Dezembro de 2008
Ponto de vista do agressor / The aggressor's point of view
Janeiro 2009: dia 02
Ponto de vista do agressor / The aggressor's point of view
Israel launches air strike in Gaza 27/12
Israeli shelling of Gaza 28/12
Dr. Mads Gilbert 31/12
Janeiro 2009: dia 02
A causa foi a descoberta de gás petrolífero no litoral da Faixa de Gaza.
Uma das consequências foi a Operation Protective Edge que Israel levou a cabo para despojar os palestinos, além de terra e água, também do ouro negro que permitiria aos palestinos independência e perspectiva econômica viável.
Na história dos genocídios que Israel cometeu na Palestina, há al-Hawa, Hayy al-Zeitoun, Khuzaa, Deir Yassin, Kufr Qasim, Sabra & Shatila, Qana, Jenin, Gaza, e quantos mais?
Entre as datas que marcaram minha vida de jornalista, até 2008, a Palestina e o Líbano - sempre com os palestinos sendo vítimas indestrutíveis - foram palco de quatro das nove grandes barbaridades das últimas décadas. As únicas que não foram protagonizadas ou apoiadas por Israel e os Estados Unidos foram Srebrenica (?) e Ruanda.
A Operation Cast Lead foi um massacre a mais dentre os tantos da Naqba. Mas foi a primeira operação em larga escala e com jornalistas proibidos de testemunharem.
Começou às 11:30 da manhã do dia 27 de dezembro de 2008. Surpreendeu o Ocidente durante as festividades natalinas. O choque foi brutal, com a falta de moral e excesso de poder de Israel para cometer atrocidades contra uma população de refugiados (por ele criado) enclausurado, faminto, sedento, e bloqueado por terra, mar e ar.
A hasbara chama essas operações militares israelenses na Palestina e no Líbano de "guerra". Não. Nenhuma foi e será guerra. Guerra é quando um país livre combate o outro com armas equivalentes, tem independência de exercer o direito de defesa, e é protegido pela Convenção de Genebra.
O que Israel faz na Palestina é bombardear covardemente um povo ocupado, concentrado em um campo delimitado e sem liberdade de locomover-se fora do terreno autorizado.
Tanto na Cisjordânia quanto na Faixa de Gaza.
Como Israel não pode mais bombardear a Cisjordânia sem que os invasores judeus sofram efeitos colaterais, bombardeia a Faixa de Gaza com armas convencionais e químicas, ilegais. Assim testa e expõe o arsenal que quer comercializar no mercado internacional - legal e ilegalmente.
O objetivo político da OCL foi o mesmo dos EUA com suas bombas e drones: restaurar "detterrence". Ou seja, "its ability to massacre and terrorize entire populations into submission".
Israel esperava remover a resistência do Hamas ou no mínimo enfraquecê-lo, assim como as outras facções, a fim de assinar uma "paz" que aniquilasse de uma vez por todas os palestinos.
Para ganhar, tinha de quebrar a Resistência.
Fracassou.
As facções esqueceram as divisões e aguentaram unidas durante 3 dias com suas infra-estruturas sofrendo poucos danos.
Aí Israel fez o que adora: procedeu à punição coletiva, por despeito e por ilusão de que a população se viraria contra seus compatriotas da resistência.
Complementando as informações das Operações MilitaresXIII, eis abaixo a visão de órgãos de imprensa independentes sobre o massacre.
Dia 5
Dia 6
Dia 7
Dia 8
Dia 9
Dia 11
Objetores de consciência / refusiniks israelenses recusam participar do massacre dos palestinos
Dia 13
Objetores de consciência / refusiniks israelenses recusam participar do massacre dos palestinos
DN: Leading Israeli Scholar Avi Shlaim: Israel Committing "State Terror" in Gaza Attack, Preventing Peace.
Dia 15
Part II: ohttps://youtu.be/QxlCSkrlMIg
DN: US Rabbis Urge Obama to Push for Gaza Ceasefire.
AJ: David Foster talks to the great deceiver Mark Regev below
Part II: https://youtu.be/XLmqxuuLHG0
Dia 16
Part II: https://youtu.be/MhA1cWcl6xE
DN: Palestinian Astrophysicist in US Recounts How His 11-Year-Old Son Died When Israeli Warplanes Bombed His Family's House.
Dia 21
Dia 22
Part II. https://youtu.be/DBQnRfouXvI; Part III. https://youtu.be/UqXmOEX0MQY
Foi graças à pressão popular que os ditadores árabes, temendo uma revolta, pressionaram os EUA para que parassem o massacre antes que fosse tarde demais.
