Gaza: Beating to the rhythms of the US electoral cycle
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So the killing in Gaza ends as it began, to a timetable determined less by events in the region than the rhythms of the US electoral cycle. The latest round of carnage began, of course, back in November when Israel breached the ceasefire with Hamas on the day that Americans went to the polls, judging (correctly, as it happened) that, with the world’s media focused on the US, a few Palestinian deaths would slide neatly down the memory hole. Operation Cast Lead duly took place during the final weeks of George Bush’s term, a period in which both the outgoing and incoming presidents could deftly avoid any responsibility. No-one was listening to W any more; Obama was yet to take the reigns. Thus the ceasefire. The SMH explains: “By halting the offensive, Israel has spared Barack Obama the spectre of a Middle East bloodbath to mark his inauguration and avoided friction with the new US administration.” Warmongers, take note. You can kill 1206 Palestinians, a third of them children. You bomb mosques and shell schools and cover UNRWA refugee shelters with white phosphorus. But what you can’t do is lower the tone of an official function. Why, this inauguration’s about hope, don’t you know! Well, there’s precious little of that in Gaza now. In a territory already so impoverished that, even before the offensive, Palestinians suffered from malnutrition, eighty per cent of Gaza’s national product has been destroyed. The total damage bill is said to come to $1.5 billion. Some 20,000 buildings have been hit, fifteen per cent of the total structures on the strip. About 26,000 Palestinians have become internal refugees; the unemployment rate now exceeds 60 per cent. Insofar as the international community pays attention to Gaza over the next few days, it will be to nod wisely over the need to close the border tunnels to Egypt. The smuggling routes might have supplied Hamas with rockets but they also gave Gazans access to food and medicine and the other supplies of which the Israeli blockade deprived them. Israeli intelligence says that the Palestinians will have the tunnels open within a few months. Of course they will. With the blockade continuing, what else can they do? That’s why the most likely prognosis is for a brief lull — and then more of the same. Though the Israeli politicians most closely associated with the war have received a boost in the polls, the residents of Sderot feel cheated by the cease fire and the Israeli far-right will agitate to avoid the “mistakes” of Lebanon and to finish the job. On the Palestinian side, Hamas, simply by surviving, can claim some sort of victory, especially since it retains the ability to fire rockets. Nonetheless, the Gaza crisis has also widened the schisms within Palestinian politics, and with Fatah now actively collaborating with the IDF, a Palestinian civil war seems more likely than ever. In that light, it’s worth revisiting David Rose’s remarkable article from Vanity Fair last year, a piece that revealed the US’s covert operation to arm and train Fatah militants to overthrow Hamas after the Palestinian Authority’s first democratic elections. Rose’s research illustrates, once again, that the USA is not an onlooker in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians so much as a central player. After all, almost all the weapons by which Gaza has been reduced to rubble came, one way or another, from the USA, the source of some $53 billion in military aid to Israel over recent decades. That’s why, amidst the glitter of Obama’s inauguration, the Palestinians remain, as always, the skeletons at the feast. The crisis in Gaza is not over. In many ways, it’s just beginning. |
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21 Comments
Anger is natural, it’s unavoidable. It’s how to apply that energy to constructive purpose that builds our resilience and character. Let’s be entirely clear, no one should bomb anyone. The many beautiful Jewish people should never be bombed. The many beautiful Arabic people should never be bombed, starved, stolen from.
Human rights are not divisible. That’s the way forward. God knows the spiral of violence has a huge headstart on peaceloving people everywhere.
The world stuffed up supporting an ethno religious state with no written constitution to the exclusion of the other indigenous. It’s our responsibility to seek and find a resolution. As Gandhi said knowing your arguments well helps avoid violence. A good start was page 1 story in the SMH today documenting the 4 months starvation blockade during the truce forcing the parties into conflict.
As for the 53 UN facilities hit by IDF fire to quote Chris Gunness of the UN on tv tonight - many of these were “direct hits”. As I keep saying you get a society with 30% support for pardon of assassin Yigal Amir, and give them serious weaponry in Gaza as part of compulsory national service, and immoral things are likely to happen. And they did. And they do.
To say ‘bomb Tel Aviv’, well now you’re going down the road of illegal collective punishment currently on by some supporters of the Gaza offensive. The Abyss gazes into you etc etc.
Here is an excellent editorial btw:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1052348.html
Maybe gas chambers would be more effective, Kevin?
And don’t forget to boycott your local Jewish business too. They’re all part of the one giant hook-nosed conspiracy, right?
LittleJimmyKoward:
Quite obviously Crikey do not agree with you, as don’t the vast majority of Aussies & Aussie Jews…you pathetic, bigot mummy’s boy…
As I’ve said b4, you’re the best promoter of HAMAS in Oz….nice work, dimwit….
