http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/16/israels-goliath-to-palestines-david/ 'I do respond. I am a proud Jew; my wife reads Torah in our Saturday morning minyan. But I am a Jew of another generation, one involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements, one who experienced American Jewry as a progressive force.
I see Israel as a disgrace to the eloquence, humanity, and social justice of Judaism as a world religion and global ethical experience. Not Neo-Cons of today itching for war, not American Jews and Israelis alike, who see Palestinians as vermin and worse (Golda’s famous remark about Schwarzas), not Mossad with its assassinations, not the Israel of today who use disproportionate force to enforce the degradation of another people.
If thing go hard with Israel on the international scene, it won’t be because of so-called “self-hating Jews,” the way Israelis and AIPAC described all Jewish critics of Israeli policies and actions, but God who punishes Jews who commit murder in His name.'
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine 'I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.'
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/04/tax-dollars-detroit-and-israel/
‘But’, the august, so-called representatives of the U.S. citizenry will proclaim, ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, a major ally of the U.S., and therefore must be supported’. Really? One wonders why this ally not only refuses to cooperate with the U.S.’s hapless and insincere efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, but actually spits in the face of the U.S., as it accepts $9 million a day. When the joke of peace talks is announced, with the U.S. saying neither side should do anything to jeopardize them, Israel announces more illegal settlements. When the United Nations proposes condemning increased settlement-building, which the U.S. has stated it believes to be in violation of international law, Israel knows it can rely on the U.S. to veto any such resolution. When the U.S. hypocritically decries the human rights abuses so prevalent around the world, Israel knows that it is exempt from any such condemnation, if it only brutally abuses Palestinians.'
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/21/on-human-shielding-in-gaza/
JULY 21, 2014. How the Israeli Army has Tried to Justify Striking Civilian Areas
On ‘Human Shielding’ in Gaza . All fighting within cities and all bombardments of urban spaces, even the most “precise and surgical”, is a potential death trap for civilians. Consequently, the permeation of war into cities inevitably transforms their inhabitants into potential human shields.
For Palestinians living in Gaza today, simply spending time in their own homes, frequenting a mosque, going to a hospital or to school has become a dangerous enterprise since any one of these architectural edifices can become at any moment a target. One can no longer safely assume that the existence of masses of human bodies – even the bodies of children – in civilian spaces can serve as defence of the weak against the lethal capacity of the hi-tech states.
“Where do Gaza terrorists hide their weapons?”
But since hi-tech states can and do kill hundreds or thousands of civilians, they have to provide moral justification for their action in order to preserve their standing in the international arena; they have to demonstrate that they are protecting the principles of liberal democracy. It is precisely within this context that we should understand the series of posters recently disseminated by the Israeli military through its Twitter account, Facebook and blogs.
The poster “Where do Gaza Terrorists Hide Their Weapons” is a paradigmatic example, where the subtext does the speaking: Houses, mosques, schools, and hospitals are legitimate targets because they are presumed to be weapon depositories.
When is a house a home?”
This is also the message in “When Is A House a Home?” which simply zooms in on one of the images in the previous poster, showing how Palestinians presumably hide rockets in civilian homes.
The logic is straightforward: insofar as Hamas hides weapons in houses (illegitimate), Israel can bomb them as if they were military targets (legitimate). Within this framework, a single function (hiding weapons) out of many existing functions (home, shelter, intimacy, etc) determines the status of an urban site (in our case the house), so that the edifice’s form loses its traditional signification.
The question “when does it become a legitimate military target?” is merely rhetorical. Its real meaning is: “All houses in Gaza are legitimate targets” since all houses are potentially non-homes.
“Israel uses weapons to protect its civilians”
Not unlike colonial as well as other vastly asymmetrical wars, Israel’s legitimisation for its indiscriminate bombing is premised upon a profound moral disjuncture between Israelis and Palestinians. In the poster “Israel uses weapon to protect its civilians. Hamas uses civilians to protect its weapons”, Palestinians are depicted as barbarians who ignore the elementary grammar of international law.
Israel’s warfare is, however, not only about the re-signification of architectural structures, but also about the transformation of human beings into collateral damage, subjects who can be killed without violating international law. This is the subtext of the poster featuring Israel’s Chief of Staff saying: “Even as we carry out strikes, we remember that there are civilians in Gaza. Hamas has turned them into hostages.”
“We remember that there are civilians in Gaza”
Again, the logic is clear. All civilians in Gaza are being held hostage by Hamas, which is considered a war crime and a gross violation of international law governing armed conflict. This, then, provides legal and moral justification against the accusation that Israel is the one killing civilians. Presumed human rights violations carried out by Palestinians against Palestinians - taking hostages and human shielding – thus become the legitimisation of lethal and indiscriminate violence on the part of the occupying force.
Hence, the use of human shields is not only a violation. In contemporary asymmetric urban wars, accusing the enemy of using human shields helps validate the claim that the death of ”untargeted civilians” is merely collateral damage. When all civilians are potential human shields, when each and every civilian can become a hostage of the enemy, then all enemy civilians become killable.
“Some bomb shelters shelter people…”
In order for all this to be convincing, the Israeli military depicts the asymmetric context in which it unleashes its violence against a whole population as symmetric. This is carried out, for instance, through the poster “Some bomb shelters shelter people, some shelter bombs”. Here a radically disproportionate situation is presented as if it were balanced.
The residents of Gaza are bombed by cutting edge F-16 fighter jets and drones, yet they do not have bomb shelters, and they have nowhere to flee. Israel’s residents are bombed mostly by makeshift rockets, many of which have been intercepted by Iron Dome missiles. The majority of the population in Israel has access to shelters and can flee out of the rocket’s range.
These powerful images, spread by the Israeli military through social media, attempt to transform the very presence of civilians as suspect in the areas it bombards, regardless of the fact that the areas it bombs are urban centres.
The crux of the matter is that in the context of contemporary asymmetric warfare, the weak do not have many options. When there are no bomb shelters, people remain at home during extensive bombardment. And if, like in the case of the Palestinians in Gaza, fleeing is not an option – because all exits from the strip have been closed, or because the neighbour’s house is under the exact same threat as one’s own, or because one is already a refugee and does not want to become a refugee anew – staying put, which the high-tech states term “illegal human shields,” constitutes a form of resistance.'
423] Congressional Wiki Re-Writes, Live From Gaz…: http://youtu.be/TUeTtpUSPgc
At 5.27 just how little land is left for Palestinian'
The Gaza Bombardment - What You're Not Being Told: http://youtu.be/iXRO1YFreNA
Gaza Under Siege: http://youtu.be/OJDUFhNnwbg
How Israel kills. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/