Power of protest

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Power of protest

(Friday 02 January 2009)






JOHN WIGHT explains why Gazans desperately need our support.



Despite the huge propaganda offensive which Israel has unleashed to justify its barbaric assault on Gaza, people are rising up in condemnation of the attack and in active solidarity with its victims - the Palestinians.

Commentator after commentator has attempted to browbeat Palestinian spokespeople with the same question. Why is Hamas launching these homemade rockets?


The answer, in truth, is really very simple. It's because they do not have Merkava tanks, Hellfire missiles, and F16 fighter aircraft at their disposal.


With its usual pusillanimity, our trusty mainstream journalists have sought to portray this is a conflict between two equal sides.


Yet think about it for a moment.


On one side, you have the state of Israel with a 2007 population of just over seven million, a per capita GDP of around $26,600 and a military budget of $8 billion, making it the fourth-largest military in the world, including 450 aircraft and a nuclear arsenal comprising an estimated 200 warheads.


On the other side, you have Palestine with a population of around four million, 1.5 million of whom are currently under siege in the Gaza Strip, in addition to another estimated 5.5 million refugees scattered around the world.


It has a per capita GDP of $830 - after the usual remittances are siphoned off to the Israeli government for the pleasure of allowing Palestinian exports to pass through its hands - and no military budget to speak of, enabling it to amass a "deadly arsenal" of homemade rockets, stones and petrol bombs, including an unknown number of slingshots.


It is this Palestinian "military might," which Israel views as a clear and existential threat to the only Western-style democracy in the Middle East, that has led to a state policy of mass murder masquerading as self-defence.


In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to state that Israel regards the Palestinian people, with their insistence on survival, to be a clear and existential threat to civilisation itself.


And yet perhaps this is not the case. Perhaps, in their reluctance to be ground into the dust, the Palestinians of Gaza are only following the advice of no less a heroic figure than first prime minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, who said just before he died: "Why should the Arabs make peace?
If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural. We have taken their country.


"Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them?


Zionism, although it began as a self-consciously secular, nationalist movement, absorbed a religious justification for Israel's existence, promulgating the view that God had promised the land to the Jewish people.


This is a view which still enjoys common currency not only in Israeli society but in capitals throughout the West.


Indeed, our very own Prime Minister Gordon Brown, in a speech to the Israeli Knesset earlier in the year to mark the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel, said: "I am especially pleased, as the first British prime minister to address the Knesset, to congratulate you at this 60th anniversary on the achievement of 1948: the centuries of exile ended, the age-long dream realised, the ancient promise redeemed, the promise that, even amid suffering, you will find your way home to the fields and shorelines where your ancestors walked."


He went on to say in the same speech: "You proved that, while repression can subjugate, it can never silence; while hearts can be broken, hope is unbreakable; while lives can be lost, the dream could never die.


"That, in the words of the prophet Amos, 'justice would roll down like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream'."


Now, I don't know about you, but, in the world I live in, people who hold such beliefs of divine exceptionalism are not in need of their own land, they're in need of psychiatric care.


To put it another way, imagine smashing down the door of a stranger's house, informing him that you and your family have been promised his house by God, before forcing him and his family into the box room and then calling the police when he tries to force his way out again.


In any civilised society, you wouldn't just be arrested for such a crime, you'd be sectioned.


Yet this, in microcosm, describes the fate of the Palestinian people, though with one significant caveat.


Those who have invaded the homes of others have not been the ones criminalised. It is the Palestinians who've not only been branded criminals but demonised for daring to resist.


The militant protests that have been taking place in London outside the Israeli embassy against Israel's assault on civilians in Gaza reflect a mood of determination and anger when it comes to Palestinian solidarity that is long overdue.


In the coming days, with protests planned to continue around the country, let's ensure that the pro-Israel consensus that currently and egregiously dominates the body politic in this country is rocked to its very foundations.
Let's ensure also that the international campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel called for by Palestinian civil society is placed at the heart of every organisation's solidarity work with the Palestinian people from here on in.


Let's ensure that, by the time we're finished, Gordon Brown, George Bush, Ehud Olmert et al are left in no doubt that, when it comes to our Palestinian brothers and sisters, the people have spoken.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

No end in sight

(Sunday 04 January 2009)







RAMZY BAROUD despairs at Arab leaders' limp response to the Israeli military's savage assault on Gazan people.



IN times of crisis, most Arabs tune in to Al-Jazeera television. Sometimes, it's comforting for the truth to be stated the way it is, with all its gory and unsettling details, without censorship.

With Israel launching massive air strikes against Gaza, terrorising an already hostage and malnourished population, I, too, tuned in to Al-Jazeera.


Within seconds, I learned of the tally - 500 deaths and climbing, with 2,500 more wounded. But, as dramatic as this may seem, there was nothing new to learn.


Tragedies anywhere - natural or manmade - tend to lead to social, cultural, economic and political upheavals, revolutions even, that somehow alter the social, cultural, economic and, ultimately, political landscapes in the affected regions, apart from in Palestine.


I gazed pointlessly at the screen. Learning of the aftermath of such tragedies seems more of a ritual than a purposeful habit.