O objetivo de Tel Aviv era aproveitar os últimos dias do governo de George W. Bush e terminar o trabalho antes de Barack Obama assumir o comando. Não por temer uma possível reação desfavorável do padrinho da Casa Branca, e sim para não expor de cara a cumplicidade do presidente Democrata que chegava a Washington cercado de sionistas, com o apoio dos "liberais" e com simpatia internacional.
Os gazauís se salvaram da exterminação imediata graças aos diplomatas que viam a Al Jazeera, a única televisão que mostrava as terríveis imagens censuradas nos canais ocidentais. Graças a dois jornalistas que estavam lá por acaso, a trabalho.
Quando a AJ compartilhou as imagens, o Ocidente viu a destruição, os meninos mortos, o massacre - 100 palestinos para 1 israelense, foi demais. Até a CNN acordou para o horror desproporcional.
Como disse Ali Abuminah, criador da Electronic Intifada, "Through their resistance, steadfastness and sacrifice, Palestinians in Gaza have defeated this policy and reasserted that they are an inseparable part of Palestine, its people, its history and its future." Isto porque a Cisjordânia reagiu em apoio a seus parentes de Gaza. Não Mahmoud Abbas e os cartolas do Fatah, não. Estes são impermeáveis à vida real. E sim os jovens. Foi a nova geração, sem perspectiva de vida, que disse basta.
Fora, a Europa indignou-se, assim como a América. Não os governantes (com exceção dos nossos do Cone Sul), e sim os cidadãos humanos.
A mobilização popular em defesa dos palestinos nos quatro cantos do planeta provou que o mundo estava acordando para ver Israel como realmente é: um Estado fora-da-lei, terrorista, genocida, que rivaliza com a Alemanha nazista.
Israel mostrou que a vítima de ontem virou o verdugo atual, com uma perversidade ímpar e uma sofisticação tecnológica de dar inveja a Hitler.
Não apenas na Faixa de Gaza como também na ocupação opressiva na Cisjordânia.
Na verdade, em janeiro de 2009, Israel enterrou definitivamente a Convenção de Genebra.
O grande arcebispo Desmond Tutu, mandou um recado claríssimo aos genocidas que dirigem Israel.
Dia 23
In full: Noam Chomsky: Obama's Stance on Gaza Crisis "Approximately the Bush Position".
Nesse ínterim em Ni'lin, na Cisjordânia ocupada, a população faz sua passeata semanal contra o muro do apartheid. No dia seguinte, a IDF pegou pesado, como faz constantemente.
Nesse ínterim em Ni'lin, na Cisjordânia ocupada, a população faz sua passeata semanal contra o muro do apartheid. No dia seguinte, a IDF pegou pesado, como faz constantemente.
Dia 27
In full: Worse than an Earthquake: Peace Activist Kathy Kelly on the Destruction in Gaza.
In 2009 for reasons best know to themselves, the BBC banned itself from airing a humanitarian appeal for the people of Gaza. Former Labour MP Tony Benn defied the BBC's self-imposed ban on broadcasting it - by hijacking an interview on the Today to make the appeal himself.
Haim Bresheeth: Where peace is a problem
Jonathan Cook: Jewish "refugee" lobby seeks to eclipse Palestinian losses; Israeli electioneering with bombs.
Abaixo, três artigos de jornalistas israelenses comentando os horrores desse mês fatídico.
Uri Avnery escreveu, a meu ver, o melhor artigo sobre a OCL. Foi transcrito nas melhores mídias do mundo e sacudiu muita consciência adormecida. Ei-lo.
Nesse ínterim, Barack Obama assumiu a presidência e nomeou George Mitchell para o cargo de Middle East envoy. Abaixo, o Inside Story que demonstra a esperança que sua nomeação representou.
Dia 28
In 2009 for reasons best know to themselves, the BBC banned itself from airing a humanitarian appeal for the people of Gaza. Former Labour MP Tony Benn defied the BBC's self-imposed ban on broadcasting it - by hijacking an interview on the Today to make the appeal himself.
Journeyman: The Gaza war from ground level
Haim Bresheeth: Where peace is a problem
Jonathan Cook: Jewish "refugee" lobby seeks to eclipse Palestinian losses; Israeli electioneering with bombs.
Abaixo, três artigos de jornalistas israelenses comentando os horrores desse mês fatídico.
Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz.
This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.
Absurd?
No more than the daily descriptions in our [Israeli] media, which are being repeated ad nauseam: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as “hostages” and exploit the women and children as “human shields”, they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.
In this war [Operation Cast Lead], as in any modern war [military operation], propaganda plays a major role.
The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million.
In the political arena the gap between them is even wider.
But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.
Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.
True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Aljazeera’s Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.
War – every war – is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one’s country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor.
The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.
An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of this war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee camp.
Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the army “revealed” that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: a falsification.
Later the official liar claimed that “our soldiers were shot at from inside the school”. Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of terrified refugees.
But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time, the Israeli public [and American and Western in general] was completely convinced that “they shot from inside the school”, and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.
So it went with the other atrocities.
Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a “symbol of Hamas rule”. Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the “most moral army in the world”.
The truth is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak – a man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called “moral insanity”, a sociopathic disorder.
The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In the imagination of the planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a foreign country.
The reality is, of course, entirely different.
The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the eminently democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. It won because the Palestinians had come to the conclusion that Fatah’s peaceful approach had gained precisely nothing from Israel - neither a freeze of the settlements, nor release of the prisoners, nor any significant steps toward ending the occupation and creating the Palestinian state. Hamas is deeply rooted in the population – not only as a resistance movement fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the Stern Group in the past – but also as a political and religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.
From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not a foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the other Palestinian regions. They do not “hide behind the population”, the population views them as their only defenders.
Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous assumptions. Turning life into living hell does not cause the population to rise up against Hamas, but on the contrary, it unites behind Hamas and reinforces its determination not to surrender. The population of Leningrad did not rise up against Stalin, any more than the Londoners rose up against Churchill.
He who gives the order for such a war with such methods in a densely populated area knows that it will cause dreadful slaughter of civilians. Apparently that did not touch him. Or he believed that “they will change their ways” and “it will sear their consciousness”, so that in future they will not dare to resist Israel.
A top priority for the planners was the need to minimize casualties among the soldiers, knowing that the mood of a large part of the pro-war public would change if reports of such casualties came in. That is what happened in Lebanon Wars I and II.
This consideration played an especially important role because the entire war [operation cast lead] is a part of the election campaign. Ehud Barak, who gained in the polls in the first days of the war {OCL], knew that his ratings would collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV screens.
Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses among our soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli soldier, as has happened, but also 800. The avoidance of casualties on our side is the overriding commandment, which is causing record numbers of civilian casualties on the other side.
That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel kind of warfare – and that has been its Achilles heel.
Uri Avnery further comments on OCL: The Boss Has Gone Mad; Black Flag.
Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, peace activist, former member of the Knesset, and leader of Gush Shalom. You can email correspondence to correspondence @ gush - shalom . org (without the spaces)
It is based first and foremost on sheer lies transmitted with a newspeak reminiscent of darker days in 1930s Europe. Every half an hour a news bulletin on the radio and television describes the victims of Gaza as terrorists and Israel’s massive killings of them as an act of self-defense. Israel presents itself to its own people as the righteous victim that defends itself against a great evil. The academic world is recruited to explain how demonic and monstrous is the Palestinian struggle, if it is led by Hamas. These are the same scholars who demonized the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in an earlier era and delegitimized his Fatah movement during the second Palestinian intifada.
But the lies and distorted representations are not the worst part of it. It is the direct attack on the last vestiges of humanity and dignity of the Palestinian people that is most enraging. The Palestinians in Israel have shown their solidarity with the people of Gaza and are now branded as a fifth column in the Jewish state; their right to remain in their homeland cast as doubtful given their lack of support for the Israeli aggression. Those among them who agree — wrongly, in my opinion — to appear in the local media are interrogated, and not interviewed, as if they were inmates in the Shin Bet’s prison. Their appearance is prefaced and followed by humiliating racist remarks and they are met with accusations of being a fifth column, an irrational and fanatical people. And yet this is not the basest practice. There are a few Palestinian children from the occupied territories treated for cancer in Israeli hospitals. God knows what price their families have paid for them to be admitted there. The Israel Radio daily goes to the hospital to demand the poor parents tell the Israeli audience how right Israel is in its attack and how evil is Hamas in its defense.
There are no boundaries to the hypocrisy that a righteous fury produces. The discourse of the generals and the politicians is moving erratically between self-compliments of the humanity the army displays in its “surgical” operations on the one hand, and the need to destroy Gaza for once and for all, in a humane way of course, on the other.
This righteous fury is a constant phenomenon in the Israeli, and before that Zionist, dispossession of Palestine. Every act whether it was ethnic cleansing, occupation, massacre or destruction was always portrayed as morally just and as a pure act of self-defense reluctantly perpetrated by Israel in its war against the worst kind of human beings. In his excellent volume The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, Gabi Piterberg explores the ideological origins and historical progression of this righteous fury. Today in Israel, from Left to Right, from Likud to Kadima, from the academia to the media, one can hear this righteous fury of a state that is more busy than any other state in the world in destroying and dispossessing an indigenous population.
