Debunked: The Mendacious Propaganda Israel is Pushing to Justify Its War On Gaza

It was Israel that initiated the assault on Gaza--not the Palestinians.

 By Mustafa Barghouthi

It is time to clarify the real facts on the aggression the Israelis started on the Palestinians.  Unfortunately, the Israeli narrative has dominated in the global media. It’s very important to uncover the Israeli narrative and bring facts to the public’s attention. The world needs to differentiate between myths and truth.

The first and very important point is that it was Israel which initiated this war and not the Palestinians.

This is very different from what is presented in most of the media and it’s completely wrong to accept the Israeli narrative here.  Israelis claim that Israel was subjected to rocket shooting from Gaza to which Israel responded by airstrikes. This is not true. The reality is that Israel initiated airstrikes on Gaza, several times, and assassinated people in Gaza, trying to provoke a reaction until they got rockets being shot at Israel. And then, it was spun in the media as Israel defending itself.

The second point is that this war started not in Gaza but in the West Bank, when the Israeli army, without providing a single proof that Palestinians were responsible for the disappearance and subsequent death of three settlers, started a collective punishment campaign all over the West Bank. One of the results of that campaign was the arrest of more than 1,000 Palestinians, including huge numbers of Palestinian members of Parliament, bringing the number of Palestinian parliamentarians in Israeli jails to 34. During that campaign moreover, Israel invaded more than 3,000 houses, destroyed many of them, stole money from people and destroyed furniture. Israeli forces initiated wide-ranging violence against Palestinians and started using high-velocity bullets and gun shots against peaceful demonstrators who were protesting against the kidnapping of Muhammad Abu Khdeir who was tortured and burned alive by Israeli settlers. This led to a very serious escalation all over the West Bank.

The third point is that this war in not on Hamas only, it is a war on all Palestinians. It is a war on Palestinians in Gaza, it is a war on Palestinians in the West Bank, in East Jerusalem and on the Palestinians in general.  It is very important to mention that most of the people who suffer from the Israeli aggressions are civilians. At the time of writing this article, on the 26th of July, at least 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, 90% of whom were civilians. Among them, are more than 208 children. Over 6000 people have been injured, 31% of whom were children. Whole families have been eliminated. Just this morning, 20 members from the same family, including 11 children, were killed in their sleep as the building they had found refuge in only the day before was leveled. We are talking about more than 30 families that have been scratched out of the civil record because the whole extended family was eliminated, the father, the mother, the grand-parents, the grand-children, everybody. This kind of extermination of people, this level of attack is nothing less than a massacre, a genocide that is conducted by Israel.

To add insult to injury, Israel has forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their homes, forcing them to leave by bombarding them. No less than 13,000 homes were completely or partially destroyed, thousands of people have lost everything, their clothes, a lifetime of belongings and memories and now, hundreds of thousands of people are refugees once more, many living in schools, with nothing. If the war ends, when they come back, they will come back to nothing, only rubble. Entire neighborhoods like Shujaeya were completely eliminated within 24 hours. Even hospitals were attacked. So far, the Israeli army has attacked seven hospitals, 13 ambulances and two Medical Relief centers, among other clinics. In several cases, they have injured and killed medical workers and/or patients. They also attacked a care facility for disabled people, killing two disabled women in the process. On another occasion, a disabled young man, deaf and unable to speak, did not understand what was going on until he was directly hit and paralyzed from the waist down, adding yet another disability to his life. The most touching and heart-wrenching words I have heard were those of a man who was speaking to two of his children in the hospital, killed by Israeli airstrike: “Forgive me my children, I could not protect you.”

This feeling of helplessness is overwhelming because thousands and thousands of people today in Gaza, thousands of mothers and fathers are unable to protect their children. Many have seen their children killed; some have seen their children decapitated by Israeli shrapnel.

The next point I want to make is related to the claim that Israel has the right to defend itself. The most insulting thing here is that many of the world’s leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany and Barack Obama of the United States are speaking of Israel’s right to defend itself, while no single word is said of the Palestinians’ right to defend themselves, although the Palestinians are the oppressed ones, the underdogs in this struggle. The Palestinians are the ones whose land has been occupied for 47 years, who have been forced into displacement and refugee status since 1948, who are suffering from a system of apartheid, discrimination and segregation created by the Israeli occupation. Yet, not a single word has been uttered about our right to defend ourselves.

