EDITOR: How long can the madness go on for?
With voices within Israel calling for a ceasefire, and with doubts even within the IDF about the ‘wisdom’ and ‘necessity’ of a ground offensive, the chances for an early end to this mad aggression may now be stronger. Israel is facing the truth of its predicament: It has gone to another murderous war against Gaza, with more than 200,000 soldiers awaiting their marching orders around Gaza, and apart from death and destruction, including in Israel, it has achieved exactly nothing. Security in southern Israel is shattered, Tel Aviv is panicked, but nothing ‘positive’ has been achieved.
In Gaza, more than a hundred people, including babies, children and pregnant women were killed. Before the new initiative by Qatar of rebuilding Gaza got under way, and just after some rebuilding of the 2009 damages, Israel has inflicted terrifying wanton damage again. Maybe the Israelis really believe in mindless violence – over 90% of the Jewish population of Israel, and similar numbers of Jews across the world are supporting the massacre. What this says about Jews and Israelis is terrifying in itself, and will no doubt bring about a growth of anti-Semitism in its wake. Do Israelis really think that they will get more security by more murders of civilians in Gaza? Do they really believe that they can suppress the Palestinian wish for freedom and peace by bombing? Apparently, this is indeed the case. If so, then the Middle East can prepare itself for the worst, and that is even without mentioning Iran, Lebanon, Sudan, and god only knows what else is being hatched in the sick brains of Barak, Netanyahu and Lieberman.
If this criminal madness was only the pattern in Israel, it would be very bad indeed, but the trouble is that the whole of the west is in hock to Israel, and has supported the atrocities without blinking, blaming Hamas, as usual. Until this changes, nothing else will.
As Israel assaults Gaza, BBC reporting assaults the truth: The Electronic Intifada
BBC has shown deference to Israeli goverment line in its reporting on Gaza in recent days.
In 2006, an independent panel of senior public figures published a report assessing the impartiality of the BBC’s coverage of the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
The panel, chaired by Sir Quentin Thomas, a senior figure in the British Home Office, found “identifiable shortcomings, particularly in respect of gaps in coverage, analysis, context and perspective and in the consistent maintenance of the BBC’s own editorial standards.”
The Thomas Report, as it became known, was quickly shoved under the carpet by the BBC, even though it had originally been commissioned by the corporation’s own governors, and business continued as usual (“Report of the Independent Panel for the BBC Governors on Impartiality of BBC Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” April 2006, available on the Internet Archive).
In the last few days, the shortcomings highlighted in the report have never seemed so glaring.
Gaza reported without context
Across the BBC’s output, from the 24 hour rolling news channel, BBC News, to its flagship news and current affairs program Today on Radio 4, the Israeli assault on Gaza has been reported without context, without perspective and with a bias that has wholly favored the heavily-armed, nuclear state of Israel against the mostly refugee population of the besieged Gaza Strip.
This pattern of partiality was noted by Thomas and his panel. They made several mentions in their report to the “asymmetry of power between the two sides” and noted that “given this asymmetry, the BBC’s concern with balance gave an impression of equality between the two sides which was fundamentally, if unintentionally, misleading.”
To counter this flaw, the Thomas Report recommended that the BBC “should make purposive, and not merely reactive, efforts to explain the complexities of the conflict in the round, including the marked disparity between the position of the two sides.”
Yet, rather than providing information to its global audience which would make clear that Israel is deploying a vast arsenal of high tech armory against Gaza’s civilian population, to which the response is crude rockets, the BBC’s coverage of the past days has portrayed the stateless Palestinians as vicious aggressors against an exhausted Israel.
On the morning of 15 November, the day after Israel carried out the extrajudicial killing of Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jabari and unleashed a wave of terror against Gaza’s civilian population, the BBC put an article onto its website headlined: “Gaza rocket arsenal problem for Israel.”
The article goes into minute detail about what the BBC’s diplomatic and defense correspondent Jonathan Marcus describes as “the Palestinian rocket arsenal.”
There are descriptions of the types of rockets in the “arsenal,” their range, their design, their country of origin, the threat they pose to Israel, the towns in Israel they might be capable of reaching. Marcus also spends time discussing the capability of Israel’s “Iron Dome” defense and Israeli allegations of shipments of arms coming via Sudan to Gaza.
