British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim writes in Prospect magazine-
In 7th January 2009, while Operation Cast Lead
which began with an Israeli raid to destroy a tunnel which would be used to kidnap IDF personnel.
was in full swing, I wrote an article in the Guardian. “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe”.
There was no catastrophe. About a thousand Palestinians died. Israel took few casualties.
This was Israel’s first major assault on the Gaza Strip after its unilateral withdrawal in 2005.
Gaza should have stopped digging tunnels.
Further major military offensives followed in 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022, not counting minor flare-ups and nearly 200 dead during the border protests in 2018 known as the March of Return. By my count, the current war is the sixth serious Israeli assault on Gaza since, and by far the most lethal and destructive.
Because the recent Hamas raid was the most atrocious and lethal
And it also raises the ominous spectre of a second Palestinian Nakba.
Indeed. It appears Palestinians are sick of living under Palestinian masters. Every time the Egyptians loosen things up at the border, thousands of the smartest and best educated leave never to return.
Going forward, either Gaza becomes a penal colony run by Israel's 'contractors', of they simply starve in the rubble. It appears that no Arab state will welcome them. Perhaps the Malaysians or the Indonesians will send ships to take those splendid, hard-working people whose only fault is that they voted in a bunch of gangsters fifteen years ago.
The only way to make sense of Israel’s cruel and self-defeating wars in Gaza is
by looking at how much money Hamas's leaders have made. The Islamic Brotherhood has received a shot in the arm. But, how long will this last?
through understanding the historical context. From whatever perspective one chooses to view it, the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians.
This guy's family had to leave Baghdad. But they would have had to flee sooner or later even if Israel had been wiped off the map by invading Arab armies.
Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. Israelis call it “The War of Independence”; Palestinians call it the Nakba, or the catastrophe.
Which they brought on themselves. Grand Mufti Husseini made a mistake by allying with Hitler and committing war crimes.
The most horrific event in the suffering-soaked history of the Jews was the Holocaust.
6 million were killed
In the history of the Palestinian people, the most traumatic event is the Nakba,
In which 15,000 Palestinians were killed.
which is not in fact a one-off event but the ongoing process of the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland that continues to this day,
about an equal number of Jews were displaced from Arab lands at around the same time.
in the unspeakable horrors being visited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Gaza.
They speak plenty about them. Where the IDF falls down is in the rape and decapitation department. Give them time.
The United Kingdom was the original sponsor of the Jewish state,
But the commitment to create a 'national home' for Jews was only made binding by the terms of the League of Nations mandate. This applied only to Palestine, not 'Trans-Jordan' which did well enough under British tutelage.
going back to the Balfour declaration of 1917. But by 1948, the United States had replaced the UK as the principal backer.
Stalin, too, backed the creation of Israel. This was a disaster for Arab Communist parties.
British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state,
Not really. They allied with Israel and France to try to grab the Suez Canal from Nasser. Eisenhower put the kybosh on that.
although they themselves had enabled and empowered the Zionist takeover of Palestine.
Only because the Palestinians kept trying to kill them. So too did the Jabotinsky type Zionist extremists but there were far fewer of them.
The conditions that gave rise to the Nakba were made in Britain.
No. They were made by Grand Mufti Husseini who was very popular in Iraq. The Brits had to send in troops to crush the pro-Axis regime there.
Yet no British government has ever accepted any responsibility for the loss and suffering it brought upon the people of Palestine.
It withdrew because neither the Arabs nor the Jews wanted them to remain. The same thing happened in India where there was a big transfer of population accompanied by much more killing and rape.
In the period since 1948 the western powers, led by the US, have given Israel massive moral, economic and military support, as well as diplomatic protection.
France was more important than the US in the Fifties and early Sixties. It is probable that they helped Israel get the atom bomb.
The US has used its veto power in the UN Security Council 46 times to defeat resolutions that were not to Israel’s liking.
It also kept trying to get the Israelis to return to the pre 1967 borders. That was the Rodgers' plan. The Yom Kippur war was the turning point in US- Israel relations. The Soviets had already been thrown out of Egypt- because they would only give Nasser defensive technology- and US support for Israel paid off by greatly increasing American power in the region. Still, America was happy to broker a deal between Sadat and Begin. But the latter bungled his intervention in Lebanon. BTW, the Lebanese Civil War took 150,000 lives. France, it seems, was worse than Britain in creating confessional states.
America also gives Israel around $3.8bn in military aid each year,
less than 1 percent of their GDP. There are strings attached to that aid. Perhaps Israel would be better of trading on open markets.
with more this year to enable Israel to sustain its military offensive in Gaza. The trouble with American support for Israel is that it is not conditional on Israeli respect for Palestinian human rights or international law. As a result, Israel gets away, literally, with murder.