FYI, I’ve just received my first run of posters showing the Star of David as a swastika…..shall I send you one? A friend of mine’s son, who is a Moriah College student, has asked for a supply to hand out when school resumes………
Either that or I’ve been on holidays, Kev.
I’ve read some drivel on Crikey over the years - much of it written by me - but your comment above is one of the most disgusting I’ve seen.
Australia’s $5million in aid,to Gaza looks so-o-o-o generous.
No,really, I appreciate your reporting Jeff.
While expecting nothing from the print media in covering this catastrophe and therefore not disappointed, I am sickened by the ABC’s scared,onesided coverage of the’conflict’.
Send me the poster via Moriah College Principal’s office Kevboy.
By the way what is your friend’s name?
You truly repugnant excuse for a man
Lucky Bernard Keane!
You missed the past 2 weeks of unrestrained ‘Kevboy’ insanity filled with psychic affliction and repugnant ideas.
This has been but a soupçon!
Do not dispose of your travel sickness medication as it will still be useful when reading Crikey…..
Bernard Keane:
Well Bern……lost for words?…….or did you sober up…or were you directed by Crikey management not to further embarass yourself.? I’m tipping both of those……
Finally, you must be chuffed to have gained the support of LittleJimmyKoward…….next time you holiday, I’d suggest just a little less sun…..
Bernard: you’re obviously avoiding my question…….let me put my view another way, so that you’re able to grasp it more clearly.
If the New Zealand armed forces were bombing Sydney & killing innocent civilians including young children, you wouldn’t support a retaliatory bombing of Auckland as a preventative measure……..what would you recommend that Australia do in those circumstances?
C’mon Bern…you’re big on the grand accusation but so far short on the rationale
I concur with most here. I wonder the Obama regime possibly creating some no war space, maybe, given his speech against Iraq in 2002 when it mattered. Plus the fact he can crunch Hilary if he really wants/has to, just as Olmert reportedly crunched Cond Rice via hands off W Bush UN vote.
What I want to address is Koutsoukis p1 smh story corroborating your timeline in a general way. That the strangulation of Gaza was in from June 19 says Oz UN man in Jerusalem. UK Guardian confirms Nov 4 strike killing 6 Hamas members. Didn’t realise this was voting day in USA. God have mercy.
Add in our ‘friend’ JamesK here on crikey spilling the beans on 4 months strong discipline by Hamas little or no rocket fire or mortars July, August, Sept, October. Add in Al Jazeera point that the derisory low rocket/mortar fire in this time possibly was other splinters like Islamic Jihad not Hamas. Then as you say the US presidential cycle overlay. It’s looking like a very very grim dog whistle in the Feb 2009 Israel vote, Arab parties banned, window in W’s last weeks.
Which bring us all the way home to the Jewish Board of Deputies funding Paul Sheehan exposed by Marg Simons. Paul, and I speak gently inversely proportional to the professional danger to him, says today yes the JBD funded him (tick to Marg Simons/crikey) but it was in effect ‘only in November before well before the Gaza offensive’.
But the timetable suggests the war machine was already turning over. Paul was drawn in via financially conflicted travel freebie at the threshhold of the war, after maybe 5 months of preparations, including arguably 2 instances of IDF ceasefire breach, one constructively via maintaining the blockade 4 months, two by the strike on Nov 4 killing 6. Paul appears either a dupe or propagandist - neither flattering. We asked Tim Dick the opinion editor by phone in the last hour as a follow up to previously ‘Will you sack him for not declaring a financial conflict IN THE MIDDLE of the slaughter?
Just to add, I only learned about the strike on Hamas killing 6 via google of the UK Guardian article of the 5th November. Possibly a fortnight ago. But it does call up the question, whether he knew about it or not. If not why not find it by google when preparing his opinion piece of 12 January 2009.
I can imagine he didn’t know of the 4 Nov strike at the time given the hoo haa in the USA election. But he should have known by the time he came to write his piece. I must say I was already on notice to cross check the Israeli line having been generally aware of the Yitzak Rabin murder in late 95. Then when I got the killer’s name, Yigal Amir, and googled his fate, whoa, 30% of Israelis think he should be “pardoned”. What has happened to their society to get that kind of a result? He’s been allowed to marry and has a son.
That’s the kind of political influence combined with compulsory service in the IDF that suggests potential foul play, or dishonest government PR. And so I think it can be demonstrated.
The West are left pondering the use of alleged existential risk as a cover for ruthless expansion of the ‘Greater Israel’ agenda including Feb 2009 electoral politics to harvest the ultra right vote to build a majority coalition. And I didn’t even know Pauline was Jewish (!)
Well said, Jeff!