Israeli arsenals unreported by the BBC
Nowhere in the article, or elsewhere on the BBC, does Marcus investigate Israel’s weapons stockpile, which is funded to the tune of $3 billion a year by the United States.
There are no reams of paragraphs devoted to describing the different types of bombs, mortar shells, drones, fighter jets, gunboats, tanks, guns, nuclear warheads or white phosphorus shells that are in Israel’s arsenal. Yet, with the exception of nuclear missiles, all of these have been used at some point against the people of Gaza with devastating consequences.
A second article published on the BBC website the same morning is headlined: “Escalating violence takes its toll on Israelis.” Here we have journalist Yolande Knell putting a human face on the Israelis who have faced rocket attacks in the towns of Ashkelon and Kiryat Malachi over the last two days.
There are interviews with Israeli men and women describing their fear, their pain at the previous day’s fatalities in Kiryat Malachi, their scramble to find shelter when the air raid sirens sound and the damage to their buildings. Knell describes “eerily quiet” streets in Ashkelon, closed restaurants and schools and how “normal life here remains on hold.”
Minimizing Palestinian voices
Yet when it comes to how Palestinians in Gaza endure frequent Israeli bombardment, Palestinian voices and their pain are minimized.
A BBC article in March claimed the people of Gaza are “almost inured to the endless conflict” and life in the Gaza Strip carries on as normal — a report based on the perspective of BBC correspondent, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, rather than interviews with the Palestinians themselves.
When the Palestine Solidarity Campaign complained about the bias inherent in Wingfield-Hayes extraordinary claims, which were juxtaposed alongside an article by Kevin Connolly describing the “dread” felt by Israelis during rocket strikes, a reply was received from Fraser Steel, Head of Editorial Complaints at the BBC.
He wrote: “I have to say it seems to me that the aspects of the reports which you single out for criticism can be interpreted as evidence of bias only if one approaches them with a prior assumption of bias on the part of the authors.”
The bias that PSC was highlighting is not on the part of the authors, but on the part of their employers, the BBC, and with good reason.
Israeli spokespeople unchallenged
Since al-Jabari’s assassination on 14 November, the BBC has rolled out all the Israeli heavyweights across its programming: Ron Prosor, Israeli ambassador to the UN;Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister; Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesperson; and Daniel Taub, Israel’s ambassador to the UK.
All have been allowed to disseminate, with virtually no interruption or correction, the propaganda line Israel is using for the duration of this assault on Gaza: that Israel withdrew its settlers in 2005 in order to allow Gaza to live in peace but Hamas insisted on a war which Israel has so far resisted, but is now being reluctantly drawn into in order to protect its citizens.
On the Today program on 15 November, Taub was interviewed by BBC heavyweight John Humphrys. For four minutes he was allowed to expound Israel’s hasbara line that Hamas rockets rain down on southern Israel with no response from Israel and that no other country but Israel would be so understanding.
Humphrys gave no challenge when Taub said: “We have to recognize, seven years ago, we pulled out of every inch of Gaza. We removed 9,000 Israeli civilians along with their homes, their schools, their kindergartens, in order to try and have a peaceful situation with Gaza … Tragically, that opportunity was not taken up. Hamas took over and since then has been waging an intensive war.”
The BBC’s major evening current affairs program Newsnight was used as a vehicle for similar hasbara the previous evening by Danny Ayalon, who enjoyed an uninterrupted three minute interview with presenter Gavin Esler.
At the very end of the interview Ayalon said: “Not only do they [Hamas] target the civilian population in Israel, but they implant themselves in the midst of the civilian population in Gaza, so in fact they use a population as a human shield for their hideous attacks.”
To which Esler replied: “Ok, we’ll leave it there. Danny Ayalon, thank you very much.”
There was no attempt, or even it seems a willingness, by this senior BBC journalist to confront and challenge Israeli propaganda and falsehoods.
Meanwhile Zionist activist Jonathan Sacerdoti appeared four times as a guest on different BBC television news programs during the first two days of the Israeli assault. The BBC allowed him to pose as an independent expert, neglecting to mention his past work for the Zionist Federation and current role at the Board of Deputies of British Jews (“Who is Jonathan Sacerdoti, the BBC’s Go-To Man on Gaza?” New Left Project, 16 November).