Just as NATO did during the War on Terror. What is sauce for the goose...
In August 2005, a Likud-led government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pull-out from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,500 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace. But in the year that followed, more than 12,000 settlers moved into the West Bank, consolidating Israeli control, and further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state.
The Palestinians had had a small civil war of their own. Both al Fatah and Hamas were as corrupt as fuck. 'Pay for slay' leads to Israel grabbing land and sending in settlers. Jewish blood purchases Palestinian land. In this context, Terrorism is a bad business model.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority, but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank.
D'uh! The question was whether this was economically viable. The answer, it seems, is yes. Real Estate matters, raping and beheading may be cool, it may be rad, it may get a lot of clicks on Social Media, but, at the end of the day, you lose real estate and start feeling sorry for yourself.
It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen as the Israeli national interest.
It was an effective form of retaliation. You are cheering about a nifty piece of 'pay for slay' your cousin did. Then the IDF bulldozes your house and your ancestral olive grove is turned into a condominium for IT workers born in Stockholm or Seattle. So not worth it.
Anchored in a fundamental rejection of Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
The Jordanians and the Syrians and the Lebanese felt the same way about letting Palestinians have any 'independent political existence'. Egypt has sealed its border with Gaza. It has plenty of land in the Sinai which the industrious Palestinians could develop economically. But, having got rid of Morsi and the Brotherhood, El Sisi isn't going to let in the Ikhwan by the back door.
This did not stop Israeli spokespersons from making the preposterous claim that by quitting they gave the Gazans a chance to turn the strip into the Singapore of the Middle East.
This was preposterous because Palestinian leaders dream or rape and beheading, not setting up a Stock Exchange and growing rich off medical tourism and IT services. Lee Kuan Yew, on the other hand, was constantly sodomizing and beheading Malaysians- right?
In December 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, in breach of a six-month ceasefire that Egypt had brokered. This was not a war in the usual sense of the word but a one-sided massacre. For 22 days, the IDF shot, shelled and bombed Hamas targets and at the same time rained death and destruction on the defenceless civilian population. In all 1,417 Gazans were killed, including 313 children, and more than 5,500 wounded. Eighty-three per cent of the casualties were civilians.
That's what you get for building tunnels to hide terrorists. At a later point, Egypt would flood those tunnels and seal the border. Let Hamas stew in its own juice.
War crimes were investigated by an independent fact-finding mission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by Richard Goldstone, a distinguished South African judge who happened to be both a Jew and a Zionist. Goldstone and his team found that Hamas and the IDF had both committed violations of the laws of war.
Bush's invasion of Iraq was, of course, perfectly legal.
The IDF received much more severe strictures than Hamas, on account of the scale and seriousness of its violations. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups were found guilty of launching rocket and mortar attacks with the deliberate aim of harming Israeli civilians. The Goldstone team investigated 36 incidents involving the IDF. It found 11 incidents in which Israeli soldiers launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcomes (in only one cause was there a possible “justifiable military objective”); seven incidents where civilians were shot leaving their homes “waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so”; an attack, executed “directly and intentionally” on a hospital; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; several attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chicken farms, sewage works and water wells—all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. In the words of the report, much of this extensive damage was “not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.
Did Obama condemn Israel? Did Blair or Brown or Bush or anybody else? Did anybody pay any attention to this? No. Still, you can't say Israel hasn't been consistent. It sent a strong signal in 2008-9 and kept repeating the message. Incidentally, Netanyahu had resigned because he opposed the Gaza pull-out. Olmert supported it. As Prime Minister, he was responsible for 'Cast Lead'. Facing criticism for his mishandling of the 2006 Lebanese war, Olmert pivoted to a dove like position- calling for talks with the Palestinians and conceding much to Abbas. Hamas rocket attacks led to 'Cast Iron' but Olmert's political and legal troubles meant that Abbas was in no hurry to sign up to what was quite a generous deal. With hindsight, Netanyahu has been vindicated but he may be a lame duck because the Hamas attack occurred on his watch.
In conclusion, the 452-page report noted that while the Israeli government sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of the right to self-defence, “the Mission itself considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”
This was hilarious because we were spending a lot of money killing Muslims of various descriptions. Sadly, we were taking a big financial loss on these operations. Let the A-rabs just kill each other rather than waste our tax dollars helping them out in this regard.
Under the circumstances, the mission concluded that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
Sounds like what we would soon do to Libya. They too are A-rabs right? Well, that's all right then.
