Tagged with Gaza

When genocide is permissible?

2jdjj1tNever. Well, sometimes. Or at least thinking aloud about it is okay. Why else would The Times of Israel publish such a thing? They may have removed it in short order, but as we know once things get on the internet….

Yochanan Gordon’s execrable screed shits on the memory of his ancestors. I am loathe to bring up history, but someone else once justified the extermination of Europe’s Jews in terms of securing the national well-being of his people. Yet Gordon has done the world a service. By putting his thoughts down on paper, as it were, he has distilled the barbarism consuming Israel. The “facts” are crap, but the facts do not matter. The 800 or so words articulate a feeling, an impulse.  Continue reading →

Does Israel “cause” antisemitism?

"Hitler was right" slogan The great German socialist August Bebel once dubbed anti-semitism “the socialism of fools”. This oft-quoted aphorism referred specifically to the conspiracy-mongers of his day for whom capitalism was the front for international jewry. But could it be that anti-semitism is the delusion of the desperate too? This question was raised in the Lords last night. Ex-diplomat and crossbencher Lord Wright of Richmond mused whether there was a link between the rise of anti-semitism in Europe and Israel’s brutal assault on civilians in Gaza. He further suggested that its spread might be curbed in this country if the government acted resolutely against current operations, and pressured Israel to take the two state solution seriously by withdrawing from illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. This drew two sharp responses. One from Lord Winston, who argued that if such a link was tenable, then “the affairs in Syria would cause anti-Islamic feeling in this country”. Likewise, Lord Ahmed, “the Islamic faith is very clear – in such situations you should protect churches, you should protect cloisters, you should protect synagogues, you protect all innocent life.” Continue reading →

Hard to believe Israeli shelling of civilians, hospitals & refuges wasn’t deliberate

Free GazaThe killing last night of sleeping children in a school in a refugee camp has been rightly denounced by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, as a “serious violation of international law by Israeli forces” and “an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame”. The evidence also indicates that it was deliberate. The UN has said its officials had repeatedly given details of the school and its refugee population to Israel. The Israeli army would have known the exact co-ordinates of the refuge.

Nor was this the result of one stray shell since the school was hit by no less than five shells during the night. Nor was this an isolated incident. The attack on the school was the sixth time that UNRWA premises have been hit since the war in Gaza began over 3 weeks ago. The Israeli army (IDF) excused the action on the grounds that Hamas militants fired mortar shells from the vicinity of the school and Israeli forces returned the fire. But the UN said there was no evidence of militant activity around the school. Continue reading →

End the slaughter in Gaza

gaza_demo_260714_owen_jones_460The scenes of desolation and destruction in Gaza, of whole streets reduced to piles of broken rubble, and the images of torn bodies, especially of young children and babies, demand that the international community do all that we can to end this slaughter.

Just before noon on Tuesday morning I spoke to Saeb Erekat in Ramallah on the west Bank. The Palestinian Unity Government was holding an emergency meeting to discuss the deteriorating situation.

Saeb is an Executive Committee Member of the PLO and is the Chief Negotiator for the Palestinian government. He took a few minutes to brief me on the current situation in Gaza and the behind the scenes efforts to achieve a humanitarian ceasefire. Continue reading →

Gaza genocide will only stop if the political & military cost to Israel is too high

Free GazaAt least 425 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli blitzkrieg on Gaza, including 80 in the last day alone, and nearly 80% of the dead are civilians, 20% of them children. This is the result of launching the world’s fourth military power against 1.8 million Palestinians already blockaded in the largest open-air prison on Earth.

What is really sickening about this is the attitude of Obama (and Cameron) in blaming the victims for resisting aggression whilst backing Israel with impunity whatever the scale of their utterly unjustified civilian killings. US and UK leaders point the finger at Hamas’ firing rockets into Israel as the trigger for the Israeli attack, without which all this appalling bloodshed would never have happened. That is a concoction of fantasy. Continue reading →