Israeli War Criminals – to the International Criminal Court, NOW!

Make Zionism History!

One year since the Gaza Carnage by Israel’s murderers! We shall not forget!

Across the globe, many thousands are today marking the anniversary of the Israeli barbarity started in December last year during the month-long attack on Gaza. There are numerous publications on this topic today, far beyond what can be included in a daily blog, so I have tried to have some of the main one, but included here only part of the text. The whole text can be accessed by using the link above each item.

One year to the Gaza Carnage

Mother Palestine: Settlements, by Latuff

One year on, we need progress in Gaza: The Observer

IN THE 12 months since Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, conditions in the Strip “remain wretched”, to use Amnesty International’s phrase. The Israeli economic siege has remained in place since Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections and enforced its rule within Gaza. Almost no work has been done to repair an estimated $1bn worth of damage because of restrictions on the import of building materials.
Indeed, since the end of the conflict in January, only 41 truckloads of building materials have entered Gaza when thousands are needed. The economy is dependent on the Hamas-regulated warren of tunnels on the southern border with Egypt.
For Israel itself, the consequences of its war on Gaza have been more difficult to assess. Rocket fire by the Palestinian factions has finally been halted, but the cost to Israel of a war that claimed almost 1,400 Gazan lives has been serious. The use of white phosphorous against civilian targets, as well as other suspected breaches of humanitarian law, have corroded the country’s moral standing even among its most robust supporters. Israeli politicians and officials have been forced to confront the fact that they risk arrest in a number of countries including, for now at least, the United Kingdom. The impact on Israel has been pernicious in another way. The principle of deterrence has been crucial for its defence. So its failure to dislodge Hamas from Gaza, coming so close after the disaster of its adventure in Lebanon in 2006, has seen its military diminished.
But the assault on Gaza had other consequences that it is, perhaps, easy to forget. The conflict was conducted in the febrile conditions of an Israeli general election which saw all main parties aggressively endorsing the war. It returned Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister in a coalition that has included Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, a man notable for demanding Israeli Arabs swear an oath of loyalty or face expulsion. Unsurprisingly a peace process, already moribund, has faltered further.
Netanyahu has carefully managed a new style designed to derail US demands for a freeze to further settlement in the West Bank by offering the most partial of freezes, in the knowledge it cannot possibly be acceptable to the Palestinian leadership. If Netanyahu has succeeded in this policy thus far it is because he has been allowed to by an American president who promised so much in his Cairo speech and yet has delivered so little. While it is fair to say Barack Obama has been preoccupied with other issues, it is a truism in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that no movement has ever been achieved without the full, vigorous engagement of the US president.
So what we have is an increasingly dangerous stasis in which all issues, save for the stop-start negotiations for prisoner exchange, are on hold. Palestinian national reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, the West Bank and Gaza, has made little headway; Israeli-Palestinian talks are on hold; the economic stranglehold of Gaza goes on. All largely ignored by the international community.
The peril of this lack of movement has been starkly visible in the last week, as Israel yesterday shot dead six Palestinians in two separate incidents in the West Bank. What is required, if there is to be any movement, is an urgent new sense of commitment that must begin in Washington. But equally, there needs to be moves to relieve the plight of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents.
They must be allowed access to markets so that they can rebuild, and at least makes some attempt towards lives of dignity. Moreover, stasis suits Hamas, its enemy a sense of opportunity and purpose among those it governs. It is not good enough for the world to ignore this problem while a new generation grows up frustrated and alienated in what is effectively an enormous prison. That is no solution, merely tragedy deferred. Violence will follow.