The Arab and international responses to the killings can only serve as a reminder of how ineffectual and irrelevant, if not complacent, that their timid mutterings are.


Once again, the US has blamed Palestinians and the Hamas "thugs," using phrases that defy logic such as "Israel has the right to defend itself." The statement remains as ludicrous as ever.


A country like Israel, with an army that possesses the world's most lethal weapons including nuclear arms, cannot possibly feel threatened by an imprisoned population whose only defence mechanism are fertiliser-based homemade rockets.


While Israel has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, a handful of Israelis have reportedly died as a direct result of the Palestinian rockets in years. Do numbers matter at all?


European governments chose their words carefully, "expressing concern," "calling on Israel to use restraint" and so on. Arab governments were, as usual, distracted by trivialities and protocols and easily lost sight of the crisis at hand.


Then, the same, ever-predictable outbursts began. Passionate voices from all over the world called various TV and radio stations in the Middle East and shouted, yelled, cried, vented, called on God, called on Arab leaders, called on all of those with "living conscience" to do something.


In turn, audiences, too, cried at home as they listened to the heated commentary and watched footage of the heaps of Palestinian bodies piling up throughout the Gaza Strip.


The passion soon spilled onto the streets of Arab capitals, of course under the ever-vigilant eyes of Arab police and secret services. Flags of US and Israel and, in some cases, Egypt were set ablaze along with effigies of Bush and Israeli leaders.


"Rising up to the occasion" some Arab governments declared, with much hype, their intention to send an aeroplane or two of medicine and food to Gaza, a few boxes clad with the donor country's flag, flashed endlessly on local media.


Meanwhile, news reports spoke of Palestinians attempting to flee the Gaza prison into the Sinai desert. They were met with a decisive Egyptian security presence at the border.


Strangely enough, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas remained faithful to the script, despite Gaza's unprecedented tragedy. He blamed Hamas for the bloodbath.


"We talked to Hamas and we told them: 'Please, we ask you, do not end the truce. Let the truce continue and not stop,' so that we could have avoided what happened."


Was Abbas informed of the fact that Hamas hasn't carried out any suicide bombings since 2005? Or that the "truce" never compelled Israel to allow Palestinians in Gaza access to basic necessities and medicine? Or that it was Israel that attacked Gaza in early December, killing several people, claiming that it had "obtained" information of a secret Hamas plot?


Even stranger is that, while Abbas has chosen such a position, many Israelis are not convinced that the war on Gaza is at all related to the Hamas rockets and is, in fact, an election ploy by desperate politicians vying for Israel's dominating right-wing vote in the forthcoming February elections.


In fact, the Israeli design against Gaza had little to do with the "escalation" of the rocket attacks in mid-December.


"Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public - all these stood behind the Israel Defence Force's 'cast lead' operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip," wrote the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz on December 28, which also revealed that the plan had been in effect for six months.


"Like the US assault on Iraq and the Israeli response to the abduction of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser at the outset of the second Lebanon war, little to no weight was apparently devoted to the question of harming innocent civilians," said Haaretz.


And why should Israel devote a moment's thought to the question of harming civilians or violating international law or any such seemingly irrelevant notions - as far as Israel is concerned - as long as their "Palestinian partners" or the Arab League or the international community continue to teeter between silence, complacency, rhetoric and inaction?


A doctor from a Khan Yunis clinic in Gaza told me on the phone: "Scores of the wounded are clinically dead. Others are badly disfigured.


"I felt that death is of greater mercy for them than living. We had no more room at the Qatara Clinic. Body parts cluttered the hallways.


"People screamed in endless agony and we had not enough medicine or painkillers. So we had to choose which ones to treat and which not to.
"In that moment, I genuinely wished I was killed in the Israeli strikes myself, but I kept running, trying to do something, anything."

But still, one has to wonder if Israel kills 1,000 more, then more thousands or half of Gaza, will the US still blame Palestinians? Will Egypt open its Gaza border? Will Europe express the same "deep concern?" Will the Arabs issue the same redundant statements? Will things ever change? Ever?

Ramzy Baroud

is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers, journals and anthologies around the world. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London).

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Emergency national demonstration: Saturday 10 January
Israel's limitless barbarity


Israel's mass slaughter and devastation of Gaza shows its barbarity has no limits. Half of Gaza's one and a half million Palestinians are children, dozens of whom have been killed or injured. Hospitals in Gaza are overflowing with dead and wounded while facing severe shortages of essential medical supplies and spare parts.
The full horror of Israel's war crimes is not being shown by the British media. Stop the War has been sent these pictures which capture what happens when the fourth most powerful military in the world unleashes its arsenal of terror on a defenceless people trapped in the most densely populated area in the world.
National Demonstration: Saturday 10 January

Stop Israel's crime against humanity

Assemble Hyde Park: March to Israeli Embassy

High St Kensington, London

Daily protests 5 - 9 January, 5.30pm-7.00 pm
Israeli Embassy, High St, Kensington, London
Join the national demonstration: Stop the War is asking all its local groups outside of London to book coaches or arrange other transport to help make this the biggest demonstration yet seen in this country in the cause of Palestinian freedom. Email details to office@stopwar.org.uk