BBC failure
The findings of the Thomas Report from 2006 are holding true during this latest onslaught on Gaza. This unwillingness by both Humphrys and Esler, together with the presenters on television and radio news, to point out the facts to their Israeli government interviewees is just a symptom of the BBC’s failure to provide context and perspective, as highlighted by the report.
And so BBC audiences listen to Regev and the rest without being made aware that Israel is considered by the UN to be an occupying power in Gaza with obligations under the Geneva Conventions to protect the inhabitants.
Taub is allowed to freely say that Israel has withdrawn from Gaza, without being made to explain how he can make such a travesty of the truth when Israel holds Gaza under tight military siege, restricting access to food, medicines, water, fuel and other essentials, and restricts the free movement of Gaza’s people in and out of the territory.
Prosser can stand in Kiryat Malachi condemning Palestinian rocket attacks, as he did on the BBC News channel on 14 November, and not be asked to comment on Israel’s massacre of 1,400 Palestinians in three weeks in 2008-09 or its continuous bombing and shelling of Gaza since then.
And that is how Ayalon can barefacedly mislead BBC viewers with the human shield fallacy, because nowhere on the BBC, including Newsnight will its audience be told that 1.6 million people are crammed into a strip of land about 20 miles long and four miles wide, and consequently there is nowhere that is not inhabited.
In its final points, the Thomas Report summed up: “some of the deficiencies are serious and … [the BBC’s coverage] could be a great deal better: more distinctive, challenging and informative.”
If only it were. Imagine how many people around the world and those paying the licence fee in the UK would become aware of Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians, its daily violations of international law, its lies and deceits.
One presumes this is why the Thomas Report has rarely seen light of day since its publication.
Amena Saleem is active with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK and keeps a close eye on the media’s coverage of Palestine as part of her brief. She has twice driven on convoys to Gaza for PSC. More information on PSC is available atwww.palestinecampaign.org.
Gaza conflict: family’s four children buried as bombardment continues: Guardian
Eight members of Dalou family – which had no known affiliation with any militant group – died in air strike on home
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Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
The bodies of four children wrapped in Palestinian flags were carried above a huge crowd from the rubble of their home, destroyed in an Israeli air strike, to their graves on Monday amid mounting anger over the sharply rising toll of civilians in the six-day-old war in Gaza.
Bulldozers, which were clearing concrete and twisted metal from the site of the Dalou family’s home in the hope of finding two bodies still trapped beneath the ruins, stopped work to allow the funeral procession to pass.
“Do these children look like terrorists?” asked grief-stricken relatives and neighbours of the dead. Eight members of the Dalou family, including four children aged between one and seven, were killed when a missile struck their three-storey home at around 2.30pm on Sunday. Two family members are still missing, and two neighbours were also killed.
The funeral took place amid a heavy Hamas presence, although the family had no known affiliations with any militant group.
“There has been a drastic change since the beginning of this conflict,” said Hamdi Shaqqura of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza. “There is now a complete disregard for human life, shown by the attack on the Dalou family home in the middle of a residential area. This was not the home of a militant.”
According to the PCHR, there were 31 civilian deaths in the 24 hours to noon on Monday, whereas in the previous four days there had been a total of 27 civilian deaths. “There has definitely been a big acceleration,” said Shaqqura.
At least 18 children have been killed since the start of the conflict last Wednesday, and more than 600 civilians have been injured, he said. The Gaza health ministry said 24 children had been killed.
The total death toll in Gaza topped 100 on Monday following another day of intense bombardment. According to Ashraf al-Kidra of the Gaza ministry of health, the most recent victims included a child killed by flying shrapnel and five farmers. Elsewhere it was reported that a father and son were killed while the man was repairing a water tank on the roof of his home.
Israeli fighter planes targeted a high-rise building containing the offices and studios of local and international media organisations in the centre of Gaza City for a second time. Ramez Harb, the head of Islamic Jihad’s media operations, was killed and at least six were wounded.
Black smoke billowed from the building after it was struck by three missiles. Witnesses reported chaotic scenes as paramedics tried to reach the injured while firefighters tackled the blaze.
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said the building was a “hideout” used by Islamic Jihad. In a statement it said: “The Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, who were involved in firing rockets at Israel, were inside the media building when it was targeted.”
The IDF spokeswoman Avital Liebovich tweeted: “The presence of senior Islamic Jihad militants in media building in Gaza demonstrates the ongoing tactic of using civilian [buildings] as shield.”