Goldstone later published an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying that while Hamas had committed war crimes (its rockets were “purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets”), “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel. The other three members of the fact-finding mission said that they stood by the conclusions, which were “made after diligent, independent and objective consideration of the information related to the events within our mandate, and careful assessment of its reliability and credibility.”
Who gives a fuck? Any way, after reading the conclusions of an IDF investigation, Goldstone conceded in 2011 that he'd got it wrong. Israel had not targeted civilians. Hamas had. The author has engaged in a deliberate 'suppressio veri'. He should know that Goldstone changed his mind. Yet, he pretends otherwise.
Neither Israel nor Hamas was held to account nor made to pay any price for its war crimes.
Whereas Bush and Blair were sent to jail for the illegal invasion of Iraq- right?
The Israelis resorted to a character assassination of the report’s author rather than engaging with any of its findings. Although it did not lead to any action, the Goldstone report offers a deep insight into the pattern of Israeli behaviour in Gaza in this and all subsequent operations.
The fact that this author suppresses relevant information- viz. Goldstone said, in 2011, that new evidence put Israel in the clear- tells you everything you need to know about his character. This is a link to the article Goldstone published in the Washington Post admitting his mistake. Israel did carry out an internal investigation of war crime allegations. Hamas gloried in them.
The absence of sanctions also explains why Israel was able to continue to act with utter impunity and, yet again, to get away literally with murder.
Iran and Russia and so forth have plenty of sanctions placed against them. That doesn't seem to stop them going in for murder on an industrial scale.
While committing war crimes, Israel claims to be exercising its inherent right to self-defence,
which, Goldstone says, is all that they actually did.
and its western cheerleaders repeat this claim parrot-fashion.
While this parrot pretends Goldstone found that Israel had committed war-crimes. It hadn't.
In this most recent and most devastating attack on Gaza, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, outdid even Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak by stating that Israel’s right to defend itself justified the denial of water, food and fuel to the civilian population.
Good on you Keir.
All three leaders persisted for eight weeks in their refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire, contenting themselves with feeble pleas to Israel for pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid to reach the besieged civilian population.
Why is Rishi Sunak not raping and beheading the Israeli Ambassador? Nothing less will do.
Like most of its claims in this savage war, Israel’s claim that it is simply exercising its right of self-defence is baseless—or at least hotly disputed.
Not by Goldstone- who was a Judge, not a stupid pedagogue brainwashing retards.
Francesca Albanese,
she studied at SOAS- i.e. is both stupid and bigoted. She thinks that Gaza is 'occupied'. But the UNHCR itself defines occupation as the 'unconsented presence of foreign forces' which is scarcely the case. She calls Israel and 'apartheid' regime yet Israeli Arabs have the vote and can marry whom they please.
the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has noted that under international law this right is only relevant in the case of an armed attack by one state against another state, or if the threat comes from outside.
Nope. You are welcome to slaughter insurgents or terrorists of any stripe. The good news is that the Geneva Convention re. treatment of POWs does not apply. You can torture them to your heart's content before affording them the mercy of a bullet in the back of the head.
The attack by Hamas, however, was not by a state, nor did it come from outside. It came from an area for which, under international law, Israel is still the occupying power because after its withdrawal it continued to control access to Gaza by land, sea and air.
No it didn't. Egypt sealed its border with them. Moreover, a state under embargo or naval or other blockade is not deemed to be under occupation. Only if there are foreign boots on the ground and they face no organized resistance can a place be said to be occupied.
Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies.
Which is why no British soldier or policeman has the right to stop me from beating and sodomizing them.
In this case, therefore, the self-defence clause, Article 51 of the UN Charter, has no relevance.
Because something superior is available- viz. your right to slaughter your own subjects wholesale. International law is irrelevant as the thing is an internal matter.
It is the people under occupation who have under international law the right to resist,
Though, if they really are under occupation, they will be slaughtered wholesale.
including the right to armed resistance.
Which, sadly, is also the right to get shot while your women-folk are being raped to death.
And the Palestinian people are in a unique position: they are the only people living under military occupation who are expected to ensure the security of their occupier.
No they aren't. It isn't the case that when Moshe beats Golda, Golda rings up the local PLO or Hamas office and demands that they send a squad car to arrest Moshe. On the other hand it is true that Putin is constantly emailing Zelenskyy demanding that he protect Wagner Group mercenaries.
Taken together Israel’s attacks on Gaza reflect a profoundly militaristic outlook,
which is way better than a profoundly terroristic outlook
a stubborn refusal to explore avenues for peaceful coexistence,
like inviting Hamas to Shabbat dinner followed by some nice rape and decapitation of all kaffirs present.
The plain fact is Olmert tried to do peaceful coexistence. Hamas wasn't having any of it.
habitual disregard for the laws of war
Goldstone says Hamas, not Israel, was guilty of this.
and international humanitarian law,
which requires the rape and decapitation of kaffirs- right?
and utter callousness towards enemy civilians.
Including European and African and Asian kaffirs.
Israeli generals talk about their recurrent military incursions into Gaza as “mowing the grass”. By this they mean weakening Hamas, degrading its military capability and impairing its capacity to govern.
There isn't a lot of grass in Gaza.
This dehumanising metaphor implies a task that must be performed regularly and mechanically and with no end.
Like firing missiles into Israel.
It also alludes to indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and inflicting the kind of damage on civilian infrastructure that takes several years to repair.
This time, there may be no repair.
Under this grim rubric, there is no lasting political solution: the next war is always just a matter of time.
As Olmert discovered. Maybe Israel should have listened to Netanyahu and kept Gaza.
“Mowing the grass”
as opposed to raping and beheading kaffirs
is a chilling metaphor but it provides another clue to the deeper purpose behind Israel’s steadfast shunning of diplomacy and repeated resort to brute military force on its southern border.
Is that purpose to stage an all dancing all singing version of Death of a Salesman featuring animatronic cats? That would be cool.
The current Israeli bombardment of Gaza is a response to the Hamas attack on Saturday 7th October, or Black Saturday.
No shit, Sherlock.
This was a game changer. In the past, Hamas has fired rockets on Israel or engaged with Israeli forces inside its territory. On 7th October, Hamas and the more radical group Islamic Jihad used bulldozers to break down the fence round Gaza and went on a killing spree in the neighbouring kibbutzim and settlements, murdering about 300 soldiers and massacring more than 800 civilians, 250 of whom were at a music festival. They also captured 240 hostages, including some military personnel. The brutal, murderous attack on civilians was a war crime, and it was rightly denounced as such by international political leaders.
This caused Hamas to cry and cry. Islamic Jihad's condition was even worse. It has deleted all its Social Media accounts and is now retraining as a Dental Hygienist.
Whether the Hamas attack was totally unprovoked, as Israel and its friends claim, is another matter.
The very existence of kaffirs is a terrible provocation. Sadly, they may kill you before you can send them to Hell.
The attack did not happen in a vacuum. The backdrop was 56 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories—the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times.
It was a picnic compared to China's occupation of Tibet.
It constitutes daily violence against the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a daily violation of their basic human rights.
Sadly, this is likely to get much much worse. This has been a horrible decade. Chances are it will become more horrible yet. The big question is whether there will be ethnic cleansing or nuclear armageddon.
Hamas is not a terrorist organisation pure and simple, as Israel and its western allies keep insisting.
It is an offshoot of the Islamic Brotherhood- as is IJ. Currently it is Iran's puppet. A lot of money is being made in Doha. But that may change. Sunni Arabs may revive ISIS to break the Shia alliance.
It is a political party with a military wing whose attacks on civilians constitute terrorist acts. Indeed, Hamas is more than a political party with a military wing. It is a mass social movement, a prominent part of the fabric of Palestinian society which reflects its aspiration to freedom and independence.
It is a Leninist organization aiming at an Arab Caliphate. It is sacrificing Gaza so as to improve its standing in Iraq and Turkey. But Erdogan is interested only in crushing the Kurds and helping the Turkoman. Will he fall out with the Iranians? Not yet- but it may happen.
It is the failure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to achieve freedom and statehood that largely explains Hamas’s growing influence.
Fuck has Hamas achieved? It has lost its profitable smuggling operation in Gaza and nice little subsidy from the UNRWA.
In 1993 the PLO signed the first Oslo Accord with Israel.
Why? Arafat had backed the wrong horse in the First Gulf War. But America was keen to settle the Palestinian problem so as to deny Saddam an opportunity to rebuild his position as the champion of that cause.
Mutual recognition replaced mutual rejection. For the Palestinian national movement this was a historic compromise: it gave up its claim to 78 per cent of Palestine as it existed between 1920 and 1948 under the League of Nations Mandate, in the hope of gaining an independent state in the remaining 22 per cent, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a capital city in east Jerusalem. But it was not to be. The Oslo Accord turned out to be not a pathway to independence but a trap.
Because of generous International assistance to the Palestinians whose leaders promptly stole every penny. The problem with Palestinians self-rule is that it makes things shittier for Palestinians. Obviously, this is Israel's fault.
Following the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the hardline nationalist party Likud came back to power under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spent the rest of his political career in a relentless and so far successful effort to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Hamas has been a great help. However, it is the growth of the Israeli knowledge-economy and the success of the IDF as a tech incubator which has altered the picture. Back in the Nineties, people like me believed a Palestinian entity would concentrate on getting rich through hard graft and commercial acumen. 'Free money' undid that dream.
He has never been a partner for peace with any Palestinian faction. His game is to play them off against one another in order to frustrate the Palestinian national struggle.
Which had frustrated the fuck out of Jordan and Lebanon and Syria etc.
“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told his Likud colleagues in March 2019.
He was right. Israel will now aggressively expand settlements and turn Palestinian areas into a prison camp run by thuggish 'kapos'. Just as Hamas committed atrocities 'up front' so as to ensure unconditional support from bleeding hearts, so to is Netanyahu playing the long game. The problem is Lebanon. Begin and Olmert came a cropper there.
“This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” By weakening and discrediting the moderates in the West Bank,
who were corrupt, senile, and wholly incompetent
Netanyahu inadvertently assisted the rise of Hamas.
Get your story straight! You just said he deliberately helped Hamas secure in the knowledge that they'd fuck up Gaza.
The 1988 Hamas Charter is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist and calls for a unitary Muslim state in the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea” as the slogan goes. But like the PLO before it, Hamas gradually moderated its political programme.
No. Hamas, as an Ikhwan off-shoot, had to subordinate its ideological line to that of the broader movement. Don't forget Morsi did actually come to power in Egypt. He was so fucking stupid and incompetent that El Sisi- whom he appointed- soon got rid of him.
Perhaps realising that the suicide bombings it carried out during the Second Intifada were both morally wrong and politically counter-productive, it opted for the parliamentary road to power. In January 2006, Hamas won an absolute majority in an all-Palestine election, in both Gaza and the West Bank, and proceeded to form a government. This was a more moderate, pragmatic government and it offered to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel for 20, 30 or 40 years. Although the Charter was not revised until 2017, in a long series of speeches Hamas leaders indicated that they would accept a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.
They were lying. That's what Leninist parties do. But so do politicians of every description.
Israel refused to recognise the democratically elected Hamas government and turned down its offer of negotiations. The US and EU followed Israel’s lead and joined it in measures of economic warfare designed to undermine it.
China recognized Hamas and was offering to broker a deal with Israel. That's one reason Hamas went ahead with its atrocities to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.
The western powers claim to believe in democracy but evidently not when the Palestinian people vote for the “wrong” party.
This guy lurves Rishi Sunak and the Tory party coz they were democratically elected. He also lurves Netanyahu- right?
To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, if the Israeli and western governments are dissatisfied with the Palestinian people, they should dissolve the people and elect another.
This guy is dissatisfied with the Israeli people. Why can't he just dissolve them and elect another bunch of people who will express great delight if raped and beheaded by jihadi terrorists?
With Saudi help, the rival Palestinian factions managed to reconcile their differences. On 8th February 2007, Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in Mecca to stop the clashes between their forces in Gaza and to form a government of national unity. They agreed to a system of power-sharing, with independents taking the key posts of foreign affairs, finance and the interior. And they declared their readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.
This soon fell apart. It turns out that no nice foreign power wants to pay for Arabs to slay each other. They should do this for pure love of the thing. However, there's always money available for killing Jews or other kaffirs.
Israel did not like this government either and again refused to negotiate.
Whereas Bush and Obama were constantly phoning Osama and offering to negotiate
Worse was to follow. Israel and the US secretly plotted with Fatah officials and Egyptian intelligence to undermine the national unity government. They hoped to reverse the results of the parliamentary election by encouraging Fatah to stage a coup to recapture power.
The author disapproves of 'Remainers' who sought to reverse of the Brexit referendum. I often used to see him in the streets threatening to rape and behead Gina Miller. True, he was wearing a BoJo type blonde wig, but I was able to identify him easily enough.
In 2008, a leak of memos from the Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations showed that Israel and the US armed and trained the security forces of President Mahmoud Abbas with the aim of overthrowing the Hamas government. (Later, the “Palestine Papers”, a cache of 1,600 diplomatic documents leaked to Al Jazeera, would reveal more.) American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Hamas pre-empted a Fatah coup with a violent seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007.
That was completely spontaneous- right?
At this point the Palestinian national movement became fractured, with Fatah ruling the West Bank and Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip.
What was the upshot? Olmert's peace plan would bite the dust by the end of the year.