In reality, what we see from the Israeli narrative is nothing but a consistent effort to dehumanize Palestinians, as if Palestinians are not equal human beings, as if Palestinian life is not important, as if Palestinian life is worth nothing, as if it is okay that over 1,000 Palestinians are killed and 6000 are injured. Meanwhile, all anybody is talking about is the psychological impact on the Israeli population of the fear, although so far projectiles fired out of Gaza have killed just two civilians. Up until now, 42 Israelis were killed, 40 of whom were soldiers. These are soldiers who were killed inside Gaza while they were invading Gaza and attacking people in an act of aggression. We don’t want anybody to die, whether Israeli or Palestinian. But to say that Palestinians are the aggressors in this situation is very wrong and totally unacceptable.

The asymmetry in the current situation is also a very important point to clarify. We are talking here about the Israeli army which is probably the fourth most powerful army in the world, attacking civilians in one of the most crowded areas of the world, with 1.8 million people living in less than 140 square miles, about 12,000 people per square mile on “normal” days, but nearly double that number these days, as Israel has declared 44% of Gaza unsafe and hammered in the message by bombings homes. These 1.8 million people have been attacked by a powerful air force, very powerful ships, and artillery, while these people have only very primitive means to defend themselves. Even the rockets that were thrown at Israel – and we don’t want these rockets to be thrown – are almost invariably nothing but a psychological instrument.  This has been frightening Israelis, it is true, but these projectiles have caused harm exceedingly rarely. The harm is happening almost entirely on one side, the Palestinian side. There is no way anyone can compare the two, this sophisticated army and the Palestinian people. The asymmetry is clear and yet, Israeli forces are consistently using indiscriminate and disproportional force against the Palestinian population.

One element that is almost always ignored is the issue of the siege of Gaza. The siege on Gaza has been ongoing for eight years and it has caused the most dramatic humanitarian crisis not only in this region but probably worldwide. We are talking about 1.8 million people besieged by sea, by air and by land. Israel is controlling all passages, it is controlling the sky and it is controlling the sea. Fishermen are not allowed to fish deeper than three miles into the sea; they haven’t been allowed to sail at all for the past three weeks. Almost nobody can get in or out, even to go to the hospital or receive medical treatment. The one entrance to Egypt is also closed from the Egyptian side. This siege has caused very serious problems. Gaza lacks construction materials. Gaza does not have access to clean water; 90% of the water in Gaza is not fit for drinking because it is either salinated or polluted. More than 300,000 people have lost all water supply because the water pipes were destroyed by Israeli shelling and when workers tried to repair them, they were shot at by the Israeli military.

Electricity is an enormous problem in Gaza too. Most of the time, most people do not have electricity for more than six to eight hours a day. Today, more than one third of the population does not have any electricity at all because Israel bombarded the only electricity plant in Gaza. Because of the siege, 90% of educated young people are unemployed. Because of the siege, the level of poverty is very high in Gaza, a fact compounded by the high prices of basic products which have to come from Israel. This is an unacceptable situation. A siege like that is considered an act of aggression. It is very important to remind world politicians of the fact that, in 1967, Israel declared that it had the right to attack Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian people and occupy all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the whole of Sinai just because the Egyptian army closed the passage to Eilat, a small port in the southern part of Israel. Israel still had full access to the Mediterranean Sea, yet they considered this an act of aggression that gave them the right to conduct one of the worst wars in the Middle East. That is why we say that a ceasefire is not enough; it is very important to also lift the siege on Gaza, because the siege itself is an act of aggression.

Today the Palestinians have been demanding to have a ceasefire. But Israel is refusing. Three or four efforts were made to have at least a humanitarian ceasefire, so that the Palestinians could take out all the bodies of those who were killed and who are buried under the rubble in Shujaeya and other places like Khuzaa. It is heartbreaking to note that there are many injured people there probably, who still cannot get access to medical care and who will die, bleeding out slowly or from their wounds, because no full ceasefire was allowed to take place and no medical teams were allowed to reach them. As a matter of fact, Israel has attacked not only hospitals, schools, mosques and houses, but also attacked first aid teams and ambulances as well as killing three first responders. They burned down two ambulances trying to reach injured people in Shujaeya. They destroyed many clinics and many first aid providers were shot and injured. This is an act of ethnic cleansing, an act of genocide and a massive act of terror against the Palestinian population.

