A senior IDF officer: “As we learned during Cast Lead, it [white phosphorus] doesn’t photograph well, so we are reducing the supply and we will not purchase beyond what we already have.”
Gaza
The success or failure of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza can only be judged against the operation’s aims.
The dawn of a Palestinian state has been a long time coming. After 65 years of dispossession, 45 years of occupation, and 20 years of failed peace attempts, on Thursday Palestine took one step closer to joining the community of nations. Al Jazeera’s Empire program discusses the prospects for peace with our guests: Rashid Khalidi, Peter Beinart, Ethan Bronner, and Tony Karon.
An old man in Gaza held a placard that reads: “You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back.”
An uneasy cease-fire has been declared ending Israel’s attack on Gaza, Operation Pillar of Defense. Take this quiz to see how much you know about the situation.
The ceasefire agreed by Israel and Hamas in Cairo after eight days of fighting is merely a pause in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It promises to ease movement at all border crossings with the Gaza Strip, but will not lift the blockade. It requires Israel to end its assault on the Strip, and Palestinian militants to stop firing rockets at southern Israel, but it leaves Gaza as miserable as ever.
More than 160 people died in the eight-day Gaza war. And though the fighting may have stopped, the dead and the nightmares remain. Survivors and victims’ families say they want revenge.
[Israel’s current “Pillar of Defence” assault on the Gaza Strip] may serve Netanyahu’s hidden agenda: a protracted regional war may provide a smokescreen for a major ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. This is a long-term plan supported by all major Zionist parties. It is designed to resolve the contradiction between the deep-seated Zionist opposition to the creation of a Palestinian sovereign state, however small, in any part of pre-1948 Palestine, and the even greater “demographic peril”, as it is openly described in Israeli public society, of Arab majority in that land.
The inciting cause of the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas has little to do with the firing of rockets, whether by Hamas or the other Palestinian factions. The conflict predates the rockets – and even the creation of Hamas – by decades. It is the legacy of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, forcing many of them from their homes in what is now Israel into the tiny Gaza Strip. That original injustice has been compounded by the occupation Israel has not only failed to end but has actually intensified in recent years with its relentless siege of the small strip of territory.
Attorney Hussein Abu Hussein: “This verdict is yet another example of where impunity has prevailed over accountability and fairness. Rachel Corrie was killed while non-violently protesting home demolitions and injustice in Gaza, and today, this court has given its stamp of approval to flawed and illegal practices that failed to protect civilian life.”
If anything can be said about the inhabitants of the many refugee camps in Jordan it is that they have shown remarkable resilience in the face of unspeakable injustice. The people at Gaza camp are warm and welcoming, albeit curious. Numbers haunt the life of every refugee; on one hand, there are passport numbers, national identification numbers, and social security numbers that are denied to them. On the other hand, you have the statistics that their lives have been reduced to: 24,000 refugees, 2,000 makeshift shelters, 50% unemployment, 0.75 square kilometers.
Israeli official: “It’s true that the new British law is better than the original one, which allowed any judge to issue a warrant, but the government promised it would be changed so that only the Attorney General, who is a political figure we can trust, would authorize universal jurisdiction arrests. Instead they decided that the Director of Public Prosecutions, who is a civil servant, may decide that he is going to authorize arrest warrants. We are still waiting for assurances on this from the British government.”
Military prosecution says will take no legal steps against those responsible for deaths of Samouni family, killed in their home during Operation Cast Lead.
In 2011, over 9,000 patients from Gaza received emergency care in Israeli hospitals. Many of the admitted were injured in Israeli attacks on the strip. The director of Physicians for Human Rights’ occupied Palestinian territories division and Khamis al-Essi, emergency physician at one of Gaza’s largest hospitals, talk about why Gaza’s healthcare system fails to treat the thousands of injured who are forced to seek treatment outside the strip.
Eyes in Gaza: What did I see in Gaza and what you can do? A presentation by Dr. Mads Gilbert, one of two foreign doctors allowed into Gaza during Operation Cast Lead.
Economic war of attrition: “Each Iron Dome system costs $50,000,000 and each Tamir interceptor it employs has a price tag of no less than $62,000. In contrast, each of the Qassam rockets that the Iron Dome is meant to intercept cost no more than $1,000. It is believed that there are tens of thousands of Qassam rockets in Gaza alone and the capacity to produce more.”
IOA Editor: The Israeli leadership has long preferred a ‘technology fix’ when dealing with problems arising from the Occupation. Disregarding the underlying assumptions made by the author, it is clear that technology fixes have significant limitations. In this case, a nation gone mad, preferring occupation to security and stability — both physical and economic — not to mention justice which, clearly, is not a policy consideration.
This hooligan-like logic turns into part of a totally uninhibited language. We are allowed to assassinate, but you aren’t allowed to respond: For the little, if any, of our blood spilled, you will pay with many liters of blood. This is a colonial logic, in which the West has permission to do what it pleases, while the natives do not. This, incidentally, is the logic in the campaign against Iran: You don’t have permission to acquire nuclear facilities, only we do.
South Korea has offered to buy a significant quantity of Israeli-made weapons and defense systems, including the anti-rocket Iron Dome system, if Israel agrees to purchase South Korean fighter jets.
IOA Editor: From crushing Palestinian resistance — however misguided and ineffective — in Gaza via Israeli ‘technological fixes’ (with extra US funding) to profiting from them around the world. The show, called ‘Occupation,’ must go on because there’s no business like war business…
On the third anniversary of the Cast Lead onslaught, we remember the anonymous soldiers who fired on a red car, in which a father, Mohammed Shurrab, and his two sons were returning home from their farm lands. It is not fair that the officer who then served as GOC Southern Command of the Israel Defense Forces, Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant, will be the only one remembered on this anniversary. Indeed, the list of fighters who should be mentioned and recalled is long.
While hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and Gilad Shalit return home, hundreds others go into exile, and thousands remain jailed in Israel.
Eyes in Gaza reminds us why Israel and the US have been terrified that Palestine’s success at the UN would mean accountability for Israel. It shows why 80 percent of the Arab world considers Israel the world’s most dangerous country, and why even certain policy-makers in high US places are beginning to mutter about Israel’s being a liability to the US in America’s current economic crisis.
