bodies for ballots . countering israeli hashtag hasbara

 Tis Beastly reading. This report from 'The Dailybeast' bares the Beast in the  Middle East. From 'Mondoweiss' comes a more analytical article that challenges the Western Discourse on the " conflict".

One side of which  they  champion. 

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Israel does not like to admit it doesn’t have the military might to accomplish something. But when it comes to relations with Palestinians, and with Gaza in particular, there is no military solution.

Israel has tried assassinating Palestinian leaders for decades but the resistance persists. Israel launched a devastating and brutal war on Gaza from 2008 to 2009 killing 1,400 people, mostly civilians, but the resistance persists.

Why, then, would Israel choose to revert to a failed strategy that will undoubtedly only escalate the situation? Because it is far easier for politicians to lie to voters, vilify their adversaries, and tell them ‘we will hit them hard’ than to come clean and say instead, ‘we’ve failed and there is no military solution to this problem.’

With Israeli elections around the corner, the right-wing Israeli government chose the counter-productive path of escalation even though civilians would pay the price and their domestic opposition rallied behind them.

Trading bodies for ballots is an equation Israeli leaders are happy to be engaged in, especially since all the ballots are Israeli and the bodies are almost always Palestinian.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/15/bodies-for-ballots.html

As the war between Gaza and Israel heightens to levels unseen since the devastating Operation Cast Lead, the competing narratives behind the conflict have reached a new platform: social media.

The war between hashtags embodies the deep mischaracterizations that are so prevalent on multiple ends of the conflict. While supporters of Gaza have been banding under the hashtag#GazaunderAttack, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) has created its own response--#PillarofDefense. The translation from Hebrew can be interpreted as Pillar of Cloud, a Biblical reference to God incarnating himself as a cloud to confuse and terrorize Egyptians in order to protect the children of Israel.

All moral implications of using Biblical imagery for military operations aside, the IDF has taken its social media coverage of the attacks on Gaza to new levels. It has successfully created a brand for the Israeli military, and its sleek designs and infographics serve to suppress the horrifying stories of occupation out of Gaza.

 Eight civilians, including an 11-month-old baby, have been killed as a result of air strikes, with 120 civilians injured.

But these are not the stories the IDF wants the public to see. Brilliantly, it has created a social media campaign that markets occupation as if it were Coca-Cola, a PR combination of capitalism and terrorism at its finest.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/16-2

 through the eyes of Western government and mainstream media some of these killing apparatus are regarded as legitimate and others are not. The F-16, the Apache helicopter, the drone, the bomb are weapons that the US, the UK, the EU can understand and relate to. They should as they are large importers of Israeli military and intelligence technology. The rocket, homemade from donkey shit and sugar or fabricated using Iranian technology is a weapon that is foreign to Western discourses on legitimate forms of killing. While both apparatus have maimed and killed civilians and military targets over the last two days, the bomb dropped is a more comfortable thought in the minds of the BBC watcher in England than the rocket being launched from a Palestinian resistance fighter into Israel. These western narratives forget that the rocket is used by the lesser military power in this asymmetrical bomb competition between Israel and Gaza. It neglects that resistant fighters in Gaza don’t use high performance jets or helicopters, not because they elect for a more brute or savage weapon; no, they use the rocket because they don’t have drones who can target identified military leaders from hundreds of meters up. They don’t have the military technology, power or resources to send fighter jets to Tel Aviv or launch a naval battle from the Mediterranean. They do not enjoy the support of the largest military power around the globe to assist it in making its attacks more “surgical”.

All Palestinian resistant movements are referred to as militants or terrorists. Western media sources feel comfortable awarding responsibility for all attacks on Israel as being launched by that “terrorist organisation”: Hamas. Hamas, who although has strongly avoided the topic of elections in recent years, it was once upon time the democratic elected body of Palestine. Hamas was also not responsible for the rockets launched prior reaching the ceasefire on November 14th, 2012 before the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari; Hamas’s military wing leader. The blowing up of one of its leader was bound to bring Hamas into this violence, which at least initially, it was trying to avoid. 

I would like to ask a question of these dominant Western discourses. In their mind who is allowed to legitimately resist against Israel? According to Westerns news media all resistant fighters in Palestine are militants. Israel, as a western favored state, is allowed to target and assassinate Hamas government and military officials: March 2004, Gaza: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, killed by missile strike, April 2004, Gaza: Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, co-founder and leader of Hamas, killed in missile strike, January 2009, Gaza: Said Siyam, senior Hamas commander, killed in air strike and now, November 2012, Gaza City: Ahmed Said Khalil al-Jabari, commander of Hamas' military wing, just to name a few. This precision killing is regarded as a legitimate form of violence. Hamas or other movements working from within Gaza are legitimate targets because they are regarded as militants or terrorists; their retaliation attacks, however, are regarded as illegitimate because they are from non-state militants or terrorists. So Palestinian military and political leaders can be legitimately targeted but they are not allowed to legitimately retaliate.

 If these Western narratives were more dedicated to their own professed adherence to human rights then they would not be able to stand in defence of Israel. According to the Geneva Conventions a people under occupation have the legal right to resist their occupation; this Article 1 (4) of Protocol 1 stresses that force may be used to pursue the right of self-determination. States and actors who attempts to suppress the Palestinian right to resist violent occupation is in direct contradiction with the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which all legally aim to provide support to those fighting colonial regimes. The Western discourse on the legitimate use of violence needs to sensitise and educate its view: Palestinians have the legal right to resist and that is exactly what they are doing.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/16-13