Dehumanizing Palestinians will never negate the facts. And it is important to clarify all of them. This war was started by Israel. It is even debatable whether it can be called a war, as a war suggests a fight between two equal sides. In reality it is not a war, it is an act of aggression from an occupying power which is trying to solve the problem of occupation by increasing the occupation. In this attack, Israel was the initiator and the victims are mainly the Palestinians.

Now the killing has extended again to the West Bank, where Israel has resumed shooting peaceful demonstrators with high-velocity bullets. For years, the world has been urging us to organize big peaceful marches with thousands of people. This is exactly what we did in Ramallah on the 24th of July when more than 25,000 marched peacefully to Jerusalem protesting the massacre in Gaza, demanding the end of aggression and demanding access to Jerusalem to go pray in Al Aqsa on the holiest of all nights for Muslim Palestinians. Before we reached the checkpoint, which was heavily manned, the Israeli army started to shoot people. Snipers shot demonstrators with high-velocity bullets in a scene reminiscent of what the apartheid police did to the peaceful protestors in Soweto in the 1970s. During the night, 211 Palestinians were shot with high-velocity bullets. During the course of four hours, six of them lost an eye, six others were injured critically and one lost his life. The very next day, the Israeli army, using live fire, killed nine Palestinians who were demonstrating peacefully in Hebron, Nablus, Bethlehem and Jenin. Approximately 60 people were injured. The list goes on.

The people who are being killed in the West Bank are not Hamas and are not in Gaza. They are not shooting rockets at Israel, they do not have any weapons to defend themselves. Yet they are killed repeatedly by an Israeli army which considers itself above international law thanks to the silence and complicity of many Western leaders. UN Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, does not have the courage to hold Israel accountable, even when a UN school serving as a shelter in Beit Hanoun is attacked by the Israeli army, killing 16 women and children and injuring 200 others.

Finally, one has to remember that this stage of terrible violence has repeatedly happened over the last 66 years. The root of the problem is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, settlement building and the forcing of hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes. This is the longest occupation in modern history and has endured for 47 years. This is an occupation that has transformed into a system of apartheid and discrimination. Without solving this, without ending the occupation and the apartheid system, there will be no peace, let alone stability or normal life. When we struggle as Palestinians for our freedom, it is not only about our future, but also about the future of Israelis. Because Israelis will never be free themselves as long as we are not free. It is time to see that extremists in Israel, who have benefited from all these wars, are using Palestinian lives and neighborhoods as a testing area for their weapons, so that Israel can still continue selling weapons worldwide, becoming the third largest military exporter in the world. This has to stop.

Occupation must stop and this asymmetry must be addressed; impunity and reality must be exposed. It is time to tell Israel “enough is enough”; it is time to say to the world “please see the reality, look at the facts.” Citizens from all the countries in the world, be it the United States, Germany, or France are entitled to know the truth and your media are not telling you the truth. Your media, for the most part, are overwhelmed with the Israeli narrative. This has to be corrected.

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi is a leading figure in Palestinian civil society, a long-time advocate for the non-violent Palestinian protest movement, one of the founders of the independent political party, the Palestinian National Initiative, and a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's central council.

 

 http://www.alternet.org/world/debunked-mendacious-propaganda-israel-pushing-justify-its-war-gaza?paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

Data stored overseas should be accessible to US government, judge rules

A federal judge in New York City sided with the United States government on Thursday and said that Microsoft must comply with a search warrant compelling the corporation to surrender customer data it stores overseas.

The multi-national computer company has for months now refused to turn over emails and other digital content requested by authorities in the US because the information in question, Microsoft insists, is kept on data servers physically located in Ireland. Previously, Microsoft said in a statement that “a US prosecutor cannot obtain a US warrant to search someone's home located in another country, just as another country's prosecutor cannot obtain a court order in her home country to conduct a search in the United States.”

But District Judge Loretta Preska ruled from a Manhattan courtroom on Thursday that, contrary to the company’s objections, Microsoft must produce the information sought pursuant to a US-based investigation.

"It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information," Preska said at the conclusion of a two-hour court hearing, Reuters reported from New York.

Microsoft said that it will challenge that ruling, however, and Preska has placed a stay on her decision to keep the order from going into effect ahead of the Second US Circuit Court of Appeal’s anticipated analysis.