One year on, Ban bemoans lack of ‘durable’ Gaza cease-fire: Ha’aretz

Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson on Sunday said the United Nations Secretary-General was “deeply concerned” by the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, on the first anniversary of Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
“While violence has been at lower levels this year, incidents continue and there is no durable cease-fire in place,” said the spokesperson in a statement.
“The quality and quantity of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza is insufficient, broader economic and reconstruction activity is paralyzed, and the people of Gaza are denied basic human rights.”
The Israel Defense Forces began the 3-week offensive on Dec. 27, 2008 with a wave of aerial strikes, a few days after Hamas declared that a cease-fire in Gaza had ended.
Israel’s stated goals in the 3-week offensive were to halt cross-border rocket fire by Gaza militants, which had terrorized the country’s South for eight years, and to curb weapons smuggling into the Hamas-ruled territory.
In the statement, Ban urged Israel to end the “unacceptable and counterproductive” blockade of Gaza, which it maintains with Egypt, and to facilitate economic activity and civilian reconstruction and uphold international law.
“There is a sense of hopelessness in Gaza today for 1.5 million Palestinians, half of whom are under eighteen,” the statement said. “Their fate and the well-being of Israelis are intimately connected.”
He also called on Hamas to “bring an end to violence” and fully respect international law.
Ban made no mention of the damning UN report on the conflict authored by South African jurist Richard Goldstone, which accused both sides of committing war crimes, but focused mainly on alleged Israeli offences.
Israel says around 1,100 Gazans were killed during the offensive, of whom the majority were militants. But Palestinian human rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans were killed, most of whom were civilians. Thirteen Israelis were also killed during the hostilities: ten IDF soldiers and three civilians.

Gazans mark anniversary of war: Al Jazeera online

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are marking one year since the start of Israel’s 22-day offensive on the territory, which left hundreds dead and damaged millions of dollars worth of infrastructure.
Hamas officials held a ceremony on Sunday outside the destroyed Palestinian Legislative Council building in Gaza City – one of the first targets of the assault.
Air raid sirens were turned on at 11:20am (9:20 GMT), the exact time that the aerial bombardment began.
Ismail Haniya, the deposed Palestinian prime minister, was expected to unveil a plaque commemorating the 1,600 people that Hamas officials say were killed during the war.
Other estimates put the Palestinian death toll closer to 1,400, the majority of whom were civilians, including around 400 children.
Thirteen Israelis were also killed during the war – 10 soldiers and three civilians.
A month of events are planned to commemorate the war in Gaza.
Sombre mood
Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros, who was among one of the few international broadcasters to report on the war from inside the territory, was at the scene.
She said that “the message here isn’t just one of sombreness and sadness to mark one of the darkest phases of Palestinian history, but also one of defiance by the Hamas government, who continue to maintain control, law and order here in the Gaza Strip”.
The stated aim behind Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” was to cripple the ability of Hamas and other Palestinian groups from launching rockets into southern Israel.
Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokesperson, told Al Jazeera on Sunday that the operation had been successful.
“This [goal] was achieved as, a year after the operation, we are seeing very little rocket fire. In that sense, it has been a success,” she said.
Palestinian armed groups have slowed, but not stopped, their indiscriminate rocket attacks, but the factions claim that is by choice.
Hamas defiant
Al Jazeera’s Ayman Mohyeldin was granted exclusive access to a rocket-manufacturing site, where they demonstrated that their capabilities have not been diminished.
The 22-day offensive heavily damaged the infrastructure of the Gaza Strip In a rare interview, the spokesperson for Hamas’ military wing the al-Qassam Brigades, known as Abu Obeida, dismissed Israeli claims that his group had been weakened by the war.
“We were affected by this war, but we were able to regroup even during the battle, before it finished and the impact on our military capabilities was marginal. We were capable of rearming and much more.”
Dr Ahmad Yousuf, a senior Hamas official and former advisor to Haniya, said that the political movement also remained strong despite the devastation caused by the Israeli offensive.
“The Israelis failed their objectives on all accounts,” he told Al Jazeera from Gaza City.
“Hamas is still there and we try to help our people, but we are still under occupation and suffering from sanctions.”
Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group, has accused both Israel and Hamas of failing to take punitive action against members of their own forces who are accused of rights violations during the war.
Shattered infrastructure
Mustafa Barghouti, an independent Palestinian politician and former minister of information, criticised Israel for refusing to allow in supplies to rebuild Gaza’s shattered infrastructure.
“Today 25,000 houses in Gaza remain unrepaired because Israel is not allowing a single sack of cement or a piece of glass into Gaza,” he told Al Jazeera from the West bank town of Ramallah.
Barghouti also criticised international governments for failing to put sufficient pressure on Israel.
“My question is why does Europe and other donor countries not send ships with materials for construction. They can have Nato investigating these ships to make sure there is no security risk.”
Last week, 16 rights groups including Amnesty International and Oxfam issued a joint statement saying the world has “betrayed” civilians in the Gaza Strip by failing to end the Israeli blockade of the enclave.