It is crucial to explore the ideological origins of this attitude and derive the necessary political conclusions form its prevalence. This righteous fury shields the society and politicians in Israel from any external rebuke or criticism. But far worse, it is translated always into destructive policies against the Palestinians. With no internal mechanism of criticism and no external pressure, every Palestinian becomes a potential target of this fury. Given the firepower of the Jewish state it can inevitably only end in more massive killings, massacres and ethnic cleansing.
The self-righteousness is a powerful act of self-denial and justification. It explains why the Israeli Jewish society would not be moved by words of wisdom, logical persuasion or diplomatic dialogue. And if one does not want to endorse violence as the means of opposing it, there is only one way forward: challenging head-on this righteousness as an evil ideology meant to cover human atrocities. Another name for this ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke for Zionism, not just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way of countering this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically. Let us hope that significant voices in the world will tell the Jewish state that this ideology and the overall conduct of the state are intolerable and unacceptable and as long as they persist, Israel will be boycotted and subject to sanctions.
But I am not naive. I know that even the killing of hundreds of innocent Palestinians would not be enough to produce such a shift in the Western public opinion; it is even more unlikely that the crimes committed in Gaza would move the European governments to change their policy towards Palestine.
And yet, we cannot allow 2009 to be just another year, less significant than 2008, the commemorative year of the Nakba, that did not fulfill the great hopes we all had for its potential to dramatically transform the Western world’s attitude to Palestine and the Palestinians.
It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. In this new year, we have to try to realign the public opinion to the history of Palestine and to the evils of the Zionist ideology as the best means of both explaining genocidal operations such as the current one in Gaza and as a way of pre-empting worse things to come.
Academically, this has already been done. Our main challenge is to find an efficient to explain the connection between the Zionist ideology and the past policies of destruction, to the present crisis. It may be easier to do it while, under the most terrible circumstances, the world’s attention is directed to Palestine once more. It would be even more difficult at times when the situation seems to be “calmer” and less dramatic. In such “relaxed” moments, the short attention span of the Western media would marginalize once more the Palestinian tragedy and neglect it either because of horrific genocides in Africa or the economic crisis and ecological doomsday scenarios in the rest of the world. While the Western media is not likely to be interested in any historical stockpiling, it is only through a historical evaluation that the magnitude of the crimes committed against the Palestinian people throughout the past 60 years can be exposed. Therefore, it is the role of an activist academia and an alternative media to insist on this historical context. These agents should not scoff from educating the public opinion and hopefully even influence the more conscientious politicians to view events in a wider historical perspective.
Similarly, we may be able to find the popular, as distinct from the high brow academic, way of explaining clearly that Israel’s policy — in the last 60 years — stems from a racist hegemonic ideology called Zionism, shielded by endless layers of righteous fury. Despite the predictable accusation of anti-Semitism and what have you, it is time to associate in the public mind the Zionist ideology with the by now familiar historical landmarks of the land: the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel during the days of the military rule, the brutal occupation of the West Bank and now the massacre of Gaza. Very much as the Apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology — in its most consensual and simplistic variety — allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern that cannot only be discussed in the academic ivory towers, but has to be part of the political discourse on the contemporary reality in Palestine today.
Some of us, namely those committed to justice and peace in Palestine, unwittingly evade this debate by focusing, and this is understandable, on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) — the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Struggling against the criminal policies there is an urgent mission. But this should not convey the message that the powers that be in the West adopted gladly by a cue from Israel, that Palestine is only in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and that the Palestinians are only the people living in those territories. We should expand the representation of Palestine geographically and demographically by telling the historical narrative of the events in 1948 and ever since and demand equal human and civil rights to all the people who live, or used to live, in what today is Israel and the OPT.
By connecting the Zionist ideology and the policies of the past with the present atrocities, we will be able to provide a clear and logical explanation for the campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Challenging by nonviolent means a self-righteous ideological state that allows itself, aided by a mute world, to dispossess and destroy the indigenous people of Palestine, is a just and moral cause. It is also an effective way of galvanizing the public opinion not only against the present genocidal policies in Gaza, but hopefully one that would prevent future atrocities. But more importantly than anything else it will puncture the balloon of self-righteous fury that suffocates the Palestinians every times it inflates. It will help end the Western immunity to Israel’s impunity. Without that immunity, one hopes more and more people in Israel will begin to see the real nature of the crimes committed in their name and their fury would be directed against those who trapped them and the Palestinians in this unnecessary cycle of bloodshed and violence."
Ilan Pappe is chair in the Department of History at the University of Exeter.
Month in pictures: Coping in Gaza
Photostory: World demonstrates for Gaza
Reservistas da IDF, forças israelenses de ocupação - Shovrim Shtika - Breaking the Silence
Eyal - I
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário