the express purpose of establishing an ethnic state that could reasonably be seen as a mortal threat to the Palestinians and as a grievous assault on their rights. Given this threat, the Palestinians were right to make no concessions of sovereignty to the Zionists and, given that the Zionists would not abandon their project, there was no room for compromise. However, a real opportunity for peace arose with the Israeli conquest of the Occupied territories in 1967, when the Palestinians made concessions they did not, as a matter of right, have to make. This opportunity was decisively abandoned by the Israelis, not so much by the occupation itself as by an extremist settler movement and the policies that supported, nurtured, and sustained it.
The settler movement constituted a new mortal threat to the Palestinians, worse than the previous one. The Palestinians were entitled - indeed rationally compelled - to resist this threat, and they were justified in supposing that violent resistance was required. Moreover, nothing in the character of that resistance supports the claims that the Palestinians are consumed by anything more than the entirely normal hatred that is born of warfare and that generally dissipates with peace. The claim that Palestinians are permanently bent on destroying Israel and consumed by inextinguishable hatred now shows itself to be baseless. The Palestinians' desperate attempts to defend themselves against catastrophic dispossession are no evidence whatever for that claim. What you say and feel when someone has trapped you and is progressively making your life intolerable is no evidence for how you will act when that person relents and departs.
What makes the Israeli position particularly indefensible is it's utter gratuitousness. There is no conceivable reason for Israel to promote the settlements that have been the cause of so much misery. The settler movement is built on psuedo-Biblical foolishness, bad history, greed, and - worse - a sort of racist messianism that deserves no tolerance, consideration, or respect. Israel could have not only peace but vastly increased security tomorrow if it chooses: It has all the options and the Palestinians none. The fussing about negotiations, trust, and hatred are nothing but self-deceiving excuses for more bloodshed.'
Michael Neumann
'It is sometimes alleged that complete withdrawal from the occupied territories is "impracticable" because the facts on the ground are too deeply entrenched: Israeli settlements are just too extensive and important to uproot. One can hardly take this seriously. If it was "practicable" for hundreds of thousands of stateless Palestinians to leave their homes, why is this impracticable for half as many Israeli citizens in far more comfortable and peaceful circumstances? Throughout modern history, from the waves of U.S immigration to the peaceful post-World War II population transfers, there have been far greater shifts than this movement of a few miles. In many cases, if the settlers prefer, they can simply return to their homes in the United States. "It's impracticable" seems here a stand-in for "Aw, gee, these towns are too nice to let the Arabs have them".
The significance of the withdrawal alternative is not that it represents a just solution. Arguably, justice would require much more than that - not only the abolition of Jewish sovereignty in Israel, but a full right of return, with compensation, for the Palestinians, and the eviction of Jewish inhabitants occupying Palestinian property. But the existence of the withdrawal alternative effectively completes the case against Israel. It's willful and pointless rejection of that alternative places Israel decisively in the wrong. In the first place, Israel has a right of self defence, but it does not apply in the Occupied Territories. If the U.S invaded Jamaica and dotted it with settlements, neither the settlers nor the armed forces could invoke any right to defend themselves against the Jamaicans, any more than a robber who invaded your house. So it is with the Israeli's in the Occupied Territories. Their right of self-defense is their right to the least violent defensive alternative. Since withdrawal (perhaps followed by fortifying their own 1948 border) is by far their best and least violent defense, that is all they have a right to do.'
Michael Neumann - 'The Case Against Israel' P107-108
Some Israeli's may have seen the first Post-1967 settlements as outposts, advance warning stations guarding the new frontiers against possible attack. This never made a lot of sense: why not just have real advance warning stations, military positions, instead? No one has ever explained why a sprawl of civilian subdivisions and enclaves was required when, to all appearances, a few purely military outposts would have fulfilled any defensive functions at least as well, and at far less cost to both Israeli's and Palestinians. Dayan himself stated that "from the point of view of the security of the State, the establishment of the settlements has no great importance." Other officials shared his assessment:
"We have to use the pretext of security needs and the authority of the military governor as there is no way of driving out the Arabs from their land as long as they refuse to go and accept our compensation..."
In 1969 moreover, Dayan had emphasized that the settlements were eternal: "the settlements established in the territories are there forever, and the future frontiers will include these settlements as part of Israel." In private, he had already in 1967 made it quite clear how the Palestinians were not, in fact, to have a secure and tolerable existence: "there is no solution," he said, "and you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever prefers shall leave..."
...The settler movement's messianic notions of racial destiny have been amply documented. Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former Major General and intelligence chief in the Israeli Defense Forces, describes how they interpret the "halakha - the body of religious laws designed to encode a unique and binding lifestyle." Harkabi, like others, considers Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook to be the mentor of the Gush Emunim settler movement and cites him as saying at a public meeting that:
"I tell you explicitly that the Torah forbids us to surrender even one inch of our liberated land. There are no conquests here and we are not occupying foreign lands; we are returning to our home, to the inheritance of our ancestors. There is no Arab land here, only the inheritance of our God - and the more the world gets used to this thought the better it will be for them and for all of us..."
Out of curiosity Yosi, I've been reading a lot of comments and articles over the past few days relating to Israel's latest assault upon the Palestinians, and I've noticed that this civilian-combatant ratio topic has been at the forefront of many of these same comments and articles.
This is a serious question: Do Israel's supporters, it's internet army - the Hasbara - receive briefings from Israel's multi-million dollar propaganda division instructing them what to focus on and discuss in online forums, article comments sections, and social networking sites?
It's just that whenever another one of Israels attacks upon it's neighbours occurs, I always notice a pattern in the way Israel's supporters attempt to defend and justify Israeli aggression, and a tendency for the same bullshit excuses and justifications to surface.
So is there some sort of manual, or briefing that goes into circulation amongst Israel's internet army? If so, can you do me a favour and forward me a copy, as I'd really like to see it?
In the meantime, and on the subject of Israel's alleged expenditure of a 'great deal of effort to avoid civilian casualties', can you please reply to my previous post detailing Israel's blanketing of civilian areas of South Lebanon with cluster munitions in 2006? Maybe the following will help you with your answer?
http://www.cggl.org/scripts/document.asp?id=46269
Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon
Human Rights Watch issued today a new 50-page report analyzing almost two dozen cases of Israeli air and artillery attacks on civilian homes and vehicles in Lebanon. The main conclusions are (i) that Israeli forces have systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon and (ii) the pattern of attacks in more than 20 cases investigated by Human Rights Watch researchers in Lebanon indicates that the failures cannot be dismissed as mere accidents and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices. The report goes on to conclude that some of these attacks constitute war crimes.
To read the full report, “Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon,” please visit: http://hrw.org/reports/2006/lebanon0806
Summary
This report documents serious violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of war) by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Lebanon between July 12 and July 27, 2006, as well as the July 30 attack in Qana. During this period, the IDF killed an estimated 400 people, the vast majority of them civilians, and that number climbed to over 500 by the time this report went to print. The Israeli government claims it is taking all possible measures to minimize civilian harm, but the cases documented here reveal a systematic failure by the IDF to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Since the start of the conflict, Israeli forces have consistently launched artillery and air attacks with limited or dubious military gain but excessive civilian cost. In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians. The Israeli government claims that it targets only Hezbollah, and that fighters from the group are using civilians as human shields, thereby placing them at risk. Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack. Hezbollah occasionally did store weapons in or near civilian homes and fighters placed rocket launchers within populated areas or near U.N. observers, which are serious violations of the laws of war because they violate the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. However, those cases do not justify the IDF’s extensive use of indiscriminate force which has cost so many civilian lives. In none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack.
By consistently failing to distinguish between combatants and civilians, Israel has violated one of the most fundamental tenets of the laws of war: the duty to carry out attacks on only military targets. The pattern of attacks during the Israeli offensive in Lebanon suggests that the failures cannot be explained or dismissed as mere accidents; the extent of the pattern and the seriousness of the consequences indicate the commission of war crimes.
This report is based on extensive on-the-ground research in Lebanon. Since the start of hostilities, Human Rights Watch has interviewed victims and witnesses of attacks in oneon- one settings, conducted on-site inspections (when security allowed), and collected information from hospitals, humanitarian groups, and government agencies. Human Rights Watch also conducted research in Israel, inspecting the IDF’s use of weapons and discussing the conduct of forces with IDF officials. The research was extensive, but given the ongoing war and the scope of the bombings, Human Rights Watch does not claim that the findings are comprehensive; further investigation is required to document the war’s complete impact on civilians and to assess the full scope of the IDF’s compliance with and disregard for international humanitarian law.
While not the focus of this report, Human Rights Watch has separately and simultaneously documented violations of international humanitarian law by Hezbollah, including a pattern of attacks that amount to war crimes. Between July 12, when Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed eight, and July 27, the group launched a reported 1,300 rockets into predominantly civilian areas in Israel, killing 18 civilians and wounding more than 300. Without guidance systems for accurate targeting, the rockets are inherently indiscriminate when directed toward civilian areas, especially cities, and thus are serious violations of the requirement of international humanitarian law that attackers distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians. Some of these rockets, Human Rights Watch found, are packed with thousands of metal ball-bearings, which spray more than 100 meters from the blast and compound the harm to civilians.
This report analyzes a selection of Israeli air and artillery attacks that together claimed at least 153 civilian lives, or over a third of the reported Lebanese deaths in the conflict’s first two weeks. Of the 153 civilian deaths documented in this report by name, sixtythree of the victims were children under the age of eighteen, and thirty-seven of them were under ten. Israeli air strikes also killed many dual nationals who were vacationing in Lebanon when the fighting began, including Brazilian, Canadian, German, Kuwaiti, and U.S. citizens. The full death toll is certainly higher because medical and recovery teams have been unable to retrieve many bodies due to ongoing fighting and the dire security situation in south Lebanon.
The report breaks civilian deaths into two categories: attacks on civilian homes and attacks on civilian vehicles. In both categories, victims and witnesses interviewed independently and repeatedly said that neither Hezbollah fighters nor Hezbollah weapons were present in the area during or just before the Israeli attack took place. While some individuals, out of fear or sympathy, may have been unwilling to speak about Hezbollah’s military activity, others were quite open about it. In totality, the consistency, detail, and credibility of testimony from a broad array of witnesses who did not speak to each other leave no doubt about the validity of the patterns described in this report. In many cases, witness testimony was corroborated by reports from international journalists and aid workers. During site visits conducted in Qana, Srifa, and Tyre, Human Rights Watch saw no evidence that there had been Hezbollah military activity around the areas targeted by the IDF during or just prior to the attack: no spent ammunition, abandoned weapons or military equipment, trenches, or dead or wounded fighters. Moreover, even if Hezbollah had been in a populated area at the time of an attack, Israel would still be legally obliged to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize civilian casualties resulting from its targeting of military objects or personnel. In the cases documented in this report, however, the IDF consistently tolerated a high level of civilian casualties for questionable military gain.
In one case, an Israeli air strike on July 13 destroyed the home of a cleric known to have sympathy for Hezbollah but who was not known to have taken any active part in hostilities. Even if the IDF considered him a legitimate target (and Human Rights Watch has no evidence that he was), the strike killed him, his wife, their ten children, and the family’s Sri Lankan maid.
On July 16, an Israeli airplane fired a rocket into a civilian home in the village of Aitaroun, killing eleven members of the al-Akhrass family, among them seven Canadian- Lebanese dual nationals who were vacationing in the village when the war began. Human Rights Watch independently interviewed three villagers who vigorously denied that the family had any connection to Hezbollah. Among the victims were children aged one, three, five, and seven.
Others civilians came under attack in their cars as they attempted to flee the fighting in the South. This report alone documents twenty-seven civilian deaths that resulted from such attacks. The number is surely higher, but at the time the report went to press, ongoing Israeli attacks on the roads made it impossible to retrieve all the bodies. Starting around July 15, the IDF issued warnings to residents of southern villages to leave, followed by a general warning for all civilians south of the Litani River, which mostly runs about 25 kilometers north of the Israel-Lebanon border, to evacuate immediately. Tens of thousands of Lebanese fled their homes to the city of Tyre (itself south of the Litani and thus within the zone Israel ordered evacuated) or further north to Beirut, many waving white flags. As they left, Israeli forces fired on dozens of vehicles with warplanes and artillery.