“The only issue that was certain this morning was that the District Court’s decision would not represent the final step in this process,” Microsoft said in a statement, the Washington Post reported..

“We will appeal promptly and continue to advocate that people’s e-mail deserves strong privacy protection in the US and around the world,” added the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant.

On the evening before Wednesday’s decision, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith insisted in an Wall Street Journal op-ed that content stored on the web’s “cloud” — or data that can be accessed from most anywhere with the internet even if it physically exists in a single spot — must have the same legal protections as private property.

“This dispute should be important to you if you use emails,” Smith wrote, “because it could well turn on who owns your email — you or the company that stores it in the cloud.”

“The US government position contravenes the longstanding principle that warrants issued by US courts are generally not enforceable outside the US. It also conflicts with the concept of comity, which US courts have long recognized requires them to give due regard — and, where appropriate, deference — to the laws and legal system of a foreign country,” the Center for Democracy and Technology said in a statement this week. “Applying the US government’s position on a globally reciprocal basis would yield chaos, with governments serving demands on local representatives of global companies seeking disclosure of data stored elsewhere and covered by the laws of the country where it is stored.”

http://rt.com/usa/177104-microsoft-preska-ireland-server/

Gaza: Where International Law Has Gone Down in Flames

A War of Collective Punishment

by PHYLLIS BENNIS

As Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip rages on, ceasefires come and go. Most last just long enough for Palestinians to dig out the dead from beneath their collapsed houses, get the injured to overcrowded and under-resourced hospitals, and seek enough food and water to last through the next round of airstrikes.

“There is nothing left but stones,” Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer quoted an old woman saying as she searched desperately through the rubble of what had been her home.

Casualties are soaring. By late July, Israel had killed more than 1,100 Palestinians — at least 73 percent of them civilians, including hundreds of children. Fifty-six Israelis, almost all of them soldiers, have died too.

A July 28 poll shows that 86.5 percent of Israelis oppose a ceasefire. Yet we continue to hear that Israelis want peace.

It’s true that at least some of them do. An Israeli protest in Tel Aviv brought 5,000 people into the street. That’s good — though a far cry from the 400,000 who poured into the streets to protest Israel’s invasion of Lebanon back in 1982.

And when a young Palestinian teenager was kidnapped and tortured to death — burned alive — in Jerusalem after the bodies of the three kidnapped young Israeli settlers were found, many Israelis tried to distance themselves from the horrific crime. “In our society, the society of Israel, there is no place for such murderers,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed.

But in fact, there is a place for those who call for murder — at the highest political and military levels of Israeli society.

Meet Ayelet Shaked, a member of the Knesset — Israel’s parliament. She belongs to Israel Home, a far-right party in Netanyahu’s governing coalition. She issued on Facebook what amounts to a call to commit genocide, by deliberately killing Palestinians, including women, children, and old people.

“The entire Palestinian people is the enemy,” Shaked posted. “In wars, the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”

The Knesset member went on to say that the mothers of Palestinians killed should follow their dead sons to Hell: “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”

Her language reminds me of a chapter in our own history — the genocidal Indian Wars. U.S. military leaders had called on their troops to wipe out all the Native American. Col. John Chivington was asked on the eve of the Sand Creek Massacre about killing Cheyenne children. “Kill and scalp all, big and little — nits make lice,” he replied.

Shaked’s comments also echo the words of an Israeli colonel who testified under oath at the wrongful death trial of Rachel Corrie, a young U.S. peace activist killed by an Israeli soldier driving an armored bulldozer in Gaza. “In a war zone there are no civilians,” said the military officer — who was responsible for training Israeli soldiers to serve in the occupied territories.

There’s no question that Hamas’ primitive rockets violate international law. They can’t be accurately aimed at military targets. But that doesn’t justify Israel’s violation of its own obligations under international law as the occupying power in Gaza.

Israel has the region’s strongest military, the only nuclear weapons arsenal in the Middle East, and the unconditional backing of the United States. Its assault on Gaza violates the Geneva Conventions. Israel is imposing collective punishment against all Gazans, attacking hospitals, and using disproportionate force.

Israeli officials know full well that the best way to protect their citizens is to implement a real ceasefire — a breakthrough that would require opening Gaza’s borders. Some of them also know the best way to keep their citizens safe long term is by ending the occupation altogether. Problem is, not enough of them will admit it.