The following piece, which appeared in Redress.com, is of somewhat doubtful nature. While I checked out the quotations from Alderman and they are accurate, there is an assumption here that ‘whistle blowers’ from the various Jewish organisations have assisted in the collecting and phrasing of this ‘report’. This is unlikely, to say the least, but I cannot prove my doubts, so decided to publish this and see whether some proof emerges. To not publish can be seen as some form of censorship, I feel.

Britain’s Jews in crisis over national loyalty, identity and Israel: Redress

Whistleblowers say top Zionist institutions in unprecedented crisis
By Redress Information & Analysis
26 December 2009
Britain’s leading Jewish institutions are facing their worst crisis in living memory as their loyalty to the United Kingdom and support for basic universal principles of human rights and common decency come under growing scrutiny.
In recent weeks Redress Information & Analysis has been approached by a number of existing and former employees and volunteers of prominent Jewish bodies, all pointing to an acute internal crisis within their institutions.

Breaking ranks
The first to make contact with us were two whistleblowers from the Board of Deputies of British Jews. They explained to us the nature and scope of the crisis gripping Britain’s top Jewish institutions and offered to put us in contact with people in the Office of the Chief Rabbi and the Jewish Chronicle newspaper. We took up the offer.
Naturally, we were curious as to why our interlocutors chose or were willing to talk to Redress Information & Analysis rather than voice their concerns to a national media outlet such as the Guardian, the Independent or the BBC. All said that they were worried that their names would be leaked back to their institutions or published in the press and that, as a result, they would be sacked or ostracized by their Jewish relatives and friends. Some feared the possibility of “moles” in the national media, or people in these media who have “special relations” with the Jewish institutions, doing the leaking.
We have gone to extraordinary lengths to corroborate the identity of our contacts and can confirm that they are all genuine – that they are who they said they are and that they work, or have worked, for the institutions they said they worked for.
Our contacts agreed for us to publish their concerns and to quote them but strictly on condition of anonymity. Consequently, we have undertaken not to publish their names, gender or the dates on which we made contact with them, although, to emphasize once again, their identity and the Jewish institutions for which they currently work or have recently worked have been verified beyond any doubt.
Our Jewish contacts expressed common concerns, focusing on questions about their identity and loyalty to Britain – the country of their birth – and on the attitude of their institutions towards the State of Israel, especially in the wake of the Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip in 2008-09, in which Israel killed 1,400 Palestinians, injured more than 5,000 and wreaked carnage and destruction on the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Strip.

Board of Deputies of British Jews – under “unbearable pressure”
Our contacts at the Board of Deputies of British Jews described the crisis ripping through Britain’s Jewish institutions in stark terms. One said:
Our support for Israel, especially its attack on Gaza in 2008-09, is creating ruptures in the wider Jewish community in Britain and placing institutions such as ours under unbearable pressure. The fact that the Board of Deputies’ support for Israel is couched in relatively anodyne terms and in a superficially impartial context no longer works. The wider Jewish community, and the general public at large, are beginning to see through this.
For the first time in my memory, we are being pressed by British Jews to answer questions that have always been in the backs of our minds but which we can no longer brush aside. Are we British or are we Israelis? If we are British, then is it not incumbent upon us to question, as the wider British public is questioning, the policies and behaviour of the State of Israel without harbouring any feelings of disloyalty – because our loyalty is to the UK and not to Israel?

Our second contact at the Board of Deputies of British Jews added:
Israel purports to speak on behalf of us as Jews. Many in our community are telling us that we therefore have a special responsibility – more so than Britons of other faiths or those of no faith – to condemn Israel’s violations of human rights and common decency when dealing with the Palestinians. Many others are saying that we should say explicitly and unequivocally – both as individuals and through our community institutions – that our loyalty is to Britain first, second, third and fourth ad infinitum, that we have no special loyalty or allegiance to Israel and that, for us, Israel is just another country, like France, Italy or Spain.
They say that we should distance ourselves from Israel and be the first to condemn its policies and actions towards the Palestinian people. A small but growing minority – a minority that is growing exponentially, I hasten to add – tell us that we should go further and take the lead in calling for the boycott of Israel until it implements all United Nations resolutions, including Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, and until it begins to behave as a civilized and responsible member of the international community.
But I would say that the question of our allegiance is the one that is the most serious and damaging in the long term. It does not help in this regard when some of our Jewish ministers, such as the foreign secretary, David Miliband, and the Foreign Office minister, Ivan Lewis, are either openly pro-Israel or are seen to be supporters of Israel. This casts doubt on the loyalty of all of us to Britain, our country.

Office of the Chief Rabbi – “living in a time warp”
According to our contact at the Office of the Chief Rabbi, the problems facing Jewish institutions in Britain have been compounded by the failure of these institutions to adapt in the light of international developments and a sea-change in British public opinion. The contact said that this failure applied to the Office of the Chief Rabbi as much as to any other Jewish organization in the UK. In the contact’s own words:
The Office of the Chief Rabbi, the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Chronicle and many other Jewish organizations up and down the country – at universities, for instance – are living in a time warp, as if today were 1948 or the eve of the 1967 war.
The world has changed, and the information the community has available to it shows that we Jews are not in peril – on the contrary, Jews in the UK and throughout Europe are prospering like never before. Anti-Semitism – by which I mean racist, anti-Jewish feeling – has all but vanished. In fact, it is the Muslims, not the Jews, who are bearing the brunt of racism in Europe. Islamophobia, spurred on by neo-Nazi parties and neo-conservatives, is what we Jews, as members of a wider multi-cultural community, should be fighting against.
In fact, I would say that thanks to an abundance of reliable information now available on the internet, even those who live in a time warp are living a fiction in a time warp built on myths. Israel was never in danger from its impotent but bombastic neighbours: we saw this in 1956, when it invaded Egypt together with Britain and France, and we saw it again in 1967, which we now know was being planned for by Israeli leaders ever since the 1956 fiasco.
Yet, our community leaders, including – I am sorry to say – the Office of the Chief Rabbi, would never publicly acknowledge this. I have no idea what they think or believe in private, in their own conscience, between themselves and God, but I cannot imagine any intelligent, well-educated and open-minded person not recognizing matters as they are. And if they are conscious of reality but act differently, what does that make them? I think I’ll leave you to answer that question.
It pains me to say this but our self-appointed leaders, including the Chief Rabbi, have built our community institutions on foundations that are more appropriate to 1930s Germany than the Europe of the 21st century. You cannot have healthy institutions based on a make-believe world of fear and distrust of everyone and everything that is not Jewish. If we Jews are to have Jewish institutions per se, then these institutions should have as their primary objectives community cohesion, including full integration into our wider society, British society. We cannot – and should not want to – live in a ghetto. Our focus should be on our own country, the UK, not on promoting, speaking on behalf of, answering or apologizing for Israel.
As far as Israel is concerned, our approach should be no different than that of any other British organization, be it Amnesty International, a trade union or a professional association. In other words, we should condemn it when it is in the wrong and we should praise it when it does the right thing. In other words, our approach should be based entirely on merit. Unfortunately, I see no signs of this happening any time soon.

The Jewish Chronicle – “engaging in subterfuge”
Our whistleblower at the Jewish Chronicle gave a damning assessment of the internal crisis engulfing the UK’s Jewish institutions, as reflected in the Chronicle, Britain’s top Zionist newspaper and Israeli mouthpiece.
According to the whistleblower, the newspaper is “in denial” and “sticking its head in the sand” in response to the changes in UK public opinion, especially following Israel’s onslaught on Gaza. Echoing some of the views expressed by our source at the Office of the Chief Rabbi, our contact at the Jewish Chronicle said that, instead of acknowledging the changing reality around it and adapting accordingly, the paper’s management has “gone in the opposite direction” and is “engaging in subterfuge”. However, our contact says, this “isn’t washing and it won’t wash”.
According to our whistleblower, the Jewish Chronicle is making a conscious effort to brand itself as a moderate newspaper that is focused on the affairs of Britain’s 280,000 Jews and in tune with mainstream British public opinion. However, our whistleblower says, in reality it is “embracing the neo-conservative agenda on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, lock, stock and barrel”, and its primary concern is “to be on-message with Israeli foreign policy, whatever Israeli government is in power – Likud, Kadima, Labour or some abominable ultra-far-right party”.
Our whistleblower was especially scathing about the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, Stephen Pollard, describing him as “uncharismatic, myopic and an inarticulate and clumsy spokesman” who has “bought a one-way ticket to a parallel universe”. The whistleblower said that Mr Pollard “is so detached from reality and so out of touch with British public opinion that the notion that anyone with just an average intelligence might see right through what he’s doing could not even cross his mind”.
According to our whistleblower, the idea of breaking with tradition and recruiting Martin Bright in September 2009 as the Jewish Chronicle’s first-ever non-Jewish chief political editor was Mr Pollard’s “master-plan for creating an image of the Jewish Chronicle as a mainstream newspaper and to boost its circulation, which currently stands at just over 30,400 for the UK and the Republic of Ireland – slightly more than your average local newspaper rag”.