What really underlines your remarks was Israeli Foreign Minister’s frantic dash to Washington to stitch up a deal with the outgoing Bush administration by getting Condoleeza Rice to sign up to a document aimed at stopping the flow of arms from Egypt into Israel….without any regard to the outflow of warplanes,missiles and strange new bombs from the US to Israel. But consider the hide of that dash to Washington….Olmert had just finished publicly boasting that he’d ‘shamed’ Rice into abstaining from the UN ceasefire. It puts a whole new face on that biting the hand that feeds you saying.
Why should Obama feel any obligation to be bound by that sort of skulduggery?
The world is relying on him to talk with Iran, to talk with Hamas, and shaking off the stranglehold that Tel Aviv has had on the shaping of US Middle East policy for so long.
There’s surely a Pulitzer Prize waiting for someone who’ll tell the full story on the destruction of Gaza and its defenceless people, a story that’ll act as the brief for Israel to be arraigned before the International Criminal Court to face charges of war crimes….a story that wont be stifled by the fact that neither the US nor Israel recognises that court. It’s at the international bar of world opinion that Israel will finally be condemned, rejected by the family of nations.
Bernard Keane: so you’re supporting Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, are you? What a dilatory interpretation of my rationale.
I’d suggest that you have a glass of water & then let me have the benefit of your your wisdom on this matter…….or maybe your confused analysis of my position, is exactly why Crikey aren’t letting you near this issue.
Christopher Hitchens a proud left winger but altogether better informed and profusely more honest and intelligent than the ever predictable Jeff Sarrow says “the timing of the carnage has been determined by three sets of electoral calculation(s)” in an excellent article on this calamity for both sides of this debate in the West.
http://www.slate.com/id/2207872/
Absolutely right, Jeff. However, you forgot to mention that the killing in Gaza commenced for the electoral benefit of Israaeli politicians. As a person with no axe to grind in the Arab-Israeli conflict, I am extremely distressed that Arab lives have been regarded so cheaply in recent years.
I say…BOMB Tel Aviv……as I would have said ’ bomb Berlin ’ when the Nazis were bombing the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.
These evil fascists deserve nothing better…the time for talk with the Israelis is over…the free world must boycott Israel NOW.
Even that pathetic Zionist Issy Liebler believes that Israeli society is rotten at the core..i.e. morally & intellectually corrupt…it’s the first time I’ve agrees with Dizzy Issy on anything.
Daniel: exactly my point. The genocide by the IDF in GAZA is exactly that: collective punishment. The Israeli Government has been practising this tactic for decades.
But watch the Zionist bigots (& Bernard Keane) react to my suggestion that such punishment be used against Israel. My point in saying it is to highlight the on-going double standard applied to all of Israel’s pronouncements. These people are no different to the NAZIS.
Israel doesn’t want peace……its clear aim is to militarily crush the Palestinian political & military forces out of existence, & turn the Palestinians into an underclass in their owns lands.
The Israeli fascist cowards know the chances of missiles reaching Tel Aviv are slim…thus they murder the legal occupants of the Gaza with impunity. HAMAS want the genocide to stop, and for the West Bank to be returned to them. They have offered a 2 State solution on that basis.
An international boycott of Israel, similar to that imposed on South Africa, is needed. Sadly, & I hope I’m wrong, Obama’s appointment won’t change much.
Rudd’s playing realpolitik….I don’t know what Bernard Keane’s playing….Koko the Clown maybe?
Hitchens reads fine until the last paragraph - and it’s a long one - where goes into lots of controversial assertions as reliable fact. Ignores the popular election of Hamas as one important reality. My guess Hitchens has never actually been elected to anything. It does influence one’s self perception and sense of responsibility in the normal course: To broaden one’s policy attitude. Indeed it’s quite hard to shout out all those genuine requests for assistance on a simple human level even if it’s outside the platform. That’s practical small scale politics. Israel itself played on this vis-a-vis Hamas leaders in and outside Gaza.
One assumes this is the case for Hamas in Gaza like anyone else presuming they too have two eyes, two arms, two legs etc and all attached this side of a dime ordinance from the IDF - and their 30% plus sympathisers with convicted assassin Yigal Amir for “Greater Israel” that Hitchens seems sure has been abandoned post Sharon. Sadly the targeting (?) of 53 UN facilities seriously suggests otherwise.
Cheap shot from Tom McLoughlin: “Sadly the targeting (?) of 53 UN facilities seriously suggests otherwise.”
Difficult enough for reason to win out with the people directly involved but truly despairing to see reason discarded in a ‘supposed’ nonpartisan observer with an ounce of nous.
Yes obviously Crikey moderator failure has seen Kevboy Loon Herbert proliferate from just distasteful to truly repugnant.
‘Incitement to Racial Hatred’ is a criminal offense Jonathan Green.
Crikey should lift itself out of the sewer and do the right thing. I’m tired of this filth!