Israel responded to the Hamas move by declaring the Gaza Strip a “hostile territory”. It also enacted a series of social, economic and military measures designed to isolate and undermine Hamas. By far the most significant of these measures was the imposition of a blockade. The stated purpose of the blockade was to stop the transfer of weapons and military equipment to Hamas, but it also restricted the flow of food, fuel and medical supplies to the civilian population. One American senator was outraged to discover that pasta was on the list of proscribed items. The boycott applied not only to imports but, perversely, also to some exports from Gaza. Why prevent the export of agricultural products, fish and other non-lethal goods? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the hidden motive was to cripple Gaza’s economy and to inflict poverty, misery, and unemployment on its inhabitants.
It is usual to try to cripple the economy of a hostile power which fires rockets at you. The author however is well known for his opposition to American sanctions against Putin. I often see him trying to rape and behead policewomen stationed outside the American Embassy in London. Since those policewomen represent an occupying power, they have no right to self-defence but must patiently submit to his senile attempts to penetrate their various orifices. Well, when I say I have seen this, I mean I've seen it on Pornhub.
In its non-military aspects, the blockade constituted a form of collective punishment that is clearly proscribed by international law.
The same international law which forbids American sanctions against Iran or Russia.
Given the scale of the suffering inflicted by the blockade on the inhabitants of the strip, if Israel were a person it could be considered guilty of “depraved indifference”, a concept in American law (its equivalent under English common law is “depraved heart”) that refers to conduct that is so wanton, so callous, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the lives of others and so blameworthy as to warrant criminal liability.
The author is wrong. Depraved heart means a sociopathic type of reckless endangerment. To prove this you need to show that the IDF does not have a proper military plan. Yet, if that is the case, it can't also be accused of being an occupying power or committing war crimes. The mens rea is lacking. This silly man doesn't get that 'deprave heart' is a lesser charge. It would be second degree murder if a fatality occurred.
The Israeli bombardment of Gaza since 7th October may undoubtedly be described as “depraved indifference” on account of
the Israelis not intending to kill anybody. They were just having a little fun is all. They like seeing bombs go 'boom'. They are too stupid to understand that bombs can kill people.
the indescribable suffering it is inflicting on civilians. While the main enemy is Hamas, Israel keeps targeting civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances and UNRWA food depots.
Because they are used as cover for Hamas weapons factories, tunnels, etc.
By the end of November, the death toll has risen to more than 15,000 dead and more than 30,000 injured—more than the total of the previous military offensives combined. An estimated 6,150 of the dead are children and 4,000 are women. Slaughter of civilians on such an industrial scale may well have taken Israel to the verge of committing genocide, “the crime of all crimes”.
Why stop there? Why not suggest it has taken Israel to the verge of sodomizing its own grandmother while slitting her throat?
There is one other aspect of this campaign that was not present in previous ones:
It is the epitaph of the 'two state' solution.
the danger of ethnic cleansing.
Israel will take land as payment for Jewish blood spilled by terrorists. But this has already been going on. Currently ten percent of Israelis are 'settlers'. That number will double by the end of the decade. It is likely that there will be more European and American immigration as anti-semitism rises.
In previous campaigns Israel brought death and destruction to the people of Gaza but kept them cooped up in the enclave, “generously” allowing them to stay in their homes. This time Israel ordered the residents of the northern part of Gaza, nearly half the total population, to move to the southern part of the enclave. Some of those who obeyed the order were subsequently killed in Israeli air strkes. At the time of writing more than 1.8m, out of a total of 2.3m, have been internally displaced. As the Israeli military offensive moved into southern Gaza, the refugees were ordered to move out of the area to which they had fled. This amounts to a forced transfer of civilians: a war crime.
No. It amounted to issuing warnings to civilians which obligatory under the rules of war. Forced transfer means people being marched off at bayonet point. How fucking stupid is Shalim?
The upshot is that nowhere in Gaza is safe.
Whereas Israelis are perfectly safe from Hamas or Hizbollah's rockets- right?
Stretching the laws of war beyond credulity, Israel argues that civilians who disobey its orders and stay put in their homes in the north become legitimate military targets.
No. It argues that there are legitimate military targets which they are legitimately targeting. True, they inform civilians about this to the best of their ability but is because they expect civilians to move away from a place they know will come under attack.
In addition, Israel seems to be working on a plan to transfer people permanently from Gaza into northern Sinai. In a leaked document dated 13th October, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence drafted a proposal for the transfer of the entire population of Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has expressed strong objection to the plan as well as its determination to keep the Rafah crossing firmly closed—apart from to allow some aid into Gaza during the ceasefire.
So, Egypt is doing the same thing as Israel! It seems Hamas is hated by fellow Hanafis across the border.
But the combined pressures of the massive bombardment by the IDF and its medieval-style siege on Gaza may result in a human avalanche across the border.