U.S. taxpayers also have a stake in this conflict because Washington keeps sending Israel billions of our tax dollars and refuses to push Tel Aviv to stop violating international law.

For real peace, both of those things must change.

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

This essay originally ran in Foreign Policy in Focus.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/31/gaza-where-international-law-has-gone-down-in-flames/

Why Hamas’s Fight is Legitimate

The War Between Gaza and the Zionists

by WILLIAM JAMES MARTIN

It is important to understand the genesis of the present round of violence between Israel and Hamas, really between Israel and the people of Gaza.

Both President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and the American news media have consistently described the conflict as Israel justifiably respondingto the firing or rockets into Israel by Hamas and protecting their citizens, as if world history only began at this moment and that prior context did not exists.

More thoughtful and better informed observer than Obama and Kerry have more correctly noted that the present waves of Hamas rockets was preceded by a sequence of events which left Hamas with little choice except to resist with their only available means, which is firing rockets into Israel.

Let us recall: On June 2, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas announced the completion of an agreement unifying the two governments and to be led by the moderate Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and with ministries run mostly by technocrats, a process worked out with input from the American government which included terms that would not automatically trigger a US ban.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, however vowed never to work with a government that included Hamas which he described, as is normal for him, as a ‘terrorist’ organization and also admonished western governments including the US not to conduct discussions with them, a call that went mostly unheeded, to Mr Netanyahu’s great frustration.

The abduction and murder of three Israeli youths was met by Mr Netanyahu’s .response: “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.” This was his chance to wreck the unity government.

Thus a ‘search and destroy’ operation was initiated consisting of 18 days of Israeli army rampages which targeted anything affiliated with Hamas on the West Bank. Hundreds were arrested, about 500 total, and about a dozen Palestinians killed, Hamas offices and clinics were ransacked and destroyed, with computers confiscated, hundreds of Palestinian homes were invaded, usually in the middle of the night with the homes ransacked and contents destroyed or damaged, guns were pointed at women and children and people terrorized, and many arrested. Homes of so-called suspected persons were blown up and destroyed.

In addition, Mr Netanyahu’s rhetoric contributed to an atmosphere of anger and vengeance which resulted in the abduction and burning alive of a Palestinian teenager by several Israelis.

As of almost three weeks later, there has been no evidence what so ever that the Hamas leadership was involved or even knew in advance about the kidnapping.

Furthermore Max Blumenthal has reported, based on his sources inside Israeli intelligence, Shin Bet, that they knew, with high probability, within hours of the kidnapping that the three abducted youths had been killed. This news was not released to the public thus permitting the ‘search and destroy’ operation to continue.

The rampage of Israeli soldiers in the west Bank was quickly followed by aerial attacks by Israel into Gaza which killed seven Hamas members.

Thus the charge, by Mr Netanyahu, of Hamas responsibility in the abduction and killing of the three Israelis, and the suppression of information to the effect that the Israeli government knew the three Israeli youths had been killed were disingenuous techniques of Mr Netanyahu to destroy or seriously degrade Hamas and destroy the unity government which Mr Netanyahu so despised.

Obama, Kerry, and Netanyahu and their minions constantly repeat the question. “What would you do if your country were attacked by rocket fire?” And, of course, there is the ever present refrain, “Israel has a right to defend itself”

A far less trite question is, “What would you do if you were Hamas, and your offices were being ransacked and destroyed, and your people killed.? And what would you do if the population of Gaza were living under a brutal siege, unable to export their agriculture or the products so their labors, with foodstuffs embargoed allowing only a bare subsistence, with electricity and fuel limited, and potable water in short supply, and with building and rebuilding of destroyed structure from two previous wars with Israel, as well as this one when it ends, impossible because of the Israeli siege?

All this is taking place in the political-diplomatic space created by the multiple failures of the Obama conflict resolution efforts which included sending Kerry to the Middle East with the instructions to ‘solve the problem’, as he had George Mitchell before, without any presidential directive or program toward a solution. Further, the efforts of Kerry were undermined, as were those of Mitchell’s earlier, by President Obama’s failure to apply any pressure at all to Israel and even to echo the narrative and talking points of the Israeli government and to repeat the Israeli-Zionist interpretation of Jewish-Zionist history and its justification for the Zionism project.