Shortly after his appointment Mr Bright told the Independent: “The idea is to broaden the scope of their [the Jewish Chronicle’s] political coverage. It would be fair to say that they want to move the political coverage away from the more parochial approach they have had in the past and rather than saying ‘What will interest our Jewish readers?’ they are saying that what interests readers will be what interests anyone in politics.”
But, our whistleblower says, Mr Pollard “picked the wrong goy” [gentile] because “not only is Martin Bright a media has-been, but he’s also a card carrying neo-conservative with strident views against Muslims and a strong affinity to Israel and, therefore, would carry little credibility with the wider newspaper-reading public”.
Martin Bright’s career has followed a trajectory that has taken him from the national to the fringe media. After a steady rise between 1993 and 2005, which saw him move from a minor BBC magazine to the Guardian (national, circulation: 430,000), the Observer (national, circulation: 500,000) and the New Statesman (national, circulation: 30,000), where he was appointed political editor, in 2009 Mr Bright left the magazine under a cloud, amid speculation that his strong support for Israel, especially after the slaughter in Gaza, was too much for it to stomach. His career prospects then took a dive when, in September 2009, he joined the Jewish Chronicle (fringe, circulation: 30,400) as chief political editor.
A self-proclaimed leftist, Mr Bright subscribes to a broadly neo-conservative agenda on Islam and the “war on terror”, and believes that opposition to Israeli policies and actions “on the left was only explicable as anti-Semitism”. He is the author of a pamphlet for the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange in which he attacked UK government dialogue with Muslims, a pamphlet that was warmly praised by the leading US neo-conservative Richard Perle. His friends include Observer columnist Nick Cohen who infamously declared after meeting Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz for drinks at the Mayfair nightclub Annabel’s: “I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom.” Since his appointment at the Jewish Chronicle, Mr Bright has begun writing for the website of the right-wing Spectator.

Our contact at the Jewish Chronicle said:
As a strategy for extending the scope of the Jewish Chronicle’s appeal, the choice of Martin Bright as our chief political editor just underlines how out of touch with the real world Stephen Pollard is. It isn’t just a question of Martin’s neo-conservative and Israel baggage – and the circumstances under which he left the News Statesman – but what about the rest of the Jewish Chronicle’s coverage?
Take a look at some of our commentators and columnists. The average British reader would take one glance and say “What a rogues gallery!” You have Tzipi Livni, that broken record Melanie Phillips and, worse of all, Geoffrey Aldeman. For God’ sake, Geoffrey Alderman is one of our regular columnist, believe it or not! For a newspaper that’s struggling to keep its readers, the choice of Geoffrey Alderman is a damn strange one, but that’s Stephen Pollard for you.
Mr Alderman believes that Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are legal, even though they are universally acknowledged as illegal under international law.
Moreover, in an article published in the Jewish Chronicle, he said that Islam was founded “in part, on an explicit anti-Jewish discourse”.
Most controversially, in early 2009 Alderman argued that according to Jewish religious law, it was “entirely legitimate to kill” every Palestinian in Gaza who voted for Hamas.
For our whistleblower at the Jewish Chronicle, the fact that Mr Alderman was still a regular columnist for the newspaper after making these comments was not just “bad, bad public relations”, but was “scandalous and outrageous, morally and politically”. The whistleblower said:
Geoffrey Alderman spits out stuff that not even the British National Party, Combat-18 and the Ku Klux Klan would dare say these days.
Just imagine what would have happened if a British Muslim columnist said that it was fine to kill Israelis who voted for a government that slaughters Palestinian civilians. The whole country, from Westminster to the media, from the tabloids to the so-called “quality papers” to the BBC and ITN, would be up in arms with condemnations day and night, day after day for weeks on end. Politicians and others would be calling for prosecutions, Stephen Pollard would be rushing from one TV studio to another bellowing “anti-Semitism”.
But here we go, Alderman in effect condoning the murder of innocent civilians and he still writes for the Jewish Chronicle. What a way to appeal to the broader public! What morality!
All of our whistleblowers, some of whom are not quoted here but who nevertheless gave us an invaluable insight into the Jewish institutions to which they are affiliated, said that their experience in their institutions had been life-changing, in that it had altered their views of Britain’s Jewish “leaders”, Israel and the Palestinian cause in a most profound way.

Israel attacks Gaza: The Observer

John Ging, a UN relief director, on why hope endures despite three weeks of bloodshed in the Gaza strip

I got back into Gaza in the first days of January. I’d been on Christmas holidays in Ireland with my family, when I’d seen the aerial bombardment unfolding on my TV screen. It took a couple of days to get in because the Israeli ground operation had just begun. A small group of Red Cross doctors and I were the only people allowed in or out.
When we crossed into Gaza the scale of devastation and the eeriness were immediately striking. Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth, and on the journey into UNRWA headquarters we travelled down empty streets with rubble and destruction everywhere. The only sign of human life was a single family scurrying across a narrow street with a couple of suitcases. I’d been in Lebanon, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, and in times of conflict you would find certain dangerous areas that would be very quiet and in other areas a lot of movement. I quickly came to realise that in Gaza there was no safe haven: everyone was terrified. This operation was unprecedented in scale and scope.
At the main hospital the ambulances were streaming in endlessly. The quantity and nature of the injuries and the number of young children killed was particularly harrowing to see. The doctors bore the physical signs of exhaustion and bewilderment – there had been no let-up for them. High on their list of anguish was the nature of the injuries; phosphorus burning was very difficult to control and they were talking about other injuries that they couldn’t fathom – wounds that wouldn’t respond to conventional treatment. There were an extraordinary number of multiple amputations.
My job now was solely about getting humanitarian aid into Gaza and out to the people. As the invasion was raging this involved difficult decisions, balancing staff safety and humanitarian need. We were going out in convoys of trucks with UN insignia and being shot at by the Israeli Defence Force. A number of our staff paid with their lives. The problem seemed to be a breakdown of communication between the higher command and the soldiers on the ground.

To read the rest of the article, use link above

Gaza ceasefire in jeopardy as six Palestinians are shot: The Observer

Eruption of violence comes as Israelis who opposed the war a year ago say they are being silenced and vilified

Israeli troops yesterday shot dead six Palestinians in two separate incidents, as evidence emerged that an increasingly fragile ceasefire between armed groups loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement and Israel appeared to be in danger of breaking down.
The shootings, the most serious violence in months, came a day before today’s first anniversary of the outbreak of Israel’s war against Gaza in which almost 1,400 Palestinians died – and as allegations have emerged from Israeli human rights campaigners who opposed the war that they are facing concerted attempts to silence them.
Three of the Palestinians were killed in an airstrike just inside the Gaza border. According to Israeli officials they had been scouting the area for a possible infiltration operation, but according to Hamas officials and medics they had been searching for scrap metal to salvage.
More serious in its implications, however, was the shooting dead of three members of Fatah’s armed wing – the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – in a raid on the northern West Bank city of Nablus, apparently in retaliation for the shooting of an Israeli driving near the settlement at Shavei Shomron. Relatives who witnessed the Nablus shootings said soldiers fired at two of the men without warning. An Israeli army spokesman, Major Peter Lerner, said troops fired after the three men failed to respond to calls to surrender.
It also follows the discovery of an improvised explosive device on a busy road leading to the huge Israeli settlement at Modi’in with a letter from an al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades unit claiming responsibility. The two incidents have followed recent warnings from both Israelis and Palestinians that frustration among a younger generation of al-Aqsa members – which signed an amnesty deal with Israel in 2007 – over the lack of progress in the almost moribund peace process was in danger of boiling over.
An aide to Abbas described the killings as a “grave Israeli escalation” which showed “Israel is not interested in peace and is trying to explode the situation”.
The shootings have come as Israeli human rights campaigners issued a stinging critique of how Israelis who opposed the war in Gaza have been treated by the state, claiming that they have been silenced, accused and vilified.
In its annual report, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel states: “Instead of taking an honest look at its reflection, Israeli society and its institutions chose to smash the mirror.”
Although much attention has been focused on the continuing plight of Gaza’s residents, still suffering under a prolonged Israeli economic siege that has prevented rebuilding of the war-damaged coastal strip, there has been less focus on the treatment of those Israelis who campaigned against the war and for the ending of the blockade.
“There has been a huge change in the way the government treats those who dissent,” says Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer representing several human rights groups. This process, he adds, has accelerated in the year since the attacks in Gaza: “The gloves have come off.”
Sari Bashi, director of human rights group Gisha, says Israeli campaigners in this field “know that red lines were crossed in Gaza, that the Israeli military relaxed its restraints on the use of force and that terrible violations were taking place”. But she accuses the Israeli government of using a “shoot-the-messenger” tactic to deal with such concerns.
“Instead of addressing credible claims of human rights violations, there have been attempts to undermine the legitimacy of anyone trying to raise awareness,” she says.
One prominent issue has been a scrutiny of the funding of human rights groups. In June 2009, Breaking the Silence, a group of veteran Israeli soldiers, released shocking testimonials from combat soldiers who served during the Gaza assault. The Israeli army dismissed these reports, while the government pointed out that the group receives funding from the EU, as well as from Britain, Spain and the Netherlands.
Foreign governments were asked to stop funding Israeli groups critical of the Israeli army. The Israeli media swarmed with denouncements of Breaking the Silence, partly on the grounds that it was serving “foreign interests”.
This year, Knesset members initiated a draft law that would require Israeli civil society organisations to state their funding sources in every document and every media interview. But Bashi points out that such financing is already transparent. “We report our sources of funding to three separate organisations and on our website,” she says.
Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman, says the concern is over whether groups defined as non-governmental organisations should receive contributions from overseas governments. “No one has in any way inhibited their activities,” he said of human rights groups in Israel. He described the complaints of de-legitimisation as “attempts to create a bogeyman”.
But campaigners hold that, as a consequence of attempts to discredit them, their motivations are more discussed than the actual content of their reports. Breaking the Silence says the group is still struggling to raise discussion of the details of its testimonials – and not just the fact of their release – within Israel.
Several commentators point out that, in an increasingly “us-and-them” society, it is not just groups reporting on Gaza that have become targets of denunciation. Campaigners for the rights of foreign workers in Israel are also decried, sometimes at ministerial level: one foreign ministry official wrote that the Israeli Hotline for Migrant Workers, “represents criminals and helps them extinguish morality from the land of Israel”.
Campaigners focused on Gaza’s plight complain that they are still as marginal as ever. “I am a very lonely voice,” says Naomi Zion, a peace campaigner who lives near Sderot. Zion finds it “almost impossible to ask critical questions about Israel’s actions”.
“We lost the ability to see the other side; people just don’t care,” she says. “We lost our empathy skills – and when you lose that, you lose your humanity.”