The reason for the targeting of the Dalou family home remained unclear. Two Israeli papers reported that the IDF had targeted the wrong house, while a third said it was targeted in the belief that a Hamas militant was inside.
Neighbours told reporters that the Dalou family had no connections with militant organisations and that the father – who was not at home at the time of the air strike – owned a grocery shop.
Israeli intelligence tracks militants by their use of mobile phones, informants and evidence gathered by unarmed surveillance drones.
In the first two days of the offensive, Israel focused its firepower on military training grounds, rocket-launching sites and weapons stores. It has since turned to targeting the homes of militants, increasing the likelihood of killing civilians in the densely populated residential areas of Gaza City.
The IDF said it had struck 80 targets in Gaza on Monday. More than 120 rockets had been launched from Gaza, with 42 landing in Israel, it said. Three Israelis were slightly injured.
Gaza is no longer alone: Guardian
In the nations of the Arab spring, people are now rising up to demand Palestinian rights as well
If you click here, you can listen to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. You can hear explosions, drones and ambulances. This is the soundtrack of the lives of Palestinians there now. They’re recording it and transmitting it, and their friends all over the world – particularly the Arab world – are listening to it live.
We are also reading the tweets and blogs the young Gazans are putting out, and taking a good look at the images they’re posting – like the one of Ranan Arafat, before and after. Before, she’s a pretty little girl with green eyes, a green halter-neck top and green ribbons in her hair. After the Israeli bomb, she’s a charred and shrunken figure. Her mouth is open. A medic lifts – for just a moment – her blue hospital shroud.
In that hospital, Shifa in Gaza City, we watched the Egyptian prime minister, Hisham Kandil, this morning. For the first time in 42 years an Egyptian prime minister was where we Egyptians wanted him to be. For the first time a government official was telling the truth when he said he spoke for the Egyptian people. And he was spot on when he referred to the Egyptian people first, before the Egyptian president.
Since he won the presidency, Mohamed Morsi has tried to be a pragmatic politician. He pressed on with “security co-ordination” with Israel in Sinai; he started sealing up the tunnels that provide a lifeline to the besieged Gazans; he rejected the proposal of a free trade area on the borders between Egypt and Gaza; and he sent an ambassador to Tel Aviv with a fulsome letter to Shimon Peres. And so he found himself uncomfortably cosied up with remnants of the Mubarak regime and aficionados of the military government.
The rank and file of the Muslim Brotherhood and their Freedom and Justice party had a hard time justifying the actions of their man in the presidential palace to the rest of the country. Progressives and liberals mocked them for their big talk on Palestine all the years they were in opposition, and their resounding silence now they were in power. Skits about Morsi’s “love letter” to Peres appeared online and parodies on Cairo walls.
Now, the Israelis have pushed him – pushed him perhaps into a position where he’ll find himself more at ease in his presidency, and more in tune with the people. Large groups of young Egyptians have been heading for Gaza; my youngest niece is one of them. Like the efforts of the world’s civil society to send ships to Gaza, young Egyptian civilians with a passion for freedom are going to support their friends. And on a more “official” level, medics and pharmacists have already arrived there. Abdel Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, a presidential candidate and doctor, has gone – as he did in 2008 during Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead“, long before he had political intentions. The Arab Doctors’ Union has called for donations and volunteers.
Israel has always sold itself to the west as a democracy in a sea of fanaticism. The Arab spring has undermined that narrative, possibly fatally. So Israeli politicians have been pushing hard for a war against Iran and, in the interim, they’ve gone on a killing spree in Gaza. If they had wanted to instigate violence against themselves they could not have done better than to assassinate Ahmed al-Jaabari, the Hamas commander who’s prevented attacks on Israelis for the past five years. With his killing they’ve raised the probability of these attacks resuming, as is happening now. They can then try to hijack the narrative of the Arab spring and wind the clock back to “Islamist terrorists v civilised Israelis”. Meanwhile, they take the heat off Bashar al-Assad’s murderous activities in Syria – and, of course, score hawkish points for Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak before the coming elections.
But they have served to remind the world that Israel is a democracy where politicians may order the murder of children to score electoral points. Palestinian children, true. But the citizens of the world don’t make racist distinctions. On Thursday there were protests for Gaza across the world. They continued today. And there will be many more.
In every Arab country where the people rise up to demand their rights, they demand action on Palestinian rights as well. Tunis has just announced that its foreign minister is heading for Gaza. In Jordan today, hundreds of thousands were on the streets and, as well as demanding the fall of their own regime, they’re also calling for justice for Palestine. Protesters are out in Libya. In Egypt, people are heading for Rafah. We are heading for true representation of the people’s will in the region and, in the coming years, governments will need to follow the road shown to them by their people.
To the residents of southern Israel: Haaretz
The pretentious fringes of the left can indulge themselves in the debate over ‘either one state or apartheid,’ but meanwhile the destruction is being done by the government and the IDF.
Ignore the incitement against the Tel Avivians: The vast majority of them have supported the war from the moment it started and, like everywhere else, the support will end as soon as we hear the familiar question once again on television: “Our military analyst, Roni Daniel – where did we botch things up?”
The Tel Avivians live here because of their love for the city but also because it’s the place – a mere 10 minutes from Ben-Gurion Airport – from where it’s possible to emigrate. Why? For example, a chance to live a normal life. We were always taught that Israel is the only place that is safe for Jews, but if it is unbearable that Jewish children should live under the threat of missiles, why shouldn’t they live in a place where Jewish children are safe? In what way is the Gaza border area better than Toronto, or Tel Aviv better than Paris? In other words, what exactly are the politicians in the south doing when they acquiesce to our rulers, translate your suffering into war mongering and are scared to demand negotiations with your neighbors, who live in hell?
Let’s assume that the election is not the reason for the war and that the employment of the Iron Dome defense system does not have a mega-commercial dimension, and that your distress really does matter to the government, and that the cries from some areas in this country do indeed reach the government’s ears and convince them to do something – to enlarge the health basket, let’s say, or to widen dangerous roads (war is much more expensive).
And let’s assume that Hamas really wanted a war and begged the Islamic Jihad to shoot at an Israeli military jeep, even though it knew that only Israel is allowed to do so and not the Gazans. Now, do you think it’s going to be quiet, or perhaps they are preparing the herd’s bellowing: “They didn’t let the IDF win?”
And let’s assume that the Palestinians’ pound of flesh will be acceptable to the West just as it is to U.S. President Barack Obama, and let’s assume that our radio and TV channels will continue 24 hours a day, in perfect North Korean, to create a cocktail of panic and encouragement, after all the cynicism that every political reporter has shown there about the motives of the politicians in general and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak in particular, until the war started and the motives became exalted: What do we have to prove? That we can be killed a little and kill a lot because we are stronger, and therefore we can breathe freely from now on?
What is the optimism of the start of a war always built on, when people talk about “after the war”? That the Gaza Strip should join the Labor Party and begin chanting: “The nation demands social justice only for Jews”? Does anyone think Gaza will melt into the sea?
But, yes, they do. Don’t be mistaken about the ultimate source of defilement, such as Shas leader Eli Yishai. He is merely more uncouth than Netanyahu but this is the truth about which those who dance on the blood, and build political and military careers, fantasize about, this pointless end – that Gaza should sink into the sea. That it should rot and that its lot should be more illness and hunger; and lack of electricity, sewerage and sanitation, and vaccines, and the ability to study abroad, and visits from relatives and vacations, and a health system. And that its infrastructures should continue to be destroyed, and that it should lose its social cohesion, and that its middle class should emigrate and its civilian structure be dismantled, and that it should be replaced by tribalism and ignorance that will inflame the conflict even more, with abysmal apathy also toward the situation of the residents of the south of Israel.
In this way, with different dosages of destruction, the ghetto-ization of Palestine is being carried out – that of the West Bank also – under the cover of the legal alibi of “temporariness” and the propaganda of “no partner” – until they expire as a freedom-seeking nation and return to being a Zionist myth, “What they were before we returned to our land – foreign nomads”.
The pretentious fringes of the left can indulge themselves in the debate over “either one state or apartheid,” but meanwhile the destruction is being done by the government and the IDF.
And a word to the credit of Tel Aviv: Indeed there are several hundred people there whom wars bring out onto the streets to demonstrate. But have no fears: They too will get used to them. For decades, people who were irritated by wars passed through this left, but after two or three wars even they rejoice when they hear: “Hi, this is Shelly.” And even though this intonation is less nerve wracking than a siren, it is extremely annoying because the self-righteous demagoguery reminds us that Golda Meir has not died.