And, of course, there is the ever present refrain which Obama, like his predecessor George Bush, never tires of repeating: “Israel has a right to defend itself”, thus justifying Israel’s violent operation, both in 2012 and at present, which has been interpreted by the President as a ‘response’. Obama has advanced the argument that no nation could tolerate rocket fire aimed toward its citizens further justifying Israel’s air, land and sea attack on the people of Gaza, and implying that the cause of the present conflagration began with the Hamas launched rocket fire – that Hamas is responsible for the present round of violence.

Obama has never hinted at the slightest discomfort of the siege of Gaza in which at least half of Gaza’s 1.7 million people are food insecure and almost all are impoverished unable to export the products of their labors, nor to import enough of their material needs, including the need to upgrade their water and sanitation facilities. Though Obama is a constitutional lawyer, he seems not to have noticed that collective punishment as well as using food as a weapon of war violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Obama’s vetoes of all Palestinian sponsored UN Security Council resolutions which were critical of Israel or its occupation, his efforts to join Israel in quashing the Goldstone Report and rendering it ineffective, and his efforts to pressure the Palestinians not to seek memberships in UN Agencies or join international conventions, certainly undermined any possibility of Israel making an effort at compromise. Why should Israel compromise when the President of the United States as well as the US Congress will protect it from the pressures  or constraints of international law, and also echo its talking points for general popular consumption.

Obama has sought to confine the possible avenues of potential resolution to the so-call ‘peace process’ and to the principle that any resolution must be one mutually agreed to by Israel and the Palestinians, which means that any constraints potentially imposed by international law will not be applied to Israel  which occupies the land captured in the ’67 War and has a large and very well equipped military making it capable of occupying the land against the will of the Palestinian people for an indefinitely long period in to the future.

Everyday Israel seizes more Palestinian land, adds new settlers to the East Jerusalem and the West Bank population, and its leaders, particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu, has indicated very many times that the state of Israel has absolutely no intention of relinquishing any substantial amount of West Bank territory or any of East Jerusalem. Such indications includes a meeting of Mr Netanyahu with President Obama in the Oval Office in which Netanyahu told Obama to his face that Israel would never withdraw from ‘Judea and Samaria’, the Jewish nationalist designation of the West Bank. And that Israel must maintain an indefinite military presence in the Jordan Valley.

Obama acts as though he did not hear him, or doesn’t care. And his response to Mr Netanyahu, on that afternoon in the Oval Office, was complete silence.

Obama has done nothing but reinforce Mr Netanyahu’s argument that the occupied territories are not illegally occupied but are “disputed areas” subject only to negotiations between parties in to which Israel has as much right as anyone else. He has certainly never attempted to counter Mr Netanyahu’s frequent claim that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews by virtue of ‘the Jewish historical right’.

During Obama’ s five and half years in office, Obama has never displayed any insight at all in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nothing beyond the echoing of the Israeli-Zionist narrative. He has never used the term Nakbah, nor recognized that there was an ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in 1948, though he did use the term “dispossession” in his (overrated) Cairo speech. I have never heard him use the term “occupation”.

His only insight into the Zionist movement is to echo the false claim that Jews dreamed and hoped for 2000 years to return to the Land of Israel. This mythology has been thoroughly debunked by Shlomo Sand and by any careful reading of the history of the Zionist movement – a movement which only became a project of Jews, and a small subset of Jews at that, in the 1880’s though it was preceded by four centuries by Christian Zionism, mostly in England, which set the parameters of Jewish Zionist thinking and introduced the term return to describe the migration of Jews into Palestine.

It is doubtful anyone would use the term “return” if the Egyptians decided to conquer Palestine though they ruled it a millennium before there was a Jewish city state in Jerusalem.

This war belongs to Obama as much as to anyone because it emerged in the vacuum created by Obama’s laziness and lack of courage in standing up to Netanyahu and the Zionist supporters in the US and in Congress.

Obama ignored the seven year long siege of Gaza. Now it has come back to bite him. His legacy will include that.

Given Obama’s limited shallow understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its history, there may have been little else he could have done. Imagining Obama conducting a 13 day debate with Netanyahu, as Jimmy Carter did in 1978 at Camp David with Menachem Begin, is complete unimaginable.

Hamas and the people of Gaza can give up and let Israel slowly strangle them to death under a siege that stands in clear violation of international law which prohibits collective punishment.  Or they can fight back with their only means available.

