By now, we've all heard about the recent attacks on Gaza, but just to re-cap: on Saturday at about 11:20am (when children were at school, employees were in offices, and aspiring police officers were in the middle of training), 60 Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed 50 different sites in Gaza. This first bombardment took 3 minutes and 40 seconds, killed over 200 Palestinians, and injured nearly an additional 1,000. By Monday morning, several buildings at the Islamic University in Gaza had been leveled, tunnels between Gaza and Egypt were no longer functional, and
more than 325 Palestinians were dead (as well as 2 Israelis since Saturday). At this point, as Gaza hospitals are running out of supplies and room for corpses (which they are forced to pile up on morgue floors right now), Israel is poised to embark on a ground invasion: tanks are lined up near the Gaza border and journalists have been forced to leave the area.
The US government has voiced near-unequivocal support of Israel's actions (actions which the UN called "disproportionate" in a frustratingly weak call for a cease-fire). In a statement on the situation in Gaza, Nancy Pelosi wrote:
"When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally." And on Meet the Press, Barack Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, avoided anything like condemnation of the Israeli attacks as well, telling viewers: “There’s only one president at a time...The president speaks for the United States of America. We will honor that.”
On December 27, Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories, issued a statement outlining
Israel's war crimes in Gaza on Saturday, which include collective punshment, targeting civilians, and disproportionate military response.
Israel has called this an all-out war against Hamas because of quassam attacks that have killed about 18 people in 8 years, but as
Neve Gordon writes in the Guardian, this attack has nothing to do with rocket attacks, which Israel could have prevented long ago. Instead, it has to do with a) the destruction of Hamas as a
political entity (which, Gordon notes, is not going to happen, at least not through military means); b) to help Kadima and Labour defeat Likud and the abominable Netanyahu; c) to re-establish the Israeli military in the eyes of the world after its performance two summers ago; and d) to keep Abbas in power for a bit longer after his term ends on January 9. In Syria, the exiled political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, is calling for
a 3rd intifada, a call which the Fatah leader clearly has no mind to heed. Meshaal said on Al Jazeera that Hamas had tried
"all the peaceful options, but without results;" he is now pushing for more rocket attacks and considering the reinstitution of suicide bombings in Israel (which would be the first since 2005). For more information on whats going on in Gaza, please see this article by
Jennifer Loewenstein in Counterpunch,
Hassan Haidar's piece for Dar Al Hayat on the timing and pre-meditation of the attacks,
this first person account of the bombing on Saturday by Dr Eyad Al Serraj, a psychologist in Gaza City, this episode of
Democracy Now, which features NE favorite Gideon Levy as well as an phenomenal discussion with one-state solution advocate Ali Abunimah. We'll leave you with an excerpt:
We have to go back to the Warsaw Ghetto or Guernica to find crimes in the modern era of the scale of the viciousness and of the deliberateness of what Israel is committing with the full support of the United States, not just the Bush administration, but apparently as well the incoming Obama administration. We have to recognize the complicity not just of the so-called international community, but also of the Arab regimes, Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak, the Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt. Tzipi Livni, when she issued her threats against Gaza, was in Cairo in the biggest Arab capital, and Aboul Gheit stood next to her silently. Mahmoud Abbas is not a bystander, the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority. For two years since the elections, which Hamas won, he and his coterie have been collaborating with Israel and the United States, first to overthrow the election result and then to besiege Gaza. We have talked before of the Palestinian Contras, funded and armed by the United States, which sought to overthrow Hamas in June 2007 and had the tables turned on them. And now this. The complicity of Mahmoud Abbas is very clear and must be clearly stated. He does not have the authority, moral or otherwise, to call together the Palestinian people for anything. He has gone over to the other side. He has joined the Israeli war against the Palestinian people, and I choose my words very carefully.
And let me say this, as well, Amy, that Israel is trying to produce and promote the fiction that it is engaged in a war with a so-called enemy entity. What Israel is doing is massacring a captive population. You heard—you said in the headlines how Nancy Pelosi, our so-called progressive, liberal, antiwar Speaker of the House, gave her full support to these crimes. Obama has done the same through a spokesman. And that will not change. The United Nations issued a weak statement aimed at covering the backsides, let me say, of those who issued it, not aimed at changing the situation.
What are Palestinians calling for today? Yesterday, the Palestinian National Committee for the Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions reissued and reaffirmed its call on all international civil society in the United States, in North America, in Europe, everywhere, to redouble the efforts for boycott, divestment and sanctions modeled on the anti-apartheid movement. This is necessary. This is moral. This is the nonviolent resistance we can all participate in. And it is more urgent than ever. Let’s not look back at these crimes like we look at the Warsaw Ghetto and like we look at Guernica and we look at the other atrocities of the twentieth century and say, “We had the chance to act, but we chose silence and complicity.” The time to stop this is now.
And we also have to be clear that those who are accountable—Ehud Barak, his orders over the past few months to withhold insulin, chemotherapy drugs, dialysis supplies, all forms of medicine from the people of Gaza, were just as lethal and just as murderous as the orders to send in the bombers and warplanes to attack mosques, to attack universities. The Islamic University in Gaza is not a military site. It is a university with 18,000 students, 60 percent of them women. Last night, Israeli warplanes attacked a female dormitory in the Islamic University. This is what Israel is attacking. They attacked the fishing port. No food gets into Gaza. People can barely fish enough to sustain them, and Israel has attacked the fishing boats that sustains them. These are historic crimes, and we cannot be silent about them.