Two Israeli air strikes are known to have hit humanitarian aid vehicles. On July 18 the IDF hit a convoy of the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates, destroying a vehicle with medicines, vegetable oil, sugar and rice, and killing the driver. On July 23, Israeli forces hit two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances in the village of Qana. As of August 1, tens of thousands of civilians remained in villages south of the Litani River, despite the warnings to leave. Some chose to stay, but the vast majority, Human Rights Watch found, was unable to flee due to destroyed roads, a lack of gasoline, high taxi fares, sick relatives, or ongoing Israeli attacks. Many of the civilians who remained were elderly, sick, or poor.
Israel has justified its attacks on roads by citing the need to clear the transport routes of Hezbollah fighters moving arms. Again, none of the evidence gathered by Human Rights Watch, independent media sources, or Israeli official statements indicate that any of the attacks on vehicles documented in this report resulted in Hezbollah casualties or the destruction of weapons. Rather, the attacks killed and wounded civilians who were fleeing their homes, as the IDF had advised them to do.
In addition to strikes from airplanes, helicopters, and traditional artillery, Israel has used artillery-fired cluster munitions against populated areas, causing civilian casualties. One such attack on the village of Blida on July 19 killed a sixty-year-old woman and wounded at least twelve civilians, including seven children. The wide dispersal pattern of cluster munitions and the high dud rate (ranging from 2 to 14 percent, depending on the type of cluster munition) make the weapons exceedingly dangerous for civilians and, when used in populated areas, a violation of international humanitarian law.
Statements from Israeli government officials and military leaders suggest that, at the very least, the IDF has blurred the distinction between civilian and combatant, and is willing to strike at targets it considers even vaguely connected to the latter. At worst, it considers all people in the area of hostilities open to attack.
On July 17, for example, after IDF strikes on Beirut, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, Eliezer Shkedi, said, “in the center of Beirut there is an area which only terrorists enter into.”1 The next day, the IDF deputy chief of staff, Moshe Kaplinski, when talking about the IDF’s destruction of Beirut’s Dahia neighborhood, said, “the hits were devastating, and this area, which was a Hezbollah symbol, became deserted rubble.”2 On July 27, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said that the Israeli air force should flatten villages before ground troops move in to prevent casualties among Israeli soldiers fighting Hezbollah. Israel had given civilians ample time to leave southern Lebanon, he claimed, and therefore anyone remaining should be considered a supporter of Hezbollah. “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah,” he said.
International humanitarian law requires effective advance warnings to the civilian population prior to an attack, when conditions permit. But those warnings do not way relieve Israel from its obligation at all times to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians from harm. In other words, issuing warnings in no way entitles the Israeli military to treat those civilians who remain in southern Lebanon as combatants who are fair game for attack.
In addition to recommendations to the Israeli government and Hezbollah that they respect international humanitarian law, Human Rights Watch calls on the U.S. government immediately to suspend transfer of all arms that have been documented or credibly alleged to have been used in violation of international humanitarian law in Lebanon, as well as funding or support for such materiel, pending an end to the violations. Human Rights Watch calls upon the Iranian and Syrian governments to do the same with regards to military assistance to Hezbollah.
This report does not address Israeli attacks on Lebanon’s infrastructure or Beirut’s southern suburbs, which is the subject of ongoing Human Rights Watch research. It also does not address Hezbollah’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israel, which have been reported on and denounced separately and continues to be the subject of ongoing Human Rights Watch investigations. In addition, Human Rights Watch continues to investigate allegations that Hezbollah is shielding its military personnel and materiel by locating them in civilian homes or areas, and it is deeply concerned by Hezbollah’s placement of certain troops and materiel near civilians, which endangers them and violates the duty to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. Human Rights Watch uses the occasion of this report to reiterate Hezbollah’s legal duty never to deliberately use civilians to shield military objects and never to needlessly endanger civilians by conducting military operations, maintaining troops, or storing weapons in their vicinity.
The armed conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is governed by international treaties, as well as the rules of customary international humanitarian law. Article 3 Common to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 sets forth minimum standards for all parties to a conflict between a state party such as Israel and a non-state party such as Hezbollah. Israel has also asserted that it considers itself to be responding to the actions of the sovereign state of Lebanon, not just to those of Hezbollah. Any hostilities between Israeli forces and the forces of Lebanon would fall within the full Geneva Conventions to which both Lebanon and Israel are parties. In either case, the rules governing bombing, shelling, and rocket attacks are effectively the same.
Methodology
This report is based primarily on investigations by Human Rights Watch researchers, who have been in Beirut since the onset of the conflict and traveled for two days to Lebanon’s South. The team focused on interviewing witnesses and survivors of Israeli strikes inside Lebanon, gathering detailed testimony from these individuals, and carefully corroborating and cross-checking their accounts with international aid workers, international and local journalists, medical professionals, local officials, as well as information from the IDF.
Security conditions did not permit on-site visits to many of the villages or other sites where civilian casualties are documented in this report, but in all cases Human Rights Watch located eyewitnesses to attacks. All cases for which Human Rights Watch could not find eyewitnesses, survivors, or other credible sources of information have been excluded from this report. A parallel team of Human Rights Watch researchers operated during this same period in northern Israel investigating and reporting on Hezbollah’s attacks on civilians in Israel. That team also contributed to Human Rights Watch’s understanding of IDF operations in Lebanon through on-site observations and conversations with IDF spokespersons.
In a small minority of cases, Human Rights Watch researchers in Lebanon could locate witnesses only in Hezbollah-controlled camps for displaced persons in Beirut. Hezbollah controls an estimated seventy of the 120 schools currently housing the displaced. On such occasions, Hezbollah officials often insisted that Human Rights Watch researchers not ask questions about the location of Hezbollah militants because such information, wherever Hezbollah might be located, was of military value. These conditions limited Human Rights Watch’s ability to make a legal determination regarding whether the target in question was legitimate. In such cases, researchers sought additional witnesses outside of Hezbollah’s control to investigate the location of Hezbollah militants in the area at the time of the attack. If such witnesses could not be found, Human Rights Watch dropped the case.
As noted, in the cases documented in this report, witnesses consistently told Human Rights Watch that neither Hezbollah fighters nor other legitimate military targets were in the area that the IDF attacked. However, Human Rights Watch did document cases in which the IDF hit legitimate military targets, and, with limited exceptions, witnesses were generally willing to discuss the presence and activity of Hezbollah. At the sites visited by Human Rights Watch—Qana, Srifa, Tyre, and the southern suburbs of Beirut—on-site investigations did not identify any signs of military activity in the area attacked, such as trenches, destroyed rocket launchers, other military equipment, or dead or wounded fighters. International and local journalists, rescue workers, and international observers also did not produce evidence to contradict the statements of witnesses interviewed for this report.
The researchers also monitored information from public sources about the attacks, including Israeli government statements. Although Human Rights Watch’s research has been extensive, it is, as noted, not comprehensive. Further inquiry is required, particularly as access to the affected villages in South Lebanon improves, and to the extent that Israel ultimately decides to make its commanders and soldiers involved in the operation available for interviews.
so better read links from guided media,or from people i know hate israel,or support israel,,
i said today to see greek news..'we always here are more close to palestinians,so i wait to see what the say..they said
8 palestinians are dead and 3 israelian for the last 4 days attacks..
and 300 palestinians at hospitals
bombing from israelian and rocket from hamas..
350 rockets was shot from hamas,more than 200 go down from israelian antirocket defence..
the rest explode..
and ofcourse,usa,United Nation,now will have meeting to save the situation,,blah blah..the same bullshit as always.
i read earlier an ispaelian friend on facebook wall..a rocket hit the house next to his...
thats the shitty part..i wish i have some palestinian friend toread his side of story..
well the way i see it..
people will die from both sides,families will suffer from both sides..there is no angels in all this....only evil here..i hope this shit stop asap..
"..That's One Happy Fuckin Ghost.."
“..That came up on the Pillow Case...This is for the Greek, With Our Apologies.....”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... -us-policy
Stop pretending the US is an uninvolved, helpless party in the Israeli assault on Gaza
The Obama administration's unstinting financial, military and diplomatic support for Israel is a key enabling force in the conflict
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 17 November 2012
A central premise of US media coverage of the Israeli attack on Gaza - beyond the claim that Israel is justifiably "defending itself" - is that this is some endless conflict between two foreign entitles, and Americans can simply sit by helplessly and lament the tragedy of it all. The reality is precisely the opposite: Israeli aggression is possible only because of direct, affirmative, unstinting US diplomatic, financial and military support for Israel and everything it does. This self-flattering depiction of the US as uninvolved, neutral party is the worst media fiction since TV news personalities covered the Arab Spring by pretending that the US is and long has been on the side of the heroic democratic protesters, rather than the key force that spent decades propping up the tyrannies they were fighting.
Literally each day since the latest attacks began, the Obama administration has expressed its unqualified support for Israel's behavior. Just two days before the latest Israeli air attacks began, Obama told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas "that his administration opposes a Palestinian bid for non-state membership of the UN". Both the US Senate and House have already passed resolutions unequivocally supporting Israel, thus earning the ultimate DC reward: the head-pat from Aipac, which "praised the extraordinary show of support by the Senate for Israel's struggle against terrorist attacks on its citizens". More bipartisan Congressional cheerleading is certain to come as the attacks continue, no matter how much more brutal they become.
In reflexive defense of Israel, the US government thus once against put itself squarely at odds with key nations such as Turkey (whose prime minister accused Israel of being motivated by elections and demanded that Israel be "held to account" for mounting civilians deaths), Egypt (which denounced Israeli attacks as "aggression against humanity"), and Tunisia (which called on the world to "stop the blatant aggression" of Israel).
By rather stark contrast, Obama continues to defend Israel's free hand in Gaza, causing commentators like Jeffrey Goldberg to gloat, not inaccurately: "Barack Obama hasn't turned against Israel. This is a big surprise to everyone who has not paid attention for the last four years" (indeed, there are few more compelling signs of how dumb and misleading US elections are than the fact that the only criticism of Obama on Israel heard over the last year in the two-party debate was the grievance that Obama evinces insufficient fealty - rather than excessive fealty - to the Israeli government). That the Netanyahu government knows that any attempt to condemn Israel at the UN would be instantly blocked by the US is a major factor enabling them to continue however they wish. And, of course, the bombs, planes and tanks they are using are subsidized, in substantial part, by the US taxpayer.
If one wants to defend US support for Israel on the merits - on the ground that this escalating Israeli aggression against a helpless population is just and warranted - then one should do so. As I wrote on Thursday, it's very difficult to see how those who have cheered for Obama's foreign policy could do anything but cheer for Israeli militarism, as they are grounded in the same premises.
But pretending that the US - and the Obama administration - bear no responsibility for what is taking place is sheer self-delusion, total fiction. It has long been the case that the central enabling fact in Israeli lawlessness and aggression is blind US support, and that continues, more than ever, to be the case under the presidency of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
The US is not some neutral, uninvolved party. Whatever side of this conflict you want to defend - or if you're one of those people who love to announce that you just wish the whole thing would go away - it's still necessary to take responsibility for the key role played by the American government and this administration in enabling everything that is taking place.
Media coverage
Due to extensive travel the past few days, I've been subjected to far more television news coverage than is probably healthy, and it's just been staggering to see how tilted US media discourse is: Israeli officials and pro-Israel "experts" are endlessly paraded across the screen while Palestinian voices are exceedingly rare; the fact of the 45-year-old brutal occupation and ongoing Israeli dominion over Gaza is barely mentioned; meanwhile, every primitive rocket that falls harmlessly near Israeli soil is trumpeted with screaming headlines while the carnage and terror in Gaza is mentioned, if at all, as an afterthought. Two cartoons perfectly summarize this coverage: here and here.
On a related note, the Nation's Jeremy Scahill was interviewed on Tuesday night after a Sundance Institute panel on political documentaries which I moderated. Scahill, who is working on a documentary entitled "Dirty Wars" about the US violence in Yemen and other parts of the Muslim world, spoke for 12 minutes to We Are Change about Obama's terrorism and foreign policies; I highly recommend it:
UPDATE
According to Haaretz, Israel's Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, said this about Israel's attacks on Gaza: "The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages." Let me know if any of the US Sunday talk shows mention that tomorrow during their discussions of this "operation".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wa ... ing_Israel
Israel attacked Egypt in 1967, not the other way around.
As for protecting itself against Palestine or Lebanon, when was that?
Finkelstein - 'Khowing Too Much'
[The 1967 War]
P.167: Nasser announced that the Straits of Tiran would be closed to Israeli vessels and foreign vessels carrying "strategic" cargo to the Israeli port city of Eilat [....] In reality just five percent of Israel's trade passed through Eilat; the only significant commodity possibly affected by a blockade was oil, which could have been rerouted to the ports of Haifa or Ashdod, and anyhow Israel held in reserve an ample supply if oil carrying it over for many months to come.
[Michael] Oren [Israeli Ambassador to the U.S & Israeli historian] reports in profuse detail on the "frightful" news that Egypt had mined the Straits and otherwise forcibly implemented the blockade, only to note in passing that "the waterway remained mine-free." In fact Israel already knew right as Nasser declared the blockade that he would allow ships escorted by the U.S to go through, and after a few days vessels using the Straits passed freely without even being searched: Nasser had quietly lifted the blockade.
Notes: Gluska, 'Israeli Military' p.137, 155. Rabin was privy to "top secret" information that "the Egyptians had already decided that ships under American escort would not be stopped," while Eban speculated that Nasser "has not decided to disrupt shipping," but rather "decided to be in a position where he can brandish this sword" at his whim.
Oren also contends that in 1957 Israel had won "international recognition of it's right to act in self-defence if the Straits were ever blockaded," and that the U.S "pledged" to "regard any Egyptian attempt to revive the Tiran blockade as an act of war to which Israel could respond in self-defence" ('Six Days' PP.81, 12). Although Israel did obtain from the U.S and other maritime states support for it's right of "free and innocent" passage in the Straits, Washington still stipulated that "any recurrence of hostilities or any violation by any party" be referred back to the United Nations. U.S officials and legal scholars as well as U.N secretaries-general Hammarskjold and U Thant all conceded it was a "complicated" jurisdictional dispute.
P.168: Reaching Cairo right after the blockade was announced, U Thant [U.N Secretary General] elicited a "very significant" (his words) assent from Nasser to a new diplomatic initiative: the appointment of a special U.N representative to mediate the crises, and a two-week moratorium on all provocations in the Straits [of Tiran]. Israel rejected both of U Thant's proposals.
Even 'Middle East Record', a semi-official Israeli compilation, observed after the June war that 'a number of facts seem to indicate Abdel Nasser's belief in the possibility of terminating...the conflict through diplomacy." It pointed in particular to the Egyptian President's "suggestion" that the International Court of Justice arbitrate the Strait's dispute, his purposeful "vagueness" on the blockades enforcement, and his "willingness" to revive EIMAC [Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission]. "Up to the outbreak of the war," [Zeev] Maoz [Israeli strategic analyst] concludes, "Nasser was interested in finding a ladder to climb down from the tall tree he found himself on."
Nasser agreed to send his vice-President to Washington to explore a diplomatic settlement. Just two days before the Egyptian's scheduled arrival, however, Israel attacked.
P. 170: 'U.S appraisals of Nasser's Intentions on eve of 1967 war'
Major General Meir Amit, head of the Mossad, told senior American officials on 1st June that "there were no differences between the U.S and the Israeli's on the military intelligence picture or it's interpretation". "The Egyptian build-up in Sinai lacked a clear offensive plan," Israeli scholar Avraham Sela reports, "and Nasser's defensive instructions explicitly assumed an Israeli first-strike."
25th May - CIA Appraisal: 'In our view, UAR [Egyptian] military dispositions in Sinai are defensive in character...The steps taken thus far by [other] Arab armies do not prove that the Arabs intend an all-out attack on Israel....In sum, we believe these are merely gestures in the interests of the fiction of Arab unity, but have little military utility in a conflict with Israel.'
26th May - General Earle Wheeler, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff: 'The UAR's dispositions are defensive and do not look as if they are preparatory to an invasiob of Israel...'There was no indication that the Egyptians would attack. If the UAR moved, it would give up it's defensive positions in the Sinai for little advantage.'
26th May - CIA's Board of National Estimates: 'Clearly Nasser has won the first round. It is possible that [Nasser] may seek a military show-down with Israel, designed to settle the whole problem once and for all. This seems to us highly unlikely...The most likely course seems to be for Nasser to hold to his present winnings as long as he can, and in as full measure as he can.'
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