Hamas’s fight, which is mainly a struggle to lift the siege of Gaza, is an honorable one. Hamas’s fight possess the dignity with the Israeli brutalizers cannot not even  imagine. In fact, the Zionists gave up any hope of dignity long before they ethnically cleansed Palestine of most of its indigenous population in 1948.

William James Martin can be reached at:  wjm20@caa.columbia.edu.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/31/why-hamass-fight-is-legitimate/

The rape of Gaza

Gaza has turned from the world's biggest concentration camp to the world's biggest graveyard. Haidar Eid Haidar Eid is an associate Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. "A terrorist, like those who kidnapped the boys and killed them, the only thing that will deter them, is if they know that either their sister or mother will be raped if they are caught," said Middle East scholar Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University How can one describe the ongoing massacre  in Gaza with language that has long been proven to be slippery? Where is one to start and finish if one wants a semiological analysis of the dramatic footage of children bleeding to death despite Israel's attempts to convince us that these children were not the targets, but the militants were? If there were any questions to be asked, they would be about the nature of a hegemonic modern ideology that dehumanises toddlers and drives soldiers to shoot women, shell hospitals and schools used as shelters for those who have become homeless. It is definitely not the right time for such grandiose philosophical questions. But what is the Palestinian to do when she or he lives such a crude political reality? This article does not claim to be a reasonable political analysis of the "Gaza conflict" and "violent clashes" that erupted recently in the Gaza Strip. Nor does it claim to be an analysis that investigates the background and expected outcome of what many Palestinian activists consider the end of Oslo.  It therefore, should not fall into the mind-body bourgeois dichotomy. Emotions at this historical junction cannot be ignored. Consider this: While writing this article, a dozen Palestinian civilians were killed; more than 1,300 have been killed as Gaza massacre begins its 24th day; rights groups say 80 percent of dead are civilians. And Israeli attacks seem to be on the rise. The (unpuzzling) question that Palestinians have been asking, and answering, is "How can a government which claims commitment to peace with its "Palestinian partner" order its soldiers to shoot and kill indiscriminately?" The importance of the image in "the age of mechanical reproduction" lies in its ability to convey an instant message. For many, the only source of information is what they see on their TV screens. The footage of headless toddlers, has, therefore, become the direct message that Palestinians want to use to convey: "This is our daily political reality. This is where we have reached 20 years after the signing of the Oslo Accords." So much for the peace process and the two-state solution! Yet mainstream media has systematically sanitised the images that have been coming out of Gaza to present a more "acceptable" picture of violence. To echo Edward Said and Noam Chomsky, how can the international media - read western - be objective when they are controlled by five transnational corporations, all of which have intimate relationships with the US defence industry? Are the more than 200 children killed in Gaza only "regrettable" collateral damage? What about the 28 families that were completely wiped out while having their breakfast? And the children inShujayea who bled to death for hours while their parents watched  because the Israeli soldiers refused to let an ambulance approach the area? And the entire Abu Jamei family getting killed when their four-storey home was targeted by an Israeli fighter jet? How many more are "acceptable collateral damage" for the western media? The Hamads in Beit Hanoun? The Hajjs in Khan Younis? The Syams in Rafah? The Zaanins? Kanan and Saji, Al-Hallaque, massacred together with their father, pregnant mother, grandmother, and aunt while the family was breaking their fast at  iftar. And their grandfather, my colleague Professor Akram Hallaque has to live now with the pain of losing his family - wife, daughter (my student), two grandchildren, and pregnant daughter- in-law. His son has been in intensive care for days now. Who will bring justice to them? Who will be made to pay for the loss of these families? Negotiations brokered by Obama and Kerry on behalf of the Israelis? War criminal Tony Blair? Are they supposed to see a non-sovereign state of West Bank and Gaza as a "fair" deal for the lives of the dear ones they have lost? Those who have been killed had lived such short lives, all of it in the Gaza Strip - a life lived and lost as refugees under brutal Israeli occupation. It's our fate: to die in the 2006 war, or if not, in the 2008-09 war.  Or if you've survived, then another attempt in 2012, and if still living, then they'd finish you off in 2014, or next time in 2015, 2016, 2017? But is this enough for them? No! Gaza is a challenge to the Israeli regime because here two-thirds of the population are refugees who are entitled to the right of return under UN Resolution 194. Could this be the real reason Israel is committing  genocide on Gaza repeatedly? Kill the "brute" and live happily ever after?! Gaza has become a permanent war zone; the biggest concentration camp on earth has become a burial site - a noisy graveyard. The Palestinian body has become the ultimate target of the Israeli bullet - the younger the better! The Palestinian body has, in other words, become the site of (in) justice: eliminate the body, and it will leave a vacuum that can be occupied - a land without people for people without land. The Palestinian people have long realised that the so-called "peace process" does not challenge or change the long-held status quo, nor will it allow them to exercise their national and political rights. Right or left, the Israeli position is crystal clear: No return to the borders of June 4, 1967, No dismantling of Jewish settlements, No return of Palestinian refugees, no backing down on Jerusalem as the undivided, eternal capital city of Israel, and no sovereign, independent Palestinian state with its own military on the western bank of the Jordan river. The best that is on offer is a Palestinian Bantustan, a reservoir for the unwanted natives. And the people in Gaza don't even deserve that undignified solution: better to get rid of them all with a final solution via genocide with the support of the US president, European countries, the Arab League and even some native Palestinians! Hearing these powerful instigators and supporters of the genocide bleating for a ceasefire 24 days after such a huge massacre adds insult to injury! The Palestinians of Gaza get blamed for being shot and bombed because they did not run away; they get blamed for being in the same building that they have lived in all their short, brutal lives; they get blamed for not being able to run in 57 seconds; they get blamed for letting their children play on the beach. And they get blamed for refusing to let the coloniser, the occupier, the oppressor, the murderer and its allies dispossess them and dishonour their dead with their false words, their biased media channels, their fake empathy and their useless shuttle diplomacy that has no intention of giving Palestinians their rights under international law. Hence, the unprecedented brutality continues! The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/07/rape-gaza-201473114415929540.html