Apparently, there are hefty bribes to be collected from those seeking to leave via Rafah. Egypt has a vested interest in keeping the border sealed. Moreover, though Sina's infrastructure has improved a lot, it can't absorb the better educated Gazans who can pay to get out. They will work hard in the Gulf or other places and send money home. The problem now is that many of those homes have been destroyed. But the misery of the Gazans is a business opportunity. Grab as many of those talented and hard working as you can while the going is good. They will generate tax revenue for you to piss against the wall.
One thing is certain: any civilians who leave Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes. More than half of the houses in Gaza have already been destroyed or damaged in indiscriminate Israeli bombing. So nearly half the population do not have homes to return to. No wonder that the bleak legacy of 1948 haunts the Palestinian community.
More Gazans have already been killed than died in 1948. True, the population was much smaller then.
While the martyrdom of over two million innocent Palestinian civilians continues,
suffering. To be a martyr you actually have to die.
despite the temporary ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, a bigger question looms: who will run what remains of the Gaza Strip after the guns fall silent? Netanyahu has declared that he wants the IDF to keep indefinite security control of the strip but no one in Israel wants to assume all the responsibilities of an occupying power again.
Get 'kapos'- i.e. guys who run smuggling and human trafficking syndicates- to do the wet-work. The thing isn't rocket science.
Meanwhile, his own grip on power at home is weakening. He faces strong popular opposition for his failure to prevent the horrendous Hamas attack and, more generally, for making Israel the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live.
Only because they had the sense to run the fuck away from places run by Muslims.
He is also embroiled in a corruption trial on charges—all of which he denies—including fraud, breaching public trust and accepting bribes. Politically speaking, he is a dead man walking. His days in power are numbered and there is a chance that he will end up in prison.
He may be replaced by more hawkish figures.
But he is still the prime minister, and his clearly stated aim is to eradicate Hamas and to prevent it from returning to power ever again. So, who will govern the Gaza Strip after the Israeli army leaves?
Will they leave? Why not keep corridors and use them to take a cut on 'humanitarian' aid? Also, get in your own proxies to do the wet-work.
Early signs suggest that the Americans and the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, favour the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza.
But the EU may be moving to the Right while America may turn isolationist. Talk of 'human rights' and 'international law' already rings hollow.
This is a totally preposterous proposition. The problem is not Hamas—which did not exist until 1987—but the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Moreover, if only Pharoah had killed Moses when he had the chance, there would be no Jewish question or 'kaffir question'.
Moreover, the Hamas that committed the massacre of 7th October is far more extreme than the Hamas that won the 2006 elections and formed a national unity government.
No. The Brotherhood thought it could benefit from the ballot box and thus took a pragmatic line. But it is difficult for a Leninist party to change its spots.
By blocking the path to peaceful political change, Israel and its western supporters are largely responsible for this regression to fundamentalist positions.
Moreover, the refusal of men to chop off their own dicks is causing RAPE!
Hamas may not be to their liking, but it still commands broad popular support.
Because Gazans become deliriously happy when their houses are blown up.
If an election were held today, Hamas would almost certainly beat its Fatah rival again.
Neither Hamas nor Fatah believe in holding elections. Still, Hamas might win in the West Bank which, no doubt, is anxious to meet the same fate as Gaza
And what about the sclerotic Fatah-led Palestinian Authority? It is docile, weak, corrupt and incompetent, and can barely govern the West Bank.
In other words, it is too lazy and senile to do lots of killing.
It receives funding from the EU and to a lesser extent from the US, essentially to serve as a subcontractor for Israeli security in the area. It has shown itself to be utterly incapable of resisting the expansion of Israeli settlements, the escalation of settler violence, the slow but steady takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the flagrant encroachment by fanatical religious Zionists on the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem.
Whereas Hamas has shown itself incapable of preventing Israel from turning half of Gaza into rubble.
Fatah also lacks legitimacy because no parliamentary elections have been held since January 2006.
Like Hamas, Fatah doesn't believe in elections.
It has stalled on holding another parliamentary election precisely because it realises that Hamas would win.
Why didn't Hamas hold elections? Was it because it was afraid Trump would win?
The idea that this discredited Palestinian Authority can be imposed on the proud and long-suffering people of Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks is completely detached from reality.
So is the notion that they can win this war.
But it is mildly interesting, in as much as it exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of the people who espouse it.
They're just talking. Nobody believes the outcome won't be one of Israel grabbing land and using AI enhanced drones or robot dogs to control a broken and demoralized Palestinian population. Indians will be brought in to do the menial labour.
It is not for Israel or its imperialist backers to tell the people of Gaza who should govern them.
Israel is backed by King Charles III, Emperor Macron, and Badshah Biden.
If the events of the last few weeks have demonstrated anything, it is that the old narrative of Israel having a right and a duty to defend itself against a terrorist organisation, no matter the human, civilian cost, can no longer be sustained.
Why not? That is what is happening. What can't be sustained is a fairy story about a two state or three state solution.
What is happening in Gaza today is the cruel manifestation of Israeli state terrorism.
Just as what is happening today in London is the cruel manifestation of the Imperialist terrorism of Rishi Sunak. Did you know that if try to rape and behead a policewoman, she has the 'right' to beat the fuck out of you? This violates International Law according to which the occupying power has no right to protect itself from rape and decapitation.
Terrorism is the use of force against civilians for political ends.
Which is why the British Bobby is actually a terrorist. A policewoman beat the hell out of me just because I tried to grab her titties. This was for a clear political end because I had exited the pub to lead an invasion of Iyerland which is currently being illegally occupied by a half-Maratha leprechaun named Varadkar.
The cap fits and Israel must wear it.
Otherwise Shlaim will cry and cry.
The Israeli politicians and generals who orchestrate the criminal assaults on the people of Gaza are no better than riffraff.
Because they are not wearing a cap which Shlaim wants them to. Riffraff are like that only. Fuck you, riffraff! Go back to Riffraffistan!
This ghastly war has also exposed the ruthless hypocrisy of the western leaders,
they clutch their pearls when Israel kills a paltry twenty or thirty thousand. Once the death toll crosses 1.3 million, they will be more appreciate.
their blatant double standards, their indifference to Palestinian rights and their complicity in Israel’s war crimes.
Not to mention the illegal actions of their policewomen who beat the fuck out of me if I try to grab their titties. The occupying force should express gratitude for being groped.
Israel is an aggressive settler-colonial state
like England. The Anglo-Saxons should just very kindly fuck off back where they come from.
and increasingly a Jewish-supremacist state
Golda Meier was actually a Buddhist lady.
intent on keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subordination.
I think they may now prefer just to get rid of them.
As long as Israel has western support, it will continue to act unilaterally, in violation of international law, in breach of a raft of UN resolutions and in defiance of the most basic norms of civilised international behaviour.
No. It will continue to do so till it is militarily defeated. As the West declines, it will find new allies in the region and outside it.
This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population.
In which case, the conclusion to this conflict is foregone.
And there is absolutely no military solution to this conflict.
Yes there is. Armies can kill more effectively and on a much bigger scale than terrorists.
Israel cannot have security without peace with its neighbours.
It does have peace with its neighbours. Its problem is with Iran backed proxies- Hamas, Houthis, Hezbollah. The question is whether a second 'war of the cities'- i.e. ballistic missiles fired at Iranian cities- forces Iran out of the region.
A negotiated political compromise, as in Northern Ireland, is the only way forward.
but the Brits didn't give a fuck about Ulster. Enoch Powell was the last mainland politician who cared about it- but only after he was forced out of Birmingham and had to relocate there.
That settlement required external intervention, as does this one. Here, however, the US cannot serve as the sole broker because its pronounced bias in favour of Israel would make it a dishonest one.
Nor can China because Hamas was only pretending to care about their peace plan. The problem here is that Iran, Turkey, Egypt, China, Russia etc. don't really care about Palestinians. Nobody does. Who shed a tear for the Tamil Tigers? Not even the DMK.
Ever since 1967, it has arrogated to itself a monopoly over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process but failed to put pressure on Israel to compromise. What is needed now is a new international coalition led by the UN
which everybody considers utterly useless.
which includes the US and EU but also Arab states and members of the global south.
Furthermore lesbian penguins and disabled aardvarks must have a decisive voice in the proceedings.
The priorities of such a coalition would be humanitarian relief, reconstruction and a long-term political plan that includes an independent Palestinian state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with a capital city in East Jerusalem.
This was the Olmert plan. It failed because Hamas started firing rockets.
Such a plan is eminently practical.
Provided Israelis start wearing various caps which Shlaim chooses for them.
All it would take to realise it is for Israel to shed its settler-colonial and Jewish-supremacist ambitions,
furthermore, all Israelis should convert to Islam, undergo gender reassignment surgery and wear a burqa provided of course they don caps which Shlaim assigns to them.
for America to end its unconditional support for Israel,
not to mention its unconditional support for America
for the EU to morph from a payer to an active player,
so that Israel can turn into post-Gaddafi Libya
for the United Nations to overcome its self-imposed impotence,
by conquering the Globe and forming a World Government
and a few similar trifles.
which only the riffraff oppose. Fuck you riffraff! Fuck you very much! Why don't you all just fuck off back to Planet Riffraff so that Shlaim can get everybody to wear caps of which he approves?