‘They Planted Hatred in Our Hearts’: New York Times

Joe Sacco’s gripping, important book about two long-forgotten mass killings of Palestinians in Gaza stands out as one of the few contemporary works on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle likely to outlive the era in which they were written.
Sacco will find readers for “Footnotes in Gaza” far into the future because of the unique format and style of his comic-book narrative. He stands alone as a reporter-cartoonist because his ability to tell a story through his art is combined with investigative reporting of the highest quality.
His subject in this case is two massacres that happened more than half a century ago, stirred up little international attention and were forgotten outside the immediate circle of the victims. The killings took place during the Suez crisis of 1956, when the Israeli Army swept into the Gaza Strip, the great majority of whose inhabitants were Palestinian refugees. According to figures from the United Nations, 275 Palestinians were killed in the town of Khan Younis at the southern end of the strip on Nov. 3, and 111 died in Rafah, a few miles away on the Egyptian border, during a Nov. 12 operation by Israeli troops. Israel insisted that the Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces were still facing armed resistance. The Palestinians said all resistance had ceased by then.
Sacco makes the excellent point that such episodes are among the true building blocks of history. In this case, accounts of what happened were slow to seep out and were overshadowed by fresh developments in the Suez crisis. Sacco, whose reputation as a reporter-cartoonist was established with “Palestine” and “Safe Area Gorazde,” has rescued them from obscurity because they are “like innumerable historical tragedies over the ages that barely rate footnote status in the broad sweep of history — even though . . . they often contain the seeds of the grief and anger that shape present-day events.”
Governments and the news media alike forget that atrocities live on in the memory of those most immediately affected. Sacco records Abed El-Aziz El-Rantisi — a leader of Hamas (later killed by an Israeli missile), who in 1956 was 9 and living in Khan Younis — describing how his uncle was killed: “It left a wound in my heart that can never heal,” he says. “I’m telling you a story and I am almost crying. . . . They planted hatred in our hearts.”
The vividness and pace of Sacco’s drawings, combined with a highly informed and intelligent verbal narrative, work extremely well in telling the story. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how any other form of journalism could make these events so interesting. Many newspaper or television reporters understand that the roots of today’s crises lie in obscure, unpublicized events. But they also recognize that their news editors are most interested in what is new and are likely to dismiss diversions into history as journalistic self-indulgence liable to bore and confuse the audience.
In fact, “Footnotes in Gaza” springs from this editorial bias against history. In the spring of 2001, Sacco and Chris Hedges (formerly a foreign correspondent of The New York Times) were reporting for Harper’s Magazine about Palestinians in Khan Younis during the early months of the second Palestinian intifada. They believed the 1956 killings helped explain the violence almost 50 years later. Perhaps predictably, however, the paragraphs about the old massacre were cut.
American editors weren’t the only people who found their delving into history beside the point. When Sacco returned to Gaza to search for witnesses and survivors in 2002 and 2003, with Israeli forces still occupying the area, young Palestinians could not understand his interest in past events when there was so much contemporary violence.
Sacco’s pursuit of Palestinian and Israeli eyewitnesses as well as Israeli and United Nations documentation is relentless and impressive. He details the lives of those who help him, notably his fixer Abed, and brings to life two eras of the Gaza Strip, its towns packed with refugees in the early 1950s as they are today.
It was an atmosphere filled with hate. Few Israeli leaders showed any empathy for the Palestinian tragedy. But early in 1956, the Israeli chief of staff Moshe Dayan made a famous speech at the funeral of an Israeli commander killed on the border with Gaza. What, Dayan wondered, explained the Palestinians’ “terrible hatred of us”? Then he answered his own question: “For eight years now they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.” He added that Israelis needed to be “ready and armed, tough and harsh.”
What this meant in practice became clear as Israeli troops took over Gaza six months later. The killings in Khan Younis were relatively straightforward, according to eyewitnesses and a few survivors. The men of the town were told to line up in the main square and were then systematically shot so their bodies lay in a long row. Some who stayed in their homes were killed there.
The episode in Rafah was more complicated and took place over the course of a day, when people were summoned to a school so the Israelis could determine if they were guerrillas or soldiers. Here there were many more survivors than in Khan Younis; they describe how some were shot on their way to the school and others beaten to death with batons as they entered the school courtyard. The Israeli Army did order two officers to conduct an inquiry into the “Rafah incident,” as a top-secret communiqué called it. (The same communiqué said 40 to 60 people were killed and 20 injured.) Sacco’s researcher found no report in military archives.
Gaza has changed radically since Sacco did his research. In 2005, Israel unilaterally dismantled Jewish settlements and withdrew its military forces, although it remained in tight control of Gaza’s borders. In 2007, Hamas seized control, and in 2008-9 the enclave came under devastating Israeli attack. In this bewildering torrent of events, Sacco’s investigation into the 50-year-old killings is one of the surest guides to the hatred with which Palestinians and Israelis confront one another.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of “Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq.”