Sushma confronts Kerry with snooping

SUHASINI HAIDAR

‘Since we are friendly nations, it is not acceptable to us’

In India’s strongest statement on the issue yet, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called the U.S. surveillance of Indian entities “unacceptable”, and said she had taken up the issue of “snooping” by the National Security Agency (NSA) with Secretary of State John Kerry during the India-U.S. strategic dialogue here on Thursday.

“I did raise the snooping issue with Mr. Kerry,” Ms. Swaraj told presspersons at a joint press conference. “I told him that people in India were angry. I told him that since we are friendly nations, it is not acceptable to us.”

In reply, Mr. Kerry said, “We do not discuss intelligence matters in public. We value our relationship with India. President [Barack] Obama has undertaken a unique and unprecedented review of our intelligence.”Ms. Swaraj said India and the U.S. had now hit a “new level” in their relationship.

Even so, no breakthroughs marked the strategic dialogue between India and the U.S. on the trade facilitation talks at the WTO, Mr. Kerry admitted. While talks were still in progress in Geneva, the deadline for India to sign the Trade Facilitation Agreement expired on Friday.

The two leaders met and were joined by their delegations as they spoke for approximately four hours, and followed their press conference with a “working dinner”. However, given the lack of breakthrough in talks over WTO, pharma concerns, patent rights and U.S. restrictions on visas for skilled Indians, Mr. Kerry conceded, “We know we have a lot of homework to do. We need to break down barriers in trade.”

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/us-surveillance-of-indian-entities-unacceptable-says-sushma/article6268797.ece?homepage=true

CIA Admits It Spied on Senate Intel Panel

Director Apologizes for Lying to Committee

by Jason Ditz, 

After long-standing denials, the CIA has finally admitted that its personnel “improperly accessed” computers belonging to the Senate Intelligence Committee to spy on the details of a report they were compiling on the CIA’s use of torture.

Improperly accessed in this case means illegally hacked, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D – CA) dubbed the spying a violation of the “understanding” the committee had with the CIA as well as a violation of constitutional separation of powers.

CIA Director John Brennan, who publicly denied that any such spying took place as recently as March, has now issued an apologyto the committee for “misleading” them on the issue.

The Justice Department, as always, is shrugging off the news of Executive Branch power abuse, insisting they would not conduct any criminal investigation over the matter. The White House likewise dismissed the story, praising Brennan for his “instrumental role” in the global war on terror.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D – CA) refused to publicly criticize the CIA for spying on Congress for fear of retaliation, noting they “really come after you” if you talk about them in public adding “there’s a price to pay.”

http://news.antiwar.com/2014/07/31/cia-admits-it-spied-on-senate-intel-panel/